Floor Statements

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 1 o'clock and 39 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, September 16, 2013, at 2 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, this is a day of remembrance. It is a solemn day. It is a day that brings back tragic memories for all of us. And then, in some ways, it brings great hope.

We all remember where we were on 9/11/2001. And I know there are some that say, I just can't take seeing what happened that day; I don't want to see any more video. And I would only submit, it is important not to forget.

To fly planes into buildings, use them as bombs, is an act of war, just as dropping bombs in Pearl Harbor was an act of war. Even though there were no boots on the ground at Pearl Harbor, even though there were no boots on the ground in New York City or Washington, D.C., using bombs, whether planes or missiles are personally set, they're acts of war.

I wasn't aware until this past weekend that there's only been one time when article 5 of our NATO alliance has been triggered. That article of the NATO alliance is a mandatory requirement, and it requires that when any signatory to NATO, any member of NATO is attacked in an act of war, then all other members of NATO must take it as if they've been attacked in an act of war and go to war against whoever attacked one of the NATO members.

The only time that's been triggered was 9/11 of 2001 when the United States was attacked. Because of the treaty, it's not a voluntary act on behalf of the member states of NATO. It doesn't require the request of the attacked country.

But it had gone without my notice, but the countries that were part of NATO immediately, that day, 9/11/2001, were instantly at war with whatever country attacked us. The problem was we didn't know who attacked us; and, as a result, it did end up eventually causing other countries to go with us into Afghanistan and Iraq.

Actually, within about 4 months of going into Afghanistan, with less than 500 special ops and intelligence individuals, the Taliban was defeated. And then came our mistake, where we added tens of thousands of American troops and allied troops and we became occupiers instead of those that defeated the Taliban, and left the country back in the hands of those who should have had it.

But 9/11 should truly evoke the emotions that we had that day, as people were trapped 1,000 feet or so above the street surface and had to make a decision, do I want to burn up in a horrible burning death, or do I jump to my death?

I think most all of us resolved that day, including those of us who were not in Congress, that it should be our job, as a Nation, to ensure that Americans were never put to a choice like that again, ever.

Actions we knew had to be taken, and authorization of use of military force was passed. In the haste to get it passed to give the President authority to go forward, it had far too much flexibility. So we have been able successfully to rein some of that in in the past months. More work has to be done.

But in the Middle East, the question is coming up in the last few days from leaders over there who did not wish to be identified publicly, but the questions were asked:

Do the people in your government not understand that on 9/11 you had radical Islamists, Muslim Brotherhood people, al Qaeda, trained by the Taliban, but Muslim Brotherhood at the core, that attacked you?

And you went to war, you said, against al Qaeda, the Taliban, and that the Muslim Brotherhood supports them. And you're at war with them.

And then do you not remember that that's who you've been at war with?

And this administration, the Obama administration, has said they're not engaged in a war on terror. They're only at war with al Qaeda. And they mistakenly thought al Qaeda was on the run. Well, if they were on the run, it was a run toward killing more people.

And these leaders in the Middle East have asked: If you could remember that, then why did you come into Egypt and demand the ouster of your ally, with whom you had agreements, with whom you were working, with whom you were making sure, as best that you could, and the Egyptian leader Mubarak could, that he would try to maintain as much peace with Israel as possible?

So you had all these agreements with him, just like you do with us.

And then Qadhafi was a bad man. But after 2003, when you invaded Iraq, it scared him so badly that he became your ally. You had many agreements with him, he and family members, particularly family members. I remember meeting his son here, who said he was

meeting with people in the administration, was going around Capitol Hill meeting. I didn't have a meeting with him, other than just meeting him, someone introducing him. But this was Qadhafi's family here because after 2003, he had become our ally.

And as some in the Middle East have pointed out, he was doing everything he could to provide you information with who the terrorists were. He was your partner. You had agreements with him. You had signed agreements, verbal agreements. He was your partner, and you turned on him.

And even Assad, as bad a guy as most people knew he was and is, you had Secretary Clinton out there saying, oh, Assad's a reformer. He's going to be okay.

But we have watched you, with the Northern Alliance, with Mubarak, with Qadhafi, with all of these people who were your friends, your allies with whom you had agreements, and you tossed them aside and ran them out of office, only to give control to the Muslim Brotherhood.

We do not understand what you're doing; and privately we ask among ourselves here in the Middle East, Which one of us, your allies, will you turn against next?

Which one of us will you decide is a throwaway, you don't need us anymore?

We're concerned, but we don't want to tell people because we don't want them to take that as a sign they need to be coming after us and us be the ones they discard next.

That's no way to have an international policy. It's no way to be the greatest peacemaker in the world, when your allies worry because they've seen you completely disregard signed agreements, verbal agreements, pats on the back.

I mean, you know, when you see the videos of our great Secretary of State Kerry sitting with Assad, having lavish meals and meetings and then all of a sudden he's such a horrendous ogre that you've got to hurt him somehow.

And this stuff about America is the only one that can effectively hit Syria, so we have to be the ones. Why wouldn't it be someone who is in harm's way who actually could perhaps put boots on the ground, go in and destroy chemical weapons?

For heaven's sake, to see Vladimir Putin end up playing the high card, being the diplomat was incredible. It should have been the U.S. administration that said that we're going to do, actually, what George W. Bush did before the Iraq war. He tried every diplomatic approach he could. He went to the U.N. repeatedly. They got resolutions passed ordering Iraq to open up their weapons systems, ordering Iraq to do the right things, which they refused to do. The first reaction of the much- maligned George W. Bush administration was to go to the U.N., get agreements, get resolutions passed, and then enforce those resolutions.

So we've come to a sad day, now 12 years after 9/11 of 2001, where we're not the ones who proposed diplomacy before we come in and act like a bully in a country in which there was no national security interest, just as our Secretary of Defense Bob Gates said before the administration bombed Qadhafi, destroyed his air force, and made it possible for the rebels, including all the al Qaeda that were immersed within them, to take over Libya; and that ultimately led to a year ago, when our Ambassador, Sean Smith, Ty Woods, and Glen Doherty were killed and others wounded.

Bad decisions have consequences. Most everyone is familiar with the old adage that those who refuse to learn from history are destined to repeat it. The trouble is you cannot learn from history until you learn what the history was. So when some may be tempted to ask what difference it makes with what happened at Benghazi a year ago, it makes a difference in avoiding repeating history because we could not learn from history because the administration was hiding the truth.

I have come to meet and know surviving family members of those we lost in Benghazi. They feel like the blood of their loved ones should be enough to require truth. They would like to think if there was anything accomplished by the loss of their loved one, it could be that we could learn our lessons to be sure it didn't happen again.

Unfortunately, after two U.S. Embassies were attacked and people died in the late 1990s during the Clinton administration, the truth was not effectively and completely learned, and we didn't learn properly from those lessons. So we have to learn another lesson at Benghazi, which was a year ago today. But we can't learn a lesson when we don't know what the truth is.

And it scares our allies. They don't know if they can trust us. Members of Congress can be a big help in letting allies know that, hey, we appreciate the peace you're trying to bring. We appreciate what you're trying to do. Let us know if there's something we need to take up, hearings we need to have in Congress, an appropriation we need to get rid of because it's doing more harm than good. Let us know. It's a wonderful thing to have working relationships with people on the other side of the world that are in the hotspots.

I continue to communicate with Ty Woods' widow. Ty and Dorothy have a young son. She said he's got so much of Ty in him that he's more than a handful. Because that's an American hero. Ty and Glen were two men who heard that our people were under attack; and rather than go on planning for a campaign trip the next day or sitting down and having meals with others, casually going through conversations, whatever is done, that's not what these two former SEALs did. We knew there were two former Navy SEALs, but it's outrageous that when the names were released, this administration used the words ``they were killed while seeking cover.'' I didn't know Ty Woods and I didn't know Glen Doherty. I had never met them personally. I certainly have come to know them vicariously since. But I know enough SEALs, former and present, to know that those two former Navy SEALs did not die seeking cover. I knew it instantly when I read that. What an outrage.

When I was in the Army at Fort Benning, we were not at war. We should have gone to war with Iran over the attack, the act of war in 1979 against our Embassy. And I think if we had demanded their return within 48 hours or it would be the entire hell that America could bring to bear would come down on Iran if one hostage was harmed, and I always felt during those first few days when they kept saying the students had these hostages, that if we had had a backbone and made a demand and been willing to back it up, they would have released them. And if they had not and we had shown them we were not a paper tiger or a toothless tiger, that we would not have lost the thousands and thousands of Americans we have since. And it would not have been able to be used as a recruiting tool to recruit radical Islamists by telling them, look at what they did in Tehran. They fled Vietnam. The next incident is 1979. They did nothing. They were totally helpless, begging us to let their people go. That's all they would do.

There was a failed rescue attempt, which I would submit failed because of the leadership at the White House and the restraints that were put on them from the beginning. But there is a price when proper decisions are not made. And that weighs heavy on any President. I know it weighs heavy on President Obama. But, for heaven's sake, we have got to learn. It's been 12 years. A year ago, when it was just 11 years, our lessons had not been learned. And so more Americans die in Libya.

I know that people in this administration mean that they have love and respect and admiration for those who were killed in Benghazi; but I would humbly submit that love, respect, and admiration that leads to lies and coverups are not actually love, respect, and admiration. It is the lowest form of contempt. These heroes deserve better.

One of the greatest speeches I ever heard was by a man named Barack Obama. I heard the speech. It touched me deeply. We shouldn't be a red State or a blue State. We shouldn't be black or white. We should be Americans. And I want so desperately for this country to come together in that way, and I know it can happen, because I saw it happen on September 12, 2001.

I was a judge at the time, and I watched as hundreds of people came into our town square, as they did all over the country. America came together. There was no red America, blue America. There was not a single hyphenated America in this country on 9/

12. We all held hands, embraced, touched in some way, as we sang ``God Bless America'' and ``Amazing Grace'' and prayed together. And I looked around and my heart soared as I saw Americans--skin color didn't matter, creed didn't matter, national origin didn't matter, age didn't matter. We were Americans standing together. But you can't have trust, you can't stand together when you know someone next to you is not being truthful. They are being deceptive. They are covering up.

So it's heartbreaking that this article today from CBS Interactive, Inc., says:

One year after the September 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on

Americans in Benghazi, Libya, no arrests have been reported

but the Justice Department says investigators have made very

significant process.

On down, it says:

Last month, government officials confirmed that sealed

criminal charges have been filed against suspects. They're

said to include Ahmed Khattala, who gave interviews in

Benghazi with several news organizations, admitting he was at

the scene of the attacks but insisting he was not the

ringleader. Khattala also said nobody from the U.S.

Government had attempted to question him.

On further, it says:

The Obama administration continues to keep a great deal of

information under wraps, citing an ongoing investigation,

national security, and other reasons. The secrecy is an

ongoing point of contention with Republicans in Congress.

The article goes on to say:

Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to

Secretary of State John Kerry, demanding the Benghazi

survivors be made available for interviews with Congress or

else they may be subpoenaed. According to the letter, the

State Department told Congress on August 23 that it was not

prepared to support the request for transcribed interviews.

If that doesn't change within 2 weeks, Committee Chairman

Darrell Issa, Republican of California, said, I will have no

alternative but to consider the use of compulsory process.

The FBI, CIA, Director of National Intelligence, Defense

Department, State Department, National Security Agency, have

all rejected or failed to answer multiple Freedom of

Information requests made by CBS News, as well as appeals of

the denials. The agency cites exemptions related to ongoing

investigations of national security.

There's an article today by John Sexton from Breitbart, saying:

It's been nearly a year since the attack which killed four

Americans in Benghazi. During that time, various minute-by-

minute accounts of the attack have been published. In

addition, the administration's decisions to refuse additional

security requests and to revise its talking points after the

attack have been examined in detail.

Further down, it says:

The general outlines of the CIA effort have been reported.

One fact which has not been highlighted is that the U.N. arms

embargo of Libya, which the United States helped pass in

2011, makes shipping weapons in or out of the country of

Libya a violation of international law. Indeed, the way the

U.N. resolution is written, even knowingly allowing such

shipments to take place may be a violation of the agreement.

Yet we keep hearing that guns were being shipped from Libya, perhaps to Turkey, perhaps making their way to al Qaeda rebels. Because the rumor that keeps surfacing is that the Turks that we got weapons to are the ones that decided where the weapons would go. And those did not go to people who had any abiding love or even patience with Christians, as we have seen as Christians have been decapitated, killed, maimed in horrendous ways in Syria by those this administration would have been supporting had we bombed Assad. This is all tragic. We need to learn from history, but we've got to know the truth to do that.

I love Darrell Issa, but the quote should not be that if the information is not forthcoming, as he says, ``I will have no alternative but to consider the use of compulsory process.'' In the name of Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Ty Woods, and Glen Doherty, it should not be considered; it should be done. There should be a select committee to get to the truth. We should use all compulsory methods at our fingertips, including cutting off funding to any Federal agency that refuses to comply with proper oversight by Congress, because a Constitution that can be nullified by one of the three branches is a worthless Constitution. And if Congress cannot do meaningful oversight and examine what the money we are appropriating is going for, then that money should not continue to be appropriated to anyone who will not allow knowledge of how it's being spent and if it is being misused.

This has to stop. On 9/12/01, as a district judge in Texas, I was so heartened that on 9/12 we came together. On the congressional delegation trip last week in the Middle East, two Democrats I don't agree much with politically, but I got to know them a lot better, and I care deeply about them. They are very, very good people. We have the same desire for this country's freedom, liberty, peace, longevity of life--different ideas of how to get there.

I've been encouraged over the last week because of the way we can talk honestly, without impugning anyone's motives, and try to work toward answers. That's what I saw on 9/12, people wanting to work together. But I keep coming back to this fact that people in this administration need to understand, and our own Republican leadership needs to understand: we have got to get to the bottom of these matters; we have got to get the truth.

Jesus said, ``You will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.'' He was talking about a particular truth. But sometimes the truth comes out and it hurts the person that was seeking the truth or the people who were seeking the truth. And I would humbly submit, here it doesn't matter. We just need the truth.

One of the things that people around the world, as I've talked to people around the world, even going back to my summer in '73 of being an exchange student in the Soviet Union, people have admired the way the United States would expose the truth no matter how ugly it made it appear. People admired that.

Even in the Soviet Union, when they were not getting truth, privately--they couldn't say it publicly, but privately there were college students that pointed this out, We really do admire the way you bring out truth. And your own government's embarrassed, but somehow you manage to keep going on because you deal with truth.

One, in particular, said, I am concerned about my country because we don't get the truth.

Standing and looking at an exhibit in Moscow with a couple of Russian college students, I was amazed. One of them pointed to Gagarin. And I said, wow, Gagarin, the world's first man in space. There was an account that he had been killed during test piloting a jet in the Soviet Union. I was surprised that the two Russian college students would say, Yeah, we know that didn't happen.

I said, You don't believe what your government is telling you?

And he said, No, our government frequently does not tell us the truth.

Well, I didn't know if Gagarin was killed testing a jet plane or not, but I was struck by the fact that these Soviets, college students, knew that their government lied to them routinely. And they said, You seem to get to the truth in your country--it has taken a while with Watergate, but you seem to keep working toward the truth, and we don't do that here. We just have to accept what we're told.

I believe the expression was ``there's nothing to be done.''

Well, in America, there is something to be done. We have got to get to the truth. We owe it to the heroes that have given their last full measure of devotion for this country. We owe it to those who have put their lives on the line.

That means getting to the bottom of the rule of engagement for our military as well so that we don't have situations as we just read about this summer, a lieutenant--obviously very young--in charge of a roadblock at a security checkpoint. From the account--and I do want to do further investigation to get to the bottom of it--when waving, trying to get the attention of three people on motorcycles to slow down, to stop for the security--they were going fast, with no indication of slowing down--the lieutenant ordered shots be fired above their head. They didn't slow down. Knowing there had been people killed, Americans killed by so many green-on-blue attacks, knowing that his men were at risk if they had a bomb, he finally ordered his men to fire on the motorcycle riders; two died, one lived. That lieutenant is now reported to be doing 20 years in Leavenworth. That's just wrong. That's just wrong.

I've been in Afghanistan and talked to our soldiers there--soldiers, sailors, marines--and they tell me privately, Look, we have a hard time deciding, do I want to risk just letting someone kill me or going to prison when I get home? I kind of think I'd rather die as a hero and have an NAS burial than to be an embarrassment to my family by going to Leavenworth when I get back to the U.S.

We owe the 9/11 victims, the 9/11 survivors, the Benghazi victims, the Afghanistan soldiers, sailors, and marines that we have lost, we owe those who died in Afghanistan and Iraq, we owe them the truth. We owe them good rules of engagement so their lives are not needlessly put in jeopardy because of political gamesmanship.

We are owed the truth. And when Ambassador Chris Stevens' last words to his State Department colleague and friend, Greg Hicks, were, ``Greg, we're under attack,'' everything should have stopped. The personal, hand-picked representative of the United States President was under attack. Everything should have stopped. I really think if it had and this administration had done everything they could to get help to these people, this President would have won in a huge landslide because he stood up for people, our Americans who were in harm's way.

A year later, we don't even know what he was doing. We don't know what the Secretary of State was doing. We can't talk to the CIA agents, and they keep getting polygraphed every 30 days to make sure nobody's leaking any information to Congress because apparently that would be embarrassing.

I mentioned to some people earlier today about the doctrine of spoliation. It's a legal doctrine that applies in courts of law. And whether in a court of law or in the court of public opinion, credibility always matters.

We have seen, this week, a briefing by people who may well have gotten their talking points from the same person or persons who altered the talking points a year ago, falsified them, and handed them to what I believe was an innocent Susan Rice and sent her out to unknowingly be a dupe to spread things that weren't true about a video when it wasn't true at all. How do we know what we get in a classified briefing if we don't know who it was that made true intelligence into lying intelligence a year ago? We need to know so we know we can have more faith in what Susan Rice, John Kerry, Secretary Hagel, General Dempsey, in the things they're saying. Where did your information come from? Is it somebody that created some of the lies we got in the past or is this a totally truthful source? It matters. It matters.

It matters when we have Christian Navy SEALs killed in Afghanistan and American flag-draped coffins are mixed with Afghan flag-draped coffins. And an American chaplain is not even allowed to pray in Jesus' name, even though a chaplain may be a Christian and be taught that Jesus said, ``If you ask for it in my name, it will be given.'' Being prevented--as the First Amendment said the Federal Government should never do--from freely exercising his religious beliefs, and then compounding the problem by bringing an imam in Afghanistan to stand and give a Muslim prayer over our SEALs that includes basically the words that, in the name of Allah, the merciful forgiver, the companions of hell, where the sinners and infidels are fodder for hellfire, are not equal with the companions of Heaven. The Muslim companions of Heaven are always the winners. We let an imam speak in his language, say words that, when examined, appear to be gloating over the dead Navy SEALs that should have never been allowed to take off in that chopper, that should never have been allowed to stay on after the Afghans pulled out the Afghan soldiers on the manifest and put other Afghan soldiers on that apparently were disposable to them. It should have stopped there.

There were so many places it should have stopped. But we can't get all the answers about that, how it came about, why our best and brightest were put in harm's way. We can't really get to the truth as to why a good man--I've spoken with him personally, privately; I like him very much--Leon Panetta, why he would tell people who did not have security clearances that it was SEAL Team Six that took out Osama bin Laden; why Joe Biden, as Vice President, I know he meant no harm to our SEAL Team Six, but when he outs a SEAL team as the one that took out Osama bin Laden. And as one SEAL called his mother and said, Mom, you've got to get my name off all of our family stuff online; we've been outed. One parent said his daughter-in-law looked out the window right after Vice President Biden outed his SEAL team took out Osama bin Laden, the Marines had provided her a guard because they knew what it meant. It meant this administration had exposed our valiant fighting forces, our SEALs, to danger they should never have been in.

This is a day of remembrance, but if it is not used to get to the bottom of what happened a year ago and what has happened in the 12 intervening years since then, find out where we've made our mistakes so that we can correct them so that we do not have more Boston bombings or attempts like we had in Times Square--thank God for local police and people paying attention there. And thank goodness for a sweaty rear end of a bomber that was prepared to take out a plane and was attempting to do so on Christmas.

The Divine Providence, as our Founders and George Washington so often referred to as God's overseeing, will not protect us forever when we will not protect ourselves. God is good all the time. All the time God is good. But it's time to be better friends to our friends. It's time to stand up and be better enemies to our enemies. It's time that the blood of those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice was honored with the truth.

I hope and pray in the days ahead we will have the resolve, as Members of Congress across the aisle, to stand firm and say, Give us the truth. We don't care who is made to look bad, Republican or Democrat, let the chips fall where they may. The blood of our devoted, life-giving patriots cries out for truth. Let's finally get to it.

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

Thank you, my dear friend, Randy Forbes, for all that you do on behalf of religious freedom. I know it is not merely Christian freedom, but it is religious freedom, and it is under attack. When we look at what the Constitution says, I know it has already been read, but so often we forget the first word. We just blow right past the first word of the First Amendment, and that is that ``Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.''

Why was it that they singled out Congress, because they mentioned States in some of the other amendments. In the 10th Amendment, anything that is not prohibited to the States, that power is reserved to the States and the people.

So why is it that they singled out Congress? It is because this was intended for Congress and not for the States. Because the people that voted for these amendments knew that every one of the States had some laws that dealt with some aspect of Christianity, whether it was the oath that was required to be taken, or in some cases, a belief in Jesus Christ. There were all kinds of State and local university laws that had to do with religion, and that, if you wanted to be part of this, you had to believe this way.

It was supposed to be a restriction on Congress. We've gotten so far afield from that now we think that we are not allowed to even bring up a hymn here in Congress. Whereas, my friend Randy Forbes knows, and Trent Franks--you all know, right down the hall the man who coined the phrase ``separation of church and State,'' Thomas Jefferson, as President came to church every Sunday he was in Washington, and on some occasions he brought the Marine band to play the hymns. It was the biggest church in Washington for much of the 1800s right down the hall in what was the House Chamber back then.

Now look at what has happened. We see these incursions on the freedom of belief, and Christians are persecuted and forced to endure the slams and the arrows that should never be endured. Like SEAL Team 6, for example, those heroic members that were put in harm's way in a situation they should never have been put in in Afghanistan, after SEAL Team 6 was outed as the one that took out Osama bin Laden. You can see the DVD, a recording of the Ramp Ceremony. They have an imam come up in his language and do a Muslim prayer over the American flag-draped caskets, and we know some of those guys were devout Christians. He says a prayer that when you get the interpretation, basically it condemns them to hell, that they will never defeat the Muslims, the followers of Allah.

It turns out today we see persecution after persecution of Christians. When you look at the underpinnings of this Nation, it was Christians. About a third of the people that signed the Declaration of Independence were ordained Christian ministers.

If you look at what drove Lincoln, it was coming closer and closer to a walk with God. Some of the most powerful Christian messages ever delivered include the second inaugural address of Lincoln. Why? Because the Christian faith that he heard John Quincy Adams right down the hall talk about drove him to come back into politics and to get back involved to try to eliminate slavery. He knew that it was difficult for God to bless America when we were treating brothers and sisters by putting them in chains and bondage.

The next big step toward true Christian brotherhood and sisterhood in America came from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. What was he? He was an ordained Christian minister. And now within 50 years it has become only acceptable to persecute Christians. This administration and so many have taken a stand--yes, it is an outrage that poisonous gas was used by anyone in the Middle East, but you don't hear the administration or others talking enough, including us in Congress, about the persecution of Christians.

One article here says ``Syrian Rebels to Christians: Flee or Die,'' an article by Bob Unruh, who used to be with the AP. He talks about the report. Over and over Christians were told, you either denounce your Christianity or die, and we've done nothing about it. That was written in June.

We have an article September 9. The village of Maaloula has been taken over by Syrian rebels associated with al Qaeda, who have stormed the Christian center and offered local Christians a choice--conversion or death--as they screamed ``Allah Akbar.''

Well, there is too much persecution of Christianity. That was never supposed to be the case. That was what so many said would be the salvation of our little experiment in democracy. It is time to stand for freedom of religion, not freedom to persecute Christians from Washington.

I appreciate my friend very much for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, it's always such an honor to speak here on the floor. Some have said that you'll regret being in Congress. Well, it's where the fight for America is.

I appreciated so much the comments, as I sat here for some time listening to the former majority leader of the House, talking about the need for bipartisanship, the importance of bipartisanship, the importance of working together. The deepest regret I experienced in listening to that wonderful speech by my friend from Maryland was that I didn't have a transcript of that speech to read him every single week that the Democrats were in the majority here on this floor and every single time that they came forward with a closed rule allowing no amendments. In fact, each time that it came to the floor, the Democratic majority, during those 4 years between January of 2007 and January of 2011, it was the most closed Congress in the history of the country, with the least number of open rules, the least amount of bipartisanship. They rammed through the most destructive bill in American history in the last 100 years, that being the ObamaCare bill, without a single Republican vote. There was no bipartisanship.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the comments from my friend, the former majority leader. Gosh, I wish I could have read that back to him over and over during the 4 years they were in the majority. He has such a great sense of humor, Mr. Speaker. I know he would have laughed over and over as I read it to him. In fact, there was a time that the majority leader was coming down the aisle and we were about to vote on the card check bill, which was going to eliminate secret ballots for elections. The secret ballot would have been eliminated for elections to be a unionized group or not to be. I was kidding around with my friend from Maryland as he came by, and I said, Word here on the floor is that you're about to vote against your party and against the card check bill so that you're not going to be in agreement to eliminate secret ballots. He's so intelligent and has such a great sense of humor. He said, The odds of that happening are infinitesimal. I said, It's just that everybody here on the floor knows that before Nancy Pelosi became Speaker, she had promised John Murtha would be the majority leader. And if you hadn't had a secret ballot, John Murtha would have been the majority leader instead of you. He laughed. He has a great sense of humor.

So I'm sure if I were able to go back in time and read our former majority leader's comments today about the importance of bipartisanship, he would probably laugh as he did when he voted to end the secret ballot for union elections, even though the secret ballot is what got him elected as majority leader.

But are some amazing things going on. It was huge when this Congress did something a few weeks ago that people said couldn't be done and that was with regard to the agriculture bill and that was many years ago, the agriculture bill, which was quite small, comparatively, combined with the food stamp bill. And I wondered when I got here 8\1/ 2\ years ago why was food stamps part of the agriculture bill. It was explained to me that this is strictly for political purposes, because there are not enough farmers that have enough representation in Congress to ever get a farm bill passed by itself, and that there's enough people concerned about the waste in the food stamp program and the abuses in the food stamp program that it might have a hard time just passing on its own without having a lot of restructuring and efforts to clean up the waste, fraud, and abuse. So by putting them together, you combine enough votes from both sides of the aisle to get a farm bill with food stamps passed. But if you separate them, you won't pass either one, at least not in that current form.

So it was really historic what was done and why a number of us voted for the agriculture bill without the food stamps attached. But we kept making it very clear, we're not out to end the food stamp program. We know there are people who need food help and we want to help them, so we are not for taking food out of the mouths of children that can't feed themselves, even though we were continually told that by people on the other side of the aisle. It broke my heart because I had a bunch of good friends, even though they're at one end of the political spectrum and I'm at the other, but they'd come to the floor and say something that they surely, surely, I hope they didn't mean. But they did say it, that Republicans are trying to take food out of the mouths of children. Well, that was rather tragic of them to say that since that was simply not true. And the heartbreak of having friends come down and make allegations that absolutely, unequivocally were not true came rushing back as I heard our former majority leader say that we were trying to eliminate food to the hungry when we made the point over and over.

I know it is tough being in the leadership of either party. You're constantly doing stuff. He probably didn't hear where we said over and over, We're not eliminating the food stamp program; we're separating it from the ag bill, that's all. So I will make sure that our friend understands and gets the message. We actually were not out to eliminate the food stamp program, but we sure do need to clean it up.

I took grief for just telling of a constituent that had mentioned that he was standing in line at the grocery store behind somebody who had crab legs, and he was wishing he could afford to have crab legs and he was looking at his ground meat. Anyway, then when that person in front of him got ready to pay for the crab legs, he pulled out a food stamp card.

I forget which Washington rag it was, but one of them--and it may not have been a Washington rag. But the left wing went nuts talking about how I am accusing people of squandering precious food stamp money on crab legs

when that was not the case at all. Then right after that, one of the Washington papers did have a front page story, and in part of that story was a picture out here where seafood is sold, a massive amount of crabs for sale with a big red sign saying, ``Food stamp cards welcome.''

Breitbart, I've got so many great friends there, brilliant people, and even though they're really brilliant, they like me okay. They ran with the story about how the left wing made a big deal out of it, and all they had to do was go to a seafood place.

Anyway, I also saw a picture that was not in the paper, massive crab legs, and there was that red sign that they take food stamps. So, obviously, it would seem that the left wing blogs, in their attempt to smear me, actually exposed, once again, their ignorance.

So there are a lot of things that need to be fixed up. We want to help people that need food that can't provide for themselves. But if they can work, it is a good thing to push people to reach their God- given potential.

The problem with that, especially for African Americans--and I think they're the worst hit group in all of America with regard to unemployment. This President's policies have absolutely devastated African American communities in this country with a massive, high unemployment rate. And so I sure hope that we can change things because the unemployed of whatever race, creed, color, gender, they deserve an opportunity. They deserve a chance at pursuing happiness. But these policies of this administration are making that increasingly difficult.

That's why it really focused people's attention recently when the President came out in full support and actually made it happen and said: You know what, I am just going to speak into being new law and cancel old law. I've said before, some of the things that this administration, this President have done are so unconstitutional. One of the things that ought to end up resulting is a massive class action by all of the people who took his constitutional law course to want their money back, because for any President to say I rammed through ObamaCare without a single Republican vote, we didn't get any input from those people, we didn't want it. But you know what, it is such a disaster, and I'm hearing from people that I've called fat cats before, big business folks, they're saying it's going to devastate their businesses. So tell you what, I am going to postpone for a year the big business requirement, big business being anything over 50 employees, I'm going to postpone their requirements to follow the law, just choose not to enforce the law so they can get away with not following it for a year.

Well, I have listened to some of the President's incredible, amazing eloquence, some right here from this second podium here, expressing concerns for Americans, but especially the poor and downtrodden. Now to me, somebody that's making $11,000 has got it tough. It's tough to live on $11,000 right now, but that's considered the poverty rate. It's right about $11,000. So under the ObamaCare bill that was shoved through the House and Senate, unconstitutionally because it included a tax and raised revenue that did not originate in the House, and hopefully we'll get the Supreme Court's action on that and they'll do the right thing unless somebody knows something about Chief Justice Roberts that I don't. Anyway, it didn't originate in the House. I think we should ultimately get it struck down for that reason. They took a bill from the House, deleted every single word and substituted therein about 2,500 pages is what my copy was, for a tax credit for first time home buyers who were veterans or in the military. So, obviously, it was not germane, and hopefully the Supreme Court will still do the right thing and strike it down.

But in the meantime, people are having to make preparation to live under it. That includes Congress. Except for the leaders and the committee staff members, all of us in Congress are going to be forced into the ObamaCare exchanges come January.

So I've heard the President's speeches about caring so deeply about the middle class, and our former majority leader was talking about the middle class and what we need to do for them. But here again, I keep coming back to ObamaCare. I was shocked when I read in the ObamaCare bill that if you cannot afford to buy the minimum health care mandated by the Federal Government in ObamaCare, then you're initially going to have a 1 percent income tax, but then it is going to go to 2.5 by 2016. I thought, that's crazy. My friends across the aisle, President Obama, they're always talking about how they care so deeply about those who are struggling and doing everything they can to get by. It just is shocking to come to realize they have no clue about the suffering that somebody making $14,000 is going to have thrust on them by ObamaCare when they can't--if they're only making $14,000, it is unlikely their employer is going to be able to pay $7,000 for an insurance policy, so they will be on their own.

We have heard over and over that employers are trying to get down below 50 employees. I know a restaurant back in Tyler, my hometown, they indicated they are going to sell off a couple of their restaurants to get under 50 because they can't afford to meet the mandate. So a lot of people are losing their insurance, despite the President's assurance you wouldn't. That's happening all over the place.

And it is happening, ironically--and this is kind of rich. It really is rich, and I hope America can see the humor. So many of our friends across of the aisle said over and over at these microphones, If you like your insurance, you can keep it. And then they passed a bill without a single Republican vote that says all those people that said that, you can keep your insurance, they're not keeping, not one of them is going to keep their insurance. So it's kind of rich. It's a little humorous if you like sick irony. All these speeches about if you like your insurance--they're just quoting the President--you can keep it, turns out they're all wrong and every Member of Congress is going to lose their insurance come January 1, unless they retire before January 1, then they actually can keep their insurance.

And then we find out today that actually there is an issue because the way ObamaCare was addressed, it did prevent the leaders of both parties, as I read it, and committee staffs from having to be under ObamaCare. So the leaders, they're protected. They don't have to be under ObamaCare, and the committee staffs won't have to. But all the rest of us, all the rest of the Members of Congress, the rank and file, we'll be under it.

And now we find out there is a huge ambiguity because it doesn't say whether or not the Federal Government can continue to pay the 72 percent of the health care costs, the health insurance costs for Members of Congress. Right now Members of Congress, we are on Social Security, despite what the email that has been going around for 20 years says. We pay Social Security tax. Despite all this stuff about a golden parachute and you can retire and get every dime you make, I think that changed during Ronald Reagan's time as President. So you don't have a golden parachute. I think most Members have a 401(k)-type thing where the government will match up to 5 or 6 percent of what you put in, but it is the same retirement program that every single Federal worker across America has.

People forget that Newt Gingrich--and I appreciate my friend from Maryland bringing up Newt Gingrich. He's an amazing guy. He is a big idea guy, and I like the way he thinks. We don't agree on all his big ideas, and he doesn't agree with all of my big ideas, but he comes up with some good ideas. In the Contract With America, one of the big ideas that was immensely popular, way over 70 percent popular, was that Members of Congress ought to live under the same laws that everybody else in America does. And that passed. That was part of the contract, and they lived up to it. It became law, and so Members of Congress have to live under the same laws as everybody else does.

That's why, after I've been cooking ribs to share in a bipartisan manner--and not many days go by when I don't have somebody on either side of the aisle ask, Louie, when are we going to get ribs again? Well, the Architect of the Capitol found out. I thought he was a little overzealous, but he feels like I violate some of the codes that everybody else in America has to live under,

and so I can't cook ribs. We've had all kinds of things. The media wanted to come do something on me cooking ribs. President Bush liked my ribs.

People on both sides of the aisle do. They may not vote for anything I'm for, but they love my ribs. And it was a nice time.

But the reason I can't cook ribs anymore is because we're living under the same laws as everybody else did. And apparently there's a law that said you can't have a fire within 10 feet of wood in a building structure, so they shut me down. We're living under the same law as everybody else is.

And then it comes to ObamaCare, and the decision by the--and it wasn't by Congress. I was grilling our Republican leaders just earlier about exactly what's happening.

The Office of Personnel Management, under the Obama administration, has decided that the Federal Government will go ahead and, come January, we won't keep our same insurance. I've got a health savings account. They made sure I'm not going to get to keep my insurance, and we can't figure out what happens to the HSA.

I'd like to drop ObamaCare insurance and just put money into a health savings account. But they've even screwed us over with ObamaCare to prevent that kind of thing from happening.

So, anyway, it looks like the decision by the Obama administration will be that Members of Congress will have 72 percent of our health insurance paid by the taxpayers, and what we have to borrow from China, of course, or other places.

Well, that's nice, but if America is not playing under those same rules, it doesn't seem fair for us. And I'm hopeful, when we get back, maybe we can get a bipartisan bill through that just says everybody in America can opt out of ObamaCare and not pay a fine, not pay a tax or whatever you want to call it, and provide what they feel like is appropriate. But it all ought to be fair across the board.

And now, the issue has gotten rather large since we find out the IRS truly has been targeting, after 2010, when the President said, you know, how much they wanted to stop the Tea Party; he felt they were a threat to America. They were a blessing to America. They were a threat to an oppressive government, because everybody I've run into, I've talked to people of all kinds of national origins, all races, from both genders, I mean, all kinds of folks at Tea Party events. And the only thing I can find they have in common: they're all paying income tax. They're all paying income tax.

And the President felt like this group needed to be gone after, and he made comments to that effect. And somebody, and we need to find out whom, was the top person in the administration, but it appears it at least goes back to the President's own hand-picked council, as far as who knew, who participated.

And of course there's been a denial, just like there was during Watergate, but we'll see what the truth is, even though there's a lot of obfuscation in the process.

But with regard to the IRS, the thing's very clear: we should not have the IRS involved in our health care at all, ever. And yet they are a central part of ObamaCare.

And then we find out this week, reading the story, it's changed some, but basically, a couple were wondering why law enforcement showed up at their home, when they had just looked online for a pressure cooker and a back pack. Turns out, apparently, at work one of them had looked at something else. They were no threat to anybody.

But the question keeps arising, wait a minute; who's monitoring every Web site that every American goes to?

Well, must be the NSA, apparently. But I did attend a classified briefing, so I can't go into anything there.

But it appeared, before the briefing, very clear to me, and I still feel this way, that when you blind yourself as to who the enemy is, as we have, purging all kinds of material from our FBI training material, State Department, intelligence material, as to who radical Islamists really are and what they actually believe, you blind our law enforcement, our security people, from the ability to see our enemy, we're not protected.

And then when you have an open border where people are coming across at will, and Border Patrolmen have told us three to five times faster than they ever have since we started talking about just handing out legal status, anybody that happened to be here by a certain date, all this talk about amnesty, citizenship, all these other things being talked, do they get benefits, not get benefits, all this talk has increased the number of people coming in by about three to five times.

The border's not secure. When you don't control what kind of terrorists may be coming into your country, and you don't train your law enforcement, your terrorist-discerning folks who it is that are the terrorists, and you keep pulling back our ability to see who our enemy really is, then it appears the solution is to have the Federal Government more intrusive than any of us ever dreamed it would be.

And then, you couple that with what we found out yesterday, and this article's dated August 1, 2013, and it's titled ``Exclusive: Dozens of CIA Operatives on the Ground During Benghazi Attack.'' And in part it points out CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency's Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out:

Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency's

mission in Libya have been subjected to frequent, even

monthly polygraph examinations, according to a source with

deep inside knowledge of the agency's workings. The goal of

the questioning, according to sources, is to find out if

anyone is talking to the media or to Congress.

It is being described as pure intimidation, with the threat

that any unauthorized CIA employee who leaks information

could face the end of his or her career.

In an exclusive communications obtained by CNN, one insider

writes, ``You don't jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your

family as well.''

Another says, ``You have no idea the amount of pressure

being brought to bear on anyone with knowledge of this

operation.''

Agency employees typically are polygraphed every 3 or 4

years, never more than that,'' said former CIA operative

and CNN analyst Robert Baer. In other words, the rate of

the kind of polygraphs alleged by sources is rare.

So says the CNN article.

``If somebody is being polygraphed every month or every 2 months, it's called an issue polygraph, and that means the polygraph division suspects something, or they're looking for something, or they're on a fishing expedition, but it's absolutely not routine at all to be polygraphed monthly or bimonthly,'' said Baer.

A source now tells CNN that the number, talking about the number of people at Benghazi mission, was 35, with as many as seven wounded, some seriously. While it is still not known how many of them were CIA, a source tells CNN that 21 Americans were working in the building known as the annex, believed to be run by the agency, talking about the CIA.

He goes down, and he talks about Congressman Frank Wolf, a dear friend. He says, Wolf has repeatedly gone to the House floor asking for a select committee to be set up, a Watergate-style probe involving several Intelligence Committee investigators assigned to get to the bottom of the failures that took place in Benghazi, and find out just what the State Department and CIA were doing there.

More than 150 fellow Republican Members of Congress have signed his request. And just this week, eight Republicans sent a letter to the new head of the FBI, James Comey, asking that he brief Congress within 30 days.

In the aftermath of the attack, Wolf said he was contacted by people closely tied with the CIA operatives and contractors who wanted to talk. Then suddenly, there was silence. And I can verify that problem as well from some of the people that were going to talk to me and then all of a sudden they went silent and said, no, I'm not going to talk.

``Initially they were not afraid to come forward. They wanted the opportunity, and they wanted to be subpoenaed, because if you're subpoenaed it sort of protects you. You're forced to come before Congress. That's all changed,'' said Wolf.

Speculation on Capitol Hill has included the possibility that U.S. agencies operating in Benghazi were secretly helping to move surface- to-air-

missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of the Syrians rebels. It's clear that two U.S. agencies were operating in Benghazi. One was the State Department. The other was the CIA.

The State Department told CNN in an email that it was only helping the new Libyan government destroy weapons deemed ``damaged, aged, or too unsafe to retain,'' and that it was not involved in any transfer of weapons to other countries.

But the State Department also clearly told CNN they ``can't speak for any other agencies.'' And the CIA would not comment on whether it was involved in the transfer of weapons or not.

So perhaps that was going on, but we still have got to get to the bottom of why four great, heroic Americans were allowed to be killed, were put in a situation like that.

What difference does it make at this point?

It makes a difference at this point, or a year from now, or 2 years from now, or 3\1/2\ years from now because people need to understand, they need to understand clearly.

When somebody's life is taken, normally, if a criminal law is involved, the statute of limitations are a lot longer. And Eric Holder, I can assure you, will not be Attorney General for the next 4 years. Three and one-half years from now we'll have a new administration. And we will hopefully get to the bottom of these scandals.

And they're not phony. We know that because the President has assured us, back when they first arose, he was going to get to the bottom of it. And unlike what one of the family members of those killed at Benghazi told me, there, at the ceremony, Secretary Clinton said we're going to get the guy that did the video. And all they wanted was to get justice from those who caused the death of their loved one.

We owe that to them, Mr. Speaker.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Senate Concurrent Resolution 22, 113th Congress, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 2 o'clock and 57 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until Monday, September 9, 2013, at 2 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, it is an honor and a privilege to be here to speak.

At this time, I yield to my friend from Kentucky (Mr. Whitfield).

I thank my friend from Kentucky. I just had seen an article that's really an exclamation point, really, of what the gentleman was saying. The headline is:

Two Americans Added to Food Stamp Rolls for Every Job the

Administration Says It Created.

I mean, how tragic. What an exclamation point on those facts that were laid out by my friend, Mr. Whitfield. Thank you.

There's news being reported today that Attorney General Eric Holder has announced the opening of a new front in the battle for voting rights--at least so he says, his brand--which is rather ironic because this administration, and particularly the Attorney General, the Department of Justice, had talked about, in essence, how the Supreme Court had eviscerated the Voting Rights Act and just rendered it basically nothing by its terrible decision. Yet if you look at the words of the Supreme Court in that decision, the Supreme Court points out that the factual data does not bear out the attacks by this administration continuing on the States that had done wrong, if you will, sinned back 50 years ago.

There was racial discrimination in this country at the time of the Voting Rights Act, and there is racial discrimination today; but it has moved. The Voting Rights Act has accomplished a great deal in our efforts to move toward equality of opportunity around the country. And so it has accomplished something that is very good and very important to the country.

But, amazingly, when the Voting Rights Act was extended--with support from people on both sides of the aisle--they decided that, gee, since some of us have districts where there is now racial discrimination, even though at least six of the States that were originally gone after in the South by the Department of Justice, they had better racial equality in voting than the average for the entire country.

Yet this administration decided our goal is to punish those States that did not vote for this President--we're going after these States; we're going to continue to punish them; we're going to continue to be punitive to them. We're going to ignore areas like Massachusetts, where there's now more racial disparity than in at least six of the States-- maybe all of them--in the South. But as I understood it, Massachusetts, unfortunately, has moved into the arena of being a State that has significant--most significant racial disparity. And yet the Voting Rights Act did nothing to address those areas of the country where over the last 50 years discrimination has grown, it's raised its ugly head.

Yet this administration said, no, we're too busy punishing States who corrected their problems and are doing so much better than the rest of the country. Why? Because we can. Actually, that is the reason the Voting Rights Act was extended without the Gohmert amendment that would have made sure that the Voting Rights Act applied across the country in any area where there was racial discrimination. But in a bipartisan manner, a majority forced the extension for 25 more years, which would mean--now, I don't even recall who all was in office back then. I was a little kid. I didn't know who was discriminating and who wasn't. I had no part in it. And people who had no part of the discrimination that was going on back then--the discrimination that needed to be addressed, the discrimination that needed to be corrected--for some reason, have people in a majority of places that voted to extend it, keep punishing areas that are no longer committing wrongs, no longer sinning.

We want to keep punishing them because if we open it up and apply these

same punitive things across the country and come up with a new formula, gee, we're not going to be able to keep punishing these areas for their sins of 50, 60 years ago. We may have to punish our own States because racial disparity has grown there.

So the Supreme Court did the proper thing--legally, fairly. Now we see this administration saying, oh, it turns out we can use the Voting Rights Act to continue to punish Texas. Why? Because we can; because we want to. So they're coming after Texas, as announced today, again.

At some point, I hope we get to the place that the President spoke of when he spoke at the Democratic Convention so eloquently, talking about there's not a red America and a blue America, we're just Americans. I loved that speech. I thought it was fantastic. It caused me to rise up and take notice, wow, this guy is saying the things I believe in. He's so right. And yet his policies have been diametrically opposed. They have racially divided us; continuing to go after political enemies; continuing to have this administration's Internal Revenue Service weaponized in a way that Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson could never have even dreamed they could have done.

So, hopefully, the court to which the administration has gone in Texas will do the right thing and say, you know, Mr. Attorney General, we remember your comments about how you don't have the power really to do this anymore since the Supreme Court struck section 4 down. And so either we believe what you're saying now, or we believe what you said out there after the Supreme Court decision. And that becomes a real problem when you have an Attorney General that says different things to different people, because the highest law enforcement officer in the country needs to be trusted. He needs to have respect and adherence for and to the law.

We have an Attorney General that's been held in contempt. He's been in contempt of Congress; he's been in contempt of the law; he's been in contempt of the actual facts--repeatedly. We need a different Attorney General.

I asked President Bush to appoint a new Attorney General when there was a scandal over national security letters. I thought it was the appropriate thing to do. When someone's credibility is hurt, even if they didn't even know what was going on, it's time to have new leadership and change what's going on. And we got a new Attorney General.

Yet I'm amazed at how my friends on the other side of the aisle keep clinging, as does the President, to an Attorney General who is in contempt of Congress, contempt of the law, and in contempt of facts; an Attorney General who would have the nerve to testify that he's never even heard of anyone attempting to prosecute a reporter, when he knew as he said it he had okayed and given his blessing to the persecution of James Rosen with Fox News. So he either lied to the Congress in his testimony, or he was a part of a fraud upon the court.

Because the allegations in the affidavit and the application for a warrant before the court going after James Rosen claimed he had violated the law, set out the law he had violated, that he was a flight risk, that he was a risk to destroy evidence; so either he believed the things that he approved, which means he lied to Congress, or he spoke truthfully to Congress and committed a fraud upon the court. Either way, we need the highest law enforcement officer in the land to have more credibility than that, and yet here he is doing the same thing, saying one thing one place, claiming another in another place.

It is so critical that we be able to trust our government, which brings us back to the issue of NSA spying.

Now, I was a freshman in 2005-2006 in the 109th Congress. I was on the Judiciary Committee, and we had some very rancorous debate between our own party behind closed doors, out in the committee room, here on the floor, over the PATRIOT Act, over the extension of power over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts. I was very concerned, even though we had a Republican administration and a President that I liked and respected, George W. Bush, smarter and wittier than people gave him credit for, a good, decent man.

But we have to consider the possibilities and we have to be specific in our laws. When we debated these changes before the Judiciary Committee back in the 109th Congress when I was a freshman, there were people, my Democratic friends across the other side of the aisle, that were very concerned about an abuse of power that might be occasioned if we don't tighten up the PATRIOT Act.

I am just anal enough, I read the bill as it existed. I read the law as it existed. I was pushing for some things to be changed, and it did cause me some concern that the title of what basically is section 215 of the PATRIOT Act as it was at that time before amended:

Access to records and other items under the Foreign

Intelligence Surveillance Act.

As amended, it would read:

Access to certain business records for foreign intelligence

and international terrorism investigations.

So I knew those were the titles, so it really applied to foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations.

My Democratic friends across the aisle that we would often consider way left had serious concerns. I understood their concerns, but I thought they were being way too fearful of government because the law, we could make it specific enough that it would not be abused by a Republican or Democratic administration.

As I read through, having been a judge and a chief justice and had to consider from a legal standpoint what do these words mean? what does this word mean? can this be considered vague, ambiguous? is this considered arbitrary and capricious? is there room for misunderstanding? I actually had some concerns behind closed doors. I was asking people from the Bush administration, Justice Department, I'm a little uncomfortable about this; what does this mean?

One of the things I asked about was, in the reference to the proposal for the amendment, it says, ``the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of the Director (whose rank shall be no lower than Assistant Special Agent in Charge) may make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person''--well, I was comfortable with that language. That seemed to protect U.S. citizens pretty well.

And then there's this disjunctive preposition ``or,'' this disjunctive ``or.'' Okay. Well, it can be that or it can be this.

The other aspect was ``to protect against international terrorism.'' Well, I felt like at the time I was okay if we are really seriously to protect ourselves from international terrorism. Again, that doesn't involve an American citizen unless you can establish with probable cause that an American citizen is involved in international terrorism.

And then we get a second disjunctive ``or''--``or clandestine intelligence activities.''

And I raised the issues behind closed doors in our Republican meetings and when we met with justice officials: I'm uncomfortable with this because it doesn't say ``international'' in that part. You have the disjunctive ``or,'' but you left out ``international'' there. I would really be more comfortable if it said, ``to protect against international terrorism or clandestine international intelligence activities.''

I was told: Congressman, we know you're a judge and you get caught up in words sometimes, but look at the title of the article. The article says, ``Access to certain business records for foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations.'' So you shouldn't have to be concerned. This is only about intelligence. It's only about foreign contacts.

And we were assured repeatedly behind closed doors and in debate that this amendment to the PATRIOT Act would make it more difficult for an administration to abuse it--Republican or Democrat. I was still a little uneasy, and I know that when there is a disparity between language within a law and the title of the law, the language within the law itself takes priority

over the title, I know that, but it was somewhat comforting.

If you read on down--this was as we were trying to amend it and as the Justice Department under President Bush was pushing--it says, ``An investigation conducted under this section shall,'' and then it has, ``(A) be conducted under guidelines . . . (B) not''--and there's an ``and,'' so this is important; you can't go without (B)--``and (B) not be conducted of a United States person solely upon the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.''

There were some concerns during this debate over amending section 215 of the PATRIOT Act back in the 109th Congress that we don't want the administration gathering intel about someone if it is all having to do with their activity that is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

So, for example, if someone were burning a United States flag or burning a Holy Bible, the Supreme Court tells us those are protected activities protected by the First Amendment, and therefore you could not use those to go gather intelligence data about an American who was doing those things.

Now, of course, we have the U.N. and former Secretary Clinton and President Obama and others saying, We like what the U.N. is saying.

Basically, if we adopted what the U.N. said, it would still be true, our Supreme Court would allow you to burn a Bible and a flag, but you could never, ever do anything like that to a Koran, which then would allow our radical Islamist friends who want an international caliphate to check the box that they created and was discovered during a raid some years back, that one of their 10-year goals was to subjugate the United States Constitution to shari'a law; and as soon as we adopt a law that says you can destroy a Bible and a flag but not a Koran, they can check that box. But under the proposed amendment in 2005 to the PATRIOT Act, or the official title under title 50, War and National Defense, chapter 36, ``Foreign Intelligence Surveillance''; chapter IV, section 1861, so paragraph (3) after (2), that says, ``An investigation conducted under this section shall . . . (B) not be conducted of a United States person solely upon the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment''--we get to paragraph (3). And this was an issue that was very contentious. There were groups boycotting and demonstrating and saying, Hey, this is all about library books, we don't want the Bush administration being able to go in and get a list of books we've read.

Well, I contended then and still contend now that to do such a thing of an American citizen you should have to have probable cause that an American citizen has violated the law and get a warrant to do that. But this didn't require a warrant. This is allowed under the PATRIOT Act if it was for foreign intelligence purposes and for international terrorism investigations, according to the title. But unfortunately, in the law itself, it said, ``or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine terrorism activities.''

And I told people at the time: I'm a little uncomfortable with that, because ``clandestine intelligence activities,'' what is that? What if it's just somebody going somewhere asking questions, not doing it in public but going privately to individuals and saying, ``I'm really concerned about what the administration is doing on this or that; what do you know about what this administration is doing? What have they done to you?'' Would that be considered as somebody doing clandestine or private intelligence activities?

I was told: You're being paranoid here, Gohmert. Look at the title again. It's ``international terrorism.'' It's ``foreign intelligence.'' This is not about American citizens. Look at the overall context.

But those words hanging out there after a disjunctive ``or,'' it was a little uneasing. But I had enough people in the Justice Department, on my committee, with the administration at that time that said: No, gosh, no. You're looking for things where there aren't any. This is not an issue.

But this paragraph (3), ``In the case of an application for an order requiring the production of library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, book customer lists, firearms sales records, tax return records, educational records, or medical records containing information that would identify a person''--wow, that's kind of scary when you consider that entire list of things that the Justice Department might be going after.

But it says, ``the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation may delegate the authority to make such application to either the Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Executive Assistant Director for National Security. The Deputy Director or the Executive Assistant Director may not further delegate such authority.''

So they wanted to assure us that only people that were looking at foreign intelligence and foreign terrorism who had the big picture, not some low-level rogue agent, would be pursuing anything like this, and we were told repeatedly: But it's all tied to foreign terrorism.

Mr. Speaker, so much is happening in the world today, so much that is really earthshaking in its potential effect.

In the Middle East, I've spoken before about the potential rise of a new Ottoman Empire that, unfortunately, our own country, this Obama administration, has helped jump-start.

In Egypt, we supposedly had a friend. There were comments to direct attention to. Back on June 2, the BBC reported an interview in 2009 where during the interview the President was asked:

Do you regard President Mubarak as an authoritarian ruler?

President Obama said, in part:

He has been a stalwart ally in many respects, to the United

States. He has sustained peace with Israel, which is a very

difficult thing to do in that region. But he has never

resorted to, you know, unnecessary demagoguing of the issue,

and has tried to maintain that relationship. So I think he

has been a force for stability and good in the region.

He points out, obviously there have been criticisms, but he saw him as a force for good in the region.

That's rather amazing when you look at what happened--we recall it was an

Arab Spring, that we've later since realized was more of a nightmare winter. Certainly, the people of Egypt did not see it as a ``spring'' after President Morsi got around 13 million votes from the potential, as I understand, 50 million or more that could have voted. And he took over; and he began creating problems; and he became dictatorial; and he started violating his own constitution and taking actions that only a monarch or a tyrant should be taking.

But going back to the disposition and deposal of Mubarak in Egypt, it creates problems for a country when their leader on one occasion says, as the President did:

He has been a stalwart ally in many respects, to the United

States. He has sustained peace with Israel, which is a very

difficult thing to do in the region. But he has never

resorted to, you know, unnecessary demagoguing of the issue,

and has tried to maintain the relationship. So I think he has

been a force for stability and good in the region.

What kind of message does it send to the world from what has been referred to as the remaining superpower in the world when its leader says to the world, this man has been a force for stability and for good, and then, not so long later, the same U.S. leader says he's got to go? He's got to go. He just needs to be done.

Well, if he was a force for stability and good, if you were accurate in those comments, then one would think to get rid of him would bring about instability and bad--to use the antonyms. But push, cajole, make efforts to force Mubarak to leave, we did. And as the President said, you know, he had been an ally.

That doesn't look very good when other nations start trying to determine how should we deal with the United States.

In one of my trips overseas meeting with foreign diplomats, I was told that diplomats from China regularly stop by and ask, Have you learned that you cannot trust the United States yet? Because one of these days you are going to figure that out; you can't trust the United States. They'll say they're your friend one day and then turn around and be your enemy soon after. One of these days you're going to figure out the United States can't be trusted, they're not your friend, and we're ready to be your friend whenever that happens. Just let us know. We're always ready to be your friend. You can trust us.

Well, I'm not so sure about that, but I am concerned about the U.S. lack of credibility. So Mubarak was ousted and the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt. The people of Egypt, on the whole, very good, decent people. The moderate Muslims that reside there didn't want Muslim Brotherhood, didn't want tyrants, but enough people didn't come out early on.

The Muslim Brotherhood had the best organization, and anybody with any intelligence in the region or anybody that watched news other than CNN could figure that out, that the Muslim Brotherhood was going to take over, but they were not what the rank-and-file people really wanted. That became clear when the rank-and-file people saw Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood member who actually technically said he was withdrawing since he was leader of Egypt. But his comments, so disparaging and slanderous of Israelis and Jews, and certainly uncomplimentary of Americans, did not make him someone that the United States should endorse so wholeheartedly.

In Libya, though Secretary Gates, Secretary of Defense, said we have no national interest in Libya at all, we had a President that decided unilaterally--at least, unilaterally in this country. He did have the support of the 57 States that comprise the organization Islamic Council and he had support of some of the NATO countries that got a lot of oil from Libya. He went in unilaterally, when it certainly did not appear there was any will of a majority of Congress to use American assets, military assets, to take out Qadhafi.

Make no mistake about it, Qadhafi was a man who had blood on his hands, there's no question. Qadhafi was a man who had been engaged and supported terrorism. But interestingly, after 2003, when the United States, under President Bush, went into Iraq because both Democrats and Republicans, most of them, believed he was a threat, and according to the CIA notes, some guy named Joseph Wilson also believed that they were trying to get uranium, and even though there had been reports of yellowcake uranium having been taken out of Iraq, President Bush went into Iraq and in record time Saddam Hussein, his defense became the mother of all weak defenses and he was ousted.

All of a sudden Qadhafi, in Libya, went from a man who had been supporting terrorism to a man who was afraid of the United States and all of a sudden wanted to be our dear friend. There was a document that was made public that says the United States rescinded Libya's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism in June of 2006. Libya renounced terrorism and weapons of mass destruction in 2003 and has continued to cooperate with the United States and the international community to combat terrorism and terrorist financing.

On July 20, Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure confirmed to the Malian press that Libya, Algeria, and Mali planned to coordinate military and intelligence efforts to fight security threats linked to al Qaeda in the lands of the Islamic Maghreb in the Sahel-Saharan region.

Interestingly, Qadhafi had a true conversion experience when he became afraid that the United States might invade him next because of his support for terrorism, and he actually and legitimately did became an ally in the war against terror. In fact, when we look at things that the U.S. did--this is from The Washington Post, certainly not one of my biggest fans. But July 9, 2009, they reported that:

Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi, who former President Ronald

Reagan once denounced as a ``mad dog,'' supped on pasta just

two seats away from President Obama at the Group of Eight

summit today and even secured a handshake with the U.S.

President.

It talked about Qadhafi attending the summit, and it said, as Obama was shaking hands with Qadhafi, there were families of Pan Am 103 victims gathered at the British Embassy in Washington, it goes on, because they still were concerned about the blood he had on his hands.

So that was rather interesting that all of a sudden this was a man we could shake hands with, be friends with, and work deals with. Of course, Senator McCain was one of those who had gone over and felt like there was an opportunity to be friends. In fact, with regard to Mubarak, Senator McCain, supportive of the Obama administration and Secretary Clinton, had said this: the case of Mubarak is a great example that Mubarak was a great friend of the United States. Mubarak's predecessor concluded Camp David agreements and he stuck to it. Basically, there was a stable relationship between Egypt and Israel.

With regard to Qadhafi, this article from Reuters from August 14, 2009:

Senator McCain and the delegation with him expressed their

deep happiness to meet the leader--

Talking about Qadhafi.

and praised him for his wisdom and strategic vision to tackle

issues of concern to the world in his efforts to sustain

peace and stability in Africa.

So there were bipartisan feelings when the Obama administration started that, gee, Mubarak was an ally, Qadhafi had become an ally as somebody who could be trusted, and all these things. They're easy to find on the Internet, just a Bing search away from finding these things.

So the world watches this and they look for consistency. Because one of the things, for those who are fans of baseball, some umpires call balls and strikes with a different strike zone. But having been an umpire and having played baseball, you can live with somebody that calls a ball just off the outside corner as a strike as long as he's always consistent. So, you know, you can trust this umpire. He skewed a little bit, but he's consistent, so you can always trust him.

Consistency is critically important in the area of foreign affairs, yet we don't seem to have been very consistent when we used our military resources to help oust Muammar Qadhafi after he had a conversion experience and was doing what he could to help us fight terrorism outside of Israel. Some referred to him as the best friend we

had in getting inside information on terrorism to help us combat it.

There was the sense here in Congress we had no business getting involved in Libya, especially as the reports emerged that al Qaeda was backing rebels and we didn't know how extensive that al Qaeda involvement was. But we knew it was there. We knew there were radical Islamists that were trying to drive Qadhafi out, and this administration did not pause long enough to get an answer to the question: If we drive Qadhafi out, will we be more safe in America or less safe?

Because, despite this desire to please the organization of Islamist Council and others in NATO, the number one obligation of this Congress and this President is to provide for the common defense of the people in this country. We took an oath to support this country under this Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.

The reasoned analysis of Libya during this so-called Arab Spring that was really a freezing winter was that we are going to be in more trouble if Qadhafi is thrown out than if he is kept there--at least, those of us who looked at it besides the OIC and some that were getting oil from Libya who felt otherwise. But most people could see you're helping create instability into the region. If you look at the map of the former Ottoman Empire, you can see it around north Africa coming around up through the Middle East and Turkey, and you can see this starting to take shape.

We helped get rid of Mubarak and all of a sudden we get a radical Islamist in charge of Egypt. We helped not just merely with words and coercion but with bombs to get rid of Qadhafi. Many believe it is doubtful Qadhafi would have fallen, and certainly wouldn't have fallen when he did, if it weren't for all our bombing and air support to help the al Qaeda-backed rebels to throw him out and ultimately have him tortured and killed.

So where was the reasoning about how much this would help America, to allow radical Islamists to take Egypt and Libya? And then coming on around, as things fomented in Syria, it looked like initially these were not al Qaeda-backed rebels in Syria, and perhaps, as some believe, if we had acted quickly enough, if we had someone that wouldn't vote ``present,'' if we had acted quickly enough, maybe we could have supported rebels who were not al Qaeda rebels, not radical Islamist rebels. But as it has degenerated in Syria now, and even as recent as this week, people are admitting that it looks like Assad really is more in control now.

It is degenerated to the point where our national security interest is not to get into the middle of that fight. You have a tyrant of a leader on one hand, and you have radical Islamists, most of whom would like to destroy the United States as well, who are challenging him. Where in the world is the interest in spilling American blood or treasure in getting into Syria?

With regard to Syria, we can look at comments that this administration had about Assad. CNSNews.com reported, March 28, 2011:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on Sunday, drew a

contrast between Syrian President Bashar Assad and his late

father and predecessor, and said U.S. lawmakers who recently

have visited Damascus regarded him as a ``reformer.''

She made the startling comment while explaining why the

United States will not intervene on behalf of Syrian

civilians revolting against the regime as it has done in the

case of Libya.

President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of

the discussions we have had.

This is Secretary of State Kerry, continued.

``And when I last went to--the last several trips to

Syria--I asked President Assad to do certain things to build

a relationship with the United States and sort of show the

good faith that would help us to move the process forward.''

He mentioned some of the requests, including the purchase

of land for the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, the opening of an

American cultural center, noninterference in Lebanon's

election, and the improvement of ties with Iraq and Bahrain,

and said Assad had met each one.

``So my judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change

as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United

States and the West and economic opportunity that comes with

it and the participation that comes with it.''

Also in March of 2009 from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, it says:

In early February, in a reversal of a longstanding U.S.

policy, the U.S. Department of Commerce approved a license to

sell Boeing 747 parts to Syria . . . A few weeks later, the

U.S. Treasury Department authorized the transfer of $500,000

to the Children with Cancer Support Association, a Syrian

charity associated with President Bashar Assad's wife, Asma.

Both decisions were seen as a softening of U.S. sanctions and

an important U.S. diplomatic overture.

So it goes on, our cozying up with Assad. Perhaps that's why, when others around the world were saying that you have some moderates who were rebelling against Assad and that perhaps we can help them, this administration had already started having good feelings with the Assad administration, and perhaps that contributed to the slowness to want to move and act.

One thing is very clear at this point--it should be to anybody who looks objectively--Syria is not a place the United States should be involved in right now because, when the winner between two forces fighting is not going to be helpful--no matter who it is--to our country and when our oath and obligation is to this country, we should not get involved in that.

There are stories about gunrunning, running guns from Libya to Syria. Hopefully, at some point, we'll know exactly what the story was on that and is on that. Was it ongoing? Was it going on when Chris Stevens was involved? Hopefully, our leadership will allow us to pursue that properly and get the information so that we know exactly what happened, because we still have not gotten to the bottom of what happened in Benghazi, and there are families of dead patriots who died in Benghazi who deserve to know the answers.

So we supported and were thrilled--I say ``we,'' meaning this administration, not the Congress, necessarily--and seemed to be pretty impressed with Morsi's taking over. Though reports came out of the slanderous things he said about Jews and Israelis and Americans, this administration seemed to be thrilled with his taking the position that he did, and seemed to be comforted by his saying--this is a Texas paraphrase--You know, I may have been part of the Muslim Brotherhood, but I'll kind of back off of that for a while.

If you look at what he did, here are developments as reported by FOX News in Cairo in 2012:

In June: Morsi was elected President with 51.7 percent of

the vote. He was sworn in. He became Egypt's first civilian

Islamist ruler;

In August: A gunman kills 16 guards near the border with

Israel; Morsi scraps a constitutional document which handed

sweeping powers to the military, and he ousted Field Marshal

Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who was Head of State after Hosni

Mubarak's fall in February of 2011;

In November: Morsi decreed that he would have sweeping new

powers for himself. Later that month, the Islamic-dominated

constituent assembly adopted a draft constitution after a

process boycotted by liberals and Christians;

In December: Morsi annulled the decree of giving himself

increased powers after all of the rancor and the people began

to rise up in Egypt. Later in the month of December, 64

percent of the voters in a two-round referendum backed the

new constitution in a vote that was marred by low turnout.

The people of Egypt could see what was going on. Egypt

plunged into political crisis with demonstrations by Morsi

supporters and opponents, and they sometimes turned deadly;

Coming through April 2013: Sectarian violence north of

Cairo kills four Christians and a Muslim;

In May: Morsi carried out a cabinet reshuffle, which fell

short of opposition demands. Later in May, gunmen kidnapped

three policemen and four soldiers in the Sinai peninsula.

They were freed on May 22;

In June: Egypt's highest court invalidated the Islamist-

dominated Senate, which assumed a legislative role when

Parliament was dissolved and a panel that drafted the

constitution. The Presidency says the Senate will maintain

its powers until a new lower house is elected;

Later in June: Egyptian and foreign nongovernment official

employees were given jail sentences, ranging from 1 to 5

years, from working illegally, causing international outrage.

We know there were some good people who were jailed for

nothing except trying to help people;

On June 15: Morsi announced the ``definitive'' severing of

relations with war-torn Syria;

On June 21: Tens of thousands of Islamists gather ahead of

a planned opposition protest;

On June 23: Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi warns the

army will intervene if violence erupts;

On June 28: The U.S. says nonessential Embassy staff can

leave after an American is killed during protests;

On June 29: U.S. President Barack Obama urges Morsi to be

more ``constructive'' as the death toll rises. The Tamarod

``rebellion'' campaign, which called rallies for June 30,

says more than 22 million have signed a petition demanding

Morsi's resignation and a snap election. The reports are that

the largest demonstration may reach 33 million.

There had never been a demonstration in the entire world of as many as 20 million people, but the people of Egypt rose up. They recognized that radical Islamists in charge of their country were not a good thing even though the leaders of our country and the executive branch could not see the obvious.

In having talked to Egyptians who were furious with CNN--because most of them don't get FOX News, and so they're relegated to CNN. They were furious at how CNN seemed to take the side of the Muslim Brotherhood over and over, and they related that CNN was basically a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, at least as conveyed to me. There were people very upset.

Why are they not more objective?

And I tried to explain to them, Look, you have to understand that CNN has gotten such low ratings at times in the last couple of years that sometimes we've got more people watching C-SPAN--they're that bored-- than watching CNN. Even though we're not part of the Nielsen ratings with the coverage here in the House, there are estimates. How sad is that for the once great Cable News Network?

What's even sadder is that this administration, with all of its assets and intelligence ability at its fingertips and disposal and with supposedly all of the people it could ever want--the people they thought were the best in the world at analyzing foreign situations-- they thought Morsi was a good thing. Then, as you look at the map and as you see this jump-start of an Ottoman Empire having developed, wow, a problem occurred.

As I've said on this floor, Egyptians have caught me and have said, Hey, you're in Congress. Quit helping the Muslim Brotherhood. They're not good for Egypt. We don't like their tyrannical nature. We want to have a government where we have some say. We don't want tyrannical people who are Muslim. We don't want that.

Just as in Afghanistan, moderate Muslims say, We don't want radical Islamists, like the Taliban, controlling our country.

I can't blame the administration for the constitution that was forced on Afghanistan--that forced shari'a law, that forced a centralized nation. Many of them I've met with over in Afghanistan. Together with the Northern Alliance leaders we've met with, they've said, Look, if you could just give us a more federalist government like you're supposed to have in America where States have more power; if you could let our regions elect our governors instead of the President appointing them and elect our mayors instead of the President appointing them; if you could let us have more control, we can keep the Taliban from taking over. We're Muslim, but we don't want the radical Islamists. Don't leave us in a situation where that's what we have.

That's what we left them with and appeared to encourage in Egypt. It's certainly what we left Libya with, and four Americans were dead in Benghazi as a result. Bad decisions, unfortunately, at the level of the highest positions in the United States of America have terrible consequences all around the world.

As I've mentioned, an elderly African from west Africa told me before I left a couple of years ago, We were so excited when you elected a Black President in America, but we've seen America. It appears to be growing weaker and weaker, and you're not taking the strong stance you used to. We're concerned because, if America does not stay strong, we will suffer around the world, those of us who count on you to stand for freedom and what's right. Please don't get any weaker.

There are people around the world pleading that, and they don't even ask us to be the world's policeman. They just ask us to stand strong so that, if we were needed to stop an outright injustice that could threaten the world, including us, we could step in. But unfortunately, in the Middle East, nobody fears the United States and nobody is threatened by the United States. They see us as a paper tiger.

It has been amazing, though. If you just watch certain cable news networks--and even FOX I don't think has done quite an adequate job of really capturing what has been going on in Egypt. This is for the whole history of mankind. We are talking about a major, incredible, earthshaking revolution that has gone on in Egypt. These are people-- moderate Muslims, combined with Coptic Christians, coupling themselves with liberal secularists--who don't want radical Islam running Egypt. So this grand scheme of building a great caliphate, a new Ottoman Empire--whatever you want to call it--ran into a huge problem when these incredible, freedom desiring Egyptians rose up in greater numbers than has ever arisen anywhere in the world in the whole history of mankind.

This is incredible--incredible--and people need to recognize and need to be encouraged, not by the Arab winter that was originally called an Arab Spring, but by the true spring that is now happening in Egypt as moderate Muslims and Coptic Christians and caring secularists have arisen together and said ``no'' to radical Islam. We want freedom. We want a say in our government.

In having visited with a friend who has been over there and has taken pictures and talked to people, she said it was amazing to see the Egyptian pope have people--Muslims--come up and say, We are so sorry for the way Christians are being treated in Egypt by the Morsi administration. We are so sorry. We hope we can change this to where we can live together in peace.

That's what they want. Twenty, thirty million people coming out in protest? That would scare the little, puny Occupy Wall Street people to death. It's incredible.

The people of the United States, Mr. Speaker, need to understand we are living in a time that we are witnessing extraordinary international events, even when people at the highest levels of this country do not recognize how extraordinary it is. Perhaps they do, but perhaps they're embarrassed because radical Islam, through the Muslim Brotherhood, is now taking over Egypt and Libya and trying to take over Syria and putting our allied King Abdullah in Jordan in the hot seat, trying to force agreements out of him over the threat of deposing him.

People over in the Middle East get it. The people in Russia and China, leaders there, they get it. This is a big deal. But perhaps our administration has been embarrassed by not recognizing the real truth of what was going on.

I thought it would be helpful to just look at some of the photographs just recently taken during these demonstrations to get more of a feeling of where the Egyptian people are as this most extraordinary of revolutions is taking place. And it's important to note that you can talk to people in Egypt that say, Look, we want to be friends with the United States. We like the United States, but we cannot stand the fact that your government, we believe, really helped force us into having a Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamist in charge of our country. We didn't want it. You forced the elections on us before we were ready. Some would say, Well, they chose their own elections. We were helping. We could've delayed them until more people had time to participate. But all the information that I was hearing here on the Hill, that was nonclassified, indicated that if elections occurred when they did, the Muslim Brotherhood would win. They were the most organized. And if they could be delayed to a time where the people themselves had a chance to organize and be heard, that there really would be a good turn in Egypt.

But this administration did not help, did not delay the elections long enough to allow the true Egyptian people to be heard, and as a result, no matter how unfair it may be or how fair it may be, the Egyptian people, millions and millions of them, have a terrible perception of the leadership of the United States. They make clear they like America, they like the United States, but the leadership currently did them great harm.

We know that when the President was elected, as he went around and

spoke in the Middle East, some said that this was going to really increase the love and affection between the United States and majority- Muslim countries. The polling data seems to say just the opposite: that our country, because of the leadership of this administration, is respected and admired far less than it ever was even under the Bush administration, because at least under the Bush administration they knew that Bush would be consistent, whether they liked him or not.

So I think it would be helpful to look at some of these pictures, one of the big posters that was being used during the revolution. Make no mistake. When the Egyptians put messages in their big banners and signs in English, they want the message coming to America. The message these Egyptians had:

Egyptians spoke. Al-Sisi listened. We the people have

spoken.

So they're appreciating the military leader that--after 20 million, 30-plus million Egyptians arose that dwarfed the small number of votes that Morsi got in the early election, the people of Egypt spoke. This was a revolution, an uprising by the people. And the military heard and witnessed the people rising up, and it answered and said, Okay, Morsi goes, because they recognized, as did the vast people across Egypt, that he had violated the Constitution. He had become a tyrant. He had become a dictator, and he had to go. Our administration here was slow to recognize. It's very sad because we do have a very intelligent President in the United States. Yet, the image they have in Egypt is that he sided with the wrong people, that the masses in Egypt did not want.

So on this same poster where they're praising the leader of the military in Egypt for listening to the majority of adults in Egypt and doing the right thing for democracy, they have a red ``X'' through our great President's face. It's terribly unfortunate. It does not actually do what this President and most of us in this country hoped--well, at least majority-Muslim nations will look on us more favorably, and this is what we're seeing.

I have another poster here during the massive protests. From what I was told by people that were there, they got really upset as CNN kept saying this is a coup, this is a coup, trying to diminish the importance of what was happening with 20 million, 30 million Egyptians rising up. So obviously they mean this for United States consumption. But these are things that massive numbers of people in Egypt were supportive of. It's a revolution, not a military coup, 33 million Egyptians protesting peacefully against Morsi, the tyrant and terrorist, who was supported by the USA. They want to make sure that we understand this is the real people of Egypt rising up. We need to be supportive of that.

Another sign:

New supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood. Anne

Patterson, hands off Egypt.

There were multiple of those signs around as people were gathering.

They've seen what this administration did, and they didn't like it. These were the masses. The symbol of the Muslim Brotherhood was in the same circle with CNN because they began to feel in Egypt that CNN was not reporting accurately, that the people did want to live in peace with Christians and did want to live in peace with secularists, and not at the hands of a Muslim Brotherhood tyrant.

This sign, in both English and their language, says, ``Obama supports terrorism.'' Well, of course President Obama doesn't support terrorism. Of course he does not. But the way it looked to Egyptians when we were supporting a terrorist, they presume we must and our President must support terrorism. We know he doesn't, but they don't know that because this Nation, this administration has supported terrorists in Libya and Egypt, and is now trying to get support for terrorists in Syria.

Another sign during the demonstrations obviously for U.S. consumption:

My dear American friend, when you get killed by terrorists,

do not blame anyone but your President Obama and his

administration.

Well, that's ridiculous. When we're killed by terrorists in America, we should not blame the President. There may be negligence in America by many people when it occurs, as I believe happened with the Boston bombing. We were given information that was not properly utilized because of the handcuffing that has gone on within our FBI, within our intelligence community, within our State Department, and the purging of training material to keep us, as one intelligence officer said, from being able to see who our enemy is. We have hurt ourselves in a terrible fashion in our ability to understand who wants to kill us.

I don't support any of these signs. I don't think they're proper. But I think it's important to understand what the people in Egypt are seeing and thinking so that we can give them the proper perspective on American people.

You can't really read the whole thing on this one, but it is basically making it clear this is not a coup, it's the people:

Thanks to our great Army that supports our great

revolution.

In the October Revolution in the Soviet Union, Lenin appeared there in St. Petersburg and persuaded some people to support his revolution, but that revolution, that little gathering would not have done any good, as historians know. It was not until Trotsky went across to the military, across the river--I've been there--and he got up on something and he starts speaking eloquently to the military. Once he convinced the military to side with Lenin, then there was a true revolution that occurred. Nobody called that a coup. It was a small handful of people around Lenin rising up, but they convinced the military to support the October Revolution. As a result, there was a revolution and not just a tiny little uprising, which it would have otherwise been without Trotsky's eloquence.

That's why it's important to understand that when 33 million in Egypt rise up, this is not an in-house coup. This is the masses of a great country rising up to say, We yearn to be free, and we don't want a radical Islamist controlling our country. And it's important for people of the United States to understand this is where we are. And 33 million people, the vast majority of the adult voters in that country, want to make clear they want to live in peace with Christians, secularists. Those are the people we can hold accountable and trust more that they will do the right thing because the support for the persecution of Christians around the world, the persecution and the killing of Christians, the torturing of Christians around the world, is growing like never before, and this great nation that arose based on Judeo- Christian ethics stands idly by as the last public Christian church in Afghanistan closed, as the last Jew, publicly admitting Jew, leaves.

That's when Afghanistan still had vast American presence. Even today, we could still turn the tide if we choose to, but we are not. And there may be an accountability issue some day with the judge of all judges. Because as John Quincy Adams argued, right down here below us in the old Supreme Court chamber downstairs, in the Amistad case, as he stood there representing Africans who were free Africans, but then they were wearing chains, and they were said to be slaves because they had been captured by other Africans and sold and brought to the Caribbean and then put on the Spanish ship the Amistad, and then they landed in America by mistake, and the Africans wanted to be free and the Spanish said, No, they're our property. Ultimately, the Supreme Court downstairs--you can find online, Mr. Speaker, the last part of John Quincy Adam's oral argument as he was literally frightened because he knew if he had not done an adequate job to argue his case, that those Africans would wear chains for the rest of their lives, and their children would and possibly their children, if he did not do an adequate job in representing them.

He didn't feel good about the first 2 days of his argument. So he finishes by asking, Where is Chief Justice Marshall? And he ran through the names of every justice that had been on the court and was dead.

One of the Justices of that nine-Justice Court had died during oral arguments one night. It was not during the arguments themselves, but during the course of the arguments. So they were down. He asked where he was. He asked where the solicitor general was that

had last argued a case against him in the early 1820s. And he ends up pointing out, in essence, they've all gone to meet their Judge, and the biggest question about their lives is did they hear, Well done, good and faithful servant?

John Quincy Adams won the case, and those Africans left as free as they should have been.

But some of us have a fear that if we do not do more to support truth and justice and the American ideals that this country was founded on, there will come a day of judgment; and but for grace, it would be a horrible thing. But we still have an obligation to do the best we can, to meet our sworn obligations, and to let people like this in Egypt know that we want to stand with free nations and be friends of free nations.

Here's another big banner that was there during the Egyptian protest:

Egypt will remain a civil state. Live, freedom, social

justice.

And then with an American in the picture, the caption says:

We know what you did last summer.

They've gotten the wrong impression of the people of America, and it's up to the Americans to demand our leadership give the people of Egypt the proper impression that we do care about freedom-loving people.

Here's another one. It's hard to read, but:

Obama and Patterson support terrorism in Egypt.

Well, we know that's not true, but there are masses over there that believe that. We've got to correct that, and the way you do that is by supporting people who really do want to be free.

And another picture that just came from Egypt, I was told the Egyptians love America, but they don't trust our leadership.

We have an obligation. Our obligation is to the United States of America. And in this Congress, our obligation is to our oath, to fulfill our oath. And those of us who are Christians, to whom oaths mean so much more, we owe everything we have, owe everything we can do to support our Constitution and to protect people in this country from all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to protect our Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

And there are some who would say, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood, they got pretty violent over to Egypt and Libya and other places, and there are Muslim Brotherhood members in the United States. As one Egyptian article pointed out with pride, gee, they can be proud, they have six Muslim Brotherhood members who are high level confidants in this administration, in important positions of really advice in this administration.

The Muslim Brotherhood members here in America, as I understand it, did not support the Boston bombing because their position is we are doing such a great job of infiltrating and getting key positions of advice where we can monitor and watch and talk people into doing what we believe should be done, we don't want to stir up violence in the United States now; but maybe at some point it'll be necessary, but right now we're doing so well helping infiltrate the government and take over that we don't want violence right now. It may wake up the American people.

But the truth is anyone in this country or around the world that wants to subvert our Constitution to sharia law is an enemy of the United States. Whether they live here domestically or they live abroad, if their allegiance is to subvert the U.S. Constitution to sharia law, they are our enemy. And they are people from whom we took an oath to protect our Constitution and this country. The people of Egypt, God bless them, they have arisen and made clear, we don't want radical Islamists running our country. We don't want to see Christians persecuted and killed and tortured, as has been going on. Those are the kind of people this Nation should befriend and not try to rush in and shore up those who would persecute, torture, and kill Christians and Jews and secularists that just want to be free.

Mr. Speaker, we have an awesome obligation. We have an obligation to the people of the United States of America to get things right around the world so we do not put Americans at risk. And for those who would try to put a racial label on anything, there's nothing racial about wanting right and truth and justice. And I wonder where they were when I was supporting Alan Keyes. It's not about race; it's about truth, justice. It's about the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness with which we were endowed by our Creator. But just like any inheritance, any endowment, if we're not willing to protect it, if we're not willing to fight for it, we will lose it.

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

Madam Speaker, this evening, we had a difficult vote-- not difficult for some, but for some of us, it was.

On the one hand, we had the President, who had announced he was going to do the unconstitutional even though he had pushed through ObamaCare without a single Republican vote for it, and people are beginning to realize just how devastating this is. They've lost their doctors; they've lost their insurance, and they're going to lose their insurance; people have been forced from full time to part time, and now they're seeking more part-time work to make up the difference; they're being told they're losing their benefits.

This extra whammy for American workers was going to be even more devastating if the individual mandate went through. Somebody making $14,000 was either going to buy insurance he couldn't afford or pay extra income tax.

Some of us knew if we would just let the whole thing go through, then people would be hurt, and they would demand repeal; but I had to vote not to make people suffer. Let's put off the suffering as long as possible and then, hopefully, repeal it.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, July 18, 2013, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, we are here to talk about something that is a rather important subject. Immigration has helped make us the greatest Nation in the world, and we want that to continue. We do not ever want our borders closed; we want them secured.

Here to help in this conversation is my friend, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Barletta), to whom I yield such time as he may consume.

I appreciate my friend from Pennsylvania's comments.

It is interesting, and it really is heartbreaking, when you see so many people, like all of the masses that were here in Washington, to protest over the ObamaCare bill. Anyway, it is rather dramatic. The unions are now coming out. Of course union leaders were all for ObamaCare. Many of us said back at the time: Do you know what, when the union members find out what the union leaders have done to them in supporting ObamaCare, they are going to be exceedingly upset.

Now when you look at the results of ObamaCare forcing so many people to part-time work--as my friend from Pennsylvania was alluding to, people now have been relegated to part-time work--they may lose that. When you combine the devastation of ObamaCare and people that are losing their jobs and are being forced to part-time work and now having to do more than one part-time job with less benefits, and then you add on it the Senate bill, especially for African Americans here, it is absolutely devastating. It is a devastating one-two punch to the gut of America when you look at the Senate bill and how many Americans will be really troubled to find employment.

We have other people that are here that also wish to be heard. I yield such time as he may consume to my friend from Louisiana, Dr. Fleming.

Mr. Speaker, at this time, I appreciate very much my friend from Louisiana. We do border at our State lines there. We can be just the best of friends and never worry about somebody being moved into the other person's district for redistricting purposes. But I appreciate so much the perspective. As a person who spent his professional life and his training all geared toward helping others, administering to others, and addressing their needs, I appreciate that perspective of an excellent physician here.

At this time, I would also like to yield such time as he may consume to my friend, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King).

Thank you. I appreciate those observations so much, and it brings to mind our colleague from down in central Texas who is also a former district judge. He and I share that, but he was a district judge twice as long as I was.

So many people say, Well, you've got to have compassion. Despite the allegations from friends on the other side, we have compassionate Republicans, and our hearts break for people. For one thing, there are all of those people who are out of work who really want to work now, and we haven't created that environment--through ObamaCare, through the welfare state, through the problems with not respecting and adhering to the law when it comes to securing the border. The government has the obligation, from both a Biblical perspective and a secular perspective, of enforcing the law and of making sure the people within its boundaries

are protected who are lawfully there. That is the obligation.

Sometimes defendants would come before me as they'd come before Judge Carter, from central Texas, during his days on the bench. They'd know you were a Christian, and they'd bring a big Bible and try to play on your senses--well, you've got to have compassion. I've got a big Bible here, and God has worked in my life, so now don't sentence me harshly. Judge Carter had one gentleman come before him who said, Judge, I know you're a Christian, so you've got to have forgiveness, and you've got to forgive me. Judge Carter replied, Sir, individually, I do forgive you, but the State of Texas sentences you to 20 years in prison.

There is a difference. Individually, you can have that compassion and should, but when you're acting as the government, people expect you to have respect for the law, adherence to the law, so that there is a country in which people can come and feel safe, at least reasonably so, and understand that the law is going to be applied across the board.

We have also been joined by our friend from Alabama. I am proud to have had him join Congress back 2\1/2\ years ago in the great sweep, so I yield to my friend Mr. Brooks from Alabama.

I thank the gentleman from Alabama. Those were really amazing numbers that you provided, and we'll talk about those further.

Mr. Speaker, at this time, I would like to yield to my friend from Minnesota (Mrs. Bachmann) for such time as she may consume.

Those are wonderful points, and it brings back to mind what someone has said before. The example of being on an airplane, the instruction we're all given when you get on an airplane is if there's a loss of cabin pressure, you lose oxygen, then you must put your own mask on before you help others. Let's face it, America is struggling right now in a number of ways, but particularly economically. This is the worst recovery from any recession we've ever had, the longest, the poorest recovery from any recession. We're still struggling, having millions and millions of Americans out of work; and it's not because of a lack of compassion that we say we need to follow the law, we need to respect the law. It is out of respect for the rule of law, for this country. We're in a position as government, we have got to make sure that we follow our oath, that we do the best we can to make this country as strong as possible because we know there is no other country in the world that has as many people wanting to come visit or live in this country. This is number one in the world for people wanting to come visit or live.

But if we do not keep it viable, keep it strong, get the mask on, get the oxygen flowing again, get the patient strong again, then this is not going to be a place that others in the world are going to want to flee to as a refuge. It is very critical what we do here.

My friend from Minnesota brings up the point about taxes being paid. Congress some years back passed--and there are a couple of different kinds of child tax credits where actually if you're an American that's authorized to file income tax and you have a Social Security number, then you can claim those child tax credits. So we have people who are getting more money back because of the tax credit than they actually paid in, and Congress made clear you have to have a Social Security number in order to do that. But as I understand it, there were some people at the IRS who in between line dancing sessions had determined that, you know what, there's a lot of money out there by people who don't have Social Security numbers that if we got them to pay taxes, even though they're not legally here, if we got them to pay taxes, think about all the extra money that'll flow into the Treasury.

So why don't we, as a regulatory body, and we know Congress didn't authorize it, but why don't we just give them a tax ID number, even if they're illegally here, so they can be paying in all of the taxes to help the country. And an analysis earlier this year by different groups indicated that we may be, because the IRS authorized people to pay taxes into the system with tax ID numbers rather than Social Security numbers, we're probably paying out between $1 billion and $4 billion to people who are claiming child tax credits that are not authorized to claim those because they're illegally here.

We had newspaper reporters go out, people in the media, go out and do their own investigations and find a house here or a house there where a whole bunch of different people are

claiming that they live and that children are living there by the scores that aren't actually living there. And so it comes back and raises the issue, like Mr. Brooks was pointing out and my friend, Mrs. Bachmann, was pointing out that it doesn't necessarily follow that just because you give people legal status, all of a sudden you're going to be flooded with new tax dollars coming in.

I also want to point out there's this issue that keeps coming up about compassion. There is no more compassionate people in the world than the American people as a group. You'll find individuals extremely compassionate around the world. I've been in places where I'm deeply moved by how wonderful they are; but as a Nation of people, this is the most compassionate Nation in the history of the world. And individually, people in this Nation have done more to assist those suffering around the world, and it would seem to be the healthiest thing to do as a Nation, to make sure there is respect for our law, adherence to our important laws, and then make the country healthy.

Capital, we know--money, that is--investment money comes in. It flows, as the saying goes, capital is a coward. It flows into countries where it feels the safest. Make this country a strong country again economically so then we are able to go, as so many churches have, to Latin American countries, to countries around the world, and reach in and help them not by giving them a fish, as the old adage goes, but by teaching them to fish and providing them a means to have food and to make a living. That's a compassionate kind of thing.

There is no reason that Mexico should not be one of the top 10 or even top five economies in the world; and if we were the proper kind of neighbor, we would lure the hardest working Mexicans into America. We would help them have a strong, vibrant economy. But that will never happen until they have respect for and adherence to the law, and that means ending corruption. So it is critically important we live up to our oaths here. Some of us have even paid parking tickets we didn't owe because we had a Park policeman that didn't know the law.

It doesn't matter. The law is important to respect and to follow, and we cannot become a healthy Nation until we have that out of the Government of the United States.

We have a couple of minutes left, and I'd like to yield to my friend, Mrs. Bachmann, to finish our time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I object. I can't agree to a unanimous consent that this increases hunger in America.

Objection.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

I object.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Today, despite all of the diatribe, all of the allegations, so many of which shocked me, this bill passed. There were things in the farm bill I was not crazy about, but what an extraordinary day for this reason: over the last 40-50 years, Members of the other party have increasingly made the United States a welfare state where more and more American people are dependent upon this government for their livelihood. Having been at a Harvard orientation course, I was shocked to have a dean there with charts that showed that since welfare began, and assistance to single moms, a check actually for each child that any woman could have out of wedlock, they would get a check from the government. Now, it was well intentioned.

Back in the sixties, there were deadbeat dads that were not helping with their obligation to help their children, and so the government, people here in Congress thought, wow, why don't we help these poor single moms by giving them a check for every child they have out of wedlock. At that time we were around 6-7 percent of children being born to single-parent homes. And after 40 years--actually after 30 years, as economists will tell you, you will get more of what you pay for. And so we are to date now past 40 percent and moving toward 50 percent of children born in American to a single-mom home because we got what we paid for.

Now, it doesn't matter how well intentioned the program was. What I saw happening in the nineties as a judge was single moms coming before me for welfare fraud, and the stories were usually the same that they presented to me. So often they were bored with high school, and someone said, hey, you can just have a baby and the government will send you a check. And then you can live, and you don't have to work. You don't have to finish high school.

And those well-intentioned Members of Congress back in the sixties ended up in effect luring smart young women away from finishing high school into having a child out of wedlock and away from reaching their full potential.

Now, even for those of us who are Christians that believe God created heaven and Earth and that God created at one time a Garden of Eden from which man fell for disobedience, even in that scenario when the world was perfect, Adam was given a job. In a perfect world where everything was fantastic--before childbirth pains, before briars, before thistles, before all of the things that frustrate farmers, at that time he had a job: tend the garden.

In a perfect world, people will have a job to reach their God-given potential, and there is a good feeling from doing a good job in what we do.

That's one of the things I miss about working in the yard or working out on a farm or working with your hands. When you finish, you see you've done something good.

When we work here, we try to do the right thing, on both sides of the aisle, but we never know for some times decades whether we did more good than damage.

And I would humbly submit that the program that began to lure young women away from their potential, away from finishing high school, away from time in college, was well intentioned, but this government should never be in the business of luring people away from their potential, from luring people into results from which they cannot seem to extricate themselves.

And they'd come before me for welfare fraud, felony welfare fraud, as a district judge. And normally the scenario was that they realized, after a number of children, they couldn't live on that little bit of government subsistence; and they would think, well, maybe if I get a job, and I don't report it to the Federal authorities, maybe I'll finally have enough income that, combined with what the government's giving me, then I can get ahead and I can get out of this hole, this rut.

And so when the Republicans took the majority, in 1995, one of the things that they wanted to do was welfare reform. And I was at that Harvard orientation seminar and was surprised when they brought out the big poster graph of single mothers' income over the 30-or-so years since that program had first begun.

Single moms' income, when adjusted for inflation over that 30-year period, was flat-lined. All those years, the average single mom never got ahead. She was flat-lined because she was lured into that government program.

I'm not sure what the right thing was, but I think it's time to have the debate about it.

So I know that those people that passed the bills in the sixties, they had the best of intentions, but those poor single moms were flat- lined for about 30 years of what they were bringing home. That's tragic. I know both sides of the aisle would want them to do better and do well and every year to do a little better. I know that feeling is on both sides of the aisle, but we disagree with how you get there.

But what really shocked me today, and I've got to say, in some cases broke my heart, is to hear friends talk about how Republicans wanted to take food out of the mouths of children. I would never insinuate or say such a motive on the part of friends across the aisle, even though I believe that that welfare program, back from the sixties, did exactly that.

I would never ascribe that motivation to friends across the aisle because I know that's not their heart. They really do want to help. They just went about it in the wrong way in the sixties.

And so, in 1995, when Newt Gingrich led the Republican Revolution, had the Contract With America, they put in a requirement for work. If you could work, you had to work. And it pushed people who had been subsisting on welfare, barely getting by, it pushed them into the workforce.

And this graph, about 9 years later, showed that single moms' income, when adjusted for inflation, after welfare reform, had single moms making

more money. Every year that graph showed their income went up. And surely that is what both sides of the aisle would want.

And when we took up this farm bill today, I voted against it for the first vote, previously. But if we are ever going to get down to truly reforming what has become a welfare state that lures far too many people away from the job they could be doing, and from the good feeling of actually accomplishing something, and the good feeling of knowing you're reaching closer, ever closer to your potential. I was willing to vote for this today because we were going to take the food stamp program out of the agriculture bill.

And I don't know what the Senate's going to do, and I can't help what they're going to do. But I know this: today, we had a first step in the right direction. And I agreed with my leadership, if you will separate out the food stamp program so that we can have a separate debate on the food stamp program, and even though I don't agree with a number of things in the farm bill we voted on, that was such a big deal, a tremendous stride forward.

People said neither the House nor the Senate would ever, ever separate the food stamp program from the Ag bill because in either the House or the Senate, you had to have them tied together to get enough people from both sides, or either side to vote for the bill because you'd never get enough Republicans by themselves, you'd never get enough Democrats by themselves and you'd never get enough together unless you put the food stamp program with the farm program.

But by doing so, it prevented us from looking closely at the farm program because the food stamp program made 70 to 80 percent of the budget; and you couldn't look effectively enough at the food stamp program because it was linked with the farm program.

This was a big step, and I know there are a number of groups that I thank God for that are doing a great job. And I have friends in these groups and they've said this was a major mistake today. And I would submit, very humbly, hide and watch. This was a first major step.

And my goal, and I hope I live to see it, and I hope this country's around long enough that we can do it, is to take every form of public assistance, every form of public assistance, and put it into one bill, in one subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, and they deal with all welfare, all types of public assistance. And once that happens, we can have major reform.

But the reason we have trouble having reform of this ever-growing, ever-bloated welfare state is because the public assistance programs are found throughout all the committee's budgets, throughout all the appropriations. So if over here in the farm program you say, wait a minute; we need to reform the food stamp program. They go, oh, you hate children. You want to starve children, you want to starve mothers or veterans or military. You must hate all these people.

Why?

Because they're willing to say things that are not right to come in here and say. And that's what broke my heart today over and over, hearing people that surely know I would never want to take food out of the mouth of someone who could not provide for themselves. I don't know any Republican who has ever said that or would ever want that.

We want to help people who truly cannot help themselves.

And my friend across the aisle, Mr. McDermott, at Rules, when I made a proposed amendment to separate the food stamp program from the farm bill, he said, so do you want to completely eliminate the food stamp program?

And I pointed out, no, I did not. Of course, that didn't stop the mainstream press or the left wing blogs from spouting lies. They're accustomed to that. And God bless them, they have the freedom to do that, and they should be able to do that without this administration grabbing up all their phone records.

But it was not true, and I pointed out to Mr. McDermott what was true. No, I don't want to end it. I want to separate it out. And one day I want to have all of the public assistance in one committee, where we can see all of the ones that are redundant, those that duplicate services already provided, those where the most waste, fraud and abuse is taking place, because the thing we know, we're over $50,000 for every child of debt before they ever even have a chance to start making a living.

And we have done that, and it is immoral what we have done to future generations, loading them up with debt, just because we can't get to the bottom of waste, fraud and abuse, get to the bottom of what helps this country more than hurts it. And there will be a price today to pay someday for our negligence.

But it's not too late. We can still fix it. But a start happened today. This was a big deal, to separate the food stamp program out so we can look at it.

And a good example of what I'm talking about, how these different types of assistance are spread out through so many different budgets, was pointed out by my good friend, Dan Webster from Florida, first Republican Speaker of the House, as I understand it, down in Florida, was reluctant to run, did run, is elected here.

He decided to get to the bottom, just one little tiny aspect of this Federal, bloated bureaucracy. How many Federal programs are there that are responsible for getting people to appointments?

So far he says he's found 87 programs responsible for getting people to appointments, and most of them are in the same cities, and most of them have the vans that are the same size, same kind of vans. And on average, when they do take somebody, they'll maybe average three people per trip.

Well, when you take up one committee's budget, or one appropriations, and you were to take one of those 87 programs and say, you know what, let's combine this with these other programs, then we will hear, as we've heard today, oh, you hate children, or you want to take food from people's mouths.

If it's all 87 programs in one bill, then we can come before this body and say, no, we love children. We want to help this country. In fact, we will do more good for children of the future than what you've proposed because you're loading them up with debt, while we lavish it on our generation, and going to make future generations pay for lavishing ourselves. That is just wrong.

But if you combine them all into one bill, then we can say, no, we care every bit as deeply and perhaps more than you do, but we don't need 87 programs. We don't need all the duplication. Let's eliminate the redundancy.

Let's get down to what we really need as a Federal Government, because this administration was certainly shocked. They talked about all the horrors of cutting the budget with the sequestration.

Well, the sequestration made too many cuts in defend. Some were appropriate, but it did some in the wrong places. As I told my leadership 2 years ago this month, you never put your security on the table.

You can make cuts but you can never gamble your national security or your home. By putting defense on the table, my leadership did, and I was promised that those sequestration cuts would never happen. I was sure if that bill passed that would happen, and it would be a disastrous mistake and we would be blamed even though it was the President's idea. It all happened. Sometimes it's just not fun being right.

But here, today, we did something good. We started a step toward that goal one day of having all the public assistance in one bill, one budget, one committee, where we can get in and analyze without all of the false statements that people want to make about others wanting to take food from the mouths of children, from my friends saying that we wanted to do that, that I wanted to do that. Come on. Mr. Speaker, that is just wrong.

On our side of the aisle, yes, we will complain ObamaCare is going to hurt health care. We're now seeing that. We're seeing it all play out just as we said would happen. And maybe it wasn't a death panel. Call it what you want, but it is a panel under ObamaCare that will say that you're a little too old; you've had a good life; your hip is killing you. Before ObamaCare, you would have gotten a

new hip. But now we, the government, say, No, you don't get a new hip. Yes, you can use a new knee, and you might have 20, 25 good years with it, but we're the government and we say you've had a good knee for long enough so you're not getting a new knee. Or, as the President pointed out in his town hall meeting when a woman asked about a pacemaker that her mother had gotten, Will you consider the quality of life in deciding who gets a pacemaker and who does not? Since my mother has lived 10 years after getting a pacemaker, I'm concerned she wouldn't get one under ObamaCare. He beat around the bush but then finally said that maybe we're better off telling your mother to just take a pain pill, and that means die without your pacemaker.

That's what ObamaCare is going to do. But I would never, ever ascribe to any one of my friends across the aisle the intention to want people to die. Well, they might tell me that sometimes, but not to the public that they are charged with protecting, because I don't think they mean to do that. I just think they're motivated to do the right thing, but it's being done in the wrong ways and people are being hurt. And that's the way we look at it.

So today, to hear dozens and dozens of friends across the aisle come up here and try to vilify Republicans, saying we want to take food out of the mouths of children, that this is going to destroy these poor people that can't provide for themselves and this is what we want to do, most of those things were said in ways that it would have done no good to ask that their words be taken down because they would ascribe it to Republicans in general or to a big group so that you couldn't say that violated the rule of saying a specific person had a specific evil motive; but it was, nonetheless, just as hurtful.

That's, apparently, the difference. One side is willing to accuse the other of wanting to push Grandma off a cliff and let her die bouncing down a cliff, and the other side, we think you're going to cause Grandma to die early, but we know you don't mean to do that. In fact, ObamaCare will do that very thing because of what we've seen.

And I heard Bette Midler and Michelle Malkin are good friends. I heard she tweeted something to the effect that if we had lost the Revolution, everyone would have universal health care. Well, I have three daughters and a wife that's been married to me, God bless her and help her, for 35 years. Four women in my life in my immediate family. Sometimes children do things that break your heart. Sometimes they bless you beyond anything you could imagine.

What I think Ms. Midler didn't understand is, if we had England's health care, they have a 19 to 20 percent lower survival rate from breast cancer than we have in the United States because our health care is that much better and you get treatment that much quicker here. You didn't have to wait until you felt a lump. You could get a mammogram. There were groups that could help if you didn't have the money. But in England, you had to get on a list for everything you did.

And so, when you think about one in five women with breast cancer, I can't imagine anyone would want England's health care if they realized it means we're going to lose 20 percent of the women with breast cancer in this country.

I mentioned before that one of my constituents came from England. She said her mother died of breast cancer because she lived in England and was on list after list to get the diagnostic care to find out if she had cancer, and then when she found it, she went on another list. It took too long to get surgery, get help, get treatment. Her mother died, she'd said, because she lived in England. She said, On the other hand, I'm in America. I'm a secretary here and I don't have much money, but I'm alive today because when I was found to have cancer, I didn't have to go on a list. I was able to get treatment when I needed it, whether I could afford it or not.

And those who yearn for the ObamaCare days, where we look like England's health care, where we have 20 percent less survival rate of women we love with all our hearts, like the four women in my life, if you've got five women, which one of them do you want to die so we can have health care like England?

The disagreement here on the floor was not about anybody wanting children to not have the food they need. But we have seen the results of welfare reform, and the results of welfare reform in the Republican revolution of 1995 resulted in single moms having more income after inflation than ever before under the giveaway programs of the Great Society.

So, in that scenario, who cares more: those that pushed through the Great Society, that lured women into a rut that so many of them couldn't get out of, or those who pushed through a bill that forced them to start meeting their potential?

I spoke at Texas College, the oldest college in Tyler, Texas, my home, within the past few months. It's a great college. It changed my opinion about colleges that began as all one race. Now they're all different races. But it's basically an African American college still today. The people in charge are Christians, and they care deeply.

And I spoke to a combined sociology class there at Texas College and I laid this issue out before them. As one single mom told me, You've got to clean it up. You've got to clean these programs up. I'm now, after so many years later, coming to college to try to better myself. And I wish it had been otherwise, but you need to make people work. You need to make people finish high school. And if they can, have them do some college. You need to incentivize that. You do not need to just give people a check. She said too many people even spend it on drugs instead of their kids. She also said, You need to reform the system so that I don't waste years trying to get to college. And others chimed in and they said similar things.

These were people who understand the system better than I do. But as a judge, as a citizen, I've seen it from different angles. And though we care equally on both sides of the aisle, one way leads to the end of a Nation. And it's the broad path and it's wide, because every Nation in the history of the world has gone down that path and come to an end. Unless the Lord comes before, we will, too.

So my goal by running for Congress, the goal of so many people I know here, was to come try to make a difference, to prolong what some called a little experiment in democracy, to prolong what Ben Franklin said. It's a republic, Madam, if you can keep it. That's our goal. That's what we hope to do.

I really believe today we made a step in that direction toward reforming the system and starting down the path of eliminating the duplication. I realize it may not all happen in this farm bill by the time we agree with the Senate, but then we can expose those in the Senate that did not do the right thing and we can expose those in the House that didn't. I think it will end up giving us a majority of those who will do the right thing. Not that everybody doesn't have the right motivation, but we need more who will do the right thing, even under pressure from friends or enemies to do something else.

I think we did a good thing today.

With that, I yield to my friend from Nebraska (Mr. Fortenberry).

The Syrian Conflict

I thank my friend from Nebraska. A wonderful point.

I know that there are people on both sides of the aisle who are motivated, again, by doing the right thing. But when you know that you have a tyrant on one side in charge of the country and you know that now perhaps it would have been different if we'd gotten in earlier, but at this point al Qaeda or the most radical Islamists, brutal killers, are driving the rebels, there is no good reason for this country to expend any blood nor any treasure to get in the middle of that conflict, and I appreciate so much my friend pointing that out.

It points to the problem in the Middle East with regard to the American position. This President had his administration help the rebels in Libya when we knew--hey, people were saying it right here--we know there are al Qaeda supporting the rebels. We're not sure how extensive it is, so let's get to the bottom of it before you just launch in and eliminate Qadhafi. Because Qadhafi was giving us more information on terrorist elements in the world than most anybody but our best friend, Israel. He was being helpful. And though he had blood on his hands for which he should have paid, you have to choose between the lesser of two evils.

As Secretary Gates said at the time, there is absolutely no United States national security interest at stake in this Libya crisis, in the rebellion, and yet this President went headlong. And when you know, as one Egyptian paper reported, bragging, they have six Muslim Brotherhood members that advise this administration--and there are a lot more people sympathetic to Muslim Brotherhood that advise this administration than that. When you know that that is going on, then it makes sense, they're going to make stupid decisions. They're going to always, like they did in Egypt, say, well, let's rush in and help, even though it allows the Muslim Brotherhood to take over Egypt.

I've heard so many people say they've talked to people from Egypt who have said we don't want the radical Islamists in charge, we don't want the Muslim Brotherhood. We don't want them in charge. We want a moderate Muslim government so that we can live in peace and not tyranny, like Afghanistan did under the Taliban. And now, to the disgrace of this Nation--this, the greatest Nation in the history of the world--this administration is about to leave Afghanistan--which we should have done probably in 2002, but now we're about to leave it in the hands of the Taliban.

If we had left in 2002, the Taliban had been totally destroyed. They were gone. The people that were members were in such disarray they did not have any real presence in Afghanistan. Why was that? It wasn't because tens of thousands of American troops went into Afghanistan and wiped out the Taliban. No. It was because of the heroic sacrifices of those within the tribal groups called the Northern Alliance at that time.

General Dostum led those troops, and the United States provided less than 500 special ops intelligence people in Afghanistan and provided them air cover, gave them some weapons. And they routed the Taliban within a matter of 3 or 4 months. In the last famous battle with General Dostum leading, these Northern Alliance tribesmen, on horseback, with weapons, riding uphill into the strong area where the Taliban was located, with bullets, RPGs flying all around them, killing many on horseback, but they never stopped. They went up there to the fortress and they defeated the Taliban.

Now this administration says, as a result of how forceful those Northern Alliance were in defeating the Taliban, well, those are war criminals. No, they know how to fight the Taliban. Clearly, we don't because the Taliban has come back.

I would submit that this administration releasing Taliban leaders to go back and be in charge is not a good thing. Because we had four Americans that were killed at the same time this administration was pleading, oh, please, please, come talk to us. You don't have to have any preconditions, just talk to us. We look weak because this administration gives every appearance of being weak because it's getting terrible advice.

In that part of the world, they don't understand turn the other cheek. As Christians individually--individuals of us here that are--you are to turn the other cheek. But as a government official, you provide for the common defense. And you make sure if others do evil to people in this country or threaten this country, that they are punished because the government is not given the sword in vain. People misunderstand that and think, oh, if we will apologize enough for all of the Americans who have laid down their lives--not for some great empire, but for other nations to continue to speak their language, to continue to have their own identity, and to continue to have freedom that was taken away. This country has sacrificed for freedom like no one in the history of the world.

In the past, there were some selfish, very selfish motivations. Our selfish motivation has normally been that we want these people to be freer so that we can be friends and freedom will be catching. But as we've seen, if you are not educated in how to sustain a democratic republic where you actually could govern yourself, if you don't understand how to do that, you will lose it. We've watched in Turkey, which, after Ataturk made those great changes to the government--yes, Islam is the most widespread religion in Turkey, but it was a secular government where other people could also worship. We see that being removed little by little in Turkey. And I hear from Turkish friends who are frightened of what's happening.

Now our government seems to be on the wrong side in each of these disputes. We're out there trying to work with the Taliban while they're killing Americans. Shouldn't that at least be one precondition? Would you stop killing our American soldiers that are training your farmers, training your government officials, could you stop killing them long enough for us to have our talk? Because what needs to be done is you kill an American, we're going to wipe out a whole bunch of your folks because we are about protecting ourselves.

I still feel guilty for 1979, being in the United States Army when we were attacked. It was an act of war against our embassy in Tehran and we looked weak to the world. And it's still used as a recruiting tool. Forget Abu Ghraib--the best recruiting tool is the way we left Vietnam, the way we did nothing to avenge or even to truly get our people out of Tehran after that act of war.

I love the leadership of Ronald Reagan, but in 1983 he had a Democratic Congress. People that worked with him, when I blamed him for withdrawing from Beirut after attack, that showed weakness, they said the Democrats made clear he didn't have a whole lot of choice. But that gave a sign of weakness.

USS Cole, we basically did nothing. Nobody paid as they should have. If we're going to protect this Nation, we have to take care of things at home. Stop all the waste, fraud and abuse so

that people who truly need help get it, and those who can work have the opportunity to work, not with some do-nothing government program but with a real job where you make real money and you accomplish real things. Because one other thing that ObamaCare is doing is a disaster to our American friends.

I've been told by people, look, I used to work full time at McDonald's, and now, because of ObamaCare, they cut me to part time. So now I don't have the benefits I had before, and I have to go back and forth between Burger King or Arby's and McDonald's because everybody's cutting to part time because of ObamaCare.

Regardless of the incentives for passing the bill, regardless of all the desire people express about giving people better health care, they're having worse lives. It's the slowest recovery, the worst recovery in American history--other than from the Great Depression. And like Morganthau, the Secretary of the Treasury, said in 1940 in his own handwriting, he said, we have spent more money than anyone in history trying to end the Depression, and we created nothing but debt. No better off, they were no better off.

It was not until World War II began and we got drawn into that by Pearl Harbor being bombed and seeing liberty under attack through our European friends, we got drawn into it. And then the government started doing their number one job--provide for the common defense--and lo and behold we came out of the Depression. The government did the most important thing for it to do: provide freedom, protect Americans so they can grow the economies, so they can be entrepreneurs.

When the government does the most important job--provide for the common defense--it ended the Great Depression. Now we have people in government that think, though they may not have ever been successful in business, that they can tell people who have been and who are how to run their business so much better, and it's hurting this economy. Oh, not with companies like General Electric, those who have gotten plenty of crony capitalist help.

I would also advise those who don't want to see reform of welfare-- that I think can only occur when we get all public assistance in one appropriation, in one committee, then we can get real reform. And we will save so many billions and billions and billions--heck, maybe trillions of dollars over a 10-year period. We will save so much money that they will be able to throw it away on many more thousands of Solyndras. They can have all kinds of crony capitalism with the money we can save by providing incentives to get back to work, by providing incentives to finish high school and to go to college if you need to. But not everyone needs to go to college. You don't have to get a college degree to learn how to weld.

I was over in Marshall, at the TSTA facility, the institution there. They're teaching welders, and they're making great money when they leave. And it's true of other institutions that teach those kinds of vocational training. But instead, we now have more people on food stamps than ever in history.

What has happened to this country when those of us who want to get the country back running by reforming welfare are vilified and accused of wanting to take food out of the mouths of children? How wrong that is. We want more children with more food. The same way I've been vilified for saying children need to be taught English. Even if they're just newly arrived from Mexico, teach them in English. Maybe they need some beginner courses to get them there. But don't teach them in Spanish, help them move into English. Why? Not because I or people like me hate those Hispanic children, it's because we love them. And we know that if you teach them in English, as my friend, Commissioner Ramirez, former City Councilman Ramirez, said, his parents from Mexico said they couldn't speak Spanish at home. His father said you can be anything in America you want to be but you've got to speak good English. It was true. And I am thrilled to death that Gus' new restaurant in Tyler is working out so well. But he wasn't allowed to speak Spanish at home, and the sky is the limit.

For someone born in this country, they can be President of the country. Instead of being a manual laborer speaking Spanish, they can be president of the company. So who really cares more about people? Those who rail against us who want to reform the entitlements we're told they are, that were supposed to be a hand up, not bait to be lured into a rut they could not get out of. That is immoral.

I know for some people--Star Parker, and there are others--who talk about how they have pulled themselves up, they're an inspiration. But there are too many that did not have the ability to pull themselves up or the wherewithal, and shame on us for luring them into a rut they couldn't get out of. It is time to reform that.

But I can also say, as the attacks on the Christian religion have grown and grown exponentially, this country is in deeper and deeper trouble and will continue to be. The assault and the intolerance upon Christianity is incredible.

People came to this country in the early days, Founders, Columbus when he discovered--he didn't know he was in a new country or a new continent. He thought he found a new way to Asia. But he claimed the land for his king and queen and also his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He wrote in his own journal it was the Lord that put it into his mind that he could sail west and get to the east, and it was the Holy Spirit that comforted him all the way.

And you look at George Washington's writing, the father of this country, without whom there would be no country today as we know it, a noble, honorable, honest man. Faults, yes.

This country didn't begin to start really reaching its potential until we dealt with the blight of slavery and the horror that was in America. There has not been any kind of blight on our soul like slavery in American history until we started killing babies. Slavery had to go.

After we did away with slavery and more people were encouraged to be entrepreneurs and we came into the 1900s, we still needed a civil rights movement to set things straight. And Christian leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., who had studied the Bible and wrote touching things like those letters from the Birmingham jail, they knew Christ was their salvation and they knew they were supposed to ensure that brothers and sisters treated brothers and sisters as such.

There were vile Christians, but I would submit those weren't really Christians. They didn't understand Jesus' teachings. But it was the church that was behind the revolutionary movement. It was the church that was strongest behind the abolition movement. It was Christian leaders who were strongest behind the civil rights movement.

Now this Nation, our government at least, seems to be at war with Christianity. We can have a little group complain that, Oh, we didn't feel comfortable in the military because of the prayers that were said or crosses worn or things that were said about Christianity. We have examples of someone being told you can't give someone a Bible when they need one because you may be prosecuted or thrown out of the military. Under the rule some are trying to push through, if you have a dying friend that asks you, ``Is there a God?'' under the order some would have, you couldn't even tell them what you know with all your heart. It's gotten to be a problem.

I love Ronald Reagan's quote back in 1984. He said:

The frustrating thing is that those who are attacking

religion claim they are doing it in the name of tolerance.

Question: Isn't the real truth that they are intolerant of

religion? They refuse to tolerate its importance in our

lives.

The teachings of Jesus would allow people to make whatever choices they wish--choose not to believe in God; choose to be an atheist; choose to be an agnostic and say, ``I just don't think there's enough evidence''; choose to be a Buddhist; choose to be a Muslim--because all children are acceptable in God's eyes.

I believe God's will is not for any to stumble, that they will all come to eternal life. But the war that has been declared, as it appears to be, the gloves are off against Catholicism as a form of Christianity, all these different religious beliefs against abortion, those who have beliefs religiously against birth control, those who have beliefs

about marriage being what it has been for most of the world's history and without which marriage between men and women we would not have had the future generations that even exist today. You say, ``I support that traditional marriage,'' and now you are to be drummed out of your job, drummed out of having friends, eliminated from the public sector.

Ronald Reagan was right: the real intolerance, the real hatred is from those who choose to impose their beliefs and force them onto others.

Mr. Speaker, today still, nonetheless, was a good day. We made a big move toward what will one day, if we are faithful, allow us to take some of the burden that we have been putting on future generations and the $50,000 or so we have already humped onto the backs, shoulders of children that don't have jobs yet. We made a first step toward the day when we can reform them; we can start encouraging people to their God- given potential instead of luring them into ruts.

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 4 o'clock and 52 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, July 15, 2013, at 10 a.m.

I appreciate my friend from Minnesota yielding.

It is pretty overwhelming. It's not just Texas. There's a 2010 Rasmussen poll that says 68 percent of likely voters think that securing the border is more important than granting amnesty to illegals. So this is nothing new.

Yet the President himself has promised that he would secure the U.S. border with Mexico. But then again, he also made a speech in May of this year in Mexico condemning the sale of guns in the U.S. that have gone to Mexico. And of course we know his administration required that to be done.

So you can't just go by what's being said. The President promised to secure the border. It hasn't. The American people are sick of promises not being kept, and they want the border secure. I know that none of us want the border closed. We appreciate immigration as wonderful fresh water coming into this great lake, but it's going to sink the boat if it comes too fast. Anyway, I'm mixing my metaphors.

But the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act promised it would secure the border. Not only that, it said that ``it would prevent and deter the illegal entry of aliens in the United States and the violation of the terms of their entry.'' That has not happened. In 27 years that has not happened. The American people are not stupid. Lincoln pointed out ``you can fool some of the people some of the time'' or ``some of the people all of the time.'' But regardless, here it's like this administration thinks they're going to fool enough of the people enough of the time to continue to pass things that hurt America.

It is interesting, though, the immigration bill that was passed previously and then in 2006, we had another bill that was supposed to actually get enforcement done, and it didn't happen. I'm not sure if my friend from Louisiana was here at the time, but we were told there would be a fence, virtual fence, walls where needed, all this would be taken care of, and this was under the Bush administration, and there were billions of dollars appropriated for that.

And if my friends will recall, it wasn't all that long ago, the Secretary of Homeland Security just out of the blue announced, I've decided not to do the virtual fence. So we're just going to blow that off. The money had been appropriated. It's in the law. Here's what you do. And this administration just decided, we don't care it's in the law; we don't care there's money there to do it. We're not going to do it.

If the gentlelady will yield, we do have one metric from the Government Accountability Office. They have certified or indicated in their recent report that of the approximate 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico that 129 miles are under full control, to use their words; 129 miles out of 2,000 are under full control, and this administration is saying, Let's just go ahead and provide amnesty to everybody that's here and then we'll eventually secure the border.

We are going to have to keep doing this kind of amnesty bill every couple of years--or maybe we wait 10 years and do it in lumps every 10 years--unless we do what the law already requires: secure the border.

I would like to see us adopt a resolution that just says basically until the United States' southern border is secured as confirmed, not by Janet Napolitano because we know we can't trust that, but as confirmed by the Governors and the legislatures in the four southern border States, the House of Representatives shall not bring any legislation, including any conference report, regarding immigration before the House for a vote. I think that's what we ought to do.

We've got Americans upset and concerned about the IRS, upset and concerned about Benghazi, upset about this administration snooping. Of course, we have to say, though, as Matt Salmon said, the people finally have a President who will listen to them, or at least his administration listening to these things.

But anyway, there are all these other issues that need to be taken up, and I think our position ought to be very clear to the White House: you do your job and then we'll get an immigration bill.

And one other thing on the comprehensive, since the gentlelady mentioned that, since I got elected in November of 2004, it's my experience that when somebody in either the House or the Senate down here says we want a comprehensive bill on anything, that is code meaning--you break down the code--we've got a lot of really bad stuff that we want to get passed and nobody will ever vote for it if it stands up and people see what it is. So we need such a massive bill that we can hide the bad stuff in there we want passed so people won't see it until long after the bill has been passed. That's what ``comprehensive'' has come to mean.