Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, so we just took up the humanitarian crisis that is going on at our border and passed the Senate bill, so there will be a tremendous amount of money that will be going to provide more beds, shelter, food, transportation, whatever is needed. The one thing that the Senate bill is especially void of is money to secure our border.

It is something to say that, with all of the problems in the Senate bill, the things that were not addressed in the Senate bill, the fact that it was so much better than the House bill says an awful lot about the House bill and its shortcomings.

We have, still, and will after this bill is signed into law and money is put into use, a crisis on our southern border.

As was pointed out to me after some of us visited Normandy with the Speaker on the 75th anniversary of D-Day, on D-Day, we had 150,000 or so Allied troops that invaded Normandy, over 150,000, a tremendous number, landing craft, parachuting. Yet just in the month of May, that is about how many invaded our southern border--that we caught. We don't know how many didn't get caught.

Some think that for every one we actually catch and in-process, there is one that gets away. We don't know.

We know that there are a great number of people who are not caught because they are picked up on cameras

and with other information that is gleaned on the border.

But it will continue to be a problem after this money is spent, and there is some concern--it is legitimate--that when you have what the civil litigation would indicate is an attractive nuisance--that is the terminology in a lawsuit--and you don't put up a fence, a wall, something to impede people from coming into property illegally, then, if they hurt themselves--and the example most people think of is a swimming pool or a pool or a pond.

If you have that water on your property, and you don't bother to put up a fence or a wall, and someone comes onto your property and drowns, you are going to end up paying a tremendous amount of money, normally, to the family of whoever drowned coming onto your property when it was not properly secured with a fence or a wall.

That is not to say it has to be electrified or some kind of really intense structure. But you need to have something that would impede somebody from coming in and drowning in your water.

Now, the moment of silence earlier, most of us were deeply moved by the picture, horrendously tragic, of a child, who seemed to be so close, even sharing the father's shirt, with her little arm around his neck.

Having had girls growing up, that is an emotional picture for some of us especially.

But we have what most would say is the highest-evolved justice system, judicial system, litigation system in history. It has come through thousands of years of different types of laws, be them looking up at the bust of Hammurabi, the Code of Hammurabi, the Justinian Code. We have a Napoleonic Code.

We have had thousands of years of laws, and the civil litigation in this country is perhaps at the most perfected--a long way from being perfect, but as perfected as it has ever been anywhere.

That is where this concept of attractive nuisance has evolved and arisen from. There is a responsibility when you know there is something so attractive that people will be tempted to break the law and enter that property illegally, potentially, to their own detriment.

What are you supposed to do if you are a caring individual in charge of property? You put up a fence or wall, just like our former President Obama did.

I understand he built a 10-foot wall around his home. That is a good, responsible thing to do. It was good enough for the President when he was in the White House to raise the height of the fence and wall around the White House, and it is good enough for the former President as he built a wall around his private residence.

It is a good, responsible thing to do by a responsible person in charge of property, not only to provide privacy, but also to keep people from being lured to their own detriment.

It is high time we address that on our southern border. There are very few people in this body, on either side of the aisle, who have not at some point said that we need to secure our border, that we can't keep having people pour into this country illegally.

But something strange has happened as our friends have taken over the majority and Republicans have moved into the minority. Some people have realized: Wait a minute. If these people keep flooding into our country from other countries illegally, and they see us as the party that keeps the border porous and open for them to keep pouring in, they will surely reward us with their votes, so we will be able to develop a permanent majority.

The only trouble with that is that when that happens, we are destroying the goose that had been laying golden eggs of opportunity, freedom, incredible liberty like the world had never seen before, the United States of America and our Constitution, followed with the Bill of Rights.

Yes, it has taken a while to get them continuing to evolve toward greater perfection. But we have to do something, because if we don't, if we continue to have people pouring into the United States--when you look at the example of Normandy with 150,000 or so, we had that many illegally invading America in 1 month.

We have to do something because the people pouring in have not been educated on the responsibilities of maintaining self-government. They will end up forcing this country--not intentionally but because they do not understand the responsibility involved in continuing this little experiment in self-government that has lasted 230 years. They will unintentionally give way to either communism or progressivism, if you prefer that these days, or a pure dictatorship.

It is very disconcerting that, in this country, there is more and more rising emotion between different political thought.

Look at the difference between the American Revolution, the 8 years that it took to win our independence, 1775 to 1783, and toward the end of the year when the Treaty of Paris was signed. It started, ``In the Name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity.'' The British signed that. They thought that would be an oath that they would have to take so seriously in England that they would not breach that oath taken in the name of the ``Most Holy and Undivided Trinity.''

Historians know, normally, a government doesn't last more than 200 years, and they are lucky if they last 200 years. We have gone 230.

People look at the 10 years of the French Revolution, from about 1789, when our Constitution was ratified and when the Bastille was stormed, to 1799. What was the result of the French Revolution? It was an Emperor named Napoleon.

Some historians say that they think the big difference between the U.S. Revolution resulting in liberty and the French Revolution resulting in hundreds of thousands of heads being cut off was our Revolution was about liberty.

The Founding Fathers were not out there to cut off heads. They were out there to grab and preserve liberty, whereas in the French Revolution, there was so much sentiment of getting revenge that it ended up culminating in an Emperor named Napoleon.

We now seem to have so much animus and so much anger. There is some, from time to time, in this body. But some of the most vocal people pushing for impeachment, like my friend Al Green, he, literally, is a friend. He is a Christian brother. I disagree with him strongly on the need for impeachment, but I like the guy. He is my brother. I know he would not be saying what he does unless he really believes it.

I would never wish harm on somebody that I cared about like that. We can disagree without being mean. Yet, too often now, that is being lost.

We have to preserve this place. We are about to recognize our anniversary, the Fourth of July, when the Declaration of Independence was made public. This needs to be a time of serious reflection.

It ought to include John Adams' encouragement to celebrate, have parades, enjoy families, enjoy the country. Of course, he says the firing of guns. We try not to do that. Instead, they use fireworks.

He knew there ought to be a celebration to remind us of the sacrifice, what was gained through that great sacrifice, and the responsibility that ensued, along with the liberty.

We should also remember the way they got to the Constitution was when Randolph, from Virginia, proposed that, after 5 weeks of yelling and fussing, that even though they didn't have money to hire a chaplain, why don't they take a few days off and gather together, on our Nation's Independence Day, at a local church there in Philadelphia. They ended up settling on the Reformed Calvinist Church, with the Right Reverend William Rogers presiding, and they worshipped God together. They were led in prayer by Reverend Rogers. They came back after that and gave us the most extraordinary founding document in the history of the world that we still use 232 years later. It was a time of reflection.

Unless we secure our border though, we will not be a shining light on a hill. We will be a transit station for people around the world to pass through, hoping for something great but, instead, only seeing a once-great country whose experiment in self-government was destroyed by too many people coming in too quickly, who did not know, as they hadn't been educated, how to go about preserving self-government.

My hope and prayer for this Independence Day is that we will return to an appreciation for the God from whom all blessings, all good things, flow. If we do that, we can preserve this place for generations to come.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 57 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, June 28, 2019, at 3:30 p.m.

Madam Speaker, I have comments about my giving remarks at the end of the week, so it might be worth setting a little history of these Special Order remarks.

In 2005 and 2006, my first term, I was not prone to give any remarks in Special Orders, but I observed during those 2 years that one of my classmates that came in January 2005, like I did, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and some other Democrats arranged each night, often taking both hours of Special Orders that their party was afforded.

I was told by Republicans who had been here for a long time, ``You know,

nobody is paying any attention to what they are saying. They are making themselves look bad. They make us look good by what they say.''

There were times I would say, ``But are you paying attention to what they are saying?''

You could see on C-SPAN sometimes when the sound was off, it would be scrolling, and I would say, ``Look what they are saying. They are blaming us for all kinds of things. We need to respond. This isn't accurate.''

And I was told, ``Look, you know, don't worry about it. It doesn't make any difference.''

And over the course of 2 years, I saw that a group that called themselves the 30 Somethings--everyone that was probably in their sixties or seventies, but otherwise in their thirties--that they did affect national opinion. I mean, you could see over that many nights, they made a difference.

After that, I endeavored to try to address some of the critical issues when I had the chance, if other Members of my party were not taking those opportunities.

So on fly-out days, when so many are rushing and have to get to the airport by a certain time, they don't have time to come down here and address some of our critical issues, then I volunteer. I will stay an extra hour or two before catching a plane back to Texas in order to address some of these important things. And it is a great opportunity.

I used to do more than one Special Order a week many times, but my Democrat friend, and I mean that sincerely, John Garamendi, had referred to a new Democrat rule that was put in place this year that no one could take more than one Special Order during the week, my friend, John, referred to that as the Louie Gohmert rule.

The good thing about that was that it enabled me not to just continue as I had been year after year encouraging other Republicans to take a Special Order and address some of these important national issues, then I was able this year to tell them, ``Look, I can only do one a week, so you guys have got to start signing up for Special Orders and taking the time, addressing areas that you know well that we need to communicate about.''

So I have been very pleased with how many of my colleagues have signed up for Special Orders and addressed critical issues, helped educate on the matters before us, because you don't always get straight and accurate news even by some of the so-called fact-checkers.

Often fact-checkers, as they call themselves, need fact-checking, because many times they are not accurate either.

So this is a great opportunity that we have in a legislative body to address issues so that information does get out to the public, unless they are reading the remarks in some article that has had the facts and statements twisted and edited to change the meaning. Otherwise, they can judge for themselves exactly what has been said and what is accurate and what isn't.

I heard our Majority Leader Hoyer and our Minority Whip Scalise and their dialogue back and forth bringing up the critical issue of our border and the humanitarian crisis going on there. In their discussion, they did not get into what is causing--well, I guess they referred to it. People are trying to get away from terrible circumstances.

Well, those circumstances in different places in the world have gone on for centuries. We have never had the kind of mass effort at entrance that we have seen in recent months.

So, things haven't gotten worse in the world. Why the huge surge at our border this year? And the border patrolmen with whom I communicate, the people who are dealing with those coming in illegally, coming through places that are not legal ports of entry, the border patrolmen get information from immigrants exactly why they are coming.

Sometimes immigrants are given pieces of paper--the immigrants coming in illegally--with addresses, names, and these are either approved or given by the drug cartels. Nobody comes into the United States across our southern border without permission of the drug cartels.

The drug cartels are not interested in preventing humanitarian crises. Drug cartels are interested in helping create humanitarian crises. And since I have been there all hours of the night, which used to be the prime time for people coming across illegally--now they are just coming all the time--I got to see this so many times firsthand.

I have even seen, numerous times, people that had their little piece of paper. It was supposed to be the address that they gave the Border Patrol and, later, ICE: Yes, this is the address where I have somebody waiting for me, somebody who knows me, a family member.

Often that information was provided by the drug cartels: This is where you will go.

This actually fit together to help answer mysteries of who is telling them where to go.

But the immigrants would be asked by Border Patrol, and it wasn't on the list of questions they are required to ask: How much did you pay the gang or the drug cartels that are responsible for bringing you in? Because sometimes the drug cartels have gang members who will act as coyotes and bring people in illegally. And the answer is, normally, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000.

And the question follow-up: Where did you get that kind of money? You don't have that kind of money.

Well, we have got $1,000 or $1,500 here, and then people in the U.S. send us some money.

Well, what about the rest of it?

And the disturbing comment was, normally: They are going to let me work that off when I get where I am going.

Well, these are drug cartels, and obviously the work they were going to be doing would be either drug trafficking or sex trafficking, both doing severe damage to our country. Yet we have not been able to reach passage of a bill, bipartisan or otherwise, that would actually help totally secure our border so we can control who comes in and ensure that they are not people who are wanting to do damage to the country.

Now, some just want to come in the country, and they don't realize, by coming in, they will do damage, that they have not been educated on how you keep, how you retain a representative form of government and how with the liberties and freedoms come great responsibilities.

The responsibilities portion has also been neglected in so many schools. It is all about rights without getting into responsibilities.

But I will continue to bring up Ben Franklin's answer to the woman after the Constitutional Convention: Sir, what have you given us?

A republic, madam, if you can keep it.

Eric Metaxas has a book on this that I read recently. It is very difficult to keep a self-governing system going. Historically, any attempt at some type of self-government has not lasted normally more than 200 years. We are beyond that.

The Constitution was ratified and first elected a Congress, President, and Vice President under the Constitution of 1787 that finished being ratified in 1789. So we are 230 years beyond that founding document being ratified. So we are beyond the number of years that a self-government has been able to last in the past, normally.

The fact is there haven't been normal self-governments, and that is why, in Ben Franklin's speech at the Constitutional Convention, although kids are taught today in school that he was a deist, if Franklin is even mentioned at all--a deist believing there is maybe some force, some thing, some whatever out there that created things, and if such force or person or being or deity existed and still exists, it never interferes with nature or the things that were set in motion originally. That is, in essence, a shorthand rendition of a deist.

But Franklin himself, we know what he said, because he wrote it down when people asked for a copy. He said: I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of this truth. God governs in the affairs of man.

This means he wasn't a deist.

But he says: If a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it possible an empire could rise without His aid? We have been assured, sir, in the sacred writing, that unless the Lord builds this House, they labor in vain to build it.

He said: I firmly believe this. I also firmly believe without His concurring

aid, we shall succeed in our political building no better than the builders of Babel. We will be confounded by our partial local interests, and we, ourselves, shall become a bower down through the ages.

Because Franklin knew. He studied history along with science and other things, but he knew from history this is not something that had been effectively done the way they were wanting to do it.

Sure, the Romans had had a Senate. The Greeks had made an effort at democracy that worked for a short time--not well, but worked for a short time.

The British, from whom we separated, they had a Parliament, but they also had a king. This was going to be a new thing. And the ``Novus ordo seclorum'' that is under the pyramid on the two-sided Great Seal that was adopted over 200 years ago, ``Novus ordo seclorum,'' Latin, meaning, ``new order of things,'' ``new order of the ages.''

Some have tried to say: A-ha, new world order.

But if you look at the Founders' own remarks, they make it clear that they knew nobody had really gotten this self-government thing right. But if they could do it right--and as Franklin said, it wasn't going to happen right without the Lord's concurring aid.

But if they could get it right, this would be a new order of things. This would be what people around the world, for the rest of history, would probably try to emulate, if not outright imitate.

But if they didn't get it right, since they had the opportunity and failed, as Franklin said, they would become a bower down through the ages. They would be ridiculed. They had the chance to do self- government right, and they blew it.

But even though they got this thing incredibly right, the founding document and the agreed upon 10 Amendments, the Bill of Rights, obviously it has taken a couple hundred years to get the Constitution to apply and mean what it says. It took a Civil War. It took a civil rights movement. But here we are today, and we have not continued to educate people on what Franklin knew would require education in order to keep the Republic.

Oh, sure, we have got more schools now than ever, but because of the heavy-handedness of the Federal Government Department of Education, even though that education is something that is not an enumerated power in the Constitution and, therefore, under the Tenth Amendment was reserved for rights only of the States and the local government, the Federal Government got involved and, as a result, not many students are being taught the complete history that they should know and they need to know in order to sustain this little experiment in self-government.

So when people come in and they have not been educated at all on what it takes to keep a self-governing system, they are just told in their own language about all of the free things they can get, they are not told about the important responsibilities that come with those free things and opportunities, that keeps up for so long, and there is no bright light on a hill that draws people from around the world.

Then, as some West Africans told me, when America gets weak, we suffer. And we are seeing that around the world.

Iranians are suffering tremendously under a heavy-handed, even criminal, terrorist regime in Iran that came into place because we had a President who didn't understand radical Islam, did not understand that when he turned his back on the Shah, who was not a great guy--he apparently did not treat his people as well as they should have been-- nonetheless, things certainly got worse.

When the Ayatollah was welcomed into power by President Carter as a man of peace, well, the world soon found that Iran, now that radical Islamists who wanted a new caliphate for the world to subjugate Christians and every other religious group under their mean-spirited, actually, dictatorship as a religious dictatorship, the people of Iran suffered. The world has suffered from the failure during the Carter administration to understand the dangers that were lurking there. Well, those dangers are no longer lurking there. They are being spread around the world.

I was amazed to hear people on television say, well, they couldn't really say if Iran had caused the death of any Americans. Certainly they have.

Not long after the Ayatollah Khomeini took over in Iran, our Embassy was attacked and over 50 individuals were taken hostage. But they have continued to support terrorism, unabated, over all these years since 1979.

They are responsible for the deaths and the explosions at the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. And the message that was sent by the Democratic majority in the House and Senate was to force the complete withdrawal of troops in the area.

So that was a great encouragement to the Ayatollah and to the radical Islamists that want to destroy self-government. They think that they need a dictator who is really a religious bigot in control of things to dictate to people what they can or can't do, and that is such a foreign concept after 230 years here under our Constitution.

But anybody who studies history, who is up on his history, knows there is a lot better chance that a dictatorship will eventually prevail, whether it is a religious extremist like you have ruling in Iran or it is just a dictator like you have had in the Soviet Union.

So having been in the Soviet Union for a summer as an exchange student between my sophomore and junior year of college, I saw the way people suffered. I saw the way the government spied on its people; I saw the mean-spirited things the government did to people that weren't being manipulated the way they wanted them to be; I saw suppression of free thought and free exchange of ideas; and I came home literally thanking God that we didn't have that kind of suppressive government.

But in the intervening years, we have seen a government get so powerful that it can spy on its own people, and we saw with what was released by WikiLeaks, the FISA application, the underlying affidavit, and the order that--holy cow, the FISA judge just basically ignored the Fourth Amendment, the protections against unwarranted searches and seizures.

The application, my interpretation, was basically it said: We just need all of the information Verizon has on every customer they have and an underlying affidavit saying, basically, yeah, we just need every bit of information Verizon has on every customer.

And then the judge--even though a Federal, Senate-confirmed judge, it is a secret court--he just signs off on it: Oh, you want every bit of information Verizon has on every single customer? Sure, yeah. Why don't you provide that? Here, here is an order to provide it.

That scared me because it actually confirmed what some of us had feared back when the Patriot Act was being reauthorized in my first term: Wait a minute. This is giving the Federal Government power that could go too far. There is language that is too loosely written that could allow the government to spy on people without proper authority.

We have got to revisit those issues.

And that has been further brought to a head with what we are learning about the abuses of the FISA court when one administration wanted to spy on a campaign and then spy on--and, hopefully, eliminate--the selection of a majority of the electoral college.

The electoral college itself underwent some evolution back in the early days, because, originally, it was a brilliant idea. It was a way of ensuring that both heavily populated States and lesser-populated States would all be relevant in a national election for our President and Vice President.

Unfortunately, in the beginning, the second highest vote getter became the Vice President, and that became apparent as a failure and a bad idea under the Presidency of John Adams, when Jefferson, his dear friend, became Vice President with the second highest number of votes. By the end of the fourth year, as McCullough points out in his book on John Adams, Jefferson even hired a notorious newspaperman to make up some lies about Adams to help him defeat him, which he did, which probably explains why Adams is the only President who didn't stick

around for the inauguration of his successor. But that got changed to a constitutional amendment, and so we have the electoral process.

If you do away with the electoral college, then it would mean most every State that is not a heavily populated State will never see a candidate running for President, because it would be a waste. They will want to spend their time in the heavy population centers and mainly disregard what some people refer to as flyover States, which many of us feel are the real guts and the heart of the country.

So it is an important thing to have, but people are not getting education on these things these days, and why things were created the way in which they were, what succeeded, what failed.

When I do tours around the Capitol, sometimes they go a lot longer than I think they should, but I am ready to stop any time the people are, but they still have questions. We find so many people haven't gotten the education.

I hear so often: I never really liked history in school.

Well, that doesn't tell me anything about them. It tells me a lot about their history teachers, that they had history teachers who didn't understand the importance of history, so they had true/false, multiple choice, or fill-in-the-bank questions rather than emphasizing that the real importance in history is the stories, what went right, what went wrong.

Yes, it helps to have them in chronological order, but the more important aspect is what worked and what didn't. And that is not what so many American students are getting anymore.

And certainly those who are rushing into America illegally, they certainly haven't gotten that. They know America is supposed to be a better place, but they don't know why. They don't know that they are jeopardizing that country's ability to continue as an attractive place for people to want to go, the most attractive place for immigrants to want to come in the entire world.

So we have got more education to do. And I am hoping that our colleagues here in this body will begin to understand that, when we take up legislation that will ultimately legalize illegal activity-- like coming into the country illegally or giving benefits for coming in illegally--it becomes a lure for more and more people to come illegally, which means it is going to make more money for the drug cartels. It is going to have more young women raped.

We are told that is occurring. About one in four girls coming to the United States through Mexico will end up being sexually assaulted, little boys at a lesser rate. I think I read 17 percent, something like that--just human tragedy.

It happens when well-meaning individuals in Congress think: Let's help those less fortunate by luring them to our country, not understanding that there is a tremendous amount of human suffering that goes on, in addition to undermining the very foundation of what was the freest country in the world.

So everybody is now indicating that America is not the freest country in the world. We continue to add laws that keep taking more and more of our freedoms away. But I heard the majority leader ruing that we haven't had comprehensive immigration reform.

Well, in my time in Congress, what I have come to understand is, when you hear the term ``comprehensive immigration reform,'' it normally means we want a bill that is so big and so massive that people who will vote on it won't have a chance to read it all and will be able to stick things in there that a majority would never agree to if they knew they were there. That is what I have come to see ``comprehensive'' meaning when it comes to legislation.

We are better off if we take subjects up individually, let people have a chance to read and know what is there, let them have a chance to analyze the language. Is this something likely to be struck down? If we don't have that opportunity, we pass legislation that is not what we want as a majority.

And as a majority--obviously, I am a Republican. We are in the minority. But I am talking about a majority of this body.

So we have these ongoing offers, which is what it is every time we pass a piece of legislation, even if it doesn't become law. That word is used by the drug cartels to encourage more people to pay them, to bring them in. That means they are going to have more employees-- really, more like indentured servants--in the drug trade, in the human trafficking, sex trafficking trade, and people suffer as a result of well-intentioned but poorly thought-out legislation. We have got to do a better job on that.

Unfortunately, in the last term of Congress when Republicans had a majority in the House and the Senate, had a Republican President, we had leadership in both Houses that was not interested in securing our border or we could have passed a bill to do that. We could have passed a bill and gotten it into law.

But there are monied interests out there that contribute heavily and encourage people not to secure the border. Of course, I said before from this lectern, if you hear somebody who is elected in Mexico say, ``We don't want the border secure; we don't want a wall anywhere on our border with the United States: Then you know that is someone who is getting money from the drug cartels. You can take that to the bank.

But you also heard well-intentioned but uneducated or miseducated individuals talk about what is happening on our border and even refer to the efforts to care for those who have come in illegally as concentration camps. If that were so, it would be the first time in human history that people have flocked by the hundreds of thousands to voluntarily go into concentration camps, because that has never happened in the history of the world.

The Jews, during the 1930s and 1940s did not go flocking by their own choice into concentration camps that resulted in over 6 million deaths. They were forced into those.

The people who are coming voluntarily and illegally across our border, they are putting themselves at risk of sexual exploitation but also even for their very lives, because we constantly get reports about people dying trying to get in or getting in illegally and then being left by coyotes out somewhere to die.

We constantly, if you pay attention, get reports of our Border Patrol saving the lives--ICE agents--saving the lives of people who have come in illegally but have been abandoned by the drug cartels' coyotes.

So it is also interesting when you think about the facilities on our borders.

The concentration camps of World War II did not have Germany appropriating billions of dollars or their equivalent for them to have a more comfortable existence. That didn't happen.

That is why, clearly, they are not concentration camps, as people continue to flock there by the hundreds of thousands knowing what they are going into. But as they continue to hear that we are passing laws that will eventually allow them to be legalized if they come illegally, we are going to have the numbers that we are seeing there at this time.

In the past, we have been told that they feel like they are catching most of the people coming across. But if my colleagues spend a lot of time on the border as I have, the Border Patrol will say that what scares them is that they don't know what they don't know about the people coming in.

They do know that every time a big group comes across our border illegally and makes themselves available to be picked up and detained, that the drug cartels know. We have to put all of our people on duty trying to in-process these folks, and that is when the drug cartels know they can bring in big shipments of drugs, bring in people who otherwise may be a threat to our country.

We continue to hear from Federal officials about people coming. We just had a report in the last couple of weeks about the ISIS member who admitted that they are continuing to get radical Islamists who want to destroy our country into our country through our southern border by paying the drug cartels to bring them in with other people. That is all going on.

Then comes this article yesterday from The Washington Times, Stephen Dinan, that says, ``The Border Patrol has documented more than 100,000 immigrants who they know managed to

illegally sneak past them and get into the interior of the country, the agency's Chief told Congress on Thursday, saying it's the most in 5 years.''

Just for reference here, we do have balloons that can be floated up that have infrared or thermal technology, night vision. We have people on the border with night vision, thermal technology, so they can see the outline of individuals who get in, even when they are not caught.

But going back to the article: ``Known as `got aways,' the migrants are ones who agents detect but know they didn't manage to stop from crossing the border.''

I need to insert here that our Border Patrol for a number of administrations has not been allowed to prevent people from coming into our country. We need to fix the law so they can prevent people from coming into the country using reasonable means.

I know when the Texas Department of Public Safety has their boats out on the Rio Grande where people are crossing, they don't cross because Texas DPS doesn't allow people to cross into Texas illegally if they can stop them.

The Border Patrol, on the other hand, has their hands tied. They have to allow them to come in illegally and then try to in-process them.

This article goes on. It says: `` `This high level of ``got aways'' is a direct result of agents being reassigned away from the front line to provide humanitarian support to the unprecedented numbers of individuals and families in custody,' Chief Carla Provost told the House Homeland Security Committee.

``The panel was meeting to hear how President Trump's orders to send National Guard and Active Duty troops to the border is playing out. Chief Provost said they've been a major boost, suggesting the got-away numbers might have been worse without the troops there to fill gaps left when her agents get pulled away to do babysitting duties for the families and unaccompanied children.''

I have gotten pictures from our border of our actual Border Patrol pushing baby carriages, literally babysitting because these folks have been lured in by what we are doing here, what we are talking about here.

Chief Provost goes on to say, `` `That support as my agents are being pulled away to deal with the humanitarian crisis is key to us having situational awareness on the border,' she said.''

The article says, further down: ``In one example last month, National Guard troops in Texas spotted a group of migrants rafting across the Rio Grande and reported it to Border Patrol agents. Agents, with the help of local police, corralled the group, whose members had paid up to $10,000 to be smuggled into the U.S.''

It says they corralled them, but what I didn't get until I started spending a lot of time on the border is that that doesn't mean they stopped them. It means they in-processed them into the United States.

Anyway, this article makes clear it is not even just the people who are coming in at a record pace this year. But just in 1 month, they think there may have been 100,000 people who came in that were not in- processed. They just came into the United States. Who knows if they want to do evil or good, but they certainly wanted to engage in illegal activity.

Another article here from Adam Shaw, ``Illegal Immigrants from 52 Countries Crossed the U.S.-Mexico Border this Year.'' That is just so far. We are in June.

``The U.S. Border Patrol Chief testified Thursday that migrants from 52 countries have illegally crossed the border this year as she described an agency `overwhelmed on a daily basis' by the escalating crisis.''

She said, `` `While smugglers primarily target the Northern Triangle, family units from 52 countries have illegally crossed the southern border so far this year.' ''

Further down, it says: ``A Senate panel on Wednesday approved a $4.6 billion request for funding to tackle the humanitarian crisis at the border, but only after including a condition that none of the money be used for a border wall.''

As I understand our majority leader's discussion today, they are talking about emergency funding to deal with the humanitarian crisis, but actually, the way it is being talked about, it will contribute to the crisis because it will encourage more people who we are spending a new $4.5 or $4.6 billion on, to provide food and comfortable shelter for people who come in illegally.

That language is being drafted to ensure not only that it not be spent on the wall, but that it is not going to be spent at all on preventing people from coming in illegally. It is just going to be spent on the more and more volumes that are coming in illegally, which will, in this cyclical, worthless effort, encourage more to come in. We will have to appropriate billions and billions more for a bigger humanitarian crisis, and that will encourage more.

At some point, we have to take seriously, and I know there are a lot of people who don't like Biblical references--not very many, but some-- but the fact is that it is the most quoted book in the history of our country. It was the most quoted book during the Constitutional Convention, and it continues to be the most quoted book in Congress.

If my colleagues look back in the Old Testament references, in Psalms, Proverbs, and other places, the best that we can hope and pray for is justice where the rich are treated like everybody else. They don't get any special consideration. And the poor are treated like everybody else and not given any special consideration. Everyone is treated fairly and equally under the law.

Yet, what we are seeing in this effort is that we are going to treat people who are trying to come into this country legally, we are going to penalize them. We are going to make them take 7 to 10 years, as some have, that we have tried to help family members with before.

But if they will just come illegally, we are going to treat them specially. We are going to ship them to a place the drug cartels want them to be to work as their employees or indentured servants. We are going to treat them specially. We are going to give them all kinds of things that people who are still waiting in foreign countries to get approval to come legally are not getting and will not get because they are trying to do things the legal way, while others are flooding the zone illegally.

That is not a good scenario for a country to continue to keep a self- governing system. Of course, we have billionaires that have donated large amounts of money to try to push us into being a socialist system. Of course, Marx didn't foresee the growth of a middle class the way we have had it here in the United States.

I continue to think that is the real strength of our country, the huge middle class. It shrank during the Obama administration when, for the first time in our history, 95 percent of the new income one year went to the top 1 percent income earners. The middle class shrunk. The poorest got poorer; the rich got richer; and the middle class shrunk.

That could end up leading to a communist revolution once we get to having that small ruling class and then the much larger poor class. Unfortunately, for the billionaires that contribute to help take us to a socialist system, they haven't been educated in history adequately to understand that if we go to a socialist system, normally, the billionaires' money is taken. They are put in prison or killed, and they don't end up being part of the elite ruling class as they had been so hopeful of.

We do have a crisis on our southern border, but it needs to be while we deal in a humane way with people who are here, that we also secure our border because otherwise, we are not a nation. If we don't have a border that is enforceable, we are not a nation. We are just a transient area. And if there is wealth in the area, it will not continue on for many more decades.

We had a hearing this week, changing gears, on the issue of reparations. It has been amazing how miseducated people have been on slavery, who supported it, who was against it; on civil rights, who supported it, who was against it. It has really been amazing.

There is an article here from Jeffrey Lord in The American Spectator from June 21.

It says: ``So amidst the chaos of that congressional hearing on reparations for slavery, former NFL star Burgess Owens got straight to the point, saying this, as reported by BizPac Review:

`I used to be a Democrat until I did my history and found out the misery that that party brought to my race,' Owens said.

``He added, `I do believe in restitution. Let's point to the party that was part of slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, that has killed over 40 percent of our Black babies, 20 million of them. State of California, 75 percent of our Black boys can't pass standard reading and writing test, a Democratic State. Let's pay reparation. Let's pay restitution. How about a Democratic Party pay for all the misery brought to my race.' ''

The article by Mr. Lord says: ``Bingo. Yet somehow, some mysterious way, the hard facts of history are blithely ignored by members and sycophants of the Democrats, the latter without doubt the party of race.

``Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas had the audacity to quote from a 2008 article of mine that originally appeared in this space and was reprinted in The Wall Street Journal. Among other things in that article I noted these hard facts about what was missing from the website of the Democratic National Committee as it tried to portray itself as the champion of civil rights by leaving out the hard facts of the party's horrendous actual history on race.''

Madam Speaker, these are the things he correctly notes that I read into the Record at our hearing.

This is from the Democrats' ``Our History'' section of their website.

He said: ``There is no reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms supporting slavery.

``There were six from 1840 to 1860.

``There is no reference to the number of Democratic Presidents who owned slaves.

``There were seven from 1800 to 1861.

``There is no reference to the number of Democratic Party platforms that either supported segregation outright or were silent on the subject.

``There were 20, from 1868 through 1948.

``There is no reference to `Jim Crow' as in `Jim Crow laws,' nor is there reference to the role Democrats played in creating them. These were the post-Civil War laws passed enthusiastically by Democrats in that pesky 52-year part of the DNC's missing years. These laws segregated public schools, public transportation, restaurants, restrooms, and public places in general, everything from water coolers to beaches. The reason Rosa Parks became famous is that she sat in the `whites only' front section of a bus, the `whites only' designation the direct result of Democrats.

``There is no reference to the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, which, according to Columbia University historian Eric Foner, became `a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party.' Nor is there reference to University of North Carolina historian Allen Trelease's description of the Klan as the `terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.'

``There is no reference to the fact Democrats opposed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. The 13th banned slavery.''

Madam Speaker, on further down: ``There is no reference to the fact that Democrats opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. It was passed by the Republican Congress over the veto of President Andrew Johnson, who had been a Democrat before joining Lincoln's ticket in 1864.

``There is no reference to the Democrat's opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1875.''

Anyway, Madam Speaker, it goes on and on here. But it was amazing to me and this article points out: ``Tellingly, when Congressman Gohmert was finished reciting these hard, cold, and quite accurate facts of history, someone in the audience yelled out, `You lie.' An unwitting admission of absolute historical ignorance or maybe just plain denial. And over at the website Splinter writer Samantha Grasso assailed Gohmert as the `dumbest Republican in the room' for daring to cite the Democrats' appalling historical record.''

So anyway, Madam Speaker, it is an interesting time. Education is important, but it has got to be accurate education.

One other thing I would like to quickly reference is the need for criminal justice reform within our military. There are some aspects of military justice that are very good.

In the grand jury process in the civilian sector, constitutionally the defendant, potential defendant, is not allowed to be there, nor to have his attorney there or her attorney. Attorneys are not allowed to be there for a potential defendant when that potential defendant is actually testifying before the grand jury.

Whereas, in the military system of justice, under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, there is what is called an Article 32 investigation which is sort of the equivalent, except a potential accused, as we call them in the military, is allowed to be there and have an attorney there to see what is being said against him and to give a chance to present evidence to the Article 32 investigating officer.

But one of the problems--and it is a very, very serious problem--is that the charges are sent to a court-martial by the commander, normally a commanding general or admiral. He is called the convening authority. He puts his signature on there saying: I want this individual charged and tried in a court-martial for this offense. That is after reviewing the results of the Article 32 investigation.

But where it becomes rather unfair is that to get a jury--I saw this during my 4 years at Fort Benning--the commanding general has each unit--we have platoons that make up companies. Platoons would offer suggestions of hard-nosed guys that would convict anybody who was sent if they were on the jury, and they were referred up to the company commander. The company commander would choose those that he thought were the very best out of those nominated, and he would refer them up to the battalion commander. The battalion commander would winnow that group down to the very toughest who would follow what the commander would want them to do and send those up to brigade. The brigade would take them and review them and decide to get it down to a number that they would send up, and eventually it would get to the commanding general of installation, and he would pick maybe up to 15 people who would sit, sometimes for 6 months, on every court-martial during that time.

They knew why they were there. They knew why the commanding general put them on the jury. They were sent there to convict the guys that the general sent to be tried.

There were a number of acquittals, but I can tell you every time there was an acquittal in a court-martial, you never saw that jury panel again. They may have been new, but if they acquitted somebody, found them not guilty, the general immediately disbanded them as a jury panel. It is not like you have jury selection where you can challenge somebody and have them taken off the jury.

I remember one court-martial where virtually all of the jury said that if a defendant did not testify, they would hold it against him and find him guilty just because he didn't testify.

The judge said: Hey, we are all part of this man's Army, and if I instruct you--and I will instruct you--that you will not hold it against the defendant that he doesn't testify, will you follow my direct order not to consider it against?

Oh, oh, okay. Sure. We didn't know you were going to instruct us not to.

But they had already made clear that, yeah, they are going to hold it against him.

So a defendant's constitutional rights in a military court-martial can sometimes be illusory. I think we are seeing that with Eddie Gallagher out in California. Even after a witness came forward and said that he is the one who asphyxiated the deceased who was wounded, he was an ISIS member, that Eddie Gallagher didn't kill him, they still continue on with the court-martial.

From what I saw at Fort Benning, if you had somebody come in and say: ``I am actually the one who did it,'' I have seen a good military judge say then: Mr. Prosecutor, do you have a motion to dismiss at this time?

And they would make a motion to dismiss.

But, really, I have a great deal of concern. I saw in a brief that someone had prepared for a parole matter that there was out of World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam, it said there were seven American military members convicted of war crimes, but since then,

the Iraq war, Desert Storm, Kuwait, and Afghanistan, we had over 200.

This is something that needs to be looked at. We should not have our military members risking conviction simply by trying to defend themselves and those around them. So I am hoping that we can come together in a bipartisan way and make some changes, some corrections, and some improvements to military justice so that our heroes don't get killed trying to avoid being seen as criminals by people who don't understand what they are going through.

So, in any event, I am hopeful that we will do something next week to help fund border security, but it sounds like from what we have heard on the floor all we are going to do is help attract more people to come in illegally because we are going to send $4 billion or so down to the border.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 1 o'clock and 11 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, June 24, 2019, at noon for morning-hour debate.

Madam Speaker, this past week, we were privileged to have been invited by our Speaker, those of us who have been in the military, served our country in the military, to go with her to the 75th anniversary of Normandy. It was deeply moving. And to be on those beaches and to see and know the sacrifices that occurred there, we talked in terms of it being an invasion over and over.

Now I get back to Texas and I found out, last month, about the same number, about 144,000 invaded France, is what we had last month here in America--just right here, even, in Texas. We are being invaded by people who do not know how to preserve a self-government.

Ben Franklin said: It is a Republic, madam, if you can keep it.

If we don't stop the invasion, we will not keep it.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 962, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.

Madam Speaker, I urge the immediate scheduling of that bill for a vote here.

Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, it is an interesting process we have for appropriating money. Some people are wondering why there were so many requests for a recorded vote, because normally most will go by a voice vote. We don't have to gather everybody together to vote. I think it is important. I know Members are not supposed to mention this when they are asking for a recorded vote, but we have a crisis on our southern border.

Last month, there were over 144,000 individuals that came into the United States across our southern border illegally. That would seem to be a crisis. As I mentioned early this morning, around 9 o'clock, in my 1-minute speech, some of us had just returned from being at Normandy for the 75th anniversary of D-day.

What an incredible thing that is to contemplate. And, of course, for those who know history thoroughly, World War II, be aware that there was even a dress rehearsal for D-day. There were no live rounds that were utilized, and yet, the Allied forces lost hundreds of military members during that fiasco of a practice for D-Day, which some attributed as being partly the reason that General Eisenhower, as the Supreme Allied Commander, had written out a resignation letter and given it to his subordinate that tendered his resignation with instructions that if D-Day went poorly, to please submit his resignation to his superiors.

He didn't know how it was going to come out. They tried to prepare, but there are different estimates: 150,000, some up to 170,000, some 158,000 were involved in the D-Day landing at Normandy in France.

Those courageous individuals that came ashore--some tried to come ashore and didn't make it that were dropped off too far out. Some had landing crafts that were sunk, but they were trying to come ashore, and did come ashore, and there were thousands of casualties as a result.

Some of the stories bring tears to your eyes as a person contemplates what they went through. I had not been to Normandy before this weekend, and I am very grateful to Speaker Pelosi for inviting former members of the military to accompany her to Normandy. It was amazing.

I have never been to Pointe du Hoc, but having attended Texas A&M University, I knew all about, at that time, Colonel Earl Rudder's heroic actions as he took the first group of what were then called Rangers--and have been called Rangers since--who trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, for most of that training, where I spent 4 years.

He took them up the cliffs. Their goal, their job, their order was to take out the big cannons that were doing so much damage to the Allied forces. They fought their way up the cliffs, got to the top, and found out those big guns had been pulled back down the hill, so then they had to fight their way down the hill. But they did eventually take out those guns.

There were a lot of mistakes made, as there are in any conflict, but the determination was to try to soften the German forces before our troops came

ashore there at Normandy. So planes were loaded with thousands of tons of munitions that were to be dropped on those outposts, those bunkers all along the beaches.

As they taught us in military science, you want to have good crossing fields of fire so that you can, unfortunately, kill more people with different lines of fire from different directions, and Rudder had directed those placements very carefully and did an extraordinary job.

That was one of the things the planes were going to soften up with their tons of munitions, but there was significant cloud cover that day, so they were to delay dropping the bombs, and at a given point, start counting up to three, four, five, and then drop their payload of bombs.

Unfortunately, so many of those bombs ended up 3 miles past the bunkers they needed to take out. So around 150,000 or so Allied forces, a big part of those being American troops, came ashore. They invaded a Nazis-controlled France. They fought valiantly, and as a result, France was able to go back to being France.

As a result of the ongoing actions, the rest of Europe, at least Western Europe, was able to go about being the countries they had been--even better once they built back up--largely, or at least with great help from the Marshall Plan.

It was amazing. I was not aware that so many of the French people still held what the Americans and the Allies did in such high regard.

So as our bus got near to--and this was actually on Sunday--there were going to be thousands of paratroopers reenacting their parachuting. Fortunately, nobody landed with their chute on a church spire and got killed as they hung there. That didn't happen.

But the chutes were actually more modernized chutes, so they could control their descent more easily than those poor guys did back on June 6 and the succeeding days in 1944. But we got off the bus, the Members of Congress, and were proceeding to where we were going to be watching from in this little valley area. And there were thousands and thousands and thousands of people who were walking in the same direction, and most of them had something to indicate United States, whether it was a little American flag or scarves that indicated something to do with the Stars and Stripes.

At first, I thought: Wow, all of these thousands of Americans made it over here for the D-Day 75th anniversary? This is incredible.

But then I quickly realized the huge majority of those people were not Americans; they were French. Though many of them were children, young adults, adults with young families, they knew what America had done to help save their freedom and their country.

So it was a very moving experience, especially when you go down, like, to Omaha Beach and you think about those poor guys, Mr. Speaker, so dedicated to liberty and to ending the evil that the Nazis posed. And to think about them having friends on either side being killed, they were at risk, some were being shot, but still moving forward and making their way up through concertina wire. In some places they would blow holes through the wire, so they could start getting through and not be sitting ducks out on the beach. It is very moving to be there where so many, as Lincoln said, ``gave the last full measure of devotion.''

But we get back home, and we see the report from May that across our southern border we had at least a minimum of 144,000 individuals come across our southern border illegally. I don't know how you don't call that an invasion, Mr. Speaker. The huge majority didn't carry weapons, most did not at all. They just wanted to get into the country. But as we have seen repeatedly, there are gang members who come in.

In fact, an article came out June 7 by Samantha Lock, titled ``ISIS plotted to smuggle terrorists into the US over the Mexico border to launch terror attacks, captured jihadi reveals.''

This article tells us: ``A captured ISIS fighter has made a chilling confession detailing how the terrorist group planned on exploiting vulnerabilities in the U.S. border with Mexico to take advantage of smuggling routes and to target financial institutions.

``Abu Henricki, a Canadian with dual Trinidadian citizenship, said that he was sought out to attack the U.S. from a route starting in Central America.

``ISIS allegedly had plans to exploit vulnerabilities in the U.S. border with Mexico.

``The ISIS fighter was interviewed last month--together with over 160 ISIS defectors and returnees--by research group the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism.

``The study, published in Homeland Security Today, concluded: `We have learned . . . about multiple individuals who knew of, or were themselves offered, or pressured by the ISIS emni--intelligence--to return to Europe to mount attacks at home.

`` `We learned that, indeed, there was at least one ISIS plot for their cadres to travel from Syria to penetrate the U.S. southern border by infiltrating migration routes.'

``Henricki was detained by the SDF in Rojava, Syria, and spoke with researchers for more than an hour on May 12, giving his firsthand account of being attracted to, traveling, joining and serving in the Islamic State caliphate, first as a fighter and then later unable to fight due to chronic illness.

``In video footage of Henricki's confession, he opens up about a plot in which he says he and other Trinidadians were invited in late 2016 to attempt to penetrate the U.S. borders to mount financial attacks.

``He explains: `The emni--ISIS intelligence arm--was inviting us.

`` `They, what they will have, what they wanted to do, basically, is they wanted to do financial attacks. Financial attacks to cripple the U.S. economy.

`` `Apparently, they have the contacts or whatever papers they can get to a false ID, false passports to send me out for this kind of attack.

`` `They have their system of doing it. So that's maybe the way that I could have gone out with other individuals.'

``He adds: `It wasn't me alone. They were sending you to Puerto Rico and from Puerto Rico to Mexico.

`` `They were going to move me to the Mexican side of the U.S. southern border via Puerto Rico.

`` `This was masterminded by a guy in America. Where he is, I do not know.

`` `That information, the plan, came from someone from the New Jersey State from America.

`` `I was going to take a boat from Puerto Rico into Mexico. He was going to smuggle me in. I don't know where I'd end up.'

``Henricki detailed how he and his Canadian wife were imprisoned by

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 4 o'clock and 49 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, June 14, 2019, at 1 p.m.

Mr. Speaker, this is about harassing the President, and it is about delaying the inevitable.

I would have hoped that my friends across the aisle, especially in the Judiciary Committee that had concerns in 2005 and 2006 about the overreach that was possible through the FISA procedures, would have seen that there was no collusion, that the Russians did try, but nobody with the Trump campaign bought.

So we are left with the fact that the real collusion here was between the Clinton campaign, with Fusion GPS hiring a foreign agent, Christopher Steele, who talked to people he now admits could well have been agents of Vladimir Putin, who gave false information about Trump, the candidate, that was used in a dossier that was used to manipulate the FISA court into giving a warrant to start spying on the Trump campaign. That is what this was about.

And what people are calling obstruction of justice is exactly what you have when you have somebody falsely accused of colluding, conspiring with the Russians, and he knows he didn't do that, and he sees his family being harassed, and everybody that worked with the campaign that can be pushed and shoved and blackmailed, as happened, and bankrupted, you want to bring it to an end. You want to see justice done.

But instead of my friends in Judiciary coming together with us who have been concerned about the abuses of the FISA system so that it doesn't happen to other Americans, instead, they come with this resolution to push the matter down the road a little further to the 2020 election.

It has got to stop. Let's stop now.

Mr. Speaker, we heard earlier some comments from the other side about, gee, what could have been done, and the desire for a bipartisan agreement on things. And yet, I know since President Trump came into office, he offered a deal to work out legalization for folks that had been granted DACA, and that offer was slapped down.

So it is interesting to hear now, after the opportunity did present itself in the last Congress, with Republicans in control in the House and Senate, and the President, wanting to work something out in a bipartisan manner, now, we hear, oh, we wanted it bipartisan all along.

Well, a problem with a self-governing nation is that when people abandon the rule of law in that self-governing nation, it is not going to remain self-governing that much longer.

What has made America strong was that--one of the things--that nobody was above the law. That included Presidents, it included most everybody. There were exceptions.

But as I have continued to say for a number of years, we should seal--not seal, but we should control the border, get it secured, continue to give over a million visas a year. Fine. Most generous country in the world when it comes to allowing access, ingress and egress. Continue that, but control the border.

And once the border is controlled, we can work out about what to do about the people that came in illegally. We can work that out.

Some try to slam Republicans and say, oh, you must hate Hispanics. They don't know our hearts. They don't know my heart.

The huge majority of Hispanics I know, they love God, they are devoted to their family, and they have an incredibly hard work ethic. I think those are three things, three components that help, really, make America a great country, the greatest I believe in the world. We need more of that. That is a great thing. But the immigration has to be legal.

Now, this bill, though, we had a rule shoved through, no amendments were going to be allowed. Not only is this not going to be a bipartisan effort to work out an agreement from both sides, we are slamming this through. We are not letting any amendments.

And there were clearly problems with the bill. For example, my amendment would have helped stop gang members from being given legalization. No. No. That got voted down.

And not only was the amendment voted down, under the bill, the Secretary cannot consider the fact that we have information in our database that clearly shows that someone is a gang member. Oh, no.

Not only that, the Secretary, under this bill, is prohibited from getting help to go through and review evidence of who is a gang member and who isn't. That would mean hundreds of thousands of people would have to be considered by the Secretary individually.

That is no mistake. They knew the Secretary could not do that. So they were going to get as many gang members in as can possibly come in. And there will be disputes over who came in when. That is an ongoing issue.

But if a gang member is denied under this program, then all the other applicants, will have to pay a fee that will pay for the gang member's lawyer to sue in Federal court.

Look, it is clear what is going on. One party thinks their future as the only party, as the majority party, will be to get as many felons voting as possible and get as many people in here beholden to the Democratic Party, legally, illegally, whatever.

But the tragedy continues to go on at the border. Every time we mention legalization, amnesty, DACA, Dreamers, all of those things, the Border Patrol made clear, people flood in illegally.

Let's do the right thing. Let's vote ``no'' on this and work something out when the border is secure.

Mr. Speaker, it is wonderful to hear the great tributes to those who have served this country well, as we just heard. In fact, we have so many people to whom we should be eternally grateful.

As Abraham Lincoln said, they gave their last full measure of devotion for the freedom of this country, not for some wishy-washy government in Washington, D.C., that can't figure out what it should do or not do, but for the idea of freedom.

I heard more discussion again recently about the Revolution. I have read a few new books I hadn't read this year about the Revolution, the victory at Yorktown, and other aspects of the Revolution.

And, still, there are so many historians who wonder why there was such a dramatic difference between the outcome of the United States Revolution, 1775 to 1783, and the French Revolution which followed.

I think the historians have it right who have said that the key difference, the reason the U.S. Revolution lasted and was unlike the French, which resulted in so many heads being cut off and eventually resulted in a monarchy again, the key difference was that the U.S. Revolution was about liberty and freedom.

It wasn't about vengeance. They weren't out to cut off as many of the British heads as possible. It was about liberty. Unfortunately, too many in the French Revolution, not all, but too many in the French Revolution were about revenge and not about liberty.

So the great efforts of great heroes in France got hijacked. Many people lost their lives, and then they lost their effort to have a republican form of government, as we have had.

A lot of people don't understand the difference between democracy and a republic. I think it is fair to say, as most historians do, we have a democratic republic.

Democracy would mean the majority always rules, and our Founders realized that sometimes you can have too much passion and not enough time for clear reflection. You are better off, especially among a majority that really doesn't understand the total aspects and factors involved in a decision, selecting and electing representatives with majority votes, except for President.

We set up the electoral college so all States would have a say in who was President, not just the few that had the most people.

But all the other elections were about a majority--so a democracy-- electing representatives to their governmental entities locally, State, and Federal. So, really, we have a democratic republic.

It is interesting, as we saw this week, the Speaker of the House getting ready to go meet with a President of the United States from the other party, and he really wanted to talk about infrastructure and making this country stronger.

I think probably most everybody on both sides of the aisle has seen the surveys regarding the permanent structures, the infrastructure of this country that helps tie us together as a nation, and most of the scores are D-minus, D, D-plus at best. And that is about all you see.

We are better in some areas than we are in others, but whether it is dams, bridges, or highways, we have a lot of infrastructure needs. And that is something that I would hope that we could come together on and work out, as those who went before us were able to do.

We are told in Proverbs that, where there is no vision, the people perish. And it is interesting, when you see towns that had community leaders with visions who could see certain things needed to be done to have a vibrant community 10, 50, 100 years later, you saw how blessed that community was to have leaders with vision.

You go to some communities, and you find, gee, they haven't progressed very well. They seem to be eternally declining and holding on to what they have. Normally, you will find leaders in a community like that who have been spiteful, who didn't want somebody else to get credit for what was being done. And they prevented a community from flourishing for years into the future just because they were small- minded and had petty differences and didn't want somebody else to get the credit.

One of my heroes, Ronald Reagan, is often credited with the line that actually had been around for a great deal longer than President Reagan, but he used the line: It is amazing what you can get accomplished if you don't care who gets the credit. And that has been true since the beginning here in Washington and, even before Washington became the capital, in Philadelphia and New York.

But the Speaker announced at a press event, before going over to the White House to talk about infrastructure, that the President of the United States had been engaged in a coverup. We weren't told a coverup of what. We were not told what was done to cover up.

``Coverup'' is a very ingenious term to be using, almost as brilliant as the term ``collusion,'' because neither the term ``collusion'' nor ``coverup'' are crimes. There is no law that says it is a crime to cover up. There is no crime that says it is a violation of the law to collude.

So words like that have been chosen and used and repeated over and over and over so that the public thinks, ``Oh, my goodness, crimes have been committed. There was collusion. There was a coverup.'' Well, of what?

We now know that, after 2\1/2\ years of hearing about collusion with the Russian Government--and I am certainly no fan of Robert Mueller. He did more damage to the FBI than any FBI Director ever, including the worst of J. Edgar Hoover, when he was spying on Americans.

We had Mueller's FBI that took innocent people, destroyed their lives. In the case of the longest serving Senator, Republican Senator, at the time, he even saw to it that he was convicted immediately before his election, and then that cost him the election.

And then he was killed in a plane accident that he would never have been involved in if Mueller's FBI hadn't framed him for a crime he didn't commit and gotten him voted out of office right before or at his election. That was, of course, Senator Ted Stevens from Alaska.

And Dr. Hatfill, who Mueller accused of committing the crimes of murder using anthrax right after the 9/11 attacks. There was no evidence to support that Dr. Hatfill committed the crimes.

We are told that, at one point--though Mueller kept pursuing Hatfill and questioning his neighbors, telling the neighbors, through Mueller's minions, that Hatfill had committed murder with anthrax and they needed to be careful and report anything. They basically ruined the Hatfill family's lives.

But, at one point, President Bush is reported to have called him in and said: There is no evidence that Dr. Hatfill is the guy who did this. Are you sure? I mean, there is just no evidence. And Mueller stated: I am 100 percent certain.

So, when it turned out he was not the guy that had been involved with anthrax and should have been cleared--by anybody but Mueller--Mueller was asked if he had any regrets about destroying the life of an innocent man. He said, ``Absolutely not,'' and never apologized.

Unfortunately, U.S. taxpayers paid millions of dollars in settlement for Mueller's vindictiveness with no evidence.

Curt Weldon stood right here at this podium making speech after speech in my freshman term. This was obviously well after 9/11. I didn't get here until 2005. But in 2005, 2006, he was talking about a program through which information had gotten to the FBI, and, according to Curt Weldon--Able Danger, I think, was the name of the program that had identified some radical Islamist terrorists, wannabes, and that they were planning an attack in the United States.

And according to Curt Weldon's speeches right here at this podium where I am standing, the FBI, if they acted, they probably could have prevented 9/11, but they didn't act.

And I kept thinking: I don't know if what he is saying is true. I was not familiar with the Able Danger program at that time. But what I kept thinking was: Gosh, these are really serious allegations about the leadership of the FBI. Surely Mueller is going to have to come out and address these allegations from Congressman Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania. And the FBI never publicly addressed those issues, not that I have been able to find.

But they did address them. Mueller's FBI, in fact, raided Weldon's adult daughter, a lawyer, her office, early in the morning. And, gee, somebody in the FBI committed a crime, apparently, and leaked it to the media so they could be there when the warrant was run early in the morning. And somebody alerted Democratic operatives. They had signs that morning around the office talking about, you know, Curt Weldon is caught red-handed, he is a thief, alleging all kinds of crimes.

It turns out he hadn't committed any crimes. It turns out, some months later, they notified the Weldon family they could come get all the stuff that Mueller's FBI had collected during the raid. They were told: It has never been presented to a grand jury. We just did the raid. No prosecution, no grand jury, no indictment.

But since they did that 2 weeks before his election, he narrowly lost that election.

So it appeared to me pretty clear that Mueller's way of responding to allegations that his FBI--and, in fairness to him, he hadn't been there that long before 9/11, so he had plausible deniability: ``Gee, I just got there. I didn't know about Able Danger at the time.'' But, instead, what he chose to do was have his FBI affect an election adversely, causing a critic to lose.

So these are all part of Robert Mueller's background.

But even as much as he wanted to ruin Donald J. Trump, later President Trump, the guy that he begged for a second appointment as Director of the FBI, just shortly after he was begging Trump for appointment to Director of the FBI again and President Trump turned him down, he jumped at the chance to investigate and try to destroy the life of the sitting President who refused to hire him. And he spent 2 years, virtually 2 years, on it. I have seen $25 million, $35 million that Mueller spent.

Mueller took the unusual step of hiring people to assist him in the Special Counsel's Office who hated Donald Trump. Normally, when there has been a special counsel of integrity, they know they are going to be vilified, so they are careful to hire people that appear will be even- handed.

I can't imagine any person of integrity actually hiring people who contributed to the opponent of the person to be investigated, who would go to what they hoped would be her victory party, who despised the man who got elected. It is surprising he would go out of his way to make sure that he hired people that hated President Trump, whom they were supposed to investigate.

But here again, the one good thing that I can say about Robert Mueller is--and he apparently served honorably and well in Vietnam, so I thank him for that service--the guy is consistent. When he decides he wants to destroy an innocent man, he gets after it.

Weissmann hated President Trump. These other folks that hated Trump, some of them still work at the FBI. Many of them have been fired and run out of the FBI or DOJ in shame. They should have had more than that happen, and hopefully they will.

But there was no crime committed. His report indicates that there were efforts by Russians to reach out and try to pull the Trump campaign into some type of conspiracy, but nobody in the Trump campaign took the opportunity that was presented by Russia, and there was no crime of conspiracy with Russians.

And then, as we go along, the more we find out, we find out that, actually, it is a whole lot worse than Mueller indicated. Mueller indicated no collusion, no conspiracy, no crime that anybody in the Trump campaign committed with Russian agents. But if Mueller had been the man of integrity that I would have hoped, he would have investigated those who did conspire with Russian agents.

Because, now, the information is coming out that the Clinton campaign had hired Fusion GPS. Perkins Coie law firm was helping them negotiate and work through some of these things, using their firm's name in the conspiracy--it sure seems like a conspiracy to me--as they hired a now- disgraced foreign agent who had worked for MI6, Christopher Steele, to do digging to try to find some tie between the Trump campaign and Russia, any kind of dirt they could get.

They tried to lure Don Trump, Jr., into some kind of deal. They said, gee, there is a Russian person who has all kinds of negative information about Hillary Clinton.

He agreed to meet and found right away that this is not what it was represented to be and got out of the meeting as quickly as he could.

Here again, Christopher Steele was hired, apparently through Fusion GPS, to dig up dirt, true or not true, about Donald Trump. Fusion GPS hired this foreign, disgraced intelligence agent to do digging, using Russian agents.

Fusion GPS also hired the spouse of one of the top FBI people, Bruce Ohr. That was his wife, Nellie. She was hired to dig up dirt, anything she could in Russia about Trump.

I didn't realize until more recently that Christopher Steele was not even traveling to Russia to dig up this dirt. He was simply contacting people in Russia, trying to find somebody who had some dirt on Donald Trump.

Apparently, he has now recently indicated: You know what? I guess there is a good chance that the people I was talking to in Russia who gave the false information about Donald Trump, yeah, they may have been working for Vladimir Putin.

It appears the evidence is now starting to come out, no thanks to Robert Mueller and the tens of millions of dollars he wasted, the years that he wasted. The truth is starting to come out, and it is making people who are in positions of power very uncomfortable.

We have heard Clapper and Brennan making really inappropriate statements for somebody who had been involved in our intelligence- gathering agencies. But it is appearing that it was probably Brennan-- we will be finding out in the days ahead--who may have asked England's intelligence agencies to spy on American citizens involved with the Trump campaign because our intelligence community is not authorized to spy on American citizens. So there may be a wink and a nod.

We need to get to the bottom of whether our intelligence community winks and nods, and says: Hey, we want to spy on our own citizens, but we are not allowed to legally. So how about you spy on these citizens, and we will spy on some for you in our country?

We need to know if that kind of thing has really gone on. If it has gone on, if there is a quid pro quo, we need to know. We need to know if some of our top intelligence officials have committed crimes. This is serious stuff.

It turns out there was no collusion, no conspiracy between anybody in the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin or Russia. But it is appearing more and more that there was a conspiracy between people associated with the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie, Christopher Steele, potential agents of Vladimir Putin, to try to destroy Donald Trump before the election and after the election.

We expect to see more coming out as some of the information that was classified is declassified. It appears now we

are hearing, and we heard previously, that an Australian Ambassador had spoken to a member of the Trump campaign, just tangentially part of the campaign.

But what we have found out now is, apparently, the Australian Ambassador was manipulated through the Democratic effort to defeat Donald Trump, recruited to tell a tangential member of the Trump campaign that the Russians had Hillary Clinton's emails.

Then they set that same Trump marginal official up by asking him questions: Have you heard anything about Russia having information on Hillary?

He said: Well, yes. I heard that Russians had Hillary Clinton's emails.

Then they used that information to help them get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. It was a total setup by potentially our intelligence community, potentially British MI6.

We have to get to the bottom of this. People who have committed crimes need to go to prison.

In the meantime, there is all this animosity that has been stirred up against Donald Trump. Now we find out there was nothing to the collusion. He knew that he had not committed any kind of conspiracy with Russia. He knew that this was all bogus. He was hearing rumors that if there was a conspiracy, it involved the other campaign.

What do you do? How do you act? I would submit, you act exactly as President Trump has acted, frustrated. He can't believe that his own United States Government is trying to set him up and say that he committed some crime that he never committed. He can't obstruct justice when he is doing everything he possibly can to ensure that justice gets done.

That is where we have been. We heard the roadblocks, the things that, oh gee, there was collusion. When that didn't materialize, then: Well, there is a coverup.

No allegations other than just the general term ``coverup.''

Clearly, efforts are being made in this city to prevent President Trump from being successful in getting legislation through this House and through the Senate that could become law and help the country.

Even on issues of securing our border, President Obama talked about the need to secure the border and stop illegal immigration. Senator Clinton had talked about the need to stop illegal immigration and secure the border. Most of the leaders on both sides of the aisle have talked about that at some point.

Why don't we do it? Well, he would get credit for keeping a campaign promise, and apparently, it is more important to stop the President from keeping campaign promises than it is important to some to help the country.

What it reminded me of, as I thought back--and I have been here 14 years. Never expected to be here this long. I feel like I am kind of going to a scary movie. Get into it and I am sorry I went, but I can't leave until I see how it turns out. I want to make sure that we get on a proper footing here.

I know in the 14 years that I have been here, I have not seen either party work so hard to prevent the other party's President from being successful.

As I majored in history, I have never stopped studying history. American history is my favorite. I have tried to think back, okay, when was the last time, if there ever was a time before, when one party worked so hard to prevent another party's President from being successful and helping the country?

I think it probably goes back to John Quincy Adams' days. John Quincy Adams, he was the first son of a former President to be elected President, and he did not get a majority of the vote. It ended up that he didn't get a majority of the electoral college.

It was thrown here to the House of Representatives to decide, under the Constitution. Henry Clay, so beloved and respected here in the House of Representatives, he decided to throw his support to John Quincy Adams.

I have studied John Quincy Adams, read a very thorough biography. I liked it. I chose it because it incorporated more of John Quincy Adams' own journal, where they kept calling him JQA. John Quincy Adams, apparently, kept more of a journal than any President we have ever had. He started very young, and he went until the last few weeks of his life when he could no longer see to write.

I didn't know until I read that, for example, that his last night at home before he came to the House floor to give a speech against the war with Mexico, because he was concerned that that would perpetuate slavery longer, that the reason he had run for the House of Representatives after being President was to try to do what William Wilberforce had done in England, and that is to use his elected position to fight to end slavery.

Wilberforce got it totally outlawed 3 days before he died in 1833. In 1830, that is what Adams thought he was supposed to do. That is why he ran for Congress.

The night before, he had a massive stroke. The next day, when he tried to stand up and speak against war with Mexico, he couldn't see.

He couldn't sleep, and he asked his precious wife if she would mind reading him any of William Wilberforce's sermons. She chose one. She read it for him, and he finally dozed, listening to William Wilberforce's sermon the last night he slept at home, before he had his massive stroke on the House floor here in the Capitol.

In 1824, John Quincy Adams was still a man of integrity. He was always a man of integrity. Some feel like it is possible that he was the smartest President we have ever had. Certainly, he was one of the top-educated Presidents we have ever had. He spoke a number of languages.

One thing he had in common with our current President, he is the only other President to have had a wife who was not born in America. Much like President Trump's wife, John Quincy Adams' wife spoke multiple languages, very fluent. She herself was brilliant. So we share that with the current First Lady.

John Quincy Adams even wrote some history books in German. His favorite foreign language was French. He was an amazing guy.

He knew he was a man of integrity, and when studying his life, you figure out that he was a man of integrity.

He asked Henry Clay for his support. Henry Clay threw his support behind John Quincy Adams for President. That got him the votes in the House to win the Presidency.

When it came time to pick Cabinet members, President-elect Adams said that he believed the person who would make the best Secretary of State would be Henry Clay.

Those people who were close to him, who loved him, said, yes, he was right, that Henry Clay would make a fabulous Secretary of State, but that if he appoints Henry Clay to be Secretary of State, it will look like he cut a deal with Clay in return for his support for him for President, which gave him the election. If he agreed to make him Secretary of State, people would think he made an illegal deal.

He said: He is the best person for the job. I didn't make any kind of deal with him. He threw his support behind me. I never mentioned Secretary of State to him. I never mentioned making him a Cabinet official, but I think the world of the man. I think he would be the best Secretary of State. People know I am a man of integrity. I wouldn't do an illegal deal to be elected President, so they just need to get over it. He is the best man. I am going to appoint the best man to be Secretary of State. People who know me will know that I never made a deal, promised him Secretary of State in return for throwing his House support behind me. That is just a lie, and I am not going to be prevented from appointing the best man for Secretary of State by my fear about what somebody might think.

So he appointed Henry Clay to be Secretary of State, and people got really upset: There must have been a deal. He must have cut a deal with Henry Clay. In return for Henry Clay's support that won him the Presidency, Henry Clay gets to be Secretary of State.

Apparently, there was no deal, but people thought there was. People felt like: This looks terrible. It looks like he made a deal. He must have made a deal. We know Adams is an honest guy, and so if he made a deal with Clay, he surely would have kept his end of the deal.

There was no deal, but there were so many in the opposition party who were

mad about it, they just decided they were not going to let John Quincy Adams accomplish anything as President.

He was elected in 1824, sworn in, in 1825. His term was 1825 to 1829. He was defeated by Andrew Jackson and defeated fairly easily because people thought he had cheated to win by making a deal he didn't make with Henry Clay.

During those 4 years--anyone can do the research--he couldn't get much of anything done. There were even cases of Members of this House who were of the opposition party, the Democratic Party, there were Democrats who had actually written and sponsored bills they desperately wanted to get passed. When John Quincy Adams threw his support behind the bills because he thought they were a good idea, the person who wrote the bill, sponsored the bill, withdrew his support. He did not want John Quincy Adams to get credit for passing some important bill.

He had some great ideas. He wanted a national observatory. He felt like it would be good to have a uniform system of weights and measurements. That had not happened. He wanted to create a naval academy for the country. He wanted to have a code, a systemized national bankruptcy law.

Bankruptcy is mentioned in the Constitution. There were finally some laws passed before he was President, but it wasn't a uniform national bankruptcy law as it needed to be.

He had some great ideas, but they weren't passed because people did not want him to get credit. They were willing to hurt the country to prevent John Quincy Adams from having a great victory.

That is what went through my mind. Somebody may be able to find a case in which one party did everything it could to prevent a President from having any big successes.

It is a little late. President Trump got a great tax bill. It wasn't as good as I had hoped it would be, but it was helpful to the country overall. He got that passed, signed into law.

Hopefully, we are going to vote on the Mexico-Canada trade agreement. It is better than NAFTA was. Hopefully, we will get that done, and we won't keep harming the country by failing to bring that for a vote.

For Adams, there was a tariff that was passed. That was about the biggest piece of legislation passed during his 4 years, but it didn't even get enacted until Andrew Jackson took over as President.

So Adams, a man of integrity, was accused of making an illegal deal with Henry Clay to get himself elected President. The country suffered for 4 years. Those who despised John Quincy Adams, they were able to hurt the country for 4 years just to keep John Quincy Adams from having a major victory.

It is important to learn from history. As we know from the old adage, those who refuse to learn from history are destined to repeat it. Of course, I also grew up learning there is a corollary to that, that those who do learn from history will find new ways to screw up. We have seen both of those play out in this country.

I am hoping it will come together, and we will be able to pass some of the critical legislation to secure our border and to get some infrastructure built so we don't give a country to our children and grandchildren that has infrastructure crumbling and with so much debt that they can't afford to rebuild the infrastructure. We already know that we are the first generation in American history that didn't have as our driving goal to give a country to our children better than we had it.

The debts continue to skyrocket, over $23 trillion now. We really need to come together on these important issues.

With regard to the President's effort to try to secure the border, I continue to believe with all my heart, the most compassionate, caring thing we could do for the people of Mexico--and I was talking to the Ambassador from Guatemala yesterday. I sure like him. Guatemala, of course, was the only country to immediately recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, as it was 3,000 years ago, and should be and is today, and will be for the future. Guatemala had the courage to back us up on that.

Apparently, MS-13ers come mainly from El Salvador, but Guatemala wants to help. We ought to help Guatemala to help us. I hope that will be occurring.

If we really want to be compassionate for the people of Mexico and Central America, the best thing we could do is secure the border, cut off the tens of billions of dollars every year, maybe into the hundred- plus billion, that go to the drug cartels. It funds corruption in Mexico. It is the one thing that keeps Mexico from being one of the very top economies in the world.

They have fantastic natural resources. They have a better location geographically than the United States does. They are between North America and South America. They are between two oceans. They have a great location. They have some of the most hardworking people in the world.

I also am thrilled that the huge majority have faith in God. I think we could stand another boost of people who have faith in God, a devotion to family, a hard work ethic like we generally find among the huge majority of Hispanic people from Mexico and Central America. We could afford more of that here, but we have to enforce the law.

If we secure the border, Mexico ought to be able to put down the drug cartel corruption and become a top economy. Then you won't have people doing everything they can, risking their lives, having their daughters raped repeatedly coming up here from Mexico or through Mexico to the United States. We can go back to having the kind of vibrant tourism that we once had in support of Mexico.

But there are efforts that are being undertaken here in the House by friends across the aisle who do not want Donald Trump to have success in helping the United States, and, really, it would greatly help Mexico.

What is the result? Well, here is a story from May 21, Washington Times, Steven Dinan: ICE says Prince George's County released illegal murder suspects.

The story says: ``Two teens arrested last week on charges stemming from a horrific killing in Maryland were supposed to be deported last year, but local authorities didn't turn them over to ICE, the immigration agency said Tuesday.

``Prosecutors say the teens, Josue Rafael Fuentes-Ponce, 16, and Joel Ernesto Escobar, 17--suspected of being MS-13 gang members--feared they would be ratted out for an April robbery, so they and an accomplice snuffed out a 14-year-old suspected snitch. They made her strip before beating her with a baseball bat and chopping her with a machete. The girl's body was found in a creek this month.''

This is in Prince George's County.

``U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in a pointed statement Tuesday, said the crime could have been averted''--could have been completely prevented--``but for Prince George's County's sanctuary city policy.''

That is what stopped it, or it is what kept our ICE agents from preventing the baseball bat and machete mutilation of this 14-year-old girl.

``Mr. Fuentes-Ponce and Mr. Escobar were in county custody last year on attempted murder charges for another crime. ICE placed a detainer on them, asking to be notified when they would be released so agents could deport them. ICE said the Prince George's County Department of Corrections defied the request.

`` `These individuals had demonstrated violent criminal behavior before, and because they were released in spite of the lawful detainer, they were afforded an opportunity to take a life.' ''

And not just take a life. They beat her, stripped her, beat her with a baseball bat and then chopped her up with a machete.

Thank you very much, Prince George's County, for your sanctuary city. No telling how many people will have to lose their lives while you defy Federal law.

This article says: ``ICE has placed new detainers for both teens after the murder charges. Prince George's corrections spokesman Andrew Cephas said the agency didn't release the teens into the community. He said the Corrections Department did have custody last year but remanded the teens to

Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, a State facility, after a judge's ruling.

`` `Neither of these individuals were released to the public from Prince George's County Department of Corrections. They remained detained in the juvenile facility until the disposition of their cases earlier this year.' ''

Yeah, right. The cases were disposed of, a little slap on the wrist for their attempted murders. But this says the county department does inform ICE--or the Prince George's County spokesman said they inform ICE about upcoming releases but did not provide notification in this case.

``ICE says the county should have given notification of any transfer out of custody so the agency could lodge a detainer with the new prison or jail.''

``Under a 2014 Department of Corrections policy, county jails say they will notify ICE of impending releases but won't hold the migrants for pickup unless ICE has a signed warrant from a judge.

``Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for stricter immigration controls, said the teens are at the center of several raging immigration debates.

``Mr. Fuentes-Ponce came to the U.S. in late 2015 as part of the surge of families from Central America who have overwhelmed the border in recent years.

``Under the Obama administration, the family was paroled into the U.S. to await its immigration case. Like many other families, Mr. Fuentes-Ponce didn't appear for his hearing and was ordered deported in absentia, ICE said.

``Mr. Escobar, meanwhile, entered the U.S. in 2016 as an unaccompanied alien child, the other major demographic in the border surge.''

That is one of the things we debated for hours and hours yesterday in our Judiciary Committee. The committee's majority wants to have even more widespread amnesty than DACA, which President Obama had said 20- something times it would be unconstitutional for him to do what he ultimately did creating the DACA program. He didn't even sign executive orders, I understand. He had the Secretary of Homeland Security do a couple of memos.

So he changed Federal law without the bill being passed by the House and Senate, without signing it into law. He didn't even sign an executive order. He just had a couple of memos that changed the policy.

``Mr. Krikorian wondered whether the killing of the 14-year-old girl would receive as much attention as the death of an illegal immigrant teen in Border Patrol custody this week.''

There was a teen who died from an apparent flu.

``That case prompted reporters to question Mr. Trump about what steps he would take.

`` `The antiborder activists are quick to blame the Border Patrol for deaths that are out of their control, but rationalizes the crimes committed by people who would be removed if the law were enforced. There really is a double standard here.'

``The D.C. area has long had a large Central American population, making it one of the top destinations for families and unaccompanied alien children involved in the surge. Prince George's, Fairfax, and Montgomery Counties are among the top 10 locations.

``More than 5,660 unaccompanied alien children have been placed with sponsors in Prince George's County over the past 5 years, topping Fairfax at about 5,200 and Montgomery at about 4,300.

``The unaccompanied alien children have strained schools and, security experts say, created a breeding ground for gang recruitment.

`` `Most of the Central Americans coming across the border are not criminals, but gangs have used this flow of people across the border to bring their members into the U.S., and others who weren't gang members in Central America have become gang members here,' Mr. Krikorian said.''

So it would really help if we could come together, if the President wouldn't have to be building the wall without any help from a Democrat- controlled House.

It is a shame they want to do all they can to try to prevent the President from protecting the country, but we ought to learn a lesson from the damage that was done between 1825 and 1829 during the Presidency of John Quincy Adams, and we ought to come together, get the border secure.

Let's not have any amnesties until the border is secure, then we can talk about them, debate them. But every time we talk about amnesty--I got a picture this week from a friend on the border, a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old, unaccompanied children, yet we are told: Oh, no. We are doing this DACA amnesty because the children were brought into the United States by their parents, and so these children were drug into the United States without their choice, and so we need to give them legal status.

And yet you have got a 6-year-old and an 8-year-old that are coming in, as my friend across the aisle said yesterday: Well, they don't come in without help. She is right. The parents weren't with them. The parents weren't with them, forcing them.

We also have been hearing that, since there is so much fuss made about allowing people to stay that had children with them, the children have now become a negotiable commodity. I have been there when children were passed back and forth between different adults--you know, who is going to claim these kids--and they are waiting for the border patrolmen to get down to them so they can answer the questions.

But the drug cartels have figured out, the gangs have figured out-- gangs are often paid to bring people in illegally, and the gangs get paid by the drug cartels because, as we know, every inch of the border of the United States is controlled by some drug cartel.

So the gangs make money, the drug cartels make money by bringing people in. And since they have learned they have a better chance of staying in if they bring somebody's kid with them, then more kids are coming in now.

But it is interesting. I am wondering how the debates will go when we say, well, here is a person we want to give amnesty to because their parents dragged them into America, even though there were no parents with them. Well, so the gangs brought them in.

Anybody in the drug cartel brings in a child, that means we are supposed to give them amnesty?

At some point, we have got to secure the border. It is the most compassionate thing we can do. Mexico will become a great economy in the world, one of the top, and the wonderful people of Mexico, Central America will have a better standard of living. Heck, you might have United States citizens thinking maybe they would like to go work in a vibrant economy in Mexico if and when we can help stop the drug cartels with all the money that they have got coming in.

Mr. Speaker, may I ask how much time I have left.

Since we are going into Memorial Day weekend, I am thrilled Sergeant Derrick Miller has been released. I testified at two different hearings for him. I am thrilled he is released. He shouldn't have been incarcerated.

Lieutenant Clint Lorance, hopefully that can be brought to an end and he can be released like American Taliban John Walker Lindh was.

But I want to finish by mentioning Ross McGinnis. I promised his father, Tom, I would never forget him, and I haven't.

Ross was 19 when he was in Iraq. Ross loved the Army. Ross finished high school in Knox, Pennsylvania, joined the Army. He loved it, and his platoon sergeant said everybody loved Ross. Ross helped energize people.

Ross was a machine gunner up in the turret of a Humvee going through a village in Iraq. A grenade was projected into the bed of the Humvee, and Ross was the only one in a position to jump out and save himself. He yelled, ``Grenade.'' Ross saw the four people in the bed crouch. Ross knew they were going to die, so Ross jumped down, covered the grenade, and saved four people's lives.

I went to Ross' funeral, his graveside in Arlington Cemetery, because two of the four people Ross saved were my constituents.

Ross' sergeant and the two others who made it back from Iraq for the funeral came up after the ceremony,

knelt before Ross' remains, put their hands on Ross' remains, and as they told me, they thank God for Ross McGinnis, and they thank Ross for saving their lives.

We should thank God for all of those who have served and protected us and thank the families of those that lost a loved one protecting us.

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

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the efforts of my friends across the aisle who believe that they are acting on behalf of equality. I realize that they believe that their way of approaching things includes much more wisdom than that of Moses, who is the only great lawgiver depicted in this Chamber with a full face rather than a side view.

I would only submit we are not wiser at this time than Moses. I have heard comments from my friends, including my friend the former law professor saying he was impressed with the ability of the courts to sort out these civil rights issues.

But as my friend Justice Scalia once told me: If you guys are going to screw up legislation over in Congress, don't come running to us all the time because you don't know how to make laws that are fair.

That is what we have here. In an effort borne out of the best intentions, we want to help the feelings of people who are gender confused or just suffering gender dysphoria, the opposite of euphoria. We don't want to hurt their feelings.

We are told that 25 percent of all women will suffer sexual assault. The literature is clear that women suffer post-traumatic stress disorder after sexual assault at three to four times the rate that soldiers do, and that they are traumatized and retriggered by being in a confined space like a dressing room or a restroom when a biological man comes into that private area.

We are going to say to those women: You know what? You have just got to get over your trauma because for the less than 1 percent who though a biological man but think they may be a woman, so they are confused gender-wise, we don't want to hurt their feelings. So you are just going to have to get over your trauma.

This is what is going on here. If you look at the battered women shelters around this country, who pays for most of those? It sure appears to me, for the ones I see, they are Christian, Salvation Army, Catholic. I have been told by many of these folks: We are just barely surviving financially. This will force us to change our accommodations, and we will go out of business.

We believe, as Christians, that Moses had it right on males and females. Although there are people wiser in their own eyes than Moses and Jesus, who said exactly verbatim what Moses did, if an orthodox synagogue says, ``You know what? We think men should be rabbis,'' but they don't hire the biological woman who says, ``I feel like I am a man today,'' then they can be sued. But this bill gives not only the claimant the ability to sue but also allows the Attorney General to come in with the full force of the United States Government and destroy that synagogue or that Christian organization.

I know there are people here who think, ``I do a whole lot more good than these Christian organizations,'' but do you really?

This is borne out of good intentions, but it is going to be so destructive to common sense and to people, to women who have been hurt. As we heard in our committee from the second woman to get a scholarship under Title IX, you are going to destroy women's scholarships.

She had a chart there. The three top times for the 400-meter in the Olympics of 2016, she said there are thousands of men who have better times. I know my friends said in the hearing, ``Gee, we know that men would never act like a woman just to get a massive amount of money and scholarships.''

I don't want to hear the majority say later, ``Wow, we really didn't think that would happen.'' It is already happening.

If we are going to preserve the gains made by women under Title IX, this needs to fail and not become the law. To preserve what we have already done in the way of gains for women, I urge a ``no'' vote.

Mr. Speaker, we heard a great deal of applause today from all around the gallery when the so-called Equality Act passed.

Equality, what it really means is equality for some, but if you believe the teachings of Moses and Jesus, then you are not only not going to be treated equally, you are going to be persecuted, prosecuted, tied up in court.

You will have people try to destroy not only you, but any religious institution that tries to faithfully follow the teachings of Moses and Jesus.

So the Equality Act is a misnomer, as is the statement that this means the end of persecution.

Somehow, I hear Al Pacino in the background when it comes to persecution, saying, Oh, I'm just getting started.

So I come before the House with a broken heart, as someone who has studied, loved history, studied history, continues to read more history, constantly.

This Nation is in big trouble. We have gone from the days when--I guess the Bible is still probably the most-quoted book, year after year, in this body, but somehow it often is used for personal abuse or used without giving real context and real meaning.

But above every door in the gallery is the side profile of what were once considered the greatest lawgivers in all of history. Some of us learned about the code of Hammurabi. He is up there. The Justinian Code is next to Hammurabi.

I think there are two or three Popes that were considered great lawgivers.

Some wonder why Napoleon is up there, but the Napoleonic code is still the basis of law in Louisiana.

Jefferson wasn't there during the Constitution, but he helped with a great many laws and, of course, did most of the writing of the Declaration of Independence. But there was much in the Constitution, or a number of things were based on some things that Jefferson had already worked on.

But the only profile that is not a side profile is that of Moses.

When Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke last in here, from this podium behind me, the second level--some people wonder why the President, or people like Netanyahu speak at the second level and not the top level, and that is because this is the people's House. To speak in here you must either be a Member of Congress or have been invited by the Congress to speak here. That is why they are at the second level.

But, at the end of Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech, he paid tribute to the fact that he was facing a great Israelite, Moses; that, like I say, at one time he was considered the greatest lawgiver of all times.

In view of decisions over the last 50 years, we have had a majority-- the Supreme Court, probably has reduced his 10 commandments down to four or five.

But this bill, today, will allow persecution and prosecution of anyone who tries to faithfully follow the teachings of Moses and Jesus.

When it comes to marriage, I know the Supreme Court has ruled. They have substituted a majority, at least five judges, substituted their opinions, and that is what they are, opinions, for that of the law, the Constitution; because the Constitution, if you really followed it strictly, marriage is not mentioned as a power or something that the Federal Government would have power over. So, as the 10th Amendment says, such a thing would be left to the States and the people. And many of us believe that is where it should have been left.

But the Supreme Court, at least five oligarchs, decided to take that over. And since they were so much wiser in their own eyes than Moses and Jesus, they substituted their opinion for the opinions of the people of 50 different States and, just basically, took over that function, without amending the Constitution, without even changing the law legislatively, or referendum, any means like that. They just substituted their opinion.

It was Moses who said a man shall leave his father and mother, a woman leaves her home, and the two will become one flesh.

When Jesus was asked--naturally the Pharisees were testing him, trying to trick him, but he quoted Moses verbatim; man shall leave his father and mother, a woman leaves her home, the two will become one flesh. But Jesus added another line on to that: What God has joined together, let no man put asunder. Nobody separate.

There is a video called White Winds, and in that video, the research they have done indicated that there has only been one time in recorded history when legal marriage included same-sex couples.

And, of course, those of us that have studied history, think about, historically, the Roman Empire days, when same-sex couples were widely accepted. Ancient Greece, same-sex couples were widely accepted.

But according to the research, this indication was that they say marriage is, basically, as being an institution for procreation. And so marriage was a man and woman. Have whatever same-sex relations you want, but in those times and places, marriage was said to be between a man and a woman, if it was legal.

Some of us would think back to the days of Sodom and Gomorrah, when-- well, the term ``sodomy'' comes from Sodom. But when same-sex relations were widely accepted, obviously, no discrimination.

But according to the research in the documentary, marriage, even in Sodom and Gomorrah, did not include same-sex couples because marriage was for procreation, family.

According to the research, there is one recorded piece of information about legalized marriage being same-sex couples. It was from a Babylonian Talmud that indicated that during something called the Days of Noah, marriage was legal between a same-sex couple.

So, according to the research of that documentary, we are living in days similar to the days of Noah before the flood.

We are now beginning, in this country, in recent years, to experience what people fled to this country to avoid experiencing, and that is, discrimination against an individual because of their religious belief as Christians.

Whether the Pilgrims, or so many other groups that came, of course, there were some, even prisoners that came for other reasons. But in the settlement of North America, what is now the United States, over 90 percent accepted Judeo-Christian beliefs as appropriate and the norm.

Some called Jefferson anything but a Christian, but he made clear that he believed the teachings of Jesus. The story is told that--and I did ask the opinion, or not an opinion, but ask for the facts from the Congressional Research Service--about this Capitol being used as the largest Christian church in Washington, D.C., in the District of Columbia.

They came back with the information that it truly was; that what we now call Statuary Hall--back at the time it was the House of Representatives' Chamber--for the majority of the 1800s it was considered, or it was used on Sundays for Christian worship service. And Thomas Jefferson, as CRS verified, would come to the church service--the nondenominational, Christian worship service that was held just down the hall--each Sunday that he was in Washington during his time as President.

The story is told that on one of those occasions he was riding his horse, as he normally did, to come to church up here on top of Capitol Hill in the Capitol. And someone saw him with a big Bible and asked, Where are you going, Mr. President? And he said, I'm going to church up in the Capitol.

And the individual said, But you don't believe everything that they do.

And he said, Sir, I am the highest elected magistrate in this country. It is imperative that I set the proper example.

So those were early beliefs. Sometimes it is hard for us to reconcile those beliefs with the cruelty of slavery.

Even Jefferson, in the first version of the Declaration of Independence--what looks like the longest grievance against King George--Jefferson was saying, We have a right to separate from King George because of the fact that he allowed slavery to ever start in America.

So, on the one hand, Jefferson actually understood how destructive slavery was; and on the other hand, he had slaves.

But it is--if you look through our history and how we improved up until now, the great strides in civil rights, great victories in civil rights, have come based on a powerful push from churches, Christian churches, and from people who were guided by Christian principles.

The 1730s, 1740s, 1750s, sometimes referred to as the first great awakening in America, powerful, powerful time of revival.

Winthrop is said to have spoken to a majority of Americans. They knew of him or had heard him speak. He was a traveling evangelist.

Many historians say it was the great awakening and the belief in religious freedom that drove--the belief in freedom that drove those early Americans to a Revolution in standing for the rights given by our creator and acknowledging, of course, that there is a creator.

Of course, the Constitution is written, agreed to in 1787, ratified in 1789, but it is concluded, it is dated, ``In the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven,'' and it is referring to our Lord.

I am sure that if many judges, many Federal judges had their way, we would strike ``our Lord'' from the Constitution, as them thinking that is somehow unconstitutional to mention ``our Lord'' in our own Constitution.

But you look in the 1800s, certainly there were secularists who saw the damage of slavery and there were some churches that supported it, but the movement toward abolition was driven by people who believed in God, most of them in Jesus Christ.

John Quincy Adams, who ran for the House after being President, stood up down the hall over and over to speak against slavery. He had written to a guy named William Wilberforce in England. Wilberforce had a spiritual Christian awakening and ran for parliament. He believed God's call on him was to bring an end to slavery in all of the British empire, and that is what he spent his adult life in parliament trying to do.

He had a victory at one point, partially through his parliamentary career, in getting the slave trade outlawed. But still slavery persisted, just not the trade in Great Britain. And then 3 days before he died in 1833, slavery was outlawed altogether.

John Quincy Adams thought he was supposed to bring an end to slavery in America the way Wilberforce had fought and successfully done in England, but he didn't get it done.

He served in the House of Representatives from 1831 until his massive stroke in 1848. It happened when he was trying to get up and speak against the war with Mexico, because he was afraid war with Mexico would end up perpetuating slavery even longer.

Daniel Webster, one of the great abolitionists, he would have crowds gather around outside his office during times when he would read the Bible out loud from within his office.

I have been here in Congress since January of 2005, and I don't believe I have ever heard anybody reading out loud from the Bible and having crowds gather around the outside of their office in the hall here at the Capitol, but it used to happen.

Daniel Webster was driven by his Christian beliefs that slavery had to come to an end. He, John Quincy Adams, so many others believed that it was totally inconsistent. How could we expect God to keep blessing America when we were putting our brothers and sisters in chains? The church-ordained ministers were such a powerful force in bringing an end to the evil cruelty called slavery here in America.

Then in the 1950s and 1960s, we didn't have a great awakening in the 20th century, but nonetheless, there was an ordained Christian minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., and he was guided, informed by his Christian beliefs. He was the most powerful individual force in moving our country into accepting what the Constitution said and in assuring that people would be treated equally.

But what Congress has been doing in recent years is passing more and more legislation that will permit persecution of people trying to follow their Christian beliefs, and that passed the House today.

Born out of the best intentions of people that don't want to see anybody persecuted, and yet as a result of this bill, if it were to become law, there would be widespread persecution and prosecution of people who try to hold to their Christian beliefs.

And I know our friends don't want to harm battered women or do damage to women's shelters, but I tried to encourage my friends, look at the literature about women who are victims of sexual assault.

Having been a felony judge for a decade, I heard testimony constantly about the victims and the victims' suffering and their ongoing suffering and their trauma that they continued to live through and the things that triggered their trauma.

It appears from the research literature that women--of course, we are told that one out of four women will experience sexual assault.

We are also told that it is a fraction of 1 percent, a fraction of a fraction, perhaps, of 1 percent of people who truly suffer from gender dysphoria.

It used to be called a disorder. I think it still was in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV. It for sure was in III. But now in V, it is called gender dysphoria, dysphoria being the opposite of euphoria. It is a confusion, a dissatisfaction, an unhappiness with a biological gender, so gender dysphoria.

It is interesting, even in the Equality Act itself, I mean, at one place here it recites findings, and here on the bottom of pages 6 and 7, it points out that about one in five transgender people experience homelessness.

Now, it doesn't go into the reasons for that, if that is true. And possibly there could be discrimination that leads to homelessness, but since this is a condition of unhappiness, a dysphoria, we don't know the reasons for one in five, if that is correct, of people suffering from gender dysphoria being homeless.

But without giving that finding, you go through the bill, this bill is going to allow people to sue lenders who don't lend to people suffering from gender dysphoria at the same rate as those who do not suffer from gender dysphoria. Well, not only can those seeking loans come against and sue the bank and win, the attorney general of the United States is authorized under this bill to bring the full power of the United States Government at war against any individual who questions or is concerned about lending money to someone suffering from this dysphoria.

But if someone even considered the fact that this gender unhappiness or dysphoria, if they even considered that, then they are going to lose the lawsuit under this bill to the individual and to the Attorney General of the United States.

Now, previously, ministers were thought to have some religious exemption. This is the first bill in American history we could find, and it is certainly the first one since the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, but the first time a bill actually spells out specifically that you cannot claim religious beliefs as a defense.

So I am not hearing people talk about it, but I understand that Orthodox Jewish synagogues believe they should have men as rabbis.

Well, under this, if it becomes law, if a woman comes forward and says, ``I believe I am a man and I want to be your rabbi,'' and they are not hired, well, not only does that person have a claim against the synagogue, but also the Attorney General can come in and destroy the synagogue financially. And that can happen with any church.

If a church says, ``We love everybody,'' like my own church, Christian church, Green Acres Baptist, we love everybody. We welcome anybody in our church. We will not discriminate against anybody who wants to come worship the Lord with us. But if you want to be married, it needs to be what Moses and Jesus said marriage is. Well, in the past, you could utilize religion, religious beliefs as a defense, but if this is the law of the land, then there will be no defense for religious beliefs.

And, again, if White Winds is correct, then for the first time since the days of Noah, we have come to believe that we are so much smarter and so much wiser than Moses and Jesus. So it is an amazing time.

I know Christian friends say, Louie, you seem so down. You know, Paul said, ``Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice.'' And I understand that, but I also know that as Jesus contemplated Jerusalem, he had a broken heart. He said:

How many times have I wanted to bring you under my wing and

love you and protect you, and you wouldn't have it.

So there is a rebellion going on in this country, a rejection of things upon which this country was founded.

And, you know, people try to paint someone like me as being a hater. I am not a hater. There is nobody in this body I hate.

At a recent event, I had a person who looked like a woman, she said she believed she was a woman, and we had a talk for about 20 minutes. And I understood her thinking and I understood what she felt, though she was a biological man. We disagreed about her lifestyle, but I had nothing but Christian love. And we hugged, agreed to disagree, and hugged as we went our ways. We were up here at the Washington Convention Center.

I don't hate her. I don't hate anybody.

Plenty of people hate me.

But it is so unfair to say that anybody, just because they believe in the teachings of Moses and Jesus, is a hater. It is simply not true.

But I do know that if anybody is not willing to forgive and love, they haven't really grasped what it means to be a Christian.

But it doesn't mean you have to accept and encourage and applaud things that you know are not helpful. I mean, for heaven's sake, the most thorough research ever done on transgender--and it was done, I believe it was Finland, a 30-year study, people seeking sex change surgery--that 30-year study found that those who were seeking sex change surgery were 20 times more likely to commit suicide. Now, how could somebody who loves their fellow man and fellow woman, how could somebody who truly loves them want them in a state of mind in life that they are 20 times more likely to kill themselves, to take that precious gift of life they were given? How is that loving somebody to want them, encourage them, Oh, you stay in this lifestyle. You are ten times more likely to kill yourself, but that is fine, we applaud you for being in that situation, 20 times more likely to kill yourself.

And there is this great study here, ``The New Atlantis, a Journal of Technology and Society'', this is from the fall of 2016, of a special report on sexuality and gender: Findings from the biological, psychological, and social sciences, by Lawrence Mayer, MB, MS, Ph.D., and Paul R. McHugh, MD. Dr.

McHugh is an amazing, brilliant man. He was the head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. Johns Hopkins was the first hospital in the United States who did sex change operations.

But as Dr. McHugh points out, after about 20 years of monitoring the people on whom they did sex change surgery, they found that the patients who went through this brutal, really brutal sex change surgery, were no better off mentally than they were before. That was Johns Hopkins' finding. They said: Why should we cut off or take out perfectly healthy organs if the result is the person is no better? So they quit doing sex change operations. As I understand it, they were later threatened with losing a lot of money in support, so they are back doing them now.

We hear from the left all the time about the importance of science, and yet when it comes to science, like the heartbeat bill based on science, we have been told that it is nothing but a mass of tissue inside a pregnant woman. And yet, technology now has gotten so good that at some 6 or 8 weeks into a pregnancy, you can hear a heartbeat, and that heartbeat is from a living person.

And as has been said on this floor previously, if someone sees a body collapse, you run up and check if there is a heartbeat. If there is a heartbeat, you call for an ambulance. If there is no heartbeat, you call for a morgue. We put a lot of stock in a heartbeat, so why shouldn't it be part of a bill? And yet States that have passed the legislation that says there is a heartbeat, then you can't do an abortion, it is a living being.

Personally, I am thankful that nurturing women are the ones who carry a child in utero, because if it were left to us men, I don't believe there would be near as much love and affection felt by the child in utero.

But I think back about when our first child was born 8 to 10 weeks prematurely and my wife had to stay in Tyler. I didn't know whether to stay with her or go with our child who was taken to Shreveport, trying to keep her alive. She said: Go. Do anything you can for our child.

So I went to Shreveport. When I got there, the neonatologist, Dr. Singh--just a wonderful, wonderful doctor. He loved those babies--he said: Look, your baby's eyes, they are not working properly. She can't see you, just a general blur. But she has been listening to your voice for many months now. Even though she was in the womb, she could hear your voice. She knows your voice. You talk to her. Stay here and talk to her, caress, talk, that will be a great comfort.

And as most people know, a premature child, usually the lungs are the last to develop, and that was Katy's case. The breaths were so short and just erratic, and the heartbeat was really fast and erratic. It was in Tyler and it was in Shreveport. After a couple hours of my sitting there and just talking to her and caressing her little arms and face, Dr. Singh came over and said: Have you looked at the monitors? And I hadn't. I was looking at our child.

I looked up. The breathing was still fast, the heart was still fast, but they had stabilized, they were not erratic. And Dr. Sing said: She is drawing strength from you. She is drawing life and strength from you. Well, how was I going to leave after that? They said I could only stay 2 hours, but I couldn't leave. My child was drawing strength from me.

So after I had been there 8 hours, he came over and said: Sir, you really have to leave, you have got to take a break, you can't sit here this long. And I said: But look at the monitor, she is doing well, I don't want to leave. Eventually, they forced me to leave, but my mind was back with Katy.

Anyway, that child knew my voice. She could hear my voice those 7 months in the womb. They know. They make a difference.

And the people who have supported the heartbeat bill, all of them that I am aware of here in this body, it is based on Judeo-Christian beliefs and the value of one person, the right to life that precedes the right to liberty and pursuit of happiness.

This body has been in the business of taking away religious freedoms for quite some time, and it appears that it is going to continue. But, Mr. Speaker, I just want people to understand, the positions of the people I know of who were against the Equality Act, it is not out of any hate, it is not out of any desire to be discriminatory, part of it is a desire not to have people 20 times more likely to kill themselves.

For heaven's sake, we have enough veterans taking their own lives, so tragic; Americans taking their lives, so tragic. There is not much you can say at a funeral of someone who has taken their life that brings a lot of comfort to the family.

It specifically says in here, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, as amended, and it says right here in the bill that people who are transgender, one in five will experience homelessness, without telling us why. It says, So you have got to give them credit. Well, we just brought our economy to the brink of ruin in 2008. And at some point, in the beginning of that tragedy, we almost lost everything, back in the nineties, when banks were required to lend money for homes to people who couldn't afford it.

And I personally feel like some of the lenders who pushed people into homes fraudulently that they couldn't afford should have done some jail time. But it went on, it happened. A lot of lenders have told me over the years: We are being forced to lend money to people we know can't afford it, but, if we don't, the Federal Government is coming after us. And if this bill becomes law, that will be the case, too.

A banker who says, Well, I am a little concerned, there is a 20 percent chance that this person suffering from gender dysphoria is going to be homeless. They don't make good decisions. Maybe it is because of some discrimination, but certainly some of it is because of poor personal decisions. And now I have got the Federal Government under this Equality Act saying I have got to lend them money anyway. That if the fact that they are 20 percent more likely to be homeless, if I consider that at all and say, We can't risk that money, we don't want to bring the country to the brink of failure again, then the United States Attorney General is authorized to sue me. The individual that is not granted the loan will be authorized to sue.

This bill, though, unlike the Hate Crimes Act, some of us were pushing in the Hate Crimes Act, let's at least define what sexual orientation is. So because, as I said back then in debate, if you don't define sexual orientation, some judge sometime in the Supreme Court at some point will say, Well, you didn't define it, but you used the term sexual orientation. So the meaning of that is very clear: anything you are oriented toward sexually. So that would legalize some sexual orientations that are currently crimes, whether it is necrophilia, pedophilia.

Some have tried to say that I equated homosexuality and bestiality. They were lying. I never did that. I said, let's define out those things that we can agree should not be included, and we were refused any type of limiting definition.

So one thing in this, there is a limitation that says, sexual orientation. The term sexual orientation means, homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality.

But then when it comes to gender identity, that definition is going to cause a great deal of problems. And it makes clear, it even spells out that you cannot deny access to a restroom, locker room, dressing room, based on gender identity. It says, that is in accordance with the individual's gender identity.

My friend, very smart friend, Mr. Askin, said that he has been amazed over the years how courts could move forward and progress in determining people's civil rights. He felt like we are not going to ever have a problem with men claiming to be women, so they can get huge scholarships, national notoriety, millions of dollars, or television appearances. No man would ever do that. And if they tried, the courts have been really good about being able to discern who is faking, who is a man that says they are a woman and they really don't mean it, and who is legitimately a man thinking that they are a woman.

The trouble with that is this Equality Act makes clear no individual has the right to tell someone who says, ``I think I am a woman,'' if you don't think they are a woman and you try to

ask questions to determine if they are really thinking they are a woman before you treat the person like one, you have just violated the Equality Act. You can't call into question somebody's own self- determinative identity of what they are, genderwise. This bill makes that very clear. They and the Attorney General of the United States can come after you.

That is why some people who have probably never voted for a Republican in their lives have been heard saying: Wait a minute. Title IX back in 1970 says you have to have an equal number of women's scholarships and men's scholarships.

We had a witness who is a professor and said she was one of the first couple of people to get a women's athletic scholarship under title IX at Villanova, where she went to school. She pointed out: Look, here are the three fastest times of the women in the 2016 Olympics in the 400 meter. Those are those three dots. And then the thousands of blue dots, thousands of which are faster than those women, those are men, and many of those are second-tier athletes. They are not great male athletes, and they still beat the best women's time.

Just in the last couple of weeks, we had a guy who believes he is a woman, and he broke a number of weightlifting records for women.

I know there are a lot of Democratic Party voters who may have been here in the gallery clapping, violating the rules and clapping on the passage of the Equality Act, but I have a feeling they have a daughter who cannot get an athletic scholarship even though she is the best female athlete in her high school, one of the best female athletes in the State, and they are shut out from a female athletic scholarship because guys are now applying who think they are women, and you can't question them.

If they tell you they have self-identified as a woman under this Equality Act, if that becomes the law, and you try to challenge them on whether they really do think they are a woman or not, then you are wide open to the Attorney General coming into your school and costing mega- dollars.

But I have talked to people who worked in women's shelters, and they have said: We have been totally dedicated for decades to helping women who are battered by sexual assault, maybe a husband assault. But we are a Christian group, and if we are mandated to allow a man to come in because he thinks he is a woman, we are mandated to bring them in where these women are so vulnerable and so fragile, we will have to close our doors.

I have had small college leaders tell me: If this bill becomes law, we will have to change so much in the way of accommodation to accommodate people under the new law that we will have to shut our doors. We are just barely making it by a shoestring right now.

Now, the massive colleges and universities, you know, they are getting so much money these days, they will be okay. But the small colleges, they are going to have trouble coming up with the money.

The women's shelters are going to have trouble coming up with the money, and they are not going to want to. They care so deeply about the women who have been battered. I have seen it. I have talked to them. But I have experienced the love they have for these women. They are just at the end of their rope. And they sometimes call the women's homeless shelter. They have nowhere else to go.

Now, after they have been brutalized by a husband or some other man, somebody that is stalking them, they are going to be told they can't keep a man out if he thinks he is a woman. They will close their doors.

So I know this Equality Act was done out of the spirit of caring and not wanting to hurt anybody's feelings, but as we have heard over and over throughout the history of this place, rights do have to be balanced.

So on the one hand, you have people who are very confused and unhappy about their gender, even though there is also plenty of evidence to indicate that a child who identifies with the gender that that child is not biologically, if that child is left alone, not pushed in one direction or another, over 80 percent of the time that child will ultimately resolve the situation and become comfortable, mentally, with their biological gender.

But someone like Walt Heyer--I love the guy; he has been a woman, physically, and he is back being a man--tried to commit suicide, and now he spends his time lovingly counseling, encouraging, trying to talk people down from killing themselves. He is just a sweetheart of a guy. I saw him again, recently.

But if this Equality Act becomes law, he won't be able to do that anymore. You can't try to talk somebody through their difficulty, their suicide ideations if you are going to encourage them to be mentally what they are biologically, because this allows even the Attorney General to come after people like that.

People in this body would think such a person is mean-spirited. I don't find a mean-spirited bone in Walt Heyer's body. He is just a sweetheart of a person.

But when you hear people say this bill will bring an end to persecution, it will bring an end to discrimination, that is true with regard to someone who is different, mentally, from what they are biologically at that moment.

As I said, the studies indicate that over 80 percent of the time, someone who is left alone and not trying to be coached one way or another, they end up having their mental attitude on gender resolving and being biologically and mentally the same gender.

But you try to counsel somebody on that, you are going to be sued individually. The Attorney General can come after you. And if your position is based on the kind of love that Jesus Christ has filled you with, care and compassion, and you try to counsel someone out of that love and compassion, well, you have just violated the Equality Act, and Big Brother government is coming after you.

It is really tragic. We used to have more religious freedom. Yes, there were a lot of battles between denominations in America, and that is why, in the Continental Congress, everybody didn't trust one person in the Continental Congress to do a prayer that was fair to everybody, because there were so many different denominations.

It sounded like the Quakers were usually the toughest to please by a prayer by somebody who was not a Quaker. But they were always able to come together and agree: Okay. This minister may not be from my Christian denomination, but that minister will do a fair prayer for all of the Christian denominations here.

But that is why, when Benjamin Franklin made his motion 5 weeks into the Constitutional Convention, that they begin each day with prayer the way they had during the Continental Congress, it ended up being voted down, because, basically, they were saying: We don't have a treasury. We are not getting paid, and so we can't afford to hire a chaplain we can all agree on. So, if we can just get a Constitution together, then we can have a treasury, then we can hire a Christian minister to come in here and pray for all of the denominations represented here.

That is when Randolph from Virginia said: Okay. All right. You are right. We don't have money to hire a chaplain right now, so I move that we recess. Here we are, the end of June. A few days from now, it will be July Fourth. We are going to celebrate our Nation's independence. I move that we recess here in this Constitutional Convention and we reconvene together at a church that has a minister that we can all trust to be fair to our Christian denominations. Then we will worship together, and after we worship together, then we will come back and try this constitution, try putting one together.

Now, that one passed, and they all gathered at the Reformed Calvinist Church in Philadelphia.

My friend Dave Brat loves that because he is Calvinist.

And the Reverend William Rogers was the minister presiding. Apparently, he did an awesome job as a Christian minister of bringing all of these delegates attending the Constitutional Convention together.

It was written by others that when they reconvened, there was a new spirit. Yes, they had disagreements, but there was a new spirit there.

I know people are taught nowadays that Benjamin Franklin was a deist, someone who doesn't believe in God, just thinks some force, some thing,

something, created the universe, and if that thing or force, person, is still around, it never interferes with nature or man. Everybody is on their own.

But it was Ben Franklin that said: ``I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth-- that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it possible that an empire can rise without His aid?

We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that `except the Lord build the House they labor in vain that build it.' I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.''

We will be confined by our local partial interests; and we, ourselves, shall become a byword down through the ages.

That is because he knew this was the best chance in the history of all of the world to have people self-governing. The Romans had a form and the Greeks had a form, but not like this.

We have been blessed. We have continued to work together over the centuries to get the Constitution to where all people will be treated as they are created: equal; not equal in talent or intellect, but equal in the sight of God, our Creator.

Yet, the Equality Act sends a message that if you are going to base your life on the teachings of Moses or Jesus or both, then we will not only persecute you, we will prosecute you. And the Attorney General of the United States is authorized under the Equality Act, basically, to destroy your life if you happen to believe and practice what Moses and Jesus said.

We have done so much destruction of families in this country over the last 50 to 60 years, and it is tough. I have seen it. People I love have been a single mom or single dad raising kids. It is tough.

We have taken action, passed laws that really have been destructive of the home as a nuclear home. We have seen the falling away from Judeo-Christian beliefs.

As John Adams said, this Constitution is only meant for a religious and a moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any others.

So this is one more nail in America's coffin. As Jefferson said, I fear for America because I know God is just. But this says Moses and Jesus were just wrong. Anybody who tries to follow those teachings publicly, we are going to destroy you until we make everybody equal except Orthodox Jews and Christians following the Bible, and also Muslims who are following the Koran. They will not be able to follow the teachings of the Koran if this becomes law.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 1 o'clock and 46 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, May 20, 2019, at noon for morning-hour debate.