Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, the American people are not buying what the IRS is selling re these lost emails.

They want us to believe that within 10 days of Dave Camp requesting emails from the IRS, Lois Lerner's hard drive just happened to crash; her emails are gone and unrecoverable.

Now, what are the odds that the IRS is telling the truth? My friend, colleague, and MIT grad Thomas Massie provided me the following calculations:

Using the IRS's own figures, the chance that a hard drive would crash on any given day is 0.01 percent. So, over a 10-day period, the odds are basically 1 in 1,000 that your hard drive would crash. But here's the thing: only 10 percent of hard drive crashes result in having data and emails that are completely unrecoverable. So if you multiply those probabilities out, the odds that the IRS is telling the truth is one one-hundredth of 1 percent.

Now, if you, as a taxpayer, provided the IRS with an explanation that was that improbable, how long do you think it would take them to laugh in your face and hold you accountable? So the question we have, Mr. Speaker, is: Why should we accept such an improbable explanation from the IRS?

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Speaker, my amendment prohibits the Department of Housing and Urban Development grants from being used to repay loans from the same agency.

Under current practice, taxpayers can find themselves on the hook not only for loans to private developers, but also for repayments on those loans.

Now, even if one agrees with the questionable practice of government money being used to finance the building of hotels, parks, arenas, and restaurants, it is absurd that the government grants are also being used to repay such loans when the projects fail. This practice encourages cronyism and economic distortion while throwing away taxpayer money on projects that couldn't survive on their own with private funding.

Now, my amendment simply bars the use of grant money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development from being used to pay back loans from the same agency. This commonsense amendment will ensure that taxpayer money isn't used to bail out developers or local governments when they make poor investment decisions--especially when these bad investments were made using taxpayer-funded loans to begin with. And I would note that an identical amendment to the one I am offering now was offered in the U.S. Senate by Senator Tom Coburn in October 2011, and it passed that body 73-26.

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

Madam Chair, I rise to commend the Armed Services Committee for their hard work. There is a lot going on, and they deserve a lot of credit.

I just wanted to take the opportunity to highlight an aircraft that is a vital component of our national security, and particularly to our Navy. That is the E-2D Hawkeye, which is the Navy's carrier-based airborne early warning and battle management command and control system. It provides theater air and missile defense, synthesizing information from multiple onboard and off-board sensors, making complex tactical decisions, and disseminating actionable information to Joint Forces.

Our ability to take an aircraft carrier and move that anywhere in the world and then project power from there is critical to our national security, and the E-2D serves as the eyes of the fleet, protecting our assets and our forces. I just want to say that I think it is vitally important that our fleet is equipped with these.

There is no better person that I know of in this body to speak to the importance of the E-2D than my colleague from Oklahoma, Jim Bridenstine, who is also a lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve and is a former E-2 pilot himself. So I will yield to my friend from Oklahoma to discuss the importance of this aircraft.

Mr. Speaker, a year ago, when news broke that the IRS had been targeting Americans based on their political beliefs, the President of the United States said that it was outrageous. He said that: we demand full accountability.

Attorney General Eric Holder said that it was outrageous and unacceptable. Everybody agreed this was serious. Everybody agreed that this required a serious investigation; yet, as we sit here a year later, it is clear that we have not seen the action that we were promised.

First of all, the Department of Justice had been discussing with the IRS, as late as May of 2013, the possibility that some of these groups that had been targeted could end up being prosecuted criminally. The DOJ actually had a role with the IRS.

We know that the investigation is being led by somebody who is a big contributor to President Obama's reelection campaign.

Of course, at the Super Bowl earlier this year, the President said the investigation was essentially over. Nothing happened, he said. No, not even a smidgeon of impropriety. And, of course, the Department of Justice has leaked to the media that no prosecutions will in fact occur.

And when the President said as a senator in 2006 that the highly political context of the allegations and charges may lead some to surmise that political influence may compromise the investigation because this investigation is vital to restoring the public's faith in government, any appearance of bias, special favor, or political consideration would be a further blow to our democracy, that basically applies to what we have now.

The American people don't want their government targeting them and targeting their First Amendment rights. If that is done and power is abused, they need to be held accountable.

But when this is all said and done, I think the American people want to have confidence that this was looked at in a fair manner. And when you have all these political considerations swirling around, I don't think many Americans have confidence that the Department of Justice is doing this in a way that is not conflicted.

And, don't forget, the entire context of this whole scandal was targeting essentially the President's political opposition in the run- up to his reelection campaign.

So I am proud to stand here supporting this resolution. I think voting ``yes'' on it is voting ``yes'' for transparency and accountability in government.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the motion to recommit.

Mr. Speaker, we have in this country a government of laws, not of men. The Congress passes laws, the President executes laws, and the courts adjudicate disputes under those laws.

One law on the books already requires the Attorney General to report to Congress when the executive branch suspends enforcement of a law due to constitutional concerns, and AGs ranging from Holder to Gonzalez have done this.

When the executive branch suspends execution of the law for other reasons, this same reporting requirement should apply, and, in fact, may even be more important on separation of powers grounds. This transparency will help Congress safeguard its constitutional authority, and will allow the American people to evaluate the actions of the executive branch.

Now, why is this necessary?

Yesterday's paper, The Wall Street Journal:

Last week the administration quietly excused millions of

people from the requirement to purchase health insurance or

else pay a tax penalty.

This latest political reconstruction has received zero

media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department

didn't think the details of this delay were worth discussing

in a conference call, press materials, or fact sheet.

Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated

rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don't

comply with ObamaCare benefits and redistribution mandates.

This is no way to run a government. Surely, this is not consistent with being the most transparent administration in history.

Now, some have said that the transparency requirements would be burdensome, but this raises the question, exactly how many laws is this administration suspending?

This bill can only be burdensome if the administration is consistently suspending duly enacted laws.

My question is: What is wrong with a little sunlight?

Now, I have not heard the President's defenders articulate a limiting principle regarding his actions. ``If Congress does not do what I want, I will do it anyway'' is not a limiting principle, and is not consistent with constitutional government.

Here is a limiting principle. U.S. Supreme Court, Kendall v. United States:

To contend that the obligation imposed on the President to

see the laws faithfully executed implies a power to forbid

their execution is a novel construction of the Constitution,

and is entirely inadmissible.

Now, news reports have detailed how the latest ObamaCare suspensions are tailored to help the President's party in the midterm elections. Now, this is not sufficient justification. Of course there is always going to be another election around the corner.

Once you do suspension to get to 2014, well, you are going to have 2016. Do you need to get Hillary across the finish line?

Then when a Republican President takes over, guess what? That President's supporters are going to say, hey, they suspended these provisions. Why don't you suspend the provisions that we don't like?

Pretty soon, you end up with Presidents of both parties picking and choosing what they want to enforce.

Here is the deal. Short-term political advantages and fleeting policy victories do not trump our duty to support and defend the Constitution. This is true whether the President is a Democrat or a Republican.

I would much rather lose out on my preferred policy outcomes and see my party lose an election while safeguarding our constitutional order, because it is, ultimately, that Constitution which does the most to protect our freedoms.

If we go down the road where Presidents of both parties simply enforce what is good for their party and disregard what is not, then we will no longer be a government of laws, but a government of men, and this institution will be forever diminished.

The Constitution delegates the Congress the power to make law, not to make suggestions. The Faithful Execution of the Law Act will help shine a light on executive branch failures to faithfully execute the laws of our land.

A vote for this bill is a vote for transparency, for the rule of law, and for constitutional government.

I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this motion, and vote ``yes'' to pass this bill.

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

I thank the chairman for yielding me this time.

Madam Speaker, I have to tell you, listening to the other side, I don't know what world they are living in. We didn't have a hearing on the bill? I testified at the hearing; I don't think I made that up, I think that happened.

The idea that we are going to be reporting people's names and phone numbers for this bill--no. The Attorney General will go and say we have established a policy not to enforce ObamaCare mandates, for example. We have a situation now where these policies are illegal under the law. So if you actually looked up the law, they would be illegal, but the executive branch has taken the position that we are not going to enforce that for a couple of years, so there is a divergence between the law on the books and the law in action, and those are the types of instances, policy decisions not to enforce that will be done. That ultimately is what we are talking about here.

Some people want different policy outcomes one way or another, but the important part of this is we are talking about power and we are talking about authority. So in some of these instances, I don't agree with those ObamaCare mandates; I would like to get them off the books, and so policywise I agree with that, but as a matter of authority, the President cannot simply suspend that law that was enacted. That ultimately is what we are talking about, clarity and how the government is operating.

Ultimately, the power resides with the American people, not with Members of Congress or with the President. The people own power under the Constitution, and then we exercise that authority consistent with the power that they have delegated to us. We have the authority under article I of the Constitution to legislate, and we have the exclusive authority to legislate.

The President has the duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. He does not have authority delegated him to amend, suspend, or change duly enacted laws, and this is a fundamental principle of our constitutional system, that there are separated powers and checks and balances.

George Washington, in his farewell address, admonished the Nation that to preserve these checks must be as necessary as to institute them.

The problem that I keep running into is, if I don't know what the limiting principle in some of these things is, if you can suspend the ObamaCare insurance mandate and you can suspend the business mandate and you can suspend the individual mandate, can a Republican President come in and just suspend the whole shebang? If not, why not? What is the difference?

Make no mistake about it, when there is a Republican President, there is going to be pressure on that President to suspend provisions of law that those voters who elected that individual don't like. If we start going back and forth where one side enforces what they like and the other side enforces what they like, then you don't really have a legislative body passing laws. We are essentially passing suggestions, and then it is ultimately the Executive who determines what will be enforced and what will not be enforced. That is not a road, I think, we want to go down.

The good thing about this bill is it is just saying put your cards on the table. If you are going to not enforce certain provisions of law, then report it to Congress and let us know about that.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman.

So put your cards on the table. We should not in Congress have to rely on a leak to the press or find a blog post or look in some footnote in some unrelated Federal rule to know whether some of these things are being suspended, and the American people deserve to know whether or not their laws are being enforced.

So at the end of the day, this is really a transparency provision. It has worked with, in terms of the constitutional questions--Attorneys General Gonzalez, Mukasey, and Holder have reported to the Congress when the Federal Government has adopted policies of nonenforcement due to constitutional concerns.

So this says if you are going to take the position that as a matter of policy you are not going to enforce clear mandates in law, then provide that to us, offer your justification so we can evaluate it.

Ultimately, I think it is now just common parlance in the press here that a lot of these ObamaCare delays are done to help Democrats in the midterm elections, that maybe they won't lose as many seats if you can do that. Well, this is stuff that I think the American people need to know. That is a completely unacceptable reason to suspend laws.

So ultimately, I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

The only way it could potentially be burdensome is if their people throughout the bureaucracy are instituting nonenforcement policies left and right. The average Federal official does not have the authority to decide to institute a policy of nonenforcement. They may be able to institute discretion on a case-by-case basis. I was a prosecutor, I couldn't just decide not to enforce drug laws anymore, so some of this stuff is a red herring.

I thank the chairman for yielding me the time, and I thank the chairman of the full committee for offering this bill. I urge my colleagues to support it

Mr. Chair, I offer my amendment.

Mr. Speaker, James Madison told us in the Federalist Papers:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. And

if angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal

controls on government would be necessary.

And so as I look at this agency which lacks all the traditional measures for constitutional accountability, I am reminded by that insight. The Founding Fathers understood human nature, and they understood that people in positions of power will eventually, at some point, abuse that power. That is just inherent in the nature of man, and so they built a government to have checks and balances.

As I look at this consumer financial protection agency, I am wowed by the amount of power that has been invested in this: very limited executive accountability, the CFPB Director is essentially the financial czar of the country, and no budget oversight by Congress. I know we are trying to change that in this bill, but Madison said that the most effectual check that we have in Congress is the power of the purse.

There is this huge amount of deference in terms of what judicial review

is allowed to be done. The courts are instructed to defer to the CFPB. The problem with that is that there are a lot of novel concepts in this bill. Terms are introduced that don't necessarily have a definition in other regulatory history, and the CFPB is basically going to be given carte blanche to go forward on that. And when asked about some of these terms, the CFPB Director said, well, you kind of figure it out when you see it, and it is a puzzle that we are putting together.

Well, that is not acceptable, and I think the American people need to have recourse to the courts. So what my amendment does is it reinstitutes judicial review, and it removes this excessive deference that has been granted to the CFPB.

I hear reports about all this data that is being collected on American citizens--credit card transactions and debit card transactions, millions of these things are being done. Are we just supposed to say that the people should have no recourse in case that is abused? We are just supposed to trust the CFPB in terms of how they use that data?

The bottom line is you have an agency that is combining legislative power, executive power, and judicial power. That is contrary to our constitutional structure and contrary to the separation of powers doctrine, and I don't think most Americans have confidence that some far, distant Bureau should just be left to their own devices and that somehow they will be able to make all these decisions better for individual Americans than they can make for themselves.

So I urge the adoption of my amendment, Mr. Chairman, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to adopt this amendment. The notion that somehow we are just going to put all this trust in the CFPB and why you can't have the ability to go into court and have the courts review some of their actions to me just doesn't cut it. I would much rather err on the side of having protections for the American people from government agencies that have too much power than err on the side of giving the agency an excessive amount of power and just hoping that they exercise that in a prudent fashion.

With that, Mr. Chairman, I ask my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on this amendment. I applaud the other Members who have been involved in crafting this bill.

I yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the gentleman from South Carolina.

When we left in December to go back to our districts for the Christmas weekend, I got home and thought, Okay, the President is going to do something with ObamaCare as we get close to Christmas. You just know anytime you come up on a holiday, some news gets put out. July 3, leading into the 4th of July, was the employer mandate delay. The grandfather stunt was pulled leading into Thanksgiving.

And sure enough, December 19, the Obama administration grants a ``hardship exemption'' from the individual mandate tax penalty to those who have seen their plans canceled due to ObamaCare.

I don't think any of those plans should have been canceled. I offered a bill here, and the House passed something similar, to essentially grandfather in those plans. The Federal Government shouldn't be forcing people out of plans they like. Certainly, things needed to be done there.

But understand how unfair this is. If you had insurance and your policy is canceled, and then the ObamaCare replacements are not affordable for you, they are saying, Okay, you are fine. No penalty for you. But if you are somebody who couldn't have afforded insurance the prior year, and now you are told you are forced to go on these ObamaCare exchanges, you still have to pay the tax, even though you may have been worse off than some of those other folks.

Or if you are somebody that had employer coverage last year, and now maybe going out on your own and you need to buy individual insurance, if you end up in the exchanges and you don't find those affordable to you, you don't get the same relief.

When you are talking about arbitrary delays like this, it is inherently unfair.

Now, give the administration some credit. Unlike some of the other delays, there is actually a provision in ObamaCare that says people can qualify for a hardship exemption from the individual mandate. The problem is that in this instance it is ObamaCare itself that constitutes the hardship.

So because ObamaCare is implemented, these people are suffering a hardship. Therefore they are exempt from the statute. To me, I think that is an abuse of what the statute is supposed to do. Certainly, it begs the question, Could you simply delay or grant a suspension of all of these provisions of ObamaCare?

It is interesting because I was reading in the Weekly Standard publication, one of the reporters was asking members of the Senate what are their limits, what is the principled justification for his conduct.

And so the reporter asked one Senator:

How do you determine if the President couldn't do something

that it does exceed his authority? Are there any parts of the

law that the President does not have the authority to delay

or suspend?

The Senator's response--a Democratic Senator:

I don't know. I'm not the scholar on that.

Well, the reporter went to another Democratic Senator and said:

Are there are any delays the President wouldn't have the

authority to make? Could the President potentially suspend

the entire law if he wanted to?

His answer:

I can't answer a hypothetical.

The reporter asked again:

So you can't say if there are any parts of the law he

couldn't delay unilaterally?

The Senator said:

I can't answer a hypothetical.

Finally, another Senator told the reporter he doesn't know of any legal impediment preventing the executive branch from delaying the employer or individual mandates.

When asked:

Couldn't a future President just simply come in and suspend

the entire law?

That Senator said:

I don't want to speculate what a future President might do.

And so I think those answers, when Senators and the President's own party cannot offer any principled justification for the President's conduct that would exclude the potential of a President simply delaying all provisions of the law, you know that you are not in the realm of faithful execution of the law.

I think it is a challenge. We have talked about it in this Chamber in hours like this. We have had hearings in the Judiciary Committee with experts--even liberal constitutional law experts--saying that this conduct goes beyond what the Founding Fathers intended and what the Constitution envisioned.

I would like to see somebody offer a principled justification for the President picking and choosing which parts of the law should be enforced and should not be enforced, should be delayed, should be suspended, or should be ignored.

It is interesting, because when you go back and look at the Founding Fathers when they created the Constitution, when they created the Congress, when they created the executive, at the convention James Wilson from Pennsylvania was the one who moved to create a President consisting of a single person. And that caused silence in the convention hall because they had just rebelled against Britain. And although you needed some type of executive power, there were some who were a little bit taken aback that you would even have a single President, even in a constitutional system. Some of the people said at the time that you can't really have a strong President and have a republic.

So this was a huge issue for the Founding Fathers. Clearly, it would not have been acceptable to stand up at the Constitutional Convention and say, Yes, the President is going to have the authority and duty to enforce the laws; but if there are laws he doesn't like, he will be able to delay provisions or ignore provisions as he sees fit, as long as it is consistent with his overall purpose or political agenda. That would not have been acceptable to anybody at the time.

Can you imagine if when John Adams succeeded George Washington, he just started delaying provisions related to the bank of the United States or the Jay Treaty? Imagine when Jefferson came in. He ran against the Alien and Sedition Act. Some of those were just allowed to expire, but they went in and repealed a core portion of the Alien and Sedition Act. They didn't just ignore it. The provisions that expired, expired; and then they repealed the provisions that were still in effect.

That is the way it is supposed to be done. They would never have allowed John Adams or Jefferson to come in and just willy-nilly enforce what they wanted to and not enforce what they didn't want to.

And so part of the frustration of this is Congress is supposed to stand up for its authority. I think the House people here realize that what the President is doing is not proper constitutional government, but the U.S. Senate is just totally out to lunch on this. They are not interested in safeguarding their institutional prerogatives, because they are putting their political interests ahead of the legislative body's authority. That really runs contrary to how the Founders envisioned the separation of powers and checks and balances working.

In Federalist 51 Madison said:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

What he meant by that is that, yes, you have separate powers. You have an executive, a legislative, and a judicial power. But just because you separate them doesn't mean that individual liberties can be secure.

So you have got to give each branch the ability to check the other branches. And they were sure they knew people would have different partisan allegiances and all that, but they were pretty sure that each branch would have the wherewithal and would want to defend its own prerogatives.

And so in this instance, I think what you don't have is a Senate that is willing to join with the House, use the power of the purse, use the appointment power, advise and consent, all the powers that we have, use those until the President starts conforming with the law.

But we are not there yet. And so this idea of trying to bring this in front of courts, we shouldn't have to do that. We should be able to defend our own turf. But it is frustrating because we don't have a lot of other options at this point.

So I think that my colleague from South Carolina, you know, I give him credit for thinking of what can we actually do that could potentially be successful. And so I am hoping that this move will be successful.

But I think, going forward--and this has been a problem before this President. He is not the only one who has pulled stunts like this, although I think he has gone beyond what any previous President has done.

Ultimately, people in this body and in the other Chamber have got to get serious about defending our constitutional responsibility. That means holding Presidents accountable who are not in accordance with article II, section 3, the ``Take Care'' clause. But it also means not delegating so much legislative authority to these bureaucracies when they end up essentially legislating, and those rules are imposed on the public without Congress saying anything at all about it.

So, ultimately, the courts cannot save us if we aren't willing to save ourselves and protect the authority that the Constitution grants us and that we are supposed to exercise on behalf of the people that we represent.

We are, especially in this House, we are the people's House. The President gets elected, too, but we are the closest to the people, and I think we have got to do a better job of this going forward.

So I would just tell my friend from South Carolina, Thank you for doing this. I know you have signed on. I have a resolution just to say that the House doesn't approve of this conduct, because I fear if we don't do anything, then we are basically setting a precedent where this is going to be unquestioned going forward.

So I think as much as we can do, even if we are not successful, at least we are showing people that we think this is a contested practice, and we are not willing to allow this to become something that is accepted for future Presidents, Republican or Democrat.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. Speaker, I am struck by having been here to witness something that I think is pretty neat. We had a newly sworn in Member take the oath of office to become a Member of this body. Part of it is neat because he got endorsed by Duck Dynasty, which I know a lot of people like; but it was neat because I think it reminds us what our duties are here. He was asked to take an oath of office right here in the well of the House. That oath was very simple. It charged him with the duty to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

I think we need to have more of a reminder that that is our duty here. I am struck by reading the Constitution and how the Founding Fathers laid out separation of powers and checks and balances.

For example, article I states clearly:

All legislative powers shall be vested in a Congress of the

United States.

Article II prescribes authority for the President and imposes a duty on him to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

I think that going back on those constitutional foundations and looking at how this particular President has made claims of his authority to essentially put aside the law or change the law should cause us great concern.

For example, with this employer mandate aspect of ObamaCare, the statute said very clearly it shall take effect this January 2014.

Well, that, obviously, would have been disastrous had they implemented that. We in the House were willing to delay it by statute. The President chose to do it by executive fiat.

And then most recently with the idea that ObamaCare was causing people to lose their plans, a lot of people in this body said, Look, we ought to grandfather these plans in; let people keep their plans. The President threatened to veto that, and then he issued, essentially, an executive order saying he is going to extend the grandfather clause and not enforce the ObamaCare mandate that is causing the cancelations.

So, on the one hand, ObamaCare is a holy writ that people in Congress are not allowed to touch in any way with our Article I power, but the President can essentially pick and choose which parts to enforce, which parts to delay, and who to grant waivers to. That ultimately is not sustainable, and it conflicts with the basic structure of American Government.

The American Revolution, if you read the Declaration of Independence, it was a revolt against executive power and the British King. Jefferson lists all the abuses that they were revolting against. One of the things that he mentioned was that King George III, what King George III had done wrong was for abolishing our most valuable laws and altering, fundamentally, the form of government.

Students in school throughout America are taught, Congress passes the law and the President can sign or veto the law, and the President has the duty to enforce the law. Now, there is certainly prosecutorial discretion that comes with that. If the President has a good-faith belief that a law is unconstitutional, of course they have to prefer the Constitution to the statute. But here, this President has not made any claim that ObamaCare is unconstitutional; and, indeed, he can't, because it is his signature piece of legislation.

I think the key thing to think about is the Founding Fathers did not create separation of powers, checks and balances because they thought that students would need something to study in civics class. They did it because, ultimately, that structure of government was the surest way to protect the individual liberty of the American people and to preserve and maintain the rule of law.

I think disputes that we have regarding what this particular President may do should not even be about him, per se, because that just gets lost in partisanship back and forth. I think when

we see any President taking steps that may not comport with how the structure of the government was intended to operate, we have to think about what precedent that sets, not just tomorrow, but 50 years from now. And so I have introduced a resolution that enumerates some of the instances in which the President has gone beyond using executive discretion and is essentially rewriting the law, either by failing to enforce entirely or suspending affirmatively different provisions of the law.

Much has been said recently about the failure of this core promise with respect to ObamaCare, that if you like your plan, you can keep it can. Obviously, we are seeing that is not true. We are going to continue to see that. People are going to lose doctors, and it really is a deception on a massive scale.

So I was thinking, you like your plan, you keep your plan; that obviously didn't work. Maybe we should get everyone in Congress and the White House to agree with this simple proposition: if you take an oath to the Constitution, you should keep your oath to the Constitution.

I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding to me, and I know you will be someone who will take that oath seriously.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. Speaker, the power to tax is the power to destroy, and so when you have the government using that taxing power to target individual Americans based on their exercise of First Amendment rights, that really is the utmost seriousness in terms of the threat that that represents to constitutional government.

I received a letter from one of my constituents a couple of weeks back named Carole McManus, and she is a leader in a conservative group in northeast Florida. They are basically dedicated towards educating about constitutional government, individual freedom, the rule of law, and traditional American principles. I would think that that would be something that we would be applauding, especially in this day and age.

Well, they had to go through this situation with the IRS. So they submitted an application and they waited for a month, 3 months, 6 months, a year. It took 18 months for the IRS to respond to their inquiry; and when the IRS responded, did they approve the group, as would be a matter of course, particularly for groups that were recognized as representing a liberal perspective? No. They were given a list of very intrusive questions about the operation of their group.

I actually saw this firsthand during the 2012 election, because I went just to shake hands with folks one night just to see how people were doing, and all the group leaders were scared that I was there because they didn't want to get hit by the IRS. They didn't want to do anything wrong.

And so what the IRS was able to do by stretching this out, by submitting all these intrusive questions, they really chilled these folks from feeling confident in being able to exercise their First Amendment rights. And they did look scared about what could happen to them just because I happened to show up even though it was not a partisan event. I was shaking hands and we were talking about this stuff.

So I appreciate the gentleman from Texas organizing this hour.

The frustrating thing about it is, yes, you may have impropriety in any given administration, but what we have now with the IRS is we have a lot of career bureaucrats who have their own ideological bent. We have people like Lois Lerner, who take it upon themselves to target groups that they think deserve targeting. And the problem with that is nobody ever elected Lois Lerner to anything. Essentially, she is a nameless, faceless bureaucrat that you have just got to hope the point of view that you are trying to pursue is not one that she finds objectionable.

That lack of accountability, not knowing whether the bureaucracy will come down on you, that is a problem with the IRS. That is a problem in any of these agencies, quite frankly.

So I think the more that Americans understand the threat that is posed by a runaway bureaucracy, I think the better. I would like to see some far-reaching reforms so that we are protecting taxpayers and we are protecting American citizens in the exercise of their right.

And you know what? If the bureaucracy steps out of bounds, there ought to be consequences for that. The idea that somehow Lois Lerner is going to retire with full pay and benefits and not be held responsible at all, even though she couldn't even testify in front of the Oversight Committee, I think that rubs a lot of Americans wrong.

So I thank the gentleman from Texas for organizing this. I really appreciate the attention that you have focused on this issue.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. Speaker, I just want to say a few words about accountability.

Normally, the way it works is that Congress can consider a piece of legislation. Maybe it passes. Maybe the President signs it. You implement it. Then the voters can decide whether they like it, whether it lived up to its billing, so to speak.

With ObamaCare, it was interesting because this was rammed through Congress at the beginning of 2010; yet it is just now really being implemented. I am starting to get a lot of people in my district contacting my office who are really shocked at some of the stiff premium increases they are seeing. So I think it is useful just to review some of the promises that were made and whether any of those promises have been kept. I think what you will find is that this is a law not only that the public opposed, not only that was rammed through with no bipartisan support, but a law that in many ways is resting on false pretenses.

Promise one, the President made this: it will lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year.

I have not seen that true anyplace. In fact, people are seeing $2,500 increases. There was a family in California, it was reported, who saw an increase of $10,000. So I think, right here, as this is being implemented, we know that that is just not going to be the case.

Promise number two, the President said this: ``If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan.'' Period.

Well, we know that that is not true. We see spouses losing spousal coverage. We see people with major companies losing their employer- provided insurance, getting pushed into some of these exchanges.

So the idea that ``if you like your plan, you can keep it'' is absolutely not proving to be true for thousands of people throughout the country.

This is just beginning. People who have looked at this from the Congressional Budget Office to other groups say you could have anywhere from 7 to 30 million Americans who actually lose their employer plans because of ObamaCare.

Of course, if you are losing your plan and you are getting pushed into an exchange, you may not be able to keep your doctor because that doctor may not be in the network, may not be available based on the plan that you are having to take because you have lost your original plan.

Promise number three--this is the President: ``I can make a firm pledge: under my plan no family making less than $250,000 will see any form of tax increase.''

Well, we know that the individual mandate he said wasn't a tax. Then when it got challenged in the Supreme Court, his administration was saying, yeah, uphold it because it is a tax. That is eventually what the court did, saying that it is a tax. That is a tax that hits blue collar ``salt of the Earth'' people, forcing them to buy a product that essentially they may not even be physically able to obtain because the Web sites don't work, and if not, they are going to tax you. That certainly hasn't been true.

But there are a whole bunch of other things in the law that hit middle-income and lower-income people. There is a cap on flexible spending accounts. It is actually harder under ObamaCare to deduct medical expenses from your income taxes. Even a tax on indoor tanning salons. I think there are a lot of people who make less than $250,000 a year who are doing the tanning salons.

Then, of course, there are a whole bunch of other taxes--over a trillion dollars--that may not be directly levied on somebody making less than $250,000, but the costs will end up being passed on. For example, the employer mandate, the tax on health insurance plans, the medical device tax. Those taxes are on companies, but those costs are going to get pushed to individuals, and they are going to have to bear the cost of that. And, oh, by the way, certain good health care plans that a lot of union members have who are not making $250,000 a year, those are considered Cadillac plans, and those will be taxed extra going forward.

Finally, the President said: ``I will sign a universal health care bill into law by the end of my first term as President that will cover every American.'' It is interesting--people on the other side of the aisle will say, oh, you

Republicans, why don't you want everybody to be covered? The most recent analysis from the Congressional Budget Office said that in 10 years from now--so after 13 years of ObamaCare being the law--you will still have in this country 31 million Americans that don't have any insurance. Of course, we know ObamaCare is causing people to lose the insurance that they have.

So this is not something that is a universal health care bill, by any stretch of the imagination. There are going to be a lot of people who aren't going to have any insurance.

The point I just wanted to make with this is, there has got to be accountability in government. People want to have a redress of their grievances. These issues were not necessarily teed up in the election, and so now people are coming to terms with what has happened. So the point I would just make is, at a minimum when you are dealing with the broken promises of ObamaCare, we have got to communicate to the public that this has got to be based on some semblance of fairness.

For example, the Members of Congress who wrote this law must live under the exact terms of the statute. They should not be granted any extra legal relief from the burdens of ObamaCare. The fact that businesses have had the law delayed for them--and, of course, Members of Congress have gotten special treatment as well--I think individual Americans have got to be given the same deal. It is just wrong to have the IRS tax people to buy something from Web sites that aren't functional--and buy products that they may not like.

So accountability is key. This is a law that was passed. There were specific promises made over and over again. What we are finding now, unfortunately, is those promises are not being kept.

I thank the gentlelady from New Mexico. I am glad she brought up the examples of the toll that this shutdown is taking on our National Laboratory employees.

We are hearing back at Livermore, at Sandia, and at Lawrence Livermore so many examples like what the gentlelady mentioned with security clearances. You wouldn't think about it. But when thousands of employees have security clearances that depend on them continuing to have financial stability, that stability is threatened when our National Laboratories furlough them and they are unable to meet their debts and obligations and pay their bills and keep their families running.

The gentleman from California (Mr. McNerney) also talked about the effects of furloughing these scientists. When you furlough scientists, you also furlough scientific progress.

I mentioned the town hall that I had last weekend in Dublin, California. Lab employees from Sandia and Lawrence Livermore showed up for that town hall. I am going to fly home this Sunday, and we are going to host another town hall at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia. It is going to be at 1:30 on Sunday. We have alerted laboratories to that town hall, and I look forward to talking to them. I hope to have a more positive update than what I can provide today. I hope that I can tell them that the shutdown will not continue; that they will be able to continue their work at our great National Laboratories.

Now, I talked a little bit about how we got here. That we had a budget from the President and the Senate at $986 billion, but the House's budget wouldn't accept only $986 billion; it wanted to repeal and defund the Affordable Care Act.

The reason I am so hopeful that we hold firm in the Senate, and that the President continues to hold firm and insist that we pass what is called a clean budget at $986 billion, is because of the dangerous, dangerous precedent it would set should we allow either side to try and seek concessions or seek a ransom for simply doing their job of providing a budget.

Our job being here in Congress and working under article I of the Constitution requires us to pass a budget that funds the government to pay the debts and obligations of the United States.

It would be a dangerous precedent if we had an environment where every 45 days, 60 days, or if we ever got back to passing a budget on an annual basis, that one side in one Chamber attempted to use that budgeting process to revisit and try and resettle scores that have already been settled.

That is so obviously occurring here with the Affordable Care Act. This is a provision that was initially brought up and contemplated in the 2008 campaign for the Presidency, where one person, one candidate, said that if he was elected he would seek to bring our country for the first time in over 100 years since it was first proposed affordable health care for all. That person was overwhelmingly elected to the Presidency--Barack Obama.

In 2010, the Congress, the 111th Congress, passed the Affordable Care Act. It was signed into law by the same President who campaigned on it.

In 2012, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who was appointed by a Republican President who served before President Barack Obama, wrote a majority opinion that said that that law, the Affordable Care Act, was constitutional.

That same President who ran on the Affordable Care Act in 2008, who signed into law congressional action in 2010, who saw it upheld in 2012 by a Republican-appointed Supreme Court chief justice, ran for reelection, and again was overwhelmingly elected.

The Affordable Care Act will do many great things to provide affordable, quality health care to many Americans. But like every government program, it will not be 100 percent perfect. It too will require fixes and updates.

Just recently, Social Security celebrated a birthday. It is in its late 70s now. Social Security is not the same program that it was over 70 years ago. It has gone through different modifications and changes through the years. Just as the Affordable Care Act, we owe it to the American people to look at it as it is implemented, to look how it is helping people, to look at where glitches are and what we can do to make it work.

We must mend any problems with the Affordable Care Act, but not end it. We must not use the Affordable Care Act as a way to hold up a budget that provides so many jobs for the Federal workforce, so many services that come from the greatest government that presides over the greatest democracy in the world, so many services being held up for so many people across our country.

It would be a dangerous, dangerous precedent if we allowed either side to do this. Let me just offer an example: if we were to make concessions on this budgeting process--say at the very best buy us a 45-day continuing resolution where the government would be funded for another 45 days--what would the other side ask for next? Would it ask for us to privatize Social Security, something they attempted to do in 2006 but weren't able to do? Would they ask us to turn Medicare into a voucher system, something that they are not able to achieve because of a majority in the Senate and a Democratic President who has vowed not to let that happen?

But also think and reverse the situation: imagine if you had a Republican in the White House, a Republican-controlled Senate and a Democratic majority in the House. Imagine if that Democratic majority tried to use the budgeting process to achieve what it couldn't achieve at the ballot box. You can imagine the different scenarios where we can try and do this--whether it is passing background checks, something that has frustrated so many House Democrats that we couldn't get that passed in the Senate; whether it is passing an assault weapons ban, something that so many House Democrats would like to see renewed, as we had back in the '90s. It could be comprehensive immigration reform, something that our country is calling for. People are coming to our capital asking to have a roadmap to citizenship in reforms and work visas. We can't do that legislatively right now. But imagine if Democrats had a majority here and a Republican in the White House, and they said: No budget; we are shutting down the government until we get what we want because we couldn't do it at the ballot box.

We have never operated that way, and I hope we do not continue to operate that way, and that more reasonable minds come forward and allow us to put our National Laboratory employees back to work, allow us to put our Federal workforce back to work.

This shutdown is affecting and hurting real people. I mentioned in the beginning of this hour that I came to Congress to help people, but right now it is hurting innocent Americans.

Even though the Federal Government is closed, essential services must continue so hundreds of thousands of Federal employees are being forced to work but with no paycheck. How can we treat such dedicated public servants this way?

We saw just last week as an erratic driver tried to drive through the barricade on Capitol Hill that our brave men and women of the Capitol Hill police force rushed to protect the doors of democracy. And what thanks did we give them in return? We told them to keep working, keep protecting this House, but we are going to hold your paycheck.

Many more aren't even allowed to work in the Federal Government, denied the chance to do the jobs they love, serving on behalf of the American people, and they are left worrying if they will ever get paid or if they are going to be lost.

The loss also ripples throughout our economy, affecting businesses throughout the country. It is estimated that this shutdown is costing the economy $300 million a day. And so you can see, people are asking across the country: Will I get paid this month? Will there be enough money for food? Can I pay my mortgage this month? I am a first time home buyer; some of those FHA loans look very good for me, but they are delayed, they are on hold. Will I be able to pay my child's college tuition? All of the questions that folks in our Federal workforces, folks who are working at our national laboratories are asking.

Small businesses can't get SBA loans. Small business centers which help women and veterans are closed. Our national parks are closed. Technology updates for all of our Federal programs are being delayed. And mentioned earlier, our cybersecurity centers, employees there are going to be furloughed, the cybersecurity centers that work to protect our Nation's networks, that work to ensure that nation-states and individuals who wish to do us harm aren't able to do so.

I would like to now yield to the greatest champion in this House to end and reduce the effect of poverty on our community and somebody who has the honor of representing Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has over 4,000 employees. I have visited that facility, and they are doing such great work to advance the progress of science.

I yield to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee).

Mr. Speaker, I am trying to get my hands wrapped around this ObamaCare thing.

The policy is: the IRS is going to tax Americans unless they purchase a government-sanctioned product, which they may not want, off a government-run Web site, which costs $634 million to create and does not work.

And what do they have to expect for that, once they go through that process and put their personal information there?

One disclaimer in one State's exchange goes as follows:

Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system

may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited,

inspected, and disclosed to authorized State government and

law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of

other agencies, both domestic and foreign.

Mr. Speaker, no, thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to discuss an issue of increasing relevance to our national affairs and to constitutional government properly understood--and that is the requirement that the President faithfully enforce the laws of the land and the failure of the current incumbent to satisfy that obligation.

The Constitution sets out a simple yet effective structure: the major powers of government--legislative, executive, and judicial--are divided into three separate branches of government. The legislative branch--the Congress--passes laws, makes law; the executive branch--the President-- enforces law; and the judicial branch--the Supreme Court and inferior courts--interprets laws.

Article II, section 3 of the Constitution imposes upon the President the duty to ``take care that the laws be faithfully executed.'' This duty has roots in Anglo American law dating back to the Glorious Revolution of 17th century Britain. In fact, the English Bill of Rights of 1689 provided that:

The pretended power of suspending laws, or the execution of

laws, by regal authority, without the consent of parliament,

is illegal.

For his part, the Founder of our country, George Washington, saw the faithful execution of the law to be one of the President's core responsibilities. In a letter to Alexander Hamilton, then-President Washington explained that the Constitution's ``take care'' clause meant:

It is my duty to see the laws executed: to permit them to

be trampled with impunity would be repugnant to that duty.

The duty of the President to ``take care that the laws be faithfully executed'' is a central component not simply of the executive branch of government, but to the entire constitutional system.

Yet the conduct of the current incumbent has evinced a disregard for this core constitutional duty. By picking and choosing which laws to enforce, the President has undermined the constitutional order and has failed to keep faith with the basic idea that ours is a government of laws, not of men.

Now the most conspicuous vehicle for the President's disregard of the Take Care duty has been the implementation of the law that bears his name--the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare.

Now, it is interesting that of all the arguments that have been put forward to counter those who seek to defund, delay, or repeal this law, the one that ObamaCare supporters have embraced most frequently as of late goes like this: ObamaCare is the law of the land and has been upheld by the Supreme Court; therefore, it cannot be repealed, defunded, or delayed.

Now, this is a nonsensical argument on its face. Congress has the authority to legislate, per article I of the Constitution, and can amend, supercede, or repeal ordinary legislation as it sees fit. But this argument is particularly rich regarding ObamaCare. Because if this law is somehow sacrosanct, then why is the President not enforcing it as written? It is untenable to assert that Congress cannot change the law through legislation but that the President can delay or waive provisions of the law by executive fiat. Exhibit A for this, as it relates to ObamaCare, is the President's unilateral decision for 1 year to delay the enforcement of the so-called employer mandate, a central provision of ObamaCare requiring most businesses to provide government- sanctioned insurance to their employees.

Now, section 1513(d) of that law states that the employer mandate ``shall apply to the months beginning after December 31, 2013.'' Note the statutory command of ``shall.'' This is not discretionary, and there is no provision of the law permitting the Executive to delay it.

Incredibly, the President has not offered any coherent rationale for his actions. He was asked in an interview with The New York Times whether his critics were justified in asserting that he lacked authority to delay the mandate. He responded by saying:

If Congress thinks that what I've done is inappropriate or

wrong in some fashion, they're free to make that case. But

there's not an action that I take that you don't have some

folks in Congress who say that I'm usurping my authority.

Some of those folks think I usurped my authority by having

the gall to win the Presidency. And I don't think

that's a secret. But ultimately, I'm not concerned about

their opinions--very few of them, by the way, are lawyers,

much less constitutional lawyers.

In other words, the President doesn't care what Congress thinks, as elected Representatives of the people, and feels no need to justify his official conduct.

Now, a couple weeks later he was asked again about this decision to unilaterally delay the mandate, and he said, look, he ``didn't simply choose to delay this on my own'' because the decision was made ``in consultation with businesses all across the country.''

Now, I have searched the Constitution in vain for the provision allowing the President to suspend article II, section 3 of the Constitution so long as he consults with business, but I have not found it.

What is even worse, though is that the President further justified his conduct by stating:

In a normal political environment, it would have been

easier for me to simply call up the Speaker and say, you know

what, this is a tweak that doesn't go to the essence of the

law. Let's make a technical change of the law. That would be

the normal thing that I would prefer to do, but we're not in

a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to ObamaCare.

That's the end of the President's quote.

Now, this is absurd. The Constitution doesn't relieve the President of his duty to faithfully enforce the law simply because the political environment is difficult. Second, the President didn't, in fact, need to call the Speaker, because a couple weeks before his comment, this House voted 264-161--with 35 Members of the other party voting ``yes''--to delay the mandate by law for 1 year. Most of us in the House actually think that, as a matter of policy, the employer mandate is bad for the economy. The President responded to our request to delay the employer mandate by threatening to veto the bill.

Now, with respect to the employer mandate, the emperor truly has no clothes. The unilateral delay of this mandate is not consistent with the Constitution's Take Care clause and is an abridgement of Congress' constitutional duty to make the law. The separation of powers is designed to ensure a government of laws, not of men. This President is content to be a law unto himself.

Now, the employer mandate delay is not an exception that proves the rule, unfortunately. Far from it. The entire enterprise of ObamaCare implementation has been an exercise in the administration picking and choosing which provisions to enforce and which provisions to delay or waive. Rather than implement the law as written, the President is rewriting the law as he goes along.

The following list represents a pretty impressive display of this lawlessness:

ObamaCare contains a statutory cap on out-of-pocket health costs, yet the President suspended this provision, most likely because he feared it would lead to health insurance premiums rising even more than they already are.

Second, the law requires the State-based ObamaCare health insurance exchanges to verify whether applicants for exchange subsidies qualify for subsidies based on their income level. Yet the President suspended this requirement, thereby allowing taxpayer money to be handed out based on the ``honor system''; and we know that it's going to hit the taxpayer more than if you actually enforce the regulations.

The plain text of ObamaCare also provides that subsidies can only flow through State-based exchanges, yet the President's IRS is disregarding this requirement and is allowing subsidies to flow to Federal exchanges.

So this is creating, I think, a patently unjust scenario: The law imposes substantial burdens on society as a whole, but those with political connections--employers, insurance companies, what have you-- are granted delays and/or waivers from the law's burdens. This is precisely contrary to James Madison's admonition in the Federalist No. 57 that there should be ``no law which will not have its full operation on the political class and their friends, as well as on the great mass of society.''

The most egregious example, though, of political favoritism via executive branch lawlessness has got to be the illicit bailout for Members of Congress with respect to congressional health plans. Now, when the bill was being debated several years ago, the American people were told we have to pass the bill to find out what is in the bill. And sure enough, the law contained all sorts of surprises, including an interesting provision regarding health care for Members of Congress.

Now there is broad agreement among analysts who have looked at the effects of ObamaCare that the law's structures and incentives will cause millions of Americans to lose their employer-provided coverage and get pushed into these health care exchanges. The only dispute really is how many millions of Americans will suffer this fate. The Congressional Budget Office said 7 million. Other analysts have said it's going to be tens of millions of Americans.

Perhaps recognizing this possibility, one section of ObamaCare makes Congress eat its own cooking. The idea behind the provision is that, because ObamaCare will upend the health care arrangements of other Americans, Members of Congress and other political insiders should be placed in exactly the same position as their fellow citizens whom they have burdened, and thus Members of Congress must go and get insurance through these ObamaCare exchanges. No more gold-plated plans for Washington, given Washington is having a negative effect on other Americans.

Now, one can search the health care law in vain for any provision providing Members of Congress taxpayer-financed subsidies for use on these ObamaCare exchanges. It's just not there. In fact, as Politico reported, the Office of Personnel Management initially said that lawmakers and staffers couldn't receive subsidies once they went into the exchange because there was no authority to give them subsidies. This is probably also because any other American who loses their health coverage and goes into the exchanges is prohibited from getting a tax- excludable employer contribution.

This state of play didn't sit well with a lot of Members of Congress. So after being lobbied by Members of both the House and Senate, the President pledged to ``fix the issue.'' He ordered OPM to reverse course and grant unique taxpayer subsidies to Members of Congress and other Washington insiders--again, without having a statutory authority to do so.

So this is a lawlessness in service of liberating Members of Congress from having to live under the terms of the laws that they impose on others, And this is creating all sorts of problems of fairness and equity.

I think the Founding Fathers had it right when they said that the President did have a duty to take care that the laws would be faithfully executed. And that word ``faithfulness'' means something. Yes, you have discretion as an executive to enforce laws to a certain degree or not, depending on the situation. That is a natural aspect of prosecutorial discretion. But the idea that you can just supercede or delay laws by executive fiat is something that's foreign to our constitutional tradition.

I'm going to yield in a second to the gentleman from Oklahoma, but think about this: Had Mitt Romney won the 2012 election and he came in and started delaying or waiving parts of ObamaCare with impunity and with no congressional authorization, can you imagine the uproar that we would be hearing from the press and from our friends on the other side of the aisle? I think it would be very loud in here if that were the case.

At this time, I thank my friend from Oklahoma for coming, and I yield to him.

I thank the gentleman from Oklahoma. Thank you for those comments, and thank you for the service that you have given to the country, here in the Congress, but particularly as a naval aviator flying more than one platform--the E-2D Hawkeye and then also the F-18 Super Hornet.

You have been deployed in harm's way numerous times, and you speak with a great deal of authority, not only on these issues, but on issues related to national security. I think it has been great that the gentleman and I have had a mutual pact to be supporting our blue-water Navy because there is no other weapon in the world like it when you can move a carrier 90 miles off somebody's coast and project power.

With that, I would like to recognize another one of my colleagues, the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Salmon), a guy who has been here before, he has walked the walk, and one of the few guys who will tell you what his principles are and will come here and will actually put those principles into action. He did it in the '90s and he is doing it again.

I thank the gentleman from Arizona for those great comments.

I think he brings up a great point about the funding bill that was sent the day before the fiscal year ended was not demanding that the President fully repeal the health care law; it basically had two very reasonable policy asks:

One, that Members of Congress live under the exact terms of the law that they passed and not get any type of special unauthorized treatment; and then

Two, that individuals be given the same courtesy that the President gave to Big Business.

That was very reasonable. The press hasn't really reported that. That is not really the way they framed it. I am not surprised at that. But that is a vote--by standing beside the Senate majority leader, all those Senators who did that--that is going to be a vote that is going to reverberate into the future.

I think it is interesting because when we are talking about the proper constitutional authority of the President, our primary means to check the President is the power of the purse. That is basically what we are doing in terms of we are sending the funding bill, but we are saying, look, we cannot afford to continue going with this disparate treatment throughout society. You have got to treat everybody the same.

I yield to the gentleman from Oklahoma.

I thank the gentleman for the question. That is not only an adult way, that is exactly the way that the Founding Fathers envisioned it. James Madison, when he wrote about the different branches of separation of power, checks and balances, he said:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

So you have an executive that gets beyond their scope, he expected the legislature to check that. So in this instance, we are saying, Wait a minute, you can't unilaterally delay the law for business, but then leave the rest of the American people holding the bag. You can't let Congress, the people who are imposing this law upon others, get out from under the exact text of the law. So in that sense, that's exactly the way the system is supposed to work.

Now he has a different view of, basically, the Congress needs to do what he decrees, and then he will grant Congress the courtesy of actually discussing issues with them. That would probably not have gone over very well with the Founding Fathers.

I want to just make another point because the gentleman from Arizona brought up how ObamaCare was passed and kind of the genesis of it. Some of our friends on the other side of the aisle that say, How can you guys be talking about this, it's the law, move on, not giving any credence to the 50 to 55 percent of Americans who are being negatively affected by it. But if you compare how that law was passed compared to any other major piece of legislation, I pulled some interesting numbers. Social Security in 1935, in the House of Representatives, 96 percent of the Democrats voted for it, 81 percent of the Republicans voted for it. The interstate highway system under Eisenhower, 93 percent in this body voted for it, 98 percent of the Republicans in this body voted for it. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, maybe the most important piece of legislation in the 20th century, 61 percent of the Democrats in the House voted for that piece of legislation, 80 percent of the Republicans in the House voted for that piece of legislation.

Even 1981, the Reagan economic program, in the Senate, 78 percent of the Democrats voted for Reaganomics, and 98 percent of Republicans voted for Reaganomics. When the gentleman from Arizona was here when they did welfare reform, you had a unified Republican Party joining with a number of Democrats and a Democratic President. So when you have this bill that never received any support from the other party and that rests on all these broken promises about your health care is going to decline by $2,500 a family, you can keep your plan, keep your doctor, we know none of that is going to be true.

I just want to ask the gentleman from Oklahoma, yield to him because he and I had been discussing the idea of the President's responsibility to enforce border security and enforce laws related to immigration. I yield so you can discuss that.

Thank you for that. It's interesting. As you bring up former Secretary Napolitano, that brings up the Presidential appointment and confirmation process. The Constitution provides for Cabinet officers and judges, that the President will nominate, the Senate votes to advise and consent to confirm, and then at that point they can become appointed and fill the office.

There is also another provision in article II of the Constitution, in section 2, involving what are called recess appointments, and it says:

The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies

that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting

commissions which shall expire at the end of their next

session.

This made a lot of sense at the time, especially because you'd be in session, people lived all over the country. They'd take a horse-drawn carriage to get to Washington and back, so the Senate may be out for months and months. The Founders didn't want government ground to a halt. It's been used more recently if the Senate is on a recess, the President can kind of strategically figure that out and appoint somebody who might not otherwise be confirmed. Well, what this President did was a step further than that. He actually said that if the Senate says that it's not in recess, if they are just adjourned for say a day, a couple days and they are having pro forma session, that that doesn't actually count as a recess in his judgment and he can go ahead and do recess appointments, people to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Board that would not otherwise be able to be confirmed. A lot of people cried foul about this, and it actually got tied up in the courts. Normally, we have to check some of these things, but there was somebody who had standing to bring a lawsuit. It has gone to two different Circuit Courts of Appeal and they both said, Look, the President can't just unilaterally determine when the Senate is in recess. The Senate is either in recess or they are not. If it is just that they go to sleep at night and come back the next morning, the President can't wait until midnight and just thrust somebody into office. So both of those courts have said that the President has overstepped his authority by shoving these recess appointments in office while the Senate was not in a formal recess; they were just adjourned within that term of service. And so I think the Supreme Court is going to hear that this time. I think they are definitely very likely to agree with those courts and say if the President can determine when it is a recess, then the whole idea of advise and consent gets swallowed up by the exception, and that's just not something that's going to work.

The gentleman from Arizona is interesting with his history because I listed some major pieces of legislation and how they all got broad bipartisan support. And the last one I mentioned was the 1996 Welfare Reform Act which Congress basically passed. It got vetoed and passed again, and finally President Clinton signed it. And the core of that, as I understand it, was that you would actually try and incentivize work instead of dependency, and so it had work requirements for able- bodied folks. I think the results of that were very, very positive. It essentially changed the incentive structure and actually gave people hope to get off dependency and into a productive life.

I yield to the gentleman from Arizona because the President has basically watered down those work requirements unilaterally, and I think that will have a negative effect.

I thank the gentleman from Arizona for that.

You mentioned just as the President came into office, and I remember the first thing, and I wasn't here. None of us were in Congress at the time. Just as a citizen, I was Active Duty Navy. You were probably too, Mr. Bridenstine. But we had this stimulus bill that had been passed. This was a huge thing. Part of that, as I've learned more about it, is that there were actually requirements that the executive branch was supposed to submit timely reports that would document the different spending and what was going on. I think even the Vice President said, Hey, I am going to be the watchdog on this. It is, in fact, the case that most of those deadlines have just been completely disregarded, that you haven't seen the type of reporting that was envisioned by the law, and that's perhaps because the law wasn't successful at engineering an economic recovery.

Shortly after that, though, one of the biggest issues that happened in 2009 was the auto bankruptcy. This was something that was unusual because the White House actually got very involved on the ground in terms of refereeing the rights of the various parties, including the creditors.

I now yield some time to the gentleman from Arizona to discuss that because you had mentioned that was something that had bothered you at the time. The floor is yours.

I thank both the gentleman from Oklahoma and the gentleman from Arizona for coming here today to offer their views. Their comments are much appreciated. The great thing about these two guys is they will stand up to people, regardless of party. They will stand up to people in their own party. They will stand up to people in the other party if what they're trying to do is not the right thing because these guys want to do the right thing.

I just want to conclude by invoking two giants in American history in terms of some of the issues that we discussed today and kind of what they mean.

The first is the Father of the Country, George Washington. When he took the reins as the first President of the United States, he made the comment ``I walk on untrodden ground.'' So he had a great sense that it wasn't just about him. He was already the biggest hero in the country. He could have taken over the country after defeating the British. He could have been king, but he surrendered his sword and retired to Mount Vernon until he was called back to further service. He was very sensitive to the idea that he was trying to establish a framework for freedom that could last generations, and it wasn't just about his own personal glory. What he tried to establish was the proper role of an executive in a constitutional system. There's a lot of people that said you either have a strong executive and it is a monarchy, or you just can't have a strong executive. I think he laid the foundation to say, actually, you can have a constitutionally circumscribed executive power that was nevertheless a force of good for the country.

The other gentleman that I would like to mention is Abraham Lincoln, who's obviously one of the greatest presidents we have ever had. His earliest recorded speech was a speech before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. This was in the 1830s, so he still had decades before he was President. I don't think he had been elected to anything even locally at the time. He was really concerned about the future of the country because he said you had this great Revolution, you had this great Constitution, you had these wonderful decades where people were actually living and breathing that. Obviously, he felt that there was a lot of work to do because he spoke out against things like slavery, but he thought that the ball was moving in the right direction in terms of individual freedom. But he feared that as the Founding Fathers and their generation passed away, that people really wouldn't have something that they could all have to organize around and be faithful to in terms of our country. So what he told people to do was to really embrace constitutional principles and the rule of law.

In his speech, he said:

As the patriots of '76 did to support the Declaration of

Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and laws

let every American pledge his life, his property, and his

sacred honor. Let every man remember that to violate the law

is to trample on the blood of his father and to tear the

charter of his own and his children's liberty.

He went on to say:

And, in short, let it become the political religion of the

Nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor,

the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues and colors

and conditions sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.

I think what Lincoln was getting at was this idea of American

exceptionalism. It is not because we as Americans are anything special. I am certainly not anything special. It is not that we are so much better than anybody as people. The exceptional part of the country is the origins of the country and the principles that the country is designed to further. That, I think, is what Lincoln was talking about; that when you embrace the Declaration, when you embarrass the Constitution, you're embracing a framework in which individual liberty is the paramount objective of society, and that is why things like the separation of powers and proper lawfulness from the legislature and executive are so important. It is not just because this is all a game and we want to try to blow the whistle on people who are in the other party. It is because ultimately this constitutional structure and these protections are what make us different from all the countries that have come before and all the countries that have been founded since.

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

I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

I just want to address some things that I have been hearing out there that just strike me as wrong. The President

said that ObamaCare has nothing to do with the budget. Now that is very rich, considering it was passed using budget reconciliation in order to ram it through the Senate with less than 60 votes. So it was a budget issue then. Somehow it's not now. Of course the individual mandate has been ruled a tax by the Supreme Court, and it authorizes trillions of dollars in new spending.

Now some say ObamaCare is the law and, therefore, cannot be changed. Well, this body has the constitutional authority to legislate. We can always amend or change the laws. But I would also say, if this particular law is somehow so special and sacrosanct, then why isn't the President enforcing it, as written? Indeed, he has given waivers and exemptions to politically connected entities, including a bailout for Members of Congress, giving them relief from the text of the very law that they passed without reading.

I think ObamaCare is dangerous in terms of how it's going to impact economic growth and medical care in the country. But just in terms of good government, this really is a recipe for institutionalized cronyism. You have burdens imposed on society. And then those who have political connections can get those burdens removed.

So employers can get it removed. We know there will be something for labor unions at some point. But if you are an individual, well, you've still got to abide by ObamaCare's dictates.

Some say doing individual bills is simply cherry-picking, we can't pass individual spending bills, which the House has been doing very resolutely over the last several days.

Big omnibus CRs, that is not the way business is supposed to be done. You are packing all the departments into one big bill. You are forfeiting Congress' ability to make good spending choices, forfeiting Congress' oversight authority, locking in bad policy. We haven't done appropriations bills in this House for years. A lot of this stuff that's locked into these CRs was done when we had the previous Speaker of the House. So individual bills are better. The Senate should absolutely act on our bills.

And then just finally, I would say, before I yield back to the gentlewoman from Missouri, ObamaCare is the only major piece of legislation that's passed in the last 80 years that had zero support from the other party. Social Security had 80 percent of the Republicans in the House; the Civil Rights Act had 80 percent of the Republicans in the House; Reaganomics, the Reagan economic program, had 78 percent of Democrats in the Senate. So typically, these big laws have broad bipartisan support. This one didn't. And we have a lot of constituents who didn't want it to begin with and don't like living under it now.