Floor Statements

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, March 25, 2014, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, at this time, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Flores), my new friend.

Remembering Retired United States Air Force Colonel Robert Darden

``Pete'' Peterson

At this time, Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Reed), my friend, such time as he may consume.

NO MORE Week

Thank you for those stirring and important words.

Mr. Speaker, at this time, I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Holding), my friend.

Mack Pierce

Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, there are many great Americans. There are some who are exceptional, and it is always a pleasure to hear about a life well lived, someone who will meet his Maker and who will hear the words ``well done, good and faithful servant.''

We have some who do a rather sloppy job with the duties they are given. It specifically brings to mind, Mr. Speaker, the National Journal Daily. It has got a picture of my friend Justin AmashK on the front with the words--in big letters--``Drunken Karaoke with Justin Amash.'' Yet, when you read the story, it is very clear that Justin Amash didn't have anything to drink. It was not a drunken karaoke event.

As my friend Mr. Amash puts it in a letter that many of us have signed:

The story concerned a fundraiser for Representative Thomas

Massie, which was held earlier this week. The fundraiser was

hosted by a number of Virginia Young Republicans at an Irish

pub in Clarendon. One of your reporters who regularly covers

House Republicans attended the event. As you reported,

Representative Amash spoke as a guest at the event. He

introduced Representative Massie, and talked briefly to a

crowd of young people about public policy and principles that

many Republicans share.

After the event officially ended--not part of the event--

Representative Amash stuck around to take pictures with fans

in the crowd as a courtesy to the Young Republican hosts, and

there were some who stayed for the usual Tuesday night

karaoke. Representative Amash did not participate in any

karaoke singing or drinking.

That is even noted in the article. That is why it was such a surprise that the National Journal would have as the headline--front page, top story--``Drunken Karaoke with Justin Amash.'' That is libelist. That is outrageous, and particularly--I did some checking--it turns out that the National Journal has a contract with the House of Representatives to provide everybody a copy of the print version for $617,000 per year.

With that kind of sleazy title, I think it is time to relook at that contract. I mean, we all know the National Journal's ratings of conservatives. Justin Amash usually gets rated by the National Journal as one of the more liberal when he is, if not the most conservative, one of the most conservative. So we have known that National Journal reporting in some areas has been very suspect, but that is just as sleazy as it gets. A front-page, top-story apology to Justin Amash is owed by the National Journal. That is the least they can do.

Since we are part of the government here in Congress, it is important to note when things go well, and it is important to note when things don't go well and when there are problems.

There was a major story yesterday afternoon. The Daily Caller reports ``Health and Human Services Official Resigns, Pens a Must-Read Rebuke of Federal Bureaucracy.'' It is an article posted by Caroline May, and its original publication is in AAAS news.sciencemag.org by Jocelyn Kaiser.

This story from The Daily Caller reports:

A Health and Human Services official has resigned after

dealing with the frustration of the ``profoundly

dysfunctional'' Federal bureaucracy which left him ``offended

as an American taxpayer.''

In a resignation letter obtained by ScienceInsider, David

Wright, Director of the Office of Research Integrity, ORI,

which oversees and monitors possible research misconduct,

offers a scathing rebuke of the unwieldy and inefficient

bureaucracy that he dealt with for the 2 years he served in

that position.

In his letter to Assistant Secretary for Health Howard Koh,

Wright explains that the 35 percent of his job that was spent

working with science investigators in his department ``has

been one of the greatest pleasures of my long career.'' The

majority of his duties, however, represented his worst job

ever. ``The rest of my role as ORI Director has been the very

worst job I have ever had, and it occupies up to 65 percent

of my time. That part of the job is spent navigating the

remarkably dysfunctional HHS bureaucracy to secure resources

and to, yes, get permission for ORI to serve the research

community. I knew coming into this job about the bureaucratic

limitations of the Federal Government, but I had no idea how

stifling it would be.''

I want to add parenthetically here that he is talking about the remarkably dysfunctional Health and Human Services Department that wants to make your decisions for you about your health care. They want to tell you and have told millions and millions of Americans that your health insurance is no good even though most Americans liked the insurance they had and wanted to keep it and were promised by the President and so many friends across the aisle, if they liked it, they could keep it. It turns out that was absolutely not true.

The HHS, the Health and Human Services Department, in being as bureaucratic, as negligent, and as dysfunctional as they are, is what every Democrat in this body and in the Senate and without a single Republican vote wanted to shove in control of every American's health care. Now we are finding out just how disastrous that was.

This article about Director Wright goes on to read:

According to Wright, activities that in his capacity as an

academic administrator took a day or two, took weeks and

months in the Federal Government. He recalled an instance in

which he could not get approval for a $35 cost to have

cassette tapes converted to CDs. He eventually was able to

get them converted in 20 minutes for free by a university. In

another instance, he ``urgently needed to fill a vacancy,''

but was told there was a secret priority list. Sixteen months

later, he wrote, the position was still unfilled.

Again, parenthetically as to this article about HHS dysfunctionality, it is important to note that these people who took 16 months and still didn't fill a position because they had a secret priority list are the same ones who are going to have a list as to who can get what surgery at what age. Some people bristled when Sarah Palin called it a ``death panel,'' but they are going to decide who can get a pacemaker, at what age, and who cannot. So, as I had to do a couple of times, they are not going to have to actually sign an order sentencing somebody to death, but it is basically not that different. When you say someone who must have a pacemaker in order to live can't have it, you might as well be signing a death penalty order.

This is an organization that cannot get their act together--not to build a Web site, not to protect people's most personal information, not to even get a $35 authorization to convert cassettes to CD. If they can't do that, do you really want them deciding whether you get a pacemaker or not? Whether you get a bypass surgery you need or not?

A conversation with somebody in my district who came from Canada keeps coming back to me. He told me about his father, in the Canadian glorious health care system that everybody got shoved under, where the government controlled who got pacemakers, who got surgery, who got what, needed bypass surgery, and was on a list. Two years later, he didn't get it. And he died because he hadn't had bypass surgery.

I said, Well, that is amazing. I didn't know it took 2 years. What was the problem? He said, They kept moving people on the list in front of him. I said, My understanding is it is a crime in Canada to give anything of value to get someone to move you up the list. He said, That's right, but there is a panel that moves people up the list as they feel appropriate. They didn't move my father up the list. He didn't get bypass surgery for 2 years. And so he died.

If someone, unknown of whether he has insurance or not, were to go into a hospital here in Washington or in my hometown in Tyler, Texas, or Longview, or basically anywhere, and he is immediately found to need a bypass, they are going in and doing the bypass. But not in Canada. Not in England. And not here in the United States, once the group that shoved ObamaCare down the throats of the American people have their way and this bureaucracy with secret priority lists gets to tell you what you get or don't get in the way of health care.

I just cannot imagine thinking Americans wanting the government, and particularly Health and Human Services, making those kind of decisions.

We found out this week, when my friend Tom Price asked how many people have paid for their health insurance, they couldn't tell us. Secretary Sebelius doesn't know. Can't know.

Do you think they are going to know when you, Mr. Speaker, need bypass surgery? They won't.

Some will say, Well, in Congress they probably get special treatment. They have no idea. We won't get special treatment. We will end up like the people in Canada, going on a list.

I read an article sometime back about England. They have got a new target, it said. They were trying to adjust down the amount of time it took to get surgery or treatment or whatever a doctor prescribed after it was prescribed. They knew it wouldn't be done overnight, but if everybody pitched in, everybody worked hard, they thought they might get the delay in getting the surgery or treatment you needed down to a 10-month wait. If everybody worked hard, eventually they could get it down to 10 months.

I thought, Good grief. And you want to do that to America? You don't have to wait 10 months for a mammogram or surgery or a biopsy, if it's needed.

These people that keep saying, You Republicans have no alternatives. We have all kinds of alternatives.

What I keep encouraging our conference and the RSC to do--and I am hoping one of our groups here is going to do it--is start having informal hearings and bring in witnesses so that we do what President Obama promised when he was a senator. If I am President, he promised us, we are going to have debate over health care. We are going to do it on C-SPAN. We want the whole country to see who is standing up for whom.

That is what I want. That is what we need. Let America see who stands for them and who stands for the big, bloated, secret priority-listed bureaucracies like Health and Human Services.

This article goes on about HHS. David Wright, who has now resigned, said:

On another occasion I asked your deputy why you didn't

conduct an evaluation by the Op Division of the immediate

office administrative services to try to improve them. She

responded that that had been tried a few years ago and the

results were so negative that no further evaluations have

been conducted.

David Wright closed by saying he plans to publish his daily log to further shed light on his work. He said:

As for the rest, I'm offended as an American taxpayer that

the Federal bureaucracy--at least the part I've labored in--

is so profoundly dysfunctional. I'm hardly the first person

to have made that discovery, but I'm saddened by the fact

that there is so little discussion, much less outrage,

regarding the problem. To promote healthy and productive

discussion, I intend to publish a version of the daily log

I've kept as ORI Director in order to share my experience and

observations with my colleagues in government and with

members of the regulated research community.

These people at HHS, who couldn't find their rear end with both hands, are going to tell you what you can have done to your body?

I have heard friends across the aisle for so many years now talk about how they want the government out of our bedroom. Are you kidding me? With ObamaCare, they are in your bedroom, they are in your nightstand, they are in your bathroom, your kitchen cabinet. They are everywhere in your house and outside your house you try to go. This puts them in charge of your most personal private matters.

It is time to repeal ObamaCare. It is time to have an alternative that some of us have brought to the front.

One of the things we need to do is not make sure everybody has high cost insurance. It is to make sure everybody has accessible, affordable health care.

When you combine all the money the Federal Government and the State governments spend providing Medicare and Medicaid and you divide it by the number of households in America that have someone on Medicare or Medicaid, which my office tried to do back in 2009 and 2010, it was tough getting the information on how much we are spending on all this. People could only give you an estimate. The same people that want to run your life and tell you what you can have in health care can't even tell you what they are doing.

But the best estimates we can get from these government sources and the best estimates from the Census Bureau--because they couldn't give us an exact number--indicates that back 4 years ago we were spending about $20,000 to $30,000 per household for people that had somebody on Medicare and Medicaid. It was most likely closer to the $30,000 number.

That is what inspired me. I told Newt Gingrich about it, and he said, You have got to get that in bill form and get it scored. It may change the whole debate in Congress about health care. This is nearly a year before ObamaCare was passed.

So we got it in bill form, and it included giving seniors the option for the first time since the sixties to really control their own health care. Because we would buy them not bronze or some other kind of health insurance, we would buy them the best Cadillac insurance you can get. We wouldn't require that they had to have maternity care, because there are not that many 80- and 90-year-old people that need the maternity care that this administration is forcing.

It would give them Cadillac insurance for what they did need, and give them a high deductible. At this point, we might say the deductible would be $5,000, $7,000, or something like that. Whatever the amount the high deductible was, my bill, my proposal, was we are better off giving every senior on Medicare or Medicaid cash in a health savings account with a debit card that is coded so it will only pay for purely health care items, and you empower a senior to get what they need--to go to the doctor or health care provider they want to go to and not need some bureaucratic fool in HHS to tell you whether or not you can see this person.

We have got to get power back into the hands of our seniors and into the hands of the poor. They are entitled to be able to choose who they want to go to, I would think.

Let's empower people and quit punishing people simply because they are middle class and they have got a job and they are paying taxes. Let them have the same opportunities as those they are paying for.

What is going on is outrageous. And just when we think it wouldn't get much worse, we have this article in Power Line, ``Bill Henck: Inside the IRS,'' by Scott Johnson. He notes:

As noted at the top, William Henck has worked inside the

IRS office . . .

And that is the IRS office. How is the IRS linked to a discussion about health care? They are going to enforce ObamaCare. We have got the IRS, as if they don't have enough power now, is going to be in charge of enforcing health care.

Most of the Republicans I know want to eliminate the IRS. Some want to go to a fair tax. I would like to have a flat tax. I think it is time to have that debate and go to whichever wins the debate and gets rid of the IRS.

My brilliant friend--and I am surprised he let's me call him his friend, but he is a brilliant man--Arthur Laffer, the genius behind turning the devastating economy around under President Carter, I talked to Arthur about this and I said, I would like to go to a flat tax--I know a lot of people want to go to a fair tax--so we can get rid of the IRS, but somebody is going to have to enforce it. How would we do that if there were no IRS? Arthur says, I have got it all spelled out. I have got it written out.

I am hoping some of my colleagues here will meet with Arthur and let him give them the one, two, threes.

He said, You don't need an IRS. He said, The big mistake with the IRS is that the Federal Government set up an entity that not only gets to pick and choose whom they audit, they get to enforce what they find and what they do.

So they can pick either at random or intentionally and maliciously. Even though that violates the law--we have seen it happen already--they can pick who they want to audit, whose life they want to make miserable. And then if they don't comply with what they find and what they order, even though it may be very wrong, then they are capable or have the authority to take everything they have.

That is why my brilliant friend, Arthur Laffer, says, You set up a very small auditing entity, but you cannot give them the power to enforce their audits. That is too much power for one government agency.

So you have a very small auditing agency and, as Arthur said, you don't allow them to ever pick who they want to audit. Every audit is selected at random, so they don't get to pick on people they dislike. They only audit whatever person or entity randomly is selected by the system. And if they were to do otherwise, they would break the law and be subject to punishment themselves.

These days, now, if somebody calls the IRS out, then they are normally going to get hit up with an audit and be treated maliciously by the IRS.

So this article goes on. It says:

I have been an attorney in the IRS Office of Chief Counsel

for over 26 years. Over a number of years, I have attempted,

largely unsuccessfully, to alert the public to abuse within

the IRS. One of my kids suggested I contact a blog, and Power

Line has graciously agreed to publish this account.

I do not personally know whether the IRS has targeted

conservative groups or individuals, but I do know that the

environment within the agency, the IRS, is ripe for such

activity, and there is nothing to prevent it from occurring.

As stated in more detail below, I have personally witnessed

improper giveaways of billions of dollars to taxpayers with

inside access at the agency, bullying of elderly taxpayers,

the coverup of managerial embezzlement and misappropriation

of thousands of dollars in government funds, and a

retaliatory audit.

I have also heard credible accounts of, among other things,

further improper giveaways, blatant sexual harassment, and

anti-Semitism. All of these have been swept under the rug.

Parenthetically, in this article, where this person, this attorney in the Office of Chief Counsel for over 26 years, points out, anti- Semitism in the IRS? We are seeing it grow.

I mean, when I heard, as a child, in history class, about the Holocaust, and I read that Eisenhower required that people in the community be required to come help clean up these horrid concentration camps where gas ovens and other ways were used to torture and kill Jews, I thought, for Eisenhower to order that, that is a little rough, you know, for these people to have to come out and clean that up. I mean, nobody will ever deny there was a Holocaust. There is too much information about it.

Now we have people denying there is a Holocaust, and as I understand it, there are five main Jewish groups that support Israel, and all of them are being mistreated by the IRS, and they don't want anybody to talk about it because they don't want to get targeted any more than they already have.

Then we see, from an attorney in the Office of the Chief Counsel, or general counsel, for 26 years, he says, I have seen the anti-Semitism within the IRS. So I hope my Jewish friends on the other side of the aisle, my Jewish friends across the country that have not been involved in politics, will wake up and help us clean up the mess in the Federal Government by speaking up about the prejudice and the bias that they have had to live with.

This article goes on:

A number of years ago, a manager in my office, there in the

Chief Counsel's Office, the IRS, was embezzling thousands of

dollars in travel funds. His actions were common knowledge,

but other managers, including a currently high-ranking

executive in the Office of Chief Counsel, did not report him.

I did report his conduct to the Treasury Inspector General

for Tax Administration, but they did not investigate the

matter for a considerable length of time. After I complained

to my local Congressman's office, the Treasury Inspector

General for Tax Administration finally forwarded the matter

to the Office of Chief Counsel to be handled internally.

Eventually, the Office of Chief Counsel made the manager

pay the money back, but took no other disciplinary action,

even though others who committed the same type of scheme were

punished severely.

The manager in question has led a charmed life. Several

years after this episode he decided to retire, but was

starting a new job at a different city 2 months before he was

eligible to retire.

He could have retired early and taken annual leave for 2

months before retiring. However, he did not want to take

annual leave because Federal employees can cash out annual

leave when they retire.

Rather than have him burn at least $20,000 in annual leave,

the IRS transferred him back to the new city, but did not

give him any work, allowing him to work at his new job while

still receiving a government paycheck.

I obtained an email from this manager in which he admitted

that he had no work, that the IRS was not planning to give

him any work in the new city, and that he was working on

matters related to his new job while at the IRS.

I forwarded this email to the Treasury Inspector General

for Tax Administration, TIGTA, but of course was ignored by

both TIGTA and the Office of Chief Counsel.

TIGTA has a well-deserved reputation for protecting IRS

managers. In fact, a TIGTA agent once stated that ``We don't

investigate IRS managers.''

At the same time, the manager was embezzling travel funds.

I was working on a case involving what I call the Elmer's

Glue scam. Tax shelter operators misused synthetic fuel

credit.

And for those who don't know what that means, that is part of the green economy that this administration wants us all to participate in. The bottom line is, it gives them more control over our personal lives. That is what the movement is about.

But nonetheless, there are some that are dedicated to it that really believe in it. But the people at the top, they know it is all about more government controlling people's lives.

But anyway, he says:

Tax shelter operators misused a synthetic fuel credit by

spraying watered down household glue on marketable coal,

degrading the coal, but producing huge tax credits for

investors. This was costing the Treasury at least $3 billion

a year. The IRS turned a blind eye toward this activity and

harassed those of us in the agency who were trying to stop

it.

Since I had witnessed TIGTA help cover up embezzlement, I

decided to go to the press about the Elmer's Glue scam. The

Wall Street Journal published a story about it, but the scam

continued.

As a result of complaining about TIGTA's inaction regarding

embezzlement that is within the IRS, and speaking out about

the Elmer's Glue scam, my wife and I were subjected to a

retaliatory IRS audit.

After an experienced revenue agent from Fairfax spent an

entire day auditing our tax returns, he stated that they were

clean. Soon thereafter, he called me and apologetically

stated that his ``special projects'' manager had ordered him

to return to Richmond and keep digging into our returns. He

stated that his regular manager would not have ordered this.

In parentheses David Wright says:

I believe that because in 26 years at the IRS, I have never

heard of an agent being sent back to continue a

straightforward individual return that had been judged to be

clean.

So David Wright says:

I contacted The Washington Post, gave them my privacy

waiver to discuss our tax returns with the Service. When the

Post presented that waiver to the Service, they quickly

dropped our audit.

Now, I happen to know many IRS agents who are decent, good, hardworking, honorable people. They are the kind of people I would want working in an auditing agency like Arthur Laffer has talked about because I know they would be fair, they are honest.

These are the kind of people that complained to me when the Secretary of the Treasury was given to Tim Geithner, even though he had signed, 4 years in a row, under oath, under penalty of perjury, that he would pay the tax on the funds the International Monetary Fund were paying him if they would not deduct the money he was supposed to pay, so he swore he would pay it personally. And then he blamed it on TurboTax, and he paid it back after he was appointed Secretary of the Treasury.

But there were IRS agents, honest, honorable, decent IRS agents all over the country who were outraged that Timothy Geithner was appointed to the Secretary of the Treasury, to be the boss of people, these people, these front-line workers in the IRS, who made it very clear, if they ever even underpaid, so they had to pay additional taxes at the end of the year, they would be fired.

And here was a guy who didn't pay his taxes for 4 years, not until he got appointed to be Secretary of the Treasury, that was put in charge of all of these very honest, upright, decent people who happen to work at an agency that includes some who are incredibly corrupt and who protect the corruption as David Wright is pointing out.

Well, David Wright goes on and says:

Within the past few years, the IRS has used a ``cadre'' to

pursue a particular type of case. I was assigned one of those

cases that was in Tax Court. I believed we should concede the

case in question because our legal position was incorrect. As

a result, I was called a quitter and a coward, was threatened

with retaliation and, in fact, suffered retaliation.

The cadre--he says I hate that term, but that is what they

call themselves, pushed cases with an obvious legal defect.

Taxpayers were denigrated in writing as ``upper class

twits.'' And one cadre member stated that, despite the

weakness in our legal position, the taxpayers in these cases

were typically elderly, and could be forced into settling

their cases.

I stated my ethical concerns to management, and they were

answered with a short non-response and did not even bother to

ask for the name of the cadre member who stated that we could

bully elderly taxpayers into settling their cases.

He adds, the Tax Court ultimately rejected the Service's

position regarding that legal issue.

I mean, it ought to scare Americans profoundly that the IRS that is going to be in charge of enforcing the health care law thinks it is okay, at least some think it is okay, to bully elderly because they are elderly and they will get scared and they will pay the government rather than have the government come down on them. So even though they don't owe it, we can scare them into paying money because they are elderly.

I mean, Americans ought to be up in arms over this kind of abuse. And to think that a majority in Congress in 2010 wanted this same government controlling everybody's health care?

Americans need to wake up. This is a danger to their life and their liberty.

He goes on and points out more abuses that shock the conscience. It is outrageous what the IRS--I am sorry--some in the IRS have been able to get away with, this same government that a majority in 2010 trusted with every American's health care.

We have a story this week from Breitbart. Robert Wilde reports that there are emails now that reveal the Obama administration shut down the World War II Memorial, knowing the World War II veterans were coming.

One email that they cite from a government official says:

While I understand that these memorials have remained

accessible to the public during past shutdowns (I'd imagine

with the Mall being so open, it'd probably be more manpower-

intensive to try to completely close them), I wanted to do my

due diligence and make 100 percent sure that people could

visit the outdoor memorials on the National Mall in the event

of a shutdown.

I can say, from having been out there on October 1 and having pulled one of the two barricades aside so that our World War II veterans could go through the open-air memorial dedicated to them and to their friends that died serving with them--and I saw that, wow, they have shut down an open-air, open-sidewalk, walk-through, roll-through in your wheelchair memorial.

It has cost them money to bring in all these barricades, and I have been there at all hours of the day and night, to the Lincoln Memorial, to the World War II Memorial; and most of the time, it is hard to see a park employee out there, but eventually, if you look hard enough, you will see one or two out there.

The day after the gentleman from Mississippi, Steve Palazzo, and I picked those barricades up and moved them back after I cut the yellow tape, the next day, I counted them--16 Park Service police--many of them on mounted horses that you never see out there, out there to try to intimidate World War II veterans from being able to go through for the one time they were in Washington in their lives to see those places that listed where they fought and where friends died.

As one man with tears told me--he pointed to the islands in the Pacific that were listed, the names of his friends who fought with him and died on each of those islands, and this administration, which wants to control

everybody's health care, wanted to deprive those World War II veterans--knowingly deprive them of just this one chance to roll through in a wheelchair and see what was dedicated to them. It is tragic, what is going on. It is time Americans awoke.

Ben Franklin is credited with saying, in essence, those who are willing to give up liberty for security deserve neither. We are seeing that. Americans have given up so much liberty over and over, saying: well, at least it is going to keep me safer.

At what point do you say enough giving the Federal Government power? We want our liberty that the Founders established in the Constitution, that war after war was fought to provide, that the Declaration acknowledged were rights that were endowed by our Creator.

Some ask: Well, if these rights are endowed by our Creator to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, why doesn't everybody in the world have them?

It is real easy. God, the Creator, gave us freedom of choice. We are free to choose things that would do us harm and free to choose the right way that would lead to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

We happen to have been blessed by either being born here or have come to a Nation where we had those liberties, where they were fought for, where the things that were taught in church, that were spoken of in the Bible--the Bible is the most quoted book in the history of this Chamber, especially in the first 150 years, and especially by those who fought against slavery, saying: How can we expect God to continue blessing America when we are putting our brothers and sisters in chains and bondage?

Those individuals laid the groundwork--the foundation for us to have this life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. We owe them to leave it to the next generation.

Poll after poll say this is probably the first time in American history that a generation will leave a country less free, with less opportunity to their children.

That is why I ran for Congress. I want to do everything I can to keep that from happening.

I was taught as a Boy Scout--especially as an Eagle Scout--we were never to leave a place worse off than we found it; and if we don't turn this thing around, we will be the generation that does that. God help us and God forgive us if we do. We simply cannot do that.

When we have people who have stepped forward, as these in the IRS and Health and Human Services have, to say: Warning, red flag, red light, stop. There is too much abuse here. Demand your freedom back. Quit turning it over to Federal agencies.

When those people are rising up and saying wake up, America, we had better wake up. When we have a President who said, over and over as a Senator, that we cannot allow a President to usurp more and more power away from Congress, it showed us that he knew right from wrong in this government.

Now, the same President is, by executive order, changing the law repeatedly, and it is time this House rose up and said: we are not funding one single part of the executive branch that usurps power that is not afforded it in the Constitution.

We have the power to do that. Why? Because the Founders put it in the Constitution, and just like our Creator endowed us with certain inalienable rights, just like some parents have plenty to endow to their children when they die, the children don't enjoy those benefits if they won't claim them and be willing to fight for them.

There are always people--evil people who want to take away those benefits, take away those rights; so no matter what someone inherits, if they don't accept it, claim it, and be willing to fight for it, they will not keep those benefits.

We owe the next generation what we were given and better, and until we start holding the executive branch accountable--at least those in it that are not complying with the law, that are violating the law--we are destined to be that evil, narcissistic, self-serving generation that leaves the country worse off than we found it.

Mr. Speaker, I hope and pray that enough of us will arise to prevent that from happening.

With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I heard my friend from Tennessee talk about revisionist history, and yet he has also talked about the Republicans shutting down the government.

So that we get this accurate, the truth is this body here proposed and passed three different compromises. One was going to suspend ObamaCare for a year. The Senate would not even take that up; they wanted a shutdown. Then we sent down a bill we passed from here that would actually just suspend the individual mandate--that the President has done unconstitutionally

and unilaterally for Big Business. Then when that didn't work, we passed a bill that said: Look, here's our conferees; you appoint yours; we will have a deal worked out by morning. Harry Reid wanted the Congress and all of the Federal Government shut down, and so he did nothing.

So, we know who shut things down, but I want to read a quote:

These last few years we have seen an unacceptable abuse of

power at home. We've paid a heavy price by having a President

whose priority is expanding his own power. The Constitution

is treated like a nuisance.

Barack Obama said that, and he could not be more right as to classification of his own conduct.

Mr. Speaker, at this time I would like to yield to my dear friend, Mr. LaMalfa.

Mr. Speaker, sometimes it is very helpful to set the record straight, as my friend from Tennessee talked about earlier, and I thought that would be highly appropriate, given some of the lighthearted and sometimes mean-spirited barbs that have been sent the way of former Governor, Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

So I just wanted to set the record straight, Mr. Speaker, so that people will understand, and the Congressional Record will properly reflect just how prescient that Sarah Palin has been in the past.

We are going back 5\1/2\ years, but this was an interview that Charles Gibson did that gave rise to a ``Saturday Night Live'' skit. This was Charles Gibson, quoting verbatim from him, and then Sarah Palin.

Gibson: Let me ask you about specific national security situations. Let's start, because we are near Russia. Let's start with Russia and Georgia. The administration has said, we have got to maintain the territorial integrity of Georgia. Do you believe the United States should try to restore Georgia and sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia?

Sarah Palin: First off, we're going to continue good relations with Saakashvili there. I was able to speak with him the other day and giving him my commitment, as John McCain's running mate, that we will be committed to Georgia. And we've got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable, and we have to keep-- Gibson interrupted and said: You believe unprovoked?

Palin: I do believe unprovoked. And we have got to keep our eyes on Russia. Under the leadership there.

Gibson: What insight into Russian actions particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of this state give you?

This is the operative line here. Sarah Palin said: ``They're our next door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.''

Gibson: You are in favor of putting Georgia and the Ukraine into

Mr. Speaker, it is a great honor to have a number of outstanding football programs well established within the First District of Texas. To have two tremendous east Texas teams as the last ones standing, battling it out for a state championship title, makes me all the more proud as their Representative in Washington, D.C.

Today, we stand to recognize and congratulate the Carthage Bulldogs on a stellar high school football season in 2013 which culminated with their claiming the Texas State 3A--Division I Championship over the previously undefeated Kilgore Bulldogs, also an extraordinarily talented group of young men who were playing in their second state title match in school history.

As a result of extraordinary teamwork and athletic prowess, these two east Texas powerhouse teams faced off in what became known as the ``Bulldog Bowl.'' This canine clash came just one year after both teams were defeated in the state semifinals. More than 17,000 fans packed the stadium the week before Christmas to witness this battle to determine who would be ``top dawg'' in the state of Texas for 2013. The 34-23 victory secured the Carthage Bulldogs' fourth state championship trophy since 2008, the team having captured three straight state titles from 2008 to 2010.

The Carthage Bulldogs' 2013 championship success is a testament to superb coaching, as well as a tribute to the players and all who assisted them along the way. Such championships do not come without extensive year-round preparation of everyone involved, the coaches' tireless groundwork, unrivaled discipline & selfless teamwork of players and staff, enthusiastic support and unwavering encouragement from family, friends and fans, all fueled by a dogged determination to reach the highest goal achievable in Texas football.

The lessons learned about teamwork and discipline will undoubtedly improve every participant's life in immeasurable ways. These same lessons should help boost every player, coach, and supporter through the knowledge that potential obstacles that lie ahead in life can be overcome with championship capability.

Congratulations to Superintendent Dr. Glenn Hambrick, Principal Otis Amy, Assistant Principals Pat Browning and Wade Watson, along with the entire athletic staff including Athletic Director and Head Football Coach Scott Surratt, Assistant Coaches Chris Smith, Darren Preston, Andre Granger, Chris Cloninger, Clint Endsley, Matt Folmar, John Goodwin, Brandon Hargers, Ryan Marion, Dennis McLaughlin, Benny Mitchell, Mike Morgan, Jay Malone, Charlie Tucker, Jim Milstead, and Stephen Luman; the Junior High Coaches Paul Bishop, Brian Caver, Jeff Griffin, Brian Stacy, and Damon Roberts; Athletic Trainer Dustin Swaim; and Student Assistants Mason Brittain, Kyla Burd, David Johnson, Nicholle Moore, Cynthia Puente, Hannah Taylor, Sydnee Taylor, and Sarai Vassar; and Athletic Secretary Mamie Vanover.

And of course, we pay tribute to the championship team consisting of Jakeldric Jackson, Dylan Possoit, Keldrean Strong, Blake Bogenschutz, Terian Goree, Jeremy Matlock, O'keeron Rutherford, Clark Neuman, Kirston Ingram, Troy Davis, Roberto Jimenez, Trevor Cooper, Jarod Blissett, Ross Barron, Tevin Pipkin, Christian Allison, Micah Templeton, Jordan Romero, Juston Clough, Tredarion Jackson, Bryian Bolton, Ty Jones, Tra'Kareon Leary, James Marshall, D'Vodney Brooks, Jace Zett, Johnathan Brown, Ronald Mayweather, Javontay Brown, Christopher Howard, De'Arreus Hearn, Rafael Hernandez, Gilbert Perez, Travis Phillips, Jimmy Gonzalez, Seth Ward, Kiiron Lewis, Jonthan Sells, Ravodney Hardy, Kedrick Henderson, Cade Clinton, Garrett Harvey, Branton Halcumb, Bryce Rickert, Mario McCain, Braden Russell, Micah Johnson, Hunter Hutto, Nolan Griffin, Akashdeep Singh, Devon Nitzschke, TC Bryant, Jonathon Rayson, Griffin Bankhead, Trevor Broadway, Brandon Carlson, Adrian Goodacre, Dillon Husar, Cristian Jimenez, Jarrod McLin, Cagan Baldree, Leonard Maxwell, Marquise Guinn, Ja'Marcus Roberson, and Tavorin Pellum.

May God continue to bless these young people, their families, friends, and all those individuals who refer to Carthage as home. It is my most esteemed honor to congratulate the 2013 State Champion Carthage Bulldogs and everyone involved with this endeavor, as their legacy is now recorded in the Congressional Record that will endure as long as there is a United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, these are interesting times in America. For most of us who went to law school, we were taught that for an adversarial system of justice of law to work, there has to be active participation on both sides of an issue, of a person charged with a crime, on defense, or litigation over a law itself. So Chairman Goodlatte from just across the river in Virginia called a hearing in the Judiciary Committee this week. We had another hearing about the constitutionality, or lack thereof, of actions by this administration, and it is very alarming.

Professor Jonathan Turley, with whom I have disagreed on many policy issues, has a wonderful grasp of the Constitution; and he recognizes the dangers when an administration decides to pick and choose which laws will be enforced and goes further and issues executive orders, not like prior administrations that simply explain on most occasions or illuminate some law as to how they think it is to be interpreted, but to actually make law and executive orders. That is just unconscionable for somebody that took an oath to defend the Constitution.

I can't recall times that I have agreed with The LA Times before, but they had an editorial that indicates even The LA Times understands the danger of what is going on right now in this country with this administration.

We have an Attorney General who has been requested to produce documents lawfully, informally, refused to do so, been subpoenaed to produce information documents, has refused to do so unlawfully, to the point that the committee had a hearing and ultimately found the Attorney General of the United States in contempt of Congress, which came to this floor and, in a very unusual action found, the Attorney General, the highest law enforcement officer in this country, in contempt of Congress, basically in contempt of the Constitution.

This has far wider implications than most in America seem to grasp because, when the highest law enforcement officer in America refuses to comply with the law, holds himself out as being above any law, creates laws that he wants to defend--at least the administration creating laws that they want to defend or follow--and actually saying in this room--I just had the President of the United States say in this room: I am going to go around the Congress--if you don't do what I want, I am going to go around the Congress.

The ramifications for that are so staggering to anyone who has contemplated the founding of this country that it is beyond words. The Founders set up these checks and balances believing that, surely, there would be people in the judiciary--although they

saw that as the least powerful branch, though it has now become the most powerful--they saw Congress as always being willing to defend its own laws, even to the point of defunding anything in the administration that did not protect and defend the law.

They saw a President as standing up and refusing to follow things that were not the law. They felt like each branch would judiciously protect their own powers under the Constitution, and that balance would allow this Nation to go forward as the freest Nation in the history of the world.

But today, we are living in a time where all of that is in jeopardy, when one branch can act to the total disregard of another branch or other branches. We have seen that with executive orders that just completely change the law as written and completely intentionally disregards the law of the land. It is staggering.

The LA Times had an editorial on February 27 that talked about the Attorney General's posture on just picking and choosing which laws he would provide a defense for.

Mr. Speaker, I stand here as someone--as a prosecutor, as a lawyer, as a judge, as a chief justice--who at times absolutely did not like laws--particular laws--but knew if this Nation were to remain for years to come, we had to either change the law legally; or as lawyers, as officers of the court, as judges, as chief justices, we had to follow the law.

Back in the '80s, I was ordered by a State district judge to file an appeal--to represent a man on appeal after having been convicted of capital murder. I was then, as now, a very conservative person.

I went to the judge after I got the call that I was going to be appointed and begged the judge not to appoint me, that I was doing civil trial work, I wasn't doing criminal work, please don't appoint me to appeal a criminal conviction because I will have to go back to school to do a proper job of representing a man on appeal of the death penalty.

I knew if he appointed me--because I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, I would spend incredible hours to make sure I properly represented the man on appeal, even though I didn't know any more about the facts of the case than I had read in the papers. From the papers, I got the impression that he had probably gotten what he deserved.

But the judge appointed me to appeal a capital murder conviction in which the defendant was sentenced to death. I didn't want the case, didn't ask for it, begged not to have it.

But I knew that if our system was to work, I had to do everything ethically and legally I could to present my client's side of the case. As I got into it and I read the entire long, long transcript--every word of it--I realized the man had not gotten a fair trial, and unknown to the district attorney, an assistant district attorney had acted inappropriately, and it caused great harm and jeopardy to the case for the defense.

I did the very best I could for my client legally and ethically, and the case was reversed at the highest criminal court in Texas.

Even when, as attornies, we would disagree with the law--and as we have heard from this Attorney General and people in this Justice Department over and over--even when someone is absolutely convicted, clearly is a criminal, they deserve a proper defense.

So how this administration and this Attorney General and this Justice Department can justify picking and choosing which laws they will defend and which laws they will let fall without a defense is unimaginable. For people who have learned anything about our Constitution, we have to zealously represent the clients, the laws that are put before us to represent.

This administration has now repeatedly chosen not to defend some laws when the highest law enforcement in the land, we know, actually was willing to help convicted absolutely-known criminals to get pardoned, to get lighter sentences.

We bring people in who have fought--or at least one individual who fought to get a convicted murderer of a police officer--who the evidence indicated stood over him after he shot him and shot him repeatedly--a police officer--and yet, the Attorney General can justify bringing someone in; the President justified bringing someone in by saying: Oh, no, but everybody is entitled to a defense, that is how our system works.

Then when he has a constitutional obligation to produce documents to Congress and just says: I am going to ignore that requirement of the law, I don't care, and not only am I going to ignore that requirement of the law, even after the extraordinary event of having the United States House of Representatives declare the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the country to be in contempt of Congress--which is really in contempt of the Constitution--still has the nerve to come in here during the State of the Union, which is really thumbing the nose at the Constitution--at Congress--that: I will ignore the law, I won't follow the laws I don't like, I won't defend the laws I don't like; and then this week actually go out and tell State law enforcement officers--highest ranking State law enforcement officers that, in essence, if they don't like a law, then just don't defend it.

So this editorial, just in part, from the LA Times, points out that:

The six State attorneys general who have declined to defend

their States' bans on same-sex marriage in court got some

encouragement this week from U.S. Attorney General Eric H.

Holder, Jr. In a speech to the National Association of

Attorneys General, Holder said that it was sometimes

appropriate for attorneys general to abandon their usual

obligation to defend the constitutionality of State laws.

This page supports same-sex marriage unreservedly. But even

so, we worry that Holder's comments will embolden additional

State attorneys general--Republicans and Democrats, liberals

and conservatives--to pick and choose which of their States'

laws they will defend in court.

It also says further down:

Yet when attorneys general are elected, as in 43 States,

the temptation will be to transmute a popular political stand

into a constitutional objection.

Even if Holder is right that attorneys general should

refuse to defend State laws in ``exceedingly rare''

circumstances, those laws ought to be defended by someone.

Further down they point out that:

They probably would react differently, however, if a future

Attorney General refused to defend the constitutionality of

statutes that treat attacks on gays and lesbians as hate

crimes.

I would imagine this Attorney General would find that unconscionable; but once we began to ignore the law and become a Nation of men--and that is generic, including men and women, whoever is in authority-- instead of a Nation of laws, then we become like the nations that so many people try to flee to come to America because there is graft, there is corruption, because the rule of law is not followed.

It is whatever the dictator, the drug group, whatever the people in power think should be the law will be the law, and it becomes an unbearable place to live.

There is a reason that fences end up being built around a country not to keep people in, as in the Soviet Union days, but because people want to come flooding in, which would overwhelm our country, overwhelm our ability to provide government services, and end the ability to be a Nation where people want to come.

There is a reason. It is because we have been a Nation of laws that has applied the law fairly across the board.

Clearly, because the government is composed of human beings, there will be mistakes and there will be abuses, but in abuses, even Presidents have been held to account. That keeps us being a Nation of laws. Yet, when the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in the country refuses to provide information to Congress that he lawfully is required to produce, this country is in grave jeopardy. I am pleased that even the LA Times has gotten a glimpse of the potential problems here.

In a couple of different hearings, I have asked the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in our country for the production of documents provided to the defendants, to the defendants who were convicted of supporting terrorism, making them terrorists. I have asked for the copies of the documents that were provided in discovery to convicted terrorists. I have been told there could be classification problems, and as I have pointed out, if you gave them to the terrorists, you can give them to Members of Congress.

After yet another request last June, in writing--months and months later--I finally get a response that, in essence, says, Here is a Web site where you can go look at some of these documents. We have got 500 documents that were introduced at trial, and so that should take care of it.

No, it doesn't.

The Justice Department gave terrorists thousands and thousands of pages of documents, and even in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' opinion, the Fifth Circuit, they point out that there were 9,600 or so transcripts of recorded conversations. Those were given to the people convicted of terrorism, and yet this Justice Department refuses to allow Members of Congress to see those.

The Founders had the idea that there would be oversight and that Congress would supervise what happened in the executive branch. That provided that balance of power to keep us from moving in the direction of a monarchy or of a totalitarian government. Yet, when this body finally gets around to some oversight, it is dismissed. What do we do? We vote to hold the Attorney General in contempt and then allow him to remain in contempt without consequences.

Perhaps the proper remedy, under the thinking of the Founders, is, if an Attorney General refuses to enforce the laws that Congress passes and other Presidents sign into law, then you defund the particular individuals in the Department of Justice until such time as they start doing their jobs. You don't defund the people who are out enforcing the law, protecting the country, but you defund those people who are thumbing their noses at the Constitution and at proper, legal, constitutional oversight. We haven't done that.

So the American public, the laws, and the Constitution remain at risk because people who have defended terrorists and who have worked to get even terrorists lighter sentences and pardons and things like that don't think laws duly passed by Congress, signed into law by the President and upheld by the Supreme Court are worth defending. Then don't stop there. Not only actually start telling the highest law enforcement officers in the country that they should start ignoring laws in rare cases but to ignore the laws when you don't think they are appropriate.

We also know we have a Justice Department that, in their efforts to avoid making radical Islamist terrorists think that we might not like them, started outreach programs under the prior administration. I asked the prior FBI Director: Since you say that this Muslim community is like every other community in the Nation, how are the other outreach programs going with the Baptists? The Catholics? The Jews? The Buddhists? There is no other outreach program to any other religious group, so that would seem to indicate there is something special here.

There are violent people in every religion, but as Thomas Jefferson was so shocked to find out, there is one religion that has a small component of it that believes that a sure way to paradise is to kill innocent men, women, and children because they don't believe religiously like those radicals do. That is the reason Thomas Jefferson got his own copy of the Koran that the Library of Congress still has. He wanted to see for himself. He was so well read. He couldn't believe there was a religion that had a holy book for a basis that would allow anyone to interpret it in such a way as to kill innocent men, women, and children.

There have been, to be sure, purported Christians over the ages who thought it was their duty to go about brutalizing people who were not Christians, but anyone who studies the teachings of Christ about how we are to individually act knows those would not have been Christians doing the kind of violence that they did. It is not supported by the Bible. What is supported in the Bible is that if you do evil, be afraid, because God does not give the government the sword in vain. Individually, we are not supposed to judge and be vigilantes, but there is in an orderly society a need to have a government that will punish evil and encourage good conduct.

This little experiment in a democracy, in a republic and representative form of government, is so fragile. It bothers me when I read and hear those words from Ronald Reagan that freedom is never more than one generation from being gone and, even more troubling, that a generation that loses liberty does not get it back in that same generation. I have hoped that I would find a time and place where Reagan was wrong about that, but I have not yet.

So, when we see liberties being lost, privacy rights being violated right and left by our Federal Government, all kinds of snooping on American citizens without probable cause, not only by the NSA--and certainly they have the highest cause for which they are working, which is for our protection, but yet, when our privacy is completely eroded, is our safety worth losing all of our privacy completely?

We lost a dramatic amount of our privacy when, without a single vote from the Republican side of the aisle, the Democrats in the House and Senate passed what they called the Affordable Care Act, which has become so unaffordable, because the Federal Government will get everyone's medical records.

I was a bit staggered and maybe too naive. After I had heard people speak so emotionally from the heart about the protection of privacy and what happens in the bedroom, I was a little staggered over these years to see people on the Democratic side of the aisle--my friends over here--who were so thrilled to be giving every bit of private information about their most private body parts, about their most private activities, to the government in whole and bulk, and even said, That is not violation enough; let's do a contract with General Electric, and let them keep these records for us.

It is not like the government and private industry can't be hacked. Talk about loss of privacy. I don't really have anything to hide in any of my medical records, but it is nobody else's business. Yet, wholeheartedly, people rushed and applauded the giving of all of that most private information to the Federal Government.

This week, I have been so proud of my friend Jeb Hensarling, as chairman of Financial Services, who has been trying to rein in this Consumer Financial Protection Bureau--wow, what a misnomer--that is gathering information about our credit cards, our debit card activity, our loans when these were supposed to be private between us and our lenders as long as there was proper oversight to make sure they were not violating the Constitution. Yet the Federal Government, as they are, starts getting all of our debit card and credit card information. They now have all of our medical records that they are getting. They are now watching and have the ability to check every email, to check Web sites you visit. They have the ability to examine every log of every call that you make. People who once said I was crazy for giving this example some years back may begin to realize I wasn't so crazy. The example was this:

When the Federal Government has the obligation to supervise every aspect of your health care--when you force government-run health care on the people of this Nation--and when you have that same Federal Government that can monitor every credit and debit card purchase you make and when they know where you go online and when they can go into your emails, is it so hard to believe that at some point some American citizen would not get a letter from the Federal Government, saying:

We noticed that you purchased bacon and butter at the grocery store this last weekend, and we also noticed that your cholesterol level is over 200. What were you thinking? We can't let you do something like that, so we are going to have to punish you. We are going to have to start charging you more money. We are going to have to start supervising your activity. You are going to have to start going and working out. We saw that you let your membership at the gym lapse, and you are not going anymore. We can tell by where your car goes, by following the GPS on your car, that you are not going to the gym like you used to. You need to start going back to the gym. You need to quit buying butter and bacon, and then we won't punish you financially like we are now.

Is that so hard to believe that that would start happening, could start happening? When you give the government this much private information, then liberty is sure to go shortly thereafter.

In quoting Benjamin Franklin, it has been written different ways over the years--some say he didn't say it--but basically, he certainly advocated that those who are willing to give up liberty for their safety deserve neither.

How much of our privacy and our liberty are the American people willing to give up just so that we can feel a little safer? Because when you do that, you will not be safe from your own government. Your own government then becomes the biggest threat to your liberty, to your freedom.

Things that brilliant colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle have said over the years about our liberty and about our privacy are really becoming an issue now, and I am not hearing my friends across the aisle that raised those important points now talking about them. And I know when you have someone in the White House that is from your own party, it is kind of tough to stand up and say, This is a mistake. This is wrong.

But it is time that friends across the aisle--Senators who are Democrats--start standing up in numbers and saying: Enough. You have usurped too much power that the Constitution gave to Congress.

Just because you don't like the fact that we take a long time and it is not pretty to see laws being made doesn't mean you get to skip the whole process. The Founders wanted gridlock. They wanted it tough to pass laws. They didn't want us meeting year round like we do. I am sure if the Founders were around today, they would be appalled that we meet as much as we do. And when some people back in east Texas say: Gee, why aren't you in Washington? I'm saying: You're safer when we're here because it means we're not passing another law that takes your liberty away.

The Founders wanted some gridlock. They didn't want it too easy to pass laws. Because they knew when that happened, every little emotional issue that came up would cause Congress to come in and pass something even though the moment was fleeting and we should not be doing things quickly and emotionally.

Thomas Jefferson was not part of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. He was amazed at how good the document was. But he is reported to have indicated that if he could change one thing, he would make it a requirement that before we could pass a law, it had to be on file for a year to make sure people have plenty of time to discuss it.

We see how good an idea that would be if we didn't just run in here and do things out of emotion, and we would never, ever pass another bill so we could find out what was in it. My party has not done anything as blatant as ramming through bills. My copy of ObamaCare was right around 2,500 pages. But we have had some bills that we have not been given time to read and to properly go through.

We were going to take up a flood insurance bill yesterday, and I am grateful that it got moved off because we haven't had enough time to know what the bill has actually got in it word for word. Summaries are not enough, on many occasions. Sometimes if it is not a big deal, a summary may do it, but somebody besides some staffer needs to be looking at every word.

That is one of the benefits of going through what we call regular order. The subcommittee gets to have a markup where they discuss every part of the bill, and anyone can offer an amendment to any part of the bill. And then it goes to the full committee, and anyone at the markup can offer an amendment to any part of the bill, and it gets debate and discussion. That is a good process.

I believe that when we took the majority, we would do even better than we have. We have done a lot better than the 4 years from January of 2007 to when we got the gavel back in January of 2011. I was appalled at the completely closed rules and how it was just staggering. We had no input. Nearly half of the country basically had no representation at all on all of the important bills because they just rammed them through without any input from Republicans--who represented Democrats and Republicans. They didn't get represented in those districts.

It is important, no matter who is in charge, that if it is really a critical issue that needs immediate laws passed, changes made, that we fully vet every law that we pass.

We had an Over-Criminalization hearing today. One of the huge mistakes--and it has been a very bipartisan mistake--is that over all these years, when Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle want to show how strongly we feel about something and how tough we are, we slap a prison sentence on things, and one of the greatest injustices that Congress has done is to pass laws that say any violations of the regulations under this law will carry a term of imprisonment.

In our hearing today, there was an estimate that there are probably 300,000 regulations, the violation of which carries a prison sentence. Congress has never seen them, never debated them, and knows nothing about them.

We have heard testimony from people who have been sent to prison who did some act and had no idea there was a law against what they did. They did time in prison as a result.

There was a man from Houston who was doing business during retirement by raising orchids. He ordered some orchids from South America. They were sent to him, but the proper forms were not filled out by the people that sent them to him, and under the law, any violation of those postal regulations requires time in prison.

So what happened? He was arrested in his home in Houston. And since the law gives choice of venue and it had been mailed through Miami, they took him to Miami, where he didn't even know anybody, didn't have the money for bail, and ends up doing 18 months in prison, during which time he had a stroke. He couldn't testify. His wife had to.

There was a poor guy from Washington State that was trying to create a better battery. He had every chemical properly stored. One day, driving home, the EPA SWAT team had black Suburbans come up behind him, the side, in front, and forced him off the road, yanked him out of his car, threw him to the ground, handcuffed him, threw him in jail, and then drug him to Alaska.

His heinous crime was that when he mailed a chemical to Alaska, legally, properly, he didn't know that it was not enough to check the box that it had to go by ground. It couldn't go by air. He didn't know that you needed a little sticker that had a picture of an airplane with a red line through it. That sticker with the plane with the red line through it had to be on there. And since he didn't do that, that caused him to deserve to be run off the road by the EPA SWAT team, thrown to the ground, handcuffed, hauled up to Alaska, and put in prison.

When he got acquitted of that, the Justice Department wasn't happy with it, so they looked around and realized when they ransacked his home he had every chemical properly stored, but there was a law that says if you ever abandon these certain chemicals for over a certain number of days, then you committed a Federal felony. And even though it was the Federal Government that forced him to abandon those, and even though they were properly stored, he was in jail in Alaska and away from the chemicals beyond the time that the law allowed, so he went to prison for abandoning chemicals because the government drug him away from them.

These are the kind of laws that are out there. We ought to pass a law in this body that says no criminal penalty may attach to a violation of any regulation unless this Congress has passed a specific law putting a criminal penalty on that specific regulation. We should not be able to leave it to bureaucrats to decide what becomes an offense punishable by imprisonment.

So when you take the violations of privacy that have now been passed into law--all of our medical records, now our credit card and debit card records, our emails, all of our phone logs all being usurped and grabbed by the Federal Government--and couple that with abuses that we have seen over the years by the Federal Government of people's rights under color of law, and understanding that when this Federal

Government violates your rights, your privacy, your freedoms, you have nowhere else to go and there is no appeal to anyone else, it is time this body and the Senate took action to make sure the Justice Department follows the law and doesn't just pick and choose. And also that we make sure the White House doesn't just make up law out of whole cloth and decide which laws they liked and which ones they didn't. There are oaths involved here, and there should be consequences for not following them.

Then, we need to investigate further these executive departments who think they are above the law. And when Members of Congress duly request documents that were provided to people convicted as terrorists and we are told that terrorists can have them but you, Members of Congress, cannot, then it is time to defund people that will not abide by the law and will not participate in proper oversight.

It is also time we had a select committee that properly investigated Benghazi. It is time we had a special prosecutor, not some big donor to the President, to investigate this horrendous scandal in the IRS that not only has smidgeons of evidence, it has overwhelming evidence of people's rights being violated. It is time that we started making sure as a Congress that people who enforce the law actually enforce the law.

We have seen the desire by this administration to embrace Islam as closely as possible. And I know the attitude is that if we bring people close from Islam into the administration, that will help us get across that we mean no ill will. The trouble has been we have brought foxes into the henhouse to give advice to the chickens.

We have a report from the last couple of weeks. The Clarion Project had been making Freedom of Information Act requests. They finally got some documentation that shows--and this article is from the Clarion Project. The Clarion Project investigation has discovered a jihadist enclave in Texas where a deadly shooting took place in 2002.

Declassified FBI documents obtained by Clarion confirmed

the find, and show the U.S. Government's concern about its

links to terrorism. The investigation was completed with the

help of Act for America Houston.

The enclave belongs to the network of Muslims of the

Americas, a radical group linked to a Pakistani militant

group called Jamaat ul-Fuqra. Its members are devoted

followers of Sheikh Ali Mubarak Gilani, an extremist cleric

in Pakistan.

The organization says it has a network of 22 villages

around the U.S., with Islamberg as its main headquarters in

New York. The Clarion Project obtained secret MOA, Muslim of

America, footage showing female members receiving

paramilitary training at Islamberg. It was featured on the

Kelly File of FOX News Channel in October. A second MOA tape

released by Clarion shows its spokesman declaring the U.S. to

be a Muslim-majority country.

A 2007 FBI record states that MOA, Muslim of America,

members have been involved in at least 10 murders, one

disappearance, three firebombings, one attempted firebombing,

two explosive bombings, and one attempted bombing.

It states:

The documented propensity for violence by this organization

supports the belief the leadership of the MOA extols

membership to pursue a policy of jihad or holy war against

individuals or groups it considers enemies of Islam, which

includes the U.S. Government. Members of the MOA are

encouraged to travel to Pakistan to receive religious and

military/terrorist training from Sheikh Gilani.

The document also says that ``The MOA is now an autonomous

organization which possesses an infrastructure capable of

planning and mounting terrorist campaigns overseas.''

Other FBI reports describe the MOA in similar ways with a

2003 file stating: ``Investigation of the Muslims of the

Americas is based on specific and articulate facts given

justification to believe they are engaged in international

terrorism.''

MOA members believe the holiest Islamic site in the country

is located at the Islamville commune in South Carolina. Other

MOA entities include the International Quranic Open

University, United Muslim Christian Forum, Islamic Post,

Muslim Veterans of America, and American Muslim Medical

Relief Team.

On further down it says:

The MOA referred to its Texas commune as Mahmoudberg in on-

line instructions for a parade in New York in 2010. A posting

on an Islamic message board in 2005 advertised a speaking

engagement in Houston by someone from Mahmoudberg.

According to the reports, the commune is 7 to 10 acres

large, is in an ``extremely wooded area'' and two or three

trailer homes moved there in December of 2001. However, ACT

members visited the area as part of Clarion's project or

investigation and interviewed one nearby local who

confidently said it is closer to 25 acres in size and spoke

of a presence dating back to the late 1980s.

Further down, the FBI reported in 2007 that:

One commune resident used to be a leader at the MOA commune

in Badger, California. That site was called Baladullah.

In March 2001, one of the Baladullah members was arrested

for transporting guns between New York and South Carolina.

Another was charged with murdering a police deputy that

caught him breaking and entering a home.

Interviewed residents all agreed that MOA members are

private, yet, when the ACT members were spotted in the area,

they were immediately and repeatedly approached. At one point

a commune resident gave them a final warning to leave,

despite the fact they weren't even trespassing or harassing

Mr. Speaker, today, once again, the President has unilaterally, almost like a monarch, said ObamaCare is the law.

The fact is Harry Reid and the Senate were willing to shut down the government instead of just passing a bill that would have suspended ObamaCare for a year--or, at least suspend the mandates--and he did it again today.

So it makes it very clear the shutdown of our government that hurt so many people was clearly a political game by Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats because they wanted America to hurt--and blame the Republicans--when all along they were willing to agree to what we offered to avoid the shutdown.

Shame on you.

Mr. Speaker, it has been an honor and a privilege and a pleasure to work with Trudi Terry here in the House. I really hate to see her retire. She has put up with me more times than most people have had to, and kept a wonderful spirit and cooperative atmosphere in this body, in this Chamber, and I will be forever grateful. Thank you. I really hate to see you retire. So I guess to add to the bad news of Trudi Terry retiring, there are other things going on.

One story that hits home for me as someone with other friends like Dana Rohrabacher and Steve King, who have met with Baloch leaders from the Balochistan area of Pakistan--it is the area where most of Pakistan's minerals are located. It is an area where Pakistan has, for many years, terrorized the Baloch people, persecuted them mercilessly. They want the Baloch area's minerals and assets to keep Pakistan going and basically radicalized, but they don't want to let the Baloch people live in peace.

I proposed in a previous op-ed a couple of years ago that perhaps it is time to look at encouraging a new Baloch state, a new country of Balochistan as independent of Pakistan so that the people can live in peace, so they don't have to be worried about Pakistan officials and military coming through and committing, really, crimes against these people. After I wrote that op-ed and included a statement that perhaps it is time to join in the encouragement for a new Balochistan state, there was an article in a Pakistani daily paper that said in essence maybe it is time to quit persecuting the Baloch, reach out to them and figure out a way to let them live in peace because to Pakistan that area was important. The op-ed from the Pakistan paper also indicated that perhaps they needed to quit funding and helping the Taliban defeat the Americans in Afghanistan and just concentrate on their own country. That would have been wonderful, and would still be.

This story is out from the Toronto Sun, and it regards the Balochistan province in Pakistan. By the way, I have heard from numerous members of our American military and from others in Afghanistan that most of the supplies to the Taliban are coming from Pakistan through the southern Baloch area of Pakistan, and that is why the thought was triggered, maybe if Balochistan was independent of Pakistan, that would cut off the supply to the terrorist Taliban in Afghanistan and would save a lot of American lives. Since that has been said, we have lost hundreds more American soldiers. More American blood has been shed because we have failed to neutralize the Taliban, and they have continued apparently to grow in their efforts to take over Afghanistan shortly after we leave.

This article, though, says:

It would have been inconceivable that any U.S. official,

let alone a Secretary of State, would host a delegation from

Serbia the day after mass graves were discovered in

Srebrenica in 1995. Yet on Sunday, a day after bullet-ridden

bodies were discovered in suspected mass graves in Pakistan's

military-controlled province of Balochistan, Secretary of

State John Kerry was toasting a delegation of Pakistan

security officials at the State Department. Balochistan and

human rights officials say 169 bodies have been uncovered so

far. Pakistani officials put the number at 15. Victims and

families of Baloch youth who have disappeared and who are

feared to be among the decomposed bodies being unearthed from

the mass graves had hoped that Kerry would raise the issue

with his Pakistani counterpart.

Instead, they heard Kerry say to the Pakistanis, ``We are

really delighted to have you back, and I look forward to our

continued conversation.'' America looked the other way in

1971 when the Pakistan Army slaughtered a million of its own

citizens in what is now Bangladesh.

What emerged was a country that hosted the mastermind of

the 9/11 attacks, allowed Osama bin Laden to operate on its

soil for more than a decade, and whose terrorists have been

involved in numerous jihadi attacks around the world ever

since the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the

attack on USS Cole off Yemeni waters.

Yet America continues to give Pakistan billions of dollars

in aid, which is then turned around to generate more hatred

toward the West and produce more jihadi terrorists.

Inserting parenthetically into this article is my oft-quoted statement that you don't have to pay people to hate you; they will do it for free. We continue to send billions of dollars to nations that hate us and want us gone from the map. They want to see us suffer, and we keep sending them money to hate us. We can use that money here. We could save raising some taxes. We could get some roads and some of the infrastructure that the President promised if we gave him $900 billion, basically, in a stimulus package right after he took office, and that was going to fix all of the infrastructure, but maybe 6 percent of $900 billion went for infrastructure, and so the President is back out saying we have got to build these roads.

I mean, we have been talking about this for 5 years. He has. So you didn't do it with the stimulus money--why don't we just save some of the billions that we are giving to people who hate us, and then we don't help them kill Americans. We don't continue, as this administration is doing, to assist Syrian rebels who are killing Christians.

For anyone who happens to believe that there is a God as reflected in the Bible, the question will have to be asked: If there is such a God as reflected in the Bible, which I believe, is it going to bode well for a Nation which is funding and helping nations that are killing, torturing, kidnapping Christians around the world?

This article goes on:

Now the U.S. is giving the same Pakistan army another pass

as it carries out the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous

Baloch people from their homeland.

In response, the Baloch have taken up arms and are fighting

their fifth war of independence since 1948, when the Pakistan

army invaded and captured the independent and sovereign state

of Kalat.

The article goes on.

But the fact is we have people in this administration demanding that what they say are indigenous people--despite the fact that the children of Israel occupied the promised land 1,600 years or so, 1,700 years at least, before a man named Muhammad was born. There are people who say: Oh, but these Palestinians--a name that arose as Newt Gingrich pointed out in the last 40 or so years--these Palestinians are indigenous, so you have got to give them their land.

Yet they are not saying it about Balochistan. They are not saying it about the Baloch people that are being killed and persecuted by Pakistan. Oh, no. We are helping kill and persecute the Baloch people by giving aid and assistance to a government that is killing and persecuting them.

If there is a just God in the universe, would there not be a price for a country as powerful as the United States that continues to support those who kill, maim, torture, horrify innocent

people, Christians, Jews, secularists, and oftentimes they are even more brutal to moderate Muslims that are not as radical as they think they should be?

That is why in Egypt, for those who really have eyes and really have ears to hear, we had an incredible event last summer. This was the real Arab Spring, but it came in summer. This is when moderate Muslims, Christians, Jews, secularists rose up, some reports of 30 to 33 million people, larger than any demonstration in the history of the world. They rose up and said: We don't want radical Islamists running Egypt. The radical Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood that were controlling Egypt-- as we knew they would if they had election too quickly--the Muslim Brotherhood became desperate because they knew, to have a new Ottoman Empire running around the Mediterranean that would become a worldwide caliphate, they could not afford to lose Egypt from under their iron fist.

So what do they do? They immediately start burning down churches, killing Christians particularly, and so many others. That is why I was so encouraged. Over 90 percent of the people voting--which was a higher percentage than we have voting here in the United States--came out and voted for the new constitution that has been drafted under the chairmanship of Amr Moussa.

I was very pleased that Chairman Moussa was willing to come on the Sean Hannity radio show a few weeks ago when I was guest hosting for Sean Hannity. It is really encouraging what is going on in Egypt by those who want a democratic form of government and who do not want terrorists running Egypt, who don't want a worldwide caliphate, who don't like the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood, who are not as blind to the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood as the leaders of this administration are.

If one will just go look at one of the symbols used by the Muslim Brotherhood these days, you find the crossed swords, the signs and wording in their language denoting the Muslim Brotherhood, and that is fixed over a globe of the world. It is not just Egypt, Iraq, Iran, not just in the former Ottoman Empire. Oh, no. This is fixed over a globe that is revolving, and the United States of America passes under those swords of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is true that the Muslim Brotherhood here in the United States does not want to utilize violence right now because they have made so much progress in this administration that they are afraid violence right now might do damage. Violence in Egypt, the same Muslim Brotherhood feels it was necessary because they had just been caught. They had been rejected by moderate Muslims--the majority of Egyptians--and they became desperate. So their violence had to occur. Christians, according to these radical Islamist Muslim brothers, had to die.

Once America starts figuring out that the goal is global caliphate-- including the United States--then they will be participating in horrendous violence here, as they have in other places in the world.

Some of our moderate Muslim friends in the Middle East asked some of us last September: What is wrong with you in America? Don't you understand? You call it al Qaeda, but that is really just an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. They are the ones that attacked you on 9/11/ 2001. These are moderate Muslims asking these questions.

Why do you not understand: Yes, it was the Taliban, but it is really the Muslim brothers behind it that you were at war with in Afghanistan? They are the ones that did more killing of Americans in Iraq, and yet you are helping the Muslim Brotherhood, you are running to their aid and assistance; and in Egypt you are demanding that either they put the radical Islamists back in charge of Egypt or we are not going to provide them the Apache helicopters, the tanks, and the jets that we were going to provide to the Muslim Brother leaders of Egypt.

They asked: What is wrong with you people? What are you not getting? You are helping the people that want to destroy you. People can see that around the world, but here in Washington, D.C., it is apparently one of the hardest things to find and see.

We hear people saying: Well, we really need all the people's most private information about phone calls, every phone call they make; we need to have that as part of the government because one time we believe it may have stopped a bombing.

Well, if this administration would do their homework, they wouldn't need the logs of every phone call of every American. We could go back to what the Constitution does require and the Court should require, and that is probable cause, before you start giving out personal information, before you let the government start monitoring every email of every person in America.

We were promised my freshman term that if the PATRIOT Act were extended, specifically section 206 and 215, that that would only apply if someone were in contact with a foreign terrorist, but Americans would never have to worry unless they were in touch with foreign terrorists. Then after Edward Snowden, we find out that actually what they promised was not true. And yes, that was during the Bush administration. I don't care. I don't care if it was a Republican or Democrat. I don't care where it started. When we find out it is still going on, it has got to stop. We are supposed to have some privacy in this country.

Those Democrats that were suspicious of the Bush administration wanting that much power were right. Where have my friends gone now that it is a Democrat administration? I certainly don't have a problem calling out a Republican administration when they are not doing the right thing. I wish my friends across the aisle would do the same thing and join me.

What about the Boston bombing? The Russians took a huge risk in giving this administration information and saying: Look, Tsarnaev, this guy has been radicalized and you are letting him back in America. You are headed for trouble. This is a bad guy. They took a risk in giving us that information because, when any country gives intelligence to another country, then sometimes it allows that country that gets the information to figure out how that other country is getting intelligence just by the information they get.

So now we have people here in this administration saying: Oh, the Russians, shame on them. They didn't give us enough information.

Are you kidding me? They told you a person had been radicalized.

When I asked the Director of the FBI in our hearing about not even going to the mosque to investigate, he says, ultimately: Yeah, we did go to those mosques--and I didn't hear it at the hearing. I didn't hear it until the replay. And he said: Under our outreach program.

Under the outreach program? Well, that is the FBI's ridiculous former program where they have special outreach to Muslim communities to try to be friends with them. It is not the FBI's job to be friends with people. It is the FBI's job to enforce the law and, in so doing, protect us.

When Tsarnaev, the older brother, came back into this country from a place on the globe where we know radicalization is occurring--and as I understand it, he didn't even have his passport; he had his legal permanent resident card--he wasn't even pulled aside for extra questions when there should have been bells and whistles going off everywhere. The best I can find out, all they did, basically, was talk to him and his mother, and he said: No, I am not radicalized.

No, my son is not radicalized.

They didn't go to the mosque and start asking questions that would tell them has he been reading Qutb, which is the author, the Muslim brother from the sixties that was involved in trying to commit assassinations and other terrorist activities, and he wrote a booklet called ``Milestones'' that Osama bin Laden credits with helping turn him radical.

If you know about the people that hate you and want to destroy you, then you can ask intelligent questions to find out if someone is your enemy. But because of the purge of training materials at the FBI, the intelligence departments, at the State Department--as one intelligence officer told me, we are blinded to our ability to see our enemy, because there was a young man named Tsarnaev who wanted to kill innocent Americans at a Boston Marathon and they got a heads-up from the Russians. They got all the information

right before them that they could possibly need, and we don't even stop him coming into this country after he has been radicalized. What more did you need? We shouldn't have needed a heads-up from the Russians. All the signs were there for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

But we were so busy in our outreach program to a mosque that was founded by the Islamic Society of Boston, the founder of which is a man named al-Amoudi, who is in prison today for 24 years, I believe, for supporting terrorism, despite all the assistance he allegedly gave to the Clinton administration helping them find good Muslims to help in that administration. After 9/11, a couple of years or so after 9/11, it has been determined that he has been supporting terrorism, and now he is in Federal prison.

A man named al-Awlaki, who this President ordered a drone strike on in Yemen, though he was an American citizen, because his parents came over on a visa to study, had him, he is an American citizen. They take him back to Yemen. He learns to hate America, comes back and works on radicalizing Americans, except, of course, when he led prayers of Muslim staff members here on Capitol Hill.

Otherwise, this President determined that he needed to be killed without a trial because he radicalized Americans, and he was a threat to this country. al-Awlaki had attended the Boston mosque where the Tsarnaevs attended.

I mean, how many heads-up notices do you need to figure out there is a problem, and innocent Americans are going to be killed and maimed as they were in Boston? It is time to wake up. Yet we get this story from Matt Apuzzo. The picture was from the Associated Press, January 15: ``U.S. to Expand Rules Limiting Use of Profiling by Federal Agents.''

The Attorney General, who came here last night, sat here for the State of the Union address while he is in contempt of Congress, while he is being lawless in not following the law and providing information. They wouldn't even give me all of the documents that they provided to convicted terrorists in the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas. I asked repeatedly. We finally got a letter many months after the request, basically saying, We will give you the 500-or-so documents that were entered into evidence in the trial, and we have got some others you can come look at.

I still don't understand, Mr. Speaker. If they will give boxes and boxes of information to the terrorists who are convicted ultimately as terrorists, why can't you give that to Members of Congress? Is it because the convictions occurred in 2008 under the Bush administration?

Then this Justice Department came in and stopped any further prosecutions from going forward even though there were a couple- hundred-or-so named coconspirators in that case who were unindicted. My understanding from former Justice Department folks is that the plan was, if they could get the first convictions, then they would move forward with more and continue to follow up until they got this network that was allegedly supporting terrorism. We know five of them were supporting terrorism.

Could it be that this Justice Department doesn't want us to see all of the documents that they provided to the terrorists that actually show they are terrorists? Could that be the reason they don't want Members of Congress to see?

It is because then we might realize, wow, they convicted those five in 2008 under President Bush. They could surely have gotten a lot more convictions if they had just used this same evidence. Oh, sure. Congressman Gohmert, come over here, and we will show you some of the documents. We will let you see some of the electronic versions.

You gave them to terrorists for heaven's sakes. You can't give them to me so I can look at them in my office? It is unbelievable what is going on here.

Then there is a story from Kerry Picket from Breitbart. The story starts:

Senator Dianne Feinstein--a Democrat from California,

chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee--told

Breitbart News on Monday that she did not know a CIA annex

existed in Benghazi, Libya, before the deadly September 2012

attack--which took the lives of four Americans--on the U.S.

compound happened. Feinstein could also not confirm if other

Members of Congress knew about the CIA annex prior to the

attack.

Senator Feinstein and I disagree on many things, but I know she wants what is best for America even though we have staunch political disagreements on how we do that and what that is. My understanding is that, with anything of that nature, it would have been required that the Super 8, as they are sometimes referred to, would be briefed--the top Republican and Democrat on the Intelligence Committee in the House and in the Senate and the Republican leader in the House and the Democratic leader in the House and the Democratic leader in the Senate and the Republican leader in the Senate. Yet Senator Feinstein said, I didn't know there was a CIA annex at the Benghazi consulate.

What else is this administration doing to help rebels, who include al Qaeda--as it did in Libya? What else is it doing that it is not following the law and briefing the people who are required to be briefed in Congress?

I heard the President, who was standing right here last night, get applause when he, in essence, says, If Congress doesn't change the law, then I will do it--and he got applause. To thinking people, when you hear somebody say, ``if Congress doesn't do what is necessary,'' which is required by the Constitution, ``I will do it,'' it sounds like I am going to chuck the Constitution and do what I think is best.

Now, I have read about those situations, of countries that had a fair and representative form of government. Ancient Greece and ancient Rome had senates that were somewhat representative. There have been types of representative governments, and you would always find that, eventually, people had that desire for one rock solid leader. They would get tired of the disagreements because, as one of the English leaders had said-- and it may have been Churchill--democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the others. It isn't a pretty thing to watch, as has been said. It is like watching sausage being made. Yet when you strip away the checks and balances that the Founders put in place to keep one executive officer from just doing whatever he wanted, then you don't have a democratic Republic as we are supposed to have; you have one man making the rules or one woman making the rules. It is time America woke up and realized their constitutional rights are at severe risk, and we are at risk as a result.

I wanted to mention something else that happened here at the State of the Union. A wonderful young man got the longest, best applause of the evening here as the President recognized Cory sitting up there.

In addition to Cory--the hero that that dear man is--I could see other uniformed people. In fact, there were some uniformed people up in that section up there, one of whom was not Cory but was Alonzo. The President didn't recognize Alonzo because Alonzo was a staff sergeant at Fort Hood. With Nidal Hasan, people kept looking the other way. They kept giving him good officer evaluation reports because they didn't want to be deemed to be profiling or doing something that was considered racist when the man made clear over and over that he was going to have to take action--violent action--against his country if they tried to ship him over and order him to fight Muslims overseas.

I did not get to meet Alonzo last night. I looked up and waved a few times, but I have great respect for that man, and he deserves so much better than he has been treated. He was shot six times; and apparently, while he is lying with six bullets in him, he realizes, as the shooting continues by Major Hasan, that he is not going to be able to pass off as dead because he is sweating profusely. As he says, dead people don't sweat, so he figured he had better get out of there, as I understand, and he took off. That is when he got shot and lost one of his eyes.

This administration has prevented Alonzo from getting the benefits he deserves because of an act of war, an act of terrorism. He is not even considered at the level of the 9/11 victims. He heard, Allah akbar, and he knew it was not going to go well. Everybody who heard that radical Islamist yell before

the murders began knew this was not workplace violence, that this wasn't a postal employee going postal. This was a radical Islamist who was carrying out a war against what they consider to be infidels in America. They deserve to be treated as victims of an act of war--an act against them as uniformed military--and to get the benefits coming to them. That is what should have happened.

We heard the references last night to health care, and it kind of sounded like applause started when he was talking about how they were helping to reform health care, and then it died so quickly they must have realized, ooh, I don't want to be on camera clapping for the reform of health care when people are hurting across America who have lost their insurance--people like me, who liked my insurance, but ObamaCare said your insurance policy is not good enough. So I lost it. Thank you very much. There are people in really tough shape around America who deserve better health care than what ObamaCare is doing to them.

There were so many things in the State of the Union address. He was talking about raising the minimum wage with Federal contractors with a stroke of the pen. I mean, how many other laws does the President want to pass with a stroke of the pen? It is not constitutional to make laws with one man's pen. That is not the democratic Republic we are supposed to be. There was even, it sounded like, some snickering when he said that. He didn't talk about the millions who have lost their insurance as a result of ObamaCare. If it were only about trying to ensure the 30 million people who reportedly didn't have health insurance--they had health care; they didn't have insurance--then let's direct it at those. Let's don't take millions and millions of Americans' insurance away in the process.

As far as illegal immigration, one of the newspapers in my district-- Longview--had an article, an op-ed, in which they were saying I was opposed to immigration reform. Obviously, they read left-wing blogs and don't read and talk to me and understand what I have said repeatedly.

We desperately need immigration reform in America, but every time anybody here starts talking about legal status--amnesty--the ICE agents and the ICE union representatives tell us repeatedly that more people try to rush into the United States, that more people die trying to come across the desert, that more people fall into human trafficking and a horrible life. My position has been clear for anyone who cares to see or hear, and it is supported by so many other Republicans.

Mr. President has the money; he has got the wherewithal; he has got the manpower to secure our border. As soon as it is secured, as verified by the border States, we will come to an immigration reform bill so fast that people won't be able to believe it; but until the President enforces existing law, there is no sense in talking about it and luring more people to their deaths, more people in here. Control the border. Secure it. Don't close it. We need that water continuing to flow into this pond, but secure it so we know who is coming in, and when people are here without valid visas, we need to pick them up.

Nearly 40 to 50 percent of the people that are here illegally came legally and overstayed their visas. Enforce the visas.

And so when a guy has been radicalized, do your homework. Don't let Tsarnaev back in when he doesn't have a passport and there are all kinds of indications he is now a terrorist. Don't let him in. We could have done without that one.

Secure the border. We will get an immigration bill done immediately after that. But before that, there is no reason to expect the President will ever secure the border.

With that, 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 31 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Friday, January 31, 2014, at 3 p.m.

I appreciate so much my dear friend, Mr. Perry's, last hour, almost, talking about such an important issue. I know there are those who say the number one job of Congress is to create jobs; but I think a more appropriate reading of our constitutional duties is, number one, we are supposed to provide for the common defense. Every American should do as George Washington prayed that we would, to never forget those who have served in the field--that is our military men and women--some of whom have given all, but all gave something.

That was Washington's prayer at the end of his resignation as he resigned as the commander of the Revolutionary forces--something that had never been done before. And my understanding is it has not happened since. As a leader in the Maldives Islands said a few years ago, unsolicited, he said:

We have never had a George Washington to set the proper

example, so we are always worried about a military coup.

And, unfortunately, they have had one.

What a blessed Nation we are because people like Washington were raised up for such a time as they were in. Abraham Lincoln spoke more than once so eloquently about the need to help those who have served and their widows and orphans. So it is particularly dismaying when Congress passes anything that does not properly honor and address the issues of those who have served in the field, and as we have talked about before, to follow up and fulfill our obligation to keep our promises. This government promises individuals if you come into the military and you serve until retirement, here is what you will get in return. We should not break our promises to those who have served and risked life and limb to protect us.

Just as my friend, Marcus Latrel, said recently on CNN, basically that they didn't go to the mission in Afghanistan senselessly, that it is not senseless when someone hears the call, sees the order of his country, and acts in accordance with their order, win, lose or draw. And that is the mentality. Of my 4 years in the Army, probably 2\1/2\ were under Commander Jimmy Carter and a year and a half under Commander in Chief Ronald Reagan. The last year and a half was far better because we had a Commander in Chief that truly appreciated more the opinion of those who were serving in the field and restored honor for the military. President Carter, obviously, from his background had respect, but you sure couldn't tell it from the actions when we were in the military. As a result, our reputation suffered around the world and we had an act of war on our embassy in Tehran. And other than a scaled- back rescue attempt--scaled back by the White House itself--we were embarrassed. And it is still used for recruiting today among radical extremists. Muslim Brotherhood members abroad say that these guys don't have the backbone to do what is necessary to win.

In such an important time in this world where so much is at risk to have an administration and some in the House or Senate that think it is okay to break our word to our military. We have got to turn this around. To those who think it is okay, we need to make clear, Mr. Speaker, it is not okay. We have the moral obligation to keep our promises and to do everything we can to protect those who are protecting us and to never send them into harm's way unless they have been given authority to win.

That should have been the lesson learned from Vietnam that wasn't learned. The lesson was not that we couldn't win--we could. And as Sam Johnson says in his book and points out in person after his 7 years in the Hanoi Hilton--much of it in complete isolation, brutally treated-- after carpet bombing North Vietnam for 2 weeks, which could have happened many years before and ended the war early, a vindictive commander at the Hanoi Hilton laughed, saying, in effect, you stupid Americans, if you had just bombed us for 1 more week, we would have had to surrender unconditionally.

So it should be. We should not get involved anywhere where we do not give full authority to those in our military to go kick rear-ends, win, and then come home.

In an article today by Kristina Wong from ``The Hill'' publication, headline ``Pentagon's hands tied on hunting down Benghazi attackers,'' this article says:

The U.S. military cannot hunt down and kill people

responsible for the deadly 2012 attack on an American

compound in Benghazi, Libya, as long as the terrorists are

not officially deemed members or affiliates of al Qaeda,

newly declassified transcripts from congressional hearings

show.

This article goes on to say:

``In other words, they don't fall under the AUMF, that

stands for authorized use of military force, authorized by

the Congress of the United States. So we would not have the

capacity to simply find them and kill them either with a

remotely piloted aircraft or with an assault on the ground,''

Dempsey said.

They are talking about General Dempsey in his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, and those were the transcripts that were released.

But he is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and here is where I have become amazed how this administration could think that the AUMF somehow gives this President authority without consulting Congress to go over and bomb and have our military play an active role in taking out Qadhafi, provide weapons to Libyans who very well may have been used to help attack our consulate, by the way, in Benghazi. We don't know enough to know for sure, but there is a good chance we

were giving them the weapons. But how this President, this administration, thinks you can go over and go to war against Qadhafi, who had become an ally after he got scared enough after the invasion of Iraq that he just opened up all of his weapons systems, became an ally and, as some moderate Muslim leaders in the Middle East have said to me, he wasn't a good guy, but he was one of your good friends after he got scared of you in 2003. And some have said he was doing more to help fight terrorism in that part of the world than anybody besides Israel, and yet you bomb him and you give weapons to go against him. We don't understand you.

But this administration felt as if under the AUMF it had full authority to go in and attack a place where even the Secretary of Defense said we have no national security interest in Libya. Oh, sure, the Organization of Islamic Council, the 57 states that make up that organization--sometimes confused with the 50 States we have here in America--but that 57 states that make up the OIC, they wanted us to go in and take out Qadhafi because they didn't like him because he was fighting terrorism, radical Islam, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

How would an administration, how would a Commander in Chief have authority to go into Libya, and then when we find out there are people that still want to destroy America, kill Americans and destroy our way of life, all of a sudden you say, but we don't really have authority to go after people who have declared war on us, have committed an act of war in attacking our embassy, but we are just not sure we can go after them.

That did not seem to stop this administration and the President from issuing an order to murder, to kill a guy I wasn't a fan of, Anwar al- Awlaki, a U.S. citizen because his parents came over on a visa and he was born here, and then he went back and was taught to hate America. Even though earlier, even during the Bush administration, he came to Capitol Hill and led congressional Muslim staffers here in prayer here on Capitol Hill; even though he had contacts within this administration, he visited with people in this administration's government, for some reason, we didn't see the need to arrest him and put him on trial here in America, but they thought it would be better just to hit him with a drone attack in Yemen and kill him over there.

And I'm not finding fault necessarily. That is a different debate over whether a President should order a drone attack on an American citizen without a trial. My point is if this administration felt as if the AUMF, the authorization for use of military force, allowed him to take out an American citizen in Yemen, then how is it that this administration all of a sudden gets scared and says, gee, we might violate the AUMF if we go after the people that killed our Ambassador in an act of war against U.S. property, which was our consulate in Benghazi?

I think it is helpful to read directly from the language. It is something I was extremely concerned about and a number of my friends here have been extremely concerned about. It is why we have pushed amendments to rein in the Presidential authority to go after American citizens, and we have worked on language and passed language to effect this to prevent any U.S. President, whether it was former President Bush while he was still President or this President or a future President, it would prevent them from being able to just arrest an American citizen and hold them indefinitely. We put restraints on the President.

Here is the language that now-General Dempsey and this administration say we just don't really have the authority under the AUMF to go after the guys that assassinated our Ambassador and killed three others including two former Navy SEALs and took much of the leg of a former Army Ranger that was on the rooftop with Ty Woods and Glen Doherty.

Here is the language. It says:

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and

appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or

persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided

the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or

harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent

any future acts of international terrorism against the United

States by such nations, organizations or persons.

So we have had people that took that and said, gee, you know, al- Awlaki didn't help plan 2001's 9/11 attack. In fact, we had him around Washington, leading prayers here on Capitol Hill and having contacts with this administration. But, gee, they didn't have a problem using this language to kill an American citizen in Yemen--not because he participated or helped plan 9/11/2001, but simply because they were using language here in the last part that:

Or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to

prevent future acts of international terrorism against the

United States by such nations.

So that has been interpreted by this administration for a long time now, gee, you didn't have to participate or help plan 9/11/2001; but if you did anything to aid, abet, assist, encourage in any way any of these organizations that may have participated in some way in 9/11/ 2001, then the President can do whatever he needs to with military force to, as it says:

Prevent any future acts of international terrorism against

the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

Well, if al-Awlaki could have this language used to take him out with a drone attack, then certainly under this administration's definition and usage of that language, it sure ought to authorize them to go after people that declared war on us and committed an act of war against our enemy, or harbored such persons or organizations. And we already know, everybody but The New York Times, everybody knows that the organizations, some of the organizations that participated in the 9/11/ 12 attack, the act of war on our consulate in Benghazi, were affiliated with al Qaeda, organizations that did participate in 9/11.

So these organizations didn't necessarily part in 9/11 on 2001, but they certainly were working with them. So anyway, it just seems to be contradictory for the administration to use the AUMF to possibly accede their authority to kill people abroad and then turn around and hide behind it.

And perhaps if Dr. Gates had not written the book he did and given us insight into things that are said or not said in this administration, then maybe we wouldn't know as much. But since we now know that even the Secretary of Defense and our top generals can feel the President is doing the wrong thing but not have the guts to tell him to his face, then I don't know, perhaps possibly General Dempsey is in that category now. Maybe he is one of those who fits in the category of maybe knowing something is appropriate but, instead, popping those heels together, saluting, yes, sir, and never fulfilling their duty not just to follow orders, but to give helpful information to a commander above you, in this case the Commander in Chief.

This article says:

The U.S. could seek to capture the Benghazi attackers under

the existing AUMF, but it would need to allow forces in

Libya, or any other countries in which the attackers are

hiding, to do so.

Well, isn't that interesting, because that is not what this President did to kill al-Awlaki, Anwar al-Awlaki. They just killed him. They didn't allow any Yemen force, or anybody else. They just took him out with one of our drones bombs. And now all of a sudden they want to hide behind this language and say, Oh, well, actually, we can't do that. So is that our excuse now for why, after a year and a half--and I feel sorry for the President because basically he wasn't going to rest until we got these guys. So, man, a year and a half is a long time not to rest.

This article says Dempsey's classified comments highlight the limits of the existing authority which was approved by Congress after the September 11, 2001, attacks and the difficulty of fighting a constantly evolving enemy that in al Qaeda has inspired independent terrorist groups to try to murder American forces and civilians. The AUMF gives the military authority to hunt and kill those responsible for the 2001 attacks, wherever they are, and has allowed President Obama to authorize hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. It has also been used to authorize several Special Operations raids, such as the one that took out Osama bin Laden.

But, see, the article just accepts what the administration says. General Dempsey said apparently in his testimony, Oh, well, gee, apparently you can go after all these other people. Well, if you can go after them, you can use the same language to go after the perpetrators of 9/11. So what is the administration afraid of?

I keep wanting these questions asked, and I think we need a select committee to ask these questions. Why don't you just come forward, all those in the administration that have information, why do you keep polygraphing our intelligence agents who knew what went on in Libya and what was going on in Libya? Why do you keep polygraphing them to make sure that they are not talking to Congress or anybody else? Why don't you just let them tell Members of Congress so we have better information from which we can authorize other actions and appropriate money to help with those actions? Why don't you just come forward and tell us what was going on? Why don't you try for a change being the most transparent administration in history? It is a long way to go, but maybe it is time to start.

We are in a war; and as others have so appropriately said, apparently we have been in a war since 1979 when radical Islamists committed the act of war against American property. An embassy belongs to the country and the soil is considered to be the country that occupies that embassy. You commit an act against that, military act, hostile act, it is an act of war. So we have been at war since 1979. The trouble is until 9/11/01, most Americans didn't know we were in a war. Only one side knew we were in a war. That was borne out in 1983 when our marines, over 200 marines, were killed in Beirut by a bombing, a truck bombing that came in there.

So many acts of war, of violence, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, including the two embassies that were bombed under the Clinton administration, although perhaps some in the administration might be tempted to ask, as Secretary Clinton asked not that long ago, What difference at this point does it make how or why they were killed basically in those embassies. Well, it makes a difference because we can prevent them in the future if we know why they were killed and what went wrong in the present. But it is a mystery.

Why hide behind the same AUMF as an excuse not to have brought the assassins of our Ambassador to justice? And something I heard, I heard a former JAG officer talking on Fox News one night this week, obviously a smart man, but an ignorant man. You can be smart, but be ignorant. He was ignorant of the Constitution because he seemed to think that the Constitution requires you capture someone who has declared war on you, you have to give them all kinds of access and let them send manifestos around, you have to give them all kinds of freedom; and that is simply not the case. Some people who mean well but are ignorant of the Constitution say everybody has to be treated exactly the same under the Constitution. Their constitutional rights mean this or that, not understanding that actually under the Constitution everybody is not entitled to the same court. They are entitled to due process, but constitutionally that means different things.

So in the Army, in the military--I say the Army because that is what I was in--but in the military, constitutional rights are different. So you don't have the right to freedom of assembly. I wanted to claim that many times. We were ordered to be out for a 5 a.m. forced 25-mile march. I wanted to claim, Sir, I have a right to freedom of assembly wherever and whenever I want, and I would just rather not assemble for this 25-mile forced march. Or the--and I can't remember now--two 5-mile runs, whatever we used to do, early in the morning before you even started the day. It would have been nice to say, No.

It would be nice to have freedom of speech so as a member of the military we could have said what we really thought about some of President Carter's orders, but he was Commander in Chief. And as it should be, you are not allowed when you are Active Duty military to publicly criticize your command chain. In order to have good order and discipline, that is the way it needs to be. But once you are not on Active Duty, you can say whatever you want. You should be able to say without worrying about a drone taking you out.

So constitutional rights are different when you are in the military. The Constitution also makes clear that Congress has the authority to set up the disciplinary procedures, the court systems, tribunals for the military. It makes clear that Congress has the authority to set up different courts for immigration purposes, entirely constitutional.

So I get amused when some people that are smart, but ignorant about the Constitution, start saying everybody in America has a constitutional right to be tried before a United States district court. Well, that is ridiculous. There is not a U.S. district court that is even established in the Constitution. That is completely up to Congress. This Congress has the authority to get rid of every district court in America, get rid of every Federal court of appeals in America and just set up a whole new system. We have the authority to do that.

As Professor David Guinn used to say, there is only one court established in the Constitution, all others owe their existence, their jurisdiction, their very being to Congress. As Bill Cosby used to say, his daddy told him and his little brother, I brought you into this world and I can take you out.

Well, Congress brought these courts into this world, and Congress can remove them. We have that authority. So nobody has a constitutional right to a U.S. district court. There is no constitutional creation of a U.S. district court. It is up to Congress.

So to have some former JAG officer go on TV and say, Oh, yeah, you have to give all of these rights. No, you don't. Under our Constitution, if you declare war against the United States, we have every right if we capture you to hold you until the cessation, the stopping, of the hostility, the war that you declared against us. And then once the war is over, we don't have to try you. Convince your buddy, we will let you send a letter to your buddy telling them stop the war so I can be released as a POW. We don't have to release them if they are part of a group that is at war with us. And then when the end of the hostilities comes and the war is over, then you don't even have to release everybody that was a POW. If somebody you believe has probable cause, that is a good standard, you believe that they have committed a war crime, then instead of just releasing them and sending them home, you can try them for a war crime.

But I understand that there are a lot of people in this administration that don't really understand that part of the Constitution. Perhaps they got a bad professor at the University of Chicago Law School or somewhere, and they don't really understand what the Constitution actually says or doesn't say. But you can hold people indefinitely, and the Supreme Court verified that. You may have to give them a writ of habeas corpus hearing, but you don't have to let them go or send manifestos. We owe an obligation to protect this country. We have authority to do it here in Congress; and, Mr. Speaker, that is what we should do.

With that, 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 44 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, January 17, 2014, at 1 p.m.

This is an important day in the history of at one time the greatest nation in the world, Egypt. It has come a long way since those days thousands of years ago. But there is a lot of misunderstanding about what has being going on in Egypt, including by people in this administration, which also means, of course, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the mainstream media and other liberal bastions.

In fact, The New York Times had an editorial dated December 4, 2013, that talks about the election that is happening today, yesterday, today, in Egypt, 14th and 15th Egyptian time.

This editorial from The New York Times editorial board talks about the Egyptians squandering another chance to build a broadly inclusive democratic system with the latest constitutional revisions.

Mr. Speaker, what these intellectual giants at The New York Times don't understand is, when you're in the Middle East and you decide to try to build a democracy, a democratic republic as we have here, and you decide to be inclusive of people who believe in utilizing terrorism--there are religious fanatics who believe if they kill innocent children, women, men, then they may have just earned a place in paradise. That is so foreign to American way of thinking, to Western way of thinking, to Israeli way of thinking, to European way of thinking--historically, that is.

As radical Islam, not to be confused with the moderate Muslims, such as those who are trying to establish democracy in Egypt, radical Islam, if included, will use terrorism, will use violence, will use anything they can to take over, and there will be no democratic republic. There will be no democracy of any kind. It will be top-to-bottom totalitarian, a religious extremist country.

I know the editorial board has people that are extremely intelligent, but it is amazing to read these kinds of things broadly inclusive. So they are wanting the people of Egypt to do things like release a man who is acting outside the constitution. He is charged with ordering the murder of so many who just wanted to have liberty in Egypt. Morsi was playing the new version of Chavez in Venezuela; get elected and then pull all power to you.

I asked General el-Sisi if it was true what a former American intelligence

agent had told me that Morsi, President Morsi, was trying to hire--take out a contract, basically--to have General el-Sisi killed. He beat around the bush, but eventually he said in the presence of other U.S. representatives that, yes, they had evidence that Morsi was trying to have General el-Sisi killed.

It may be a shock to some, say, at The New York Times, Washington Post, and others, but when you have a religious fanatic as the leader of a country, even though he may have been--and this is arguable as well, but he may have been elected. When he starts acting outside the bounds of the constitution, then the people have to act. And the constitution that the Muslim Brotherhood shoved through in Egypt after the so-called Arab Spring was one that did not even provide a provision of impeachment.

That seemed strange to most Americans. I am sure it doesn't to The New York Times and The Washington Post. But to most Americans, not having a way to remove someone who is the highest official in the land, who is acting outside the bounds of their authority, it is a problem.

How do you remove the highest leader in a country if your constitution, if you have one, does not provide for civil impeachment and removal of the leader? And Egypt's constitution that the Muslim Brotherhood shoved through did not, because the Muslim Brotherhood, once they seized power, there was going to be no need for impeachment, because radical Islam would be in charge. It is reported by credible people, there are videos of the supreme religious leader dictating terms that President Morsi would have to follow.

The Arab Spring under President Morsi did not yield the kind of republic, democracy that had been hoped for, but this New York Times editorial says:

The new charter defies the revolutionary promise of the

Arab Spring by reinforcing the power of institutions that

have long held Egypt in an iron grip.

Apparently, not realizing that the Muslim Brotherhood had seized Egypt in its iron grip, and the only way around it, since there was no impeachment provision in the Egyptian constitution, was exactly what happened. It was not a military coup. A military coup is when the military rises up and takes over. What happened in Egypt was one of the most beautiful acts of true democratic efforts, and some have reported that this was the largest gathering, largest rebellion in the world's history, reports of 20 million people gathering in demonstration by Egyptians, a country with 90 or so million people.

Another report of another effort, 30 million; 33 million, one report said. Morsi only claimed to have gotten around 13 million votes when he seized power. He said the opponent--the Muslim Brotherhood made clear if the opponent tried to contest and say there was any fraud, they would burn Egypt down. So they got control. They had a constitution that wouldn't allow them to remove Morsi, not to impeach him.

This was a real revolution. Barely peaceful as revolutions go, until the Muslim Brotherhood began to carry out what they had promised previously, that if people who wanted true democracy in Egypt tried to contest Morsi being the supreme leader there, then they would burn the country down. Well, they began burning down churches.

Now, some people when they hear the word ``church'' think in terms, well, maybe it was like a rural southern church. Maybe they had a trailer or something. This is in an area where there have been Christian churches for nearly 2,000 years. These are incredibly historic places, some of them, and the Muslim Brotherhood could have cared less.

Now, we have plenty of Muslim brothers here in the United States, and so far they say we have been--in essence, their position is we have not really needed violence in the United States because we are getting so much control without violence. But certainly violence is an appropriate tool in places like Egypt where they got ousted so they couldn't follow through with pursuing a new Ottoman Empire, a new world caliphate as the Twelfth, the Twelvers, the Twelfth Imam believers wanted to take over and begin right there where the Ottoman Empire used to exist as it began its way around the Mediterranean.

But for those who believe the Twelfth Imam is going to emerge out of chaos, even if it is self-inflicted nuclear chaos, those who believe he will emerge and begin ruling and take over a world caliphate, they know they can't afford to lose Egypt as an important linchpin. You have 90 million people there in Egypt. That is critical if they are going to take over and have a world caliphate. You have got to have Egypt.

So last July, I took to this floor and this podium and talked about the incredible uprising, how deeply touching it was to hear personal accounts, to see the photographs, to hear and see the videos of what was going on when moderate Muslims, Christians, Jews, seculars were coming together figuratively and literally, hand in hand, to protest against radical Islam being in control of Egypt.

As some have indicated, if the Egyptian people had waited another year to try to oust Morsi, he would have gathered so much power, they would probably not have been successful. It was critical that the people of Egypt rise up, as they did. And we owe them a debt of gratitude for rising up and saying, We are not going to have radical Islam in charge. Moderate Muslims did not want radical Islamists in charge. That is true throughout the Middle East. It is true in Afghanistan, where our allies who fought and defeated the Taliban, by 2002 with less than 500 Americans in country embedded, weapons we provided, aerial support we provided, under the lead of General Dostum who summoned this administration, now called a war criminal, they defeated the Taliban. These are moderate Muslim friends, allies, because their enemy is our enemy, the Taliban, and they do not want radical Islam taking back over Afghanistan.

What does this administration do? It empowers the group that will end up allowing the Taliban to take right back over, when we ought to be empowering our friends in Afghanistan, not with 100,000 precious American men and women's lives, but empower the enemy of our enemy and let them protect their own country. They can do it, but not when you call the enemy of our enemy war criminals and do everything you can to marginalize them.

The New York Times editorial says:

The constitution, approved by a 50-member citizen committee

on Sunday, replaces one imposed last year by the government

of President Mohamed Morsi, who was deposed in July, and his

Muslim Brotherhood allies. It is expected to be ratified by a

popular vote in a referendum within the next 30 days.

This was written December 4, published December 4.

The editorial goes on toward the end to say:

This new constitution is equally flawed because it was

drafted with minimal input from Islamists and could further

crush the Brotherhood by banning political parties based on

religion.

All one needs to do is just a little bit of investigation, open- minded investigation. If you are taking your lead from Al Jazeera, from the Muslim Brotherhood, from Imam Magid, who is the head of the Islamic Society of North America--the Federal courts have said it is just a Muslim Brotherhood front organization--or from leaders of CAIR, which Federal courts in this country have called a Muslim Brotherhood front organization to which is given great honor and credibility by this administration, but if you are listening to them, then, oh, yeah, this is a terrible constitution, because they are not going to allow a radical Islamist political party to take back over.

Now, again, if you do a little bit of research, you find out this is something that Ataturk fought against and was able to overcome in Turkey so many decades ago. And because he was able to overcome and overwhelm radical Islam in Turkey, Turkey has surged to the forefront over the past decades in all kinds of areas.

Now, we see the scary creeping of radical Islam back into control in Turkey. But the way they advanced as rapidly as they did in Turkey after this great leader Ataturk forced out radical Islamist leaders was they prevented those types of people from taking over, and it is the same thing. These are smart people, Emir Musa, the chairman of this constitutional committee, convention, whatever you want to call

it, of 50 very diverse people. But no, it did not include the Muslim Brotherhood. They don't want a radical Islamist group taking over Egypt.

I know it is hard for some in this country to believe who read too much of their own press, but banning a political party based on religion in the Constitution and recognizing other religions in their Constitution and recognizing the absolute right of belief religiously in this new Constitution should be hailed as a good thing.

I was shocked--I believe it is article 235, perhaps, in the new Constitution, these moderate Muslims and secularists are so bent, so dedicated to try to have a democracy that they can build on and grow and advance. They even put this article in there that says, in essence: the country is going to rebuild the churches that the Muslim Brotherhood destroyed during their radical violent temper tantrum after a president acting outside the bounds of the Constitution and charged with ordering the death of so many civilians there, after he went so far astray. They don't want that kind of people back in charge.

Now, something that The New York Times says at the end:

In the final analysis, the real test of any constitution is

how it is carried out in practice.

That is true. That is so true.

I once heard Justice Scalia telling a group, one of which had asked: Is the reason we are the greatest country with more freedoms than any country in history because we have the best Bill of Rights ever in history? Justice Scalia can be so blunt and so brilliant. He indicated: Oh, gosh, no. The Soviet Union had a better Bill of Rights than we do.

That is why that last statement in The New York Times editorial is so true. It is more how the constitution is carried out. I am glad they recognized that by the end of the editorial.

One thing is clear: if a constitution is pushed through by the Muslim Brotherhood, it is going to be radically religiously based on radical Islam, and the first elected leader could very well end up being the last until he is gone. Of course, in Iran, where we have radical Islam in charge, you have a supreme leader and then you have the token president that is elected that serves as long as the supreme leader is okay with it.

The Washington Post, in an editorial published January 13, on down in it says a criticism of the current Egyptian government. They have a judge who is the interim President. Talking with him, meeting with him a couple of times, I think he is really trying to do right by the people in Egypt, but The Washington Post says:

Opposition media have been shut down, and three Cairo-based

journalists from Al Jazeera have been imprisoned without

charge.

One of the things that is so hard for some pseudo-intellectuals here in the U.S. to realize is something that Franklin Roosevelt grasped, even with his unconstitutional actions of interring American citizens, something that he appropriately understood is, if you have media that is helping the cause of anarchy or the overthrow of a constitutional democracy, Democratic Republic as we have here, then they are enemies of the state and they are guilty of treason and they can be stopped.

Some in this country think freedom of speech means--whether it is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed down in Guantanamo or some other religious fanatic that wants to destroy our freedom here--they think: oh, well, you have to give them freedom of speech. Whereas, for most of this country's history, people understood if you are advocating for the overthrow of the constitutional government we have, it is treasonous. If you are advocating by peaceful means using the government, as some are trying to do: Let's move toward progressivism, let's move to what is really socialism, where the government gets to dictate everything, they know everything you are doing.

As I said earlier today to a group, it appears that the main thing George Orwell missed was the date. He said 1984 when it turns out it was closer to 2014 where you have the government spying on their people, taking whatever actions they want, saying if Congress doesn't do it, we will just do it without Congress, which is a violation of the Constitution in most cases.

This editorial from The Washington Post comments that the ``military's repressive methods cannot stabilize Egypt, much less address its severe economic and social problems.'' That is true. That is a wise comment because Egypt is suffering severe economic and social problems.

We need to be concerned, because what Egypt had become is a social welfare state; what we are trying to become here in America, a social welfare state where most of the country is dependent upon the government for at least part of its means of living, that cannot long endure. It is always doomed to fail.

The only reason socialized medicine doesn't completely fail is because socialized medicine ultimately ends up putting people on lists to get the treatment they need, they die while they are waiting on the list, and enough people die so it doesn't go broke.

A country that is under a socialistic authority, as the Soviet Union was, it eventually will fail because the model can never work in this world.

Egypt tried to do that. You had a tyrannical leader, as charged by many different leaders, but in order to buy loyalty, more and more welfare was provided, and they have severe economic and social problems.

It is my hope and prayer, Mr. Speaker, that the people of Egypt will continue to show the courage they did when they rose up last summer and said: We are not going to allow radical Islam to rule this country, we want religions to live in peace, and they will not live in peace when radical Islam is in charge.

That is why you don't find a synagogue in Afghanistan. For heavens sake, all the blood and treasure of Americans that has been lost and spent in Afghanistan for freedom's sake, and because we were okay with them having a constitution under sharia law with supreme power basically in a very tight federal government, then it becomes corrupt, it becomes easy to take over, as the Taliban will if this administration doesn't change its policies.

Christians are persecuted in Afghanistan. For heavens sake, there ought to be religious freedom anywhere America sacrifices that much of American lives and treasure. Iraq, where Christians are persecuted, and we provided so much American blood and treasure there.

The Washington Post says:

If President Obama believes the United States should

sanction a new autocracy in Egypt, he should make the case

for doing so. Otherwise his administration should side with

those Egyptians who continue to fight for a genuine

democracy--starting with those who have been imprisoned.

They have imprisoned radical Islamists who have killed Christians and burned churches, and here we have a newspaper advocating: let those people go that terrorize Christians and Jews and people who are secularists that don't want to follow any religion, let them out, let them back in charge of the country.

The people of Egypt have spoken in greater numbers than percentage- wise we have had in this country in so many years when they went to the streets: we are not having radical Islam in Egypt. They are to be congratulated for that.

They are a long way from being out of the woods. People here need to understand that this is a big deal.

I got a letter today from the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, delegation that is here in Washington. They expressed concern with my comments on the House floor January 10. They claim that ``U.S. academic sphere demanding an end to decades of discrimination against Palestinians are based on the principle of equality, not hatred of Jews.''

Unfortunately, they are either lying or they haven't reviewed the material that children are being taught in Israel in the Palestinian schools. They are teaching hatred with money we are providing. They are naming holidays, they are naming buildings and areas after terrorists who have killed innocent women and children.

I have got a tremendous amount of material that I could use, but time does not permit here today. But I am going to take some time to talk about the hatred that is being taught among the Palestinians.

Here is a Palestinian summer camp named after Wafa Idris, the first woman suicide bomber who murdered one and injured 150 in Jerusalem January 27, 2002. It is a girl's camp naming it after a woman who went out and killed an innocent person and injured 150 innocent people.

A Palestinian soccer tournament is named after a suicide bomber. This is a camp for 14-year-old Palestinian boys and it is named: ``The Tul Karem Shahids Memorial Soccer Championship Tournament.'' He was a suicide terrorist who killed 31 on Passover, and the children are participating in this tournament named for this horrendous human being who thought it so grand to kill 31 innocent people on a religious holiday of Passover.

People from the PLO want to try to tell me that they are not using hatred. For heaven's sake, start spending some of that money to teach love and affection, and we will have peace in the Middle East. As Netanyahu said right here at this podium: If the Palestinians lay down their arms, there will be peace in Israel and among the Palestinians, and if the Israelis lay down their weapons, there will not be an Israel in which there are Jews.

Now, I get it. The PLO and others say: Oh, yeah, we recognize Israel's right to exist. The Prime Minister of the Palestinians told me that years ago: Oh, yeah, we recognize their right to exist.

As a Jewish state, that is why they were created after the Holocaust killed 6 million Jews in Europe. That hatred of Jews is arising again in Europe among academics in the United States. Shame on you. You are allowing that hatred to grow, and it is fermenting more hatred. It has to be stopped--talking about a boycott of anything Israel. So you want the Jews out there without a country so they can be killed in another Holocaust, or you want Iran to have a nuclear weapon so they can with one weapon have another Holocaust? This is where it is going.

If people's voices are not heard as the Iranian gas chambers are being constructed now despite this ridiculous deal that is allowing them to keep the centrifuges going and developing, then the blood will be on our hands, and Mr. Speaker, we should not--cannot--allow that.

With that, 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 30 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, January 16, 2014, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, sometimes people say, Gee, if you are back here in Texas, you ought to be in Washington in session. I have to remind them that when we are in session, it is often the single biggest threat to American liberty, because when we are in session, we pass laws; and most every law, in some way, impacts people's liberty in one way or another, for good or for bad.

So often we think we know so much more here in Washington, that we can do so much better than others. And, of course, that message is not helped by ignorance in the media, particularly left-wing and so many in the mainstream.

Mr. Speaker, I spoke a couple of days ago here about a real burden on my heart for women who are lured into ruts by promises of money by the Federal Government, lured into dependence, and how that is immoral for the government to do that. The government is not supposed to encourage or lure people into conduct that is not helpful to the individual. The government is supposed to be about encouraging good conduct. But if you do evil, then you should be afraid of the government because, as Romans says, God didn't give the sword to the government in vain.

That is the point, that we should not be about encouraging or paying people to engage in conduct that is hurtful to them. And yet ignorance in the left wing of our media is so pervasive that you could actually have people write stories saying I was up here blaming single moms. I mean, it is either ignorance or just complete dishonesty of people that want to destroy the very fabric and foundation of this country because of their ill will for all that is good and wholesome.

Why would they want to protect a system that lures people into dependency and prevents them from reaching their God-given potential? I realize some of them don't believe there is a God, and that is problematic because, since the Founders believed that we were endowed by a Creator with certain inalienable rights, among those life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, if you don't believe there is a Creator, it creates a problem, because then you have to think that government is the sole source of your rights, and if that is the case, you really have no rights.

C.S. Lewis pointed out after he went from being an atheist to being a believer in some God, some universal authority of right and wrong, if you don't believe that, then there can be no justice, no right and no wrong, if there is not a universal standard. So if it is relying on some government to establish what is right and not an innate sense instilled in us by some Higher Power, then there's no hope for most people of ever having rights, freedoms and liberties as we have had in this country.

It is plain that as we become more and more secular, there become fewer and fewer liberties and less and less privacy. Now especially, looking at ObamaCare, the government invades every room in the house. It used to be that our liberal friends here in the House complained repeatedly if they thought a Republican bill might, in some way, invade some room in the house. Yet without a single Republican vote, the Democrats passed through a law that invades every room in the house.

I am a big fan of Mark R. Levin, and I don't know that there is a better synopsis or there could be a better textbook for people to learn about our founding history than the book ``Liberty and Tyranny.'' I guess the reason ``Liberty and Tyranny'' could never be a textbook for some government class would be that it costs less than $20, and in order to be a textbook, some professor normally has to make 100, 200, $300 a book, or it is not going to be utilized; or some leftwing source has to be the one providing the book and profiting, or it doesn't get used. ``Liberty and Tyranny'' has so many incredible jewels, as I have read from here on the floor numerous times.

In Mark's last book, there are things that we need to be reminded of that this brilliant--I don't know that anybody knows more about the history of the Supreme Court than Mark Levin, a brilliant man when it comes to our law, our Constitution, our Supreme Court--but he mentions in here, he draws so much from our history and throws it back in our faces so that we can't miss it, but Mark Levin points out the Nation has entered an age of post-constitutional, soft tyranny. Then he quotes from French thinker, philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, as he explained presciently:

It covers the surface of a society with a network of small,

complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most

original minds and the most energetic characters cannot

penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not

shattered but softened, bent, and guided. Men are seldom

forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from

acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents

existence. It does not tyrannize, but it compresses,

enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people until each

nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid

industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

I know, because some people don't like to be beat up by the left wing--as I apparently do--they don't want to be pointing these things out, and so I know that apparently we have got Republican staffers helping Senators who think that the things in this book are not worth spreading around the country. This is our history. If you don't learn your history, then how can you ever figure out the best way to go forward?

I am a big fan of the comments of Satchel Paige, an incredible baseball player. He came up with some great lines. I guess he is baseball's answer to Will Rogers. He is often quoted for saying, ``don't look back, they may be gaining on you,'' but I have read that later in life he had a quote that I like even better. Satchel Paige reportedly said: ``It is okay to look back, just don't stare.''

Well, I majored in history. I think it is good to look back. As the old adage goes, ``those who refuse to learn from history are destined to repeat it.'' Some follow up and say that ``those who do learn from history will find new ways to screw up,'' but that is another lesson.

Mark Levin goes on in ``The Liberty Amendments'' and said, de Tocqueville observed further:

It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to

use men in order to make things great. I wish they would try

a little more to make great men, that they would set less

value on the work and more upon the workman, that they would

never forget that a nation cannot long remain strong when

every man belonging to it is individually weak, and that no

form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to

make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous

and enfeebled citizens.

Today, Congress operates not as the Framers intended but in

the shadows, where it dreams up its most notorious and

oppressive laws, coming into the light only to trumpet the

genius and earnestness of its goings on and to enable Members

to cast their votes.

He goes on to say:

Congress also and often delegates unconstitutionally law-

making power to a gigantic, ever growing administrative state

that in turn unleashes on society myriad regulations and

rules at such a rapid rate that people cannot possibly know

of them either, and if by chance they do, they cannot

possibly comprehend them. Nonetheless, ignorance which is

widespread and deliberately so is no excuse for noncompliance

for which the citizen is heavily fined and severely punished.

This is really a great synopsis of where we are. Congress thinks we know better, the President thinks he knows better, and some of this was started before the last Republican President left office with TARP. What a disaster. You can never achieve greatness if you do not have the same opportunity to fail. If the tightrope you are walking to achieve something extraordinary is sitting on the ground, then there is no risk, and there is nothing great achieved. Yet, this government wants to put such restrictions on people that they can never reach greatness. They can never reach as high as the grass might go.

I love this part in Mark Levin's book, and I realize it may bother not only the leftwing but some Republican Senate staffers. Mark Levin wrote:

Having delegated broad lawmaking power to executive branch

departments and agencies of its own creation contravening the

separation of powers doctrine, Congress now watches as the

President inflates the congressional delegations even further

and proclaims repeatedly the authority to rule by executive

fiat in defiance of or over the top of the same Congress that

sanctioned a domineering executive branch in the first place.

Notwithstanding Congress' delinquency but because of it an

unquenched President in a hurry to expedite a societal

makeover has repeatedly admonished Congress that `if it won't

act soon to protect future generations, I will.'

That is, if Congress will not genuflect to his demands and

pass laws to his liking, he will act on his own. And the

President has made good on his refrain on a growing list of

matters. He has, in fact, displayed an impressive aptitude

for imperial rule with the help from a phalanx of policy

czars from immigration, the environment, labor law to health

care, welfare and energy. The President has excised his

executive discretion to create new law, abrogate existing law

and generally contrive ways to exploit legal ambiguities as a

means to his ends. He has also declared the Senate in recess

when it was not, thereby bypassing the Senate's

constitutional advice and consent role to install several

partisans in top Federal posts. Today, this is glorified and

glamorized as compassionate progressivism. The Framers called

it `despotism.'

Then here is what makes Mark's book so great. He goes right to the source and quotes ``Federalist 48'' by James Madison. Most people give more credit to Madison for the Constitution getting specifically written than other people, but Madison wrote:

An elective despotism was not the government we fought for

but one which should not only be founded on free principles

but in which the powers of government should be so divided

and balanced among several bodies of magistracy as that no

one could transcend their legal limits without being

effectually checked and restrained by the others.

Mark Levin cites ``Federalist 78'' by Alexander Hamilton:

Whoever attentively considers the different departments of

power must perceive that in a government in which they are

separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of

its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the

political rights of the Constitution because it will be least

in a capacity to annoy or injure them.

I mean this is the Founders saying that the Supreme Court that we must now all bow and scrape to as they rewrite the Constitution in their own image like some kind of gods on Mount Olympus, the Founders said they are the least dangerous because they are going to have the least power to ``annoy or injure.''

Levin goes on:

Yet having seized for itself in the early years of the

Nation the final words on all matters before it, the Supreme

Court, with just five of its nine members, can impose the

most far-reaching and breathtaking rulings on the whole of

society for which there is no recourse.

My copy of Mark's book is falling apart, but it is still good stuff.

He also says in ``The Liberty Amendments'':

What was to be a relatively innocuous Federal Government

operating from a defined enumeration of specific grants of

powers has become an ever-present and unaccountable force.

This is so scary, but Mark Levin puts it so well. He describes the Federal Government as the Nation's largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health care provider and pension guarantor. Moreover, with aggrandized police powers, what it does not control directly, it bans or mandates by regulation.

For example, the Federal Government regulates most things bathroom, laundry room, kitchen, as well as the mortgage you hold on your house. It designs your automobile and dictates the kind of fuel it uses. It regulates your baby's toys, crib, and stroller, plans your children's school curricula and lunch menu and administers their student loans in colleges.

At your place of employment, the Federal Government oversees everything from the racial gender and age diversity of the workforce, to the hours, wages, and benefits paid. Indeed, the question is not what the Federal Government regulates, but what it does not regulate. And it makes you wonder, how can a people, incapable of selecting their own light bulbs and toilets, possess enough confidence to vote for their own rulers and fill out complicated tax returns.

Mark also points out that the Federal Government consumes nearly 25 percent of all goods and services produced each year by the American people.

That should, if people will wake up, it should begin to scare them because if the Federal Government is the largest consumer, just on that alone, it has the power to bankrupt companies, to make companies. And then you start running into the horrible constitution that we rubber- stamped and may have helped put together over in Afghanistan, where they so centralized the power in the federal government that the President in Afghanistan gets to appoint governors, gets to appoint mayors, gets to appoint police chiefs, appoint the highest level of teachers, appoints many of the slate of part of the legislature, has tremendous power of the purse, and you wonder why that country is about to fall as soon as we pull out, when we were complicit in a constitution that on its face should have told people this government under this constitution is doomed to fail and fall back into Taliban hands, and that is exactly what is about to happen.

We should have known better than to help Afghanistan and be complicit in a constitution that does what our Founders said should never be done for a federal government. But when we have lost the lessons of our founding such that Congress allows power to be totally usurped by a Supreme Court or by an executive branch, and the American people do not rise up and condemn the comments by a leader in the Senate who says, What right does the House have to say how the money is spent?, that ought to be enough to have a recall election if a leader in the Senate doesn't even know why the House of Representatives is supposed to have an extremely loud voice in how the money is spent.

And, in fact, any bill that raises revenue must start in the House, which the same Senate leaders did not understand, or perhaps they understood and tried to tap dance around, but since the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Roberts rewrote ObamaCare, the un-Affordable Care Act, because it is certainly not affordable, it is costing so many people in my district, Republicans, Democrats, Independents, party doesn't matter when it comes to ObamaCare. Seniors that I visit with at retirement homes and communities are scared because they are realizing and they are finding out, gee, ObamaCare cut $716 billion from reimbursing health care providers for care we were going to get.

And they are starting to figure out even though they were assured, you don't have to worry, you are not going to be affected, you are not going to lose any health care because this is only cutting what we reimburse health care providers, seniors are smart folks. They have been around awhile, and they are figuring out, wait a minute, you cut $700 million out of reimbursement for our health care providers with ObamaCare, really, and you think we are not going to figure out that that means we are not going to get the treatment we need. We are going to be told we don't have the knee replacement we need or the hip replacement we need because we are too old, or we get put on some list for an exorbitant amount of time which means you are hoping that we will die before we get the treatment we need, as often happens in England and Canada and other places with totally government-run health care.

Single payer, that is such a misnomer. It is government-run private lives. Instead of single payer, it is government. It is the GRE, government running everything. When the government can tell you what care you can have and not have, they control your life and they control how quickly your life will come to an end.

It is wrong. It is so against the foundation, the principles upon which we were founded.

My brilliant friend, Mark Levin said:

What was to be a relatively innocuous Federal Government,

operating from a defined enumeration of specific agents of

power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force.

I want to reiterate that because the problem that we see repeatedly now is when someone presides over death of people entrusted to their care and protection, they can stand up and say, What difference at this point does it make? So they died. What difference does it make why they died, how they died?

A Libyan acquaintance a few weeks ago said, you guys in the United States, Congress in Washington, are asking the wrong question. Of course, personally, I think it is an appropriate question to ask: Who killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, and our two former Navy SEALs? Who killed them? Who killed Ty Woods and Glen Doherty? Who blew off much of the leg of David Ubben?

I think it is a legitimate question, but this Libyan man I met said, You keep asking in America who killed these people. You ought to be asking why they were killed. Well, that is certainly an important question. And I know our former Secretary of State said, What difference at this point does it make? But I think this Libyan man is right. We need to be asking why were they killed. And it certainly wasn't about a video. And I know that we have got some newspapers that are losing viewership or readership and so they are trying as best they can before people completely quit reading it to help their next candidate for President, I get that. I understand.

But the fact is these were radical Islamists, al Qaeda-related people in the group. There was never a demonstration. It was an attack from the very beginning, just as Chris Stevens called and Greg Hicks pointed out: we are under attack. There was no indication of a demonstration about some stupid video. They were under attack. It was predicted and talked about. Some in Egypt were saying if you don't release the blind sheikh who was implicit and in prison for the murder of New Yorkers as they tried in 1993 to bring down the World Trade Center, they were saying you have to start by releasing the blind sheikh or there is going to be violence. It wasn't about a video, for goodness sake.

When the government consumes 25 percent of everything produced in America, the government is too big. It needs to be reduced in size. Powers need to be returned to the States from which they were usurped. We need to give more power and control back to the local government. We have got people screaming about the minimum wage. It is outrageous for people in this town to tell somebody in San Augustine, Texas, what they have to pay, that they have to go to pay $10 or $15 for minimum wage. It is outrageous. Some places in the country, that may not be enough as the bottom line and isn't, and people are being paid more than that. But for teenagers, like I was when I started working, actually before I was a teenager I started working, but I started paying into Social Security, I guess, when I was 13 or 14, but minimum wage is a great place to start. When I went to work as an assistant district attorney for Titus, Camp, and Morris Counties, I was getting paid $700 a month. It was what they could afford, and I was able to live at home and work for that and help those counties. The closer to the facts on the ground is the control of a government, then the better the government.

When the Federal Government here in Washington dictates school programs, school tests, it is just wrong. And this isn't an issue of Republican or Democrat. I had this discussion with President Bush's Secretary of Education because she was violating the Constitution because education is not an enumerated power within the Constitution. Therefore, under the 10th Amendment, it is reserved to the States and people.

She said if you liked what I was doing in Austin, you ought to love what I am doing in Washington. I said, No, when you were in Austin, you were acting within the confines of the Constitution. And now you are here in Washington, you are acting beyond the Constitution. You are mandating that people teach to a test. You got to go to

Gladewater, Texas, with me and go to a special needs school there where they got over 120 precious lives. And when one of them for a good day can touch something, point to something shiny, to have a Federal bureaucrat dictate the kind of test that needs to be given, or in Tyler at the St. Louis School where I met a young man, a special needs young man, and their goal for the end of the year was if he could put his fork in a piece of food and get it to his mouth, but because the Federal Government intervened, because they didn't know that special needs young man and because they didn't know the kids there in Gladewater there at that precious school, they dictate.

Now, the Secretary of Education said, Oh, but you can get an alternative test. And I said, Yeah, and you know what kind of alternative test got approved for that young man they were trying to teach to feed himself. They wouldn't approve him being able to feed himself. No, but they did approve if he would point to a sticker with food on it, he could pass his test. Thank you so much Federal Government. And that is what we have had with so many of these programs that were well intended.

You want to help a single mom, I want to help a single mom with a deadbeat dad not helping at all. But the best way to do it is not to lure them into a rut from which they cannot extricate themselves. The better policy is to help them get a high school diploma. They are better off with daycare than with a handout that encourages them to have more and more children out of wedlock. I am not blaming the single moms. I am blaming the Federal Government for creating a system that after 50 years has taken our nuclear homes that were the backbone of this country and gone from between 6 and 7 percent of children being born to a single mom in the sixties, and because of this government's well-intentioned, but ridiculously stupid, program, we now have over 40 percent of children being born to single moms, heading toward 50 percent.

It is wrongheaded when a government does not help.

I will tell you, I spent some precious time out at Texas College in Tyler, one of the oldest colleges in Texas. It was started as an African American college. I used to wonder, I am looking forward--as Martin Luther King, Jr. said--to the day when people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. I am looking forward to the day when race is not on a form anybody fills out because it doesn't matter; it doesn't make any difference. I am looking forward to that day.

But I have learned a lot from Texas College because I have seen young African Americans--repeatedly, I have met African Americans--who are the first in their family to go to college. It is a great stepping off place. It is a great place to start, to break through that ceiling that has kept people in poverty.

I met with and visited with a combined sociology class some time ago and talked about this issue of the Federal Government wanting to help, but instead luring young single moms into holes they can't get out of. Many do, but many can't. I asked them for advice. There were single moms there. I was shocked with some of the suggestions they said. They said you need to have a drug test on aid for dependent children; you need to have a drug test on any kind of welfare; you need to have a work requirement on any kind of welfare.

That was a tough group.

They said you are not doing enough to push people to reach their potential.

Then when you meet and talk with single moms, African Americans, that got lured into a rut, and by the grace of God they are trying to get out of that. They are trying to get some college and improve themselves and reach their potential, but they feel like the government lured them into a rut now they are trying desperately to get out of. We owe them better. We owe them a system that doesn't lure them into holes but helps them reach for the sky.

Maybe it would have been better in the '60s to help with daycare if somebody has a child, a single mom has a child, because we know from study after study you've got a better chance of having a successful life if you finish high school. So why not have that as a goal instead of luring people into having more and more children.

The people that I had to face for felony welfare fraud, some may think it is a racial issue, but I saw it wasn't at all. Every race, creed, color, people got lured into this, and it was wrong. The government should not have systems that do that.

There is another profound statement that Mark Levin has in this book, ``The Liberty Amendments.'' He points out:

The individual's liberty, inextricably linked to his

private property, is submerged in the quicksand of a

government that is aggregating authority and imploding

simultaneously.

What then is the answer? Again, Alexis de Tocqueville offers guidance looking back at the Constitutional Convention some 50 years afterwards. He observed that:

It is a novelty in the history of society to see a great

people turn a calm and scrutinizing eye upon itself, when

apprised by the legislature that the wheels of its government

are stopped, to see it carefully examine the extent of the

evil, and patiently wait 2 whole years until a remedy is

discovered, to which it voluntarily submitted without its

costing a tear or a drop of blood from mankind.

It is a profound book. Levin quotes Madison in Federalist 14:

In the first place, it is to be remembered, that the

general government is not to be charged with the whole power

of making and administering laws: its jurisdiction is limited

to certain enumerated objects, which concern all the members

of the Republic, but which are not to be attained by the

separate provisions of any.

Then in Federalist 45, he insisted:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the

Federal Government are few and defined. Those which are to

remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.

In Federalist 46, Madison asserted that:

The powers proposed to be lodged in the Federal Government

are as little formidable to those reserved to the individual

States, as they are indispensably necessary to accomplish the

purposes of the Union; and that all those alarms which have

been sounded, of a meditated and consequential annihilation

of the State governments, must, on the most favorable

interpretation, be ascribed to the chimerical fears of the

authors of them.

This is a great book. There is just so much wonderful history from our United States history that deserves further looking. The library should have the book if people want to read it.

We are not thinking straight in this town, and there are negotiations ongoing with Iran about nuclear weapons, whose leaders have called us the ``Great Satan'' that needs to be destroyed, called Israel the ``Little Satan'' that needs to be destroyed, and they have missiles they can put nuclear weapons on top of Israel for its destruction creating a new holocaust, millions of lives could be lost. But as our friend Prime Minister Netanyahu points out, they are building and they have created intercontinental ballistic missiles.

He is trying to wake the United States up, Netanyahu is, when he is saying that they don't need those to take out Israel. They've got missiles to take us out. Those intercontinental ballistic missiles are for the United States they call the Great Satan. Its leaders believe that under their interpretation of prophecy from the Koran that the twelfth Imam, al-Mahdi, can emerge or will emerge from chaos. They believe that it could be nuclear chaos. So by creating nuclear bombs and setting them off, Israel, the United States, Little Satan, Great Satan, they can hasten the return of the twelfth Imam to rule over the global caliphate.

When somebody thinks that kind of thought, we need to make sure they don't get nukes, and we need to take out anything where they are producing nukes. We have the power and ability to do it. Everybody, including Russia and China, needs to understand, if we don't take them out, they could be launched at Russia and China, because they are led by infidels, to Iran's way of thinking, just like the U.S. and Israel are to their way of thinking.

So January 7, there is an article in TheBlaze, Sharona Schwartz. It says:

An Iranian official says that his country needs a nuclear

bomb in order to ``put Israel in its place.''

``We don't aspire to obtain a nuclear bomb, but it is

necessary so we can put Israel in its place.''

Of course there are plenty of quotes from their leaders that the proper place for Israel is ``wiped off the map.''

``After arriving in New York''--the article points out ``Rouhani''-- the new President--``again was contacted at his hotel by an unspecified White House official.''

And this is from a parliament member in Iran, Muhammad Nabavian:

``I assembled the delegation accompanying me and we decided

not to meet with Obama. On Tuesday afternoon after the press

conference, they said to me, `why did you humiliate Obama in

America?' and I said there was no humiliation. Here I

recalled the words of Imam Khomeini who said that one must

humiliate the infidel leaders,'' Nabavian reported about

Rouhani's description of the events.

It is very important that the leaders in this country, including our President, realize that to these religious fanatic nuts he is an infidel leader, we are infidel leaders, and we are worthy of being humiliated, and as the leaders of the Great Satan we are worthy of being destroyed. That must be understood.

What has come about as radical Islamist--and I am very careful about that, despite what some of the more ignorant in the left wing would say in the left-wing media. We don't have to fear moderate Muslims. And I am talking about the kind of moderate Muslims that I have befriended in Egypt and Afghan, who are the enemy of my enemy, who are the enemy of the United States' enemy, who are the enemy of Israel, our ally.

We can work with them, just as is happening in Egypt right now where moderate Muslims were sickened by the Muslim Brotherhood's burning of churches, killing of Christians, persecution of Christians. That is something that former President Morsi is on trial for. And the interim President right now is a former judge, so we had some things in common as we spoke not long ago there in Egypt.

Yet, as the odds are getting stacked farther and higher against Israel's existence, and as we are demanding Israel give away more of its land as Palestinian leaders continue to say they are not agreeing to anything, they are not agreeing to Israel's right to even exist as a Jewish nation, as a place where Jews can avoid another holocaust like in World War II, they are not even willing to recognize that, how can there ever be peace? As I said personally to the Palestinian's former prime minister, how can you expect peace when you won't even recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish nation?

So they want Israel to keep giving away more and more land, and every time--going back to the very inception of Israel, 1,000, 1,600, 1,800 years before Muhammad was born, the actual founding of Israel, going back that early, any time Israel has given away land trying to buy peace, that land ultimately gets used as a staging area from which to attack it. They are about, I hope, to learn that lesson.

So what do we have going on here in the United States now? Well, Caroline Glick has a great article called: ``Column One: The Left Against Zion.'' This is from December 19. She says:

This week has been a big one for the anti-Israel movement.

In the space of a few days, two quasi-academic

organizations--the American Studies Association and the

Native American and Indigenous Studies Association--have

launched boycotts against Israeli universities. Their

boycotts follow a similar one announced in April by the Asian

Studies Association.

These groups' actions have not taken place in isolation. They are of a piece with ever-escalating acts of anti-Israel agitation in college campuses throughout the United States.

I would interject that it is sickening and incredible to me to see anti-Semitism growing just the way it did before the 1930s and 1940s when over 6 million Jews were mercilessly, brutally killed--and we are seeing it arise. When I learned about the Holocaust and when I went to Germany, through what I had learned and read and seen, I could never have imagined. Thank God we could never have that happen during my lifetime. Now I am watching the seeds of anti-Semitism, of anti- Israel--of people wanting to wipe them off the map, of those who are proposing another Holocaust.

Then we have pseudo intellectual wannabes at universities where they no longer allow true diversity of thought and discussion that made them originally great, which allowed them originally to have liberals there get in charge, and now they cut off so often conservative speech. It used to be in universities, even as conservative as Texas A&M was when I was there, that we had many liberal speakers, and I enjoyed meeting and debating with some of them, with some of the greats in the country. Now, even at Texas A&M, they are careful not to invite people who are too conservative because you don't want to tick off the Faculty Senate. Like most universities, it has gotten very, very liberal.

In Caroline Glick's article she points out:

Every week brings a wealth of stories about new cases of

aggressive anti-Israel activism. At the University of

Michigan last week, thousands of students were sent fake

eviction notices from the university's housing office. A pro-

Palestinian group distributed them in dorms across campus to

disseminate the blood libel that Israel is carrying out mass

expulsions of Palestinians.

At Swarthmore College, leftist anti-Israel Jewish students

who control Hillel are insisting on using Hillel's good

offices to disseminate and legitimate anti-Israel slanders;

and the left's doctrinaire insistence that Israel is the root

of all evil is not limited to campuses.

At New York's 92nd Street Y, commentary editor John

Podhoretz was booed and hissed by the audience for trying to

explain why the ASA's just-announced boycott of Israel was an

obscene act of bigotry.

It is a great article. I don't have time to read it all, but she points out:

This week, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz retired

after 50 years on the law faculty. His exit, the same week as

the ASA and the NAISA announced their boycotts of Israeli

universities, symbolized the marginalization of the pro-

Israel left that Dershowitz represented.

For years, Dershowitz has been a nonentity in leftist

circles. His place at the table was usurped by anti-Israel

Jews like Peter Beinart, and now Beinart is finding himself

increasingly challenged by anti-Semitic Jews like Max

Blumenthal.

The progression is unmistakable.

People need to wake up and understand that this kind of thing has all happened before, and when people don't recognize it, it happens again in history. God help us that it doesn't happen while our generation is in charge, but these growing acts of anti-Semitism, anti-Israel continue to progress by so-called ``Progressives,'' making it seem as if this is another apartheid like in South Africa, which was so unfair, racially so wrong in South Africa. It got corrected. This is not the same thing at all. This is a group of people who have been persecuted throughout their history, having a country where they have a longer history of right to that area than any other people existing today.

Yet, as universities, the so-called ``left'' become more loud and more vocal in their hatred and anger, I have wondered: If Iran dropped a nuke on Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, if Iran killed a million Jews in Israel, have those leftists--those anti-Semitic, anti-Israel folks at universities--gotten so far from decency that they would applaud Israelis, Jews being killed by the millions in Israel? I wonder. I wonder if there would be any reaction like there has been in history, like there was in Germany when Jews were being killed? They deserved it. They were the problem in this country.

Rationalization is a great thing, and it is a dangerous thing.

People who were in Germany, who lived through the Holocaust don't want to talk about it because they cannot believe that they got sucked into that group dynamic that allowed them to be so inhuman and so callous that they didn't care about the extinction of Jews in Germany. I really don't know the answer. These anti-Israeli groups in universities like to think they are diverse, but yet they go after and destroy anybody who attempts to debate them. Would they cheer if Jews and Israelis were killed by Iran?

I hope they will wake up to what is happening at these universities, but here again, love and money can be the root of all evil, and we see universities across this country getting more and more money from Middle Eastern countries that say, Hey, by the way, you need to teach a course on Islamophobia or at least have a seminar, and talk about anybody who raises issues about radical Islam, like the author in The Washington Times, Husain, who just lied completely about things that I had said. He just lied. He made stuff up. He didn't do his homework. Yet those kinds of things are being talked about and taught at universities.

We have got to get back to having real debate. Some people think, when I get upset, it means I hate somebody. I don't. I come from a family where we fuss at each other tooth and nail. We still love each other and stand by each other. I heard that this was attributed to Johnson, as President, but we had a pastor in Mount Pleasant, Texas, in 1953, who said it to my parents: if two people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary. The same is true here in Congress. If we all agree on everything, then all but one are unnecessary. We don't need a Congress. We don't need advisors. If one person knows everything, then just let him make all the decisions, but that is not the case in this fallen world. We need to hear from everybody. Debate is a good thing, and it used to be at universities and can be again if they will allow all voices to be heard.

I have one other story here from CNS News:

Afghanistan will resume being a terrorist haven when U.S.

troops depart.

That is going to happen. I have been talking about that for a number of years, and it doesn't have to happen if we would simply grant the people of Afghanistan what the Founders originally gave us. We have messed it up, but they originally gave us a government where the States were the most powerful entity. As my moderate Muslim friends in Afghanistan have said, and as former Vice President Massoud has said, and others: if you will just help us push Karzai to let us have an amendment in our constitution that allows us to elect our governors, elect our mayors, get our own police chiefs, govern our own regions, our own state areas--if you will let us do that, we can keep the Taliban out.

I mentioned it before, but when I asked, ``What makes you think we could exert that kind of pressure?'' they informed me that out of about a $12.5 billion government budget in Afghanistan, the Afghans only provide about $1.5 billion. The rest is provided by foreign countries, and most of that is the United States. Today, if this President says you either let the states elect their own governors and mayors and pick their own police chiefs--that is today--or we will cut off every dime going to Afghanistan, I would bet that would be the day they would get started and that they would get an amendment to their constitution, and they would become more of a democratic republic like we started out as, perhaps even more than we are now.

We need to do that for them. We don't need to let more American lives be killed and be taken in Afghanistan. That doesn't have to happen. It didn't have to happen. Even though Secretary Gates said that he didn't believe the President was really convinced the surge was a good idea in Afghanistan, he still sent more troops, and what people haven't been talking about for a long time is that 75 percent of the people of the American soldiers who have been killed in Afghanistan--soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen--all of them--have been killed while President Obama has been Commander in Chief.

I did not think President Bush did the right thing by sending tens of thousands of American troops in after the Taliban was defeated with fewer than 500 Americans in supporting the Northern Alliance, but we became occupiers. It was a mistake by the Bush administration, I believe, and then a mistake that President Obama inherited, and it got worse. We don't have to leave and have the blood of our soldiers--of our military--cry out as we leave Afghanistan and as the Taliban takes back over. Let us, Madam Speaker, help Afghanistan to root out the evil in its own country. Let's help them get a constitution that let's them root it out for themselves. That is how we should be doing foreign policy.

May God awaken the universities that were once so diverse and so great to understanding that they should not, cannot--I hope and pray do not--continue to foster this anti-Semitism, this anti-Israeli sentiment, that is growing, that might someday cheer when Israelis are nuked.

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

Mr. Speaker, I certainly want to thank my colleagues for bringing such an important issue to the floor for discussion.

This is an important time in American history for so many reasons. Foreign policy is just in terrible shambles right now. But today is January 8, and it is generally recognized that 50 years ago, on January 8, 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared a war on poverty.

There is an article today from The Washington Times entitled: ``That's rich: Poverty level under Obama breaks 50-year record,'' by Dave Boyer.

It says:

Fifty years after President Johnson started a $20 trillion

taxpayer-funded war on poverty, the overall percentage of

impoverished people in the United States has declined only

slightly and the poor have lost ground under President Obama.

Aides said Mr. Obama doesn't plan to commemorate the

anniversary Wednesday of Johnson's speech in 1964, which gave

rise to Medicaid, Head Start, and a broad range of other

Federal antipoverty programs. The President's only public

event Tuesday was a plea for Congress to approve extended

benefits for the long-term unemployed, another reminder of

the persistent economic troubles during Mr. Obama's 5 years

in office.

``What I think the American people are really looking for

in 2014 is just a little bit of stability,'' Mr. Obama said.

Although the President often rails against income

inequality in America, his policies have had little impact

overall on poverty. A record 47 million Americans receive

food stamps, about 13 million more Americans than when he

took office.

The poverty rate has stood at 15 percent for 3 consecutive

years, the first time that has happened since the mid-1960s.

The poverty rate in 1965 was 17.3 percent; it was 12.5

percent in 2007, before the Great Recession.

About 50 million Americans live below the poverty line,

which the Federal Government defined in 2012 as an annual

income of $23,492 for a family of four.

President Obama's antipoverty efforts ``are basically to

give more people more free stuff,'' said Robert Rector, a

specialist on welfare and poverty at the conservative

Heritage Foundation.

``That's exactly the opposite of what Johnson said,'' Mr.

Rector said. ``Johnson's goal was to make people prosperous

and self-sufficient.''

The President's advisers defend his policies by saying they

rescued the Nation from the deep recession in 2009, saved the

auto industry and reduced the jobless rate to 7 percent from

a high of 10 percent 4 years ago.

Further:

The President last month declared the widening gap between

the rich and poor as ``the defining challenge of our time,''

and Democratic candidates are expected to pick up that theme

on the campaign trail rather than debate deficits or the

complications of ObamaCare.

In spite of the administration's antipoverty efforts,

however, the government reported this week that poverty, by

some measures, has been worse under President Obama than it

was under President George W. Bush. The U.S. Census Bureau

reported that 31.6 percent of Americans were in poverty for

at least 2 months from 2009 to 2011, a 4.5 percentage point

increase over the prerecession period of 2005 to 2007.

Of the 37.6 million people who were poor at the beginning

of 2009, 26.4 percent remained in poverty throughout the next

34 months, the report said. Another 12.6 million people

escaped poverty during that time, but 13.5 million more fell

into poverty.

Mr. Rector said the war on poverty has been a failure when

measured by the overall amount of money spent and the poverty

rates that haven't changed significantly since Johnson gave

his speech.

``We've spent $20.7 trillion on means-tested aid since that

time, and the poverty rate is pretty much exactly where it

was in the mid-1960s,'' he said.

The liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said in

a report that some trends have helped reduce poverty since

the 1960s, including more Americans completing high school

and more women working outside the home. But the group said

other factors have contributed to persistent poverty,

including a tripling in the number of households led by

single parents.

Mr. Rector said too many government antipoverty programs

still discourage marriage, factoring into statistics that

show more than 4 in 10 children are born to unmarried

parents.

``When the war on poverty started, about 6 percent of

children were born outside of marriage, he said. Today,

that's 42 percent.'' A catastrophe.

So it is rather interesting. Fifty years after the war on poverty was declared as an actual war, $20.7 trillion, according to Mr. Rector, has been spent on means-tested aid since that time, and basically we haven't changed anything except we have got more children being born in broken, single-parent homes.

It is certainly noteworthy that, since the beginning of 2009, we have had 12.6 million people escape poverty, but 13.5 million fall into poverty. That means we have had just under a million people worse off, falling into poverty, than were there when this President started with all the giveaway programs--$900 billion in so-called stimulus that turned out to be nothing more than crony capitalism, spending money on so-called ``green'' programs that turned brown rather quickly after millions and hundreds of millions and billions of dollars were spent.

He claims he saved the auto industry. Actually, there was a proposal by many economists, led by an FDIC former Chairman named Isaac, who made a proposal in late 2008, an alternative to TARP, and it could have been used to do a more effective job of getting the auto industry on its feet.

The proposal was, instead of nationalizing Wall Street, having the government buy private assets, which is nationalizing, government takeover, by another means rather than the government nationalizing the auto industry, taking a big hunk of the auto industry, telling dealers which ones had to close their doors without due process of law. They were an unconstitutional taking. And to the embarrassment of this country and the great Justices--those who were great on the Supreme Court and the ones that are great on there now--to their total humiliation, this Court stood by and watched unconstitutional takings and did nothing.

Now, it is true that, during the unconstitutional, illegal turning of the Bankruptcy Code upside down during the so-called saving of the auto industry, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to her credit, put a 24-hour stay on an auto deal that was proposed, but the stay lapsed and the Court did nothing, which should have been to their incredible embarrassment.

They knew that bankruptcy laws had been completely eviscerated, completely ignored, turned upside down. There were no proposed plans by creditors. Secured creditors were treated as unsecured and, against the law, they were made unsecured. They had their security taken away. The government gave security, illegally, under the law, to unsecured creditors, and the Supreme Court didn't do anything but a 24-hour stay.

I had hope for the Court. I had hoped that they would do the right thing, do the constitutional, the legal thing, and they sat by. Some say it was because they were privately scared by the administration, that if they put longer than a 24-hour stay on the auto bailout, the auto plan, that everybody in any way connected to the auto industry would lose their job, and it would all be the Supreme Court's fault.

So what did they do?

Nothing. They should be humiliated that they did nothing. Violation of the law, violation of the Constitution by unconstitutional takings of dealers, auto dealers, sounded like the bankruptcy court was used, weaponized a bit, as the IRS has been.

We had an auto task force with a czar. What a lovely name, coming from old Russian days of dictators. We had an auto task force czar and an auto task force.

At one time, I believe, as I recall, no one in the auto task force had ever been involved in auto manufacturing, the auto business, and as I recall, it may have been a majority of them, a big majority didn't even own cars.

Regardless of whether they did or didn't, though Congress, some here, asked for transcripts of the meetings, who decided what dealers would lose their dealerships, we were never provided any transcripts, and that should be to the embarrassment of Congress.

We should have demanded, we should have defunded White House activity until they came forward and produced what Federal money that Congress appropriated, had produced. What had they done? We have the power to do that. We should have.

The American people were owed answers, and especially, those car dealers who lost their dealerships.

Save the auto industry.

If we went back to the proposal that Isaacs and other economists made, it was rather interesting. You had a number of us in Congress that thought it was the best idea we had heard proposed; basically, that we knew there was at least $700 billion, now some say

clearly more than $1 trillion, owned by American citizens, American companies, that was earned in foreign countries and put in foreign banks.

Taxes were fully paid in those countries where it was earned, where it was banked, but they knew if they brought it into the United States that a greedy Federal Government was going to yank another 30, 40 percent, plus penalty and interest out of them, and they would lose most, much of the money, if not most of the money that they had earned and paid taxes on where it was earned. So the money was sitting on the sidelines in foreign countries.

So basically, the proposal was, instead of nationalizing, socializing, whatever you want to call it when the Federal Government buys private assets and becomes the boss of private industries, instead of doing that, basically, in essence, the proposal was, why don't we have Congress just say, if you bring that money, if you are an American citizen or an American company, and you bring money in a foreign bank that would otherwise never come into the United States, bring it in here and invest, whether it is in Wall Street, whatever Congress decided, or the President suggested was a troubled entity, if you will invest in that troubled industry, particularly the auto industry, then, obviously, you get ownership of stock.

You become a player in that corporation, and the government gets to stay as a referee, not as a player and coach and referee. We would stay as referee, and American citizens would bring their money in and bail out the auto industry. They would also own stock, which means they would change the directors, change the officers, in all probability, and you would get a change of direction in those companies.

If they needed to go through bankruptcy, they would go through legitimately, so that secured creditors remained secured, unsecured creditors were treated as unsecured creditors, contracts that were destroying the automobile industry could be renegotiated in bankruptcy, and we really would have saved the auto industry, far better than this clumsy effort that was done.

Now, I had a Fiat during the 4 years I was in the Army. But why couldn't we have an American manufacturer owned by Americans?

How embarrassing. That is what this administration pushed. Let's turn over, let's push an American auto industry into foreign hands.

Yeah, right. You saved an American auto industry, when, actually, under--we had Democrats in control of the House and Senate when the President took office, and he pretty much got anything he wanted.

I would submit, the auto industry would be a lot stronger today if commonsense solutions like those that former FDIC Chairman Isaacs proposed and other economists--and this economy would be much better on its way.

Then, instead of 12.6 million Americans climbing out of poverty, while another 13.5 million climbed into poverty, fell into poverty, because of this administration's policies, we should have been already on track.

I know this administration loves to brag about how oil and gas production are up, but it is no thanks to them. They have used again, weaponized the EPA, OSHA, Department of Justice, the Interior Department, they have become as big an impediment as they possibly could to the oil and gas industry in America.

What a lot of Americans don't understand, and frankly, I was a little surprised myself to find out that, in the Continental United States, 94 to 95 percent of the oil and gas wells are drilled or operated by independent oil and gas drillers, American companies.

So when the President, for the last 5 years, has talked about how he is going after Big Oil, if you look at his proposals, he wants to eliminate tax deductions, the elimination of which would bankrupt most independent oil and gas operators.

So what would that do?

The 94 to 95 percent of the oil and gas wells in America would either cease, or they would fall into the hands of the big, major oil companies that the President decries.

Well, isn't that strange?

You bash and bad mouth Big Oil, and yet, everything you propose and try to do seems like it is making them richer and getting rid of their competition.

We hear a President call Wall Street executives fat cats, and determined to do something about them, and yet, when you look at the real books and the real story, four out of five gave money to Democrats. About 80 percent of them, of Wall Street executives, donate to Democrats and the President over Republicans.

Well, that's strange. Why would he call them fat cats? I don't know.

Why have they gotten richer and richer and richer and expanded the gap between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor during this administration's last 5 years?

The distance, as this President has pointed out, has gotten worse. What he has failed to do is say, because of my proposals, the things I have pushed, the things I have done, the poor and the rich have grown further and further apart.

My rich friends, my rich donors have gotten richer than they might have ever dreamed, and we have had more people fall into poverty than were able to climb out.

That, 50 years after Johnson's speech.

If it weren't for the policies in this war on poverty declared 50 years ago, it may well be that I would not have ever run for Congress, because what got me thinking about it first, as a State district judge back in Texas, was seeing more and more young women, single women, coming before me, single moms, charged with welfare fraud under State law, a felony, so they came before me as a felony judge.

I heard the story over and over and over, how, as a young girl in high school, she was bored with high school, and someone suggested, well, why don't you just drop out of high school and have a baby? Then the government will send you a check, and they will send you a check for every baby you have out of wedlock.

Drop out, have a baby out of wedlock, get the check from the government, and the ones that came before me would normally explain, it wasn't enough. So I thought, well, maybe if I have another baby and get another check it will help me get out of the hole. But it didn't.

One woman had had 15 kids, didn't even know where they all were. That was the most that I ever dealt with.

It began to really eat away with me that, in the sixties, the Federal Government, desiring to help poor moms who were dealing with deadbeat dads that weren't helping, decided, we will help. We will give a check for every child you can have out of wedlock, when the statistics made clear then, and make clear now, and every point in between, that a young man or a young woman has a better chance of a financially successful life if they finish high school.

Normally, kids have a better chance of financial success if they finish college. That was until more recent days, and I am not sure what the statistics on that are now. We know that, clearly, people are better off if they learn to read, they finish high school, have a high school diploma, or at least a GED.

That is why, with most of the women, I didn't send any of those women to prison. I put them on probation. I would normally give them a tremendous amount of, I think it was about 800 hours you could give as community service, and then give 750 hours credit if they got a GED or got a high school diploma, because I knew that was better for society if they finished high school, and if it was better for them, it would be better for society, and they could be more successful.

After Republicans took over the Congress in the 1994 election, sworn in in 1995, one of the things they did was welfare reform, and they started requiring people to work who were on welfare.

And when I was a freshman at Harvard, we were given a presentation-- and I was shocked it was at Harvard--which showed that single moms' income since the war on poverty began, when adjusted for inflation from the mid-sixties until 1995, was flat-lined.

That incredibly expensive war on poverty didn't help single moms one iota in the long run. Oh, sure, it helped them buy groceries and things at the time, but look at what happened. They were lured into ruts from which many of them could not extricate themselves

successfully. But after there was a requirement for work that was put in after the Contract With America, it was a contract for America, the graph showed that over the last nearly 10 years, income for single moms had taken a sharp rise upward over that entire period.

And what happened when President Obama came in? He wanted to waive, and did waive, the work requirement. Could he do that? No, not legally. Did he do that? Yes, he did. Could he rewrite immigration law and say, We will legalize these folks meeting these requirements? No, not legally. Did he do it? Yes, he did. And what did Congress do about it? A bunch of us complained. But the Senate was going to protect the President no matter what he did is the way it appeared and the way it continues to appear.

So when the President brags about saving the auto industry, the auto industry would be a whole lot better off today if the bankruptcy had been done in accordance with bankruptcy law and the Constitution and dealers had not had dealerships jerked away from them. For heaven's sake, it is not like the dealerships were costing the manufacturers anything. Dealers have to pay for their own expenses. Yet he cost them royally.

And now we know, because so many people have gotten desperate and have just given up hope of getting employment, we actually have more people not working now than ever. So we have those who are listed as unemployed and those that just have given up hope, and they are not even counted in the unemployed anymore.

The war on poverty has been a disaster. The best thing for Americans is that they have a home that is a nuclear home, and there is at least one or two people in that home who have a job making money.

America has always been about greatness. Give us your tired, your poor--but not so we can put them on welfare and lure them into a hole they can never get out of. It was so that they could get a job and earn a decent living and raise a family; and, instead, we incentivized single homes. So that after the war on poverty began, we went from just over 6 percent--between 6 and 7 percent of all children being born to single moms--to now over 40 percent, continuing to head toward 50 percent.

Why do the children have to suffer for the ignorance and stupidity of the government and those who meant well but just did stupid things? It is tragic. It shouldn't have to be that way. We owe the people of America so much better. Nuclear family homes are a building block of this country that has made it successful; and by the grace of God, I hope and pray we can pass legislation that gets us back to strong homes and jobs and not more government giveaways.

And I keep wondering, Mr. Speaker, wouldn't it have been better in the sixties to say, you know what, we realize you are dealing with a dead beat dad. We know you would be better off with a high school education. So instead of giving you a check for every child you can have out of wedlock, how about if we give you some day care for that child so you finish high school and you are on the right track to getting a job. That would have made a difference for more Americans.

And with that, I yield back the balance of my time.