Floor Statements

I move to strike the last word.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

In listening to the presentation by the gentlelady from Tennessee and the rebuttal by the gentleman from California, I'd make the point that it isn't only the Supreme Court that makes a decision on constitutionality. We all take an oath to uphold the Constitution here in this Congress, in the executive branch, and also in the Federal court system. And when you go through the process of a constitutional determination, we do allow the Supreme Court, as a public and a people, to make that decision. We do so under Marbury, which is something over a couple of centuries old.

But in the final analysis of the balance of powers, in the end, it's the people that decide what's constitutional, not the Supreme Court. And I say that because we have the authority here in this Congress to control funding, as the gentlelady from Tennessee has in her amendment that comes out. And there's a reason for that.

We have many debates on constitutionality here in this Congress on this floor. It's our obligation to do that. It's our constitutional obligation to do so. And this discussion about ObamaCare and its unconstitutionality has gone well beyond the Chambers here. Many of us raised these issues 2 years and a month or so ago about the unconstitutionality of ObamaCare. We now see that at least 26 States have brought suit. It is before the Supreme Court to be decided. Tens of billions of dollars of good money has already been thrown after a bad policy and an unconstitutional policy, and now we're on the cusp of getting word from the Supreme Court.

But whether or not the Supreme Court finds the ObamaCare unconstitutional--I believe they will, at least under the individual mandate. I do not think they will sever it. I think they will throw it all out. But in either case, this Congress will continue to weigh in on constitutionality, on viability, on affordability, and on the policy itself. And the things that we do as a majority of this House of Representatives are entirely within the province of the Constitution to cut off all funding, if we choose to do that.

This Congress could cut off all funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare. This amendment just cuts off the funding to enforce ObamaCare. There's much of that unfolding today. This is a strong message to send. And I'm not suggesting we send it to the Court. I want the Court to have an independent decision on the language in ObamaCare itself. But this is a message to the American people that this Congress also has a voice. We have a voice on constitutionality. We have a voice on policy. We have a voice on affordability. And it's unaffordable; it's unconstitutional, and it's bad policy. It's an unconstitutional taking of American liberty. And this amendment at least suspends good money going after bad policy.

I strongly endorse the gentlelady from Tennessee's amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I just make a brief point that the executive branch has made a decision not to defend DOMA, which is the law of the land. So that's a discretion that apparently we would concede to the executive branch of government not to defend DOMA, but not accepting the antithesis of it, which I believe is the Blackburn amendment.

Madam Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Madam Chair, I rise in support of the Schweikert amendment.

As I listened to his presentation, it rolls me back to the year 2000 when I watched the fiasco take place in Florida and the recount that took place there. At the time, I was the chairman of the Iowa Senate State Government Committee. It was my job to see to it that we made sure that Iowa wasn't a Florida in a recount like that. In that process, I went through 37 days where almost every waking minute I was looking into voter election fraud. It really brought my attention to it, to the point where every day I carried an acorn around in my pocket just to remind me that free and fair and legitimate elections are what we need to have. It's the very bedrock for this constitutional Republic. The Constitution is the foundation, but legitimate elections and the perception of legitimate elections are the very bedrock upon which the foundation of our country sits upon.

So through that period of time, we've watched since that there has been more and more election fraud, promoted by ACORN, that brought this to the public sight, but something that I've been on

now in my 12th year. As I brought legislation in the State forward to legitimatize the elections that were in question, I asked that we made sure that our voter registration lists are free of duplicates, deceased, and felons, and that we require a picture ID.

The gentleman from Arizona has put together a list of the things that you need a picture ID for, and it's rather astonishing when you look through that list. Since he yielded back the balance of his time, I'm going to just pick some things off of this sheet, Madam Chair. That is this:

You can't get a package from a post office, a post office general delivery box, without showing a picture ID in cities. I can in my hometown.

You can't purchase a handgun without a picture ID.

You can't purchase tobacco or liquor without a picture ID. I can't get a beer in Chicago without a picture ID, or open a bank account or get on a passenger plane or get a ticket to Amtrak or rent a car or return merchandise or a refund or sell scrap metal in a junk yard or purchase police uniforms in California. I've never tried that one.

You can't be treated in any doctors' offices or admitted to a hospital without being in an emergency without a picture ID, or rent an apartment or get a bank loan or a cell phone or a teaching license or enter a major university, enroll as a student or get a library card at any libraries or enter military ports, check into a major hotel chain, rent a truck from a U-Haul or, as the gentleman from Arizona said, you can't visit Eric Holder without a picture ID. It's pretty astonishing.

This morning, in a hearing before the Judiciary Committee, the Director of the FBI, Director Mueller, I asked him if he had heard of the incident of the early twenties young Caucasian male that walked into the polling place in Virginia and asked for Attorney General Eric Holder's ballot. He just gave the name and identified the address, and they tried to hand him the ballot. He said, I need to go get my ID. They said, You don't need an ID; here is the ballot. It didn't occur to the poll worker that this early twenties Caucasian male was not a 61- year-old black man whom everybody ought to know his face by now, the Attorney General of the United States.

The Attorney General of the United States apparently wasn't alarmed that he easily could have been disenfranchised of his vote if that individual had just gone and picked up the ballot and gone and voted. He was not alarmed. And the Director of the FBI said under oath, this morning, he hadn't heard of this case, this incident that, by the way, twice was brought before the Judiciary Committee and the video was run. It's a matter of record with the Judiciary Committee within the last month, Madam Chair.

There are things that you can't do. As I said, you can't get a beer in Chicago without a picture ID and you can't vote in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela without a picture ID. It's about time, in the United States of America, we allow the States to clean up our election laws and kept the Department of Justice out of the business of interfering with the justice that is delivered by the States in the United States of America.

I yield back the balance of my time.

I move to strike the last word.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I rise in support of the Poe amendment, and I thank the gentleman from Texas for bringing it.

Just to clarify some of the history, this is the questionnaire that apparently has replaced the need for what was the census long form. The census, of course, is directed by the Constitution every 10 years. And that's why we're going through redistricting now and all the primaries take place across the country.

But from 1940 until the year 2000, we also had the long form that was part of the census question. Some people got the long form; some got the short form. And this questionnaire came along and replaced the long form. So the perception was that it actually was a census question--the replacement for the long form--but it really is not. Of course, it's the American Community Survey.

I agree with the gentleman from Texas. If a government is going to be so intrusive, they're going to issue a 24-page packet of questions that's got 48 questions in it, some of them very, very intrusive. Just names, age, gender, race, income, physical and emotional health--that must have been the one where you have to answer the question on whether you're having trouble concentrating or making decisions--

your family status, details of your residence--that might be the one about whether you have a flush toilet or not--and intimate personal habits--whether you actually use it or not. I'm having trouble concentrating on whether I actually have one.

But I'm thinking that when one gets one of these in the mail and you're looking at someplace between--I know it's not been enforced, but they don't know that when they get the questionnaire--so someplace between a $100 fine and up to a $5,000 fine, by the information I have, that's pretty draconian just to get information from American people that volunteer on a basis by the tens of millions and contribute billions of dollars in charity. We can find enough Americans to fill out this survey and give the government the information that they need.

I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

I believe 250,000 is the number I have.

Reclaiming my time, Madam Chair, I would make the point if it's less than 1 percent of the population, it certainly is. It's far less than 1 percent of the population. We can find that many volunteers that will fill this out voluntarily. Send it to me. I'll fill it out voluntarily. But when you tell me you're going to come in and fine me for it, that's intrusive. And these questions are personal enough that people should be able to say, I don't want to share that information with my Federal Government. I don't want that to go into a database that might possibly get transferred across into other people's information.

I think it's important to have the information, but it's important that people have freedom and liberty and we do not have an intrusive Federal Government that would impose a fine on people if they didn't let the information come out about whether they had a flush toilet and whether they can concentrate on whether they had it and whether they used it. That seems to be part of the center of this. We can at least reduce some of these questions down there.

I yield to the gentlemen from Pennsylvania.

Reclaiming my time, I recognize that. I think we get better information from volunteers than we do people that are coerced. They may well not fill out this survey accurately if they think they're doing so under penalty of law.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

I rise in support of the Huelskamp amendment. I listened to the gentleman from Colorado say at least three times, a government takeover of marriage. Yes, the faith and the church and the churches have been the ones who have established marriage over the centuries and over the millennia. But when it comes to civil marriage, the government writes the rules. If the government is writing the rules, it's not a takeover of marriage. The definition of marriage from the beginning of time has been a man and woman joined together, hopefully in holy matrimony, for the purposes of encouraging a family unit and raising children and pouring our values down through that crucible of marriage into the next generation because that's the most successful and effective way that we can advance civilization.

Government has an interest in promoting marriage for the purposes of holding together the continuity of our culture and our civilization. It is not a nefarious thing. It's not the government taking over marriage. It is the voice of the American culture and the American people seeking to advance into the following generations the best values that we have.

And those that say it is discrimination to determine what marriage is, I would argue instead, Mr. Chairman, that government provides a license. The States provide licenses for marriage. A license is a definition to do that which is otherwise illegal. A license to hunt, a license to carry a gun, a license to fish, for example.

I want to finish my statement, but if I have time, I will yield to the gentleman from Colorado.

States issue marriage licenses because they want to promote and encourage an activity and a behavior, not because they want to punish another behavior. It is because there is something that they have determined has value, and so they give a permit to do that which is otherwise illegal, and that's what a definition of a license is.

With regard to the President and the executive branch, the Constitution and the oath that's implied in the Constitution, the oath that the President takes that is implied that he adheres to in the Constitution says he shall take care that the laws are faithfully executed.

And so the law of the United States is DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act. The President's obligation, and his appointees and all of those in the executive branch of government, is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. The appointments of the President and the executive branch are bound by his oath, and they take their own oath to uphold this Constitution. And when the President of the United States decides he is going to flip on his position, or maybe let it evolve into a condition, and then direct, and I believe it is direct, the Department of Justice to first refuse to support and have the Solicitor General no longer support Federal law passed by a majority of this Congress, the House and Senate and signed by President Clinton and then turn around, and now we're concerned that they are going to use taxpayer resources to defy a legitimate law that is the will of the people and on the books in the Federal Register.

That's what the amendment does that Mr. Huelskamp has offered. It says it's bad enough that you don't keep your oath to take care that the laws of the United States are faithfully executed, and we want to say to you, Don't at least turn a 180 on us and go against the will of the American people and use taxpayer dollars to work against the will of the American people, against your oath of office and against the statute.

So out of courtesy, I would yield to the gentleman from Colorado.

Reclaiming my time, civilization is in jeopardy. It's in jeopardy when you have seven supreme court justices in the State of Iowa who declare that they have found rights in the Constitution that were up to this point ``unimagined.'' If you have justices that find unimagined rights in the Constitution, they are completely unqualified to legislate from the bench or determine what's constitutional and what's unconstitutional; and three of the seven were up for a retention ballot a year ago last November, and they were all three voted off the bench, the first time in the history of the State, partly because people disagreed with the policy they sought to impose by legislating from the bench, mostly because the people in the State understood that you cannot have judges that will find rights in the Constitution that were up to this point unimagined.

Judges that can imagine rights in the Constitution will take your rights away. A President that will change his position, that will not uphold his oath of office to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, that will direct the Department of Justice to work against and the Solicitor General to work against Federal law will turn this thing 180 and use the Federal resources against the will of the people of the United States, and that's the Huelskamp amendment, and I support it.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 158, I was detained while attempting to reach the House floor to cast my vote. Had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 96, I was not able to vote because I was called away for the funeral of a close friend.

Had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 97, I was not able to vote because I was called away for the funeral of a close friend.

Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege and honor to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives in this world's great deliberative body. And taking it from the top, as I listened to the statements that were made tonight in the 1-minutes, I think of the gentlelady from Texas and her statement about Syria.

Now I'm not here, Mr. Speaker, to defend President Assad and Syria. In fact, I think he needs to go. And I believe that all people of the world have a right to a self-determination, and they should not live under tyranny and they should not live under despotism.

I just think back to when some of us objected that the former Speaker of the House, Mr. Speaker, and that was Nancy Pelosi, as she took over the big gavel, she set up a diplomatic tour and mission, and one of those places was Syria. And I remember the President of the United States, whom, according to the Constitution, is in control of--and I'll say according to the interpretation of the Constitution, he's Commander-in-Chief but also controls the foreign policy. It's implicit, and it's more than a two-century practice that you have to have the President of the United States as conducting foreign policy.

The President of the United States was George W. Bush who asked the then-Speaker of the House, please, do not go to Syria. Do not seek to negotiate with President Assad. Do not upset the diplomacy that's taking place between the United States and Syria, or the lack of that diplomacy.

And I think about that time when Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker, crossed that line, even though it was requested by the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief of our Armed Forces, and the individual who was in command of all of our foreign policy, had asked her not to go.

Now we see what's going on in Syria. And I listened to the comments, and I just think that if the gentlelady from Texas had spoken up at that time when I did, it might be a little bit easier to hear tonight than this particularly was.

Mr. Speaker, there are many things in front of us in this Congress. Among them, of course, are economics and national defense, and our national security.

Right now, as I listened to the gentleman from Texas talk about the Israelis, and there's an event going on tonight that brings together about 12,000 people that are some Israelis, many people of Jewish origin here in the United States, and all who will be sitting there at the AIPAC dinner will be strongly supporting an independent Israel that is in control of defending themselves, the sovereignty of Israel.

I'm a strong supporter of Israel. I look at the country of Israel surrounded by its enemies, formed in 1948, and for most of my life, I've watched Israel develop and defend herself, and I've watched how they are the most stable and reliable democracy in the Middle East, and for a long time they were the only democracy in the Middle East. It would be the only place for a long time where an Arab could get a fair trial out of all of the Middle East.

Today, we're seeing the dialogue take place from Iran, not with Iran, and Israel is the stated target of Ahmadinejad. They've been working in Iran, as you know, Mr. Speaker, urgently and feverishly to develop a nuclear weapon and a means to deliver it.

When I came into this Congress and was sworn in in 2003, I sat down then with the ambassadors to the United States from Germany, France, and Great Britain, who were seeking to convince us here in the Congress that we should encourage our President to open up dialogue with the Iranians and perhaps be able to talk them out of their nuclear endeavor.

Now, that was in September of 2003 that that meeting took place over in the Rayburn building, Mr. Speaker. As I sat in on that meeting and weighed in on that meeting, I kept hearing the message come back about ``open up dialogue.'' They wanted to open up dialogue.

So when it came around to the opportunity where I had the floor, I asked those three ambassadors from each nation, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, What is your long-term agenda here? What do you propose to do? They said, We want to open up dialogue. My answer was, If we open up dialogue with Iran, what is the next step? They said, We're only here to talk about opening up dialogue.

But if you open up dialogue with Iran, there are other steps along the way. If we just talk with them, and they refuse then to shut down their nuclear development within Iran, what are you prepared to do?''

I watched these diplomats start to get nervous. When you talk to diplomats about action, they start to get nervous. So what are you prepared to do? What do you mean? We all, I think, knew what was coming.

Well, are you prepared to go to the United Nations with us and ask for a resolution rejecting Iran's nuclear endeavor? Are you prepared to bring about sanctions? If the sanctions don't work, are you prepared to bring about a blockade? If the blockade doesn't work and there's a line in the sand that says if you violate the blockade, and if you continue on your nuclear endeavor, are you prepared then to go to the desert and enforce the very things that are being started in this dialogue here?

Of course they weren't prepared to do that. They weren't even prepared to talk about that.

Mr. Speaker, when you start down the path of diplomacy and you think

that the only tool you have is diplomacy, there is nobody out here operating as a sovereign nation in the world that's just kind of dumb or duped that doesn't understand that there has to be a force, there has to be some kind of threat, there has to be a consequence and an ``or what,'' or otherwise we would go to the Iranians with our hat in our hand and say, Why don't you be some nice guys for a change and shut down your nuclear development, your nuclear endeavor? What kind of luck will we have with that?

If they believe, as they seem to, that they're called upon by the entity that they worship to annihilate Israel, the miniature Satan, and then turn around and annihilate the Great Satan, the United States of America, that's their stated purpose, Mr. Speaker. And their stated purpose is target one, Tel Aviv, because it's the city that was created after the origins of Israel, and its predominantly of Jewish population. So they would target Tel Aviv.

Now, any nation that would take that position, we would think that somehow we would say to them, Even though your goals are to annihilate Israel and to annihilate the Great Satan, the United States, would you just please be a nice guy and stop developing your nuclear weapons? I mean, how naive could we be to go to Ahmadinejad and make that kind of a request under the guise of dialogue and think somehow that that's going to get the job done?

We should have known then--I'll tell you, Mr. Speaker, I knew then-- that dialogue was not going to solve the problem. You never win on dialogue alone. You always have to have a leverage point, so they will look at that, they'll look you in the eye and decide, they mean what they say. It isn't worth it any longer. The juice is not worth the squeeze. I'm going to back off and stop developing the nuclear. But of course that didn't happen. The three countries that were here asking us to engage in dialogue, good people and good friends, very respectable ambassadors each. I have personal admiration and respect for them. But when you start down the path of dialogue, you must also understand there has to be a consequence at the other end. That consequence, in sequence, was to go to the United Nations for a resolution of rejection and disapproval, make it clear in the international world that the Iranians were violating the nuclear nonproliferation agreements that were established, make it clear that there would be sanctions, and if that's the case, there would be then an embargo and there would be a blockade, and on the other side of that, that there would be action to take out their nuclear capability.

Now, our current President has said that he takes nothing off the table. But when you say you take nothing off the table, that doesn't mean that everything is on the table. It's a little bit of that language that we've learned we have to look at pretty carefully and understand that there's a loophole in that. If you didn't put it on the table in the first place and you take nothing off the table, he may have already in his own mind taken military action off the table, and we don't know.

Mr. Speaker, I was watching the news on Friday morning, and on ``Fox and Friends,'' I heard Gretchen Carlson release the story that Israel and the United States, and that would be President Obama and President Netanyahu, had reached an agreement that Israel would not strike Iran's nuclear capability before the election.

Now, I'm a little amazed that that isn't all over the newspapers and all over the floor of Congress, Mr. Speaker. I'm a little amazed that that story has not been picked up and pasted throughout the blogs and Americans up in arms, Israelis up in arms. I'm a little amazed that that's not going to be the central discussion taking place in the AIPAC dinner with 12,000 people there tonight, and I'm amazed that the President of the United States can give his address to AIPAC, as he did last night, to such a great applause and support, as was reported in the news. I'm amazed.

First of all, was the Fox story true? My experience has been you don't see news come out of there that's unbased or unfounded. It's based on something. It's founded upon something. I haven't chased it down to look at the original sources that are there, but I know what I heard. It disappeared from the media.

But if the President of the United States is even thinking in terms that he would play nuclear showdown with Iran by calculating an election date as part of that equation, it is an appalling concept to think that it could even be reported in the news as fact that the President of the United States would conduct his negotiations and manipulate his foreign policy, especially when it comes down to an Armageddon-type of a policy based upon an election date for his reelection.

I can understand the motive, Mr. Speaker. But to think in terms of if something bad happens between Israel and Iran that might risk the President's reelection, that at least it's reported in the news that he would have had the incentive to negotiate with Israel to say, Do not mount a military strike to knock out Iran's nuclear capability before the election.

I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, I don't believe we have that much time. I think we count this time in weeks, perhaps 2 or 3 months. But I don't think we count this time until after the November election.

Furthermore, when you get to the point where you have these kinds of crises coming forward and when we have the President, who has announced that the Iraq war is going to be finished on such and such a date and that the Afghanistan war is going to be finished in 2014 and that by the way, oh, time out, Iran, on your nuclear endeavor here until after my reelection because then it will be a lot more comfortable time to deal with this crisis as I take nothing off the table, I don't remember the President saying he has put military strikes on the table. I just remember him saying, I take nothing off the table.

So here is what needs to be done, and I don't know that the credibility exists at this point in the White House for this to be done; but a President who was a credible individual could look at the camera and look across the ocean into the eyes, through video, of Ahmadinejad and the mullahs and say:

I have put an X on the calendar, and that marks the date beyond which you will not be allowed to continue your nuclear endeavor. I know that date, but you do not. I will work with you so that you can save face in Iran, Mr. Ahmadinejad and the mullahs. I'll work with you to accelerate the demolition of your nuclear capability to the satisfaction of American inspectors, and we'll do all of that so you look as good as you can and can save as much face as possible, but you will never know what that date is on the calendar unless you push it too far.

By the way, if you're one day from having it all demolished and you're not done, sorry. The date is the date. You'll not be able to develop your nuclear endeavor beyond that date on the calendar, which you don't know and I do.

That's how you negotiate with terrorists, with cold-eyed people who believe that the United States is the Great Satan; that they're somehow called by the entity they worship to annihilate Israel, to annihilate the United States and to negotiate with them--to think that you can open up dialogue and go through all of the resolutions and sanctions and embargoes and knock the blockade and let some of the rest of the world violate those agreements, by the way, and profit from it.

We saw it happen in Iraq. It didn't work. We're watching it happen in Iran. It's not working. Now we're dangerously walking very close to that line of Iran having the capability of having developed a nuclear weapon and a means to deliver it.

By the way, when I say ``a means to deliver it,'' Mr. Speaker, it isn't just a nuclear-tipped missile that can strike Tel Aviv from Iran at 750-or-so miles from the sovereign territory of Iran to Tel Aviv, itself. It is the ability to put that anywhere in a suitcase. It could be delivered aboard ship; it could be delivered aboard a little boat; it could come about any way over land. Once they have that capability and it's proliferated, there is no stopping the proliferation. We must end their capability before they have that capability--not after. After is too late. That nuclear horse is out of the barn as soon as they are able to produce that

weapon; and when it is, they will terrorize the world. We don't know where it is.

So, Mr. Speaker, I urge the support of the American people in the United States Congress for the autonomy, the sovereignty, and the self- protection of Israel. Should Israel decide that they need to take out Iran's nuclear capability tonight, tomorrow, at any moment, I stand prepared to stand with Israel. Even though this administration might send the message that military support and global political support would no longer be forthcoming from this administration, I believe we have a new administration around the corner.

If we can tell the Iranians to wait with their nuclear development and if we can tell the Israelis to wait with a military strike to take out the nuclear capability that's growing now in Iran, then I can say that the American people look forward to an administration that will treat Israel right, an administration that will support and encourage that Israel defend herself, and a United States of America that will step up and protect and defend Israel as we are pledged to do both philosophically and spiritually and by the obligation that we have from history.

That is just what comes to mind, Mr. Speaker.

Then, as I listened to the speakers here tonight, Syria is a very dangerous place. I am for a regime change, and I don't think that we should have negotiated with nor sent a delegation to President Assad. He is slaughtering and murdering his own people. So to that extent, I agree with the gentlelady from Texas.

But I came here tonight, Mr. Speaker, to address a number of subject matters. On this subject matter, I'm looking out at tomorrow as Super Tuesday, Super Tuesday with 10 States having primary elections. Perhaps out of that comes a direction, the likelihood that there will be one Presidential candidate who will emerge and become the likely nominee, the apparent nominee. I think the odds are a little less than even that that can happen, but it's close.

What we have is a longer, drawn-out nomination process than was anticipated, which started back in Iowa more than a year ago as we worked with the Presidential candidates through that time. Some of them were just putting their toes in the water. They were looking. They came to Iowa and decided they didn't really want to do it, and they stepped back out again. Others hadn't quite emerged. Rick Perry came on a little bit later in August of last year and made a credible run. For a while, he was at the top of the polls. In piece after piece of this race, we've watched as some candidates took a look and stepped out while other candidates stepped in and stepped out.

Now we're at this point where there are four Republican candidates for President who are in the race, and we're watching as the polls are starting to separate. I don't want to make this prediction, Mr. Speaker, but I'll say this: if I look across the platforms of the Republican likely nominees, potential nominees for the Presidency, I begin to say: we don't have a Republican agenda that's a national agenda. We don't have a consensus on that national agenda.

This Congress has been moving pieces of legislation, almost all of them tied to jobs, jobs, jobs. It seems to me I can think back about 4 years, and I can hear our current Speaker ask the previous Speaker: Madam Speaker, where are the jobs? Jobs, jobs, jobs. Well, I've heard ``jobs, jobs, jobs'' for a long time. It's nice that we're about jobs. I haven't heard a lot about profit, profit, profit, which is required to pay for the payroll to create jobs, jobs, jobs. Yet profit isn't something that comes from a government job, Mr. Speaker. That would be something I hope the President would have overheard. Profit is not something that comes from a government job. Government jobs consume the profits of the private sector.

There are two sectors in the economy here, the public and the private. The public sector is the regulatory sector, but not exclusively. When the public sector provides law enforcement, for example, that gives us security so that the private sector can operate--so you can open up your shop and do business, so you can open up your factory and do business. You have to have some security. You have to be able to have a judicial branch of government, more limited than the one we have, I might say, so that you can enforce the laws. You need some functions of government. You need people to build the roads, and you need people to sometimes reach out and do for the people that which they cannot do for themselves. Leave us otherwise alone, I would say, Mr. Speaker.

But the drain on the private sector, on the productive sector of the economy, comes from the public sector. The public sector generally consumes the energy and the resources and the product of the private sector. The private sector invests capital; it produces goods and services that have a marketable value both here and abroad; and the economy dynamically grows. The Federal Government reaches in and takes out 22, 23, 24 percent of the gross domestic product, most of which needs to be on the private sector side because they're the only ones generating wealth; they're the only ones taking capital and reinvesting capital.

Historically, for the last 40 to 50 years, the Federal Government has consumed about 18 percent of GDP. Now that has grown up, roughly, to the neighborhood of 23 percent of our gross domestic product; but it saps the vitality of an economy to have a government that grows and consumes more, and it saps the vitality to tax and spend it on the government entity side. The endeavor of the President's economic plan should be to roll people out of public employment and into the private sector because the private sector is producing goods and services with a marketable value both here and abroad.

I don't see that coming out of this White House today. I pray it comes out of the White House in less than a year from now when a new President, Mr. Speaker, is elected who understands the principles of free market economics. I can go deeply into that, but I'm hopeful that I can express to you tonight the need for this Congress to move on a series of issues that are very important to the American people.

It is unclear who the apparent nominee, and in the end the nominee, for President is. So, therefore, we can't go to that individual and say will you please write up for me the platform that you are going to run on when you are nominated as President of the United States. That's unclear.

To me what is clear is there are a series of issues that are universal across the contending Presidential candidates. These are the issues that we should move through this Congress, planks in the platform of the next President of the United States. We are in a perfect opportunity to do this.

We are here with a not particularly intense legislative agenda. It's kind of hard to have a lot of things to do when you send them down there and stack them up like cord wood on the desk of Harry Reid. Let's send some things down there that the American people can see are the planks in the platform of the next President.

We know what this President will do. He gave us ObamaCare. He tried to give us cap-and-tax. He gave us Dodd-Frank. Those are the big egregious pieces. He gave us TARP; he gave us the economic stimulus plan, all of that out of President Obama. He blocked the Keystone XL pipeline because apparently he had concluded that it wasn't a national security issue and he needed a little more time to study. I'll come back to that in a little bit, Mr. Speaker. That's the agenda of the current President of the United States.

The next President of the United States needs to have a clear platform to run for office on. They have been articulating that, but the American people don't know what it is because they don't know who the apparent nominee will be.

Well, I can help out with that, Mr. Speaker, because I have sorted through the platforms of each of the viable Presidential candidates and come down with a list of those issues that would be universal across the campaigns of the likely or potential nominees of the Republican Party for President of the United States. And I would suggest, Mr. Speaker, that the leadership in this Congress move the legislation that's universal to any of the potential nominees so that we can lay out that

platform for the next President. The planks are there. If it's something that's popular with the American people, and it's in the agenda of each of the Presidential candidates, bring it to the floor of this Congress.

Bring it through committee first. Let's go through regular order. Let's mark it up in committee, bring it to the floor, and let's have a debate and a vote on it and send it over to Harry Reid and see how well he does rejecting the agenda that the American people support.

Let me start off the list, and this is off of a bit of a research list that I put together about 2 weeks ago. It comes this way: every Presidential candidate that is a viable candidate and with a reasonable potential to be nominated for President of the United States on a Republican ticket supports a fence.

I have stood on this floor over and over again and said go down to the southern border, those 2,000 miles, build a fence, a wall, and a fence. We can't just think that four strands of barbed wire is good enough or that a vehicle barrier is good enough or that a single fence, where the other day they showed a video of the panels in the fence where they went in with a post jack, is what I call it, and jacked the panel up. Then the drug smugglers and the illegals poured underneath that, and then they dropped the panel back down again and walked away with their jack kind of laughing or whatever the south of the border version is for high fives was taking place.

Now, we need to build a fence, a wall, and a fence, Mr. Speaker. I have stood here on this floor and demonstrated how you do that. We need to go down to the border and build first the barrier fence that defines our border, and that says don't come across this, it's U.S. territory, you can only come here legally.

Next, we need to come north of there, a reasonable span, 40 to 50 feet, perhaps, and put in another fence. I would make that out of concrete, precast panels with a slip form trench foundation in it, and I would drop those panels in and affix that in such a way that it would be a strong barrier so that humanity is not pouring through across the border.

I would come again further up another 50 feet or so and build another fence. That can be steel, that can be chain link, it needs to be tall so that you end up with a fence, a wall, and a fence, two zones of no- man's land that it can be enforced. Yes, we need to use all the virtual that we can, all of the cameras and the sensory devices that technology will provide, so that we know to deploy our Border Patrol to the place where there has been a breach or a violation in that fence and enforce that 100 percent.

We can't just let people come into the United States, shrug our shoulders and say, well, we'll catch somebody later on or somebody tomorrow. We have to ensure that if you're going to sneak into America, we're going to catch you, and we're going to enforce the law. In the end, if you violate that law, we are going to need to punish you and put you back into the condition you were in before you broke the law.

Now, I don't understand why that somehow seems to be cruel and unusual punishment to encounter someone who is unlawfully in the United States, who has violated our laws if they crept into the United States across the border and entered into the United States illegally. That is a crime, Mr. Speaker. It's not a civil violation. It's not. It is a crime. That makes the people who sneak into the United States illegally, people who commit crimes, by definition, are criminals.

I suggest that we build a fence, a wall, and a fence. Some will say we can't build 2,000 miles. My answer is, have you ever seen the Great Wall of China? The Great Wall of China is 5,500 miles long and armies marched on top of that.

The first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, back in 245 BC connected the existing sections of the Great Wall of China so that it is one continuous 5,500-mile long wall. They did that, not with huge machines and excavators and cement plants; they did it with stoop labor, putting it together piece by piece by piece. If the Chinese could build a 5,500-mile long great wall, and it's one of the wonders of the world, it would be a wonder to me why we have such difficulty building something that approaches 2,000 miles in length, a simple solution to a complex problem.

Our little old construction company could get tooled up to build a mile a day. I'm not suggesting that our people go do that; but if our little company has that capabilities, think what the big companies have for a capability.

By the way, I'm not suggesting that we build 2,000 miles of fence. I just say this, build it according to the Secure Fence Act. That's the law we passed. That's what Duncan Hunter was for; that's what I was for. Let's just build a fence, a wall, and a fence, and just build it till they stop going around the end. It doesn't have to be 2,000 miles long if they stop going around the end sooner than that. They leave tracks, by the way.

You go out there and you take a look. Well, okay, they went around the end of this fence. Well, let's add another 20 miles, and now I'll see how that works, and we'll just keep building fence until they either quit crossing the line or we have 2,000 miles of it.

The math on that, Mr. Speaker, is not that hard to figure out, although the question doesn't get asked often enough. So we did the math on this a little while back, and I have got to adjust it by a mental calculation to get it into contemporary, and now it's probably even a year old.

We're spending about $12 billion enforcing our southern border, $12 billion a year. Now if I take 12 billion, divide it by 2,000, that's $6 million a mile. If you are spending $6 million a mile to defend the border, the Border Patrol comes before the Judiciary Committee, the immigration committee, under oath and testifies we think we interdict about 25 percent of those who attempt to cross the border.

I go down to the border and I ask those enforcing it, so you're stopping about one in four? They laugh at me. Oh, no, we're not stopping one in four, maybe 10 percent. Some say 2 to 3 percent, but the most consistent answer I get from the enforcers on the border is 10 percent. But I'm willing to go back to the 25 percent number and use that, even though I think it's probably high.

I do the calculation. I think, let me see, if Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, came to me and said, Congressman, I want to hire you to guard the west mile from your house across rural Iowa, that mile gravel road for that mile. For that mile I'm going to pay you the same amount that we're paying to protect our southern border, $6 million a year--oh, and by the way, if that's not enough incentive, it's a 10-year contract. She would lay, in theory under this formula, $60 million on my kitchen table, and my job is to guard that mile of road and see to it that no more than 75 percent of those that try get across?

I'm going to snap that up, Mr. Speaker. And I'll tell you, I'm not going to go out there and hire myself a multitude of people that are boots on the ground. I'm going to hire some, but I'm going to be very well aware that you have a benefits package that goes along with it, health insurance, retirement benefits and all of the pieces that have to do with supporting an officer, including a vehicle for him to drive, multiple vehicles in some cases. I'm going to recognize that. And I'm going to look at the capital investment for the long term all of the way through retirement of hiring boots on the ground. And, yes, we need them; and those that are there do a good job, and they want to do a good job.

But I'm going to look at it and think: I could invest some of this $60 million in this contract a little more effectively. I think I'll just build a fence, a wall, and a fence. Then I'll have myself a few Border Patrol officers there to rotate the shifts and monitor the sensors and watch the cameras, and maybe man a guard tower here and there. And we'd make sure that no one would get across that.

And, by the way, as I brought up Israel a little bit earlier, they built a fence. They designed that fence so that it would be as reliable and as tight as possible. It has some wire there. It has got towers and they monitor it, and it has been 99-point-something percent effective. So we can learn something from the Israelis. Why do they build fences if fences don't work?

We look at the Mexicans. They have barriers down there between Mexico and Guatemala.

There's a fence that was being built between Saudi Arabia and Iraq so they could interdict the refugees that they anticipated would be coming into Saudi Arabia, to keep them out.

There is a fence that's being built right now in that bankrupt country of Greece, between Greece and Turkey, to keep the illegals that are pouring into Greece from Turkey out of Greece. Even though the Greeks can't afford it, they are building the fence to keep the illegal Turks from pouring into Greece.

Now, some will say there is something inherently immoral about a fence--a fence, a wall, and a fence, in my case, Mr. Speaker--and I would argue there's a difference between that, those who would say, Haven't you ever heard the Berlin Wall? Well, of course I have heard of the Berlin Wall. I've walked almost every foot of the Berlin Wall. I have a piece of the Berlin Wall in my office over at 1131 Longworth, and it's framed. It is framed with a wood frame and it has a red cloth behind it and a piece of the Berlin Wall about that big. It was chopped out on September 12, 1990. It represents the single-most significant historical event in my lifetime, the end of the Cold War when the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall itself, literally the Iron Curtain came crashing down.

But the Berlin Wall was designed to do something entirely different than all of the fences that I've described, Mr. Speaker, and that is it was designed to keep people in, not out. And that's the difference. A wall that's designed to keep people in because you don't want them to achieve and access freedom and liberty and our God-given liberty rights, that's what the Berlin Wall did. It trapped people; it fenced them in.

The other fences that I've talked about are designed to keep people out who are trying to come into the United States, and other places, in violation of existing law.

And others will say--and some are clergy that will say: Well, you were a stranger. You were an alien in a foreign land, and I took care of you.

There are a lot of quotes in the Bible that remind people that we should reach out to the less fortunate among us. But I happen to have stood on Mars Hill in Athens where St. Paul gave his famous speech, his famous sermon in Act 17, when he said: And the Lord made all nations on Earth, and he decided when and where each nation would be.

That was St. Paul's statement on Mars Hill in his famous sermon in Act 17. Each nation has its sovereignty. The Lord decided each nation on Earth and when and where those nations would be, and we should not shrink from that responsibility, that sovereign responsibility, to protect our borders and to protect the rule of law.

And the borders of the United States are what define the sovereignty of the United States. If we should accept the idea that there aren't borders, that people have always migrated and somehow it is immoral for us to define those borders or tell people you can't come across, then I would ask those who advocate a policy like that, and I believe it is an illogical policy, but those who advocate for such a policy, I would say to them, then: How many people do you believe should be allowed to live in the United States? What should the population of the United States of America be? Six billion people on the planet. We're the third largest population country on the planet, 300-plus million of us. How many should live here?

If you asked the rest of the world: Would you like to live in the United States of America and we'll buy you a plane ticket to go and we'll give you an unlimited supply--well, how about the current access of welfare benefits that are there? Seventy-two different means-tested Federal welfare programs; and, by the way, refundable tax credits for illegals working in America under an employer ID number, a 42-dash number instead of a Social Security number.

I congratulate Congressman Sam Johnson of Texas for bringing his legislation that prohibits any tax credits from going to, any refunds from going to those who are filing their taxes without a Social Security number.

But they could tap into all of these benefits, 72 different means- tested welfare programs and the refundable tax credits that are there, and we'd say to them: You can live by an implied guarantee in the United States of America at a middle-income level, middle class without working, and we're going to see to it that it's all available to you. Come to America and we'll give that to you. I would predict, Mr. Speaker, that more than half of the 6 billion people on the planet would opt to come to the United States.

So how many people do those who advocate for open borders, what do they think the population of the United States should be? Should it be 3 billion? Am I right on that? Should it be 2 billion? Should it be 4 billion? I'll suggest it would surpass 3 billion under that kind of an offer, except many of those on the tail end of that great transshipment of humanity would realize that our system here would collapse long before you could ever load 3 billion people into America, or 2 billion, or maybe even 1 billion.

So what is the number? What is it that those who advocate for open borders and suspending the rule of law, what is it that they believe should be the future population of the United States of America? How many would they let in?

And I constantly hear the lamentation that it takes too long to come into the United States legally. It takes too long. Well, I suppose if we just opened it up and we accelerated the process and everybody that was in line, if we let them in right away, inside of a year, maybe that's not too long. I'm constantly hearing candidates, Presidential candidates even, some in the past, not so much now, argue that we need to speed up our immigration process and that those who are here in the United States illegally need to get right with the law and that they need to go to the back of the line.

So if they need to go to the back of the line, do they really understand that the lines don't start in the United States? The lines for legal immigration into the United States start in foreign countries where people have an aspiration to come here, and they apply for a visa and eventually a green card to come here; and that line, those lines, when you add up all of the lines of the various visas that are out there--H 1Bs, H 2Bs, the visa lottery program, the list goes on and on--you add up all of that, the lines to get in, waiting to come into the United States legally are 50 million long--50 million. Fifty million people are waiting in foreign countries to come to the United States legally, and I hear constantly the wait's too long. We need to accelerate coming into the United States.

So we bring 1.2 million people into this country legally, kind of on average each year, 1.2 million. We're the most generous country on Earth by far. And some data shows that we bring more people legally into the United States than all other countries combined. I can't anchor that in a data point, so I want to put that caveat in the Record, Mr. Speaker. But it's in that category, someplace pretty close, 1.2 million legals coming into America, drawing from a pool of about 50 million that are waiting in line. And in all of that, we only have about 7 to 11 percent of those legal immigrants that we even score their ability to contribute to the United States. The rest of it is all about how they can benefit from the taxpayers and the workers here, how they can benefit.

No nation other than the United States would allow for the, what should I call it, the evolution of an immigration policy that just simply grants this to people because they want to be here and gives them the authority to accelerate the legal immigration of the family reunification plan so that beyond that first individual they can start bringing in people outside that extended family tree.

We sat down and did a spreadsheet calculation and wondered how many people could one individual bring in to the United States under family reunification. We built it on a spreadsheet. We got out to 357 individuals brought in by one single individual, and then we ran out of room on the spreadsheet and realized you really can't calculate it. But you can calculate the visas, the means by which we are legalizing people in America.

It depends on whether you look at one study or another. There are competing studies, and that is between 89

and 93 percent of the legal immigration into the United States is not based on merit whatsoever. There's no merit quality there whatsoever. And then the balance of that, between 7 and 11 percent, does come from some measures of merit such as H 1Bs, having a skill.

I'm suggesting this, Mr. Speaker, that we develop an immigration policy here in the United States Congress, with the cooperation of our next President, that's designed to enhance the economic, the social and the cultural well-being of the United States of America. Any country worth its salt is going to have an immigration policy designed to benefit the country itself. We're not in the business of trying to alleviate--well, we'd like to, but we cannot be in the business of trying to alleviate all world poverty, all world hunger, and all world lack of liberty and freedom. It isn't just enough to bring people in here and let them understand and be inspired by American liberty--God- given American liberty; but we need to promote and inspire it in other countries in the world instead of going there to bow before foreign leaders and apologize for being Americans.

I'm astonished, Mr. Speaker, that we had a Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who told the world that she wouldn't wear a lapel pin with an American flag in foreign countries because she was afraid it offended people. My attitude about that is, go find a country that's offended that's not accepting foreign aid. And what are they offended about? American liberty? The way we've led in the world? Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas has so well and famously said with regard to foreign aid that goes out to people who set themselves up as our enemies and that vote against us consistently in the United Nations, he says, You don't have to pay people to hate you. They'll hate you for free.

So I want to configure immigration policy that's designed to enhance the economic, social, and cultural well-being of the United States. We should be scoring the applicants for legal immigration into the United States. We should be scoring them by their ability to contribute to this society, this economy, this culture, and this civilization. And one of the ways that we can do that is we can look to our English- speaking allies for some guidance. Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia come to mind.

Each of them either has a policy or has been developing a policy to set up a point system, a scoring system, so that they can evaluate the applicants for immigration into their countries. And here are some of the criteria: education, job skills, earning capacity, and age--you want young people to come in so they can pay taxes long enough so that you can justify paying for their retirement--and English-speaking abilities, because the ability to speak, write and understand English is the strongest indicator we have of the ability to assimilate into the broader overall culture.

So there is nothing discriminatory about this other than if we're going to have a policy that's good for America, we have to do some discrimination in favor of those who can do the most to help our country. I'd like to bring in and continue to bring in bright, energetic people, especially young people. And if they are preeducated by the taxpayers of a foreign country, that's fine. I'm happy with that. Come on in here and help America's economy grow and raise your family, but embrace our American traditions, our American culture, and our American civilization. After all, that's why you came. And to the extent that you bring some of your culture along with you and there are certain traditions that you follow, that adds to the flavor and it adds to the zest of life here in America.

But, Mr. Speaker, when they come and reject American liberty and the American way of life, and they try to recreate in an enclave the life that they left instead of embrace the life that's offered to them here in America, I would ask, why are you here? Why would you come to America if you're going to reject Americanism and seek to recreate the place you left? Why didn't you just stay there? And that's some of the foundation of the immigration concept that we have, Mr. Speaker.

By the way, as I get to item number two on this long list of universal items that I think all Presidential candidates should embrace and this Congress should pass, I would add that we've got E-Verify legislation before this Congress, and I am not satisfied that it is written in a way that it will work in the way it's intended. I am very concerned, Mr. Speaker, about the preemption that's written into it that prohibits the political subdivisions from supporting and enforcing immigration laws that mirror those of the Federal Government.

Aside from that, I have proposed an offer that actually solves this problem without having to go there and preempt the States and the political subdivisions, and it is called the New IDEA Act. New IDEA stands for the new and the acronym is the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. The Illegal Deduction Elimination Act clarifies that wages and benefits paid to illegals are not tax deductible, and we know that. But the practice is to write off wages and benefits paid to illegals because they know that nobody is going to come along and enforce. And this has been a practice since the Amnesty Act of 1986.

Under the New IDEA Act, then, the IRS, coming in to do a normal audit of an employer's company, would run the Social Security number and other pertinent data through E-Verify. So let's just say I have 100 employees. The IRS would come in, the Internal Revenue Service would come in to do an audit of my company. They would look at my receipts and my expenditures; they would look for anomalies in that calculation that might indicate that there would be money that was scooped out that tax wasn't paid on, or a tax avoidance. And in the process of doing that, they would run those Social Security numbers of the employees through E-Verify, the Internet-based system that can verify whether the data identifies someone who can legally work in the United States.

As they run those 100 Social Security numbers through E-Verify, then E-Verify would either come back and affirm that they could lawfully work in America; or if there's no answer, there's no response, then it's implied that they can't work legally in the United States. So therefore the IRS could deny that business deduction of the wages and benefits paid to that illegal.

And they would give a period of time for the employer and the employee to cure any data that is there and give the employer safe harbor if he uses E-Verify so that for another means of lack of verification, they can't come in and enforce against him for hiring illegals. Safe harbor for using E-Verify, not a mandate that they use E-Verify, the IRS would make the determination by using E-Verify and that result is this: if out of those 100 employees, let's just say I had 10 that were illegal, the IRS would say, I'm sorry, but you paid $50,000 a year to each one of these employees, and that's no longer a business expense because they were unlawfully working in the United States and you had the tool to verify.

And so that $50,000 times 10 is $500,000. That $500,000 that you wrote off of the gross receipts number--just say I grossed $10 million and that 500,000 would be one of my expenses that's there--they would deny the expense of $500,000, $50,000 paid to 10 illegals, and that $500,000 then goes out of my expense column on Schedule C, goes over into the gross receipts side and shows up down on the bottom line as net income, taxable net income. That means that your $10-an-hour illegal, by the time you pay the interest, the penalty and the tax liability, becomes about a $16-an-hour illegal.

So the employer can draw a choice. Does he really want to take a chance on being audited every year and seeing his expenses of his illegals move from $10 an hour up to $16 an hour, or would he maybe go offer an American a job at $13 or $14 an hour? I think that's what happens, Mr. Speaker. And it provides an incentive so an employer doesn't have to switch it all overnight. They can calculate the risk, and they can clean up their workforce incrementally if that's what it takes.

Furthermore, in my bill, the New IDEA Act, it requires that there be a cooperative team put together between the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security so the right hand, the

left hand, and the middle hand know what each other are doing. We get Social Security No-Match Letters that used to come out--they stopped sending them out a while back because nobody was doing anything with them. They would just send them out saying: We did our job; these Social Security numbers didn't match that you're sending in. A letter would go out; nobody shows up; that's the end of it.

You've got Homeland Security that is operating at the direction of the White House, that has decided they're going to provide administrative amnesty. Three hundred thousand illegals in the United States already adjudicated for deportation, and the President and Janet Napolitano and Eric Holder set up a policy--primarily Janet Napolitano--set up a policy to take staff time and scour through the 300,000 already adjudicated for deportation illegals that are there and see if they can find a means and a way to justify allowing them to stay in the United States. Administrative amnesty.

My bill, New IDEA, puts the three of them together so the IRS sends the information to Homeland Security and to the Social Security Administration; No-Match Letters from Social Security Administration go to the IRS and to Homeland Security, and it says: Put your heads together; figure out how to enforce America's immigration law.

That's what we need to be doing, Mr. Speaker.

By the way, the President of the United States, who has disrespected the rule of law, has a couple of family members who have received some type of administrative amnesty asylum--Auntie Onyango, whom I hope I don't have to spell that. But in any case, she has been in the United States for a long time illegally, since the 1990s--President Obama's aunt--living in public housing, reportedly, was finally adjudicated again for deportation. And the Obama administration declared her to be at too much of a risk if now, after all these years since the nineties, if she were sent back to Kenya. Because his aunt is now too high a profile public figure to be sent to Kenya, someone might kidnap her and hold her for ransom, and so it's a great risk; therefore, we should give her asylum in the United States where surely no one would kidnap her living in public housing and hold her for a ransom here. They just would do it in Kenya.

So, Homeland Security--I presume the State Department may have had a voice in this--granted, according to news reports, asylum for Barack Obama's aunt.

Now, if you can get asylum for the President's aunt, and you think in terms of the rule of law as applied the same to everyone, then who would it not apply to? Well, the rule of law surely didn't apply to Barack Obama's drunken Uncle Omar, who had also been processed and adjudicated for deportation and also didn't honor the court order to be deported. So drunken Uncle Omar nearly ran into a police car, found himself afoul with the law with a blood alcohol content of nearly twice the legal limit--it was 1.4--nearly twice the legal limit, and drunken Uncle Omar disappeared from the scene. And I'm confident that he went the way of Barack Obama's aunt, an administrative amnesty manufactured by the administration, not deported, not shipped off back to Kenya.

So if we won't deport the President's aunt, if we won't deport the President's uncle no matter what his blood alcohol content, and we've got 300,000 that are in the United States illegally who have already been adjudicated for deportation, and even though we're shorthanded and we're having trouble processing all of this and the President has said--well, at least Janet Napolitano has said that we don't have the resources to enforce all of the laws, why are we using our staff resources to go try to give people an exemption from the law that's already been enforced? That's administrative amnesty. So they've been scouring the books to give people a pass on a rule of law.

I raised the issue, and I asked dozens of people across the spectrum in my district and around the country: What's the most important component of immigration law? Mr. Speaker, what I hear is the rule of law. The rule of law. Not the idea that some people are needy and it hurts our hearts to enforce a law--it does. But in the end, if we don't respect the rule of law, if we don't refurbish the rule of law, we have then desecrated one of the essential pillars of American exceptionalism.

We cannot be a great country if we don't have the rule of law. We must be a country, a sovereign nation. Sovereign nations must have borders. Borders must be defended. Those borders must be controlled in a way where we decide who comes in and decide when people go out, if they don't decide on their own. And we must preserve and protect and refurbish and enhance the rule of law.

That's what the New IDEA Act does. It has the support of all Presidential candidates--formally, not attested to yet by Governor Romney, but I believe philosophically he would tell you that he sees the logic in it. If we passed this off of the floor of the House of Representatives, I believe that Governor Mitt Romney would be supportive of such an initiative.

Then, if you go on down the line of the planks and the platforms that are universal among the Presidential candidates, you would see the desire to repeal Dodd-Frank there universally among Republicans. Dodd- Frank, that's set up such that the government would decide which lending institutions were too big to be allowed to fail. Then, once declared too big to fail, the three entities in the Federal Government would decide whether they were going bankrupt, and if they went into receivership, who and what entity would receive them.

It's a horrible scenario to think that the Federal Government will decide winners and losers by a statute written by the very people that contributed so much to the financial problem that we had, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, so I'm for a full 100 percent repeal of Dodd-Frank. If it has a couple of redeeming qualities--and I believe it does--let's restate them back into the law. Let's not make exceptions and leave pieces there.

Dodd-Frank needs to be repealed. We need to pass the repeal of Dodd- Frank here on the floor of the House. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota has been the lead on that. She drafted the legislation to repeal Dodd- Frank. She's been a strong and vocal advocate for repealing Dodd-Frank. So have all the other Presidential candidates. We should do this for the American people, for the next President, and we should do it to honor the effort of Michele Bachmann, Mr. Speaker.

Next piece is official English. Almost every country in the world has an official language, at least one official language. It's been so recognized throughout the ages that the single most powerful unifying force known throughout all history and humanity is having a common language. If we can talk to each other, we have an instantaneous bond with each other. Here in America, we're so fortunate that English is that language, and yet there seems to be an open effort to try to encourage language enclaves in America where the second and even third generations of Americans don't learn English; they just live within the enclave. They're trapped in that economic and that cultural cycle of the enclave, the silo of an ethnic minority instead of assimilating into the broader society.

We need to establish English as the official language of government, not to disparage another language, but to unify the American people and hold us together as a people and strengthen our unity. The government does not need to be spending that kind of money on language.

Then repeal ObamaCare and a number of other things.

I appreciate your attention to this matter this evening, Mr. Speaker, and I would yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 7 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, March 6, 2012, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

I want to thank the gentleman from Texas.

Timing of circumstances, Mr. Speaker, brought me to the floor here simultaneous with this wonderful tribute that Mr. Gohmert has provided to Andrew Breitbart and the life and the things that he stood for and believed in. I don't know how I can add to the completeness of the message that Louie Gohmert has delivered here.

I had the privilege of calling Andrew Breitbart my friend as well. I think of the last time Louie Gohmert, Steve King, and Andrew Breitbart were in the same room, and it was over in the place that I affectionately call The Bunker, the house a couple of blocks east of the Supreme Court--very fitting, by the way--just almost within gaze of the east portico of the Supreme Court where Moses sits there looking down upon all of humanity with the tablets on his knees, with the Ten Commandments in his arms, and saying to all the world, We're a Nation of laws, not a Nation of men, and that our laws come from God, and his profound belief in that.

As we were there, I remember I was invited to a dinner over at Breitbart's. Now, some might think that a dinner with Andrew Breitbart could be somebody sitting at the table with cufflinks, for example. It's possible, but it's unlikely that there's actually going to be a table. It's more likely that there's a counter in the middle of the kitchen, and on that counter and on the counter over on the wall were refreshments of all kinds, teetotaling and nonteetotaling refreshments. On the other counter are ribs and chicken. I think the ribs were there for Louie Gohmert, personally. He and I are the only two Members of Congress.

In that room was a constant din. Within that din, you'd always know what was on Andrew Breitbart's mind. Whenever he spoke, there was always an ear tuned to that, but he was very much a person engaged in the moment. He was driven to no end. I know when I walked in the room, he played a trumpet with his hand just to get the attention in that din now that I'd arrived.

But what I remember was that it was an engaging conversation about liberty and freedom and freedom of the press and truth, justice, and the American way, as Louie has said. When it was all done, the refreshment bottles were empty and the ribs and chicken were bones, and we'd had one of the most engaging evenings you could ask to have in Washington, DC, and we have some here.

That, I think, does describe Andrew Breitbart's life: engaging.

I don't know who was more engaged than Andrew Breitbart. I look back at it. Just, for example, this morning I got up and I got ready to go, and I changed my pin over here and I put my Constitution in my pocket here and I put my keys in this pocket. Other than that, the only one other constant was I had to look around this morning and I couldn't find it. I went over to my backup storage, and I pulled this out and put it in my pocket this morning.

Let the record show, Mr. Speaker, this is an acorn. I've carried an acorn around in my pocket for about 2 years. I wouldn't be doing this if it weren't for the influence of Andrew Breitbart. In fact, we might not even know about the threat to the underpinnings of our Constitution, the legitimate electoral process we have in this country, if it hadn't been for Andrew Breitbart.

Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe came together and they went out and got some brilliant tape of the unconscionable activities of ACORN that produced over 400,000 false or fraudulent voter registrations. How many other false votes went up, we don't know.

But my belief is, and I believe Andrew's belief was, that the Constitution is the foundation of American liberty. But underneath that foundation that sits on the bedrock of legitimate elections, any entity that threatens those legitimate elections threatens the very Constitution itself and American freedom.

It was Andrew's brilliance that took those tapes of Hannah's and James and said, You roll these out, they will discredit you. They will attack you. You will be under the heat like you've never seen before in your life. We need to give them a little bit, and then they will attack you and say that's the only one. It's an anomaly.

Really, the tapes of the unconscionable acts of ACORN would be discredited immediately. It was Andrew who put together the strategy.

First, you have to know the man to have instant confidence that he knows, and he instantly thinks ahead. He never was, I don't think, a linear thinker. He always was a conceptual thinker. Some might go A, B, C, and maybe can get their way to Z. Andrew could go A, here's Z, and you know he knew every letter in between and how they were rearranged, and he could see the strategy in an instant and he could inspire you to step forward to that. That was part of the brilliance of Andrew Breitbart. That's one of the reasons I will carry this acorn in my pocket until they are gone.

As I sat and thought about the life of Andrew, I wrote these words down to try to describe him, and words do not describe the man that Andrew was.

I used the words ``dynamic,'' ``brilliant,'' ``fearless,'' ``visionary,'' ``altruistic,'' ``passionate,'' ``unconventional,'' ``trailblazer,'' ``patriot,'' ``lost friend.'' All of those things describe Andrew Breitbart, and many, many more.

As Louie Gohmert has said, his influence will be cascaded across this civilization and this culture, I believe, in perpetuity, just like the influence of John Quincy Adams has had that influence.

What I want to say also is that Andrew had a real sense of righteous indignation of when the ObamaCare debate was taking place here and an effort was staged to cast aspersions on the Tea Party as being racist. I remember in the middle of that press gaggle when they said, What do you think? Somebody was hollering the ``N'' word out at the Congressional Black Caucus as they walked across the grounds.

I said, Who has reported that? They named that. Who actually heard it?

They couldn't name me who heard it.

Andrew Breitbart understood that it was a manufactured story created to discredit the Tea Party and put $100,000 on the table for anybody that could produce an audio or a video that would confirm the false allegations of racial epithets being thrown by the Tea Party at anybody. He shot that story down, and he has provided us a tremendous amount of credibility for the Tea Party in the process.

Pigford Farms, another story. The list goes on.

Andrew Breitbart understood the science behind the communications in the world. He understood the Internet before many even knew the Internet existed. He understood its potential. He had opened that up with big everything, with big ideas and global ideas and had them grounded in the full spectrum constitutional conservatism with an effort to provide protection for the rights of everybody, as God gives us those rights.

I am also tremendously saddened by the loss of our good friend. It's a big Breitbart family that grieves today and prays that he will be nestled in the hands of God and that his close family will be well taken care of and energized and nurtured by the profound belief that they've had the wonderful privilege to have Andrew Breitbart as their father, husband, friend, and that his influence moves on. We dedicate ourselves to the renewed effort to follow through on those efforts, and we will seek to do what we can to match and emulate the brilliance of Andrew Breitbart.

I appreciate my friend Louie Gohmert for coming to the floor and starting the beginning of a national conversation about the long reach of Andrew Breitbart, and it reaches into the future. I thank Andrew for his life. I thank God for Andrew's life.

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

As I listened to the dialogue take place here in the last 30 minutes and the gentlelady from the District of Columbia, I'm glad she has a voice here in this Congress. And I do take an oath to uphold the Constitution, as does everyone who serves in this body, as does the President of the United States and many of our executive officers and every military personnel. I believe every State legislator takes an oath, as I did when I was in the State senate in Iowa, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States and the State of Iowa.

As that oath takes place, I would just remind you, Mr. Speaker, that we have to have an understanding of the Constitution in order to take an oath to the Constitution. And when we place our hand on the Bible and raise our right hand and take the oath to the Constitution of the United States, it's not an oath to a constitution as it might be reinterpreted by activist judges at a later date. It's not even an oath to a constitution that has been interpreted by the activist judges that came after the Constitution was ratified.

The oath that I take to uphold this Constitution is the oath to uphold the Constitution as it was written, as the clear text of the Constitution defines, and as the amendments, the clear text of the amendments defined, and as it was understood to mean at the time of the ratification, whether it would be the full body of the Constitution, or later on the Bill of Rights, or whether it would be the subsequent amendments to the Constitution.

No public official, no person who takes an oath to a constitution can be taking an oath to something that is amorphous, something that fluctuates and something that can change. The Constitution has to be fixed in place. Guarantees aren't amorphous, Mr. Speaker. It is no guarantee if it's amorphous. It has to be fixed in place and fixed in time.

I understand that our language changes over time, and I understand that we have people that have looked at this Constitution with disrespect and they would like to disregard the American Constitution.

If we look back through history, we will see that there was an effort that began in the late 19th century, especially when some of the liberal-thinking people emerged here and in the intellectual world. In the United States, many of those people came here from Germany and established themselves. In fact, they established themselves on the west coast. And our friend whom we expressed our deep regrets at the loss of and our deep sympathy to the family of Andrew Breitbart grew up around some of those people that were the foundation of the progressive movement in America.

These are the people that grew from socialism, the ideology of utopianism. Karl Marx put it down, and it grew from there. Lenin advanced it, and Gramsci also advanced it. It has gone on to the day where liberalism got a bad reputation, so they decided to define themselves as ``progressives.'' It's all rooted in a Marxist, socialist, utopian ideology. And that Marxist, socialist, utopian ideology looks at the United States Constitution, the Constitution of the United States of America, with abhorrence. They reject our Constitution. They're just afraid to stand up and say so.

The clear meaning of the Constitution is something that they concluded, back in the late part of the 19th century and coming into the early part of the 20th century, that they would like to abolish. They would like to abolish our Constitution. They would like to have a new Constitutional Convention or no Constitution and change and shape America at their will. They reject an America with individual rights that come from God. I would like to think the gentlelady from the District of Columbia and I would likely agree on that. They want an America that can always be in constant flux and constant change with no locked-down guarantees or values.

In other words, they looked at an effort to undo and repeal America's Constitution. They concluded that they could not do so because the culture of America has so embraced the Constitution of the United States that Americans would rise up in defense of the Constitution. If they tried to assault the Constitution, Americans would rise up and reject anybody that would seek to do that. So they sold us an alternative of trying to repeal and undo the Constitution and amend it out of existence.

There's another alternative, and that alternative is the one that they chose more than 100 years ago. That was the effort to redefine the Constitution, to undermine the meaning of the Constitution and turn it into this--remember the language, Mr. Speaker?--a living, breathing document. A living, breathing document is the language for an amorphous constitution, a constitution with no guarantees, a constitution that only takes reaction to the majority at the time that can be found in the House of Representatives, in the United States Senate, or a majority in the United States Supreme Court or the activist judges that by the hundreds have been appointed since that period of time during the last more than 100 years, and the law schools in America that have been populated by leftists who have been undermining the Constitution even while they teach the Constitution.

That's what we've seen here in America, Mr. Speaker.

And if the solid, conservative American people understood the flow of history and how the Constitution has been willfully undermined by active and by now self-labeled progressives, they would stand up against them everywhere they appear.

Think of a contract. The Constitution is a contract, it is a guarantee, and it is the supreme law of the land. It's defined as the supreme law of the land in the Constitution itself. When you have a supreme law, a law has to be black and white, it has to be clear, and it must be also enforced. It's impossible to take an oath to something that is amorphous, that's living and breathing.

It is now being taught under constitutional law in universities across the land that this Constitution doesn't mean what it says. That's what some of the judges say. That's what some of the law school professors say. In fact, that's what a majority of the law schools in America teach. They don't teach the foundation of American liberty, which is the clear text of this

Constitution, but they teach something that's been redefined by the courts.

And, by the way, we have course after course across the country--and I could go back to my big-ring notebook when we did the research on this--that teaches constitutional law in law school without using the basis of the Constitution. You can take the course on con law and never be required to read the Constitution. And the test questions aren't on the Constitution; they're on what they call ``case law.'' Well, I will sometimes refer to case law. It is usually a slip of the tongue when I do that. Case law is what they say now is the Constitution. I can think of a lawyer who says: I don't have to amend the Constitution. If you give me a favorable judge and a favorable jury, then I will amend the Constitution in the courtroom.

Think of what that means, Mr. Speaker. An attack on the Constitution is taking place by activist lawyer after activist lawyer with favorable judge after favorable judge in front of a favorable jury that a lot of times just doesn't know the movement of the currents in this country and the competition that's going on between two philosophies and ideologies.

One of them mirrors the words of our Founding Fathers, the beliefs and the foundation of our Founding Fathers, that our rights come from God. No place in history have we seen that aside from the New Testament. No government was ever formed on the foundation of religious belief and believing that we have individual human rights, that these rights come from God. We're endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. I don't say ``inalienable.'' That is a typo in the Jefferson Monument down here. It's ``unalienable'' rights. We're endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We all know those words. They echoed us. They are writ on our hearts as Americans. And we should remember that our Founding Fathers were inspired and, I believe, guided by God to articulate the vision of the unique liberty that's endowed within each of us who is created in His image. They articulated it; they understood it; they made the argument; they laid it out in the Declaration; they fought a war for it; and they enshrined it within the Constitution itself, this rule of law.

How hard was that compared to our charge today, Mr. Speaker? How hard was it in comparison to the Founding Fathers identifying liberty, articulating liberty, using the language and the scholarship that they created to write on our hearts: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

As an aside, Mr. Speaker, it wasn't an accident that they delivered to us three distinct rights, not exclusive to those three. When they said life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Thomas Jefferson didn't just pull those things out of a hat and say, Well, let me see. Life came out first and what is the next one? Well, it is like a Chinese fortune cookie. Liberty. And the third one he pulled out is pursuit of happiness. They are carefully placed in the Declaration because they are prioritized rights.

The most important right is life, the next most important right is liberty, and the last of the three is pursuit of happiness.

Let me start with pursuit of happiness. Our Founding Fathers--and especially Thomas Jefferson--studied and understood Greek. They looked back in the history of Greece and they understood this term that I will pronounce ``eudamonia.'' It is a Greek term that really is pursuit of happiness. It is spelled e-u-d-a-m-o-n-i-a. Eudamonia by my pronunciation. What it means is to be intellectually and spiritually whole, to pursue knowledge, to pursue an understanding of this unique being that we are with a soul, with a spirit, with an intellect, and to expand that to the maximum limit that God has given us. That was eudamonia. Pursuit of happiness wasn't a tailgate party at the ball game. Pursuit of happiness was the Greek understanding of happiness, which was developing your whole being to the maximum amount.

Thomas Jefferson placed that pursuit of happiness language in there understanding what it meant in the Greek understanding. He understood what it meant to the Americans at the time. That's been redefined since that time to now people think somehow pursuit of happiness is a tailgate party or going to the ball game or going out on the deck to light the grill or going down to the corner pub and having a drink with the guys, whatever it is that people do. Go fishing, go skiing in the mountains, that is pursuit of happiness? None of that was in the minds of the Founding Fathers. What was in their minds was the ability to have the freedom that God gave us to develop ourselves as human beings spiritually and intellectually. That was eudamonia. That was the pursuit of happiness. It was the third right, Mr. Speaker.

The second one was liberty. We understand, I think, liberty better here in America than in the rest of the world. Liberty is a component of our history and often gets conflated with the term ``freedom.'' Freedom and liberty are two different terms, Mr. Speaker. They have two different meanings even though they are associated with each other.

You might think of freedom--as I look across outside the snowy landscape where I live, sometimes I will see a coyote run across the field and I will think he has freedom. He is out there in the wild; he can run wherever he wants to run; no fence keeps him in; he is free to chase down rabbits and anything else that he wants to go after, and my pheasants I might say. He has freedom. But there is a difference between freedom and liberty. The distinction is this: liberty is freedom bridled by morality, bridled by an understanding that you have a moral obligation, a faithful obligation not to go outside those bounds that have been laid out for us. If that is the case, you have liberty. You have freedom, and the bridle that goes on freedom is the moral underpinnings that we must adhere to as Americans. That's why this Constitution works for us, we know.

So within liberty, are those rights that are defined in the first 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights? The liberty for freedom of speech, for religion, freedom to assembly and peaceably assemble for redress of grievances, the freedom to keep and bear arms, the freedom from double jeopardy, the freedom to keep and own property, the freedom to have a trial by a jury of our peers, the freedom for the powers that are not defined within the Constitution for the Federal Government to devolve down for the States or the people respectively, that is all liberty. Everything I've defined in there is liberty, provided it is within the moral boundaries.

Now I take us up the ladder of the priorities of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness--eudamonia. Pursuit of happiness is subordinated to liberty. You can develop yourself, Mr. Speaker, intellectually and spiritually in the philosophy of our Founding Fathers, provided that you don't trample on someone else's liberty. If I want to develop my knowledge base, my spiritual base, I can exercise my freedom of religion, my freedom of speech, my freedom of assembly in any way that I so choose under the rights that we have that are liberties, provided that I don't trample on the liberty of someone else.

I can't take a position that says you will be censored because I'm going to exercise my freedom of speech or you can't assemble because I don't like what you say, I'm exercising my freedom of assembly, you must not. I can exercise my pursuit of happiness, my development, my own liberties, provided I don't trample someone else's. The Founding Fathers understood that priority. In the exercise of our liberties-- freedom of speech, religion, assembly, keep and bear arms, the list that I've given--Mr. Speaker, in no case can we take someone else's life in the expansion of our liberties.

If I say that there's someone that encroaches upon my liberties, therefore I'm going to take their life, I have violated the principles of the Declaration, the principles of this country, let alone the laws of the United States of America. We need to understand that the Founding Fathers laid out prioritized rights in the Declaration: life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. That pursuit of happiness cannot trample on liberty or life, and the exercise of our liberties cannot trample on life.

They understood that and that life is the most sacred. If we understand also

that life begins at the instant of conception and we need to protect that life both in law and in fact and provide for those who cannot scream for their own mercy, cannot speak for themselves, that protection for life, all of that is wrapped up in this Constitution and in the rights that the gentlelady from the District of Columbia referred to.

I go back to law schools in this land teaching Constitution law as if this Constitution is a living, breathing document and some amorphous combination of case law created by activist lawyers, activist judges, and sometimes I will say compliant juries, because they seldom see the big picture of what is going on. They have respect for what is taught in law schools; they have respect for judges sitting behind the bench. I do too.

But I will take the position, Mr. Speaker, that any judge that believes they can amend the Constitution by their policy decision on case law should not be seated on that bench. Anyone who takes an oath to the Constitution and they believe it was whatever it will be defined to mean by somebody that comes along later, they should stop and take stock of what they are about to do. That may be a violation of conscience just not thought through.

We had a major case in Iowa a couple of years ago called Varnum v. Brien. Seven State supreme court justices universally declared that they could find rights in the Constitution that were up to this point unimagined. They wrote unanimously that they had discovered unimagined rights in the Constitution itself.

Can you imagine a guarantee with unimagined rights, Mr. Speaker? The Founding Fathers could not have imagined allowing judges to sit on a bench who believe that they could write any decision they chose to write, that they could manufacture unimagined rights in order to get their public policy in place. But that's exactly what happened in Iowa in that case. Three of those judges were up for retention and Iowans voted them off the bench. Now there are three new supreme court justices there, and hopefully there is a reconsideration among the other four.

The unimagined rights that were inserted into the supreme court decision impose same-sex marriage on the State of Iowa. That brought about some people like my good friend Congressman Louie Gohmert, who came there to help with that cause and went on the bus to help with that cause who made the constitutional argument consistently and continually. It is an example, Mr. Speaker. But we have a number of other examples of activist courts, and I'm concerned about what has happened historically.

And I'll make this point: that if I look through the continuum of Supreme Court cases that take us to where we are today, and we have a conscience protection piece of legislation before this Congress, one of them may have had a vote in the Senate this afternoon, and that would be Senator Blunt's language, Senator Blunt from Missouri. In this Congress, it's Jeff Fortenberry from Nebraska, who understood conscience protection and introduced the legislation that protects the health care providers and all of us for our religious liberty. And this Congress may get a vote on it, and it may actually have failed in the Senate this afternoon is what I'm advised was about to happen. I haven't confirmed that. And it could actually be happening after I finish speaking, Mr. Speaker.

But what I see happening is that the Constitution protects our religious liberty, our religious rights, and still, this government steps in to usurp them. This executive branch steps in to usurp our religious rights.

To this extent, and I'll take you, Mr. Speaker, through this continuum that is appalling to me, and it would be appalling to the Founding Fathers had they lived through these decisions.

1965, no, excuse me; I'll go back to 1963, Mr. Speaker. There was a case called Murray v. Curlett, and I don't know that that is very well universally recognized, but that was the case that took prayer out of the public schools. There was an argument made before the activist court in 1963 that there was a separation of church and state, and that that separation of church and state was firm enough and solid enough that we could not pray in our public schools because that advocated for a religion.

And so I'll read to you the language that surely had to be reviewed by the Supreme Court justices. It says, Congress shall make--this is the First Amendment, Mr. Speaker--Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. And it goes on, of course, freedom of speech, the press, and the right of the people to assemble.

It says Congress shall make no law. There was no law that came from Congress that established a religion. The law that Congress made just didn't exist with religious freedom because Congress understood that the First Amendment means what it says. The textual reading and the original understanding said Congress shall not establish a religion. We're not going to be like Sweden, establishing Lutheranism as a state religion. We're going to have freedom of religion, but it shall not establish a religion. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

But if you believe in judge-made law, the Supreme Court, by that decision in 1963, Murray v. Curlett, outlawed prayer in the public schools by a court decision. I think it's in direct violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution. If we're going to respect judge- made law and stop praying in our public schools, that was the beginning of the judicial activism that's begun to break down this civilization and this culture. I think those decisions needed to be made at the local school level, not at the Supreme Court level.

And I remember sitting, as a freshman in high school, and this news came to me, I was sitting in general science class. And they said now there will be no more prayer in our school. And I remember thinking, what does that actually stop? How will they stop us from praying? If the teachers decide not to, does that mean I can't? Can we not, as students? Can I not pray before a test? I needed help, I will tell you.

A thought process went through my mind. The only way that the Federal Government could prohibit prayer in the public schools would be to clear out the public schools. If we insisted on following through, they'd have to empty the schools. Otherwise, there was going to be prayer in the public schools, as well as our parochial schools. They would have to come in and march us all out of school, chain the doors shut, and post a guard to prevent prayer in the public schools.

So what did we do? We genuflected to the Supreme Court, accepted the Murray v. Curlett decision in 1963, stopped activity of public prayer in public schools, and we've had subsequent decisions along the way about whether students could pray, whether athletes could pray, whether coaches could pray with athletes, whether coaches could be there when athletes prayed with themselves, all of these things decided by a Supreme Court that believes in stare decisis, that there was a decision made in 1963, and that they're somehow bound by that decision, rather than looking back at the plain text of this Constitution and concluding that as long as Congress doesn't make a law establishing a state religion, or interfere with the practice of religion, then it isn't the Federal Government's business to be engaged in religious activity that takes place in the public or the private schools. But that's what happened in 1963.

Then, Mr. Speaker, 1965, we went through, at breakneck speed, went through the Constitution over here at the Supreme Court, out those doorways and off that way, breakneck speed. This was Griswold, Griswold v. Connecticut. At that time, Connecticut and Massachusetts and multiple other States had outlawed contraceptives in their States. That meant that you couldn't go in and buy contraceptives at the drug store. The case of Griswold was brought against--Griswold brought the case against the State of Connecticut and said, your State law that bans contraceptives is unconstitutional. And they went before the Supreme Court and argued.

What are you going to base that on? How does a State not have a power that's not--all non-enumerated powers are reserved for the States or the people, respectively. So the Constitution, I say, defines that the States had that

power. But yet, the Supreme Court, in their imagination in 1965, created this right to privacy, a right to privacy fabricated out of whole cloth, didn't exist in the Constitution, doesn't exist today in the Constitution, but it exists on the lips of every law school professor that's teaching constitutional law, a right to privacy that's been created now by the Supreme Court. They say it was in this Constitution somehow but had never been discovered until the Supreme Court discovered it in Griswold v. Connecticut.

So it was against the law in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and multiple other States to even sell contraceptives. So the Supreme Court created a right to privacy and outlawed the ban on contraceptives in Connecticut.

I say if you lived in Connecticut in 1965 and you wanted contraceptives, you could drive across the State line, or you could move to another State. That was the vision of the laboratories of the State experiment of the Founding Fathers. States' rights, Tenth Amendment. They imposed that in 1965.

Oh, by the way, in 1972 there was a case called Eisenstadt that said, well--it was just married people in Griswold in 1965. Eisenstadt came along and said, well, if there's a right to privacy for married people to be able to purchase contraceptives, surely that exists for unmarried people as well. They imposed that, and the Federal Government took another reach, and now we have the foundation for Roe v. Wade, which turned into--the right to privacy became the foundational argument for Roe v. Wade in 1973, just 8 years after Griswold.

And they found, in the emanations and penumbras, a right to abortion. Only the right to abortion of a nonviable fetus, I might add, but the companion case was Doe v. Bolton. And in that case it said, But there will be exceptions to the viable fetus if the health of the mother is considered. And health of the mother was defined to be mental, physical, or familial health of the mother. And so it was an open door right to any kind of abortion, this all rooted in judicial activism, I might add.

Today, seeing what has happened in Griswold, and them setting aside a State law, now, to the point where the President of the United States, Mr. Speaker, stepped before a press conference, a week, 2 weeks ago, on a Friday at noon, and he said, Well, okay, you know I might have gotten in a little hot water about taking away the rights to conscience of the Catholic Church and other religious institutions by telling them, through Kathleen Sebelius, that they shall provide, not just contraceptives any longer--I want to emphasize, Mr. Speaker, it wasn't just that. It was contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients, pills that cause abortion, requiring religious organizations, pro-life organizations, especially the Catholic Church, to provide that if they're going to provide any kind of health care for their employees or their patients, a direct, clear, imposition of a violation of rights to conscience.

And Father Jonathan Morris said, publicly, that you cannot force someone to violate their conscience. You keep your convictions of your conscience, even unto death. I applaud the position that he has taken. I endorse that position that he has taken.

But now, a few days after this announcement came out, and the heat came on the President, his noon press conference on that Friday, he stepped up and, instead of, let's say, legislating within the confines of the Constitution itself, the supreme law of the land, or amending the Constitution if you disagree with what it says, or even legislating from the bench, as Griswold, Eisenstadt, Roe and Doe, and many others have done, we have now a President with the highest degree of audacity I have ever seen--and by the way, he uses that term ``audacity'' pretty often.

He thinks he's legislating by press conference. He said, Well, I'm not going to impose this on you any longer, Catholic Church and others. I'm going to impose it on insurance companies. They shall provide contraceptives, sterilizations, abortifacients, abortion-causing pills, and they shall do it at no charge.

The audacity of the President of the United States to issue such a thing. And we should not comply with such an unconstitutional order from the President of the United States.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence, and 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 50 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, March 5, 2012, at noon for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, it's my privilege and honor to be recognized by you to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to take up some of the issues of our day.

First I'd like to address the situation that we are in with regard to the payroll tax extension and the unemployment extension and the components that are being deliberated now as a conference committee is trying to get to a final solution.

I'd take you back, Mr. Speaker, to the lame duck session a year ago last December when, within, oh, 30 to 45 days of the election of this 112th Congress, the legitimized now-112th Congress, the lame duck session negotiations took place, initiated by the minority leader of the United States Senate, Mitch McConnell, and the President, President Obama, to deal with a way of extending the Bush tax brackets to avoid the automatic imposition of a 55 percent death tax at midnight on New Year's, beginning on the first minute of 2011. It was the payroll tax holiday, and it was also the refundable tax credits, unemployment benefits extended, and the list went on.

Mr. Speaker, I'd just make the point that we had 87 freshman Republicans waiting in the wings during that lame duck session. They were the legitimate representatives of the American people. And when the United States Congress makes a decision to move forward on large pieces of legislation, any large piece of legislation, in a lame duck session, then it must be something that is urgent and mandatory that we take that kind of action. Our Founding Fathers did not imagine that we would--well, first of all, Thomas Jefferson said, large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities.

Large initiatives should not be advanced on slender majorities, but, Mr. Speaker, also large initiatives should not be advanced by lame duck sessions of the United States Congress. When that happens, you have a lot of people that are going home: 87 freshman Republicans, 9 freshman Democrats, they replaced all of them, people that were going home. So there's your math.

Ninety-six Members of this Congress today, and there have been several others that have been added, but 96 were waiting in the wings to be sworn into office here in the first week in January so they could do their just constitutional duty, and while that was going on, negotiations were taking place for a lame duck session, a large initiative lame duck session to address Bush tax bracket extensions, unemployment benefit extensions, and for the first time, the severance of the 50-50 relationship between employer and employee in the contributions to the Social Security trust fund.

Now, I've watched that Social Security trust fund since I came here to this Congress, and it was at about a plus of $1.74 trillion. It's grown to $2.34 trillion, one of the times I looked. It's moving quickly now because the higher the unemployment, the more damage it does to our Social Security trust fund because the contributions slow down.

As we're seeing baby boomers retire and qualify for Social Security and Medicare, there are more and more demands on the Social Security trust fund.

But the payroll tax holiday that was passed--and that's what it was called--but it actually created a $130 billion hole in the Social Security trust fund. Now, you can charge it against the general fund, and when the time comes to pay the bill, it will have to come out of the general fund because the Social Security trust fund is borrowed from by the Federal Government anyway.

But the accounting created a $130 billion hole. You can count that up proportionately and round $10 billion, $11 billion a month, each month that there is an extension of the suspension of the 2 percent contribution of the employee into the Social Security trust fund.

Now, that was one of the components from the lame duck session. We never should have, Mr. Speaker, severed the 50-50 bond between equal contribution to the Social Security trust fund out of the employer and the employee. As soon as that happens, it opens the door for class envy. It already had discriminated against the employer in benefit of the employee.

Now, if it had been a reduction of 1 percent from the employer and 1 percent from the employee, at least then the 50-50 bond would have been withheld. We have, in the past, adjusted the Social Security contribution rate so that we have a viable fund. But we have not in the past broken that 50-50 equal contribution, employer-employee. That happened in the lame duck session. It was one of those things that was agreed to in order to be able to extend the Bush tax brackets. Extending the Bush tax brackets at that time gets us just until December 31 of this year, and then all of the game changes again.

Now, it is a way to avoid having that be a debate while President Obama is up for reelection, just like the debt ceiling was timed so that the President can essentially direct a debt ceiling increase and avoid having a fight here on the floor of the House or the Senate to approve another debt ceiling increase. It looks as though we've negotiated some agreement to keep the President off the hook for holding him accountable coming into this Presidential election.

But to add into that agreement--the lame duck deal, I will call it, Mr. Speaker, when you add to that agreement the payroll tax situation that suspended 2 percent from the employee and didn't suspend any from the employer and broke that bond, we also had the extension of the Bush tax brackets, and we had an adjustment to the death tax, which was zero on the day that this was voted upon, but it jumped to 35 percent. It was automatically going to go to 55.

We also had an extension of unemployment benefits out to 99 weeks, Mr. Speaker. So 99 weeks of unemployment benefits are, as far as the charts that I have looked at and my memory, unprecedented in the history of this country. So the 99 weeks of unemployment, that and extension of refundable tax credits and a few other smaller programs, totaled $212 billion in outlays just for the duration of that bill, that bill that was negotiated by people who were anxious to make a deal.

Why? I have a little trouble figuring out why the Republicans were anxious to make a deal, Mr. Speaker, because we had 87 new freshmen waiting in the wings. The legitimate voices of the American people, the shock troops that they sent here, they sent them here for fiscal responsibility. Every single one of them ran on the 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. They ran on fiscal responsibility. They ran on a balanced budget. And $212 billion went out the window with the lame duck deal without hardly any debate, $212 billion, most of it to extend unemployment benefits for 99 weeks, but some of it for refundable tax credits. That did not include the $130 billion created by the suspension of 2 percent of the contribution rate into the Social Security trust fund, that hole that was created

All of this so the Bush tax brackets could be extended beyond the reelection of the President of the United States.

That agreement, Mr. Speaker, in my opinion, and it's a strong conviction, should never have been negotiated in a lame duck session. We should have allowed the new Members of this Congress, the 87 freshman Republicans, the nine freshman Democrats, to weigh in, to have a chance to debate, to configure a policy and to vote.

But meanwhile, they were waiting in the wings going through orientation while this vote was taking place. By the time they were actually seated here in this Congress, that horse was out of the barn. That plane had already left the runway.

The horse was out of the barn, the payroll tax was what it was, and it was set to expire at the first day of this year as we know. Now it's been extended for 2 months, and we're in the negotiations to see what to do with the rest of it.

But the problem is rooted back in a bad deal, the lame duck deal, and now this freshman class is being asked to address it, to solve the problem, and to not necessarily reach in their pockets and pay the price but to pay the political price to try to resolve this issue, which is going to go on and on and on until we put the pieces back together, Mr. Speaker.

We've got to put the pieces back together, and to get there politically, no one can paint that picture for me, no one can draw that map. And since I couldn't have drawn that map either, I wouldn't have gone there in the first place.

But we are where we are. It's $212 billion in outlays to extend unemployment benefits from the lame duck session a year ago last December, and it's $130 billion in the hole in the Social Security trust fund until you find it some other way, but that's what it is.

The result of extending unemployment benefits out to 99 weeks was that we had a lot of workers in America that were 63 years old that amazingly found themselves unemployed with unemployment benefits guaranteed with no obligation on their part except to sign up, out for the duration of their working career. So it amounted to an early retirement for 63-year-old employees or 64-year-old employees in America, unmeasured in its impact on our economy.

Meanwhile, the measure of what happens when you pay people not to work for 2 years is that their skills atrophy, they're out of the workforce, technology moves on. Not only are they not getting caught up with and staying caught up with technological changes and the modern shifts within our very nimble economy that we must have, but the skills that they had on that day are atrophying.

Now, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have unemployment. We should have. The consistent duration of unemployment has been 26 weeks. That's a half a year. If you look at the data, when unemployment runs out people are far more likely to go to work than they are the week before it runs out. It is a fact; it is not an opinion. It's a fact, Mr. Speaker.

But my point here is that we're in this discussion today with a pretty difficult decision that's being made by the conference committee, by the Speaker, the majority leader, and others, but this difficulty we have now is rooted in what I consider to be a mistake in the lame duck deal.

Oh, Mr. Speaker, how I wonder how much different it might have been if we had waited and seated the freshman class, consulted with them, asked them if they wanted to sever that 50-50 equal contribution rate between employers and employees. Ask them if they were willing to accept on their conscience a $130 billion hole in the Social Security trust fund. Ask them if they were ready to face extending the payroll tax reduction, and doing so in perpetuity. As long as the other side is willing to play class envy, are we going to be willing to continue to dig a hole in the Social Security trust fund?

That is one question in front of us.

Another one that's in front of us--and one I'd like to ask the freshman class also--is:

Did you ever really think that 99 weeks of unemployment was the appropriate thing to do? How did you intend to fund that? Would you have found a pay-for if you'd thought 99 weeks were the appropriate way to deal with an unsettled employment situation in America? Do you have compassion for the employers who are looking to build their businesses with employees when it's difficult to hire them off of the unemployment rolls?

We had a hearing before the Small Business Committee, Mr. Speaker. Before that committee, we had four or five small business employers-- there might have actually been six--but I asked them going down the line:

Have you had any kind of luck hiring from the unemployment? They invariably said: Once the unemployment expires, I can hire them just fine. One employer out of the list said that she had hired off of the unemployment rolls on one occasion.

That's fairly typical. I will tell you that I know of businesses in my neighborhood that look around the neighborhood, and they see that there are employees they'd like to hire. They know, when their unemployment benefits run out, they'll be knocking on their doors 1 week or 2 weeks before the unemployment benefits run out so that they're in line to hire them. We have employers who are lining up to hire the unemployed, but they know they can't get that done as long as unemployment is being paid.

Now, yes, there are people who are unfortunate; there are people who can't find jobs; there are especially people in parts of the country who have an economy that's far worse than that which I

represent in northwest Iowa, Mr. Speaker; but we need a logical unemployment plan, perhaps one that ratchets those benefits in an incremental way so that it slowly provides more of an incentive for people to go to work. It's not just that you as an unemployed can't find a job in the community you live in and in the profession that you happened to have been practicing before you were laid off. No, Mr. Speaker. There are many more aspects to this.

There is such a thing as travel: Go and get a job where you can get one. Relocate there if the job is good enough. Go check it out. Call for your family if that's good enough. That has happened throughout the history of this country. Yet our Federal Government is essentially saying to people, You're not going to be obligated to relocate. Some of the people over on this side of the aisle think that somehow we ought to take the jobs to where people live.

It puts me in mind of an article that was researched and written--I happened to have read it in the Des Moines Register some years ago, more than a decade ago, I'm certain, Mr. Speaker. They had gone into a neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, into a residential neighborhood, and interviewed every household there--all the residences in a six- block-by-six-block area, 36 square blocks. As they interviewed the families and--I guess I can't say the word--analyzed the families and identified the characteristics of the families, they didn't find a single male employed head of household in all 36 square blocks of the residential area in Milwaukee.

The history of that area was that the people in that neighborhood had predominantly been descended from those who had moved up to Milwaukee, right after prohibition ended, in order to take on the brewery jobs, the good brewery jobs in Milwaukee. They brewed a lot of beer in Milwaukee, and they created good jobs there right at the end of the prohibition era, and people were willing to move from the Gulf States up into those neighborhoods to go to work in the breweries. So that would be the thirties, from the thirties to the nineties, a 60-year period of time so to speak. Thomas Jefferson would call that three generations. I'd say probably so. One generation arrived in Milwaukee at the dawn of the aftermath of prohibition. Another generation was born and raised, and the grandchildren were still living there, but they didn't have a single employed male head of household in 36 square blocks.

The story was about the lament, Mr. Speaker, in that we couldn't bring jobs to the people in that neighborhood; but, truthfully, their ancestors--their parents or grandparents--had moved to Milwaukee from the Gulf States for the jobs. Yet it didn't occur to the person writing the article that people could also move for jobs in the modern era. That is what you must do. If we're going to have a flexible, mobile economy, we've got to go to where the work is.

But the disincentive is there from the Federal Government that discourages such things, and we don't ask very much the question about why is it that not a single male head of household is employed in this entire six-block-by-six-block area of Milwaukee. The biggest answer to that is that the 72 different means-tested welfare programs that we have are disincentives for people to find jobs. Now, that sounds shocking to the hyperventilating liberal left, Mr. Speaker, but it's just a fact. It's a fact of human nature. So the discouragement from finding a job has created neighborhoods of people who don't have a tradition of working anymore.

America was built on high productivity and on the efficiency we have, and the intuitive nature, the instinctive, innovative nature of Americans, has been what has made our economy so strong; and it's a very sad thing to think that here we sit with this discussion about whether or not unemployment should be 99 weeks or 79 weeks or 69 weeks. Mr. Speaker, 26 weeks have been long enough for almost all of the history of this country. We are not in an economic situation that matches that of the Great Depression's at this point, although the debt that has been accumulated does match that of the Great Depression's and then some.

I recall the President coming before our Republican Conference on February 10 of 2009, shortly after he'd been inaugurated as President, to make the case that we should advance his economic stimulus plan--his $787.5 billion, grown into $825 billion, shovel-ready, spend-now, pay- interest, and pay-principal-later plan. He said to us that FDR's New Deal actually did work. It worked, but FDR lost his nerve. He got worried about spending too much money, so he pulled back. When he pulled back in the second half of the thirties, it brought about a recession within a depression. These are President Obama's words. In this recession within a depression, unemployment went up, and then before the economy could recover, along came World War II, which was the greatest economic stimulus plan ever. That was the President's presentation to us.

President Obama convinced me and, I think, everybody who was listening that day that he will not lose the nerve that he believes FDR lost. President Obama is the lead Keynesian economist on steroids in the history of the country and, I believe, of the world in that he believes that borrowing money and spending money will stimulate the economy and that, as that economy rolls, the benefits of it will create jobs. He believes if you borrow money and hand it to people, not in exchange for a good or a service that has been produced but just get it in their hands one way or another--if they'll work for it, fine. Then give them something for working. If they won't or if you can't give them something--because they can surely be busy spending as they've got more time do that if they're not working after all, and spending money stimulates the economy; and, Mr. Speaker, Keynesian economists believe that: that spending money stimulates the economy.

I believe this, that we here in America have to produce goods and services that have a marketable value and that can be sold competitively here and abroad. We need to produce our way out of this economic doldrums that we're in, not spend our way out of it. They believe that if you spend billions of dollars--and in the President's case, I have to give him his due of trillions of dollars, of 4 or 5 or more trillions of extra dollars of debt that have been piled upon us-- that that comes back to you severalfold.

In fact, the statement was made by our Secretary of Agriculture that, for every dollar in food stamps that gets spent, it stimulates $1.84 in economic activity. Now, if that's the case, why don't we give out a lot more food stamps. That's because people have to produce the food and because they have to deliver it, stock it, shelve it, and those things. Well, if that's such a good economic stimulator, why don't we just do all of that, throw the food away, and then we can stimulate the economy, too. But who's going to pay the debt?

Here is what I do believe, Mr. Speaker. If we borrow money and if we hand it to people and say, Spend it, spend it, spend it--it's your patriotic duty--it may stimulate the economy for a short while. I call it a sugar high. It may be just for a little while that you can get that little bump--very, very temporary. The trade-off is that the trough that you might otherwise be falling into may not--not will not but may not--be as deep as it would be otherwise.

But the result will be, you have to recover, and you have to pay off the interest and the principal. So even though you might not fall as far, you have a much broader trough to recover from.

We have to pay the interest, and we have to pay the principal on all of this debt that's been accumulated over the last 3-plus years. And it doesn't mean that the Bush administration is somehow forgiven for the debt that's been driven up. But during the height of the Iraq war, the Bush administration came within $160 billion of balancing the budget. Now $160 billion sounds like loose change today compared to the President's budget that he rolled out, which is minus $1.33 trillion. You run up a deficit of $1.33 trillion, and you increase taxes by more than $1.5 trillion in that process, you can see what happens, Mr. Speaker.

This budget that the President has offered should be the news of the day.

And maybe we ought to be looking at what's in it. But what we really hear instead is that it's dead on arrival, that his budget will not be brought up--certainly it will not be brought up here in the House. At least I don't think so here in the House, unless it's to illustrate its lack of support.

Last year, President Obama's budget was brought up on the floor of the Senate. And of all the talk about giving the President his due and working with the President on his budget, his budget was voted on in the Senate and voted down 97-0. Mr. Speaker, I don't know that I've had a piece of legislation come to the floor of this Congress that had that kind of unanimous--well, I guess I can't say ``support''--unanimous rejection. That would be tough on my ego if I couldn't get anybody to agree with me after I had all that staff put that big budget together. But they didn't want to be held accountable for what the President's budget said.

The President now has a political document--not a fiscal management document--that he'll run around the country, talking about his budget. He will use it to beat up on Republicans that don't support his budget. And maybe he'll realize that it isn't just Republicans; that last time it was Harry Reid and all of the Democrats who voted on the budget over in the Senate. We didn't support it over on this side either.

We had a couple of budgets come to the floor here in the House of Representatives last year, Mr. Speaker. One of them was the RSC budget that balanced in 8 to 9 years. And the other one was what we call the Ryan budget, the Republican Conference budget. That's the one that actually passed here on the floor of the House. And even though that budget had a level of austerity to it, and even though it was ground- breaking in the boldness with which it addressed a path to prosperity, it wasn't strong enough, Mr. Speaker. It went in the right direction. And it was bold by historical standards, but not particularly bold by the standards that we need to envision the future.

Yesterday we had the chairman of the Budget Committee make the statement that we have 2 to 3 years, and we have the potential of becoming one huge Greece. I have been making a similar statement over the last year and a half or so. And what I believe is that--by the way, Greece is relatively easy to bail out, if you wanted to do that, because their economy is only 2 percent of the EU's GDP. And that's the EU's gross domestic product, just in case the acronyms are bothering people, Mr. Speaker. So 2 percent of the EU's GDP, not that hard to fix.

Here in the United States, we have a different kind of difficulty. The Ryan budget a year ago, though, didn't balance for 26 years and left us with a national debt at the end of 10 years of $23 trillion. We walked into it with $14.3 trillion in national debt and ended up 10 years down the road with $23 trillion in national debt. But when the debt ceiling deal was made last August, it broke faith with the Ryan budget, which projected $23 trillion in national debt, and became $26 trillion in national debt. But in fairness, without applying the Ryan budget, we were looking at $28 trillion in national debt 10 years from now. From $14.3 trillion to $28 trillion. The Ryan budget dialed the $28 trillion down to $23 trillion. The debt ceiling deal dialed it back up to $26 trillion in national debt in 10 years.

It's hard to declare a victory over a $1.2 trillion cut on a debt ceiling deal if you're reducing the projected national debt from $28 trillion down to $26 trillion. And if you are dealing with a budget that no longer is binding, having broken faith with at least the big numbers within that Republican Conference/Ryan budget, on a budget that didn't balance for 26 years--I have to go back and look at my three sons who are grown--they're in their thirties right now--and say to them, Sorry we didn't have a balanced budget in the previous decade. We haven't had an effective balanced budget, I don't believe, passed in this millennium. And in 26 years, if all goes well--and we've already said it's probably not going to--we might see a balanced budget. But you will, my sons, be eligible for that Social Security that will be paid for out of the trust fund that has, by then, hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions of dollars in holes created in it by paying for things now that make us feel good or we avoid the political confrontation of it.

And you'll never have worked and paid taxes in the United States of America for an entire career and known that a balanced budget is passed out of the United States Congress.

Can you imagine, Mr. Speaker, those sons in their thirties that have been working for well over a decade going through an entire career, knocking on the door of Medicare eligibility, Social Security eligibility, having watched a hole created and expanded bigger and bigger in the Social Security trust fund every year while they're closer and closer to being able to finally qualify for Social Security and Medicare, and we can't fix this problem now? And the Federal Government is running a deficit for all of those years: 26, 28, 38, add 10, 12,--40 years, 40 years of deficits are what are staring us in the face now, before we can get to the point of paying off the first dollar on our national debt. And that's if we would stick with Ryan's budget of last year. And I'm hopeful we'll do better this year.

But the President, who spoke in his State of the Union address in front of where you are seated right now, Mr. Speaker, when he came for this much anticipated State of the Union address a couple of weeks ago, he made no mention whatsoever of a balanced budget. He didn't make mention of fiscal responsibility, let alone austerity. He laid out his agenda of spending. And I guess I know now why he didn't address the promise that he made 3 years ago in which he said he was going to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term. Well, no, that hasn't happened. That would require a deficit proposal by his budget of roughly a half-trillion dollars, somewhere in that neighborhood. He has got red ink in his own budget of $1.33 trillion. And he says, This is not the time for us to tighten our belts. This isn't the time for austerity. The economy can't stand it now. Well, the creditors are not going to be able to take this much longer either.

As I sat asking a series of questions over in the German finance minister's office not that long ago, we went through the national debt of the countries that are in trouble, those who have had their bond ratings just lowered by the news that I saw today. And if you add up the national debt of those countries--and I will name them: Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Belgium, those countries. If you take the national debt of those countries, not including France, for example, but just the countries that have been, for months now, hanging in the balance of facing the fear of default, their total cumulative national debt, if they paid off everything that they owed as a country, the sovereign debt of those countries that I have mentioned totals $4.5 trillion.

Now the President already met that. Running up the debt within the first 3 years of his office, he had already arrived at a little over $4 trillion. So we're in the same neighborhood. The red ink spent under this administration was enough red ink to pay off the sovereign debt of the nations in the EU that are having trouble. I'm not suggesting that we should have done that. But look at the austerity that Greece is having to accept and the fires in the streets, when the streets of Athens go aflame when they find out that about 15,000 government jobs have been cut in order to meet the budgetary guidelines that they must meet if they're going to be able to borrow money from--who are the players in the European Union? It really comes down to Germany now today.

Fifteen thousand government jobs cut in Greece alone, a little old country that is 2 percent of the GDP of the EU. And we're here, and we cannot tighten our belt. We have a President that puts a budget out that will not even speak of moving toward balance. He will not speak about tightening our belt. But he will demagogue people who will propose such things, and that includes Paul Ryan.

So, Mr. Speaker, I'm suggesting that we call upon the Presidential candidates who are seeking the Oval Office and ask them, renew your efforts. Declare and ask for the support of the American people; that if you are elected to the highest elected office in this

land as President of the United States, call for a mandate from the American people for this Congress to pass a balanced budget out of the House and out of the Senate and message it to the States to begin the ordeal of the ratification of a balanced budget amendment in the 38 States that are necessary in order to implement an amendment to our United States Constitution.

And the balanced budget amendment must have a GDP cap. I'll stand on 18 percent. That's the historic take-out of the GDP for the Federal Government, 18 percent. And it must require a supermajority in order to raise taxes.

Mr. Speaker, this country will not survive in the long run with less. The will to balance the budget does not exist in this Congress today. It doesn't exist in the House. It surely doesn't exist in the Senate. The push from the President for deficit spending is one of the factors. But if you remove the President of the United States and put a new individual in there who is fiscally responsible, we still have the problem of the tendency to overspend and the unwillingness to tighten the belt and the unwillingness to listen to the American people that insist that we balance this budget.

And so, Mr. Speaker, I want to see the Presidential candidates call for a balanced budget amendment. I want that to be actually the second plank in their platform. The first plank needs to be the full, 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. That's an essential component for us to get our liberty back, and it is an essential component to balance the budget.

We can't afford ObamaCare. It takes away our liberty. It takes away our freedom. It takes away our choices. And we're dealing now with the national debate over right to conscience.

Never in the history of this country have we seen a President that had the level of audacity to believe that he could sit in the Oval Office and dictate the terms of health insurance policies to every American. And the President did so. Make no mistake, Mr. Speaker. It wasn't Kathleen Sebelius sitting in her office with some of her trusted advisers over at HHS that decided they were going to compel, especially the Catholic but the faith-based institutions who were providing health care services, to provide also for their employees health insurance policies that 100 percent of them would cover birth control pills, other contraceptives, that 100 percent of them would cover sterilizations, tubal ligations--vasectomies in particular.

That 100 percent of the health insurance policies would cover the morning-after pill or the Plan B pill that comes in after the morning- after pill, the ella pill; the ella pill that is prescribed to bring about an abortion up to 5 days but is effective up to 22 days. That would be 4 days after the baby's heart starts beating, I might add, Mr. Speaker.

To compel any religious institution, any person of faith, let alone the Catholic Church, which is the largest single institution standing for life and marriage in the United States of America, the White House understands that if they can plow through the Catholic Church on life and marriage and matters of conscience, then there is no institution left that can stand up to the President of the United States and his radical, social, transformative agenda would have no serious impediment from that point forward.

Thankfully, Mr. Speaker, the American bishops understood what was taking place when Kathleen Sebelius made the announcement, which was actually the order of the President of the United States to compel religious institutions, in particular Catholic institutions, to fund, provide and pay for birth control pills, sterilization, and abortifacients.

That was a violation of the right to privacy. It was a violation of the religious right to conscience, a right to conscience which is guaranteed in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, freedom of religion.

But for the Federal Government, and I should probably not use that term quite so benignly because this is, for the President of the United States to issue such an order, tells us how radical and aggressive his agenda is, maybe how out of touch he is with the faith community in America.

But I compliment the American bishops for taking such a bold stand, Mr. Speaker. And the stand needed to be taken. When you think about the martyrs of history, it's not a hard stand to take here in the United States of America. You're not going to be crucified. You're not going to lose your head. You're not going to be stoned to death for taking a stand like this. You might be ridiculed, but when you stand on principle, how can that hurt. It doesn't. If you believe in the principle, it doesn't.

And so, Mr. Speaker, the American Catholic bishops took this position. They said it was a violation of a right to conscience. And they wrote: We cannot, we will not, obey this unjust law. The strongest language that I have heard read from the pulpit in my years as a faithful Catholic. We cannot, we will not obey this unjust law.

A bold position, a bright line, uncompromising. And I know the question was posed that the delay of 12 months in implementing the rule was to give the religious institutions an opportunity to make accommodations and adjust to the imposition of the Federal Government in requiring them to violate their conscience.

Mr. Speaker, I'd submit that one does not violate their conscience. If it is a conscience clause that protects you, that's one thing, but it is your conscience that prohibits you from crossing the line.

The lives of babies are ended by morning-after pills, by the ella pill; and it is a direct violation of the teachings of the Church and no government can compel a church to violate its conscience. Nor can a government compel individuals to violate their conscience. This rule that was imposed was designed to do that, and I believe the President calculated that he could fracture the Catholic Church in doing so. And if he were successful in doing that, then there would be not an impediment in the way with the other components of the radical social agenda.

But, Mr. Speaker, that didn't happen. It's not going to happen. The bishops listened to the President's ``accommodation'' and bought a little bit of time and said we're going to study this and deliberate and we'll give you an answer. And they did. They studied it, deliberated, and they came back with an answer in a short period of time. It was less than 48 hours, as I recall, and rejected the President's accommodation because it still violates conscience, and it violates the conscience of many faithful Americans and Americans of all religious denominations. Particularly, it runs directly against the principles of the Catholic Church.

And so, Mr. Speaker, we now have a bright line drawn along the line of conscience protection, and we're having a good American debate on conscience protection, and I'm hopeful that we'll be able to get that established. But I would caution this body, Mr. Speaker, if I were addressing them instead of yourself, that we should not accept the idea that we can go into ObamaCare. All this power and authority is rooted in ObamaCare. ObamaCare grants this authority to the executive branch. The President assumes the authority because he makes the appointments within the Department, such as Kathleen Sebelius.

But to make changes in ObamaCare that essentially lower the pressure, the 1099 squeal forms component, well, this House passed a bill to repeal it. And you've got other components of ObamaCare that have been egregious and efforts made to repeal a little piece here, a little piece there. The medical equipment tax would be one of those. And now we have the violation of conscience that imposes that everybody in America pay for everybody else's contraceptives and their sterilizations and their abortifacients. My conscience won't let me do that, Mr. Speaker.

But yet the President of the United States believes he has the power built into ObamaCare; and every time we come to this floor and pass a piece of legislation, it takes some of the pressure off from a legislation that would amend out the most egregious aspects of ObamaCare. I remember some of the language back when ObamaCare was passed, and some of the leaders within this Congress--and I count you all as leaders here, as I address you, Mr. Speaker--have said, We will repeal the most egregious aspects of ObamaCare.

The most egregious aspect? Mr. Speaker, every aspect of ObamaCare is egregious. It is because it's a violation of our American liberty. And if we repeal one egregious aspect after another after another after another, each time we do that, we take the lid off the pressure cooker, and we lose that opportunity for the heat to come up where we can solve the whole mess.

So I have argued since the beginning, we need to hold the lid on, keep the pressure on and let the heat increase until such time as we are all ready to pass a repeal of ObamaCare and send it to the next President. This President, we have an idea what he would do with it, but the next President will sign the repeal.

And so I've worked on that relentlessly over the last couple of years and worked with each of the Presidential candidates on this, and every Republican candidate has taken a pledge or an oath multiple times for a 100 percent full repeal of ObamaCare. Almost all but one of them have pledged to rip it out by the roots, to repeal 100 percent of ObamaCare and not leave one particle of it left behind.

It's what we must do if we're going to keep faith with our Founding Fathers. It's what we must do if we're going to protect, preserve, and refurbish the liberty that is God given to us as Americans. It's what we must do if we hope to have an economic future in this country with an unsustainable ObamaCare staring at us. It's what we must do if we're going to have research and development in the health care industry and if we're going to continue to lead the world in providing health care. It's what we must do if we're going to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States, which we've all taken an oath to uphold.

All of these are reasons for the full 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker. It needs to happen. It needs to happen in the first weeks of the next Congress, and the repeal needs to be set upon the podium on the west portico of the Capitol, prepared there for the next President of the United States so, when he takes the oath of office, his first act of office can be to sign the repeal of ObamaCare right there at the podium, the west portico of the Capitol. I hope to have a good seat for that glorious occasion, Mr. Speaker, and I'll intend to do my share of the work to continue this argument to position us so that this Congress is prepared to pass that repeal.

I believe that we should just go through a warm-up drill here fairly soon. Now, this is St. Valentine's Day, February 14. Sometime in the next 30 to 60 days would be appropriate, Mr. Speaker, for the House of Representatives to renew and refresh our vote to repeal ObamaCare again. Perhaps the people over in the Senate have understood how important it is and have changed their mind, but I believe that this Congress should remind the American people that we are still--100 percent of the Republicans--in a bipartisan way in favor of the full 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. That's an important message to send.

Mr. Speaker, I'd also submit that the repeal of Dodd-Frank is an essential component, too. We've got to do a lot of undoing of this administration before we can get turned around to doing what we need to do to start the reform process over again. We will have lost 2 or 3 or more years before President Obama, and being locked up in a Congress that's led by Nancy Pelosi then and Harry Reid on the floor of the Senate, and we'll have lost 4 years of the Obama Presidency. We've got to make some progress. We've got to make some progress, and that can't come as long as ObamaCare sits in the way. It can't come as long as Dodd-Frank sits in the way.

The decisions that were made by Barney Frank and Chris Dodd to presumably reform the financial world, the solutions came from some of the people that contributed to the problem. And I would suggest that we do this as a financial package, Mr. Speaker, and that would be in the early days of the 113th Congress to pass the repeal of Dodd-Frank, to pass the repeal of the Community Reinvestment Act, and to move Fannie and Freddie even more boldly towards privatization. And some of those, I understand, are in the agreements that are being negotiated right now. But it won't be bold enough or strong enough, I'm convinced of that.

And, by the way, let's repeal Sarbanes-Oxley while we are at it. If we do that--running the table is what I would say--repeal Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, the Community Reinvestment Act, and move Fannie and Freddie toward privatization, all of these things will lay a foundation where we can write some reasonable regulations in on our financial institutions and open this country back up to do business again, Mr. Speaker.

I think it would be appropriate of this Congress to move the repeal of Dodd-Frank that Michele Bachmann has introduced. She has carried that legislation with her around on the Presidential campaign trail. She is the lead on repeal of Dodd-Frank. And I think a great way to welcome her back to the conference after a brilliant run for the Presidency would be to bring her repeal bill forward here on the floor, the repeal Dodd-Frank. And it sends a message, Mr. Speaker. The message that it sends is the House is for repeal of Dodd-Frank. The Presidential candidates are for repeal of Dodd-Frank. Send it over there to the Senate and see what they want to do about it. But getting that marker down helps encourage the Presidential candidates that this Congress is in and will be in lockstep with the Republican nominee.

Those principles that are universal among all Republican candidates at this point should be moved by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. For example, passing official English. Eighty-seven percent of the people in this country support English as the official language. It sits there as a dormant issue because it seems as though the only agenda that this Congress has is jobs, jobs, jobs. Well, people earn better pay and better benefits in their jobs when they have English skills.

We burn billions of dollars--and that means ``consume'' or ``waste.'' That was a hyperbole, so to speak. We waste billions of dollars in multilingualism, when the strongest and most powerful unifying force known to humanity throughout all of history is having a common language. It's more powerful than a common religion, a common background, a common race or ethnicity. It's more powerful than a common sex. It is the most powerful unifying source in the world.

When God looked down at the Tower of Babel and He said, Behold, they are one people, they speak all one language, and they are building the tower to the Heavens with the arrogance that we remember. He said, Behold, they are one people, they speak all one language and nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them because of having a common language to bind them together. So God scrambled their language, and that's where the Tower of Babel came from, and they began to babble. They couldn't understand each other, and they split up to the four winds. And that's the Old Testament story about how we ended up with so many different nations.

We also know historically what has happened. People move into enclaves and live in those enclaves. They communicate with each other. If they do that and don't have a language, they'll create their own. But even if they go there with a language, the language morphs into something else if it doesn't interrelate with the other communications in the region, in the neighborhood, and in the world.

So we have encouragement going on in this culture of encouraging language enclaves instead of the success of assimilation. And I think we should move the H.R. 997, the English Language Unity Act, here right away. It's an 87 percent issue. I know nothing more popular than that. If I've got an agenda here, Mr. Speaker, that is as popular as 87 percent among the American people and I can't get a vote, meanwhile, the President can offer his budget and 97 Senators reject it and he gets a vote, there's something really wrong with that. There's a lot of disparity between the two.

So I think that's another thing that needs to happen. Let's move English, and let's move the repeal of Dodd-Frank. Let's move the repeal of ObamaCare. Those pieces would be good messages to send to the American people. They're good pieces of policy to be established to lay on the desk of Harry Reid that can join the cordwood of the jobs creation legislation that

this House has sent over to the Senate and help set the stage for the next President of the United States who needs to come in with a strong mandate from the American people, from the United States Congress, with a clear vision that Americans support our new President to take us where we need to go as a people.

But the components of the agenda of the next President need to include a balanced budget--a balanced budget amendment, a commitment to that balanced budget amendment, and a mandate from the American people to get that balanced budget amendment passed. It's the only way that I can see that we get that accomplished, Mr. Speaker. We need to call for the Presidential candidates to call for a balanced budget amendment.

So I will go through these issues again: pass a balanced budget amendment, one that has an 18 percent cap on spending of GDP, one that requires a supermajority to raise taxes, that has legitimate exemptions for a declared war or a case of a serious national emergency. Balanced budget amendment, repeal ObamaCare, repeal Dodd-Frank and the other financial components that I said, and let's move forward with a country that's based upon freedom, upon liberty, upon free enterprise. If we do all that, Mr. Speaker, the American people will take care of the rest.

We still have interest that we've got to pay and principal that's got to be paid down before we can get rid of the interest bill. This is a huge credit card that has been run up. The debt of the countries in trouble in the EU is $4.5 trillion. And now President Obama's $1.33 trillion added on to his $4-plus trillion threaten to take his term of the Presidency well over $5 trillion, knocking on the door of $6 trillion in accumulated debt in his time in office.

Whatever we do that's good, we still have to pay the interest and have to pay the principal on that debt. So the recovery time, the depth which we might have otherwise fallen a little bit further, it takes a lot longer to recover when you borrow the money to do so. That's the nature of the free enterprise system. That's the nature of capital and investment and risk. That's the nature of Keynesian economics that the President has embraced.

I am a supply-sider. I don't believe that borrowing money, handing it to people, telling them it's their patriotic duty to go out and spend that money is how we're going to recover from this economy. We're going to recover from this downward economy by producing those goods and services that have a marketable value here and abroad. We do that, we'll sell, we'll compete, we'll rebalance our trade deficit, we'll make American industry strong again, and we will again be the powerhouse of the world. When that happens, we are strong culturally, politically, we are strong militarily, we are strong economically, and we will continue to be looked up at by the rest of the world.

If we fail economically, if we become one huge Greece--as Chairman Ryan is concerned, and as I am and many others--if we become one huge Greece, there is no one to bail us out. There's no one there. We can hold our tin cup out, but no economy will be big enough to put enough in the tin cup that we can get a meal. We would be in a situation of default. It would be a sad, sad day in America. It would take generations to build our credit back again. It would take generations to recover. In fact, the trajectory of this country would be so altered that we could never recover.

Power abhors a vacuum; it fills it. If America has an economic crisis, as I'm suggesting looms in our future, that power, that global vacuum will be filled by our competitors. Much of that power that is projected around the world has been paid for in treasure and blood, Mr. Speaker. We must maintain that for the future destiny of our country. We must maintain it out of honor for those who have sacrificed so much to protect freedom and liberty around the world.

We are a great country. We're the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world. We derive our strength from Judeo-Christianity, western civilization, and free enterprise capitalism. We need to understand those underpinnings of American exceptionalism, those pillars of American exceptionalism. We need to celebrate them. We need to teach them. We need every child to understand the pillars of American exceptionalism and be able to recite them in the same fashion that the seven sacraments are recited in the very Catholic Church that's standing up for our constitutional rights today, along with the other faith-based organizations.

It's a big picture we have going on in this country, Mr. Speaker. It's a great country that we are. It's a great country filled with great people, people with individual spirits, individual sense of self- sacrifice, willing to tighten their belt, willing to carry their share of the load.

And what do they want out of it? An opportunity to work, prosper, raise their family, live free without an oppressive government reaching in and regulating every aspect of their very lives. They want to be able to utilize the God-given liberty that was articulated by our Founding Fathers, and promote that kind of liberty to all humanity throughout the world, wherever they may be.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention to the discussion that I've had with you this evening, and I would yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege and honor to be recognized by you to address you on the floor of the House of Representatives. It's also my privilege to be here to listen to the presentation of the gentlemen from essentially the east coast and the west coast present their version of solutions for the United States of America.

If I can just take that, Mr. Speaker, and roll it backwards from bottom to top rather than top to bottom. I hear their concern--and I share concerns--about the loss of American manufacturing and the loss of American trade and the trade deficit that we do have. I hear the advice, which is we should have wise public policies that we should advance going forward that would be good for American manufacturing, good for American trade, that would bring about the refurbishment and the renewal of American manufacturing and bring about a balance in trade and perhaps a surplus in exports, which is good for this country because we would rather collect IOUs than issue IOUs.

I agree with the gentleman on both of those points, and I suspect we don't agree on how to get there to those points, Mr. Speaker. But I would make this point, that the United States has been a very strong, industrial Nation. In fact, at the end of World War II, we were the only industrialized nation in the world that had an established, globally competitive industry that had not been devastated by the war. We had a surplus of exports because here in the United States we could produce things, we could make things, we could export them to the rest of the world, and we did. We did it with military supplies. We did it with all kinds of industrial supplies. The United States of America was the industrial powerhouse of the world. Much of the rest of the industry had been destroyed, and we had built ours up in that period of time in order to supply the global World War II war effort. So the United States' industry was the preeminent industry in the world.

Why was it?

Because of the reasons I've said, plus we were competitive. We had a wage and a salary and a benefit package that was competitive. We had American workers that were more productive than any other workers in the world. We had a well-educated workforce. We had a work ethic. We had a work ethic where we took great pride in being able to go to work. If we punched the clock, we produced more per hour that we were out there on the floor of that factory than anybody else in the world because of a number of reasons: American ingenuity, American industriousness, and America's work ethic. We did those things, and we set the standard for the world. That carried us beyond World War II, through the fifties, through the sixties, through the seventies, into the eighties, and actually into the nineties.

Over a period of time, as the gentleman's charts show, America's industry began to lose its competitive advantage with the rest of the world, and the rest of the world began to catch up.

I saw the signs of that. I saw the signs of it in the fifties, when we would get close to New Year's--and just think of Japan, Japan devastated in World War II. A lot of their production facilities were in homes, not in factories. And they had factories too. And they were bombed, and they were burned, and they were destroyed, and the tragedy, all that is part of history that I don't care to address here tonight, Mr. Speaker.

But in the aftermath they needed to start up something. They needed to produce goods and services that had a marketable value, both in Japan and abroad, and they did. And the things that showed up here were paper goods, little things like when it came time to celebrate New Year's, there would be a little Japanese whistle that would blow out like the tongue of the dragon and roll back up again. That way we got those paper products coming from Japan because that's what they could do. They could make them. They could produce them. They could sell them. They could make a little money selling those things to Americans. And that would be in the fifties.

In the early sixties, what came along? Well, transistor radios. And there would be the Toshiba radio, Japanese-made, portable transistor radio that you could carry around with you out on the farm and listen to the radio. How about that? What an idea of an invention.

I didn't mean that that was a Japanese idea. It was a Japanese- produced idea that could compete with the American production. And so they sold radios, made in Japan, into the United States, and a lot of young American kids carried those Toshiba radios around, and other portable radios, in order to listen to rock music of the time. They didn't have talk shows at that time, not that I remember anyway.

And so slowly the Japanese began to ramp up their industry. They went from paper toys to radios, to optical equipment. Some of the best optical equipment in the world was produced in Japan. It still is, for that matter. And so they made binoculars and cameras, and they created a culture of people that love their cameras, and they evaluate those cameras made in Japan and how they compete with the rest of the world. And if you watch the Japanese tourists, they're here using their cameras on a regular basis.

Now, all the ways they've ramped up to be able to compete with the rest of the world, here we sat in the United States thinking that somehow or another this wave that we had caught would forever carry us, and our industry slowly began to atrophy, slowly began to lose its competitiveness.

And it reminds me of a study that was done by a Russian economist who was commissioned by Lenin back in the second decade of the 20th century, when Lenin decided that he wanted to

find an economist who would prove that capitalism would eventually expire, that it was a self-defeating economy. So he hired an economist, or ordered him to produce a product, and his name was Kondratiev.

Well, the economist Kondratiev put together the theory that Lenin had directed him to produce, which is that capitalism would expire, that it was self-defeating, that even though it might have brief bursts of success, eventually that it would run out of energy and it would expire and diminish and, essentially, that would be the end of the wave of capitalism.

So Kondratiev sat down, and he chartered the free enterprise economy going clear back to the 18th century and earlier, and he tracked unemployment, gross domestic product, the output of the nations, and followed the industries. And when he tracked this cycle of capitalism in the effort to prove his charge that had come from Lenin, it was this: That yes, capitalism does decline, that the capital investment and the unemployment and the GDP of the countries that have free enterprise economies does diminish, but it diminishes down to a point where it regenerates itself again.

And when looked at, and this was a study that was back in the dusty volumes at MIT University and much forgotten about until there was a computer study that was done, and somebody remembered that they had read Kondratiev's study that was back in the annals at MIT. Now, they went back and dusted it off and compared it to the modern computer analysis which now is a generation old, and they concluded that the computer analysis of the cycles of capitalism matched that of Kondratiev, whose theory was this: that we have a 52-year cycle.

Now, I don't stand on that it's 52 years or 75 or 25 or any year other than that. But the theory that he uses to explain his 52-year cycle is instructive to all of us, and that's this: That when you hit the bottom economically, when your GDP has bottomed out, when your unemployment rate is at the top, and when your capital investment is at the bottom, you look around, as a society, a culture, and economy, and you think we have to do something. What are we going to do?

And the psychology of that is that all of us sitting at the bottom of the economic cycle, with high unemployment, low GDP and low capital investment, we see that if we keep doing the same thing over and again, we're going to end up with the same result. And we don't like where we are. We don't want to be where we are in 4 or 5 or 10 or 20 years or a generation or two, so what will we do that's different?

And I've lived through this a time or two, especially during the farm crisis years of the eighties, when I saw that land values were spiraling downwards to perhaps as low as a third of what they were just a few years before, market prices going downwards the same way. We rely on rain. It couldn't rain. The markets didn't produce the value for the crops that could be raised, and the land values went down. Everything was spiraling downwards.

But what was going on was the manifestation of Kondratiev's theory springing up, and people who had no immediate hope economically began to put together a strategy for the long term so that we would have a successful economy. And it matched almost perfectly with Kondratiev's theory, the Russian economist's theory, which is that when your economic cycle reaches the bottom, and everything is sitting down here with the low capital investment, high unemployment, low GDP, people are looking for a way to solve those problems. So their creativity kicks in and they begin to think and talk and dream and pray about what kind of ideas can come to fruition to reverse the cycle, the downward cycle that they are in.

And so they begin to come up with new inventions, and they come up with new efficiencies. They come up with new business models. And as these ideas are generated, the ideas have to catch the kind of energy that can attract capital.

Now, there's not as much capital in a low economy as there is in a high economy, but there's much more demand for it. And so you go out with your ideas and you market them, and you attract the capital to generate these ideas.

This is what we did at the beginning of the dot-com bubble. If you remember, we learned here the creativity of a bad economic cycle was a contributing factor to developing the microchip and the ability to store and transfer information more effectively and more efficiently than ever before. And thus was born the dot-com bubble, the creation of the boom of the dot-com.

And that was, once investors saw that ability to store and transfer information more effectively, more efficiently than ever before, they began to invest in it because they believed that transferring that information, storing and transferring it, turned into a profit share. So they invested their capital, and the profit share began to get injected into the dot-com, and the dot-com bubble was born.

Now, the mistake with the dot-com bubble was just an adjustment in investment. But what really happened was there was an overexuberance in investment during the dot-com bubble years, and those were the years that the middle of the nineties were the beneficiaries of. The overexuberance in investments reflected the understanding of the investment community, the attraction of capital to these dot-com ideas, these creative ideas, to store and transfer information more efficiently than ever before.

The creativeness of that was not regulated by this realization that storing and transferring information didn't necessarily translate into profit; that it had to create efficiencies in order to be translated into profit. So we had an overexuberance in investment. The dot-com bubble began to swell. And when, under the Clinton administration, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, that was the lance that pierced the dot-com bubble. The dot-com bubble collapsed.

But the growth that came was the growth that came from the understanding that we had created an ability to be more efficient than ever before, and the adjustments were in the aftermath.

Well, that fits exactly within Kondratiev's theory. We had hit the bottom economically. The creative people were looking around for something that they could do to change that paradigm. And what they came up with was the microchip and the other tools of software that allowed us to store and transfer information more efficiently than ever before, and being able to do that caused people to invest more, start new businesses, to transfer efficiencies around the country, and to increase our efficiencies.

If you think for example, just in the trucking industry, the software packages that would allow truck dispatchers to click the mouse rather than make a judgment decision and send a truck to Portland that could drop a load off there and go to Seattle and circle back through Montana and drop off a load and come back to the warehouse in, say, Des Moines, for example. Many more efficiencies were created by software packages that made the decisions instead of fallible mortals that were using judgment calls while they were under stress on the fly.

All of those things fit back to Kondratiev's theory, his theory that during hard economic times you would generate ideas. Some of those would be good ideas. The good ideas would attract capital. The capital would be invested. The invested capital would bring about new technology. The new technology would bring about increased efficiencies. Increased efficiencies increase productivity. Increase the GDP, the gross domestic product, increase GDP. Of course it was good for the wealth of the Nation. And once you reached the apex of growth in the GDP, you ended up with a sense of success, a sense of complacency where we have arrived, we have invested our capital, we have invented our new methods to produce more goods and services more efficiently than ever before, and we've translated that into profits. Now, let's just keep this ball rolling down the road.

As you keep the ball rolling down the road--you don't realize it at the time, but the complacency of the continued day-to-day success brings about that idea of let's just hold on. Let's not create new. Let's just ride this out. And societies, economies, cultures ride out the successes. When they ride out the

successes--if competition doesn't catch you first from a foreign country--eventually those successes are riding on the capital investment of decades gone by, and the efficiencies diminish in proportion to the depreciation of these capital investments and also in proportion to the creativity of the competing economies. When that happens, you don't know it, but you're going downhill.

I think of a poster that I saw in a friend of mine's house years and years ago. It is a picture of a little boy sitting on a tricycle, and he has his hands on the handlebars and his feet up off the pedals. He's got a big grin on his face, and his hair is blowing back behind his head. Underneath the poster picture, it says: If you're coasting, you're going downhill.

Mr. Speaker, there are many economies in the world throughout history that have reached the apex of their growth and they have decided they like where they are. They get complacent and they begin to coast. If they are coasting, they are going downhill. Each economy, each society, each culture gets to that point where they start to coast and they go downhill. The societies and cultures that see it a different way, that understand that you have to constantly be innovating, you have to constantly be creating, you have to constantly find a way to be more competitive, they are the ones that show up in the Super Bowl of the global economy.

When I listen to my colleagues from the east coast and the west coast talk about what's wrong and what we need to fix and we need manufacturing jobs and that we've exported these jobs overseas, I would say to them, you've been advocates for the policies that are protectionism. You tried to protect the union jobs in the United States. You've opposed the free trade agreements that we've negotiated with foreign countries, including South Korea, Panama, and Colombia. And just being the voices of the unions that you represent, you have insisted that we have trade protectionism and that the working conditions and the jobs and the benefits packages that are negotiated in places like Colombia or South Korea be similar to those that are negotiated here in the United States.

Mr. Speaker, we can't change the policy in South Korea; we can't change it in Colombia; we can't change it in Panama; and we can't change it in places like China or other places in the world. They are who they are, and they will compete within the limits of their ability to produce. If we have policies that diminish our ability to compete, then we are going to have a lower market share, and no amount of Congress posturing itself for the people that write campaign checks is going to change that competitiveness. We've got to be competitive.

What would I advocate? What is my solution for this? I could go down through the list. They talked about the American Dream and they talked about trade agreements, and they talked about manufacturing jobs and exporting our jobs overseas and the export of American manufacturing to China. They talked about trade protectionism and they want to reignite the American Dream. So do I. I would like to think that it still burns. It burns based upon American liberty, American freedom, American opportunity. And what makes this country great would be a wonderful discussion to have between Democrats and Republicans here in the United States Congress. We seldom have any discussion like that.

What makes this country great? What are the underpinnings that has grown this country into the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world? Yes, we have our contemporary troubles. We remain the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world economically, culturally, militarily, politically. We're the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world.

Why?

I challenge my colleagues to embellish the things that I'm about to say, but I would say this: We have God-given rights, God-given liberty. This is not a manifestation of Steve King and the modern world in 2012 telling you something right now. This was a deep conviction of the American Founders that we have rights that come directly from God. We get our rights from God. We don't get them from man. We don't get them from government. If government gives us rights, then who are we, if government decides to take our rights away, who are we to complain? They are the all powerful. They are the omnipotent, the government.

Our rights come from God, and our Founding Fathers all knew it and they signed off on the Declaration of Independence. We're endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. These are the rights that are the foundation of American vigor. Think about the breadth of what this means.

America has received immigrants from donor nations all over the world. I believe every nation in the world. Why do they come here? Because they are inspired by the American Dream, the image of the Statue of Liberty--not necessarily the inscription, but the image of the Statue of Liberty. It says all of you who come here legally into the United States have an opportunity to access the American Dream. When you access the American Dream, you have an obligation to leave this country and this world a better place than it was when you came. And into that bargain is this: God-given rights.

We are the only country in the history of the world that has been founded upon that principle. Others might aspire to it, others might look across the ocean here to the United States and aspire to God-given liberty, but this is the only Nation in the world that is founded upon it. And the beacon that comes out of the Statue of Liberty, the beacon of that liberty, itself, is what attracts people here to the United States. When they get on that ship or on that plane, or whatever their method of transportation is to legally come into the United States, they come for the dream. They are attracted by the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, freedom of press, the right to keep and bear arms, the protection against double jeopardy, to be tried by a jury of your peers, to have property rights.

There is a State's right component of this that devolves these powers down to the States so each State can be a laboratory; and the Federal Government is to be a hands-off minimalist government, not an all- powerful, omnipotent government.

Mr. Speaker, that vision, that attraction, that magnetism of American liberty brings people from all over the world here to the United States.

Who does it bring?

We have the visa lottery, and even that gets a better cross section of the global humanity than you would have if you just went out and did a random selection of 6-plus billion people on the planet and brought 50,000 in under the visa lottery. At least those that sign up for the visa lottery have a dream: They want to come to America.

And 50,000 a year get lucky and cash in on the visa lottery. I think it is a bad policy. And you add the visa lottery to the family reunification plan and a number of other plans that we have, and anywhere between 93 and 89 percent of the legal immigrants in America are not measured by their merit, not measured by their ability to contribute to the United States; they are measured simply by their ability, their desire to come here, or if they have a family member to come and join, or if they got lucky in the visa lottery, or if they happen to receive asylum as directed by the Secretary of State or some other method.

But we only have between 7 and 11 percent of legal immigration where we actually set the criteria here in this country. The Constitution says that our job is and that Congress has an authority to establish a uniform form of immigration. Well, ``uniform,'' to me, would mean a standard for everybody who comes into the United States, and I would set that policy to reward those people who could most contribute to the United States of America.

Why wouldn't you have an immigration policy designed to enhance the economic, social, and cultural well-being of the United States?

That's the logic and the rationale that we had when the Constitution was drafted and when it was ratified. It should be our logic and our rationale today, Mr. Speaker.

But what's good? There are many good things about our immigration policy, but what's good?

In particular, it is that it has attracted the cream of the crop of every

donor civilization on the planet. Every country that contributed immigrants to the United States has sent us their dreamers, their doers, their workers--those people who wanted to access the American liberty and develop out the American Dream.

So, when you think about America as being an appendage of England or Scotland or Ireland or Italy or Ethiopia or Colombia or any other nation on the planet, we're not an appendage of that. We're the country that set up the filter, that screened out those also-rans--those people who had only a mediocre dream--and let through that filter people who had the exceptional dream, the dream that gave them an exceptional energy, an exceptional vision, an exceptional desire to come here and add to American exceptionalism.

American exceptionalism is built upon those liberties, those rights-- the freedom of speech, religion, the press, to keep and bear arms, the protection from double jeopardy, property rights, States' rights, to be tried by a jury of your peers. The list goes on. It's all of those things, and free enterprise capitalism is an essential component.

If you want to be naturalized into the United States and if you want to study for the naturalization test, then you can use the flashcards-- the glossy flashcards put out by CIS, Citizen Immigration Services--to study in order to become a naturalized American citizen. They have these little flashcards. You look at them, and on one side, it will say a question such as: Who is the Father of our country? Snap it over and it says--we all know the answer, Mr. Speaker--George Washington. Then you pick up the next card, and it might say: Who emancipated the slaves? Snap it over: Abraham Lincoln. The next card: What is the economic system of the United States of America? The President might flunk this, but the answer is--snap it over--free enterprise capitalism.

Those are principles that give us American vigor. When you look at the American vigor and the component of that and at the American vigor that comes from a filter, the filter of the difficulty of legally coming into the United States that skimmed the also-rans out and skimmed the global vigor in and redirected them into the United States, we have this saying: The dreamers came to America. The doers came to America. We are an American vigorous civilization and society of people who came here because they wanted more opportunity than they had in the country that they left. There was only one place they could go that had the opportunity that matches that, and it was the United States of America. They came here to do, and they did. They came for religious freedom. They came to raise their families. They came to leave this country a better place than it was, and they succeeded in all of that.

Mr. Speaker, the United States of America is the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world because of the fundamental principles, the fundamental rights, the fundamental American liberty--that exercise by dreamers and doers who stood on principle, who came here for religious freedom, for economic freedom, for property rights, for all of the things that are listed and laid out in the Bill of Rights. They were not just a mediocre cross section of the global population. They were the dreamers, the doers. The vigor of the planet came to the United States of America, and this vigorous American character, culture, and personality is unsuitable for the nanny state. It's unsuitable for the nanny state. The nanny state cannot be used and should not be used to oppress a free people--a people of vigor, a people of personality, a people of can-do spirit.

Yet here we are with what happened in the last Congress. The ruling troika imposed upon us Dodd-Frank, ObamaCare, and they tried to impose upon us cap-and-tax. All of them should be rejected by a vigorous American people who will regulate themselves, who will moderate and control themselves, who will set their own moral standards, and who need to have those standards implemented and enforced at the closest level to the people as possible. That's the cities, the counties, and the States, not the Federal Government, Mr. Speaker.

So I think it's important for us to realize and recognize that the American people are a unique race of people, that we are not like anyone else on the planet. We may not look like anyone else, but underneath whatever those looks might be of your idea of what a cross section of Americans are is an American vigor, an American personality, an American culture, a common sense of history, a can-do spirit, people who are members of the society and the culture and the civilization of the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world. We derive our strength from free enterprise capitalism, Judeo-Christianity, Western civilization. That's the core of America, the vigor of America, and that's what we must continue to protect, regrow, and refurbish.

Mr. Speaker, I am aware that the clock is winding down, and whether there is another speaker who is about to arrive, I have more in me, but I would pause for a moment to receive my instruction from the Speaker.

In which case, Mr. Speaker, I would recap this with my gratitude to the American people: We are here. We are putting a mark in place for posterity, and posterity watches us today. They're inspired, and they're informed by the actions of this Congress and by the actions of the President.

As I watch what unfolds here in the continuing growth and dependency and in the growth of the regulatory class in society and as I think about the growth of the nanny state--the nanny state that seems to think that it can be the protectorate for all of us and that somehow we can't make decisions for ourselves and for our well-being--Mr. Speaker, yes, we can, to quote the President, but not in any foreign language like ``si se puede.''

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate your attention and the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege and the honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to follow the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus) here in the well.

I want to first say that he makes clear sense with the argument he makes. We don't hear these arguments enough. Too often, this Congress is dealing with superfluous issues, political issues, rather than practical solutions.

It brings to mind for me the President's speech last night from in front of where you are right now, Mr. Speaker. Very early in his speech, the President said he wants to see a future where we are in control of our own energy. Part of that solution is encompassed by the delivery of John Shimkus here a little bit ago with what to do with nuclear waste. I would say also there are other things we can do from a technical perspective to utilize that, recycle that.

Some of the nuclear waste is tied up because of an Executive order that was signed by President Jimmy Carter more than 30 years ago. We haven't cracked the code on how to resolve that even though the science has caught up.

We have a long ways to go, and we need to have an administration that actually means this: A future where we are in control of our own energy. The instant that I heard that statement last night, it occurred to me that the President is in control of our energy, but the American people are not in control of our own energy.

I would point out the Keystone XL pipeline as an example. I heard an instantaneous rumbling here on the floor of the House of Representatives when the statement was made that we were going to be in control of our own energy.

The President also said he wants to see an all-of-the-above energy policy. The all-of-the-above policy includes responsible utilization of all of the nuclear fuel that we have and then responsible positioning of it when we can no longer utilize the energy within it.

But it also includes drilling offshore, and it includes drilling the nonnational parks public lands in the United States, and it includes bringing in energy from other places on the North American continent from our friends, our number one trading partner, Canada, our good friends to the north.

They are in energy-export despair right now because they have listened to what the President had to say. For 3 years, the study has gone on about the Keystone XL pipeline, 1,666 miles of pipeline that runs from Canada down to the gulf coast. It allows for a spur to go off of that to a future refinery that I hope is built in southeastern South Dakota and which would be able to transfer refined oil that would come from the oil sands in northern Alberta and be able to distribute that across the country, primarily to points from there south and east.

Mr. Speaker, the President has blocked the Keystone XL pipeline. He announced last night that he is opening up 75 percent of the--I have forgotten the exact word he used--75 percent of the Federal lands that are eligible, I think would be a fair way to characterize his statement, to drilling for oil. That is news to all of us. It is news to the oil industry, I believe. In the previous State of the Union address that he gave, if I recall correctly, he mentioned that he has opened up drilling in the gulf coast again. In at least one of these addresses that he made, that's what he has said.

But when you look at the permits, it is a different story. They say they are opening up permits again after the BP spill; but we have lost a lot of deepwater rigs to other parts of the oil-developing world, including outside the Western Hemisphere. The industry tells me that once you lose a big rig from a location, it takes about 4\1/2\ years to transition it back into the gulf coast again. That has happened to rig after rig down off of the gulf coast.

The announcement that this is the most oil that we have produced or most petroleum that we have produced domestically in 8 years may be true. I don't know anyone else that knew those numbers in this Chamber either. And I am wondering how they defined it, how they quantified it.

In any case, we have a lot of oil that is being produced up in the Bakken region of North Dakota. The reason for that is because they found the oil up there. It is on private land. The Federal Government has not as many tools to obstruct the development of oil production in the Bakken region of North Dakota as they might have in 75 percent of the Federal property that the President addressed last night.

I don't know that any of us believe that he is serious about wanting to develop American energy, especially American petroleum energy. If he were serious about it, why would he not direct the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton--whom he spoke kindly of last night--why would he not direct her to sign the agreement with Canada so that we could go ahead and build the Keystone XL pipeline? The only Federal procedural obstruction left in the way is the permit that is the agreement between Canada and the United States. All that is required to do is to drop that last section of pipe in place right there at the 49th parallel, at the border of the United States and Canada. The rest of that is all green light.

And so if it weren't for the fear that the billions that would be invested for a real return--not to mention the 100,000 jobs that would be created, if you look at the iterations that come forth from not just the construction of the pipeline but the operation of and the economic development that flows from it, 100,000 jobs. But his speech last night was about jobs, and we can't have the 20,000 jobs instantaneously lit up by the Keystone XL pipeline or the additional 80,000 jobs that flow from the economic development from the Keystone XL pipeline. Why? Not because there is a legitimate environmental concern. There is not one left. Not because, as the President said, he needs more time to study it. There has been 3 years to study it.

Think about how this works if you're the President of the United States. You're constantly barraged with decisions that must be made, and you have set up a network, a pyramid of advisors that filter that. You're only dealing with the most difficult problems that there are. Your subordinates take care of all the other decisions. No one--no matter how smart, no matter how quick--really has the mental space to deal with all of the things that go on here in the United States of America. It is humanly impossible. The President has a series of advisers. They advise him.

The President has said, I haven't had time to study the Keystone XL pipeline. The President of the United States is never going to have time to study all of the nuances that have to do with all of the components of the

Keystone XL pipeline. Hardly any Member of Congress could dedicate a career to know all the things there are to know about the Keystone XL pipeline. It isn't how we make decisions in the real world. It isn't how the President makes decisions in the real world.

What if the Iranians launched a nuke and it was in the air? Would the President say, ``I don't have time to make a decision''? I would like to think not.

I'd like to believe, Mr. Speaker, that the President would make that decision in a split-second heartbeat. In fact, I'd like to believe he had that delegated so there could be instantaneous action and a response, and we could shoot that missile down before it could get over the continental United States and be within the cone of its target. I'd like to think that would happen.

I'd like to think the President had fail-safe systems in place to protect us for national defense. And I'd like to think that he has a system in place where he can trust his advisers to look at something that is conceptually like the Keystone XL pipeline and be able to say, Mr. President, we've studied this for 3 years--if I'm listening to that briefing, it's already cleared a lot for me at that point, and ``what have you found out?'' would be my question if I had to ask it. And the answer would be, there's no environmental risk. Zero.

We have tens of thousands of miles of pipeline that pump a lot of things more toxic than crude oil through it underneath the ground of the United States of America, and the average number of problems we have that I hear about is zero. And so if we had had spills from an oil pipeline, I guarantee you the environmental extremists would have let us know, and they would have embellished it to the point where everybody in America would know about how horrible it might be if one of those pipelines got a crack in it and some oil seeped out.

But instead, environmental extremists come with this argument. My gosh, it goes over the Ogallala Aquifer. It's an important aquifer, a wonderful, freshwater aquifer. They pump water out of it to irrigate and water cattle and people. That's all true.

But also, it's true that there are hundreds of miles of pipeline that run over the top of the Ogallala Aquifer now, and some of them have things in it that are less digestible than the petroleum that's coming out of the oil sands in Northern Alberta. So I don't have heartburn over that because we have already established we can build pipelines effectively and we can build them safely, with a very, very, very minimal risk of any spills. Statistically it's almost zero.

And by the way, Mr. Speaker, I'm not just speaking as someone who has an opinion, having read a briefing document put together by someone else. I'm actually a guy who's gone out and worked on a pipeline, built pipelines. I've been down in the ditch, I've been up on the bank. I've been a swamper on a bending crew. I've been a welding helper. I've built pipelines in Kansas, I've built them in Iowa, and I understand the mechanics of it, and I understand the system. I understand the labor structure, the business component of it.

And by the way, I'd say this to the Keystone XL pipeline people. Let's do this. Let's take the risk. There's a lot of money invested now anyway. This country needs to move forward. This pipeline will be built. It'll either be built with the approval of this President, or it'll be built after the disapproval of the American people elects us a new President.

So why wouldn't we just take this risk and move this ball down the field a little ways, start that investment and build this pipeline in the United States, build all of it that's appropriate. The only thing that can't be done is you can't cross the 49th parallel. You can come down from Canada right up to that line. We don't know how wide our border is. You know, it's infinitely narrow, at least in theory. But let's say a 20-foot section of pipe--that's what I'd leave out.

Build it down from Canada, stop 10 feet from the 49th parallel, take the GPS locator out there, drive a stake in the middle at the border. Step over to the other side. Oh, wait a minute. Bring your passport, then step over to the other side, and start 10 feet south of the 49th parallel and build that pipeline all the way down to the Gulf Coast.

Now we have it all built, except for 20 feet, and we've done it all within the law, all within the regulations. Everything else is all cleared and wide open. That 20-foot section of pipe can sit there then on the spoil pile, can just sit there, and we can look at that for a while. Let's set up a Web cam and a Web site, and then all the American people and everybody around the world, including the oil sheikhs and the oil cartels and those tyrants that are rich with oil money that are getting more and more belligerent in proportion to the oil price, they can watch too on the Web cam, on the Web site, as that piece of pipe 20 feet long sits there waiting for the President to let Hillary Clinton sign the agreement with Canada so that 20-foot section of pipe could be set in place and welded, and then we could open up the valve and send that oil down to the refineries. And oh, what a breath of economic fresh air that would be.

Mr. Speaker, that's what should be done, and with the Web site and the Web camera watching this still piece of pipe sitting there on the spoil pile right at the 49th parallel, what we need to have also is a little counter on there; that is, how many days they've stalled, how long does he have to think about it now, and how much money is being lost and how many jobs are being lost, three little counters there on that Web site, along with the Web cam shot of the still photo of--well, we can make it a video, can't we--of the section of pipe 20 feet long that's sitting there, 10 feet of it to go in Canada, 10 in the United States.

By the way, somebody's going to sign that permit some day, sooner rather than later, whether it is the new Secretary of State that will be appointed by the successor to Barack Obama, or whether it's Hillary Clinton that might sign that agreement.

I'm standing here, Mr. Speaker, saying this will happen. The Keystone XL pipeline will be built. The American people support it. They know it's environmentally safe and sound. The labor unions want it. There is a tugging of war going on within the political support base for the President, and he found himself in a situation where he had to decide between environmental extremists, a very strong base for him, or the labor unions, another strong base for him. He essentially said to America, I'm making a political decision here, and I'm going to go with my environmental extremist friends, and the labor unions are going to have to just swallow this one for a while. That's the answer.

He told us he didn't have time to study, and Congress said you shall come back with an answer within 60 days of whether this is an economic security risk for the United States, this pipeline, whether it needs to be built for economic security reasons or not, national security reasons or not.

Twenty-eight days into the 60 days that he had to study--now, remember, he had all of those 3 years to study like everybody else did, and all of those advisers to synthesize this for him, boil it down and give him one or two or three points, all he really needed to know. But instead, he opted to jump the gun, go only 28 days into the 60-day period of time he had and then say, I didn't have time. How would that be?

What if he had to go out and run a race that was 30 or say 60 laps long, and you run that race for 28 of the 60 laps, and then you go, well, I didn't have time to finish the race so I'm quitting now. Cut this thing off, shut it down.

We know the difference. The American people, Mr. Speaker, know the difference between reasons and excuses. The President has given the lamest of excuses. No thinking person in the country believes that it was a reason that he didn't have time to study the Keystone XL pipeline.

It will be built. We need to build it all within the United States and within Canada, leave out that 20-foot section. For the people that might want to set it as a 50-foot section or a 10-foot section, I'm good with all that. I'm not going to quibble.

I'll just tell you here's what I'll do personally, if you'll let me. I'll go up there and swing that section of pipe into place myself, and I'll go down there and grab the welder, and I'll weld it in place myself. I'll weld my initials

on that pipe, too, while I'm there and the date, and that date and the time will coincide with the last date and time that will be on the Web site that will be ticker tape rolling through, telling us how much money it's costing not to complete that Keystone XL pipeline, how many days it's been, how many jobs it's cost, and this economic development piece.

So a President that comes to the floor and says last night, I'm for all-of-the-above energy policy, well, let's see. Except for the Keystone XL pipeline, except for drilling offshore, if that means actually issuing permits, except for this mystery that how much public lands he's going to hold off of the production. I think we ought to drill all the nonnational park public lands where there's oil. We don't know how much oil there is in the United States. We haven't been able to examine it. We have not committed the resources to do the inventory. We used to have an inventory that there were 406 trillion cubic feet of natural gas available in the United States. We know that number's a lot higher than that now. We've learned how to develop it.

When we look at the fracking technology, that's another thing that the President didn't speak to last night. But if he's for all of the above, the EPA should not be turning over every stone, looking at every geological nook and cranny trying to come up with a way to block fracking, the fracking technology that's opened up so much energy to this country, developed by Americans. We have about 1.2 million utilizations of fracking, and now the EPA has found some elements that could have been potentially used in fracking in a shallow water location someplace in Wyoming that they say could have actually come from a fracking utilization in a well somewhere. They've not tied it together; they just run that red herring up the flagpole, and now the environmentalists can hyperventilate and they can try to find another way to shut down energy production in America.

Why? Mr. Speaker, what's going through the fixed goals of these people. And to the American people, why do they have patience with that kind of thinking, the effort that goes after the economic development efforts in the United States? What's going on?

And here's what's behind it. The President alluded to that last night, too, come to think of it. He said he doesn't think the votes are in this Congress to pass cap-and-tax. Oh, wait a minute. I might have amended the President's quote a little bit, Mr. Speaker. So I'd back up just a little and say he didn't think the votes were here to pass his proposal or his version in his speech last night of cap-and-trade.

No, they aren't. They aren't because the American people have wised up and so have a lot of Members of Congress. And we have 89 new freshman Republicans in this place, many of them the result of what happens when you try to advance bad policies through this Congress.

So the votes aren't there for cap-and-tax, that's true. The EPA is looking to implement it by order of the President, and his public statement that they could implement and promulgate rules and end up with the same thing as cap-and-tax. So underneath that is the almost religious belief by environmental extremists that if you burn petroleum products and these hydrocarbons release into the atmosphere CO2--and it does, by the way. I can concede that point, the CO2 in the atmosphere--they believe that is the cause of global warming.

Now, first you have to come to a conclusion that global warming is taking place, and then you have to come to the conclusion that it's an unnatural global warming taking place caused by activity of man. Then you have to conclude the activity of man that causes it is the release and suspension of CO2 into the atmosphere.

So I listened to all of that, and I say there's a tough equation to make. And it was really hard for the people in the University of East Anglia and Penn State, Michael Mann and some of those other people to make that case. They had to fabricate, remember? Mr. Speaker, they had to fabricate the case for the actual data that would support even that the Earth was getting warmer, let alone the calculations that it's being caused by CO2 suspended in the atmosphere, let alone that that CO2 is sourced from industry, let alone that that industry is primarily U.S. industry.

So I just ask a few--you might call them dumb--questions, Mr. Speaker. I might call them simple questions, the basic questions that I sometimes find out nobody asks. Everybody is a specialist nowadays, and they only deal with a component of the overall picture. They don't look at the big picture, be it generalist, they say wait a minute, arrange this all for me so a logical rational deductive mind can come to a conclusion, do that first and then we'll get to the details.

And so the physicists deal with the formulae that are handed to them by the meteorologists; and the data, it comes from other places. They accept what comes to them, and they work within their zone. And then who picks up the whole picture? I don't know.

So I just ask this question: tell me if CO2 is suspended into the atmosphere by U.S. industry, is the cause of the theory that global warming exists, then would you tell me how much CO2 is in the atmosphere from the U.S. industry? Because they propose they are going to cut it by one-seventeenth each year until the year 2050.

So if they know the formula that's going to turn down the Earth's thermostat--and, by the way, I spent a lot of my life cold, so I'm not sure that that's a good idea--but I do know that on their comparison chart they have a whole list of bads on one side of the ledger and no list of goods, good things that might happen from a warmer Earth.

So I look at this and I say, all right, so show me, I want to know how much atmosphere has the gravity of the Earth attracted throughout all this time of it orbiting around the Sun and floating through the galaxy. So we get this answer back: it's not a disputed number. The gravity is pulling it so many metric tons. I don't have the number committed to memory, Mr. Speaker, but that is okay. So, fine.

Now we know how much atmosphere there is. Now I'd like to know how much of that atmosphere is CO2 suspended in it as a result of the cumulative effect of U.S. industry since the beginning of the dawn of the industrial revolution. So that calculated out to be, when we did this, 205 years of industrial revolution.

So we add this all up. I said, now, take all of this atmosphere of the Earth, draw it in a circle for me, two sheets of drywall, so to speak, an 8-foot diameter circle, a little bit higher in my hand all the way around. That's the size of the Earth's atmosphere in your pie chart.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I'd ask, think about it. How big a circle would you draw in the middle of that 8-foot diameter circle in order to demonstrate the total volume of the CO2 that's suspended in the Earth's atmosphere, a cumulative effect for 205 years of the industrial revolution, this thing that we're going to reduce by one- seventeenth of its emissions each year? By the way, that's one- seventeenth of one-two hundred and fifth the first year. We're going to adjust that, and we're going to use that to turn the Earth's thermostat down.

How big is that circle of CO2 suspended in the atmosphere, 8-foot circle is all the atmosphere? Mr. Speaker, I'm not going to put you on the spot, but I'll just say, here's the answer. One might imagine that it's a 4-foot circle of CO2 suspended or something that could really impact the Earth's temperature.

Well, it's not. It is .56, Mr. Speaker, just a little over a half an inch in diameter. That's the size of the CO2 that's suspended in the Earth's atmosphere, the cumulative effect for 205 years of U.S. industry, some of those times that we were belching a lot of the smoke out into the atmosphere from burning raw coal in ways that aren't nearly as clean as they are now.

So I looked at that and I thought, are you kidding me. An 8-foot circle is the Earth's atmosphere, and we're going to take this .56 circle of all the CO2 that's in there from the U.S., and we're going to reduce that by one-seventeenth, which is actually one- seventeenth of the 205 years that it has accumulated, remember, and we're going to do that for the next 50 years and dial the Earth's temperature down?

What utter arrogance to think that we could do that. Haven't the physicists looked at this, also? I don't think they have.

Then I go back and--see, I'm a generalist, so go across some other studies, Mr. Speaker. I found a book called ``Human Universals,'' and it's written by a Professor Brown from the University of California at Berkeley. I don't usually go there to find my enlightened authors, but he's the only one I could find that actually has written a book on human universals.

What are the common denominators of humanity? What do you see in human beings that has been true since the beginning of time, the first civilization? What did Adam and Eve do, and what did every generation of humanity do that was common to them then that's common to us now and common to every generation across all cultures, civilizations, continents and tribes?

There are a list of about 123 things in his book, and he explains almost all of them. But one of them, Mr. Speaker, this human universal is every generation of man has tried to not just worship the weather, or was affected by the weather. Every generation of man has tried to change the weather, to change the weather. You know, they sacrificed virgins down in Central America and sometimes ripped their heart out and threw them down in the pit, and that was going to change the weather and get it to rain or not rain, as the situation called for.

I just wonder, Mr. Speaker, if this cap-and-tax is not the modern version of the rain dance. And the weather is probably not going to change because we argue in here--and it's probably not going to change because we change the emissions. I think we should, though, put our factories together and control our emissions and have the cleanest atmosphere we can have because it's good for the air we breathe.

But I think it's utter arrogance to believe we're going to adjust the Earth's thermostat with the methodology that we have here. We do know the methodology of cap-and-tax that was advocated by the President last night is a methodology that will transfer our wealth in our industry to countries that care a lot less about the atmosphere, which is my point, Mr. Speaker.

I didn't really intend to go down that path, but I thought it was important to bring it up, and I make another point that came to my attention last night, and it was in the very early part of the President's speech. He spoke of this being the first time in two decades that Osama bin Laden doesn't threaten the American people, a very good thing. I give the President maximum kudos for that and the SEALs, of course. It was the right decision, it was the right order, and it was the right result, a very good thing.

But he went on to say--and, by the way, he delivered that in a subtle fashion that was becoming of the President of the United States in a speech he gave last night--but he went on to say the Taliban's momentum has been broken. I disagree, to this extent: the Taliban's momentum has shifted from military tactical to political.

They have a lot of political momentum. It's not been broken. Their political momentum has been accelerated, Mr. Speaker. I would make this point that if we look at the country of Afghanistan and look back through its history, starting at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties--well, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance, the mujahedin, many of them at the time, took on the Russians and fought them through that decade with the help of Charlie Wilson and at least one Member in this Congress seated today, the help from U.S. missiles that took out Russian helicopters.

But the tenacity of the Northern Alliance today, the tribes from the northern part of Afghanistan that took on, that took on the Russians and drove the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance leaders today, the men who mounted horseback and then themselves led the cavalry charge on horseback and attacked Russian tanks with AK-47s in their hands, these courageous men are the men that drove the Russians out of Afghanistan and, at that point, there was a power vacuum.

The Taliban filled up Afghanistan, and we remember what they did. They blew up the Buddhist temples, and they drove the life expectancy of a woman down. The only country in the world to have a lower life expectancy for women than men was Afghanistan. They treated them horribly. Afghanistan was digressing back to the Stone Age. It was a fertile area for al Qaeda training camps. We got hit on September 11. The United States went in to help them with Special Forces. The Northern Alliance rose up again and, with our help, drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan. Then they handed over their heavy weapons and embraced the constitution that was proposed by the United States State Department, accepting that we would look out for their political interests.

And what do they have?

These warriors, who defeated the Russians and the Taliban, who lost their political influence because they trusted the constitution to represent them and who gave up their heavy weapons, are now watching the White House and President Karzai negotiate with the Taliban.

The Taliban's momentum has not been broken. It has been transitioned into political power, and they are looking today to hand political power over to the Taliban in Afghanistan so that the Afghanistan Government will reflect the wishes of the Taliban and less reflect the wishes of the Northern Alliance.

Mr. Speaker, I would inquire as to how much time I might have remaining.

So I will take 10 seconds to thank you for your attention and for the opportunity to address you. I appreciate that privilege.

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 12 o'clock and 11 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Friday, January 27, 2012, at 11 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 947 I was detained while attempting to reach the house floor to cast my vote.

Had I been present, I would have voted, ``yea.''