Floor Statements

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 37 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, April 9, 2014, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

We are constantly confronted with agendas and issues, some of which are good for the country, and some of which are bad for the country. That is why we debate here in this Congress.

I would like to think that anything that passes off the floor of the House of Representatives enjoys the full support of at least a majority of the Members of the House of Representatives. I would like to think that is also the case with the Senate. I would like to think that when we disagree, we come together in conference and we produce a conference report that can achieve and enjoy the majority support of the House and the Senate of the conference report and go on its way to the President's desk, where it is either signed into law or vetoed and sent back to the Chamber of origin, as the Constitution directs.

There are also tactics and maneuvers that go on in this Congress, and this more than two centuries of the structure of this great deliberative body has developed a system within our committee process to define jurisdiction committee by committee. More committees have been created over the years, some committees have been abolished over the years, but it is designed to function so that this constitutional Republic--which is guaranteed in our Constitution, by the way--brings the best judgment of the people in America through their elected representatives.

There are 435 House districts and 100 Senators from the 50 States. The good ideas that come from our neighborhoods need to go into the eyes and ears of their Member of Congress, and we need to bring it here and bring those best ideas forward and compete. Put those ideas together in a competitive fashion so that as we sit down and first we draft a bill, that bill gets assigned to the committee of jurisdiction where the people have accumulated expertise on the topic are seated. There will be hearings for them to get better informed about the bill in question itself, and then in the subcommittee, a markup of the base bill that allows every member of the subcommittee to offer an amendment, any series of amendments, that are germane to the topic and the subject of the bill, which is assigned to the committee because of the jurisdiction of the committee, and then that subcommittee acts, in which case then the bill goes to the full committee for a similar process to the broader committee.

If it comes out of that committee improved in theory--and actually improved in practice most of the time--then that bill goes on the calendar here on the floor, where in which case it is subjected to the amendments that might come from all of the other Members, the Members that are on the committee of jurisdiction and the Members who are not on the committee of jurisdiction.

When this Congress is set up to function accurately, when we are defending, protecting, and respecting the jurisdiction of the various committees, we get the best product because we have the people on the committees that have--at least in theory--the most knowledge about the topic that comes before the committee. Some have years and years of expertise accumulated, some not quite as long, but they might bring that interest from their private life into the committee, as well.

I get very concerned when I see a bill come to the floor that didn't go through the committee process, that didn't have a legitimate hearing process, that didn't go through subcommittee or the full committee and comes to this floor because someone decided that it was so urgent that we act on a subject that we didn't have time to go through regular order.

That concerns me a lot. I get concerned when there is an expectation that we will have a full debate here on the floor on a bill, and it is brought to the floor and voice-voted on a weekend, going into a weekend, without the knowledge of most of the Members of Congress. I get concerned about regular order.

I have had my conversations with our leadership regarding that. I am not yet satisfied that this is the last time. However, Mr. Speaker, I came to the floor to address a different kind of regular order, a kind of regular order that is this: if we have committees that are not committees of jurisdiction of a subject or a topic and that subject or topic outside their jurisdiction is slipped into a must-pass piece of legislation from another committee, now they have usurped the jurisdiction of the committee that actually has that jurisdiction, and they have placed a topic into a subject matter that must pass, and the people who have allowed that to happen on their watch, at least in theory, don't possess the expertise that exists within the committee of jurisdiction.

Now, all of this gibberish that I am talking about now, this technical explanation of what goes on here in this Congress boils down to this, Mr. Speaker--and I want to speak specifically to this issue. There is a bill that is floating around this Congress that is referred to as the ENLIST Act.

I can't read for you the name of this bill because it is about as accurate as the Affordable Care Act is to naming ObamaCare; but it is one that grants amnesty to people who come into the United States--are unlawfully present in the United States.

Many of them committed the crime of unlawful entry. A good number of others may have overstayed a visa or come into America on a visa waiver program. In any case, they are unlawfully present in America. They might sign up for the military. If they do that, they are defrauding the Department of Defense.

We don't recruit people into our military who are unlawfully present in the United States. They have to have a green card, at a minimum; citizenship, better.

Now, one might presume that we are having trouble recruiting people to come into the military, so therefore, we should bring in mercenaries from outside the United States and take the oath to uphold, preserve, protect, and defend our Constitution and go out and defend the liberty of Americans.

That actually happens, but when it happens, it is a violation of the law. If they take that oath of office, illegal aliens into our military have to misrepresent themselves in order to be accepted into the military, so that is fraud. It might well be document fraud.

This bill called the ENLIST Act would reward them for doing so, for defrauding the Department of Defense and, yes, putting on the uniform and, at least in theory, defending America. They take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. They salute our flag.

They may mean it; they may not mean it. But we know the very act of entering the military was a dishonest act on their part. So why would we accept their oath to have more value--the oath to defend the Constitution, to have more value than their word that they gave when they misrepresented themselves to join the military?

In any case, this ENLIST Act bill rewards people who broke our immigration law by putting them on a path to citizenship, giving them a green card. The only qualifications you need is you are unlawfully in the United States, you enter into the military, you misrepresent yourself to do that because we are not taking them into the military if they are unlawfully present.

Then they have to assert they were in the United States continuously since before December 31, 2011, which happens to be the date that is in the Gang of Eight's bill, and they have to assert that they were brought into this country or came into this country by the time they were 15 years old--they might be in their 30s when they sign up

for the military, who knows--but those have to be the assertions.

Then if they are in the military at the time, then they have to be either honorably discharged or on the path to honorable discharge, and they will then have a path to citizenship.

I think this is a misguided bill. I think it is misguided to think that we need to reward people for breaking the law. It is misguided to believe that Americans will not sign up for our military. We are shrinking our military. We are not expanding our military.

We have high-quality Americans who are lining up to join in all of our branches of service. Yes, I am sure there are recruiters who would like to do a little more, but this is not an expanding Department of Defense budget; this is a shrinking Department of Defense budget. It is not an expanding military; it is a shrinking military.

But that, Mr. Speaker, isn't so much the point as it is what is right and what is wrong, what is justice and what is equity and what is not.

I understand there are people who have sympathy, and they say: this pulls on my heart strings; I think, if they are willing to defend America, I think we ought to give them a path to citizenship.

I understand that, but do the advocates for this ENLIST Act, do they understand that it is a reward for lawbreakers?

They are not just someone who came across the border illegally or someone who overstayed their visa. They are the ones who misrepresented themselves to get into the United States military; we would then trust them with perhaps military secrets and the security of Americans and American installations around the world?

It is not that I don't trust them. I just don't believe that we should be rewarding people who have already proven they have broken the law. If they take the oath to the Constitution and if they are not on a path to citizenship already, if they are unlawfully present in the United States, then they violated the law already, and we are supposed to accept their word for it. I think it is wrong, Mr. Speaker.

I look at some of the press that has come out on this, the tactic and the effort that seems to be that they think they can slip a provision into the NDA bill, the National Defense Authorization bill, a provision in there that would legalize people who illegally entered into the United States military and reward them with a path to citizenship for their trouble?

There are many countries in the world where you are a lot better off in the United States Marine Corps than you would be, say, on the streets of many cities in the countries of the world. That is true.

So this would put out the advertisement, this bill, this ENLIST-- badly named ENLIST Act would put out the advertisement, which is sneak into America, sneak into the military, and that is going to be the most expeditious path to American citizenship and the whole smorgasbord of benefits that comes from American citizenship.

Citizenship must be precious, not handed out like candy in a parade. We don't ride along and throw out citizenship like you do M&Ms or Tootsie Rolls or whatever it is that we are tossing out in our parades.

Citizenship must be precious. The rule of law is precious. It is the center core argument on the immigration issue, the rule of law.

We can't grant amnesty to people because our hearts tell us we have sympathy for individuals. I have sympathy for individuals. In fact, if I am ever declared a liberal, it is because of how I deal with some people individually, because I see something in their eyes and hear something in their voice and see how they carry themselves.

I see something in how they conduct themselves and what they do that convinces me that this is a good person, and I want to invest in them, whether it is my capital, my time, my trust, or recommendations that others do the same. I actually do that on occasion because I have faith in an individual.

But when you set policy--policy for the United States of America because your heart tells you to have sympathy for some people you know, keep in mind there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people that are impacted by that decision, and you have to say: I trust every one of those people the same way I trust the individual or the individuals that I know that bring the sympathy from my heart.

We aren't charged with having sympathy here in setting foreign policy or setting our national policy because of the sympathies of our heart. We are charged with providing justice and equity, and that is laid out in the Constitution.

To me, it is a clear charge; so when I take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend this Constitution, I mean it. It is the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, and it is the foundation for the rest of the laws.

Congress passed a law that says we are not going to bring people into our military that are unlawfully present in the United States, and when I hear from let's say other Members, in particular an individual Member that says Steve King is dead wrong on this issue, Mr. Speaker, I take issue with that.

I am right with the rule of law. I am right with current law. The policy is right because, otherwise, you fill our military up with people who may and likely do and some certainly will have foreign interests.

It is not to the interest of the United States to replace on our ranks, our troops, people who are American citizens or people who are on a path to citizenship, replace them with people who came into the United States illegally.

How poor would we be as a people? How empty our soul as a people if we say: Well, that is another job that Americans won't do? They don't want to put on a uniform and go defend our country, so we will have to reward illegal immigrants, if they will just lie to us, we will let them in the military, and we will give them a path to citizenship.

That is what the ENLIST bill does. It does damage to the rule of law. It is misguided, however good the hearts are of the people who advocate for this.

I think this is an important debate, Mr. Speaker. It doesn't belong on the defense authorization bill. This debate doesn't belong in the Defense Committee, the Armed Services Committee. This debate belongs, if it is going to take place at all, in the committee of jurisdiction, the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, where it ought to have--if it deserves any debate at all, it ought to have witnesses who agree with people like me.

I have seen these hearings come out before, even in our Judiciary Committee, where someone gets the idea that we ought to grant a path to citizenship to several million people who are unlawfully here, and I have seen the committee, even there where there were four witnesses, no questions, another round of four witnesses, now the chairs and the ranking members get to ask questions, 90 minutes after the beginning of the hearing, the first voice of dissent might be heard.

That is not a very good committee, in my opinion; but at least it was in the committee of jurisdiction. I would like to expect that the subcommittee chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee would defend the jurisdiction of his committee and reject the idea that they sneak this bill into the defense authorization bill.

I would like to see that the chairman of the full committee defend the jurisdiction of the committee, as he did so effectively last year, and deny this end round that they are attempting to run this poorly named ENLIST Act around an end run of the Judiciary Committee and to slip it into a must-pass piece of legislation that would come to the floor here under the National Defense Authorization Act.

Our country will be stronger. The security of the country will be at least as strong. The heart of our country will be just as strong. We can still have sympathy for people without turning them all into Americans, and our defense will be stronger because we will have more American citizens step up and actually qualify to get into the service.

Just think, across this country, you go to work, whether you punch a timeclock, whether you are on salary or whatever it might be, you walk into that workplace, and you are there, and let's just presume you are on a production line making an American car.

Let's call it a ``Hord.'' On your right hand is someone working who is unlawfully present in the United States and can't work legally in the United States. On your left hand, there is somebody who fits that same category.

Do the workers standing there realize that there are two good, well- paying jobs that Americans aren't doing, not because they won't, but someone else who is unlawfully in the United States has stepped into their stead and taken that good-paying job, that job that actually pays taxes and contributes to the benefits of people who aren't working?

So if you look on your right and you look on your left and you see somebody working who is unlawfully present, and you say, I like him, I enjoy working with him, he is efficient, probably that is true.

But what is it doing to America? What is it doing to the soul of America? And what is it doing to the rule of law to reward people who break the law while this Congress borrows money every year, 42 cents or so off of every dollar we spend from places like China, Saudi Arabia?

And with the bonds that are out there, about half of our debt to the American people that so far are willing to reinvest in the debt we have, what does that do to America when we are borrowing money to fund the more than 80 different Federal welfare programs that are there?

We have a population of some 316 million Americans. 101.4 million of those 316 million are of working age and simply not in the workforce, and some of the biggest reasons are right there in the list of the 80 different means-tested welfare programs.

So what should we do in this Congress, Mr Speaker? We should have policies that increase the average individual annual productivity of our people. Each one of us should get out of bed and go forward to contribute to the gross domestic product that day.

That means we come in an hour or 8 hours or 24 hours, if you can. You are contributing to the GDP. That will increase your income. You can pay your share of the taxes. When you make that contribution, you are helping pull the load.

If you are sitting, though, and you are one of those people that has taken this safety net that we offer that I support and turned it into a hammock for yourself and you are riding here when you should be contributing off of somebody else's labor, it is wrong.

We need more Americans going to work. We need a higher percentage of Americans working. There is no work that Americans won't do, including putting on a uniform, going into basic training, being trained up in AIT or wherever you might be assigned to go and step up and defend our country. It has been done with honor. It has been done with dignity. It has been done gloriously by Americans since before there was an America, and it needs to be so for the duration of this Republic.

Mr. Speaker, I would say, furthermore, the idea that there are jobs that Americans won't do, I looked at this and I thought: what would be the toughest, dirtiest, nastiest, most dangerous job that Americans are ever asked to do? When I think of this, I think, I bet I know somebody that is an authority on that, and that would be one of the gentlemen in my Conference from Colorado that served in the Marine Corps. The toughest, dirtiest, nastiest, most dangerous job we ask Americans to do is how about rooting terrorists out of a place like Fallujah. What does that pay? How do we get Americans to do that if we can't get Americans to cut meat or pick tomatoes or whatever it might be? How do we get them to do that?

I went back and ran the numbers on that. So a marine in the streets of Fallujah in the line of fire, if you figure him at a 40-hour week, instead of about a 70- or 80- or 90-hour week or more, at a 40-hour week, they were getting paid right at about $8.09 an hour. If a marine will go into the line of fire for God and country for $8.09 an hour-- and God bless him--I bet we can find some Americans for $20 an hour to go out there and cut meat and $20 an hour that might go out and pick lettuce, as the Senator from Arizona used to talk about during his Presidential campaign.

So here is my point, Mr. Speaker. I think this Enlist Act is misguided. I think the press that has spilled out on this has illuminated a deft maneuver to try to circumvent the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee. I reject that. I am here defending the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee. I think that those who have a heart that tells them, ``I want to pass some legislation because I have sympathy for individuals that I know who will make good Americans,'' I understand that. I have some sympathy for individuals I know that will make good Americans, too, but I am not about--I am not about to usurp and undermine the rule of law, because I didn't run for office telling my constituents my heart is going to overrule my head, my heart is going to overrule human experience and human history and the rule of law and the Constitution. We should know better. We are here to be analytical, to lead and not let the emotions drive us.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Speaker, I remember a display at the National Archives as I was waiting some years ago to be able to walk up there where the Declaration of Independence is on display. There I see they had the display of the Greeks who had demagogues in their communities. They had the pure democracy. They found out that there were demagogues that could get the masses all ginned up and they would storm off in a direction that was bad for the city-state of Greece. They couldn't control the overheated rhetoric of the very effective and persuasive demagogues, so they had a system to blackball them. If three of the members of the city-state--men of voting age in those days-- dropped a black ball into the pottery that was the voting one and discarded a white one in the nonvoting one, then they would banish that demagogue from the city-state for 7 years. But that was emotionalism.

Our Founding Fathers understood we didn't want to form a democracy here. We created a constitutional Republic. It is guaranteed in our Constitution. And it has done so because it charges each of us to have a cool head. And I owe my constituents, as everyone here does, my best effort and my best judgment. That includes listening to my constituents, all of them. But it includes also, step back, take a look at it from 10,000 feet; analyze the policy; understand my oath to the Constitution and the supreme law of the land; and act accordingly for the long-term best interest of the United States of America.

This Enlist Act is not in the long-term best interest of the United States of America. It is not in the best interest of America that we circumvent the jurisdiction of the committees. That is not either in the best interest of America. What is in the best interest is we preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and the rule of law and recognize that this immigration debate is driven by emotion on their side. The open borders, amnesty people are driven by emotion, and there are others that stand here and say: We are going to protect the rule of law.

So here is what I would submit, Mr. Speaker. If they are successful in passing a Gang of 8's bill in this House or bringing it to the floor and trying to get it passed, if they are successful in eroding the rule of law with regard to the Enlist Act, if they are successful in getting passed what they call the DREAM Act, that also erodes the rule of law. Anything that rewards people for breaking the law is a continuation of the Amnesty Act that was signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986. We are debating the results of the signature on that bill today.

It was passed this way. It said we are going do legalize a million people who are here illegally because we don't know what to do, and then the promise is we are going to enforce the law hereafter and there will never be another amnesty so long as anyone shall live. That was the promise of the '86 Amnesty Act, and Reagan was honest about it.

So we live with that, but they are pushing on the other side. We never got the enforcement. The 1 million became 3 million plus. The enforcement didn't come, but the implied promise of amnesty exists, and that is what they are pushing on.

If any amnesty is passed now, that perpetuates the promise that there will be another amnesty, which turns up the current end of the huge electromagnet that draws people to come into

America, the promise that they will receive citizenship, a path to citizenship, some kind of amnesty.

We have to restore the rule of law, the respect for the rule of law. If there is a provision that is an amnesty provision that passes, then that promise exists in perpetuity that there will be another one, which means we will not be able to restore the rule of law in this country-- at least with regard to immigration--again. I don't know that I can say ``ever,'' but I can say never again would we see the rule of law with regard to immigration within the duration of this Republic, not as long as I shall live or as long as we shall live, not until death do us part. But until the death of this Republic, we will not be able to restore the rule of law, at least with regard to immigration. And the argument goes to the next and the next and the next, Mr. Speaker.

So this is a critically important issue. I am happy to debate this with the colleagues from my Conference in any State where they would like to take this up, be it California, be it Colorado, be it anyplace else around the country.

This debate is one that is important. We need more American people that are aware that our hearts cannot overrule our heads. We cannot allow the rule of law to be torn asunder because we have sympathy for certain people.

Let's have sympathy for Americans first. Let's understand that America can be defended by Americans, and if people want to come and join and defend and help protect America, go get in line the right way. Because the advocates for this kind of legislation will tell you, well, they go to the back of the line. Except this bill isn't the back of the line. It is we create a new line and you are in the front of it. They are not going to allow them to go to the back of the line. They don't really believe it. They will just tell you that.

They will say there is work Americans won't do. Defending America, then how is it that marines will step in the line of fire for $8.09 an hour? How is it that we have Americans working in every single job and profession that is listed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site?

Americans are doing every work there is to do in this country. They just need to be paid what the work is worth. The wages are being suppressed by elitists who are making millions of dollars off of the cheap labor that is subsidized by the taxpayers who are backfilling and funding these households with the 80 different means tests and welfare programs, and we are borrowing the money from China to do it. So let's have that discussion.

Tell me how we get this budget back to balance. How do you do that while you are rewarding people for not working and you are rewarding people for breaking the law? What kind of country do you want?

I think the advocates for this bill that I so oppose actually want the same kind of country that I want. I just don't think that they see what they are doing to erode the progress that we need to be making.

I think that when they declare that I am dead wrong, the real result is, if they get their way, there will be more Americans that eventually are actually dead, because there is not a day that goes by in this country that there isn't at least one American citizen that dies at the hands of someone who is unlawfully present in the United States. Whether it is an act of homicide, whether it is an act of willful manslaughter, whether it is an OWI on the streets of America, hardly anybody has gone through the last 10 years and doesn't at least see that show up in their local newspaper, if it doesn't show up in their neighborhood.

So Steve King is not dead wrong. Let's keep more Americans alive. If I need to go to those States and have those debates, that is what I will do. But I call upon our committee chairs especially to defend the jurisdiction of our committee. If you are chairing a subcommittee or a committee in the United States House of Representatives that happens to be the Judiciary Committee, the rule of law and the Constitution are essential. I also expect and call upon those who have that special charge to renew their vigorous defense of the rule of law, the jurisdiction of the committee, and the supreme law of the land, the Constitution.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 4 o'clock and 26 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, April 7, 2014, at noon for morning-hour debate.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding and, also, Mr. Young for his authorship of this bill.

It changed dramatically what I had to say when I came down here when I heard that the Republican endeavor to reestablish the 40-hour workweek, which is a practical thing that is good for people, is a fraud. A fraud? People that have been the advocates for ObamaCare are using the word ``fraud''?

No, I won't yield. I heard what the gentleman had to say.

Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I might have?

Madam Speaker, the gentleman used the term ``fraud.''

It is ironic that ObamaCare itself has been so misrepresented to the American people that, for the top three things that were stated by those who advocated for ObamaCare--if you like your policy, you can keep it; if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, and, by the way, we are going to save these families $2,500 a year. There is not a single family in America that that promise has been kept for, and yet I hear the word ``fraud'' from the other side of the aisle.

It is not very far down to Mount Vernon where, at least by legend, it is alleged that George Washington was asked who chopped down the cherry tree. He said: I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the cherry tree.

Well, calling the Affordable Care Act the ``Affordable Care Act'' is not true. George Washington could not utter these words. He might be able to say the ``Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,'' because that is technically the name for it, but to utter those words and try to tell the American people it is affordable by anybody is not true, and I don't think George Washington could state that.

So we are watching here as people have jobs where they get paid overtime, 56 hours a week, 45 hours a week. They are getting paid time- and-a-half over 40 hours because that is the standard workweek, and now we see ObamaCare dropped it down to 30.

Employers did the rational thing, and we are hearing that that gap between 30 and 40 cancels insurance policies. It doesn't cancel any insurance policies. Instead, it gives people an opportunity to work, work longer, earn overtime, and for the employers and the employees to keep their contract with each other.

I strongly support this bill, H.R. 2575.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding and for pulling this Special Order together here and bringing out this case as something that all the American people aren't going to realize what is taking place here, if we don't have this discussion here. It takes leadership in this Congress to do this. I appreciate the strong voice of Mr. Perry and Mr. Weber.

I look back at it this way. On my first trip to Israel some time more than 10 years ago, I looked across at what was taking place from Israel proper and West Bank, the Palestinian area.

I went through the briefings and saw the data of a culture of people that raise their little girls to put on these fake suicide vests in order to make sure that they entrench deeply in them a multigenerational hatred towards Israelis and Jewish people. Now, why?

It is not a rational thing for a culture and a civilization to be so full of hate; yet all they really need to do is accept the existence of Israel, and a lot of us, this resistance we have within us would start to dissipate.

It wouldn't be gone because you don't just accept somebody's word who has such a history of doing what they have done. The hatred goes deep.

I think of Congressman Gohmert of Texas, if he were standing here tonight, he would say: you don't have to pay people to hate you, they'll hate you for free.

So all these billions of dollars--$5 billion since 1988, as Mr. Yoho just said, the idea of trying to trade off land for peace, and what you get back is a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, in a more violent and a bloody and a brutal way.

You see that there is a fundraising mechanism worldwide that pours dollars into the Palestinian Authority, and they then use it to pay the payroll of people that are sitting in a prison for crimes against--let me say it this way, crimes against humanity, not necessarily the technical definition of the convictions that they have--who get a payroll check for demonstrating hatred, acting on it, in a kinetic fashion, being locked up to protect the rest of society, and then being paid in reward for that.

This is an appalling circumstance, tapping into the United States of America where--we have to think about this--if we want to pay people that hate Israel, who are prisoners for committing crimes, and we grant that over to the Palestinian Authority in our foreign aid package or whatever particular line item it might be, so we have to go to China: Will you loan us some money, so that we can run it through our Treasury, so we can funnel it in to go in to pay people that have been--in any measure of decency, what they are committing is wrong?

They need to have their hearts softened. They need to raise their children to love their neighbor as they love themselves. They need to understand that there is a good functional government going on in Israel proper and still likely the only place in the Middle East where an Arab can get a fair trial is in Israel, where Arabs serve in the Knesset, where they serve in the supreme court, where they have the rights of land ownership.

That is the way you run a country that has a multidimensional ethnicity and religion in it.

I would yield.

Well, I think they will view us as a foolish country that doesn't understand our priorities and doesn't understand where the money is coming from or where it goes.

I would say this call out: Mr. Netanyahu, why don't you just ask us to take that money and give it to Israel instead? Give it to the people that are promoting peace, the people that are surrounded by enemies throughout, the people that had to stand there and face the all-out attacks over and over again.

They are a democracy in the Middle East, a stabilizing force in the Middle East; and if we allow them to be weakened--sometimes by the willful actions of this administration--if we allow them to be weakened, if they collapse, so does a lot of freedom in the Middle Eastern part of world.

It threatens Europe, and in the end, it threatens us. So our safety and our security is tied together. We need to protect our brethren who believe in freedom, who believe in a form of democracy, and we need to encourage that everywhere in the world.

There are good people in the Palestinian lands. They need to have good leadership, and if we give them the right incentive, they are going to perhaps produce good leadership.

But if we pay them to hate people, there are going to be more people hating people. I think we should turn that money back around and reward the people that don't, those who need to be defended.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate very much the honor and privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to follow my good friend, the gentleman from Texas, Judge Gohmert, in this presentation here tonight.

I have been watching forward with increasing concern about some of the potential decisions that might be made here in this House of Representatives. We have been through some long immigration debates in this saga of what happens to the future and the destiny of the United States of America. It is something that goes back, I will say, in the modern era, to sometime January 5, 2004, when then-President George Bush gave his speech that launched their effort to advance ``comprehensive immigration reform.''

Mr. Speaker, I had my discussion with the President's west wing at that time, meaning west wing of the White House. I advised them--I should say, I advised him that what you have described here is amnesty. However you want to redefine it, however you want to try to call it comprehensive immigration reform, in the end, amnesty is amnesty. The American people will know what amnesty is, and they will reject amnesty because it is bad policy for our country.

Well, since that time, I will say that that has proven to be true in each one of these national debates that we have had and these waves of national debates that we have had.

That debate that took place in 2005--excuse me, 2004 into 2005 and beyond, when there were, at times, tens of thousands of people, often coming in on buses wearing identical white T-shirts, pressing Congress to suspend the rule of law and give them a special path to citizenship. Through that, this discussion has pivoted on what I called, at the time, the scarlet letter A, called amnesty.

The definition of ``amnesty,'' it comes in different forms. Black's Law has one. There are a couple of other definitions for ``amnesty.'' But the practical definition that applies in this political arena that we are in, this cultural American arena that we are in, Mr. Speaker, is this: to grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime.

Now, the objective of their crime--and in most cases it is a crime. It is not necessarily someone who is unlawfully present in the United States or necessarily guilty of committing a

crime, but it is true in most cases. In any case, we don't always know the objective of their crime, whether it is to come into the United States to get a job and seek a better life and take care of their family. If they cross the border illegally, that is a crime. If they come in legally and overstay their visa, then that is a violation, a civil misdemeanor. And yet, if they go to work in this country, they have to fraudulently misrepresent themselves in order to legally work, then in that case, it is often document fraud, and that is also a crime.

So the objective of their crime may have been a job; it may have been a home; it may have been what is planned to be and often is a better life; and it might be someone coming in here with a different kind of intention. We know that coming across our southern border we have had, I will say, scores of people, at a minimum, who are persons of interest from nations of interest.

Now, that is the verbiage that gets used in our security personnel. If they are from a nation of interest, that is a nation that is in the list, having been a nation that spawns terrorists. If they are a person of interest, they are a person from that nation that is a nation of interest that spawns terrorists.

So you have got kind of a double marker here. Somebody shows up coming across our southern border and they are from Yemen, for example, they are going to be a person of interest from a nation of interest, which means we should pay more attention to that because they are a risk to the security of United States because that is a place that terrorists come from in the records that we have and the data that we know. It doesn't mean that everybody that might come across our southern border from Yemen is a terrorist. It means, though, just what the definition is. This happens on a regular basis.

When anyone is interdicted, apprehended, coming across our border who is a person of interest from a nation of interest, they are turned over, as soon as possible, to the FBI. That act immediately closes the case as far as public discussion is concerned because now it is classified. So, if they are continually classifying the reports and any prosecutions and how we handle persons of interest from nations of interest, that means, Mr. Speaker, that we don't know how many people have been caught coming into the United States with ill will towards us or suspicion of ill will towards us. That is classified.

What I know is I know of seven cases where we have interdicted a person of interest from a nation of interest. And the reason I know about them is because, having spent time on the border, been down there when a person of that definition is interdicted and I gain knowledge of that circumstance, same business day, early enough in the day and close enough to the incident that they can tell me about it before that individual or individuals are handed over to the FBI where the case becomes classified.

This Congress doesn't seem to be aware that this circumstance exists at all, so they whistle through the graveyard. And it may be a more appropriate explanation than I had actually thought when I started to say it, whistling through the graveyard here on what could be going on inside the United States when people come across the border who are from sources that we normally identify as sources for terrorism. That is one piece.

Another is, 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America come from or through Mexico. It isn't all their fault. One is that some of those drugs are produced and smuggled into Mexico and then into the United States. Another is there is a huge demand in the United States for illegal drugs. The value of that marketplace in this country could well be over $60 billion. That is 60 billion with a b. But even the Drug Enforcement doesn't know that number, and they aren't comfortable producing that number. That number actually comes from a media report.

In any case, so we have persons of interest from nations of interest. We have 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs coming from or through to Mexico. It is a threat to our country, a threat to our society.

And on top of that, we have a border that remains porous. We have a President whose administration has been announcing that he has been deporting record numbers of people, but when you look at the numbers, you find out that he is double counting and he has changed the definition of ``removals.''

He is counting those who are turned back at the border, those who are caught crossing the border that do a voluntary return to avoid it going on their record so that they can avoiding being subject to the 3- or 10-year bar and double-counting some of those that are turned back.

So here are the real numbers, and it is this: That the lead deportations that actually took place in our modern era under--not the George Bush administration, Mr. Speaker--but they took place under the Bill Clinton administration in the year 2000 when there was some number above 1.8 million removals from the country. And we have a President now, under Barack Obama, down around 450,000 removals from the country, a long, long ways from being what they sometimes accept the definition of him as being the Deporter-in-Chief.

No President has taken the position that this President has, that he picks and chooses the laws that he wants to enforce and ignores the rest. No President has so broadly gone out there and violated the limitations in article two of the Constitution.

Just within immigration itself, when the Morton Memos came out--and those are the memos that created DACA, which is the executive amnesty that was produced and signed by Janet Napolitano, then the Secretary of Homeland Security, who came before the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Speaker, and alleged repeatedly that they had prosecutorial discretion, that they don't have the resources to enforce every law, therefore, they have to enforce with the best effect of the resources that they have, and stated: We have prosecutorial discretion, and it is on an individual basis only, an individual basis only. She repeated it in her testimony under oath before the Judiciary Committee, and I had in front of me at the time the document that describes this, and in a page and about a third of single-spaced 12-point type, it said, used the term ``on an individual basis only,'' by my count, in memory, seven times.

Now why would this administration remind Members of Congress, especially members of the Judiciary Committee, that they were executing prosecutorial discretion by waiving the application of the law to hundreds of thousands of people altogether under this definition of ``on an individual basis only''? We know they didn't deal with them on an individual basis only.

When you read that report and you go through and draw a couple of x's and o's, you come to this conclusion: that Homeland Security, under the Morton Memos of ICE, created four different classes of people, and they are broadly exempted from the law by the definitions of the classes of people created in the very memo that says, seven times ``on an individual basis only.''

This was what I thought was a lame effort to try to cloak themselves in prosecutorial discretion when there is no such thing. Mr. Speaker, I want to emphasize this. There is no such thing as prosecutorial discretion outside of an individual basis only. It only can be applied on an individual basis. It cannot be applied to classes or groups of people because everyone that is paying attention to law, the structure of law, knows that the law defines classes and groups of people, and the exemptions under prosecutorial discretion have to be justified, justifiable, and on an individual basis only. This administration didn't adhere to that, and they know it. And, Mr. Speaker, they strategized around it so that they could grant what is the equivalent of executive amnesty to hundreds of thousands of people.

Now Senator Jeff Sessions has released a report a little over a week ago, and I want to thank him and his staff for the work that they have done to dig the details out of this network of regulations and rules and executive edicts to come down to this point: that the application of the law almost completely exempts the law, itself, which requires those encountered by immigration officials who are unlawfully present in the United States to be placed into removal proceedings. That is the law.

It is real clear that the DACA documents, the Morton Memos, direct ICE to violate the very law that they have taken an oath to uphold, and that is the requirement that they place into removal proceedings those whom they may encounter who are unlawfully present in the United States.

The President has ordered that they not do so, which violates their oath to the Constitution, their fidelity to the law, and their fidelity to the rule of law, and it usurps the directive from Congress, which sets up immigration law here in the United States of America.

This is an appalling assault on our Constitution and on the rule of law and on the separation of powers, and the administration knows it. And I am not drawing this as an assumption, Mr. Speaker. I am drawing this from this understanding.

The President has told us on a number of occasions that he taught constitutional law as an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago's School of Law for 10 years. Ten years of teaching the Constitution means you can't avoid coming across these constitutional requirements, and you can't avoid addressing the separation of powers that are distinct between articles one, two, and three of our Constitution. And if we wondered if somehow the President could have taught con law for a decade and not run across the separation of powers concept, or the authority that is granted to the Congress: All legislative powers shall be vested in the body of the United States Congress, the legislative body in article one. All powers, all legislative powers. The President had to have taught that for 10 years. I don't think you can take con law and not encounter that principle. And he didn't.

He didn't avoid that principle. In fact, he was teaching it as recently as March 28, 2011, when he was speaking to a high school class at a high school here in Washington, D.C., when he said to them: You want me to enact the DREAM Act by executive order. But I am here to tell you that you have studied this, and you know that the Congress doesn't allow that. I don't have the authority to implement the DREAM Act by executive order because--and he said this this way--Congress writes the laws; the judicial branch interprets the laws; and my job is to enforce them. It is a very compact and succinct and, I think, a clear understanding of the three branches of government embodied in articles one, two, and three.

So it is clear not only did the President teach this very principle for a decade, but he--and I don't want to say ``lectured,'' but he gave a speech on it to a high school class and said, I cannot implement this by an executive order or fiat; it is exclusively reserved for Congress. Some months later, though, apparently the idea was stuck in the head of the President of the United States, and by executive fiat, he did do just what had he said publicly he didn't have the authority to do. That is just on the immigration piece.

We could go on through ObamaCare--the 38, 39, or more different changes that have been applied to ObamaCare. Now, I don't assert, Mr. Speaker, that they are all unconstitutional moves on the part of the President, but some of them are so clearly unconstitutional that it cannot be argued with a straight face if you know anything about the Constitution whatsoever.

The clearest, the starkest was, the directive in ObamaCare that the employer mandate shall be implemented in each month after December of 2013. That is real clear. But the President announced months ago, we are going to delay the employer mandate for another year. They are going to add another year to the implementation date. So it is as if the President--you know he said he had a pen and a cell phone. It was as if the President took his pen, went to page whatever it is in the 2,700 pages of ObamaCare, and went in there--it would be a red pen, not a blue one--and drew a line through the number that said 2013, and in each month after December of 2013, drew a line through that and just changed the number 13 to the number 2014.

Now, the President does not have the authority to do that. If he does, then the work of this Congress is meaningless, and it would never have a relation to anything, except we would be a debate body here. So we could be in the business of deciding whether we side for or against the President without any power whatsoever. If the President continues to exert this authority--it is unconstitutional, it is a violation of his constitutional authorities and the separation of power. There are multiple lawsuits that are working their way through the courts, and I think that the administration has done a calculation of, they are not going to catch up with us before the President's term is over and he goes off into his happy perpetual golfing land, that he might.

But this immigration issue sets the destiny for America. It is not a policy like ObamaCare, which is the largest social movement in my adult lifetime, social piece of legislation, social engineering piece of legislation. It is a takeover of a huge percentage of our economy, some say as much as 17 percent of our economy. It is a directive that orders American citizens, for the first time, to buy a product that is produced and specified by the Federal Government or be fined and punished by the Internal Revenue Service.

That is where we are with ObamaCare. That is what it does to this God-given liberty and says, You shall be a subject of the State, and you will buy a product that is approved by the Federal Government. And if you fail to do what we have told you to do, ordered you to do, then we are going to fine you and punish you, and we are going to use the Internal Revenue Service to chase you down and dun you for that money.

Now, that is an appalling thing to a free people. But we should think of that in the context of, first of all, if the Federal Government can order you to buy an insurance policy, they can order you to buy an automobile, they can order you to buy a washing machine, they can order you to go to the grocery store and buy broccoli. They can forbid you from buying--let's just say butter, or whatever it is that the First Lady might think is not the healthy diet for the American people. By the way, they are already dictating the calorie limitations to our kids in school.

This country has become not so much the land of the free any longer. It has become a land where they seek to micromanage every aspect of our lives. It has started. It is going down that way.

But if the White House can configure a bill and pass it through this Congress by hook, crook, and legislative shenanigans, and, in the process of making the deal to get the votes to get it passed, promise a Member of Congress--let's just say a Member of Congress from Michigan-- that, never fear if the language that you would like to have doesn't become part of the law, the President will sign an executive order to amend ObamaCare after the bill is signed if the agreement that they make here doesn't follow through in the final piece of legislation that comes from the Senate.

Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, the very idea that the President would promise to amend a bill? He has no authority to amend any bill whatsoever. He has no authority to amend any legislation whatsoever. He has no authority to amend existing U.S. Code of any kind whatsoever.

Now he can influence the executive branch to pass a rule, to publish that rule and take it out for comments. And through the authority granted to the executive branch through the Administrative Procedures Act, they can have the force and effect of law. But they can't change law. They can't amend law. And they cannot write a rule that changes the directive language that is part of the law. The law is the law. The Constitution is the foundation for this Republic, and the laws that are passed by it are supreme, not the President.

So we have this usurpation of congressional authority from the President. We have an ObamaCare piece of legislation that is a taking of American liberty. And we have a President that changes it willy- nilly at will. And not an ability in this Congress to put the brakes on that. But maybe, just maybe the American people will go to the polls in November and bring it around the other way. In 2016, there will be a new President elected. That President must run on adhering to, respecting, and reverting our country back to this Constitution.

But this country, the bedrock underneath our Constitution is free and fair elections, confidence that they are free and fair and legitimate. The foundation

is the Constitution. The Declaration is the promise; the Constitution is the fulfillment.

As we sit here in this most blessed country in the history of the world, Mr. Speaker, we are watching it be taken apart by executive fiat and executive edict piece by piece. ObamaCare changed 30-some times. Immigration changed five or six times. And a President who threatens to go out and do that again, one who suspended Welfare to Work when it was written specifically to tighten up, that a President couldn't suspend the work component of Welfare to Work. And No Child Left Behind, suspended by the application of waivers that go on because he didn't agree with the policy and he thought he had a better policy, but he didn't want to come to Congress because Congress might not think it is a better policy.

This President doesn't negotiate with this Congress. He doesn't work in a cooperative fashion. He imposes the whim of the White House on the American people.

This Congress went through a government shutdown to assert its will and came in to second place on that because not enough Members of this Congress had the will. We watched the Constitution be eroded because of that lack of will.

Now, Mr. Speaker, what I see coming is an effort to grant more amnesty through the legislative process instead of, this time, the executive fiat or executive edict or executive overreach process, and the President threatens to use his pen more to grant more amnesty if we don't pass it here in the House.

We have some misguided people on my side of the aisle that ought to be better thinkers than they are. I understand why Democrats are for amnesty almost universally because they get the big political benefit from it.

They have been discouraging me for years from bringing up this topic, that Democrats have long known, Mr. Speaker, that a significant majority, 2 to 1, 3 to 1, 5 to 1--there are even statistics out there of 8 to 1--that newly arriving immigrants, if given an opportunity to vote, are going to vote in those kind of statistics at least 2 to 1 for Democrats.

Here is a King axiom, Mr. Speaker, that newly arriving immigrants will assimilate into the politics of the locale where they arrive because they don't know what party they are when they get here.

They will simply associate with their neighbors, their friends, and their family. When they go to political events, if they go, they will go with them, encouraged by them, and when they go to the polls, they are going to take their first advice.

I look down through my neighborhood. We have fourth generation FDR Democrats that by heritage are Democrats, by philosophy are Republicans, but they don't change, necessarily, their voting stripes.

If someone thinks I am wrong about this, they could go to Boston, and they could find me an Irish Catholic Republican. I am sure one of them exists. I understand there are two. But the heritage of inheriting the politics of the locale where you arrive as a newly arriving immigrant is a big part of this.

That is what drives Democrats. It is not about truth, justice, and the American way. It is not about justice and equity. It is not about fairness. It is about political power, and it is about Democrats seeking to expand the dependency class in America because that expands their political class and their political leverage at the expense of the Constitution, the rule of law, safety in the streets of America, and at the expense of the destiny of our country.

We need to think this through much more deeply. We need to look ahead, Mr. Speaker. We need to see that, if we make an immigration decision in this Congress, we are going to live with that decision and our children and our grandchildren. Every succeeding generation lives with the decisions that we make here on immigration.

It is different than ObamaCare. ObamaCare is bad. It is a horrible usurpation of God-given American liberty. It can be repealed. It can even be, in components, diminished in its negative effects by some tweaks that we could do, and I have got some on the books that I will be advancing here in the upcoming week; but we could repeal ObamaCare.

We could undo it. We could recover. We could even somehow struggle through a massive amendment of it and come out with a product that the American people could live with and still have a measure of freedom; but if we get the immigration question wrong, there is no going back to repeal. There is no going back to change. There is no going back to undo what would be done by the colossal mistake of amnesty.

Whatever you think about demographics, whatever you think about political power, and whatever you think about economics, there is an essential pillar of American exceptionalism that we can't do without and still be a great country. It is called the rule of law.

The rule of law means that the law has to treat everyone equally. Justice must be blind. Lady Justice stands there with the scales in her hands, balanced, and most of the time, you will see her with a blindfold on because Justice needs to be blind and treat everyone equally. If we lose the rule of law, we will never be able to restore it again.

If we sacrifice the rule of law in a misguided idea that, somehow, our sympathy for people that want a better life--and by the way, there are some 6 billion of them on the planet that want a better life--if our idea that our sympathy for people that want a better life is more important than our fidelity to the rule of law, then we have sacrificed the core of the greatness of America because our hearts overruled our heads.

I am not surprised when Democrats do that. That is what they are in business to do, is have their hearts overrule their heads; but we can't let that happen on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, not even--not even--for someone who came into the United States illegally, misrepresented themselves to get into the United States military, put on a uniform, took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and maybe, just maybe, risked their life in a performance of that duty.

They have already violated our laws, they have already misrepresented themselves, and they have already defrauded the Department of Defense.

Any bill that might be attached to a National Defense Authorization Act or comes to this floor in any form that rewards someone who has defrauded the Department of Defense or the United States--whether or not they have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, it is a false oath because they have given their false word--any bill like that needs to be met with the full rejection of the full vigor of the rule of law here in the floor of the United States Congress.

That includes those things that are coming out now in the press today. We don't need to have an intense fight over immigration. We have an election coming up in November.

We have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution and have defended it, generally, from this side of the aisle and not exclusively, Mr. Speaker.

We have an obligation to defend that rule of law, preserve the sovereignty of America, and refuse to reward lawbreakers. If we reward lawbreakers, we get more lawbreakers. We need fewer lawbreakers, not more.

I will defend my oath to this Constitution and the rule of law, and I will encourage and challenge all of my colleagues to do the same.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 36 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, April 3, 2014, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman, the chair of the Constitution Subcommittee, for yielding to me.

I rise in support of this act. I am a little bit astonished by some of the debate and the dialogue that has taken place here throughout this day, especially on the topic matter that is Executive overreach.

We have had extensive hearings in the Judiciary Committee. It should be clear to all that, when the liberal constitutional professors are concerned about our country, a tipping point in our Constitution, it is time for maybe a little bit more of an open dialogue here and I think more of an objective dialogue.

I would bring to your attention, Madam Speaker, some language that was in The Wall Street Journal today. It was in support of the Faithful Execution of the Law Act and then the reporting act that we are talking about.

It is a perfect example of why this bill is necessary in a report in The Wall Street Journal. It says, in today's issue, describing yet another ObamaCare delay that flies in the face of the statutory text:

This latest political reconstruction has received zero

media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department

didn't think the details 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 benefit and redistribution mandates. Our sources

only noticed the change this week.

Madam Speaker, this is not the way Congress should be informed of the President's failure to faithfully execute the law or his utter defiance of the law or his executive endeavor to amend the law outside the bounds of his article II constraints.

Madam Speaker, when the President or any other Federal official adopts a policy of failing to enforce a law or refusing to enforce a law, it should immediately inform Congress in writing, so the duly elected representatives of the American people can respond appropriately.

To have to find out in a newspaper article or find out on a Web site or, worse yet, in one of the earlier unconstitutional overreach efforts of the President to amend the ObamaCare law, we found out on a third- tier U.S. Treasury Web site.

Now, what of 316 million Americans responsible to know what the law says and do our best to comply with it can be cruising around on a third-tier U.S. Department of Treasury Web site, to see if the President has gotten up that morning or gone to bed late the night before, maybe a little bleary-eyed, and issued some kind of an order that there is going to be another change in ObamaCare?

ObamaCare, it has his name on it, Madam Speaker, the President's name, ObamaCare on the top and his signature on the bottom.

We had a constitutional review meeting this morning with constitutional scholars, and I said: Is it 31 times that the President has, by the stroke of his pen or the word of his mouth, amended ObamaCare?

They corrected me. They said: no, it is 38 times.

I don't have that list. I hope I get that list because I would like to examine some of them that I am missing, but the President of the United States has no authority to amend ObamaCare.

Yes, there is executive discretion on the implementation of it, but the starkest violation of the Constitution and the starkest amendment to ObamaCare is the one that people agreed with, and it is this: that the President announced that he was going to delay ObamaCare, the employer mandate, for an extra year when the bill itself says the implementation of the employer mandate shall commence in each month after December of 2013.

Now, I don't know how the gentlelady from California's dialogue gets

around that very, very strict language that was written into ObamaCare. It doesn't say if the President changes his mind; it doesn't say if Democrats are vulnerable. It says shall commence in each month after December of 2013; yet the President decided he would just simply delay that for a year. Now, there are, what, 30 or 37--pick your number-- different times the President has done this?

I remember criticism from last summer when I was asked by the press and the public and the demand from people on the other side of the aisle, ObamaCare is the law of the land, so we are obligated to fund it through the appropriations process.

That was a big debate here on the floor of this House. I said, then, we don't know what the law is because the President has so stirred the pot with his executive orders, his executive pen, his cell phone, his ink pen, or his press conferences, that no one today knows what ObamaCare is or says.

Even if we think we knew, we would have to be a contemporary scholar of the bill, and we couldn't go to bed tonight thinking we knew what it would be tomorrow morning because it is likely to change again. That is what is going on, simply, with just ObamaCare.

By the way, I would add conscience protection, when we were assured-- and it was to be written into the bill--that the conscience protection would be there for those folks who had a concern.

I thank the gentleman.

I want to make a point. The President even amended ObamaCare by press conference, which is completely outrageous.

Not to get to the immigration components of this, there is nothing in this that deports anyone. The things that we did with my amendment addressing the DACA language are also the President's overreach; and by the way, the prosecutorial discretion says on an individual basis only seven times in that order, but it creates entire classes of people-- four classes of people--encompassing hundreds of thousands of people.

You can't describe hundreds of thousands of people of being individuals. They are groups created unconstitutionally by the President.

I very much appreciate the gentlelady for yielding to me. I have a few topics I intend to bring up in the subsequent hour.

I want to thank the gentlelady for raising this topic and for the significant information that has been delivered here with regard to Ukraine, the Russians, and the political scenario that we are in.

I am contemplating what this means to the world. I will say, Mr. Speaker, that I am more troubled than many about the circumstances that have unfolded off of the Black Sea.

I have watched as Putin set up the Olympics. It looked like part of it was for self-glorification. When I think about what this means politically, much of the world is looking at Putin, thinking, well, look at all of the $50-plus billion you invested in the Olympics, and now, you see the world opinion now has turned against you when you had all of that good will that was garnered at the Sochi Olympics.

I think it is a little bit different perspective from where I sit, that is that the component of this is true, but I don't think Putin cares about world opinion. I think he cares about how much hegemony he can deliver from the seat that he has. I think that the good will that came among the Russian people, his popularity numbers had to go up.

Remember, this is a man who went through a difficult contentious election in 2012. There were demonstrations in the streets in multiple places around Russia. The tension that was there, as any leader, his hold on power can't just be by force and fear alone, there has to be some support that is there.

I believe that the Olympics actually helped Putin and gave him the support base at home that would allow him to pull off an invasion--an illegal invasion of the Crimea.

I don't think he cares about what we think. I don't think he cares what the President thinks, Mr. Speaker. I don't think he cares so much even what the European Union thinks, as long as they continue to buy gas from him and keep his economy going, but I think that was a component.

The next thing is that I have watched him for a good number of years, and perhaps not with the attention to detail the gentlelady from Ohio has delivered here tonight, but I have long concluded that Vladimir Putin is committed to restoring, to the extent that he can in his time, the old Soviet Union.

I think he sees this as a giant geopolitical chess game. I would think back at the time in 1984 when then Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick stepped down as ambassador to move on with her career.

I remember picking up on page 3 or 4 of the newspaper a little tiny article there that mentioned it. It wasn't any examination, but it said a little quote that I think she was very well known for, Jeane Kirkpatrick.

We were in the depths of the cold war at the time, I would add, and she said: What is going on in this cold war between the United States of America and the Soviet Union is the equivalent of playing chess and Monopoly on the same board. The question is: Will the United States of America break the Soviet Union economically in the Monopoly component of the game before the Soviet Union checkmates the United States militarily?

That was the contest. That was a contest as Reagan and Thatcher saw it. That was the contest as far as Pope John Paul II saw it, I believe. We know how that turned out at least in the temporary. The strength of the economy of the United States and our ability to continue to develop more and more technology--to put SDI up in order to restore our national defenses--became the deciding factor. The Soviet Union could no longer keep up with the United States, and the Soviet Union couldn't keep up with the free world. The juggernaut of our economy overwhelmed the managed economy of the Soviets. Of course, Gorbachev was a player in this, and we had glasnost and perestroika. So I think he saw that he couldn't hold it together anymore, and to the extent that he cooperated with Lady Thatcher and President Reagan, we saw the worm turn of history.

I hold in my office a piece of the Berlin Wall. That is framed in my office, and I have had it since 1989. Excuse me. Actually, it was on September 12 of 1990 that that piece was chiseled out of the wall for me. I didn't get to do that myself. That piece of the Berlin Wall represents a piece of the Iron Curtain, itself. The Berlin Wall was the physical structure of the Iron Curtain that Winston Churchill described at Fulton, Missouri, in 1948. The Iron Curtain was drawn by, I believe, the finger of Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin, whom the gentlelady has mentioned, at Yalta, on February 11, 1945, when we didn't know how World War II was going to turn out.

The Allies got together when we were allied with the Russians, and they drew a line across the map. On the east side of that line, they were going to live under the Soviet Union, under the iron fist of communism. On the west side of that line, people were going to live and be free, and the destinies of hundreds of millions of people were determined at Yalta. It is curious to me that Putin has invaded and occupied Crimea, which includes Yalta.

One day, I hope to stand on that real estate and look out across the bay where that decision was made. It was a momentous time in history, and it began the domino effect of the military invasion and occupation of free country after free country. It spilled over to the east--into Korea, Southeast Asia. I have long believed that, had we held a different position--a stronger negotiating position--and if we had insisted with Stalin that we were not going to hand the Eastern Bloc countries over to him, we might have ended up with the map that we see today rather than the map that was so hard fought through the cold war. Think how different it is.

Now I would ask, Mr. Speaker, that when people think about this--and the gentlelady from Ohio and I discussed this in some of the very engaging conversations we have had--think about how the Iron Curtain was constructed, defined at Yalta on February 11 and 12 of 1945, and how that line moved when the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989 as each of the Eastern Bloc countries stepped up and grasped their freedom. I think of the people by the tens of thousands standing in the square in Prague, rattling their keys in the square at Prague. Over time, they rattled their keys into, essentially, a bloodless revolution that brought about the freedom of the Czechs for the first time in decades. That kind of desire--that heart for freedom--washed across Eastern Europe. It actually washed across Russia for a time. There was a time that I said that freedom echoed all across Europe and all the way to the Pacific Ocean. I believed that for a while, Mr. Speaker.

Of course, we don't believe this today because the Russia that is ruled under Putin isn't the Russia that the Russian people believed they were going to get when the Soviet Union melted down and imploded, and that became what we thought for a time--hoped for a time--was the end of the cold war. Now I fear that it has relaunched and restarted. Yet we should look at this map of where the new Iron Curtain is. It is at the border of Russia. It doesn't go west of the border of Russia, and it should not be allowed to creep west of the border of Russia.

That is what I believe the gentlelady and I are committed to working towards--to restoring the strength and the prosperity of the people who live free and who give the inspiration to those who do not to live as we do, as a free people.

I very much appreciate the gentlelady.

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized by you and to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

I would first like to say I appreciate the gentleladies'--and that is plural--presentation and the breadth of their attention to the part of the world that has been the center of our discussion here tonight and that should be the center of our American discussion, and will be, for some time to come.

As I watch this unfold, and think of the time in 2008 when I found myself in the Nation of Georgia within a little more than a week after the Russians invaded two provinces or states of Georgia, one of them South Ossetia, and having arrived there and met with the leadership in Georgia, including President Saakashvili and his cabinet that were young people, and a minister of defense that was still awaiting his 30th birthday, I heard the narrative from inside Tbilisi on what the Russians had planned and what the Russians had done.

Now, history is little bit undecided, Mr. Speaker, about who fired the first shot in Georgia. It may have been the Russians baited the Georgians into it. It may have been that the Russians actually fired on the Georgians and the Georgians fired back.

In any case, the narrative that I received there that was part of a briefing that was synced with our State Department and with the representatives of the Nation State of Georgia brought together information that there was a single underpass, there was a two-lane underpass; that within a 24-hour period of time, some 2,200 Russian vehicles, tanks, armor and other equipment went under that underpass.

They had to have staged that invasion of Georgia. It could not have been a spontaneous response on the part of the Georgians firing on the Russians or the Russians who may well have fired the first shots at Georgia.

In any case, when the Russians went in and occupied those parts of Georgia, that began a movement, a strong movement of hegemony, and I think that it was passed off that the Georgian circumstances were somehow an anomaly, that somehow it was regional tensions that were brought up, and that the eye to the sea wasn't necessarily what Putin was thinking about.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I believe that he was. I believe it was the first piece on the giant geopolitical chessboard, the chessboard that our President doesn't seem to think actually is in play any longer, that Cold War chessboard.

But when I look at the map of that part of the world and look at the flow of energy that goes back and forth, Ukraine and Georgia have similarities. One is, they have ports.

The second one is that they are a nexus for energy, transmitting energy through their countries with pipelines and, in the case of Georgia, rail lines. It is important that if you can control Georgia you can control a lot of the energy that comes through from the east, and if you can control Yugoslavia, you can control a lot of the energy that comes through from the east.

Those two things, plus the historical involvement of the Russians in the Crimea. I take us back to the gentlelady from Ohio who laid out the case of the 1994 treaty that the Russians signed and the interested parties signed that all would respect the territorial and sovereign borders of the Ukraine, and of course the Russians violated that.

I don't expect much of anything else to happen. I don't think they are bound by their honor in any way. I think they are only bound by the limitations of the static tension that comes from power, and that power can be economic, it can be political. It is probably not very much cultural, but it also is, in the highest degree it is military.

When there is no military deterrent in place, then Putin is going to be determined to move forward and reconstitute the old Soviet Union. He lamented years ago that the worst thing that happened in the 20th century was the implosion of the Soviet Union, or the disintegration of the Soviet union.

I would also point out that the world is not going to tolerate a lone superpower, which the United States of America is, the unchallenged greatest nation in the world, the strongest superpower there has been, with global reach everywhere.

When the United States pulls back--first, Mr. Speaker, we project power. We project power in the ways that I said, economically, culturally, militarily and strategically, and when the United States pulls back from that, when we decide that we are not going to exert influence in parts of the world, then the lust for power that comes in the embodiment of someone like Putin fills that vacuum. In fact, it is pushing constantly. It doesn't need a vacuum to push in.

Russian pushed into Georgia in 2008. They gave us a preview of what was to come.

Now, here we are, these few years later, these six or so years later, and we are watching now, as Putin finished up with his Olympics, his 50-plus billion dollar endeavor, I think a lot of it had to do with raising the spirits of the Russian people and their sense of support for him so that he could get away with this cold tactic of a military invasion and conquest of the Crimea.

I don't have any doubt that he has got his eyes on the balance of the Ukraine, that he has got his eyes on the balance of the Soviet Union in whatever order that he can pull this off.

If we show weakness, if we don't stand strong, if we don't stare him down, if we don't put the kind of equipment and resources in place to block his move, then Putin is going to march through these countries, one after another.

It is a fairly long hiatus between Georgia and the component of the Ukraine that has now been invaded and occupied that we call now the Crimea, but I think it is interesting and I think it is ironic, Mr. Speaker, that it is the Crimea that has been grabbed as part

of the Ukraine, and now they are seeking, the Russians have already annexed it, Mr. Speaker, and now they are about forcing a referendum this Sunday.

When they talk about how the Duma has to operate and what the legal structure is in Russia, it is all a matter of what does Putin command. Whatever the sequential order of the Duma is, and whatever we might think they have to jump through for hoops, I think it is just this: if Putin commands, then they will jump through the hoops at his command.

We should think about this. Georgia, and now the Crimea and the eyes of the Russians and Putin, in particular, looking into the Ukraine, and think about what happened the last time we had a dictator who had such a desire for conquest and occupation.

I would take us back to this piece of history where, as I saw this happen, when the Russians went into the Crimea, Mr. Speaker, immediately, I began to rethink the sequence of history, when Adolf Hitler demanded that they receive the Sudetenland, a component and the western perimeter of at the time Czechoslovakia. The pretense that he used was identical to the pretense that Putin has used to go into the Crimea.

It was Hitler that said there are German-speaking people and they deserve German representation, and someone has got to protect them and represent them, and I need to do that, as the leader, the Fuhrer of Germany. They are German-speaking people, they are German people, they need to be under German rule. That was the pretense that he used that forced the negotiations that took place in Munich in 1938.

Before we go to that spot, there was a peaceful march into and invasion of the Nation of Austria, and pulling us back in that history, Mr. Speaker, there was significant pressure that was put on the Austrians that began back prior to 1938, and Hitler made the arguments too.

Austria, still, to this day, is a German-speaking country. They identify very closely with the German people. They flow back and forth. The difference between an Austrian and a German isn't a particularly distinct one, although they are separate nation states today.

But Hitler put pressure on the Chancellor of Austria, and as he brought them to an agreement and got the Chancellor of Austria to make some appointments of Austrian Nazi officers, he weakened the resistance of the leadership by doing so.

On March 12 of 1938, essentially the day--March 11, the Chancellor of Austria resigned. March 12 Nazi troops flowed into Austria. By the 13th of March they had declared Austria to be a protectorate, a separate protectorate of the German empire that had begun.

Now, this is a recovery of a nation that was defeated in World War I. They had gone through tremendous economic crisis and chaos, as had Austria, and they were vulnerable, and Austria was powerless to stand in the way of the Nazi military machine, and the Wehrmacht. So March 12 was essentially the date that the flow of the Nazis marched into, went into Austria and Vienna, March 12 of 1938, Mr. Speaker.

Now, think of this. In the spring of 1938, Nazi troops flow into Austria, essentially annex the country without firing a shot. Pretty similar to the Russians going into the Crimea.

Now, they did fire some shots in Georgia, a lot of shots in Georgia, and people were killed, and a number of Russian planes were shot down by the Georgian military, but we are back in 1938. Spring of 1938, Austria taken over by the Nazis. In September of 1938, Hitler has been spending the whole summer agitating that the Sudetenland needs to also come into the German sphere of influence in a similar fashion that Austria had been brought into the German sphere of influence.

Neville Chamberlain, the now infamous failed peacekeeper, peacemaker then flew to Munich to meet with Hitler and made an agreement called the Munich Agreement with Hitler and signed off on it and got a letter that Adolf Hitler signed which said, we are going to have peace now in Europe if you just give me the Sudetenland, the German-speaking area which was the western perimeter of Czechoslovakia.

The date was September 29, 1938, when Neville Chamberlain met with Hitler in Munich. He flew back to England and landed, had a press conference on the airstrip on September 30 of 1938 and waved the letter in his hand that said, peace for our time.

We remember it as peace in our time, but he actually said peace for our time and waved the letter, did the press conference, and let all of England and the free world know that Hitler didn't have any further designs on any kind of real estate; he didn't intend to take over any other part of Europe, that he was going to be happy with what he had achieved, which was Austria and the Sudetenland, the western perimeter of Czechoslovakia. Peace for our time.

So after that press conference, I am sure that Neville Chamberlain went to bed thinking that he had accomplished something, and the very following day the Nazis then flowed into Sudetenland, and they stayed there and occupied throughout the winter.

That takes us through the winter of 1938 and the spring of 1939. By March 16, the Nazi troops had flowed throughout the balance of Czechoslovakia, occupied it.

Now, you would think that we were going to have peace for our time at that time because, after all, Hitler didn't announce his planned operations to go in and invade and occupy any other part of Europe. He had been announcing that he was peaceful. He signed the letter. He just didn't keep his word.

Sound a little curious, doesn't it, Mr. Speaker. The Russians signed the agreement with the Ukrainians in 1994 that they would respect the territorial boundaries of the Ukraine. They kept that deal as long as it was suitable to the Russians.

The Russian signature, of course, means nothing to Putin if they have territorial aspirations, if they have territorial greed. So Putin, in a very similar fashion to Adolf Hitler, went into the Crimea and took the Crimea over.

He had it planned. He had it strategized. He should have been able to see it coming. I would like to think that our intel predicted this as a strategic move, rather than just a response to a military move. I don't know that and probably will never know that, if that was ever the dialogue of the people who were watching very closely in that part of the world.

When Hitler went in and occupied the balance of Czechoslovakia, and we had the summer then of 1939 wondering, but not very intensively, we have got peace in Europe again. Land for peace. Worked out pretty well, Neville Chamberlain thought.

Yet, September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. He had already cut a deal with the Russians that they were going to carve Poland up. It took the Russians another 12 days to get mobilized to go in and start carving up their part of Poland, but the Nazi divisions were prepared to go, and they launched a blitzkrieg invasion of Poland and invaded and occupied and penetrated to the predetermined line that he and Stalin had agreed to, and Poland was carved up.

Now that crossed the line for the rest of Western Europe. That did launch World War II in a formal fashion. So as the Western World began to mobilize for a war that they hoped to never see fought and were not very well prepared for, the following spring, in April of 1940, the Nazis invaded Norway. April 13, they invaded Greece and Yugoslavia.

Think how fast this took place. They had been planning for a long time. They had mobilized for a long time. They had the strategy put in place, and by April 13 of 1940, in a short 2-year period of time, they had gone through Austria, the Sudetenland, the balance of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Greece, and Yugoslavia by April 13, 1940.

Mr. Speaker, this was a dramatic takeover of real estate and property. At some point, Hitler no longer needed to put up the pretense because the war was declared then, and it was declared on September 1 of 1939, shortly after September 1 of 1939, Mr. Speaker.

These are dramatic changes that took place across Europe. They were ideological clashes, economic clashes, geographic clashes, and cultural clashes that came to a head in that part of the world. We think it can't happen

again or it won't happen again. We fought the cold war for 45 years, and, finally, the Berlin Wall went down, and Marcy Kaptur went over and chiseled a piece out with her own hand. I learned that tonight on the floor. I am impressed, and I am proud of her for having the conviction to go and do that, knowing and understanding what that meant then and what it means today.

Mr. Speaker, we are watching a Russia push back on this. We have seen the character and the culture under Stalin; we have seen it under Brezhnev; we have seen it under Khrushchev; and we have seen it under Lenin, the territorial hegemony attitude of the Russians and a Putin who would like to reconstruct the old Soviet Union and do so by military conquest. That is what we have in the Crimea. I don't have any doubt he is looking again at Ukraine.

Now I will go through some of the rest of these countries that fell at the beginning of World War I. I have taken you through Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, and Poland carved up by Russia and the Nazis. They made a deal, a cold and cruel agreement to carve Poland up, and they executed a lot of Jews, and they executed a lot of Poles just for being Jews and Poles.

History marks that kind of brutality on both sides of that line that came into Poland. I recall meeting in Cologne, Germany, a few years ago with some leaders in that part of the world. The gentleman who was sitting next to me at a dinner table and I got into a conversation-- about the same age--what did our parents do during the Second World War? Mr. Speaker, I listened as he told me that his father fought at Auschwitz. I said: Did he fight to liberate Auschwitz? He said that he fought in the Russian invasion of Auschwitz in September of 1939 when the Russians went in and invaded Poland from the east and invaded and occupied, and Auschwitz was part of that territory that the Russians carved out.

It is quite a thing to listen to that kind of a narrative. Clear over on the east side of the line that we didn't think about enough throughout that course of history, there were people that were invading armies that were launched in September of 1939 to go and take the free country of Poland and carve it up in a cold-blooded and greedy way to latch on to the property of Poland.

So the pattern is there. And they are on this together, and they are staring each other down across this line. But it takes us through 1939 and into 1940, when Norway and Greece, in the spring, were occupied along with Yugoslavia. And then on the 10th of May, the Nazi panzer divisions rolled through Belgium and into France. Belgium lasted about 18 days and ended about May 28, 1940, when they fully surrendered. And France lasted until about the 22nd of June. Paris capitulated and surrendered June 14, and the balance of France was handed over under Nazi control with Vichy cooperation as late as June 22 of 1940.

Then the Battle of Britain began--and that was fought over the English Channel, much of it, and over the land area of Great Britain. That essentially ended. You don't know when it ends, but looking back on the calendar, it ended in the late fall of 1940. And we are still not in this war, Mr. Speaker. This country is still sitting here watching the lot of the rest of the world engage in the conflict--not that I wanted to be in that conflict any earlier than that--but we were neutral, although we were trying to help out our Allies and help out the British. And I am thinking, what are the Russians looking at at the time? They are wondering, their ally, Hitler, was not very reliable, but they went through 1940 and through all of the spring of 1941 believing that they had made an agreement to carve up Poland, and somehow they were going to have the static border between Germany and the Russians. They probably believed that Hitler didn't have any further land aspirations either.

Now, I bring this up because we should not believe that Putin doesn't have further aspirations. Hitler did have. On June 22, 1941, he launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded Russia itself, from a treaty to carve up Poland to an all-out assault and offensive on Russia, to invade and occupy Russia, and nearly got it done.

That, Mr. Speaker, is a very long and complex history that can be read in a book entitled ``Absolute War,'' written by Chris Bellamy. It is about 750 pages. It goes through the details, in great detail, of that Operation Barbarossa and the German invasion of Russia. It was, of course, turned back at Stalingrad.

While that went on, it was easy to see that Hitler was planning the invasion of Russia for a long, long time. He was retrofitting his railcars to be able to go on the different gauge rails as they were sending men and equipment into Russia. He had an agreement with the Russians that they were going to send him the things he needed, raw materials and feed grains and the raw materials that they could use and that they needed badly in Germany in exchange for German engineers going to Russia. He had his German engineers that were helping the Russians develop and build military equipment and munitions, except the German engineers were ordered to slow-walk the Russians and do very little to help move them along in their progression of developing their military capability, all the while raw materials--food and supplies that Hitler needed from Russia--were pouring into Germany and becoming part of the resources for the war effort that was about to come.

That launched June 22. It would have been earlier by about 6 weeks if it hadn't been for an uprising revolution in Yugoslavia that took five German divisions to go down there to put the uprising down, the revolution down in Yugoslavia. That delayed the planned invasion of Russia for Hitler from May 12 up until June 22. It likely was the difference in whether the Nazi troops would have been successful in Stalingrad and in Moscow.

But if one, today, Mr. Speaker, travels to Moscow and you land at the airport and take ground travel from the airport, that long high traffic area on into Moscow, you will see just outside of Moscow a large tank barrier that is sitting there which marks the furthest most easterly advance of a German tank that was part of the invasion attempts in Moscow.

We don't think about how close that came. It came within perhaps weeks of being successful, that difference between the delay of that invasion which would have been scheduled for May 12 that turned out to be June 22, 1941. We don't study this in our history very much, Mr. Speaker, because we turn our focus to Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, and then the need and the necessity for us to launch a two-front war almost immediately.

That conflict set the borders for today, a conflict of the Second World War. I take you through this piece of history, and I will be naming some of the countries that may well be targets of Putin. But I take you through this history to get, Mr. Speaker, people that are paying attention to this discussion, to get you to Yalta on February 11, 1945. I briefly mentioned it while the gentlelady from Ohio had the floor.

I think about that meeting between Franklin Delano Roosevelt, between Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill, the three leaders that were the central players in the Second World War European theater--not the Japanese or Pacific theater, but the European theater. They met at Yalta. It is ironic to me that Yalta is in the Crimea. Putin has annexed, not only annexed the Crimea, he annexed Yalta itself, the very place where those three leaders took a map of the world, of Asia and Europe, and drew a line on that map.

West of the line--after the war was over, they planned that they would defeat this Nazi Germany that has marched through all these countries that I have described. They planned that they were going to defeat Nazi Germany, that they were going to invade and occupy all of the countries from the east on the Russian side and from the west the Allied side. By that time, it was just post the Battle of the Bulge, which ended near the end of January in 1945.

So they decided they were going to carve up Europe. If the war ended in victory for them, then the Russians were going to take a half of Germany. We know where that line was. It became the Iron Curtain wall, and in Berlin it became the Berlin Wall. And they were going to take the Eastern Bloc countries that we know of, and that was Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania,

and Bulgaria, the list goes on, Yugoslavia, those countries, parts of them.

So that agreement was made at Yalta. The agreement was agreed to by Churchill, by Roosevelt, and by Stalin. And then they collapsed in on Germany and carved that part of the world up according to the plan at Yalta.

Now, can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, sitting at Yalta in the Crimea with a map of the world and drawing on that map, this is the line east of which people will live under the Soviet influence--which hadn't technically formed yet--west of this line people will live under Western influence and, by the way, even carved up Berlin itself so that we had a U.S. sector, we had a French sector, a British sector, and a Russian sector of Berlin itself.

That set the destiny for a lot of history that was to come after that. What we saw happen over the course of, then, 45 years of cold war, Mr. Speaker, was that these countries that had been taken over by Russia, and some of them were closely within the sphere, but I will say the countries that are Eastern Bloc satellites of the Soviet Union, occupied and influenced by them, Hungary, Georgia, I mentioned the Crimea, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Baltics, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic and now the Slovak Republic, Croatia, Austria, Belarus, to name some, to leave some out, but to get most of them, these are countries that are now on Putin's list. He puts Crimea in his little pocket and says, I have got that, I am going to hold it, and not many people in this country can devise a plan to get it back. He has got parts of Georgia in his hand.

If we don't step up our resources so that there is a deterrent in place, this man, Putin, will march on down the line. I believe he will march into eastern Ukraine. I believe that some of those operations could be going on now. I think he will be looking very closely at Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, members of NATO, member countries that we are pledged to defend. But I think that Putin looks in the eyes of our Commander in Chief and wonders how much resolve is actually there, and I think he concluded that the resolve wasn't there. That is one of the contributing factors that Putin went into the Crimea.

I don't suggest that he would not have done it if we had had a different President; although, I suspect that if this had been a stronger President, I will just say, Mr. Speaker, it is less likely if we had had a stronger President.

Now, the countries that are along that perimeter, that see Russia on their border and they see what has happened with troops marching into the Crimea and they see the threats that the balance of Ukraine is under, they see what has happened in Georgia--and, by the way, the amount of Georgia that remains as sovereign is a fairly large share of their original real estate. They are the furthest, most easterly outpost of Western civilization in the nation of Georgia.

They have a strong spirit. They love freedom, they love free enterprise, and they love Americans. That is the case for a lot of countries up and down through that part of the world. We need a stronger presence in each one of them. We need to have a stronger force lined up. I would say one of the first moves that we need to make, and I recall the Poles and the Czechs, but under the Bush administration, we had negotiated the placement of missiles and radar in Poland and Czechoslovakia, respectively, and shortly after our President was elected, Mr. Speaker, he canceled the agreement to place the missiles and the radar in those two countries.

The headlines in the Warsaw paper--and they found out about this in the news. It wasn't the President calling them up saying, I'm not going to follow through on this; they found out about it in the news. The headlines in the Warsaw paper read: ``Betrayed.'' The United States agreement with Poles and the Czechs was a betrayal of our word, and it was because Putin influenced Barack Obama into canceling the agreement that established the missiles and the radar in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The headlines said ``Betrayed'' in Poland. They were betrayed.

I have had some conversations with Poles since the invasion of Crimea, and I am convinced that they would accept the missiles again even though we haven't been very reliable in our partnership. They are taking a lot of heat. They are right there. Russia is next door, and the Poles have stood in the middle of invasions going two directions in the memory of many of the Poles yet today. They have enjoyed a long period of peace, fairly long considering their history, but the Poles, I believe, would accept the missiles today, and we ought to place them there. The Czechs, I don't have as good a measure on, but I would be hopeful we could place a radar there and start to build up the missile defense shield.

We did operations on the ground in Poland last August. We need to ramp them up again and do more ground operations, more joint military exercises. We need to expand those exercises along that part of the world, working in conjunction with the NATO troops and the troops of the sovereign countries along that border that is now on the west side of the new Iron Curtain that Putin has essentially announced by his invasion into the Crimea. We need to put whatever kind of advisory support the Ukrainians need right into Ukraine so that their people are trained and their people are ready to step up and defend themselves. If Putin decides to move into the balance of Ukraine, how could they do anything but defend themselves. I think they must. I would like to see that they are ready.

Mr. Speaker, I am known as a fiscal conservative in this House. I supported the resolution that advanced the $1 billion in loan guarantees to the Ukrainians. I don't think that is enough. I think we should be prepared in this Congress to go down the line and match Putin dollar per dollar with loan guarantees, provided we could condition them in such a way that Putin himself doesn't get his hands on those resources. We need to demonstrate our commitment to the Ukrainians and let them know that we will be there.

We need to invite Georgia into NATO. We should have done that back in 2008. We should have brought Ukraine into NATO during that same period of time. Those kind of things could well have been a deterrent to Putin, and we didn't take advantage of the opportunity to bring them in the NATO sphere of influence.

So I would offer again to Georgia, come on into NATO. Ukraine, get stabilized a little bit so we can see what kind of government is going to emerge, but we ought to consider a stabilized government of Ukraine being an eligible candidate for NATO. We need to build our defenses up along those borders. We need to understand that, back to that static nature, that this is the renewal of the cold war launched by Putin, and we can't continue to back up thinking that he is not going to push.

I have read through and delivered the history of the Nazi regime from 1938, March of 1938 on until the invasion of Russia by the Germans, by the Nazi regime, because there is a distinct difference, on June 22, 1941, when the Second World War was launched in a large way. This is not going to happen in a way that Putin is going to put it out on the calendar and tell us that he has his eye on some of the eastern regions of the Ukraine and then maybe he thinks he is going to put a little pressure on some of the other countries, maybe back to Georgia again or Belarus, but they are so closely aligned there, it is hard to draw a distinction. Maybe it is one of the other countries along the way. Maybe it is Estonia. Maybe it is Latvia. Maybe it is Lithuania; maybe it is all of them. I have gone through this history of what happened at the beginning of World War II, and I think we understand how quickly it can happen and how little is the time to get ready and how important it is to be prepared.

Mr. Speaker, we must be a strong military Nation. We must be prepared. About the same time that Secretary Hagel announced drastic military cuts is about the same time that Putin went into the Crimea. It is possible it is a coincidence, but the military cuts information was already out. I think we should suspend those cuts now. I think we should be prepared to match Putin dollar per dollar in the Ukraine. I think we need to put the missiles up

and the radar up in Poland and Czechoslovakia. I think we need to sail a few more operational ships into the Black Sea. I think we need to have more presence in that part of the world, and we need to get our military back to ready. If they are cutting our military down to pre- World War II levels, and I look at some of the troop levels that we have for all of our arenas of operation, and I see what can be mustered by the Russians in one location, and I see how weak the military is in Western Europe, and how weak their resolve is, Mr. Speaker, I am very concerned that this second cold war has been relaunched, and you never know if it is going to turn into a shooting war, but trading land for peace has no successful precedent in history that I can think of.

Neville Chamberlain tried to trade off the Sudetenland for peace. What did it get us? That gave up the rest of Czechoslovakia and the invasion of Poland. I recall the Gaza Strip being traded off, land for peace, and what does that get? That gets tunnels, and it gets rockets shot out of the Gaza Strip into the balance of Israel. Land for peace, Mr. Speaker: if someone can show me a successful trade of land for peace, I do not know what it is throughout the course of history.

It isn't that this is something--the Second World War that happened a long, long time ago in a different place and a different time. A lot of Americans are buried in that soil in Europe, and they gave their lives so that freedom could live.

We are going to commemorate and celebrate the successful landing at Normandy this upcoming June 6. That should be enough to bring our focus to what transpired then in that period of history, and it should bring our focus into the prevention of anything like that happening again. It should bring our focus into having peace through strength, being strong militarily, being strong economically, and being strong spiritually and strong culturally. Those are the credentials of the United States of America, to live free and be strong.

Each time we have been involved in wars that were, some would say as critics, foreign interventionism, then we have decided there was a peace dividend, chopped our military down. We don't need them so much anymore; we will have a core group of our military because, after all, we are Americans. Just being Americans is a deterrent.

Obviously, it is not. Putin thumbs his nose at us. I will take us through the cycles. We were late getting into World War I. We went over there very highly mobilized, and made a significant difference to help close out the end of World War I. It was a travesty in that part of the world, and World War I did not end it. It did not end decisively and conclusively, and it set the stage for World War II.

We instead cut our troops back down going into 1940. We were weak. The Japanese knew it. That is why they had the audacity to attack us in Pearl Harbor in 1941. The Nazis didn't respect us or they would have been more hesitant in their part of the world they were invading and occupying.

A strong America has always been successful. Ronald Reagan came onto the scene, and recognized that we were weak. He recognized, Mr. Speaker, that there was a cold war and a geopolitical chess game taking place. As Jeane Kirkpatrick described it, chess and monopoly on the same board. The only question was, during the cold war--and this was in 1984 when she said this, and 5 years later, we found the answer. In 1984, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ambassador to the United Nations, appointed under Ronald Reagan, as she stepped down, she said chess and monopoly on the same board in this cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the question is whether we bankrupt the Soviet Union economically before they checkmate us militarily.

We know the answer to that. We bankrupted the Soviet Union before they checkmated us militarily. They could not keep up with our investment and America's innovativeness. They couldn't keep up with our missile defense system that we were putting place, either, the Strategic Defense Initiative that was announced by President Reagan, and should I say demagogued here on the floor of the House of Representatives by Democrats calling it Star Wars. I thought it was a tactical and a messaging error on the part of President Reagan not to embrace it and say that's right, it is Star Wars. We are going to build a missile defense system, and that seemed a long reach at the time. It doesn't seem like such a long reach today, and that defense system should have deployed in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

There is a defense system that is deployed in other places around the world, and a defense system, of course, that is deployed to protect Israel today. That is a product of SDI, that is the vision of SDI; but the vision of Putin, Vladimir Putin, is hegemony. That means if you were once a Soviet state, he wants you back as a Soviet state. If he can get it militarily, he will get it militarily. If he can get it politically, he will get it politically, but we should understand that these countries that I have named off are countries that he looks at, that he would like to have back as part of the Russia Federation, to re-create the old Soviet Union. I will name these countries again: Georgia. He invaded and occupied Crimea, that is part of it. Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Croatia, Austria on the edges, and Belarus. That is some of them, not all of them. We have a big challenge in front of us.

Mr. Speaker, I would challenge and encourage the Members of this Congress to get better informed, to get up to speed on what is taking place in foreign relations.

For about the last six months, I have been very concerned that I don't hear a foreign policy discussion or debate here on the floor of the House. I don't see much for legislation come through. I don't hear it in the dialogue among my colleagues. I hear a handful of Senators on the other side of the Rotunda that will go out and engage in foreign policy and have those kinds of discussions.

Yes, I agree, the President sets the foreign policy and he is the Commander in Chief, but he is not the sole source of knowledge and input. He needs good advisers. I think he needs to make better decisions than he has made. He needs to be strong and he needs to be bold. He needs to be able to look Putin in the eye and see the KGB that John McCain identified, and understand that there is an agenda there, and Putin can be deterred if the price is high, but the price has to be high enough to deter Putin.

I want to challenge and encourage the Members of the House, Members of the Senate, get engaged in foreign policy. Travel and meet the leaders of these countries and build relationships in those countries. When it is time that things must be done, it is too late to start building a relationship; then it is time to act. Build a relationship first, build an understanding first, and we need far, far more expertise on foreign policy than we have today.

We have a Presidential election that is starting to emerge, and among the Presidential candidates, I strongly encourage them, get your foreign policy credentials up. Travel now while you can. As the campaign gets closer, there is less time available to do it, and it will look more and more like you are trying to burnish your foreign policy credentials. From my standpoint, you need to go to those countries and you need to see the leaders. You need to know them face to face and eye to eye. They need to recognize you when you walk into the room.

This Congress needs to get more focused on foreign policy. This country needs more focus on foreign policy. When something like that happens, then we can have a more open discussion. I was encouraged to hear the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) talk in depth on the relationship with Ukraine, and as chair of the Ukrainian Caucus, Marcy Kaptur has been very good on these issues. There are not enough of us engaged in a similar fashion.

Here is what I would do if I were moving the pieces around on this chess board, rather than having my voice and my vote here in the House of Representatives. I would put the missiles and the radar back up in Poland and Czechoslovakia. I would amp up our energy production here in our part of the world. I would release it so we could ship liquefied natural gas out of the United States over to Europe, to help give them, back them up in the event that Putin decides to shut their gas off.

Having that supply stream would be very useful. Putting more energy out on the market does go into Russia's economy and it makes it harder and harder for Putin to have the resources to be able to do the things he wants to do militarily. I think that is all delayed reaction, however, and in the short-term offer NATO membership to Georgia. Take a look at doing that as soon as the government could be established by and for the people of Ukraine by bringing them into NATO. I would encourage the EU to take a look at broadening their membership also, because I think it is easier to support a NATO membership if they are also a member of the EU, although I am only slightly thrilled about that particular proposal.

Special trainers in operations and forces to help support the Ukrainians in any place up along the border of the countries that border on Russia, and land operations up and down through that entire theater. Build then a military shield of deterrent, and start building it so that he knows that any aggressive move that he makes is going to be met by a countermove, strategic countermove. And the Ukrainians need to be prepared to fight for their land.

At this point, I haven't heard very much about what they might do if Putin decides to go forward and invade. You may not be the military that can stand up to the Russian military, but if you don't defend your own country, no one else is going to be able to step in and help. I say that, Mr. Speaker, to the Ukrainians, and encourage them: love freedom; love liberty.

Let's strengthen our relationships with the Ukrainians so that the growing economy of the West, the freedom that comes with free enterprise and liberty-loving people, strengthens the Ukrainian people and all the people up and down along that border.

Mr. Speaker, I don't want to see a replay of what happened at the beginning of World War II. I don't want to see countries on the Eastern Bloc side eventually taken over, some without firing a shot, some by a brutal invasion.

But I will just go through the march that took place from Hitler again, and it started in 1938. Austria, then the Sudetenland, then the balance of Czechoslovakia, then Poland invaded by the Nazis and by the Russians in September of '39, then Norway in the spring of 1940 by the Nazis, and then Greece and Yugoslavia by the Nazis, then on into France essentially the same day. France capitulated June 22. A year later, Hitler invaded Russia in Operation Barbarossa and nearly succeeded in his invasion of Russia.

That is the march that went through by a country that essentially was fighting a two-front war--Germany. The Russians don't have that problem. They are a one-front situation. But the hegemony of Putin needs to be recognized. He will take the old Soviet bloc countries when he thinks he can get away with it. He will only be restrained by that. If he thinks he can't achieve, then he can be restrained. The ways that we make him do that are: respect economic power and respect the military deterrent.

We need to call upon our European allies to remember these lessons of the Second World War that I have described. I know that some of them announced that they have had a vote that declares them to be neutral in every conflict. I recall sitting in Vienna not that long ago with some of the leaders of their country and they announced they are a neutral country, and their policy is they will be neutral in any conflict and they will never fight another war and that nothing good comes from war. That was a discussion.

I happen to have been to the site that overlooks the Battle of Vienna that took place in September 11 and 12 of 1683 when the Polish King Jan Sobieski launched a cavalry charge down into the Turks that had Vienna surrounded, and they were a matter of days before they would have succeeded. The Turks would have succeeded in invading and occupying Vienna, and if they were successful, nothing likely would have stopped them in a march all the way across Europe.

I pointed out to the Austrians: it is a good thing that your ancestors didn't have such a resolution in September of 1683, because we would all have been occupied by the Ottoman Empire if it hadn't been for the courageous battle that took place right there in Vienna where we sat, and it was the West versus the East.

So history does turn on battles; it does turn on wars. They are enabled by or sometimes stifled by a successful or a failed economy. They are promoted by people who believe in themselves, and the overreach of brinksmanship brings about war.

I am opposed, of course, to war. I don't want to see our American troops go overseas. I don't want to deploy our military in a place like that. But we have got to provide support. We need to provide that support in a nonkinetic way now. If we do that, we might be able to deter what otherwise likely could come, which could very well be Putin deciding that in his lifetime he is going to reconstruct the entire Soviet Union.

That is what I fear, Mr. Speaker. That has to be our caution and our byword. If we act as if it is not a threat, as if it is not going to happen, if we turn our policy to let's make sure that--and this seems to be the policy that is emanating from the White House, Mr. Speaker. Give Putin an off-ramp. Don't close the gate on the off-ramp. Let's push a little bit, give him a little pressure, but give him room to pull back out of Crimea.

Mr. Speaker, I can tell you it is not about an off-ramp for Putin. He pulled in there, he is not pulling out. He wants Crimea. He is going to hang on to it, and his eyes are on the balance of Ukraine right now.

The idea that we are going to coalesce our foreign policy around not pushing on Putin too hard because otherwise there isn't a way for him to get on an off-ramp, I would mark the times it was mentioned by our administration on my hand, and I have, in Sarah Palin-style, eight different marks on my hand the times that they mentioned ``off-ramp.''

It isn't about an off-ramp, Mr. Speaker. We can't be obsessing about an off-ramp. Putin doesn't want an off-ramp. If he wanted an off-ramp, he never would have gone up the in-ramp that he took to go into the Crimea.

This is about deterring him from going into the balance of the satellite states, in particular, in Eastern Europe. It is necessary that we put the deterrents in place. It is necessary that we go through these steps that I have described, Mr. Speaker.

I appreciate your attention and urge all those that have listened to my words to follow them.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 22 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, March 12, 2014, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker on rollcall No. 91, I was not present due to unavoidable air travel delays. Had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 92, I was not present due to unavoidable air travel delays. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 99 I was not present due to unavoidable air travel delays. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized and to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Of all the things that are on my mind that I would like to express to you, I know that there are also a good number of things on the mind of the gentlelady from Florida, and so I would be so happy to yield as much time as she may consume to the very classy gentlelady from Florida.

I thank the gentlelady from Florida. And reclaiming my time, I will move to the microphone.

Again, Mr. Speaker, through you I am thanking the gentlelady from Florida for raising this issue and giving me the number of the bill that I expect to sign on in business tomorrow, H. Res. 488. I am of the opinion that here in the House of Representatives we have too few people that demonstrate the leadership that the gentlelady from Florida is demonstrating tonight and taking a stand on foreign policy issues. I am very happy to see the focus that has been brought on Venezuela from some of the leadership that emerges from Florida.

It has caught my attention, Mr. Speaker, when I listen to the circumstances taking place in Venezuela, I can't help but think about essentially the sister state of Cuba and how they have led the Marxist socialist regime in the Western Hemisphere since about 1959. I think of this Western Hemisphere, all of it, as the domain of, as Churchill described it from this hemisphere, Western Christendom; the foundation of Western civilization, Judeo-Christianity; the values that come from the Old and New Testament; the values that Christopher Columbus brought here across the ocean, and that great footprint of the moral values and the ethics that have emerged as part of our Old Testament values and our New Testament values; the idea of the Protestant work ethic, turning the other cheek and building a civilization, a society to provide the best opportunity for salvation to glorify God and our country and to understand, as our Founding Fathers understood, that our rights do come from God, and to promote that. The full-throated Americanism as the leaders of the free world, of Western Christendom, has not been asserted strongly enough in this hemisphere, and certainly not strongly enough in other hemispheres, Mr. Speaker. But it comes home when you see the violence in a place like Venezuela where at least a dozen dissidents have been killed as political enemies to the Maduro regime, and one a beauty queen who was abducted on a motorcycle, shot in the head, and died last week.

The tragedy that is taking place down there, I can't help but reflect back upon my travels in that part of the world and recognizing a trip through some of the places such as Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Panama, some of the stops I made along the way. I have not been to Venezuela. I have been to Cuba, Mr. Speaker. But one thing that I recognized is that in South America they just don't know America very well. They don't know Americans very well. They look to the United States as the leader in the free world, the economic leader, the military leader, and the cultural leader, but we watched as the beginnings and the growth of the leftist regimes have taken hold in South America for a number of reasons.

Some is because nature and power abhors a vacuum, and we have allowed a vacuum to take place in places like Venezuela.

In Cuba, we have sat back and watched for all these years waiting for the biological solution to take place with the Castro brothers--and that is the vernacular that I picked up on a trip to Cuba some time ago.

If the United States doesn't take leadership in this hemisphere, we are going to see some philosophy, some ideology take that leadership, and we have seen it take place in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez seemed to be enamored with Cuba, and we have seen Fidel Castro led the Marxist regime in Cuba, and influenced Venezuela. It is hard to think of a Venezuela that has been such a Marxist thorn in the side, a belligerent Hugo Chavez, one who called our President ``the devil'' from New York City from the United Nations, from the podium, and went on with, I will say, a smelly description, Mr. Speaker, that was offensive to anyone on the planet, let alone Americans.

Hugo Chavez drove that Marxist agenda in Venezuela, and then he handed this thing over to Maduro, according to Maduro, and now we have a second regime there, a second Marxist regime that is oppressing its people and killing freedom demonstrators and dissidents and people that stand up for freedom, and we have sat here without a strong voice coming from our President of the United States. Not a condemning voice of the violence in Venezuela, not a strong leadership that says to them there is a reason why you are running into shortages. One thing that the gentlelady from Florida didn't miss: a shortage of toilet paper, of all things. Now, how can an oil-rich country that is rich enough to promise that they are going to give free energy and fuel to Americans-- that was just a couple years ago by Hugo Chavez--and yet they can't operate an economy that can provide the simplest necessities of life, like some food products, or toilet paper, for example. Those things are produced automatically and spontaneously by a demand economy that comes from free enterprise.

If there is no product on the shelf, and say it is milk or bread--in Cuba it is the ration of sugar and beans and rice--but if there is nothing on the shelf in America, somebody will look around and think, Why is that shelf bare? Why can't I buy something I want, and they will start to produce it. If you bake a loaf of bread and put it on the shelf, and it is of moderate quality for a moderate price, someone else will come along and bake a better loaf of bread for a lower price, or maybe a cheaper price of equal quality, and that competition of one loaf of bread sitting next to the other decides. When the consumer pulls that loaf off the shelf and puts it in their grocery cart, that is a vote for one product over another. It happens over and over again in this country, and because of that, we walk into a grocery store in America--and I remember the stories when the Russians first were able to come over here and see what a supermarket looked like. It was amazing for them to see that you could grab anything you wanted.

Then I think of my trips to places like Russia and Cuba, and it looks to me like their societies and their civilizations are trained to stand in line. When we went to the Duma in Moscow a few years ago on a trip, we stood outside even though we were expected by their parliamentarians. We waited a long time to get in line and then a long time to get into the line where you hang your coat up. Everybody wears a heavy coat over there. Then to get into the line again to go into the hallway, and then get into line to go into the room, then to go into the waiting room, and I looked around at people that were standing in line, and it looked to me like maybe they didn't all know why they were in line, but it

was what they were trained to do, stand in line. I presume when they got to the front of line, some of them found out why they were there. Maybe all of them knew. I didn't know the language of the culture there. When they finished that, they would go get in another line.

It is a full-time job to go line up and wait for those things that come to us as Americans, offered to us, some of them delivered to us, but free people stand in fewer lines than oppressed people do. You will see lines in communist countries far more often than you see lines in free countries like the United States of America.

You don't want to stand in line to buy something. You don't want to stand in line to receive something. You will stand in line for something free from government. That happens in this country, too. You surely don't want to stand in line to pay for something that you already have. So you will find there is somebody working the cash registers to move you through to get their hand on your credit card and ring that up. That is what happens in a free country.

Lines in Russia; lines in Cuba. I recall seeing a couple of lines in Cuba that I didn't expect to see. One of them was a line for ice cream. As we went down the street, I looked over and here is this long line that went for a couple of blocks. I asked our guide, What is going on there? They have a shipment, a delivery of ice cream, and so the Cubans are lining up to get an ice cream cone. Now two blocks to wait for an ice cream cone? We wouldn't do that. We would walk another block to get an ice cream cone at the competing store, or the one next to that, or the one next to that. That is one of the differences that are taking place.

You know, I reviewed some of the speech that was delivered by Ms. Ros-Lehtinen's Senate counterpart, Senator Rubio, and as he spoke on the Senate floor about doctors and about how the junior Senator from Iowa, and that is my word ``junior,'' who traveled to Cuba and was very happy and proud of what he had seen there and the accomplishments of the Castros and talked about the medical system that they have in Cuba. I think that flows from Michael Moore's movie rather than anything that has to do with fact, Mr. Speaker, but it was stated by the gentleman from Florida that yes, they have good doctors, doctors that are Cuban, and many of them are the ones that defected to the United States. I agree with that statement.

He also mentioned doctors and cabdrivers. I have experienced that. I have hailed a cab in Havana, a legal trip to Havana, I might say, which might have been different than the ones we are discussing, and what do you meet behind the steering wheel? A doctor driving a taxi cab. What was the most logical tax cab when I was there? A 1954 Chevy with a Russian diesel engine under the hood. It looks like it is a rolling repair shop up and down the streets, which are better than I thought they would be. There are cars that have pulled off that break down, and they just come along and jack them up and crawl underneath and fix them with the parts that they can scavenge. When the car is repaired, they drive it on again. It is part of traveling to stop and repair the vehicle you are in. These vehicles are put together from parts from different places.

One of the things also that I noticed was that there were Russian tractors sitting all over the place. They are broken down, and they had been robbed for parts. There would be a circle maybe of grass growing up around the tires where they had been there for a long time.

Then I began to notice that there were these Brahmin oxen around the island in a lot of places, and they are staked down with a rope. There is a stake driven down and then a rope, so they have what I call a pivot-grazing system for these Brahmin cattle that they are using as beasts of burden, and I imagine raising them for the meat they get as well, scattered all over the island. I was able to plow with a team of Brahmin oxen. I had my NRA cap on, and I have a picture of that that I won't forget.

But what happened in Cuba was, back in the 1990s when the Soviet Union was going with a stronger economy than the Russians are today, Mr. Speaker, they saw the Soviet Union meltdown going into the 1990s, and when that happened, the subsidy for Cuba stopped. They weren't able to continue that subsidy. What had been taking place was Cuba raised sugar. The world market for sugar then was 6 cents a pound. The Russians would send them oil for sugar. The Cubans would ship the sugar to the Russians, and the proceeds from the oil would come into Cuba, and they were getting 51 cents worth of oil for every 6 cents of sugar they sent. That was how they propped up the government in Cuba. It was subsidized by the Soviet Union. That was the most important equation of it all.

When the Soviet Union imploded and shrunk back, states declared their independence and the Russian Federation was formed a little bit over time, the Cubans had to stand on their own. When that happened, the subsidies stopped, so did the parts and the support for the Russian tractors that were being used. They got parked as they broke down, and then they were robbed for parts. It is the only economy that I know of that has gone from an industrialized, mechanical tractor production for agriculture back to using animals again and animal husbandry. That is digression, and I would make that point to my junior Senator from Iowa.

Cuba digressed. It wasn't progress, it was digression. They digressed to using animals as beasts of burden again, where once they had tractors, albeit Russian tractors. They digressed from doctors in the clinic and hospital to doctors behind the steering wheel of a 1954 Chevy with a Russian diesel under the hood. They digressed from a country that had a measure of freedom, however harsh the dictatorship was under Batista, to a nation now that has been oppressed and under a communist dictatorship since 1959.

The Senator from Florida also mentioned that they don't have the freedoms there, that even though there was discussion about access to the Internet--I can tell you personally, the Senator from Florida is right, Cubans don't have access to the Internet. I was on a trip up to a college up in the mountains in Cuba. We rode up there in the back of a Russian deuce-and-a-half, and it took, oh, about an hour and 45 minutes or maybe 2 hours to wind our way up there into this little campus in what I would call hills, but they said mountains. As we were interviewing some of the professors there and some of the students there, I was standing next to a gentleman who was from Florida. His parents had escaped from Cuba and still held deeds for land that they owned, real estate that they owned in Cuba that they had never been compensated for. He was perhaps the best interpreter that I had ever experienced. His name is Ed Sabatini, and I hope that Ed Sabatini is out there somewhere.

As they were talking, he was telling me what they were saying, and he was reading their body language, their voice inflection, and what they said and putting this together for me in real time. He was one of those people who could talk and listen and interpret simultaneously. He was very skilled. He said to me in the middle of this, as I was asking questions of the Castro minders, he said, you realize that they are not asking the questions that you are asking, because I would ask a question to one of Castro's minders and interpreters. He would turn to a couple of instructors at the school. He would ask a question in Spanish and return it back to me in English. Ed said to me, You know the minder, the Castro minder, is not asking the questions of them that you are asking, and he is not giving you the answers that they are returning. He is telling you something different than you would be learning if you could understand what they were saying. No, I didn't know that. So we broke away from that conversation.

I had asked, Do you have Internet here at this school, at this university? It was a specific question. Their answer came back specifically, Yes, we have Internet.

You have full access to Internet?

Yes, we do. We are in the modern world. We have full access to the Internet.

When I learned they were not answering my questions, we moved away and went down to talk to the some students sitting on the curb, and began more of a rapid-fire conversation that I was catching up with a little bit after the

fact. I wanted to know what this Internet looked like, tell me some more facts about the Internet. They didn't seem to know how to answer the question on having Internet access. We drilled in to get the answer, and it was this: yes, they had access to Internet, and if they had a question that they needed a response to that they would get from the Internet, then they would formally make that request. They would write that request out in a letter form, and put the letter in an envelope, and when the Russian deuce-and-a-half went down the mountainside to Santa Clara, a small city near there, they would deliver the request in letter form, and then whoever was the minder of the Internet would decide if they would get them the answer off the Internet. They would apparently access the Internet, print out the answer that they thought that the student or the instructor should have, put that on a different Russian deuce-and-a-half after a few days or a week, and it would wind its way back up the mountain again. It was 70 kilometers away at least, to send a Russian deuce-and-a-half down with a letter in it to ask somebody who had clearance from Castro to go on the Internet and get an answer back, to send a Russian deuce-and-a- half up the mountain to a student.

That is Internet access as I saw it and heard it from the lips of students there on that mountain school that is like an extension school, an ag college. Some will know what the name of that school is.

When I found that out, I said I want to see out what you have. So we went into a classroom. As we walked into the class courtroom, there were 12 or 14 computers in there. So yes, they had computers. They were old 386s. There were two or three students sitting at every screen, and the instructor was teaching a course on how bad capitalism is.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I wish I had had an iPhone so I could have taken a picture of that screen and captured it. It was in Spanish, but it was interpreted to me this way, and this is what I can recall. There were five points on why capitalism is so bad. They were instructing these kids, these students, they were college-aged students, and they were all young men, on how bad capitalism is, and one of the lessons of these five points was a capitalist keeps all of the money and all of the profit and takes enough just to feed the worker so the worker can just barely survive while the capitalist gets rich.

That was one of the five points, and it was those kind of Marxist points on down the line. As we walked in, they were in the middle of indoctrinating their students in favor of Marxism and against capitalism.

I don't know who has seen a lesson like that take place in a communist country. I have. It impressed me that how does a young person in a controlled environment with controlled communication ever get the idea that there is a whole great wonderful world out here in America?

But they have a sense of what America is like because then it turned into a question-and-answer period. There were students that were asking questions directly of me. Most of them had to do with agriculture. I was answering them through Ed, the interpreter. Then at a certain point, it became too rapid fire, and he took it over and just did the conversation.

But here is what happened. I remember one big-faced young man sitting in the back of the room, and he asked some of the most prescient questions. But these questions were: Who sets the markets for your agriculture products? And what would be the price of beans and rice and corn, for example, and oats and wheat?

I answered him that the market sets the prices. Well, how does the market set the prices? Well, there is a buyer that makes an offer and a seller that decides whether or not to take it. If the seller says no, then the buyer might decide to raise his price until they get to a place where they agree. That was an amazing concept, and it looked like they had never heard that before.

Then it is, well, no one sets the prices; how can that be, that no one sets the prices? And the second thing will be, well, how often does the price change? That can change hundreds of times a day. It changes every transaction because the buyer and the seller can reach at a different point down to the tenth of a penny, a hard concept for them to understand.

Another question, who sets the price of farmland in the United States? Well, I know about that. The market sets the price of farmland.

Another new concept was, well, no one steps in and assigns a price? No, the buyer and the seller have to agree. That sets the price. You can see that soaking into their minds as they were asking the questions.

And then a question was, Why does anyone ever sell land? I had to explain that sometimes you reach that point in life when you don't want to work the land anymore; maybe you want to retire; maybe you want to take your capital out and roll it into another business; maybe you want to put it into savings; maybe you want to sell it to a neighbor who can utilize it better and the price is high enough; maybe you are overleveraged with a lending institution and you have to sell off a piece of land to get liquid again; maybe the economy went bad and you went broke and you had to sell it all before the bank foreclosed; or maybe the bank foreclosed and then sold it all out from underneath you, as we would say.

All of these were new concepts for these young men in this classroom in Cuba that I had been told by Castro's minders that, yes, they had full access to the Internet, they had computers, and they were connected to the modern and real world.

Well, what I found out was they only had old 386's. They were sharing them two or three at a station. They were learning on the screens of these computers in the old font style that you would see, with that kind of green screen with white lettering on it. They were learning the perils of capitalism and the merits of Marxism.

So that is the kind of minds that are influenced by the Castro regime. We have had an embargo on trading with Cuba for a long time, and we have got a lot of years invested in it. We need to keep it in place. We have to have the kind of leadership in this country that can inspire people to step up and take their island back.

We need the kind of leadership in this country that can inspire the people in Venezuela to step up and take their country back. We need the kind of leadership in this country that will send the message and go down and stop and visit and inspire, in country after country in this hemisphere--even if we are only speaking about this hemisphere--to inspire the people of Central and South America to embrace the kind of life that we enjoy here.

The difference between the United States of America and countries in points south isn't because we are blessed with an extraordinary amount of natural resources that sets us apart. They have a lot of natural resources down in Central and South America, too.

It isn't because our climate is so much preferred to theirs. They have a favorable climate in most of their continent as well, and a lot of people go down there because their climate is favorable to ours.

I have a cousin who spent 8 years in the Peace Corps at Tegucigalpa. He sat in the mountains. He had the only refrigerator for miles around. That is because he is a diabetic, and he needed to keep his insulin in a propane-powered refrigerator.

I talked with him those years ago, and I said, what is the yield potential for corn? Now, we will raise now over 200 bushel an acre in our neighborhood. Down there, a decent crop back then was a little over 100 bushel. He said it has got the potential to raise 100 bushel.

What does it need? It needs fertilizer. It needs seed corn. I said, can't you get fertilizer and seed corn down there?

After I pressed him very hard in those idealistic years when we were still young and haven't experienced a lot of the world--and he more than I have--and his answer was, you have to understand the mindset when you are in subsistence agriculture as opposed to agriculture for profit.

He grew up on a farm. He said the difficult thing you have is to try to not get so hungry that you have to eat your seed corn. That is a different mindset.

We do capital investment here. We wouldn't think of starting a house and

building a house very often, at least, unless we had the capital lined up to go in and build that thing and frame it up and close it in and get it wired and get the utilities all set up, put the roofing and the siding on, and pave the driveway. We might even sod the lawn and have that all penciled into our deal, and then we start.

Down there, it is a different attitude. If they get a little bit of money together, they will go buy a few bricks and put that in the wall of the house. If they get a little more money, they do a little more. They might be building on that house for years and years and years.

Maybe they don't ever get to live in it, but their children do. Maybe their grandchildren move into that because they don't have access to capital like we have because--guess what, Mr. Speaker--because they are not capitalists. They are Marxists. They live with the oppression of Marxism, and it has to be mind control and thought control.

If you fear that your neighbors are going to report you to the regime, if you even fear that your family members that sit around the supper table with you, that one of them might be currying favor with the regime and report what you said at the supper table at night, after a while, it disciplines your thought to not think those things anymore because what you think eventually you might say and what you say might get you in trouble with the regime and might get you imprisoned, incarcerated. And then you can be the subject of the regime and have to suffer through the incarcerations that we know of, of the dissidents that are there in places like Cuba and Venezuela.

I am amazed that one could be impressed with what Cuba has built. I don't know that anybody is particularly impressed with what Venezuela has. They do have oil. They are blessed with natural resources. They have got the wrong forum and the wrong system of government, Mr. Speaker.

What gives people an opportunity, that gives them prosperity, that let's them plan not only for their future and put in capital investment, build a home, get it paid for, put some money in the bank, have an investment for a 401(k) so that you can live comfortably in your retirement, those things come from capitalism, from free enterprise--a free enterprise economy. They don't come from a Marxist state that has a central command that controls it all.

I am very troubled that the inspiration that the United States is isn't being utilized to the extent that it needs to be. So as I look at the void in our foreign policy and I look at a President who has made it his foreign policy to lead from behind, and then I look around the world and I see where is the leadership vacuum--and power abhors a vacuum, so it rushes into that vacuum. Right now, there is a bit of a power vacuum in Venezuela.

But I don't know that we have any kind of a plan or a strategy to even voice that strong support for the freedom-loving people that live in places like Venezuela and Cuba. Let our light shine, send the message to them, get this operation going so that one day we can see the Western Hemisphere not only just be the foundation of Western civilization in the modern world, but it can grow and prosper, and we can live in peace and harmony by free enterprise and free trade and open access to everybody's market on an equal basis, not on a preferential basis.

When we passed the free trade agreement, the CAFTA-DR Free Trade Agreement, which is many of the Central American countries and the Dominican Republic, that opened up markets for us. We had already given them access to our markets. It opened up our markets.

We need to go down there now and say thank you and meet people and build the kind of relationships necessary. An American presence--and I mean a United States of America presence in Central and South America-- should be grown and should be expanded, and it should be part of our strategy to strengthen our leaderships in this hemisphere.

If we do a far better job than we have done in the past, then we also have the moral authority to strengthen our relationships outside of this hemisphere in the Eastern as well as the Western Hemisphere.

Mr. Speaker, I am very troubled also by that strategy of leading from behind in country after country. I am troubled that President Obama, as he came into office, and he was elected in early November of 2008, and on the 17th of November of 2008, then-Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, who is a stellar public servant and an impressive individual as far as an Ambassador is concerned, and someone who, if you listen to him talk, you know that he has got a deep knowledge base on that part of the world. But Ambassador Ryan Crocker signed the agreement, the status of forces agreement, in Iraq. In it, it just simply cleared out all U.S. influence and all U.S. troop presence in Iraq, with the exception of a few marines inside the Green Zone at the new U.S. Embassy.

I looked at the bases that we had established there, the airstrips that we had established there, the billions of dollars invested in military and logistical infrastructure. Essentially, our pledge was to sack up our bats and go home.

I was troubled when I read that agreement. It was already signed on November 17 when I read it. I contacted the White House and said, You are pulling everything out of Iraq, with the exception of a few marines in the Green Zone near the U.S. Embassy, giving away air bases.

And the answer was, We wanted to clear the field so that the incoming President will have free rein, and we hope and expect that he will renegotiate a U.S. presence on these bases in Iraq.

Now, I don't know the depth of the agreement that took us to that point on November 17, 2008; I just know what that agreement said. Of course, Obama was already elected President. Later on, he was inaugurated January 20, the following year, 2009. He continued with this strategy of the pullout in Iraq.

The negotiations that I think should have and had a real opportunity to be successful failed, so that agreement of November 17, 2008, essentially stood, and all of our military and our munitions, the foundation for security that we had established in the entire country of Iraq, gone, gone down to just an embassy security personnel presence was it. All the blood, all the treasure handed over to the Iraqis who were led by a Shi'a and Maliki.

We were advised by some of our top foreign policy people that we shouldn't worry because Iran won't be exerting its influence in Iraq. There is a natural tension there. We should remember that they fought a war back in the eighties, and so they are not going to team up in a way; they are not going to line up against American interests; they are not going to be a thorn in our side or troublesome.

Look what happened in Iraq instead. Yes, a strong influence on the part of the Iranians, the Iranians pushing military supplies through Iraq, reported in the news just a couple of days ago, and also, the al Qaeda flag flying in places like Fallujah and Ramadi, places I have been to, places that were all shot to pieces, places where their mayors and their local leadership said, We are going to rebuild this city, and we are going to live in peace and prosperity.

We all know, Mr. Speaker, you can't live in peace and prosperity if you are living underneath that black al Qaeda flag. That is a result of leading from behind. That is a result of stepping out of Iraq and handing that country over. That is a result of not focusing on the negotiations necessary to establish a status of forces agreement in Iraq that could have provided the security and the stability and the training necessary for the Iraqis to protect themselves from the outside influence that now has a powerful influence in those places that were paid for, some of them more than once, and that includes Fallujah, in American blood, Mr. Speaker. That is Iraq.

Afghanistan, the President found himself pushed into a situation where he had to order a surge, even though he rejected the surge that was ordered by President Bush in Iraq--and it was, by all objective accounts, a successful surge in Iraq. President Obama, Mr. Speaker, ordered the surge of a minimum number of troops in Afghanistan.

I recall General McChrystal laying out those numbers. I don't have them exactly committed to memory, but something to the extent of 75,000 troops will get the job done. With 50,000

troops, it will take a while. There will be a greater risk, and maybe we can get the job done. We kind of think so. And if you get down to 35,000 troops, you hope that you can get the job done.

The President opted for the lesser option and went in, in a minimalist attitude, and leaked out there and in a slow way reinforced our troops in Afghanistan. As soon as he ordered the surge, at the same time, he announced when the United States would pull out.

I don't know how any military strategist would announce when they were going to pull out. That says directly to the enemy, You have to hold on past this date; you will no longer have anybody to fight when they are gone.

I think, Mr. Speaker, that leading from behind has created a vacuum in Iraq that is being filled by al Qaeda and by the Iranians and the conflicting Iraqis again, and leading from behind in Afghanistan, that is creating a vacuum that is being filled by the Taliban.

When we look at where this is going, I am asking, what is our objective there any longer? What are we trying to preserve? I haven't heard this President tell us his goal or his objective.

But I do know this: in listening to the chairman of the Armed Services Committee in the news press conference just yesterday, how it boiled down, is what I heard from the esteemed chairman, Mr. McKeon, and that is this: If you are going to order our troops into battle, Mr. President, Commander in Chief, then you owe them, you owe them your support for them, but also for their mission. You can't say you support the troops without also supporting their mission.

That needs to be, in a full-throated way, articulated by our Commander in Chief. If you support the troops, you can't do so, unless you also support their mission. If you are the Commander in Chief, you have to articulate that mission and let them know that the sacrifice is worth it and why the sacrifice is worth it. If you don't think so, you have to give a different order.

Those are those parts of the world.

Now I take us to Egypt, and these are the foreign policy discussions, Mr. Speaker, the ones that we don't have very often in this Congress. We can go a whole year and not have a debate on foreign policy. Throughout the Middle East--Egypt and Libya and Lebanon and Israel-- these are countries that I visited with a small delegation of Members right before Christmas, so it is fairly fresh. Egypt was a very interesting stop. The things that I learned there and the view that I have on Egypt don't match up with our State Department's view, which, I think, is mirrored in an effort to reflect the President's view. Mr. Speaker, in September, which is when we went in and met with the interim President, Mansour, and also with General el-Sisi, the commander of the military, it was only just June 30 through the 3rd of July that the Egyptians had come to the streets.

I think I have to back up on the history a little bit more in that, yes, Mubarak was a heavyhanded dictator. He was there for a lot of years as a heavyhanded dictator. Yet he was someone we had done business with. If you look back through the history of our relationship with Egypt, it warmed up considerably when Dwight Eisenhower told the British the Suez Canal is not yours. You need to move out of there, and the Egyptians will control the Suez Canal. In '54, that built a bond between the United States and Egypt. It was the right call on the part of Dwight Eisenhower. The British did pull back from their operations going on in the Suez, and it brought about a greater degree of stability in that part of the world.

Then take us to 1979--'79 is the year, as I recall, that we began doing joint operations with some Egyptian troops and other interests-- but with American troops--and some of them were National Guard personnel from my neighborhood. It was joint operations in the Sinai. We have conducted those operations since 1979, up until this year, so we have a strong relationship with Egypt. Since 1979, their military equipment has been, by and large--and I don't know that I can say it has been exclusively the U.S., but it has been vastly, predominantly the U.S. The Russian influence in Egypt has been minimal, so that is how I want to keep it. If we are going to have peace in the Middle East, Mr. Speaker, Egypt is an anchor that is necessary for peace in the Middle East.

When our President went to Cairo and gave his speech in Cairo on June 9 of 2009, he seated the Muslim Brotherhood in the front row. Now, that is something that would have been missed by me at the time because I don't recognize the faces of the Muslim Brotherhood, but Egyptians do. They knew that the Muslim Brotherhood, which was formed in Egypt, was pushing to do a takeover of Mubarak, and they didn't understand why the message that was sent by President Obama was at least implied or implicit support for the voices of those folks sitting in the front row. Shortly after that speech--sometime after that speech--our then- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the statement that Mubarak needs to be gone yesterday. The Egyptian people didn't understand why it appeared to them that the new administration at the time was supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and opposing Mubarak and implying that the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood should come to power, which is what happened.

As they demonstrated in the streets, the unrest brought it about that Mubarak was pushed out, and into power and into elected office was the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. This was incompetence in the government. Plus, each move that was made was assuring the Egyptians they would never see another election again, that their individual and their human rights that they had were going to be diminished as Morsi strengthened his power grip on the control of Egypt. There were 83 million Egyptians, of which only 5.6 million voted for Morsi as President. He did an incompetent job in Egypt. As the economy went into shambles and they saw their freedom go, they thought, What could be worse? We were better off under Mubarak. It wasn't so great, but we were better off under Mubarak.

On June 30 of last summer, the Egyptian people emerged into the streets. Of the 80 to 83 million Egyptians, 30 to 33 million went to the streets to protest peacefully to remove Morsi and put in a government of the people of Egypt.

What happened from that, after that June 30 to July 1, 2 and 3, is that they pleaded with the military to step in and take over. At that point, General el-Sisi and others stepped in to take over the Government of Egypt, and they provided that stability. Yes, it was bloody in the streets of Cairo and in other places in Egypt, but throughout that, you saw radical Islamists who were going in, raiding Christian weddings and slaughtering the wedding parties and others there at churches. While we were there in September, they burned down 70. Then I learned it was as many as 100 Christian churches in Egypt.

How is it that the Christians were caught in a conflict in a mostly Sunni country and were being attacked in that fashion?

The reason was the Muslim Brotherhood wanted the Christians to enter into it to create more of a civil war and more chaos because they believed that they could take power in the chaos. Instead, the Christians said--and there are less than 9 percent who are Christians and over 90 percent Sunni Muslims in Egypt--we are going to pray for these people who are destroying our churches and killing us. We are going to forgive them, and we are going to pray for peace. That was a component that brought about the demonstrations in the streets last summer that I mentioned from June 30 until at least July 3.

Out of that came the stability from the turmoil, however bloody, with interim President Mansour and with General el-Sisi in command of the military, who told us in September of last year, as did President Mansour, We are writing a constitution, and we are going to offer it to the people when we get it polished up and ask them to go to the polls and ratify the constitution in Egypt. That was September when they made that promise.

When I returned in December, shortly before Christmas, I sat down with the chairman of the constitution committee, and I remarked as they had written the constitution, which had been published a couple of weeks before we got there, You promised us that you were going to produce a constitution

and have it delivered to the people of Egypt in November, and I noticed that it didn't show up until December.

He looked at me, and he said, We were only 72 hours late, 72 hours into December. I think that is pretty good for government, don't you?

I smiled and laughed, and said, If you were in my country and asked me a similar question, I would hope that I would be astute enough to give a similar answer that you gave to me.

Seventy-two hours into December they produced a constitution. They put it on the ballot after we left, which was January 14 and 15. It passed overwhelmingly by a vote of the people of Egypt. It sets up elections in Egypt in a couple of months and then elections for a new President down the line, less than 3 months after that. We are seeing the pieces being put in place.

Even though the news media reports every outburst of unrest that is there, I see stability being anchored in Egypt, but it is not being anchored by the leadership of our administration, and it is not being anchored by the leadership out of our State Department. It is being anchored by the voice of the people of Egypt and by the good judgment of those whom they have empowered and, I think, whom they will continue to empower in the upcoming elections.

We are told we don't have to worry about the Russians doing business in Egypt because they don't give anything away, because they don't give any military equipment away. They have to sell everything. If the Egyptians don't have any money, it would seem that there wouldn't be a calculation done for the loans that were offered out of the Saudis and out of the United Arab Emirates, but now we have the Russians, who have negotiated a military equipment deal with the Egyptians for the first time that I know of since 1979 or, I will say, pre-1979. We didn't need the Russians in Egypt. They filled a vacuum--a vacuum due to a lack of leadership, a vacuum created by the implication that the President and our administration is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Egyptian people ask us: Why do the Americans support the Muslim Brotherhood? We are trying to get them out of here. My answer to them in a press conference in Cairo twice was this: the American people do not support the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, the American people oppose the Muslim Brotherhood.

I believe this administration is on the wrong side of the issue in Egypt, and I think they will have to turn that giant ship of state around slowly because the administration will have to save face. I can't expect that the President is going to go out into the Rose Garden and step behind the podium with the Great Seal of the United States of America and say, ``I came to confess that I was wrong in Egypt.'' No, there will have to be some smoke and some mirrors. If things go as well as they can over a period of time, we can ratchet our policy around to get behind the voice of the people in Egypt and strengthen our relationships there--the economic relationships, the trade partnership relationship and the military relationships--so at least they have the equipment that we had promised them so they can fight off al Qaeda in the Sinai.

So we say al Qaeda is growing in the Sinai, and we say to the Egyptians, You are going to have to go short of some of the equipment you expected from us because we don't like the idea that there was a duly elected Muslim Brotherhood president that was so bad that 30 to 33 million Egyptians poured into the streets.

Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, if that percentage of the population-- say, roughly, 40 percent of the population--of the United States were all in the streets on the same day? Can you imagine what that would be like? If 125 million Americans came to the streets and stayed there from June 20 until July 3, do you think it would bring about a change in the policy and in the government of the United States with that kind of unrest? That is the magnitude. I have only seen this magnitude a few times.

I can think of a time when we had the magnitude of that kind of response in the nation of Georgia, when the Russians went in and invaded South Ossetia and the other client state. They went in and invaded and occupied. It was shortly afterwards--a week or so after that--that they had hands across Georgia, where they said a million of the, roughly, 4 million Georgians were in the streets. I saw thousands of them with their flags wrapped around their shoulders and their babies wrapped up in their flags, standing together in unity. When people come out of their homes to the tune of 25 or 40 percent of their population, you know something is wrong, Mr. Speaker.

That didn't get the attention of this administration enough for them to start to ratchet our policy around and get behind the voice of the people. Still they insist that there was a duly elected Morsi, and despite whatever happened after that, we are going to stick with the guy because the people of the Muslim Brotherhood were sitting in the front row, and our President gave a speech in Cairo. It sent a message, and it was a factor in the change in power in Egypt. It was helpful to bring Morsi to power. When Morsi came to power, the Muslim Brotherhood was in power. They did consolidate their power, and they did begin to shut down the rights of the people of Egypt, and the Egyptians rose up.

It is because of a vacuum, and it was because of leading from behind, and it is from having sympathy for people who carry within them the values that are contrary to that of the United States. That is the Muslim Brotherhood. That is just Egypt.

Now, if I go on and I look at the things that have happened in the more than 2\1/2\ years of the Arab Spring, and in each of those things, when the Arab Spring erupted within country after country, across North Africa and across and around the Mediterranean, each change that was brought about went against the interests of the United States.

But somehow, the myopic belief that I think was in the mind of Jimmy Carter when he saw the Ayatollah Khomeini return to Iran from London, if I remember where he was based back in 1979, another watershed year, because there was a religious leader we ought to be supportive of him instead of the Shah of Iran.

Look what that got us, the beginning of the radical Islamic uprising, and we have been fighting that ever since, but not with the knowledge, the full knowledge base of what is going on.

In Libya, you have got a civil war that really hasn't ended, it just is suspended, and you have terrorists and radical Islamists that are controlling Benghazi.

You hear people that go to Libya, and you get the idea that somehow they went to Benghazi and walked around the ashes and the ruins where Ambassador Chris Stevens and our three other heroic Americans died. But they are not going there. They can't go there. We don't have the security personnel to go there. Neither do the government officials from Tripoli.

The country is divided at this point, and the terrorists are in control of most of Benghazi, and they go into Tripoli once in a while, and they have surrounded the Parliament and other government buildings and exerted their control there, Mr. Speaker.

There is still a void and a vacuum. We didn't get it resolved in Libya, in spite of all of the treasure and some of the blood that was spilled, thankfully, not American blood.

In Lebanon, it is an even bigger mess with a less decisive future, and you have Hezbollah controlling a significant component of that country and standing out on the streets in their uniforms under their yellow flags with their weapons, defiant. They are a terrorist organization, and they are occupying parts of Lebanon, parts of the Beirut.

The results in Israel: constantly, the pressure is on Netanyahu and the Israelis. Don't you have a little more land that you can sacrifice in the belief that somehow you can trade land for peace?

There is no model in history that I can find that you can successfully trade land for peace, but still, our administration pushes, negotiate to give up something. A two-state solution. Let's move the Jews out of the West Bank because, after all, doesn't everybody know that they have no business living in a place like Judea, where they have lived since antiquity?

It is their ancestral homeland. What justice is there in pushing people out?

If 20 percent of the population of Israel proper is Arab, and they can live in peace and harmony there--remember, the fence is to keep people out, but the 20 percent of Arabs that are inside are peaceful. They are happy enough to live there. They vote. They serve in the Knesset. They serve in the Supreme Court. They have a voice that many will say is equal to that of Jews that live there. There is some question about it.

But if they can live in relative harmony in Israel proper, why is it that the Jews don't have a right to live in places like Gaza or the West Bank?

Then the problem is Netanyahu; the problem is the Israelis.

I don't think so, Mr. Speaker. I think we need to be in full-throated support with every kind of commitment necessary to bring about the kind of solutions that promote God-given liberty and things that we know here as American ideals.

We need to elect the next President, a very astute foreign policy president who believes in free enterprise, who believes in the pillars of American exceptionalism, and believes in exporting them to the rest of the world, because we are far better off with an American policy and a promotion of our beliefs and our ideals in other places in the world, where they want to embrace our way of living, than we are pulling back and allowing that vacuum to be filled by the power-hungry despots of people like a Castro, a Chavez, a Maduro, a Putin.

That is the mission for America. It is one of the missions for America. When the Presidential candidates come to Iowa, Mr. Speaker, I want to ask them, speak on foreign policy, become a student of foreign policy. Go travel, draw your own conclusions.

But, in the end, we are a world player. We have been a world player for a long time. We need to stay a world player.

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