Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017

Madam Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and I have a couple of topics that I intend to take up for the folks here watching and listening.

Madam Speaker, I want to talk about the Heartbeat bill and I want to talk about the immigration bill and the tax policy all together. But there is an important issue before this Congress that I want to hear about before I take up these issues. And for that purpose, I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. DeSantis) to get this off of his heart.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida for his presentation and certainly support and endorse every word that I have heard here.

I think about the leadership that George Washington provided, and a couple of things come to mind. One of them is, in my six trips into Egypt, I have met with President el-Sisi each of those times. He finds himself in a position in Egypt very similar to where Washington was in his first term, Madam Speaker, and that is now with a constitution that has a limitation of two 4-year terms for the President of Egypt. He was elected under that constitution, committed to accepting civilian leadership of the military--and that has been taking place--rebuilding the Christian churches in Egypt, establishing a parliament that reflects women as well as men, and religious diversity in allowing for a lot more religious freedom in Egypt. He has followed through on all of that.

The real test will be if President el-Sisi is re-elected in Egypt when he is up for that re-election, if that should happen, and I hope it does, then I am also listening very closely to what would be his second inaugural address. In that second inaugural address, I am calling upon him to announce that the second term will be his last term in keeping with the standards that are set by George Washington. That is how you transition into a republican form of government that is a representative form of government, a government of we the people.

I would also reflect, as I listened to Mr. DeSantis speak about the greatness of George Washington--and we understand that there has been, I think, an erroneous reading of history and a misinterpretation of history--that there is an effort to purge from and to revise our American history to conform with what contemporary values are. So now if we disparage and expunge from history the statues, the faces, the words, and the leadership of people--some of whom were slaveowners back in that time: Washington, Jefferson, and a list of others all the way up the line--then we fall prey to this weakness of wanting to judge our Founding Fathers and the people who went before us in each generation by the standards of this generation.

Yet we admire people like William Wilberforce and John Adams who stood for years to defend the battle against slavery. They made the moral arguments against slavery. We had people who were against slavery who owned slaves. If you were in Virginia, and if you owed taxes, then you couldn't free

your slaves. That was true for some of our Founding Fathers who found themselves in that position. They couldn't legally free their slaves. They opposed slavery anyway, but they just couldn't pay their taxes. That is a piece of history that isn't often discussed, Madam Speaker.

We need to judge Washington for what he did as the Father of our Country and judge him within the context of the values that they had then. We should remember that they tried to eliminate slavery in the founding documents of this country. They were not able to do so because they had enough representation in the South that prevented it.

So we were, then, less than a century later swept into a giant Civil War which was still the bloodiest war that we have been involved in in our 200-plus years of our history, and that was a bloody war of brother fighting brother, North versus South. 600,000 Americans--mostly White, male Christians--went to their graves to put an end to slavery. That is how huge that contest was.

That argument needed to be won here. It was debated here in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the United States Senate. It went through the Supreme Court.

I listened to the testimony of Star Parker who testified this past Wednesday morning on the Heartbeat Bill, H.R. 490. Star Parker is a magnificent witness. I count her as a real leader in this country and a good friend. She is also an African American who has had several abortions before she came to the conviction that she understood that life begins at the moment of conception and that human life is sacred in all of its forms. So now her voice is being heard--heard in this Congress and heard across the land.

As an African American, she compared slavery to the abortion issue today. I look back in the slavery era, the first half of the 19th century building up to the Civil War, and I ask myself, in looking back at my heritage and my predecessors and the things that they believed in and passed on down to me: Where would I have been? Where would I have been, Madam Speaker, if I had been, say, born in 1800?

Would I have had enough vision to step forward and oppose slavery in the same fashion that I oppose abortion today? I would hope I would have. I pray I would have. I would think that those same principles would apply as Star Parker drew that comparison and that juxtaposition in her testimony last Wednesday before the Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee.

Yet here we are today with a similar debate and a similar argument before us. Slavery was morally wrong. Today, I have never in my lifetime met someone who defended slavery, but there were many of them who defended slavery right here where I stand, Madam Speaker, and across the rotunda in the United States Senate where they stand. They defended it because it was the legacy of the culture and the civilization of their times that was included within every civilization throughout the world. Every nation had to figure out how to throw off that yoke of slavery and give all creatures created in God's image an equal opportunity and equal freedom. It cost a lot of blood to put an end to that--600,000 lives.

As a matter of fact, not that long ago, I was standing in the Lincoln Memorial. They call it the temple area there around where the huge statue of Lincoln is seated in his chair up in the Lincoln Memorial. Every time I have walked up those steps, I have walked over to Lincoln's left--it is my right as I face him--I read Lincoln's second inaugural address. I don't have the text of it precisely in front of me, but I will get the gist of it, Madam Speaker.

There in his second inaugural address--remember, the Civil War is not over yet, so we don't know how it is going to end. He said:

Until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid

by another drawn with the sword, as was said, so it is

written that the Word of the Lord is true and righteous

altogether.

Now, I stood there some time back and read that. Sometimes you can read things four, five, six, ten, or twenty times before you see the wisdom in it, but it hit me as I stood there, a drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by a drop of blood drawn by the sword; how many Americans died in the Civil War? 600,000. Lincoln could not have known that.

I thought I knew how many Black Africans had been brought to what is now the United States to be slaves and to be enslaved here; I thought I knew that number. I looked it up. It is without much contention, there is a consensus number out there, Madam Speaker--600,000. 600,000 Americans died to put an end to slavery, and 600,000 Africans were brought to what is now America to be slaves.

Lincoln could not have known either number. He could not have known those killed in action and those who died in the Civil War. He could not have known that 600,000. He could not have known how many were brought to what is now America to be slaves. A drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, so it is written, the Word of the Lord is true and right and just altogether.

It turns out to be 600,000 versus 600,000. Those are prophetic words that came from the mouth of Abraham Lincoln in his second inaugural address, Madam Speaker. It is chilling to think about how prescient they were. It is impossible for Lincoln to have known, but the instinct that the hand of God that guided him, the guidance of providence that put those words in his mouth that day, turned out to be true this day.

I think of all that this Nation went through to put an end to slavery and all that we are going through to put an end to abortion. I look at the cases of Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and a Supreme Court that one might say was leaning very strongly to it as an activist court and the string of decisions that brought them to Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.

I would take us back through that, Madam Speaker. In about--I have got to guess at the years here again--about 1964 or 1965, there was a case that came before the Supreme Court called Griswold v. Connecticut. There, the State of Connecticut, being a strong Catholic State, had outlawed contraceptives in Connecticut because that was also the position of the Catholic Church. There was a couple that decided to sue to be able to purchase contraceptives. So it made its way all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court looked into it and decided, well, there is a right to privacy, and the State of Connecticut has no business interfering with the constitutional right to privacy that a married couple has in Connecticut to purchase contraceptives.

So they created this new right--this right to privacy--that didn't exist in the Constitution. It still doesn't exist in the Constitution. Now there are those who will argue that it exists in precedent and exists in case law, and, according to stare decisis--respect for previous decisions--it cannot be changed. We are stuck with this idea that the Constitution includes a right to privacy, a right to privacy that is applied to married couples who wanted to buy contraceptives in the State of Connecticut.

That was when the Supreme Court reached well beyond their bounds, and they needed to stay within the guidelines of the Constitution itself, hence this right to privacy.

Then there was the Eisenstadt case where the decision was that unmarried people had the same right to privacy as married people. So they extended that right to privacy to unmarried people as well, and now everybody could buy contraceptives everywhere at any time, and many other things were included underneath that definition.

So Roe v. Wade came together, and they decided that, yes, these rights existed, this right to privacy could be extrapolated into a right to abortion because this was all written in the emanations and the penumbras that are up there. To explain that, emanations and penumbras are like this: they are in the shadows of. So if you look up at the clouds during, let's say, a semi-cloudy day, then you will see that little shadow along the edge of the cloud. You can't quite see the other side of the cloud, but you see that fringe along the edge.

Someplace in there, those black-robed jurists could see constitutional rights that they couldn't actually find in the text of the Constitution, that they couldn't quite find in Griswold,

that they couldn't quite find in Eisenstadt, but they wrote it into Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton and decided: Okay, we are going to guarantee this constitutional right to have an abortion as long as the baby is not viable.

The viability, of course, is a pretty mushy definition. The Court has thrown some of our pro-life legislation back at us because they thought our definitions were a little too mushy, but they write some mushy ones themselves.

Then you have the Doe v. Bolton case settled at the same time, simultaneous with Roe v. Wade. There they write in the exceptions, which would be anything that might affect the life or health of the mother. The health of the mother can be determined to be the physical health, the mental health, or even the familial health of the mother. So what it means is any reason whatsoever.

When you couple those two cases together--and if you respect the Supreme Court decisions, which America did--it said abortion on demand for any reason whatsoever, whether it is a physical reason, whether it is a mental health reason, or whether it is a family issue, anything that is an inconvenience. We ended up with abortion as birth control and abortion on demand for everyone.

At that time, the Court could not have seen that we would be having partial-birth abortions conducted across this country in significant numbers to the 24th week and beyond.

That is such a ghastly process. This Congress did deal with that through legislation and wrote legislation to ban partial-birth abortion. It was defined. It was outlawed by this Congress. It was litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, as we would know.

When I arrived here, the Supreme Court had found that it was unconstitutional for Congress to ban this ghastly process of partial- birth abortion, of bringing a baby to birth through breach, feet first, and one inch before that baby could fill its lungs full of American air and scream for its own mercy. They would kill the baby while it struggled and squirmed, and they would collapse the skull by withdrawing from it the contents. That is the ghastly process. It went on over and over again.

The Court found it to be unconstitutional for Congress to ban--or any State, for that matter--that ghastly process. So we went back to work here in this Congress in the Judiciary Committee.

Under the leadership especially of Steve Chabot of Ohio, we held hearing after hearing after hearing, and we established and first wrote a definition for partial-birth abortion that was precise so that the Court couldn't argue that it was too mushy, too vague, not precise enough. We wrote a precise definition.

Then we held hearings that determined that a partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary to save the life of the mother. We outlawed partial-birth abortion again. Then it went through the litigation process.

Our statute that banned partial-birth abortion, that came from we the people, was shot down in three circuits around the country but appealed to the Supreme Court, and it finally survived on that final analysis of the Supreme Court. Even they couldn't bear the thought of what was going on in this country. It was too stark. It was too ghastly. It was too gruesome.

So here we are today, with this House of Representatives having passed legislation that bans abortion if the baby can feel pain at 20 weeks. It was a true and right and just thing for this Congress, this House of Representatives to do altogether, Madam Speaker.

We have sent that bill over to the United States Senate. The bill has a little bit of vagueness in it because we are saying 20 weeks. We would like to precisely identify the exact time that the baby can feel pain. But it screams at our conscience that a baby who is struggling for its own survival can be killed in the womb. If it could fill its own lungs, it would scream for its own mercy. It fights to get away from the abortionist's tools.

That is the bill that bans that, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which we sent to the United States Senate and now sits on Mitch McConnell's desk and probably doesn't move unless there is a Democrat who also agrees with us over in the House of Representatives.

It was bipartisan here in the House of Representatives, and I thank the Democrats who have joined us in the pro-life movement; but it has diminished significantly among Democrats in my time here, Madam Speaker.

I won't use the name of the Member. I will just say that a Democratic Member who is a pro-life Member whom I have served with for roughly a decade, but I went to him and said: Can you sign onto my Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490? Are you ready to do that?

He said: Not yet.

That left the door open for: Well, maybe.

I said: How many Democrats do you think we can get to sign onto the Heartbeat bill that bans abortion from the time a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected?

He said, without hesitation: Two. We can get two--which meant, I think, him and one other.

I said: How many pro-life votes were there in the House of Representatives among Democrats when you came here roughly 10 years ago, how many pro-life votes among Democrats?

His answer, without hesitation, was 60. Sixty Democrats would put up a pro-life vote. Ten years later, today, two, maybe three. I hope and pray it is more than that. I will work for all the votes that we can get.

But that, I think, tells us something about how polarized the political arena here is in this House of Representatives, in the United States Senate, and explains why Tom Perez, head of the DNC, can say there is no room for pro-life people in the Democratic Party. If you can't be a Republican, then transform the Democratic Party so we can save the lives of these innocent unborn.

That is what the Heartbeat bill is, H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act, which we held a hearing on last Wednesday. The testimony, I think, was stellar that came out of the panelists who were there.

David Forte delivered the constitutional arguments even more so in the Q&A than he did so in his presentation.

We heard from Dr. Kathi Aultman, who has been an abortionist and committed an uncounted number of abortions, and she has also had an abortion herself. She has delivered a baby girl vaginally herself. So she is a mother and an abortionist.

She said in her testimony: I realize that when I meet the young people whom I delivered--an OB/GYN who had a dual purpose of bringing babies forth in the world, protecting their lives with all the medical technology and skill set that can be developed on this hand, but over on this hand, kill them, and the dichotomy of that hit her after she delivered her own daughter.

She went back to work and her hands were still doing what they had been doing, but her conscience screamed at her, and she had to put the tools down and stop this ghastly practice of abortion. Now she has committed a significant portion of her life to putting an end to this.

But she said she realized, when she met young people, the joy that she had helped bring them into the world if she delivered them; but at the same time, she understood that there were a lot of young people who are not here because she aborted them. So it always tore at her conscience that way.

Another thing that I had not heard from anyone in this movement in the past, in all of our discussions, was this. She said: If I was going to abort the baby, I always referred to it, when I spoke with the mother, as a fetus. But if we were going to deliver the baby and give this baby a chance at life, I always referred to it as a baby.

I think that explains to us the difference in the disagreements we have here in the House of Representatives. Almost universally, over on this side, people support abortion in every form they can, with those exceptions whom I tip my hat to and those who will be converted, hopefully, by their conscience over time like Cathy Aultman was.

They say ``fetus''; we say ``baby.'' God knows it is a baby. God knows that it is a unique human being from the moment of conception. What we can't yet do, medically, is precisely tell the mother the moment of conception. We don't have a medical way to determine that moment, or I would be focusing our legislation on that moment. But what we do have now, with ultrasound,

is the ability to identify that heartbeat in that baby.

The legislation in H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act, says this. We require the would-be abortionist to check for a heartbeat before that abortionist would continue with an abortion. They have to maintain records on this: check for a heartbeat, and then if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. We know that is life. If an abortionist stops that beating heart, we know that has ended the life of that innocent baby.

As we brought this legislation forward, we found out that there is something about that heartbeat that speaks to the conscience and the hearts of America, Madam Speaker. We know that billboard after billboard--there must be thousands of them around America, many of them put up by the Knights of Columbus--saying: Abortion stops a beating heart.

When we see that billboard, maybe it only registers a little bit, but many of us have seen it hundreds and hundreds of times, and we associate the heartbeat with life. If there is a beating heart, we know there is life. If you stop that beating heart, you know that you ended a human life.

On the argument that a baby isn't viable, in the Roe v. Wade era back in 1973, the Supreme Court said maybe that is at 28 weeks. But now we have babies that survive at 22 weeks. That is a month and a half less than before.

I recall a circumstance in 1992 where I had an individual who was part of the administrative oversight on a construction project that I was on that fall. He was gone for 2 weeks, and I knew why. His wife had gone into labor and delivered a little baby boy prematurely.

This little baby boy was in the early part of 20-some weeks. And I am not certain, but I am just guessing earlier than 24 weeks, but certainly not 28.

They went to the city and stayed in that hospital with this little boy for 2 weeks and didn't leave. They stayed at his side and prayed for him and they did all they could. He was hooked up to all kinds of tubes.

When he came back to me after 2 weeks, he was relatively assured that this little boy would survive. He walked up to me and handed me a cigar that said, ``It's a boy.'' He wasn't handing out those cigars the first 2 weeks because he wasn't confident this little boy was going to live.

But he handed me that cigar--and I knew where he stood politically-- and I said to him: We would do anything to save the life of any little baby. Any little boy or girl, we would do anything to save their life. There is no amount of expense we wouldn't go to. There is no amount of medical effort we wouldn't go to to save the life of a baby, no matter how small their chance was to survive. We will do everything. We will spend $100,000, $200,000, $500,000 to save that innocent little life. We do everything we can do with all the medical technology that we have. We spare no effort from doctors or nurses. We will spare no effort on our knees praying to God this little baby can be born and grow into a full human being.

He agreed with me 100 percent. He said: I agree with you, and I am so glad that my little boy looks like he is going to be okay.

I said: Then are you going to go into the polls of next month--this is October of 1992--and vote for the man for President who will appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who are going to continue to enable abortion in America?

He looked at me and called me a name that we can refer to by the first letter of those three words, but he said it in such a way that it wasn't insulting to me. It said instead: You have drilled a point home.

After these 30-some years, I ran into him in the grocery store here several Sundays ago after mass. We are both Catholic. I hadn't talked to him in a long time. I asked him how that little boy was doing, and he told me.

He said: You straightened me out back then, didn't you? Do you remember that?

He asked me if I remembered it. Of course I did. I said: Yes, I remembered it, but I didn't want to bring it up. I did want to know how he is.

So that is a composite of the conscience of the Nation, Madam Speaker. I think it tells us that we all haven't come to the realization of the immorality of abortion yet, but America came to the realization of the immorality of slavery. We will get to the realization of the immorality of abortion. We are making progress.

Looking at this legislation, H.R. 490, we have a number of 69 percent of Americans supporting protecting any baby with a heartbeat.

That is, 55 percent of Democrats support protecting a baby with a heartbeat, and this legislation would save the lives of at least 90 percent of the babies that are otherwise being aborted.

So I want to thank all the people who have done so much work on this that brought us to this point. We are at 170 cosponsors. We have had a hearing. Next step, hopefully, is to get the markup before the Judiciary Committee. My goal is to bring the Heartbeat bill to this floor of the House of Representatives January 19 of 2018. That is the date of the March for Life here in this town, and that is the date we need to bring that legislation to this floor. If we can do so and send it over to the Senate, if the Senate can take it up and pass it, I am confident our President will sign it, and we can begin to put an end to this carnage.

To speak of the magnitude of the carnage of abortion: 60 million babies aborted since 1973 in Roe v. Wade.

I had a lady, who is a Democrat, say to me just over here a couple of months ago: Steve, why are you so worried about this? We have abortions down to where they are almost, or maybe even are below, a million a year?

Only a million abortions a year? How can anyone quantify that and say that is anything other than a bloody carnage and a loss of human potential and a denial of the gifts from God?

Sixty million babies aborted since Roe v. Wade in 1973. And how many babies would be born to those who were aborted? How many of those little girls that were aborted in the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and even in the early part of this millennia--for a small part, the earliest part of this millennia--how many of those little girls would be having babies today? And how many would they have?

Just a back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that there are another 60 million babies that are missing because of the 60 million that have been aborted. And here we are, America. I am listening to people argue, and they will say: Well, you know there is work that Americans won't do, and we have a shortage of labor, so we have to go to some other culture, some other civilization and bring in hundreds of thousands or millions of people to do work that Americans won't do.

I wonder, if you would ask those innocent little voices that are in Heaven today, if they wouldn't mind laying a few bricks or maybe cutting some grass or doing a little bit of landscaping around or maybe cutting a little bit of meat. These are all things I do, by the way, even today, if I get the chance. Ask them if they wouldn't have liked to have had a chance at the right to life, if they wouldn't have liked to have an opportunity to live, to love, to breathe air, to laugh, to have their own children, to enjoy the greatest country the world has ever seen, and it is all denied to them.

It is denied to 60 million of them, and it is denied to perhaps another 60 million who didn't even have the chance to be aborted because their future parents were killed in the womb. So 60 million plus 60 million is 120 million missing in this country today. No wonder we have a labor shortage.

Oh, here is another reason why we have a labor shortage, Madam Speaker. If you look at the numbers of--according to the Department of Labor statistics in their website, there are 94\1/2\ million Americans who are simply not in the workforce. They are old enough to work. They are not in the workforce, 94\1/2\ million.

If you add to that the 7-plus million who are on unemployment today, you get up to right at 102 million Americans who potentially could be in the workforce, they are not looking for work or they are on unemployment, and I am listening to employers scream for more labor, more labor, more labor.

By the way, they are screaming for more unskilled labor. I look on that same website, and I see--where are the highest levels of unemployment?

In the lowest skills we have. We don't have a shortage of low-skilled laborers. We have a shortage of employers who want to pay a competitive wage.

So call it 102 million Americans that could be in this workforce. Then we took that number and we started chopping it down.

How about those that are too old?

We can't ask them to work, so dial that down a little bit.

And then how about those that are physically disabled?

They can't work, so dial that down.

What would it be if we were going to mobilize our workforce on the levels of, say, World War II, where at the end of World War II, we had the lowest unemployment in history? And often this is misquoted and people want to point to some other number. 1.2 percent was our unemployment rating at the end of the Second World War.

Women went to work. My mother did. Of course, my father was deployed. But if we mobilized on that level, how many would be available to go into this workforce?

We think about 82 million Americans are sitting there today. Some of them on a couch in their front lawn, some of them are riding around in their Mercedes, but a lot of them could be going to work.

In fact, everybody I mentioned so far should be at work contributing to our GDP instead of just consuming. Eighty-two million or so out there out of the 102 million that are not in the workforce, and they say: Well, we have to bring in hundreds of thousands or millions or tens of millions of people to do this work in America.

Around our family, Marilyn and I raised three sons. I started a business in 1975. I started a family in 1975. Those three sons got an allowance. They got paid for the work they did. In addition, the allowance was younger, paid for the work they did came a little later. But of those three sons, they all knew what they had to do.

Now, if one of those three sons--by the way, I am talking about one- third of our workforce is not in the workforce. They are simply not in the workforce. But one-third of the people who could be are sitting back on the sidelines.

So let's just say, around our operation, there is work that has to be done. You got to scoop the tracks out of the dozer. Somebody has got to change their oil. Somebody has got to mow the lawn. Somebody has got to take care of the other chores. Somebody has got to trim the trees, all those things that need to be done. They all got their assignments and they did them.

But if one of those sons said, ``Well, I am not working. I am going to sit on the couch and watch the ball game or sit on the porch and watch the rest of you work. I want to eat with the rest of the family. I want to put my feet under the table. I want good food. I want my clothes all clean. I want them ironed. I want them ready to go. Somebody else can clean my room, too, but I still want my allowance,'' you all know, if you grew up in the family, how long that would last.

If one of the siblings, a brother or a sister, said, ``I am not doing my work, but give me my allowance, and I still want the keys to the car,'' it wouldn't last one day.

In our house, it goes completely the other way. It is: ``Oh, you think that? Now you get all the work, and they get your allowance until you change your mind.''

We fixed that really quick in my household, and I think it would be fixed a number of different ways, but really quickly in every household in America. We don't tolerate a slacker sitting there taking up a room in the house that is demanding all the benefits of the work of the rest of the family.

But we have got 102 million Americans sitting there. Many of them are being bribed not to work by welfare checks. We have over 70 different means-tested Federal welfare programs in the United States. Over 70. Some say 87 of them. No one has even memorized the list. So that should tell you that no one understands how they interrelate with each other. No one understands whether there are disincentives or incentives for people to do the right thing and step forward and carry their share of the load.

So why wouldn't we dial the welfare down in America until the labor force magically shows up in the workplace?

That is what happened with John Smith. His experiment early on in America worked exactly like that. He said that there were--of all the royalty that was there, they thought, because they had blue blood--and that is, of course, the expression of royalty--that they didn't have to work and those commoners needed to work for the rest of time.

He said: I am not going to burn up the labor of these common people here so that a bunch of royalty can sit around with their feet up.

That is a summarization of the statement.

Everybody had to work, and they had the ``no work, no eat'' policy. Well, when you get to that policy, a lot of people decide that working is better than going hungry, but it doesn't mean we don't take care of the people who are needy. It doesn't mean we eliminate these programs. It just means, as I said, maybe we need 10 million more American workers. We can dial this welfare system down, ratchet it down.

It is now a hammock. It used to be a safety net, and this Congress with special interests has cranked up the level of the safety net to the level of the hammock, and now 102 million Americans, a good share of them, are in that hammock.

We just crank it back down. We could dial it down in proportion to the amount of labor that we need. Everybody that gets off the hammock and goes to work becomes a contributor. They grow our GDP--our gross domestic product--and they pay taxes and they take themselves off the welfare rolls.

So why wouldn't you do the twofer, instead of go to some other country and bring people here to do the work who don't speak our language, who don't understand our culture, and who don't embrace the American civilization in many cases, and who run down people in bike paths in New York, and who attack us at Fort Hood--the list goes on and on--Orlando, Florida; San Bernardino, on and on, the people who hate us?

As Louie Gohmert often says, ``We don't have to pay people to hate us. They will hate us for free.'' He was talking about foreign policy. We have got people on welfare who hate us. We don't have to pay them either. We need more people working. We need more people back in the rolls.

So I want to applaud Kevin Brady, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, and I thank him for the very diligent work that he has done in order to bring this tax policy as far as it is today, and to roll it out with the coordination that they have, with the support from the leadership within the House, the Senate, and the White House, and that message has been clear.

Also, Kevin McCarthy, our majority leader, stood here today and defended it and explained it, I think, very well. He is an articulate voice for our entire conference and he does an excellent job, along with our Speaker and our whip.

By the way, our whip, Steve Scalise, maybe he doesn't have all of his moves back yet, but his heart and his head are back as strong as ever. His voice is as strong as ever. Steve Scalise has his mojo back, Madam Speaker, and I am awfully glad to see that. We need that. It is a gift to us to have him.

So what do we do with this need for labor?

I asked the question a little earlier in a tax conference downstairs: Of this tax policy, the bill now that was dropped yesterday, does it allow an employer to deduct as a business expense the wages and benefits that are paid to illegals who are in his employment?

The answer that I got was: We didn't address that in the bill, so whatever it is today is what it is.

What it is today, Madam Speaker, is every employer--let me put it this way: I will say virtually every employer who deducts the wages that are paid of them is often--if they have illegals working for them, they go on the schedule C, like any other employer.

So let's just say, if there is an employer there who pays $1 million out to illegals, that shows up in his schedule C as a business expense, wages. And those wages then are deducted as a business expense. Of course, you don't pay taxes on business expenses.

I don't pay taxes on fuel. I don't pay taxes on parts. I don't pay taxes on the wages our company pays in 42 years in the construction business or on the benefit packages that we have there. And--but--so employers are deducting wages and benefits paid to illegals, and that is supposed to be against the law.

But they don't address that in this tax bill. And the way the IRS has addressed it is that--it says this--according to section 162(e) of the Internal Revenue Code, it denies a deduction for ``illegal payments.''

But even though it denies a deduction, under the statute for illegal payments, the IRS has interpreted this a little bit differently. So it says here in this document: even though it is illegal to employ unauthorized alien workers, the IRS has ruled that section 162(e) does not apply to the wages paid to those aliens--and I would call them aliens--even if the employer knowingly broke the law.

Well, there is a problem with IRS interpretation, but I also know they are not very likely to change that interpretation, unless Congress should crack them over the knuckles with some legislation.

I have, for a number of Congresses, introduced legislation known as the New IDEA Act. Today, the New IDEA Act is H.R. 176. It does this: it clarifies. It amends 162(e) of the Code, and it clarifies that wages and benefits paid to illegals are not tax deductible for Federal income tax purposes. It gives the employer safe harbor if he uses E-Verify to verify his employees.

In other words, if you hire people, you have got people on your payroll, you run them through E-Verify. We know all about this program. The Judiciary Committee passed a mandatory E-Verify bill out of the committee here a couple of weeks ago. But you run them through E- Verify. If you are the employer and they have qualified to be legal to work in the United States through the E-Verify program, then the IRS cannot touch you with regard to hiring illegals. So it is a safe harbor that we build into the bill.

So tax, wages, and benefits paid to employers are not tax deductible. The employer gets safe harbor if he uses E-Verify.

We also require the IRS to exchange information and build a working committee with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security so that the right hand, the left hand, and the middle hand know what each other is doing.

This is the Federal Government, after all. And how can we have departments within this government working at cross purposes with each other?

So the IRS' job should be to collect taxes. They should not be allowing the deductions of wages and benefits paid to illegals. They are not legal to work in America.

If you are buying illegal drugs, do you get to deduct your illegal drugs?

If you pay off somebody to commit an illegal activity, do you get to deduct that?

No. In none of those cases, we don't allow deductions for illegal activity. That is partly what the legislation said. But the IRS has their practice.

By the way, before I wrote this bill, I was looking around for what department within any branch of government do the people respect fear the most. As one who has been audited thoroughly a number of times, I notice that the IRS is the one that we respect the most--probably fear the most--and the last organization that we want to show up at our door that is going to check to see if we are hiring illegals.

So what would happen under this bill is the IRS would show up--we don't accelerate any audits. The IRS would show up to do a normal audit under normal terms of identifying businesses that they would normally audit, and, in the course of that audit, they would run the Social Security numbers and the identifying information of the employees off of the I-9 forms that have been required since 1986 and punch them into E-Verify.

If they could verify that all of the employees could work legally in America, then, fine, no problem, and that employer only has his other tax issues to worry about. But if E-Verify kicks any of those employees out--one or more--then the employer has 72 hours' notice to cure, like they would under any other circumstance, to correct any records that might need to be corrected. Otherwise, the IRS could look at that and say: Okay, this million dollars that you wrote off as a business expense is not a business expense. That goes back into the gross receipts and shows up at the bottom as net taxable income.

If we do the math on this and break it down, what is the impact? Well, the impact works out to be this:

If you have a $10-an-hour illegal and the audit comes in and says you can't deduct that $10 an hour, then the impact of it is that the employer then would be billed for interest and penalty and the tax liability that we calculated, I think, at around 35\1/2\ or 36 percent. That turns your $10-an-hour illegal into about a $16-an-hour illegal.

Now, if you are going to have to pay $16 an hour, maybe you could actually hire an American to do that work. You wouldn't have to hire somebody that is sneaking around and that snuck into America. That is one way to look at this is it raises the cost.

There is also a 6-year statute of limitations. Nothing goes backwards. There is no ex post facto in this. It would only be from the day of enactment. From that point forward, there could be a 6-year cumulative liability.

So the first year that the bill would pass--hopefully, in this tax package that we have in front of us that is coming to us next week-- from the first year the bill would pass, you have 1 year of liability.

And say the IRS doesn't audit you the first year. The second year, now you have 2 years of liability. That risk accumulates then for the period of 6 years, that statute of limitations. So, each year, the employer would see that they had a contingent liability: the IRS. If the IRS shows up and audits, they are going to go back at least 4 years, I am going to guess, maybe longer.

That means that they are going to work to clean up their workforce. They can do it incrementally or they can do it all at once. But nobody is going to want to sit there with a 6-year statute of limitations hanging over their head.

Madam Speaker, I include in the Record an article that is written by the Center for Immigration Studies, dated August 31, 2017, titled: ``Raise More than a Quarter Trillion Dollars of Tax Revenue by Ending Tax Subsidies for Unauthorized Employment of Illegal Aliens.''

[From the Center for Immigration Studies, August 31, 2017]

Raise More than a Quarter Trillion Dollars of Tax Revenue by Ending Tax

Subsidies for Unauthorized Employment of Illegal Aliens

(By CIS)

Aliens enter the United States without authorization for

many reasons, but for most of them the goal is to secure

employment at much higher wages than are available in their

native countries. While breaking the law provides very

significant economic benefits to these illegal workers and to

the businesses that hire them, it comes at a cost to American

workers. According to Harvard economist George Borjas, recent

empirical research indicates that American workers suffer a

reduction of $99 billion to $118 billion in annual wages

because of illegal immigration.

The economic rewards of unauthorized employment of aliens

are not limited to the higher wages of the illegal workers

and the lower labor costs of their employers. Unauthorized

alien workers and their employers also enjoy multi-billion

dollar tax deductions and tax credits that were enacted into

law for the benefit of law-abiding workers and businesses.

When Congress returns from summer recess on September 5, it

is expected to focus attention on a major reform of the

federal income tax system, including a combination of lower

rates and other tax incentives to families and to businesses.

The largest challenge facing tax reformers is finding

sufficient additional revenue to pay for the tax cuts and tax

incentives they promised to the people who elected them. In

fairness to the American families and businesses to whom

these tax cuts have been promised, and in particular to the

American families whose household incomes have been

diminished by illegal immigration, Congress should consider

eliminating unwarranted tax breaks to unauthorized alien

workers and their employers.

Each of the following reforms--one that eliminates a tax

subsidy for employers of unauthorized aliens and the other

that eliminates a tax subsidy for the unauthorized workers--

comes with an estimate of the additional revenues that would

be raised by the reform Together they could raise $296

billion over 10 years--more than a quarter-trillion dollars.

1. No Deduction for Wages Paid to Illegal Aliens. Section

162(e) of the Internal Revenue Code denies a deduction for

``illegal

payments''. Even though it is illegal to employ unauthorized

alien workers, the IRS has ruled that section 162(e) does not

apply to the wages paid to those aliens, even if the employer

knowingly broke the law. On January 3, 2017, Rep. Steve King

and eight other members of Congress introduced H.R. 176, the

New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act, Section 2 of which

would amend section 162(e) to clarify that no deduction is

allowed for wages paid to unauthorized alien workers. H.R.

176 provides employers a ``safe harbor'', allowing a

deduction to employers that used the Department of Homeland

Security's free, online E-Verify system to confirm the

employee's eligibility to work.

The amount of wages paid to unauthorized alien workers

cannot be known with certainty. One of the most extensive

studies of unauthorized immigrants in the United States was

conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center in 2009. According to

that study, there were approximately 8.3 million undocumented

immigrants in the U.S. labor force, a figure that Pew more

recently estimated had fallen to 8.0 million. Pew estimated

the median household income of unauthorized worker families

to be approximately $36,000 and that there were approximately

1.75 workers per household, implying median per-worker

earnings of $20,571. Multiplying Pew's estimated number of

unauthorized alien workers by the earnings-per-worker

estimate yields an estimated total of wages paid to

unauthorized alien workers of approximately $165 billion.

Many unauthorized workers are employed in the ``underground

economy'', i.e., by households and other employers that are

not reporting or paying payroll taxes and presumably are not

deducting the wages. A 2013 report by the Social Security

Administration estimated that, of approximately seven million

alien workers in various irregular work statuses in 2010,

approximately 3.1 million (44 percent) had Social Security

numbers (mostly false or fraudulently secured), while

approximately 3.9 million (56 percent) were working in the

``underground economy.'' On the assumption that employers

reported payroll taxes and claimed wage expense deductions

only for the 44 percent of unauthorized workers who could

produce an SSN, and that most employers deducted wages at or

near the corporate tax rate of 35 percent, we estimate that

disallowing a deduction for wages paid to unauthorized alien

workers would increase federal tax revenues by approximately

$25.4 billion per year (35 percent x 44 percent x $165

billion), or $254 billion over 10 years.

2. Deny Refundable Tax Credits to Illegal Aliens. Section

24(a) of the Internal Revenue Code allows a $1,000 per-child

tax credit for taxpayer's whose earnings fall below a

specified threshold. The Child Tax Credit is refundable to

the extent it exceeds the taxpayer's tax liability, in which

case it is referred to as the Additional Chad Tax Credit or

ACTC. A 2011 report by the U S. Treasury Inspector General

for Tax Administration explained that aliens authorized to

work in the United States are required to obtain a Social

Security number (SSN). For aliens who need to file U.S.

federal tax returns for other reasons, such as to claim

refunds of withholding tax on dividends, the IRS issues

Individual Tax Identification Numbers (ITINs). Unfortunately,

according to the inspector general, the IRS had been

permitting aliens to claim ACTCs on returns that reported an

ITIN rather than a Social Security number.

The payment of ACTCs to illegal aliens is arguably a direct

violation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity

Act of 1996 (``PRWOA''), which expressly provides that an

illegal alien ``is not eligible for any Federal public

benefit.'' The IRS has applied the PRWOA rule to prohibit

payments of Earned Income Tax Credits to ITIN filers, but

based on a questionable interpretation of the law has allowed

ITIN filers refunds of ACTCs.

According to the Inspector General, ``[b]ased on claims

made in Processing Year 2010, disallowance of the ACTC to

filers without a valid SSN would reduce Federal outlays by

approximately $8.4 billion over 2 years,'' i.e., $4.2 billion

per year. Although the inspector general's figures are based

on 2010 fiscal data, Treasury Department tax expenditure

estimates indicate that the total child tax credit

expenditure was virtually unchanged between 2010 and 2017.

Accordingly, based on the inspector general's report, we

estimate that limiting the Child Tax Credit to taxpayers with

Social Security numbers would increase federal tax revenues

by approximately $4.2 billion per year, or $42 billion over

10 years.

The bulk of this article addresses my bill, H.R. 176, the New IDEA Act, the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. They go through the calculations here, and I will just touch on some of them.

This is data from a Harvard economist, George Borjas. It is his empirical research. He shows that the workers in America, because wages have been suppressed by an oversupply of unskilled and illegal laborers, that American workers are suffering somewhere between a $99 billion and $118 billion loss in annual wages because they haven't gotten a raise in a long time. Nobody gets a raise as long as there is cheaper labor there that keeps that down--no effective raise. So between $99 billion and $118 billion. That is the Harvard economist, George Borjas. That is the annual wages loss because of illegal immigration.

If we go to the next page on this, it lays out the conditions, and we are seeing this. This is a number from the Pew Hispanic Center in 2009. It says that there are 8.3 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. labor force. They recently estimated that number is actually ratcheted down to about 8 million. It doesn't say why. But if they estimated the median household income of unauthorized worker families to be approximately $36,000 at 1-\3/4\ average workers per household, that is roughly--let's see. It says, ``implying median per-worker earnings of $20,571,'' they estimated that the earnings-per-worker estimate yields $165 billion a year. This is some of the magnitude of the money that is going out of our economy. Also, added to that, roughly $60 billion is being wired out of America.

So those who say, ``Well, we really need these illegal workers because they stimulate our economy, they grow our economy,'' they are siphoning this off. They are holding down the wages for the working people in America to the tune of $100 billion or more a year. They are earning something like $165 billion a year, and they are sending at least $60 billion of that south of the border, about half to Mexico and the other half to Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.

So all of these are economic impacts.

But the CIS, the Center for Immigration Studies, drew this estimate that, should my bill, the New IDEA Act, H.R. 176, become law--and the perfect place for it is in this tax policy--they estimate that it would score at, the number would be, $25.4 billion a year. If we do a 10-year estimate, that means a $254 billion score, a quarter of $1 trillion poured into our budget at a time that we are cutting taxes and we have a red ink tax policy--which I want to see passed, by the way. We have got some solutions here, and I want to see those solutions become law.

H.R. 176 is one of the unique tools that has been here for some time. It is thoroughly vetted. It has had a good number of cosponsors on it over the past years. I knew Barack Obama would never sign it, but Donald Trump will. It was on his website.

Early on, when he first launched his Presidency, the support for the New IDEA Act was on his immigration policy that was posted then. I haven't checked it now in quite some time, but I don't have any doubt that, if we send a tax bill to Donald Trump's desk with H.R. 176 in it, it will score better, to the tune of probably a quarter of $1 trillion.

It will put an end to the illegal workforce in America, or at least an end to the deductibility of wages and benefits paid to illegals, and it brings together the Social Security Administration, Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS to exchange information so that, if there is a Social Security number that is overused, they need to tell the DHS and they need to tell the IRS. If the IRS comes up with employers that are hiring illegals--and they will--they need to tell the Department of Homeland Security so ICE can come in and enforce the law.

So each one of these agencies needs to cooperate with each other. This way, we open up jobs for American workers, and we give the American workers a raise.

Now, what could be better than giving the American workers a raise and giving the American workers a tax cut all at the same time, while we nearly guarantee an economic growth cycle for the next decade of an average of over 3 percent per quarter? We can do that. It is all sitting here in front of us. And my hope, my prayer, and my effort is that we can all work together to reach all of those goals.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized to address

you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

I come before this floor to address a topic that has been front and center in this country since 1973: when the Supreme Court came down with the decisions known as Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, then the subsequent case in the early 1990s, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

This is a nation that has traditionally--and from the very beginning of the very first founding document, the Declaration of Independence-- respected and revered life.

As our Founding Fathers put that language together, and as John Adams coached Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Jefferson put his pen to the Declaration of Independence: ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.''

Now, Mr. Speaker, it wasn't an accident that the order of these rights that come from God be started out with life, then liberty, then the pursuit of happiness.

Of all the scholars that I have talked to and the times that I have sat in the classroom and in my readings, it just never really claim clear. It is not educating our young people about what they were thinking about when they drafted that language in the Declaration: ``We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,'' but the right to life is listed first. It is not second or third.

They didn't put together a list of four or five or seven or ten different rights. They laid three out in the Declaration. And those three start with life, because life is the most paramount right.

The former Governor of Pennsylvania, Governor Bob Casey, a Democrat, who has since passed away, was denied an opportunity to speak at the Democratic National Convention some years ago because he was a pro-life Democrat Governor and he would speak in favor of life. He said this: ``Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure itself against which all other things are weighed.''

The measure itself.

Now, what does that mean and how do we think about this, Mr. Speaker?

It would be this: when the Frenchmen devised the metric system, they set up a distance that was divided out to mean a ratio of the circumference of the Earth in whatever manner of calculation they had. And they came down to--however many times they divided that around, it came down to the length of the meter.

Then they produced this meter that was a platinum rule that was set at precisely the length of the meter. And, in controlled temperature and pressure, at standard temperature and pressure, what would the length of this platinum rule be? Exactly a meter.

Now, how long is a meter? I guess I could tell you, we can measure it by other measures. We can do some comparisons. But that meter, that original meter made out of platinum that is maintained at standard temperature and pressure, that is the measure itself; and all other measurements of length that are incorporated within the metric system, all of those measures of length are in relation to the meter itself. That meter stick, the original one, is the measure itself against which all other distances are weighed and measured in the metric system.

Human life is the measure itself against which we measure every other value that we have because human life is sacred in all of its forms. And then, once we accept that and this Nation accepts that human life is sacred in all of its forms--Democrats and Republicans do agree to that, I believe, generally speaking, maybe even universally--but the disagreement comes in, well, when does life begin? When does life end?

We can look at any one of the pro-life groups that are here in this country. You can ask the priests and pastors around America: When does life begin? The most consistent answer to that question is life begins at the moment of conception, the instant of fertilization, the instant of conception. That language is threaded throughout.

I have walked into gymnasiums, or maybe a whole school, K-12, or maybe a high school alone, and I will say to them: You will be faced with a couple of questions in your emerging young adult life, and the counsel that you would give to your friends perhaps, or maybe you, yourself, you will have to answer these two questions: Is human life sacred in all of its forms?

And I will say to them: Look at the person next to you. Is their life sacred? And they will nod their head.

Look at the person on the other side. Is their life sacred? And they will nod their head.

And I said: And they are looking at you, and they are nodding their head at you, too, because everybody in here, your life is sacred. It is precious. It is the measure itself against which all other things are weighed.

So once we universally agree that human life is sacred in all of its forms, then we have the next question and ask the question: At what moment does life begin, at what instant? And that is that instant at conception, that instant at fertilization. The rational, moral thought and faithful reasoning comes to that conclusion.

Yet the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade and in the accompanying case of Doe v. Bolton, on January 22, 1973, brought down a decision that decided that liberty and pursuit of happiness trumped life. They concluded that a mother could decide whether that child was inconvenient, whether they didn't want the child at the time, and allowed for abortion on demand. Coupling the two cases together, they allowed for abortion on demand.

Doe v. Bolton wrote everything in the list that could be exceptions: it could be the mental health; it could be the physical health; it could be even the familial health of the mother, which any of this could be affected by finances themselves. So if you don't think you can afford this baby, Doe v. Bolton lets you say: Well, it affected my mental health. It affected my familial health, so I decided to abort the baby.

And any abortion doctor could conduct an abortion at will, staying within this framework that was manufactured by the Supreme Court that turned the principles that are in our Declaration on their head. They no longer recognize that life is the paramount right that is delivered to us from God and that liberty is secondary to life and that pursuit of happiness is tertiary to life.

Now, think of this. If any of us, in our pursuit of liberty, would decide that someone's life is in the way of our liberty, we can't go kill them. We would end up in prison or executed in some States. We can't go kill somebody because they infringe upon our liberty. Their life is more important than our liberty.

Neither can someone, in their pursuit of happiness, trample on someone else's liberties. Our liberties of freedom of speech, religion, the press, assembly, the right to keep and bear arms, the protections that we have on a reasonable search and seizure, a jury of our peers, the States' rights that are enshrined in the Constitution that are subordinate to the enumerated powers in the Constitution, that is all laid out within a beautiful framework that has never been done better anywhere in the world in the history of the world, but it is based on the prioritization of God-given rights. Life is more important than liberty, is more important than this pursuit of happiness.

By the way, to define pursuit of happiness a little more thoroughly, some of the young people are growing up and they read that and don't give it very much thought. They say, well, pursuit of happiness is a fun tailgate party before the ball game; it is getting together with my friends; it is sitting down with my Xbox and enjoying the video games that are going on. Maybe it is just listening to music. None of those things fit the categories that our Founding Fathers envisioned when they put pursuit of happiness in the Declaration.

Pursuit of happiness was lifted from the Greek term ``eudaimonia,'' which is spilled E-U-D-A-I-M-O-N-I-A--because we are friends, Christina. Eudaimonia, the Greek term, means pursuit of happiness in this concept that our Founding Fathers understood, and that was that development of the whole human being, not a party at all, not a joke at

all, not a time necessarily of laughter, but it was a component; to develop one's self intellectually, develop one's brain power with a knowledge base that was as strong as it could be, and for a lifetime, to develop one's mind and develop it thoroughly and contemplate deep thoughts to develop themselves. That is the intellectual component of it.

There was a theological component to develop one's self religiously, which they did. Even though they were pagan, in my view, they developed themselves in a belief in a hereafter and in a belief in higher beings. It was plural for the Greeks, the higher beings. But they were developing their intellect. They were developing themselves spiritually and theologically and also physically.

They kept their bodies in shape, and they worked out and they exercised, and they competed in the sports that are the foundation of our Olympics today. All of that was wrapped up in the eudaimonia of the time that our Founders read and understood. Thomas Jefferson thoroughly understood. There is no doubt he understood the meaning of the word ``eudaimonia.'' He just didn't think the American people would understand it, so he wrote in there, ``pursuit of happiness.''

We have just kind of given a short and a brief definition of that. We haven't given it the full respect it was intended by the drafter and, in many cases, the author of our Declaration, Thomas Jefferson.

So now that I have reset this, life is paramount and it is the most important, and any of us should be willing to sacrifice at least some of our liberty to protect and save the lives of others because those lives are that precious and that important. Any one of us who is in pursuit of our eudaimonia, our pursuit of happiness, should be willing to give up some of that in order to secure and protect the liberties-- not only our liberties, but the liberties of others.

So a nation that is built upon those principles would also be a nation that would do most anything to protect the lives of the most innocent among us, our unborn, our unborn that don't have the ability to scream out for their own mercy. They don't have the ability to come to Congress and lobby for themselves. They are silent. They have no chance to make a noise even until the day that they draw their first breath, if they have the opportunity to draw that first breath.

But the tally for the decision of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton on January 22, 1973, now has reached or exceeded 60 million babies--60 million babies sacrificed on the altar of choice.

Watching the prioritized rights that came from God, we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Our Supreme Court got it wrong, and they set the liberty of the mother over the life of the baby. They set the pursuit of happiness, the eudaimonia, presumably, of the mother, over the life of the baby.

We have a hole in our society; not only a hole that comes from the heavy, heavy guilt of tolerating this throughout these years, but it is a hole that is a multigenerational hole: 60 million babies not born that would otherwise be living, loving, laughing, learning, falling in love, having babies of their own, worshipping, and raising their children with the values that have made this America a great nation.

But that is all denied this Nation. It is denied the world. The solutions that they would have provided, the happiness and the joy they would have delivered, intellectual firepower that would come from 60 million babies is denied to us.

And to go back and look and think, also, a good number of those little girls that were aborted since 1973 would have otherwise been mothers today. And to look at it generationally, and this is a back-of- the-envelope calculation, to take those little girls and predict that maybe each one of them would have had three babies, each one, that calculates out to be, Mr. Speaker, another 60 million babies--another 60 million.

So the population of this country would be something like 120 million stronger if the Supreme Court had believed and had conviction on what I have just described about the right to life being the paramount right-- more important than liberty, more important than the pursuit of happiness, eudaimonia, the right to life.

When the Supreme Court made that erroneous activist decision, they started this country in a downward spiral, a spiral where there is less respect for life than there was before 1973.

Mr. Speaker, if I just take you to the school shooting data and address that, we look back through the history and the records of the school shootings as well as mass killings that have taken place in schools, look back over the last century, the earliest one that we could find was 1924, in Michigan. It was a series of bombs that were planted in the schools there in Michigan, set to go off by alarm clocks, which would be the kind that we would see in the old cartoons today. Those bombs were timed to go off, and the result of that was 40 people were killed in the bombings at the school in Michigan in 1924, mass school killing. That is the largest mass school killing that we could find by sorting through history as deeply as we could research it, 40 killed, bombings, 1924.

Then not another mass school killing or shooting, not another killing until 1940, when an individual went into a school in Pasadena and killed five people with a pistol. Then not another school shooting, mass shooting of any kind at least, took place from 1940 on. It took us all the way to 1963, 23 years after that single mass school shooting in Pasadena.

Twenty-three years later, the Supreme Court came down with another erroneous decision called Murray v. Curlett. Murray v. Curlett is the case that took prayer out of public schools. Up till that time, we went to school and we went into school and started the day with the pledge and a prayer in the classroom with the teachers, especially in elementary school. I remember that clearly.

But by the time the Murray v. Curlett decision came down, I was a freshman in high school, and I remember that order. The Supreme Court commands no more prayer in the public schools. Where did they get the authority to declare that we couldn't exercise our freedom of religion?

Now, I have been challenged on this a good number of times in subsequent years, but I remember them saying: Well, what will you do about the separation of church and state?

Well, first of all, there isn't a separation of church and state, but it is being exercised by Supreme Court decisions as a separation even not only of church and state, but church and school.

Now, the First Amendment of the Constitution writes, and what it specifically does is it prohibits Congress from establishing a law that creates a state religion. And it denies the ability of Congress to pass that legislation that establishes a state religion, so that is all it does.

And the freedom of religion shall not be infringed. We have a freedom of religion, but they still, the Supreme Court, made the decision to take prayer out of the public schools, an activist act that then began to scrub faith and morality out of our public schools.

I remember that freshman year when I learned this. I remember in that classroom--and these images are in my mind clearly. It was: How are they going to stop us from praying in our schools? What could they possibly do to keep us from praying?

They hadn't invented duct tape yet at that time, Mr. Speaker, but, you know, I am thinking the white adhesive tape that doctors use, the medical tape, and I had images in my mind: Well, they could tape our mouths shut with that tape. We could pray silently. They couldn't stop us from praying by taping our mouths shut.

The only way to stop prayer in the public schools, if we refuse to accept the order, was to empty the schools out themselves. That image is in my mind. Denison Community Schools, where I went to high school, I can still see the central building in my mind's eye, clearing out all the rooms, emptying the rooms, all the students going outside, outside of that school.

And the Army. The Army is in my imagination--Vietnam era--that the Army would come in, and they would have a new chain to roll around those bars that you push inside the doors to open the doors, wrap that chain around there, put a new padlock on it, and post a guard, an Army uniform outside those doors, every entrance into that

school. That is the only way they could have stopped prayer in that public school.

But they stopped it because we accepted the order of the Supreme Court. We accepted the beginning of the degradation of the moral core of America that was being taught in every public school in America at that time.

We revered our faith. We understood our history. We knew that our Founding Fathers, who put this country together, who I believe were moved around like men on a chessboard by the hand of God--I believe the Declaration is written not with divine inspiration, like the Bible, but with divine guidance, just a little bit lower standard of proof. We are gifted in this country with the divine grace that God guided the men and women who built this country in the nearly perfect foundation that they put in place in the Declaration and in also the Constitution.

But we let the Supreme Court, that was never designed to be the most powerful of the three branches of government--we let the Supreme Court rule. And then, now, today, we teach in those schools that there is three equal branches of government. They are not equal. They were not designed to be equal. The Founding Fathers put them together that the judicial branch of government was designed to be the weakest of the three branches of government, and they were not even the branch of government that was designed to come down with a rule on what is constitutional and what is unconstitutional.

The Constitution requires that Congress establish a Supreme Court. And I had made this case to, God rest his soul, Justice Scalia, an awfully hard man to say goodbye to for all that he has done for our country and all the clarity that he has brought to the understanding of the Constitution. I am grateful that Justice Gorsuch is there to replace him in picking up on the things that are so well perfected by Justice Scalia.

But in a meeting with 30 or 40 other members here several years ago, I made the point, Mr. Speaker, to Justice Scalia, and I said to him that Congress is the most powerful branch of government, the legislative branch of government, and the House, in particular, because all spending bills have to start here, and the Constitution doesn't require that we establish all of the Federal circuits that are out there or the Federal district courts below that.

The Congress only--and this is how I put it to Justice Scalia-- Congress is only required to establish a Supreme Court. We could abolish all of the other Federal districts if we chose to do so. In fact, Congress did abolish two judicial districts back in about 1802. That is a pattern. It has been established.

So if Congress decided to do so, we could weaken the judicial branch of government, and we could reduce the judicial branch of government down to just a Supreme Court, because it requires that we-- constitutionally, we are required to establish a Supreme Court. But there is nothing that requires us to build a building, fund a building, or to fund an administrative staff and team for them.

So I said to Justice Scalia: We could eliminate all the Federal courts, except the Supreme Court. We could reduce the Supreme Court down to the Chief Justice at his own card table with his own candle, no staff.

And I think it was a bit of surprise for the very glib Justice Scalia to hear that out of a Member of Congress, especially in a setting that was, I will say, quasi-public at least.

He thought about it for a little bit. I am not sure if he had ever thought about what I had presented to him, Mr. Speaker, but he thought for a little bit, and he said: Well, I would argue that you could reduce the Supreme Court down to three Justices because, otherwise, if you don't have anything but a Supreme Court Chief Justice, there is nothing to be the chief of. So I would argue for three Justices.

And I said: Well, Justice Scalia, there have always been too many chiefs and not enough Indians.

And we, more or less, declared a case ready to move on for further discussion.

But the point of this exercise, Mr. Speaker, is to make the point that the Court's power exists because Congress empowers it. And if there is a struggle between the legislative branch of government, Article 1; or the executive branch of government, Article 2; or the judicial branch of government, Article 3, I would remind the folks involved in any discussion like that that the branches of government were prioritized in the Constitution in the same fashion that the God- given rights are prioritized in the Declaration--life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

In the Constitution, Articles 1, 2, 3--legislative, executive, judicial branches of government--prioritized because our Founding Fathers envisioned that there would be a struggle between the three branches of the government, and they wanted to set up a static power base so that they expected that each branch of government would jealously protect its constitutional authority, and there would be that tug of war, a struggle, ethically and peacefully, they hoped, between each branch of government.

That is why they put the checks and balances in place. They gave the legislative authority to the United States Congress, and the spending authority to Congress, and the initiation of all bills that initiate spending to the House of Representatives. They didn't give it to the Senate because we were to be the hot cup of coffee, and the Senate was to be the saucer that that coffee cooled in.

That is why we are 2-year terms here, 6-year terms over in the Senate, but they wanted a legislative body that would be a quick reaction for us, a fast response for if things got out of whack, if they needed to be addressed quickly, then they wanted the House of Representatives to perhaps turn over quickly so that the House could respond to these issues in a fast way.

They wanted a judicial body, that legislative body that could sit back, maybe fold their arms a little bit, and wait and be patient and think things through so it wasn't just emotional. It was also kind of a hard-charging reaction force in the House, and seasoned by experience, I might add, Mr. Speaker; and a more careful, slower moving body in the Senate, which I think they clearly achieved a more careful, slower moving body in the Senate.

But one of those examples in modern day, when things went against the American people in the elections of 2010, around March 23, 2010--it was March 23--the final passage of ObamaCare passed out from the Senate and the House to President Obama's desk, and he signed that bill as fast as he could get his signature on it. The American people had rejected a Federal Government takeover of our health insurance, at least as a minimum.

And I long said that, you know, our soul is the most sovereign thing that we have, and the government hasn't figured out how to nationalize that yet. I don't believe they ever will.

The second thing that is the most sovereign thing that we have is our bodies, our skin, and everything inside it. ObamaCare nationalized a Federal takeover of the management of our body, our skin, and everything inside of it, took out of our hands the ability to manage our own health in a free market system, and the public rejected such an idea. They rejected ObamaCare.

On March 23, it passed and was signed into law. That election that ensued the following November brought 87 freshmen Republicans to the House of Representatives. Every one of them pledged and every one of them ran on the ticket to 100 percent, rip it out by the roots, repeal ObamaCare. That is the reaction of the public when this body here was not responding to the will of the people. They changed that over in the very next election, which was just months later, from the third month to the eleventh month as--so you are only--and 8 months later, the election had taken place, and we had 87 new freshmen Republicans on the way.

We didn't get as far as we needed to get. We didn't get it fully ripped out by the roots, as I wanted to do, but you can see the effects of that election to this day, Mr. Speaker.

That is how our Founding Fathers envisioned it would work--the House of Representatives to be a quick reaction force. They reacted quickly in the 2010 election. The American people weighed in. When the executive branch gets out of line, there are provisions there. If there is going to be impeachment, the

House has to initiate that impeachment. But over in the Senate, the impeachment doesn't remove a President from office.

I believe it constitutionally requires a trial in the Senate, but to remove a President from office takes a two-thirds majority in the United States Senate. I don't think they served us very well in 1998, when the impeachment went before the United States Senate, when William Jefferson Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives, because the trial in the Senate didn't bring us a verdict. It put all the questions together.

And instead of asking the question, ``Did he commit the acts that the House had indicted him for,'' and in a separate question, ``Should he be removed from office for that,'' they jammed those questions together, and it gave some of the Democrat Senators a way out. They didn't have to answer the question, whether they believed he was guilty or not, so they never really heard the case and gave us a verdict on the conclusion.

It was inconclusive in the Senate. I think that the way they framed those questions that were voted upon by the Senators, I think it was a disservice to the American people, a disservice to our Constitution.

But, nonetheless, there is a check and a balance. If an executive--if a President gets out of line, if his executive branch gets out of line, the House of Representatives can initiate impeachment. The House of Representatives can shut off all funding to that branch of government or--well, it wouldn't do that, obviously, but to a division within that branch of government, we could cut the funds to the funding to bring about the result that is necessary if we have the conviction here and if we believe it is prudent policy.

The House controls the spending. The House initiates any impeachment that might be required, and we don't want to ever exercise that unless it is judiciously done for good reason and good cause. And the Senate, the prudent group of the Senate, come up for election every 6 years, so they can sit back a little bit. Only a third of them have the level of apprehension that all of those who are up for reelection in the House of Representatives do.

But this balance, this check and balance between the three branches of government, was that the branch of government and the division within it--the legislative branch and the U.S. House of Representatives, the division within it was always designed to be able to control the other branches of government and, by the way, able to limit the United States Senate.

The reasons for that are why we are up for election every 2 years so the people would be sovereign. We the people are the ones who really do decide who is right in all of this Republican form of government, which is guaranteed to the American people in the Constitution. We are guaranteed, Mr. Speaker, a Republican form of government. But in this form of government, it is we the people; and we the legislators within the United States House of Representatives are the most accountable to the people, and, by that, we need to be the most responsive to the people as well.

I think history has proven that out. So it doesn't mean either that the Supreme Court gets to decide necessarily what the Constitution means. I will define what it means here, Mr. Speaker, and that is, the Constitution has to mean what it says. It has to mean literally what it says, but it has to also mean what it was understood to mean at the time of its ratification.

Every one of us takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Here, in the House, 435 of us; and over in the Senate, 100 Senators; and a good number of executive branch employees, a long ways down the line, take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Now, I take that oath seriously, and I carry a Constitution in my jacket pocket every day, as close to my heart as it can get, to remember what this means, what it means to me.

But I don't take the oath to support and defend the Constitution with the idea in mind that I am going to shift my oath and the meaning of my oath to conform to a Supreme Court decision that does not reflect the original understanding of the Constitution. None of us can take an oath to a living, breathing, moving interpretation of a document.

This Constitution, Mr. Speaker, this Constitution constitutes a contractual guarantee, an intergenerational contractual guarantee that this God-given liberty, as defined in our Declaration, and the Bill of Rights and the structure of our government and the function of our government, the enumerated powers that are in here, that this is an intergenerational contractual guarantee passed down to us generation to generation, and it can't change its meaning just because five Justices over there in the Supreme Court decided to change its meaning.

Now, I want to respect their jurisprudence and I respect almost all of the decisions that have come down, but there have been times in history when an activist court has decided that they are going to rewrite this society according to their whim.

I have always admired Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas, who is a former judge. He came to this Congress and he ran on this ticket. He has been to Iowa a few times, and he is coming back. He says this:

I found myself on the bench as a judge, and I was

constrained to interpret the literal meaning of the

Constitution and to interpret the literal meaning of the laws

that were passed, and when I felt the urge to be a

legislator, I knew my obligation then was to leave the bench

and run for Congress.

That is what you need to do when you feel in your heart that you are a legislator, when you reason that you can do more to contribute as a legislator than you can as a judge.

So Louie Gohmert came to this Congress. Congressman Louie Gohmert came to this Congress in the right way for the right reasons, to legislate, because that was his heart's desire, and that is where he believed, and I hope today he still believes, that he can do the most good for this country.

But the Justices that sit on the bench that decide that they can just ignore the meaning of the Constitution are undermining our God-given liberty. They are undermining the foundation delivered to us by the Founders. They are undermining the Declaration. They are undermining the Constitution itself.

I can think of a few of those decisions. The Kelo decision, where the Supreme Court ruled that private property could be confiscated, condemned, through eminent domain by a local jurisdiction of government and then handed over to another private interest.

Let's just say that there is a widow lady that lives in a certain section of town, and she wants to live in that house the rest of her life, but there are developers that own the rest of the land around her, and they want to put in a shopping mall. So they would come in and say to the lady: Hey, here is our offer. We want to buy your house.

And she says: No. No amount of money can buy my house. I am going to live in this house the rest of my life.

Well, in the Kelo decision, they went to government, and government condemned the property, took that property away from her. It was litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court ruled that local government could condemn property under the Fifth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, which says ``nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.''

And think of this. They didn't say ``nor shall private property be condemned and handed over to other private interests, without just compensation,'' because the Founding Fathers never imagined that government would have the audacity to condemn private property to hand it over to other private interests.

But the function of that decision was, and so now the effect of the Kelo decision is, the Fifth Amendment now reads, in effect, de facto, we say: Nor shall private property be taken without just compensation. They struck out those three words ``for public use.''

That is the effect of a Supreme Court decision, and it is an erroneous decision. It is a wrong decision. It doesn't reflect the language in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

The dissent was written by Justice O'Connor. I didn't know until after I had made my statement on the floor after that decision that her dissent mirrored almost exactly the statement

that I made on the floor in rejection of it. I didn't expect the gentleman at that time from Massachusetts, Barney Frank, to agree with me either, but Barney Frank, Justice O'Connor, Steve King, and many others agreed: an erroneous decision.

A Supreme Court amended the Constitution, in effect. They de facto amended the Constitution of the United States by coming down with a decision that effectively struck the words ``for public use'' out of the Fifth Amendment, ``nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.''

So now there are extra constitutional takings of private property handed over to private property because local government has concluded they can collect more tax dollars off of that private interest that wants to build a shopping mall or a truck stop or whatever it might be to expand. That is the kind of decision that a Supreme Court can make that are activist decisions that effectively amend our Constitution if we let them do that.

So we think of a decision like Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. How did they cook that up? Where does that come from?

Well, it comes from out of the emanations and penumbras, Madam Speaker, and it is rooted back in a decision called the Griswold decision from the sixties. I believe it was 1964.

Connecticut, at that time, a strong Catholic State, had decided that they would not allow for contraceptives to be sold in Connecticut. The Griswold couple, husband and wife, decided that they had a right to privacy to purchase contraceptives to exercise their liberties.

Now, that decision that was made by the State of Connecticut not to sell contraceptives was a part of the laboratory of the States. It is a State's right to pass a decision like that; and as soon as the people in the State of Connecticut decided they rejected that decision, they can elect some new people to their legislature.

But this was litigated to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court of the United States decided that that couple, the Griswold couple, had a right to privacy, and that right to privacy included the right to purchase contraceptives.

So they created a new right, a right to privacy. They created it out of thin air, which we now call out of the emanations and penumbras. That is a little shadow around the edge of the cloud that maybe a Justice in a black robe can see but the rest of us lay people or even the brightest attorneys in the land can't quite see because they aren't seated on the Supreme Court.

Well, if you can find rights out of the emanations and penumbras that you can't find in the very language of the Constitution or statute, for that matter, you are an activist judge, and you are trying to alter our society, amend our society into your own fashion. You are legislating from the bench.

So they created a right to privacy, and this right to privacy was then used as the foundation of the decision in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton that granted, those two cases together, abortion on demand-- abortion on demand, at least before viability. And viability is a very vague measure of a baby that would be able to survive outside the womb.

Now, that length of maturity within the womb and the ability to survive outside the womb has changed substantially, Madam Speaker, since Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Now we have babies who survive clear down as early as into the 20th week. Viability has changed because medicine has gotten ahead of this, and we have saved more babies.

But viability wasn't the only measure, because Doe v. Bolton gave all the exceptions that I talked about earlier, made exceptions for the health of the mother, the physical health, the mental health, the familial health, the financial health, anything that might affect her psyche. So it amounts to abortion on demand for the sake of, well, let's wait until it is convenient to take the life of that innocent little baby.

But what we see now, Madam Speaker, what we see now is that we are watching these babies grow in the womb and the ultrasound. My iPhone has a number of little babies and the ultrasounds in it, and you can watch as those little babies will squirm and reach their arm out, suck their thumb. They look like they are trying to talk, stretch their legs out. They move around a lot more than we ever thought they did.

I have talked to mothers who say as they watch their little baby that is 19, 20 weeks along, squirming around in the ultrasound, that a lot of the time they can't yet feel that movement. We know that as we get later on, even us dads get to feel that movement, and it is a glorious thing. This is the development of a miracle, and you can't be a parent or a grandparent and hold a little baby that is flesh of your flesh and not be amazed at the miracle of a little baby.

When I took my firstborn in my hands, little David Steven King, and put him in my hands and looked at him, it was with awe that I saw so many pieces about him: counted the fingers and toes, took a look at his eyes, saw every little feature that is there, that little son.

And I began to ask that question shortly after his birth: Could anyone take his life now within minutes after he was born? As squirmy and beautiful and miraculous, created in God's image as he was, could anybody take his life then? I don't know anybody who would be ghastly enough who could do so.

So I thought, if he is 20 minutes old and we can't take his life, if he is 5 minutes old and we can't take his life, if he is 1 minute old and we can't take his life, how could we take it a minute before he was born? or 5 minutes? or an hour? or a day? or a week? or a month? Where along this continuum from this moment of conception would there be a time that we could say: Oh, he is only a blob of tissue?

He was never a blob of tissue. He was always a unique human being, joining together the DNA of his mother and his father in a unique fashion that would never be matched again.

Madam Speaker, think of this. Seven billion people on the planet, every one unique. Even the identical twins, the identical quadruplets that are there, their mother can tell them apart. Their father can tell them apart most of the time. And the older they get, the easier it is. But 7 billion faces on this planet, and God created those faces to be unique. No two faces are the same. Even if their DNA is matched up in identical twins or identical quadruplets or identical triplets, as rare as they are, their mothers can look them in the face and know which child is which. The rest of us can figure out everybody else, and we can, a lot of times, figure out the twins, too.

I have twin nieces that I could always tell apart. They would ask me how I could, and I would say: Well, one of you is really intelligent and the other is really beautiful. You two figure out which is which. I am not going to answer the question.

But we can tell them apart. Now, what a gift from God, the creation, to have the imagination to create faces, every one unique. No matter how many people on the planet there are, just the facial features are unique, let alone all the rest of us, let alone all the things that go on in our heads and in our minds and the experiences we have, the personalities that develop differently. That combination of nature or nurture that we will never unlock the mystery of that, that is all a gift from God.

We have aborted 60 million of the gifts from God--60 million--and another 60 million babies not born because their mothers were aborted. Children who never had the opportunity to live to draw that first breath of free air.

When I welcome a new grandchild into the world, I say a prayer over them, Madam Speaker, and I pray that they have a long and a healthy life, a faithful life, and a life that is long and healthy and faithful. And when that day comes that they are called home at the end of that long and healthy and faithful life, I pray that the last breath that they draw is more free than the first breaths that they are drawing on that day. And that is what we need to work for: more freedom, more God-given liberty, more young lives brought into this world.

The very source of all joy comes from little babies, from our children, and if we stopped having babies, the joy would finally just die down. The laughter, the giggling would just diminish day by day by day until there was no joy left in the world, because that is the source of it. And yet we are aborting 1 million babies a year.

That is why, Madam Speaker, I brought the Heartbeat bill to this House of Representatives, H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act. That is why we have worked so hard to get cosponsors on this legislation, we worked so hard to get the cosponsors.

People like former majority leader Tom DeLay came here to work pro bono. The leader of Faith2Action, Janet Porter, a driving force, worked to get cosponsors on this legislation, worked to send the messages in the right place. We carefully drafted language that reflects our intent to save the lives of as many babies as we can from the moment of the heartbeat.

We require that, if the abortionist is intending to commit an abortion, he must first check for a heartbeat, and that heartbeat would be detected at 7 to 8 weeks. If a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected, because we know that is a unique human being, a sacred human life.

I would like to go back to the moment of conception, but we can't yet medically identify that moment. But we can identify when a heartbeat can be detected. We all know that if there is a beating heart, there is a baby there. That heart doesn't just sit down there on its own beating away. It is in the chest of a baby, a little baby, a little unique boy or a girl who is a gift from God. That baby has at least a 95 percent chance of successful birth once we can detect that heartbeat in the womb.

So how could we allow for the ending of that unique human being's life without that baby ever having a chance to draw a breath of free air or to scream for its own mercy? How could we say no to that? How could we have in our earpieces that ultrasound of that beating heart?

That little granddaughter is 20 weeks along and her heart was beating last week, anyway, at 161 beats per minute. That beat is strong, firm, and solid. She has at least a 95 percent chance of successful birth and being welcomed into this world drawing that breath of free air, and I will pray as freer still on her last day many, many years from now.

But we need to get there. We need to protect these lives, and we need to get a bill before the Supreme Court. So here in this House, we are 170 cosponsors strong. We are far ahead of any other significant piece of pro-life legislation. I drafted the bill with the strategy in mind, Madam Speaker, to get the Heartbeat bill before the Supreme Court after the next appointment to the Supreme Court.

I am very pleased with what I see with Neil Gorsuch. When I hear the rumors of the potential retirements in the Supreme Court, our three oldest members of the Supreme Court are 84, 80, and 78 years old, Madam Speaker. So we can expect a retirement fairly soon. We need to have a bill out of the House of Representatives sitting on Mitch McConnell's desk long enough and hard enough that we can gin up the effort to get it passed out of the United States Senate.

There are four windows that need to be open before we can start to save lives in significant numbers, Madam Speaker. One of them is a pro- life majority in the House of Representatives. We have that, 237 votes behind the pain-capable 20-week bill.

The next one is a pro-life majority in the United States Senate. Senator Roy Blunt made mention in our values team here a couple of weeks ago that they have a bare majority, a pro-life majority in the Senate. Fifty-one votes voted for the 20-week bill over there. They didn't break the filibuster, but 51. That is a pro-life majority. If they suspend the rules over there and get rid of the filibuster rule, the votes are there to pass Heartbeat bill over and send it to the President's desk. That is the third window.

The first window is a pro-life majority in the House. The second window is a pro-life majority in the Senate. The third window is a President who will sign the Heartbeat bill to protect these lives from the seventh or eighth week all the way through. I don't have any doubt President Trump will sign such a bill, and I don't have any doubt that Vice President Pence will be standing right next to him when that day comes. I don't know whether I am going to be standing there, but I am going to do everything I can, Madam Speaker, to get the Heartbeat bill to the President's desk.

Yes, it will be litigated. The pro-abortion people will litigate everything that slows down the abortion mills in this country. So it would be litigated. And the timing of getting it out of the Senate to the President's desk and before the Court after the next confirmation means we are called upon to move the Heartbeat bill out of the House within the next few months because as we get closer to the election, it gets harder. Things get crazy around here. So if it gets passed around July, it is going to be really hard to move the Heartbeat bill.

There is a little rule that was handed down, I think, from the previous Speaker that says that pro-life legislation doesn't move off the floor of the House unless the top three pro-life organizations support it and will actively support it here in the House of Representatives.

Those organizations would be Family Research Council. Tony Perkins supports the bill. The next organization is Susan B. Anthony List. They also have agreed to support the bill. Yes, they have a priority they would like to have move ahead of that, but Marjorie Dannenfelser said:

Of course, I would never stand in the way of something so

good as the Heartbeat bill.

The third organization is the one that is not fully on board. In fact, I don't see that they are supporting it in any way, and back channel says to me that there are some statements made to try to slow it down. That is the National Right to Life, the oldest and the largest pro-life organization in the United States of America. They said that they don't oppose the Heartbeat bill.

Madam Speaker, this is right off of their electronic publication, whether it happens to be a tweet or whether it is their website, but here is their statement: National Right to Life, protecting life in America since 1968.

National Right to Life says they do not oppose the Heartbeat bill. I struck through there with a red line and said: Well, neither do they support it. They don't oppose the Heartbeat bill. Well, they don't support the Heartbeat bill.

They are stuck on this. They are hidebound on this. Their mission statement says that they support and protect life from the beginning of life until natural death. They define the beginning of life at the moment of fertilization.

So how can you be National Right to Life and not support the Heartbeat bill?

Their reasoning is that they are stuck in this. They refuse to challenge the Supreme Court. They refuse to challenge the viability standards that were written into Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

If the number one pro-life organization refuses to challenge the Supreme Court on those standards, then what they are really doing is accepting--and some would say accepting the idea that we are going to see 1 million abortions a year in this country, as far as the eye can see, because if you are not willing to challenge the Supreme Court, then you are accepting 1 million abortions.

That is what we get if we are trimming around the edges with pain- capable at 20 weeks. I support all of this legislation. Let's do it all, Madam Speaker. The pain-capable doesn't get the job done. It shies away from challenging the Supreme Court.

We wrote this Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490, in order to challenge the viability standard the Supreme Court has. We want to measure life-- unique, precious, sacred human life--from the moment of conception until natural death, protected. By the way, protected in the 14th Amendment. We are all protected in there: life, liberty, and property. So all we need to do is define when life begins, and we are obligated by the Constitution to protect that life.

But the Supreme Court has different ideas. I don't believe they will after the next appointment to the Supreme Court.

So some of the people who agree with National Right to Life have said that not enough States have passed it. Okay. So we went to work. Here are the States that have passed heartbeat protection language: Ohio, North Dakota, and Arkansas.

Now, John Kasich vetoed that legislation.

Who lobbied him to do that?

The arm of National Right to Life and Planned Parenthood; side by side, by the way.

What brings them to do that, Madam Speaker?

Because they don't want to challenge the Supreme Court. There is testimony that went before the Ohio Legislature December 13, 2011, that said: We don't want to force Justice Kennedy to vote ``no'' on a Heartbeat bill because then Justice Ginsburg might write the majority opinion. If she does that, she might take away the things we have gained. And we should not go before the Court and risk what we have gained.

I would argue instead that every time we have gone before the Court, we have gained. We gain something. We gain ground. The Court is sensitive to the movement of our society. They were sensitive to that when they ran up the Obergefell decision that imposed same-sex marriage on America. They decided American society was ready for same-sex marriage, and they gave us an extraconstitutional decision and forced it on everyone in America.

They must have been right because there wasn't a very big fight that was put up. But by their rationale, we are a lot more ready to protect innocent unborn human life than we ever were for gay marriage. Yet we need to get this legislation before the Court.

Tonight at 6 o'clock eastern time, 7 o'clock central time, there is a full hearing before the Iowa House of Representatives on their Heartbeat legislation, which has passed the senate 30-20. It went before the house. It has passed out of committee out of the house last Thursday night in the last hour that was available in what they call funnel week. Now this hearing is called for by the pro-abortion people who want to have a full house hearing. The witnesses will be lined up there. They will stand up for life tonight.

If the hearing goes the way we expect, I expect the bill will come before the Iowa House of Representatives and it will pass. Watching the expressions on our excellent and wonderful first female Governor in the State of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, I can't imagine she would do anything but sign it. I don't want to put words in her mouth. I am just anticipating a wonderful result.

I believe in 1 week or 2 weeks that becomes law in Iowa. Likely the pro-abortion people will litigate like they did in Mississippi on Mississippi's 15-week bill that we have just seen before today, an injunction that is going before the Sixth Circuit. The viability standards in Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and also Planned Parenthood v. Casey will be challenged in the Fifth Circuit on the basis of the Mississippi law. Then that means that the Iowa law that I anticipate also will be litigated.

Why wouldn't we send this standard over to the Senate and on to go before the Supreme Court?

H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act, litigated at the same time before the United States Supreme Court along with Mississippi's 15-week bill and Iowa's Heartbeat bill. That looks to me like a good result. That brings it from several different angles.

I would remind the body that there were three Federal circuits where the partial-birth abortion legislation was heard simultaneously. They arrived packaged up in one case before the United States Supreme Court, and life prevailed in that case, as eventually life will prevail in the United States of America.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to take up any of the topics that are already in order here, which is most every topic delivered in a decent fashion.

But I have some things to talk about here tonight that are a bit celebratory, things that I am pretty happy about. I want to discuss, Mr. Speaker, the narrative of a significant accomplishment that I think, in the end, will save the lives of perhaps millions of innocent unborn babies in this country.

The history of Roe v. Wade goes back to January 22, 1973, when the United States Supreme Court came down with a decision. Coupled were two cases the same day, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, and those two cases that were delivered launched abortion on demand in America. It was a stunning set of decisions, the scope of which, the magnitude of which, could not have been comprehended at that time.

I remember then, when they came down. We had no children yet at that point. Marilyn and I were married, but at that age in life and not having any experience with the impact of such a decision--America didn't have that experience--the way we analyzed that thing, didn't understand how severe this would be.

Yet, once the decision came down, there is something that I have learned, Mr. Speaker, and that is that people say: You can't legislate morality.

I have always thought that was a pretty weak statement and not very defensible, but you hear it quite often: You can't legislate morality. You can't legislate morality.

Well, legislation is a reflection of morality. For example, we have laws against murder and rape and assault and battery and armed robbery, and the list goes on and on of the things that are prohibited. They are the reflections of the morality of a nation.

The lack of such legislation would indicate only one of two things: either it is the lack of morality, or it is a nation that doesn't need laws to frame it because the morality of the nation is so enshrined in the culture that there doesn't need to be laws.

For example, one of those examples would be that, for centuries, marriage was between a man and a woman. We didn't need laws that said so because everybody knew that marriage defined a union between a man and a woman--in my case, joined together in holy matrimony.

So as the legislation came forward--and I was in the Iowa Senate at the time--I remember some of that debate and discussion, and it was: Why do we need to pass this law to defend marriage, the Defense of Marriage Act?

I helped write part of that language, Mr. Speaker, and I had a little bit of a hard time explaining why it was important that we move it, more or less, an insurance policy so that we could protect marriage in Iowa against the movement that had just begun not very much earlier than that by litigation out in Hawaii. And then the conflation between civil unions and marriage.

But the reflection of the values of marriage were in our culture so deeply that senator after senator stood on the floor and said: Why do we need to do this? This is a redundant exercise. It is a waste of our time. Everybody knows that marriage is between a man and a woman.

And we passed the Defense of Marriage Act. There were only about three or four who voted against it. We wondered why they did that. They were out there in the fringes, so we thought, at the time. That was about 1998.

By 2009--and that would only be 11 years later--the Iowa Supreme Court came down with the decision Varnum v. Brien, which imposed same- sex marriage on Iowa, the transformation of a culture that needed a law to protect marriage, if we were to protect it. But once, for thousands of years--I will say at least for thousands of years--marriage was between a man and a woman, and it changed.

When something became permissive, then the permissiveness of it changed the morality of the situation. That is not a very good description, Mr. Speaker, of what happened with the abortion circumstances in America. We understood then that life begins at the moment of conception. But when Roe v. Wade came down with the decision that prohibited the States from regulating abortion and prohibiting abortion, then it became permissible and permissive, and it became pervasive at the same time.

Some of our peak incidents of abortion, from 1973 until the latter part of that decade, got up to 1.6 million abortions a year. And, today, after 45 years of Roe v. Wade, this Nation has seen 60 million-- some say 61 million--babies aborted. Babies who would be growing up in our society today: going to school; playing ball; studying; going to church; loving their brothers and sisters, their mothers, their fathers, their grandparents, their aunts, their uncles. They are gone: 60 million little babies gone.

And not only 60 million--there is no way to actually describe 60 million babies as only--but, in addition, there are another roughly 60 million who were not born because their mothers were aborted. A population between 100 and 120 million Americans are missing today because of Roe v. Wade's decision--Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton--an unsoundly and unjustly decision that came down from the United States Supreme Court.

One of the problems we have in this country is we have three branches of government. A lot of government teachers and constitutional teachers instruct that it is three coequal branches of government, but that is not what our Founding Fathers expected. They defined it, instead, that the judicial branch of government would be the weakest of the three branches of government.

Yet our society, our culture, our civilization gives such reverence to the United States Supreme Court that they can't even get their minds around the idea of: What do you do if the Court comes down with an atrocious, outrageous, erroneous, nonconstitutional decision that visits 60 million deaths of innocent babies on our country and another 60 million babies who are not born because of a result of it? A missing 100 to 120 million babies--a decision of the Supreme Court.

And what do we do?

We accept the decision as if the decisions of the Supreme Court are utterly sacrosanct, and the only way they can ever change is if the circumstances of that Court should change in such a way that the appointments and the confirmations to the Court could transform and reverse the erroneous decisions in the past.

Now, there are circumstances where the Supreme Court has reversed their own decision. We had the Dred Scott decision that actually wasn't reversed. That was a decision on slavery. Some say that that was an erroneous, poorly found decision.

I think I side with Abraham Lincoln that it was constitutional at its time. It probably was a decision that conformed to the Constitution, however morally wrong it was.

Then along came the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th Amendments that rectified the situation that was put upon us by Dred Scott. And, by the way,

600,000 lives lost in the Civil War, putting an end to slavery and resolving the Union.

Was the Union going to be something that one could separate from, or once you are part of the Union are you always part of the Union?

And, as this turned out, 600,000 Americans were killed in the Civil War, putting an end to slavery--600,000. It sounds like a lot until you compare it to 60 million babies aborted, Mr. Speaker.

This is the worst atrocity ever--accumulated effect of it--the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil, and it was sanctified by the Supreme Court in an unsoundly founded decision.

Now, the thing that obstructs us from getting pro-life legislation passed is a few people who profess that they are pro-life--a pro-life organization. They say: Well, we have to respect the Supreme Court decision that it is sacrosanct.

The Supreme Court laid out the parameters of viability not only in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, but also in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992: this viability concept, which is that if a baby can't survive outside of the womb, it is really not a life. Well, we know better than that because we can hear their hearts beat, we can watch them move around inside of the womb, we can watch them squirm, we can watch them suck their thumb, and we can watch them move their lips like they are trying to talk.

We bond with these babies now through ultrasound. The ultrasound is just about as good as Skype with our children and grandchildren who are out here breathing this free air. Those are the circumstances that have changed. We know that it is life.

The Supreme Court's decision wasn't soundly found. They weren't looking at an ultrasound then, back 45 years ago. We didn't know whether we had twins, or singles, or triplets, or quadruplets then because we didn't have enough ability to even listen to the heartbeat precisely enough. Today, we can, Mr. Speaker.

Today, we are listening to heartbeats, and, today, we are watching babies squirm, and move, and suck their thumb, and move their mouth like they are trying to talk, and get their exercise inside of the womb. Now we know. We can't deny. It is not a blob of tissue, it is not some kind of an intruder. This is a unique DNA, innocent, unborn human life.

We brought legislation here to this Congress called the Heartbeat legislation, H.R. 490. In this legislation, it says that before an abortionist sets about committing an abortion, he must first check for a heartbeat with transabdominal ultrasound, which picks up a heartbeat between 7 and 8 weeks from fertilization or conception. He must first check for a heartbeat. If a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected.

This rings not only in our hearts, but it rings true in our conscience. We know that where there is a heartbeat, there is life. And we know that if you go in and surgically, or by any other method, snuff out that heartbeat, you are snuffing out life, the most innocent among us.

Father Jonathan Morris, a priest from New York whom we see on FOX News in the morning, one day was commenting. He was commenting about how the ladies and the mothers in the church, when their babies start to cry too loud, they get up and hustle them out of the church, and he said: Why would you do that?

Those are the only innocent voices in that church. Well, the most innocent are in the womb, and the most innocent have been victimized by this idea of convenience, or women's rights, or that it is not somebody else's business to tell someone else what to do with their body.

Well, it isn't about their body, Mr. Speaker. It is about that unique being, with that unique combination of DNA. That is how precious this is. We never know the potential of a baby, an innocent unborn baby.

There was a story in the news a couple of days ago. Now, there are those who would predict that inside the womb you can identify Down syndrome, you can identify other afflictions; and those other afflictions, they might argue, make that baby less than perfect. But those babies, when they are loved, are perfect for those who love them.

We can't decide with a level of certainty, regardless, when they are in the womb. If there is a heartbeat there, that is an innocent life that is deserving of protection. If we would not end that life of that baby outside of the womb, we would not, and should not, end it inside the womb. So if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected.

H.R. 490 has 171 cosponsors here in the House of Representatives. It has come further and faster than any significant piece of pro-life legislation, I believe, since 1973 in Roe v. Wade in the first place.

We need to get this bill to the floor of this House and send it over and put it on Mitch McConnell's desk. There is hardly any room left on Mitch McConnell's desk these days. That number must be up to 500 or so bills sitting on his desk. But we can put Heartbeat there on top of Mitch McConnell's desk.

When you do that, that is the highest priority. Whatever it is on top of the desk is the highest priority. And we can say to Mitch: Bring this thing out to the floor of the Senate and send Heartbeat up to the President's desk.

If you can't do that, send the President to the States where the Democrats who will vote ``no'' on it are running for office. Remind them that America is now a pro-life nation, and this pro-life nation wants to pass pro-life legislation.

If they can't do it with the Senators who are seated over there now, they can do it with the Senators who can be seated over there next January. I believe that the conscience of America will be reflected if we send that over and put the bill on Mitch McConnell's desk.

Here is the polling that we have also. There are some people who worry about public opinion. They should know their conscience and act off of their conscience. But off of public opinion, it works this way: the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490. We have a Barna poll that was conducted, actually, February of last year.

It says that 86 percent of Republicans support the Heartbeat bill without exceptions, 61 percent of Independents support it without exceptions, and 55 percent of Democrats support the Heartbeat bill without exceptions. That is an astonishing thing to see that we have a majority of Democrats. I would call that a landslide if I won by 55 percent or more. This is a poll of a landslide among Democrats where we do have a Democrat or two or three who will vote for this bill. But, for the most part, that has been polarized here also.

We used to have at least 60 different pro-life Democrats who would come in and vote on pro-life legislation. Now I count maybe three. I hope that number is more. I regret that the parties have gotten this polarized, but some of this stuff happened when they had to walk the plank to vote for ObamaCare, and the people who replaced them were conservative Republicans. That is one of the reasons why we have so many cosponsors here on the Republican side--171 cosponsors here--and 162 national organizations or leaders have signed on.

I notice that Reverend Franklin Graham sent out a tweet in support of Heartbeat legislation here a couple of weeks ago. I am a great admirer and respecter of Reverend Graham, and I believe that his moral barometer matches that of any moral.

The support for this bill has come along well.

I will circle back to the resistance that we have that we need to overcome yet, Mr. Speaker.

While we reached a plateau on the Heartbeat bill, it became apparent to me that having one line in the water--however good that line is in the water here in the House of Representatives behind H.R. 490--it was also important to get some other lines in the water. The one thing that I could do was to take the Heartbeat bill and offer it up to the Iowa Legislature.

I had a conversation with State Senator Brad Zaun. He had a shot and would have made a good Congressman, but he is chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the Iowa Senate today. I had that conversation with him and had a conversation with Senator Jason Schultz. They took the Heartbeat legislation and brought that into the Iowa Senate.

The draft of that legislation was adapted to a bit of a degree to conform

to the State legislature. They worked that bill around through their caucus a little bit. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee there, Senator Brad Zaun, said: I am bringing this bill through committee. He was keeping me up to speed with what was going on.

That was an intense hearing before the committee. I am just going to speak on what I hear back channel--not that I was in the room. There were some people who wanted to stage a protest against the Heartbeat bill. So the chairman of the Judiciary Committee looked at them before he gaveled in the committee and said: If anybody has come here to protest, raise your hand, and I will throw you out now. I liked his approach. There was no need to throw anybody out because they actually behaved.

So there was a quiet, but an intense, hearing and markup before the Iowa Senate Judiciary Committee, and the Republicans all voted for the Heartbeat bill. Then here it sits on the calendar of the floor of the Iowa Senate.

Now the next big milestone needed to be reached, and that is that the majority leader, Bill Dix, brought the topic up before the caucus. That is closed door, so I am only speculating on what I picked up also back channel, Mr. Speaker. But he said to the 29 Republicans seated there in the caucus: Is there anybody here who doesn't want to vote for this Heartbeat bill? No one raised their hand, so the decision was made: We will bring it to the floor.

Well, it had been assigned to the chair of the subcommittee for the bill, who was Amy Sinclair. Amy Sinclair put together the subcommittee effort and prepared herself for an intense debate. It was expected to be an intense debate. I pointed out to her that my first debate on the floor of the Iowa Senate took me 7\1/2\ hours before I got my bill passed.

It was official English, by the way. It was a long, hard slog, to quote Rumsfeld.

Hers was entirely different. I thought there would be 6, 7, 8, 10 hours of debate. She brought the bill up, made eloquent opening remarks, rebutted a few of the remarks that were made on the other side, and 24 minutes later, the vote went up on the board, 30-20.

An independent voted also--and his name is David Johnson--for the heartbeat bill in the Iowa Senate, along with all 29 Republican senators, 30-20 on 24 minutes of debate.

And it rocketed over to the house of representatives, and, once again, I had the misconception of thinking to myself, this is going to be easy, but, like a lot of things in life, it isn't that easy.

So, as we began to see how the bill was going to move, if it moved at all, in the Iowa House, what I learned was that they didn't think they could move it, they didn't think they had the votes. The first whip check card that we worked on there--we needed 51 votes. There were 100 in the Iowa House. Of the 51 votes we needed, we only had 35. So a bunch of us went to work.

By the way, one of the people at the top of my list to thank here in this Congressional Record tonight, Mr. Speaker, is the Iowa representative of National Right to Life--who is not supporting this bill at the national level, and they need to lead, follow, or get out of the way. But their Iowa representative, his name is Scott Valencia, and he is of Iowa Right to Life. He was magnificent in the work that he did and the strategy that unfolded and in the network that he had put together with the pro-life community within Iowa.

I could always count on Scott being at the center, the nexus, of the communications on who was thinking what, who was saying what, and helping to inform us in the spreadsheet we put together to whip the votes.

Also on that list would be, from The Family Leader, Bob Vander Plaats, whom I have campaigned a lot with. We worked together to vote three supreme court justices off the Iowa bench. He and his team at The Family Leader, including Chuck Hurley, a longtime friend, and Danny Carroll, a former representative, were stellar in their efforts in focusing on how we would pull the votes together in the Iowa House.

There were 32 organizations in the Iowa pro-life coalition. Those are the organizations that I referenced, Scott Valencia, that put his finger on that pulse, but many of these people are people I worked with for years, that go back 20 or more years on this issue, and I am so proud of the work they did.

Our former majority leader here in the United States House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, made the trip up to Iowa to testify in favor of the heartbeat bill before a hearing in the Iowa House of Representatives, along with Dr. Kathy Altman, who was a witness for us here in Congress as well, Mr. Speaker.

So I am very, very grateful to all of these folks and many more, but the jobs that they did helped move this thing in the right direction. The hearing was intense, and there was strong testimony on both sides, but the voice for the unborn, the voice for the most innocent prevailed in that hearing. And it gave more confidence to some of the people that were reluctant to vote in favor of the bill on that night.

One of those people, I suspect--and I suspect only--would be Dave Heaton, who I count as a good friend. I have always enjoyed him and had a certain affection for the affable gentleman who has so many prime ribs down there in his restaurant in southeast Iowa, but when he voted ``yes'' coming out of committee, he said, ``Yes for now,'' and I thought maybe that was the end of it. But it turned out that we needed 51 votes. We wouldn't have had them if it hadn't been for the vote of Dave Heaton as he retires. God bless Dave. I appreciate his vote.

I appreciate the vote and the work of so many there in the house, including Speaker Upmeyer, who is a second-generation speaker of the house of representatives, who has earned her place there and has become a very stable and a master strategist on how to move legislation through the legislature, along with Majority Leader Chris Hagenow, who was fully behind the heartbeat bill from the beginning and, I think, kept a low profile publicly but did a lot behind the scenes.

Then another individual whose character I know well, and that is the Speaker Pro Tem Matt Windschitl, who has been part of this strategy all along, a very, very steady hand, a very, very clear strategist, somebody you want to ride the river with. He does come from over there in the river bottom, not very far from me.

I appreciate the strategy and the work that each of these individuals did, but this doesn't stop at this point either, Mr. Speaker.

The chairman of the Human Resources Committee, Joel Fry, did master work on it, as well as the floor manager in the Iowa House, Shannon Lundgren. Shannon, I believe, is in her first term, and I haven't gotten to know her personally, but here is the narrative that I get from the way she managed that debate in the house. It was a lot longer in the house. It went on for hours, 5 to 7 hours, something like that, perhaps more. The bill passed around 11:30 that night.

Shannon, when she had brought the bill up there, this was the critique that came to me, is that she started out slow, and you might start to wonder if she was going to be able to hold her own through that very, very grueling trial that had been assigned to her that she was, I think, eager and proud to take on, and she should be proud, because she got stronger as the night wore on.

So did a number of the other members of the Iowa House. They stepped up to defend their positions and to advocate their narratives. One of them would be Steve Holt. He and also Sandy Salmon, who had introduced her own bill, her own pro-life legislation, they were strong and many others were strong in the way they handled their debate.

I didn't put together a complete, analyzed list here, Mr. Speaker, because, for one thing, I just didn't have the time, but I recognize the risk in naming names. There definitely are people that I have left out. There will be others that I will try to thread in here, but there will always be people that are left out.

Some of them in the middle of this, though, were Jack Whitver, who is the leader in the Iowa Senate. I mentioned Amy Sinclair, the chair of the subcommittee and the floor manager in the senate. Senator Brad Zaun, whom I have talked with a lot and grown to admire, and I appreciate his drive. He

doesn't hesitate, he doesn't equivocate, he knows what he believes, and he strategizes and acts upon it. And Senator Jason Schultz, whom I first brought up this topic with.

I want to thank every representative and every senator who spoke and who voted for the heartbeat bill in the Iowa legislature. It was a phenomenal accomplishment.

Last year, they passed a 20-week, called sometimes the pain-capable bill. Many thought that would be the end of the effort on pro-life for a while, and they came back this year and passed heartbeat legislation.

Not only was it the work, not only was it the debate, not only was it the negotiations and the votes that were counted and the effort on the whip team from those elected members who worked inside the house of representatives and the senate, but also the outside groups, the 32 outside organizations and then some, that came together. It was a phenomenal, phenomenal effort that brought this together.

I wanted to say also a couple of words about how difficult this was for some of the most pro-life people that we had. I am not one who believes in exceptions. I don't believe that a baby that is a product of a rape should be executed for the crime of their father. Neither do I believe that that should be the case for a baby who is a product of incest, which might be the crime of the father and it might be the crime of the father and the mother. Those babies are innocent, and they should have every right to life of every other baby conceived at any other time under any other circumstances.

But it came to that place where there were either going to be exceptions or there was going to be no bill passed. I think there would have been a way we might have been able to resolve that, but by the time it came to that place on the calendar, that place on the clock, that place on the legislative clock, a decision had to be made: Are we going to bring a bill to the floor of the Iowa House with exceptions, or are we going to have no bill whatsoever? That was the decision. That was the crux of the matter.

Coming to that place of decision, the right decision is: Let's save all the lives we can. Let's take all we can and get as much done as we can. If we could come back with heartbeat after the 20-week bill last year, maybe next year we can come back to eliminate the exceptions or perhaps even do personhood, which is the goal of the pro-life community. It should be that case worldwide.

So I know it was a very difficult decision for some. I happen to know that Skyler Wheeler may be the most pro-life member of the Iowa House of Representatives, and it was a very difficult decision for him, but with Skyler Wheeler, we got to 51. We have a bill that then was sent on its way to the Governor's desk.

Before I mention the Governor any further, I want to also mention some of the other help that we had. This promise on heartbeat legislation is rooted back to a request made by Phyllis Schlafly just days before she passed away that I would draft and introduce heartbeat legislation here in Congress. I followed through on that commitment.

She was, in a time of her life, a living, breathing icon, the clearest political thinker of our time, a pure constitutionalist, a strong, faithful Christian woman who left her mark and her imprint across this Nation in many, many ways. I have powerful respect for Phyllis Schlafly, for her life, for her contribution, for her judgment, and for the promise that I made on the day of her funeral.

I made that promise sitting in discussion and consultation with Janet Porter of Faith to Action, who has been the driving force on this, the launching force on this from the beginning. And Janet Porter now may be the most driven pro-life activist in America, and she has accomplished a lot to get this started. She teamed up with Tom DeLay, our former majority leader here. He made his fame as the whip, maybe the best whip that we have ever seen here in the House of Representatives. Both of them worked pro bono on this to move the votes and get cosponsors signed up here in Congress, which gave a lot of credibility to the heartbeat bill on its way to the Iowa legislature.

In addition, one of the push-backs that we got in the Iowa House was, ``We don't want to spend taxpayers' money defending this legislation.'' It is something that they believe that--I mean, some of the folks would say: We will lose in court. So if you know you are going to lose, you can't spend taxpayers' money, knowing you are going to lose.

My response back to that was: We know we are going to lose at the lower court level. Anybody that argues that that is a reason not to move pro-life legislation, because we will lose at the district court level, we will lose at the circuit level, that is a given, because we have a strong precedent established by the United States Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Of course the lower courts, respecting the Supreme Court, are not going to try to overturn a Supreme Court decision. We have to accept the idea that this will be litigated, it will go through the lower courts, and as it goes into the lower courts, we will lose at each turn until we get to the United States Supreme Court.

To give an example of how this worked in the past, on the ban on partial-birth abortion, which came to us about the end of the 1990s, as I recall, on the initial case, the ban on partial-birth abortion, that gruesome and ghastly procedure that is so, so awful, to describe it here on the floor of Congress is more than I will do here tonight, Mr. Speaker, but Congress banned that procedure.

Having banned that procedure, it was litigated by--guess what-- Planned Parenthood, the advocacy group for abortion itself, and the Supreme Court struck down our ban on partial-birth abortion. Of course, they have to use a rationale, so their rationale was that the act of a partial-birth abortion wasn't precisely enough defined, that it was vague, and if it was vague, then how would the abortionist know if he is committing a crime or not. I said: ``You are killing a baby. That ought to be enough.''

Instead, the Supreme Court ruled to strike down our ban on partial- birth abortion, but they wanted a more precise description of it. And they argued that Congress had not established that a partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary to save the life of the mother.

So I arrived in this Congress shortly after that decision. We went to work on this. The chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice at that time, where I am the chair of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice today, was Steve Chabot of Cincinnati, a strong pro-life advocate, and we held hearing after hearing in the Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee.

By the way, the chairman of the full committee at that time was sitting here just a few minutes ago, Mr. Jim Sensenbrenner.

So we established, through congressional hearings, and wrote a new ban on partial-birth abortion that precisely defined the act of a partial-birth abortion that we would prohibit by statute and congressional findings, after hearings, that it is never necessary to commit this heinous act in order to save the life of the mother.

With those congressional findings coupled with the precise definition, we passed the legislation and sent it out again, and it was litigated again by, let's see, Planned Parenthood--or that was Carhart. LeRoy Carhart was the abortionist out of Omaha who was the lead on that case, Gonzales v. Carhart, as I recall.

But in any case, that precise definition that we drafted and the congressional findings that it is never medically necessary to save the life of the mother were enough to get the same Court to reverse themselves and accept the conclusions that Congress had drawn because we had conformed to their request.

So there is a case where the Court came down on the side of striking down our ban on partial-birth abortion, and then we brought it back through the courts again and it was tried in three circuits simultaneously, and in every circuit we lost. But then the cases were packaged together and they went before the United States Supreme Court, and then we won on the side of life.

The Court reversed itself, but we lost at every lower court level. We only had a chance to succeed at the Supreme Court. And that is going to be the case with this legislation, as well, because it directly challenges Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

So it has to get to the Supreme Court. We are going to lose until we get there. When we get there, especially if we arrive in the Supreme Court with a new appointment to the Supreme Court, we are looking at, more likely now, under today's circumstances, the potential of a 5-4 Court, a Court that would be coming down on the side of the Constitution and the strict constructionism that protects life.

We are obligated to protect life under the 14th Amendment. So if Congress can define life, we define it as, if a heartbeat is detected, that is life, the baby is protected.

And the cost of defending this case isn't going to fall on the backs of Iowa taxpayers, Madam Speaker. Instead, we have two organizations that have volunteered to step up, pro bono, to defend this case before the courts, and those two organizations are--this is the message from Matt Staver of Liberty Counsel--Liberty University, many will know it as--and that has produced a pretty good chief of staff in my operation, Sarah Stevens.

Matt Staver has agreed to defend this, pro bono. That is Latin for ``on the house.'' And also Martin Cannon of St. Thomas More Society will have agreed that they will also defend it pro bono. So we will see how this comes together, but it doesn't put the taxpayers of Iowa at risk.

So it makes it not only the right decision for life, the right decision for law, the right decision for our Constitution and, in particular, our 14th Amendment, it makes it the right decision for the taxpayers.

When we look at the society we live in today, the last time we had unemployment numbers down as low as we are seeing now, I remember them bringing a bill into the State legislature that would require all of the health insurance policies in Iowa to cover contraceptives. One of the arguments they made was we can't be having women missing work because they are pregnant, having babies. We need the labor force too much.

Well, that didn't fit to my analysis at the time, which is why I remember it. Instead, we need babies that will go to work in 18 or 20 years, and we need to sustain ourselves and our society.

I tell young people constantly, good people need to have a lot of babies and raise them right. That fixes everything that can be fixed. If good people raise their babies right and have a lot of babies, there will be enough people here to do the work we need to do; and we will create the jobs for others, and we will see people picking up and carrying their share of the load, pulling the harness instead of riding in the wagon. That is what saves this society.

But, in any case, here we are, Madam Speaker, with a bill that passed out of the Iowa House that night, on about Wednesday night of last week, at 11:30 at night--might have been Tuesday night, 11:30 at night. May 2 was, let's see. About 11:30 that night.

And the dedication of our Iowa senators was such that they said: Well, let's just take this up right away. Why don't you carry that across the rotunda and we will take it up on the floor of the Iowa Senate.

And they did. And after a fairly short debate, they passed it in the Iowa Senate.

Again, there were so many missing, but 29 to--let's see. I remember the lower number of it. But it passed easily out of the Iowa Senate, and it was messaged to the Governor that night, which would have been, I believe, May 2.

So by the time we got around to Friday, I found myself in South Carolina, at the invitation of the Governor of South Carolina, to talk about sanctuary cities, and we ended up doing a press conference also on Heartbeat, interesting conversation.

I think we enjoyed a friendship, and I expect that South Carolina actually had a Heartbeat bill in front of them that was--it would have been very hard for it to survive reaching the sine die part of their session because they were about done.

The same with the sanctuary city bill. We tried to do what we could with that, but anything that didn't pass down there I think comes up again next year, and they have got an extra boost to get that done.

I really appreciate the leadership provided by Governor Henry McMaster on the sanctuary cities and on Heartbeat, and we will make sure that we are supportive down there, as we have been in Iowa.

Also, Governor Ricketts of Nebraska has said: Send me a Heartbeat bill; I'll sign it.

I know that there are people in the Nebraska Unicameral that are preparing to bring Heartbeat in next year in Nebraska, and I know that it is also part of the Governor's debate in the race in Florida. So there are other States that are looking as well.

This could be something that spreads out across the countryside in State after State after State, Madam Speaker, but it would not have had this kind of momentum had it not been for Governor Reynolds, who had a bill signing ceremony on Friday afternoon at 3 in her formal office in the capitol and filled the office up with lots of young kids and good, steady, stalwart legislators who deserve a lot of credit and to take a bow for this.

I looked at the pictures of that bill signing ceremony, and it occurred to me that they probably saved as many lives just during the debate for Heartbeat as were represented by the children in Governor Reynolds' office.

I thank Governor Reynolds for signing the bill and putting it into law.

She had put out a statement a week or a little more earlier that said that she is proud to be part of the most pro-life administration in Iowa history. Well, she can now, with confidence and, hopefully, at least, an inner pride let us know that she has signed the bill, and it makes Governor Kim Reynolds the most pro-life Governor in the history of the State of Iowa.

This accomplishment came about because of the work done by people I have mentioned here and many, many more who worked on this, who prayed for this, who relentlessly pushed in the right direction to bring about a bill that could go to the Governor's desk.

Governor Reynolds had such a magnificent bill signing ceremony that sent such a strong message to the rest of the country; and that message to the rest of the country would be this, Madam Speaker: that Iowa, this purple State, this State that voted for Barack Obama twice--we also went for Donald Trump, I might add. But Iowa actually launched Barack Obama's campaign for the Presidency. He slipped in there from Illinois and got a big bounce in the first-in-the-Nation caucus, and off he went to the Presidency and to his reelect as well, with strong support out of Iowa. But he won Iowa each time.

So prior to President Trump winning in the 2016 election, the time before that that went Republican was George Bush's 2004 reelect. We worked that hard, and he won Iowa by only 10,000 votes.

The other time, the next time prior that Iowa had gone for a Republican President was Ronald Reagan's reelect in 1984. So that is how rare those Iowa victories are.

We are a purple State, but Iowa Republicans have put up excellent leadership, and excellent leadership has emerged from a coalesced Republican Party that has been very strong and has hammered out the planks in the platform over and over again. They ring with utter clarity to me when I read that platform these days, Madam Speaker.

So I put out this challenge to the States and the rest of the country: If purple State Iowa can pass Heartbeat and have the strongest pro-life legislation in the United States of America--of the 50 States, Iowa has the strongest pro-life legislation passed into law, signed by Governor Reynolds--then the challenge that is laid out there for the rest of the States is see what you can do. Take a look at Iowa's legislation. Move the cleanest you can. No exceptions is best because that baby's life begins at the moment of fertilization, and we need to protect innocent life from that point on.

But we can define the beginning of life medically by requiring an ultrasound, and that ultrasound, if it picks up a heartbeat, if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected. That

phrase rings in the conscience of Americans nationwide. That is why 86 percent of Republicans support Heartbeat, H.R. 490. That is why 61 percent of Independents, and that is why 55 percent of Democrats do.

And, by the way, that 55 percent of Democrats is why no Republican will lose their seat for voting for Heartbeat, because Democrats won't dare attack you for that. If they do so, they are going against their own base, their own people, who are 55 percent pro-life, even though I can only count about three over here among the Democrats who will be cosponsors of this legislation and, I think, that can define themselves as pro-life.

So I thank all of these individuals who have worked so hard to put this whole strategy together, and I spent some time speaking to the issue, Madam Speaker, because I want the people to understand that things don't come easy and good ideas don't just float to the top and sail off to be passed. It takes real work and real organization to get things accomplished, and determination and conviction and people who believe.

I look back at Dr. John Willke, who was the founder, the original founder of National Right to Life, and that is the oldest and the largest pro-life organization in the country. He said this: ``When I founded the pro-life movement, it wasn't to regulate how abortions would be done. It was to bring the abortion killing to an end. We have waited too long, and that wait has cost us too much.'' That is Dr. John C. Willke, cofounder and former president of National Right to Life.

Now, in their mission statement, I am not sure if I have it here in my text, Madam Speaker, but I will get it as close as I need to from memory if I don't have it.

National Right to Life's mission statement says that they are dedicated to protecting human life from the beginning of life till natural death. The beginning of life raised a question with me, so I went through their website to find out how they define the beginning of life.

They define it on their website, National Right to Life, as from the moment of fertilization. Life begins at the moment of fertilization, according to National Right to Life, and ends at natural death.

I agree with that. I think their mission statement is correct. I think we need to defend life from the moment of fertilization until natural death, and I think National Right to Life should do the same thing.

But they believe that we should not challenge the Supreme Court. They believe that we have to accept Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and we have to accept the idea of viability that was framed within the Casey decision. That is why they have supported the 20-week bill, to get up there close to the edge of viability, this idea that a 24-week baby can survive outside the womb, a 23-week baby can survive outside the womb, a 22\1/2\-week baby can survive outside the womb.

So under the supposition that we work our way back to actually a 21- week baby can survive outside the womb--and I saw data that said a 20\1/2\-week also. So the 20-week is marked down there to try to stretch the definition of viability just about as far as they could bring themselves to do so, but they fear challenging the Supreme Court.

They are accepting of the Supreme Court decisions, those decisions from 45 years ago, 60 million abortions ago, and they are stuck in the idea that we can't challenge the Supreme Court.

Well, how could you not challenge the Supreme Court of the United States? This is the United States Congress. Some teach it has three coequal branches of government. I said earlier it is not three. There is a superior branch of government. There is a branch of government that is the weakest of the three, defined by our Founding Fathers, to be the judicial branch of government.

And we have a decision that is called Marbury v. Madison that came in in the first years of the 19th century, where the Supreme Court asserted their authority to define the Constitution and tell us all what it means, and we have acquiesced to that, decision after decision, for over 200 years.

And how can it be that a Supreme Court of lifetime appointees that conceivably could all be stacked under the terms of one President and live for decades after that and stay on the Court after that that could invoke all kinds of havoc on God-given liberties, and we would have no way to appeal a decision of the Supreme Court? We just have to accept those decisions as if they are the final authority? They are God to us?

I say we respect them. I think we respect their jurisprudence. I think we carefully observe what they do. And I think that most of the decisions they make are soundly founded, but some of them are completely wrong.

And they have reversed themselves in their own history, which is utter proof that they are completely wrong.

I would point out that the clearest one is the Kelo decision. They haven't reversed it yet, but Justice Scalia said he expected it would be reversed at some time.

But this was the confiscation of property. The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees property rights. It says: ``Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.''

The Supreme Court of the United States, in the Kelo decision, in about 2005, struck those words ``for public use'' from the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

Now, how can we tolerate a decision like that and accept it because it comes from the Supreme Court? And does it live forever that way?

Does the Obergefell decision, that legal, rational thought out of nowhere, they impose same-sex marriage on every union in America? How is it that a decision made by either the Iowa Supreme Court or the U.S. Supreme Court has taken away the rights of my sons to be married as husbands and wives? Why does the Supreme Court get to visit with that edict?

Because we respect them, we accept those decisions, we don't question them, because the culture is what the culture is.

Well, the culture has got to change, and we have got to change our way of looking at this issue of abortion. We cannot sit around and twiddle our thumbs or wait until the Supreme Court is configured differently.

But we can do this: we can anticipate it will be configured differently. We can call upon the Supreme Court to reverse their previous decisions. This idea of stare decisis, the concept that once decided, a subsequent court has to accept the decision made by their predecessors, this Congress can't do that. Well, we can. We don't. We say: No Congress can bind a subsequent Congress. No Congress can say: You shall appropriate X dollars going into the future and have that be irreversible.

All decisions made by our predecessors in previous Congresses and signed by any previous President can be reversed by the United States Congress if it is our will to do that. We don't accept as sacrosanct a decision made by a previous Congress, and neither should we accept a decision as sacrosanct made by a previous Supreme Court. They should all be open to question.

Yes, we should respect their judgment, their jurisprudence, but we can't allow ourselves to be bound by those decisions, even if we have to go all the way back to challenge Marbury at some point.

But we won't have to do that, Madam Speaker, because I believe the next appointment to the Supreme Court brings a strict constructionist, an originalist, to the Court, as promised by President Trump.

He followed through with Neil Gorsuch. I believe he will follow through with a second appointment to the Court, if given that opportunity.

We need to move Heartbeat legislation over to the desk of Mitch McConnell so we can begin to apply how we are going to get it off his desk and get it to the floor of the Senate and passed and over to President Trump's desk, where he will sign the Heartbeat legislation and where the very pro-life Vice President Mike Pence will be standing next to him when that day happens.

All of this needs to unfold here, Madam Speaker, and the obstruction really comes from the number one pro-life organization, the largest and the oldest: National Right to Life.

So I will put up only one poster here, Madam Speaker, and this is it. National Right to Life says, and this is off

of their site, they do not oppose the Heartbeat bill.

By my utilization of the English language, I don't know the difference between ``do not oppose'' and ``do not support.''

But what we need is support, not this intransigence that is going on, especially when the leadership in this House has essentially given the National Right to Life and two other organizations that, by the way, support the Heartbeat bill, a de facto veto that no pro- life legislation comes to the floor of the House of Representatives unless it is supported by the top three organizations in the country.

Supported by. Does not support. Why? Heartbeat matches their mission statement more closely than anything that they have supported before. And it is drafted with the anticipation that we would get it before the next appointment to the Supreme Court, not this one. And they fear that somehow we are going to lose some ground if we go to the Court before the Court is ready. And I say I fear for every year we fail to get the Heartbeat bill to the Supreme Court, we have on our conscience a million abortions in America taking place; a million little babies not born; a million little pairs of shoes that aren't going to be sitting there by that little bed, by that little crib; a million little children, as innocent as could be, who will never have the chance to live, to love, to learn, to laugh, to play, to fall in love, have children of their own, and raise their children with our American values in their hearts, our faith taught to them, their souls saved and demonstrated here as they lift our country up and the world up with the beliefs and the convictions that were passed to us from God through our Founding Fathers.

And we equivocate on something like this? And National Right to Life stands there, essentially in the way? Whether they do not oppose or whether they do not support, until that changes, this bill does not come to the floor, unless the Speaker changes his mind, the majority leader changes his mind, and the majority whip changes his mind.

So I call upon National Right to Life to take a look at Iowa. It may be news to them, Madam Speaker, that Heartbeat passed Iowa. It will be litigated. It will be on its way towards the Supreme Court, and maybe to the Supreme Court, but there is no acknowledgement that this has happened on the part of National Right to Life. It is as if it didn't happen for them, because they can't bring themselves to break out of the mold that they have been stuck in for years. This is a 45-year hidebound mold, and if it doesn't change, it is 1 million abortions a year, every year, until it does change.

This strategy, over the last 45 years, has cost the lives of 60 million babies. Now, I am not asserting that it could have been solved and reversed in the first year or 2, or 5, or even 10. But along the way, we have to make the case that the Supreme Court, if they don't change, cannot be allowed to be the final word on the lives of another 60 million babies.

So, Madam Speaker, congratulations to the State of Iowa, the Iowa General Assembly, the Iowa Senate, the Iowa House of Representatives, the Iowa Governor, the leadership in the House and in the Senate, all of those who teamed up and joined hands and worked relentlessly and persistently to bring this Heartbeat bill through, and the signature of Governor Reynolds. God bless them all for the job that they did. May we match their effort and their success here in the United States Congress.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege and the honor to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, and I come to the floor today to bring up a list of subjects that I think should be deliberated upon here in the House Chamber.

The first one that is on my mind is the moral calling that we have to step in to save the lives of the most innocent among us. And as I watched some of the discussion that took place here on the floor today, and I look over at the people that were a part of the privileged motion, as I reflect upon however strong they are in their verbal support for the Catholic Church, I didn't see one of them over there that actually will defend innocent, unborn human life. And we have tested it time after time here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

So the central principle of the Catholic Church, and many other Christian faiths, I will add, is to protect innocent, unborn human life, to oppose abortion-on-demand, and to respect the values that once a child is conceived, once fertilization takes place, we have a unique combination of DNA that is never matched again in history; and that unique combination of DNA is created in God's image, and I believe that he puts a soul in that little baby from that moment.

And as that little baby starts to grow in its mother's womb, we have a child that is a gift to the world and a gift here to America; a gift to that child's parents, grandparents, family, neighbors, community; a gift to our country.

Yet there is a policy here that allows for the Supreme Court to step in and intervene with the will of the people and establish what they seem to believe is a right to decide who lives and who dies and under what terms that might be.

In 1973, January 22 of 1973, two decisions came down from the United States Supreme Court. One was Roe v. Wade, which most everyone seems to know and understand; and that Roe v. Wade decision essentially was that they believe that the child wouldn't be protected until after the first trimester. Trimesters were part of the dialogue in Roe v. Wade.

Doe v. Bolton was the companion case; and in that companion case of Doe v. Bolton that was decided on the same day, it essentially said, except for all of these other things: the life or health of the mother, the familial relationship of the mother, the economic condition of the mother, of course the physical health of the mother. The list went on.

But it was so broad that it really said this: that Roe v. Wade says you can have abortion on demand after the first trimester. Doe v. Bolton said you can have abortion on demand for any reason or essentially no rational reason whatsoever.

And that stayed in place from 1973 until 1992, when the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision came down.

It is interesting that the son of Democrat Governor of Pennsylvania-- former Governor of Pennsylvania, since passed away, God rest his pro- life soul--Bob Casey, who was denied the opportunity to speak before the Democratic National Convention because of his pro-life credentials, was the subject of the lawsuit from Planned Parenthood to Governor Casey of Pennsylvania.

Out of that decision came a majority opinion that ratcheted the abortion issue a little ways, and it said: Well, you can't abort them after there is a viability.

But that viability was indistinct, and it settled in somewhere around 24 or 25 weeks. So it had litigation around that. We have had legislation around that. But, meanwhile, abortion on demand pretty much walked its way across this country.

In the late part of the 1990s, we had legislation that passed that banned partial-birth abortion. It was a big debate here on the floor of the House of Representatives, that ghastly and ghoulish practice--and I won't describe it here on the floor out of sensitivity, Mr. Speaker, to ears that might not be able to absorb this--but it is ghastly and it is ghoulish, a partial-birth abortion.

Yet that practice was going on around this country. This Congress banned it in the House and in the Senate. Then it was litigated; and, let's see, as it was litigated, the Supreme Court ruled that partial- birth abortion was a legal act because the Congress had failed to define the act of partial-birth abortion precisely enough that it was a vague description as to what that act actually was. So they said that that burden couldn't be upon the abortionist to know what Congress actually meant. Therefore, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.

They also added to it being indistinct that Congress had not established that it was never medically necessary to save the life of the mother.

So we went back to work here in this Congress, and I was part of that as a member of the Judiciary Committee. The chairman of the Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee at that time was Congressman Steve Chabot from Ohio, a very strong and principled pro- life Congressman to this day, and I hope the next chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and he is the central player in this, and I got to weigh in and maybe tweak the language a little bit, but we precisely defined the act of partial-birth abortion precisely enough.

We also held hearing after hearing that concluded that a partial- birth abortion was never necessary to save the life of a mother.

There were ghastly testimonies that came before the Judiciary Committee in that period of time, but we passed that legislation off the House, we passed it off the Senate, and it was litigated again. LeRoy Carhart was the lead abortionist who litigated this case. It was Gonzales v. Carhart, as I recall.

I went to Lincoln, Nebraska. It was heard in three circuits. The one in Lincoln, Nebraska, is the one I sat in on; and after a number of hours of listening to that case be heard before the court, I went out and did a press conference outside the Federal building because the judge had said that the two attorneys in the case, the opposing attorneys in the case, had done more due diligence than the United States Congress.

I knew what the due diligence was here. He did not. So I raised that issue: How do you do more due diligence than the United States Congress bringing in the wisdom of America and the American people and having public hearings and rolling that information out over and over again, and the due diligence of precisely parsing the language of the decision that went against life and for a ghastly and ghoulish abortion, and precisely defined that act so that it could no longer be argued that we didn't make it clear enough in our legislation?

And we made it very clear that it was never necessary to do a partial-birth abortion to save the life of the mother.

We established those principles; and once we established those principles, then I am there in Lincoln, Nebraska, to defend it. I could only speak to that court through the press. There wasn't a way for me to walk down and make a case before the judge, but I made the case to the press; and when he read the press clippings the next morning, apparently, is when he discovered this, he offered to recuse himself.

Well, I wish they had taken him up on that. But in any case, Judge Kopf

found against life and for abortion, as did the other two circuits, and we had now lost at two or three circuits in the previous legislation, we lost before the Supreme Court, the ban on partial-birth abortion had been struck down, and we have lost in three circuits when we came back with the better language and the congressional findings that it is never necessary to do a partial-birth abortion to save the life of the mother.

We lost in all of these areas. So that is two or three circuits the first time around, and a Supreme Court the first time around, and three circuits the second time around on our way to the Supreme Court.

Now, who would think we would be successful before the Supreme Court the second time through with Gonzales v. Carhart?

And I would say that, looking back on history, we should have been able to expect that. I don't know what I expected, I just knew what my job was was to do all I could do to save the lives of the most innocent among us.

So the Supreme Court found in favor of life and against LeRoy Carhart and said that Congress had successfully and legally and constitutionally banned the ghastly and ghoulish act of partial-birth abortion.

That is the only case that I know of where we have gone back to the court after we had failed the first time on the life issue, tried again. So when we went back to the court, we gained ground; we didn't lose.

And if you track the court along the way, I think that you see that there has been an incremental increase in their support for the authority, the constitutional authority of Congress and the State legislatures, to ban abortion or to limit abortion. And we are sitting there today with a Supreme Court that might well be a 5-4 decision against the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490; the Heartbeat bill that requires an abortionist who is contemplating committing an abortion to first check for a heartbeat, and if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. That is the standard that is within H.R. 490.

We don't make exceptions for rape or incest because I believe it is immoral to execute a baby for the sin and the crime of the father.

So we have a very clean, very precise, very well-worded--and it is not worded in anticipation of it going before this court, Mr. Speaker, but it is written in anticipation of going before the Court after the next appointment and confirmation to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch 2, I might say.

And even though this Court could be disposed to uphold Heartbeat, because their legal argument gets a little vague, they don't get to say a heartbeat is vague. We know if there is a beating heart, there is life. We know it is a human life. We know that an unborn baby with a beating heart has at least a 95 percent chance of experiencing a successful birth.

And some of those numbers go higher than that, not to 100 percent, but approach 100 percent. I use 95 percent because I am confident that that number does not overstate. It does not overstate the prospects for a child that has a heartbeat.

We know that a heartbeat designates life. We know that abortion stops a beating heart. And we know that, in the 14th Amendment, it requires that we protect life, liberty, and property, in that order, I might add, in a prioritized order.

And, Mr. Speaker, I take it all back to the Declaration of Independence when Thomas Jefferson penned the words that the protection for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are the words that are in our Declaration. A little bit different than John Locke's life, liberty, and property.

But the life, liberty, and property is deeply entrenched within the literature that brought us up to the Declaration and the Constitution and is enshrined in the 14th Amendment.

So I assert that our Founders understood, and nearly a century later, with the 14th Amendment, the Framers of the 14th Amendment understood, that they were prioritized rights. They didn't get this wrong. They never put property, liberty, and life; or liberty, property, life; or any other combination that might be conceivable with the three rights that are protected.

In every case that I can find in literature anywhere, it is always life, liberty, and then it either says property or pursuit of happiness.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Speaker, pursuit of happiness was understood by our Founding Fathers to be rooted in the Greek word ``eudemonia.'' E-u-d-e-m-o-n-i-a is how it is spelled, and I believe exactly how it is also pronounced.

And what it means is, that is the Greek word for pursuit of happiness, which they understood to mean the development of the whole human being. The development of a person's physical body, to get to exercise and stay in shape, get in shape, stay in shape, become proficient athletically so that you can use your body for all of the things you might need to use it for.

And the second component of this is to develop one's self intellectually, because God gives you a brain, after all, and that raw material, that brain, is a gift to you. You have an obligation to develop your intellectual capacity. So that is your education, your training, your cognitive skills, develop them to the max.

So develop yourself physically, develop yourself intellectually, and then the third component is develop yourself spiritually to put together the composition of the whole human being. That pursuit of happiness is understood by the Greeks and identified by the Greek word ``eudemonia.''

That is what the Founding Fathers understood when Thomas Jefferson took the quill and wrote: ``Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.'' Not a fun tailgate party, not putting your feet up and watching the ball game. Not a celebration among your family in that way. All those things are fine, but it is about developing the whole human being.

And even that, as important as it is to develop yourselves as a whole human being, the efforts and endeavors to do so could never step on the liberty of others; the liberty of others to have a speech, religion, assembly, the right to keep and bear arms, the rights to property. All of those things that are some of the liberties that are God-given liberties that are protected, they are protected even from someone else in their pursuit of happiness or their development of their own eudemonia, cannot take away someone else's freedom of speech, religion, right to assembly, freedom of the press, the right to keep and bear arms, the protection from unreasonable search and seizure, or the right to own property. All of those things are protected as God-given liberties in the Framers' documents, and particularly in the Declaration of Independence, and then they are additionally enshrined within the Constitution itself.

So pursue happiness, use your liberties to do that. None of those things are any good if you don't have life. Life is the paramount right; and in protection of life, especially the most vulnerable among us, innocent, unborn human life, and the protection of that life, no one can use their liberties to take someone else's life.

And no one can use their pursuit of happiness to take someone else's liberty or life. These are prioritized in that order: life is paramount, liberty comes second, and eudemonia--pursuit of happiness-- comes third.

That is the structure that was understood intellectually and intuitively by our Founding Fathers, by the Framers of our Constitution, and the drafters of our Declaration, and that is the framework that we must adhere to in this country if we are going to continue to enjoy God-given liberty in any of its forms over the long haul.

The sin that this Nation is committing with 60 million abortions-- these innocent little babies who are the future of our country, 60 million, and today we have what we call a full-employment economy. The unemployment rate is as low as it has been since 2001. And I am constantly hearing employers say: You need to get me a labor force.

Well, I remember 10 years ago the message was: You need to create jobs. The private sector creates jobs--not government, as a rule. But it was jobs 10 years ago. Today, it is: We have too many jobs and not enough workers.

Well, where are those workers? They are the aborted generations that we are missing today, the ghosts that sit between us when nearly a third of a generation is gone and 60 million are missing.

Not only 60 million are missing, but there is roughly another 60 million who

were not born because their mothers were aborted. And when you do the back-of-the-envelope calculation on that, it falls to roughly 60 million more. So somewhere between 100 million and 120 million Americans are missing because Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Planned Parenthood v. Casey--Planned Parenthood, that, itself, spends millions lobbying the United States Congress and State legislatures across this land, millions.

They are the number one abortion company--factory--in America, committing around 354,000 abortions a year of the right at 1 million abortions a year.

When I talk to people here on this floor, a gentlewoman from the other side of the aisle just spoke here some minutes ago, who said to me: Steve, why are you worried about abortion? We have got abortions down to under 1 million a year.

The peak was about 1.6 million abortions a year, so why am I worried about this?

They score the difference between the high watermark in abortions at 1.6 million and what appears to be a very stable, maybe low watermark of 1 million abortions a year. They think that somehow by messaging we have saved 600,000 babies every year is good because we are not aborting babies at the willy-nilly pace we were at the peak of abortions a couple, four decades ago.

I say instead, you don't get to keep score because there aren't as many babies being taken today by abortionists. You can only keep score by ending a ghastly, ghoulish, and immoral practice and protecting these innocent lives. These are innocent lives of all races. All of God's children, every one, created in His image.

And that unique piece of DNA that I mentioned at the beginning, Mr. Speaker, that will never be matched up again. Of all of the possible combinations, it is beyond our imagination to think how that unique person could become matched up in another generation. There are 7 billion people on this planet, and what are the distinctions between us?

Just think, how many times have you heard a voice from another room and recognized that voice because it is unique. You know who it is. It has to be somebody usually close to you or somebody you have heard quite often.

I know that I have come up behind a vehicle out in my neighborhood and the vehicle had probably been traded two or three times since I had seen the driver, but I come up behind that pickup, I see the back of his head, and I can tell by the way he sits behind the steering wheel who he is--even if I haven't seen him in 20 years--because we are that unique. There are 7 billion faces here, and they are all unique.

Even though there is identical DNA in the case of identical twins, triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, septuplets, sextuplets--I think I covered all that has ever existed--but whatever kind of combination of unique matches of DNA, they still look different enough. All of their mothers can tell them apart. And the older these identical twins get, the easier it is for all of the rest of us to tell them apart just by looking at their face, sometimes by listening to their voice.

Even the genetically identical are not identical. We can tell them apart because God has given us a unique visage, a face. And think what we do with it. I mean, can you imagine if you were going to create the world and invent all of the things that were put here in Genesis and then you put Adam and Eve down there on the planet, what kind of thought process that takes to give us a visage, a face, that is so unique that everybody can tell it apart from everybody else?

Think how hard it would be if we all wore a mask every day. We couldn't recognize each other. If we couldn't recognize voices or faces, or if we couldn't read facial expressions, how hard would it be to go do business? How hard would it be to express a feeling, a sense? How hard would it be to say: ``I am happy with you''; ``I kind of wonder about you''; ``I have my doubts about you''; and ``I am angry at you.''

All of those things come out of our faces, and little kids, from babies on up, recognize facial expressions. They know a smile means joy; they know a frown might not be; and we listen to them and watch their faces. It is instinctive in them, because God gave us those abilities to be unique and to express ourselves, each with our own unique visage.

And that is what we are eliminating with abortion, somehow believing that it is a mass of tissue that doesn't have identifying characteristics, that doesn' have a potential--and we all know in our hearts better than that. That is why I wrote the Heartbeat bill, because it does touch to our hearts, and we know what the sound of that beating heart is.

In my iPhone here, Mr. Speaker, I have a series of different little babies with beating hearts, and I can turn on that audio and listen to the beating heart of my little granddaughter that is due to be born in the latter part of July of this year. The baby is 26 weeks and 2 days along, today, as we speak, and the last heartbeat pulse I got was 161 beats per minute. I also have, of course, the ultrasound pictures in here of that little miracle that is waiting to burst forth and breathe free air here in America.

And I am far from alone. There are millions of Americans that experience the same thing.

I have what is now a former district representative that worked for me for a decade, and there framed in his office--a picture about this big--framed was the first picture of their firstborn son, firstborn child, and his name is Joseph Dean Anderson, and the picture is of his ultrasound.

The picture was there well before he was born, and they bonded with him from the beginning because they could see the facial expressions. They could watch him move. They could hear his beating heart. And today, that little guy is about 9 years old, a handsome, towheaded little boy that loves God and will be a fine American citizen.

We have an obligation to protect those lives, Mr. Speaker. This Congress has, I believe, the votes within it to protect those lives, but not the will, at this point, to move H.R. 490, the Heartbeat bill, to this floor--or even to committee, for that matter.

Now, I have gone to work on this and we brought the Heartbeat bill further and faster than any pro-life legislation of consequence since Roe v. Wade in 1973. As we entered into this Congress and we went to work on this--and my thanks to Janet Porter and Tom DeLay for their tremendous work that they have done--we built a whip team here in this Congress of about 12 to 15, and we fanned out throughout the Conference, and people brought their cards back in, and we ended up with 170 cosponsors on H.R. 490.

Well, I said, ``ended up.'' That is how many we had yesterday when the Sun came up. We added one more at the end of the day yesterday, and I am thankful that we are still making progress. And I expect there will be a trickling that will be added on to that, but it is a pretty good, long list of Republican Members that say: I will vote for it. I am just not quite ready to sign on the bill yet.

They have their own political reasons for that, but I believe the votes are here in this Congress to pass Heartbeat.

And if we pass Heartbeat, we will have taken the first step to saving the lives of nearly 1 million babies a year in America and starting to fill back up again that hole that is two or three generations old by now, 45 years old. Some would say that is two generations. It is probably closer--Thomas Jefferson declared a generation to be 19 years. Two, or a little more than two generations are missing in America. Some of those little girls who were aborted would have had babies by now, and there would have been roughly maybe another 60 million babies already born to that generation that is missing.

We have an obligation to defend their lives. We have an obligation to defend life. We have an obligation to restructure, again, the priorities of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

How can we sit here and say we are moral? How can we be indignant about a discretionary decision made by the Speaker of the House and not have a bit of a qualm about 60 million babies aborted because of the intransigence of the people who stood there just an hour ago to lecture the American people on a judgment call that they disagreed with form the President of the United States and, by the way, with the Speaker of the House.

That lack of a moral position over on that side of the aisle is why we still

have Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, nearly 1 million abortions a year, two missing generations, and a population that would be 100 million to 120 million stronger had that Supreme Court made the decision that was constitutional, true, right, and just in all of its aspects in 1973.

Information emerged years later at the retirement of Justice Blackmun that Justice Kennedy was prepared to vote on the pro-life side in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and that there were decisions that were made that will always be within the bowels of the Supreme Court as to why that didn't happen. But the information out there says it was very close, that the decision really was on the side of life; and for an unexplained reason, it went the other way in 1992, and that gave Kennedy the opportunity to write the majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That is why we came up with the viability nonstandard standard.

Now we have taken the Heartbeat bill up through the circuit court in North Dakota, and the court struck it down, as we knew they would. It just should be common knowledge by anyone who is involved in this discussion that with the Supreme Court precedent decisions, and especially precedent decisions that are as well-known and have extended as long as they have with Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Doe v. Bolton and Roe v. Wade, that with those precedent cases, no lower Federal court is going to attempt to defy the United States Supreme Court.

So any pro-life legislation that challenges existing Supreme Court precedent, which we must do if we are going to ever reduce the nearly 1 million abortions a year down to far fewer--by, say, 95 percent--will always lose at the lower court. At every level in the Federal court, we will lose, because those lower courts will not challenge the United States Supreme Court, Mr. Speaker.

That means we have to go back through this motion that we had again, go back through the exercise we had again that three circuits heard the ban on partial-birth abortions. Three circuits struck it down, even though we had rewritten the legislation to conform with the Supreme Court decision because they were not about to tell the United States Supreme Court that the inferior courts are superior to the Supreme Court. So we accept that.

I don't want to hear an argument from pro-life organizations that say: Well, the case is already settled. We tried Heartbeat before the circuit when it was passed in North Dakota, and the circuit struck down the North Dakota law, so we are defeated.

Really, that is not a defeat. When you know you have to accept that defeat in order to qualify to get to the Supreme Court, that is not a defeat. That is a process that you accept at the onset.

I accept that process at the onset to go forward through the lower courts to get to the Supreme Court, but the challenge isn't so much that, right now. The immediate challenge is this:

There are four windows that we have to get Heartbeat, H.R. 490, through if we are going to save the lives of these babies with the beating heart. The first window--by the way, these windows have to be opened in the right sequence. There are four windows, and I will name them: the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court opens up and we lose pro-life majorities in the House or Senate, if the Supreme Court opens up, it isn't going to do us any good because we can't get there with the case--at least, out of this Congress we can't.

If we lose the Presidency, say we wait until the year 2020 and lose the Presidency and we end up with a pro-abortion President again, it isn't going to do us any good. Remember, President Obama said he didn't want to see his daughters punished with a baby.

If we end up with a pro-abortion President, again, it won't matter if there is a pro-life majority in the House or the Senate, because the President would veto it.

By the way, Mr. Speaker, we do have a pro-life majority in the Senate today. It is a bare pro-life majority. It is a 51-49 pro-life majority in the Senate. That was proven with the 20-week bill that did not defeat the cloture vote over there, but it had a bare majority of votes. So it is close, but a pro-life majority in the Senate.

We have a pro-life majority in the House of Representatives. That is clear here. I believe we have the votes to pass H.R. 490, the Heartbeat bill, off the floor.

Window number one, pro-life majority in the House. We have it. Let's move H.R. 490. Let's move it now.

The second window is the pro-life majority in the Senate. Questionable. But if they suspended their rules, they could pass Heartbeat in the Senate. If that happened, H.R. 490 then would go to the President. The President will sign H.R. 490, the Heartbeat bill. He will sign it, and one of the things that I guarantee is that Vice President Mike Pence, who has a terrifically good heart himself, would be standing next to the President of the United States at that time.

The President would sign that bill. Now we can count on it, at that point. That is window number three.

Window number one, pro-life majority in the House; window number two, pro-life majority in the Senate; window number three, a pro-life President that will sign the bill.

Window number four is the Supreme Court. We have to walk through the swamp and the quagmire of the lower courts to get there, but we would get there at that point. A Heartbeat bill passed by this Congress would get to the Supreme Court, and they would have a very difficult time refusing to grant cert and they would hear the case, I believe, and it would be a landmark case.

We would be in a position to see Planned Parenthood v. Casey reversed, Doe v. Bolton reversed, Roe v. Wade reversed, and to see life respected in America again, as it was before 1973. That is the path we need to follow.

What is obstructing this path, Mr. Speaker?

I know that you are asking that yourself, but for me, I am prepared to answer the question that you are thinking.

There seems to be a perhaps longstanding rule, one that was probably continued by Speaker Boehner or created by him. It seems that it goes back further than the current leadership in the House, but I have talked to each one of the top three Republican leaders in the House and each have told me: We won't bring pro-life legislation to the floor of the House unless it is supported by the top three pro-life organizations in the country, that being Family Research Council, Tony Perkins; Susan B. Anthony List, Marjorie Dannenfelser.

Both of those people are good friends and powerful, committed pro- life workers. I have great respect for them and all of their organizations they have put together, and many others. By the way, there are 170 cosponsors on Heartbeat, plus 162 pro-life organizations or national leaders that are cosponsors on this. So I have named the two of the three, what some have expressed as the holy trinity of pro- life, so to speak.

The other is the National Right to Life, NRLC. @NRLC would be their Twitter handle. They say: We do not oppose Heartbeat. I say they do not support Heartbeat. They say they don't have veto power, but the Speaker, the majority leader, and the whip say they do. But the Speaker's spokesman said: No, there isn't any such rule. Well, it is being applied.

National Right to Life, when I say to them it is time to lead, follow, or get out of the way, they say: Well, we do not oppose and we don't have that kind of power.

My answer to that is: Then pick up the phone, call the Speaker, and tell Speaker Ryan you don't want to have that veto power; remove yourself from this. And I said specifically: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

It is probably too late to lead for them. It is probably not too late for them to follow--I hope they do--but at a minimum, get out of the way. Pick up the phone, call the Speaker, tell the public that you don't want to have veto power over Heartbeat, that you want to get out of the way.

If the Speaker wants to pick another organization, let him do that. That would be fine with me. There are plenty of good organizations out there.

Meanwhile, National Right to Life says to me: Why are you dividing the

pro-life community? We can't be pitting ourselves against each other. We will never accomplish anything if we fight among ourselves.

My answer back to that is, Mr. Speaker: Accusing me of dividing?

One hundred seventy Members of the House of Representatives say: I want Heartbeat to the floor for a vote. There are a whole bunch of others who want to vote for it that aren't yet ready to sign on.

The will of we the people is reflected in the votes in this republican form of government which is guaranteed to us in the United States Constitution. It is not what anybody says out here that controls what goes on in here. It influences, but it doesn't control.

We have an obligation, every one of us. All 435 of us owe our constituents our best effort and our best judgment. That best effort and judgment doesn't mean that we let unelected, outside organizations dictate against the will of the majority here in the House of Representatives. But that is what is going on by this rule that hangs up there in the Speaker's office that, unless National Right to Life comes onboard, the pro-life legislation is not coming to the floor of the House of Representatives.

I do not think that that is a defensible position. It is not defensible for National Right to Life, whose mission statement says they protect life from the beginning of life until natural death. If you look a little further on their website--because I wanted to know the technicalities--when they believe life begins, posted on their website: at the moment of fertilization.

I agree with them completely, with their mission statement, that we should protect life from the moment of fertilization until natural death, because human life is sacred in all of its forms. It begins at the moment of fertilization. It begins at the moment of conception.

In fact, former Governor Bob Casey, whom I spoke of earlier in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, said years ago--I clipped it out and put it on my bulletin board--before we had electronics, everything had to be saved; you couldn't go search on the internet--pre-internet, Governor Bob Casey said: Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure itself against which all other things are weighed.

Think of that. What is a life worth?

It can't be quantified because it is the measure.

When the Frenchmen created the metric system, they did a calculation of the distance either around the Earth or pole to pole--who knows if it is right or not--and they divided it down into increments and came up with the meter. Well, the meter is a standard for distance of measure.

How long is a meter?

Well, it is whatever the distance is that is identical to the platinum strap, I will call it, the platinum meter stick that is stored at standard temperature and pressure so that it doesn't expand or contract and it is always a standard length. They created it in kind of an odd fashion, but they established it as the measure.

That measure, that platinum stick at standard pressure and temperature that is a meter is the distance against which all other distances are measured and made within the metric system.

Well, that gives you an idea of what human life is. Human life is sacred in all of its forms. It is the measure itself against which we measure every other value that we have.

So how can we say that this life is not worth it when it is sacred and it is the measure?

We are here with the National Right to Life resisting--and I use that word as an informed word, not just a random one off the shelf-- resisting the movement of Heartbeat, because they believe that if we challenge the Supreme Court, then Kennedy would be--and I will use these words--Justice Kennedy, because I do respect him--using their words, would be forced to vote against Heartbeat and would be in a position to assign Justice Ginsburg to write the majority opinion, in which case she would likely take away all things that we have gained.

I say: What? What do we have to lose? What could we possibly lose?

All we know is this: 45 years of incrementalism has piled up 60 million dead babies. And we are afraid to challenge the Supreme Court, when every time we knock on their door, we have gained something rather than lost something?

Furthermore, society is moving. Society is moving in the direction of life, because we see the ultrasounds. We know.

I will say, Mr. Speaker, I always knew. I knew when I picked up my first little baby, little David King, on March 24, 1976, and I looked at him, that little miracle. There was an aura about him. I was so amazed at the miracle of that child, you could have convinced me that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ himself, that aura about him.

I was stunned. I was so drawn to him, drawn to that miracle. I had to go to work later on that day, and I was sitting there working and I was thinking: Could anybody take that little baby's life now, now that he is these few hours old? Could they take his life when he is an hour old? Could they take his life at the moment he was born when he burst forth into the delivery room and began to cry and gurgle and scream and experience the harshness of birth, which has got to be a stunning thing--I am kind of glad, maybe, I don't remember that myself--but I remember his. An absolute miracle.

If they couldn't take his life the minute after he was born, why could they take it the minute before he was born or the hour or the day? Or could we take his life the week before he was born or the month or the trimester or another trimester?

You can follow that all the way back to conception. There is no distinct moment in development of an innocent little baby. Once the sperm fertilizes the egg and you have that unique combination of DNA, from there on, there is no distinct moment or instant.

I would like to protect those babies from that moment on, but we can't prove that fertilization, conception today, medically, in that instant, but we can with a heartbeat. Anyone that has heard a heartbeat knows that that beating heart tells us there is life. It speaks to our hearts and it speaks to our consciences.

It is impossible to be a moral human being and make an argument that taking the life of a little baby with a beating heart somehow is justifiable, when we know the potential for that little baby is as great as our own in almost every case.

Even if they are not, we have a case that looks like its going before the Supreme Court that bans the abortion of a baby that might be diagnosed with a disease, particularly--an affliction, I should call it--Down syndrome. In Indiana, now-Vice President Mike Pence signed the bill. These are some of the most lovable human beings on the planet. They have a heart in them that seems to have more love than the average heart in the rest of us. They have banned the abortion of Down syndrome babies in Indiana.

Now, what is curious is, the way that is left, maybe that is upheld in the Supreme Court, maybe it is not, but if it is upheld in the Supreme Court, it leaves the door open for abortion on demand for others who are not diagnosed.

So does it say that there will be babies of whom they will deny the diagnosis of the affliction of Down syndrome so they can be aborted?

These moral questions should not be answered at all by a civilized society. They should be answered by this: a unique human being created at the moment of conception. We can be certain of that when that baby has a beating heart. If we stop that beating heart, we are ending an innocent human life. That is the question. I would like to start it at the moment of conception, but from a beating heart, that is the time that we can prove it.

Now, everybody knows it. Everybody knows it because we have ultrasounds and the audio of that 161 beats a minute. That little granddaughter of mine that, Lord willing, we are expecting her arrival the last week or so in July, that strong, purposeful heart is beating at 161 beats a minute. We can't stop that life because it is inconvenient, because somebody is inconvenienced by a pregnancy.

Why is it that abortion came along shortly after the contraceptives became so available everywhere, all the time, to anybody?

I remember when birth control pills came in, about the mid-sixties. Shortly after that, here is abortion on demand in 1973. If ever there was contraception

available on demand, they became available within the decade before Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.

Why did that happen? The least excuse possible was when contraceptives became the most available possible. That all happened almost simultaneously.

And by the way, it was my generation coming of age at the time that that happened, Mr. Speaker.

So I urge National Right to Life to lead, follow, or get out of the way. I would be awfully happy if you join in and follow, because we know this: there will be a turnover in the United States Supreme Court. We know that the President of the United States has pledged that he will make nominations to the Supreme Court off of the list of 21 that was approved by The Federalist Society, by The Heritage Foundation, and, if it matters, also by me.

The first appointment out of that list of 21 is Neil Gorsuch. I think we can be very optimistic about the decisions that he will bring down, from what I know of him and his history and the conversations I have had with the people who have known him for a lifetime. I am very, very impressed with Neil Gorsuch. I might have disagreed with him already on a case a week ago, but I am very impressed with him, with his juris prudence, and with the principles that he carries within him.

I would like to let the world know, Mr. Speaker, that when they interviewed the other candidates for Supreme Court, which I learned from White House counsel, they interviewed all 21 on The Federalist Society's list. And of those 21, they asked them all the same question, a whole series of questions, but they all got one same question, at least, and that was: If it is not to be you who would be nominated for the Supreme Court, who should it be? And of the other 20 who were interviewed, every one answered Neil Gorsuch. What a powerful endorsement of a man's juris prudence, of a man's character, of a man's support among his peers.

I say, Mr. Speaker, that I could easily find 20 Members among this Congress who would say those same things about me, but I would have to handpick them. Neil Gorsuch didn't handpick those 20. They were listed by The Federalist Society and supported by The Heritage Foundation. His peers, universally, said Neil Gorsuch is the best pick. ``If you can't pick me, Neil Gorsuch is the best pick,'' was their answer.

I would like to know what Neil Gorsuch said when he was asked that question. We may never know that, or perhaps that will be the next appointment to the Supreme Court.

But the rumors about Justice Kennedy retiring, not substantiated. They have been coming back a little more all along. We don't know what he might do, but we do know that time moves on. Turnovers do happen in the Supreme Court. They are eventually inevitable. When that happens, we need to be ready.

It won't do for us to sit on our hands in the House of Representatives, for the Senators to sit on their hands and to wait for a configuration of the Court to come around in such a way that we have great confidence that they will find in favor of life, no. Instead, we need to do our job; and our job is to move the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490, off the floor of the House of Representatives and send it over to the Senate.

It will take some serious work to get that done over there at the Senate, Mr. Speaker, and I think we can get there. But if we are knocking on the door in the Senate, then the Senators who are running for office, and especially a good number of them who are, some say, vulnerable in conservative States, States that Donald Trump won--they have been getting a little more conservative the closer they get to their reelection, and we have got a shot.

We have got a shot to put together, maybe after this next election, the 60 votes necessary; and we have got a shot, also, at the Senate changing the rules so they are no longer handcuffed by the filibuster rule and the requirement of 60 votes for cloture in the Senate. We can't control that, the other side of us. We can influence it perhaps, but we can't control it.

We can control what we do here. That means we have to bring Heartbeat to the floor of the House of Representatives, and we need to get the votes on it to do it. We need to send it over to the Senate. And a way to do that now is for National Right to Life to pick up the phone, call the Speaker, and say: Mr. Speaker, take this cup from me; I don't want this responsibility. The guilt will be too heavy if there is an appointment to the Supreme Court and the Heartbeat bill hasn't gotten there because we wouldn't let it come to the floor of the House of Representatives.

That is the guilt they have to carry.

By the way, this configuration hasn't existed in 45 years, where we had the windows open of a pro-life majority in the House and in the Senate and a President who will sign it and a Supreme Court that we have confidence will find in favor of life. It hasn't existed in 45 years. So, if we wait for a Court to get lined up in a way that pleases us, we might well wind up with no way to open up one of the other three windows necessary to get it to the Court.

So why wouldn't we move the ball down the road as far as we can get it, get this thing out of the House of Representatives. Sit it on the desk of Mitch McConnell. If Mitch can't get that up this year before the elections in November, or even before the transition takes place in lame duck session, fine. We will start again next January. We will bring Heartbeat here again. We will send it to the Senate again, and the new Senators can deal with it.

And maybe they change the rule at that point so that a simple vote-- even a 50-50 tie with Mike Pence there resolves this thing, sends it to Donald Trump. Donald Trump signs it with Mike Pence standing by his side. We send it to a Court that, by then, perhaps, has a new Supreme Court Justice there who would support our Constitution, the rule of law, we the people, the will of the people, and defend the obligation which we have, which is an obligation to defend life first, liberty second, pursuit of happiness third, or, according to the 14th Amendment, property third--those priorities.

It is our obligation by Declaration of Independence, it is our obligation by Constitution, it is our obligation by the 14th Amendment, it is our obligation by every measure of humanity that I know of to protect life.

I'll get to this closer, here, before I yield to Mr. Carter.

I was listening to Father Jonathan Morris of New York on FOX News one morning. He was talking about how, when he is celebrating mass in his home church, when the mothers who bring their babies in, when the babies start to cry, they get up and carry the babies out of the church. And he said: I don't know why they would carry those babies out of the church. They think those crying babies annoy me for some reason. But we should always remember, those babies, those gurgling babies, those crying babies, are the only innocent voices in the entire church.

And these babies are the most innocent among us, except the unborn babies don't have a voice. They can't cry out to us from anywhere except from Heaven. And they do cry out to us from Heaven, and we do have an obligation to hear them and to ask for forgiveness for what we have done.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to conclude my part of this, at least for the moment, and am happy to yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Carter). And I would note that the clock runs out at about 1:32, for the gentleman's information.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to Mr. Buddy Carter.

Honoring Patricia ``Trish'' DePriest

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, this great deliberative body.

To start this off, I yield to the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Fortenberry).

The answer would be a fair amount, and I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Fortenberry) for his presentation here today, his friendship, and the job he has been doing for a long time representing the eastern third of Nebraska, generally speaking.

I would point out also, Mr. Speaker, that we actually first met on the pro-life issue. As I was looking at the primary candidates that were vying for that position in eastern Nebraska, I wanted to measure their character, the content of their character, the value of their faith and their commitment to principle and planning and Constitution, but especially life. In looking at the candidates, it didn't take very long to figure that out.

I think Nebraskans have done very well with the representation that they have sent to this Congress, especially in the case of Mr. Fortenberry, who has exceeded my expectations. And I am pleased to say that here.

As the gentleman indicated, I came to the floor here this afternoon, Mr. Speaker, to speak about life, about innocent, unborn human life.

To start with, I will put it this way, Mr. Speaker. There are a series of values that we hold dear. Many of the debates here on this floor and in the committees and the various committee rooms around the Hill that we have are more or less working around the edges of the central issue. Sometimes, though, we do get to the central issue. The central issue was debated here on the floor earlier with a different piece of legislation.

When young people are growing up in America and they are listening to their parents, their teachers, other friends and relatives and schoolmates, the question will emerge--and you can't grow up in America without the question of abortion emerging; and sometimes they are counseled on one side of that question and sometimes on the other--but when I am talking to young people, I want them to shape their values around the most solid principles, as our Founding Fathers shaped the values of America around the solid moral principles.

It doesn't do to simply pass off the idea of abortion and say: I am not going to think about it; or I am going to leave it up to God to decide. He calls on us also to contemplate these things.

Our Founding Fathers wrote into the Declaration of Independence that we have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When I contemplate those words and the order of those words, often it is conflated together as equal or equivalent values as if life and the pursuit of happiness are equivalent values, with liberty in the middle of all that, and you can stir it up and no one's pursuit of happiness should be diminished by someone else's search for liberty or the exercise of their liberty or that no one's life should trump that of someone else's pursuit of happiness or liberty.

Mr. Speaker, in understanding the Declaration of Independence, the foundational document that undergirds our Constitution and the most beautiful document written in the history of the nation-state--and I believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were inspired with divine guidance, just a little bit lower standard of true than divine inspiration; a divine guidance--I believe our Founding Fathers thought deeply about that message that was coming to them from above and the words that were put down on that parchment by Thomas Jefferson.

The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were rights that were considered carefully to be prioritized in their order of what was the most important down to the least important of the three. Life came first. They didn't say right to pursuit of happiness, to liberty, to life. They didn't say right to liberty, pursuit of happiness, and then to life. They wrote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

To understand what that means, think of this. First, the definition of pursuit of happiness is understood by our Founding Fathers. Our Founding Fathers didn't see this pursuit of happiness as let's just say a tailgate party on a Saturday noon or early Saturday afternoon. It wasn't about going off to a party or sitting in your backyard with your family or doing the things we enjoy to do, enjoying sports, watching or participating; or being out on the water or down the ski slopes.

That was not imagined at all as the pursuit of happiness because they understood pursuit of happiness to be the definition of the Greek term that I pronounce eudemonia, pronounced with a Greek accent. But what it means is: in pursuit of happiness.

Happiness under the Greek understanding of the term was the whole person; to develop one's self as the whole person. That would be to develop yourself physically. As you grow into adulthood, keep yourself in shape, build your muscles up, eat healthy, sleep healthy, do the healthy things, make sure that this temple of our body is taken care of and respected and appreciated. That is the vessel through which we carry our values and are able to carry out many of the things we do in our lives.

So physical health was part of the pursuit of happiness, but also the mental development. And it is not just pursuing knowledge, not rote memorization alone, which has its value--always has, always will have-- but also the understanding of a philosophical person and an intellectually complete individual to complement the physically healthy and in-shape individual, philosophically sound, intellectually sound, but also theological sound.

That is eudemonia. That is the complete human being. That is making the most out of God's gift to us and developing ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, theologically, and psychologically. The whole human being.

The understanding that our Founding Fathers had was that you have a right to pursue this. You have a right to develop yourself. In fact, the implication is that we have an obligation to do so. That means we have got an obligation to evaluate the moral questions in front of us with the brain that we are given and the values that we have developed and the education that we worked to earn.

That is pursuit of happiness. But that is the lowest of the three on the priority, Mr. Speaker.

The next value is liberty. With that value of liberty, there are certain things that are liberty. We take liberty with our speech. We take liberty with our religion. We take liberty with the press. We have our right to assemble and all of those things. If someone is in pursuit of happiness, they are not going to take away our rights to our liberty.

Most of our rights to liberty are wrapped up in the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment catches the most important ones early. Also, the liberty to keep and bear arms, the property rights that come along in the Fifth Amendment, the components of liberty that we have and the provisions that allow us to face a jury of our peers and no double jeopardy. Those are liberties. The liberties that are defined trump the pursuit of happiness. In other words, someone else can't take away our freedom of speech because they are in search of a good tailgate party.

We go from the lowest priority, the pursuit of happiness, to the next level up, liberty, and to the highest level up, which is the right to life. Life itself is sacred.

When I talk to young people, I ask them the question: Do you believe that human life is sacred in all of its forms?

They look around each other in the bleacher seats in the gymnasium, if it happens to be a school in that fashion, and they come to a consensus: Yes.

And I will ask them: Is your life sacred? How about the person sitting next to you, is their life sacred?

After a little while, they start to nod their heads and agree.

It is no trick question. Human life is sacred in all of its forms. Once we understand that and we accept that universal consensus that is here in this society of America, then the only other thing we have to say is: Well, if human life is sacred and we protect it with all that we have, then we need to know when life begins and we need to know when life ends.

We know that in 1973, 44 years ago, the Supreme Court came to a conclusion. Well, actually, they didn't know, but they spoke of viability and they used a vague, mushy definition of viability and trimesters, but that is not a way to define life. When you deal with something that is sacred in all of its forms, you don't use a definition that says maybe it is or maybe it isn't a life; maybe it is viable, maybe it isn't; maybe it has actually crossed this threshold of this trimester or this one or this one.

So what they ended up in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the combination of the two was abortion on demand and the person's right to life. That personhood that begins at the moment of conception is subject to the judgment of the mother, who may think that this life is inconvenient to her liberty or her pursuit of happiness.

That was when they crossed a moral line that needs to be examined by everyone in this country who goes to the polls and votes or conducts themselves in a fashion that is affected by the abortion industry itself.

So I say to them, students especially: Is human life sacred in all of its forms?

The answer comes back: Yes, it is.

And then I say: Then you have to choose a moment that life begins, and that moment, there is only one moment that we know, and that is the moment of conception. That moment of conception that life begins is a moment that I believe that God places the soul in that little being that is a full complement of a combination of the DNA of the father and the mother, the full complement of the human being, a unique human being, a unique human being that there will never be another one exactly like that little baby that is conceived.

There will never be another one. Even identical twins have their distinctions, Mr. Speaker. Mothers can tell them apart. Not always easily, but they can tell. Fathers can tell little babies apart. Even though they have got matching DNA that is exactly the same DNA, they are still unique. They are still a little bit different in certain ways. Their personalities develop in different ways, and they have physical characteristics that become more and more apparent as the years go on. There are no two human beings exactly the same. That is because God made it that way. Think of how unique this is.

There are over 7 billion people now on this planet. Our population has gone over 7 billion people. Of all the people who have gone to their graves throughout history from the beginning of time, from the Garden of Eden until today, and all the people who live on the planet, 7 billion today, and of all the people who will come, likely by the billions, into the future, there are no two faces that are the same. They sometimes look a little the same--more than a little--but there are no two faces that are the same. There are no two faces that anybody who knows them can't tell the difference.

Think how genius it is to create a species, Homo sapiens. We each have a unique visage that will never be matched again throughout the duration of time. It has never been matched before from the beginning of time, and no matter what any scientist might do in a laboratory, there is never going to be anybody exactly the same, even if the DNA matches exactly. That is a unique approach to this.

Think about this: The thing that we measure ourselves by and recognize ourselves by, our face, our visage, carries with it the package of all of the emotions and the thoughts and the expressions that bypass so much need to use the words in this very excellent language that we have.

Think of how you interact with your friends, your family, your neighbors, when you are sitting at a meeting, when you are giving facial expressions that don't require a sound. People read those facial expressions, and they react off of them.

I think of the days that I am out, as Mr. Fortenberry said, working on a crew, maybe laying pipe with my three sons, and we may not even have to speak all day long because facial expressions, a nod here and there, we know each other, we can communicate with our facial expressions, and that is enough. That is a unique thing that we have been blessed with.

Every one of us is unique. Our lives begin at the moment of conception. We can't measure and we can't prove scientifically when that moment of conception is. We just know. We know that that is when that baby, when the components of the DNA of the father and the mother come together in that fertilized egg. That is the moment of conception; that is the moment that life begins.

I would like it if we could identify scientifically, if a little bell went off and we knew, here is conception. There is a unique little life here in the womb of the mother--and, by the way, she is a mother at that moment. But we can't do that yet.

We have come a long way. When our family was born, at that time, we couldn't tell whether it was a boy or a girl, and so it was nice, in my opinion, to have a surprise on whether it is a boy or a girl. Of course, I always prayed that they would be mentally healthy and, after that, physically healthy, but never began to ask whether it should be a boy or a girl.

But today we know. We can measure if it is a boy or a girl. We can tell facial characteristics. We can see the personality of these little unborn babies in the womb. When they make faces, you can see them grimace. You can see them smile. You can see them suck their thumb. There are many, many people in this country today who have a 4-D ultrasound of one or more of their children that is taken well before they are born.

I can think of one of my district personnel who has, in his office in Sioux City, a framed picture of the ultrasound of Joseph Dean Anderson, my godson. It is there, framed, the

ultrasound of that little baby boy months before he was born. Now he is about 7 years old or so, perfect little towheaded, blond-haired kid running around, full of happiness, love, and energy. But he was first known in his mother's womb and first recognized as a family member there and his picture framed. It still is there in the office in Sioux City. He is about tall enough to see it straight on these days.

That happens all over America because we know that life begins at the moment of conception. We hold it; we cherish life as sacred to us.

These little babies are the future of America. They are God's will, and they are the future of America. Yet, nearly 60 million of them have been aborted over the years since 1973 and Roe v. Wade, nearly 60 million. Think of that, 60 million babies in 44 years. And we are watching a nation that has a birthrate now that is lower than the replacement rate.

You hear debate on this floor, Mr. Speaker, that says that we have to go to foreign countries to bring people in here to do the work that we don't have enough people to do. I don't accept that as a rational thing for a country to do in that way.

What we need in this country is we need good people to have more babies and raise them right, and yet we are missing 60 million. That doesn't include the second generation of those who were aborted in the first half of the 44 years of Roe v. Wade.

Thomas Jefferson concluded that a generation was 19 years. It is probably a little longer than that today. Generations turned over, by his estimation, in 19 years. It is just convenient for me, 44 years since Roe v. Wade, I am going to call that, divided by two, two generations, 22 years a generation. Two generations, a third of Americans, gone because of a court decision that unjustly found, unconstitutionally found, immorally found, irrationally found, and the guilt that this Nation carries for tolerating a Supreme Court decision and accepting that Supreme Court decision.

But it is not everybody in this country who carries that guilt because we have armies of pro-life workers who are out there on a daily basis doing all they can to bridge the gap for, let's say, a mother who is in a crisis and can't care for the baby that is on the way; the crisis pregnancy centers that are there; the lives that have been saved by the thousands and thousands by the pro-life workers, the lives that have been saved by the inspiration that comes from seeing hundreds of thousands of pro-life marchers come to this city and make that march from around the Washington Monument on up to the Supreme Court and to the west side of the Supreme Court to plead for justice for those who are voiceless in the unborn.

Well, Mr. Speaker, it is time for this Congress to address this. It is time for Congress to move along the issue. And so because we cannot medically prove when a conception begins, we believe profoundly that personhood begins at the moment of conception, and personhood needs to be protected in all of its forms. The closest we can get to verifying that personhood, that conception, is the measure of the heartbeat. We all know that a beating heart is life. When the heart stops beating, life ends.

Now, we can detect a heartbeat as early as 16 days from conception, and often the number is published to be 18 days from conception, Mr. Speaker. It may not always be detectible in every pregnancy that early, but it is entirely detectible early on in the pregnancy.

So I have introduced legislation, Mr. Speaker, to protect these innocent babes, these babes that can't speak for themselves, that can't cry out for their own mercy, but they are already formed in their mother's womb, and the unique individual that grows from the matching of those two DNAs. And when that heart starts to beat, a physician can detect that heartbeat, when they can detect the heartbeat, we need to protect the baby. With the understanding that when a heartbeat can be detected the baby must be protected, I have drafted and introduced legislation that is H.R. 490, Mr. Speaker.

Now, this bill is titled the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017. It makes a lifesaving stride in enshrining the rights, the rights of the unborn, into U.S. law. It ensures that no child for whom a heartbeat is detectible is aborted unless the life of the child's mother is endangered in fact by a physical disorder, by a physical illness, or by a physical injury.

Any abortionist who performs an abortion under this legislation, H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017, any abortionist who performs an abortion in spite of a detectible heartbeat and outside of the exceptions that I have defined, which is for a physical disorder, a physical illness, or a physical injury, any physician who performs an abortion outside of those exceptions would be subject to a fine or imprisonment--and that is for a period up to 5 years--or both. This is a serious piece of legislation, and it needs to be, because life itself is the number one thing that is sacred here on this planet, especially in this country.

This legislation, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017, will require all physicians before conducting an abortion to detect the heartbeat of the unborn child; and that means they have to maintain the records of their endeavor to detect a heartbeat, and if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected. That is the center of this law.

Ever since Roe v. Wade, which was unconstitutionally decided in 1973, 44 years ago, these 60 million babies--almost 60 million babies that have been ended by the abortion industry--have received a rubber stamp from the courts, from the Federal Government, not from this Congress and not from the States. The Supreme Court overrules the efforts in the States to protect innocent, unborn human life. The Supreme Court overrules this Congress to protect unborn human life, and we have been trying to find ways around that decision ever since 1973. But I have introduced the bill, and it will protect the lives of the voiceless innocents.

Then to make a point now, Mr. Speaker, there are probably some people who are thinking this is a little bit too big of a leap for where we are on the topic today. I would submit that it is not, that we have been working too patiently with what I will call incrementalism. When I came to this Congress more than a decade ago, I had been, at that time, already working to try to help pass legislation that banned partial- birth abortions, and the Supreme Court had found the partial-birth abortion ban to be unconstitutional based on a couple of things. One of them was the Supreme Court ruled that it was necessary to save the life of the mother or the health of the mother, and the other one was that Congress hadn't defined the act precisely enough.

So we went to work in the Committee on the Judiciary. I want to thank Congressman Steve Chabot of Ohio for taking the lead on this issue. We held hearing after hearing, and Congress had findings that a partial- birth abortion was never medically necessary to save the life of the mother; and that is with much, much testimony of experts before the committee for a long period of time definitively concluding such, and then the act itself was more precisely defined.

Then it went back before the courts, and each of the Federal districts that heard the case, three of them, simultaneously, all of them turned it down as unconstitutional. But it went to the Supreme Court, where the ban on partial-birth abortion was upheld. It has saved some lives but has put a small dent in this huge 60 million aborted babies industry.

We began to go to work on this in other ways. We have legislation that is introduced before this Congress that bans sex-selected abortions.

We know that there are mothers and fathers that will use the ultrasound to determine the sex of the baby. If they want a little baby boy and it is a girl, sometimes they will abort that little girl and try again for a boy. We know this is happening in places like China, where they have had, up until recently, the one-child policy, and the proportion of boys to girls is way out of whack in China because they are aborting little baby girls because they would prefer having a boy.

That happens in America, too, but not as statistically evident. It is immoral to do that. That piece of legislation has 77 percent support. That is the strongest support we have, statistically, for abortion legislation that

exists, as far as I know, in this Congress.

Then we have pain-capable legislation, little babies that can feel the pain of abortion when that needle with a saline solution is stuck into--Mr. Speaker, I am just going to bypass the details of how this functions. Babies can feel pain. They can experience joy; they can experience pleasure; and they can experience pain. We have legislation to prohibit abortion from the time that we can determine that that baby feels the pain of being aborted. But that is a definition of pain, not a definition of life.

If this is a unique life, as I have described at length here, then this unique life must be protected. We don't say this unique life which has this soul--and God put in this soul from the moment of conception-- doesn't deserve to be protected unless they feel pain. What we are saying is it bothers our conscience too much to have a baby killed that can feel the pain and suffering.

I support these other two pieces of legislation that I have described: the ban on sex-selective abortion and the ban on pain- capable abortion. But, Mr. Speaker, that doesn't get at the heart of this.

The heart of this is this: sacred human life. Human life, sacred in all of its forms, begins at the moment of conception. We need legislation to protect that personhood. And when we can define and clearly detect a heartbeat, a heartbeat in a baby from as early as 16 days, we must protect the life of that innocent baby.

So that, Mr. Speaker, is my conviction, my deep conviction, my very profoundly held conviction. But I wonder: What does the rest of the country think?

Sometimes I find myself out there right without a majority. Sometimes they will say: Well, you didn't have a majority because you weren't right. And this one, I have no doubt, Mr. Speaker, human life is sacred in all of its forms.

So we ask the question in polling across America: What do the American people think of the proposal to ban abortion once a heartbeat can be detected? Mr. Speaker, the polling that we have out there is very carefully done, and I am going to give you the numbers first. This is the general number that asks the question, if the heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected, and here is how the polling came together. Sixty-nine percent agree with the position that I have just taken here in the bill that I have introduced, which is H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017.

The data contained in this polling report are responses to a question that was commissioned by Faith2Action. That is in a Barna Group OmniPoll. 1,002 interviews were conducted of U.S. adults nationwide. The sampling error for this 1,002 interviews is plus or minus 3.1 percent. That is about as accurate as you get with polling. That means that there is a 95 percent confidence level that these numbers are right.

The data is weighted in the national distribution of U.S. adults. They took minimal statistical weighting and they used it to calibrate the samples--so, of known population percentages--and it is in relation to the demographic variables of age, gender. I bet it is age, sex, education, and region, so that it is scientifically applied. It is a poll that was run from January 19 until January 27. This is pretty fresh information, about as fresh as it gets.

These interviews were conducted over a majority landline--60 percent or so off landlines and 40 percent off cell phones or other mobile devices, so that we got a good cross section of people throughout that. They were conducted by experienced, trained interviewers. They were supervised at all times. They were monitored. They were computer- assisted telephone interviewing to make sure that the balance of this thing was as good and as objective as it could get, Mr. Speaker.

So this polling result says, among U.S. adults nationwide, a slight majority, 55 percent, agree strongly that, if a doctor is able to detect the heartbeat of an unborn baby, that baby should be legally protected--that is the core of the question that was asked--and 18 percent disagree either strongly or somewhat with this.

So when I look at the numbers here, 69 percent overall are packaged up within the agree strongly component--fifty-five percent. Now, that is landslide in a political election, 55 percent. And this will be a landslide in the polling that says 55 percent strongly agree that, if a doctor can detect a heartbeat, the unborn baby should be protected by law, a 55 percent landslide majority, Mr. Speaker. And then you add to that the 14 percent who agree somewhat with this.

So, from a general agreement standpoint, 69 percent, or as close as you can get and not exactly hit the number, 7 in 10 Americans say let's protect those lives of those innocent, unborn babies when you can hear their heartbeat.

The people who disagree strongly are only 10 percent. And then those who disagree somewhat are another 8 percent; 18 percent disagreeing on the other side, but only 10 percent disagree strongly.

So 55 percent say they strongly support a ban on abortion, once a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected, and only 10 percent disagree with that strongly. I am going to say that they are probably some of the hardcore leftists that I am engaged in debate with on almost a daily basis with here, Mr. Speaker. But you can divide 10 percent into 55 percent and say, for everyone out here who says we should not protect that innocent, unborn baby whose heart is beating, for everyone who says that, there are five and a half Americans who say we have to protect, we have got an obligation to, and they believe strongly that we protect the lives of those innocent, unborn babies with a heartbeat.

That is a huge majority on the side of life. I am very gratified to know that that is the position of the American people, with only a 3.1 percent margin of error in a scientific poll that I am happy now is part of the Record in the United States Congress.

I would say there is another way to analyze this poll. I am looking at this one that says there are 13 percent undecided, Mr. Speaker. So you have 69 percent who agree altogether, and you have got 18 percent that disagree altogether, and 13 percent that neither agree nor disagree. Now, I always wonder, when we are doing polling, why do we measure those without an opinion? If they don't agree or disagree, that is about the definition of ambivalent. They call that mox nix where I come from.

So if I take that out of there and calculate it the other way and put it together, you add together 69 percent and 18 percent, and then you say what percentage are those that agree, well, it is actually 79.3 percent say we should not abort a baby whose heart is beating, and 20.7 percent say, well, it would be okay with them if we did. That is another way of measuring this. And that is a 4-to-1 measure--5.5-to-1, 4-to-1 Americans are ready to protect innocent, unborn human life.

Mr. Speaker, think what this means. Think what it means that we are a society that seems to have plugged our ears to the understanding that life begins at conception. I have known this for a long time. It wasn't a mystery to me.

I see the beautiful little baby going out now. Mr. Speaker, that is a very gratifying thing to see from down here, parents raising their children right.

But from my standpoint, I have this memory. Marilyn and I were married in 1972. I remember sitting there in card club, and the discussion at that time was we have all these babies being born in Central America and why do they have these babies if they can't feed them? Why don't they just abort them? I remember that discussion around card club on a Friday night.

It didn't really trigger me at the time because we hadn't been very far into the abortion debate. I hadn't thought about it very much. We weren't parents, and Marilyn wasn't pregnant at the time. We were just married.

So I remember that discussion though, and it just didn't hit me. It just kind of went through. I don't even know if I engaged in it. I just remember that somebody at the table said, well, if they can't feed them, why don't they just have an abortion?

Well, not very long after that our first child was born. And I picked up that little baby--actually, he wasn't little. He was just a little bit short of 9 pounds. But I looked at him, and I

was in such awe of the miracle of that little boy, that little baby boy named David. There was an aura about him. He was a product of Marilyn and me from our love. And there he is, a miraculous little child in my hands, warm and squirmy and soft and beautiful and a miracle. It is different if it is somebody else's child, I suppose, because it hadn't hit me like that. But there was an aura about this little baby, and you could have convinced me he was the second coming of Jesus Christ, himself.

And I looked at him and I thought, how could anyone take this little miracle's life? How could they kill this baby now? He is minutes old. How could they take his life the minute before he is born? No one could do that--well, almost no one. Could they take his life the minute after he was born? Or could they take it the minute before he was born? Or could someone take his life an hour before he was born or a day? Or could they take it a week before he was born or a month or one trimester or two trimesters or 8 months or 36 weeks or 37 weeks before he was born? What changed? What changed throughout that time?

In a matter of minutes, it all fell into place for me. From the moment of conception he was formed in his mother's womb, and from that point on he is growing on the genetic configuration that he is, blessed with a soul placed in him at that moment. That little boy grew from that point on, and now he is the father of three of my grandchildren. They are all miracles to me. And our other sons are all miracles to me, and our other grandchildren are all miracles to me.

But I can't conceive of doing anything except sacrificing, if I needed to, my life to protect them because they are unique human beings, worthy of all of the protection that society can give them, just like every American is; and, in fact, everybody on this planet is seen in God's eyes.

There has to be a moment that our lives begin. We have to choose that because we can't have an immoral position coming out of law that says, well, it is up to the mother to decide whether this baby is going to have an opportunity to fill its lungs full of free air and scream for its own mercy. They can't do that from the moment of conception, but they can do that from the moment of birth. And if we could hear that inner womb scream at that moment of abortion, we would plug our ears in terror and fright at the crime that abortion is.

So it is our moral obligation to protect all human life from the moment of conception until natural death. That is what this bill does, H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017.

The polling that we have here says clearly that the American people agree. And it is not only, Mr. Speaker, the American people--well, it is actually in the polling. But I separated them out into categories so we could understand how people think about this and how they think about it from the categories of being Republicans and Democrats and no party or Independents.

As you can see, among the Republicans, 86 percent agree that, if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. That is 86 to 6 percent disagree. Eighty-six percent of Republicans, that is about as high a number as you see on anything.

I should run a little measure sometime when you ask, does the Sun come up in the east. That is probably about only a 97 percent issue. But it is 86 percent want to protect a baby with a heartbeat-- Republicans.

Democrats, still that landslide majority of 55 percent of Democrats want to protect a baby from the moment a heartbeat can be detected--25 percent say no, 55 percent say yes. It is more than a 2-to-1 support among Democrats to support the language that is in this bill for H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act.

And then when you go among Independents, they are a little more pro- life than Democrats are. I shouldn't be surprised at that. Sixty-one percent of Independents want to protect a baby from the moment that their heartbeat can be detected.

This is a huge issue for America. America is not yet informed enough about this legislation that is available. And sometimes we get stuck in a rut and we decide, well, we have been working on the sex-selective legislation or the pain-capable legislation, or we have been trying to get Planned Parenthood defunded--which this Congress must do--and we need to do it perpetually, not just annually.

Those are all things that we need to be working on, but it is time now for this Congress to swing for the fences, to move legislation that is based upon a clear and distinct principle of life. If that heartbeat of that little baby's heart, that innocent little baby can be detected, we have a moral obligation to protect that baby.

Then how do we measure the end of life? And how has it been from time immemorial? When the heart stops? When the heart can no longer beat?

Yes, we measure brain waves and we do other things. But when that heart stops and it can't be started and we can't sustain life, we call that death. And when an abortion is committed, that little baby's heart is beating. And you know that the abortion stops a beating heart. That is on posters by the Knights of Columbus and others all over this country. Abortion stops a beating heart.

We need to protect the lives of all of those little babies with beating hearts. We can detect them now with the ultrasound and the science that we have. It is time for this Congress to move.

In our March for Life here that I mentioned a little earlier, Mr. Speaker, when we have hundreds of thousands of people that come out here and gather on The Mall and then march to the Supreme Court building to plead for the court to protect innocent, unborn human life, what is happening is America is waking up. America is feeling the guilt, and we pray for the mothers who have had abortions. But America is also understanding that there is a life that begins at the moment of conception.

So of all of the families that have first bonded with this little unborn baby by seeing the ultrasound--sometimes by framing it, as exists in my Sioux City office for Joseph Dean Anderson's ultrasound-- but millions of those cases across the country are raising the awareness of the American people, and it is not just the mother and the father that see that ultrasound.

They see it in realtime, and they hear the sound for real. It is not just a picture that goes up on the wall that is framed, but it is a living, breathing, moving organism where you can see that innocent little baby squirming and moving around inside in the amniotic fluid, and you can see the expressions on their face and the movement that is there. That this is a real human being and you want to get your hands on that little baby and hold them and love them, but you have to wait until they grow enough that you can do that.

But family after family has this, and little brothers and sisters are shown that ultrasound and they say: This is your little brother or little sister that we expect on such and such date--we have become pretty close with that date. And so kids, brothers and sisters, the siblings are recognizing their brother or their sister, acknowledging that they are an innocent unborn human being well before they are born. And they grow up knowing this.

Now, for the 44 years since Roe v. Wade, we have millions of millions of pro-life people and millions and millions of anti-abortion people who understand this. They grew up understanding this. And no one can any longer tell them that it is just a blob of a tissue and that it is not alive.

I recall a World War II veteran, one who I admired and respected. He has passed away now, as many of them have. His name was Vic Lunsman. We were having this discussion while we were talking about building terraces and tiling, and he said: When the pro-abortion people say that this baby is not alive--if this baby is not alive, why then do you have to kill it? Why do you have to kill it?

I thought he put that into a package about as compressed as it could be. We know that abortion ends an innocent life of an innocent human being that is created in the same image that we are recreated in, in God's image. And now we know from 16 days on that--it is not just that we know that there is a heartbeat, but we can hear it. We can hear the beat, beat, beat, beat, beat of

that little heart. And to think of that little heart struggling for life; to think of that baby squirming to try to avoid the abortionist; to think of that baby feeling the pain; to think of that baby being aborted because the mother or the father wanted a boy or a girl; or because somebody told them that that baby wasn't going to be exactly perfect, none of that measures up against innocent, unborn human life, sacred life, that life that we have to protect from the moment of conception to natural death.

That is what is wrapped up in this heartbeat bill. And if we had the science to prove the moment of conception, I would be standing here with a moment of conception bill. We don't have that science today, but we do have the science of detecting a heartbeat.

And we know the sound of a beating heart is the sound of life. And if you can detect a heartbeat, if you can hear that heart beating in any of us, you know that person is alive; you know there is a spirit within us; you know that our soul is still within our body; and you know that there is a hope for us--at least whoever that might be whose heart we are listening to--to get up and to move about, to live, love, laugh, learn, reproduce, and contribute, to glorify this Earth in a way that we are challenged to do.

Yet, 60 million babies have been denied that opportunity and have been denied that gift of life.

What might they have done? What might they have done for America? What might they have done for the world? How many Presidents, how many Mother Teresas, how many Billy Grahams? How many people have lost their life before they ever had a chance to breathe and fight for it that might have solved the problems that we are facing today here in this United States Congress?

We can't deny that potential. We carry that guilt today, but the best we can do is end it as soon as we can end it. And we would end 90 to 95 percent of the abortions in America with H.R. 490 the Heartbeat Protection Act.

Mr. Speaker, I want to remind you here in this Congress that this is a bill that has strong support in the polling that we have rolled out here. Eighty-six percent of Republicans say that if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby should be protected. Fifty-five percent of Democrats agree that if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. Sixty-one percent of Independents say that if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. And of those who oppose it--at least those who oppose it vigorously--only 6 percent of Republicans, 25 percent of Democrats--and I am going to suspect that a fair amount of these 25 percent of Democrats, Mr. Speaker, are more for political reasons and that they wouldn't be able to sustain themselves in a moral debate on the topic. I think that may or may not be the case for the 27 percent of no parties.

But to put this back into summary, Mr. Speaker, here are easier numbers to remember: 69 percent of the American people, with only a 3.1 percent margin of error, believe that if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. That is 7 in 10 Americans that take that stand. And that is one of the strongest pieces of support you can get for any bill that would ever come to this floor or any discussion that we ever have if you get up to that level of 7 out of 10, and only 18 percent disagree vigorously.

So, Mr. Speaker, I hope that the people that listen in on this conversation between us have contemplated the central points that I have put into this debate and this discussion here this evening, and I hope they have thought about the principles that are involved. I hope they are able to carry this message along to their children and grandchildren, and into our schools and our classrooms, our churches and our synagogues all across this land, this profound belief that if Americans share; that we believe that human life is sacred and it needs to be then sacred in all of its forms.

The second question is: At what moment does life begin?

There is only one moment in the full development of a full human being, and that is the moment of conception. The closest we can scientifically get to proof of that conception is the sound and the detection of that heartbeat, which we all recognize to be the sound of life. That sound of life, that beat of that heart cannot be extinguished by a moral human being who believes that a human life is sacred in all of its forms, and knows that it begins at the moment of conception. And then we can measure the heartbeat and protect that baby from the moment that that heart has begun to beat.

Any doctor that fails to follow the directive in this legislation, in H.R. 490, any doctor that fails to search for a heartbeat and conducts an abortion without--or conducts an abortion in spite of that beating heart is facing a fine and a prison term up to 5 years, or both.

That is a respect for human life. By the way, we hold the mother harmless. She is also protected from any touch of this law. It is only the abortionist that is the subject of this piece of legislation that I have introduced. But it aims to protect human life from at least the moment that the heartbeat can be detected; the baby is protected. And this will gain momentum as we go forward.

The American people will understand what this means. I am hopeful that across our churches, across our schools, across our families, they begin to talk about the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017. And our little kids that grow up, as mine did--having once seen the film, that families grow up respecting the heartbeat of innocent, unborn human life.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention this evening. I yield back the balance of my time.