Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, today, I rise in recognition of Renard Group Advertising, the oldest advertising agency dedicated to supporting and assisting the businesses, organizations and charities of Tyler, Texas. This agency recently celebrated 40 years of dedicated service to its community.

As the representative and servant of the 1st District of Texas, I have had the privilege of knowing the city of Tyler, its blessed and beneficent inhabitants along with its very rich history. Renard Group truly and accurately promotes the pride, passion and personality of the people and businesses who make Tyler the remarkable and close-knit Rose Capital that it is and proudly will be for the future.

Accordingly, congratulations is due to and extended in honor of all those who have contributed to Renard Group Advertising's success, especially its founder, Michael P. Smith.

Mr. Speaker, it is always a privilege to be in this last bastion of civility. Sometimes it hasn't been all that civil, but it has been a place where the rules were supposed to be enforced.

I know there are all kinds of wild allegations being thrown around. People seem to enjoy throwing them at this White House, but I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to the President this week. This has been a very big week, as an article by Kaitlan Collins from The Daily Caller points out: our President hosting three foreign leaders this week in what could be a big moment for foreign policy. Well, this was dated April 2.

One guest that he invited that I am so grateful that President Trump invited was the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. It has been my privilege with some of our other colleagues, and I have had other occasions alone to visit with him in Cairo. I am just so grateful he was invited because Egypt is doing everything it can. The leaders of Egypt right now are doing all they can to try to prevent an international caliphate that is dominated and enforced by radical Islam.

In years past, when I brought up that there are some radical Islamists who are wanting to create a new Ottoman Empire--and I think it is an indictment of some of our schools, both secondary and college level, that more people are not familiar with world history. So I referred some reporters to a map. Go look at a map, look at where the Ottoman Empire was, look at what countries were included in that empire, and look at what the Islamic State is trying to do, what al- Qaida had tried to do, and what radical Islam, with really Muslim Brotherhood playing a powerful role in trying to create part of that caliphate, you look at what they have done, advances made, and it is very clear that those who wanted a new Ottoman Empire that many thought was over 100 years or so ago, we would never see the rise of radical Islam controlling so much of north Africa and Europe.

Then, of course, during World War II, radical Islamists raised their heads. They had something in common with Hitler. Many don't realize that radical Islamist leaders were allied with Hitler because they shared what? A common hatred for Jewish people. They both wanted Jewish people annihilated. They wanted a genocide. They wanted them wiped off the Earth. In the early days, the United States, to our discredit, did not do enough to help the

Jewish people who were the target of that genocide, both by radical Islamists but largely led by Hitler himself.

So when that great June uprising in Egypt that was completely peaceful by the Egyptian people--the only real violence was instigated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Muslim Brotherhood continues to this very day to plot and to strategize to try to take back over the country of Egypt. With over 90 million people or so in Egypt with such a critical location, the Nile River running through Egypt, being right there at the Suez Canal, being right there at the gate of the Middle East, being at the gate to north Africa from the east, it is a critical linchpin for any radical Islamist who wants to start with a caliphate.

Of course, the true radicals, though they have some disagreements over what real radical Islam is, they all agree that to get back this worldwide caliphate, we actually must get Egypt back under radical Islamic control.

Having met President el-Sisi, visited on a number of occasions, even before he was President, this is a man who wants to do the will of the people. He is also a man who has 20/20 vision when it comes to looking at the Muslim Brotherhood.

It was rather tragic when President Obama and two Republican Senators started putting pressure on the 30-plus million Egyptians who made clear that despite Morsi, the Muslim brother leader who allegedly was elected despite the claims of fraud in the election that were not followed up on because of the threats that were made by the Muslim brothers that if you contest this election, we will burn Egypt down.

But the 30 million after the election, once they saw Morsi was acting extra-constitutionally, he was taking powers that didn't belong to him, really kind of following the model of Chavez in Venezuela where, yeah, he got elected, and then he used that position to start knocking off and eliminating competition, pulling powers under himself. Morsi was doing that. And, of course, there is video of him taking marching orders from a radical Islamic leader. So some think he was more of a puppet at the whims of radical Islamic leaders.

But that was such an incredible day for the world, when 30 million Egyptians, moderate Muslims, Christians, Jews, secularists, they went to the street. Some people are not aware, yes, there are Jews in Egypt. There is a millennia of history there. But they went to the street, and as I have mentioned before, Mr. Speaker, the Pope there in Cairo has told me on more than one occasion just how deeply emotionally moving it was to have secularists, Muslims, and Jews come up to him and say there in the streets as they marched together peacefully: We are so sorry for the way you have been treated by the Muslim Brotherhood. We are so sorry for the persecution that our leaders have inflicted upon you and Christians here in Egypt.

What a great day for the world when they demanded, peacefully but demanded, the removal of the President who would be king, Muslim brother Morsi.

And now we still have some in this country, former President Obama and others, who had such wrongheaded policies that put the world so much at risk by supporting Muslim Brotherhood, they complain that this President, our President Trump, doesn't know what he is doing. It appears to me he knows exactly what he is doing when it comes to radical Islam, to those who want an international caliphate, to those who are moderate Muslims, like President el-Sisi, who has actually had the courage to stand up, as I have not seen any national or international leader do, and tell a roomful of imams that it is critical that we get control of Islam back from the radicals who have hijacked it.

It did a disservice when the last administration kept saying the Islamic State, the radicals in Egypt, radicals in Libya, al-Qaida, that they are not Islam. Well, yes, they are. And that is why President el- Sisi had to make clear: We need to get our religion back. Baghdadi, who is head of the Islamic State, has made very clear that, yes, the Islamic State is Islamic, and if moderate leaders don't step up and rein in radical Islam, then this world is headed for disaster.

Though we had some disagreements here recently on other matters, I still think that the media attention that is given claiming Trump is this crazy guy, that Donald Trump puts the world at risk, they are so reflective of the comments that were heard about a guy named Ronald Reagan when he was President.

As I mentioned last fall in a private meeting with now President Trump, I said, you know, my study of American history seems to indicate that those Presidents who were considered by the media to be our smartest Presidents, when it came to foreign matters, foreign policy, they were some of the least effective.

In some cases, actually, terrible at foreign policy and foreign diplomacy, it seems that some of our most successful Presidents, when it comes to foreign policy, have been depicted as being just a little bit crazy.

And I mention to now President Trump, if he will remember back to the days of ``Saturday Night Live'' when it was funny, they did skits about President Reagan. They enjoyed portraying President Reagan walking around as if he was in some daze or stupor, with his finger out asking where the red button is--``Where is the red button?''--like he was so anxious to start a nuclear war.

But when you analyze the history of our Presidents and their effectiveness at foreign policy, I think you actually end up seeing that, when the world is a little bit concerned about a United States President being just a little bit crazy--``That guy is crazy enough, he may start a nuclear war''--it is a fantastic help to diplomacy, so that when a President like Reagan or Trump says, ``This is it. Don't do this because I will draw a red line,'' they can't be sure that he won't launch a nuclear war.

So I hope that he won't take anything off the table. I think he has handled some of these issues very well. As he has said: I am not taking anything off of the table. I am not going to warn our enemies of exactly what we are going to do and when.

That is wise counsel in handling foreign diplomacy.

I am looking forward to the days ahead, because this week, in meeting with President el-Sisi, it sent a message to the world that President Obama refused to send, and that is we think we can work with President el-Sisi.

He has his hands full. Egypt has a tough road ahead because they are trying to come back from what had become a quite socialized government in Egypt. A lot of people are on some form of welfare.

It is always difficult, as one of the Caesars found, when you try to move people off of bread and circuses and get them to working so that they will find out they have value, provide self-worth. Every individual has value in God's eyes, and the Founders knew that. So let's get them working. Most everybody can do something. And leaders like President el-Sisi are attempting to do that.

It was also an embarrassment for the United States, and those that are observing world affairs, to have noted that an incredible world event happened since President el-Sisi has been the head of the government in Egypt. They opened a second lane to the Suez Canal. There were top leaders from most all of the more powerful nations in the world. They came to honor Egypt and their incredible accomplishment of opening a second lane. It didn't go all the way the distance, but it allows for so much more traffic through the Suez Canal.

I remember one conversation prior to that with President el-Sisi, when President Obama had promised Muslim brother leader Morsi: We will send you tanks. We will send you jets. We will send you money. We will send you Apache helicopters.

President Obama was more than happy to send powerful weaponry that the Muslim brothers could use to go after Christians to weaponize the Sinai, as Morsi did.

A lot of Americans had the wool pulled over their eyes, including some at AIPAC, who didn't realize, as they sent people around to support President Morsi, that: Oh, gee, we think he is a lot better than people are giving him credit for.

I knew who he was. I know what he was. But some of the top folks at AIPAC did not realize you don't want

to be supporting a Muslim brother President or leader anywhere.

And, in fact, we should do right here in the United States what Egypt did, and that is list the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Now, it is true in the United States. Some of their leaders have said, oh, no, we don't want to get to violence, because the indications are they believe that they are making so much progress, and they really did. Under the leadership of President Obama, the Muslim Brotherhood made vast strides in power in the United States without violence, so they didn't want to jeopardize that.

But as some of the documents that had been seized over the last 30 years make clear: Yeah, we will use peaceful means as long as we can; but, of course, at some point, when we are no longer successful in gaining the upper hand in America, we will have to support violence to do the final takeover.

But some people here get it. They understand the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood is.

It is great that President Trump invited Egyptian President el-Sisi to be here to meet with him. And, Mr. Speaker, I look forward to the day when we have enough time to have President el-Sisi stand right here where Prime Minister Netanyahu has stood at least, I think, three times and where other great international leaders have stood and have spoken to a joint session. I look forward to the day when we have President el-Sisi stand here. The man is a true hero for the world, for everyone except the Muslim Brotherhood.

President Trump also welcomed King Abdullah of Jordan, King Abdullah, leader of a majority Muslim country. And, of course, those who have studied the Bible know that so many of the Biblical references actually are right there in Jordan.

Some wondered why President Obama didn't get much encouragement from those around him to go ahead and do a status of forces agreement with Iraq. We know that Iran was making so many of the IEDs, putting people and weapons inside the country of Iraq, while American soldiers were fighting, losing their lives, being maimed, losing arms and legs--our great heroes--carrying out the will of the U.S. Government.

It seemed that President George W. Bush pretty well had a status of forces agreement teed up. He probably could have finalized it. For all the criticism that some heap onto President Bush, he is actually a very gracious man. Look at the time he entertained people at the White House and was so gracious. People like Ted Kennedy that would walk right outside and trash him after he had been so gracious to him.

But he actually left a hanging curve ball for President Obama to hit after he came in as President. And from what I understood from people in the Bush administration, they thought this would help his Presidency come in and very quickly sign the status of forces agreement that should be easy to get done.

But one of the things--well, there were two main things, it seems, from what I can figure out, that stood in the way of the status of forces agreement. One was President Obama really didn't want to leave troops in Iraq, not even a small force, to help solidify what we had taken away from the radicals. And he didn't use good judgment, which has now cost the lives of tens of thousands--hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East because of his shortsightedness.

Another reason that there is no status of forces agreement was an element I didn't realize until I was talking to my friend Joel Rosenberg, a great author, a New York Times Best Seller author. Joel has done so much fantastic research into Israel, Egypt, and the Middle East. His novels reflect so much history that is accurate.

He was pointing out to me--and I had not seen it until he pointed it out and I started doing some research on it. But some of the crazies who think that the 12th imam, who was thrown in a well as a child around 10 years of age, is going to some day come back and take over and be the great Mahdi, the 12th imam, that unites the world caliphate and puts everyone under radical Islamic control of the Mahdi, the 12th imam, most of the 12th-ers believe, those who believe the 12th imam is coming back, some have said they have already seen him on short appearances.

There are prophecies that the 12th imam will first come back and take charge in a small town. I believe it is pronounced Kufa. It is kind of like the Bible prophesied that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem.

Well, those who believe the 12th imam is going to come back--and, actually as I understand, they do believe in Jesus. They believe he is going to fight at the right hand of the 12th imam, so they don't have anything close to the beliefs that Christians do and the orthodox Jews do. But the only way he can come back and begin the start of this reign, if he comes back to Kufa, there cannot be any infidel soldiers, infidels in the land, occupying the land.

So if the United States had an occupying force in Iraq, it is going to impede the ability of the 12th imam to come back and start the beginning of the worldwide caliphate that will fall in place thereafter. And, of course, he is supposed to emerge from chaos.

There were those in Iran at the top who thought--not rank-and-file people, but some at the top thought, look, he is supposed to come out of chaos. He will appear here in this small town and start the beginning of the accumulation of the world caliphate.

So, in Iran, if you were a crazy top leader in Iran that believed that is where the 12th imam is coming back, you could not allow the United States--that they consider infidels, the Great Satans--you could not allow the United States to have a status of forces agreement so that we had what they consider infidel soldiers. So it wasn't anticipation that Iran would fight so hard to keep America from agreeing to keep soldiers in Iraq, and part of that is because President Obama did not allow people who had studied radical Islam.

Now, he had Muslim brothers around him. That is what Muslim Brotherhood publication indicated in December of 2012, I believe is when that article came out, bragging about the six people that were in top positions, people like Imam Magid; and Elibiary, who was on the Homeland Security Advisory Council, the top advisory council for Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. And I pointed out conflicts there that were disregarded and problems that his allegiance was not to us; it was for a more radical Islam, for the Muslim brotherhood at least.

Finally, when he tweeted out that the caliphate--the world caliphate is inevitable and Americans just need to get used to it, they finally decided to let him rotate off advisory council. But the Muslim brothers were bragging about the people they had in top positions that were advising President Obama.

There are some holdovers in positions who were not top Muslim brothers, but they are in positions that I hope this President will be able to root out. And I think it helps a great deal that he talks to President el-Sisi, he talks to President Abdullah, because some of these radical Islamists are also a great threat to King Abdullah in Jordan, and we need him keeping peace on the eastern side of Israel.

And then you also had the Chinese President come, and we have got to deal with China because they are a power and they own a lot of our debt.

But I appreciate what was reported this week. Ali Waked at Breitbart reported from Tel Aviv:

`` . . . Abdel Fattah Sisi's visit to the United States . . . will be an opportunity to undermine the Muslim Brotherhood's standing in Washington, a former Egyptian Ambassador to the United States said.

``Abdel Raouf al-Ridi told Egyptian paper Alshorouk that `Egyptian- American relations are entering a new phase, and the degree of their success relies on Egyptian efforts.' ''

He went on to say: ` ``Presidents Trump and Sisi can break the ice created during the Obama administration,' he said. `Without doing injustice to Obama, he adopted the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.' ''

He is talking about President Obama. President Obama would never admit that. Who knows whether he was taken in or really understood what he was embracing.

But one other great thing that I want to express appreciation for is the President's steps on trying to stop illegal immigration into this country.

Mr. Speaker, as I have talked about a number of times, having spent so much time all night on the border, the drug cartels control traffic coming into America, and they have people that they are smuggling in through their coyotes who actually get paid to bring them in. That money goes to the drug cartels and they coordinate. The drug cartels, according to the Border Patrol, coordinate sending in these groups of illegal aliens in the United States. They knew, when they sent a big group in on one or more rafts, that all of our border patrolmen would have to flock to that area and start processing them, go through their checklist of questions, and that is when they could send massive amounts of drugs in.

So what President Trump is doing is a great favor to the United States. When he stops illegal immigration, he is not just stopping illegal immigration, he is stopping the ability to bring in drugs, making it more difficult. Oh, they are still coming, but it is a start. And I am grateful to the President for doing that.

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

Mr. Speaker, nestled in the eastern portion of the First District of Texas is a community which is home to the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame, known as the Gas Capital of the United States, and also home to the Texas state champions of the high school gridiron for 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2013. Once again we have the great honor to recognize the accomplishments of the Carthage Bulldogs football team which has captured the title of Class 4A Division I Texas State Football Champions for the fifth time in the school's history.

The title match found the Abilene Wylie Bulldogs meeting the Carthage Bulldogs on the turf to tangle for the state championship bragging rights, with the Carthage team emerging victorious and a final score of 31-17. The Carthage Bulldogs displayed great resilience and commitment throughout their season, and it is indeed an honor to bring these outstanding athletes to national attention and retention in our national record. The life lessons learned about teamwork, perseverance, and discipline will no doubt improve every participant in immeasurable ways.

My heartfelt congratulations to champions Ashton Hicks, Jesus Jimenez, Keilinn Shelton, Davian Parker, Dee Bowens, Baylor Colle, Mason Graham, Felipe Ponce, Mekhi Colbert, Greg Hurst, Jase Dixon, Macain Jones, Dewaylon Ingram, Cole Whitlock, Josh Gradberg, Darrian Ingram, Elijah King, Tristan Boniol, Jace Tiller, Brandon Medrano, Roderic Calloway, Austin Russell, Gunner Capps, Austin Gray, Chris Attaway, James Ebarb, Cam'ron Matlock, Peyton Bickham, Nick Moore, Jaden Smith, Dayquan Woodard, Nate Brittenham, Logan Baker, Christian McClure, Freeman Thomas, Jaime Gonzalez, Kason Davis, Kevion Booty, Grant Griffin, Jesse Wayne Pierce, Brewster Griffith, Hunter Gauger, Chad West, Callam Barber, Terrance Lewis, J.T. Romero, Tyler Lewis, Demetrius Cooper, Mykel Gates, Casey Jones, Tucker Smith, Tanner Elliott, Jose Dejulian, Brandon Collier, Keaontay Ingram, Tykieast Crawford, Montario Wilson, Dillon Ebarb, Kaden Holcomb, Peyton Monroe, Trevonte Alexander, Matt Davis, Kelvontay Dixon, Tre Gatlin, Jalen Brooks, Alberto Sigala, Callahan Baldree.

No matter how talented and committed, no team could achieve such success without a head coach of extraordinary vision and ability who could lead the Bulldogs to success both on and off the field. Scott Surratt has earned an unprecedented five state titles in his ten year career as head coach for the Carthage Bulldogs, placing him in the prestigious position of being one of the most successful Texas high school football coaches of all time.

The Bulldogs are a perfect representation of what can be accomplished when a team possesses both perseverance and resolve with proper guidance from the entire coaching and support staff. Congratulations are extended to Assistant Coaches: Darren Preston, Kevin Davis, Lee Berry, Zeke Dixon, Clint Endsley, John Goodwin, Brandon Hargers, Demond Horsley, Ryan Marion, Dennis McLaughlin, Jim Milstead, Mike Morgan, Josh Ross, Charlie Tucker, James Watson; Junior High Coaches: Paul Bishop, Art Horton, Jeff Griffin, Bryan Stacy, Damon Roberts; Athletic Trainer: Derek Reed; Athletic Secretary: Mamie Vanover; and the Student Assistants: Mynaisa Bowman, Tara Sells, Serena Rascoe, Neece Pellum, Kayleigh McCormick, Ebonae Maxwell, Devan Hudman, Hunter Gray, Leticia Gonzalez, Austin Buchanan, Caleb Randall.

A team and its coaches cannot soar to the heights of becoming champions without the encouragement and full support of the school itself, starting at the top with Superintendent: Dr. Glenn Hambrick; High School Principal: Otis Amy; and Assistant Principals: Pat Browning & Wade Watson.

It is truly an incalculable honor to pay tribute to this sensationally astounding group of young people who became so much more than the sum total of the team's individual parts. They magnificently represent the very best of the Carthage community and the entire First District of Texas.

May God continue to bless these young people, along with their families, friends and neighbors in Carthage, Texas. It is a tremendous honor to congratulate the 2016 State Football Champion Carthage Bulldogs, as their legacy is now preserved in the United States Congressional Record which will endure as long as there is a United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, it is indeed a pleasure to follow my good friend from Iowa, Steve King. I know Mr. King cares deeply about America. He not only cares deeply, but having been in the private sector in business where he, like our President, was involved in building things and making things work and making things accessible, he has good solutions. I have no doubt if he were not in Congress, he probably would have gotten the bid on the sections of the wall that the President is taking bids on even now.

We are at an interesting time. It has been interesting to see some of the messages. Some are hurtful. I know the liberal papers like the Longview newspaper immediately pick up on any dissension in the Republican Party, especially if it is aimed at conservatives like me. I don't know why we use the term ``conservative.'' It used to be just somebody with common sense that believed in keeping our word, believed in following the Constitution.

We seem to get in trouble when we don't follow the Constitution. For example, it makes very clear that everyone who is an American citizen is supposed to have rights. We can't assure the rights of every person in every other country. That would turn into this remarkable experiment in a republican form of government that we have here.

It is really a democratic Republic--a Republic where you select representatives so that you don't have big gangs running around as a majority wreaking havoc when people disagree with them. We elect representatives so they can come together and, hopefully, read bills and not have to vote on them so they can find out what is in them, go ahead and read the bills in advance and hopefully have something to do with the writing of the bills, especially things that affect people's health.

When we see messages like have come out today, it is unpleasant. One was apparently sent out from the White House, condemning the Freedom Caucus, apparently, because we have the audacity to want Republicans, including those at the White House, to keep our promise. I still remain in favor of--as do my friends on the Freedom Caucus and a lot of others--and remain committed to our promise to repeal ObamaCare.

I realize there can be honest disagreement. Some think if we give more power to Health and Human Services, more Federal Government, and give more power to the people we trust in the Federal Government, whom I do trust, then they can do what Congress is not willing to do, and that is repeal ObamaCare and have a system in place that will assure people can get health care that is affordable.

The fact is most people talk about how we have got to make sure people can get health insurance. And then, over the years, they use the term ``health care'' synonymously with ``health insurance.'' Actually, the fact is we should be most concerned about people, all Americans, having access to affordable health care, whether they have insurance or not.

One of the problems that health insurance has gotten into over the last 50 years is that health insurance has ceased to be insurance. Under ObamaCare, health insurance was certainly not insurance.

If you look up the root of insurance, the word ``insure,'' insurance was intended to be something you could purchase very cheaply that would insure against an unforeseeable event some point in the future, maybe a catastrophic accident, a chronic disease, something that you don't expect and you hope never happens. For the insurance companies, it is actually a form of legalized wager that you are paying a little amount, hoping that never happens, but just in case it does, insurance will be able to take care of it at that point.

We have long since lost the idea of true insurance, and people began paying health insurance companies not to insure against an unforeseeable event in the future, but to pay them to manage their health care, to tell their doctors what medication they could prescribe, what procedures they would cover to help their patients, telling the patients which doctors they could see.

Actually, the truth is, as the Federal Government got more and more involved, we saw less and less insurance and more and more insurance companies managing people's health care, and the managing insurance companies were actually following the lead of the Federal Government.

The more we passed laws regarding health care and insurance, the more the Federal Government had a say in people's health care and well-being and the more insurance companies moved into a management role, much as the Federal Government in Medicare and Medicaid moved into a governing role.

This morning, I am meeting with constituents that are very caring individuals and who provide health centers that are extremely affordable, very, very cheap, but provide quality care for people that can't afford the care. They don't have to go to the emergency room, which costs more than going to a clinic for minor matters. It saves a lot of money. It is a lot of cheaper.

Of course, emergency room care is about the most expensive care you can get, and people who don't have insurance often go and line up at emergency rooms, which drives up the cost of everybody's health care and everybody's health insurance. We can break the cycle of that.

I understand there are very well-meaning friends on the Republican side of the aisle that think if we just give the Federal Government, give Health and Human Services, more power to control all of this, we have a guy in place that I do believe can do great things to cure the ills of health care.

My problem is, if we don't repeal the outrage known as ObamaCare, or the Affordable Care Act--which is really unaffordable--if we don't actually repeal it here in the House, have the Senate repeal it, then no matter how much those in the executive branch and those in Health and Human Services, including my friend, the Secretary, no matter how much they do to help Americans, the next liberal that comes in, the next Kathleen Sebelius who comes in thinking she knows more about what is best for you than you do, then all of those great reforms will go out the window. Because the Secretary will have more authority and more ability to make regulation under the Republican proposed bill, then I am quite certain that somebody that comes in, like Kathleen Sebelius, who knows better what you need than you do, will make sure that the regulations and the overreach become even more burdensome.

I totally understand the President's frustration. He was told that the Republican bill would basically repeal ObamaCare. The truth is I totally agree with the President. We need to act to repeal ObamaCare. I stand with the President, through whatever hardship, to repeal ObamaCare.

I have heard people referring already to the Republican bill as SwampCare. There are some good things in the bill,

but it appears to analysts that I trust and have a reputation for being accurate that premiums will go up and that this bill is not going to really bring down health insurance costs and that they may go up for the next 2 years.

Hopefully, in 2019, after Republicans have lost the majority because we didn't keep our promise, they are projecting that in 2019 the prices will go down maybe 10 percent if everything works out well. That would be good for the new Democratic majority because they will have taken office and they will get all the credit for costs coming down.

Even though it is very slightly, they will get the credit, and Republicans will be left out to dry, which means the American Dream-- freedom, entrepreneurship, the ability to decide what health care you need, when, without government or an insurance company telling you otherwise--that dream of personal independence will be gone, and you will see a new America that begins to reflect the values of the former Soviet Union, which anybody that studies history like I majored in and never quit studying, you know there has never, ever been a time when socialism succeeded. It always has failed. It always will fail.

Even the Apostle Paul's effort to bring into the common storehouse and share and share alike, eventually he realized his error and that it is going to work in Heaven, but it is not going to work here. So, new rule: If you don't work, you don't eat.

The Pilgrims, just a beautiful Compact: Bring into the common storehouse, share and share alike. But after so many died that first winter, they realized: Maybe it will work out better if we let people have private property and they get to keep, use however they want, whatever they produce. What a great idea.

That kind of entrepreneurship, that kind of encouragement and incentive in this world for people to do well, to control their own destiny, is what made America the greatest country in the history of the world.

Now, as we proceeded over the years, we have moved toward more and more socialism, especially in the last 50 years. We have now allowed people like Bill Ayers to take over our educational facilities. They have been successful.

I understand 30, 40 percent of young people coming out of college today think that socialism would be a good thing. Well, it would be in a perfect world, where everybody worked as hard as they could and then shared and shared alike, but we have seen in this world that will never work. The only way socialism remains as long as it does, as it did in the Soviet Union, is if you have a ruthless totalitarian government that takes people's freedom away. But even then, it is all going to be for nothing.

We have an article from Mark Miller in Reuters, and the title is: ``Republican Health Reform Is the Real Disaster for Older Americans.''

One of the things I have got to say, Mr. Speaker, I was hoping in our bill--since we know and we have talked about all these years since ObamaCare passed that it cuts $716 billion from Medicare, and seniors need help. They are beginning to experience rationed health care the way the VA has been administering to our veterans for too long.

Hopefully, we will get that fixed. I don't know the person that President Trump appointed to head up the VA. She has been part of the VA system, so I am concerned she may not be able to deliver on reenergizing the VA to actually help veterans.

With all the problems that have existed across the Veterans Administration, which are a clear example of what happens when a federal government takes complete charge of a medical system, and with all the veterans we have in record numbers committing suicide because they just feel so hopeless--they feel like there is nowhere to turn. The VA doesn't help them. They have got nowhere to turn, and they do take that irreversible step of hopelessness. People that are seeing that in the VA now are coming and saying they want the Federal Government to have more control over people's health care, kind of like the VA, because that is such a good thing.

Do we need more people killing themselves in the general society at the levels of our precious veterans?

I mean, let's take care of our veterans. Let's drop that to zero for veterans and let's work on it for the general population.

I do believe that the bill that my friend Dr. Tim Murphy helped push through, did such a great job on--it was bipartisan; we had people on both sides of the aisle working fervently on that bill--I think will be able to do some good. For 30 years or so the pendulum swung too far against people getting the mental health care they needed. So it is good to see that change.

But, Mr. Speaker, this bill--I left at the end of the week last week, and I know a lot of people were down, and I was in part, but the other side was. I really felt like this was going to be a good week, we were going to come together, we were going to discuss, we were going to find a way to come together. I thought on Tuesday--Monday evening, as I saw our leadership getting together with members of our party, I thought: Yeah, I bet we can get something by the end of the week. I got the feeling most of the Republicans felt if we don't have a bill that we can agree on and get passed for the good of the American people, let's actually take steps.

Okay, our leadership said we can't repeal ObamaCare. Well, let's repeal at least as much as we can. Let's at least repeal as much as we did 2 years ago. Let's at least not give more power to Health and Human Services. Let's at least take out some of the requirements from ObamaCare that have caused premiums to skyrocket. We are told: Well, trust HHS because they will be able to help bring down premiums so we don't have to take that action in this body ourselves.

For all of those who were ignorant and didn't understand, the Freedom Caucus was trying to reach an agreement so that we could vote a bill out of this House, but those of us in the Freedom Caucus all had heard over and over from constituents: You have got to do something to bring down the cost of our health insurance, of our health care. Our deductible is too high, we will never be able to get to our insurance help. Our premiums are so high.

I heard from businesspeople that their costs have tripled in the last few years. They cannot afford to stay in business and keep paying these high premiums for their employees. They will have to leave them high and dry, which means they go to Medicaid. And I am really shocked that even people in the Obama administration would brag about adding millions of people to Medicaid, which has not been the help that people needed. We were told: Oh, no, ObamaCare will drive them to great insurance.

No; it has driven millions to Medicaid that is even worse than Medicare.

So I know most of the Republicans on this side of the aisle believe that so many States have good solutions. So what is our solution to help the States?

Gee, if we give more power to the Federal Government, then they could start a high-risk pool that will be able to pull people out of the insurance policies where premiums are spiking, and then the Federal Government will run that for a while and then devolve it back to the States.

I am sorry, Mr. Speaker, in my time in Congress and even my time on the bench as a judge and chief justice, I have watched government, and I just don't trust government. That was something I shared with our Founders. That was something Justice Scalia told to a group from my home in Tyler. There were probably 50 or 60 seniors who came up.

I asked: Is there something special you would like to see or do while you are here?

They said: Well, you seem to be friends with Justice Scalia. Do you think we could meet him?

Well, I will ask. Well, son of a gun, Justice Scalia found the time, and we met him over at the Supreme Court.

He said: Well, what questions do you have?

He didn't start with a speech.

He said: Well, okay, Louie said you wanted to meet me. Here I am. What questions have you got?

He leaned back against the table at the front of the room, and nobody said anything.

He said: Oh, come on, I have taken time. I want to come here and let you meet me.

I loved how abrupt he was and straight to the point.

He said: Come on, here I am, have the courage, ask your question.

One of our seniors said: Well, Justice Scalia, would you say that the United States is the most free country in the history of the world because of our Bill of Rights, that it is the best ever?

Justice Scalia surprised me, but then I thought, well, yeah, he is exactly right.

He said: Oh, gosh, no. The Soviets had a better bill of rights than we have. It had a lot more rights in there. No, no, no. The reason we are the most free country in the history of the world is because the Founders did not trust government. So they gave us a Constitution that tried to put as many obstacles as it possibly could between people in Washington--at the time, first New York, Philadelphia, then Washington. But people at the Federal level creating laws or regulations, they wanted it as hard as possible. That is why the President is not a Prime Minister selected by the Congress. It is why we have three branches instead of one or two. They wanted to make it hard to pass laws.

He went into further deliberation on that. It was very informative. He was exactly right. I studied the Soviet Government. I remember in college when I was at Texas A&M I did a paper--and I got an A on it-- about the Soviet Constitution, the Soviet rights. They did have more rights spelled out. But the trouble is, their founders wanted government to do things, and trusted government implicitly so that it was totalitarian, so the bill of rights they wrote meant nothing, the Constitution meant nothing.

That is where we are headed here, it is with bureaucrats having taken charge over people's lives, their health care, their financial situations, usurping or at least getting copies of people's finance records. You used to have to get a warrant to do that.

Now the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau just gets them when they want to. That should be illegal. It should be unconstitutional. It should require a warrant with probable cause established under oath that a crime has been committed and this person probably committed it. I used to sign warrants if probable cause was established. Not anymore.

Under Obama, the Democratic Congress passed a law saying: Yeah, let them do whatever they want to somehow help us with our financial situation.

Well, when you combine what they have done with what the NSA, CIA, and Justice Department have done to invade people's rights, we are severely limited in the privacy we once had.

I know there were people who were shocked that Congress passed a bill regarding internet privacy rights, but the fact is that our party should have done a better job of getting the message out of what it really did. It just repealed the intrusion that the Obama administration had with regulation and got us back to where we were a few years ago. So there are still protections; it is just not the intrusiveness of the Federal Government that President Obama created.

Some of us were convinced that he was not as concerned with privacy rights as we were or as others in America were, and he was not as concerned about the United States' control of the internet as we were because he gives away the ability to do websites to an international group instead of trusting the United States. That is different. President Obama didn't trust the United States to be fair to the world. Those of us in Congress, at least on our side of the aisle, thought we would do a better job. I still think we will do a better job.

What has been heartbreaking the last day and a half is to see it doesn't appear that Republican leaders are trying to work with conservatives to get to a solution. We have now seen the solution is: go to war with those who want to stand on the Constitution; contact everybody who donates to the National Republican Congressional Committee, the National Republican Party, contact the big donors who donate to candidates; and make sure they send messages to all the Republicans that they better get on board and vote for a bill that those people who are calling never read, like some of us have, and that they didn't research. They are just trusting the people they have been donating to to do the right thing.

If that were the case, Republicans would have repealed ObamaCare a long time ago, and it would have been the first thing we took up in January, and we would never have had ObamaCare because Republicans would have stopped it when we did have the chance. We had multiple chances. But that is another story for another day.

So I am sorry, this bill is going to ultimately result in Republicans losing the majority. But that is not my number one concern. Yes, it bothers me that I think this bill could lead to our loss of majority in 2018; and, yes, it concerns me that, from what I am hearing from friends across the aisle, the first thing they want to do if they get the majority in 2018 is impeach and remove from office Donald Trump.

So it has really been amazing to see the war develop the last day and a half, that those in October who stood with the President when our leaders were saying: Forget Trump. Our numbers are clear, he has no chance of winning. So our best hope is for every Republican Member to save yourself. Win your election so that when Hillary Clinton is President next January, we can, in the House, rein her in.

But I am so grateful the rank and file of our party stood fast and said: No, if Trump doesn't win, we are not going to rein in president Hillary Clinton. She will do whatever she wants.

Heck, we couldn't even get our party to impeach Koskinen when the guy clearly lied to us here. Other members of the Cabinet in the Obama administration clearly lied, and we couldn't get our group together to remove perjuring people from the Cabinet?

At least now, hopefully, we are going to get the documentation that shows the kind of crimes that were being committed in the last administration.

But in the meantime, people are hurting. They need their premiums to come down. I know we can trust Health and Human Services in this administration to try to bring down costs. But the words of my late friend Justice Scalia: If you guys in Congress, with the power to repeal a bad bill, don't have the guts to do it, don't come running across the street to us and ask us to repeal your bad bill. Heck, just go to the floor, repeal the bad law, and leave us alone.

That is all I am asking, Mr. Speaker. The courts have not worked out extremely well for people who love the Constitution in recent years, and I know the President is frustrated. He is probably nearly as frustrated as I am almost maybe. I am told that maybe some of these anti-Freedom Caucus tweets originated with his Chief of Staff Priebus.

But I want to suggest, as Sam Rayburn did when he was Speaker: My friends, Mr. Speaker, the Republican brothers and sisters are not your enemy. They are your friends. They want to repeal ObamaCare, bring down costs, get more control back to people. If we pass a bill that doesn't bring down premiums and give the American people hope and not give more power to the government and hope they do a better job in this administration, then we will deserve to be voted out.

I just hope, Mr. Speaker, we will do what we promised to do. I hope those who are getting calls and emails demanding they call their representatives, if they have been big donors, tell their Congressmen to get on board with the bill. I hope they will trust us who are reading the bills on their behalf.

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

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 12 o'clock and 30 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, April 3, 2017, at noon for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I do thank my friend from Georgia (Mr. Woodall) for his able presentation on this very good bill and our colleague, Mr. Smith.

I am sorry to change the subject back to something that is relevant, material, and germane. By the way, I am also looking forward to the investigation into Russia and the sale of such a huge percentage of our uranium by Hillary Clinton's State Department. They approved it. But we will get into that later.

Right now we are talking about a fantastic bill because the EPA is very close to being omniscient, omnipotent, and ubiquitous--they are everywhere all the time. We have had a hard time in the last 20, 30 years as it got more and more heavenly in getting information on why they were making the decisions they were. As the EPA has continued to crush jobs, like in Texas if there were no EPA, we have agencies that have continued to make our water and air cleaner and cleaner every year, and, despite the EPA's constant interference, they are doing a great job.

But one of the things that we have wanted, as my friend, Mr. Woodall, was pointing out for years, is whether it is a Democrat in the White House or a Republican, we just wanted some openness. We wanted to know what these seemingly arbitrary rules were based upon. So the purpose of this rule coming from Chairman Smith is let's go ahead and require the EPA to do what anybody would have to do in one of our courtrooms, you got to show why there is a reason to take action.

But since the EPA has been at this level where they were basically unquestionable for so long and could make arbitrary and capricious decisions which could not be challenged effectively, this may be a very helpful start to stopping the EPA from being so heavenly they are not earthly good.

So I think it is a fantastic bill. It is something I hope will be a bipartisan vote as we require the EPA to just show the basis of what you are doing, and then we can know whether this American god, this EPA, actually has feet of clay or is back in the real world or is actually killing jobs unnecessarily.

Mr. Speaker, at this time, I yield to my friend, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Gaetz).

Honoring the Dedicated Service and Selfless Sacrifice of Sergeant First

Class Robert R. Boniface

Mr. Speaker, I certainly thank my friend from Florida for such a compelling tribute to a great American hero.

Mr. Speaker, at this time, I yield to my friend, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Davidson).

Welfare BRAC Act

Mr. Speaker, it has been an interesting few weeks here in Washington, and we are not done with healthcare legislation. There has been a lot of talk about that, but, Mr. Speaker, I would like to say, I have been encouraged as today has worn on. We had a tough family meeting this morning together as Republicans, but, to me, what I felt was coming out of it in the end--disagreement on some important issues but agreement among Republicans that people are hurting under ObamaCare.

People need relief from the high premiums, the high deductibles. So many people not only lost their doctor, lost their health insurance policy, but they can't afford--they tell us--to go to the doctors. We talked to constituents because they would have to get to several thousand dollars before the insurance portion would kick in.

People are hurting across the country, and, of course, we know that, without a single Republican vote, ObamaCare was passed, which cut Medicare by $716 billion dollars, with a ``B.'' And I know President Obama assured seniors: look, seniors, you know, you are not going to have to worry about this $716 billion in cuts to Medicare. You won't be able to tell the difference. This is only going to affect the doctors, the healthcare providers.

What seniors have noticed who I have talked to around Texas and in other places in the country, they have noticed that when Medicare doesn't pay their doctor, doesn't pay for tests that are needed, and doesn't pay for medication that they specifically need then it does affect them personally.

The bill that we took up, that didn't get passed on Friday, that we didn't vote on, there was nothing that was going to help those on Medicare. There is apparently some difference of opinion, but it appeared to many that some of us trusted that people between the ages of 50 to 64 were going to get hammered.

I am very encouraged to have seen Speaker Ryan, Majority Leader McCarthy, Whip Steve Scalise, and our Deputy Whip Patrick McHenry incredibly busy today talking to Republican Members around the House about how we can get to a bill that will get 218--actually we need 216 right now--so that we can send it down the hall to the Senate.

Mr. Speaker, I am encouraged, and I hope others are, that we are not done. We had indications that the Senate was not going to take up the bill--even if we passed it on Friday, they were not going to take it up until sometime in May. So we have time to address this issue and come together on a bill that would pass.

Once again, a reference was made, Mr. Speaker--and it is so often that this event is referenced by Republicans when they get frustrated as to why we ended up with a bill that would require so many Republican arms to be twisted, that would endanger Republican seats to have to vote for it. People referenced back to this.

Remember some years back, some summers back--and I believe, actually, that was the last week of July of 2014, as I recall--in which Speaker Boehner had told us that he had cobbled together a bill that embraced 10 principles that every Republican in the House had agreed to. Some of them seemed a bit esoteric to me, but we agreed to them all. And we kept being told this is going to be a bill that embraces all the principles that all of us have agreed to.

So when the bill was finally filed on Tuesday evening, with Speaker Boehner having announced we were going to vote on it Thursday morning, for the first time, we got a look at the bill we were going to be voting on. By the time Thursday morning came rolling around, there had been so much information that came out--not opinion, but actually verbiage from the bill. It seems like it was around 60 pages, 70

pages, somewhere around there--but people were able to see for themselves what was there. There was so much commotion made about it that, by Thursday morning, much like Friday, Republicans made clear to our leadership--at that time Speaker Boehner--that they couldn't vote for it; that it didn't embody the 10 principles that we had all embraced.

I was so proud of my Republican Conference that Thursday because particularly a number of young Members, newer Members, got up in our emergency conference that they asked for. Speaker Boehner said: Well, I guess we just go on home and have the August recess.

Numerous Members said: No; let's have an emergency conference. Let's talk about this. We need to do something. We need to pass a good bill.

So people got up and they pointed out, like in a good family: Look, we have got differences, but we can reach agreement on this.

And there were probably 20 or so of us in a room for 2\1/2\ hours or so, and we compromised, and we got a bill that we could all vote on.

Unfortunately, at that time, there was a Democratic majority in the Senate, and we didn't get our bill passed through the Senate, but we showed that it could be done.

Once again, after Friday's problems, there are Members that are saying: Remember when we did that, where we just got people in a room and we agreed?

Mr. Speaker, I do believe, knowing so many of the Tuesday Group so well--they are good people--and the number one concern they have is their constituents and the things they are hearing from their constituents because they ran and they got elected to help people.

Everybody that I hear from on our side understands people have got to have help because ObamaCare is creating so many problems. I am hearing from many seniors, and it seems to be as a result of all of the $700- plus billion that Obama cut from Medicare.

Whereas, 7 or 8 years ago, even 6 years ago, before ObamaCare really started being implemented, if they needed surgery, if they needed something, under Medicare, the doctors immediately took care of it. If it was medication, if it was a treatment, if it was surgery, whatever, they took care of it.

I am hearing more and more east Texans who are on Medicare tell me: Now, doctors are telling me they can't schedule it this week or next week like they used to because of ObamaCare; that the only way they can make ends meet and still stay in business, they need to schedule it a couple of months down the road.

Many of us on the Republican side were pointing out, when ObamaCare passed, that what this leads to is a form of rationed care. Whereas, right now, if you have good insurance and you like your doctor and you need something done, it gets done immediately. That is what made America's medical care so attractive to other countries around the world.

I have visited in Middle Eastern and north African countries where the wealthy would say: If I needed surgery done, I'd fly to the United States. Unfortunately, I have heard more than once that: Yeah, and the great thing was that I flew back and never had to pay for it.

Well, somebody paid for that, that is for sure.

It is important that we fix our healthcare system as best we can. I have an article from Conservative Review that came out today from Daniel Horowitz. I don't agree with everything in the article; but Daniel Horowitz, as usual, is quite thought-provoking.

He says: ``Earlier today, a couple of Republican officials, in a refreshing display of honesty, admitted what we have known all along: They don't want to repeal ObamaCare. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican from Kentucky, admitted there won't be another attempt.

``He's certainly come a long way from his 2014 campaign promise to repeal ObamaCare `root and branch' and his 2013 CPAC speech in which he said `anybody who thinks we've moved beyond it is dead wrong.'

``As we explained yesterday, the compromise solution for repealing the core of ObamaCare, but not quite all of it, is already on the table, and Paul Ryan, Republican from Wisconsin, has already agreed to and campaigned on it. Why aren't they doing it? Because they don't want to repeal ObamaCare and never intended to.''

That is the part I do disagree with.

I know we have all said this, but it was in Speaker Boehner's pledge that he and his leadership colleagues cobbled together back in 2010 and it was in the Better Way that Speaker Ryan and his leadership colleagues cobbled together last fall that we have got to repeal ObamaCare. We can't get down to this rationed care system where we are currently headed.

This says: ``As early as 2014, the Chamber of Commerce made it clear that their official position was to fix, not repeal ObamaCare. Money talks, everything else from there walks.

``The sentiment was evident today when Senator John Cornyn, Republican from Texas, the Senate majority whip, said that they will no longer pursue repeal of ObamaCare through budget reconciliation and that `it needs to be done on a bipartisan basis, and so we're happy to work on it with Democrats if we can find any who are willing to do so.'

``There you have it, folks. They know darn well there are no Democrats who will ever have incentive to work with them to repeal ObamaCare. They have always known that this had to be done unilaterally either through reconciliation or by blowing up the filibuster. But Republicans never intended to do so. That's why we heard all these phony excuses about process limitations. Now that they are proven false, Cornyn is at least being honest by saying they will repeal it when Democrats help them. When hell freezes over . . .''

And the article goes on.

Mr. Speaker, what Leader McConnell and Senator Cornyn are talking about, I think they must have been discouraged when the House didn't pass a bill that would come their way. But good news for Leader McConnell and Senator Cornyn, we are not done. People are hurting, and we are going to come together on a bill.

For those who attempted to say that those in the Freedom Caucus kept moving the goalposts, I know that was not said maliciously, but it was said. Anyone who said that was speaking just out of ignorance of what actually was the case.

Anybody that bothers to actually check and get the facts will find that, as many problems as people in the Freedom Caucus--and I am probably the newest member, I guess--had with this bill, we were doing what we could to reach a compromise that would give enough help, enough relief to Americans who are desperate for that help and that relief that we could hold our nose and vote for it.

There were all kinds of issues in that bill that create problems. For one thing, I would have thought a good amendment that would easily be accepted would be that, since this creates a new entitlement program, a tax credit program where you actually can get more money back--like a child tax credit, where we have so many people who are actually illegally in the country, claiming children, as there have been reports--and, of course, not everybody cheats on this. But there are numerous examples of stories around the country of people claiming to have children--mass numbers, dozens of them in the same house, and we don't know if they are in the country, we don't know if they are in another country, we don't know if they exist--and people getting more and more money back.

I had a senior citizen from Tyler telling me she is no longer working for H&R Block, that she used to during tax season. But it just grated on her so much that it created tension headaches and she couldn't sleep during tax season because she had so many people who did not have a Social Security number. But they got a tax number, and she would fill out the returns for them. Invariably, each would pull out a sheet of paper and would say: Don't I get this?

And it was the income tax credit--child earned credit.

She would fill it out, as they requested. And, invariably, they would get much more money back than they paid in. So it was a way of redistributing--it is not wealth, because the people that are in east Texas paying

those taxes, they are not wealthy. They are struggling to get by. That is why they can't afford the high deductibles that ObamaCare has driven them to.

Here it looks like we are going to have another program unless we get this amendment in there when we bring the bill back up.

So I am hoping that that will be one of the adjustments because we were seeking to have something in there to require you to be legally in this country before you could get more money back from your income tax than you paid in. It is a new form of welfare, just like some have found the tax credit to be, where they get more back than they paid in.

So that is a concern, creating a new entitlement as we are about to go over the $20 trillion mark in debt, that we are coming up with a new way to go even deeper and quicker into further debt. But there were a number of issues here with the bill.

The thing that I kept hearing--and I had telephone townhalls, Mr. Speaker, with, really, tens of thousands of people that we reached out to in east Texas. The technology is so great, I can ask questions and have them punch a number for yes, no, and get results on what people are thinking. It was feelings about ObamaCare and the need to do something about it and the help that is needed and the losses of insurance they had before ObamaCare, problems they have had since ObamaCare.

East Texans, my constituents, need help. They want help. They want ObamaCare repealed, and they want a system back where they can choose their doctor, they have a relationship with their doctor, and they don't have an insurance company between them and their doctor or their hospital telling them what they can or can't have. And they don't want the government in between them and their healthcare provider telling them what they can or cannot have.

The health savings accounts that Republicans believe strongly could get us off this final road to complete rationed care, socialized medicine, like they have in England--it was a pleasure to talk to the sister of a member of Parliament from England. I have been in his home in England; he has been in my home in Tyler, Texas, just a great MP.

But talking about our systems, and I pointed out, I have a wife, I have got three adult daughters, and so I am kind of sensitive to being pushed into a system like England has, no offense to those in England. But when we saw the numbers back during the ObamaCare debate that indicated a 19 percent higher survivability rate from the same point of breast cancer being discovered, well, that is one out of five are dying in England unnecessarily, or at least back there when we got those numbers. I am not sure what the numbers are now.

It may be that ObamaCare has created more problems and now we are moving, already, toward the percentages of recovery that England had that were not as good as ours. But I would just as soon not lose one out of five women who have breast cancer, which we were not losing in the U.S. and they were losing in England.

It was interesting. I didn't realize, and I learned yesterday that, actually, that is why, in England, yes, they have socialized medicine, but you can also pay for private care on top of the socialized medicine because it just takes forever to get the kind of treatment that you need when you need it. So people with any means in England, they have the socialized medicine that is so inefficient, that tax funds pay for so inefficiently, and you get as much government as you do health care. But, if you have money, then, on top of the massive taxes you pay, you can also, then, pay for your own health care on top of that. That is different from Canada.

But, look, the bottom line is we don't need to continue down this route. So, again, I am encouraged we are going to come together and we are going to work toward a remedy.

It disturbed me that we heard from people who sounded like they knew what they were talking about, that rates are going to go up for a couple of years, and we are hoping that maybe 3 years after the Republicans would lose the majority in the next election because people are so upset about their higher premiums that then it might come down, premiums might come down 10 percent.

But the concern to me is not about losing the majority. It is about losing Americans unnecessarily if we don't fix this disastrous ObamaCare that is costing seniors. It is costing 50- to 64-year-olds. It is costing young people money that they shouldn't have to spend in the way that they are being required.

So some say we were moving the goalposts as the House Freedom Caucus, but, actually, from the beginning, we did indicate we would like to remove what experts are telling us in title I would dramatically bring down the cost of premiums very quickly--very quickly.

But we had agreed. Heck, we agreed with the Democrats, before they pushed through ObamaCare, let's work on a law together, bipartisan, that will make sure that insurance companies can't play games over preexisting conditions because it has resulted in unfairness and, at times, I can say as a former judge, actually, fraud. Let's work on that one.

Then I think there was fairly universal agreement on both sides of the aisle here that, if you are 26, you are still living with your parents, then you ought to be able to be on their health insurance. From my standpoint, I didn't even care. I didn't think we actually even needed an age, a cutoff age.

If you are 50 and you are still living with your parents, which we hope will soon be remedied by an economy turning around with a new President who knows how to get things going, but if you are still at home when you are 50, I don't have a problem. If you are still living with your parents, then you ought to be able to have a family insurance policy and be on it. So those were not problems.

I had a doctor friend back in east Texas who said I was a purist. I like him. He is a great guy. He apparently was a great surgeon. But I realized that, in his letter, he was speaking from a great deal of ignorance as he continued to point out things that simply weren't true, unless a purist is someone who says: Okay. Okay. I will vote for the bill, but you have got to give us something in the way of amendments to this bill that will help my constituents bring down the price.

Now, see, to me, that is not a purist because we were all willing to compromise in the Freedom Caucus. Actually, in communicating with President Trump two different times, we thought we had an agreement. Then we would hear back from our leadership: No. No. You can't do that. Either there is a problem with the Parliamentarian and it puts the whole bill at risk, or, gee, you are going to lose votes from some other group.

But I still believe, as I did then, if we would get the intermediaries out of the way, that Republicans can come together, Tuesday, more moderate group, Freedom Caucus. We can get people together like we did 3 years ago in July. We can get together and work out a compromise.

Now, to me, someone who agrees twice to a compromise that really bothers them is not the purist that I would expect, but then again, I guess it depends on your own personhood as to what you think is pure and what you think is not.

So, anyway, I appreciate very much, Mr. Speaker, the former Speaker, Newt Gingrich, pointing out yesterday that it is a good thing that this bill did not pass on Friday because we know, as Speaker Gingrich pointed out, in 1994, Democrats lost the majority in this room because they tried to push through HillaryCare. We know that in 2010, Democrats lost the majority in this room because they had pushed through ObamaCare against the majority will of the American people.

As former Speaker Gingrich pointed out, if we had rammed through this bill and, for example, people didn't see premiums come down before the next election, we would justifiably lose the majority in this House, and there are some good people that are serving here that should not be defeated. They are doing the best they can.

But we can do better than where the bill stood on Friday, and I am very grateful to Speaker Ryan, to leader McCarthy, our whip, for working so hard today, reaching out, seeing them all over the place trying to work, talking with different ones of us. It is really encouraging, and I would hope, in

the future, that we will start those things, we will--yes, we appreciate all the listening sessions, but then, as happened too often under Speaker Boehner, somebody, we don't even know who--there were a couple of things that made me wonder: Who wrote this? Is this the insurance lobby? Where did this come from?

But bring the bill out and let us see it instead of telling every Republican: It is going to go through committee; and Democrats are going to have a million amendments and we have got to vote down every one of them; we don't want any Republican amendments; we are going to take it like it is.

Well, see, to some of us, that is not really regular order. Regular order is a chance to have amendments, and especially from people in the majority who see real problems with the bill.

So we can do that, and I look forward to doing that. And since we knew the Senate wasn't going to take it up until May sometime anyway, we have got time to do that.

Mr. Speaker, I hope you felt the same as I did hearing all across our Conference, people saying, look, this is important enough. We are going to have time where we go back to our districts between now and the middle of May when the Senate might take this bill up.

Let's make sure we don't go on recess, go back to our districts to have people scream at us because we hadn't passed something. Let's stay here, and let's get it done like we did 3 years ago on the border security bill.

But we have got a lot of work to do. There are serious problems with the bill. But we also now know, despite what some have represented, that, gee, we can't know what the Parliamentarians would say or recommend. It is great to know that the Parliamentarian in the Senate, actually, Assistant Parliamentarians work a great deal like our splendid Parliamentarian here.

If you are getting ready to file a bill or if you are thinking about an amendment, you can actually go to any one of our Parliamentarian or assistants, show them the language. They can't give an obligatory ruling, and they generally tell us when they advise us: This is what I think, how the rule would apply there, and you may want to tweak this or that.

They always have the caveat: But remember, I am the Parliamentarian. I don't rule on anything. All I would do, if I am allowed, or it is requested, I will whisper in the ear of the presiding--which, in the Senate, hopefully, would be Vice President Pence.

And, gee, the Byrd Rule is not that complicated. When you are under reconciliation, it needs to be about the budget. So, if anything that is amended or added to or part of the bill will materially affect the budget, it survives the Byrd Rule and it stays in. That is it.

The word in the Byrd Rule is ``incidental.'' It can't be just incidental or have an incidental effect on the budget. It has got to have a material effect; otherwise, it is considered extraneous.

Well, I would hope, knowing my friend, a former Member of the House here, former Conference chair, now Vice President, I would hope and certainly imagine if our friend, the Vice President, is in the presiding officer's chair in the Senate and a Democratic Senator stands up and says, ``I make a point of order because I believe this violates the Byrd Rule, where the House inserted a provision, you have to show that you are you lawfully in the U.S. in order to get the tax credit,'' well, there may be people that are so used to massive numbers here in Washington that they would say, well, those millions or tens or hundreds of millions, that may not be material, that may be only incidental.

I hope my friend, my Vice President, would understand that, to Americans, the kind of money we would be talking about is hard-earned and it is material to the budget. So what happens if the Vice President then rules--who is the President of the Senate--well, your point of order is overruled, it is not appropriate, it doesn't violate the Byrd rule. Well, then that same Democrat or another could jump up and say: I appeal the ruling of the char.

Then what happens?

Normally, a Republican would stand and move to table the appeal of the ruling of the Chair. And then there are far more than enough Republicans to vote to table the appeal of the ruling of the Chair, which means the ruling stands, nothing is fatal, and we get closer to a repeal of ObamaCare. Even more important than that, we get closer to giving our constituents the help they really need.

So it has been a long few weeks. It was a very long conference, but I am encouraged, Mr. Speaker. I hope that Americans end up encouraged. I am glad the bill didn't pass on Friday just as I was 3 years ago when the original de facto amnesty bill that Speaker Boehner tried to shove through. I think we can get to a good bill. I am looking forward to seeing that happen and working with my friends here to get it done.

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

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 47 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, March 29, 2017, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, it has been an interesting couple of days. We heard from our President, and that was a great privilege this morning to hear from him at our Conference. We were reminded what an amazing victory President Trump had last November. Some said it was so very historic, maybe as historic going back clear to Andrew Jackson's victory in 1828.

That took me back, being a lover of history, being convinced over the years, as I majored in history in college because I knew out of the Army 4 years, when I finished that, I figured I would major in what I loved, and that was history. Although my mother thought I should have majored in math or either been a doctor or a college math professor.

But history I loved, and I continue to learn from history. The old adage is those who refuse to learn from history are destined to repeat it. The corollary that is not as well known is those who

do learn from history will find new ways to screw up.

But the 1828 election that saw Andrew Jackson become our President actually happened after four abysmal years, some would say the least productive 4 years any President has ever had, and it was actually a President who was a hero of mine, John Quincy Adams. He was the first son of a former President to be President. Some have said he was probably the best educated President we have ever had, having been educated at the best Massachusetts had, England had, and France had. He wrote books in German, fluently spoke French.

Of course, if he had had his way, he would have been married to an American, but when his mother, Abigail, was not too pleased with the girl he thought was the love of his life, he ended up being directed to England where he ended up falling in love with Louisa, and she ultimately became his wife; but apparently his mother didn't think she was quite fit. Louisa became the first--used to be able to say the only--First Lady the country has ever had who was not born in the United States. Like I say, if he had had his choice--first choice--then his wife would have been born in the United States. But that is the way things fall. He loved his wife dearly.

He was quite accomplished. He kept the most complete journal of anybody we have ever had who was President. He knew slavery was wrong. He knew slavery was destroying our country, that we could never reach the potential that God had for this country unless we eliminated slavery. He had corresponded to England with a guy by the name of William Wilberforce, who had dedicated his adult life since his twenties to eliminating slavery in the British Isles and British territories.

He ran for President in 1824. No one won with the electoral votes. It was thrown to the House of Representatives. John Quincy Adams garnered the favor of Henry Clay in the House. And when Clay threw his support behind John Quincy Adams, Adams then won the Presidency.

Adams had some friends who were very close to him. They knew his heart, they knew his heart was pure, and his intentions were clearly nothing but the very best for the United States. They knew him to be a man of honor, a man of integrity, a man of his word. He had not made any kind of deal with Henry Clay to make him Secretary of State. But as a man of honor, a man of integrity, he could not understand why he couldn't go ahead, and why he shouldn't go ahead, and appoint Henry Clay to be Secretary of State.

His closest friend said: John, if you appoint Henry Clay to be Secretary of State, you will never, ever be able to convince anybody in Congress--the House or Senate--you will never convince anybody in Washington but your closest friends, those of us that really love you, you will never convince the rest of the world or posterity that you had not cut a deal with Henry Clay that in return for his support for you being President, you would make him Secretary of State. Please, appoint him to anything, but not Secretary of State. It is going to look like you made a deal and bought the Presidency with the appointment.

But there were those who did not love John Quincy Adams, didn't have that much respect for him, and would have been fine if he had not won the election, but he had won the election. And those who didn't care about John Quincy Adams encouraged him: Sure, appoint Henry Clay, it is your choice. You appoint whoever you want.

Those who loved John said: John, it is not a good idea. People are going to brand you improperly. We know you are honest. Those are not really your friends that are telling you to just appoint Henry Clay to be Secretary of State. Go ahead.

He didn't listen to the closest friends who loved him and cared about him. He listened to those who didn't care if he succeeded or failed. So he appointed Henry Clay to be Secretary of State.

Some historians would say he had the least productive 4 years of any President in history. It is always arguable. But there were clearly times throughout his 4 years as President when he backed bills and pushed bills that would have been good for the United States and that should have had the support of both the House and Senate when they couldn't get passed simply because people thought he had bought the office with the appointment of Henry Clay to Secretary of State. And so they went against anything and everything that John Quincy Adams tried to support thereafter.

That may seem kind of a strange story to pull out from history, except I was reminded of it as I thought about today, and I thought about some folks who even in October, they didn't care about Donald Trump getting elected President, they didn't really support him at that point, so they encouraged him: You go ahead and let's do this bill that we are bringing to the floor and just never mind the fact that prices will not come down, unless you want to say 10 percent over 3 years, maybe 10 percent.

After the prices will probably continue to go up after those same 3 years, we may be able to cut 10 percent off at some point. Why? Because we are not stripping the regulation, the regulatory authority, out of ObamaCare. We are only repealing part of it. And we are leaving almost all of the part that has driven costs through the roof. It has driven the price of health insurance through the roof. It has blown the deductibles so high that so many of my constituents and friends know they will never have enough cash to pay for the deductible to even get to a claim that the insurance company would pay.

And I just know that when the prices of health insurance don't come down over the next few years, people are going to say President Trump broke his promise to repeal ObamaCare. He only got part of it, but the monopolies that had begun to grow in the health insurance market grew bigger and fatter. And a man who wanted to do an honorable thing for America and get rid of ObamaCare--that it cost people their insurance, their doctor, their medicine, that it caused so much suffering and heartache as people struggle with their healthcare bills--he promised he would get rid of it, he wanted to deliver on his promise, and he has been told by people who weren't really sure if they cared if he won or lost that: Gee, just pass this, this will be great. Just pass anything. Pass something. We will call it a victory and move on.

But these are the times when it is very important to take an assessment of those who want to see you succeed and those who really don't care. There are those who have felt on the Republican side that if Donald Trump was defeated, that would be the end of the Tea Party movement, that would be the end of any type of populism rising up against the runaway socialism, the runaway assault on religious freedom, the Second Amendment.

The American public rose up, and this is our first chance to really deliver on our promises. I hope that the votes are not all there yet so that we can reach an agreement so that we can include in the bill that comes to the floor, not an amendment we vote on so that it can be voted down, but actually included in the bill so that we take out at least the big hunk of what has caused health insurance prices to skyrocket.

And if we can do that, we can have a win this week, one that we can all feel good about on our side of the aisle, and even my friends on the other side of the aisle. If we do the right thing and make sure that we take action that actually legitimately brings down health insurance costs, then my friends on the other side of the aisle will hear good reports of joyful remarks with gratitude that insurance prices have come down, we can now afford it, our deductible is lower, we are building a health savings account, it is great.

There are some good things that can come out of the votes this week. But if people take advice from those who are not as concerned with their total success, then this could be the start of a Presidency that was as unpleasant as John Quincy Adams' Presidency, which ended up leading to the inevitable result of his defeat in 1828 to Andrew Jackson.

I hope we keep our promise.

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

Mr. Speaker, yes, this is an important week. There are a lot of things we are bringing up, but nothing is more important than the bill that is supposed to address the Affordable Care Act, as it was called. But it is kind of tough to call it that since it has been completely unaffordable for so many. So many lost their health insurance and lost their doctor. Some lost medication that they were taking before. It is now no longer approved under their new policy. So it has been a very difficult period of time as ObamaCare has been foisted on the country. It came so close to not passing.

And every Republican that I am aware of has promised: You give us the majority in both Houses and the President and we will repeal it. I believe Majority Leader McConnell said we will repeal it and rip it out root and branch. Republican leaders, I believe, mentioned lock, stock, and barrel. And I have great respect for my friends who were just speaking here, but I have got a real problem with the bill.

We are told there will be three phases, three buckets, three stages, whatever you want to call it. The first will be to pass this bill. It leaves in place the parts of ObamaCare that caused insurance to skyrocket. It is leaving in place the part of ObamaCare that caused deductibles to rise from very little to thousands and thousands of dollars, beyond so many Americans' ability to ever reach. So the insurance, they are paying them money every month, but they realize: I don't have $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000 to pay the deductible; therefore, I am really paying for nothing. Especially young people have found this.

We are told that it is because the Senate has what they refer to as the Byrd rule that would not allow us to take the part that is not currently in the bill regarding all of the regulations. We are told that the Byrd rule--and we have looked into it, apparently--if a bill is moving under reconciliation, as this is, then in the Senate, in essence, it must do more than affect the budget incidentally; it must materially affect the budget. And yet we know that if we repeal all of the part that is being put off for stage 2 or 3, but particularly stage 2, the regulations that were put in place by the Obama administration, the regulatory authority that was given to them, by putting that off, it means the prices that dramatically skyrocketed, they are not going to skyrocket down.

We are told, well, they may go up some, but we think there is a good chance they will come down 10 percent. But for my constituents, so many of whom either lost their insurance or are now paying for skyrocketing prices two, three, four times or more than what they used to pay, a 10 percent drop will not be a help at all. Their deductibles will not be coming down anytime soon.

We are told, though, with the regulatory reform that my good friend Secretary Tom Price will do, that will be the phase, the stage, the bucket, that will drop the prices. But when I read through--and I know some people said 2,700 pages, my two part. And I have

gotten two copies, and they are both around 2,500 pages. So unless there are 200 pages I never found, I did read the bill more than once. And someone said 1,400 times. I don't know. I know it is a lot. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is given wide discretion in putting in place rules and regulations to implement the act.

We have heard that there will, no doubt, be, immediately, litigation filed, lawsuits filed, to try to overturn the regulations that are put in place by Secretary Price. Well, since I have had experience in litigation, including Federal litigation, Federal appeals, what would be the issue?

Well, the issue would be whether or not the Secretary of Health and Human Services has authority to create regulations that will, in effect, completely destroy the bill so that eventually the prices will come back down, the deductibles eventually will come back down. That is what we are told. And I trust Secretary Price will do everything within his power to make this happen.

So Secretary Price will come forward with regulations that will emasculate the bill, emasculate ObamaCare. Litigation is filed. Ultimately, at some point, it will come back to a judge, an appellate judge.

As a State district judge, I handled cases and matters that I knew were going to be appealed. As a chief justice of an appellate court, I made those decisions and sat in on discussions with other justices, and so it seems I am in a good position to potentially analyze what would happen on appeal.

We know the Secretary has wide discretion promulgating the regulations, the rules, to bring about the implementation and the intent of the ACA, ObamaCare. But the question will be, on appeal: Does the Secretary of Health and Human Services have the authority, under the bill, to render it meaningless?

Now, I am not aware of justices at the appellate level who are a great deal more conservative than I was, but I believed in following the law even though I, at times, didn't like the law. I would not legislate from the bench. And in a case such as this, you would look, well, yes, the Secretary should have wide discretion to implement the intention of the bill and see that it is carried out.

But it would certainly seem the more powerful argument--perhaps, most likely, the winning argument--will be, yes, but he doesn't have discretion to kill the bill. He has discretion, wide discretion, to implement the bill and carry out the intent of the bill.

I just can't help but think, again, back to words from my late friend, Justice Scalia. We weren't talking about a specific case, because he never betrayed the trust that he had as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. We were talking about things in general. He said at times it bothered him that Congress had the power to end some bill, to change some law, and yet we seem to put a rubber stamp and encourage people to go file a lawsuit to get the law struck down instead of just winning the vote in the House and Senate and repealing the law.

The words that really come back are: If you guys in Congress don't have the guts to do what needs to be done, that you have the power to do and you are supposed to do, don't come running to us over at the Supreme Court expecting us to do your job for you.

He was right. This body, along with the Senate, has the power to do exactly what we have promised for 7 years we would do if we got the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. We would repeal ObamaCare.

Now, I don't know how many there are of us that cannot vote for a bill that will leave in place the regulations and the parts that made our insurance skyrocket, that caused me to lose my insurance. And I wouldn't take the subsidy for 3 years until we got insurance through other means. The law is very clear that, as Members of Congress, we weren't supposed to get that, so I went without insurance for a few years. But we promised our constituents we would repeal ObamaCare.

So what about, we are told, this part that can't make it through the Byrd rule in the Senate? Well, for one thing, 51 votes could change the Byrd rule. For another, there is nothing that is going to more materially affect the budget, in this reconciliation or any other, than bringing the price of health insurance and health care down dramatically. That is more appropriate under the Byrd rule than the whole other part that we are told will make it through the Byrd rule in the Senate.

The most important part is the part being left out. That will bring the prices down. That will give control back to the patients and the doctors. That will allow the States to come up with new ideas and new ways to provide health care and to get it to those who need it. But more important than anything, it restores freedom in America that has been lacking since that bill passed.

When the government is in charge of every Americans' health care, the government has every right to tell people how to live. Those claims from years past--we don't want the government in our bedroom--became rather hollow when ObamaCare passed and the government came into your bedroom, your dining room, everywhere in the house. It has got to be repealed. As Mitch McConnell has said previously, rip it out root and branch.

Who is going to make the decision on what seems so clear should allow all of ObamaCare to be repealed? Who is going to make that decision in the Senate?

Well, we know the Vice President can come right on down to the Capitol, come down Pennsylvania Avenue and come into the Senate Chamber. He is the President of the Senate, and I couldn't be more thrilled that he is.

If he is unable to come, then the majority leader could sit in the chair, or he could appoint someone to sit in the chair pro tem. But it will be a Republican who decides whether or not all of ObamaCare can be repealed, but especially the part that is left out right now.

Mr. Speaker, I know the President is coming, and I am so glad that we have this chance because he is President. But I believe that the President of the United States who has been sold this bill that won't bring down prices--maybe 10 percent, we are told, some day--he deserves better. He does not deserve to be slapped in the face with a midterm election when prices have not come down, as people pushing this bill know they won't--maybe 10 percent. That is not going to change votes of those who know we promised a full repeal. We have the power to do a full repeal, and we should do a full repeal.

Let's get freedom back to a doctor-patient relationship. And from what I am told--they certainly haven't called me--I am told that the health insurance lobbyists have been very active, and people in our leadership are listening. But if that is true, these are the same people with Big Pharma that signed off on ObamaCare. It meant they would make billions more than they ever had in the short term, but in the long term, they signed their own death warrant.

We owe it to the American people to make sure that insurance is viable for the future, and the only way to do that is to repeal ObamaCare, rip it out, root and branch. I like Mitch McConnell's expression. That is what needs to happen. And for those of my colleagues who are getting nervous about having pressure from the White House, pressure from the House leaders, pressure from the Senate leaders, it is nothing like the pressure you will get from your constituents when they find out you didn't really do anything to make their lives better because the prices are not coming down; the regulations that require all of those parts and policies that people don't want that they should have the freedom to choose, they are still there; and in the meantime, the new regulations by the great Secretary of Health and Human Services, in whom I have great faith, they will be tied up in litigation. Maybe they get to the Supreme Court in 2 years. Maybe they don't. Maybe it is longer.

And the American people continue to suffer because we didn't have the guts to do what we should do, what we promised we would do, and that is: Repeal ObamaCare.

I would like to keep the Senate majority in 2018, and I am convinced that the only way we do that is if enough of us endure the name calling in the short term, and stand up and say no on this bill that doesn't keep our promises. It has got some good stuff in it, no question, but it doesn't keep our promises.

And if enough of us will do that, then maybe we can get the Senate and the House leadership to agree to do what we promised.

Then the President will be hailed in 2018, as prices of insurance actually come down, people are given their freedom back to choose their doctor, their health insurance, and the short stint of the name calling now ends up paying dividends in a glorious future.

So, Mr. Speaker, thank you for recognizing me. We will see how the week plays out.

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

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 18 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, March 21, 2017, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, happy St. Patrick's Day.

March 17 is St. Patrick's Day--a day that, for so many, has become a reason for frivolity and joy and fun. Some think it is a day just for drinking, but St. Patrick is remembered not because he drank, not because of frivolity, but because he was a dedicated Christian committed to serving the Lord. I think it is good on St. Patrick's Day to remember why he was a saint.

Now going 180 degrees from talking about saints, Mr. Speaker, I think it is worth discussing the decision made by a Federal judge in Hawaii, also in Maryland. We have judges who have become dictators. We have judges who have ceased to abide by the Constitution. They have widely applied themselves as politicians, though they do not run for office.

A true judge, a conscientious and ethical judge, would review a document such as the President's executive order for what it is, what it says, what it does. Intent is not an issue. What does it do?

The President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, was seeking and is seeking to protect Americans, but we have judges who are not interested in protecting Americans so much as they are patronizing and sucking up to the liberals in the country: those in the media, those in entertainment, those in their highbrow circles. They are not interested in following the Constitution or the law.

We had a hearing in the Committee on the Judiciary on the Ninth Circuit this week. The Ninth Circuit apparently is the most overturned circuit in the country. It has a massive number more cases filed in their circuit than any other circuit. In fact, I have now filed a bill that would divide the Ninth Circuit so that the Ninth Circuit would be comprised of California only, and then all the other States--Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming I believe is in, Montana, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, and territories--I may have missed a State, but all of the other States and territories would be in a new 12th Circuit. The judges who are currently on the 12th Circuit Court in my bill--who are currently part of the Ninth Circuit would remain with the Ninth Circuit. We would have a new circuit, and the judges would be appointed by the current President.

I know there are a lot of people in California who have great sympathy for that, have been begging for years to be carved out of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals because their destructive, unconstitutional decisions are doing great harm to those who believe in the Constitution as written, not as some liberal judge thought it might should be as he tries or she tries to play up to friends at their get- togethers. They would be hailed as being so wise, but the truth is, as Scripture talks about, these are people who are wise in their own eyes, but they are doing great harm to the United States of America.

When anyone in any kind of leadership position loses their common sense, they are educated beyond common sense--they educate common sense completely out of some folks in the United States now--we have problems. And anytime people are educated and taught to believe that what instinctively they knew or were taught was not the right thing to think, and those people become leaders in the country, that country speeds up in its travel down the road to the dustbin of history.

No nation has ever lasted forever. No nation ever will in this world. It is not going to happen. So the question is, from its founding, how long does it go? It depends on how long the leaders of that nation can keep good sense within their consideration in making decisions. That is not happening. Good sense is not being used by judges who have assumed powers they never had, were never given.

Under the Constitution, the powers regarding refugees, immigration, those decisions are left to the President. Some judge may say, oh, you can't consider religion, but indeed any judge that so says is completely wrong. Thank God religion has been considered many times, as when Jews were being persecuted and killed, it was appropriate to say that we want to welcome Jews out of those horrors as refugees, bring them in. But this Nation is being put at risk by judges who are wise in their own eyes.

Now, there is an article here about the Hawaii judge. It is in The Guardian. It was written by Les Carpenter, Oliver Laughland, and Liz Barney. It was written apparently before the decision was made.

``U.S. district judge Derrick Watson is one of several judges hearing arguments over the ban in the final hours before its implementation. He said on Wednesday afternoon after hearing oral arguments that he would issue a written ruling before 6pm Hawaii time. Hawaii was the first state to challenge the second version of Trump's travel ban, after the first was halted by court order.

``The state has argued that the ban is unconstitutional, and that it will suffer damage to its local economy and to various educational and religious institutions. It also argued that some Hawaiians will be prevented from reuniting with family members swept up in the ban.''

That is heart rending, but the fact is none of those are a basis for reversing a Presidential executive order that Congress and the Constitution together gave the President to issue.

We also find from comments that the courts didn't look to the four corners of the document and look what the document says because many of us know that as long as the Constitution is the foundational bedrock for the

country, we have a solid foundation. But when we have judges like this Derrick Watson or the judge from Maryland or James Robart, who issued a ban in the first travel order, when they don't pay attention to the Constitution but pay more attention to what they hear from their liberal friends who are disgusted by the elected President of the United States, and they know they will be heroes, and they long for the accolades of the intelligentsia, which actually isn't the intelligent-- educated, yes; intelligent, no.

The Constitution gives certain powers to certain parts of the government. Congress has the power to make decisions on immigration, migration, naturalization, but it has the power to delegate those responsibilities as it sees fit to the President, and it has done so. The President has certain powers of his own office, of his own right to protect the United States of America. But these judges think that you should not consider the fact that one of the most educated people in the world on what Islam is and what it isn't says the Islamic State is Islam. He has a Ph.D. in Islamic studies from the University of Baghdad, as I recall, and he happens to be the head of the Islamic State.

But the judge would have us disregard the fact that a man who spent his life studying Islam, Koran, the Holy Koran because the Koran that is brought around to some of our offices, they take out verses that have to do with violence against those who are not Muslims, but the Holy Koran he spent his life studying, but these judges would say, oh, no, no, you can't consider the fact that these radical Islamists claim to be Muslim or Islamists, you can't consider that.

One article out this week pointed out that somebody should tell these judges that the terrorists coming in from the nations designated by the President are Muslim. They are not Christians. They are not Jews. They are not secularists. They are radical Islamists. It is ridiculous to have to continually state the obvious that we all know, that all Muslims are not a threat to the United States, but it is absurd not to understand that those who in the name of Allah are killing, beheading, torturing, trying to destroy a free society in the name of Allah, they should not be allowed into the United States. If they are U.S. citizens and their goal is to supplant the U.S. Constitution with sharia law, that is treasonous.

That is why I was so pleased with President Sisi, as a Muslim leader, telling a room full of imams: We have got to stand up to the radicals who have hijacked our religion. President Obama didn't know that. He kept continuing to say that, oh, no, the Islamic State, it is not Islamic, these Islamic terrorists are not Islamic, when actually wise Muslim leaders like President Sisi, they understand, yes, these people are Islamic. They claim it in the name of Allah. They claim it in the name of the Holy Koran, but they have hijacked our religion, and it is time to stand up to them. As long as we have world leaders who are, metaphorically speaking, without clothes, and nobody has the nerve among the world leaders to say: you are naked, put on some clothes. Again, for those who are educated beyond their intellectual level, that means you have got to call it like it is and don't just go along to play to the crowd, the media, the Hollywood types. Stand up and call it like it is. We have a President who is trying to do that.

There is no doubt, as Justice Scalia said about one of the ill- advised decisions previously made by the Supreme Court, this will end up costing American lives. These decisions, if they are allowed to stand, by these unconstitutional judges will cost American lives, and the blood will be on the judges' hands in their pursuit of accolades and popularity among the neo-intellectual elite. They left common sense behind and put our Nation at risk. It is tragic.

I have the two decisions from the courts--one from the District of Hawaii and one from the District of Maryland. But it is interesting. In this article I was reading, Mr. Speaker, it says the judge, within just a matter of brief hours, was going to have this 42- or 43-page decision made. Let's see. This is the Hawaii decision, 43 pages. It seems to me somebody must have been working on that before oral arguments. The decision must have been worked on before that to have a 43-page decision just within a matter of a few hours.

But let's face it, the litigant surely knew before they ever had a hearing what the judge surely knew before the hearing--that he was biased, prejudiced, and was in no way going to have a fair hearing. He was going to end up ridiculing the President of the United States, and unwittingly, witlessly, putting America at risk.

We have testimony here from the FBI Director saying: We will vet these people, but we have nothing against which we can check the information they give us. Yeah, we will vet them, but we got nothing to check their information against.

As Director Comey pointed out: At least in Iraq, we had government records from Iraq, we had the criminal records. But in Syria, since the Obama administration was so diametrically opposed to the Assad administration in Syria, well, the official government certainly wasn't sharing information. And since this administration said we were going to stop the Islamic State--even though we did nothing from the administration decisions, at least, but help the Islamic State grow bigger and strong, and kept sending weapons, material to what the Obama administration thought or said were our friends and allies, but actually ended up repeatedly allowing the weaponry, the heavy artillery tanks, to fall into the hands of the Islamic State--well, the Islamic State was not sharing the information they had about the people of Syria.

And, in fact, Mr. Baghdadi made clear that they were going to get some of their best warriors mixed in with refugees, and they surely have. When you have judges who close their eyes, wet their finger, and hold it up for liberal friends to blow on so they know which direction they should move, well, we get bad decisions that put the Nation at risk.

For those of us who spent much of our lives studying history, it is very clear. Since you know no nation lasts forever, then you look at important milestones along the rise and along the demise, and these are the kind of decisions that lead to a country's demise. When you refuse to recognize what your enemies say--that they are your enemies, they are going to destroy your way of life, they are going to get refugees who are terrorists into your country--because you are so stupid you don't know how to defend yourself, you want to pat yourselves on the back for being so open-minded and open-doored that you allow your killer to come in and kill you, just like the proverbial song and tale taking in a snake, warming it, bringing it back to life, and it bites the rescuer; or the tale of the tortoise carrying the scorpion across the water and then getting stung. When people tell you they despise your way of life, they are going to bring your way of life down. When their documents tell you that they believe that you are infidels and need to be destroyed, there has to be somebody at the top of the country's leadership that understands the risk and stands up to protect the country.

And when people like these judges take the Constitution into their own hands, rip it up, and say, ``I don't care what restrictions we have on us, I don't have any restrictions, I am a Federal judge for life,'' well, that is only so long as the judge has good behavior. And these judges have not had good behavior. They have taken powers under themselves--their name might as well be Chavez or Morsi--taking power into their own hands that they were never supposed to have.

But at least in the case of Chavez and, possibly, Morsi, they won elections. There was a great deal of fraud involved in Morsi's election. It was questionable whether he actually won. The threats eliminated any contest to the election results. But the 30 million or so that went to the streets and demanded his ouster in Egypt, the greatest public step in world history, demanded the removal of an unconstitutional leader in world history. There has never been 30 million people go to the streets peaceably. It wasn't all peace. But the part that wasn't peace was caused by the Muslim Brotherhood. That is why they have been labeled as a terrorist organization, and that is why the United States should label them as a terrorist organization.

Regardless of what anybody thinks about President Trump, his order was

an attempt to protect Americans against judges who think they are unaccountable because we haven't impeached near enough and who become dictators and seize power that was never given to them.

I have got a bill we are preparing that would eliminate any jurisdiction for any Federal court other than the Supreme Court to take up an issue involving immigration of refugees, other than immigration courts, but not on a constitutional level, not to issue an injunction to stop a congressional action or a Presidential action. That would have to come from the Supreme Court, and that is the way it ought to be.

When the Constitution was written, there was only one Federal court provided for. That was the United States Supreme Court. Any other court that is Federal in this country owes its life, its jurisdiction, to the U.S. Congress. As some have said in other applications, ``We brought them into the world and we can take them out,'' as far as their courts are concerned; and we need to do that. We need to take their courts out of the business of making decisions that overrule congressional and Presidential action on refugees and our national security when it is involved with those refugees.

At a hearing that Dr. Alid Perez and Steve King, my friend from Iowa, set up and held yesterday, there were very touching stories of Christians, Yazidis, the persecution of Jews in the Middle East. We heard from people that know what it is to be persecuted by radical Islamists. They see how stupid the policies have been in this country.

We heard from one of the people in the Homeland Security Department that with the massive millions of dollars that Congress appropriated to be used in countering violent extremism, an inarticulate euphemism, that we have spent millions on things like teaching young school choirs Muslim songs. Now, that is one of the contributing factors to the senseless Orlando killings, the San Bernardino killings, the Boston marathon killings--choirs. A contributing factor is that we have wasted millions of dollars, maybe billions, on outreach programs that should not necessarily be the role of some parts of our law enforcement.

I challenged FBI Director Mueller that they had not even gone to the mosque where Tsarnaev went to find out if his pattern had changed, if his behavior had changed, you know, if he was memorizing more and more scripture than he ever had.

We often hear after these shootings, these killings, or these bombings take place: Well, he was becoming more and more religious.

Well, that can be an indication that somebody has become radicalized. There are a number of factors.

Kim Jensen from the FBI, who prepared 700 pages or so on training people how to spot radical Islamists, well, he had his 700 pages purged from training materials for a long period of time. Finally, they realized somebody really needs to know what radical Islam is. They allowed some of the training materials to be used again--maybe all of them--but only for a limited number of FBI agents, as I understand it. We had material that was removed during the purge of our State Department, Homeland Security Department, intelligence departments, agencies, during the purge of their training materials, removed what our Federal agents need to know in order to be able to spot if somebody is no longer a peace-loving Muslim but now has been radicalized and wants to kill American infidels.

There are things that can be spotted if you know what to look for. We have people that know how to train for those things. Phil Haney with Homeland Security knew. With this scientific methodology of finding the connections between radical Islamists, as we have heard publicly, he had identified 800 who may have terrorist ties--reviewed 400, where nearly every one of them ended up being named on the terrorist watch list, but the other 400 were not ever analyzed.

No telling how many of those potential terrorist individuals may actually kill people, kill Americans some day, if they haven't already.

Although Secretary Napolitano said we get pinged and we connect the dots, yet she was Secretary when somebody high--maybe her, but probably someone else--was eliminating the dots, thousands of pages of dots, dots representing terrorist ties. They wiped them out. They erased them.

Phil Haney saw it as it was happening, was able to capture much that was being deleted, that would allow us to know who in the United States has terrorist ties. Under President Obama, our ability to identify our enemy was greatly weakened, and now we have judges that will put us even further at risk.

But you see it repeatedly through history. When a nation's leaders begin to think they are so wise, so above the fray that they refuse to recognize a direct threat to the nation, then the nation is--it speeds up its trip to that dustbin of history. My continued hope and prayer is that this administration will reverse that slide.

I know there are many that say that you have a cycle--whether it was ancient Greece, Rome, other societies--where they pursue freedom, they have some freedom, they begin to lose freedom, they fall under a dictatorship, a totalitarian regime, and then the cycle goes on. But my reading of history leads me to believe perhaps it is more like, can be like, bell-shaped curves where you can go up, create more and more freedoms, have periods where you lose freedoms, but if you have a generation or two that stands up and recaptures those freedoms, you could have another bell-shaped curve. It doesn't have to be a cycle where you completely lose your freedom. But the way we are headed, this will happen.

I was hearing from my friend Secretary Tom Price yesterday that there are 76,000 employees in Health and Human Services, and we are not talking about people that even put Band-Aids on those who need medical care. We are talking mainly about bureaucrats. That is one of the things that contributed so mightily to the increased cost of health care: so many more bureaucrats were being hired, had to be hired, more and more regulations.

You had IRS agents, by the thousands, that had to be hired in order to implement ObamaCare. They weren't going to help anybody's health. They might actually cause problems with people's health--ulcers, at least.

But this Nation is at risk. We have gotten a reprieve, a chance to catch our breath, restore freedom.

As I have said before, for those who have read ``Nineteen Eighty- Four'' by George Orwell, the main thing that Orwell got wrong was the date, because we now have eyes in our homes wherever we are that are staring at us, allow the government to stare at us through our own computers, through our own smartphones. When watching the movie of ``1984,'' it actually is an eye like a picture, but what it really is these days, they are computer screens, smartphone screens. The government can watch any time it wants.

We were assured that the government would not be watching like that unless they followed the law or got a FISA court warrant, but Edward Snowden showed that--those of us who heard testimony and heard statements from people in authority about what they would do and not do--has been proven to be false.

That became clear to me when I saw the affidavit seeking a warrant for all of Verizon's data on all of their customers, all of their calls, all of the information, because the Fourth Amendment says it has to be with particularity. You have got to be specific, what it is you are seeking, make sure there is probable cause to believe a crime is being committed and this person committed it, and that there is evidence to show that that is being sought, and then you get the warrant.

That is the way I reviewed applications for warrants repeatedly when I was a judge, but not anymore. No, no. A guy comes in, swears to a FISA court judge that at one time I had great trust in because we were assured, hey, these are appointed--nominated, at least--confirmed Federal judges. They would never violate the Constitution. Well, we found out that is just not true. They became a rubber stamp.

So the particularity in the affidavit we saw was: We need all the information on all the customers Verizon has. The FISA judge, supposedly out there to protect Americans' private information, said: Oh, well, that is particular enough. You want everything, all of the numbers, all of the information.

Okay, here is the order. Here is the warrant. Verizon, turn over everything you have got on all the numbers you have.

Well, so much for protection of our rights by the FISA court. We now know we are not protected by the FISA court. We can't trust the FISA court.

As I said in our hearing last week--well, I have said it publicly-- unless our intelligence agencies produce the culprits who violated the law and did not follow the law in masking the name, minimizing the transcripts, unless our intelligence agencies can root out the people that have been violating the law, I will vote against a reauthorization of 702.

I know they say: Well, we need all of this power to keep us safe. But we have competing interests here. On the one hand, we have a government that yearns to be bigger and bigger and know more and more until it knows everything about everybody; and on the other hand, we have got people wanting to be safe and wanting their government to protect them. So there has to be a balance.

But when government officials can get every bit of information about your private life, then why do we even need a Congress? You have got bureaucrats making your decisions, know all about you. Might as well let them make the rest of your personal decisions. They know everything else you know.

So we are living in a dangerous time, but the judges have got to be reined in. I hope that my colleagues will join us in restricting the ability of a district or circuit court, any Federal court other than the Supreme Court, taking up these types of national security issues involving refugees or immigrants, because it looks like that is the best thing we can do at this time.

In the meantime, I do intend to review more information about these two judges from Hawaii and Maryland--any others that may join hands as they jump off the cliff--and see if their conduct seems to be sufficiently bad conduct to require their removal from office.

I know this will be looked at as a political thing, but it is not. We are talking about the freedoms of every Democrat, every Republican, everybody that is not identified with a party--every American. The judges have overtaken the Constitution.

In the name of political correctness, we have ended up, apparently, according to the information that is coming out, allowing people who happen to be Muslim to have total access to our congressional computer systems. This article from March 15 in the Conservative Review by Luke Rosiak--and apparently, he has done a great deal of digging on this story. He seems to have more stories about it.

Well, let me touch on the one from March 13:

``Congressional IT staffers who are the subject of a criminal investigation into misusing their positions had full access to Members' `correspondence, emails, confidential files,' and there was almost no tracking of what they did, a former House technology worker said.

``Imran Awan bullied central IT to bend the rules for him so there wouldn't be a paper trail about the unusually high permissions he was requesting. And their actions were not logged, so Members have no way of knowing what information they may have taken, the central IT employee said.

``Awan ran technology for multiple House Democrats, and soon four of his relatives--including brothers Abid and Jamal--appeared on the payroll of dozens of other Members''--of Congress--``collecting $4 million in taxpayer funds since 2010.

``U.S. Capitol Police named him and his relatives as subjects of a criminal probe on February 2, and banned them from the complex's computer networks. But Members of Congress for whom they worked have downplayed their access or publicly ignored the issue.''

And, of course, the reason is no one wants to be seen as a racist. Islam, being Muslim, is not a race; it is a religion. And for some, it is not only a religion, it is a form of government that some-- fortunately, a minority--think should replace our own Constitution.

Anyway, the article goes on: `` `They had access to everything. Correspondence, emails, confidential files--if it was stored on the Member's system, they had access to it,' the former House Information Resources technology worker with first-hand knowledge of Imran's privileges told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

``Technology employees who work for Members must initially get authority from HIR, a component of the House's chief administrative officer, which maintains campus-wide technology systems.

``There were some things--like access to the House email system that were totally controlled by the technicians at HIR. In order for certain permissions to be granted, a form was required to ensure that there was a paper trail for the requested changes. Imran was constantly complaining that he had to go through this process and trying to get people to process his access requests without the proper forms. Some of the permissions he wanted would give him total access to the Members' stuff.''

And again, he used the threat of calling someone bigoted because he was Muslim if he was not given the total access that this person now being investigated as a criminal said he needed.

And it is amazing how many people gave him the full access he wanted without the proper credentials, without the proper background investigation, because no one wanted to be called bigoted since he was Muslim.

`` `IT staff at HIR can be tracked for every keystroke they make,' the worker said. But by comparison, `when these guys were granted access to the Member's computer systems there is no oversight or tracking of what they may be doing on the Member's system. For example they could make a copy of anything on the Member's computer system to a thumb drive or have it sent to a private server that they had set up and no one would know.'

``That raises questions about why Members are so quick to brush off the seriousness of the investigation.''

Mr. Speaker, as you know, we are not hearing a lot of people talk about it. We are not seeing a bunch of stories about it. But this is critical to the ongoing of Congress' actions. You can't have privileged communications that allow us to know what is going on in the departments, agencies, over which we have oversight--you can't have access to that kind of information.

The wrong people know everybody we talk to, everything that is said. They know how to fend off and best come after America. They know how to manipulate us and do so so much easier and better. You don't have to be Russian, apparently, to get access to the Democratic National Committee's emails.

I am still really interested to know if any of these five who didn't have proper background investigations, that worked on so many of our Democratic friends' computer systems, if they possibly helped set up the Democratic National Committee's computer system.

`` `After being notified by the House Administration Committee, Abid was removed from our payroll.' '' This is a quote. `` `We are confident that everything in our office is secure,' Hilarie Chambers, chief of staff for Democratic Representative Sander Levin of Michigan, told TheDCNF.

``Multiple House IT workers said it is impossible for Members' offices to make that judgment, and that Capitol Police--who are running an investigation that involves cybercrimes and current and potential international fugitives, despite their primary duties being providing physical security--aren't capable of determining what actually occurred either.

``The Capitol Police web page listing their authority, scope of work, and expertise does not mention the word `computers.'

``A Fairfax County, Virginia, police report shows that the brothers' stepmother called the police on them in January, and a relative said Imran has been out of the country attempting to access assets stored in Pakistan in his deceased father's name. The relative said they forced her to sign power of attorney documents against her will.

``After naming them as suspects in a criminal investigation, the Capitol Police have not taken their passports or arrested them. The brothers previously took a $100,000 loan from a fugitive wanted by U.S. authorities, Dr. Ali Al-Attar, who has fled to Iraq and been linked to Hezbollah.''

Just gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling, Mr. Speaker, that we have got people with ties owing money to known associates of the Hezbollah terrorist organization and their having full access to Members' computers.

This says: ``Imran ran technology for Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz--who resigned as head of the Democratic National Committee after a disastrous email hack that was blamed on Russians--and had the password to an iPad used for DNC business.

``Politico described the investigation this way: `Five House staffers are accused of stealing equipment from Members' offices without their knowledge and committing serious, potentially illegal, violations on the House IT network.'

``But it later said Hill staffers were downplaying the information security component, writing, `Sources close to the House investigation said the former staffers, while able to view some Member data, did not have access to any classified information.'

``That description rankled multiple House IT workers, who told TheDCNF those semantics misleadingly made it seem like they didn't have access to extremely sensitive information.

`` `Classified' is a terminology used by spy agencies and other executive branch agencies, not generally Congress, with the exception of the Intelligence Committee. The full email correspondence and hard drives of Members of Congress are nonetheless sensitive, extremely private, and likely to contain privileged information of the utmost import.

``And an email need not deal with national security to open that Member to blackmail or extortion. All a rogue IT staffer would need to do was threaten to release emails that were politically embarrassing.

``The central IT staffer said any suggestion that the brothers' access didn't span the full gamut of congressional intrigue was silly because they were the ones giving out permissions.

`` `When a new Member begins, they guide them on everything from which computer system to purchase to which constituent management system to go with and all other related hardware purchases. Then they install everything and set up all the accounts and grant all the required permissions and restrictions,' the staffer said.

`` `In effect, they are given administrative control of the Members' computer operations. They then set up a remote access so they can connect from wherever they are and have full access to everything on the Member's system.'

``Numerous Members of Congress who employed the suspects wouldn't say whether they've been fired or what steps they've taken to examine whether their information is safe.''

Spokesmen for a number of Members of Congress ``all ignored requests or refused to say.

``The central IT worker said they were ignoring the problem in the hopes that it will go away, but that their apathy speaks to the problem.

`` `Unfortunately, as the recent election has shown, security of computer systems on the Hill is not really taken seriously.' ''

So we are told now, this article from March 15, says that the Capitol Police are getting outside help. We will see.

Might I inquire how much time I have?

Mr. Speaker, in my remaining time, I want to address the question of ObamaCare.

Two years ago when Joe Biden was Vice President, making him President of the Senate, there was a compromise. Instead of doing complete and full repeal of ObamaCare as Republicans have been promising for years, there was a compromise: All right. We will take out all but the regulatory authority, those things that actually caused the greatest increase and expense.

But it didn't change the fact, Mr. Speaker, that we had made a pledge to America that I didn't help write but our leaders of the Republican Party in the House did, and it said: Because the new healthcare law kills jobs, raises taxes, increases the cost of health care, we will immediately take action to repeal this law. Then it goes into some detail about that.

Then we know we had A Better Way, Speaker Ryan, our leadership, current leadership's Better Way. And this was from June 22 of 2016.

The plan begins by laying out five principles. It begins by repealing ObamaCare. That is all of it as its first principle. And the last sentence of the paragraph says: ``We need a clean start in order to pursue the patient-centered reforms the American people deserve.''

That is exactly right, and I was glad that our leadership of our party put that in there because we needed a full repeal.

But 2 years ago, it wasn't a complete repeal. More so than what is being done now, in what we are being told is the new bill. It was more repeal then. But even then we wanted to do a full repeal, but we were told because Joe Biden could come over from the White House, come down Pennsylvania Avenue and take the presiding officer's seat straight down the hall, that he would likely rule that other part was not in compliance with the Byrd rule.

In essence, the Byrd rule basically means, if something is merely incidental in its effect on the budget instead of a direct effect on the budget, then it may not be considered under the procedure that was being used, and that procedure only requires 51 votes.

So the thing that everybody knew back then is, if it were a Republican in the presiding officer's seat, of course, would say all of this, especially the part that was taken out, would survive the Byrd rule because it is not just an incidental effect on the budget. It is the most dramatic effect on the budget of most any bill that Congress has ever taken up--dramatic and not incidental, dramatic.

And so now we are told: Look, everybody needs to get on board with this new bill that doesn't go as far as the one 2 years ago, and it leaves all these regulations and things, all that power. 1,400 times it says the Secretary will make the rules, regulations to implement the bill. But we are being told it is okay; you don't have to knock those out because now we have Secretary Price that can do that.

Well, for one thing, if he could, then that would mean when the next Secretary of Health and Human Services comes along and it is a Democrat, you can put them all back. We hadn't done anything. We didn't accomplish anything. We just had a little breather.

But we are also told the prices will likely continue up. There may be a 10 percent drop of the two to four times the healthcare costs, health insurance costs, at least, are increasing.

But since we know it will be a Republican in the chair, then the Republican in the chair in the Senate will be free to do the right thing and say, honestly, truthfully, absolutely, the repeal of all this regulatory massive mess is dramatically going to affect the budget, not incidentally. So it survives the Byrd rule. It stays in.

There are things that are in the new bill that probably won't survive that analysis that have been added.

Why don't we do what we promised for 7 long years, repeal all of ObamaCare? But we are told there is a second bucket, a second stage, where Secretary Tom Price--in whom I have got great faith because he knows health care, he knows healthcare law--can change those regulations.

Well, we also know that this is going to be taken to court very quickly. And even I, as the conservative appellate chief justice that I was at one time, would probably look at that and say wait a minute.

The law gives you the power to create regulations to implement the bill; it doesn't give you the power to make regulations that will destroy the bill. So it won't have to be a liberal judge that can knock down regulations.

I remember my late friend Justice Scalia not talking about a particular case, but talking about the issue of when Congress doesn't do something and has a lawsuit to do it instead, Justice Scalia said: If you guys in Congress don't have the guts to stop something you have the power to stop, don't come running over to the Supreme Court to demand we do it. You do your job. That is not our job.

And this is the case with ObamaCare. It needs to be repealed--as Mitch McConnell said, root and branch. And it survives the Byrd Rule, and then we really help America.

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

Mr. Speaker, it is the end of another week in session.

Mr. Speaker, I want to revisit an important issue. It seems that what some of us were trying to point out for 8 years under the Obama administration fell on deaf ears, that there really are radical Islamists who want to destroy our way of life in the United States, who look at us as infidels, and not just Christians, Jews, secularists, and others, but even Muslims who do not adapt and accept the radical Islamic ways.

That works to the advantage of some because we have seen for 8 years CAIR, Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups, groups that were listed as co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation trial

back in 2008, where the named defendants were convicted of many counts, and they were supporting terrorism. They have ties all over the United States and they have ties to people who constantly had access to President Obama's White House, the State Department, and so many other areas.

We saw time and time again the Obama administration looking the other way as serious matters arose involving radical Islamists, both in the United States and abroad. The Obama administration's approach was: If we can just teach these racist, bigoted, Americans to love all Islamists. Because they wouldn't point out that some are radicals, as my Muslim friends don't hesitate to point out.

But this administration didn't want to point out that there are radical Islamists, that they are part of Islam, that many of them are experts in Islam, like Baghdadi, who heads up the Islamic State. He has a Ph.D. in Islamic studies, so it is kind of difficult to say that he has nothing to do with Islam when that is the basis for everything he said and did.

If one goes and looks at the pleading that the judge declassified from 2008 of testimony given by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a court at Guantanamo Bay, he makes very clear that he is not insane, that he is very lucid. He files a very impressive document explaining himself.

For everything that he said, for example, about the need to kill Christians and Jews, he had a direct quote, not from the Koran. Like where often Members of Congress, if you bring something up on the floor about Islam or the Koran, then it is amazing. It hasn't happened in a while, but Members who bring something like that up, they frequently find themselves being presented a Koran. Somebody drops off a Koran.

But, as an expert in the field pointed out to me when I showed him the Koran that was dropped off at my House, he says, that is a Koran, it is not a Holy Koran; because what they have done is they have taken what they call the Holy Koran and they have eliminated the verses that support terrorism and the killing of Jews and Christians. So if you read from cover to cover this Koran, you don't see any of the verses that the most radical Islamists rely on for their killing, their beheading, their betraying, their lies. And it is okay, they believe, to lie if it ends up supporting the cause of their radical beliefs about Islam.

One of the reasons that I contend with so many others here that Egypt ought to be one of our dearest friends is because they have an elected president. Yes, he was a former general, like Eisenhower, like George Washington, like Andrew Jackson, like so many who had been generals before they became President. They understand warfare.

But the radical Islamists in the United States, so many of them, Muslim Brotherhood-related groups, they pointed out time and again: Look, we know we are going to have to get to violence at some point. But for now, we are making so much progress in taking over the United States without using violence that right now violence distracts from what we are trying to do.

Some of us continue to point out that what the Obama administration constantly used as their fight against, not radical Islam--they couldn't say that like President Trump does--but they would say against violent extremism: We have got to spend millions and millions, and hundreds of millions of dollars fighting violent extremism.

They believed what the often Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated individuals would say: Yes, if we spend that money teaching people to love and accept Islam, then the problem goes away and there is no more violence.

Which is, in and of itself, a complete lie.

So the Obama administration has been spending money on things. I am told by someone who was looking at the ways that the Obama administration spent hard-earned taxpayer dollars paid to the government, and then the Obama administration would turn around and spend it. I am told by someone in Homeland Security--I haven't seen it--but they even had a project spending taxpayer dollars to fight radical Islam by teaching schoolchildren pro-Islamic songs to sing. It is one of the reasons I am so glad we have had a change of President.

I know that there are so many people across the aisle, not necessarily people here in this body, but across the country, who keep saying: Oh, there is so much prejudice against Muslims, and that is the whole problem. If we can eliminate the prejudice against Islam, against Muslims, there will be no more violence.

There are those that are in this body here who have gone so far to show how open-minded they are and how much they embrace the ideals of Islam, and are in no way bigoted, that they have exposed this body to criminals, to hacking; and who knows just how far the security breaches go.

Mr. Speaker, we brought this up, but it is important to take note that this body--there were no Republicans that hired them, but Imran Awan seemed to be the ring leader, Abid Awan, Jamal Awan, Hina Alvi, Natalia Sova, each making $160,000-plus from the House of Representatives. The Awan brothers are of Pakistani descent. I am told the leader is now back in Pakistan while they are being investigated, but their immigration status appears unclear right now. They had been hired as IT specialists, computer specialists, to help some of my Democratic friends with their computer systems. And as suspicious activity continued to mount over the last 12 years, it was dismissed.

And I am reading from an article that Luke Rosiak, March 8, from The Daily Caller wrote.

I'm reading from an article that Luke Rosiak, March 8, of the Daily Caller wrote:

It was dismissed because these five individuals were being

unfairly picked on because they are Muslim.

Well, some of us don't care what their religious beliefs are unless their religious beliefs happen to cause them to believe that our Constitution needed to be eliminated and replaced by nothing but sharia law, and our elected leaders needed to be replaced by what they believe is a holy appointment of a caliph or an imam.

This article from March 8 says that congressional staffers suspected of improperly accessing sensitive data allegedly controlled their stepmother with violent threats in a plan to use her to access assets stored in the Middle East in their father's name.

So just when we thought this whole matter could not get any more bizarre, these five, according to one of their employers here in this House, he says--and I have no reason to doubt him--that they are Muslim. But I know my friends. They don't want to ever be perceived as being bigoted because they are not. But they have gone so far overboard in trying to show how open-minded they are, they have exposed this body to security breaches that are really unbelievable.

I understand from my friend, Devin Nunes, that these individuals were not, best they can tell, ever given access to the classified material in the separate classified system that the intel community has.

Talking about running the Democratic House Members' computer networks, this article says: ``Days before U.S. Capitol Police told House Members three Pakistani brothers who ran their computer networks may have stolen congressional data, their stepmother called Fairfax County, Virginia, police to say the Democratic staffers were keeping her from her husband's deathbed.''

A relative described her situation as being kept in captivity by the brothers for months while they schemed to take their father's life insurance.

The brothers, as IT professionals--computer experts--for Congress, could read House Members' emails and also had full access to their calendars: who they were meeting with and where they were meeting.

Anyway, the article says they ``allegedly used wiretapping devices on their own stepmother and threatened to abduct loved ones in Pakistan if she didn't give them access to money stowed away in that country.

``On February 2, House officials banned Imran, Abid, and Jamal Awan from the House of Representatives network as part of a Capitol Police criminal investigation into House computer security.''

But longtime employers, including--and it has been in the news--our friend, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman

Schultz, and others are named have stood by these suspected criminals. But they did say they had access to their data.

They say we have `` `seen no evidence that they were doing anything that was nefarious' like steal or hack, and were being unfairly picked on for being Muslim.

``But a Fairfax police report obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group says that separately from that investigation, on Thursday, on January 5 at 2 p.m., `Samani Galani called police after her stepchildren were denying her access to her husband of 8 years, Muhammad Shah, who is currently hospitalized,' and police responded to the Springfield home she shared with him.

`` `I made contact with her stepson, Abid, who responded to location and was obviously upset with the situation. He stated he has full power of attorney over his father and produced an unsigned, undated document as proof,' officers wrote.''

Then the officer said: ``He refused to disclose his father's location.''

So he didn't even have a signed power of attorney yet continued to assert--and, again, this is someone who is given access to the privileged computer material of people here on Capitol Hill. I am told by other IT professionals that do work here that, if you know what you are doing and you have access to even one Congress Member's computer, which means their calendar, their emails, and notes taken and stored on the computer about meetings, then it is very easy--you are good--to access virtually anybody else's information here in Congress.

I was told some time back by one of my friends in Intelligence that at one time there was concern about positions I had taken like in support of Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood and that there were those who were monitoring people that came to my office. I was told that they know everybody that walks into your office.

So when you see these kinds of reports, Mr. Speaker, it is a little disconcerting. It is disconcerting that people are not more concerned here in this body about the potential for the kind of breach that is being stated here.

Anyway the article goes on: ``The father died days later, with his children denying him a final moment with his loved one, and the body was taken to Pakistan, where there were significant assets in their father's name. Galani was shocked to learn that his death certificate''--that of her husband--``listed him as divorced, according to a relative of Galani's. The relative spoke only on condition of anonymity.

`` `They kept their stepmother in sort of illegal captivity from October 16, 2016, to February 2,' the relative said, telling her they were in charge of her life and said she was not allowed to speak to anyone. The fact that she did not speak English made it easy for them to take advantage of her.

``As Shah laid hospitalized, `they would not let the father communicate with the wife, they would say he'd be meeting her when they said so.'

``The brothers bugged her house with hidden listening devices and told her `her movements were under constant surveillance and conversations within the house and over the telephone were being listened to. They would repeat what she had told people to prove that they were really listening.'

```This happened in the United States of America, can you believe it?' the relative asked.

``Galani obtained a secret cellphone and stood in the yard to communicate with relatives, who encouraged her to call the police. . . .

``After she did, Abid `threatened her very severely, made her fearful, they told her they are going to abduct or kidnap her family back in Pakistan, and she had to apologize.' ''

Imran is the individual who had done computer work here for so many of our Democratic friends here in the House.

``Imran then tried `to manipulate her. She said to him, ``if you say you are my son, then why are you keeping my phone conversations listened to?'' So he said he would remove the devices. He came into the house and she saw him remove a couple,' including under the kitchen counter.''

So it is interesting. We have these guys who Members of Congress said: They don't need a background check. We can trust them. We are open-minded. They are Muslims, but we are not prejudiced. We don't even require a background check because we know we can trust them.

Mr. Speaker, we don't know what they did here in the House, but in their stepmother's house they planted listening devices. Apparently, they knew where to get them, and they knew how to use them in the home. It still leads one to wonder: What all did they do during the 12 years they were working on computer systems here on Capitol Hill?

Still, we know the allegations have been talked about at length in the media about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, but I keep asking: Are these the guys that set up the Democratic National Committee's computers, guys that are good at planting listening devices and who are good at setting up cameras to monitor movement and what is going on? Did these guys help the Democratic National Committee set up their system without any background checks? Are these the guys that made it so vulnerable to being hacked by Russians or most anyone else who cared to try?

``Galani learned from a life insurance executive that `a few days before the father's death, the beneficiary was changed and Abid became the beneficiary,' the relative said. On top of that, the Springfield house where she lived would go to Abid.

``Galani fled from the brothers and has filed a second police complaint with Fairfax County over insurance fraud and other abuses.

``Abid did not return a request for comment from'' the Daily Caller.

It also pointed out that, after Mr. Shah passed away, these people that were doing computer work for Members of Congress without background checks came into her house. She said that whatever documents were there they stole, along with a couple of laptops that were their father's property, and they left for Pakistan.

Now, I heard somebody that should have known that the ringleader here that headed up the computer company that serviced so many of the--well, this article talks about a handful of Democrats, but I have been hearing that at one time, over the years, over the last 12 years, they may have serviced as many as 80 different Democratic Members of Congress' computers.

But the relatives are coming forward now, according to the article, because Members of Congress have attempted to downplay the brothers' potential crimes and have limited the investigation to just the Capitol Police, who lack the ability to investigate cyber breaches and international crimes, and despite naming the brothers as suspects, have not even arrested them. This is, apparently, a Muslim woman who says that she is fighting to protect the country--talking about the United States--these are very bad people.

This kind of reminds one of the father who came forward to point out that his son had become radicalized and was a terrorist threat because, under the Obama administration, they purged the training documents so FBI agents, State Department officials, and intelligence officials would not know what to look for to spot radical Islamists.

We know most Muslims are not terrorists. They are not radicalized. Most are loving people and want to live in peace. That includes friends of mine who have lived all their lives in Afghanistan and were glad to fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan because they didn't want radical Islam. They are Muslim. They didn't want radical Islamists running the country.

Radical Islamists hate moderate Muslims as much as they do Christians and Jews.

So, this lady says she is trying to protect our country because Members are not realizing how exposed Congress has been. As she says-- she is the stepmother: These are very bad people.

Politico reported that Imran and his wife, Hina Alvi, are personal friends with the former DNC chair, Ms. Wasserman Schultz, when she was subject to an email hack that was blamed on the Russians.

This article is dated March 8. Apparently, Imran still hasn't been fired, even though he was banned from the House network, but that has been circumvented by having him serving as an adviser.

Well, Imran began working for her in 2005, the article says, and soon after, his two brothers and two of their wives all appeared on the congressional payroll, collecting more than $4 million. That is over this period of time, of course.

The brothers had numerous additional sources of income, all of which seemed to disappear. While they were supposedly working for the House, the brothers were running a car dealership full time that didn't pay its vendors. After one Rao Abbas threatened to sue them, he began receiving a paycheck from another Democratic member of the House of Representatives, also from Florida.

While they were working for House Members--and it should be pointed out, not any Republican Members--they were working for House Members, including members of the Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs Committees--the dealership took and never repaid a $100,000 loan from Dr. Ali Al-Attar, who is a fugitive from U.S. authorities and is linked to Hezbollah.

This is perfectly consistent with what was going on for 8 years under President Obama. You had Imam Majid, who had been president of an organization that was listed as a coconspirator.

So, whatever happened to all of those coconspirators named by the U.S. Department of Justice?

Well, I understood from a former member of DOJ under the Bush administration that they took this first case, and if they were successful in getting convictions, then they would turn around and go after the other coconspirators.

But the interesting thing that happened immediately after that conviction in late 2008, we had a new President, and Eric Holder became Attorney General. Eric Holder had no interest in prosecuting the named coconspirators of those convicted of supporting terrorism.

So, we spent 8 years with the Obama administration listening to people who identified not just being part of, but leading coconspirator groups and supporting terrorism.

Of course, he was an American citizen by birth. His parents were both from Yemen. They came here on visas. He was born. They went back and trained him to hate America, as I first pointed out, had been occurring 7 years ago, after a friend in an international setting advised me that this person knew of radical Islamic leaders who sent their wives to the United States to have babies so they can bring them back, teach them to hate America, and they would be American citizens. They could come in and out at will.

I know CNN refused to do a proper investigation. They like name calling better than doing proper investigations.

Our Nation is threatened by people that hate us. Different countries had what many referred to as birth right travel programs.

China was bragging that they had the best birth right travel programs. You pay money to this travel group, they would get you a visa to come to the United States. Of course, you would want to come during the third trimester of pregnancy so you can have a child in the United States.

Then, some of them would advise: We will even help you make sure your child has an American passport before he or she leaves the U.S. so that your child can never be denied entrance, whether it is for college, for work, for whatever, they can come in and out as they pleased.

That is how a man named Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, helped the Clinton administration, helped the Bush administration.

I had someone who was working at one time for the administration advise me that the Obama administration was really upset because they thought Anwar al-Awlaki was helping them as kind of a double or maybe triple agent. When they found out that he was not actually helping the United States, he was still helping radicalize individuals, was behind some of the radicalization of people that went on to kill Americans in the United States.

With all of those ties, in fact, there are photographs of him leading right here in this building in which I stand, Mr. Speaker, Friday prayers with Muslim staffers here on Capitol Hill; leading those prayers.

President Obama thinks that with all his ties to people in his administration, to people on Capitol Hill, this guy, an American citizen, free to come in and go as he wishes, was so dangerous, we could not possibly allow him to come back and have a trial where he could testify about all his connections to people in the Obama administration, or Bush or Clinton administration. This guy is so dangerous, we better blow him up in Yemen; silence him forever. We don't want to give this guy a trial. Silence him forever--the first American citizen to be ordered killed by a President without a trial, with a drone strike. That was Anwar Al-Awlaki. There are so many others.

A Muslim brother, the former President of Egypt who was ordered removed by the largest gathering of peaceable demonstrators in the history of the world, these were incredible Egyptian people--Muslims, Christians, Jews, secularists--all joined together to demand the removal of this corrupt, evil Morsi.

Even though we did have Senator McCain fly over there and demand the Egyptians release this Muslim brother and put him back in charge, he was on his way to becoming what Chavez was to Venezuela, he was about to be to Egypt.

So it wasn't just Democrats that were fooled. But thank God--I do thank God--that the Egyptian people would not have it. Morsi claimed to have had 13 million or so votes, but the Egyptians tell me, when I have been over there visiting with friends, that they knew there was a lot of fraud and that he probably did not get elected with a majority of the votes. But the Muslim Brotherhood made clear to his opponents and those who wanted him removed: If you try to remove Morsi, we will burn this country down.

When Morsi was removed, the Muslim Brotherhood tried to do that. They burned many churches--dozens of them--attacked synagogues, and then they tried to blame this on the army and others in Egypt, but it was very clear it was the Muslim Brotherhood carrying out their threat that, if you remove the Muslim brother leader Morsi from Presidency before he took all control, all while he was taking his commands from an imam, a religious, holy, radicalized Islam. I am told they had him on video taking orders from such an imam.

Well, he didn't get back into power, and they recognized the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group.

My friend, Ted Cruz, has filed a bill with many cosponsors, as I understand, and we filed one here in the House, to recognize the Muslim Brotherhood as the terrorist organization that it is.

I know that replacing ObamaCare as a system for taking care of people's health is a priority for so many of us, but we have got to multitask and not lose sight of the fact that we are still under the threat of radical Islam. They still want to kill us. They still want to eliminate our way of life here in the United States.

So, while we are, hopefully, about to create a better healthcare system in the United States, we have got to make sure the United States is protected. And for those who are so open-minded that they want to make sure that no Muslim ever suspects them of being prejudiced, they would allow people to get into our computer system constantly, without a background check, we are being put at risk.

We were put at risk when the Obama administration listened to CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the group you hear from immediately after there is a terrorist attack, basically challenging people: How dare you say this was a Muslim. Well, it was a radical Islamic. Oh, so you are an Islamophobe.

I kept hearing from people inside homeland security that we were spending more time and effort training our officers to spot Islamophobes than we were training them to understand radical Islam. But that is exactly why Tsarnaev was never stopped, was never picked up and prevented from killing and maiming people in Boston.

The FBI agents, doing the best that they could, being deprived of Kim Jensen's 700-plus pages of radical Islam that the Obama administration did not want FBI trainees to see and to know.

They finally brought it back toward the end, but most FBI trainees never got any training on what radical Islam looks like. They never knew what questions to ask. They never knew what

questions to ask at a mosque. And yes, if somebody is suspected of being a radical Islamist, you should go to the mosque and talk to their friends, find out how they were acting, find out what their new religious practices were. There are people that understood and have studied radical Islam. They knew. Kim Jensen knew.

So I am very hopeful that people like Kim Jensen will be given free rein to once again fully train our Justice Department officials, people like Phil Haney. I am hopeful and prayerful that Phil, after he had so much information that was deleted under Secretary Napolitano establishing ties to terrorism--they wanted them deleted because many of them had ties with the White House and it would make the White House look bad.

But when Secretary Napolitano talked about, Yeah, we get pinged and then we connect the dots, well, she oversaw the elimination of dots, she oversaw the elimination of the ability to ping, as she said, and she exposed our country to dangers that were completely unnecessary if proper training had been given to our people in the Justice Department, in our Homeland Security Department, in our intelligence agencies and groups.

It really is clear from what has been going on. I have only been here under two Presidents--President George W. Bush, President Obama--and now the third, President Trump. But under the first two administrations that I served with, we were told repeatedly that use of the section 215 program or the 702 program that allows wiretapping of foreign agents, we were assured that if an American citizen were picked up, nobody knows the name, it is immediately masked, the conversation is minimized, so you don't have access to that.

We were told a lot of things that turned out to be lies. And it does appear that Snowden was guilty of treason from what we have seen. He should be tried and, if convicted, punished severely. But I sure learned a lot from what got released. I learned that we were lied to during the Obama years about what was or wasn't being done in surveilling American citizens, and at least the last part of the Bush administration. It could be the Presidents didn't know. But somebody knew. If we do not, in this body, give President Trump the ability to do what he became famous for--and that is say ``You're fired''--then this country is not going to get back on a sound basis. There will continue to be people who will monitor others illegally, improperly, unconstitutionally, and use that information to get rid of leaders who don't play ball with them. That is dangerous.

We hear of foreign intelligence people who are corrupt spy on their own people, and they are impressed with what was going on under the Obama administration and feel like that was a dream come true for anyone in intelligence, to be able to monitor the people of a country, like has been going on. I mean, it has got to be cleaned up or we lose our freedoms. Once you have the ability to reach in to people's private lives, that completely--you don't even have to have a case. You can destroy their lives.

A good example was Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska. Somebody should have gone to prison for what happened to that man. As a former prosecutor, judge, and chief justice--I prosecuted people as a prosecutor, I sentenced people who were convicted when I was a judge, I ruled on convictions when I was a Chief Justice--I had to make sure due process was followed and the people got a fair trial, evidence was not obtained illegally. But in Ted Stevens' case, I know when I read that he had had this addition--I can't remember now; I am going strictly off recollection, but like 700,000 or so improvements to his home, and I thought, oh, come on, you have got to know, Senator, you can't have that kind of improvement free to your home. You can't do that.

But they came in with search warrants, took all of his documentation. They got all of his bank records, they got all of his computers, his flash drives, anything that had memory on it. They took all of his documentation. The man could not defend himself. He had, as it turns out, proof that he overpaid, maybe by half a million dollars, and that the prosecutor had material--a note, as I recall--from the contractor saying something like: Look, you are overpaying me.

Senator Stevens said: Yeah, I have got to overpay you because they will look closely at everything I do. I guess I am overpaying you, but I want the addition, and I have got to do this so I never get in trouble. Don't even cause the least suspicion. I have got to overpay you, so just take the overpayment.

He didn't have those documents, and he was not allowed to testify about documents that were not producible. He couldn't produce them because the prosecutors or the FBI, somebody kept those and refused to turn them over, which is a violation of the law, and it is a crime to unfairly prosecute somebody when you know they have evidence to prove they are innocent.

You don't even give it back to him so he can use it and show the truth?

Thank God there was a whistleblower who finally exposed--if I recall correctly, I believe it was an FBI agent. The judge hit the roof, of course. Any judge. I would have. You deceived us? You caused this prosecution, had the trial right before the election so he would lose? You changed the election?

You talk about the Russians, for heaven's sake. That was an intentional invasion, and it wasn't by Russians. It was by Americans. They ran that Republican Senator out of his office, basically destroyed his life. If he had been in the Senate, he wouldn't have been in that airplane when it went down.

But that is what a corrupt government can do. They can come after anybody. We have got to clean out the Federal Government of people who have become dizzy with their power. I always thought it interesting, one of the most powerful dictators in history responsible for killing, starving millions of people, Stalin, one of his quotes was: With power, dizziness.

We have got a lot of dizzy people working in the Federal Government. Thank God that there are not more of those than there are people who love America, who really do keep their oath to the Constitution. But it has become very dangerous, and we have got to get to the bottom of this.

I have had people say: Louie, aren't you worried? I mean, you are talking about people who can destroy a Senator, can destroy all kinds of people. Aren't you worried they will come after you, try to destroy you the same way?

I am more concerned about my country. We have got to salvage this country's freedoms from the brink that it came to under the Obama administration

Then we have a report, March 6, Paul Bedard, Washington Examiner: 300 Refugees Probed As Terrorists.

``In a bid to bolster President Trump's new executive order suspending travelers from six nations into the U.S., federal law enforcement officials revealed that they are investigating 300 refugees for terrorist ties.

``While U.S. officials would not provide details on the FBI investigations, they did say that they are refugees `who either infiltrated with hostile intent or radicalized' since coming into the United States.''

So these investigations are ongoing. I heard yet again this week a number of times, some of my friends across the aisle would say: Look, these refugees are not a problem. They are vetted for 2 years. We don't have to worry about them.

Yes, we do. We have already seen people who came in as refugees, people who were granted asylum. A couple of them, I believe it was Tennessee or Kentucky where they got asylum. They had not bothered to check or notice that their fingerprints were on IEDs that were set up to kill Americans.

So this 2-year vetting, oh, no, no, it is a long, tedious process to make sure they are okay. Well, I found out this week from an official with Homeland Security who said he wanted to know just how thorough the 2-year investigation and vetting was by the U.N. because he knew Homeland Security didn't do 2 years of vetting on these refugees. And, of course, the judges--who don't know ``sic `em'' from ``come here''-- out in the 9th Circuit think they have the right under the Constitution to be dictators, and for them, without proper knowledge of what is and isn't a threat to this country, to

just dismiss orders that the President had the authority to make and just say, oh, they are unconstitutional, even though from their own statements they proved their own ignorance.

So we have got refugees coming in. Thank God somebody at the Homeland Security Department wanted to get to the bottom of exactly what occurs during the 2 years that the United Nations refugee program does in vetting people. So he went straight to the person in charge of the refugee program at that time. He said: I would like to get a description of the processes of vetting that refugees go through from these countries they allege they are coming from. What all does the U.N. do to vet these refugees?

And the answer came back: Well, actually, we don't do any vetting of the refugees. It is a long 2-year process most of the time, as we are trying to convince countries to take these people. We are not spending any of that time looking into their background. The 2 years is what it usually takes to get a country to accept them, figure out where they are going to go. No, somebody else must do that. We don't worry about that. We are just trying to find a place for them.

Mr. Speaker, the next time you hear somebody say, Oh, no, this is a very thorough 2-year process of vetting these refugees of making sure they are not a threat, then I hope it will come to your mind that a representative of the U.N. talking to one of our top Homeland Security people--and I am not going to give his name, but he was told: We don't do any vetting. We are just trying to find a place to put them. When we find somebody who will take them, we feel like we have done a great thing.

Well, maybe, if they are not terrorists.

But we have seen the data that indicates that for the amount of money it costs to bring a refugee from the Middle East to the United States and take care of them for a year, what happens to the money actually spent, you could take care of 12 refugees if they were kept in the area and provided a safe area. That is what the Obama administration should have done. Instead of drawing red lines that it couldn't find after it drew them, the Obama administration should have said: We are going to participate in creating a safe area, provide flyover and provide people there. We are going to provide a safe area for refugees to come to until the war is over and people can return to their homes.

Rather than create a system that will allow our enemies, the Islamic State and others, to do as they promised us they have been doing and will continue to do, and that is putting their terrorists in amongst the refugees, instead of doing that, putting our country at risk, let's let them stay near to their home, provide them safety, help provide them with what they need. Because when the greatest country, strongest country, most charitable country in the history of the world becomes so self-righteous that they feel like they don't need to do vetting, when they become so taken with appearing to be open-minded that they don't even protect themselves by doing what used to be called due diligence and checking on people to make sure they are not a threat to others around them, instead of doing that, we show irresponsibility when it comes to protecting America as when you are at risk of losing the country.

But Americans, by a huge majority of electors, electoral college, elected President Trump. They wanted a change. When you look at a map that shows all of the counties that voted for President Trump and those that voted for Hillary Clinton, you see that our friends across the aisle, part of a party that has really become a fringe party, has the fringes of the country. But the massive interior--most, except for some big cities here and there--is people that want to preserve and protect the most blessed place to raise a family that there has ever been.

I am sure Solomon's Israel was apparently an amazing place, but the people didn't have our freedoms. But we are in danger of losing them when we become so cocky that we think we don't have to check on people to make sure they are not a threat. That actually is a form of bias. They are so afraid that people might say that you are closed-minded that they don't even do a background check, but they would for someone who is not Muslim, then that is a form of bias.

We have got to use commonsense, we have got to protect America, or we will be cursed when we are gone and our children see what we have done.

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

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 1 o'clock and 20 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Tuesday, March 14, 2017, at noon for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I was handed a letter by a lady when I was at one of the many events that I attended in my district. It is how I stay in touch with what is going on. This lady says: ``U.S. Congressman Louie Gohmert: I am a 52-year-old widow. ObamaCare is a major financial problem for me. Someone needs to fix the healthcare system. One-third of the money I get from my deceased husband's retirement fund is given to health care. My deductible alone is $7,000.''

She has an exclamation point.

``I am angry with the government deciding how I should spend what little money I have. I had to get a part-time job just to put gas in my car. So I clean tables and I mop floors. I am physically unable to work full time. I am frustrated with the fact I had to move back in with my parents just to make ends meet. Would you like that? Fulfilling. Could or would you do something to relieve this burden?''

That is from a 52-year-old widow in my district. That is what we have done with the burden, ObamaCare. We here in Congress decided: You know what? We are going to tell people like this widow how she has to spend what little money she has left. We are going to force this woman to go clean tables and mop floors when she is physically unable to work full time because we here in Washington have decided we know better than she does. So we have every right in Congress to force people like this dear widow to get on her hands and knees to work for the United States Congress. Pay your taxes and now, that is not enough. We are going to tell you that you are being forced to spend your money on health care that will never help you a dime because you have a $7,000 deductible.

Or how about hearing, 2 weeks ago, from a friend, one of those who was cut because of financial troubles. They had 100 employees. They can't afford the ObamaCare, so they have cut their 100 to 70, and they are continuing to work to get down to 49. Why? Because of ObamaCare. So we have already had 30 breadwinners, men and women, lose their jobs because of one thing: ObamaCare.

And now there are going to be 21 more who lose their jobs because of one thing: ObamaCare. They have got to get it under 50 so they don't have to keep paying such ridiculous prices for health insurance that has such high deductibles nobody will ever benefit.

Who is benefiting? Well, it can't be all of the health insurance companies because they have dropped out. They can't make money. So it has to be the government that is making all the money from this ObamaCare program.

A single mom told me she had been working at McDonald's making ends meet, but because of ObamaCare, they cut her hours back. Now she has to work at both McDonald's and Burger King, and she was in tears because it is just too much.

And why is she having to do it? Because people right here in this House and the other body, without one Republican vote in this body, told America: Too bad. You are not working enough at McDonald's. We want to make your life miserable. We are going to make you work at two places part time just like this widow that we condemned to start scrubbing tables and floors because the Democrats in this body, without a single Republican vote, decided we know better what you need to do with your time and your money than you do.

So it is a problem of arrogance when Washington thinks it knows so much better than people across the country. And yes, I know, I represent the 26 percent that didn't vote for me. I understand that. And I have heard from them, and I don't need a townhall to know they are for keeping this albatross of a healthcare system. The ACA is not affordable, though. It is ridiculous to call it affordable care.

One of the problems is, when you have to take precious healthcare dollars that used to go to providing care in a hospital, in a clinic, for a patient, now it goes to government navigators. Why? Because there were union officials that decided: We have lost too many union members. The unions that are growing are the government unions, the very ones that Franklin Roosevelt said you should never have a union composed of government workers.

Think about it. You are working for the people of the United States of America. Why would you need a union to organize against the people? Sounds un-American. But those are the ones that are growing. And union leaders, without concern for their members, decided: Let's embrace as many aliens as we can get into the country, legally or otherwise, because they will join the union and that will grow our ranks; and we as union leaders will be better off, but our members' wages will continue to go down, our members will continue to lose jobs. But, gee, we may have more people in our union.

We know that there was supposed to be thousands of new IRS agents hired so that they could help enforce ObamaCare. It is a travesty. The bill that has been filed is not going to do it, but, hopefully, our Republican leadership will be willing to work things out and not prevent good amendments that will make it palatable so enough of us can vote for it.

I have gotten to know President Trump a bit, and I feel like he wants the best deal he can get for America. If this bill were the best he could get, he would probably have to live with that, but we can do a whole lot better. Some of us are determined we are not going to vote for one that doesn't.

In the meantime, there is so much talk by President Obama and all of his minions that are still out there trying to undermine the Trump administration. We have a crisis here in Congress

that people are not talking about. I keep bringing it up. Doesn't seem to be a lot of folks who want to talk about it.

There was a time when we had mainstream media that actually did research, asked questions, dug to the bottom of things. But there are IT--information technology, mainly working with computers--employees, shared employees for several Democrats that are under investigation. Imran Awan was the company owner. Abid Awan, Jamal Awan, Hina Alvi--the wife of Imran Awan--and Natalia Sova, wife of Abid Awan, each made $160,000 a year as IT-shared employees working on computers for various Democrats in the House of Representatives.

The Awan brothers are of Pakistani descent, but their immigration status is unclear. There are a lot of things that are unknown about the Awan brothers. But they worked for our former DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz--that is Imran Awan. These people are under investigation for stealing material, potentially accessing material they shouldn't have, for taking material off of Capitol Hill and stealing it, using it in other places.

We are told, oh, not to worry, they didn't access classified intelligence information in the SCIF; but other IT people tell me, once someone is in the congressional system, the calendar, email for one Member of Congress, if they are good, it is not that hard to break into lots of other Members of Congress' email and calendars.

What country that hates America--some that like America--wouldn't love to know who people are meeting, especially on the Intelligence Committee like some of the people that have employed these?

Some of them, very fine members of things like the Ethics Committee, Judiciary, Foreign Affairs, Intelligence Committee. Let's see, Andre Carson, Sandy Levin, Jackie Speier--a lot of people, good people--Tim Ryan. A lot of these folks, they employed these folks. They were very trusting, kind people. And these people didn't have a background check, and now they are under investigation. I heard some have been told that Imran Awan, the lead guy, went back to Pakistan.

Well, if this guy set up and was working on computer systems, is it possible he could have--and this is what a normal mainstream reporter, 30, 40 years ago back in the seventies would have asked: Well, did he set up the DNC computer system that got hacked, that was supposedly hacked by Russians or others, did he set that up so it could be hacked? I mean, there is a lot here going on that we don't know the answers to, and we deserve to know the answers.

There were mortgage transfers, debt evading bankruptcies. Imran Awan, Jamal Awan were known to be the ringleaders of the group, had been providing services since 2005; has convictions for driving offenses which were serious enough to become criminal misdemeanors, used an illegal radar detector, drove an unregistered vehicle; some say, after masterminding the family's finances, was running the business completely by 2010 and instructed Abid not to even speak to anyone.

The wives of Imran and Abid also began receiving paychecks from the House of Representatives. They purchased two homes in Lorton in 2008, one of which was associated with all three brothers at one time. Alvi sold that home in 2016 to the younger brother Jamal for $620,000.

Imran owned a home and put it in his father's name in 2008 in Springfield. Abid later claimed, in bankruptcy, that the house was his.

Jamal Awan was placed on the House payroll at age 20, making $160,000.

Imran is also a real estate agent. Despite making $160,000 in congressional salaries, debts went unpaid by the Awan brothers, including debts to the Congressional Federal Credit Union.

$100,000 was taken from a known Hezbollah-connected fugitive, a fugitive from the FBI; and they are associated with this Hezbollah- connected agent, and there is no press out there getting to the bottom of it? What happened to the Washington press, the proud press of Washington of the 1970s? Well, they are in the bag for one party. They are not interested in getting to the bottom of the news. They are all about advocating.

God not just bless America, God help America. We have got to have people wake up before we do much more damage to ourselves. It is time to turn this country around, and one of the things we should start with is getting to the bottom of this investigation; find out how much damage these alleged criminals did from Pakistan to our Congress, and also start undoing the damage ObamaCare has done so people can get jobs again they have lost, so people can have health care that has deductibles they can afford. It is time to make America great again.

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