Floor Statements

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 50 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, February 26, 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. I have a number of things that I would like to bring to your attention that are on my mind and I think are on the minds of the American people.

The number one topic in this Capitol Building, at least on the House side right now--and I believe on the Senate side, too--is the question of the debt ceiling that has been brought forward. A lot of us have some memories of how difficult that was the last time that came through.

There are a good number of Members in this Congress that have pledged they will never vote to increase the debt ceiling. We have a President who used extraordinary methods the last time and stretched the debt ceiling out and the crunch time that was supposed to come for months. And it is curious that even though the Congress did backfill that debt ceiling for him, now he doesn't have any extraordinary means, evidently, and now we are up against the time line, up against the wall of perhaps a February 15 date. It causes this Congress to have to scramble.

It is not because this government is in risk of default, Mr. Speaker. That is the language that emerged 2 or 3 years ago on the debt ceiling. Republicans and Democrats alike talked about how this country's credit is good and we can't allow our government to default.

The definition of default really isn't what has been used in this dialogue

over the debt ceiling. The default would be if the United States could not and failed to service its debt. That would be if we didn't have the revenue stream to pay the interest and to roll the bonds over, then we would be in default. We are a long, long way from that, Mr. Speaker. We have, by some measurements, as much as 8 or 9 or 10 times the revenue necessary to pay the interest and roll the bonds over.

So America is not in danger of default, but we are in danger of getting confused about the debate and losing track of the essence of it because we allow language to be conflated in the minds of the American people, the minds of the people in the House and the Senate, and in the press. The press allows that to happen as well. And when language gets conflated, we lose the center of the argument.

To drive that point home, Mr. Speaker, I would say this. About 6 or 7 years ago, I noticed that the language was being conflated between health care and health insurance. I recall our then-Governor to the State of Iowa came here in this very building. We had a meeting with the Iowa congressional delegation and the Governor, and he pressed us around the table, seven of us at the time--five House Members and two Senators--and he said, There are 40,000 kids in Iowa that don't have health care.

No one said anything. I looked at him and I said, Governor, there can't be 40,000 kids in Iowa that don't have health care. We are taking care of those kids. Why have I not heard about kids without health care?

He said, No, there are 40,000 kids in Iowa without health care.

And I brought it back to him again. They all have access to health care. If nothing else, in the emergency room they are going to have access to health care. We would not turn a child away--not from a clinic, not from a hospital, not from an ER.

And we went around and around five or six times with that verbiage of the Governor saying 40,000 kids don't have health care and me saying that can't be true, hoping that I could get him to be the guy that figured out that he really meant health insurance, not health care.

I had to explain it to him, Mr. Speaker. There is a difference. What you really mean is there are 40,000 kids--at the time--in Iowa that didn't have their own health insurance policy, which is far different than not having health care.

But you see what has happened. The language was already conflated in his mind and he couldn't separate them apart, even at a meeting with the Iowa congressional delegation where he was pitching for more resources to go into the program.

And so if that happens in the mind of a Governor of the State of Iowa, I have to believe it happens in the minds of a lot of other people across the country. And then I have to wonder, did this happen by accident? Did the language get conflated by accident, or were there people that wanted to advance a policy and they decided we are going to conflate this language because it helps our liberal agenda?

Well, it is the latter. It helps the liberal agenda to conflate the language. They did so on health insurance and health care, and that is just a model.

The next piece of this would be the example that happens with immigration.

Now, we know that there is a difference between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants. There is a tremendously different moral underpinning of this. I don't know anyone in this Congress that isn't very supportive of legal immigrants. And all of us who took an oath to uphold the Constitution should be for enforcing the rule of law even as they set about trying to change it.

But the term ``immigrant,'' which connotes a legal immigrant, and the adjective ``illegal'' immigrant are entirely different. They have been conflated, because when you use the term ``immigrant'' interchangeably with ``illegal immigrant,'' it suits the argument of the people who are for the open borders lobby and for amnesty.

I believe, Mr. Speaker, they have intentionally conflated the terms so that they can move their agenda, because it makes it harder to debate the distinctions if you have to stop and define the difference between ``immigrant'' and ``illegal immigrant.''

And then, of course, they argue that we shouldn't use that terminology--even ``illegal immigrant.'' We should use ``undocumented'' or ``not yet granted amnesty.'' Oh, wait. That wouldn't be theirs, Mr. Speaker. But you get the point. You conflate the terms ``illegal immigrant'' and ``immigrant,'' and then you give the moral standing of the immigrant to the illegal immigrant; and then you can make the argument that you should grant them amnesty because somehow they should have access to American citizenship and all the benefits thereof.

It is a similar argument that comes along with ``health care'' and ``health insurance.'' By conflating the two terms, they convinced the American people--at least a significant number of them--that everybody has not only a right to health care, but everybody has a right to their own health insurance policy.

These are a far cry from what our Founding Fathers laid out as rights. And, by the way, they are even a far cry from what Franklin Delano Roosevelt laid out as the four new freedoms. When I go down and look at the Roosevelt monument, it gives me a bit of a creepy feeling thinking how he manufactured freedoms that didn't come from God but fit a liberal agenda--even then.

So we have got the terminology of ``health care'' and ``health insurance'' and ``immigrant'' and ``illegal immigrant'' conflated, and now we are in the debt ceiling debate, and people on both sides of the aisle are arguing that we can't allow the United States to default. Their definition of ``default'' is the moment that the United States runs out of borrowing capacity, which isn't the same, because the cash flow still comes flowing in, hundreds of billions of dollars a month, which is plenty of money to service the interest and to pay the debt.

We are not up against a hard break here, Mr. Speaker. We are not up against a deadline that says that if we can't get credit at the bank, we are going to have the house foreclosed on. That is not it at all. It is a matter of where we take the money from to service our debt and what bills we pay.

I do think that the inertia of the spending and the structure of the budget that we have pushes this Congress towards a debt ceiling increase at some point. But the House of Representatives has the majority of Republicans for a reason. It is because the American people rose up in 2010 and said, You are shoving too much government on us. We want to keep our God-given liberty. We want to reject ObamaCare. We want to have a smaller government with less taxes and less spending and less regulation, less intrusion, less nanny state, more freedom, more God-given liberty.

That is what the American people said in 2010.

They reiterated it again in 2012 with regard to the House of Representatives. And with the President, Mr. Speaker, they evidently decided that they wanted a President that would perhaps send them an Obama phone and maybe pick up the rent check and the heat bill and the grocery bill without that much responsibility.

I don't know that the American people were looking down the line to see that if they push this debt off into the next generation, it is their children and their grandchildren that will be paying the debt in the next generation.

When I go to a high school and talk to the high school students, invariably they will say to me, What are you going to do about the cost of tuition and what are you going to do about the cost of my student loan?

They are planning to go to college, and I am glad they are.

The answer to that and the answer I give them is, The best thing that can be done for the increasing cost of tuition is for you, the consumer, to make an astute choice on where you will go to school and the best education you can get for the tuition dollar. Calculate that. Go visit the schools. Don't think that you are going to pay a premium because you want a certain kind of sheepskin hanging in a frame on the wall someday and believe that you can put your feet on the desk and live happily ever after.

The world doesn't work that way. Not that often, in any case, Mr. Speaker.

Instead, go evaluate the tuition costs and the cost of housing and all of the

associated costs with a college education and bargain for the best buy that you can get, and go there and get that education.

If you are determined that you want a degree from a prestigious institution, you can start a 4-year degree there. Maybe you will spend 5 years getting that degree. Or you can go to a smaller institution that is maybe closer to home and a little cheaper, get a couple years in, maybe a third year in, and transfer to that 4-year school. You can achieve that degree and put it in the frame with less dollars and maybe get more back in return for the tuition dollar.

Be good consumers is the piece advice that I would give to the students looking at going to college. That is one of the educational components of where we are going with this country. But the debt that is there for an individual is the debt of the country in its aggregate.

When I tell the students that this is how you get the best buy for your dollar, they say, What are you going to do to buy down the interest rate on my student loan?

My answer to that is, If we do that, we have to borrow the money here in Congress from maybe the Chinese, maybe the Saudis, maybe the American people. About half of this U.S. debt, this $17.3 trillion, is held in the hands of the American people in the form of Treasury bonds, et cetera. And so if we have to borrow the money to buy down your interest rate, you are going to be the one paying it back. You get your college education; you go off into the workforce; you start paying down the interest and the principal on your student loan; you are the one paying it back. If we borrow the interest rate down now, you still have to pay back your student loan, maybe at a lower interest rate, but you are going to be paying back the national debt as the other part of that bargain.

I have a number of grandchildren, all of them tremendous gifts and miracles in their own right, but the most recent two are the ones that I happened to have actually kept the math on. My little granddaughter Reagan is 3 years old. When she came into the world, her share of the national debt was $48,000.

Little Wallace, the youngest, who has been here since, oh, back in mid-November, his share of the national debt when he came into the world was $54,000. Three years apart. If we are gifted with another grandchild, you know their share of the national debt is going to be greater and greater.

This Congress needs to understand and think about our duty to the succeeding generations. Maybe it is an easy enough thing to pass a debt ceiling increase here to pacify a President who refuses to take on entitlement reform.

We all know that this debt is out of control. The spending is out of control. The spending is on auto-pilot, and the spending is going into programs like Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security.

By the way, the latter of the three is the one that is the easiest to fix, and if we could get our employment up, we could get Social Security back on track easier than any other way. The reform of entitlements is a necessary thing if we are ever going to get this country to balance.

So the question emerges to me and others, Mr. Speaker: What would you attach to a debt ceiling increase, a debt ceiling increase that would satisfy the President which, apparently, would be an entire year, a credit card for an entire year at whatever limit that might be? What would you attach to that to send the message, to hang on to something that you can point to and say, I focused on fiscal restraint?

What could be that list of items?

Well, one would be, and my Number 1 item, Mr. Speaker, that I would attach, and this would get me to vote for a limited debt ceiling increase, would be this: a balanced budget amendment to the United States Constitution passed out of the House of Representatives, passed out of the United States Senate, messaged to the States.

I would step up and take a real good look, depending on the terms of it, of course, at voting for a debt ceiling increase under those conditions.

Now, the balanced budget amendment to our Constitution would have to include, in my view, it would need to include a cap on the GDP spending. I would cap it at 18 percent.

Another would be that we would have to be able to waive that balanced budget requirement in the case of a declared war, and we have got some language, or a very serious national emergency. Those would be some provisions.

No tax increases without a supermajority, another provision.

A balanced budget amendment to the United States Constitution that enforces fiscal responsibility from this point forward, provided that the States would ratify that constitutional amendment.

Now, Congress could pass a balanced budget amendment out of here with a two-thirds majority, out of the House and out of the Senate and message it to the States. That is all that we can ask out of here. The States then pick the balance up from there.

Meanwhile, a debt ceiling increase would pass, I believe, out of this Congress, and the 38 States required to ratify a balanced budget amendment, I believe they would step forward and do that, because, after all, they do have balanced budget requirements within their Constitutions, almost all of them, a balanced budget requirement, and we see how they live within their means.

I worked in the State senate in Iowa for 6 years. We made our way to balance the budget sometimes when it was painful, but we knew we had no choice and, therefore, you carve that budget to match. You live within your means.

Tax increases come hard. In fact, we have reduced taxes, not increased taxes. Now we have a surplus.

I mentioned the balanced budget amendment to the Constitution as a requirement before we could vote for a debt ceiling increase. I don't know if that appetite exists here in this Congress.

I make the point to you, Mr. Speaker, because I think more need to think about the merits of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

Another component that we could attach to a debt ceiling increase would be a requirement to audit the Fed. Now, that is something that has had a lot of signatures on it here in the House of Representatives. When Ron Paul served here in the House, he pushed that constantly. Yes, we have passed it out of the House of Representatives in the past, and they don't have an interest in taking it up in the Senate.

We don't know what is going on in the Fed. There are trillions of dollars that are maneuvered around over the course of years, and we aren't able to take a look at those dollars, and our job is oversight.

So when you give the Fed, essentially, an open checkbook and they can inject funds into the economy, and they can run the throttle on our economy up and down without congressional oversight, without even having access to that information to see what they are doing--the closest we get to auditing the Fed is to read The Wall Street Journal that picks up little tidbits and writes it into the newspaper, that gives us a better feel of what is going on.

Thanks to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Speaker, but that is not enough. We do need to audit the Fed. It is a no-brainer from where I sit. Congress has an oversight responsibility. We should do so, and we should not be inhibited or held back.

It is too bad that something as simple and as clear, with the kind of support that auditing the Fed has, you would even have to think about attaching it to a debt ceiling increase in order to try to get that done and get a Presidential signature.

The President doesn't want Congress to know what is going on in the Fed, and he will resist this.

There has been a consistent pattern, Mr. Speaker, of the Majority Leader in the United States Senate being a shield for the President of the United States.

Each time we move an idea that is a good idea from the voice of the American people--by definition, when it comes out of this Congress it is the voice of the American people by virtue of the republican form of government, which is guaranteed to us in the Constitution, I might add, Mr. Speaker.

But the Majority Leader in the Senate puts up the shield if the President doesn't want to see it on his desk. Then the debate stops because the President of the United States has a blocking agent, the Majority Leader in the United States Senate.

So here we sit in the House making argument after argument, as I am doing tonight, Mr. Speaker, arguing for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, arguing that we should audit the Fed, arguing that raising the debt ceiling without restraints feeds spending and accelerates the accumulation of debt.

By the way, you just heard a few minutes ago, Mr. Gohmert talk about the President, again, altering or amending his own bill, ObamaCare.

Now, think of this. I came here an innocent neophyte who just simply studied and read this Constitution for a good number of years, and carried one in my pocket longer than I have been in this Congress. Each day that I had a jacket I kept it in my jacket pocket, and the times that I was in the Iowa senate, and that is getting to be a few years ago now, Mr. Speaker.

When I took an oath to uphold this Constitution, and I actually remember where I was sitting right over there when that took place the first time here, and I never imagined that article I responsibilities that give the authority for legislation to the Congress would be so usurped by the President of the United States.

Article I, section 1, all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.

Mr. Speaker, there is no mention in this Constitution about the President involved in legislation. It says all legislative powers herein granted.

Well, where do these powers come from?

They come from God, granted to the people, and we, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, established this Constitution of the United States of America, and all legislative powers are vested in the Congress.

Article I, not article II or article III, this Federal Government, this contractual guarantee called the Constitution of the United States, was put together with the first respect for the people of the United States of America and the laws that they would ask to be passed through their republican form of government, their representatives here in the House and in the Senate.

Yet, the President, who gave a lecture a couple of years ago, on March 28, I remember the date--it might have been 2011--at a school just here in Washington, D.C., at a high school, and he was talking about the Constitution.

Now, remember, Mr. Speaker, that the President is a former adjunct law professor who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, a very highly respected and revered school, especially their law school, and their school of economics as well.

I have great respect for the people who have gone through law school at the University of Chicago. I have met a good number of them, and the ones that I have met, they have been smart, they have been good people. They understood the Constitution. They had good judgment.

Some of them were in the classroom--I circled by six or seven of them one evening--in the classroom of Barack Obama when he was teaching constitutional law, and they told me that each time that they reverted back to the clear letter of the Constitution, the clear meaning of the Constitution, that Adjunct Professor Obama would stretch it out and turn it over into an activist interpretation.

It is pretty interesting to hear that, but this President knew what he was doing when he spoke to the high school here in this city, March 28, I believe, 2011. He said, you are good students; you know this. The Congress writes the laws, and I am the executive branch, so my job is to see to it that the laws are enforced, and then the courts interpret the laws.

Pretty clear. That is what he said. It was an accurate interpretation of the Constitution, of articles I, II and III of our Constitution. He knows the Constitution, he has taught it.

In spite of that, Mr. Speaker, he steps forward and violates his own oath of office and seeks to legislate by executive edict. I don't use that first word, executive order, Mr. Speaker, because occasionally it is an executive order, but sometimes it is a press conference; sometimes it is the President's people, on a third-tier U.S. Treasury Web site, announcing that there has been some change in Federal policy that effectively amends Federal law.

Now, Presidents are required to take their oath of office, it is in this Constitution, by the way, and inclusive within that oath is the Take Care Clause, that the President's obligation is to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. That is a component of the oath that he gives when he swears in out here on the west portico of the Capitol on January 20, every leap year. We hear that oath.

So when the President of the United States doesn't enforce the laws that have been passed by the Congress, messaged to a previous President, signed by a previous President, and go into the Federal Code, when the President doesn't enforce those laws, if he says he disagrees with the laws that have been passed before he arrived at the west portico and took the oath of office, that is a constitutional violation. That is a violation of his oath of office. That is the reason that he takes it, is so we can compel him to follow the Constitution.

This President not only has refused to enforce the laws that were on the books when he became President--and it is multiple cases. The President has refused to enforce the law when it comes to Welfare to Work. There is only one component of the 80 different means-tested Federal welfare programs that we have that requires work.

That was the big deal that emerged during the mid-nineties, when we had Welfare to Work, and there were two or three vetoes by President Clinton, who finally took credit for signing Welfare to Work.

Only one of the 80 requires work, and that one the President willfully, simply disregarded, and so he ended Welfare to Work. After all of the bare-knuckle fights here in this Congress and the vetoes and the Presidential positioning and the politics that went into it, President Obama just wiped out Welfare to Work, willy nilly, even though it was written carefully so that a President couldn't ignore the work component of Welfare to Work and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families component of welfare. That is one violation.

Then we had the President just simply set aside No Child Left Behind. That was Teddy Kennedy's piece that he negotiated with George W. Bush. President Obama decided I don't like No Child Left Behind, kicked that one off the table. I am going to ignore it, and you all can ignore it because I, essentially, direct you to.

Then we get to the immigration component of this, and there are five pieces of the--we call it the Morton Memos, where the President has decided that he is refusing to enforce existing immigration law, and they argue that it is on an individual basis only.

There were seven different references to an individual basis only by Janet Napolitano, who testified before the Judiciary Committee. That is in there, Mr. Speaker, so that they can argue that it is not creating a class of people that are now exempted from the law. Well, they create classes of people and they exempt them from the law.

That is the immigration piece of the violations. Now it brings me to ObamaCare, and on ObamaCare, I can't keep track of the times that he has decided that he is not going to enforce ObamaCare and he is going to change it or amend it. The list is so full at this point I don't know if anyone has memorized how many violations, how many changes that have come to the ObamaCare law because of the President's executive edicts that come down.

I would lay the foundation of this, Mr. Speaker, in the passage of ObamaCare itself, and in the Stupak amendment, and I would like to take that discussion up in a moment.

Mr. Speaker, I am slightly mystified by that. But in any case, I will try to be aware of that comment.

To take us back to ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, as I said, I would be happy to pick it up at this point. So we have a President who was, of course, involved in the negotiations with the passage of ObamaCare, and the question became

whether they could put the votes together to pass it here on the floor of the House of Representatives because it was clear to us that ObamaCare was going to fund abortions. So what emerged from that was a group of Democrats known at the time as the ``Stupak dozen,'' who conditioned their support for the bill upon a provision, which became the Stupak amendment, that would prohibit abortions funded under ObamaCare or required under ObamaCare.

Well, as that debate ensued, the message became clear that the White House was negotiating that the President would simply sign an executive order that amended ObamaCare after it passed, after the fact, and that would fix the Stupak problem. That is the shorthand version, Mr. Speaker, of what took place.

But in any case, it was a bit breathtaking to hear that we had a President in the White House who believed that he could sign an executive order to amend legislation after the legislation passed and announce that he was going to do so, which was a condition for it to get the votes in order for it to pass.

Now, I know that there are people at home that are listening, Mr. Speaker, to whom that sounds like a lot of legalese gibberish, but it is the fact of what happened. The President, according to the press, had promised that he was going to amend ObamaCare by executive order after the fact; so, therefore, the Stupak language would remain in tact, even though it was to be stripped out in the Senate. That is essentially what happened, Mr. Speaker, and we ended up with ObamaCare that imposes funding of abortion in all but a very few cases.

To give an example, here in the House of Representatives, we are compelled to sign up for ObamaCare. If there was a way out of it, I would have found it. And there were 112 different programs to look at. And of those, there were only nine that didn't fund abortion; and of those nine, eight of them didn't cover me. So it came down to this Member was compelled to sign up for ObamaCare, pay essentially the doubling of my contribution to the premium, and it was the tripling of my deductibles for the only policy that, at least reportedly, didn't fund abortion.

Now, we had to dig pretty deeply. And I thank the gentleman from New Jersey, Chris Smith, for digging that up and giving us at least that much foundation, or I would have had to buy a pig in a poke, Mr. Speaker. I know that is going on across the country in many, many places.

But my point on this is that the President cannot constitutionally amend legislation by executive order, edict, press conference, or a third-tier Web site announcement from the Department of the United States Treasury. None of those things are consistent with the Constitution. And as the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) said in his previous discussion, in his 1-minute about a half-hour ago now, he continues to make alterations not to somebody else's legislation--that is bad enough. I mean, it is all the same kind of constitutional violation, in my view.

But when the President decides that he is going to amend ObamaCare that has got his name on it--that is his bill; he signed it--how can he, with a straight face, step up and say, I am going to change it on the fly; I am going to delay the employer mandate; I am going to delay the individual mandate; I am going to waive this; I am going to waive that; I am going to set different provisions for businesses that have 50 employees and those that have 99 employees and those that are large businesses?

And I remember also, when he stepped up in a press conference out at the White House after he had taken a couple weeks of grief for the conscience protection violations that were supposedly in the bill that Kathleen Sebelius' rules eliminated, and that was a requirement that religious organizations, as well, had to provide policies and insurance that covered contraceptives, abortifacients, sterilizations.

Contraceptives, Mr. Speaker, people understand. Abortifacients are abortion-causing drugs. Sterilizations, we know what these are. These were requirements in the rule embodied within the rule that HHS rolled out. And after 2 weeks of the religious organizations making the case against that, the President did his press conference at noon on a Friday, and he stepped up to the podium, and he said, I am going to make an accommodation to the religious organizations, an accommodation. They don't want to provide these things. So now, he said, I am going to require the insurance companies to provide these things for free.

The President of the United States had the audacity to step up to the podium and say, I am going to require the insurance companies now to fund contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilizations for free.

Now, that is pretty interesting because maybe it just got lost in the language. Maybe the President was really talking about he was going to agree, and he was going to ask Congress if Congress would actually change the law. Maybe he thought that he was going to have Kathleen Sebelius publish a different rule that would go out for comment, and once it followed the administrative procedures, it could have the force and effect of law if it fit within the language of the ObamaCare legislation. Maybe, maybe, maybe, Mr. Speaker. Maybe we could give the President the benefit of the doubt.

Trust, but verify. So I went back and checked the rules, the rules that had been published, that compelled the religious organizations to follow the path of all of the others to provide for abortifacients and sterilizations and contraceptives, and the President's announcement that he was going to change things now and make an accommodation to the religious organizations and require that these things be provided for free from the insurance companies. And you would think there would have been a proposal for an amendment, a bill to amend ObamaCare in Congress. You would think there would be a change in the rules. But, Mr. Speaker, nothing changed in the rules. There wasn't an ``i'' dotted differently. There wasn't a ``t'' crossed differently. But the insurance companies began to line up behind the verbal edict of the President. That is breathtaking in scope when you think of it.

When you read this Constitution where it says, ``all legislative powers.'' It doesn't say all legislative powers, except those assumed by the President under certain circumstances, if he so chooses. It says, ``all legislative powers.'' And yet the President is legislating by announcements on Web sites, by directing his people to change the rules, by verbal press conference that changed nothing, no rules. And he has the temerity to wave his pen at us and say, I have a cell phone, and I have a pen; I don't need the Congress--and to make that same statement from the rostrum back here, Mr. Speaker.

So I am very concerned about our Constitution and the violations of it. But the President has time after time after time made changes to ObamaCare. It is bad law, and I don't accept the constitutional decision that came down from the Supreme Court. It has got a clear and stark contradiction in it that one day I hope goes back to the Court to be reviewed again.

But in any case, we have got to adhere to this Constitution. We give an oath to uphold the Constitution, as does the President. It is our job to preserve, protect, and defend it.

And here we are, faced with a debt ceiling increase. And the reasons that we might be supportive of that increase are, in the short term, it gets people off the hook in the short term. But I want a balanced budget amendment attached to it. If we don't get that, let's audit the Fed. If we don't get that, then I would say, here is something we all ought to get behind: eliminate the bailout of our insurance companies.

Our insurance companies wrote into ObamaCare that they would be protected from a stop-loss, essentially protected from loss if their actuarial numbers and their premiums don't match up.

Now, it would be impossible for them to figure this out because the President has been changing this law all along. Most all of the changes have been unconstitutional. I would bet the clearest one would be when the President of the United States decided that he was going to extend the employer mandate for a year.

Now, the law that was signed by President Barack Obama says that the employer mandate shall commence in each month after December of 2013.

That means it must start January 2014. We should be in the second month of the employer mandate. And I am happy enough for the policy to change. I don't think it ever should be implemented. If they bring that extension to this Congress, I would vote for an extension to delay the employer mandate for a year because that is probably the right kind of policy.

We didn't get that before this Congress. Instead, the President just announced he was going to extend it. And I happen to have been on a bit of a trip when the notice came that he was going to do some delays of the individual mandate, and I remember sending an email off to one of the top insurance companies, Is anybody there talking about the constitutional violations? The answer that came back was, Well, not very much. But, yes, he is sure they are talking about them. My answer was, Merry Christmas.

This is what we get for Christmas, the President rewriting ObamaCare at will. It is ever-changing.

Months ago, a search of the Congressional Record will show, Mr. Speaker, that I said nobody knows what the law is. Nobody knows what ObamaCare, the law ObamaCare is because it keeps changing. And of the thousands of pages of regulations that are piled on top of it, on the 2,700 pages of legislation altogether, it has been changed over and over again. Insurance companies can't abide by these changes. They can't adjust their premiums. And yet they wrote into the bill the risk corridors. And they say to me, But we have to have this because, after all, if ObamaCare is going to be here, we can't be going broke if the President changes the law on us again. That has kind of compressed the discussion.

And I say to them, Were you for or against ObamaCare when it passed? Their answer is, Well, hmm--they might check their shoe shine when they answer. And they will say, Well, our choice was either to be at the table or on the menu. So I am supposed to infer, and the proper inference is, they were at the table.

The large insurance companies in the country, they weren't just at the table; they were at the White House. They decided they didn't want to be on the menu, so they got to the table at the White House and they negotiated their risk corridors, their bailout that protects them from losing money under ObamaCare--or at least losing very much money under ObamaCare.

Well, if they weren't on the menu--they were at the table instead-- who was on the menu, Mr. Speaker? And I would argue that, instead of the insurance companies being on the menu, it was the taxpayers that got put on the menu. And we ended up with risk corridors, the bailout for the insurance companies, because they wanted to stay in the large insurance business. And they believe that if they can get the taxpayers to fund the premiums, it is a more reliable premium funding stream than if you have to get that from the individual ratepayers; and also, it was designed to put 30 million more people on the insurance roles.

So whoever is in the business of expanding their business and trying to get a margin--and I have not been an anti-insurance person. I have paid a lot of premiums and have stepped up and done so willingly. They are an important component of the stability in a free enterprise economy. All insurance is, as a matter of fact.

But when they drew that protection and wrote that protection in--the stop-loss protection called risk corridors--the bailout for the insurance companies into ObamaCare, somebody was going to pick up the tab. That is the taxpayers. It expanded their potential universe to 30 million more insureds, 30 million more premiums. And, of course, there is a profit margin in that, and that is what they are in the business of doing.

Well, you expand the premiums to that 30 million, and the design that came out of ObamaCare was that we were going to see more insured. And at this point, I would lay the wager down, Mr. Speaker, that there are fewer people insured today in this country than there were the day that ObamaCare was signed into law, and we are losing people continually. And as we see what employers are going to do as they watch this, the employer mandate kick in over time--delayed now--more employers are going to be dropping people from insurance. More employers are cutting hours. More employers are reducing the number of employees.

I happen to know of an employer that had 58 employees, and he lined them up and said, If ObamaCare is passed into law and implemented, there will be 49 of you, not 58.

That had to have happened all across the country, businesses that shrunk down to under the 50 mandate, businesses that decided not to grow into that 50 employees where they are mandated to cover their insurance.

That is the fact of this life if you have more than those in employees, and then the formerly 40-hour workweek, which has been used to measure a full-time worker, was reduced under ObamaCare to 30 hours--30 hours, not 40. So we ended up with people that are getting 28 hours, that are working 28 hours a week so they are underneath the mandate, and the employer then who can't afford the premiums often for the higher cost health insurance can keep his employees on.

So here are the circumstances. There might be somebody that has got a job, and they could be working let's just say about 48 or 50 hours a week, a little overtime, time and a half overtime on that--I have done the math on this, Mr. Speaker--but running in at about 50 hours a week. The employer looks at that and says, I can't afford the health insurance. This Federal mandate is either going to take me out of business or I am going to have to lower your hours.

So he looks at his full-time employees and says, sorry, you are part time. You are 28 hours, you are 28 hours, you are 28 hours. Well, he needs more employees to fill up the production. So he goes and hires more part-time workers. Well, that is a good thing for some people, but those who had a full-time job and were getting time and a half overtime and they get their hours cut, the person who was working 50 hours now is down to 28, they have to go get another part-time job that maybe is another 28 hours. Now they are up to 56 or 60 hours, but they don't have health insurance with two jobs. Maybe that is dad, and mom is the same circumstance. She has been cut. She has got to have another job.

So now we have mom and dad trying to raise a family when each were working 50 hours a week with some overtime, now they are working 56 hours a week in two jobs with transportation and the shuttle of schedules, four jobs for two people to raise a family.

Those circumstances are emerging today under ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, and it is wrong. We need to raise that minimum, that 30-hour standard for full time, that mandate up to 40. That is an essential component of ObamaCare. I would attach that to the debt ceiling. Any one of these, one at a time, all together, I'm fine with, a 40-hour workweek.

Another one, Mr. Speaker, is this, full deductibility for everyone's health insurance premium. It has always been wrong that a certain percentage of the American populace has had to buy their health insurance with aftertax dollars. I have done this for years. As an employer, I started a construction company in 1975. I provided health insurance for our employees, but I couldn't deduct the premium for me unless I incorporated, put myself on a salary and wrote off those wages. I wanted to stay a sole proprietor for a number of reasons, but I couldn't deduct my health insurance premiums.

I would write off the business expense of premiums for my employees, a legitimate expense just like wages, salary, and benefits, write those off. But I couldn't write off my own. So Marilyn and I had to pay for health insurance with aftertax dollars, that piece that is left after you pay Uncle Sam, after you pay the Governor, the take-home pay so to speak. After you pay the payroll tax, the take-home pay is what I had to pay my health insurance with--not a deductible.

Now, here we are in the circumstance where that is bad, and it should have been changed a long time ago because it is an injustice and an inequity, but now we have ObamaCare that mandates that individuals buy that health insurance. It is a Federal mandate: you shall buy this health insurance. Now, in my case, it isn't that I go out on the marketplace and shop for a health insurance policy. It is that if I am going

to comply with the law, I have got one choice and one choice only, and that is not competition. By the way, one of the reasons that the President wanted to pass ObamaCare is so that there would be more competition. He wanted to have a Federal health insurance company to compete with the private sector companies so that there would be more competition. I don't know if anybody has talked about this in quite some time here on the floor. It is the President's plan.

Well, I had one choice, but to have the Federal Government impose that you buy a product that is either produced or approved by the Federal Government, and they take it out of your check. They commandeer your take-home pay to pay that premium. While that is going on, an employer somewhere off in a large corporation can deduct that same premium for all their people as a business expense. But ma and pa operations, the family farm, whoever it might be, they can't. It puts them at a significant disadvantage.

This country needs to provide for full deductibility of everybody's health insurance premiums. It is immoral to compel someone to buy a product that is produced or approved by the Federal Government, and it is even more immoral, Mr. Speaker, to say to them, and the money that you shall pay shall be aftertax dollars, and I am going to send the IRS in to audit you and make sure that you are paying that premium with aftertax dollars, and if not, we are going to levy a tax against you. It was just going to be a penalty, but now it is convenient to make the argument before the Supreme Court that it is a tax.

I have a whole series of things that we could do. The debt ceiling is in front of us. There is an increase that is being pushed at us. If the President's people in this Congress think a clean debt ceiling is a good idea, they should step up and all of them pledge to vote for it. I think we might find enough Republicans that would vote for a clean debt ceiling increase. If not, Mr. Speaker, I would suggest we put a balanced budget amendment on that and send it over to Harry Reid. If that doesn't work, then I would suggest that we resurrect Ron Paul's legislation to audit the Fed, attach that to the debt ceiling, and send it over there. If that doesn't work, then I would put the elimination of the bailouts for health insurance companies on there and send it over to the Senate. If that doesn't work, then I would take the 30-hour workweek, which is supposedly the standard for full time, I would change that to 40 so that mom and dad who were working 50 hours, and now they are working 56 hours or 60 hours each, can hang on to just one job, not two each, and they would get, instead of having their hours cut from 50 to 28, or maybe even 40 to 28, they can keep their full- time job and go to work and manage their lives and their schedules.

By the way, this argument that, according to the CBO, ObamaCare cuts the job equivalent of 2\1/2\ million jobs over the course of a decade, that is also appalling and breathtaking, Mr. Speaker. To think that this ObamaCare that was going to create 4 million jobs according to then-Speaker Pelosi now is going to reduce by 2\1/2\ million jobs, that is 6\1/2\ million jobs off from what was predicted compared to what we now have a better look at what we are likely to end up with, and I won't say that number is certain, it might be substantially greater than that--2\1/2\ million jobs.

So how does the administration spin this? You would think that they would find an alternative number and argue the CBO score. Or you would think that they would find a way to point out that somehow these definitions don't quite match up just right. Oh, they looked around pretty hard to find a way to rebut the CBO's numbers and they came up empty. So they settled on the spin, the spin, Mr. Speaker, which is this: oh, 2\1/2\ million jobs, think of this: all of those people that don't have to work much because we are borrowing money from the Chinese to subsidize the health insurance premium that we require that they pay to buy the insurance under ObamaCare, and so they will understand that if they stay under a certain threshold, they will get a Federal premium subsidy to buy their ObamaCare. It won't pay for them to work as many hours as they did before, and when you reduce this all down and get people under the 30-hour workweek, which I just finished discussing, then they will have more time to spend with their families, more time to play with their children, more time to paint and more time to muse about the esoteric things in life. Maybe we will have more people that are pontificating about metaphysics for this price of losing 2\1/2\ million jobs. Oh, it is a good thing we have people working less in America.

That is the core argument for this administration: it is a good thing that we have people working less in America because of ObamaCare. It gives them more free time. Well, if working less is a good idea, I guess that fits with their philosophy, because we have heard, we have heard from the minority whip as well as a number of other people, in fact, I believe it would also be the former Speaker, who say this: Food stamps and unemployment are the two quickest ways you get economic stimulus, the quickest way to grow the economy.

Now, when I first heard that, it was shocking to me that anybody could say that out loud and perhaps believe it. How do food stamps stimulate the economy? How do unemployment checks stimulate the economy? An economy has to produce goods and services that have a marketable value here and abroad, and if you borrow money abroad to pay people not to produce goods and services, let alone those with a marketable value, you are building a nation of debt and a nation of people who, if they have job skills, are atrophying because they are not using them, and as technology increases, they get further and further behind by not maintaining the skills they have and not keeping their skills up to date with technology as it moves.

This idea that this is only a consumer-driven economy, this Keynesian concept of let's just say we can't audit the Fed, but they can inject in QE 1, 2, and 3 trillions of dollars into this economy, and because a lot of the world is afraid to invest, therefore, we haven't seen inflation take ahold in this way yet. But the Fed can inject the money into QE 3, and then the Federal Government can do an economic stimulus plan like the President's $825 billion that went north of that, I guess it was $787 billion that got to 825 billion, inject this money into the economy, spend this money, and it is going to stimulate the economy, and this growth will eventually create enough tax money that you work your way out of debt.

The problem with that is, Mr. Speaker, it has never succeeded. There is no existing model of a Keynesian experiment that has ever brought a country and economy out of an economic recession. We are in the fifth year of this recovery. I guess you can say that we are coming out of the economic recession of 2008. We have had this slow improvement in unemployment numbers that has taken place. We are down there in the sixes somewhere. We have watched as the number of 15 million unemployed has worked its way down by 1 million here, 1 million there. One year ago, there were 12 million unemployed. Today, according to the most recent report, there are 10.2 million unemployed. Actually, it has been a full 2 million people less on the unemployment roles. But the monthly job increases that we have seen, 74,000 last month, a little over 100,000 this month, are not nearly enough to keep pace, Mr. Speaker.

This growth has been down there to where if you look at the last 4 to 5 years, the GDP increase in the economy has been greater in Mexico than it has in the United States. As I listened to some of the, let me say some of the self-appointed economic experts, they will explain to us that we need to import more people into the United States that have low or no skill and likely are illiterate in their own language to do the work that Americans don't want to do in this country, and in doing so will stimulate our economy and increase our fertility rate. We know who those people are, Mr. Speaker, that seem to think that. Much of this concept is just simply wrong. Keynesian economics is wrong. The idea of an open borders economic stimulator is wrong.

What is right is the understanding of first principles, the understanding of the pillars of American exceptionalism, the understanding that put those parameters in place by our Founding Fathers well more than 200 years ago,

when they saw that we had to have the rule of law in America. Without the rule of law, we are not a lot different from Third World countries.

We are a nation of laws and not of men, and our laws need to be applied equally to all of us. The problem we have today is it looks like those who are let's say not favored by the current administration have to fear the law more than those who are favored. One of those examples would be the IRS, Mr. Speaker. Our Founding Fathers would have never envisioned an IRS in the first place. It took a constitutional amendment to even provide for it, the 16th Amendment. I introduce a resolution each year to repeal the 16th Amendment, and one day I hope to see that done.

In the meantime, our Founding Fathers imagined that there would be taxes gathered through other means and that the government would be limited. Our Constitution is the very description of limited government. The concept of Federalism, Mr. Speaker, sometimes needs to be defined and described, especially so young people understand. Federalism is the devolution of power out to the political subdivisions, to the States or respectively to the people, a limited Federal Government with enough power to protect our borders and our shores, to leave us as much as possible otherwise alone, and let the States and their political subdivisions and the people solve those problems so that the laboratories of the States can be where the experiments are taking place.

They are to some degree. I see some of these experiments. There are some States that have some healthy experiments. One of them is Texas: no income tax, a dynamic economy, one that has shown, that has demonstrated to be a big chunk of the growth in our GDP and the growth of employment in the country because they run a free and fair government in Texas and no income tax. Florida is a State with no income tax. South Dakota is a State with no income tax. They seem to be destination States for people that are seeking to get out of the high- tax States like Illinois and California, the model of the States that are in economic difficulty.

Additionally, Mr. Speaker, we have seen some cities that have been run by that Keynesian philosophy of borrow, tax, and spend get to the point of collapse and ruin, Detroit among them. Detroit, a great, great, American city with a tremendous legacy, a vibrant tone within the history of America, shuffled down into bankruptcy, and with grass growing in the streets of the city because they didn't take care of their finances. That is what is in store for entire States if they don't turn the corner, and that is what is in store for this entire country if we don't turn the corner.

I am concerned that politics here in the House of Representatives is downstream from the culture. Politics in any legislative body is generally downstream from the culture. Yes, we have leaders here. We have leaders that step up and strike the right tone and chart the right course, but they would not be followed unless the culture provided the directive.

This American experiment, this grand country that we are, is dependent upon the people in this country understanding what made us great, preserving and protecting and refurbishing those pillars of American exceptionalism that can sustain a greatness into the future, above and beyond any that we have achieved today.

That is what is in store for us if we teach our children well, if we teach them the responsibility of work, if we teach them the core of our faith, the faith that laid the foundation for America, the faith that will see us through any trials, the foundation for the family, the ideal way to raise children, a mom and dad and a family, raising their children with love and setting the standard for them, and setting the standard of work as well as morality.

This country can come back again. We need to teach American history, the pillars of American exceptionalism. We need to do it from inside out, from the family on out, and those young people need to emerge as the leaders in all walks of life from the educational to the journalism to the production, and we need to revere and respect all work. All work has honor. All work has dignity. We need to put a lot more Americans back to work. There are over 101 million Americans of working age who are simply not in the workforce. We don't need to import more people to do the work that Americans won't do. We need to provide the incentive for Americans to step up and shoulder the burden with the rest of us. That is more important.

So, Mr. Speaker, we will see how the debt ceiling unfolds. I have offered a number of options, and I appreciate your attention.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives and this great deliberative body that we are part of. I appreciate the delivery of Mr. Gingrey a little bit earlier.

I wanted to take us, if I could direct your attention, Mr. Speaker, to the situation in the Middle East. And we know that the implication in our Constitution is that the President conducts the foreign policy. I would teach that class if I had the time, and I don't disagree with that.

But also, this Congress has responsibility. We have responsibilities, for example, that are specific within the enumerated powers of the Constitution. And if anyone thinks that the House of Representatives or the United States Senate or Congress itself, as a body, doesn't have a voice on foreign policy, I would direct them to the enumerated power of the power to declare war.

Certainly, we have also foreign policy responsibilities here, and we appropriate funds for foreign aid and a good number of other resources that go to help out countries that are either our allies or hopefully will become our allies one day. There is a lot that we do that has to do with foreign policy. We have a Foreign Affairs Committee. We have a Select Committee on Intelligence. We have Armed Services. All of those things are committees that deal with issues that have to do with our foreign relations and our foreign policy.

So, because of that, Mr. Speaker, a number of us in this Congress have taken a responsibility to step forward and be engaged in foreign policy, and also to have a voice and be better informed than simply letting the message come from the White House.

San Joaquin Valley and the Drought in California

Mr. Speaker, I see that my friend from Utah has just filed the rule, and I appreciate the gentleman from Utah, not only what he has done here today, but his leadership. I want to take a moment to make the message here as the topic that is coming up now is a rule that was referenced by the gentleman from Utah about the San Joaquin Valley and the drought in California.

I have traveled out there, and I have been there to see about 250,000 of 600,000 acres that were manmade drought. And now we have nature-made drought that is coupled with the manmade drought, and I intend to support the legislation that comes to the floor tomorrow.

I thank especially the California delegation for leading on this and helping the rest of the country understand how important the water issues are around the country.

I have worked with water and water management all of my professional life, and these issues come close to home when you either need water or you can't get rid of it. And that is what this bill is tomorrow. It is about needing water and directing it to the best resources.

But if I would, Mr. Speaker, revert back to the topic at hand, and that is the topic of the foreign policy and the very solid constitutional claim that Congress has to be engaged in foreign policy, to help manage that foreign policy and to appropriate resources to foreign policy.

To that end, a number of us in this Congress, and not nearly enough of us, have been involved in foreign policy and free trade agreements and traveled to a good number of countries to engage with people in other parts of the world to help stitch together and knit together our relationships that are so important.

So if I could, Mr. Speaker, I would like to first paint the big picture of what the world looks like. I will offer a little bit of history first and then paint a picture of how the globe looks today.

I will take us back to World War II, which was the most dramatic shift in power that the world has seen, at least

in my understanding of history. We saw the clash of the Imperial Japanese and the Nazi regimes that threatened to swamp the entire world. Having fought back a world war on two fronts, in Asia across the Pacific and in Europe, here in America, we see this as the time that America rose to become a superpower. As we saw then, immediately after World War II, we saw the Cold War begin, and the Soviet Union formed as a product, a part at least, a product of World War II, clashing with the United States in that Cold War that lasted for 45 years.

It was two different ideologies. It is free enterprise, capitalism, it is God-given liberty challenged up against the forces of the former Soviet Union, which were atheistic and communistic and a managed economy from top down.

We saw what happened. We saw how that was resolved, Mr. Speaker.

It was described, I think, best by Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was the Ambassador for Ronald Reagan to the United Nations, when she said, some time around 1984, as she stepped down as Ambassador to the United Nations, she said, What is going on in the world, in this Cold War, in this clash, this competition between the two huge ideologies, what is going on between the Soviet Union and the United States is the equivalent of playing chess and Monopoly on the same board. And the question is, Will the United States of America bankrupt the Soviet Union economically in the Monopoly part of the game before the Soviet Union checkmates the United States of America in the chess component of the game?

Monopoly and chess on the same board. The Russians, building missiles and expanding their military capability and trying to outdo the United States to the point where we would have to capitulate while we were pushing our economy. This growing, dynamic free enterprise economy was competing against the managed economy, the communist economy of the Soviet Union.

And what happened was, the monopoly game, the monopoly winners won out, and the Soviet Union was bankrupted, and because of that, the country collapsed and imploded upon itself around about 1991, and they had to reform back around to--they could say former Soviet Union, Russia--Russia and some of its federation countries, safer for the world because that clash of the two huge ideologies has been diminished significantly. The threat of a nuclear war has been diminished significantly thanks to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and some will say Gorbachev.

Those four personalities engaged together were the leadership that brought about the dynamic that brought an end to the Cold War. In the aftermath of the Cold War, there were those sitting around--cold warriors--to celebrate the end of the Cold War, a victory for the free world. Not only the United States, but our allies. A victory for the free world,

As they celebrated, they got ready to raise their glasses, one of them, one of them said, Just a minute. Don't be too soon to celebrate because think of this: The world will not long tolerate a lone superpower. There will be allegiances and alliances made that you have not imagined that will line up against the United States, and if those forces line up against the United States--and they will--we will find ourselves with competition and enemies that we have not seen before in the world. Some of those will be an alliance that does include Islamic nations lined up against the United States.

That statement was made in the late part of 1991, I believe it was, and that would be at least a decade, roughly a decade before the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. That very prescient comment that was made before they celebrated the end of the Cold War, before the glasses went up, Mr. Speaker, there was a realization that we would have new enemies that would form, and they would form coalitions against us.

So because of that, we should be aware of where we are today. Those enemies that have formed against us, a lot of them have been radical Islamists that have decided that they want to kill Americans because they disagree with our ideology. We should not believe that somehow it is just a matter of, we live in one place on the globe, and others live in another place, and we end up at war with each other with people trying to kill us. That is not the circumstances in that way.

Instead, it is competing ideologies. People that have a different belief system. People that believe that they need to have enemies so that they could demonize those enemies and mobilize their people, and if they can mobilize their people against a demonized enemy, they have a better chance of hanging onto power.

Those are the circumstances in Iran, where they describe the United States of America as being ``the great Satan,'' and it is the public policy of Iran to declare America to be the great Satan. They teach it in their schools, and they are spinning centrifuges for the purposes of developing nuclear weapons and a means to deliver them. The President has contended that his negotiations with Iran have slowed down their nuclear weapons effort, and perhaps they will be able to talk Iran into stopping their nuclear efforts.

Mr. Speaker, I will take you back to September of 2003, where I sat in on a meeting with Ambassadors to the United States from France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, and they sat around with a group of Members. The discussion was about whether we should open up negotiations with Iran on their nuclear capability, and after I listened to the three of them and every Member that was around that table, of which there were not very many. I was the low man on the seniority totem pole at the time. I had to wait my turn to speak, of course. Then I asked the Ambassadors, Why are you here? What is your objective in meeting with us to have this discussion about opening up negotiations or a dialogue with Iran? Their answer was, We want to you open up dialogue with Iran so that you can help us because we think that our three countries--France, the United Kingdom, and Germany--at the table with the United States, we have a chance of convincing the Iranians not to continue any further with their nuclear endeavors. September 2003.

I listened to that response, and I said, If we open up negotiations or open up dialogue with Iran, what are you prepared to do, then, if we take step one into these negotiations? Their answer was, We want to open up dialogue. That is our objective, as if there wasn't a step two, three, four, or five.

But we know that once you have opened up the dialogue, you have to be willing to follow through with something. So I said, If the United States steps up to negotiate with Iran, and it is clear that they have an objective to develop a nuclear weapon and a means to deliver it, if the United States steps up and opens that dialogue, then you are suggesting that we enter into formal negotiations. In those negotiations, you understand that if we fail to convince Iran that they should stop nuclear development, are you prepared, then, to go to the United Nations for a resolution? Are you permitting sanctions against Iran? If the sanctions aren't effective, are you prepared to blockade Iran? If you are prepared to blockade Iran, and the blockade is not effective, and they continue to develop a nuclear weapon, and somebody has got to step up to that line in the sand with men and equipment and munitions and military supplies and put blood on the line along with the treasure, are you prepared to step up to that line in the desert sand? Of course the Ambassadors were real nervous about that discussion long before I got to the part about the line in the sand in the desert.

As they expressed their will, which was, Let's just open up dialogue, they had to also recognize that when you open up dialogue, you start down the path of dialogued negotiations, United Nations resolution, sanction, blockade, and eventually, if Iran is committed, there is going to be a showdown.

I said to them, You see, if we start down this path, we have to be prepared to follow all the way through, and let's understand that we are prepared before we start because I will tell you that Iran is committed to developing a nuclear weapon and a means to deliver it. They are committed. It isn't just a feint on their part. It isn't just a motion in that direction. They are committed, and if we aren't committed to go all the way to putting that line in the sand and lining up on that line in

the sand and following through--and I said these words this way--then Iran will play us like a fiddle, and when this is all done, they will have their nuclear weaponry, and they will have their means to deliver it, and we will just look like a bunch of foolish negotiators.

Mr. Speaker, I bring this up because now here we are, these 10-plus years later. Iran is in a position where they would like to have the rest of the world think that they have slowed down and maybe given up on their efforts to develop nuclear. They still take a public position that they never really were developing a nuclear weapon, that they were just enriching uranium for the purpose of generating electricity in their oil-rich country. Of course no one should have ever bought that from the beginning.

But our administration seems to think that if they negotiate in good faith, the Iranians are going to negotiate in good faith. I think it indicates some naivete about the minds of the people that want nuclear weapons.

A nuclear weapon capability is far more valuable to Iran in their negotiations than talking nice to the United States. Especially, why do they care about us four friends if they are teaching their children to hate us? If we are the great Satan, they don't have a lot to gain in public opinion in Iran by talking to the United States.

So we should understand their motives. Their motives are to dominate that part of the world with a nuclear capability to threaten that part of the world. They have already said that they have targets chosen in the United States. That is an Iranian public position today, and if you look at the method that they could have to deliver a nuclear weapon, which might only be weeks or months away--

We can have inspectors in Iran that are examining anything that we want to examine, but that doesn't mean the Iranians don't decide that they are going to throw a public relations tantrum and kick all of the inspectors out of Iran and only be 2 or 3 months from having that nuclear weapon.

So they can choose now when the time is right for them, when the time is right for them politically to make that move. Even if they have slowed this down and even if they are not putting more centrifuges in place, the question is, are they still spinning? What happened to the enriched uranium? Even if they dilute their enriched uranium down below 20 percent, it is another chemical reaction to enrich it again--it doesn't take very long--at best, they have slowed their operations down in order to pick up $4 billion or more into their economy that they need. Their economy is suffering because of the sanctions.

So we are being played again. It is just part of the fiddle. We are being played like a fiddle. We have been played like a fiddle for the last 10 years. The conviction and the resolve from our leaders isn't strong enough, and I have said from this floor, Mr. Speaker, that if I were the lead guy, the lead person on negotiations with Iran--and I will just take us back to the Ahmadinejad era so we can think of the personality on the other side of that--we would do it this way:

I would just simply back-channel information probably through the Swiss in the diplomatic channel, back channel in to the Ahmadinejad and the mullahs, and it would be this, presuming that I were calling the shots here on foreign policy.

It would be, Mr. Ahmadinejad and Iranian mullahs, I have decided--we, here in the United States--but I have decided the date beyond which you will not be allowed to continue your nuclear endeavor, and I have taken the liberty to put an ``X'' on the calendar that sets that date. Now, you don't know that date, but I do, and beyond that date, you will not be allowed to continue your nuclear endeavor whatsoever it takes to do so, and it will be dramatic, and the world will know. You will certainly be the ones to get the first announcement because that is when the kinetic action starts. That is the implication--not the word.

Then I would say, But, you know, if you hustle up and decommission and tear down your nuclear development equipment and you do that with our inspectors to our satisfaction or with an intermediary that we can trust, we will help you with that, and we will help you with some resources to do so. We will even help you with public opinion so that you can save face as you back up from this clash of civilizations that is bound to come if we let you go down this path.

Again, Mr. Ahmadinejad, you don't know that date, but I do, and we can forestall the inevitable if you decommission and tear this down. But you have got to mean it. It can't be a bluff. It has got to be a real ``X'' on the calendar. It has got to be a real date. Maybe no one else knows it. Maybe only the leader of the free world knows that date. But he has got to mean it.

Short of that, we get played like a fiddle, and here we are, stretching this thing out again, with the world an ever more dangerous place in that part of the world. I can stand there and listen to the intellectuals and say--Europe, for example, and I mentioned the foreign travel, and listen to them say, Well, of course a nuclear capable Iran is preferable to a military strike to take it out. They utter that in the same fashion that people in this country would utter, Well, of course it is the CO2 emissions from U.S. industry that is one day going to cause the Earth's temperature to go up, as if somehow that was the conventional knowledge that was accepted by everyone.

Mr. Speaker, I reject that way of thinking. The idea that a nuclear- capable Iran is peripheral to a military strike to take it out isn't a rational conclusion that one can draw. You have to start with a flawed premise to get to that conclusion and say it is rational. There are a lot of rational conclusions that are built upon false premises, I might add, and that would be one.

A nuclear-capable Iran threatens all of the Middle East. Their immediate target would be Tel Aviv. And Tel Aviv, by the way, is not very highly populated with anything other than Jewish people, which would be their ideal target. So it is a short missile strike from Iran to Tel Aviv. They know that. They certainly know that in Israel. And today what they know is they don't have the level of confidence that the United States is standing quite as strongly next to Israel as we have in the past. That message has been sent by our President in our foreign policy for some time.

The idea that Israel should go back to the '67 borders, as if somehow the '67 borders were defensible, well, they were defended in '67 and they were defended in '73, but they expanded their defensive borders because of that. Israel traded some land for peace. It didn't work out very well. The Gaza Strip is a place to launch attacks on the Israelis from Lebanon, and Hezbollah is occupying large chunks of Beirut in Lebanon. That becomes a place where there are now some tens of thousands of missiles that are lined up there aimed at Israel, an ever more dangerous place.

Somehow we think that we can talk nice to the Iranians and they are going to treat us nice and somehow good reason is going to get something accomplished with negotiations. Mr. Speaker, it is very rare to ever see a diplomatic error take place in negotiations. Instead, you have to have leverage, and that leverage is going to be economic, military, or perhaps political. It could come mostly from other entities. If you don't have those forces in place and something that you can give, do, or give up, you are not going to just get, well, we like you, Mr. President, and you said that if we unclenched our fist, you will extend your hand. I didn't see Iran unclench its fist, but I saw our hand extended. And some of our hand was played, and some of our hand--or whole cards have been seen now and shown to the other side. It is a very, very dangerous proposition.

Looking over there in the same neighborhood as Syria, it became the issue du jour that Syria had weapons of mass destruction. It is hard to make the case in this Congress that Syria had weapons of mass destruction, that, of course, none of them came out of Iraq, because it is conventional belief over on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, regardless that Saddam gassed his own people, regardless that we did secure yellowcake uranium in Iraq. We did take it out of Iraq

and transport it across the Atlantic Ocean, down the St. Lawrence Seaway and up to Canada so it could be converted into power generation. In spite of all that, nobody seems to think that any of that could have gotten across the border or any weapons of mass destruction, such as gas, could have gotten across the border into Syria, even though we all agree that Assad used gas against his own people.

We would like to put an end to that. But once the President showed his hand on that and the British lost the vote on the floor--I believe it was in the House of Commons--the President came to Congress and said, well, now I want to strike Syria, and why don't you give me the authority to do that? That was an implied directive, Mr. Speaker, not a direct one, not a formal one. It was clear that neither the House nor the Senate had an appetite to go into military action in Syria.

So we fell back on Putin and the Russians to be the negotiators with the weapons of mass destruction in Syria. We saw the promise that the gas was going to be accumulated, picked up and transported out of Syria by the end of the year. That was the end of last year, not the end of this year, Mr. Speaker. So now it is going to take perhaps another 6 months and another and another and another.

It is a static position in the world now where Syria has digressed down to the point where it is hard to find a friend in Syria. The President said here in this very Chamber at his State of the Union address last week that we are going to oppose the regime and we are going to support our friends in Syria. It is hard to find friends in Syria. This conflict may have gotten to the point where there is nobody. Neither side is a side that is either going to support us or one that we should support. My message is that Syria has devolved downward into a very difficult, static, and ugly situation with a lot of blood and death that threaten to spill over.

Of course, we have the nuclear threat that has slowed down but not necessarily been suspended in Iran. In the rest of our foreign relations around that part of the world, we are 2\1/2\ years or more into the Arab Spring, and in almost every one of those changes--some regime changes, some civil war, and some that reached a static impasse--the result of that hasn't been favorable to U.S. interests, and you can go country after country, the conflicts around.

So several Members and I took a trip over into that part of the world right before Christmas to assess the situation. We need to do that because assessing the situation from here, it turns out that there is a lot of information that is not very reliable that comes out of the White House and the State Department with regard to that part of the world. So we traveled into Egypt, into Lebanon, into Libya, and into Israel, among other places. We met with their top leaders in most all of those countries and on down the line. Of course, we met with our State Department and got the in-country briefing.

It works out that the short version is that Lebanon is a mess. I think it is intractable, and I don't know how you resolve it. In Libya, the civil war didn't resolve it. The radical militant Islamists still control Benghazi, and it is not safe enough to go there for their government, let alone for representatives of our government. So Libya is at an impasse. They would like to be able to put together a functioning government in Libya, and I am impressed with some of the people that are in leadership there. But if they can't control Benghazi, Benghazi militants can come in and threaten Tripoli, for example, and have.

Egypt, though, Mr. Speaker, has turned, I think, in a very good and positive direction in that they rose up and threw Morsi out. Morsi--the face and the voice of the Muslim Brotherhood in the country of the origin of the Muslim Brotherhood--was rejected by the Egyptian people, and 30 to 33 million of 80 million Egyptians went to the streets mid last summer to demand that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood be taken down and out of the government. It was a popular uprising. And with the pleadings of the popular uprising, then you saw the Egyptian military take charge. We have met with them, myself eye to eye at least twice and at different levels within the government and two different trips over there.

They have written a constitution, one that protects even Christian religious interests there and commits resources to rebuilding our burned churches in a place like Egypt. They have ratified a constitution in that election the 14th and 15th of January. Now you have elections set up for a parliament, and behind that, a Presidential election. I expect we will see a legitimate civilian government in Egypt sometime in less than a half a year. At that point, the voice of the Egyptian people at least is structured to be heard through the government, a relatively new experience for the Egyptians.

So there is a lot that has been turning in the world, Mr. Speaker. I mentioned the threat to Israel, that we need to stand more closely with them, shoulder to shoulder, and make an even stronger commitment to support them. They are going to have to face up to and they are going to have to decide if they have to take action against an existential threat, which is a nuclear-capable Iran.

We need to decide whom we are going to be friends with. It is not the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Even though it looks like this administration has lined up with the Muslim Brotherhood, it is not the Muslim Brotherhood. The American people don't support the Muslim Brotherhood, and they don't support the militant wings and arms that are components of the Muslim Brotherhood and those affiliates of those militant wings and arms that might say they are not but operate in concert, especially in places like Syria.

We need to understand that this world is lined up to some degree against us. We have had friends in that part of the world that go back deep and long. Egypt is one of those countries. It was 1954 when President Eisenhower made it clear that he was going to stand with the Egyptian people. We have had them as allies, and we have worked military operations in the Sinai for a long time. We need to restore those relationships with the Egyptian people and I think the soon-to- be-legitimized civilian government of Egypt. We need to let people know, like the United Arab Emirates, that we are going to stand with them as they are going to stand with us. We want to stand with the moderate interests in the Middle East that want to engage in petroleum production, diplomacy, and the growth of their own economies.

We have had a good strong interest in the Middle Eastern part of the world, and it has been fractured time after time after time by the results of radical Islamists and Muslim Brotherhood coming into these countries throughout this long, long period of the Arab Spring, summer and fall times 2.5.

Mr. Speaker, this Nation is looked to by the rest of the world to lead. That means we need to have a strong State Department, a strong foreign policy, and a clear and coherent moral message. It has got to be that we stand with our friends. We should understand that just because there is an election in a country, that doesn't mean that democracy is going to be manifested or it is going to be the solution.

Mr. Speaker, we need a stronger foreign policy, we need more Members of this Congress taking an interest, and we need a President that gets it right.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 25 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, February 5, 2014, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to take up some of the issues that I know are important to you and are important to Americans. I come here tonight to try to put some perspective on this intense debate that we have had.

I would start with this, Mr. Speaker, that over Christmas vacation, I don't know of a time that this Congress hasn't taken a break over Christmas and gone back to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. That is the foundation of the core of the faith of our Founding Fathers that established this country, built this Capitol, and worshipped in the building.

I do remember a Christmas Eve present that we got from the United States Senate Christmas Eve morning when they passed a version of ObamaCare on a Christmas Eve vote, but I don't remember a President ever criticizing Congress for leaving town to go visit our families over Christmas vacation until this year when our President of the United States, Mr. Speaker, made his trip to his home State of Hawaii and took his Christmas break out there. He took his family with him, and certainly most thinking Americans don't object to such a thing, but I remember a speech that he gave from Hawaii where he criticized Congress for leaving town over Christmas. He said that we should have stayed here in Washington and solved this myriad of problems we have in our Nation, that going home apparently was inappropriate.

Well, I think when they were here, when the Senate was in voting on Christmas Eve morning that morning when they delivered to us ObamaCare, that was the time they should have gone home for Christmas vacation instead and listened to the American people, because the aftermath of that was that there was a huge wave election in 2010, and Republicans in the House of Representatives ended up with 87 freshman Republicans as a result of the American people's rejecting ObamaCare.

Nonetheless, Mr. Speaker, I bring up the point of the President's criticism of Congress for taking Christmas off and point out three other topics that he brought up in that speech. He said he has an agenda for 2014--and this was a preview of his State of the Union address, I might add--and this agenda that the President has for 2014 includes three things: the extension of unemployment benefits, adding weeks on what his number really is--but I know that they have supported 99 weeks, almost 2 years of unemployment--and then the other piece of it was to increase the minimum wage. He is seeking to do that by an executive edict with regard to the Federal employees. And the third piece was he called upon Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform.

Now, when you are home with your family over Christmas and you hear a speech like that from the President of the United States, the first thing you think is why in the world would he go before the American people with any kind of a message, let alone one like that? Don't take a Christmas break, and I am going to tell Congress what they ought to do. They ought to pass a minimum wage increase; they should extend unemployment benefits; and they should pass--the President said this to us before--the Senate version of the Gang of 8's comprehensive immigration reform bill.

I point out, also, Mr. Speaker, that America now understands that comprehensive immigration reform--CIR, for short--really is three words that encompass one word, and that is ``amnesty.''

One would wonder why the President chose those three topics and gave that speech at that time. I would give this answer, Mr. Speaker: no one should really wonder. A President of one party that has the same party that rules in the United States Senate and controls the agenda over there, who is opposed by Republicans in the House of Representatives, is going to do this predictably, because tactically it is what you do in this business if you are not a uniter but a divider, and that is pick the topics that unify your party and divide the opposing party.

So he picked three topics that just essentially and almost universally--I will say, virtually--unify the Democrat Party and are designed to split and divide the Republican Party--minimum wage, for example. Now, I can go back quite a ways on how far back the minimum wage goes. But I can say, Mr. Speaker, that every time that Congress has raised the minimum wage, somebody has lost a job. It has cost jobs every time. We lose more and more of those entry-level job opportunities when the minimum wage goes up because the employers can't afford to train unskilled workers and put them in the workforce and take on all of the risk, the regulation, the recordkeeping, the liability, and sometimes the benefits package that is required. They can't afford to pay all of that and bring somebody into the workforce that has maybe no skills.

The reason that there are entry-level wages is so that people can get started in a job and you can afford as an employer to hire them and keep them there and upgrade their job skills, and hopefully in the same company you can move them right on up through the chain and bring them up through the system, and their wages and their benefit package, or at least their wages, go up with that consistently.

I happen to know how that works. We have never--I founded and have operated a construction company for 28 years. In those 28 years, we have never paid minimum wage. We have always paid over that. But when we brought somebody in at a skill level, we identified their skills, paid them what we thought we could afford to pay them,

trained them, watched to see how they developed, and gave them raises in proportion to the skill level and the production that they gave because, after all, when they come to work, they would say, What is my job? And I said, Well, your job is to help me make money. If you do that, then I want you to stay here, and we are going to do our best to take care of you.

Mr. Speaker, I recall walking into my construction office in one of those years, perhaps in the early nineties, and my secretary had decorated the Christmas tree in the entryway of our office. I looked at the tree. It looked nice, and it had decorations on it. I don't usually pay much attention to those things, and I walked on.

She said to me, Well, did you notice the tree? And I said, Yes, I did.

And isn't it pretty? was her question. Sure, the tree was pretty. She said, Go back and look at it a little more closely.

I went back and looked at that tree more closely, and it was symmetrical, symmetrically decorated. It didn't have any lights on it, and it didn't have any tinsel on it. All it had on it for decorations were gold Christmas emblems that were a thin piece of something thicker than foil but that kind of a texture, gold. And it would be, oh, a snowflake, a star, a baby Jesus and different pieces from the nativity scene all over that tree. Then I looked at that, and I said, Yeah, those are nice. She said, Look a little closer. She turned one of the decorations around on the back side, and on the back side there was engraved the name of one of our employees. And you look at another, and it would be their spouse. And you look at another, it would be one of our employees' children.

By the time I had looked at those decorations on that tree, it occurred to me that the decisions that I was making that were designed to help the company make money also impacted the lives of not just the people that we were writing the paycheck to, but their spouse, their children, and their family members, and that the responsibility of those decisions impacted all of the names on that tree directly.

It is quite a thing to walk in and understand that, Mr. Speaker, and see how that is. But all of those people on that tree benefited from the decisions I made, hopefully; and we benefited, all of us together, from the work we did together.

That is the way companies are supposed to be--good companies especially. Small companies operate like families. Good companies today, large companies, talk about the culture of the workplace. They want that culture to be a culture that brings people back again, people that look forward to going to work every day. They want people to look forward to working with their colleagues and their coworkers, and they compete for good labor.

So we don't need a Federal Government that gets in between an employer and an employee. This system of entry-level wages that gets people started in a job where they can learn a skill, learn customer relations, learn responsibility, learn to look people in the eye, learn to provide service, learn to smile and hustle and act like you like it, if you can do that, you are not going to be working for minimum wage very long.

But the President and the Democrats want to divide that and put that minimum wage out of reach of a lot of employers, which means a lot of especially young people with no skills aren't going to get the opportunity. Divide, unify--virtually unify the Democrats--and divide the Republicans with minimum wage.

The next thing, extending unemployment benefits to 99 weeks, Mr. Speaker? How can we possibly afford paying people not to work for 99 weeks? The long tradition in this country has been 26 weeks, a half a year.

Now, a lot of times it is not people's fault when they get laid off. It might be seasonal; it might be the company folds; it might be the company downsizes. But that unemployment that is there is to give them a bridge to find another job, whatever they need to do to find that other job. And if this government decides, this Congress decides that we are going to borrow money, borrow money from the American people to run this government, borrow money from the Saudis, borrow money from the Chinese--$1.3 trillion borrowed from the Chinese--so that we can extend unemployment benefits and sometimes provide early retirement for people that decide, ``Well, I can qualify for 99 weeks of unemployment. I will be 65 by then. I can qualify then for Medicare, Social Security, and my pension plan. There is no reason for me to find a job at age 63 because this Federal Government has managed to add on to 99 weeks of unemployment,'' it is not a wise thing to do. It is a bad policy for our economy, and it causes our workforce skills to atrophy, Mr. Speaker.

So, having dispatched minimum wage and having dispatched extending unemployment benefits, now we are down to the third thing. In each case, unemployment benefits and extending unemployment benefits also, it is borrowed money to fund those projects that unify Democrats and divide Republicans. Part of the Republicans are going to say I am going to go along with that because I don't want to take the political heat, and inside they are going to think it is not a good thing for this country. They do the same thing on the minimum wage, increasing the minimum wage. So the President is dividing Republicans and he is unifying Democrats against Republicans.

The third thing is this: the proposal that this Congress pass comprehensive immigration reform, CIR/amnesty, that is the big one of the three divisive agenda items that the President rolled out after he criticized Congress for taking Christmas off to visit our families.

Some of the result has been the pressure felt by some of the leadership in this Congress to produce a document that is called ``Standards for Immigration Reform.'' So I received this document Thursday afternoon about 4:15 and I looked through this. These are principles on immigration, Mr. Speaker. I looked through this, and it has a preamble that starts out: ``Our Nation's immigration system is broken.'' Well, that is the first half of the first sentence, and already I disagree.

Mr. Speaker, our immigration system is not broken. We have a system of laws and a system set up for enforcement. It is not the system that is broken; it is the President of the United States who has prohibited his law enforcement officers from actually following the law. When the law expressly dictates that when encountered, they need to place people who are unlawfully in the United States in removal proceedings, and the President has prohibited ICE, for example, and the Border Patrol, from carrying out the law, it is not the system that is broken; it is the President who has taken an oath of office that includes that he take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and I would close quote there, and that includes that the President is instead taking care that the law is not being faithfully executed, and there are at least five different violations of his constitutional limitations with regard to immigration. There are multiple others, Mr. Speaker.

The Constitution is at great risk because of the--I wanted to say ``cavalier,'' but instead I would say because of the willful--disregard and disrespect for the Constitution that we have seen as the President has gone down the line and violated this Constitution multiple times.

For example, the President has suspended Welfare to Work. When that legislation was written back in the middle 1990s, and I know the author of that legislation, it was carefully and specifically written so that the President couldn't waive the work component of TANF, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. Even though the language is specific and the language is as tight as they could think to write it at the time, the President has decided we are going to provide TANF benefits, but there is not going to be a work component.

Of the 80 different means-tested welfare programs we have in the United States, at least 80 of them, only one required work. All of the hubbub on the floor of the House of Representatives in the 1990s about Welfare to Work, there was going to be welfare reform and people were going to be transitioning from welfare to work, all of that hubbub resulted in one policy, one program that required work: Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. The President suspended the work component.

The President suspended No Child Left Behind. The President supported

and his minions carried out the Morton memos, which reversed immigration law, made up new immigration law, and ordered that they not enforce immigration law against people that apparently didn't make the President feel politically vulnerable.

So that is just part of this. That takes us also, Mr. Speaker, down to ObamaCare. In ObamaCare there have been multiple times that the President has violated the law that carries his name and his signature. The first and the most egregious--excuse me, not the first, the most egregious, was when the President announced some time last year that he was going to delay the implementation of the employer mandate.

Now, the law, Mr. Speaker, the ObamaCare law says that the employer mandate shall commence in each month after December of 2013. That means it starts in January, a month ago. We are into February now. The President has announced he is going to delay it for a year. He has no authority, he has no constitutional authority to delay the implementation of ObamaCare. None. Yet, he extended the individual mandate, delayed the employer mandate.

When the conscience protection was being violated in the rules that were written by the Department of Human Services, he decided every large employer, large employers had to provide contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilizations as part of their health insurance policies, and religious organizations and individuals objected. They said I am not going to be violating my conscience. The law cannot compel me, because of my religious beliefs, to violate my religious beliefs. That is a First Amendment right, the protection of the freedom of religion. But the President insisted even the Catholic Church would have to comply.

For 2 weeks of national hubbub, the President held his ground. Until noon on a Friday, and a lot of these things happen, Mr. Speaker, around noon on a Friday, the President stepped out to the podium and said, I have heard this discussion that religious organizations don't want to provide contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilizations--and abortifacients, Mr. Speaker, are abortion-causing pills. The religious organizations don't want to do this, and so now I am going to make an accommodation to the religious organizations. An accommodation, and the accommodation he made is, he said, I am now going to require the insurance companies to provide these things for free, and he repeated himself, provide these things for free.

So I thought okay, if there is going to be a change in policy, I bet I will see it come back before the floor of the House of Representatives, and I will have an opportunity to debate, perhaps offer an amendment, and vote on this change. Well, Mr. Speaker, I didn't really think that, I just knew that is what the Constitution would require before there could be a change in the law, but there actually was a rule. So I checked the rule. Did they propose a rule change? Did they publish it? Did they go through the administrative procedures requirements in order to get a rule change?

The first thing you do is you go back and read the rule. Did anything change in the rule that compelled the churches to provide contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilizations, as compared to the insurance companies, as the President said in his press conference. No, Mr. Speaker, there was no change in the regulations. The only thing that changed was the President gave a speech, and in that speech, he said religious organizations, you don't have to do this any more. Insurance companies, you have to do this now.

What a reach. What a constitutional overreach for a President to believe that because he spoke, millions would line up and swoon at the very words of a President of the United States who again is going beyond the bounds of the authority vested in him, limited by the Constitution of the United States. That just gives a sample of some of some of the things that are going on, Mr. Speaker.

I bring this up because the President said to Congress: Pass comprehensive immigration reform. He also said if he is not satisfied with the results, if Congress doesn't move fast enough, he has an ink pen and he has a cell phone, and he will just run the government by signing executive orders. That was part of the promise that he made behind me, Mr. Speaker, in his State of the Union address last week.

Well, so some in this Congress think if we try to catch up with the President, we can get along with him, and that's why you see this language here in the preamble of the Standards for Immigration Reform that says our immigration system is broken. Well, it is not broken. What is broken is the trust between the American people and the bond that is required when the President gives his oath of office to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, not take it apart by executive action that we can't catch up with through litigation.

If the President doesn't respect his oath to the Constitution, and if the President doesn't respect the legitimate congressional authority under article 1 that the Congress has, why would he then respect a decision made by a court, especially a lower court, a circuit court. Maybe, just maybe, public opinion would force him to respect a Supreme Court, but, Mr. Speaker, it is unlikely that we will see a case get to the Supreme Court before this President is finally signing off in his last year of office.

I look at the points on this Standards for Immigration Reform, and there are four different provisions. One is border security and interior enforcement. It says that must come first. Of course we know that they would legalize everybody first, and then they are going to try to secure our borders. It says secure our borders and verify they are secure. The difficulty with that is, who is going to decide when they are secure? I would hand it over to the Texas border sheriffs, along with New Mexico, Arizona, and California. I would hand it over to the local government people and let them decide. If the States would certify the borders are secure, if the sheriffs would certify that the borders are secure, and if the county supervisors would certify that they are secure, we would have a pretty good answer as to whether they are secure, but we have heard those promises before. Janet Napolitano made it clear that she thought the borders were secure. Of course, I don't believe that.

When I mentioned earlier in a media program that just the children, the unaccompanied children that are being picked up along our southern border are running up to the numbers where for this year it is going to tally 50,000; 50,000 children, some of them little kids, tiny little kids who are being handed over to coyotes to be brought into the United States so they can qualify for the promise of the DREAM Act--50,000 kids. That is not out of me; that is from the president of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement union, Chris Crane, who is a plaintiff in a lawsuit, by the way, that is stalled and sidetracked over to Eric Holder and other places.

Next point is Implement an Exit/Entry Visa Tracking System. Supposedly these are the broken parts of the immigration system. They are going to enforce the border because something is broken and they need to pass a new law. We have the resources to enforce the law. We are spending over $12 billion on the southern border, and for about $8 billion, we could build a four-lane interstate all of the way from the Pacific Ocean clear down to Brownsville. But then the Entry-Exit Visa System was passed into law. That is the law. It was passed into law in 1996. We have an entry system but not an exit system, so there is no balance of who is here. By the way, if you get that working, who is going to keep track who is here, at least theoretically, and how are you possibly going to enforce that given that you have sanctuary cities and you have the equivalent of sanctuary States and you have an administration that refuses to allow their own people who are hired to do so to enforce the law? I don't know why this is a new piece; it has been the law since 1996. If we can't get that law enforced, why would a new one be enforced if this one is not?

Item number three, Employer Verification and Workplace Enforcement. That is actually pretty good. That is the E-Verify program, and the language defines it. It says they need a workable electronic employment verification system. Now, if you make that

mandatory, you wonder about the freedom of the American people that now have to prove that they are an American before they can go to work. That is a new burden of proof that we haven't had before. I don't want to speak too strongly against that, Mr. Speaker. I would just say instead that my new IDEA Act is a better idea. What it does is it clarifies that wages and benefits paid to illegals are not deductible for Federal income tax purposes. It allows the IRS to come in and do an audit. In that audit, they can run the names of the employees through E-Verify, and if the employer uses E-Verify, they get safe harbor on any violations of hiring people who can't lawfully work in the United States. The IRS can look at that and say you had a chance for safe harbor, you didn't use E-Verify. These employees can't lawfully work in the United States, and you can't lawfully deduct the wages and benefits you paid to them. It is not a business expense to break the law. So the IRS would deny those business expenses for salary and benefits, and they can attach interest and penalty. So your $10-an-hour illegal becomes about a $16-an-hour illegal, and you have voluntary compliance with E-Verify. It is a much better situation. Point number three isn't so bad.

Reforms to the legal immigration system. That is, they want to accelerate legal immigration, Mr. Speaker, and the needs of employers and the desire for those exceptional individuals to help our economy. Well, there is some truth in that, but we are bringing in 1.2 million legal immigrants a year and giving them an opportunity, a path to citizenship; 1.2 million. Now, those folks who want to change all this policy and grant amnesty for everybody that is here, and then open the doors up for an accelerated legal immigration to go on after that, to the tens of millions, and we are not talking about 11 million; we are talking about 11 million times some multiplying factor that is probably closer to three times or more than that say over the next 20 years.

We need to come to a conclusion as to what is an appropriate number of legal immigrants to come into America. I think 1.2 million is plenty generous. I think then we should start to upgrade those applicants so that they are young, they have education, they have language skills, they have learning capacity, they have an ability to simulate into the American culture and the American civilization and contribute and pay taxes so that they carry their share of the load because the day is going to come that they are not.

Then, Mr. Speaker, I take us down to the lower end of this. First, the DREAM Act gets addressed, and it pretty much embraces Dick Durbin's DREAM Act. Of course, I reject that for the sake of this, that, again, it rewards lawbreakers.

But in the final paragraph, the concluding paragraph, it says: ``individuals living outside the rule of law.'' It says, Mr. Speaker: ``There will be no special path to citizenship for individuals who broke our Nation's immigration laws.'' There would be no special path to citizenship.

Well, let me just say that if you put people on a path to citizenship who are in this country illegally while you have 5 million people waiting outside the United States who do respect our laws, then you have given a special path to citizenship. The nonspecial path is for those folks to go back into their home country and line up behind the 5 million who are lined up in their home country today waiting, respecting our laws to come into the United States; otherwise, it is a special path to citizenship.

But they go on and they say: ``that would be unfair to those immigrants who have played by the rules and harmful to promoting the rule of law.'' That is breathtaking in its concept. We are going to provide a special path to citizenship because it would be harmful to promoting the rule of law, except we are going to legalize all of those people that have broken the law. And we are not going to ask them to go back to their home country and get in the back of the line; we are going to let them stay here and it won't matter whether they are in a line or not. They were satisfied to live in the shadows of America-- that is what they came here to do--or else they came here on the promise of amnesty like those kids that are coming across our southern border now to line up for the DREAM Act, 50,000 strong in a year.

``Harmful to promoting the rule of law.'' No. What they are proposing here is destructive to the rule of law.

It goes on further and it says: ``from here on, our immigration laws will indeed be enforced.'' There is another breathtaking statement, Mr. Speaker. Immigration laws from here on would indeed be enforced.

I am very confident, and I have not looked, but I am very confident that I can go into this Congressional Record in the House and in the Senate and go back to 1986 and pull the debate out of the Congressional Record and point to you where time after time a Member of Congress, House and Senate, said, We are going to pass this amnesty act, and from here on, indeed, our laws will be enforced; we will restore the rule of law from this point forward, but first we must grant amnesty.

Those are the words from 1986. Those are the words from this document that was released just last Thursday. And those have always been the myopic words of people who believe in open borders more so than they believe and have reverence for our rule of law, which we still have the opportunity to restore, even from the 86th Amnesty Act, the rule of law.

If we fail to do so here and now, if this amnesty is granted, the rule of law will not be restored within the lifetime of this Republic, 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 9 o'clock and 48 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, February 4, 2014, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 569, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

I thank the gentleman from Illinois for organizing this Special Order here today and for committing one hour of floor time to the discussion of the farm bill and the need to get one passed.

Mr. Speaker, we don't get very many debates on agriculture here in the House of Representatives, and fewer and fewer people actually represent agriculture districts. There has been not so much a migration of people from the farms, although that has happened, but a concentration of people in the cities, and they lose track of where their food comes from and what it takes to produce that food.

So we are here at this point, and I want to start off with the remarks of the gentleman from Illinois with regard to crop insurance. I am going to pull these numbers from memory, and anyone can go back and check them, but they're going to be conceptually accurate and, perhaps, even precisely right.

If my memory serves me, back during some of those years when it couldn't rain--and that existed back in the eighties--it seems to me that, in 1988, we had 13 percent of the producers who actually had crop insurance. Since that time--from that time forward until this modern era--there were disaster payments after disaster payments. For any place that had a drought, for any place that had a flood, there was a discussion in Congress, and sometimes those disaster areas got rolled up together. Let's take a disaster out West and add that to a disaster in the Midwest and add that to a disaster in the South, and there might be a flood and two droughts packaged together with a disaster payment to bail people out.

I remember, when I first came here in 2003, there was a drought out West in Nebraska. And was there going to be disaster money? We looked at that, and we looked at aerial photos. Gee, it looked like here were these really beautiful, green circles from the air, and they were going to be in areas that got disaster payments. You all know what those are if you come from farm country. Those were the pivot irrigation systems. You're not going to have a drought if your irrigation system is running, but in the corners where they didn't have the boom to lay down and irrigate the corners, they were burned out. They said, Gee, we ought to get a disaster for the corner of our 160--the four corners of it--even though we've got a good crop, 200 bushels of corn, underneath the pivot system.

Those kinds of things were discussed here in this Congress, and I want to thank the Representative from Nebraska, Tom Osborne, who also was a pretty good football coach, for saying, This isn't right, and let's get that part correct.

We don't have those discussions anymore because, back in '88, there was the 13 percent who had crop insurance. It's back up to the point now where, I believe, the number is 88 percent due. We suffered through the worst flood in my lifetime in 2011 when the Missouri River ran hill to hill from mid-June until mid-September and flooded out, according to the Secretary of Agriculture, 500,000 acres. 500,000 acres were under water. Of course, all of that was a complete wipeout. You could fly over it, and you could see corn. As we say, you could row corn that was in 3 feet of water and corn that was about a foot and a half tall when it got covered by the flood. We didn't have a disaster payment for that because the crop insurance covered the flood out. In the following year of 2012, there was an epic drought. It was the same situation in that the crop insurance covered it.

In many of these States--and let's start out with my State, which I know--the premium reflects the risk. Now, it shifts from State to State and history to history, but it's hard to do that calculation. You can't do a snapshot of 1 year because, of course, 1 year might be a drought year, and the next year might be a flood year, and the next 25 years might be excellent, and I hope they are. So, if you look over a span of time--a decade is a minimum, and maybe a generation is a better way to look at this--and are able to frame the kind of experience we have with weather, the premium needs to be moved in a direction in which it better reflects the risk, but it has been a very good thing, the crop insurance piece of this.

Then, as I look at this farm bill, I want to remind the people, Mr. Speaker, that, for years, there have been direct payments, direct payments that went in to the producer who signed up per acre--roughly, a $20 per acre payment might be reflective of that era--and we saw this: we saw commodities prices going up, and we saw profitability in agriculture. When that happened, our producers came to us, people like the Farm Bureau, the Corn Growers, the Soybean Association, and they said the time comes when we need to just let go of these direct payments. They came forward and said, Here. Will you take my direct payments? I don't need them.

Hats off to anybody who has got Federal dollars coming into their operations. They gave up direct payments willingly. That's in this bill. It's in this bill, and it makes it permanent, putting an end to direct payments. By the way, in the last farm bill--the 2008 farm bill, it turned out to be--I tried to rename the direct payments then as

the ``conservation compliance payments'' because that's what they actually were. If they existed, I would say ``they are.'' It's a way to say to producers that all of us are invested in the future productivity of our soil. We are going to ask you to be good stewards of the soil, and this is, actually, in many cases, a token incentive that you do that. So that's going by the wayside.

This bill also eliminates several existing programs and rolls into two separate programs a shallow loss and a deep loss program that, I think, is a prudent use of the resources. We also said we are going to cut money out of this ag side, not just the direct payments, but we have dialed this thing down to the tune of $20 billion. There are $20 billion in cuts out of this bill on the agriculture side.

To draw a comparison, Mr. Speaker, one could think of the other part of this farm bill that is not much discussed--I don't know today--which is the jurisdiction of the subcommittee that I chair, the Nutrition Subcommittee. Now, the numbers were that about 78 percent of the previous farm bill went to nutrition and a little better than 20 percent went to agriculture and then some miscellaneous along the way. So we just rounded it. For easy talking purposes, it is 80 percent to SNAP--food stamps--nutrition programs and 20 percent to farmers. We call it the ``farm bill,'' but it is 4 to 1 nutrition. When I came to this town, there were 19 million people who were on food stamps, and we called them ``food stamps'' then. By the time Barack Obama became President, that number was about 28 million people who were on food stamps, and now that number is north of 47 million people--on its way to 48 million people--who are on food stamps. Now, it is partly because this administration believes and has said openly--in fact, I will just quote our Secretary of Agriculture:

For every dollar that you hand out in SNAP benefits--that

would mean food stamps, Mr. Speaker--you get $1.84 in

economic activity.

I've heard Steny Hoyer, the minority whip, say to us:

The best stimulation that you can get--the quickest you can

get in your economy--is food stamps and unemployment checks.

Now, that's an economic development plan for you, isn't it, Mr. Speaker, if you could just hand out more food stamps and hand out more unemployment checks? That's the best bump you can get to grow your economy? What kind of a country are we if they think that's what is going to drive our economy?

People on that side of the aisle resisted their reduction in the food stamp program, and we brought categorical changes into it. So, as it has grown into an over $800 billion program--that's over 10 years, roughly, a number that approaches about $83 billion a year--we have gone from 19 million people a year on food stamps to 28 million people when Barack Obama became President, up now to nearly 48 million people on food stamps, with millions of dollars being spent by the USDA to advertise food stamps in order to get more people to sign up on food stamps--millions--and minions are going out there who are, actually, physically signing them up. That's what is going on.

We don't need to be expanding the dependency class in America. We need to expand the independency class in America, and we want to make sure that we get those resources to the people who need them. That's what this bill does. It changes the categorical eligibility in such a way that those who need those resources still have access to them.

One of those categorical eligibility changes has to do with, if a child qualifies for a free and reduced lunch, it isn't automatic that the family gets food stamps any longer under this bill. People on the other side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, have used that to argue that we are going to kick 120,000 kids off of food stamps. It is not true. That is the most extreme example they can come up with to embellish a number to try to scare people off of the reform that we need. What it really means is, if that number is right, they have to go reapply in a legitimate way. If they are eligible, they are eligible, and they will still get their food stamps.

But they found a little sliver to make an argument that is not the objective vision on what is going on.

We see that EBT cards, the Electronic Benefits Transfer cards, have been used for tattoos. They have been used at the massage parlor. You can see the neon signs that say, ``We take EBT.'' That is just straight up. That is not talking about the 50 percent discount that is the going rate for cash that you can get for your EBT card.

We need to be responsible with the taxpayers' money. We need to move these reforms in place. We have seen our agriculture producers step up and say, I am going to give up my conservation compliance/direct payments. And we reform some of the programs. We keep the pieces in place that we need so that there is a predictability in agriculture.

Our producers need predictability. There is no guarantee when it comes to agriculture. You are taking a risk. But at least we can predict the Federal Government's policy. We need to give 5 years of policy guarantee for our agriculture producers.

We need to start the long march to start to reform the expansion of the dependency class that has been a political calculation on the part of the administration. Do the responsible thing for the taxpayers. And, by the way, slow down on this burden that is being heaped upon those children yet to be born called our national debt.

That is the picture. There is an urgency. Let's get this done.

I thank the gentleman from Illinois for his leadership here.

I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania for a question, absolutely.

In response to the gentleman's question, no, school lunch programs are not.

Reclaiming my time, I would say that there are times when people that are in the political business will intentionally conflate terms and arguments because it suits their agenda rather than informs their constituents, Mr. Speaker. That is what I believe is happening here.

If anyone is looking for proof positive that the school lunch program is not part of title IV--any part of this farm bill--all they have to do is look at the record of the committee and they can see that this person right here, Steve King, offered no amendment to the school lunch program that would have prohibited the Secretary of Agriculture from rationing calories to our kids in the school lunch program.

I wish we had that language for us here on the floor of the House of Representatives. We would have an engaging debate.

In fact, a year and a half ago, if I have got my dates right, the First Lady had an idea that she wanted a Let's Move program to go. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was passed during a lame duck session in 2010 by the then Speaker of the House Speaker Pelosi. They passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. That gave no authority to the Secretary of Agriculture to ration calories to kids in the school lunch program, which is not part of this farm bill, but they did it anyway. Now we are starving kids in school. That ought to be something that outrages the other side. But they will not show any outrage because they defend the First Lady's Let's Move, which, by the way, is a critical service and it was not shut down in the shutdown.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcalls No. 519 and 520, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. Speaker, it's a privilege and honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

I have been listening to the debate first on television in my office and then here from the floor. I would like to first, Mr. Speaker, address this idea of ``regular order.'' I heard a description of regular order that doesn't fit the regular order that I understand from my time here in this Congress. Parts of it, yes, I agree with, but it's not an objective description of what regular order is.

The argument we heard from the gentleman continually was: Go to conference on the budget. Go to conference on the budget. Does the gentleman forget that his party in the other Chamber had refused to even pass a budget for over 1,000 days and that, finally, we had to pass legislation here in the House of Representatives to force it on the Senate to require them to pass a budget in order for them to get their pay, and the political pressure got high enough that they went ahead and passed that? Then in order to comply, so the Senators could get paid, they passed a sham budget, and now we've got a sham argument that says: Go to conference on the budget.

This isn't about the budget, Mr. Speaker. This debate is not about the budget. This is about appropriations. Regular order first for a budget, if you have one. And this is a new experience for the Members that are here on the floor. They have never served in this Congress actually when there was a budget in the Senate before.

But if you have a budget, you do concur with the House and the Senate, and you live by that as a guideline for the authorizations and the appropriations so that we all come together and we live within the means that we've agreed to here.

But that doesn't happen very often in history. It generally happens when Republicans are in control of the House, the Senate and the White House. I can think of no other time that's happened.

But take this budget discussion off the table, Mr. Speaker, because it's not relevant to what's going on here. We're in a government slowdown, and we're in a partial shutdown. And resolving and conferencing a budget isn't going to do a thing to solve this situation that we're in now.

It's irrelevant to any functionality of this Congress that can address this government partial shutdown. It's only a straw man, a red herring to drag out here to divert the attention that needs to be focused on this situation we have

that has to do with, not the budget, but the appropriations process.

The appropriations process, the regular order that I thought I was going to hear the gentleman describe for the benefit of you, Mr. Speaker, and anybody that might be listening in, is what really happens when a Congress functions right, and that is, our 12 appropriations subcommittees each pass their appropriation bill under the guidelines of the authorization that comes from the authorizing committees.

Those appropriation bills come to the floor, one at a time, 12 of them, and then perhaps a supplemental that add up to 13. We bring them to the floor under regular order. We allow the gentleman that was describing this doo-dah description of regular order to us an opportunity to bring as many amendments as he would like. Any Member can do so.

Fatigue sets in. Sometimes a unanimous consent agreement comes along. But every Member has an opportunity to weigh in on each of the components of the 12 different appropriations subcommittees, and then perhaps, as I said, a supplemental.

The wisdom of the American people has, through this republican form of government which, by the way, is guaranteed to us in the United States Constitution, a republican form of government, which means a representative form of government.

And our obligation, Mr. Speaker, to the constituents within our district, is our best effort and our best judgment. And part of that is to turn our ear and listen to our constituents and the people across this country, because, among the 316 million Americans, we have the best answers to everything.

Sometimes we get some not-so-good answers to some things, but it's our job to sort those things out, generate some ideas of our own that are stimulated by those of our constituents and others, and each other, and produce the best product possible to direct the destiny of the United States of America in a trajectory that would make our Founding Fathers proud. That's the legitimate process.

But the gentleman has forgotten, or maybe hasn't been confronted with or experienced a real regular order appropriations process, even though we've done five or six appropriations bills here on the floor of this House in this Congress.

So when we talk about regular order, the regular order would already be, if the appropriations bills were received on the Senate side and acted upon, they would all be done in this House side by now. We've done them multiple times in the past.

And here's what happens, Mr. Speaker. The appropriations bills, the 12, maybe the 13, pass the floor of this House. They get sent over to the Senate, messaged according, as envisioned by the Constitution. They arrive on the majority leader's desk in the United States Senate, Harry Reid.

This is just figuratively speaking, Mr. Speaker. Then they get put in his bottom desk drawer and they stack up in his bottom desk drawer. And this goes on from June, July, even part of August, September.

We get down into September, they're usually all over there, and then Harry Reid will have them stacked up in his desk. And when you get to the end of the fiscal year--they don't move a thing. No appropriation bill comes back here. There's no opportunity for conference on a single one.

They just simply go, they stack up in Harry Reid's desk drawer, Mr. Speaker. And a week or two, or less, between the time that the government would automatically shut down, because on September 30, at midnight, we know, most everybody in America by now, that our fiscal year runs out, and the spending authority expires on the discretionary spending.

Harry Reid pulls those bills out of his desk drawer, a stack like that, sets them up, figuratively speaking again, Mr. Speaker, gets out his black marker and draws a line through any spending he doesn't like, which isn't much, and then he adds on all the spending he does like, which is plenty, and they pass it in the Senate in a stack of--as called now, this little word, Mr. Speaker--a continuing resolution, a continuing resolution, which is the stack of all the appropriation bills the Senate refused to do all year.

They send it back over here to the House of Representatives, and they say, take it or leave it. Take it or leave it. We're not going to talk. We're not going to debate. We're not going to go into conference with you. We are not going to negotiate on the future and the destiny of America. It's take it or leave it, my way or the highway. That's what's been happening.

But in a real process, each appropriations bill would either come back to us with the Senate's objections and amendments, we would have an opportunity to accept it as it is or reject it, and go to conference. We've found ways to solve that in a legitimate way many times in the past.

But under this configuration where we have no--what built the leverage that got us to this point with this continuing resolution that we passed out of this House multiple times, by the way. Republicans in the majority in the House of Representatives have, multiple times, passed all of the appropriations in the form even of a continuing resolution that's necessary to fund the legitimate functions of government, at sequestration levels, minus the money to implement or enforce ObamaCare, which reflects the will of the people of the United States of America.

That is our constitutional responsibility to do that, Mr. Speaker.

I carry this Constitution around in my pocket, and I pull it out and I read it, sometimes several times a day. But this document is, when you read it carefully and you understand and put your mind in the thought process of our Founding Fathers and the folks that put this constitution together and ratified it, you'll understand that these negotiations between the two branches of government, article I, the legislative, and article II, the executive branch of government, these negotiations are expected to take place.

There is an expectation that--first of all, it says here in article I that we shall, that Congress, and the House of Representatives, shall move legislation through the House, through the Senate, concur on that legislation, message it to the President.

If he should disagree, he has an obligation then to veto that legislation and return it to the Congress--this is important, Mr. Speaker--with his objections.

The President is constitutionally obligated to return any legislation that he vetoes to the Congress with his objections. Our Founding Fathers decided you can't have a President making you play pin the tail on the donkey. He's going to have to write down the reasons he objects to legislation, so if the Congress is considering concurring with the President, we can accept his recommendations. And if we disagree, we'll be able to identify our disagreements. That is the very constitutional definition of negotiations themselves, Mr. Speaker.

When there is an offer made, and then the other side of the equation produces a counteroffer, those who made the first offer can either accept the counteroffer, or they can produce another offer and move a little closer to the middle. This can happen one time, two, three, four, an infinite number of times if you had the time. That's between the House and the Senate, but also the Congress and the President of the United States.

And what do we have with the President of the United States, Mr. Speaker?

A President who, as far as I know, the first time in history, a President who's refused to negotiate with the United States Congress. This Constitution directs him to do so, at least when confronted with legislation that he has to choose whether he's going to veto it or whether he's going to sign it or he's going to allow it to be pocket- vetoed after 10 legislative days.

The Constitution directs the President to do so. And the President has said, I'm not negotiating with Congress. Unbelievable to me, Mr. Speaker, that he could take such a position that he'd refuse to negotiate with Congress.

He's negotiating with the Syrians through the Russians. The President has opened up negotiations with the Iranians, whom we've not had dealings with since 1979. I don't know who on the planet the President will not negotiate with except the American people serving here in the United States Congress.

Now, think how difficult it is to do business with somebody that won't talk to you. And I know they had a meeting today, Mr. Speaker. And the report that came out of that was they sat down, they talked, but they didn't negotiate. That's kind of what I expected, to tell you the truth, Mr. Speaker.

So we have a dysfunction. We have a lot of demagoguery. We have a lot of hypocrisy. And I'm hearing it on the other side, and I heard a lot of it here tonight as they rolled out some of their practice buzz phrases.

They said a series of ransom notes, Mr. Speaker. Ransom notes?

Pull your Constitutions out and read it, guys. Excuse me, Mr. Speaker. That's my advice to them, should they be listening, that they should pull their Constitution out and read it. And they should understand that it's not a ransom note when you're working within your constitutional authority, in fact, constitutional directive.

When you stepped down on the floor of this Congress at the beginning of the 113th Congress and you took an oath to uphold this Constitution, it wasn't to vacate your constitutional responsibilities or hand over your vote card to somebody else, or accept some kind of an idea that, because you disagree with the President, you should capitulate to his demands.

How do you capitulate to a man's demands who won't talk to you?

He talks to you through the press and sends out a message that says I'm not going to negotiate with Republicans. I'm not going to negotiate with people in Congress. I refuse to negotiate, and I'm not going to negotiate on the debt ceiling either.

Well, we have this bill called ObamaCare, and ObamaCare is a piece of legislation that was pushed through here by hook, crook and legislative shenanigan. And there are those who say it's the law of the land; you must accept it, and you're obligated to fund it.

Show me where in this Constitution you're obligated to fund something because a previous Congress, on a very partisan, narrow margin, passed the largest piece of socialized legislation in the history of the United States, a Federal takeover of our skin and everything inside it, the government and Federal takeover of our ability to make our decisions, as American people, on our future, on our health decisions, to dictate insurance policies, to dictate that people shall buy a product that the Federal Government either approves or produces. Never before in history has that happened.

It was a manufacture of new taxes that President Obama said were not taxes. And John Roberts and the Supreme Court said, well, you know, they weren't taxes for the purposes of hearing this case, but they are taxes for the purposes of deciding the case.

Then people will say, it's been found constitutional by the Supreme Court. Now you're obligated to fund it.

And I say, no previous Congress can obligate a subsequent Congress. And this Congress cannot obligate the 114th Congress. We're in the 113th, Mr. Speaker. This Congress cannot obligate the 114th Congress or any subsequent Congress.

All we can do is put statutory language in place that is our best judgment at the time, that likely will influence the people that come behind us and cause them to stop and think it over. But it doesn't mean they can't come in and repeal anything that's been passed in the past. And it certainly doesn't mean we're obligated to fund it.

And the House is here with a majority that was elected to repeal ObamaCare and a majority that was elected, I believe, to defund ObamaCare.

I brought the amendment to defund ObamaCare for the first time on February 15 of 2011. My amendment passed. It was detached in the Senate. I'd like to have had it be part of the bill as it came through. I didn't get that done in the Rules Committee this time.

But it happened here over the last week or two, the same thing I asked for then was approved by Rules this time and stuck with the bill when it went over to the Senate.

And so now where we sit is this: the House has said we don't want a government shutdown. We don't want a government slowdown. What we want is a government that's funded in every aspect legitimately, with the exception of the funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare.

That's our stand. If the American people reject that position, let them come to the polls and say so.

So where we sit today, Mr. Speaker, is we have Members of Congress and their staff that are receiving phone calls that are ginned up by the other side, by the stacked language that we're seeing come here. And people are calling in and they're saying, you can't shut something down as big as the government. It would be a disaster.

Well, it's Harry Reid and the President that have brought about this partial shutdown, a certain slowdown. It's Harry Reid and the President.

But it doesn't look to me like it's a disaster. If it was a disaster, they wouldn't have to manufacture a crisis and borrow money from the Chinese to rent barricades to haul them down with a forklift and bring people back who have been furloughed already because of this government partial shutdown and ask them to take the barricades and build barricades around our memorials to our veterans, in particular, the World War II Memorial.

They are borrowing money from China to rent barricades and bringing people off of furlough to put barricades up. And now, today, they're reinforcing barricades around the World War II Memorial and others, not just with yellow tape, caution tape and rented barricades, but now wiring them together, and they're bringing sandbags in and stacking sandbags up around the bases to better stabilize this, and bringing in welded wire mesh, wire that is another barrier for people.

Why?

These memorials have never been blockaded before. They're open 24/7, year-round. They're designed for people to come in, and they're designed for people to be able to go to the memorial at any time. They don't require guards. They don't require staffing. There's no money required to keep the memorials open.

Most of them were built with private money from donations from the American people who want to honor our veterans, especially the World War II Memorial.

To see those buses from Mississippi roll up, see those red-shirted veterans, between the age of 84 and 99, arrive and be able to look at that memorial from a distance but not be able to go into their memorial--

A manufactured crisis. It would save money if the President does nothing but, instead, what we have is a President who has decided to commit, I believe, the most spiteful act in the history of the Commander in Chief in the United States of America.

To manufacture something in order to try to extract the maximum amount of pain by borrowing money to rent barricades to put up barriers, to put more people on to guard--especially our World War II Memorial--and to deny access to the memorial that's built to honor the World War II veterans, many of whom who have never been to Washington, D.C., before and have not seen their memorial before, and to say to them this one chance in your lifetime, your 90-plus years into this lifetime and your chance to come back again is pretty slim, to say you're never going to get to go in and experience this memorial because I want to send a message that I disagree with the decisions of the United States Congress, that is a huge political tantrum and a spiteful act, Mr. Speaker.

I think the right thing is this: honor our veterans--those who fought in all wars, those who put uniforms on at all times. We must be there to open the gates for them every time that a bus pulls up.

I thank and congratulate my colleagues who have stepped up to do so, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor, as many of us do, to speak about the intrusion into a God-given American freedom called ObamaCare.

As I watched the debate go back and forth and listened to my junior Senator declare those of us who don't want to fund ObamaCare to be for anarchy, I would say instead it's this: that if ObamaCare is ever implemented and enforced, we will never recover from it. It is an unconstitutional taking of God-given American liberty.

What we are saying here in the House is we are not going to fund any implementation or enforcement of ObamaCare. If that means that the President would shut the government down in his throwing of a political tantrum, that's not on us; that's on him.

We have always recovered from government shutdowns. There were 57 days of government shutdowns under Jimmy Carter. We don't even remember that.

We will never recover from ObamaCare if it's implemented, and I'm going to stand in opposition to funding ObamaCare.

Mr. Speaker, it's my privilege and honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, especially at this time, as the House and the Senate hurtle towards some type of perhaps collision and sometimes perhaps a conclusion to the drama that's taking place over the funding of our government. And it seems as though the focus of all this comes down on ObamaCare.

But I'd like to first, Mr. Speaker, paint the picture on how we got here. And it's this: the House has consistently passed a budget, and then, the House-passed legislation, essentially, required the Senate to finally, after over 1,000 days, pass a budget over there themselves.

Of course it was a token and, of course it was pushed off to the side and, of course it wasn't something that could be reconciled with a responsible, legitimate budget here in the House of Representatives. But it met the criterion narrowly.

So the functionality of this Congress, which has been in the past, 12 or so appropriations bills passing here, starting here, being messaged over to the Senate where, when things worked right, the Senate picked up those appropriations bills and, through their appropriations process, their hearings, their deliberation, their subcommittee and their committee process, worked their will with the House bill that had been messaged to them.

And one at a time, 12 or 13 appropriation bills would work their way so that they had passed the House in one form and, generally, the Senate in a different form, in which case, a conference committee would be appointed, and House Republicans and Democrats would sit down with Senate Republicans and Democrats, hammer out the differences in one of 12 or 13 appropriation bills, and come to an agreement, send the conference report to the House or the Senate, for passage, in which case it would pass both, be messaged to the President. That appropriation, then, would be concluded and fulfilled.

A responsible government starts with hearing from our constituents, in November, December and January, as we look forward to the end of the fiscal year, which happens next Monday night at midnight--we're working towards getting all of our government funded appropriately.

And in those months of January, it starts up, and then in February and March, the intensity of hearing from constituents and their budgetary concerns, the appropriations hearings in the Appropriations Committee, and then here on the floor under an open rule, bill after bill after bill, a dozen appropriation bills are debated, and the open rule that allows amendments to be brought forward on that to adjust the appropriations up or down, or perhaps transfer some of those appropriations, and the House work its will, the Senate work its will.

We come together and agree on a conference report. We send it to the President. The President signs it, and those departments of government that are funded by that appropriation bill then are given their budgetary responsibility and their spending authority for the upcoming fiscal year.

That's how it has worked in the past. It does not work that way under this dysfunctional setup that exists today.

What happens now in this Congress that we have, Mr. Speaker, is this: the House debates the appropriations bills, 12 of them or so. We have passed several of them at this point in the House. We've sent them over to the Senate.

They go, messaged to the Senate, where they arrive at the Majority Leader Harry Reid's desk. And figuratively speaking, Harry Reid then puts that appropriation bill in his desk drawer and closes the drawer, not to be discussed or heard from again for the balance of the fiscal year. And another appropriation bill goes and another and another and another.

And what you see happen is, we've seen this happen in the past, where we have passed, I remember, under Chairman Jerry Lewis, the Appropriations chair at the time, all of our appropriation bills by July. Messaged them all over to the Senate, where they all would go in Harry Reid's desk drawer.

At the end of the fiscal year, some time about now, or maybe a week ahead of this time, Harry Reid would look around and think, oh, we're facing a government shutdown if I don't get those bills out of my desk drawer.

And so he pulls out a dozen appropriations bills. Each one of them is a collective judgment of the majority of the United States House of Representatives, constitutionally messaged to the Senate, stacks them up and takes his little marker through there, and he draws a line through the appropriations that he doesn't like, and he writes in all of the line items and puts on all the Christmas tree spending that he does like, and he puts in the wish list of the Senators that he wants to help out, so to speak, and some are Republicans and many are Democrats.

He creates this omnibus spending bill. Sometimes we call it omnibus if it doesn't show up at the end of the year. Otherwise, if it's at the expiration of our spending of our appropriations, as it is now, we call it a continuing resolution.

We've been operating on continuing resolutions for too long. And it isn't because of ObamaCare, necessarily, that we're at this point today. The leverage has been created because Harry Reid didn't deal with our appropriations bills.

And furthermore, he's not going to deal with our appropriation bills. He is going to create this crisis so that it increases the leverage that he has in defeating the will of the people, which is

to shut off all of the funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, to put an end to its implementation, to not let ObamaCare become implemented, because--

First of all, I don't agree with the decision made by the Supreme Court. I think it's completely inconsistent to declare a bill to be a tax as it arrives at the United States Supreme Court--excuse me--to declare it not to be a tax as it arrives at the Supreme Court for the purposes of considering the issue of the litigation on ObamaCare, but then to declare it to be a tax as a decision of the Supreme Court.

It can be one or the other. Either ObamaCare is a tax or it's not a tax, but it can't be conveniently not a tax for the purposes of whether the Supreme Court would grant cert, and then conveniently, a tax for the purposes of declaring that it is constitutional. But that's the decisions that were made by the United States Supreme Court.

All of us take an oath to uphold the Constitution, everyone in the House and the Senate and, of course, the Supreme Court as well. And we can't be taking an oath to uphold a decision that no one that I know of in America predicted.

You would think, Mr. Speaker, that of all the constitutional scholars we have that had been writing and reading and thinking and analyzing ObamaCare, that had watched as, by legislative shenanigans, hook and crook, that patchwork of ObamaCare had been jammed through the House and the Senate in a fashion that would not have mirrored any process we had ever seen before, they'd seen the time that the Senate had a filibuster-proof majority.

And I remember going into Christmas Eve, the vote that was taking place over there on the 24th of December, on Christmas Eve, and I remember when the Senate had the ability to delay that vote from 9 in the morning on Christmas Eve morning, December 24, till 9 that night, which truly would have been Christmas Eve.

And I sent the message over there to my Senator and I said, please delay that vote as long as you can. Keep that thing delayed until the last possible minute. If they want to jam this country and give us a Christmas present of ObamaCare so badly that they will sit there on Christmas Eve, keep them there then, and let them miss Christmas with their families because the flights will be gone out of Dulles by then. That's what I asked to happen.

There was a negotiation that took place, allowed an agreement from Republicans that there'd be a couple of votes in January that they wanted on some taxes or something of that nature. So they had a vote at 9:00 in the morning, December 24, that allowed for ObamaCare to move ahead one more time.

And then I wrote back to my Senator, and I said, what do we do now?

And his answer was pray, and pray for a Republican victory in the United States Senate race in Massachusetts, the special election because of the passing of Senator Teddy Kennedy.

None of us thought on December 24, that year, that the following January 18 or 19th--that's very close to the election date--that Scott Brown would be elected as a United States Senator out of Massachusetts.

That is what happened. That was the people in Massachusetts rising up and saying, we don't want ObamaCare. We reject ObamaCare. We'll even go so far as that entirely blue State of Massachusetts, that had a delegation of eight Members of Congress, every single one of them a Democrat, and none of them known as conservative Democrats by the measure that I know.

That's Massachusetts, and they sent us Scott Brown. And they're the ones that had the most example with something that looked like a preview, perhaps, of ObamaCare.

So who knew more than the Bay Staters about this?

Who had the most loaded politics that should have been electing a Democrat in that election?

No, they said, we don't want to see anything that looks like ObamaCare, and we're going to send you a young, fresh Republican whose job it is to help kill ObamaCare. And he came here and began to engage in that effort, and was significant in his role. My hat's off to former Senator Scott Brown.

But, in the end, legislative shenanigans defeated even the voters in Massachusetts' will, and they put legislation through back over from the Senate under that process they call reconciliation. They carved out some, put it into the reconciliation process to avoid the filibuster because they no longer had a filibuster-proof majority. The people had spoken. And then the legislative shenanigans began.

While that was going on, there was a drama here in the House. Now that takes us to March of that year. And the drama in the House was that there were the ``Stupak Dozen'' who said, I'm not going to vote for an ObamaCare piece of legislation that will fund abortion.

So the President made an offer--this is what's reported in the news at least, Mr. Speaker--that he would write an Executive order that would nullify the Stupak amendment, or nullify the ban on funding abortion. And that promise was made by the President before ObamaCare was passed in order to get the votes to get ObamaCare to pass here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

The President of the United States, a former adjunct professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, made a promise to a Democrat Congressman from Michigan, who, presumably, controlled 12 votes of the unnamed ``Stupak dozen,'' who were anonymous, oddly. It's hard to think you're going to control votes if nobody knows who they are.

In any case, the President made a promise that he would sign an Executive order that would nullify some of the language that's in the law. Congressman Stupak took that promise and the former adjunct law professor, President Obama, made a promise that said that the President thought that he could amend law after he signed it into law. Now what constitutional professor would take a position like that?

I dig this up for a little bit, Mr. Speaker, because I want people to understand this piece of ObamaCare legislation is not the will of the people. It never was the will of the people. It's the product of hook and crook and legislative shenanigans. It's done against the will of the people.

And furthermore, Thomas Jefferson, whom both parties revere, once said:

Large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities.

Large initiatives need to be bipartisan initiatives, not completely 100 percent partisan initiatives, which ObamaCare is. And the slender majority that Thomas Jefferson was talking about was a slender majority that he presumed to be a bipartisan majority. If Jefferson had been talking about a partisan majority, it would have been very clear, in my opinion, what he would have said. He would have said that large initiatives should never be advanced on partisan majorities. That's what happened with ObamaCare.

The largest initiative that has been jammed down the throats of the American people in its entire history is ObamaCare, advanced on a purely partisan majority by utilization of legislative shenanigans and hook and crook. That's what got us to this point.

People wonder, Why don't you just throw up your hands, why don't you accept reality? ObamaCare is the law of the land. Let it be. Fund it. Because the people have spoken.

Well, the people had spoken. They spoke when they elected Scott Brown. And in the aftermath of the passage of ObamaCare about March 20 or 21, 2010, the people spoke again that following November. And I remember when ObamaCare passed in the night. I had been battling this thing for days, and I went home about 1:30 or 2 o'clock in the morning, maybe a little later than that, but it was when the business wound down here in the House, Mr. Speaker, and I went home and I thought, I'm going to lay down and I'm going to sleep the sleep of the exhausted. And I'm going to get completely rested up, and I'm going to wake up in the morning and then I'm going to put a plan together on what we do now. Because I knew that the bill was messaged to the White House, and I knew the President was salivating to sign it. Well, he did that within about 48 hours.

I woke up, though, in about 2\1/2\ hours because the wheels were turning and I

couldn't take it any longer. And I drafted the language to repeal ObamaCare. I had that formal request to get that bill handed back to me by the draft people we have here when the door opened at 9 o'clock that morning.

We've been doing battle with ObamaCare ever since. Not only me, but the gentlelady from Minnesota that was down here and led an hour Special Order earlier today has been standing in there. And she ran for President on the issue, Michele Bachmann. No one wondered what she would do if she were elected President. She would have repealed ObamaCare. Louie Gohmert has been putting in hour after hour here on the floor and around this country, doing battle with ObamaCare.

The list of people that deserve credit for stepping up to this fight is long. And it isn't exclusive here in the House, Mr. Speaker. It includes a group of stalwarts in the Senate, led in this latest episode by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who stood on the floor for more than 21 hours and delivered a whole series of arguments against ObamaCare.

But I'll say here's the argument that is at the center of ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, and it is this: ObamaCare is, by my opinion, an unconstitutional taking of God-given American liberty. It takes away our right to manage our health. The most sovereign thing that we have as an American people is our soul. And the eternal nature of our soul is controlled by God and our will. This Federal Government hasn't figured out how to nationalize our soul.

But the second most sovereign thing we have is our bodies, our health, our skin, and everything inside it. It's the second most sovereign thing that we have. And the Federal Government, under ObamaCare, has figured out how to nationalize our skin and everything inside it.

It's a Federal Government takeover of the management of our health where, under ObamaCare, if you walk into a clinic, if you walk into an emergency room, if you apply for government-approved insurance under whatever means that might emerge, when no one really can tell us at this point, the government decides whether you get the insurance, the government decides whether you get a subsidy for the premium, the government decides what kind of research gets done, what kind of treatment one gets.

The government decides if you are worth the hip replacement or the knee replacement or whether you get just painkillers for as long as you can live with a broken hip. The government decides that, not us any longer. We understand that, those of us that have a little bit of gray hair, or maybe have lost some. We understand that. But do the children in our grade schools and in nurseries today understand that?

Mr. Speaker, we know that answer is no. They don't understand that. When these children grow up and they get out of school and they step into adulthood and they have already been brought up under a system of ObamaCare that makes these decisions for them, what happens to their dreams, what happens to their aspirations, what happens to their ability to think big? What happens to their ability to manage their life?

The institutional memory will disappear of the culture and civilization that remembers the glorious time when we could choose our doctor, when the market demand created the insurance policies that suit us, the consumers, when we could shop from doctor to doctor, from clinic to clinic, when we could say, But you know, I want this care for my mother this badly that I think even though she is 85, she needs a hip replacement. Because I don't want to see her die in a wheelchair. That's a different world than we have today.

Mr. Speaker, we've just gotten messaged to us on the CR--the continuing resolution--from the United States Senate, that the vote had concluded over on the other side, down on the other end, through the Rotunda. The Senate has now acted to peel out the ban on funding for ObamaCare and send us back what they would call a clean CR with their changes and provisions, which would include a continuing resolution up until November 15. So it is a shorter-term CR than we offered to them.

But what it says is, We as Senators are not going to let you prohibit the funding of ObamaCare. So, again, we're back to the center and the crux of this. Another dramatic event has taken place here in the United States Capitol. And the drama of this now is in the lap of the House of Representatives, where our Speaker has just received the message of H.J. Res. 59, the CR.

Now we have a decision to make. My message, Mr. Speaker, is this: if 218 House Members hold our ground, if we say we will not fund ObamaCare and we will not fund an appropriation that fails to cut off the funding to ObamaCare, if we hold our ground, we will win.

This contest now that's going on in is a contest of wills. There's a relatively narrow majority in the Senate. There's a little bit broader majority in the House, I believe. And the strength of will is being measured. This is like holding a gun on each other now, standing in a burning building, and deciding who's going to blink. But we can't just let down the hammer and stand there because the building is burning. Somebody's got to walk away from this confrontation and say, I'm going to give you your way.

Well, my message to this, Mr. Speaker, is that we've heard this message over and over again: if there is a government shutdown, House Republicans will always lose in a confrontation with the President. I don't know that that's true. And I don't know if it was even true in 1995 and 1996, when there was a government shutdown that lasted for 21 days.

What I do know is this House sent the funding to keep our government open over to the Senate. With it was language that said there would be no funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare. It happens that's language I wrote and presented here in this Congress in February of 2011.

We have said we want this government to stay open. We want to avoid a shutdown, avoid a shutdown, avoid a shutdown. If we repeat that enough times, it might be sending a message to the Senators that we really don't mean it when we say that we're not going to fund ObamaCare.

I want to send the message, Mr. Speaker, that we do mean it. And I want to send the message that we're going to hold our ground. And I'd like to remind, Mr. Speaker, that there have been a whole series of shutdowns throughout history. And I have a list of them printed here. There were at least five government shutdowns when Jimmy Carter was President. Five of them. Five incidents. One of them was over a nuclear ship of some kind. The longest shutdown he had was 18 days. Does anybody remember those shutdowns from the eighties? Kind of. It didn't change my life, that I remember.

But that was Democrats in majority in the House and the Senate and a Democrat President. Their infighting caused government shutdowns for a total of 57 days--57 days between 1977 and 1981. And sometimes Jimmy Carter won, sometimes the Democrats in the House and Senate prevailed over the President of the United States. All the same party.

So if we don't remember the price paid for a government shutdown, if the inconvenience of it doesn't linger in anybody's memory, I take you to the era of Ronald Reagan, when there were a number of shutdowns under Ronald Reagan--fewer and for a shorter period of time. One of them was over a billion dollars in social spending. Of that billion dollars, the government was shut down for about 3 days. In that period of time, by the way, there was a Republican majority in the United States Senate and we had a principled Republican President, Democrats in the majority here in the House. The Democrats refused to agree with the President and the Senate. It resulted in a government shutdown.

In that shutdown that lasted--in the end, the $1 billion in spending that Democrats here wanted was negotiated down to $900 million dollars. They gave up 10 percent of what they asked for and the government was opened back up again.

So a determined majority in the House of Representatives prevailed to the level of 90 percent of their ask against a Republican majority in the Senate that opposed them and a President who has clearly held his ground in case after case.

It isn't clear who prevails in an issue like this, but I'll say this: the American people will judge our resolve and

our determination. And the determination on who wins and who loses, if that actually matters, will be written by history.

But I say this, Mr. Speaker. If we hold our ground, I believe there will not be a political price for House Republicans to pay. When House Republicans held their ground and eventually caved in 1995 and 1996, some say House Republicans lost that. They lost eight seats in the following election. They did not lose the majority. Six of those eight seats were marginal seats they were likely to lose anyway. So perhaps they lost two congressional seats.

If we don't want to put at risk two congressional seats out of the House Republican majority to stand on the principle that cuts off all funding to implement and enforce ObamaCare, is our fear for our political jobs greater than our love of principle and the people we represent?

I would argue instead that there will not be political consequences for standing on principle and refusing to fund ObamaCare. If there are political consequences, they will be recovered from over time.

But we, Mr. Speaker, can never recover from ObamaCare if it's implemented and enforced. That is the bottom line.

No political consequences will be delivered to the people who stand up for the American people. That's the House Republican stance. That's the Senate conservative stance--that came a little short over here a few minutes ago down the other side of the Capitol. But if we stand together as House Republicans, as Senate Republicans, as principled people who look back at that time and saw that Scott Brown came to the United States Senate because the blue State Massachusetts rejected ObamaCare.

There was a wave election in 2010 that elected 87 new House Republicans--every one of them ran on repeal of ObamaCare. Every Republican in the House and Senate has voted multiple times to undue, repeal, unfund and defund ObamaCare. All of us stand together--it was bipartisan the last time. We had two Democrats that also agreed with us on this CR.

We must stand on principle. If there's a political price to be paid for standing on principle, I say it's worth it. We can recover from any political price, even though I don't believe there will be anything but a political reward; but we can never recover if we allow ObamaCare to be implemented or enforced.

That's my stand, Mr. Speaker. That's the stand that I ask my colleagues to take today, tomorrow, the next day, and every day. If we hold together and we hold strong, in the end the beneficiaries will be the American people and God-given liberty.

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 2 o'clock and 16 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Saturday, September 28, 2013, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

I thank the chairman for yielding me time, and I rise in support of H.R. 3102.

Madam Speaker, I'd like to explain my position with this bit of a narrative. When I came into this Congress a little over a decade ago, I was watching the growth in the nutrition program, the food stamp program--and I'm well aware that it was established to try to put an end to malnutrition in America. Now, it was growing too fast for me at that time. At that time there were 19 million Americans that were on the food stamp program. By 2008, there were then 28.2 million Americans on the program. The cost in 2003 was about $25 billion. The cost in 2008 was $37.6 billion. Today, our number is knocking on the door of 47 million people. From 19 million to 47 million people, from $25 billion to $78.4 billion, and we're watching an administration that has been advancing the expansion of the signup of the nutrition program by spending millions of dollars in advertising to get more people to sign up, and hiring people to go out and recruit people to sign up for more food stamps.

I listened to the testimony before the committee that we had from La Raza that said that food insecurity is now a reason for obesity in America; that people have insecurity about where some of their future meals might come from. Therefore, they tend to overeat when they do get food. And we can help solve this obesity problem by giving an unlimited supply of food stamps, the EBT benefits, to people. Then we will somehow get thinner.

This thing has been turned completely around on its head from a problem of malnutrition to a problem of obesity--all tried by Democrats to solve with the same solution, which is more and more spending into a program.

There won't be needy people that are taken off this. There isn't going to be food coming out of the mouths of babes. This is categorical. This is so that the resources are available to the people that need it, those that are truly hungry.

By the way, this remark that it is a cynical ploy I completely disagree with. This is a sincere effort to manage our budget.

Madam Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, and to do so the day after the anniversary of the tragic attack on America that took place September 11, 2001, and the tragic attack that took place against Americans in Benghazi September 11, 2012.

Who would have believed, Madam Speaker, that a full year would go by and we would still not have the truth, we would still not be to the bottom of the Benghazi events. We still wouldn't have a timeline, we wouldn't have a chronology, we wouldn't have an autopsy report from Ambassador Stevens and others, we wouldn't have the testimony of those who were wounded and those who survived, and we wouldn't have the full story from the administration. And we wouldn't have yet the confession from the administration that they willfully, I believe, misinformed the American people and the United States Congress.

And so the individual who has taken the lead on this Benghazi series of events and called for a special select committee to investigate is the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf), and I am very pleased to yield to the leader on the Benghazi incident here in the United States Congress, Mr. Wolf of Virginia.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Virginia and ask if the gentleman could stick around for a moment. I have a couple of questions that occurred to me as I was listening to his presentation. I would like to ask for the record, and your knowledge of the Benghazi incident goes more deep than mine does, and I think probably as deep as anyone in the Congress does, Mr. Wolf, and so I wanted to ask: Do we know how many survivors there were from the Benghazi incident?

The information you provided here, especially information as to the numbers of survivors and the numbers of wounded, where they were picked up, and by a Libyan plane, not a U.S. plane, was that information that was forthcomingly delivered to you or the American people by our administration, or how did you learn those facts?

Do we know, has any of that information been entered into the record under oath, so far as witnesses are concerned, before the five committees that have jurisdiction?

And so, Mr. Wolf, is it possible that the Select Committee on Intelligence could have had testimony before the committee, and because they are bound by the confidentiality of classified information, that even if they learned something from an open source that also confirms something that they learned in a classified setting, they now are prohibited from speaking about that outside of that room?

Let me pick up on that. I have a measure of classified rating as a member of the Judiciary Committee. Those are the rules that we are bound by when we go into a classified setting. What we speak about there, what we learn there, even if we know it from an open source before we go in, or even if we learn about it from an open source after we go out, we cannot speak to that topic outside of the room.

That's one of the reasons why we need the select committee. Even if all of the information we need to know happens to be gathered by the special Select Committee on Intelligence, that doesn't get that information that can be declassified declassified, that doesn't get it correlated with the balance of the information that is public knowledge, or the information that has come before the other committees.

Another question: Do we have any autopsy reports from Ambassador Stevens or any of the other three fatalities that were killed in that action a year and a day ago?

Do we have a timeline that sets down events that took place from its inception to its relative conclusion in the operations and the cleanup that also correlates with a timeline of the situation room in the White House, and who was in the White House and what they knew and when they knew it? Are you aware of any timeline that correlates that?

I thank the gentleman from Virginia. That's my understanding as well. And this colloquy that we've had here, I think, illuminates the questions, some of the questions that can be answered with a special select committee that would be addressing the Benghazi incident.

And a full year and a day has gone by. The trail gets more cold every day. And just yesterday, I saw the announcement that the administration is going to make some of the survivors available to Congress, finally, after a full year, so that we can have some dialogue with them.

I just envision the 9/11 Commission that sat around the table. They swore in witnesses. They built a public record. The American people watched in on all of those deliberations so they could draw their judgment on whose version was the most accurate and the closest to the truth.

When the 9/11 Commission report came out, it was a bound book about that thick. I read it. A lot of us read it. But that was the definitive response to the United States Congress that said these are the facts as we can determine them, the reasoned judgment of the United States Congress.

That also happened on the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President Kennedy. I think that the Benghazi incident deserves a full investigation in that fashion.

I applaud the gentleman from Virginia for taking the lead on this, and I'll certainly support it all the way to its conclusion.

I thank the gentleman from Virginia. And reclaiming my time, I appreciate having the dialog to this extent.

And I know that the gentleman from Pennsylvania has a real focus on Benghazi. We've had some of this dialogue before, and so I would be very pleased to yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Perry).

I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania and appreciate his presentation here on the floor. I'd ask if he could stick around for a moment because I'm trying to do a little research of my own here, and that is that there's a patchwork of information that's been gathered together.

Among the American people, they'd have collectively, within their memory and their records, all that's publicly available. If we could go out and pull it together and consolidate it, then we could organize it.

This Congress is similar to that. We're representatives of the American people. And from each of our districts, each of our sets of responsibilities and access to information, we can put together some of the puzzle here.

But it's hard to put together a puzzle if you don't have the picture that's on the box. This administration has the box, with the pieces, and the picture on the box of the puzzle of what actually happened in Benghazi, and they knew it almost in real-time. And they have been meting out the information, accepting or admitting to information as it was forced upon them thanks to the media, thanks to people that have done real research.

I recall a statement made to our gathering in our meeting that there weren't any wounded from the Benghazi incident out at Walter Reed Army Hospital. One of our Members went out there and hung around the cafeteria until he found out otherwise and made personal contact and had deep conversations with at least one individual that was a survivor of Benghazi that was in a long-term rehab, Walter Reed. And so that's the level that we have to go to to get an admission.

I wanted to ask the gentleman from Pennsylvania just a series of questions that clutter my mind. Have you seen a list of the survivors of Benghazi, those survivors that Mr. Wolf talked about that were picked up on the Tarmac at the airport in Benghazi and flown out by a Libyan plane?

Do you know the name of any of those 30-some survivors?

And have you seen a timeline that shows what happened in Benghazi from beginning to end, one that is credible, that you have confidence in?

Open-source timeline. Have you seen any timeline of the Situation Room in the White House?

Just wondering. When the assault went on in the compound that took out Osama bin Laden, and I would ask the gentleman, did you see any pictures from inside the Situation Room, and did you see a timeline of the events that took place on that assault?

Exactly. And as I draw a comparison to Benghazi and the takedown of Osama bin Laden, those circumstances would have been similar, except that we initiated the operation against Osama bin Laden, so I presume there were some people that got invitations to go into the Situation Room and be there. We saw the looks of worry and concern on their faces. I remember the President there in front of it, Secretary Clinton was there, and others in that setting.

But we have no visuals of who was in the Situation Room during Benghazi. We have no timeline of who came into the room, who was in the room, who left the room or when. And in that list would be when the President came, how long he was there, and when he left.

We don't know the answers to that, even though everybody that was in the Situation Room would have known when the President arrived. They would have known when he left. They would have remembered precisely all dialogue that came from the President and almost all that went to the President.

That's how I envision it. Would you envision that the same way, Mr. Perry?

And so the American people need to know this. Do you have any knowledge of who had custody of the body of Ambassador Stevens from the moment he was killed until such time as he turned up at the hospital in Benghazi?

I would agree. And the individuals that delivered Ambassador Stevens' body to the hospital should be available to us. We should have been able to put them under oath and gather the record of what took place there. We don't know who had custody of Ambassador Stevens' body. We just know his body showed up at the hospital.

And the balance of that is conjecture, although we've seen at least one picture of him being carried through the streets in a vertical way, with no knowledge of whether he was alive or dead at that time. Most believe that he was dead at that time, but we just simply don't know.

And can you imagine if it's your family member who had gone through this, and to be locked out from the truth, if you'd lost one of the four lives that we lost in that, or if you're one of those that is wounded and has been muzzled.

The argument came out yesterday that the administration asserts that they have not commanded people to be muzzled or to be quiet about what happened in Benghazi, yet there's the intimidation factor. If your top officers lean on you and say, You've already taken a confidentiality oath, you better stick with that confidentiality oath.

As a former member of the armed services, if you're bound by confidentiality and you've already taken the oath and then your commander, your superior comes to you and says, You've been involved in an incident, and you're bound to that confidentiality, would you honor that, Mr. Perry?

Do you believe that the attack by our enemies on our Ambassador and the other victims was a planned attack or a spontaneous eruption?

Do you believe that the administration knew in real-time that it was a planned attack on our Ambassador and an assassination attempt?

Do you think Susan Rice knew when she went before the five television networks the following Sunday?

I would ask the gentleman from Pennsylvania if he attended the classified briefing Monday at 5 o'clock.

What level of confidence did that give you when you see Ambassador Susan Rice there to lead the briefing?

And I would agree wholeheartedly, Mr. Perry, and end this one remaining component of this topic that I think that you alluded to somewhat in your statement. The question is: What was Ambassador Stevens doing in Benghazi?

We've seen the announcement that came out last night or today that our administration is funneling weapons now into some elements of the Free Syrian Army. I'm concerned that those elements are the Muslim Brotherhood elements of the Free Syrian Army. But they have now announced that they're finally getting some resources in there. If that was the plan and the strategy, to funnel weapons into the Free Syrian Army a year ago, that would have been a better strategy because the Muslim Brotherhood hadn't completely taken over that operation then.

But some have speculated in the media--and we don't know because we haven't had a select committee that brought all this information out-- that that was part of the business that may have been taking place in Benghazi. I don't have confirmation that that is the case. And I would ask the gentleman from Pennsylvania if you have seen any evidence that that might be the operation that was taking place and the reason that Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi that day.

Denied a straight answer to that.

Denied any answers.

So what we know is that the administration immediately announced that it was a spontaneous eruption of a protest over a video. How they ever found that information to even be able to tie it to it because it's completely disconnected and illogical, but they sent Susan Rice out before the American public and on five networks she gave the same story. And now she's been awarded with the confidence of the President to advance her even more within this administration and sent before the House of Representatives in a classified setting to lead us in the briefing on potential Syrian engagement.

So we know it wasn't a video. Do we know if the individual who actually produced that video is yet out of jail? Do you have any information?

And the last information I had was that he was still in

jail. That's been some weeks ago. But I think he's a person you might be able to identify as a political prisoner at this point. It's unlikely that he would be in jail for his not meeting the parole requirements for this period of time except for the politics that he got wrapped up into, Madam Speaker.

All of these things that are inaccuracies and some of them outright dishonesties. There's been no question that this administration went out and willfully misinformed the American people. They did so in open source setting, the President's dialogue directly to the United Nations and multiple oblique references to a video. They knew in real-time that it was a planned attack. There's a reason why we know that, and I know Mr. Perry knows that reason.

I ask you if you can tell us here why we know that it was a planned attack against our U.S. Ambassador.

I recall a message that came out from the administration that Libya is a highly armed country and people walk around with AK-47s or else they've got them very handy so, if there's a violent demonstration, that they can grab their AK-47 and run to the sound of not the guns but the demonstration.

I don't disagree that that's a possibility in Libya. I know it was a possibility in Iraq with the armament that they have or the weapons they have in their homes. But we also know that there were RPGs there. We know that there were mortars there.

We know that there were two locations. The first location was where the attack took place, and then there was a fallback location. One was the compound and one was the annex. We know that there were mortar rounds dropped in on the secondary location. It looked like, the sequence, that they had already dialed in that secondary location as a target. If that's the case, not only was it a planned attack, but it was a planned attack with intel that had the secondary location, the alternative location where they would retreat to once attacked, and the primary location already set up, the mortars zeroed in on that.

Does that fit with what you know from a military background, I would ask the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

If the gentleman were going to set up a mortar and zero in on a target, what would be the minimum number of rounds that it would take to have confidence that you can zero in on the top of a building?

I would ask the gentleman, if the third mortar round was the fatal round for two of our brave Americans, would that indicate that that mortar had been set up and planned in advance?

And we would have known that in almost real-time in the Situation Room in the White House, would be what I would say, and yet still people went out and made the story that it was a movie. And then after the story of the movie began to break down, it became, well, it was actually a spontaneous response and people came running with the weapons that they had.

We've gotten more truth out in this dialogue that we've had here in this past 45 minutes on the floor of the House of Representatives than has willingly been brought forward by this administration.

I have said that Benghazi is worse than Watergate. I think that's a very easy position to hold in that Watergate was a burglary that the President found out about afterwards. It was wrong for President Nixon to seek to cover that burglary up. It cost him the Presidency and it cost America dearly in the events of history that unfolded from that, but this is something that goes deeper and worse.

I believe it was a planned assassination attack on our Ambassador, and I believe that we had a whole group of heroic Americans who conducted themselves very well and they deserve to be identified, if they want to be, and they deserve the respect and appreciation and the honor that the American people would like to give them.

The best thing we can do for the memories of those that are lost is to provide the full truth that goes outside that that must be classified. As history moves on, classification changes because of relevance of need for it to remain secret also changes.

So perhaps today we can pick up the momentum to get those final signatures on the Wolf resolution, get to the point where we can convince our Speaker that we need to have this special select committee to investigate Benghazi, that it incorporates the top people from the five committees that have jurisdiction to do those kind of hearings with a significant budget where we can make sure that it's well staffed and also subpoena the people that we need to put that record out into the public eye and the public ear, record that record and build that and put it into a bound copy, a version which says, This is the reasoned judgment of Congress. These are the facts as they can be gathered, and that has been scrutinized by the public in real-time.

If we do that--we can draw our conclusions; historians will be able to

draw their conclusions--we can do honor to those who lost their lives, gave their lives for us. We can do honor to those who have suffered serious wounds, and we can do honor to those who were in that conflict. And we can clean this up to the point where all of those that serve us in the Foreign Service and put their lives on the line--and there have been, by my recollection, eight Ambassadors who have lost their lives in the line of duty or died while in service of our country over the course of the history of the United States--Ambassador Stevens the most recent, the most violent, but also the one that they have the most questions about.

This was going to be an open administration, one of the most transparent in history. And now we have the Secretary of State who presided over this, who was the lead voice, the one who should have given us the most direct response, has not given us a full testimony. She did appear before a Senate committee and it was a limited amount of testimony, but she has not come clean with this.

As we see this, the situation of the coverup of the facts of Benghazi, we are also seeing the people that are engaged in this that do know the facts asking for an even higher level of responsibility in leadership, in fact, all the way to the White House seems to be the direction that the former Secretary of State would like to take. I'm going to suggest, Madam Speaker, that this can't happen in America. You cannot have someone who covered up something worse than Watergate find a path to go back to the White House and then put this country back under another shield to hide information, a coverup. The American people deserve the truth.

One of the strengths that we have as a Nation is because we have been willing to face the real truth, face the real realities, and brace up and take on the enemies within the world. The people that serve this country, and do so with dignity and honor and nobility, are those in uniform. But it isn't only those in uniform. It's those that are in the CIA. It's some of the civilian contractors that have served in our military that are also part now of civilian security detail. There are those in the State Department that know they're out there on the edge and on the end. We need to honor all of them by bringing the truth out.

There are many people, especially within the State Department and the CIA, who are sick at heart because they know the real truth. We need to give them an opportunity to bring that real truth out.

I would be happy to yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Reclaiming my time, I will just say a few more words, Madam Speaker.

I sat through a series of briefings over the last week or a little better in different places around the world. In one of those briefings, one of our Special Operations Forces personnel made a point that they were ready to go to Benghazi. Now, there's nobody there that trains that isn't ready. Nobody is reluctant to step in and serve. No matter how dangerous a mission, no matter what the prospects are of success, if there are Americans in trouble and they are given the green light-- and that's the order to go into battle--they don't hesitate. They don't shrink back. They don't think, ``I wish I wasn't here.'' They train for that. And as they train for that, there is no hesitation.

So we should always know that our military men and women, our security personnel, there is no hesitation on their part. They wanted to be there. That's why, when they got the order to stand down at the third time, they went anyway because these were brethren that needed to be protected.

I yield to the gentleman.

Well, reclaiming my time, it appears to me that there was a political decision that was made in the Situation Room in the White House, and that political decision was: We're in a tough, tight, reelection battle. This is September 11. We are less than 2 months before the election date. This could become a whole pivotal issue that the election is decided upon. Let's see if we can slide this thing down and tamp it under the rug and maybe it will go away. Maybe it won't be as big or as bad as we fear that it is. That is the question that comes back.

There is a time in this job to do your duty. There is a time in this political arena that we're in that you set aside politics. There is a time when you look at your reelection and you decide, My job here in this moment doing the right thing is more important than any prospects of how people will vote 2 months from now or a year or more from now. That's that sense of duty.

That's why we take an oath to uphold this Constitution. We all stand here on the floor of this House and take this oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. The President does so. The executive personnel do so.

When I look back through history, I can think of no time that our leadership in the White House has decided that the political calculation was more important than the lives of an Ambassador that had an opportunity to be saved. And maybe we would not have been able to save the Ambassador. Maybe we could have saved two of the others that were killed later in that operation. But we could have at least been there to send that message and to intimidate. And we're now a year and a day later. The press has identified some of the perpetrators. They have gone to Benghazi and sat down and had lunch and interviewed them. There are at least three media networks that have interviewed one or more of these perpetrators. If we know who they are and justice was going to be brought to them, why hasn't that been the case? Why hasn't this administration acted?

Meanwhile, they will tell us they know exactly how to put a precision strike in on Assad in Syria to send just the right message that won't tip the balance of power and change the result of the civil war in Syria, but it will give him the message that he won't use weapons of mass destruction again. They have enough intel to apparently do that, but not enough intel to just follow the reporters around in Benghazi and collar the people that they talk to. That would be just that simple.

Furthermore, the intel that seems to have identified the elements of the

Free Syrian Army, I'll just say a few words about that that I've gathered as I have circumnavigated this globe and sat down in a whole series of meetings that took place that put the pieces of the puzzle together on the intel with Syria and Egypt and others.

Just on the Syria side, we had a Free Syrian Army that emerged. It emerged as a popular uprising against Assad for his cruel and evil dictatorship of his people and for killing some of his own people even then, his political enemies. And the Free Syrian Army emerged. So they should have easily been the people that we supported.

Well, as that battle went on, they were taking over different areas within Syria, tactical objectives and communities and cities and large geographical areas of Syria. And at a certain point, the Muslim Brotherhood stepped in. They took over some parts of the Free Syrian Army. They set up an operation to essentially sacrifice the leader of the Free Syrian Army. He was captured in an operation where he was sacrificed. They took him out of command. His successor commander now has been marginalized and pushed off to the side.

And the Free Syrian Army--the knowledge that I have--is now controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood and other radical Islamist entities, including al Qaeda. That is the entity that we now have good enough intel that we are starting to send supplies and military supplies into.

Those two entities, Assad and radical Islamist components, which is a large component of the Free Syrian Army, they're the bad guys. They're both our enemies. Yet the administration is in the business now, a year after that should have been happening in an aggressive way, of arming some of the wrong people.

It's not that we didn't have good choices. There still are good choices. There still are good people in Syria and outside Syria that will step forward that want to have a secular Syria, a Syria that has freedom of religion, a Syria that is run by the people of Syria. Those elements are still there in Syria and around Syria--at least 2 million Syrian refugees. That force can be put together. It takes longer than firing a cruise missile into Damascus and picking a target to send a pinprick message. It can be done, but I'm not confident that this administration has identified our friends.

What I have seen is that, when we've aligned with anybody in the Middle East, it's been the Muslim Brotherhood. We've had 2\1/2\ years of the Arab Spring; and in every break that has changed the power within the countries of North Africa and the Middle East, every break has gone in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, except one. That is now, when the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt under Morsi. Thirty to 33 million people came to the streets in a popular demonstration--the largest demonstration in the history of the world--to unseat Morsi because they don't have a constitutional way to impeach him. They didn't have a way to arrest him. The only thing they could do was go to the streets and demand that he be removed from power.

Our administration sent a message before Morsi came to power that Mubarak had to be gone yesterday--remember that word? ``He needs to be gone yesterday.'' Well, that upset the balance of power in Egypt. That helped Morsi come to power. Morsi squeaked by by winning an election with 5.8 million people voting for him out of 83 million or so Egyptians altogether. Not exactly what you would call a majority of the people supporting Morsi--Morsi's complete incompetence, but also his very bold moves to consolidate power within Egypt to where it became clear that there was not going to be another election in Egypt and that the Muslim Brotherhood was going to impose shari'a law. And you start seeing that happen.

Well, 30 to 33 million people in the streets of Egypt, and the Egyptian military stepped forward to support the popular uprising that took place. Now they have laid out a time line, a roadmap to write a constitution, put a constitution out on a public vote to ratify and then to elect a president and a civilian government. And General Assisi has pledged to turn over this military control of the Egyptian Government to a newly elected, legitimate civilian government. That time line is a good time line. It's a good commitment that has been set up and it's a good result.

The problem we have is that our administration was against Mubarak and helped push him out of power. That helped open the door for Morsi, who came in--one of the Muslim Brotherhood. And it's clear, this new leadership, the interim President of Egypt, General Assisi, commanding the military--and also, by the way, they have the support of the Pope of the Coptic Christian Church in Egypt--all of that, the new forces are clear. They oppose the Muslim Brotherhood.

The struggle within the Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, radical Islam, radical and violent Islamist groups working against the free people in that part of the world, we need to be on the right side of everyone, not on the wrong side of everyone. And the administration is going to have to turn their course around in Egypt and get behind the new administration and support new elections and a new constitution.

I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Well, I would just say to the gentleman that he has pointed out a stark contradiction in our policy. Eleven or 12 times of alleged, at least, weapons of mass destruction used against the Syrian people. I'm going to suggest that this push now is because some of the people that want those elements of the Free Syrian Army that I described to succeed are saying, Help us out by landing a strike or two in on Assad. That's my guess.

But with regard to justice for the people that perpetrated the Benghazi incident against our Americans and our American Ambassador, that justice needs to be delivered. We know who some of those people are. And it's irresponsible of this administration to shut information down to the United States Congress, to the American people, and to fail to act when they have a clear act of war committed against the United States on U.S. territory.

{time} 12:45

I'm aware that the clock has ticked down here to the end.

I want to thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for coming to the floor. I'm sure that he wasn't aware that this wasn't choreographed. It was a spontaneous eruption of protest calling for the truth to come out and a light to shine on Benghazi.

I thank the gentleman from Virginia for his leadership on this, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back the balance of my time.