Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 281 I inadvertently voted ``yes'' when I intended to vote ``no.'' I support the underlying sugar program contained in the Farm Bill (H.R. 1947) and should have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege of being recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. I won't, at this time, take up all the issues that were raised in the previous 45 minutes or so, Mr. Speaker. Instead, I'd like to talk about two topics, though, and one of those topics is the topic of the farm bill which historically, in a sad way, failed here on the floor of the House of Representatives within the last hour or so, hour and a half.

The first thing I want to say about that is that the chairman of the Ag Committee, Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, has conducted himself in a fashion that is deserving of and he receives my admiration and should receive that of his constituents and the people of this country.

One of the most difficult balances to achieve in any bill that we produce here in Congress is that 5-year--we call it the ``farm bill''-- the 5-year farm bill that has roughly 80 percent nutrition in it and about 20 percent agriculture in it. And each 5 years, we try to write the best formula and look into the crystal ball for the next 5 years as well as we can, and it takes the chairman of the Ag Committee, which is the least partisan of the committees here on the Hill, to direct the committee staff--which are very experienced and some of the best staff people we have here on the Hill--to work with the ag staff of the Democrat side, or the opposite party, and work with the ranking member to try to bring together such a variety of issues that have to do with sugar, dairy, crop insurance, nutrition and the qualifications for nutrition, piece after piece of this.

It's like a huge accordion, and the chairman of that committee has got to make decisions on each component of that huge accordion to try to get it lined up in a way that if you go a little too far into the necessary reduction in the food stamp side, you lose votes over here on the Democrat side. If you don't take enough out of there, you lose votes on the Republican side. If you don't take enough money out of agriculture, you lose it over here on some of the conservative side. And on the other hand, if you don't have enough subsidy, you lose votes on the Democrat side.

This is a very difficult balance, Mr. Speaker, and the marriage between the farm bill and the nutrition component of this, or the agriculture component and the nutrition component that we erroneously call the ``farm bill'' here because of history, that marriage was created out of necessity because the farm program could not be passed on its own. There were too many opponents to that, and the nutrition program had too much opposition on its own. And they married the two together, and each 5 years or so--and it hasn't always happened in 5 years. I don't know when it's ever happened perfectly--it's been dialed together as closely as possible and cooperation was asked from Democrats and Republicans to finally come together and pass a bill.

Frank Lucas put that together as perfectly as I think it could be done. I think, Mr. Speaker, that he was a maestro in the way he orchestrated all of this. And I watched as we went through the committee markup. We did one last year and couldn't get floor time to debate a bill. And so the work of the committee wasn't necessarily wasted because we started again this year. We began to put the pieces together again. We had a long markup of the bill, an extended markup of the bill, not as long as it was the previous year, and the pieces came together.

Here's what it needed: it needed to have a strong, bipartisan support coming out of committee before it was going to get floor time, and it needed to have a prospect, a reasonable prospect, of 218 votes here on the floor of the House before that floor time would be granted. And as we have seen from the Speaker, he has consistently said that he wants to see the House work its will.

Now, he let that happen on a continuing resolution in January, or I'll say February of 2011, and we did 92 hours of debate here on the floor under an open rule. And every aspect of the budget was the House working its will, and that was the longest and most expressive way that I have seen this House work its will.

But the Rules Committee here on the farm bill that came out of the Ag Committee allowed a full series of amendments here on the floor. The chairman spoke to that number. I think he said there were over 100 amendments here on the floor. And, yes, there was an agreement made under unanimous consent to pass a group of them that were not contentious, ``en bloc'' as we say. I think there was a real sincere effort to work a bill out here on the floor that would come to a conclusion that received 218 votes.

Today, Mr. Speaker, we saw an example of when that didn't work, when an amendment or two or three went on that were more of an objection to that careful and delicate balance that had been put together by Frank Lucas. In the end, when the votes could not come together--in a very rare thing--a 5-year bill--that actually has been 6 years since we passed one--failed here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Mr. Speaker, I won't forget this day. I hope that this Congress, I hope the American people, and I hope, especially, the constituents of Frank Lucas remember the job that he has done. I don't ever remember seeing anybody in this Congress work so wisely, so honestly, so justly and so carefully to put together something that had to be so carefully balanced to have a glass of cold water thrown in his face is what happened here, I think, on the floor today.

So I wanted to express my regret that the farm bill failed here today, and my appreciation for Frank Lucas, for the subcommittee chairs and the ranking members that worked with us on this. Those that gave their word and kept it, I thank all of them. And Mr. Speaker, I'm hopeful that the day will come that that work that has been earned is exonerated by a vote here on the floor of the House. In either case, I want the Record to reflect my opinion and my appreciation for Frank Lucas.

We've had a big week here, Mr. Speaker. In this big week and this big day that I'll just call yesterday, I look back on it after a full day and I've wondered how one could actually do all of the things that were accomplished yesterday. I just want to run through that narrative because it's fresh in my mind. And that is that yesterday we did the longest press conference in the history of Congress. I don't know what competition there might have been for that--now, who would want to have a long press conference? Well, somebody that wanted to have a long time to air out a huge issue, and the issue was immigration.

I have believed for some weeks now--in fact, 2 or 3 months--that the machinery of this Congress was set up to push immigration--and I'll call it ``comprehensive immigration reform,'' which is of course the euphemism for amnesty--through this Congress faster than the Congress could adjust to it, learn about the policy within the issues, and faster than the American people could learn about it and weigh in. We always need to move at the pace of the American people so that they have a chance to let us know what they think and we have a chance to digest that policy and make those decisions.

This immigration issue was moving too fast. I believed, and I believe that it was accelerated too quickly in the United States Senate. I believe that today. It's moving too quickly without enough debate. It's too big a decision to be made. I believed, and I believe that it's still moving too quickly through the House of Representatives.

I would point out that there was a Gang of Eight in the Senate--there remains a Gang of Eight in the Senate--that had been meeting in private and holding some press conferences, talking about the things that they were attempting to do, that finally rolled out a bill. I believe it was rolled out at 844 pages long.

The debate and the markup that took place in the Judiciary Committee in the United States Senate was relatively long. There were a good number of amendments that were offered. But most of those votes--some might even say all of those votes--just came down the lines of whether they were part of the deal or whether they weren't part of the deal. So it looked like the Gang of Eight had a deal going into the Judiciary Committee markup. They certainly came out of that with their deal intact, and it's to the floor of the United States Senate today. That's fast and fast track.

While that's going on, the attention of the American people on this issue has been split between the United States Senate and the House. There has been a working group, a bipartisan working group, in the House also. In the Senate, it's four Democrats and four Republicans in the Gang of Eight. In the House, I learned not that long ago that the working group was four Democrats and four Republicans. I also learned that the Speaker encouraged their work, and I learned that they were working in secret for perhaps the last 4 years.

Well, it was in secret. I have, I believe, served more time in the seat, listening and hearing immigration information and reading through reports, probably than anybody else on my side of the aisle over the last decade--although there are two or three that I think have a high level of expertise on immigration policy.

My antennae aren't that weak here, Mr. Speaker, that I'm not picking up the signals of what's going on behind closed doors. We talk, we flow through here to vote, we meet with each other, but I didn't know that there was a secret committee working here out of the House of Representatives that had the blessing of the Speaker. I didn't know that until it was announced by the press some weeks ago. And the secret committee that didn't admit to its existence, some of them facetiously spoke about it as ``that secret committee'' even though they finally admitted--and the press, I think, ferreted

this out--that they were on that committee. This committee of four Republicans and four Democrats in the House of Representatives that was secret--now it's not a committee of eight any longer, it's a committee of eight minus one, at least as far as I know--their ability to produce a bill seems to have been stalled here in this Congress. I'm not sorry about that.

About the same time that conclusion may have been drawn, I heard our Speaker, I believe it was 2 weeks ago on Friday at his press conference, say he hoped to see immigration legislation pass out of the Judiciary Committee in the month of June. Well, that was a surprise to me. And when the announcement came shortly thereafter that we should clear our schedules for this week and next week as members of the Judiciary Committee to prepare for a markup on immigration, I saw that as a green flag that was dropped that moves the immigration policy more quickly here in the House of Representatives than I'm comfortable with.

But I do not criticize the conduct of our chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Bob Goodlatte is one of the more astute people on policy that we have in this Congress. He is a seasoned and knowledgeable and smart legislator, and he sees the pieces that are moving and understands what he needs to do to move the right pieces. And I have served with him on two committees now for more than 10 years.

And yet the pace that's going through this Congress may be a wise one. It may be a wise one if enforcement first is what emerges here from the House of Representatives, and if the bill in the Senate can be slowed down or stopped in the Senate.

The consensus that I hear among the Republican Conference in the House of Representatives is this, Mr. Speaker: Stop the bleeding at the border. Shut off the bleeding at the border. Close the border. Get that done. And when you get that done, then come back and talk about the other things.

I'd make the point that when I came here a little more than 10 years ago, I said then let's stop the bleeding at the border. We've got to close the border. I came to this floor, and when people said, well, we can't--I've advocated long that we should build a fence, a wall and a fence on our southern border. And that fence, wall and fence that we can build on the border would be what will help to secure our border. I agree that we would add to that sensory devices, vibration sensors, motion detectors, you name it, add all that to it. But you simply cannot have enough border patrol agents to control 2,000 miles of border with the conditions that we have. They have to rotate shifts, they get their vacations, there's time off. It takes a lot of people on payroll to have enough people on the ground. And we know that there's bleeding through that border, a lot that's crossing through the border.

Mr. Speaker, I went down and did a surprise visit to a point of entry at Sasabe, Arizona. When I walked in there--they didn't know a Member of Congress was showing up there--I spoke with the shift supervisor, and his name was Mike Kring. He has since passed away, sadly. I think that he was a strong enforcement officer. He was well respected by his men that I saw around him. But I asked him about the frequency of the crossing there, at the legal crossing at the point of entry which is pretty much a rural port of entry in Sasabe, Arizona. And he said, well, this crossing isn't the busiest crossing near here. There is an illegal crossing east of me that's far busier and an illegal crossing west of me that's far busier. This is just our formal crossing. That tells you something about what's going on on the border.

We can close the border. We can do it with the resources that we have. I have long said that. I have not changed my position--I think it's stronger rather than weaker.

I may be the only one that's actually gone back and done the work to calculate what we're spending to defend our southern border. These numbers are old, Mr. Speaker, that I'm about to quote here this afternoon. They come to this: there's a 50-mile area north of our southwest border. Within that 50 miles, you will see Border Patrol agents, Custom and Border Protection agents, you will see ICE agents in there also. The effort that's done to control our border also is the cost of their vehicles, their communications, their benefits package, all of the things that we invest in that area. When you add that all up and you divide it out by the 2,000 miles--which is pretty close to it, it's the best number to use for the length of the border, the southern border--you end up with this number--and this number would be adjusted upward, not downward, to get it more current than the roughly 3 years ago that I'm talking about: $6 million a mile. We're spending $6 million a mile, at a minimum, every year to control our southern border. And we're getting, according to Border Patrol testimony before the Immigration Subcommittee, about 25 percent enforcement.

They think that of the 100 people that would try to cross the border they might be stopping about 25 percent. Now, it's probably gotten a little better in the last couple of years. But when I go down to the border, Mr. Speaker, and I ask the agents there candidly, without identifying themselves and without going on public record, what percentage of the illegal border crossers are we interdicting, the most consistent number I get is 10 percent, not 25. Some will smirk and say--or not really smirk, but they will just kind of snort and say, well, 3 or 4 percent. The real answer is we don't know. They know more than we do.

The 10 percent number seems to me to be more likely to be an accurate number than the 25 percent number. But think of this. At the peak of the illegal border crossings, we would have about 11,000 a night. That comes to 4 million illegal crossing attempts a year. Eleven thousand a night. Twice the size of Santa Anna's army coming across our border every night, on average. And maybe those illegal crossings have been reduced by half--maybe. That's still the size of Santa Anna's army every night.

We are talking about whether we should legalize the people that came across that border. And we're assuming by the argument of, say, Mr. Gutierrez of Illinois and many others that they're all innocent people that were brought in by their parents--maybe against their will, certainly without their knowledge that there was anything wrong with it or illegal with it, that that's the universe of all the people that are unlawfully present in the United States are just simply those that wanted to come to America for a better life.

Mr. Speaker, I go down to the border. I sit alongside that fence at night. I don't have night vision, but I have ears. I can sit in the dark and I can hear the vehicles come down through the mesquite. In fact, when you hear the one with the bad muffler come back a second time and a third time, you know they're shuttling people to come across the border at night. Within, say, an hour after dark to the next 2 or 3 or 4 hours after dark is when the highest traffic is, because they know they've got to walk across the desert a long ways and they want to make as much time as they can before it turns daylight where they might hole up or where they might be picked up if they can get to the highway north of there.

So I listen and I hear the vehicles come through across the desert. I hear the mesquite scratch alongside the vehicle, and you hear the doors open. Maybe 70, 80, 90, 100 yards south of the border you can hear the doors open. You can hear people get out. First, they open the door. You can hear them drop their pack on the ground. Then they get out and then they close the door, kind of quietly, but it is still a quiet slam of the door. You can hear them pick up their packs, whisper. You hear them walk through the brush, and you can hear them cross the fence.

When you're down there at night without night vision, you sometimes think you see some things you don't see. Have you ever sat around at night in the pitch-black dark and watched? Your mind will play tricks on you.

I can't say into the record, Mr. Speaker, that I saw good numbers of people walk across the border. I know I heard them. That's the only place they could have been going. I heard them go through the fence. I believe I saw the shadows, but I'm not certain of that particular component.

I'm very confident that there are hundreds and hundreds of people that pour across that border at night. That number that I said is roughly half of

11,000, the size of Santa Anna's army, which was 5,000 to 6,000, is roughly the number that we will see every night.

Now, this border is wide open from that perspective. All of the people that came into America aren't those that are coming through that path. All of those people that are coming into America across that border, sometimes you will see a pack train of 75. Every one of them will have a pack of marijuana on their back and they're carrying it into the United States, smuggling it into the United States. Those people fit under the DREAM Act definition, too, if they came into the United States before they were 16 and had been here whatever the length of time might be. If they came here before December 31, 2011, it would be the Senate version of the bill.

I've been on the border, Mr. Speaker, and seen the shadow wolves interdict a smuggler, a marijuana smuggler, coming through with a false bed in the box of a pick-up truck that was extended downward about 7 to 9 inches. Underneath that were the bales of marijuana. I unloaded them myself and took them up to the scales where they were weighed. They weighed approximately 240 pounds.

The reason for that, Mr. Speaker--240 pounds--is because in some sectors of the border they don't have the ability to prosecute drug smugglers and so they set a limit, the prosecutors will set a limit. Sometimes it's you have to have more than 500 pounds of marijuana to be prosecuted; sometimes you have to have more than 250 pounds of marijuana to be prosecuted. The smugglers know that.

I'm going to guess that the sector that I was in that day, the limit was, at least anticipated by the smugglers, to be 250 pounds. So they dialed it under 250 to about 240 pounds and sent their guy through, and he was caught. What we don't know is, was that a decoy so that when all converged on that smuggler, that there wasn't a straight truck through with a couple of tons of marijuana in it. I don't know that. Those are tactics that we see. That's tactics of using sometimes illegal crossings, sometimes going through the legal crossings that we have.

A lot of the border isn't marked. Across New Mexico, there's a concrete pylon from horizon to the next horizon that's just set there, and you would have to know what you were looking for to know where the border is. It's just open desert. I've flown most of that, a lot of that at night. I've also traveled--I'll say that I've traveled probably every mile of our southern border, with the exception of some of the miles along the Texas border, which zigzags quite a lot, and I haven't covered all of that.

Mr. Speaker, we can build a fence, a wall, and a fence, and we can do it with less money than we're spending today on the southern border, over $6 million a mile on the southern border.

To put this in perspective, to build an interstate across Iowa cornfield--expensive now, today, expensive Iowa cornfield--we can buy the right-of-way, we can pay for the engineering, we can do the grading and the drainage work and the paving and the shouldering and the painting and the signage and the seeding and the fencing, all of that, and open up a four-lane interstate highway for about $4 million a mile. We're spending $6 million on every single mile of our southern border, and we're getting something like 25 percent or less efficiency with what we have there.

Part of it is because the President has declared, by executive edict, amnesty. Even though I think the Border Patrol is doing their job as well as they can within those limits, it's clear that ICE has been handcuffed. We have had the President of the ICE union, Chris Crane, testify before this Congress--I think he's been nine times into this city within the last year and a half or so--doing a stellar job of pointing out that the law requires the Federal immigration officers to place into removal proceedings those people that they encounter that are unlawfully present in the United States. It's their judgment on that that dictates.

Well, the President has prohibited them from doing so through the Morton Memos, the Morton Memos that have been rejected by this Congress in two ways within the last 3 weeks or so. One is a full vote in the House on the King amendment, and the other is a vote in the Judiciary Committee on the King amendment. So we have, every way that we've had the opportunity, rejected the idea that the President can simply make up immigration law out of thin air, decide that he can issue work permits, that he can legalize people that are here illegally, that he can, by executive edict, destroy the rule of law--destroy the rule of law.

I often talk about the pillars of American exceptionalism. We are a great country, Mr. Speaker. This great country that we are relies upon this America that Ronald Reagan described as the ``shining city on a hill.'' This city is built on the beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism. Many of them are within the Bill of Rights:

Freedom of speech, religion, the press, and assembly, all wrapped up in the First Amendment to our Constitution;

There are property rights in the Fifth Amendment;

There is a prohibition on double jeopardy. You get to be faced by an accuser and a jury of your peers;

The States' and personal rights that are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

All of those are pillars of American exceptionalism. So is free enterprise capitalism.

If we had none of that, we wouldn't have the Nation we are. If you build--and I want to add to that, the core of our culture is Judeo- Christianity. We welcome people of all religions. The foundation of the American civilization is Judeo-Christianity. Without it, we can't be the America we are either.

So think of this beautiful shining city on the hill--which Reagan so eloquently described for us--sitting on the beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism, but I can't think of that city sitting there without also thinking of an essential pillar of exceptionalism called the rule of law.

Now, if you would take a jackhammer and chisel away that marble pillar of American exceptionalism, which is freedom of speech, and destroy freedom of speech, the beautiful edifice of our shining city on the hill would crumble and fall. If you did the same thing to freedom of the press, our shining city on the hill would crumble and fall. If you took away our Second Amendment rights, which I didn't mention but which are a pillar of American exceptionalism, eventually our other freedoms would crumble and fall, and tyrants would take over. If you put people subject to double jeopardy, we wouldn't be the civilization we are, and the rule of law wouldn't mean what it does. It would crumble and fall just as it would if you destroyed the rule of law, if you have contempt for the rule of law, if the Supreme Court disregarded the rule of law, and if they ruled on interpreting their law to be their whim, their wish--not the very definition of the supreme law of the land, being our Constitution.

It is as the President so well described on March 28, 2011, before a high school here in Washington, D.C., when he was asked: Why don't you just implement the DREAM Act by executive order?

His answer was to the students who were listening: I don't have the constitutional authority to do that. You've been studying the Constitution. You students know that it's the job of the legislature to pass the laws, the job of the executive branch to enforce the laws and the job of the judicial branch to interpret the laws.

Now, that is an accurate description as should aptly come from a former adjunct professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago. That is our President. He knew what he was talking about, and that description was consistent with his oath of office, Mr. Speaker.

The oath of office is defined within our Constitution. It's specific. It has been concluded with ``so help me God'' for a long time, but within that oath is also the oath to preserve and protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. In the Constitution, it requires the President of the United States--our chief executive law enforcement officer and Commander in Chief--``to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.'' That doesn't mean, Mr. Speaker, execute the law. That doesn't mean execute the rule of

law. That doesn't mean execute the Constitution itself. It means you take an oath, and your job is to uphold the law, to take care that the law is being faithfully executed.

The President has defied his own oath of office. He has defied the rule of law. He has defied the Constitution, and he said, I'm not going to enforce the law. I'm not going to enforce the laws that I don't like. I disagree with some of the immigration policy that has been passed by Congress and signed by one of his predecessors--in fact, signed by Bill Clinton. He is refusing to enforce those kinds of laws.

That does great damage to the Constitution, and it throws the balance of the three branches of government out of whack. Our Founding Fathers imagined that there would be competition for power and influence between the three branches of government. They envisioned it always with three branches of government--the legislative branch, the executive branch and the judicial branch.

This Congress is in article I. That means we are more the voice of the people than any other branch of government. It was the first and most important branch. They also knew that they had to have a strong chief executive--a strong President, a strong Commander in Chief. The experiences they went through in fighting a Revolutionary War with the Continental Congress told them you can't have a strong national defense without a strong Commander in Chief, so they established that. They established the balance between the legislative branch in article I and the executive branch in article II and also the balance--and, I think, to a slightly lesser degree--between the judicial branch. Think of it as a triangle.

They envisioned that each branch of government would seek to expand its power. That's human nature. You always want more power than you actually have, whether you take this thing from the Pope to the President, right on down the line to the Senators, who have a one one- hundredth of the power of the Senate Chamber, and to the House Members, who have a one four-hundred-thirty-fifth of the House Chamber. We always want to have a little more leverage, a little more influence-- get your hands on a gavel or maybe become the majority leader, the minority leader, the Speaker of the House. Actually, the former Speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, just walked across this floor, Mr. Speaker, and she would understand that as we all do. In a family, you always want to have more influence. If the patriarch of the family is the one who writes the rules, you always grate a little bit underneath that. That's a natural thing to always try to grab a little bit more power.

They knew it was human nature, so they set up this balance between the three branches of government, but they envisioned that each branch of government would jealously protect its constitutional authority and not concede it to the usurpation of some other branch of government. They envisioned that Congress would try to grow in its influence and authority, and they gave the President veto power so that he could veto the overreach, potentially, of the House and the Senate together.

They balanced the House and the Senate so that this hot cup of coffee--or hot cup of tea, they were thinking here in the House of Representatives--could be a quick reaction force when things go wrong in America. A new crop of House Members comes in with the freshest of vigor that comes from the American people, and they set about changing things. That's a 2-year election cycle. We saw that in 2010 when 87 new freshmen Republicans came into the House of Representatives--every single one of them having run for office on the promise to repeal ObamaCare, every single one. Meanwhile, while the House was being heated up, the Senate itself--which, if all of the Senators rather than roughly a third of them were up for election each cycle, I think we would have seen the majority turn over in the United States Senate, but it didn't quite do that.

So the Senate has been the cooling saucer to the hot cup of tea or coffee that is the House. Our Founding Fathers saw that, and they wanted to balance that. They wanted to have the longer view in the Senate. They wanted the quick reaction forces in the House. They wanted to blend them together, and they did. I think they did a very good job of that.

They also wanted to then check an overreach of article I, the legislative branch, the Congress, by giving the President of the United States veto power. At the same time, they put constraints on the President because we can control the activities of the executive branch through the appropriations if we can actually control the appropriations here in the House of Representatives. So they granted that authority, but they expected that there would be like a tug of war for that power. They did not think that the President of the United States would take an oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and be required to take care that the laws be faithfully executed and then go out and execute the law rather than enforce the law, but that's what has happened.

The President has with impunity defied the rule of law, and has simply canceled immigration law that existed on the books that requires ICE and Federal immigration law enforcement officers to place those individuals unlawfully here in removal proceedings. That's the law. The President suspended it.

And what has happened here in Congress?

There was an election after he did that. On March 28, 2011, he said, I don't have the power to by executive order implement the DREAM Act. On June 15, 2012, he assumed that authority, and he simply suspended the rule of law and imposed his will, his wish, on America.

And what happened?

The people who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law decided that they were going to honor the lawlessness. They decided that they were going to comply with the President's order because, well, their jobs were on the line, for one thing, but I say also they have an oath of office for another.

When that happens, when there is a dispute between the legislative branch and the executive branch of government, the judicial branch needs to step in to sort out that dispute. I know they don't like to do that, Mr. Speaker. In any case, I asked for a meeting and invited people to come to the table, which they did, and we discussed how we move forward to put a block on the President's unconstitutional assumption of legislative authority--a violation of the separation of powers.

I had been through that litigation in the past on an issue that I'll not take up here, but it had to do with a State issue and the State chief executive officer. I knew the arguments. Out of that meeting came the lawsuit of Crane v. Napolitano. That's Chris Crane, the president of the ICE union as the lead plaintiff. Of course, now Napolitano is the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano. That case went before the Northern District of Texas, the Federal court, where Judge Reed O'Connor ruled in favor of the plaintiffs-- that's the ICE union and the list of plaintiffs that are there--ruled in favor of it in nine of 10 arguments and sent the other argument back to the executive branch to reword it in such a way--I'll just use my terms, Mr. Speaker--it's more intelligible so he can answer and respond on that particular point.

Generally, the decision was this: Judge Reed O'Connor essentially wrote: shall means shall, not may. If it requires that the agents put people that are unlawfully present in the United States in removal proceedings, if it says they ``shall do so,'' then they shall do so. Shall means shall. It doesn't mean may. And there is no word in our language that is more definitive that can replace the word shall, at least as far as legal parlance is concerned. That's essentially the decision.

So it seems to be--and I'm optimistic that it's moving in the direction--that we will get a final decision in a Federal court and perhaps the administration will appeal this all the way up the line to the Supreme Court.

But in the end, I can't imagine how a judicial branch of government, how a Supreme Court could come down on the side of the President and decide that the President of the United States has

the authority to make up law as he goes along or disregard law as he goes along.

The President has argued--at least the President and his spokesmen and spokeswomen have argued--that they have prosecutorial discretion. Prosecutorial discretion means that they can't enforce the law against every person who might violate the law because they don't have the resources, so the resources need to be targeted where they do the most good. That's prosecutorial discretion.

I agree that that exists and that it's necessary that the discretion of prosecution exists. But I don't agree that the President can define broad classes of people that include hundreds of thousands in a single class and then decide that he's not going to enforce the law against any of them. That is what he has done. He's manufactured four classes of people and decided he's going to waive the law on all of these classes of people, suspend its enforcement. That turns out to be an invitation to more and more people to violate the law, even ``to the extent of.''

We have had illegal aliens in the halls of the congressional offices that have lobbied Members of Congress with impunity. And they will come in boldly and say, I'm exempted from the law by the President of the United States, so I can be here. And I demand that you agree with me and get me my college education. They have been inside the Judiciary Committee room. They have been introduced by the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. That's how far this has gotten, Mr. Speaker. The contempt for the law, the contempt for the rule of law and the sense of entitlement have gone beyond the pale.

So this rule of law, which must be reconstructed now, because the verbal and keyboard jackhammers of the left have chiseled away at that beautiful marble pillar of American exceptionalism called the rule of law. And because they have done that, we must reconstruct it. And if we can't hold the rule of law together, if we can't restore it, if we can't reconstruct it, then it crumbles. If the rule of law, according to the Gang of Eight's bill in the Senate, according to some of what seems to be moving here in the House, destroys the rule of law at least with regard to immigration, it destroys it.

There would be no enforcement of the rule of law with regard to immigration unless you committed a felony. You're here unlawfully, you commit a felony or you commit a combination of three mysterious misdemeanors, that happens to qualify you for removal proceedings. Those are exemptions that are part of it. They claim that they will enforce the law on that.

The balance of it is if you cross the border illegally and come into the United States, that is a crime, Mr. Speaker. If you overstay your visa, which is about, let's say, a number that approaches 40 percent of those who are unlawfully present in the United States, that's a civil misdemeanor, not a crime, at least today. If you do either one of those things only, they're not going to put you in removal proceedings. And if you come across into the United States and you defraud your employer and you come up with fraudulent documents and you use that in order to get a job, this administration isn't going to enforce document fraud, which is a felony against you.

Essentially it said if you can get into the United States legally or illegally, if you can stay in the United States, you can cheat to get a job, you can lie to your employer, you can use document fraud and there won't be a penalty to any of these things. Essentially, nonviolent, peaceful crimes are not going to be a problem. But if you get engaged in some of the serious things like maybe drug smuggling or the crimes of violence that we all know about or the threat of violence even, then it makes the administration uncomfortable, and they might decide to send you back and put you in the condition that you were in before you broke the law.

But peaceful people have been granted amnesty by the President of the United States. And this Congress has sat here almost placidly and accepted it as if he has that constitutional authority, and he does not. That's why the lawsuit of Crane v. Napolitano was filed, and it's a clear understanding from my standpoint. But the confusion seems to be that too many Members that take an oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend this Constitution, as well, don't have a clear enough understanding of the brighter line between article I and article II.

Our job is to legislate, write the laws. The President's job is to enforce them. It's that simple. Yet there was an interpretation that came out to us on the morning of November 7. Wednesday morning, November 7, Mr. Speaker--and a lot of people will understand and remember what that date was. That was the day after the election.

I was engaged in this election as much as I've been engaged in any election. And as a Member of Congress from Iowa, I was also engaged in the Presidential nomination and election process. I was engaged in the debate. And I've done events that have to do with Presidential candidates on a relatively regular basis. I think I understood what the debate was about for the election for President of the United States.

As I listened to that, it was about jobs and the economy. If you would put jobs and the economy in quotes and then put Barack Obama's name in the search engine of Google, or if you would put jobs and the economy in quotes and then put Romney or Mitt there in the search engine of Google and send that off, you're going to get hundreds of thousands of hits altogether because that was the topic of the election last November 6, jobs and the economy. I told the Romney people I've heard ``jobs and the economy'' so many times it puts me to sleep. Don't you think you're putting the American people to sleep by beating the same drum over and over again?

But remembering the mantra jobs and the economy until we were just drubbed into numbness with it also reminds us that the election was not, Mr. Speaker, about the immigration issue. I don't remember a debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney that went into any depth or substance on the immigration issue. Yet before the sun came up on November 7, some of the leading pundits and experts concluded that Mitt Romney would be President-elect by now before the sun came up on November 7 if he just hadn't said the two words ``self-deport,'' or if he had not been such a defender of the rule of law on immigration.

That was a surprise to me. I wish he'd have talked about it more. Well, he didn't. The election wasn't about immigration, but talking heads and, let me say, erroneously pragmatic individuals in my party who decided that they would contribute to this argument that came from both parties. And they drove the argument to the point where some people were convinced the election really was about immigration when it was not. And they argued that Mitt Romney would be President-elect if he had just gotten a larger percentage of the Hispanic vote.

He would not, Mr. Speaker. If he had won the majority of the Hispanic vote in the swing States, he still would not have won the Presidency. If he had won 70 percent, he might have; but that didn't happen. And no one really thinks that's going to happen in the near future. So they came to a conclusion and thought they could support it with facts. They've learned now that they can't support their conclusion with facts, but they're determined to go forward with granting amnesty to initially--they think--11 million people that are here in this country unlawfully while providing the emptiest and most vacuous of promises that one day they're going to get around to putting a plan together, and if the plan happens to be implemented they might secure the border.

That's what's going on. And I don't know how in the world they can say this to the American people with a straight face and believe that there's going to be border security in exchange for law enforcement. It's not going to happen, Mr. Speaker. It didn't happen in 1986, one of only two times that Ronald Reagan let me down.

But in 1986, the promise was this:

We had about a million people in the country illegally. Actually, it started at 700,000 to 800,000. That sounds like a minuscule number today. So roughly a million people, and debate raged in the House and the Senate. I believed all

along that good sense would prevail. I believed that people who gave their oath to uphold the Constitution in the House and in the Senate would understand that they were undermining the rule of law if they granted amnesty to people who came into America illegally. I believed all along that they would understand that if they grant amnesty, they would get more lawbreakers, more illegal border crossers, a less manageable situation than the one that they had in 1986.

But the argument for clemency, for amnesty prevailed in the House and the Senate. But I believe that Ronald Reagan would understand the principles of rule of law clearly enough and the long-term implications of such an act of amnesty in 1986 clearly enough that he would take the authority that was vested in him and the United States Congress to veto that legislation and require the Congress to pass amnesty by a two- thirds majority in the House and Senate and overturn his veto. I don't believe they could have done that in 1986.

I believed Ronald Reagan would veto the Amnesty Act in 1986. Instead, to my great disappointment, he signed it. The calculation at the time was, if we just grant amnesty to these million people, we're going to get full cooperation to enforce the border and never again will there be another Amnesty Act--never again. This was the Amnesty Act to end all Amnesty Acts. It was going to be law enforcement from that point forward. The border was going to be secured. There would be a clear prohibition on hiring illegal employees. They were going to shut off the jobs magnet, and they created the I-9 form, the I-9 form which requires an employer to fill out the form, make sure that you have the documentation, the identification, and make sure that you have all of the ``I's'' dotted and the ``T's'' crossed on the I-9 form because a Federal agent is going to come inspect your paperwork. An INS agent would come and inspect your paperwork.

I did all of those things as carefully as I could. I had a fear that I would slip up and not meet the standard, Mr. Speaker. And so we very carefully documented our job applicants in my construction company to make sure that we were in compliance with the law, all the while expecting that that INS agent was just around the corner taking a look at the paperwork of our competition or our neighboring business. Of course, they never showed up to check my paperwork. I'm not disappointed by that. I'm disappointed that they didn't show up to check the paperwork of thousands of employers with millions of employees.

The enforcement didn't really happen. It didn't happen in shutting off the jobs magnet. The litigation began. The ACLU began litigating, as did other organizations. They began to argue, You're requiring an employer to make a judgment call when he looks at the documents and the picture and the face of the person that's applying. And you cannot require an employer to make a judgment call because it makes them liable for the lawsuit that we're going to sue them with.

So the litigation of immigration turned it into a mess, intentionally, I believe, so that they could provide for open borders, which was the intention of the Teddy Kennedys and others at the time. They undermined the enforcement effort politically. And they undermined it in the courts, and they undermined it culturally, and they began to convert the people who came here illegally into a victims' group.

If you understand the politics of victimology, you understand that there is a certain amount of sainthood that gets attached to these victims, for people that are in victims' groups. That conversion has been taking place since probably before 1986, but I remember it from that point forward.

What Ronald Reagan learned and what today his Attorney General at the time, Attorney General Ed Meese knows and has three times written about, and what another member of the Reagan administration, Gary Bauer, knows and has spoken openly of is that if you grant amnesty, if you suspend the rule of law and you tell people, We're not going to enforce the law against you, continue to break it, you'll get more law breakers.

More law breakers means more lawlessness, and more lawlessness erodes the rule of law. And when they bring a bill to the Senate that legalizes, aside from the felons, the three mysterious misdemeanor committers, aside from that, it legalizes everybody here in the United States that's here illegally. Not only that, they send an invitation by the bill out to anybody that has been deported in the past that says: Reapply. Come back into the United States. We really didn't mean it.

They say if you came here after December 31, 2011, you're not going to be exempted by this Amnesty Act that is coming through the Senate, so presumably they are going to enforce the law against those who came here after December 31, 2011.

Mr. Speaker, they're not going to do that. If they were going to do that, you would see a news story about somebody who was put back and the condition they were in before they broke the law that came here after December 31, 2011. No, ICE is prohibited from enforcing the law against people who fit these definitions, and I asked that specific question of the president of the ICE union before the Judiciary Committee under oath. And he said, If they're in jail, I can't put them in removal proceedings.

Even if they're in jail, he can't go into jail and say, Listen, I'm required to put you in removal proceedings. I'm going to take you back to the port of entry. He can't do that.

Who's in handcuffs now? ICE, the Border Patrol, in handcuffs today. They can't enforce the law the way it's written in even the 1986 Amnesty Act, let alone the 1996 Immigration Reform Act of which Lamar Smith of Texas had such a huge role in. Good legislation; glad they did it. 1986 was flawed; it should have never been passed.

But if ICE can't enforce the law today, even if someone is in jail, and they are essentially handcuffed from doing their job, and there is a legalization of the people that came into the United States before December 31, 2011, and an invitation to those who have since been removed to come back again, and no prospect that they're going to enforce the law against those who come in after December 31, 2011, that makes it, Mr. Speaker, the always is, always was, and always will be Amnesty Act.

I use a little bit of, let me say, license here to speak of it this way: always is, always was, and always will be. If you is in America, you gets to stay. If you was in America, you gets to come back. And if you will be in America, you also get to stay.

This is the perpetual and retroactive Amnesty Act. It's perpetual; it goes on forever. You could never enforce immigration law again. You could never say to people, Well, you came here after our deadline; now we're going to enforce the law.

Not after you flow 11 million or 22 million or 33 million people into this country, or a number that results from this that may perhaps be over 50 million people over time. Numbers USA's number is 33 million people that get legalized as an effect of the legislation in the Senate.

Robert Rector's study at the Heritage Foundation--and both of them, by the way, did stellar work yesterday. His study only contemplates 11.5 million, which is the lowest number, the reduced number, the boiled-down number of those we know are here that essentially reflects off the United States census. That's the people that admit they're here when you ask them, Are you here illegally? A number approaching 11 million said, Yes, I am. I confess.

We know that in the '86 Amnesty Act that was roughly a million people anticipated. It became over 3 million people. So use the three-to-one multiplier. That does reflect pretty close. It's not the formula used by Numbers USA. That formula is a careful formula that calculates family unification and the record we have of human activity on how they react to the legislative changes that take place.

But if the formula was 1 million in '86, it became 3 million because of document fraud and other reasons. Those who gamed the system, those who came in before the Amnesty Act was signed, or even after the Amnesty Act was signed, to take part in that and lied about when they came here, the 1 million became 3 million. It doesn't stretch my imagination to see the 11 million become 33 million. That seems to me to match up in two different types of formulas.

So do we really want to legalize 33 million people, or even 11 million people?

Do we want to give them access to all of the government benefits that we have?

Do we want to let them have access immediately to, I'd say, at least to and their children to the systems that we have, the health care system, the education system we have, the public security systems we have?

Do we want to put them in a place where their tax return makes them eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, so that all of their children that may not live in the United States even at the time, they get a check from the Federal Treasury for that?

Do we want to see this pour out to where the number that came from Robert Rector's study is that, on average, the people that would be included in this amnesty act in the Senate, over the course of the time they would live in the United States, the average comes in at 34 years old, and a 34-year old, by the time they reach that age, will live to the age of about 84. That's 50 years in the United States. That's a net cost to the taxpayer of $580,000 per person.

Do we want to really write a check or borrow the money from the Chinese to fund that?

Do we need that many more people in the United States doing the work they say Americans won't do, for a price of $580,000 per person?

Do we want to rent cheap labor for the price of $12,000 a year? That's what the math works out to. I think it's $11,600 a year.

Do we really want to--do the taxpayers care that much about having somebody to cut the grass and somebody to weed the garden and somebody to do all this work that they claim Americans won't do?

By the way, I don't think anybody in this Congress can find work that I haven't been willing to do, and I think my sons would certainly reinforce that statement. They remind me that they've been out in 126- degree heat index and poured concrete on these days, and they've been driving sheet piling across the swamp at 60 below wind chill. They tell me that's a 186 degrees temperature change, and no species on the planet could survive what they went through growing up in our family. And I say, well, no species other than my sons. And I remind them that, and me too, guys.

We did work like that in the heat, in the cold, in the rain and the snow. We did work underground. We do the sanitary sewer work. We do earth work. We do all kinds of things. We do demolition. All of the work that they say Americans won't do, we've done a whole lot of that and will do more.

No one's too proud to do work in this country. We're just sometimes not willing to do work for the price that's offered. And we know that free enterprise capitalism takes us to this. The value of anything, including labor, is determined by the supply and demand in the marketplace.

Corn prices go up and down, depending on how much there is, how much corn there is, the supply, and how many customers there are to buy it, the demand. That's true for gold and oil and platinum and soybeans and labor.

And because we have an oversupply of unskilled labor, and underskilled labor is why we have such low wages and benefits at low- and unskilled labor. The highest unemployment's in the lowest of skills.

And yet people in this Congress think you have to expand the low- skilled labor numbers, bring people in, low- and unskilled, Senate version of the bill, seven unskilled people and undereducated people, for every one that's going to be able to pay their going rate on what it costs to sustain them in society.

For every person that would come in under the Senate bill, that would pay as much or more in taxes as they draw down in government benefits, there are seven who will not be able to do that.

The universe of those in the 11 million people cannot sustain themselves in this society that we have, not in a single year of their projected existence in this culture, in this society, in this economy. So why would we do that?

Why, if we need more people to pull on the oars, would we allow 100 million Americans, that are of working age and simply not in the work force, to sit up there in steerage, while we bring people on board to pull the oars and wait on the people sitting in steerage?

That defies any kind of rational logic, Mr. Speaker.

So to destroy the rule of law, to, I'll say, subsidize a non-work ethic, and now it turns into three generations of Americans that are drawing down some of the 80 different means-tested welfare programs, it is foolish for us to consider such a proposal. And I'm hopeful that the good sense of the American people can do something about the spell that has been cast over too many Republicans in the House and the Senate.

And so, Mr. Speaker, I urge the American people to save this Congress from themselves and restore the rule of law.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman of the Agriculture Committee for yielding, and I want to also thank him for his leadership on this bill.

This is a carefully balanced bill that we have, and I don't challenge the convictions of the gentleman from Massachusetts. We've had enough exchanges on this topic to know that we have a difference of opinion without a difference in disagreeable personalities by any means.

However, when I came to this Congress a little more than a decade ago, I was looking already at this growth in, then, food stamps. The number that I memorized at the time was that there were 19 million people on food stamps. That was a lot of people. Our population hasn't grown so much that it ought to grow to 48 million people. But when we see the expansion of the dependency class in America and you add this to the 79 other means-tested welfare programs that we have in the United States and each time you add another brick to that wall, it's a barrier to people that might go out and succeed.

We're of the same heart here. We don't want people who need them and people who deserve them to go without SNAP benefits. On the other hand, we don't want to hand these out to people that are gaming the system, so to speak. So we've tightened the qualifications down on SNAP, and we've done so for a number of reasons. One of them is reports of a neon sign up on a tattoo parlor that says, ``We take EBT cards.'' You also have the report of an individual who bailed himself out of jail with an EBT card. I don't think that we want to borrow money from the Chinese to fund such a thing. I think those people can figure out how to bail themselves out and how to pay for their own tattoos.

Instead, we tighten this down, and it's a savings of $20.5 billion. It was a tough enough negotiation to get to that point. I don't know what the gentleman from Massachusetts would say is enough, and maybe I don't know what I would say is too little. Someplace in between his opinion and mine is where we've settled today on this $20.5 billion that came out of this top line that is roughly 80 percent of the overall benefits that are in this bill.

It's carefully balanced. It's carefully negotiated. It's something that has had the cooperation with the ranking member, as well. And I think it's an important thing for us to understand that you can't simply be spending advertising dollars out there to sign more people up on food stamps. That's what

our Secretary of Agriculture has been doing. In this bill, we eliminate the advertising to sign people up on food stamps. That's a good thing. If people need it, they're going to figure out how to sign up without somebody knocking on their door and advertising in the newspaper, on the radio, or on the TV.

So we tighten up the system. We keep the resources for the people that need them, and we reduce this to say it's a 2.5 percent reduction in this massive growth from 19 million to 48 million. That's not too much to ask.

I seek time in opposition.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman's interest in the issue, but it's clear that the Agriculture Committee is not the committee of jurisdiction to be addressing the provisions of the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act.

While some may consider the growth of hemp to be an agricultural endeavor, I think that there are many who feel quite differently. I would therefore oppose this amendment and urge the gentleman to seek a hearing on the issue within the appropriate committee.

I point out also that one of the concerns that we have long had is that even though the gentleman says hemp is not marijuana, I don't know if one can tell the difference when it's planted row by row out in the field. I know that's been a problem within my State when the residue of the leftover hemp from World War II became companions with the marijuana that was raised for a different purpose.

I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota.

Reclaiming my time in amazement, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I would like to remark to the gentleman from Colorado that it wasn't a surprise to me to see that Colorado is the State that has legalized marijuana and so we also see the advocacy for this coming from the safe place. Perhaps it's a coincidence, but I'll give you two things to respond to.

The other one is the reference to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Betsy Ross. That's quite curious. And I don't think we advocate all the things that they might have participated in. Two out of three of those would have fit within a category of an ownership that I don't really care to bring up today, even though today is Juneteenth.

I yield to the gentleman from Colorado.

Reclaiming my time, I recognize that the gentleman's amendment only applies to States that have already legalized it, and that's true.

Nonetheless, I urge opposition to this amendment, Mr. Chairman, under the basis that we haven't had a full hearing on this; we don't have a knowledge base behind it; we each have our own understanding of it. Mine is a debate that I have seen that's gone on for years, which is, when you plant hemp alongside marijuana, you can't tell the difference. So it opens up the door for the recreational agriculture of the marijuana drug, and for that reason alone I oppose it. So I'd urge the gentleman to seek a hearing in the appropriate committee, and I urge the defeat of this amendment.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the arguments that come forward from the Members here. They do come from States that have voted and expressed their support for, let's say, for the husbandry of hemp. It has a long history and it has been a useful product, but we have outlawed it for clear reasons; and that is, as I said, you can plant it alongside the recreational use marijuana and you can't tell the difference. If we are going to legalize the farming and the experimental agriculture with industrial hemp on our college campuses, that really wouldn't be the first place I would choose.

I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota.

Reclaiming my time, I might want to do a night field trip up there and see that fluorescent hemp field.

This is a new piece of information for me, glow-in- the-dark hemp. I know that they have spliced a gene from a jellyfish into a monkey and it glows also in the dark, so I'm confident that the gentleman's science is accurate. But whether we can keep those who raise recreational marijuana from splicing an identical gene into their's, we've got to deal with the GMO recreational marijuana problem that would be created by this, too.

In any case, I oppose the gentleman's amendment and I urge its defeat.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

I thank the gentlelady from South Dakota for yielding to me, and I wanted to come to the floor in opposition, also, of this amendment.

I've seen what this research does, and I've watched as we've gone from no industry to an industry now that's utilizing the products that the gentlelady from South Dakota has said, from animal fats, for soy oil, and it has cheapened up our energy supply and has cleaned up our air, and it's made us a better country because of it. This research that gets done--we should remember that there isn't always a return on that research investment. That's why we do research. That's why we do research in our universities, for example. And so with that research we can find those things that make us more efficient.

I remember when the research labs said it was impossible to get the energy out of the feed grains that we now turn into energy. We've exceeded that because of research. And to utilize these animal fats has dramatically been changed a lot because of the research that takes place here with this fund.

So I think this is a piece that we need to preserve so that we can preserve the efficiency that's there and we can preserve the education.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate your yielding also to me.

I rise in opposition to the Kind amendment, and do I so because I don't want to see agriculture distorted.

We've watched as equipment's gotten larger, farms have gotten larger. And when you start locking this thing down and tying it to an AGI, what you really have is a means test for the first time. It pits neighbors against neighbors.

Here's what I remember. Back in the eighties, when we had a farm crisis and we had a real disaster, I saw on the front page of the paper, $26 billion in farm subsidy disaster money to deal with drought and the climate that we had and the bad economic climate.

We haven't had those calls. 2011 we had a big flood. No calls for disaster money. 2012 we had a big drought. No calls for disaster money.

Crop insurance is working. Eighty-six percent of the crop is insured today. I recall it being 13 percent back then when I saw the $26 billion bill hit the headlines in the Des Moines Register.

So I urge opposition to the Kind amendment.

Madam Chair, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I come to the floor, first, to congratulate this bipartisan effort. I have been through other farm bills I guess a couple of times. I've seen it when we had a Republican chair, a Democrat chair, and a Republican chair. I've seen it as Ranking Member Peterson worked hard with Republicans 6 years ago. And I've seen it as our chairman, Frank Lucas, has worked hard with Ranking Member Peterson over the last year and a half. This is a very, very difficult balance to pull together.

But here's what we get with this: first of all, the end of direct payments by the agreement of our producers. Whoever, as a recipient of a government check, stepped forward and said: I'll give that up because economically we can do that. And at the same time, we get some reform in the SNAP side of this thing that says we're going to start holding some people accountable without taking a single calorie out of the mouths of those that are needy and those who we want to get those benefits.

And in the middle of all of that, if we don't pass a bill, we revert to the 1949 bill, which would be a calamity. And if we don't address the SNAP version of this, then what we end up with, Madam Chair, is a growing food stamp program. So I urge its adoption.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege of addressing you here on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and to have an opportunity to inject some dialogue into the ears and minds of this body and across the country as people observe the deliberations here in the House.

I came to the floor, Mr. Speaker, to address the issue of immigration again. As we're watching the acceleration of an immigration proposal that's coming through, moving in this direction at a minimum from the United States Senate, it's important for us, Mr. Speaker, to recognize that there are a series and set of beliefs over there that don't necessarily conform with the majority here in the House of Representatives.

If you look at the names and the reputations and the faces of the people that are advocating for ``comprehensive immigration reform,'' and you recognize the history of some of them--regretfully, Senator Teddy Kennedy is not here to advocate, but he's one of the original proponents of what I call ``comprehensive amnesty.'' He was one of the voices in 1986. In fact, he was one of the voices back in the sixties on comprehensive immigration reform. Ronald Reagan signed the Amnesty Act of 1986. We do have some people around here of significant credibility that were part of that process back then, Mr. Speaker. One of those is Attorney General Ed Meese.

Attorney General Meese was there as a counselor and adviser to the President. He read the 1986 Amnesty Act, of course, and he had full access to President Reagan. All of his Cabinet members--a good number of them--weighed in with President Reagan. I remember where I was. I was running my construction company back in 1986 during the middle of the farm crisis.

I remember being in my office when I had been watching the debate and reading the news and seeing what was moving through the United States Congress and all the while believing that if you waive the application of the law to people who have willfully broken the laws, it is a reward for those lawbreakers to waive it; and if you reward them with the objective of their crime, as the 1986 Amnesty Act did, then the result of that is not what was promised.

What was promised was we will now enforce immigration law forever, and there will never be another amnesty act. That was the promise. The enforcement was that we had to file I-9 forms for every job applicant which would put the pertinent data of the job applicant down on the I-9 form, and we dotted all the Is and we crossed all the Ts on the I-9 form, and we looked at the identification documents of the applicants that were applying to come to work at my construction company and thousands of companies across America.

We had, Mr. Speaker, the full expectation that the Immigration Naturalization Services--then INS and now ICE--would be coming and knocking on our door and going through our records to make sure that we did everything exactly right because the force of enforcement was what was going to justify the amnesty that was granted in the 1986 Amnesty Act.

We were going to enforce and control our border and our ports of entry and enforce the law against those who were unlawfully working in the United States. In exchange for that, there was going to be the legalization of some first 700,000 to 800,000 people in the United States that were here illegally. It was adjusted up to be 1 million people that turned out to be 3 million people. The lowest number on the 1986 Amnesty Act turned out to be 2.7 million to 2.8 million; the highest number is someplace around 3.5 million or 6 million.

But in the neighborhood of 3 million people took advantage of the 1986 Amnesty Act. That's triple, by anybody's number, the original estimate. The tradeoff again was in order to get an agreement with the Senator Teddy Kennedy-types that were in the United States Senate and House at the time, there had to be a concession made.

From where I come from, Mr. Speaker, it's really pretty easy. The rule of law is the rule of law. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Legislating is the exclusive province of article I within this Constitution, the legislative branch of government, the United States Congress, the House and the Senate on opposite sides of the rotunda coming to a conclusion and we concur, pass a conference report that goes to the President. When the President signs that, it becomes law, and that's the law that we abide by. It's not complicated to understand. That's what they teach in eighth grade civics class. But the expectation that the law would be enforced and the real effort on the part of President Reagan to do so was eroded by people that undermined that effort.

Many of them never intended to follow through on the law enforcement side of the bargain. Not only the border security, but also the workplace jobs enforcement side, the legislation that some was formed then, some came along in 1996, that required that the immigration enforcement officers,

when they encountered someone that was unlawfully in the United States, that they're required by law to place them into removable proceedings. That's the law.

Ronald Reagan was an honorable man. I had great faith in the principles that he so clearly articulated to the entire Nation and the world with utter confidence. When I saw that amnesty legislation pass out of the House and the Senate back in 1986, I had so much confidence in the clarity of the vision and understanding of Ronald Reagan, that I was confident that he would veto the misguided Amnesty Act of 1986 because you can't trade off amnesty for a promise that there would be law enforcement or border security. The first thing you do is enforce the law. You establish that the law is enforced.

What would happen if there had been 700,000 or 800,000 people in the United States then who were living in the shadows, and what if we would have enforced the border at the time, if we had enforced immigration law at the time, and if we didn't force the shut-off-the-jobs magnet at that time? Then that number that was viewed to be an intolerably high number in 1986, that 700,000 to 800,000, would have become instead a number that would have been less than that and not more than that.

If you would have enforced the law in 1986, there would have been fewer people unlawfully in the United States and not more. But, instead, as time went on--by the way, neither Ronald Reagan nor his successor, George H.W. Bush, saw a particular political bump for signing the Amnesty Act or for supporting it. Regardless, as time went on, there was less and less respect for the law because there was less and less enforcement of the law.

As much as Ronald Reagan would have liked to enforce the law, he didn't have everybody bought in on that, Mr. Speaker. So as the undermining of the enforcement and the turning of the blind eye took place, there was less and less respect for the rule of law and employers themselves began to understand that INS is not going to be in your work place; they're not going to go through your HR records; and they're not going to apply sanctions against employers for hiring people that are unlawfully present in the United States and can't legally work in the United States.

Mr. Speaker, the respect for the law was diminished because there was less enforcement of the law in the workplace on the border, and then we began to see the advocates for open borders start to emerge.

I want to compliment former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Lamar Smith, for the stellar work that he has done in the immigration reform legislation that he was a central figure of when he was chairman of the Immigration Subcommittee back in 1996. I look back at the language that was put in place then and I'm continually thankful, because this nation has been rewarded by the vision of now-Congressman Lamar Smith, and it has made our jobs easier here.

But also the 1996 immigration reform, which was enforcement reform, was triggered off of, to some degree, Barbara Jordan's study that took place in around 1991, if I remember correctly, that if you grant amnesty, you'll get more people coming in here illegally. And the principles are this: you enforce the law. You have to place people in removal proceedings if they violate the law. It is not a draconian thing to do. If you put someone back in the condition they were in before they broke the law, that's not a particularly draconian punishment, and if that's hard to understand, Mr. Speaker--and I know you understand all things--but think of it this way: If someone goes in and robs a bank and they step out on the steps of the bank with the sack of loot, and law enforcement appears and says, sorry, you can't keep the loot, we're going to put that back in the bank, but you can go. That's the equivalent of removal. You don't get to keep the objective of the crime. We put you back in the condition that you were in before you committed the crime. That's not draconian. That's the minimum you can do and still have a rule of law apply. You can't be a nation if you don't have borders. And if you don't determine as a nation what crosses those borders, people, or goods, contraband or not, if you don't make those decisions as a government, as a people, then it's out of control. Then you're really not a nation. Then immigration policy is set by the people that decide they're going to break your laws and come across that border, and if we decide we're not going to enforce those laws, we have, as is often advertised by people in both bodies this year, not so much last year--this year--de facto amnesty.

De facto amnesty. That means the equivalent of amnesty in Latin. But they also argue we have to do something to resolve the circumstances of ending this de facto amnesty because it's an unjust condition to have people in.

Now, I don't feel that same injustice, Mr. Speaker, because, first of all, the people that are here living under the described de facto amnesty made the decision to come here and live in the shadows. And some will say, well, they didn't if they were a child when they were brought by their parents, and that's true to a degree, and the group of people that we are the most sympathetic to are those DREAMers, those kids that were brought here when they were young, that have gone through our educational system--paid for by U.S. taxpayers, by the way--that may have a significant opportunity in this country but are subject to removal just like their parents, who clearly knew they were breaking the law.

Some of those people have been boldly lobbying across these Capitol grounds, and there was a circumstance not that long ago where the president of the ICE union, Chris Crane, who is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit of Crane v. Napolitano that seeks to correct the unconstitutional actions of the executive branch, including the President, but Chris Crane was testifying before a Senate Judiciary Committee on immigration, and while that was going on, they had people that were illegal aliens in the United States, unlawfully present in the United States--by the way, that's a legal term, illegal alien--but they were in the room, in the Senate Judiciary Committee, while the president of the ICE union is testifying. They were also in the hallway outside the Judiciary Committee as recently as yesterday, and they had been invited into the Judiciary Committee, or at least recognized and introduced inside the House Judiciary Committee by former chairman, now ranking member, John Conyers of Michigan.

How far have we come, Mr. Speaker, when we have people who are subject at the specific directive of the law that, when encountered by the law enforcement officers, they are required by law to place them in removal proceedings, and now they come into the United States Capitol and insist that we change the law to accommodate law-breakers. If we do that, whatever our hearts say about the DREAMers, whatever the short- term piece is about that small segment of the larger group of people that's defined as 11 million, and probably is two or more times greater than that, whatever our heart says about that, we're eroding the rule of law if we grant a component of amnesty.

Our rule of law is more sacred to us than the sympathy that we turn towards people that maybe didn't make this decision themselves. But I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, that the President has directed and it is in the letter of the executive memos that have been produced by John Morton, the head of ICE, and supported by Janet Napolitano, who is the Secretary of Homeland Security, who is the subject of the lawsuit led by Chris Crane, the president of ICE, naming Janet Napolitano and has been before the court in the Northern District of Texas and received roughly a 90 percent decision at this point from Judge Reed O'Connor that when Congress says ``shall,'' it doesn't mean ``may.'' In other words, if you're for open borders, Mr. President, the law says thou shalt not read the law to mean you may enforce the law; it says you shall enforce the law.

The President of the United States takes an oath of office, and it's prescribed in the Constitution. And part of the language that he adheres to is to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. That means enforced. It doesn't mean kill the law, Mr. Speaker. It doesn't mean tear the Constitution up and throw it out the window. It means take care the laws be faithfully

executed. In other words, enforce the law.

The President has defied his own oath of office, and he has prohibited the ICE and other law enforcement officers from enforcing the clear letter of the law, and some of that was law that was put in place in 1996 under the pen of Lamar Smith, who was the lead sponsor on the immigration reform legislation of that time.

The President gave a speech to a high school just out here in Washington, D.C., on March 28--I believe the date was March 28, 2011; I know the actual date of the month, not necessarily the year--and he said to them, I know you want me to establish the DREAM Act by Executive order. In other words, legalize people who were brought here by their parents under the age of 16 and essentially give them a work permit and perhaps a path to citizenship. But he said, I can't do that. It's not my constitutional authority to waive the law and grant, I'll say, executive amnesty to the DREAMers. Instead, he said, you understand--he said to the students--you understand the Constitution, you've been taught and you learned this, that there are three branches of government. The legislature has to pass the laws, that's Congress, and the President's job is to enforce the laws. That's the President who was speaking before that group on March 28, and the judicial branch is to interpret the laws.

Well, that's a pretty nice, tight, composite summary of the structure of our Constitution and our Federal Government. And it is worthy of a former adjunct law professor who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, President Barack Obama. He understood it clearly. He articulated it clearly to the young people there at the high school just outside here in D.C. And March 28, a little over a year later, the President decided that he was no longer going to respect his own word, his own oath of office or his own interpretation of the Constitution and just, I'll say it wasn't necessarily an executive whim--I suspect it was more like a political calculation. He did a press conference 2 hours after Janet Napolitano released the memo that created four classes of people who were exempted from the law and gave them a work permit.

By the way, all lawful presence here in the United States either comes from birth, natural born citizen, or the naturalization process that's set up by Congress, or the visas, visitors visas, student visas, H-1Bs, H-2Bs, ag workers, all of the lawful presence in the United States aside from natural born citizens is a product of the United States Congress.

Many believe, and I almost entirely agree, that the Constitution defines immigration as the exclusive province of Congress. It clearly defines the legislative activity as the exclusive province of the United States Congress, article I in the Constitution.

And so when the President decides he's going to create immigration law, waive the application of the law and create new law out of thin air, and when Janet Napolitano releases the Morton memo and announces that here are these four classes of people now exempt from the law and manufactures a work permit out of thin air, that happened, and 2 hours later the President was doing a press conference repeating the same thing at the White House.

And so it's not that the President happened to say those things in a press conference. It's not that Janet Napolitano happened to pick the timing of 2 hours before the President's press conference. Of course this was coordinated, and I'd asked her that under oath before the committee, if it was coordinated. The essential answer, after the typical, long rambling that you get from those kind of witnesses was yes.

And so one can only conclude that either it was by the order of the President or the consent of the President that the Constitution itself, I believe, was violated. I believe that the separation of powers was violated. And it appears to me, from reading Judge Reed O'Connor's decision in the case of Crane v. Napolitano, he agrees also, and wrote repeatedly, ``shall'' means ``shall''; it doesn't mean ``may.'' When the law says ``shall be enforced,'' ``shall be placed'' into removal proceedings, it means exactly that.

And so I expect that we will see a final decision out of the Northern District of Texas. Roughly 90 percent of the arguments that we made before the Court were agreed to by Judge Reed O'Connor, and the other one was one that the executive branch's argument was, let's see, less intelligible than it needed to be before a definitive decision could be rendered by a prudent Judge Reed O'Connor. And we'll see that decision perhaps come down very soon.

And I expect that this administration will litigate this all the way to the Supreme Court and insist that the President can legislate by executive order or executive edict, that they can provide executive amnesty.

If the President can suspend any law, if he has the authority to suspend any law and he has the authority to manufacture any law out of thin air--and out of thin air was the work permit, just as a reminder. Made up a work permit so that the DREAMers that he had exempted from the law could legally--and it's really questionable about the legally part--work in the United States.

If the President can manufacture law out of thin air, and if the President can order that the law be suspended, and if the president of ICE can be sitting in a room with people that are unlawfully present in the United States and compelled by law to place them in removal proceedings but prohibited by order of the President or his executive minions, we have come to a very bad place in America, Mr. Speaker.

Our Constitution itself is threatened. The function of the three branches of the government has been so blurred by an Executive that has contempt for his own oath and contempt for the Constitution itself and the separation of powers. And each time that we go to the Court to get an answer, we're asking the third branch of government to be the referee between the two competing branches, the executive and the legislative branch.

And the Founding Fathers, as they set up this magnificent and brilliant and balanced Constitution between the three branches of government, they envisioned this: each branch of government would have its own constitutional power, and that power was something that wasn't precisely defined between the three branches of government.

They expected the judicial branch would be the weakest of the three branches of government. Some years it is; some years it's not. But they also expected that the executive branch, the President, and the legislative branch, Congress, would reach a level of tension between the two where each branch would jealously guard the constitutional authority that's vested within it and the supreme law of the land, the Constitution. And instead, it seems as though these Members of Congress, 435 here and 100 Senators over on the other side, even though we all take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, seem to have a different understanding of what this Constitution really is. And they seem to have a blurred and weak understanding of the legislative authority that we have here.

Our Founding Fathers envisioned that. They put all of the power of the purse right here in the House of Representatives. Spending bills start here. There can't be a dollar spent by this government unless the House of Representatives approves it, whether we start it here and the Senate amends it and it comes back, or whether we start it here and the Senate approves it and it goes to the President's desk. There can't be money spent unless this House approves it.

And so we have the power of the purse. And they expected we would use the power of the purse in order to restrain an out-of-control Executive. They set some other structures in place, too, that none of us want to contemplate having to use the more draconian approach to this. But the President of the United States has defied the authority here of Congress and his own oath of office, and this Congress has not gotten its back up nearly enough to defend the constitutional authority that we have, or the affront to it.

And so, in an appropriations bill last week, I offered an amendment, an amendment that would prohibit any of the funds from being used to carry out

the orders that came from John Morton and Janet Napolitano and approved by President Obama that grant this executive amnesty to the four classes of people. This is a whole series of six memos, known as the Morton memos. And no money can be used to enforce or implement or execute the special work permit created either by those memos. And that amendment was debated here on the floor, vigorously, I might add, very late at night, and I made a strong constitutional argument, I believe. Members of Congress came down here to the floor of the House, and they voted by a vote of 224-201 to support my amendment.

This Congress has spoken. We may disagree on what we do with people that are unlawfully here, but the majority of the House of Representatives, that 224 vote clearly said we are going to defend our constitutional authority to legislate. We're not going to allow the President to make it up as he goes along, and we're going to constrain the purse strings of a President that would legislate by executive edict, which, in this case, is executive amnesty.

So that's a move in the right direction, Mr. Speaker. But as I see the things unfolding in the United States Senate and the language that comes out of there and the argument that has been repeatedly made here on the floor of the House and, to some extent, in the Senate, we have de facto amnesty. De facto amnesty is a reality because the President, as I said, broke his own oath of office.

We've gone to court to do all we can do there, and that's moving through the system. But there's another way that this is happening, and that is this. In the minds of too many Members of Congress, they believe that we have to conform our legislation to the President's will. Because the President has refused to enforce the law, they argue that we should conform the law to something the President will enforce.

That's way outside my ability to reason within the confines of the Constitution, Mr. Speaker. I can think of a time or two--and there have been more, I'm sure--that the Supreme Court ruled and they came down with a ruling that this Congress agreed was a constitutional interpretation.

The partial birth abortion legislation was one of those. Congress passed a ban on partial birth abortion. The ruling that came out of the Supreme Court was that the language that banned partial birth abortion was too vague and there wasn't a provision in it that made an exception for the life or health of the mother.

So Congress went back to work. We rolled up our sleeves. I was there in those discussions and in the debate and helped move it forward. Steve Chabot of Ohio was the principal sponsor of that legislation. It defined the act precisely from a medical perspective of partial birth abortion. We brought in experts that testified over and over again, and we brightened the definition, and a brighter, brighter line on what that was. And the Congressional findings, after much medical deliberation, was that a partial birth abortion is never necessary to save the life of the mother, that it just doesn't occur from a medical perspective.

Yes, there are those dissenters out there, Mr. Speaker. I don't bring this up for that reason. Congress read the Supreme Court decision and conformed our legislation to the decision that was a precedent decision of the United States Supreme Court. That shows a decent respect for the jurisprudence of the judicial branch of government, and it's appropriate for this Congress to respect the judgment of the other branches of government.

But we all take an oath to uphold the Constitution. We're not bound by someone else's judgment of what that oath means or what the Constitution means. We're bound by a clear understanding of the Constitution itself, the text of the Constitution, the original text, plus the amendments.

The Constitution has to mean what it says. It has to mean what it says on its face. That's what words are there for. It has to also mean what it was understood to mean at the time of ratification, or there's no guarantee.

This Constitution, Mr. Speaker, is a contractual guarantee that we received, starting in 1789, amended 27 times since then. Every single amendment in there, all the language in there, has to mean what it was understood to mean at the moment of ratification. It can't be changed in its definition because it's inconvenient for today or our Founding Fathers would have not given us a means to amend this Constitution. It has to mean what it was understood to mean, and you can't change its definition. Because if you do so, you're breaking an intergenerational contract that was handed to us in 1789 to be preserved, protected and defended, this Constitution.

So each Member of Congress needs to understand that, take an oath to uphold this Constitution--we do that--defend it. But when the reasonable jurisprudence of a constitutional analysis comes from the Supreme Court, we conform to that. In the case of partial-birth abortion, we've conformed in a number of other times, and that's a respectful thing to do from one branch of government to the other.

But when the President of the United States defies the literal language in the law and orders that there be no application of the law because he disagrees with the law and manufactures a work permit out of thin air, and when a Congress accepts the President's idea on that and decides that we are going to pass legislation--as has been offered by the Gang of Eight in the Senate and the Gang of Eight, minus one, now seven in the House--that we're going to conform this Congress to the whim of the President--not that we agree with his policy, but they say, well, you'll never get enforcement of the law unless you conform the law to what the President's willing to do. My gosh.

What would the Founding Fathers say if the Chief Executive Officer of the United States and our Commander in Chief defies his own oath of office by his own definition--at the school, March 28, as I said; refuses to enforce the law, pledges to punish even the president of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement union for doing what he's commanded by law to do. The President does that, and there's any kind of mindset here in Congress that we should conform the law to the President's whim. No, Mr. Speaker.

The President has this alternative: if he disagrees with the law of the land and he wants to see it changed, then he can ask people in this Congress, the House and Senate--House or the Senate, for that matter-- would you kindly draft some legislation that would please me and I'll be supportive of it as you try to work it through the legislative process--through regular order, as our Speaker often says. That's the President's alternative.

He doesn't write law. He does have the opportunity to veto laws that he disagrees with that reach his desk. But, technically, the President can't even introduce a piece of legislation here in the House or the Senate. But we know that there are friends of the President that are willing to do that, and it should be so, so that the President can advocate for legislation and ask people to move it through the system.

But instead, as I said, he's defied his oath. He has challenged this Congress. And some Republicans and most Democrats appear to have this spell cast upon them that suspends their otherwise good judgment and they're working down the path of a comprehensive amnesty plan in the Senate--and the stage is set here in the House where I can surely see something similar emerging here.

We need to stand up and argue. There's a future for this country. There's a destiny for this country. It is a precious thing that we hold in our hands here, the destiny of the United States of America. The pillars of American exceptionalism built this.

You can open this Constitution up and go to article I, II and III, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branches of government--in priority order, I would say, because article I reflects more directly the voice of the people, the legislature, the Congress.

If there is a conflict between the three branches of government, how is it resolved, Mr. Speaker? If you dig deeply into this and you look at our history and you watch how things have reacted, sometimes the judicial branch comes out on top, sometimes the executive branch comes out on top, sometimes the legislative branch comes out on top. But if push comes to shove, it's the people, we the people, that come out on top.

That's why the House of Representatives has elections every 2 years, so we can be the quick reaction force. When people get their back up and they don't like the direction their government is going, they recruit people, they step up, they run for office. And 2 years later--2 years, or less, later--there's an election, and often new people come into the House of Representatives that more acutely reflect the values and the wishes of those who elected them.

We saw that happen in 2010. The year 2009-2010 brought us ObamaCare. We saw tens of thousands of people all around this Capitol. We saw not just a human chain, not just a human ring, but a human doughnut formed around the United States Capitol; people six and eight deep, human contact all the way around the United States Capitol. I went up to look at it, and I walked around to look at it. If we could have--of course for air space, helicopters can't go up and take pictures. There's no way to get that shot. I wish I had gone up with a camera up on top and done a panoramic, interconnectable picture so that people could see the magnificent unity of the American people, hand to hand, six to eight deep, that thick, a human doughnut all the way around the Capitol saying: keep your hands off our health care. Keep your hands off our health insurance.

That protest was defied when the then-Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, walked through the throng with her huge magnum gavel--you'll remember that, Mr. Speaker, about that long--in a show and display of--what shall I call it--regality. The regal Speaker was coming through with her big gavel to rule over the American people who said: keep your hands off our health care.

To this day, I don't know of a single legitimate poll that says that they want ObamaCare over repeal of ObamaCare. The last number I saw was 56 percent of the American people want to see ObamaCare repealed. They came here to this city and they said: keep your hands off our health care--tens of thousands. They came on three different occasions that I recall: on November 5, and then later in March, about March 22 or so, a Thursday, and then again on a Saturday. Some of them flew up here to be here on a Thursday, flew back home and got the call to come back again. They didn't leave the airport; they just went to the ticket counter and came back. They care that much about our freedom. And still, ObamaCare is being imposed upon them.

They went to the polls in the fall of 2010. They elected 87 new freshman Republicans to come serve here in the House of Representatives. And they every single one of them ran on the ticket of repealing ObamaCare, every single one--87 new freshmen. A magnificent turnover. A class that I call God's gift to America.

Now, that class of 87 is here--most of them still here--and a new class has been elected. All of the freshmen that came in on my side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker, and all of those that came in in 2010 and every Republican in the House of Representatives has voted to repeal ObamaCare. I believe up until, I'll say, last fall's election--I'm not certain what's happened in the Senate, but up until that time every Republican Senator has voted to repeal ObamaCare. They all took that pledge. That's an example of the quick reaction force of the people.

Now, it didn't work out so well with the Presidential election. But I can tell you that if that election result had been different for the Presidency, the ObamaCare repeal bill and getting past, I'll say, a new majority in the United States Senate, it would have gone to a new President's desk.

But it was passed out of this House of Representatives. I drafted the 40-word repeal language in the middle of the night after the ObamaCare legislation was passed. I wasn't alone doing that; I had company doing that. But the response of the American people overcomes the division between the lines of the three branches of government.

It's the people who will speak. When people rise up, when they elect new people to the United States Congress, when their voice is heard in the ballot box electing a President, then even a Supreme Court decision can be reversed by the voice of the people. It may take a constitutional amendment; but in the end, power is something that you can assume.

Anyone can assume power. We do that in our own families when we direct our children to stay out of the cookie jar, for example. As long as they respect that power, you have that power, Mr. Speaker. But if it's challenged and defied, then the power disappears, and it goes to whatever entity can claim that power, whatever entity can successfully assert that power.

So we're in the struggle right now. The President's hand is in the article I legislative cookie jar. He's reached in and said: I'm taking these cookies of immigration because I don't like the law that exists; I refuse to enforce the law; and I'm going to make up a new law while we're at it.

It's almost like having a child with his hand in the cookie jar with that defiant look in his eye thinking, ``And you can't do anything about it. You can go to the judicial branch and you can litigate.''

We've done that. The Court is one day going to come down with a decision. Will the President honor the decision of the Court? If it gets all the way to the Supreme Court, will he honor it or will he defy it?

I sat here on this floor, Mr. Speaker, as the President spoke from the rostrum right behind me lecturing the Supreme Court that sat over here and told them that their decision was wrong. That's not a decent respect for the opinions of mankind that are seated in the United States Supreme Court. That blurs the lines between the judicial and the executive branch of government. It also tells me that we have a President who doesn't understand his restraint.

But I'm troubled by a Congress that will allow that to happen and will allow that Presidential hand into the legislative cookie jar, because we take an oath to uphold the Constitution. It's our obligation to do that. That means we defend the constitutional authority that we've taken an oath to uphold. That's where we sit.

Now, we'll get to the policy side of this from an immigration perspective, Mr. Speaker. If you reward people who break the law, you get more lawbreakers. It's that simple of an equation. I knew that in 1986. I knew that as a businessman who was working through the farm crisis years of the 1980s to keep my company up and going and trying to get it and keep it profitable and raise my young children at the time.

I remember when Ronald Reagan signed the Amnesty Act. That was a big mistake. That was one of only two times that the great man whom I have great respect for, Ronald Reagan, let me down. It was only twice in 8 years, but it comes back to haunt us yet to this day.

Why did I know in 1986, not being a Member of Congress, being a guy that had only been in business 9 years at the time, that had three young sons that were roughly 10 and under and a wife at home that was also working, how did I know that that was a mistake? What was it within me? I didn't have the background that matched up with Attorney General Meese, for example, or the President of the United States. I'm outside of little Kiron, Iowa, 300 people at the time. I can't see a neighbor from my porch. But I knew that that was a mistake. I had no idea that this many years later I'd be standing on the floor of the United States Congress making this case.

It wasn't a matter of clairvoyance. It was a matter of what was justice. It was a matter of growing up in a law enforcement family and being steeped in reverence for the supreme law of the land, this Constitution, and understanding that if you don't like the law, you abide by it. But there's a means to change it whether you're the President of the United States or whether you're this young fellow that's trying to run a business and raise his family but have respect for the rule of law.

When you cross those lines, and especially when you do so from the Office of the White House, the President of the United States, it's the equivalent of taking a jackhammer to one of the beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism.

Now, to define what those pillars are, they're here. They're here in the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment is real easy:

Freedom of speech. That's a pillar of exceptionalism. Without it, we can't be

the great country we are. Freedom of religion, same answer. Without it, we can't be the same great country that we are. Freedom of speech, religion, the press, assembly, the right to keep and bear arms, and the property rights that used to exist in the Fifth Amendment before the Kelo decision that we sought to restore in the Judiciary Committee just a couple of days ago. No double jeopardy, trial by a jury of your peers, a speedy trial, no cruel unusual punishment. The rights that are not in the Constitution devolve to the States, respectively, or to the people.

Those are all pillars of exceptionalism.

Free enterprise capitalism is another one. Without free enterprise capitalism, we don't have this vigorous and robust economy that we have.

That's on the citizenship test, by the way. What is the economic system of the United States? Free enterprise capitalism.

How about the property rights that exist within intellectual property up until we amended some of the patent and trademark laws? The property rights to intellectual property is one of the big, big reasons why the United States has been so successful.

So I put this all together and add to that the fact that this country was settled by the values of Western civilization, with Judeo- Christianity included in a prominent form. All of that arrived here on this continent at the dawn of the industrial revolution and the concept of manifest destiny that settled this country from sea to shining sea.

I can look back and try to reverse-engineer America and think where did we make a turn that I could even on Monday morning quarterbacking rules make a recommendation we should have turned another direction. I can't reverse-engineer America and come up with a greater country than we are, except maybe I'd go back to 1986 and say, Ronald Reagan, if you'd just vetoed the Amnesty Act in 1986, I wouldn't be standing here right now. We wouldn't have a Senate that's seeking to stampede an Amnesty Act across the rotunda over to us. I wouldn't have this spell that seems to be cast over too many Republicans that somehow if we'd just pass an Amnesty Act everything is going to be all right in political viability, Republicans will be okay going into the future, end this spell that has suspended good judgment and reason and suspended their ability to listen to empirical data and weigh the policy.

The immigration issue cuts across all the components of constitutional conservatism. Anything that has to do with family, for example, with the rule of law, with the economy, with national defense and national security, almost every issue that we deal with in this Congress is touched somehow by immigration.

It is not a simple topic. It's not something where you just say, Well, I feel sorry for the DREAMers; therefore, I'm going to grant amnesty. I support amnesty, I get that off the table, and maybe the next Congress can deal with it.

It does not work like that, Mr. Speaker. This is an irrevocable and irreversible advocacy for amnesty. It's something that cannot be undone. ObamaCare, as bad as it is--and I've spent more than 3 years of my life fighting ObamaCare and working to defeat it before it became law and repeal it after it became law. That's a matter of clear public record. But, Mr. Speaker, if I have to accept this perpetual and retroactive amnesty that is offered by the Gang of 8, or what I expect to come from the Gang of 8 minus one here in the House, if I have to choose between perpetual and retroactive amnesty and ObamaCare, I'm going to accept the ObamaCare and defeat the perpetual and retroactive amnesty, because later on we can repeal ObamaCare. We can undo it. We can take it apart. We can roll it back, and we can put together a doctor-patient relationship and a real healthy health care system in the United States. We know what it looks like. We know what to do. We couldn't get it done because we didn't have the votes.

But you can undo ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, but you cannot undo comprehensive amnesty, because once that genie is out of the bottle, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. It becomes as amorphous as a puff of smoke. And if they don't have the political will to enforce the law now, why would they have the political will to enforce the law after amnesty would be granted?

They argue that they have all these tight provisions put into the bill, that there's border security in the bill and that we'll get tight borders from this point on. Now, when you read the legislation, there's no prospect of that. I would have to hide my face to say something like that and wink and cross my fingers behind my back with the other hand. They don't mean it. They don't believe it. They write it because it is just a vague, open, comprehensive placebo for those who want border security to give people something to hide behind.

If you say that Janet Napolitano has got this time to come up with a plan to secure the border, it doesn't mean secure the border and it doesn't mean implement the plan. It just says come up with a plan. And if we're not satisfied with that, then they appoint a border security commission whose job is to come up with a plan. And if that fails, then they go back to Janet Napolitano again.

This isn't that hard, Mr. Speaker. If you're serious about enforcing the border, you can do that. If you would give me Janet Napolitano's job and a President who doesn't tie my hands, I would take the resources that are committed now within the 50 miles of the southern border, the southwest border, and I would get you upwards of the 99th percentile of border security within 3 years--maybe sooner, but I think it would take a half a year to get all the administrative things jump- started.

I'm in the construction business. I know how to build a fence, a wall and a fence. I know what it costs to do that. I'm not proposing we go down. I wouldn't bid such a thing, but I could surely provide some advice. I have designed it already, a fence, a wall, and a fence with access roads going between so you have a road between the first fence number one, wall would be the second and fence above that yet. You could patrol both of those areas in between a fence, a wall, and a fence. Doing so, you could secure it.

It's good to have border patrol personnel. Boots on the ground are good. They do a noble job down there under nearly impossible conditions. I'm a big fan of the Border Patrol, and I'd like to think they know it when I go down there to visit.

But when you start expanding boots on the ground because you don't want to put infrastructure in place, it isn't very logical to me. I live out in the country in rural Iowa. I live on the corner of gravel roads that go a mile in each of four directions where I live. If Janet Napolitano came to me and said: ``I want you to secure that mile of road that goes from your house west, and I'm going to pay you $6 million this year to secure that road,'' if I thought I might lose the contract next year, maybe I would think, well, I'll hire myself some border patrol agents, and we'll do our best to catch some of those folks--we know we're not going to get more than about 25 percent enforcement, but it's a job, and take it on.

But if I had a 10-year contract, it's not any longer $6 million a mile, it's $60 million a mile in a 10-year contract. If that contract was tied to efficiency, in other words if they would dock my pay if I didn't enforce the law, if I couldn't secure the border, I can tell you what I would do, Mr. Speaker. I would invest about $2 million a mile to build a fence, a wall, and a fence.

Now, $2 million is more than I think it takes. And to put this into perspective for people that might be overhearing our conversation, Mr. Speaker, we can build a four-lane interstate highway across expensive Iowa cornfields for right at $4 million a mile--buy the land, do the engineering, the archeological and environmental surveys, do the grading, pave it, shoulder it, paint the lines, put the fencing in, seed it, have it done and finished, and signs, for $4 million a mile.

Well, it's easy to see now that if we can do a four-lane interstate highway for $4 million, we can build a pretty tremendous fence for a couple of million dollars--a fence, a wall, and a fence--with just simply patrol roads that allow a person good-weather access through that desert part of the country.

It isn't hard to figure that out. If you give me $60 million for a mile, I would put a couple million dollars in a fence, a wall, and a fence, I would have myself the necessary border patrol agents to watch that, I would put some cameras up to surveil it, I would put some vibration sensors in, I would put some kind of technology on there to add to that--that they don't like me to talk about here on the floor of the House--and we would have ourselves a 99-plus percent secure border.

Had we done that back when the Secure Fence Act was passed here in the House--supported by Duncan Hunter from California as the lead author and an excellent leader on this issue--had we done that, we wouldn't be having this discussion today, Mr. Speaker, because the southwest border would have been secure, and then that argument would be taken away.

Then when they promise that there will be border security, we would already have it. If we already had border security, then some of the harder hearts here in Congress could take a look at the 11 million that are here and think: Okay, we've demonstrated that we are going to enforce the law from this place forward; is there an accommodation that we can make?

We can't get to that decision because the President refuses to enforce the law, they won't allow that kind of security on the southern border--for political reasons, I believe--the ports of entry are not as tight as they need be, we don't have an entry-exit system; piece after piece of this that is necessary for security.

By the way, I have a bill called the New Idea Act. What it does is it clarifies that wages and benefits paid to illegals by employers are not tax deductible. It subjects that employer to an IRS audit. It gives the employer safe harbor if they use E-Verify, so that an employer could put the employees' numbers into the E-Verify database.

If it came back and said it confirms that these folks can work legally in the United States, put them to work without any kind of sanction or punishment for the employment--safe harbor.

But if the IRS comes in during a normal audit--doesn't accelerate the audits, but a normal audit--they would normally then--in the audit under my bill--they would put the Social Security numbers and the identifying information into E-Verify, run those employees through, and if it came back that they could not lawfully work in the United States, they would give the employer an opportunity--and the employee--to cure that in case there is misinformation in the data, which gets better every time we use it, and it's very good.

Aside from that, the IRS would then rule: Sorry, the wages that you knowingly and willfully paid to someone who is unlawfully present in the United States are not a business expense. So wages come out of the schedule C, they go into the gross receipts column again, and show up as net income at the bottom. The IRS would apply a penalty and an interest against the unpaid taxes, plus the taxes, to that income, that net income.

The effect of this is it would turn your $10-an-hour illegal into about a $16-an-hour illegal. That makes it a business decision. It means as an employer you're going to wonder: What year will I be audited--this year or next year or the year after?

Well, it wouldn't be the end of the world if they audited you for a year, but it might be pretty expensive as those years accumulate up to 6 under the statute of limitations. So employers would look at that accumulating statute of limitations of 6 years and decide, I'm going to get to legal. I'm going to work my way through and clean up my workforce. That's a logical business decision.

The bill also requires the IRS to work in cooperation with the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security so that they exchange information for the purpose of enforcing U.S. law. Now, this isn't that hard, and it's not complicated. It just takes the will. It takes a decent respect for the opinions of our Founding Fathers, the opinions of those who have written law before us and some who serve in this Congress today, a decent respect for the Constitution.

Let's reconstruct this respect for the rule of law in this country, Mr. Speaker. Let's reestablish its enforcement. Let's do so while we respect the dignity of every human person. Understand that they don't always get the clearest message in the country that they live in. They know they want to leave there. They know they want to come to America. They want to leave for some reason, such as perhaps it's too violent-- 58,000 people, some say more, killed in the drug wars in Mexico in the last few years.

The rule of law doesn't apply down there the way it does here. People aren't always equally treated under the law. Sometimes they are shaken down by police officers. That hardly ever happens in this country in a significant way.

We have equal protection under the law in America. If you look at the statue of Lady Justice, who is standing there with the scales of justice in her hands, they are balanced--equal protection, balanced protection under the law. Most times, you will see Lady Justice blindfolded, because justice is blind. It needs to treat every human person equally under the law. People come here because they want that kind of protection. It is a component of American exceptionalism--the rule of law.

The Senate is poised to destroy the rule of law, and the House seems to be moving in that direction. I am very troubled, Mr. Speaker, as I watch one of the essential pillars--the rule of law--of American exceptionalism be attacked and start to crumble before my very eyes in this country.

The job the Founding Fathers had, the vision came from God that our rights come from God. They all wrote that, they all agreed with that. It's in the Declaration.

They put this concept together--inspired, I believe--the concept of a free people, a sovereign people--``We the People.'' They sold that to a large enough percentage of the population in the Thirteen Original Colonies that they supported the Declaration. They had to sell it.

It wasn't just, Thomas Jefferson went into a room, got out the quill, and wrote the Declaration--they were so impressed by the language in it they decided to embrace it and start a revolution. This was a cultural thing, it was an intellectual thing, it was a faith component. They put that together and they sold it to the people in the Thirteen Original Colonies, who fought a war to establish this country and then to ratify a Constitution.

Their job was a lot harder than ours, Mr. Speaker. Our job is to preserve, protect, and defend it. They had to conceive of it, argue for it, sell it to the people, put it down in words and parchment--the Declaration, fight the war and some give their lives to shape America to the great, great country that we are today.

Our job is to preserve and protect and defend this glorious destiny that is out ahead of us. We cannot shrink from it, we cannot trail in the dust our Constitution or the rule of law, no matter what our hearts say about having sympathy for groups of people that may or may not have had the say about whether they came here legally or not. That is what's here to be defended.

Next week, we are going to be very vigorously defending the rule of law. I'm going to seek to have Lincoln-Douglas style debates outside of these Chambers, outside of the Capitol building, on Wednesday at 9:00 in the morning. It will extend. We will take a 2-hour break over lunch and begin again at 2:00 in the afternoon, Mr. Speaker.

This is going to be designed so that reasonable people can have an open discussion just like Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln did. Let's air this out before the public, and let's hear what the public has to say. In fact, if we can work it out, I want to hear from the public as well, Mr. Speaker. It will be a big week next week, and I'm looking forward to it.

We are called to this task. Let's not trail in the dust the golden hopes of humanity. We are the redoubt of Western civilization. If we can't protect the fortress of the rule of law and all of these pillars of American exceptionalism here, we can't look to Western Europe to save us or Australia to save us. We can look to them as allies. If our civilization is going to be

preserved, it's going to be here in the United States of America.

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

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Again, I appreciate the privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. I come to this floor to voice my concerns about the direction some in the executive and legislative bodies seem to be going.

I will start it out this way, Mr. Speaker, in that, yesterday, it finally occurred to me how to describe the political whiplash that has taken place that goes against the logic and history and experience of myself and, I think, of a majority of the American people. I said to them yesterday in an immigration meeting inside the Republican Study Committee, which had a panel there of House and Senate to talk about immigration--some of them experts--that I feel like Rumpelstiltskin.

The story of ``Rumpelstiltskin'' is that he went to sleep under a tree, and he was clean shaven, and when he woke up, he had this long, long beard that had apparently grown over a century or so. The culture shock that he got after having taken a little nap was what the narrative of the story of ``Rumpelstiltskin'' was about.

I went to bed the night of November 6 in having finished the election celebration, in having succeeded in another election, but I watched as Mitt Romney had to concede that he had not won the Presidency from Barack Obama. I understood what that election was about as much as most anybody in this country.

It starts in Iowa. We spent nearly 4 years sorting out and helping to contribute to the knowledge base of the American people as to what the planks in the platform would be, what the platform would look like, how we would select a nominee for the President of the United States. It starts in Iowa with the first-in-the-Nation's caucuses, and of the candidates who come there, many of them will go to all 99 counties. Rick Santorum, for example, had over 380 meetings in Iowa, and he went to all 99 counties. Michele Bachmann went to all 99 counties.

That's an endorsement from the Iowa caucuses that can be earned. You don't have to have millions of dollars to shape a media image and buy a nomination, but it is important to be there and talk. So we do this. We're all politics all the time. I'm engaged in the Republican Presidential nominating process from early on, so I watch this and I contribute to it. I weigh in on the things that I believe in, and I've listened as every Presidential candidate has endorsed--let me just say this--my immigration ideas.

Yet, as I listened to the debate and as Mitt Romney won the nomination and as he and Barack Obama had their multiple debates--three debates, if I remember, and there was much debate that went on throughout the media--I don't think anyone went to the polls on November 6 thinking this election is about immigration. I went to bed the night of November 6 in having realized that Barack Obama would be President for another 4 years. It was a disappointment to me and a crushing disappointment to many of us who had so many big plans on what we were going to do to put this Nation back on the right track with a new Republican majority anticipated in the United States Senate and a President Mitt Romney. It didn't work out that way, but I never believed on that night that the election was decided on immigration, Mr. Speaker. It was not. The debate was almost exclusively about jobs and the economy, jobs and the economy, jobs and the economy. It was drilled so relentlessly and so often that it put the American people to sleep. I said before the election multiple times that this needs to be more than a race about jobs and the economy. Nevertheless, that seemed to be what the polsters on the Republican side were advising Mitt Romney that needed to be continually coming out.

So the American people went to the polls doing what they do: they make decisions based upon what they hear people talking about. You can track polling, and I have looked at it for years. The polling that is going to have the highest priority of the people's concerns is going to be the one the people

are talking about, the one the media is talking about. National conversations are many times driven through the media. These conversations of a Presidential election were about jobs and the economy.

I went to bed disappointed that night on November 6, perhaps even crushed, at the loss of opportunity that this Nation would have. I woke up the next morning--not with a beard that was 100 years long, but just a normal one from a night's sleep--not thinking that there was anything except jobs and the economy and the promise of the President to expand the dependency class and telling people, You're going to have less personal responsibility under Barack Obama, and you'll have more risk under Mitt Romney.

That was part of the argument: jobs in the economy, grow the dependency class. That was the argument.

But when I woke up on the morning of November 7, I began to see some of these things come through the news, this analysis that Mitt Romney would be President-elect on November 7 if he just hadn't said ``self- deport,'' or Mitt Romney would be President-elect on November 7 if he hadn't lost such a large percentage of the Hispanic vote. Then the numbers began to trickle in a little bit, and you get those numbers that show--and I don't dispute them--that Mitt Romney got about 27 percent of the Hispanic vote and Barack Obama got about 71 percent of the Hispanic vote.

So the people who had promised that Mitt Romney was going to win the Presidency, including pundits who hung in until the polls were closed until the last minute, still insisting that there were precincts coming in in Ohio that were going to turn the election needed a scapegoat. They needed a scapegoat to blame the election loss on because they had predicted that victory and contributed to the engineering of the campaign and had pushed the jobs and the economy argument to the detriment of some of the other topics that would have been useful to get a better turnout among conservatives.

So in looking for a scapegoat, they began to say on November 7, Mitt Romney would be President if he hadn't said these two words: self- deport. He would be President if he had a larger percentage of the Hispanic vote. He lost too much of it. This is the mantra that we saw that came out of George W. Bush's campaign when he began to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform.

I remember a document that was produced by the Republican National Committee chairman. It was referred to as an autopsy or postmortem report. It said again that Mitt Romney would be President if he had gotten a larger percentage of the Hispanic vote and that George W. Bush got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004.

That number has floated out there since the day after that election in 2004; but it's not true, Mr. Speaker. George W. Bush never got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. That number is someplace between 38 percent and 40 percent. It was a stronger percentage than Mitt Romney got, but Mitt Romney was competitive with John McCain's vote on the Hispanic side, and it was clear that John McCain has been an open- borders Senator all of his life. The only time he ever really was for border security and border control was when he had to save himself from a primary, and that's when he said build the ``blank'' fence.

So what we have here is an irrational conclusion drawn on the morning of November 7 of last year that turns out to be a handy little scapegoat, excuse, change the subject matter for people who made predictions that didn't match what the professional opinion was. Another thing that takes place is if you repeat something often enough in the news media, you can convince people that that is the topic, that was the subject.

So I will just tell you in this conference, people are now starting to understand the election wasn't about immigration, and there is no mandate for Barack Obama to sign an amnesty bill. There is a strong desire on the part of people that are for open borders to pass one. I understand why Democrats are for open borders and amnesty. They're the political beneficiaries of open borders and amnesty.

Republicans are paying the price for this wedge that's being driven between the Republican Party, Mr. Speaker. And in political tactics, as well as warfare and military tactics, if you can split the line of your enemy, your opposition, your competition, if you can divide them, especially if you can pit them against each other, you have a much greater chance of success.

This is a classical example of Republicans accepting an argument and, in fact, creating the argument, some of them joining with Democrats who gleefully drive the wedge in between the Republican Party to separate the rule of law, border security, pillar of American exceptionalism, constitutional conservative Republicans away from the establishment wing of the party that sees this world a little bit different.

Conventional wisdom here is Romney would be President if Republicans had done a better job reaching out to the Hispanic community. I'm saying, Mr. Speaker, that's not true. There's no data that supports that theory. Even still, they insist on adhering to this. And when I ask them what is in this Gang of Eight's bill in the United States Senate that has passed out of committee now to be considered on the floor of the United States Senate, what's in that bill for Americans, the answer is: nothing. There is nothing in that bill for Americans.

What's in that bill, then, for, let's say, Republicans? Well, political disaster is in it. There's nothing on the upside of it for Republicans.

What's in it for Democrats? Millions of new voters, more political power, a continued expanding of the dependency class, an erosion of the individual responsibility and the God-given liberty and freedom that this country has; and that's the benefit to the Democratic side of this thing, Mr. Speaker.

Then what is the effect? The effect is pretty clear. You have a study done by the stellar Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation who does multiple studies. He is the most accomplished analyst that I know on this Hill, and his work has been subject to public scrutiny for more than two decades and his work has been unassailable.

When it was announced that he was doing an analysis of the economic impact of a Senate version of the bill, the amnesty bill, immediately his political opposition began to attack him personally and to attack a study they had never read. I know they never read it, Mr. Speaker, because it wasn't out and it wasn't released. And I got a verbal preview of that when Robert Rector came to speak before the Conservative Opportunity Society, which I've chaired for some years. And I knew they hadn't read the report because it wasn't released. I would get access to one of the first copies.

I have read every page of the Rector report. I believe it's 102 pages. There' a 5-page executive summary. This report boils down this, Mr. Speaker: if you pass the Senate Gang of Eight's comprehensive immigration reform/amnesty act, the net cost of the people who would be legalized in America, even if you use the 11.3 million, which I think is a very low estimate, the net cost to the taxpayer when you calculate the drawdown from the welfare systems and the health care and the education and the infrastructure--he's got it all broken down in detail--the net cost--and then you subtract from that the net tax contributions made by this group of people, you end up with a $6.3 trillion price tag to the Senate's amnesty bill.

And still, Republican members of the Gangs of Eight, House and Senate, posture themselves as conservatives. They posture themselves as conservatives, and they advocate for a $6.3 trillion net cost, and their best argument against the Rector report is that it's not dynamically scored.

I heard that yesterday from the gentleman from Idaho: the Rector report is not dynamically scored. If you dynamically score it, then presumably you could get around to a purist libertarian view that anytime--and that's this: anytime anybody does an hour's worth of work and contributes a dollar to the gross domestic product, they contribute to the economy. That's their theory. That's a very narrow view of what goes on in any country.

If you're going to call it economic growth because the GDP goes up by a dollar, but it costs you $2 or $3 on the other end out of tax recipients to fund the stimulation to get that extra dollar, that's not economic growth. But

they argue that it is. If you dynamically score the Rector report, it gets more costly, not less costly. The number of $6.3 trillion in cost goes up, not down.

I would suggest that these people who are attacking Robert Rector or the Heritage Foundation or the people that are making allegations that the Rector report is not dynamically scored go in there and dynamically score the Rector report then. Tell me, what is your number? It's not good enough just to criticize somebody else's data without actually addressing the data. What's your number, Gang of Eight? How much do you think the Gang of Eight bills are going to cost the taxpayers for the people who would be legalized instantly? How much?

Then they say, I want more legal immigration, more legal immigration. You could ask them, How many are coming in here legally now? Most of them who make such a statement would be stumped, Mr. Speaker. They don't know.

If you don't know how many people are coming in here legally, say, over the last decade, how can you assert whether there should be more or less? And if they do know the number, then I would say to them: you think there should be more legal immigration? How many is enough? How many is too many? There are two more stumping questions I've just asked.

They don't know how many is enough. They don't know how many is too many. They're making a political calculation, not a policy analysis. It's not good enough to change the destiny of the United States of America simply by wetting your finger and putting it into the air, or checking your political barometer and making a decision whether it's a plus or a minus for you politically. Can you get reelected if you're for amnesty or not? That's some of the questioning that's going on around this body. I suggest we have a higher charge and a higher challenge and a bigger responsibility.

This is a constitutional Republic, and one of the essential pillars of American exceptionalism is the rule of law. This shining city on the hill sits on these pillars of American exceptionalism. And among them, many of them are in the Bill of Rights--freedom of speech, religion, the press, peaceably assemble, and petition the government for regress grievance. Second Amendment rights--the right to be secure in our persons, the property rights that used to exist before the Kelo decision. That is a little editorial, Mr. Speaker. I'll take that up in another Special Order sometime--the rights that devolve to the States or the people respectively under the 9th and 10th Amendments; no double jeopardy. All of those things.

If you take any piece that I've mentioned out of the history of this country, you don't get the United States of America. You can't be the United States of America without the law, without the rule of law.

Millions of people come to this country to escape lawlessness, and we owe it to them as well as the heritage of all Americans to ensure that we do not have lawlessness institutionalized in this country.

Amnesty is. To grant amnesty is to pardon immigration law breakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. That's what's advocated by the Gangs of Eight, no matter how they want to spin it. If they do that, they will have provided an amnesty plan that can never be reversed, and they will have destroyed the rule of law at least with regard to immigration so that it can never be restored, destroyed so it could never be restored. There is no going back to this, going back to what was if this legislation passes.

And, I'll take us back to 1986. Ronald Reagan signed--he was honest with us, he signed the Amnesty Act, Mr. Speaker. He was pressured, no doubt. I'll just say I know that. He was pressured by a lot of people who have good judgment almost all of the time, good advisers, but the pressure that came was this: there are a million people in America. It started out at about 750,000; but by the time the decision was made by Ronald Reagan, they said there are a million people in America who are here illegally, and we can't deal with all of them so we want to get a fresh start. We can make this deal with the Democrats in Congress that if you just sign, Mr. President Reagan, the Amnesty Act, we will ensure also in that bill that there will be border security. Shut off the bleeding at the border, and the trade-off will be that we'll give amnesty to a million people.

And Ronald Reagan, with his compassionate heart and his good principles and good judgment, didn't see what was coming. What was coming was the intentional undermining of the enforcement. Democrats never intended to enforce immigration law in 1986. Ronald Reagan accepted their word. His word was good. He didn't have a reason to believe theirs was not. It was not. It was intentionally not good. But President Reagan signed the Amnesty Act for the purposes of the one sole and only Amnesty Act that was ever going to take place in the history of the United States. That was the promise.

And in exchange, we all had to fill out the I-9 forms with precision and fear that the Federal Government would come in and catch us in a technicality and lock us up in jail or fine us a great deal. I still have I-9 forms that are in the dusty files from back then. I was sure the INS was going to show up and take enforcement against me. It didn't happen in my company, or in thousands of companies across the country. They didn't enforce it the way it was promised to be enforced. We got the amnesty all right, but we didn't get the border security.

Now we have people that seem to have the wisdom as if they have been born since then and denied access to the history books, and they seem to think that they can write laws that are immigration laws today that will put this thing away and finish adapting to immigration law for all time. They're saying, just listen to us, pass our Gang of Eight amnesty bill, and we will fix the immigration problem for all time.

It's clear to me that the lesson from 1986 didn't soak into them. They don't have a lot of gray hair. You don't have to pull out a history book and read it. In fact, just down the street just about any respectful Member of Congress could, I believe, get a meeting with Attorney General Ed Meese, who was Ronald Reagan's Attorney General in 1986, whom I believe advised Ronald Reagan to sign the Amnesty Act. But Attorney General Meese, whom I greatly respect for his intellect, for his character, for his judgment, for his work ethic, he's still in the game, wrote an op-ed in 2006 to deal with George W. Bush's amnesty proposal, and that op-ed say Reagan would not make this mistake again. And then now some 2 weeks ago or so, he released another statement that mirrors the 2006 statement.

So they could have the benefit of Attorney General Ed Meese and listen to what happened in 1986, if these Members were sincere about making an objective decision. They are not. They are salivating over putting their imprimatur on history and changing the character and the culture and the direction of the civilization of America.

Now, America has always been about assimilation. And we are, yes, a Nation of immigrants. So is every other nation on the planet, by the way, so we should not overemphasize that. We're a Nation of people that come together, that have assimilated different cultures and civilizations, and we have something I call American vigor.

American vigor comes from, these pillars of American exceptionalism that I listed, most of them in the Bill of Rights. You add to that free enterprise capitalism, you add to that the faith of Judeo-Christianity and Western Civilization all wrapped up together on this continent with essentially unlimited natural resources, the rule of law, manifest destiny. All of that was a magnet that attracted the vigor of every civilization here.

We didn't just get a cross-section of people that came from Asia or Europe or South America that came to America. We got the dreamers, the doers, the vigorous people from every donor civilization on the planet. The people that came to work and contributed that had ideas. They wanted to be unfettered by the ropes and chains and the restraints that their own home country had and came to America to embrace the American Dream. That's why we are America. That's why we have a can-do spirit. We got the best of the spirits of every single country on the planet. We must preserve these pillars of American exceptionalism, including the rule of law, or this Nation

will never reach its God-given and intended destiny.

That's why I stand so strongly on preserving respect and adherence to the rule of law. That's why I reject the President's lawless activities to suspend immigration law that he doesn't like and advance his political foundation in doing so.

The President has suspended immigration law by executive amnesty, is what he has done. That's what the debate was about last night with the King amendment. That's what the vote was about this morning with the King amendment that passed with strong support in a bipartisan way. Some people I think took a walk. But in any case, my amendment said they'll not use any of the funds appropriated in the bill to enforce the Morton memos, which are the memos commonly referred to that come from the President's wish to grant amnesty by executive edict.

And in one of those memos, the most famous of which, which established Dream Act Light, the President of the United States went out and did a press conference within 2 hours of the issuing of the memo that came from Janet Napolitano's office. And it says in that memo seven different times that we'll apply this on an individual basis only, on an individual basis only. I can repeat that five more times. That gives you a sense of what they put in the memo.

They know that when you litigate something like this, the individual basis only is the reference to prosecutorial discretion. The executive branch has the prosecutorial discretion. It's well established. I agree with it. They can't enforce every single law, but the law also requires that when ICE encounters an individual that they believe to be unlawfully in the United States, they are obligated to place them into deportation proceedings. That's the law.

The President suspended this specific law. He created four classes of people under the Morton memos and then has suspended the law as being applied against these four classes of people.

He's not doing it on an individual basis, only it's lip service on an individual basis only.

And of 450,000 people that had already been adjudicated for deportation, they have now waived that on 300,000 and they're grinding through the rest. It looks like they're on their way to nearly half a million people that get administrative amnesty, and this is before the ``Dream Act Lite'' memo came out. That's another chunk of this.

So the President has, time after time, through the actions of his executives, defied his oath of office, which is to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. That's the President's obligation. It's his oath to the Constitution. He had his hand on the Bible when he gave that oath. And he gave an oath to our Constitution.

He gave a lecture to some students out here at a high school on March 28, year before last I believe it was. And they asked him, why don't you just pass an executive order, sign an executive order to grant lawful status to the Dream Act kids?

And the President said, as a former adjunct constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, accurately, he said, I don't have the authority to do that. The legislature passes the laws. My job is to carry them out. And the judicial branch is to pass judgment on the meaning of the technicality of the law. Pretty good response for a constitutional law adjunct professor.

And about a year later, the President decided he wasn't bound by his oath of the Constitution. Neither was he bound by the analysis or the opinion that he gave the high school kids; defied his oath, and he defied his own judgment, publicly stated, and granted administrative amnesty through a whole series of six different memos known as the Morton memos.

We cannot be a civilized country if we're going to have a President who legislates by executive edict, or by press conference, by the way.

Mr. Speaker, you'll remember that ObamaCare was not supposed to fund abortion, nor was it supposed to fund contraceptives or sterilizations. There was an accommodation that was made in an amendment here and some negotiations with the President.

But they do it anyway. They impose this on our faith communities as well. And our churches filed multiple lawsuits, more than I can actually quote into this Record today, to object on the grounds of religious liberty.

This country shall not impose a violation of religious liberty on our faith people, and it shall not draw a distinction between an individual's faith, a private sector business' faith, or a church itself. It's all the same. No one is exempt from the protection of our First Amendment rights.

Yet, this administration goes after them. And when he heard the heat that came back from the churches and, particularly, the Roman Catholic Church, the President did a press conference at noon on a Friday, and he said, I'm going to make an accommodation to the religious institution, an accommodation. Now I'm going to require the insurance companies to provide these things for free, abortifacients, contraceptives, sterilizations, and he repeated himself, ``for free.''

The President can't do that. Even if the rule further defines the ObamaCare law that passed, that rule's got to be published. It's got to go through the administrative procedures course of action.

The President cannot just simply, with impunity and utter arrogance, step up to a podium with the Great Seal of the President of the United States on it and say, now I'm changing things. Hugo Chavez does that. Barack Obama did that. He legislated by press conference.

And now we have more lawlessness coming to undermine the rule of law: grant an amnesty to 11 million people that, if history shows us right, will be 33 million people. If you score that dynamically, you take $6.3 trillion times 3 and you get better into the zone on what this could cost.

This House is going to stand and oppose amnesty. It's going to defend the rule of law. It's going to protect the dignity of every human person, God's gift to this planet. But this country is also God's gift to this planet.

And I urge, Mr. Speaker, all of those that are listening to this discussion that we're having, and my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, let's stick with our oath of office. Let's stick with our oath to uphold the Constitution. Let's defend the rule of law.

Let's have a smart, legal immigration policy that rewards people that follow the law and can come here and contribute to this country. We cannot be the lifeboat for all of the poverty in the world. But we can be the inspiration for all of God's creatures on this planet.

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 3 o'clock and 15 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, June 10, 2013, at 3 p.m.

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, this is an amendment that I offered last year that succeeded here on the floor by a vote of 238-175 in a bipartisan fashion. It's the amendment that simply says none of the funds made available in this act may be used to finalize, implement, administer, or enforce the documents described, which are known as the Morton memos.

The Morton memos are essentially executive edicts that have flowed from the White House, that have flowed also from the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, down through John Morton, who is the Director of ICE; and they seek to implement an administrative amnesty policy. There are six of these memos, and the one we're most familiar with is the memo that grants what is known, generally speaking, as Dream Act Lite, which gives I'll say a legal status, if you accept the authority of the President to suspend immigration law, to those who fit four different classes of people.

Four classes of people granted administrative amnesty if they claim to have come to the United States under the age of 16; if they've been here over 5 years; if they have received a high school or a GED degree; or been honorably discharged from the military.

And in the memo, particularly the one who is the Dream Act Light memo, dated June 15 of 2012, seven times they mention that prosecutorial discretion on an individual basis.

Well, this sets up four classes of people. It has been the subject of litigation. The litigation that's gone to a Federal court in Texas is the case of Crane v. Napolitano. Chris Crane is the President of the ICE union. They made 10 points to the unconstitutionality of these memos which direct ICE sometimes to break the very immigration law that they've pledged to uphold.

And so I have in my hand the decision that came down from that district in Texas, and it's a northern district of Texas. And of the 10 points made in this case, the judge upheld 9 of them in the favor of the Constitution and the rule of law. The 10th one he sent back to them and said, the government hasn't given us a clear enough argument; rewrite that and I'll give you another decision on it. I expect that all 10 are likely to be found in the favor of the Constitution and the rule of law.

The point here is, Madam Chair, the President does not have the authority to waive immigration law, nor does he have the authority to create it out of thin air, and he's done both with these Morton memos in this respect.

They do have prosecutorial discretion, I concede that point. But the President nor do any of his agents through the executive branch of government have the authority to create classes of people and waive the enforcement of immigration law for classes of people and then, on top of that, create a work permit out of thin air.

That's just a couple of these memos, of these six memos that are there all together. And we should remember that the memo dated November 17, 2011, includes 475,000 people who had already been adjudicated for deportation. And the President, through his agents in the executive branch, has ordered that the people that have been adjudicated for deportation on those lists should have the law waived and they should stay in the United States even though the law that requires that they've already been adjudicated for deportation--300,000 of the 475,000 have already been granted an administrative legal presence.

This Congress has the full authority to establish immigration law. The President takes an oath of office to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. And every single document that provides lawful presence in the United States of America, aside from a naturally born American citizen, is a product of this Congress, not a product of the pen of the President or the people whom he appoints.

And so this is an amendment that prohibits the resources from being used to enforce the Morton memos, and it conforms with the Founding Fathers' vision, and it conforms with the Constitution in that the President cannot defy his own oath of office. He can't defy the Constitution. The President can't take on Article I authority and legislate by executive order or edict or press conference. That's the job of this Congress. That's why we are Article I. He is Article II.

And whatever people think of the impending immigration policy here in the United States, we cannot allow the executive branch to usurp the legislative authority of the United States Congress. If we allow that to happen in immigration, it could happen to anything.

So I urge the adoption of my amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for yielding.

I appreciate the opportunity to respond to some of the statements that were made here, Madam Chair. I'll just go through some of the things that I heard from the gentleman: that this amendment is a poison pill; that it's very toxic; that it's twisting the knife; that it's unbelievable; that it's a demagogic fashion; that it's talk show appeal.

I would point out to the body that none of that has any substance. And the real substance of this is that we all stood here on the floor of this House of Representatives and raised our hand and took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. We saw that happen today with the new Member right down here.

I take that seriously. I bring my Bible in and I swear on that Bible. And I carry a Constitution in my jacket pocket every single day, and I read it many of those days. But I adhere to that, as we all take the oath to do so. And if we have Members of this Congress that don't know the difference between article I and article II, or Members of this Congress that conflate article I and article II, or Members of this Congress that can somehow excuse a President who has crossed a line that he has himself drawn not just with his oath of office that I referenced earlier, but with a statement to the high school not very far outside of where we are right now on March 28, 2011, when he said:

I know you want me to pass the DREAM Act by executive

order, but I don't have the authority to do that. That's

Congress' authority. I am the President. Congress writes the

laws, the executive branch enforces the laws, and the

Judiciary Branch rules on the language and the

constitutionality of it.

The President was right. He's a former adjunct professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago. And even though I disagree with him quite often, that time he was right. But about a year later, he issued this order that his DREAM Act Light, that is an executive act that defied his own definition of the limitations of article II, the executive branch, and he assumed the powers and the authority of article I, the legislative branch.

Now, how can we take an oath to uphold this Constitution and excuse that kind of behavior? Because whether or not we approve of the policy, let's have the debate on the policy here, where it belongs. Let's not hand this over to a President who has usurped constitutional authority.

Our Founding Fathers envisioned this tension, this conflict, but they never envisioned that a United States Congress, House or Senate, would allow the President to usurp our constitutional authority. They envisioned that each body would aggressively defend the authority that we have within the Constitution.

This amendment that I have simply says we're not going to use taxpayers' dollars to defend this unconstitutional act on the part of the President of the United States. I've taken all the due diligence I can. I called a meeting. We initiated the litigation. We're moving it through the court system. But we can never catch up through the litigation process the things that the President has usurped that are the legislative authority that we have. That's the question that is here.

Whatever your position is on the DREAM Act Light and the Morton

memos and all of the things that seem to be coming out of the Gangs of 8 in the House or Senate, we have an oath to uphold the Constitution. That's the vote here, Madam Chair.

Would the gentleman yield?

Madam Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

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

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate being recognized. I bring this amendment to the floor out of a sense of fiscal responsibility and a sense of duty to the people that go out and work hard every day and return a value for every dollar, for every hour they invest, a value returned on production.

I have spent my life in the construction industry. We have paid Davis-Bacon wage scales, I believe, in each year that I have been in business, and we were a merit shop operation. So I have both sides of experience to this. I have worked underneath Davis-Bacon wage scales, and I have worked in competition with them.

Davis-Bacon is rooted back in the early 1930s. There was a decision made by a couple of people from New York, both Republicans I might add. They let me down then before I was born. They wanted to provide protectionism for their people in New York and lock out minorities that would be coming from the South to build Federal buildings during that era of the Great Depression in New York. It remains the last vestige of Jim Crow laws that's designed to protect and lock out minorities from the construction industry as far as labor is concerned.

My records on this is it costs a lot of money to have Davis-Bacon wage scales imposed. And our King Construction records show over the years that there is somewhere between 8 and 38 percent increase in the costs that we have to bid a project when we make the adjustment for Davis-Bacon. According to Beacon Hill, there's a 9 to 37 percent increase. I just simply use a 20 percent increase as a rule of thumb to discuss the amount of cost that is extra.

So it's this: if we're going to have federally mandated union scale that turns out to be the increase in price for every Federal construction project that has $2,000 or more in it, the result of that is then that if we're going to build only 4 miles of road instead of 5; only four bridges instead of five; only four military facilities instead of five; only four sets of barracks instead of five; only four training facilities instead of five, we can get 20 percent more production out of the dollars that we have and maintain the quality and maintain that sense of responsibility and have a trained workforce, and we can bring more trainees into the process and we'll employ, according to the study I have in front of me here, an average of about 25,000 more minorities each year within the construction business that's there.

What we have instead is we have some people that are in the industry that sit down once a year and they take a look at the records and they decide, well, let's see, let's pay a little bit more to the people here in labor because we don't want to compete outside of our particular industry. We'll raise these wages and we'll transfer that to the taxpayers. It is not a prevailing wage; it is a mandated union scale. That is the effect of it, Mr. Chairman.

I have lived under this for at least 28 years that I operated King Construction. We're now in about our 38th or 39th year of business. We have deep experience with it; and the quality of the work does not suffer, neither does the finishing, neither does the completion, neither does the bonding. All of this construction industry works better when you have real competition instead of some kind of mandated wage scale. Plus, eliminating the enforcement of Davis-Bacon wage scale brings efficiency in and it brings competition in. It's an impossible and onerous Federal regulation to seek to try to regulate. No one can sit in government and determine what a prevailing wage is.

It upsets the relationship between management and workers. And I've been on both sides of that, on all four sides of it, as a matter of fact. It reduces the efficiency of the crews that are there because it reduces your ability to be flexible with the assignment of workforce and their flexibility to self-assign.

For every possible financial reason, you cannot be fiscally responsible or a fiscal conservative and oppose this amendment, Mr. Chairman. It must be supported by a country that's going deeply in debt. We're borrowing over 40 cents out of every dollar that we spend. Meanwhile, we can save 20 cents out of every dollar in this MilCon appropriation bill simply by eliminating the enforcement of the Davis- Bacon wage scale on it.

So I urge in the strongest terms possible the adoption of this amendment which would eliminate the effect of the last vestige of Jim Crow law with regard to where military construction is concerned, save 20 percent, someplace between 9 and 37 according to Beacon Hill. And we can build five facilities instead of four. This is the right way to go to support my amendment.

I urge its adoption, and I yield back the balance of my time.

I appreciate the gentleman from Texas for yielding.

First, in response to some of the remarks that were made that Davis- Bacon wages are based on surveys, well, technically they are based on surveys, but merit shop employers often do not answer those surveys because union organizers show up to organize their employees very shortly after that. It's not always a wise decision to turn your wage records in to the Department of Labor, because in many environments that just about guarantees union organizers coming in to try to drive the wages up more.

The statement about the cost of Davis-Bacon wages actually saving money in Katrina reconstruction, that's a new one for me. My recollection is that George Bush initially after Katrina suspended Davis-Bacon wages so that the money could be best applied to get the cleanup and then the reconstruction done down in New Orleans, in that area, under Katrina. He shortly thereafter lifted that order, so I don't know how a study could show how much money was actually saved. If my memory is correct, it never really was implemented for any length of time that would be appreciable. I don't know of a study that shows that imposed union scale Davis-Bacon wages actually saves the taxpayers money unless that study might be funded by the unions themselves.

There is no argument that this is the last remaining Jim Crow law, the law that was designed to lock Black Americans out of the union trades in New York, particularly in New York City. The vestiges of that remain today, and I think it's worthy to go back and look at a study and see what representation of the ethnic population is represented within these construction trades in places like New York City. It would be very constructive, I think, to look at that.

Also, labor is a commodity. The value of it needs to be determined by supply and demand in the marketplace, Madam Chair. And just like gold or oil or corn or beans, where I come from, you're not going to get the real wages out of that unless you let competition determine that.

And I, as an employer for all of these years, want to pay the best wages I can, I want to provide the best benefits that I can, I want to hire the best people that I can, and in doing so, your people are your company, and when you hire good people and you pay them a good wage, you get to keep them. What I set up a business model on was hiring people in a seasonal business to work 12 months out of the year, not seasonally, not going into the union hall and pulling somebody out and putting him to work for a few days and putting him back again, but saying to him, You can have a career here, and I'll give you 12-months' work for 12-months' pay, and I'll give you a benefits package.

I want to compete with that, but when the Federal Government comes in and tells you that somebody on a shovel has to be paid this and that somebody on a backhoe has to be paid this and that somebody on a motor grader has to be paid this, you will see them machine hopping during the day because they'll always be maneuvering to get on the machine that pays the highest wages, not the one that does the best for efficiency to get the job done.

I've had to go in and police that, and I've had to go in and build a spreadsheet that calculates the movement of everybody on our jobs going on in order to determine that I can comply with the Federal Government's requirement that I pay the wages that they demand and insist, instead of the simplicity of saying, Here is what I'll offer you for pay and benefits.

They've sometimes come to me and have said, What's my job?

I'll define your job for you. Help me make money, and I'll pay you for that, and I want to reward you by trying to give you enough money in benefits to keep you.

That's how free markets work. We cannot be out here setting up a union scale imposed by some people who are sitting in a backroom, which is what happens, by the way. We can't be supporting the last vestige of Jim Crow laws. We can't be letting the Federal Government decide what job categories are going to be paid what wages when we just want to put people to work and let them develop a skill and develop their trades.

So the machine hopping is something that gives me a lot of heartburn. Even if we have an actual representation of prevailing wage, it's still not representative of supply and demand because many States have passed their many Davis-Bacon laws, and the market has been so distorted that we don't today have a concept of what that cost is, Madam Chair. So I urge the adoption of my amendment.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives to raise the issues of our time and have this opportunity for this dialogue that I know that you turn a focused ear to, as well as do the other Members, their staff, and the American people.

Mr. Speaker, I came to the floor here, one thing is to support the statement made by the gentleman from Texas across the spectrum of the topics that he addressed. He does see the world through a clear set of eyes and isn't afraid to say so, and we need more Members like Congressman Gohmert, who is fearless and courageous and a constitutionalist and a rule of law Member, and he understands the Constitution and the law, being an attorney and a judge and a member in good standing of the Judiciary Committee for a number of years now, where one can learn a few things about those topics, as well as bring their own expertise in.

But, Mr. Speaker, that's the committee, the Judiciary Committee, where the immigration issue is likely to process through--or up to and, perhaps, not through.

There is a tremendous amount of, I will say, a hurry up, urgency momentum that has been created on the immigration issue over in the United States Senate. We can count it in hours the time that it has been since the Senate passed, I call it, an amnesty bill, a comprehensive immigration reform bill, which is the more modern vernacular for ``amnesty.'' That's phraseology that was manufactured by people who couldn't quite bring themselves to say the truth on this, and that was the case back in 2006 and 2007 when it was George W. Bush and his people who were pushing this comprehensive immigration reform- amnesty.

What happened, Mr. Speaker, was that we had an election last November, on November 6 to be precise, a Tuesday we would all know. There was a great expectation that Republicans would win the majority in the United States Senate and a great expectation that our Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, would be elected as President because, after all, who could imagine a second term for a man who refused to carry out his oath of office in his first term.

So the voters went to the polls, and there was a bit of a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the people on my side of the aisle, and a good number of them stayed home, a number that is calculated to be about 8 million voters; and about a million voters who normally would have voted for Barack Obama stayed home, but that's more than the difference between the election in the popular vote, and it may well have translated into a difference in the election in the electoral vote.

However, we know what happened in the election. The President was reelected. There were some seats that were lost by Republicans, a net seat lost by Republicans in the Senate. Republicans lost some seats here in the House, but maintained still a strong majority in the House and would expect to do so at least into the foreseeable future.

But the results of that election were overreacted to by many people on my side of the aisle. They looked around and asked, How did we lose? Of course, the people who were the architects of these kinds of campaigns wouldn't want to take on the blame themselves, so they looked around to see where they could cast the blame elsewhere. They settled upon this theory in the middle of the night, so I would say it was in the morning, which started at 12:01 a.m. on the morning of November 7, 2012.

That theory that they settled on was that Mitt Romney would be President-elect that morning and President today if he just had not been so strident on immigration, if he just had not said those two words: self-deport. Their theory was that that was the reason that Mitt Romney is not the President today.

I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that I think that's a manufactured theory, that it's a flawed theory, that it's not based on fact, in polling, in logic. If it's likely true that the Hispanic votes were the decision-maker on this election and then if the Hispanic vote went 71 percent for Barack Obama, I would ask those folks who think that you'd turn that vote around the other way by passing amnesty, Can you tell us how it is that Republicans can capture a majority of the African American vote when typically African Americans in this country will vote 92 percent for the Democrat or 95 or 96 percent for the Democrat if it's Barack Obama on the ballot?

So, if they can't tell me how one should reach out to the African American vote when we are the party of the abolition of slavery--and I can stand here and tell you my great grandfather five times great--and for the record, because people get things intentionally confused, that's great, great, great, great, great grandfather--was killed in the Civil War. He was killed in the Civil War, fighting to put an end to slavery. They were an abolitionist family, and 600,000 Americans gave their lives in that struggle to put an end to slavery, roughly half on each side, roughly 300,000 on each side--more on the Union side than actually on the Confederate side by the data that I'm looking at.

Mr. Speaker, the emancipation of the slaves and an end to slavery and the blood that was spilled by the sword that was to be compensated for the blood that was spilled by the lash seems to be forgotten in the political parties of today. When you look to see what it took to pass the Civil Rights Act in the sixties, it took Republicans in greater numbers in the House and Senate to pass the Civil Rights Act than it did Democrats. There were a lot of Southern Democrats who were segregationist Democrats, I would remind people.

Nonetheless, the promise of what's coming out of the U.S. Treasury-- and some of it's borrowed money from the Chinese and the Saudis and others--seems to have eroded the support for Republican fiscal conservatives among the certain minority groups in this country and others who are struggling to make a go of it. It's hard for them to see down the line a little ways as to how much more opportunity there is in America if we recreate the opportunity society that is being replaced by the cradle-to-grave welfare state that we have in America today. Not only is it a cradle-to-grave welfare state, but it is a cradle-to-grave welfare state that promises a middle class standard of living.

I look at some of the numbers that have been rolled out by, for example, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, who is the most accomplished, senior, respected, and definitive researcher on these topics that I know, and I deal with many, many of them. I have in my hand, Mr. Speaker, the executive summary of about a 102-page report that was issued by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. It's a special report dated May 6, 2013, and the title of it is ``The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer.'' The data that's in here should cause anyone in this Congress to pause before they would begin to look in any positive way on the Senate bill that is their 844-page comprehensive amnesty bill. Some of this data that's in here, Mr. Speaker, is shocking to people who haven't at least been numbed by the reality of it for some time.

The average illegal household in the interim phase of this bill would be a net cost to the taxpayer. They'd pay taxes and draw down welfare. Some will say that folks who are in this country illegally don't qualify for welfare. No, the truth of that is there are

at least 80 different means-tested welfare programs, and those who are in this country illegally just qualify for some of those 80, not for all of those 80. That is the truth, and it has been often distorted. So the net cost to the taxpayer per household in the interim phase for people who are unlawfully here now and who would be granted the amnesty status by the Senate version of the bill would be $11,455. That's borrowed against our children's labor, I might add, Mr. Speaker.

After that interim, when they qualify for a larger number of those 80 different means-tested Federal welfare programs--``post-interim'' is how it's defined by the researcher Robert Rector--then the net cost per household is $28,000. The taxpayers will be subsidizing these households in the interim for $11,455, and when they qualify then for more of the welfare benefits, that net cost goes to $28,000. The average retirement, because they are going to retire just like anyone else, is going to be a net cost to the taxpayers per household of $22,700.

Robert Rector in his report--and I'm going to quote from it because I think the language is very powerful--says:

Regrettably, many policymakers also believe that because

unlawful immigrants are comparatively young they will help

relieve the fiscal strains on an aging society.

Regrettably, this is not true. Now here is where I focused on this, Mr. Speaker:

At every stage of the life cycle, unlawful immigrants on

average generate fiscal deficits, and that's benefits

exceeding taxes. Unlawful immigrants, on average, are always

tax consumers. They never once generate a fiscal surplus that

can be used to pay for government benefits elsewhere in

society. This situation obviously will get much worse after

amnesty.

That is an irrefutable fact. There are others who will argue that there is a dynamic economy, and you can calculate this growth and dynamic economy. Well, they're not calculating the cost to society. They accept that we are a cradle-to-grave welfare state.

I've had this debate with Art Laffer, who I have great respect for. He is the author of Ronald Reagan's, I'll call it, ``Laffer curve.'' I agree with that theory to cut taxes and stimulate the economy. That worked when Ronald Reagan came in in the early part of the eighties and was sworn in January of 1981. Art Laffer was there, and I'm glad he was. The economy grew and we recovered, and the Reagan years are looked back on as the transformative years when America was pulled from the abyss of the malaise.

So I give him great credit. Not only that, he's intelligent and he has a fantastic sense of humor. But here's where I disagree with Art Laffer and why I disagree with some people in Cato and why I disagree with the purist of Libertarians is this:

Many of them believe that labor should flow back and forth across the border as if it were any other commodity like corn, beans, gold, or oil, and that the marketplace will determine where labor will go just like it will determine where you send these other commodities that I've listed.

The flaw in that rationale, Mr. Speaker, was spoken to by Milton Friedman, whom I'm confident Art Laffer knew well and probably had this debate with him. But Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist, famed internationally, said a welfare state and open borders cannot coexist. You might actually turn that around the other way, but the principle is the same. Yet we have a cradle-to-grave welfare state that guarantees a middle class income. If you don't work at all, you can draw down enough benefits to live as if you were working at a modest wage.

Milton Friedman understood that, that the welfare magnet will draw people in and they won't have the necessity to work in order to maintain that standard of living because it's being bought down, bid against by the welfare system.

And my debate with Art Laffer came out to be essentially this:

When I make that point to him that open borders and a welfare state cannot coexist, his answer is, Then end the welfare state.

Well, that would be nice if we could do that, Mr. Speaker. If we could at least rachet it down and take that hammock that used to be a safety net--it was as safety net to keep people from falling through. That was the original welfare system that we had. Now we have people in this Congress that continually rachet in another program here, another program there, manufacture this one here and that one there. There was only one welfare program out of an entire 80 different means-tested Federal welfare programs that required work.

Some of us will remember the intense welfare reform debates in the nineties when this Congress so aggressively and eagerly required the Welfare-to-Work program. Most of us in America have forgotten that the Welfare-to-Work program really was only one program, the TANF program, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. All the rest of them, none of them require that there be work, only TANF. And the President of the United States, even though the law is specific and he doesn't have the constitutional authority to do so, the President of the United States simply waived the work requirements in TANF. So this country now has no requirement of Welfare-to-Work, not even in one of the 80 different means-tested programs that we have.

We're seeing wealth transfer in this country. We're seeing class leveling in this country. We're seeing work and production and wealth punished and extracted from the sweat of someone's brow to pass it into the bank account, or, should I say, the EBT card, of someone else. When that happens--John Smith saw that that didn't work. He said, No work, no eat. Jesus said essentially the same thing, that you've got to work and earn your way. It's in numerous places in the Bible. It's in numerous places in our history.

Think about it in your family. If you have one family member that won't do anything, they want to sit on the couch and they want somebody to bring them food and bring them entertainment and they don't want to go out and mow the lawn or carry out the garbage or scrub the floors or do the things that you do around the home, let alone go punch a time clock and earn a living, how long does it take before that family says, I'm tired of that? I'm going to send you out into the world to earn your own way because you're digressing here; you're not developing your skills.

That is the way of the family. It's the way of the tribe. It should be the way of the Nation. Gently and compassionately take care of the people that can't take care of themselves, and nurture those that have an ability to contribute to our GDP out to go contribute to the GDP.

But we've lost that because there's a class-envy wedge that's being driven from the White House on down. It existed before Barack Obama became President. It was driven hard in here when we had the previous Speaker of the House, these class-envy wedges driven in and the effort, because somebody has something more than you have, to take from them and give it to somebody that has less.

Perhaps I can find this while I talk, Mr. Speaker, but that was well- articulated by Adrian Rogers, who has since passed away. But the principle of why people work and why they won't is an important principle to make, Mr. Speaker. Dr. Adrian Rogers was talking about wealth and work and stated:

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating

the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without

working for, another person must work for without receiving.

The government cannot give to anybody anything that the

government does not first take from somebody else. When half

of the people get the idea that they do not have to work

because the other half is going to take care of them, and

when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to

work because somebody else is going to get what they work

for, that, my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.

You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.

That was the late Adrian Rogers, from 1931 to 2005. I never met him, but with clarity, he spoke to this issue, and more articulately than I am able to, Mr. Speaker. And I appreciate his contribution to the discussion in our society, but there are people here that see this; they see that there is a political gain to be made by expanding the dependency class in America. So they decide that they're going to punish the rich, tax the rich.

Remember, the tax rates had to go up on the upper-income bracket. That was

a demand of the President of the United States. He could have gotten just as much revenue by cleaning up the loopholes and it would have given a more balanced tax plan than we have, but he had to raise the taxes on the highest bracket because that was a notch in his belt, a feather in his cap to punish the rich.

There's been a political gain to do that. That's been the motive because it gathers votes and it expands the dependency class. When you do that, that keeps people dependent upon one party with one-party rule. And this country and this society has one place where we block bad ideas. That's here in the House of Representatives where there is a Republican majority, where there's still a majority of us, I believe, that support and will defend free enterprise capitalism.

Anybody that's going to take the naturalization test to become a citizen of the United States can go look at the flashcards that CIS-- Citizen Immigration Services--hand out. They're a glossy flashcard like that on a red backing, and you can pick them up. On one side it will say, Who's the father of our country? Flip it over, George Washington. Who emancipated the slaves? Abraham Lincoln. What's the economic system of the United States of America? Flip that over, and it says, Free enterprise capitalism.

Newly arriving immigrants, to-be-naturalized citizens study that and know that, but I suspect there are a whole lot of people over on this side of the aisle that, if they know that, they don't believe it. They don't understand how supply and demand is answered by the marketplace, how people need to be rewarded for the work that they do.

I take you back, Mr. Speaker, to 1976 when Jimmy Carter, one of the least successful Presidents in our history, said something that I'm happy to quote. He said this in Iowa, as he traveled all over Iowa and made the first-in-the-Nation caucus an effective venue for Presidential candidates. He said:

I believe the people that work should live better than

those that don't.

That's probably going to be labeled ``offensive'' in today's Congress. But it was Jimmy Carter's statement back then in 1976, and I believe it.

And we have people in this party, my party, that looked at that theory that popped up in the early morning hours of November 7 and concluded, We're never going to win another Presidential election, another national election if we don't first pass comprehensive immigration reform. That's based on Barack Obama getting 71 percent of the Hispanic vote because that number has--it's gone up and down, but it's crept up for Democrats over time.

What they have forgotten is that tens of millions of dollars and very much organizational effort has been put into it by the Democrats to call Republicans racists; and my colleagues on my side of the aisle, they seem to disregard all of that money spent, all of those dishonesties perpetrated. They think that if it exists at all, it didn't have any effect. It all was just those two words that Mitt Romney said, ``self-deport.''

We need to look at the actual facts. The actual facts are Bob Dole had the lowest percentage of Hispanic vote when he ran for President in '96. It was 21 percent. It is also true that Ronald Reagan, who signed an amnesty act in 1986, didn't get George H.W. Bush, Bush 41, a higher percentage of the Hispanic vote. It got him a lower percentage of the Hispanic vote.

If they're going to correlate this thing, I tell you, here's how you correlate it, Mr. Speaker, and it's this:

There were about 800,000 people that originally were to qualify for the amnesty in 1986 that Ronald Reagan signed. That number crept up to about a million. That's kind of the settled historical number. There were about a million that were here that fit the qualifications to receive amnesty from the '86 act that Reagan was honest enough to call the Amnesty Act.

And then once he signed that bill, then there was document fraud and people who came across the border. The magnet of amnesty drew more people in, and that number now, the lowest number that I see of those who received amnesty in 1986, or from the 1986 Amnesty Act, is about 2.7 million people. A lot of times you see 3 million as the quote. It'll go up to 3.5. Well, let's just settle on 3 million people.

If 3 million people received amnesty under Ronald Reagan's 1986 Amnesty Act, and then on average each of them--and this is data that can be chased down, and bigger numbers than I'm about to quote are available out there in certain studies, but on average a low number for family members brought in because of those that received amnesty is about a factor of five, or a little bit more. So let's just hold it down on the low end.

Three million received amnesty. They averaged bringing in five people by the family reunification plans that are there. Now, that's 15 million people. Some of them have died, and some perhaps have gone back to their home country, but there are a large block of voters there that have shifted over to vote for whom, Mr. Speaker? Barack Obama. Barack Obama.

I will make this statement. If the theory of those who believe that they can reverse the trend of Hispanic vote, if their theory is correct, then I would suggest to them, if they can provide amnesty and somebody is going to benefit from that, if their theory is correct, they have to admit that Ronald Reagan's signature on the 1986 Amnesty Act brought about Barack Obama's election. If you take those numbers of people out of the polls and you calculate that percentage of 71 percent--so let's just say we take 15 million people out of the rolls and say they wouldn't have been here without the 1986 Amnesty Act, or at least they wouldn't be voting, and if 71 percent of them voted for Barack Obama, then it's clear to anybody that can do any kind of statistical analysis that Barack Obama wouldn't be President of the United States without Ronald Reagan's 1986 Amnesty Act.

And if that's the case, then how do the people on my side of the aisle think they're going to fix that problem? If it was created by amnesty, you create a bigger problem by amnesty by a factor of, let's say, four. And I'm just rounding 3 million times up to about 12 million, or 2.7 times 4 gets you in that 11.5 million range.

That's the facts of what we're dealing with here, Mr. Speaker. They've suspended their logic. They've suspended their reason. They've suspended their ability to look at data, surveys, polls. They've suspended their respect for the intelligence of the American people who honestly want to see the rule of law.

And all of us have compassion for all humanity, and I believe in the dignity of every human person. It's commanded by my faith. But also, when those who use religion to advocate for amnesty say, ``For I was a stranger, and you let me in,'' Matthew 25:35, when you look at the interpretation, you have to go back to the Greek. ``Stranger'' in English, in Greek is ``xenos.'' Xenos in Greek means invited friend, invited guest. It doesn't mean intruder. There's no religious commandment that says when someone comes into your house that you have to welcome them in. You're not commanded by God to do so. That's why we have a man's home is his castle. That's why we have nation-states with borders.

In fact, it says in Act 17:

And God created all nations on Earth, and he decided when

and where each nation would be.

That's his commandment. And I'd suggest to those people that say to us, ``For I was a stranger, and you let me in,'' they should understand also what Jesus said when they tried to trick him on that question about whether to pay taxes or not. And they showed him the coin and he said:

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and render

unto God the things that are God's.

Civil mercy is not something that can be delivered by religion, and mercy is not something to be delivered by government. We have civil law. Civil laws are set up by the judgment of the people. That's why we have penalties that are written into these laws, and that needs to be applied evenly. And, yes, people can have their dignity and still respect our laws; but somehow, some of the religious movement in the country believes that mercy should be delivered by civil law, that we can grant amnesty in the name of mercy to give a legal status to people here that

are unlawfully here in the United States.

And so I'd ask them to go back and peruse through their Bible, Old and New Testament, and show me where the word ``mercy'' is used. And wherever mercy is advocated in the Bible, next to it you will see the word ``repentance.'' Mercy is never delivered biblically without repentance as a prerequisite, a requirement.

I don't see repentance out here in the people advocating for U.S. citizenship and the reward for that, but I can tell you, they and their descendants will remember who offered it, as they did in 1986.

And when the President of the United States came to the Republican Conference and he said to us, You must pass comprehensive immigration reform as Republicans or you will never win another national election; I'm trying to help you--that's the President of the United States. He's not trying to help Republicans.

We have some people who will take the bait on that, and the hook has already been set and they're trying to reel that amnesty bill over from the Senate and line it up here in the House of Representatives. It will split this party in half. It will pit Republicans against Republicans. The Democrats know that. That is a clear tactic in politics to divide the other party down an issue if you can. Republicans are falling for that. We should not take up anything until the President keeps his oath of office and enforces the laws that we have.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 2 o'clock and 37 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, May 24, 2013, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, it's my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

And listening to the gentlelady from the District of Columbia, of course, a different opinion comes to mind, and that would be that, regardless of the discussion about the supposed anti-choice bill here, I didn't hear much discussion about ``Dr.'' and I put that in quotes, ``Kermit Gosnell,'' who has been convicted of murdering babies while they're struggling after they're born, while they're squirming, while they're gurgling, while they're crying and ``snipping the necks of babies.''

At least the jury has concluded that that is murder, and now it's come down to this point where society needs to ask the question, what's the difference between that baby that's born because he induced early labor to bring that baby into the fresh air, what's the difference between that baby and the same baby or maybe a twin that's 12 inches away?

And I would say there's no distinction from a moral perspective. That little innocent baby is alive, a unique human life that needs to be protected in all of its forms. And that's the argument that's going on here.

You'll not hear people on the other side of this argument bring up the brutal and bloody and ghoulish and ghastly Gosnell, but you will hear the argument about choice because that sanitizes this argument, and it tends to scrub the image out of our minds that we get when we think of that cruel Gosnell, who has now plea-bargained

himself into life in the penitentiary without the possibility of parole in an effort to avoid the death penalty.

But think of this, Mr. Speaker. He executed, we don't know how many babies, hundreds, perhaps thousands of babies, many of them struggling for life. We don't know how many.

He did that, he gets to spend the rest of his life, three squares a day in a cell with exercise time and reading material, and that's supposedly justice in this society.

And the gentlelady from the District of Columbia talks about not having the right to vote, not having the voice of representation. There is a constitutional foundation for that, and the early people that put this Constitution together wrote in the original document how to establish the District of Columbia. Part of it was formed out of Maryland; part was formed out of Virginia.

And if it's their determination that they want to be part of that senatorial representation, then we just simply draw a circle around this Federal complex, and the balance of that can revert back to either Maryland or Virginia, and there's your representation.

But I would make a point about representation that is far more important than the dialogue that the gentlelady from the District has brought out within this last half hour or so, and that's this point, that if those babies that have been aborted since Roe v. Wade, if they had choice, rather than the mothers having choice, if they had a vote, if they had representation, if they could magically come alive today, 53 million of them, and if they had the right to vote, and all of the districts across America where those babies have been aborted, we would have, by now, easily seen the end of Roe v. Wade, and this debate would not be taking place.

This society would have a full respect and an appreciation and a reverence for innocent, unborn human life if those voices of the silenced could be heard in a vote. That's the contradiction that is the undercurrent of this discussion that's been presented to us, Mr. Speaker.

Climate Change

I have a couple of random things to clean up on before I get to the topic that I came here to discuss. But I can't resist bringing up a resolution that emerged in my attention today, H. Con. Res. 36. It's a concurrent resolution. It is introduced by Representative Lee of California, and it is for herself, Mr. Ellison, Mrs. Capps, Mr. Johnson, Mrs. Christensen, Mr. Grijalva, Mr. Honda, Mr. Israel, Mrs. Carolyn Maloney, Ms. McCollum, Ms. Schakowsky and Ms. Speier. These are the names of the original cosponsors. This resolution catches my attention, Mr. Speaker. It says this:

Recognizing the disparate impact of climate change on women

and the efforts of women globally to address climate change.

Now, that was news to me. I hadn't considered the idea that if the climate is changing--they think they know why but they dare not have that debate any longer because the data was fraudulent--but now they're suggesting that the Earth is getting warmer, that it is man's fault, and it's women that are disparately impacted by it. I hadn't seen such a theory, Mr. Speaker.

And it goes on to say ``whereas.'' It has a whole series of whereases, as we know in a resolution.

Whereas, women in the United States are the linchpin of

families.

I agree that women are the linchpins of families, and it would be better if we had more men who were playing a more significant role. I don't think that is the position of the authors of this resolution. But it goes to say:

Whereas, climate change contributes to the workload and

stress on women farmers.

They suggest that women produce 80 percent of the food in the developing countries. Maybe. That would be a surprise to me. It says:

Whereas, women will be disproportionately facing harmful

impacts for climate change.

Different from men, for example?

Whereas, epidemics such as malaria are expected to worsen

and spread due to variations in climate, putting women at

risk.

Malaria discriminates on the basis of gender, Mr. Speaker? That also is news to me.

As I read down through this resolution, the resolution on the disparate impact of climate change on women, this is the one that caught my attention above all others, Mr. Speaker. I'll quote from the resolution:

Whereas, food-insecure women with limited socioeconomic

resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work,

transactional sex and early marriage that put them at risk

for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy and poor reproductive

health.

Climate change, Mr. Speaker? Who would have thought? Who would have thought that that temperature change, perhaps the humidity change, was going to bring about this kind of Earth-shaking discrimination on people based upon gender, or more technically, sex, Mr. Speaker?

I'll go on:

Whereas, women in the United States are also particularly

affected by climate-related disasters such as Hurricane

Katrina.

I went down there. I made four trips down to Hurricane Katrina, and men and women were both affected, children, too. I didn't ask them what their orientation was. I took it as when weather strikes, when a hurricane strikes, it universally affects everyone in the zone without regard to race, sex, creed, color, national origin or whatever your ethnicity might be. When a hurricane hits, it hits everybody.

Here is another whereas:

Despite a unique capacity and knowledge to promote and

provide for adaptation to climate change, women are

disparately impacted.

They encourage the use of gender-sensitive frameworks in developing policies to address climate change. So that's a little bit for our levity, Mr. Speaker. My constituents sometimes wonder why I come back from this town, and I have a little bit of trouble engaging in a debate and rebutting some of the things that come at me, I'm going to ask for a little help from around the countryside on how to actually rebut this argument. It's news to me. I appreciate your attention, Mr. Speaker.

Illegal Immigration

I came to this floor, however, to address the situation of immigration and particularly illegal immigration.

The first thing is that the people that have advocated for open borders have, for years now, worked to conflate the two terms ``immigration'' and ``illegal immigration.'' They did that, by the way, if you remember, with ``health care'' and ``health insurance.'' When they conflated those two terms, what they did was they blurred the topic so they can say, anti-immigrant Congressman--I don't want to use a last name because I can't think of one, we don't have any in these 435--X, Y or Z, ``anti-immigrant'' when they really mean someone who upholds the rule of law.

We have them from many of the States, but not from every State. We have one who has stood up and defended the rule of law since well before he arrived in this Congress, and he hails from the State of South Carolina. He happens to be the lead deadeye in the entire United States Congress, the man who brought the shooting trophy home again to the House of Representatives Republicans, and a man whom I have known since he was one of a group of about seven who ran in the primary in South Carolina for his congressional seat.

I'd like to yield to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Duncan).

Reclaiming my time, I appreciate the gentleman from South Carolina coming here and delivering a perspective on the rule of law that we need so badly.

I am a bit flabbergasted by the lack of the ability to reason by some of my colleagues, and that's on both sides of the aisle. It seems a little more rational on the other side of the aisle--I'll say, in fact, a lot more rational because there's a huge political gain on their side. On our side of the aisle, two plus two doesn't seem to add up to four for them. They come up with some number like 3.0, which would be Teddy Kennedy's amnesty bill 3.0. We had the '86 Amnesty Act, which was amnesty 1.0, and that was Teddy Kennedy involved in that, too.

Ronald Reagan let me down in 1986. He only let me down twice in 8 years, but they were a couple of pretty big times? This one, I think that he was influenced by the people who surrounded him and, out of a sense of decency and compassion, signed the 1986 Amnesty Act, all the while knowing it was going to erode the rule of law but judging that of all of the commitments that were made that there would be enforcement, that the trade-off was worth it. I remember him saying that to us. I remember Ronald Reagan being honest with the American people, and he called it the Amnesty Act. He didn't call it the Comprehensive Reform Act. He called it ``amnesty'' because that's what it was.

Now, I appreciate the definition of the gentleman from South Carolina. I hadn't heard that definition before: all the rights embodied in the Constitution, granting all of those rights to someone who is here illegally would be amnesty.

I've defined it this way. It's not a contradictory definition. It's a definition that I have long used. To grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. It's a pardon and a reward. And I don't know why they came here, necessarily. We don't know. They might have come for a job--many did. Some came to trade in contraband; some came to live with their families and not to work. But the presence in the United States that's unlawful becomes lawful with amnesty, and the path to the reason they came here is opened. They didn't all come to be citizens and they didn't all come for a job. 42.5 percent of them are working in America today, not 100 percent. That's a little better than five out of 12 that are actually working.

We should also remember that 80 to 90 percent, according to the Drug Enforcement Agency, 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America come from or through Mexico. Mexico doesn't produce them all, but 80 to 90 percent flow from or through Mexico.

That's a huge number, and the price for that is in the tens of billions of dollars to this society.

I yield to the gentleman.

Reclaiming my time, I appreciate the gentleman from South Carolina bringing this up. I, too, have spent a respectable amount of time on the border. I've gone down there and sat at night next to the border fence--no lights, no night-vision goggles--just listening to the sounds of the fence creaking, listening to the vehicles coming in through the mesquite, the doors open, the doors close, the packs get dropped on the ground, they pick them up, they whisper, they come back across the desert, and come through the fence. You can put your ear down on the steel post and it transmits that sound. As they flow through, you understand that the flow across this border isn't just where I'm sitting that night, but it's in many locations across the border.

We had testimony before the Immigration Subcommittee from the Border Patrol where they said they thought they, perhaps, interdicted 25 percent of

those that attempted to cross the border--25 percent. And if you look at those numbers they had interdicted that year, the number was equivalent to--if you do their formula--11,000 people a night. That meant 4 million people a year that were coming across our southern border; 11,000 a night, Mr. Speaker.

So I asked that question of one of my friends from Texas. He happens to be on the Judiciary Committee and is a member of the Immigration Subcommittee--Congressman Ted Poe of Texas. He always pays attention to what went on with Santa Anna and the Battle of the Alamo. He can quote to you Colonel Travis' letter.

I asked him, What was the size of Santa Anna's army when they invaded Texas? And he said 5,000 to 6,000. Now, think of that, Mr. Speaker. Twice the size of Santa Anna's army--11,000 people a night, every night. Now, that's at the peak. Probably it's half that by now, more likely now, although it's increased over the last few months since we've had this dialogue on immigration that's going on and those border crossings are up dramatically. But during the lull, we still had the equivalent of Santa Anna's army come across our southern border every night.

We're not alarmed by that, when 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America come from or through Mexico? And all of the pain and the price and the heartache that comes from that? No, it's not all the fault of the people that are south of here. We have an illegal drug consumption and demand in this country that is a magnet for those illegal drugs, and that's something for this society and our culture to address.

I don't deny that, Mr. Speaker. In fact, when I go to Mexico to have my dialogue with the Mexican members of their Congress, I just start out the dialogue with that, because otherwise they're going to remind me that America's demand for drugs has brought about a lot of violence on both sides of the border, particularly the southern side of the border.

The numbers of fatalities in this drug war and Mexico over the last 6 or 7 years number 50,000 to 70,000 people killed in that. That's a tremendous amount of carnage. And it does include those victims of the Fast and Furious fiasco that we still haven't put entirely to bed, Mr. Speaker.

But the price for open borders is high. It's high in blood, it's high in treasure, it's high in the value to our families and our society. And Drug Enforcement tells me when I ask them: If magically everybody that's illegally in America woke up in their home country tomorrow morning--magically, of course--what would happen to the illegal drug distribution system in the United States? Their answer: It would immediately stop. All of it would be suspended overnight in that hypothetical scenario if magically all those here illegally woke up where they could live legally. Because at least one link in every illegal drug distribution chain in America is a link from someone that's unlawfully present in the United States, is an illegal alien, and likely a criminal alien. At least one link. In many cases, it's every link.

The Mexican drug cartels control the illegal drug distribution in all of our major cities in America, also most all of our minor cities in America. When I see the number of those cities, it's so appalling. The scope of it is so broad that I'm reluctant to say so into the public record because it seems beyond reality when you think back 20 years when it was localized within some of the cities in the South and Southwest--mostly Southwest--and now it's pervasive across the entire country. They've taken over the illegal drug distribution in America, and at the cost of tens of thousands of lives in Mexico, at the cost of many lives here in the United States. A high price for that.

As the gentleman from South Carolina says, fences are not the only answer, but they're a great start. And I have long said that we should build on the southern border a fence, a wall, and a fence so that we can have a couple of zones in between them that are no man's land in an area where the Border Patrol can respond when a fence is breached and be there to interdict so that we can assure people: don't bother to try, we're going to be there to enforce the law.

That's what a smart and sane country would do. And I'm not suggesting, Mr. Speaker, that we need to build 2,000 miles of fence, although there's 1,960 miles of double fencing to go. I'm just suggesting that we build a fence, a wall and a fence--a triple fence-- with two no man's land zones, and build it until they stop going around the end. As the gentleman from South Carolina suggested, some of it's a little mountainous, some of it's a little rocky, and so you would build a fence where it's practical. And if they climb the mountain--I'll tell you that it's not impossible to build a fence on a mountainside either. We can build it on a vertical face if we need to. I don't know if we can build it quite upside down if we need to, but I don't think it calls for that. I spent my life in the construction business, and we spent our life moving dirt and building fence and setting up structural concrete and doing underground utilities and many other things.

At one point, I came to the floor and designed and demonstrated really the simplicity of building the kind of barrier that would be effective. And if you think that it's not, take a look at Israel that's put up a fencing system. And, yes, it takes monitoring, and it takes guard towers along the way, and it takes the virtual support so that you reduce the amount of manpower that's necessary.

But we've grown this manpower on the southern border dramatically over the last decade. And the results that we get are directly proportional to the will of the Chief Executive Officer to enforce the law. And we're spending at least $6 million a mile on our southern border--$6 million on 2,000 miles.

Now, I'm going to boil this down so it gets a little more simple for some of the Members in this Congress, because the scope of that is beyond their imagination. How do you build a 2,000-mile fence? And, again, I didn't say we needed to do that. We build it until they stop going around the end.

I remind them that the Great Wall of China was finished, connected together, in about 245 B.C. It's 5,500 miles long, and it's wide at the top, and they march armies down the top of that Great Wall of China. So, if they could accomplish that in 245 B.C., we can accomplish a much smaller endeavor here, with a much simpler structure with some modern technology with it, and in an efficient way. We did the Manhattan Project in a short period of time. You can't convince me we cannot build a barrier on the southern border that's effective and $6 million a mile. Here is the equation.

I live out in the countryside, and there is a mile of gravel going in four directions from the corner I live on. Now, if I just take one of those miles--and I would think that Janet Napolitano would assign me to provide the security for that mile and pay me $6 million to guard that mile for a year. What a lucrative contract that would be, wouldn't it? Now it's a 10-year contract, so it's a $60 million contract to guard 1 mile of gravel road in Iowa. There is more population along that gravel road--and there isn't much--than there is along much of the southern border. So the pressure on that might be in proportion to the urgency that people wanted to get across.

I, myself, wouldn't hire even more boots on the ground. I would take some of that $6 million a mile. I'd start out, maybe, in the first year by taking $2 million of the $6 million and I'd build myself a wall. Then maybe the next year I'd take another 1\1/2\ or so million and I'd build a couple of fences, one on either side of that wall. Then I'd put a little bit of technology on top, and after about 2 to 3 years, even just in tightening down my budget for my manpower, my boots on the ground--because you're always going to need some guards there and some Humvees and some retirement and benefits packages to go along with that and uniform costs and all--I would take about a third of that budget and roll it into infrastructure. In about 2 to 2\1/2\ years, I would have a fence, a wall and a fence built and a patrol road built in between those and in between the no man's land, and I'd have the modern devices up at the top. We would have video cameras so, if anybody breached that fence, wall and fence, even at the first barrier, video cameras with infrared would zero in on that location, and

we would deploy our boots on the ground to that location.

As soon as people figured out that we were going to have 100 percent security on my mile of road--remember, I've got a $60 million contract. I can perform with a high degree of efficiency, far higher than we're getting right now. As soon as people figured out that we were going to respond and that it didn't pay to cut or to try to climb over or to try to dig under because we were going to be there with our vibration sensors and with our new technology, then we would have 100 percent efficiency along those stretches of the border.

I would take some of that money for the next year and the next year. Then I would widen our legal ports of entry, and I would add a little manpower to those legal ports of entry so that we could move the legal traffic through and still monitor it even more effectively than we do today at those ports of entry. That's what a rational nation would do, and that would then shut off the bleeding at the border.

There is a lot of pressure from the illegal drugs coming into America. Something greater than $60 billion a year would be the street value of illegal drugs in this country. When I first came to this Congress, the DEA couldn't tell me what that number was. In fact, I don't think they'll still tell me what the number was. That number is more published from the news media than it is from the people who are supposed to know the answer to that question. With that pressure from those illegal drugs, they'll find another way into America until the demand is shut off. I can tell you that we could raise the price of illegal drugs in America, the street price, by locking down and stopping the bleeding at our southern border. Then they'll have to find another way to get it in, and the price will go up. When the price goes up, fewer people use it.

So that would be a helpful thing, but we can shut off the bleeding at the border, Mr. Speaker. Then we need to shut off the jobs magnet.

Now, there is a bill that we had a hearing on just yesterday in the immigration committee, and it's a bill that has been drafted by Mr. Lamar Smith of Texas, who is one of our lead voices on immigration enforcement in this Congress, perhaps the lead voice. He has done an awful lot to introduce and to see to it that in 1996 there was immigration reform legislation that was passed that has an extremely useful utility today, and I'm glad he is here to defend the basis of that language: making E-Verify mandatory so that government employers, government contractors and all new hires in the private sector, too, would need to be verified under E-Verify, which is the Internet-based system where you punch in the I-9 data. I call it name, rank, and serial number.

It will go out into that database and come back and tell you if it can affirm that the individual identified by that data can lawfully work in the United States. Now, it doesn't verify that the biometrics of the individual who applied with that information match the biometrics of that Social Security number. It just says, with this Social Security number and the data that is associated with it, someone can work under that. We can't identify necessarily of applicant A and applicant B which one it might be if they're using the same data, but it's a good step in the right direction to make E-Verify mandatory, but it falls short in a couple of categories.

One of them is that it leaves the existing law that prohibits an employer from using E-Verify on current employees. Now, why would you do that? If an employer has a reasonable suspicion that someone is unlawfully working for their company, wouldn't we want them to go on the Internet and check that applicant to see if they verify to be lawfully able to work in the United States? I would want them to do that. If they're sitting in the break room and if one of their employees said, Ah, you know, I'm an illegal immigrant, and I duped you, and you can't do a thing about it, that employer may be able to report them to ICE, and maybe something happens, but they are prohibited by current law from going on that Internet, accessing E- Verify and running that employee through to verify and then taking action accordingly.

Some of the people who are advocating for this E-Verify bill say, Well, we have to protect employers from potential liability. They could be accused of discriminating against someone. I'd point out that that computer doesn't know race, ethnicity. It might know national origin, but you didn't get to queue it for that. There is no query for that. You put in the information--name, rank, and serial number--as I said, and it only comes back to you and says ``confirmed'' or ``can't confirm.'' That's all you know. So I don't know how someone uses the E- Verify to discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, language barrier, whatever it might be. They make that decision when they hire. If H.R. is interviewing someone, then in all of the things that go along with an interview, they can sort all that out in their own heads and make their decisions. If they've already hired someone, if that individual has worked for them for years, then they've made their decision on whether they're going to discriminate or not. That's an entirely separate question from E-Verify's usefulness.

I think we need to encourage employers to clean up their workforce, and by doing so, we should allow them to use E-Verify on current employees, especially if there is reasonable suspicion. I wrote a drug testing bill in Iowa that uses that standard, and it has not even been tested in court it's so solid. If there is reasonable suspicion to point to one person out of your workforce--if they don't meet the standards of work, if they cross a line by being chronically late, if their eyes are bloodshot and their work is slow, if they're temperamental and those things or erratic--we have an officer who is trained in that capacity, and he can say, You're going in for a drug test because we want to make sure that we have a drug-free workplace.

That's a responsible thing for an employer to do. It's also responsible for an employer to want to have a legal workforce. It's what we'd encourage employers to do, but the law discourages them from utilizing the tools that they have. I'll be advocating strongly to change that component in E-Verify if it moves forward in this Congress.

The second thing is it preempts local government from utilizing E- Verify as a means of requirement for enforcement. It just simply says that the Federal Government is going to have the exclusive authority to regulate and enforce E-Verify. Well, that would be fine if they actually enforced, but, Mr. Speaker, you know I have very little confidence in the Federal Government's will to enforce E-Verify. There will be those who will comply because it's the law--they will be good citizens, and some will be very good corporate citizens--but we are not going to have the kind of enforcement that's necessary so that it's universal.

I know. I've lived through this. Ronald Reagan wanted to enforce the '86 Amnesty Act, the I-9 forms. I got those I-9 forms. We had applicants come into the office. I made sure that they carefully filled out those applications according to the law, and we took the copies of the support documents that were necessary, and we carefully kept those I-9 forms and associated documents in our files for the day that INS would show up and say, I want to see all of your job applicants and all of your hires and all of your employees to verify if you have followed the '86 Amnesty Act law compliance terms for

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

And as I listen to the gentlelady talk about enhanced background checks, it just occurs to me, Mr. Speaker, that if we repeal ObamaCare, we can save more lives by bringing real health care reform to this country and restoring the doctor-patient relationship, providing incentives for research and development, and letting our health care system continue to modernize instead of freezing its development and atrophy, as it will, under a government-controlled program.

As I listened to the gentlelady earlier offer her opening remarks on the rule for the Affordable Care Act, it occurred to me, Mr. Speaker, that it really isn't the name of it. It is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, that long lingo that nobody knew what it was, so it was market tested and reduced down to the Affordable Care Act.

We know it's the Unaffordable Care Act, that's why we call it ObamaCare. It was passed by legislative shenanigans, and it passed in the dark of the night. They had to split some of it out and pass it by reconciliation because even the voters in Massachusetts, to replace Teddy Kennedy's seat, elected a Republican to put a block to ObamaCare. That's an extraordinary event to happen in America. Eighty-seven new freshman Republicans came into this Congress as a result of it; the Blue Dog Democrats became essentially politically extinct because of ObamaCare; and the promises that were made were obviously not kept.

We remember the President's promises. There were three big promises that he made: if you like your doctor, you can keep him--or her. No, we all know that's not true.

If you like your insurance and your insurance premium, you get to keep it. Your premiums aren't going to go up. We know that's not true. The costs have gone up. The premiums are going up. There was a discussion about a 73 percent--apparently an average number that the earlier gentleman spoke about--premium increase with ObamaCare. I can tell you that those numbers that say up to 400 percent, they are real.

Two and a half months ago, I sat down with the health insurance underwriters. They gave an example of a 28-year-old woman who's satisfied with her share of her individual policy premium today at $200 a month. If she smokes, she would see the premium go up from $200 to $800 a month. It is a malignant tumor that's metastasizing on American liberty. It must be ripped out by the roots and completely repealed.

Mr. Speaker, it's my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States of House of Representatives. And I know that there's issue after issue that comes before this Congress; some calculate those issues in the thousands. But I'm also aware that, across America, we talk about the things that we see in the news. The things that are in the news are the large topics that are emerging here in Congress.

We've heard the gentleman from Texas speak about the Benghazi incident and how that is unfolding here, and another gentleman talked about the immigration issue, which is unfolding within the Senate and the Judiciary Committee as recently as today.

I come to the floor, Mr. Speaker, to raise the issue of immigration and seek to, I think, more broadly inform yourself and those that are listening in, Members of the Congress, as well. And it strikes me that we have been through some intense debates here in this Congress on the immigration issue, and primarily that debate that took place starting in 2005, throughout the duration of 2006 and into 2007, when we saw tens of thousands of people come to the Capitol grounds and fill up the west lawn and call for amnesty.

I recall in those days it was President George W. Bush that was promoting this policy. And I remember a discussion with his political director, I believe, the senior political adviser at the time, and he said to me, Well, if we didn't give them amnesty, would it be okay with you?

And I said, Well, first let's define ``amnesty.''

And he said, Well, it wouldn't be amnesty, for example, if we required people to pay a fine, or if we required them to learn English, or if we required them to get a job, or if we required them to pay their back taxes. And that was the language that emerged here in the middle part of the previous decade.

It happens to also be reflective of the 1986 Amnesty Act, which Ronald Reagan signed. It was one of only two times that that great man let me down in 8 years of the Presidency. Once a term's not too bad. Ronald Reagan intended to follow through on the enforcement of the law and the securing of our border.

I was an employer at the time. I remember the new rules that emerged from the 1986 Amnesty Act. President Reagan was honest enough and direct enough with the American people that he called it amnesty, and we understood that that's what it was.

And we understood the purpose for it, and that was to get an agreement so that we could enforce the law and put away the immigration debate for all time by allowing the people that were illegally in the United States a path to citizenship of full residency status and the path to citizenship, and the trade-off was that would be the last amnesty. The promise that there would never be another one was the 1986 Amnesty Act.

There was something like 800,000 people originally that were to be the beneficiaries of this plan, and it turned out to be not a million-- 3 million people. There was a substantial amount of document fraud, and there was a larger universe of people than was anticipated.

Does anybody think today, Mr. Speaker, that this universe of people is not larger than that that's anticipated by the Senate version of the comprehensive immigration reform bill?

Of course, honest people, objective people, they're not going to write into the bill that there's only going to be 11 million people that can be beneficiaries of this bill. Any kind of an amendment like that would put a hard cap on, would be a deal breaker in the United States Senate because they know that number's larger. History shows that number is larger. Data shows the number is larger. That's just the lowest number that they can, with a straight face, talk about, and it's in a calculated way to try to minimize the amount because it minimizes the opposition to this idea that has emerged.

And I understand why it's there for Democrats, Mr. Speaker. I recall this debate. And as likely the year was 2006, I saw it live. I saw it on C-SPAN, but it took place right out here on the west lawn when then- Senator Teddy Kennedy went before throngs of people, speaking through an interpreter, speaking Spanish through an interpreter, he said: Some say report to be deported. I say, report to become an American citizen.

When I heard that, Mr. Speaker, I understood why he said that. This was his clarion call to say to all of them out there: We want to give you citizenship; and the deal is, you need to come and vote. Vote for those who advocate for handing citizenship over in exchange for the implied or implicit.

And we know what has happened with the way that people have been divided, divided from Americanism into special interest groups by using the political science of victimology manufactured in the brain of Antonio Gramsci back in the earlier part of the 20th century, a contemporary of Lenin's who studied in Moscow and went to Italy and sat down and was jailed by Mussolini and wrote his prison notebooks. I've read nearly every word that he has published, Mr. Speaker.

Antonio Gramsci was a brilliant man if you can accept the flawed premise that he started with; and the flawed premise was to accept Karl Marx's theory that they needed to defeat Western civilization and defeat the bourgeoisie and empower the proletariats. That was Marx's.

Gramsci was critical of Marx's theory because he said Marx only isolated himself and focused on just economics, and he didn't believe that the Communist movement could succeed against free enterprise and Western civilization because the proletariats, the common people, the working people, needed the bourgeoisie for jobs, so there was an interdependency there.

So he argued instead, if we're going to defeat them, we have to do the long march through the culture. We have to take on all of these principles that interconnect, that hold Western civilization, Western Christendom, as Winston Churchill described it, or Western Judeo- Christendom, as I would describe it, those values that hold us together completely under assault, strategized by Antonio Gramsci, who was the President of the Communist Party in Italy from 1919 until 1926.

And he was brilliant in his perception. He is the father of multiculturalism. He didn't use the word, that I could find, but he's the father of it.

He created the idea that if you could get people to identify themselves as

victims and be in victims groups, then there will be more energy in a group with a common grievance than there would be in a group of just proletariats that needed a job and wanted a better way of life. So if you could get the focus of the grievance group intensified, then you could bundle the grievance groups up into a movement. Throughout all of that, you could break down Western Civilization, and you could empower the socialist state or the Marxist state. That was Gramsci's writings, Gramsci's teachings.

Some of the people in this Congress actually do know about this man. I think I'm the only one that's actually attempted to read all of his works. But I see it emerge here in the immigration debate. It's part of the effort to divide people--Americans, the giant melting pot, the greatest success story of assimilation the world has ever conceived of.

Why do people come to the United States of America? Because they are inspired by the image of the Statue of Liberty. And within that Statue of Liberty are the basic pillars of American exceptionalism in the minds of the people that see it. They're written into the Bill of Rights, most of them.

Can you imagine being in a foreign country where you're suppressed, where you don't have the rule of law, where you don't have right to property and the right to keep the earnings from the sweat of your brow? In a country like that where you can't trust the press and there's not an open press, can you imagine getting that message from Radio Free Europe, for example, and realizing that in the United States of America you can have--if you can come here, come here legally--you can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. What a wonderful thing to be looking at from someplace in the world where they don't have those kinds of rights.

That's just part of the First Amendment. And then you get to the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms. Why? So that we can defend ourselves from tyranny. That was the one thing that guarantees the balance of the rights.

And looking on down through: the property rights in the Fifth Amendment, the protection against double jeopardy, you get to face a jury of your peers, and then on top of that, these rights that are not specified, the authority of the Federal Government that's not enumerated, devolve to the States or the people respectively.

This means we are an even freer country than we can imagine from reading the Constitution because some States are freer than others. And we compete with each other to offer that level of freedom: economic freedom, social freedom and the freedom to be free from a 16.1-ounce limitation on the size of your Coke, for example. You can move to another State if you don't like that rule--another city--if you don't like that rule that flows out of New York. That's an example of how this great laboratory of America inspired millions of people all over the world.

So we didn't just get a random cross-section of people that came from Scotland or Germany or Italy or name your country around the world, not a random cross-section. We got the people that were inspired. These are the people that saw the Statue of Liberty.

They had enough access to the real truth because we put the message out because maybe they were interactive with Americans that travel, maybe they interacted with American troops that went to liberate some people. We've always left a positive message wherever we have gone as Americans.

An example of that, Mr. Speaker, was one that caught me by surprise, a very pleasant surprise. Several years ago, I went to a hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., to listen to a speech by then-President of the Philippines, Gloria Arroyo. In that speech, as I listened, here is how it unfolded: She said, thank you, America. Thank you for sending the United States Marine Corps to our islands in 1898. Mr. Speaker, I know you must be thinking, what about the Army? She forgot about the Army, but the Army was there, too.

She said, Thank you, also, for sending your priests and pastors to our islands to help restore and establish our faith. Thank you for sending 10,000 American teachers--if I remember right, she called them Thomasites--who taught the students in the Philippines the English language, the free-enterprise system, a sense of honesty and a work ethic, the American way of life and of being proud of being a worker and a producer and contributing to the GDP.

She said that today there are 1.3 million Filipinos that because they have these skills of language, a work ethic and an understanding of free enterprise, they can travel anywhere in the world to get a job, and they send a lot of that money back to the Philippines. She told us where the percentage of their GDP came from. It came from foreign Filipino workers that contribute to the GDP of the Philippines and to the wealth of the Philippines because more than 100 years ago Americans went there, and we transferred American culture and civilization. It had a significant influence on the Philippines. And they are more successful today. That was her speech to us more than 100 years later to say thank you.

So there is an image of what America was and an image of what I pray America still is. That's an image that is under assault by this philosophy of victimology that was created in the minds and in the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Think about how this thing flowed through. Marx wrote his ``Communist Manifesto,'' Gramsci created his multiculturalism and victimology, and he wrote and taught how you would use that to undermine our culture and civilization. And he talked about the long march through the culture: break down marriage, break down religious values, and break down truth. That's only three of about 25 on the list.

They have been doing that systematically. I see it come out of this side of the aisle every single day in this Congress. Most of them don't know they're doing that. They're just caught up and swept up in the movement of their political party.

I hear the President reducing and lowering American values by his comments that take place in the public and in the press. Think about the things that he has chosen sides on. For example, when it was Professor Gates and Officer Crowley, Mr. Speaker, we know that, first of all, no President would engage in an incident like that, but he did. And he drove a wedge down between the issues of race.

When Arizona passed their immigration law, S.B. 1070, the President had to do a profile of the type of person that he alleged might be impacted negatively by that bill when the bill itself specifically said that couldn't happen--down the lines of race and ethnicity again.

Then we've got Tim Tebow who will kneel and pray to God on the football field. Meanwhile, we have a professional athlete that decides that he's going to announce his sexuality, and he gets a personal call from the President of the United States to highlight the sexuality of a professional ballplayer.

These are ways that the culture gets undermined, where it gets divided. The people over on this side take their followership from that kind of leadership; and one notch at a time, one click at a time, American civilization, American culture, Western Civilization, Western Judeo-Christendom are eroded. They're carrying out a plan that has been put in place and thought out and advocated for almost now 90-some years ago. They don't know that they're doing it. They think somehow they're providing freedom.

They always want change. They want to change everything that's in place, but there is no goal. If you would grant a wish list to the left and say if I had the power and the magic wand, and I would say, here's the magic wand, I will give you this: you've got all the rest of 2013 to put together the list of all the things that you want to do to fix society, fix America, all the things that possibly could be done from the United States Congress, from the White House, from the judicial branch of government and throughout all of our States down to the lowest municipal judge in this country, or legislative body, city council, for example, give them their entire wish list, you've got all the rest of the year to put that wish list together, and come the stroke of midnight when the ball drops in Times Square, December 31 at midnight, I'm going to stroke the magic

wand and you can have everything your political heart wishes for. But the deal is that now you've got to clam up forever and live underneath the rules that you spent the rest of this year writing.

Mr. Speaker, we know how that would turn out. They would work day and night because they are hardworking people. They are smart people. They start with a flawed premise, but they are smart beyond that. They would work day and night to produce the longest, most complete, expansive list of all the things that the left would want. And it would be the destruction of Western Civilization in the end. But come midnight, if I gave them the stroke of the magic wand, then they would stay up the rest of the night trying to figure out how to argue that somehow they were cheated, that they really needed something else, that they left something out of the list.

They're never going to live with the values they call for because there is no constant of truth for them. They undermine it. There is no constant of faith or values because it always has to be moving. It's got to be transformative to satisfy the people on the left.

Those of us who come from the other side of the aisle, we believe there are eternal truths, that, for example, a sin 2,000 years ago is a sin today. We believe that there is such a thing as truth, there's such a thing as objective truth, and there's such a thing as sound science.

We should adhere to those things that are black and white and live by them, and we should debate the things that are gray. That's the difference between the right and the left.

I believe that if you would grant that power that I've discussed, Mr. Speaker, to those on our side of the aisle, I could probably write you up a set of rules in the next 24 hours that I'd be willing to live with for the rest of the my life. And I think that society would gradually move itself back into an ordered forum that would allow human nature and the best of human nature to manifest itself in our families, in our faith, in our communities, in our work, and our rule of law. But what I'm watching here is the undermining of the rule of law with the immigration bill.

This bill that is emerging now that's being debated in the Senate-- apparently there's one that's still hidden here in the House somewhere by a hidden committee--this is what the bill does, the Gang of Eight's bill: It grants instantaneous amnesty to everyone who's here in America, and it sends an invitation to everyone who has been deported in the past to apply to come back to America. And it makes an implicit promise that if you came into America after the deadline or if you can get into America--sneak into America--any time in the future, you will be legalized in the next wave of amnesty. It's only a matter of time. And we will never deport you as long as you don't commit a felony--or if you can mysteriously figure out which of the three misdemeanors would be so offensive that the Gang of Eight would want to send you back home again. That's the bill.

So what do they do to get people to agree, to embrace this huge amnesty bill that is breathtaking in its scope and beyond the imagination of even the people in the Senate a year ago--it's what they wanted, but they wouldn't say it publicly. They never imagined they could actually talk about this broad and expansive an amnesty bill even a year ago.

And the tradeoff is this: we have to legalize people because they're saying that we have de facto amnesty. No. We have real amnesty, executive branch-created amnesty in America today. The President has refused to enforce immigration laws. He took an oath to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. That's his constitutional responsibility. Whether he agrees with the laws or not, it is his constitutional responsibility to take care that they are faithfully executed.

When he was speaking to a high school here in Washington, D.C., a couple of years ago--the date was March 28, I'm not certain of the year--and they asked him, why don't you, by executive order, pass the DREAM Act that would grant legal status and an in-State tuition discount for those younger people that came into the United States and they're here illegally. His answer was, well, I don't have the authority to do that. Constitutionally, Congress has to pass a law like that. Because, as he explained to them, as a former adjunct constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago--I agreed with the explanation that he gave, which was: Congress passes the laws. It's up to the President to carry out or enforce those laws, and it's up to the courts to rule on what the laws mean. Now, that's a pretty compact synopsis, but I don't disagree with that. I think the President described it right. He said he did not have the power. His power was limited by the Constitution. Congress is empowered to pass immigration laws--that's what Congress has done from the beginning--and the executive branch's job is to enforce it.

Shortly thereafter--that being roughly a year or so later--the President reversed his position and, I believe by his direction, the Department of Homeland Security spit out a memorandum that created four classes of people. These four classes of people were then summarily exempted from the enforcement of immigration law. And seven times in that memorandum they wrote the words ``on an individual basis.'' ``On an individual basis,'' because they know that by--I'll just say by consent and agreement, the executive branch can't prosecute every Federal violation. That's why they have prosecutorial discretion. It's also a matter of case law out there, if you want to accept that term, and I generally don't.

But that directive, I'd grant, the executive branch has to have prosecutorial discretion to determine how best to apply the enforcement and prosecution resources of the executive branch. They can't prosecute every single violation. But prosecutorial discretion only is on an individual basis; it's not on classes of people.

But the President, Janet Napolitano and John Morton created four classes of people and waived the enforcement of the law against those four classes of people. And now, to add insult to injury, these four classes of people that they decided they're not going to enforce the law against, the President created out of thin air a work permit so that they could work in the United States, presumably legally. It's an unconstitutional, lawless work permit that he has created out of thin air, but they are getting those work permits now to work in the United States because the President has crossed the constitutional line, that line between the executive and the legislative branch, article II--and has gone to article I and claimed authority.

Now, when the Founding Fathers constructed this Constitution and they set up these three branches of government--often we're taught they are three equal branches; I would argue that, no, the judicial branch was designed to be the weakest of the three. But that point is not so important here, Mr. Speaker, but it's this: that this Congress passes the laws. The executive branch's job is to enforce the laws. The President has decided he can manufacture laws out of thin air and refused to enforce the laws on classes of people that he's created by memoranda. That, as far as I know, has not happened with another President. There are about five places where he has crossed the line into the legislative branch.

Our Founding Fathers envisioned this: that if you set up--and they did; they set up three branches of government, each with its own constitutional power and authority, each with its own domain. They knew that there were gray areas in between. You can never write something precisely so that it is a very thin bright line. They did as good as could be done with the language that we have--I can applaud them for it, of course. But they envisioned that that grayer line that couldn't quite be bright enough between the legislative and the executive or the legislative and the judicial, that line and that triangle, for example, would always be defended by each side. They never imagined that the judicial branch would be able to claim so much authority over the executive or the legislative. They thought that the legislative branch would push back against the judicial branch of government, for example.

In this Congress, I think it is not well enough informed on its constitutional article I prerogatives. So when the Supreme Court grasps legislative authority out of that that's granted in article I to Congress, seldom do we stand up and claim it back again. And we're so numb to this that when the President of the United States, the executive branch, reaches into article I and claims legislative authority, we can't get our back up in this Congress to put up a fight and tell the President that's an unconstitutional act, you crossed a line, and we're going to pull this thing back and put you back in line and make you keep your oath of office. Now, that's the structure that we have today. And we have some tools that we can use, but we have to have the will.

Mr. Speaker, to bring this around to--I'll call it a sub-conclusion of this discussion--when you look through a constitutional analysis and you look at the maximum authority that could be grabbed by the judicial branch or the executive branch or the legislative branch, what's the restraint on that? Article I is really the strongest branch of government.

The House of Representatives is reactive to the people. It's set up to be an election every 2 years so we can be reactive to the people. An example would be when people lost their good political judgment here in Congress and passed ObamaCare in 2010, we saw a wave election and 87 new freshman Republicans came in. Every single one of them ran on the full repeal of ObamaCare. Every single one of them voted--as did every Republican after that--to repeal ObamaCare. That's just the House reaction.

The Senate didn't transform itself to that extent in the last election. Part of that was also the vision of the Founding Fathers. But they always thought that there would be a tension between the branches of government, that each branch of government would jealously protect its power, and that as that little tug of war went on, those lines would be defined over time and by history by people defending their authority within their respective branch of government. They did not imagine that the United States Congress would capitulate lawmaking to the President of the United States and not draw a bright line and not have a fight. I am troubled by that, Mr. Speaker.

Now we have a President who has manufactured his own immigration law. And now we have people in the United States Senate who are advocating this to this Congress because they declare that we have virtual amnesty in America today. It's not virtual; it's literal. The President created it. And I'm not suggesting that the previous Presidents did a very good job of enforcing the law, but they didn't manufacture immigration law out of thin air. This one did.

He created it. Now, the Senators and Members in this House also are advocating that there is de facto amnesty, and the only thing that we can do is conform the laws to the amnesty that the President has manufactured out of thin air. That's the same thing as conforming this Congress to an order by the Supreme Court.

This Congress is the final answer on this. Whether it's a disagreement with the Supreme Court, whether it's a disagreement with the executive branch, the House and the Senate operating together envisioned by our Founding Fathers would be: we'll sort this out if we have to in the end.

When there's a constitutional clash and a tug of war, that's sorted out by the people expressing their judgment in the ballot box. That's how you eventually resolve serious constitutional crises. So, we have a constitutional serious concern. I'm not to the point where I say it's a crisis at this point.

But, Mr. Speaker, the President has conferred de facto amnesty? No, he's conferred literal, actual factual amnesty. And now we have people that can't think through this constitutionally, so they declare we have to conform with the President's will, wish, or whim. I suggest, no, we have a lot of ways to restrain the President, and I will not go into that today.

I do want to talk about how poor a decision it is to declare that all people in the United States illegally can stay here unless they commit a felony, or those three mysterious misdemeanors that can't be identified at this point, or those that have been deported apply to come back in. If you're not guilty of a felony of some kind, we'll bring you back to America. That's the ``we really didn't mean it'' clause. And the third one is all of those who are here after the deadline and who can get here after the deadline, never fear, because there is no one who has not committed a felony, nor not committed those three serious mysterious misdemeanors, who is going to be subject to removal from the United States under this President or under the Gang of Eight's bill. That's what we're dealing with.

So, the rule of law, which is the core issue here, it is an essential pillar of American exceptionalism, is under assault by people in the Senate and in the House, and the President of the United States, obviously, who has blown a great big hole in it by his own executive actions. The rule of law.

Now, all those people that are sitting around in the countries of the world that are inspired by the Statue of Liberty that want to come here, many of them are subject to an arbitrary ``no rule of law'' where they can be stopped and frisked in the streets and where the police can squeeze some dollars out of you just under the threat that you've got a speeding ticket, whether you were or whether you weren't, not a place to defend yourself. They don't think they get justice in a lot of the courts in the world, they don't get justice in the streets, they don't have freedom of speech, they don't have freedom of religion. And they want to come here because everyone is equal under the law.

Do you remember the statue, Mr. Speaker, of--and it's tricky to say statue here as a Member of Congress. Usually, we say statute. But I'm talking about, actually, a statue of Lady Justice. She's holding the scales of justice and these scales are balanced, they're even. You see the pots hanging from the chains on either side. Generally, when you see her, she's wearing a blindfold, because we have equal justice under the law in the United States.

The image of Lady Justice also attracts good people to come to America because they understand the image of the Statue of Liberty says, freedom, the lamp of liberty shining bright, for all who will come here legally. And Lady Justice blindfolded, equal justice under the law for everybody under the law here in the United States.

To waive the law and to give people a pass and to grant them a path to citizenship for--what is their one virtue that they have? They have access under this thing to all of the welfare systems and benefits that we have in the United States of America today.

Now, I can do this little quiz test, and, if it were fill in the blank, most Members of Congress wouldn't get this right. There are more than 80 different means-tested Federal welfare programs in the United States, more than 80.

One hundred years ago--let's just say at the turn of the previous century--we were not a welfare State. When people came here to America and shuffled across the great hall at Ellis Island where my grandmother did--and I know the exact date that she did that; I believe I've stood in the same spot where she did--when they came here, they had to show that they had a means to support themselves, that they were physically healthy enough to work and able to. They were checked physically to see if they happened to be transmitters of contagious diseases at the time.

Even though they were filtered and checked and sorted before they boarded the ship on the European side of this generally, when they arrived at Ellis Island there still were 2 percent that didn't meet the evaluation, and they were sent back to their home country. Still, after the filter was put in place and they arrived here, 2 percent got put back on the boat and sent back again.

We wanted to have a country then--we were a rational country then-- that had an immigration policy that was designed to enhance the economic, social, and cultural well-being of the United States of America. What's wrong with that, Mr. Speaker? Every other country that I know of has a policy like that.

I met with the Canadians yesterday, and I asked them, could I emigrate to Canada, could I meet the standard? They were diplomats, so they didn't exactly say no. But I asked them a whole

series of ways and they absolutely could not say yes, unless I married a Canadian.

Now, I'm not likely to do that. I've been married for 40 years, and I'm real happy with the wife I have. By the way, I love living in the United States and having an opportunity to try to turn this country into an even better place.

But here's the standard that they have. They give you points up there. They want you to be young, they want you to have language skills--that means speak English--they want you to have some capital, some education, and some jobs skills, some earning capacity. Those are the criteria that they use in Canada. These are also similar to the criteria in the United Kingdom and in Australia.

No one has the massive immigration, even as a percentage of their population, that we have here. I've sat on the Immigration Committee for more than 10 years. I've gone to hearing after hearing. I've gone through reams of documents and reports and studies.

Here is some of the under oath testimony from just a few years ago:

Under our legal immigration policy, if you're going to measure the merit of the applicants to legal immigration into the United States and you score it according to the merits of the individual applicant, only between 7 and 11 percent of our legal immigrants are even scored on their ability to contribute to America. All of the rest of them are coming through on something that doesn't have anything to do with their ability to contribute to this society. Seven to 11 percent is all. So 89 to 93 percent of legal immigrants are going to come on something other than merit: family reunification, asylum, visa lottery program, to give you a few. And that's legal, not counting the illegal, which is 40 percent visa overstays and 60 percent illegal border crossings.

What kind of a country would turn its borders over to anybody that could cross them and turn over its legal immigration system to 89 to 93 percent, something other than some way of measuring how they contribute to this country?

So the evaluation is this: that they must conclude--people on that side, people in the Senate, too many people on this side--that every individual has an equal ability to contribute to our society. Well, that's not true.

Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation gave a presentation of his study yesterday morning for an hour. It was riveting. I have the executive summary of that here, Mr. Speaker, and I have gone through it carefully before his presentation so I was up to speed.

Here's a point that he made--and I've made this point into The Congressional Record as recently as this week--that the libertarian approach to this is just let labor decide how it's going to move across borders, that goods and services and capital should all flow the same way, that we should have an open borders policy so that if business needed labor they could attract it from anywhere and put it to work wherever they wanted to, the free flow of labor, just like the free flow of capital or the free flow of materials or finished goods.

Now, Milton Friedman made it very clear that an open borders policy cannot coexist with a welfare State. And that State that we had back at the turn of the previous century that my grandmother arrived here within, we were not a welfare State, we were a meritocracy. The Statue of Liberty meant something then, and it meant that you have an access to God-given liberties, constitutionally defined liberties, and that you had the chance to achieve all you could achieve, succeed all you could succeed, and be able to keep a reasonable share of the fruits of your labor.

By the way, that took place also before we had an income tax, Mr. Speaker--no welfare state, no income tax, a meritocracy, and 2 percent got sent back because they didn't meet the standards of being able to sustain themselves in this society. I would also think there would be a few who made their way through who didn't.

In 1900, there was no welfare state; there was no income tax; and we had an immigration policy that was large, and it was so large and the numbers were so great that even then we needed low-skilled and unskilled labor back before we had, let me say, the technical development that we have in our economy today. We did need those laborers then. We needed people to work on farms. We needed people to build railroads and to construct our roads and our highways.

Today, in the United States of America, the highest unemployment rates that we have are in the lowest skilled jobs. So when you see double-digit unemployment, go find the job that requires the least amount of skill, and I can point to you the highest amount of unemployment.

What kind of a nation in its right mind would want to then increase the numbers of the people who are more likely to be unemployed and further suppress the wages of people in those job categories, those low- and unskilled job categories, when we're living in a welfare state that has to sustain these families that cannot possibly earn their own way in this society?

Culture has changed, the economy has changed, and because it has changed, we should be keeping up with what has taken place and understand that it's different today than it was in 1900.

For the most part, this Congress acts like, well, everybody who came here was a contributor to our economy and our society, so there is no limit to the number of people who should come here. I ask them sometimes: How many people should be coming into the United States legally and illegally altogether? What would your annual limit be? Would you cap that somewhere along the line? What should the population of the United States be in the next decade? in the next generation? in the next half a century? They cannot answer that question. They will not answer that question.

In fact, in a hearing on Ellis Island in that year that I mentioned-- I believe that was 2007, April 15 if I'm not mistaken--they had a demographer come testify as an expert witness to explain to us how it works, that because baby boomers are getting older and they will be accessing the retirement benefits of Social Security and Medicare that we needed to import a lot of people into America to pay that Social Security. So that was the argument of the demographer, and it was also the argument of the economist. If I remember right, he was one of the lead economists out of Stanford University.

I asked both of them: What is the optimum demographic by decade or by generation? What should the size of the population be? Is that a perfect column when you stack them each decade of population up? Is it perfect?

The demographer hadn't thought about what was optimum. He just came to tell us what we needed to do, which was to import a lot of people to pay into our Social Security and Medicare because, at some point, it would go the other direction. We know that. It will go bankrupt. The economist, as I remember, from Stanford made the argument also that we can't sustain Social Security and Medicare unless we import a whole lot of people because our birth rate has been going down.

So I asked him the obvious question that, Mr. Speaker, I'm confident you'd be asking yourself right now, and that is: Who is going to pay for the Social Security and Medicare of those people who we would bring in to pay for ours? What's the solution for the next generation?

The answer that I got was essentially that there wasn't an answer for that. That's a problem for the next generation to deal with. This is a generational issue, Mr. Speaker, and it has a lot more to do with what America looks like in the next generation and the next generation than it does about what happens here in the next decade.

Now, it's curious the Senate bill scored as it might be. I've heard the report of Doug Holtz-Eakin that it's going to be an economic boost to our society. You've heard that from the Gang of Eight. It's curious. Why do they kick this out 13 years? Why do those who would be legalized under amnesty in the 13th year then become citizens? It's because they will have access to the welfare state at that period of time. It gets us past the budget window of 10 years so they don't have to account for what it really does. Robert Rector accounts for what it really does. His numbers are appalling, and he has the most refined and careful study that has ever been done on this.

I would take issue with anybody in the Gang of Eight or with anyone who

has advocated there is an economic equation that shows this as a plus and tell you that you have to calculate this for the lifetimes of the people who are affected by it because, if it's a net cost, it's a net cost. I believe I wrote that number down. I know the net number, but the net number is this: they will draw down a little over $9 trillion in benefits; they will pay something like $3 trillion in taxes; and there is a net cost to legalizing here in America of $6.3 trillion over their lifetimes.

These numbers are broken down, and I have looked at the Rector studies in the past. I know this man. He would not leave himself exposed to an illegitimate mathematical calculation or criticism, and I haven't found people who have been able to level one against his numbers, but that's the general number. Here is a statement that is in here that is worthy of putting into the Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker. He is speaking of the universe of the 11 million, which I believe more than doubles if this bill becomes law.

He says: ``At every stage of the life cycle--'' and he means that of this universe of 11 million ``--unlawful immigrants, on average, generate fiscal deficits.'' That would be benefits that exceed taxes. ``Unlawful immigrants, on average, are always tax consumers; they never once generate a `fiscal surplus' that can be used to pay for government benefits elsewhere in society. This situation obviously will get much worse after amnesty.''

That statement stands. It stands clear and it stands strong, and it stands true in every single year of their presence in this country.

So with regard to the argument that this is an economic thing that we must do, I hear Republicans say it's because there's work Americans won't do. Well, I've done a lot of work that some Americans won't do, but I've never found work that I won't do. I've never found work that my sons won't do or work that our construction crews won't do. We are there taking care of some of the things that some have to do, and it's legal people who are doing the work for our company, which I sold to my oldest son several years ago.

I've had them out working in temperatures that were 126 degrees heat index. I've worked out there. I've worked 2 days in a row when it was 60 below windchill, driving sheet piling across a swamp because it was freezing, and we didn't have to mat the dragline. We worked in 186 degrees temperature range and heat index and cold index, windchill index.

We've done all of this work, and it grates on me to hear anybody say there's work Americans won't do. As Americans, we are not too good to do any kind of work that's necessary to do. We might be a little too smart to do some of that kind of work for too little money and too little in benefits; and when we flood the labor supply into the no- and low-skilled jobs, that lowers the wages; it lowers the benefits; and it reduces the numbers of Americans and pushes them out on to our welfare state.

For example, there is a study that I read several years ago that was done in a residential area of Milwaukee. They went in and surveyed a 36-square block residential area, six blocks by six blocks. They went into every home and interviewed them and measured the type of family that was there--the ages, the jobs they did, et cetera. In 36 square blocks, this was a neighborhood of Milwaukee where African Americans had moved up from the gulf in the thirties, at the end of prohibition, to take the jobs in the breweries and in those things that were economically developing in Milwaukee area at the time.

They were good jobs. They moved up there for good jobs. They bought homes in the neighborhoods, and they raised their families there. Three generations later, from, say, the 1930s until the late nineties when I read this report, they had gone from a good work ethic and a mobile family that had moved for a good job and had set up their homes there to where there wasn't a single employed male head of household in the entire 36-block residential area.

And the article that I read lamented that we couldn't bring jobs to them. What kind of a free market society--don't they believe in the free flow of labor and capital? Can't people at least within the United States go to find a job? Now they believe we should move jobs to people rather than let people move to jobs. Why don't people move to jobs? Because we're a welfare state, because we've had 80 different means- tested welfare programs here in this country.

Steve Moore wrote these words years ago when he was with Cato, and I cut it out and laminated it. It isn't an exact quote, but I'll get the theme down, Mr. Speaker. He said:

If you pay people not to work, they won't work. If you pay

women to have babies, they'll have babies. If you pay them

more if there's not a man in the house, there won't be a man

in the house. He might come back and visit, but he won't be

registered as living there.

Whatever you pay people to do, they will do. If you pay them not to work, they're not going to work.

There are 80 different means-tested Federal welfare programs. I can go through some of the list, but there isn't anybody in this Congress-- and I would charge that no one in America can give you that list from memory, which I think proves that there's no one that understands how all of these 80 programs interrelate with each other or how people act or react because of those programs. It's just that one bleeding heart decided this was a good idea and got it put into law, and another one manufactured that one.

Now we have a jigsaw puzzle of welfare programs and a welfare state, and we have advocates for the welfare state who also advocate for open borders. Why do they do that? I'll take this back to Teddy Kennedy's statement:

Some say report to be deported. I say report to become an

American citizen.

It's a political equation for many of the people on the left. They understand that they get votes out of this deal. The people that get to vote out of this deal will know who they need to vote for.

I've talked to those who saw their citizenship process accelerated in 1996. A million people got moved into an early naturalization process in that period of time.

I've talked to people that were beneficiaries of the 1986 amnesty act. They all understood where the political leverage was on this. The people in the 1986 amnesty act say, It was a good idea; it was good for me; it was good for my family, and I think we ought to give it to everybody. And the people in 1996 who had their citizenship accelerated, they knew that it was implied who they were to vote for in the reelection in 1996.

We've seen African Americans moved into a monolithic voting block. Part of that is--let's see. I just suggest, Mr. Speaker, that the people on the other side of the aisle understand how to divide people down their lines of race, ethnicity, national origin. It's the grungiest type of victimology: convince people that they're victims, that somehow the man is oppressing them, and the only way you get even with that is income redistribution.

So they push for higher tax rates and more wealth distribution, which discourages the entrepreneur. It discourages the worker. And now it's a public discussion about whether it's smarter to work or smarter to collect welfare, because the welfare dollars go up higher and the reward for moderate skills, let alone the low-skilled and no-skilled jobs, gets lower. And the competition for those jobs gets greater by the people that are in the United States illegally who are living on less than it takes to sustain them, and they are also accessing benefits. That's all in this report, Mr. Speaker.

From my perspective, I'd like to have a network, a support system that keeps people from falling through the cracks. I'd like to have a welfare system, a food stamp program, a way to help people out so that we can bridge them over through the hard times. I'd like to have them do Welfare to Work again.

There was only one of those 80 means-tested welfare programs that was actually Welfare to Work. That was TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. What happened? The President of the United States waived the work requirement arbitrarily, unconstitutionally, where it is specifically written into the bill that it couldn't be waived. He waived it anyway and decided that we're not going to enforce the work requirement in the one single welfare program of the 80 that actually required work.

A lot of people think that welfare was transformed and people on it are required to move towards work. No, unless the States have a way they're doing that in a more effective way than I'm hearing about. In the Federal Government, there is no longer a work requirement. There is an incentive not to work, and we're watching more and more families become the second and the third and maybe even the fourth generation who have lived on these programs.

Where do they learn their work ethic? Where do their children learn their work ethic? Who's pushing them? Who's showing them the rewards and pride of being industrious and productive and creative and the responsibility that we have to the broader society?

Each one of us has a little cell in a giant spreadsheet. That giant spreadsheet has over 300 million cells in it, people, Americans living here. We have skills that are God-given and gifts. And, yes, we are a product of our genes and our environment, and the product of that together makes us who we are. But we have a responsibility to contribute to the broader society and understand where we fit in that giant spreadsheet, and we have a responsibility to work, earn, save, invest, and leave this world a better place than it was when we came, and hopefully raise our children with those values to be even stronger and even better than the values we were raised with.

This huge hammock that used to be a safety net that we call the ``welfare system'' is eroding that. The contempt for the rule of law that spills out of the debate in the United States Senate and here in the House of Representatives erodes our American way of life. How do we think that we can move America beyond the shining city on the hill to another level of our destiny at an altitude higher and better and clearer and more pure and more industrious and more productive with more freedom and a better example for Western Judeo-Christiandom if we're going to continue to reward people for not contributing to that value in their single cell in that spreadsheet of over 300 million Americans?

We've got a responsibility to use these gifts that we have. Let's go to work. Let's strengthen our values. Let's strengthen our families. Let's protect the rule of law. Let's not tell ourselves that there's a goal here of political expediency, that somehow because a couple of talking heads woke up the morning after the election and concluded that if Mitt Romney had just not said the words ``self-deport'' he would be the President of the United States today and so now we have to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill in order to send a message to start a conversation so that in the next election or some subsequent election a Republican can win a national election again.

Who comes to that conclusion? There's no data out there that supports that. That's just simply a belief that has been created and it's self- perpetuating, but it cannot sustain itself when you look at exit polls, when you look at public survey polls.

Yes, I know a good number of people that they're talking about. I know people who are here legally and illegally who have got a good work ethic. They're good entrepreneurs. They're good family people. They've got values that are a credit to the United States of America, although they broke the law to get here. They've got values that are a credit to our country. I know some of them, and I see those faces. I can see them in my mind's eye, and I can see it in the children that come to our schools.

There's a school in my district that's 85 percent minority, and 65 percent of them came to school on their first day not speaking English. It's never the kids' fault. It's never their fault. It's our fault. It's the fault of the adults that are supposed to be running this country, protecting and restoring the rule of law. That's the responsibility.

But this is not going to be fixed by the legislature. It's not going to be fixed by the United States Congress. We can't pass a promise to enforce the borders and trade it off for perpetual amnesty and think somehow we've got a deal that's going to make this a better country and now we can restore the rule of law. We cannot. The only way you can restore the rule of law is to enforce the law.

The President has decided that he will refuse to enforce the law, and it makes it clear to me--and it should be clear to everybody in this country that is watching this issue--that this is not a legislative problem. The legislature cannot fix the problem that is of the President of the United States making his refusal to abide by his own oath of office and take care that the laws are faithfully enforced. It is an executive branch problem. We can do some things to rein him in, but it's very difficult with the majority and the Senate being run by Harry Reid.

So, practically speaking, Mr. Speaker, it's up to the American people. The American people have to be well-informed. They will draw good judgments when they're well-informed. The American people need to speak up. I hope the American people don't need to rise up to answer this and say: Our ancestors came here. We came here. We followed the law. We got in line according to the law. We didn't ask for amnesty. We went forward and received our naturalization papers after we had met those qualifications.

I've spoken at a good number of naturalization ceremonies. It's a very rewarding experience to do so.

The people that came here the right way that followed our laws are the ones that respect our laws today. The people that had disrespect for our laws, if they're rewarded for breaking them, how much respect will they have for any of our other laws? Will they be like the President to pick and choose the law that he likes? I suggest, no. Lady Justice is blind. Not only blind, it doesn't matter what economic status or what cultural status you might have or how much influence you might have in your community, justice is blind before the law.

Also, we need to make sure that all laws are applied to all of us equally, that we don't exempt people from them, reward them for breaking them. In fact, Robert Rector put it this way. He said everyone who would be given amnesty under this--this 11 million that I think is 20 or more million--their only claim to all of these welfare benefits and the benefits of living in American society and civilization, their only claim, is that they broke our laws.

So the definition of ``amnesty,'' Mr. Speaker, is this: to grant someone amnesty is to pardon immigration law breakers and reward them with the objective of their crime. That's what amnesty is.

The proponents of the 844-page bill, the Gang of Eight in the Senate and the secret committee in the House, they understand that. They understand it; that's why they keep denying their bill is amnesty. There's no rational analysis that says otherwise, Mr. Speaker.

And so I urge the American people, through my counsel with you in this speech, to take a good look at the Rector study. The Heritage Foundation released it this past Monday at 11 a.m., and it's titled, ``The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer,'' dated May 6, 2013. That good study will inform a lot of Americans.

We're going to have another immigration debate, and I'm going to suggest that the American people in their sound judgment will come down on the side of the rule of law, the Constitution, and what's good for the best long-term interest of America, the best economic, social, and cultural benefit of the United States of America, with passion and with compassion for all people who should live with God-given dignity.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 1 o'clock and 32 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the

House adjourned until Monday, May 13, 2013, at 2 p.m.