Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I was unable to vote on July 23, 2018, for travel restrictions due to inclement weather. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows:

``Yes'' on rollcall No. 366.

``Yes'' on rollcall No. 367.

Mr. Chair, I missed a rollcall vote on June 28, 2018 for having to briefly leave the House floor. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes'' on rollcall No. 308.

Amendment No. 15 Offered by Ms. Clark of Massachusetts

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the House of Representatives and take up a topic that I have been hearing about here for some time.

It seems as though the Nation is wrapped up in an immigration discussion again. We seem to peak out on our peak concern of immigration issues a couple of times a decade, and a lot of the same topics are debated over and over again.

I have been listening to the minority here for some time, a full hour, I believe, and a number of things come to mind that don't seem to match up the same from my perspective as theirs, and one of them is, you know, the discussion about separating families.

I have made multiple, multiple trips down to the border. I have traveled most of the miles of the border. I can't say definitively that I have traveled them all--I don't know if anyone has--but I have flown a lot of it, driven a lot of it, walked a fair amount of it, ridden with the Border Patrol sometimes for days on end, and sat down at night and listened in the darkness at some of the most dangerous crossings there are as illegal aliens come through the fence and over the border.

I have been there as part of the arrests of the drug smuggling that comes through our border. I have seen MS-13 be among those that we arrested for smuggling drugs into the United States of America.

I have watched as we paroled into the United States, I will say, the casualties from the bar fights on the Mexican side of the border and the knifings that have taken place there, and I have visited some of those folks in the hospital.

I have met and discussed with the hospital officials the cost to them for funding the medical care for people who are not only not Americans, they are not American citizens. They are not American green card holders. They aren't even illegal aliens in America. They are paroled into America for medical care out of the compassion and the sympathy of our hearts.

So to hear the discussion about how cruel we are, how mean we are, how

heartless we are, some of these phrases--I wrote a couple of them down, Mr. Speaker. Apparently, I did so on a different piece of paper.

However, here is one, ``tore his daughter out of his arms,'' speaking of a father and a daughter. We just heard that a little bit ago, Mr. Speaker.

``Tore his daughter out of his arms''; ``babies separated from their parents, some at 8 months, some at 11 months''; ``it is a disaster''; ``it is cruel''; it is dangerous''; ``this is child abuse''--these are the things that I am listening to.

Well, I took the trouble to go and to visit those locations, and I am thinking in particular of McAllen, Texas, in the Brownsville area, where we have multiple locations of transfer homes for these children. Most of them are unaccompanied alien children who have come into America on their own, and they are older than they are described to be, and some of them are older than they say they are.

In fact, I see some of these juveniles in the juvenile cell at the Border Patrol, and those folks that are under 18, presumably, with a little gray in their beard. That is a little bit of a giveaway. You would think that they might at least shave so that doesn't show up. But they are not the way they are characterized to be.

As I stand on the border and go into these locations, the first one, I think, of focus and attention would be going into the locations where the unaccompanied alien children are housed. One of the first locations that they set up when the largest flood came into the United States about 3 years ago was a huge warehouse in McAllen, Texas.

In that huge warehouse, they moved in there and they went to work. In a matter of 17 days, Mr. Speaker, they cleaned everything out of that warehouse, squared it away, washed it down, scrubbed it down, wired it, and put in a full air-conditioning system along with chain link barriers in there that set it off in kind of like partitions for large rooms.

You have to do that, because when you have several hundred or even several thousand youth that you have to take care of, you can't leave the boys and the girls together. You have got to separate them to a degree by age, and they did that.

So they had them managed in that fashion, the younger boys in this area, little bit older boys in this area, the more older boys in this area, and the same with the girls; keep the boys and the girls separated except for certain activities such as the outdoor recreation that they had.

So people say, well, that is cruel, because they saw--this all got started because we saw a picture on the internet of a little boy standing behind a chain link fence, and it was advertised that that little boy, Mr. Speaker, was in a cage, that we had been putting these unaccompanied alien children in cages. Well, no. It was a huge warehouse, an air-conditioned warehouse.

You can stand any child in a schoolyard--that is the same kind of fence that is in the schools all over America, all over the world so far as I know, chain link fencing. You could stand a little boy or a little girl behind that chain link fencing in the corner and take a picture of them and contend that they were in a cage.

It is not a cage. It was a large divided area. And some of those areas were large enough that they were playing soccer in them.

So when these kids come in, they get a shower. They get cleaned up. They get medical care. They get a medical examination to see if they are carrying any disease, if they have any injuries, if they need any medical treatment of any kind, and they will square them away with any medical treatment that they need. They get a fresh change of clothes.

When they go in, they get three squares a day. They get a mattress to sleep on that is about three or four times more comfortable than a sleeping bag. It is not a fancy four-poster bed, but it is a warm, comfortable place to sleep. They get their own blankets, their own coverage that way. And they are managed all the time. They have the things that they need.

Somebody said to me: Well, but they only get 2 hours of fresh air a day.

This is hot. It is hot. It is in Texas. It is hot in south Texas. They are playing soccer indoors in air-conditioning.

My kids didn't ever get to do that. My grandkids don't get to do that. I never got to do that. But that is what is going on down there.

They are not abused and they are not short of the things that they need to be taken care of. And, yes, there are counselors there to talk with them.

And by the way, the most recent trip was last October. It was a bipartisan trip. I have heard one of the Members who was on that trip from the other party complaining about how badly we were treating these kids, but it wasn't her concern when we were down there asking questions of the people who were taking care of them.

That Member did ask a lot of questions, was concerned about their care, but not alarmed because these children didn't have their mother or their father with them. That wasn't an issue that was raised at all.

So all of a sudden it becomes the subject du jour that they ``tore his daughter out of his arms.'' Well, there is a way to characterize that, isn't it? I don't think that actually fits at all. I think if you had the video, you couldn't characterize it that way.

But here is what does tear a baby from its mother, and it is called abortion. If you want to really see, Mr. Speaker, how bad that is-- nobody has got a video of what goes on in the abortion mill because it is too ghastly. But if a baby is ever torn from its mother, it is through abortion, and it doesn't seem to bother the folks on the other side of the aisle. They will rail away for days on end about 2,000 juveniles who were separated from their parents because--well, usually a parent, because the parent committed a crime.

I would submit there are more American citizens who are separated from their children because those American citizens committed crime on a daily basis than there are illegal alien mothers or fathers who are separated from their illegal alien children, because when they commit a crime, that is what happens.

So we have tens of thousands of American citizens in prison today who are separated from their sons and daughters. Usually it is the dads, not as often the moms, but that doesn't seem to bother the left either, how many of these criminal American citizens are separated, but it does bother them, apparently, because there is political hay to be made over making a big issue out of this.

The people taking care of these children down here are compassionate. They are giving gentle, loving care. We are hiring coaches to play soccer with them in the air-conditioned building, and yet they are being characterized as a cage.

Well, what shall I say? One of the largest warehouses I have seen anywhere is not a cage, but they do have dividers in there that are made out of chain link, the same thing that is used in the playgrounds, the fences around the playgrounds, Mr. Speaker.

So I think there is a lot of hyperventilation going on here and very little substance, but the President addressed this with an executive order.

And by the way, I support the policy change that he brought forth with his executive order, but it is not enough to satisfy the left. They will never be satisfied.

I have long said that if I had a magic wand--let's see if I have got one here in my pocket, a magic wand--and I would say to the left, ``You have got all the rest of the year to come up with a list of all of the things that you want and you can write these policy changes down and agree on them; and I don't care how long that list is, it can be infinity minus one, all of the things you have, and when the ball drops at Times Square in New York for the new year, I will wave the magic wand and you can have all the policy changes that you plotted up from today till December 31 at midnight,'' and if we made that deal and I agreed to all of that and this wand actually were magic, and when the ball dropped at Times Square and the new year started, I would say, ``Presto, here you go; now you have got all the things you want. We have solved all of the problems''--well, that would probably include the impeachment of Donald Trump, so I would exempt that one from the list, Mr. Speaker, but all the rest of them, here is what would happen: They would stay up all night the rest of the night whining about being cheated because we didn't give them enough time to come

up with the things they wanted to do to our country, and they would never be satisfied.

And if I required that they had to show us what they wanted America to look like once they had their globalist utopia established, they wouldn't be able to paint it, because they can't see into the future. All they want to do is tear down what is and continue to tear down what is rather than build up what is best for us. That means they are turning their back on the foundations laid down by our Founding Fathers, turning their back on constitutional issues, Mr. Speaker, turning their back and denying the very human nature components of this.

And, you know, when I see that Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, all of them have spoken for at least a measure of border security, build a wall, we can't be a sovereign nation if we don't secure our borders, all of those folks have spoken in that way 20 years ago, but not anymore--not anymore because they have decided, as a party, that they have an advantage for pouring illegal aliens into the United States of America because it picks up for them.

These illegal aliens are counted in the Census. If you noticed the hyperventilation, Mr. Speaker, that came out when the administration announced that they were going to count citizens separately in the Census, and, oh, my gosh, you would have thought that the world had come to an end as far as the Democrats were concerned, Mr. Speaker, because they are afraid that it will suppress the count of human beings. They believe that illegal aliens deserve to be represented in the United States Congress.

And by the way, they are, they are represented in the United States Congress. We have now held a couple of hearings on this. I held a hearing in the Constitution Committee that I chair just a few weeks ago. But I recall testimony from about 10 or 12 years ago that came from Steve Camarata, Dr. Steve Camarata of the Center for Immigration Studies, who testified that if we counted citizens for redistricting purposes rather than people, so then people would include legal and illegal immigrants, but noncitizens, if we only counted citizens and redistricted accordingly, then what we would have would be somewhere between 8 and 11--this is his old testimony--8 and 11 congressional districts that would move out of States like Florida, Texas, and California into States like Utah, Iowa would pick a seat back up again, and Indiana. Those States come to mind in that fashion.

But as it is, illegal aliens are counted alongside citizens. The congressional seats here are different because we are not counting citizens for reapportionment purposes; we are counting all people.

So why is it that they want to invite illegals into their cities like Los Angeles, like maybe Maxine Waters' district? Why do they want to protect them? It gives them political power. And it takes me a lot more votes to be elected or reelected in my district, because I have a low percentage of illegal aliens. And it takes a lot fewer votes if you are in a district with a high percentage, presuming that the illegal aliens are not voting. And they are voting in increasing numbers, and that has been proven, too.

So we have people that have a political gain that comes out of promoting illegal immigration. We are hearing it come out of the mouths of the people on the left time after time after time, to make a political issue out of this.

The most successful institutions over the last two centuries, Mr. Speaker, are the nation-states, the nation-states. You have to be a sovereign nation-state, and that requires a border. You have to control who comes and who goes outside of that border or inside of that border. That is what nations do.

And inside the nation-state, you have to have the rule of law. That law also covers who comes and who goes. Our Founding Fathers understood this. They wrote it into our Constitution. And they established that the Congress establishes immigration policy, because they knew they were establishing a nation-state.

The nation-states had not been established for that long or that successfully in the time that our Founding Fathers laid down the foundation for America, but they had the vision on how best to build a country. They wrote some of it in the Declaration and the rest of it in the Constitution.

Here we are, well past two centuries of terrific success, the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world. We have created a larger economy, a stronger military, a more powerful culture, more influential around the world than any country has ever seen, and it is built upon the pillars of American exceptionalism. Those pillars are described as Ronald Reagan described often for us: The shining city on the hill.

Mr. Speaker, I can see that shining city on the hill in my mind's eye, painted by President Reagan, whom I revered. But I would argue that really isn't a shining city on the hill. I would rather envision this shining city as a shining city built upon the pillars of American exceptionalism. Those pillars of American exceptionalism, the perimeter pillars around the outside edge with a central pillar in the middle that holds it all together, but around the outside edge would be a pillar for freedom of speech, a pillar for freedom of religion, a pillar for freedom of assembly, a pillar for freedom of the press. That is just the First Amendment. Another pillar for Second Amendment rights, the right to keep and bear arms so that we can protect all of our other rights. And on up the line, a pillar for property rights and the Fifth Amendment; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation. Another pillar for being tried by a jury of our peers, no double jeopardy, and on around the line.

A few other pillars along the way that aren't in the Bill of Rights, and another one would be free enterprise capitalism as our economic system that has been a foundation for the success of America. And the property rights not only that I have quoted in the Fifth Amendment, but also intellectual property rights, so that creators have a right to the proceeds of their work.

Then, as I define these pillars around the outside, the perimeter pillars in this shining city on the pillars of American exceptionalism, I would add to that, as I said, free enterprise capitalism, the dynamic economy that we have, and Judeo-Christian values that are core in the foundation. They are the founding of our country. They are the core of the moral foundation that we are, as a people. They are part of our religion, and they are part of our culture. This Nation would collapse if we ever lost them. And when they are weakened, America goes wobbly.

But all of these pillars that I have described are perimeter pillars. The central pillar of American exceptionalism, the one that we cannot and dare not sacrifice, is the rule of law. That is the central pillar that sits in the middle that anchors everything else that it sets upon and ties together.

What is happening here in this Congress, this day and these days, is a relentless effort that is eroding this essential pillar of American exceptionalism called the rule of law.

Whenever a Member gets up and argues that we should grant amnesty to illegal aliens because it makes our hearts feel good, what we are doing is desecrating these pillars of American exceptionalism and chiseling away on them and eroding them. Our job needs to be to refurbish the pillars of American exceptionalism, not erode them.

So to go back into some of these topics that are being addressed by people on the other side of the aisle and people on this side of the aisle, they continually say that it is too dangerous in these countries in Central America, so we need to get these young people out of countries like, let's say, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia, Belize, Guatemala, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominican Republic, Brazil. Get people out of there. Get young people out of there, because it is too dangerous for them. They might be killed by the gangs down there.

I recall sitting in a Judiciary Committee meeting when John Conyers was the ranking member from Detroit, and they were making that argument, that it is too dangerous in Central America for these young people, these, let's say, 13-, 14-, 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds, especially boys, to get them out of there and bring them into America.

Well, where do they put them? Right back into the inner city here, in a center of an ethnic enclave that is full of gangs.

So I said, if you think it is too dangerous for those children in Guatemala, that they should go to America, you had better not take them to Detroit, because it is more dangerous in Detroit than it is in Guatemala. It is more dangerous in Baltimore than it is in Honduras. It is more dangerous sometimes in Washington, D.C. It is more dangerous in New Orleans. It is more dangerous in St. Louis, especially East St. Louis, than it is in any of these countries down here that I have just mentioned.

But, Mr. Speaker, these countries that I mentioned, and I am going to go through it in a little more detail, these are the top 10 most violent countries in the world. There is a website called worldlifeexpectancy.com, and I have followed it for a decade or so.

So these are the most current numbers, Mr. Speaker, and I think it is important for the body to understand what is going on here. We are listening to people advocate for bringing prime gang-age young men, especially, out of these countries into America. They are coming from the most violent countries in the world, some of them going into the most violent cities in America. We know the countryside is safer than the cities, statistically at least.

So here are some numbers. The most violent country in the world right now, the one where you can have a greater expectancy of dying a violent death, is Honduras. Honduras has a 94.47 violent deaths per 100,000 rate, according to worldlifeexpectancy.com. That is Honduras.

Then El Salvador, Number two, the second most violent country in the world: 62.82 violent deaths per 100,000 reported. There have been times when El Salvador was so bad that they didn't give you a number. At least there is a number here. I don't know that I trust it, but we know it is very high.

Venezuela: 50.5 violent deaths per 100,000. That is number 3.

Number 4, it is the only one out of the top 10 that is not south of the Rio Grande, by the way: Zimbabwe, 47.41.

Now we are back to our familiar Western Hemisphere again, south of the Rio Grande: Colombia, 47 violent deaths per 100,000; Belize, 41.54 violent deaths per 100,000; Guatemala, their numbers have been a lot higher. They seem to be a little lower now, but they are still seventh highest in violent death rate in the world: 39.85 violent deaths per 100,000.

Then: Jamaica, 34.79; Trinidad and Tobago, 31.74; and number 10, Dominican Republic comes in at 31.18 violent deaths per 100,000.

Now you think, okay, what does this mean proportionally?

A few more along the way that I have here. That is Dominican Republic. Then Brazil, 29.50.

So what this tells you is nine of the top 10 most violent countries in the world are south of the Rio Grande River, and 10 of the top 11 most violent countries in the world are south of the Rio Grande.

But one of them is not Mexico. Mexico doesn't come up on this until you get to number 19, and it is easy to remember. Mexico is the 19th most violent country in the world, and they have 19 violent deaths per 100,000.

So if we wanted to enhance violence in America, if we wanted more violence instead of less, one of the things that you would do is you could go look at the most violent countries in the world, try to pick the most violent demographics out of there, young men, and bring them into America if you wanted to ensure that there would be more crime in America.

That is an irrefutable equation. If you go to Honduras and you load up several thousand young men that are 15-, 16-, 17-, 18-, 19-, and 20- years-old, and you bring them in and you drop them into the inner city in Detroit or Baltimore or East St. Louis or Los Angeles, I mean, what do you expect is going to happen, Mr. Speaker? Are there going to be more murders there, or are there going to be less?

I don't think it is any question at all. There will be more murders because of this. There will be more rapes. There will be more assaults. There will be more thefts. There will be more violent crime of all kinds. There will be more drugs dealt.

By the way, some of them, in fact a lot of them, become or are already MS-13. And MS-13, are they sending people into America to expand their drug reach? We know, Mr. Speaker, that they are doing that. And why? Well, they are perpetrating violence. They are shaking down the neighborhoods. They are extracting the mordida payments out of the people around them and threatening the people around them. We know this.

They are killing Americans. I met with some of the families out of New York. One in particular had their daughter killed, just clubbed to death. One had been killed with a machete. And this is MS-13.

But the drug gangs in this country--we had the Director of the Drug Enforcement Agency, Mr. Patterson, before the Judiciary Committee here about a month ago, as I recall, and I asked him a few questions, Mr. Speaker, and it was like this:

What percentage of the illegal drugs consumed in America come from or through Mexico? The answer that he agreed to was 80 to 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America come from or through Mexico.

They are not all produced in Mexico. Some of those drugs, a lot of them, are smuggled out of China. Then they process the drugs there, and they smuggle them into the United States, because that is the most expeditious route.

Now, it is our responsibility, here in the United States, because we have the demand for illegal drugs. But that is part of it. We need to address it here on the demand side, but we also have to address it on the interdiction side, and we need to address it with regard to Mexico and points south that are part of this equation that is producing and pushing these drugs up into America, particularly fentanyl, the highly, highly dangerous drug that coming in contact with that one time can kill you, and a very small dose of it can do that.

But we have a tremendous number of people coming out of the most violent countries in the world being brought into America, and we are being told we should have sympathy for that. Those are the boys I am talking about.

I counted the numbers down there and looked at the data some time back of the unaccompanied alien children coming into America: 81 percent young males, most of them in that 14- to 16-, 17-year-old age group. But they were 81 percent males then.

If you look at the pictures, riding the Beast, that train of death, you might see 30 or 40 young men there and one or two girls or young women there. But other information that I picked up in traveling around through Central America and down in McAllen and talking to the kids in the transfer centers, I learned this, Mr. Speaker, that it went from seven different sources. These are supervisory sources that were working with these kids.

They insisted that 100 percent of the girls got birth control before they were sent from home on up across into the United States. Say the distance of that is, El Salvador to McAllen, 1,500 miles. McAllen to Minnesota another 1,500 miles, just to put it in proportion.

They would say: No, 100 percent of the girls get birth control pills. They put them on the pill. They give them plan B, the morning after part of it, and they expect that they will be raped. And the consistent message from those same seven different independent sources that didn't index with each other, that 75 percent--75 percent--of the girls who are traveling across Mexico into the United States are raped, 75 percent.

Now, it is a ghastly thought to think that anybody would take their daughter or granddaughter and give them birth control pills and send them on a journey like that believing that somehow they would send them into America, knowing they were going to be raped before they got here as they came across Mexico. That is a piece of this equation that doesn't get stated very often, Mr. Speaker, and that is as close to known facts as we can get. That is field research done by this Member and another Member of Congress, and they are the right kind of witnesses.

So I have described the violence. I have described the drugs. I have described the types of victims that we have, 50,000 of them a month for the last 3 months in America.

That turns out to be 600,000 illegals coming into America that we would be interdicting, not counting those that get past us that we don't see; 600,000 will be the target number, I guess I will say, the predicted number for the calendar year of 2018.

In addition to this, as we talked about, Mr. Speaker, ripping children from their father's arms or from their mother's arms, and I said what really does that is abortion, ripping a child from her mother in that fashion.

We bring into this country between 1 and 1.2 million legal immigrants each year. Let's just round that to a million, Mr. Speaker, a simple number. Well, that happens to be identical to the number of abortions in America each year: 1 million.

So, since 1973 and Roe v. Wade, there have been 60 million babies aborted in this country, and about the same number of legal immigrants that have come into America.

It just came into my head a couple days ago as I was listening to someone speak, Mr. Speaker, that, for every time a legal immigrant comes into America, we abort an American baby here. And that baby goes, I guess I could say as gently, into the disposal at Planned Parenthood. That baby is destroyed for every individual that comes into America legally.

And 600,000 illegals coming into America that we have to adjudicate, and who knows how many come in that we aren't catching, that we are not adjudicating.

These American babies, these 60 million American babies are a hole in the demographics of America, and they are a heavy weight on the guilty conscience of a country--60 million babies.

And when you do the back-of-the-envelope calculation to find out what about those future mothers who were aborted, what about those future fathers who were aborted, what would they have done? How many children would they have had starting in 1973?

I did that calculation, and it is only an estimate, and I wouldn't say that there isn't a better way to come up with it, but what I came to was another number. These 60 million babies that have been aborted, roughly 30 million of them are girls. And of those 30 million girls, some of them would have had babies by now.

As you do the calculation on what the birth rate was then for those earlier years, you are looking at perhaps as many as another 60 million babies would have been born, except their mothers and presumably their fathers were aborted, too.

So someplace 60 million aborted, 60 million babies not born because their mothers were aborted. Somewhere around 100 million to 120 million Americans are missing as a result of abortion.

And we are wrapped around the axle because of 2,000 children who were temporarily separated from their parents because their parents committed the crime, at least the crime of unlawful entry into the United States of America, if not other crimes like document fraud and whatnot.

But all of the criminals who are put into prison who are American citizens are separated from their children, and I am listening to the angst over here that I think is unnecessary hyperventilation, Mr. Speaker.

I think of a mother who was separated from her daughter and how I came to learn that. About, roughly, a decade ago, a little more than a decade ago, I guess, I went over to Iraq to visit our troops over there, and I flew into Kuwait City, the airstrip there.

I was met by a young National Guard captain. It was the middle of the night, about 1, 1:30 in the morning, and she met me and escorted me over to Camp Arifjan, which was where the 1168th Transportation Unit was based as they were hauling equipment and manpower into Baghdad over land from there, a fairly dangerous run.

As the captain took me to visit the troops--and I spoke to a good- size group of the troops. But then afterwards, she had six of her troops who had personal issues that they couldn't solve while they were deployed in Iraq, and I sat town with each of those troops individually, took notes, and put together a bit of a plan of action of what I could do to try to help.

I did follow through and did what I could do. I think I helped some of them. I don't know that I solved it all. She said I did, but I didn't think so, Mr. Speaker.

In any case, I learned this young captain had a 4-year-old daughter who was home, and this young captain was separated from her daughter at the age of 4. So I promised, since the girl was being taken care of by her father and the message was that things were okay at home, I promised I would go check on her daughter because sometimes that Mr. Mom stuff doesn't get confessed over the email when Mom is deployed in the war zone.

So when I got back to the States, I traveled back to Iowa and set up an appointment and went down to visit that home. And there is this little 4-year-old girl, and she had long blonde hair with reddish highlights in it, stovepipe curls, went all the way down to her waist in the back, Mr. Speaker.

I sat there and talked to her father. I talked to this 4-year-old girl, and she had matching dimples, the cutest thing, right out of Norman Rockwell, and an energy, sparkle in her eye, a smile on her face, the laughter in her voice.

Kids are the source of all joy, by the way.

I remember her trucking around the living room and out to the kitchen and running around and full of energy, but also full of love. And it broke my heart to see that little 4-year-old girl and think about her mother being deployed in a war zone, missing out on 13 months of some of the most joyful time you can have raising a child.

That child was separated from her mother, and that child's mother's name is, today, Senator Joni Ernst, and her daughter is Libby Lou, who is now going to the Military Academy.

But we have people who are separated from their families on a consistent basis. Everybody who is deployed who has children is separated from those children for long periods of time, a lot longer than they are separated from their children when they sneak into America and break our laws.

I honor them. I respect them. I revere them. That has touched my heart for all these years, having seen that, and I have never heard a word of complaint out of either the mother or the daughter or the dad, for that matter, Mr. Speaker.

So I want to remind the body that this separation is not unique to criminal aliens. It is just that it seems that our sympathy is a bit misplaced when we should be thinking about the separation and thankful that they are willing to endure it, the separation that takes place from our Army, our Navy, our airmen, and our marines, and all of those who are serving and protecting our God-given liberty and what that means to our country.

So I think of another time that there was a severe personal problem of a young man who was serving over in the middle of Iraq at Camp Victory. I won't describe that personal problem, Mr. Speaker, but I will just say that it broke my heart to know what was going on also in his personal life.

As I went over to visit him and his unit and present a flag to them that had been flown over the Capitol in his unit's honor, I mentioned to him how difficult it must be. He looked me in the eye with a stoic, patriotic look and he said: It is manageable, sir.

Well, he served his duty and served his time and he served our country nobly and honorably and demonstrated that it was manageable.

This difficulty on the southern border is manageable, too, but we have high principles that we must restore. And the highest principle we must restore is respect for the rule of law.

When Ronald Reagan signed the Amnesty Act in 1986, I watched this debate take place here in the House and in the Senate. And, no, I didn't have C-SPAN then. I watched the text of it and I read the stories on it, and I listened to the newspaper stories as they went on.

And when it passed the House and passed the Senate, the Amnesty Act of 1986 that was supposed to be for a million people, there was supposed to never be another amnesty again so long as this country should live, and they would enforce the law and secure the border at every point since that time. But I didn't believe it, of course, and I was right not to believe it.

When the bill got to President Reagan's desk, President Reagan signed the bill with the advice of most, if not all, of his Cabinet. And most, if not all,

of those who advised him to sign it have regretted that advice because they saw that it was a big mistake. And Ronald Reagan regretted that signature on the 1986 Amnesty Act as well.

But we are here dealing with the problems created by that Amnesty Act because we didn't restore the respect for the rule of law. The right thing to do in 1986 would have been to continue the kind of enforcement that Dwight Eisenhower was utilizing during his terms of office.

Here is some of the data that I happen to have in my pocket, Mr. Speaker.

Dwight Eisenhower mounted a border enforcement program in 1954. In 1954, 1,074,277 illegal aliens were verified to voluntarily return to their home country. 1,074,277 voluntary returns in 1954 alone, that many years ago before the problem was as big as it is today.

Throughout the years of the Eisenhower administration, they managed to deport 250,000 each year, or more. And they managed to do that, Mr. Speaker, with only 800 Border Patrol agents--800 agents. Today, we have 21,000 Border Patrol agents. They had 800.

I divided that out to see what the ratio is.

For every Border Patrol Agent that Dwight Eisenhower had, we have got 26.1 now, and we are deporting--let's see. Last year, 2017, we deported 226,000.

So they got 26 times, more than 26 times better performance, better results, back in the fifties with only 800 Border Patrol agents for 2,000 miles along the southern border, where now it is 21,000. Twenty- six Border Patrol agents for every one they had then, and we are deporting fewer people than they did then.

And by the way, that 1,074,000 voluntary returns, we can set up policy that brings about a lot of that as well.

But ever since Dwight Eisenhower, each President that has succeeded Dwight Eisenhower diminished our enforcement worse and worse and worse and less and less and less. So from Dwight Eisenhower, we ratcheted downhill, and there were fewer that were deported and less border security under Kennedy, under Johnson, under Nixon, and on down the line.

When we got to Bill Clinton, I was very concerned that he was not paying attention to his responsibility to take care that the laws were faithfully executed. When I look back on what he had to say at the time, he was at least giving lip service to it, unlike Hillary Clinton, who essentially came out and said we are going to have to give people citizenship, reward them with citizenship for breaking our laws.

I recall a time here in about 2004 or 2005 when the immigration debate was ramping up again and they had bussed in thousands--many of them illegal aliens, I presume--out here on the west lawn. A lot of them had on matching white T-shirts. I don't remember what they said.

Senator Teddy Kennedy was active then. He went out to speak to them from a sound system and a podium, and he was speaking through an interpreter, a Spanish language interpreter. But I recall the language that he used and how he said it, because it caught me as the clarion call, and it was this.

He said to those thousands, and I believe actually tens of thousands, he said, ``Some say report to be deported. I say, report to become an American citizen.''

Thirteen or 14 years ago, that message was uttered out here on the west lawn, Mr. Speaker, and that message was calling people into America and promising them citizenship. And this grinds on, the same old story. Erode the rule of law, sacrifice the rule of law, discount and diminish and dilute citizenship, and take away a measure of the influence of citizens and hand it over to people that have demonstrated their contempt for our laws.

But just a little bit before that, I believe it was the year before-- I remember the day, it was January 6, 2004--Karl Rove had prepared a speech for George W. Bush and it was an amnesty speech. It was one that played off of Tom Ridge's amnesty speech that he had given the December before. And they decided that they needed to, I will say, advertise to Hispanics in south Texas, because they had lost most of those counties in south Texas that are heavily Hispanic. And, of course, they are heavily Democrat as well.

I remember that discussion with Karl Rove and I said: Karl, you cannot redefine amnesty. The American people know what amnesty is. And whatever you want to say about it, if you want to say it is not amnesty if they pay a fine, it is not amnesty if they learn to speak English, it is not amnesty if they go to school, it is not amnesty if they get a job, what has that got to do with it? To grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers, a class of people, pardon them.

And if they say: Well, it is not a pardon if they have to pay a fine. Well, it is a pardon if you don't apply the penalty that exists in the law at the time they violate the law. You can't change the penalty afterwards and claim that it is not amnesty. The American people aren't going to go for that.

At least Ronald Reagan was honest. He said: I am going to sign the amnesty act, and he did. I wish he hadn't, but he did. But you can't redefine it as amnesty is a pardon for immigration lawbreakers. And what is going on here, it is coupled with the reward of the objective of their crime.

When you hand someone the objective of the crime that they committed and you say it is not amnesty--I mean, there are a lot of different ways to describe this, but I think the simplest way is just to say that if someone robs a bank and they step out on the steps of the bank with the loot and you stop them. Then someone else robs a bank; and someone else robs a bank; and finally, you decide, this is such a popular activity, we can't enforce the law anymore. We would like to have you stop, but since we are going to let you all know we are not going to enforce the law, there are going to be more bank robbers. And, by the way, all of you get to keep the loot.

That is what this amnesty is and the American people know it, and there is outrage that is building. The clouds are not just on the horizon. They are sweeping toward the city. And if we are not going to finish this debate and shoot down that last amnesty bill, then I will tell you that the clouds will be hanging over this city next week on Monday and Tuesday when we come back to town.

The American people are going to be more and more outraged every day because they are just figuring out what is going on. They are being told that these bills aren't amnesty.

I mean, there was a Member down in conference that said the word amnesty and some folks hissed at him because they didn't think you should call it that.

Well, it clearly is amnesty. You can look it up in Black's Law Dictionary. You can take my word for it.

But Members have been going through all kinds of mental gyrations to try to find a way to rationalize the vote that they want to put up because they think that they are politically in a safer place to vote for amnesty, but they know they can't admit it.

I had a Member come to me and he said: ``What is the definition of amnesty? I have heard three different definitions in the last hour.'' And I said: ``Well, what is happening there is, they are rationalizing their vote and they are trying to redefine amnesty so they don't have to confess that they are voting for amnesty.''

Well, I am not going to have to confess that I voted for amnesty because I am not going to vote for amnesty. But I am going to hold people to a real definition of amnesty.

And by the way, we ought to think about people who have been separated from their families permanently.

How about the angel moms and the angel dads who had a son or daughter that were killed by an illegal alien, especially those that have been turned loose after they have been encountered by law enforcement.

It happens every day in this country, Mr. Speaker, and it happens multiple times a day. This country is dotted with the graves of those who have been killed at the hand of criminal aliens in this country, many of whom had been encountered by law enforcement and turned loose.

One of those I think of is Jamiel Shaw, whom I got to know here as a witness in a hearing that I had called years ago. His son, a high school football star, a stellar athlete with a great future ahead of him, was killed in the

neighborhood just a couple of blocks down the street from Jamiel's home. His son, 17-year-old, Jazz was his nickname, Jazz Shaw, killed by an illegal alien who had been deported.

Part of his gang's mission was he had to kill a Black guy. He was killed because of his race. He was murdered because of gangs. And he was murdered by an illegal alien.

And Jamiel Shaw has the courage these years after to step up every day that need be and tell us how painful it is and what kind of an obscene mistake it is to reward lawbreakers.

If we had enforced immigration laws, Jamiel's son, Jazz, would be alive today and he knows that. And he said over Father's Day, if you are worried about separating families, try spending your Father's Day talking to a grave like he has for the last 10 years.

That shakes me when I read that in text. Another one, Mary Ann Mendoza, her son, Brandon, a fine law enforcement officer, killed by an illegal alien driver. Sabine Durden, her son, her only child, Dominic, killed by an illegal alien, a DACA recipient. Laura Wilkerson, her son, Joshua, was tortured, murdered, and his body burned by an illegal alien.

Who can forget Kate Steinle? Her father, Jim, testified here in this Congress about what happened when she was killed by a five-times deported illegal alien.

And my constituents, my friends to this day, Michelle and Scott Root, who lost their daughter, Sarah Root, who was a perfect 4.0 student in criminal justice at Bellevue College. She had graduated the day before when she was run down on the road by an illegal alien who was on a first-name basis with his immigration attorneys, and who was bailed out of jail for $5,000. He absconded back to his home country, Honduras.

They said he was bailed out of jail before they could bury their daughter, and for less money than it took to bury their daughter. And what do they have left? They have got memories and broken hearts.

What about the four children who were killed up in Cottonwood, Minnesota, when the school bus was run off the road by an illegal alien who twice had been deported and still ran the school bus off the road. These four kids who were killed were two siblings, and then a child from each of two other families.

And some said: ``Accidents happen. It has got nothing to do with immigration.'' And I say: If we enforce our laws, they are not there to kill our youth. And if you don't agree with me, try going up to those parents and try to convince them that their children would still be dead if we had deported that individual when she was first encountered by the law.

No, we really know. We should know in our hearts and know in our conscience the real truth here, Mr. Speaker. And I think that also a piece of the real truth is: Who are these DACA recipients?

Barack Obama gave us the standard on what it took to be a DACA recipient. You had to have come in by a certain date or at a certain age, and then he closed that off at the other end. And you needed to be going to school.

So this little chart here tells us a little something. How many of them had no diploma. They might be dropouts--we can't be sure--21.9 percent. There are 817,000 of them in this database. 817,798 we are working with, Mr. Speaker.

And you can see, here are those who have no record at all. They didn't even bother to fill in the blank in their application or their renewal form on whether they had ever gone to school. Maybe they never had--that is the safest presumption--68.9 percent of them, that number is 564,000 disqualified themselves because they are not going to school. They don't attest that they ever went to school.

Even with help filling out the form, that information is not available, and it should have disqualified them. But they got their DACA permit anyway. So there is that 68.9 percent, and 21.9 percent over here that may be dropouts, but we can't be sure. So that is 179,719.

Then, we had self-reported criminals, over 3,000 of them in the first tranche that we were able to look at the numbers; 66 percent of the self-reported criminals received DACA permits. And I guess apparently a number of them committed a lot of crimes after they received their DACA permits, because when they applied for their renewals, then there was a number of well over 30,000, around 33,000, that were self-reported criminals. 94 percent of the self-reported criminals got DACA renewals.

I mean, they are honest criminals at least. They admitted they were criminals, but they were rewarded for being honest, I guess, because two-thirds of those in the beginning of the first tranche of criminals were granted DACA status. And then 94 percent, coming to 31,854 that received their renewals, even though they had committed crimes while they were DACA recipients.

Then we have 8,964 DACA recipients who would be normally, under the rules, under the Obama rules, would be disqualified because of their date of entry. They entered in too early or they entered in too late, 8,964. These are numbers that came from USCIS, by the way. I started asking for them last September and finally received these numbers a little over 2 weeks ago.

2,100 DACA recipients have no data on their nationality. You can't check that box so they should have been disqualified. 775 of them went back to their home country. They put that on their application. That should disqualify them. They can't say, through no fault of their own, that they weren't aware of what they did. If they were aware that they went home, they were aware that they snuck back in and that they violated the law again.

When I add this all up, and I have to discount that there must be duplicates in these categories, just to be fair, Mr. Speaker, but if we presume that there were no duplicates, that each time that one of these categories that would normally kick them out was an individual, but there might have been people that were criminals that also had no education.

But when I added up the rules violations here that should have disqualified some of them, out of the 817,798 that were approved, there were 789,851 application forms that were deficient and should have brought about a disqualification.

So I just did the math, a little bit more for fun than it is for a definitive number. Only 27,947 of them would qualify even as they attested to their eligibility.

These records are junk. The Obama administration put them in folders on paper, seven pages of application for each applicant, and there are around 2 million of these applications between the originals and the renewals. And of those 2 million, that is 14 million pieces of paper, they just began to electronically enter that data on November 1 of 2015, I believe that date would be.

So we have got a short, little window of these DACA recipients. But here are some other things. How good was the education they got of those who attested they had an education? So we are dealing again with 817,000--almost 818,000. Let's see.

Those who got a GED, 1,789 of them. That is two-tenths of a percent even had a GED. And high school graduates, 37,300. So there are 4.5 percent that are high school graduates. Some college credit, less than a year--so they went to college, 33,000 of those. And let's see, one or more years of college, no degree, 620 of those. So those who started college, 33,000 and change. Those who entered the second year beyond, add another 620.

But those who came with an associate's degree, 235. And these are just raw numbers, not percentages, of course. And those who have a bachelor's degree, college educated: 246 out of 817,000 have a college degree; 14 managed to achieve a master's; professional degrees, 2; doctorates, 1; doctor degree, 1.

So I have heard all this story about valedictorians, and I guess maybe that valedictorian could be that one who received the doctorate degree.

I am a little confused by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Flores), who has all of these highly educated Dreamers down there in his district. They don't show up in these applications unless maybe it is in his district where this single doctor is. These two professionals, I presume maybe they could be lawyers. I met one of those. He told me that he is a DACA lawyer. I said: That is great. Just what we need, another lawless lawyer.

So when I looked through these numbers, they don't at all paint the picture that I am hearing from these Members of Congress among Democrats or Republicans on what a DACA recipient really is and what the typical profile would be of these DACA recipients.

It is true that many of them did, according to the records, come in at a fairly young age. I actually thought that would be higher than it turned out to be. There are around 135,000 of these 817,000 who were brought in at prime gang age recruitment. The oldest one now is about 37 years old. So I presume some of them are grandparents by now.

The rule of law is hanging in the balance. It is our job to keep our oath of office, and that is to preserve, protect, and defend this Constitution of the United States, and that means defend the rule of law. If we allow it to be sacrificed here because our hearts or our politics overrule our heads, then this country will rue the day, and none of us who votes on this issue here will live to see the day that the rule of law is restored again.

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

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

I would say, first of all, I want to compliment the gentleman on the selection of his tie--the nice Washington Capitals red tie that he has on. Everybody behind me who is dressed in red and up there dressed in red, Mr. Speaker, has to be celebrating the jinx being broken and the Washington Capitals winning the Stanley Cup last night. The streets were full of people celebrating.

By the way, it was fairly calm, considering the exhilaration that drove all of that. A few people came here a little tired today, but with a big smile on their face. So a lot of happy, tired people in Washington, D.C. My congratulations goes out to them.

I came here today speak about a topic that has been essentially consuming a lot of our time here in these debates, Mr. Speaker, and that is this topic of immigration.

We had a 2-hour conference on Thursday morning from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.--it may have gone after that a little ways--to try to reach a resolution. It seems as though we got about the same kind of conclusion with our effort to reach a resolution as they did in the United States Senate when they debated on the floor of the Senate for 4 days on immigration issues, trying to get a consensus to bring any single bill out of the Senate that could get enough votes to pass. They fell short and nothing passed. That was February. I think some people have a sense of a consensus from the meeting yesterday, but I do not believe that we have anything that gets to 218 votes.

So, generally, Mr. Speaker, the conservatives and Republicans would agree with four of the five pillars that President Trump has laid out. I don't know if I will get them exactly right, but one is to build the wall. Another one is to secure the border. Another one is to end chain migration. Another one is to establish merit-based immigration, instead of having it be the chain migration that we have experienced.

I recall witnesses before the Immigration Committee years ago who testified that between 7 and 11 percent of our legal immigration in America--the legal immigration in America--only between 7 and 11 percent is based upon anything that we have control over, which presumably would be merit.

The balance of the legal immigration, then, is really not in the control of the American people or in the control of the United States Congress. It is in the control of the people who are, I will say, utilizing the current policy that we have, that we can't find the consensus to reverse. And those who are coming in the country sometimes by hook, by crook, and shenanigan, and sometimes just simply exploiting the laws that we have.

So it has always been very simple for me, Mr. Speaker; that is, we need to secure the border. Without a border you don't have a nation. Any sovereign nation has to secure its borders and has to control those borders. That goes for any sovereign nation all over the world, including the Vatican.

I look at that big, 30-foot-tall wall around the Vatican and understand that they don't have an open borders policy there. Neither do other countries around the world, except for the United States of America, who, under the 8 of years of Barack Obama, watched the rule of law be so eroded that it has clouded the minds of a lot of Republicans here in the House of Representatives.

There was a question asked yesterday that I wrote down here that I think is really important to contemplate. I hadn't put it in those kind of words before, although I had thought about it and I actually did research on it. And the question is this: I'll put it this way--this discussion, by the way, on immigration, the sticking point is about DACA, Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals.

So the question that was posed was this: We stopped the entire political world for these people, DACA recipients. So the question was posed: Who are they? Who are they?

We hear continually they are valedictorians or they came across the border on their mother's arm when they were 3 years old. They know no country but this one. They only speak one language: English. They don't have a memory of any other country. They study hard and work hard and get good grades. Some of them even say that they are as fine a group of people as we can select out of American citizens.

So I began asking some of those questions of our bureaucracy. I had actually begun asking those questions as far back as last September and intensified the request in January and focused on it very hard.

With a lot of work to try to get to the bottom of it, I found out a number of things about who are the DACA recipients. First, I want to characterize, just a little bit, about how we got here.

Barack Obama made DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, made it his tool for an unconstitutional amnesty. We should not forget, Barack Obama, on at least 22 different locations and times, said on videotape that he didn't have the constitutional authority to create this DACA policy.

He said at a school here in Washington, D.C., not that long ago, before he left office, before he implemented the DACA policy, he said: You are smart students here; you understand this. He said: I can't write the laws. Congress writes laws. The President and the executive branch carry out those laws, execute those laws, and the court interprets the laws. So it is up to Congress to change the policy.

But just a couple of months after that statement, President Obama implemented by executive edict a DACA policy that no thinking constitutionalist can really take the position that it is anything other than utterly, blatantly, and self-confessed by Barack Obama unconstitutional.

Yet, we have had a couple of Federal Judges who say that President Trump, who was elected to end the DACA policy--and we all expected that January 20, 2017, at noon, when President Trump took his oath of office, he would have already had the order ready to go that would have ended the DACA policy and stopped any new permits from being issued and stopped any renewals of existing permits, and perhaps even cancel the existing ones that were there, but that didn't happen.

Five to six weeks later, Mr. Speaker, we learned that the Trump administration was still issuing new DACA permits in just as unconstitutional a fashion as Barack Obama was. He just wasn't the author of it. He wasn't the creator of it. President Trump wasn't the creator of it. He was the continuer of the unconstitutional DACA policy created and established by Barack Obama.

So there were extensions, renewals of existing, and there were creations and new permits handed out for DACA. We all knew it was unconstitutional.

Then, as we went along, I want to really thank a number of States, but in particular, Texas, who put together a lawsuit, to file a lawsuit, on the unconstitutional policy of DACA, which is costing Texas taxpayers money and opportunity and every other State in the Union, as far as I know, money and opportunity.

Ken Paxton, the Attorney General of Texas, prepared a lawsuit that he had, I believe the number were 12 states that agreed to join with that suit, and they were prepared to file that suit last September 5, was the date.

Yet, they negotiated with the White House. So, President Trump agreed to end the DACA policy. He took this action last September 5. Part of that negotiation was so that the lawsuit would not be filed by Texas and other states. Because clearly, they would prevail. DACA is unconstitutional.

President Trump conceded, apparently, that point and ended the DACA policy effective in 6 months, which would be the 5th of March this year.

Then he challenged Congress to pass legislation that would resolve the DACA issue and resolve the balance of the immigration issues that we have. That deadline, presumably, was March 5.

However, there were a couple of Federal judges who decided that they were legislators, and they came to a decision, an order, that said that President Trump couldn't cancel the DACA policy, that he is compelled to continue it, to issue new permits, and to extend existing permits, for no constitutional reason that I am aware of and no statutory reason that I am aware of, just activist judges who are seeking to legislate from the bench and impose their personal policy preference on the rest of America.

Well, that can't stand, Mr. Speaker. We know that can't stand. It has got to get to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court, in nobody's imagination, is going to come down with a decision that says that a preceding President can implement a blatantly and clearly and, I said, self-confessedly--that is a word, I hope, ``self-confessedly''--illegal policy, unconstitutional policy.

Barack Obama established that policy.

No Supreme Court is going to say: And by the way, every succeeding President has to accept the executive actions of his predecessor no matter how unconstitutional they are; that he can't end, by executive action, something that was unconstitutionally implemented by the executive action of his predecessor, Barack Obama.

But that is the decision that we have right now before the courts. Thankfully, Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas ramped this back up again, and they are going back to court now. This goes before Judge Hanen, who has been a stellar constitutionalist, an originalist, and a textualist.

I appreciate the work he has done in the past. I can't speak to his decision coming up on this, except this, that we have the rule of law sitting here hanging in the balance. That is what has been pushed into the middle of the table. That is the bet, the rule of law, up or down.

And if the court is allowed to resolve this issue, whether it is before Judge Hanen's circuit court or whether it goes on to the Supreme Court, which I expect it would, the Supreme Court will come down with a decision that allows and recognizes that the Chief Executive Officer of the United States of America--right now, President Donald Trump--has the authority to reverse any executive action of any of his predecessors.

That is how our Constitution is structured. And if it is any other way, if a President can, by executive action, visit a horrible policy on the American people and we don't have a way to undo that, our Founding Fathers didn't serve us up a document like that. They gave us a document with checks and balances and the authorities to be set up in a proportional way.

So DACA, if it is allowed to continue through the litigation process, will be thrown out by the Supreme Court. Let's let that happen. Let's find out. I am willing to take a Supreme Court decision on this, because if it goes the other way, our Republic is essentially lost anyway.

So who are these people? Who are they?

Well, Barack Obama made this a tool for his unconstitutional method of getting people, I will say, quasi-legalized. When that happened, specifics went out the window. When you read through these documents-- and I have finally gotten my hands on the documents, Mr. Speaker. Each one of the applications is a 7-page application.

Altogether, there are about 2 million applications. Roughly half of them are renewals. That means there are 14 million pieces of paper, a lot of them filled out by hand, in fact, most of them filled out by hand. They only went electronic in 2015, I believe November 1 of 2015. So it is hard to pull the data out. That is why we had to work so hard to get it.

Some other things that came along that we are learning from reading through the press:

We are finding more and more DACA recipients who are MS-13. We shouldn't be surprised at that. A lot of them came in as unaccompanied alien minors. Then they get recruited into gangs, or they came in as a member of a gang.

They weren't all 3-year-old girls brought across the Rio Grande River by their mother. A whole lot of them were unaccompanied alien minors. And some of them who were accompanied went right into the highest gang areas in the country, MS-13 gang areas.

There is a large percentage of them who are also prime gang-age recruitment. Out of 817,000 DACA recipients, that universe who are currently under DACA, there are about 135,000 who were prime gang-age recruitment from that 13-, 14-, 15-year-old age.

To remind folks, Mr. Speaker, we had the Drug Enforcement Administration Chief Administrator there, Robert Patterson, before the Judiciary Committee a couple of weeks ago. I asked him a series of questions. Here is one of the things that he concurred on: 80 percent to 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America come from or through Mexico.

Mr. Speaker, 80 percent to 90 percent of those illegal drugs.

We have had 64,000 Americans die because of drug overdose, primarily opioid abuse, and at least two-thirds of that are illegal opioids.

The physicians are getting this under control, tightening down their prescriptions. They addressed this some time ago.

But the illegal drugs are killing Americans, and those illegal drugs are coming from or through Mexico, 80 percent to 90 percent of them.

It is a matter of note that--I will find this along the way. But over a period of about 3 years, from 2013 until 2016--and that is the first year, 2013 was the first year after the DACA announcement--the Mexican poppy fields tripled in acres. They tripled in size.

We wonder why we have a heroin problem and an opioid problem in the United States and where it comes from: from or through Mexico, by the testimony of Robert Patterson.

We also have that the drug crisis is directly related to the growth of MS-13. That is a statement that was made by Commissioner Geraldine Hart, Commissioner of Suffolk County, Long Island, New York. That is some of the information that is in here.

So who are they? Who are the DACA recipients, Mr. Speaker?

As I dug through the records and finally got my hands on the data, one of the hardest pieces of information I have ever had to work for in this town--and the nature of this town makes you work for information that politically they don't want you to have. Well, I have it now in my hands. And I will say no other Member of Congress has this information, and it has not been shared outside of a very tight circle in my own shop.

Here are some things:

The overall number of DACA recipients, 817,798 is the overall number--817,798.

I began looking down through those records, and of those who even filled out the form, that they came in too early, that they would be disqualified because they came in too early or they would be disqualified because they came in too late, the initial entry dates disqualify, of the 817,798, 8,964 of them because they didn't fit the parameters of the dates that they had to have come into the United States, some for the first time.

Another 2,100, their records are not available. They just simply don't have those records. If we are going to make sure that they are getting an education and learning English and working and that whole list of meritorious things that you always hear about when people talk about DACA, the least they could do is fill out the form. So there are 2,100 records that are not available.

Then they transferred the application form into form N-400 about that time in late winter of 2015, early winter of 2016. They transferred it over to form N-400. That is a foundational document that can be transferred into citizenship. So they set up the bookwork to turn them into citizens clear back then.

It always was the unconstitutional, lawless plan of Barack Obama to push this all on us. I will say I thought Republicans were stronger than they seemed to be. He must have had them judged just about right, because he thought he could feed this to us, but he also believed that Hillary Clinton would be the President of the United States.

How many of them traveled out of the United States?

``They are afraid to go back home.'' ``They don't know any other country but this country.'' We have heard this over and over again. But 775 confessed on the form that they had gone back to their home country. That should disqualify them.

Of those who already reported that they were too old to qualify, over age 31 by the closing date, there were 2,464 who were too old to qualify.

And here is the number of those who were prime gang recruitment age: 135,250 of them. But that also includes boys and girls. Of the boys and girls, more boys get recruited, of course, by far, but the girls are being recruited, too. We know how bad that can be.

That is just up to age 16. The legislation that they want to bring to this floor takes it to age 18, and that adds about another 33,000 or 34,000 for each year. So that number, then, would go to 100--let's see. Well, 66,000 to 68,000 more on top of that, so just round that up. It would be 200,000 would be the universe from which MS-13 and other gangs would recruit while they waited for the younger kids to get a little older.

They are growing up in these MS-13 neighborhoods. They are being delivered to MS-13 neighborhoods. We are eroding the culture of the civilization of America with this policy, and everybody is afraid to say who they are. Nobody is even asking the question. They are just saying, ``valedictorian,'' ``3-year-old girls.''

There are a few who are. I found them in this data, too. Actually, they are a little better represented than I expected they would be, but that is only my judgment, not the data.

On education: They are supposed to be getting an education. Here is what I found out from looking at the education: no data available.

We are out of this universe of 817,798, Mr. Speaker. Out of that universe, there were 564,103 where there was no data available at all in their application on education.

Were they going to school or weren't they? Did they have an education of any kind? Where did it take them to? Was it sixth grade? third grade? 11th grade? No data available.

That is 68.9 percent of the DACA recipients we don't have even a record that they ever went to school.

I have to believe a good number of them went to school but not long enough, apparently, to write that down on this form. And most of them had help filling out the applications. That is those where the records were not available.

Then they have this mushy question in there that is designed--this whole thing is designed to grant amnesty, so the questions are asked in such a way, when you read through there, that it was never designed to understand and get an honest reporting that came out.

Regardless, those who have no diploma and may or may not be in school, that is another 179,719, or 21.9 percent. They say, well, they don't have a degree, they don't have a diploma, they may or may not be in school, by the way the question was asked.

In any case, if you add together those with no data available and those with no verification of any kind of educational experience, that comes to 90.8 percent of all of the DACA recipients without a validation of their education. Of those who attest that they qualify-- now, remember, there is no verification here. All the stuff on this 7- page document they attest to, but the verification is almost nonexistent, although there is a little bit. Of those who attest they are qualified by education, that is 9.2 percent is all.

So I found myself adding up these things and seeing what is the worst-case scenario.

Oh, the best-case scenario is believe everything and expect that there is an excuse for 564,000 not even putting out a number on the form.

So I began to add this up. I think I left some things out, though, Mr. Speaker. I will start this way.

Of 817,798, you would subtract from that the 564,103 that they had no data on for education at all, because they would have been disqualified by the requirements of the program.

The second group, you can't tell whether they went to school or not. That is 179,719. Subtract that. They are disqualified, also, because you can't tell.

Oh, here is a really interesting one. Of those who confessed to being criminals, 66 percent of those who self-reported that they are criminals, they received their DACA permit. Two-thirds of those who said ``I am a criminal'' got their DACA permit anyway.

Those are the initial applications. Then, once their status was up for renewal, of the group who said they--that was a much bigger group then, those up for renewal. 31,854 of them were granted. The 94 percent of the roughly 33,000 or so altogether, 94 percent of them got renewed even though they said, ``I am a criminal.''

So we are not really cleaning out the folks that we wouldn't want in this group, and it is getting harder and harder to find the ones you would want in this group.

Then, of those based upon the data entry I mentioned earlier, 8,964, they would be out, disqualified; 2,100 with no data available, they would be disqualified; And of those who went back home, it disqualifies them, also, because they knew when they came back in that they were violating the law. It wasn't through no fault of their own. That is 775.

Mr. Speaker, I am sure that you have added this up in your head, as I have run through these numbers, and the conclusion you will have drawn is that, of the 817,798 DACA recipients on record at the time we pulled this data off last month, there was 789,851 of them who would be disqualified on the records because they didn't meet the standards that were put down by Barack Obama that were designed to give amnesty in the first place. That is how bad these records are.

I can't believe these people are these bad, but the records certainly are horrible, and we are here pontificating as if we know what we are doing. Statesmen and women here are deciding: Oh, yeah, I can give amnesty to DACA recipients because it is the humane thing to do. It is the right thing to do for the country. Don't call it amnesty because it hurts my feelings. And, by the way, we need to do this because if we don't give amnesty to DACA recipients, we can't get the money for the wall, and we can't pass the border security, and we can't end chain migration, and we can't pass Kate's Law, and we can't pass Sarah's Law, and we can't end sanctuary cities.

Really? This United States of America, this shining city on a hill, this stellar country that has eclipsed anything that any country has ever done before, we can't restore the essential pillar of American exceptionalism called the rule of law? In fact, Mr. Speaker, when Ronald Reagan spoke of the shining city on a hill, I always thought a little bit differently. I was always inspired by the image that he drew, but America is, instead, a shining city built upon pillars, and those pillars are the pillars of American exceptionalism, and most of them are in the bill of rights.

You have a pillar for freedom of speech, a pillar for freedom of religion, a pillar for freedom of the press, a pillar for freedom of assembly. We have a pillar for Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms, and then we have a pillar for property rights and one for no double jeopardy and a jury of your peers and the enumerated powers in the Constitution, the framework of the intergenerational contractual guarantee, which is our Constitution, all of that is there.

It leaves out a couple of things in the Constitution. It doesn't point out that this is a Judeo-Christian society with a belief and a moral foundation that

guides us in our everyday life and a level of expectations of living up to American standards, that is not there. But it is a pillar of American exceptionalism. It is a pillar of the shining city on the pillars. And free enterprise, capitalism, is another component.

All of these things come together to make America great. You know, you can maybe wound two or three of those pillars, and we would still be a great Nation. But the central pillar--think of these others that I have described all around a circle holding up that city, but the middle, the important one, the central pillar of American exceptionalism is the rule of law. It is sacrosanct to a free people. If we don't live by the rule of law, our country collapses, our other pillars fall, and we fall into the Third World.

And yet, this Congress is in the business right now of negotiating away the rule of law under some myopic belief that if we just reward this group of people for breaking the law, somehow the rest of those folks that are out there in other sympathetic categories are just going to go away and say: Sorry, I guess I missed the boat; I wasn't DACA; I was a parent that brought DACA in; or I got in too early and so I was disqualified; or I got in too late and I was disqualified. These are all illegal entries, by the way. Or I came into America, had a baby with an anchor baby. Now I am a parent of an American. How do we split up families?

You have to draw a line. The only place to draw the line is right down the rule of law, and we cannot be supporting amnesty. To grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and reward them with the objective of their crime.

What nation does that? What thinking nation would do such a thing when we have got so much at stake; and how this multiplies itself throughout the generations?

1986 Ronald Reagan made one mistake. He signed the amnesty act of 1986. We have been paying for that ever since because it created the expectation that there would be other amnesties.

There have been at least six other minor amnesties since then. This is the big one. This is at least as big as Ronald Reagan, and it sets the stage for another 10 to 20 million people rewarded for breaking American law. And what do we tell our children and what will our descendants think if we can't think any more clearly than we appear to be doing right now?

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman and appreciate him yielding, and also appreciate Chris Smith's leadership on the pro- life issue here in the United States Congress.

It takes a strong and committed force to constantly be on top of every component of the life issue every day and night. I am convinced that Chris Smith misses sleep over this, as I do and many of us do. But today, we have got something to be happy about, Mr. Speaker, and that is that the $286 million that goes into family planning and is under title X, the purpose of those funds is to help plan the number and the spacing of children. And I think that God should be in charge of that.

I have long said that a solution for our society is good people need to have a lot of babies and raise them right. And once we get our social agenda right, if we get our faith right, if we get our families right, if we understand the Constitution, if we have a work ethic that is right, and if our integrity is there, all the rest will automatically take care of itself.

I see these little babies when I look around in my church. Our church is just full of little ones. I had a little newborn in front of me last Sunday and I watched how the family passed that little newborn along. I saw a granddaughter shoot across the aisle to grandparents. Nobody worries. I don't

worry because those kids there are going to be all right.

This country always takes care of its little ones. There has never been a time where we could have more confidence in taking care of our little ones, but we have got to get them born.

We are seeing money borrowed from China to supplement a national debt to go into a title X family planning program. Abortion is not family planning. Abortion is ending a significant component of the family.

This program also has statutory prohibition on abortion. So this policy that is unfolding here--thankfully, from the Trump administration--will restore the statutory provisions and Planned Parenthood themselves--you have heard the number, Mr. Speaker, 56 million--and my math came out to 60 million. It is in that category-- that is used to advocate for abortion and to actually commit abortions.

Some people aren't moved by the utter immorality. I have looked at some things that I saw today as I was flying in this morning, and I looked around on the internet and picked up some things. One of them that caught my eye was that the U.S. birth rate has hit a record low. Now, that record low consists of this: There were only 60.2 babies born per thousand women in this past year in 2017. That is the women between the ages of 15 and 44, the fertility years, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes it--only 60.2. That is the lowest it has ever been since we have been keeping records, and we have been keeping records for decades.

Also, the total fertility rate is the lowest it has been since 1978-- and I think we had an anomaly in 1978--but that total fertility rate, Mr. Speaker, I point out that in order to sustain our population as it is, just a level population, it takes 2.1 babies per woman in order to sustain our population. And that is rated in the total fertility rate. That is 1.764 today, babies per woman, the lowest it has been since 1978, and well below--hundreds and hundreds below--what it needs to be able to sustain our population.

And here is another record that is the lowest in 30 years. Now think of this: The population of the United States of America is as high as it has ever been--about 326 million or more. With 326 million people, you would think the higher the population is, the more babies would be born into that population--at least you would set a record on babies born into the population because our population is as large as it has ever been.

But here is the real data on it. There were 3,853,472 births in 2017. That is the lowest number of births in 30 years. The lowest number of births in 30 years, and we also need to add to that, there are roughly 1 million abortions that took place in America in 2017.

So if those babies had been born, we would have had 4,853,472 little ones here rather than the 3.8 million that is in the data that we have.

According to this data, 21 percent of the babies conceived in America's lives are ended by abortion, Mr. Speaker, and I am seeing an administration that is moving around on the side of life. I am seeing a society that is moving along on the side of life. I am watching the 4-D ultrasounds where now we can hear the heartbeat and we can watch them move and squirm in the womb.

I am encouraged that America's society and America's civilization is moving toward the side of life.

Eventually, we will see the end of Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. We will get there, Mr. Speaker. And the work that is done by Mr. Smith and others and, thankfully, the President and the administration get us closer to that day.

Mr. Speaker, I applaud this decision, and I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for this Special Order hour.

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and I always appreciate that opportunity.

It is a right and a privilege of any Member of Congress to come down here and address you from this floor about whatever issues might be on our minds, and I have a couple of them on my mind here this afternoon, Mr. Speaker. One of them is the circumstance that brought about the loss of the farm bill here on the floor.

I come from the Fourth Congressional District of Iowa, and I will make the case with anyone in this Congress, out of all 435 districts, that we produce more agricultural products in the Fourth District than any other. There are some folks in the San Joaquin Valley who we have an interesting discussion with, and I tip my hat to their progress but still stand in defense of the Fourth District of Iowa.

The corn we raise, the soybeans we raise, the pork that we produce, the eggs that come out of there, all of that sets the standard for the rest of the country. And I am giving the credit to the producers, the families that raised the farmers that we have today who went off to school and came back with the technology in their brain and developed the technology to bring this kind of crop out of this ground.

I have two ears of corn down in my man cave, Mr. Speaker, and they are beside each other on a nail. I would say half the people in this Congress would guess wrong on which was which. One of them is an open- pollinated variety that they used to plant back in 1848, and the other one is a triple-stack hybrid that came out of the 2015 crop, neither one of them irrigated. God's rainfall raised them.

That one ear that is just as big as the other one and actually has got more rows around it is the open-pollinated from 1848, and it yielded between 15 and 25 bushels to the acre.

Then you look at the 2015 ear. It is roughly the same length, with fewer rows of kernels around it, and that yielded not 15 to 25 bushels, but 232 bushels to the acre, over the scales. That is how far we have come with agriculture technology.

You can divide your 15 or 20 to 25 bushels into the 230. It is almost 10 times. You might make the argument that we have got 10 times the yield today that we had back when the pioneers rolled across the prairie in their covered wagons and began to figure out how to bring crops out of this ground. That is an example of what has taken place.

We have tractors running around out in the field now. No markers. The markers used to always--there used to be planter wire and cross- checked. Then the markers would mark until we came back around, and you lined up on that mark from the last round so that all the rows were nice and beautiful and parallel and straight. Everybody took pride in having fields where they could look down those rows and see that wonderful crop of corn and soybeans and other crops coming out of the ground.

Now there are not markers on a lot of our planters, and some of the planters are running around with the markers folded up because we are being guided by GPS. That is just some of the technology.

We are applying fertilizer differently as the soil types change going across the field. We have got the ability to change and adjust the numbers of corn according to the soil type, too. We are using less fertilizer than we did. We are taking care of the water quality.

Lots of good things are coming up out of the ground, and that means food for America and Americans. This farm bill is designed to stabilize our family farm operations so that they can stay in business. It is not good enough just to be in business next year, but to be in business next generation. This is the center and the heart and soul of America.

This is the American Dream: the family farm on that land looking back through their generations and seeing

they are the fourth generation, the fifth generation family farm, the sixth, the seventh generation.

I stood in a machine shed that has had some pretty good feedlots around it and a lot of good farm ground around it and talked to--well, I guess I saw, because the seventh generation hadn't quite learned to talk yet, seven generations on the family farm. I have watched them also as they stood there together and held hands and cried as the auctioneer sold off their life's work, when we didn't have a program in place that could stabilize their hard work, their smart work, their dedication.

Nobody can do this like a family farm can. There is not a corporation that can go out there and hire people and be vertically integrated and somehow get this thing scaled up to the size that they can be more efficient than what is going on right now with our family farms in America because, when it is in your culture, when it is in your blood, you make hay when the Sun shines.

In fact, the culture is so strong in my neighborhood, we had a case in court. I was sitting in the courtroom in Sac County a number of years ago, and the lawyers were bickering back and forth and the judge was deliberating and maybe dithering a little bit. My lawyer said: Come on. Let's get this done. I have got hay down.

Well, you have got hay down. We know what that means. You have got to get it back up again before it rains. When the weather is there, you have got to move. And if the Sun goes down and you can still go, you keep going because you are looking at the clouds coming on the horizon.

By the way, we have got technology to address that, too. Now we have got the setup with the technology, teamed up with Monsanto and with Google, to put together a corporation that watches the weather report and indexes that in and sends a message off to the farmer's cellphone in a text that says: You are going to get 1\1/2\ inches of rain tonight, and you have got 6 hours, 7 hours, or 10 or 12 hours to side- dress 20 pounds of nitrogen.

That is what your crop needs because we have been monitoring it for these years, and we have calculated the Sun days, the heat units, the humidity, and the growth patterns. This is a scientific, now, very sophisticated industry.

And that is just crop farming. Then you have got the livestock side of this as well.

We worked long and hard to put this farm bill together, Mr. Speaker, and all of the hearings that were held on it. The big things that we need to make sure that we sustain and extend are crop insurance, number one, because crop insurance is the number one risk management tool for our producers.

If you don't have an ability to ensure your crop and go to the bank and be able to predict that you have got a reasonable chance of at least servicing your loan and paying your input costs and taking a few dollars out to feed the kids, if you can't do that, the bankers can't stand with you. So Federal crop insurance is an essential component of our family farm operations. It is not something that they can get along without, because we have seen these markets cycle.

We have seen the markets cycle in these ways. For example, January 4, 1980, Jimmy Carter embargoed grain sales to Russia. Excuse me. I am in the modern vernacular. It was the Soviet Union. All the Soviet Union, no U.S. grain goes in there.

They were our number one market at the time, so that embargo shut off that market for our producers in the farms all across this country, and we saw the commodities prices on the Chicago Board of Trade go into a tailspin. It nose-dived down into the gutter.

To get back out of that and get those markets put back together again didn't really happen in the way we might anticipate. It was not a bounce back. It was a struggle back. We lost family farm after family farm. I watched farm sale after farm sale.

I went to those sales. We went in some of those building sites that the family farms were pushed off of. Some of them, the acreage was sold off to somebody that had a little cash, and they came in and tried to fix up the place a little bit and tried to live there. It worked for some. In fact, it worked where I live. But it didn't work for everyone.

Some of them were burned. Some were buried. We did a lot of that. I can drive you around the countryside, Mr. Speaker, and I can point to those places now that you just see as dirt, and I can tell you who lived there, the kids' names who were there, where they went off to school--maybe Iowa State, University of Iowa, maybe UNI--also, maybe off to the coast somewhere.

Too many of our children went off to get an education and didn't look back, and now my neighbors, if they are still neighbors, buy a plane ticket to see their grandchildren. That is the result of what happened when we had the grain embargo in 1980 that was brought to us by Jimmy Carter.

We had subsidies that had to be poured into the Midwest in huge amounts. Even today, we would be stunned if I were to say into the Record the amount of money that was put in to try to bail out the disaster that we had in agriculture.

And land change prices. CRP came in, in the pick year of 1983; and with that, land prices tumbled down to, I can say, a third of what they were at their peak.

When government stepped in and put CRP in place, some of it was for conservation; and we preserve a significant amount of it in this farm bill. But, Mr. Speaker, the taxpayers paid for some of those farms a couple of different times as a result of what happened with the grain embargo in 1980.

Well, today we have a trade circumstance. That trade circumstance started, I believe, not for the negotiations of NAFTA, but the tariff that the President put on steel and aluminum--and that was globally-- for all countries that were exporting their steel or aluminum into the United States, a 25 percent tariff on it.

Then, after 2 or 3 days, the President--the Canadians--not as much the Mexicans, but the Mexicans, too--objected to the tariff that went on them. They were negotiating NAFTA. So after 2 or 3 days, the President lifted that tariff off of Canada and Mexico for the countries that are involved in NAFTA.

That, I think, was designed to try to get the Canadians to the table on NAFTA. Perhaps that has been useful, and it worked; but we also knew that a tariff on steel and aluminum coming in out of China was going to bring about retaliatory trade moves on the part of the Chinese, and they acted in a predictable fashion. They slapped a tariff on our U.S. ag products going from the United States into China.

And so here I am, Mr. Speaker, representing the Fourth Congressional District of Iowa, all of northwest Iowa, almost all of north-central Iowa, some of northeast Iowa. And when I look at the map that was put out by Bloomberg that showed the counties in America that went Democrat in blue, the counties in America that went Republican in red--and that would be, of course, the Trump election--and over the top of that they laid out a focus in, I will say, I believe they were yellow dots, that was the production of soybeans, the concentration of the production of soybeans.

It is clear that the dead center, the center of the hub of the middle of the bull's eye, that those tariffs that the Chinese put on soybeans and pork, especially, went right into the Fourth District and right into Iowa. And then it spreads out: Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana.

We all know what the corn belt looks like. The soybean belt is a little different, but that is where most of it is still raised. So we take this hit in our neighborhood, and our producers are holding together pretty well because they understand that our President is a multifaceted, multidimensional trade negotiator.

So the trade negotiations that started with NAFTA and the tariff on steel and aluminum that included the Canadians and the Mexicans in the beginning for 2 or 3 days are part of, also, what has happened with the retaliatory tariffs that the Chinese put on, especially, soybeans and on pork.

That brought the South Koreans to the table, too, and they said: Give us some relief on the tariffs on the steel. The South Koreans are the third largest exporter of steel to the United States.

While they were there, they offered up the invitation for--they had it in their pocket, evidently--President Trump to sit down with Kim Jong Un. The President said: Yes, I will do that. Stuck his head in the press room and told the press: I am going to meet with Kim Jong Un.

Now, we are pretty confident that that is going to happen in Singapore on June 12. All of this is wrapped up together, Mr. Speaker, and much more besides: national defense, national security, the denuclearization of the entire Korean Peninsula. It also plays into the Iranian nuclear agreement that was signed by, I believe, John Kerry, technically, but under the Obama administration.

You put this all together, and I have just given a quick snapshot, Mr. Speaker, on the multiple layers of strategy and negotiations that are part of this President.

Meanwhile, the message that is sent overseas to the Chinese, for example, who are putting pressure on the very producers that need to have stability, that need to have their Federal crop insurance, and those that need to know that we have got an EQIP program and those that need to be able to measure what we are going to do with our CRP program, for example, our conservation programs, all of this is only 20 percent of the overall farm bill, and the other 80 percent goes to nutrition.

When I came to this town, there were 19 million people on food stamps; and we called them food stamps then. Nineteen million. At the peak of the Obama administration, which would be about the seventh year of the Obama administration, those 19 million on food stamps had become 47 million on SNAP; and the cost to the taxpayer grew, of course, proportionally and even faster because of the inflationary aspect of this. So we found ourselves at 2\1/2\ times more people on food stamps than there were when I came to this Congress in 2003.

How do we fund that? We are watching our deficits go sky-high: $20 trillion, on the way to $21 trillion, in deficit spending.

And where do we get the money to pay the bills that are pushing us into the deficit and running up $20 trillion in national debt? Not deficit spending, Mr. Speaker.

Where do we get the money to service the national debt, and where do we get the money to pay the bills as we watch our national debt go up over $20 trillion? Well, the primary places are China, Saudi Arabia. About half of this comes from the American people investing in bonds and securities.

So we are borrowing money from China to buy people food stamps, and all we ask in this bill is that they work.

Now, why should a farmer work and watch the stability underneath him that is the farm bill, that is the Federal crop insurance piece, that is EQIP, that is a conservation program that has a MAP program on it, the Market Access Program, why should that farmer be out there sweating--sweating bullets sometimes--wondering if he can make it with markets that are 50 percent of what they were just a few years ago when other people aren't working at all? Why should the sweat of the farmer's brow pay for the food of the person that refuses to work?

The American people know this, Mr. Speaker. It is not a complicated thing. If you poll that out there and you ask them, 80 to 90 percent of the American people, they say: Yes, you ought to have to work if you are going to eat. It is Biblical, it is John Smith's rule, and it is the rule within the culture of the American people. It is just a rule that is hard to get passed here on the floor of the House.

We don't force anybody off of food stamps. We only look at the people that are able-bodied, between the ages of, I believe it is, 18 to 59. I know it is not any older than 59. And we say: If you want to get food stamps, then, fine, we will give them to you, but you have to work 20 hours a week or go to school 20 hours a week, or some combination of your own improvement 20 hours a week.

Well, 20 hours a week, is that too much to ask, Mr. Speaker, for someone to put in 20 hours a week in order to eat for free all the other hours of the week? I think it is entirely reasonable. And, furthermore, all work has dignity, all work has honor, all work enhances the character and the work ethic of the people doing it. There is no shame in being productive. There is honor in being productive.

But 20 hours a week, that is only a day's work for a farmer that is in the field that is out there planting corn or planting soybeans or harvesting those beans when you see the weather coming in, or combining corn in the fall. When you go, you go, and there are a lot that put in 20-hour days, and I know because I keep up with them and so do our crews from time to time. When we have to, you do what you need to do.

So, here we are, a bill that has been shot down here on the floor. This is the second time this has happened in the last, I will say, 5 years, a farm bill comes out here to the floor. We just need some Democrats that will support work, and we would have passed this bill here today.

But looking at the roster of those that voted ``no,'' every Democrat voted ``no'' on this farm bill. And they didn't vote ``no'' because they didn't like what was in on the ag side. They voted ``no'' because there were work environments on the food stamp side.

So when I came to this Congress, there were Democrats here that believed in work, and they would vote accordingly. We had about 53 Blue Dog Democrats, moderate Democrats that wanted to get to a balanced budget, and their agenda was: Let's cut some spending and let's raise some taxes. Let's get to balance. My agenda was: Let's cut some spending and get to balance, but we can do business.

Too many of them were forced to vote for ObamaCare. When they did that, they essentially walked the plank. When they voted for ObamaCare, the American people rose up and voted them out of office and put in conservative Republicans instead. Some of those conservative Republicans decided they wanted to leverage this farm bill for a vote on a bill that includes at least two components of amnesty.

I am wondering: Where have we gone, America? Where have we gone that we can't take care of our farmers? Where have we gone that we can't require a little bit of work to go along with a lot of free food? Where have we gone when we say that 20 hours a week to get free food--when you ask a farmer to work 20 hours a day when the weather let's him do that, and to suspend his risk management program at least--it is not suspended here, technically. I mean, it goes on. But the message is to spend it, and the doubt hangs out, and they won't sleep as well tonight, and they won't have as good a weekend.

And the people that are getting food stamps without work, they are probably snickering a little bit. They might be sitting on the couch in their front lawn right now going: You know what, those Republicans aren't going to be able to make me work, and all those Democrats are going to protect me so I don't have to work.

I regret the direction that this culture and civilization is going if work is so disparaged by one party that we can't have a tiny little bit of it plugged into a fully funded welfare program that went from 19 million people on food stamps in 2003, on up to 47 million at its peak, and now down around 45 and change, as I recall.

Forty-five million people on food stamps. And now, another one of these arguments is: Well, we have to bring in workers from overseas. That is one of the bills that some of the folks that voted against the farm bill today, Mr. Speaker, it's one of the bills that they want to bring to the floor. It brings in guest workers.

Well, actually, initially, it won't bring them in. It will amnesty the ones that are here. People that are working illegally here, a lot of them, in fact, I will say it with confidence, with utter confidence, most of them operating on somebody else's Social Security number, guilty of the felony of document fraud, would get a pass to stay in America or do a touchback and come back to America.

And, you know, the only ones that would leave to do a touchback and come back are the ones that will be precertified to have a free pass coming back into the United States, 410,000--410,000 would get that pass in a bill that they want to see come to the floor

maybe next week. And there is another 40,000 that would go into food processing.

So we have not had guest workers come into food processing. That is low-skilled work, as a rule. Now, if you are going to fill the ranks of low-skilled workers, then I suggest that we put Americans to work at that. The highest unemployment rates, the double-digit unemployment that you look at are the lowest skilled workers, and people say: We don't have anybody in America that is willing to do the work.

Well, why not? This is not that complicated an equation. We have between--disagreement here--but nobody thinks there is less than 70 different means-tested Federal welfare programs in this country. Nobody thinks there is less than 70. Some people take that number all the way to 87. But between 70 and 87 means-tested Federal welfare programs exist in this country. Not one person has memorized the names of them yet; let alone, understands how they work, how they interact with each other, how they might motivate or demotivate people that we ought to be asking to go to work.

So, what we are doing is we are bribing Americans. We are paying them not to work with welfare programs. And if we didn't have anybody out there to pay not to work and we didn't have that labor, then I could maybe understand the argument that somebody 1,500 miles away in a foreign country that doesn't speak English, that has a 6th grade education and no skills, should be coming into the United States to do some of that work, but that is not the case.

We did the chart on this, Mr. Speaker, and I believe I have introduced it into the Congressional Record, and it works like this. It is a big pie chart, and it is out on the internet, but there are 326 million Americans, according to the most recent estimate of the U.S. Census Bureau, and out of them, I will ask: What are they doing?

Well, there are 153 million of them that are employed. Now, they might be not fully employed, but they are employed. So 153 million of them working. All right. I take those off to the side. Seven million of them, though, are on unemployment, drawing unemployment checks right now, right, just a hair under 7 million. They ought to be going to work.

Second one is, there are 46 million Americans who are simply not in the workforce. They have opted not to look for a job, not to work, whatever the reason is. Maybe they are already wealthy enough that they don't need to work anymore. They could possibly be in school or enhancing their education, but chances are, a whole lot of them are on some of those 70 to 87 different welfare programs that we have.

So they are drawing down some combination of that. Maybe they are working in the black market for cash somewhere, and they don't show up on the record, 46 million of them.

Then there is another 14 million. They are starting to get a little bit older now, but some of them do want to work and can. That is those between the ages of 65 and 74. Walmart hires at 74, unemployment gets paid at 74, so we put that in there to calculate also, Mr. Speaker.

And then there are 23 million Americans on disability. And I can't believe, when I see double-amputee wounded warriors roll themselves to work every day, that all 23 million of those that are on disability payment, that none of them can work. Some can, and we ought to go back and take another look at them.

By the time I add all of this up--there is a couple of other lesser categories there--by the time I add all of this up, there are 107 million Americans of working age who are simply not in the workforce, and they are in categories that we can hire from every one of those categories. We just can't hire everyone from any of those categories, but starting with unemployment, then the 46 million, and on down the line.

So I say to people: If you need one worker, can you find him out of 107 million? If you need 100 workers, can't you find them out of 107 million? If you need 1,000 workers, can't you find them out of 107 million? And, of course, that answer is: Yes, we can.

But somehow we have the employment force, or the employer force in America that has convinced themselves that they don't want the American worker, and they are not willing to come to this Congress and work with us to tighten down this welfare system. This welfare system was created to be a safety net, not a hammock, and because of these additions to the welfare systems, going up to the 70 to 87 of them, and the benefits coming out of there, people that have the safety net has been ratcheted up and up and up till it has become a hammock. We have tens of millions of Americans that are lying in the hammock. They might be the third generation that has not worked.

There was a study that was done, Mr. Speaker, in Milwaukee that carved out a 36-square-block residential area of Milwaukee, six blocks by six blocks, and they went in and interviewed each one of those residents in those households. Now, these are people that came up from the Gulf Coast when they lifted prohibition in the 1930s to take on the good brewery jobs that were formed in Milwaukee. And, by the way, the GDP of the beer in Wisconsin today is over $7 billion, so it is a huge industry. But they came up to work there three generations ago.

The company that went in to survey those, every home in those 36 square blocks, came to this conclusion: There wasn't a single employed male head of household in any of those homes in 36 square blocks in Milwaukee--third generation.

Why not? They moved up there for the jobs. The story lamented that we couldn't bring jobs to them. I read it and thought: If their grandfathers could move up there for jobs, why can't they go to where the jobs are? There are plenty of jobs in America.

And the reason they can't is because they are rooted in the home. The home may be paid for or partially paid for, and they have established themselves a comfort zone on a welfare system and supplemented however they need to to get to that place where they are in a comfort place.

We don't need to have policies that encourage that. We don't need to have people that haven't worked in three generations. We need to have the industrious can-do American spirit driving an economy and free enterprise and being rewarded for the work they do.

I don't any longer put out any statements that say: Hardworking Americans; hardworking Iowans. There are a lot of hardworking Americans and hardworking Iowans, Mr. Speaker, but it is also important to work smart. I want to see smart working, hardworking people all over this country, and our job needs to be to increase the per capita GDP, the average per capita GDP of our people, and that comes about by starting with work on food stamps and taking that philosophy, make it a success, and move it over into many of the other welfare programs.

Another one is: You can take all those welfare programs, the 70 to 87 of them that are there, converge them all into one committee here in Congress, and then start dropping off the ones that aren't working and measuring them and shake it all down to about five different programs, instead of 70 or 87 of them. Those things will work.

We are here today with a farm bill that went down on this floor. It went down because no Democrat supports work. It went down because some Republicans wanted to leverage this farm bill in order to get a bill out on the floor to vote on that has within it two components of amnesty.

And I oppose amnesty because it destroys the rule of law. When Ronald Reagan signed the Amnesty Act in 1986--he only let me down two times in 8 years, and I revere that man in his legacy. But I believed that as the debate went on in the House and the Senate, that Ronald Reagan would see with utter principled clarity that if you reward lawbreakers, you are destroying the rule of law, and there will be another amnesty and another and another and more people will come for it.

And they have, and there have been six minor amnesties since that period of time. But this is the big one sitting here: Amnesty for people that are in America illegally; amnesty for DACA recipients. They say they came here when they were 3 years old; their mother led them across the Rio Grande River.

I actually have seen the data. I don't know of any other Member of Congress,

I don't believe, has seen the data. We have been digging it out for months on end, and I think I will soon be able to make it public. Some of them were brought here at 3 years old. Some of them were girls at that age. Some of them, it was their mother. But that doesn't represent that universe of DACA recipients.

And what I do know is, of those large numbers, especially of males that came here illegally, they were 14, 15, 16, and been more years old, that they knew what they were doing and they were responsible for what they were doing. I want to restore the rule of law, pass the farm bill, and I want to get people back to work, and I want to have allies on this floor that support work, whether they are Democrats or Republicans.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 1 o'clock and 16 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Monday, May 21, 2018, at noon for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the yielding and the work that has been put in to get this farm bill together.

First thing that I am happy about, it has the protect interstate commerce language in it, which passed in committee by simply a voice vote. It is well-established. It protects and preserves the commerce clause. We can't have States regulating interstate commerce. That violates the commerce clause. This restores it. That is item number one.

Item number two, in title I, we have in the bill that we protect the PLC program. We improve and protect the ARC program, and we protect the crop insurance. All of that keeps our families on the farm, and if we don't have that, market fluctuations take them off.

We have also increased funding for the MAP program, Market Access Program, and for the Foreign Market Development Program. We have got another FMD program too, and that is the vaccine bank that is in this bill.

Putting work into the SNAP program is an important component. All work has dignity. All work has honor. It is a good start for what we need to do to get a lot better turnout of what goes on with our welfare programs.

Mr. Chair, I thank the chairman for putting this bill together here on this floor today.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk made in order by the rule.

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

Mr. Chairman, I bring this amendment, amendment No. 1, to help supplement some of the good programs that are already existing within the existing farm bill, and what it does is it allows drainage districts to also compete for EQIP money along with the irrigation districts that exist in the country.

I have worked in this arena for a lot of my adult life, and there are roughly 2,000 drainage districts in the State of Iowa, but the important part of this is that we are concerned about water quality and water management and nutrient management, and we have developed technology that, when a producer goes into a pattern tile system, a drainage system--and we used to, and we still do in most places--we just drain all that water out down to the bottom of the tile, and we do that for 12 months out of the year.

And what happens is the nutrients that are applied, the nitrogen and the phosphorous, in particular, go down the stream, and it impacts the water quality downstream; and it contributes to the hypoxia in the Gulf Coast, as well.

So we have developed a method by which especially the flattest ground in the corn belt--this began at least 8 million acres that were under a 2 percent grade--could be pattern tiled and put stop logs in and store the water in the subsoil; drain it down for the 2 weeks in the spring that we are in the field, let the water table come back up again, hold it there, drain it down again for the 2 weeks in the fall that we are in the field, and let it come up the rest of the time.

While that is going on, the root system of our crop--corn and soybeans in my country, different crops in others--will draw up those nutrients out of that water and they will pull the nitrogen out, they will pull the phosphorous out, and we can minimize the application of our fertilizer. In doing so and having a better utilization of our fertilizer, we can also see the water that finally does go down the stream be a far higher quality.

So this allows EQIP to be spent also in drainage districts for that purpose. It is good for water quality. It is good for production efficiency, and it is something that I think has a big future for the United States of America.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentleman from Minnesota. They understand the water quality issues and the drainage issues at least as well as we do in Iowa, and working together on this kind of a proposal, I think, will yield good results all the way down, especially the Mississippi River, the hypoxia in the Gulf.

This is good for the entire United States of America. It is something that I wish we would have done some time ago, but I appreciate the support for this amendment. I urge its adoption.

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

Mr. Speaker, in November 2004, the publication of ``Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party'' by the United States-based media outlet, the Epoch Times, revealed the brutal, deceptive, evil nature of the Chinese Communist Party. These ``Nine Commentaries'' led to the creation of the Tuidang movement. Tuidang literally means ``withdraw from the Party''. The Tuidang Movement is contributing to the liberation of the minds of the Chinese people and helping to peacefully break the cycle of indoctrination that the Chinese Communist Party

(CCP) uses against the Chinese people. Tuidang allows individuals to renounce the oaths they made to the Communist Party, the Communist Youth League and the Communist Young Pioneers.

Tuidang is not a political movement and does not provide political solutions. It simply helps Chinese people reclaim their God-given conscience. The Tuidang Movement, as one of the largest and longest grassroots movements in 5,000 years of Chinese history, is peacefully guiding Chinese people to renew the moral foundation of China that is grounded in authentic Chinese culture and traditions. The objective of the Tuidang movement, first and foremost, is to cut the spiritual ties of each and every individual to communism so that they can return to their traditional values and freely pursue God. The weakening of CCP from within would be beneficial to the entire world. The Tuidang movement has brought to the international community a renewed vision of a new China without CCP, and a world without infiltration of Communists.

Chinese people from all walks of life and from all over the country participate in the Tuidang Movement, irrespective of social status, age, religion, gender, dialect, place of birth, and ethnicity. In the United States, the Global Service Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party (the Tuidang Center), based in New York, has been providing volunteering services and coordinating the efforts of Tuidang world-wide.

Mr. Speaker, again, I applaud and stand with all the brave participants, volunteers, and supporters of the Tuidang movement. I look forward to the realization of a free China, complete with the pillars of a free society, and I take this opportunity to echo the words of Barry Goldwater when he said, ``I have great affection for the Chinese people, their culture, their skills, and their potential.''

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to take up any of the topics that are already in order here, which is most every topic delivered in a decent fashion.

But I have some things to talk about here tonight that are a bit celebratory, things that I am pretty happy about. I want to discuss, Mr. Speaker, the narrative of a significant accomplishment that I think, in the end, will save the lives of perhaps millions of innocent unborn babies in this country.

The history of Roe v. Wade goes back to January 22, 1973, when the United States Supreme Court came down with a decision. Coupled were two cases the same day, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, and those two cases that were delivered launched abortion on demand in America. It was a stunning set of decisions, the scope of which, the magnitude of which, could not have been comprehended at that time.

I remember then, when they came down. We had no children yet at that point. Marilyn and I were married, but at that age in life and not having any experience with the impact of such a decision--America didn't have that experience--the way we analyzed that thing, didn't understand how severe this would be.

Yet, once the decision came down, there is something that I have learned, Mr. Speaker, and that is that people say: You can't legislate morality.

I have always thought that was a pretty weak statement and not very defensible, but you hear it quite often: You can't legislate morality. You can't legislate morality.

Well, legislation is a reflection of morality. For example, we have laws against murder and rape and assault and battery and armed robbery, and the list goes on and on of the things that are prohibited. They are the reflections of the morality of a nation.

The lack of such legislation would indicate only one of two things: either it is the lack of morality, or it is a nation that doesn't need laws to frame it because the morality of the nation is so enshrined in the culture that there doesn't need to be laws.

For example, one of those examples would be that, for centuries, marriage was between a man and a woman. We didn't need laws that said so because everybody knew that marriage defined a union between a man and a woman--in my case, joined together in holy matrimony.

So as the legislation came forward--and I was in the Iowa Senate at the time--I remember some of that debate and discussion, and it was: Why do we need to pass this law to defend marriage, the Defense of Marriage Act?

I helped write part of that language, Mr. Speaker, and I had a little bit of a hard time explaining why it was important that we move it, more or less, an insurance policy so that we could protect marriage in Iowa against the movement that had just begun not very much earlier than that by litigation out in Hawaii. And then the conflation between civil unions and marriage.

But the reflection of the values of marriage were in our culture so deeply that senator after senator stood on the floor and said: Why do we need to do this? This is a redundant exercise. It is a waste of our time. Everybody knows that marriage is between a man and a woman.

And we passed the Defense of Marriage Act. There were only about three or four who voted against it. We wondered why they did that. They were out there in the fringes, so we thought, at the time. That was about 1998.

By 2009--and that would only be 11 years later--the Iowa Supreme Court came down with the decision Varnum v. Brien, which imposed same- sex marriage on Iowa, the transformation of a culture that needed a law to protect marriage, if we were to protect it. But once, for thousands of years--I will say at least for thousands of years--marriage was between a man and a woman, and it changed.

When something became permissive, then the permissiveness of it changed the morality of the situation. That is not a very good description, Mr. Speaker, of what happened with the abortion circumstances in America. We understood then that life begins at the moment of conception. But when Roe v. Wade came down with the decision that prohibited the States from regulating abortion and prohibiting abortion, then it became permissible and permissive, and it became pervasive at the same time.

Some of our peak incidents of abortion, from 1973 until the latter part of that decade, got up to 1.6 million abortions a year. And, today, after 45 years of Roe v. Wade, this Nation has seen 60 million-- some say 61 million--babies aborted. Babies who would be growing up in our society today: going to school; playing ball; studying; going to church; loving their brothers and sisters, their mothers, their fathers, their grandparents, their aunts, their uncles. They are gone: 60 million little babies gone.

And not only 60 million--there is no way to actually describe 60 million babies as only--but, in addition, there are another roughly 60 million who were not born because their mothers were aborted. A population between 100 and 120 million Americans are missing today because of Roe v. Wade's decision--Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton--an unsoundly and unjustly decision that came down from the United States Supreme Court.

One of the problems we have in this country is we have three branches of government. A lot of government teachers and constitutional teachers instruct that it is three coequal branches of government, but that is not what our Founding Fathers expected. They defined it, instead, that the judicial branch of government would be the weakest of the three branches of government.

Yet our society, our culture, our civilization gives such reverence to the United States Supreme Court that they can't even get their minds around the idea of: What do you do if the Court comes down with an atrocious, outrageous, erroneous, nonconstitutional decision that visits 60 million deaths of innocent babies on our country and another 60 million babies who are not born because of a result of it? A missing 100 to 120 million babies--a decision of the Supreme Court.

And what do we do?

We accept the decision as if the decisions of the Supreme Court are utterly sacrosanct, and the only way they can ever change is if the circumstances of that Court should change in such a way that the appointments and the confirmations to the Court could transform and reverse the erroneous decisions in the past.

Now, there are circumstances where the Supreme Court has reversed their own decision. We had the Dred Scott decision that actually wasn't reversed. That was a decision on slavery. Some say that that was an erroneous, poorly found decision.

I think I side with Abraham Lincoln that it was constitutional at its time. It probably was a decision that conformed to the Constitution, however morally wrong it was.

Then along came the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th Amendments that rectified the situation that was put upon us by Dred Scott. And, by the way,

600,000 lives lost in the Civil War, putting an end to slavery and resolving the Union.

Was the Union going to be something that one could separate from, or once you are part of the Union are you always part of the Union?

And, as this turned out, 600,000 Americans were killed in the Civil War, putting an end to slavery--600,000. It sounds like a lot until you compare it to 60 million babies aborted, Mr. Speaker.

This is the worst atrocity ever--accumulated effect of it--the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil, and it was sanctified by the Supreme Court in an unsoundly founded decision.

Now, the thing that obstructs us from getting pro-life legislation passed is a few people who profess that they are pro-life--a pro-life organization. They say: Well, we have to respect the Supreme Court decision that it is sacrosanct.

The Supreme Court laid out the parameters of viability not only in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, but also in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992: this viability concept, which is that if a baby can't survive outside of the womb, it is really not a life. Well, we know better than that because we can hear their hearts beat, we can watch them move around inside of the womb, we can watch them squirm, we can watch them suck their thumb, and we can watch them move their lips like they are trying to talk.

We bond with these babies now through ultrasound. The ultrasound is just about as good as Skype with our children and grandchildren who are out here breathing this free air. Those are the circumstances that have changed. We know that it is life.

The Supreme Court's decision wasn't soundly found. They weren't looking at an ultrasound then, back 45 years ago. We didn't know whether we had twins, or singles, or triplets, or quadruplets then because we didn't have enough ability to even listen to the heartbeat precisely enough. Today, we can, Mr. Speaker.

Today, we are listening to heartbeats, and, today, we are watching babies squirm, and move, and suck their thumb, and move their mouth like they are trying to talk, and get their exercise inside of the womb. Now we know. We can't deny. It is not a blob of tissue, it is not some kind of an intruder. This is a unique DNA, innocent, unborn human life.

We brought legislation here to this Congress called the Heartbeat legislation, H.R. 490. In this legislation, it says that before an abortionist sets about committing an abortion, he must first check for a heartbeat with transabdominal ultrasound, which picks up a heartbeat between 7 and 8 weeks from fertilization or conception. He must first check for a heartbeat. If a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected.

This rings not only in our hearts, but it rings true in our conscience. We know that where there is a heartbeat, there is life. And we know that if you go in and surgically, or by any other method, snuff out that heartbeat, you are snuffing out life, the most innocent among us.

Father Jonathan Morris, a priest from New York whom we see on FOX News in the morning, one day was commenting. He was commenting about how the ladies and the mothers in the church, when their babies start to cry too loud, they get up and hustle them out of the church, and he said: Why would you do that?

Those are the only innocent voices in that church. Well, the most innocent are in the womb, and the most innocent have been victimized by this idea of convenience, or women's rights, or that it is not somebody else's business to tell someone else what to do with their body.

Well, it isn't about their body, Mr. Speaker. It is about that unique being, with that unique combination of DNA. That is how precious this is. We never know the potential of a baby, an innocent unborn baby.

There was a story in the news a couple of days ago. Now, there are those who would predict that inside the womb you can identify Down syndrome, you can identify other afflictions; and those other afflictions, they might argue, make that baby less than perfect. But those babies, when they are loved, are perfect for those who love them.

We can't decide with a level of certainty, regardless, when they are in the womb. If there is a heartbeat there, that is an innocent life that is deserving of protection. If we would not end that life of that baby outside of the womb, we would not, and should not, end it inside the womb. So if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected.

H.R. 490 has 171 cosponsors here in the House of Representatives. It has come further and faster than any significant piece of pro-life legislation, I believe, since 1973 in Roe v. Wade in the first place.

We need to get this bill to the floor of this House and send it over and put it on Mitch McConnell's desk. There is hardly any room left on Mitch McConnell's desk these days. That number must be up to 500 or so bills sitting on his desk. But we can put Heartbeat there on top of Mitch McConnell's desk.

When you do that, that is the highest priority. Whatever it is on top of the desk is the highest priority. And we can say to Mitch: Bring this thing out to the floor of the Senate and send Heartbeat up to the President's desk.

If you can't do that, send the President to the States where the Democrats who will vote ``no'' on it are running for office. Remind them that America is now a pro-life nation, and this pro-life nation wants to pass pro-life legislation.

If they can't do it with the Senators who are seated over there now, they can do it with the Senators who can be seated over there next January. I believe that the conscience of America will be reflected if we send that over and put the bill on Mitch McConnell's desk.

Here is the polling that we have also. There are some people who worry about public opinion. They should know their conscience and act off of their conscience. But off of public opinion, it works this way: the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490. We have a Barna poll that was conducted, actually, February of last year.

It says that 86 percent of Republicans support the Heartbeat bill without exceptions, 61 percent of Independents support it without exceptions, and 55 percent of Democrats support the Heartbeat bill without exceptions. That is an astonishing thing to see that we have a majority of Democrats. I would call that a landslide if I won by 55 percent or more. This is a poll of a landslide among Democrats where we do have a Democrat or two or three who will vote for this bill. But, for the most part, that has been polarized here also.

We used to have at least 60 different pro-life Democrats who would come in and vote on pro-life legislation. Now I count maybe three. I hope that number is more. I regret that the parties have gotten this polarized, but some of this stuff happened when they had to walk the plank to vote for ObamaCare, and the people who replaced them were conservative Republicans. That is one of the reasons why we have so many cosponsors here on the Republican side--171 cosponsors here--and 162 national organizations or leaders have signed on.

I notice that Reverend Franklin Graham sent out a tweet in support of Heartbeat legislation here a couple of weeks ago. I am a great admirer and respecter of Reverend Graham, and I believe that his moral barometer matches that of any moral.

The support for this bill has come along well.

I will circle back to the resistance that we have that we need to overcome yet, Mr. Speaker.

While we reached a plateau on the Heartbeat bill, it became apparent to me that having one line in the water--however good that line is in the water here in the House of Representatives behind H.R. 490--it was also important to get some other lines in the water. The one thing that I could do was to take the Heartbeat bill and offer it up to the Iowa Legislature.

I had a conversation with State Senator Brad Zaun. He had a shot and would have made a good Congressman, but he is chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the Iowa Senate today. I had that conversation with him and had a conversation with Senator Jason Schultz. They took the Heartbeat legislation and brought that into the Iowa Senate.

The draft of that legislation was adapted to a bit of a degree to conform

to the State legislature. They worked that bill around through their caucus a little bit. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee there, Senator Brad Zaun, said: I am bringing this bill through committee. He was keeping me up to speed with what was going on.

That was an intense hearing before the committee. I am just going to speak on what I hear back channel--not that I was in the room. There were some people who wanted to stage a protest against the Heartbeat bill. So the chairman of the Judiciary Committee looked at them before he gaveled in the committee and said: If anybody has come here to protest, raise your hand, and I will throw you out now. I liked his approach. There was no need to throw anybody out because they actually behaved.

So there was a quiet, but an intense, hearing and markup before the Iowa Senate Judiciary Committee, and the Republicans all voted for the Heartbeat bill. Then here it sits on the calendar of the floor of the Iowa Senate.

Now the next big milestone needed to be reached, and that is that the majority leader, Bill Dix, brought the topic up before the caucus. That is closed door, so I am only speculating on what I picked up also back channel, Mr. Speaker. But he said to the 29 Republicans seated there in the caucus: Is there anybody here who doesn't want to vote for this Heartbeat bill? No one raised their hand, so the decision was made: We will bring it to the floor.

Well, it had been assigned to the chair of the subcommittee for the bill, who was Amy Sinclair. Amy Sinclair put together the subcommittee effort and prepared herself for an intense debate. It was expected to be an intense debate. I pointed out to her that my first debate on the floor of the Iowa Senate took me 7\1/2\ hours before I got my bill passed.

It was official English, by the way. It was a long, hard slog, to quote Rumsfeld.

Hers was entirely different. I thought there would be 6, 7, 8, 10 hours of debate. She brought the bill up, made eloquent opening remarks, rebutted a few of the remarks that were made on the other side, and 24 minutes later, the vote went up on the board, 30-20.

An independent voted also--and his name is David Johnson--for the heartbeat bill in the Iowa Senate, along with all 29 Republican senators, 30-20 on 24 minutes of debate.

And it rocketed over to the house of representatives, and, once again, I had the misconception of thinking to myself, this is going to be easy, but, like a lot of things in life, it isn't that easy.

So, as we began to see how the bill was going to move, if it moved at all, in the Iowa House, what I learned was that they didn't think they could move it, they didn't think they had the votes. The first whip check card that we worked on there--we needed 51 votes. There were 100 in the Iowa House. Of the 51 votes we needed, we only had 35. So a bunch of us went to work.

By the way, one of the people at the top of my list to thank here in this Congressional Record tonight, Mr. Speaker, is the Iowa representative of National Right to Life--who is not supporting this bill at the national level, and they need to lead, follow, or get out of the way. But their Iowa representative, his name is Scott Valencia, and he is of Iowa Right to Life. He was magnificent in the work that he did and the strategy that unfolded and in the network that he had put together with the pro-life community within Iowa.

I could always count on Scott being at the center, the nexus, of the communications on who was thinking what, who was saying what, and helping to inform us in the spreadsheet we put together to whip the votes.

Also on that list would be, from The Family Leader, Bob Vander Plaats, whom I have campaigned a lot with. We worked together to vote three supreme court justices off the Iowa bench. He and his team at The Family Leader, including Chuck Hurley, a longtime friend, and Danny Carroll, a former representative, were stellar in their efforts in focusing on how we would pull the votes together in the Iowa House.

There were 32 organizations in the Iowa pro-life coalition. Those are the organizations that I referenced, Scott Valencia, that put his finger on that pulse, but many of these people are people I worked with for years, that go back 20 or more years on this issue, and I am so proud of the work they did.

Our former majority leader here in the United States House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, made the trip up to Iowa to testify in favor of the heartbeat bill before a hearing in the Iowa House of Representatives, along with Dr. Kathy Altman, who was a witness for us here in Congress as well, Mr. Speaker.

So I am very, very grateful to all of these folks and many more, but the jobs that they did helped move this thing in the right direction. The hearing was intense, and there was strong testimony on both sides, but the voice for the unborn, the voice for the most innocent prevailed in that hearing. And it gave more confidence to some of the people that were reluctant to vote in favor of the bill on that night.

One of those people, I suspect--and I suspect only--would be Dave Heaton, who I count as a good friend. I have always enjoyed him and had a certain affection for the affable gentleman who has so many prime ribs down there in his restaurant in southeast Iowa, but when he voted ``yes'' coming out of committee, he said, ``Yes for now,'' and I thought maybe that was the end of it. But it turned out that we needed 51 votes. We wouldn't have had them if it hadn't been for the vote of Dave Heaton as he retires. God bless Dave. I appreciate his vote.

I appreciate the vote and the work of so many there in the house, including Speaker Upmeyer, who is a second-generation speaker of the house of representatives, who has earned her place there and has become a very stable and a master strategist on how to move legislation through the legislature, along with Majority Leader Chris Hagenow, who was fully behind the heartbeat bill from the beginning and, I think, kept a low profile publicly but did a lot behind the scenes.

Then another individual whose character I know well, and that is the Speaker Pro Tem Matt Windschitl, who has been part of this strategy all along, a very, very steady hand, a very, very clear strategist, somebody you want to ride the river with. He does come from over there in the river bottom, not very far from me.

I appreciate the strategy and the work that each of these individuals did, but this doesn't stop at this point either, Mr. Speaker.

The chairman of the Human Resources Committee, Joel Fry, did master work on it, as well as the floor manager in the Iowa House, Shannon Lundgren. Shannon, I believe, is in her first term, and I haven't gotten to know her personally, but here is the narrative that I get from the way she managed that debate in the house. It was a lot longer in the house. It went on for hours, 5 to 7 hours, something like that, perhaps more. The bill passed around 11:30 that night.

Shannon, when she had brought the bill up there, this was the critique that came to me, is that she started out slow, and you might start to wonder if she was going to be able to hold her own through that very, very grueling trial that had been assigned to her that she was, I think, eager and proud to take on, and she should be proud, because she got stronger as the night wore on.

So did a number of the other members of the Iowa House. They stepped up to defend their positions and to advocate their narratives. One of them would be Steve Holt. He and also Sandy Salmon, who had introduced her own bill, her own pro-life legislation, they were strong and many others were strong in the way they handled their debate.

I didn't put together a complete, analyzed list here, Mr. Speaker, because, for one thing, I just didn't have the time, but I recognize the risk in naming names. There definitely are people that I have left out. There will be others that I will try to thread in here, but there will always be people that are left out.

Some of them in the middle of this, though, were Jack Whitver, who is the leader in the Iowa Senate. I mentioned Amy Sinclair, the chair of the subcommittee and the floor manager in the senate. Senator Brad Zaun, whom I have talked with a lot and grown to admire, and I appreciate his drive. He

doesn't hesitate, he doesn't equivocate, he knows what he believes, and he strategizes and acts upon it. And Senator Jason Schultz, whom I first brought up this topic with.

I want to thank every representative and every senator who spoke and who voted for the heartbeat bill in the Iowa legislature. It was a phenomenal accomplishment.

Last year, they passed a 20-week, called sometimes the pain-capable bill. Many thought that would be the end of the effort on pro-life for a while, and they came back this year and passed heartbeat legislation.

Not only was it the work, not only was it the debate, not only was it the negotiations and the votes that were counted and the effort on the whip team from those elected members who worked inside the house of representatives and the senate, but also the outside groups, the 32 outside organizations and then some, that came together. It was a phenomenal, phenomenal effort that brought this together.

I wanted to say also a couple of words about how difficult this was for some of the most pro-life people that we had. I am not one who believes in exceptions. I don't believe that a baby that is a product of a rape should be executed for the crime of their father. Neither do I believe that that should be the case for a baby who is a product of incest, which might be the crime of the father and it might be the crime of the father and the mother. Those babies are innocent, and they should have every right to life of every other baby conceived at any other time under any other circumstances.

But it came to that place where there were either going to be exceptions or there was going to be no bill passed. I think there would have been a way we might have been able to resolve that, but by the time it came to that place on the calendar, that place on the clock, that place on the legislative clock, a decision had to be made: Are we going to bring a bill to the floor of the Iowa House with exceptions, or are we going to have no bill whatsoever? That was the decision. That was the crux of the matter.

Coming to that place of decision, the right decision is: Let's save all the lives we can. Let's take all we can and get as much done as we can. If we could come back with heartbeat after the 20-week bill last year, maybe next year we can come back to eliminate the exceptions or perhaps even do personhood, which is the goal of the pro-life community. It should be that case worldwide.

So I know it was a very difficult decision for some. I happen to know that Skyler Wheeler may be the most pro-life member of the Iowa House of Representatives, and it was a very difficult decision for him, but with Skyler Wheeler, we got to 51. We have a bill that then was sent on its way to the Governor's desk.

Before I mention the Governor any further, I want to also mention some of the other help that we had. This promise on heartbeat legislation is rooted back to a request made by Phyllis Schlafly just days before she passed away that I would draft and introduce heartbeat legislation here in Congress. I followed through on that commitment.

She was, in a time of her life, a living, breathing icon, the clearest political thinker of our time, a pure constitutionalist, a strong, faithful Christian woman who left her mark and her imprint across this Nation in many, many ways. I have powerful respect for Phyllis Schlafly, for her life, for her contribution, for her judgment, and for the promise that I made on the day of her funeral.

I made that promise sitting in discussion and consultation with Janet Porter of Faith to Action, who has been the driving force on this, the launching force on this from the beginning. And Janet Porter now may be the most driven pro-life activist in America, and she has accomplished a lot to get this started. She teamed up with Tom DeLay, our former majority leader here. He made his fame as the whip, maybe the best whip that we have ever seen here in the House of Representatives. Both of them worked pro bono on this to move the votes and get cosponsors signed up here in Congress, which gave a lot of credibility to the heartbeat bill on its way to the Iowa legislature.

In addition, one of the push-backs that we got in the Iowa House was, ``We don't want to spend taxpayers' money defending this legislation.'' It is something that they believe that--I mean, some of the folks would say: We will lose in court. So if you know you are going to lose, you can't spend taxpayers' money, knowing you are going to lose.

My response back to that was: We know we are going to lose at the lower court level. Anybody that argues that that is a reason not to move pro-life legislation, because we will lose at the district court level, we will lose at the circuit level, that is a given, because we have a strong precedent established by the United States Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Of course the lower courts, respecting the Supreme Court, are not going to try to overturn a Supreme Court decision. We have to accept the idea that this will be litigated, it will go through the lower courts, and as it goes into the lower courts, we will lose at each turn until we get to the United States Supreme Court.

To give an example of how this worked in the past, on the ban on partial-birth abortion, which came to us about the end of the 1990s, as I recall, on the initial case, the ban on partial-birth abortion, that gruesome and ghastly procedure that is so, so awful, to describe it here on the floor of Congress is more than I will do here tonight, Mr. Speaker, but Congress banned that procedure.

Having banned that procedure, it was litigated by--guess what-- Planned Parenthood, the advocacy group for abortion itself, and the Supreme Court struck down our ban on partial-birth abortion. Of course, they have to use a rationale, so their rationale was that the act of a partial-birth abortion wasn't precisely enough defined, that it was vague, and if it was vague, then how would the abortionist know if he is committing a crime or not. I said: ``You are killing a baby. That ought to be enough.''

Instead, the Supreme Court ruled to strike down our ban on partial- birth abortion, but they wanted a more precise description of it. And they argued that Congress had not established that a partial-birth abortion is never medically necessary to save the life of the mother.

So I arrived in this Congress shortly after that decision. We went to work on this. The chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice at that time, where I am the chair of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice today, was Steve Chabot of Cincinnati, a strong pro-life advocate, and we held hearing after hearing in the Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee.

By the way, the chairman of the full committee at that time was sitting here just a few minutes ago, Mr. Jim Sensenbrenner.

So we established, through congressional hearings, and wrote a new ban on partial-birth abortion that precisely defined the act of a partial-birth abortion that we would prohibit by statute and congressional findings, after hearings, that it is never necessary to commit this heinous act in order to save the life of the mother.

With those congressional findings coupled with the precise definition, we passed the legislation and sent it out again, and it was litigated again by, let's see, Planned Parenthood--or that was Carhart. LeRoy Carhart was the abortionist out of Omaha who was the lead on that case, Gonzales v. Carhart, as I recall.

But in any case, that precise definition that we drafted and the congressional findings that it is never medically necessary to save the life of the mother were enough to get the same Court to reverse themselves and accept the conclusions that Congress had drawn because we had conformed to their request.

So there is a case where the Court came down on the side of striking down our ban on partial-birth abortion, and then we brought it back through the courts again and it was tried in three circuits simultaneously, and in every circuit we lost. But then the cases were packaged together and they went before the United States Supreme Court, and then we won on the side of life.

The Court reversed itself, but we lost at every lower court level. We only had a chance to succeed at the Supreme Court. And that is going to be the case with this legislation, as well, because it directly challenges Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

So it has to get to the Supreme Court. We are going to lose until we get there. When we get there, especially if we arrive in the Supreme Court with a new appointment to the Supreme Court, we are looking at, more likely now, under today's circumstances, the potential of a 5-4 Court, a Court that would be coming down on the side of the Constitution and the strict constructionism that protects life.

We are obligated to protect life under the 14th Amendment. So if Congress can define life, we define it as, if a heartbeat is detected, that is life, the baby is protected.

And the cost of defending this case isn't going to fall on the backs of Iowa taxpayers, Madam Speaker. Instead, we have two organizations that have volunteered to step up, pro bono, to defend this case before the courts, and those two organizations are--this is the message from Matt Staver of Liberty Counsel--Liberty University, many will know it as--and that has produced a pretty good chief of staff in my operation, Sarah Stevens.

Matt Staver has agreed to defend this, pro bono. That is Latin for ``on the house.'' And also Martin Cannon of St. Thomas More Society will have agreed that they will also defend it pro bono. So we will see how this comes together, but it doesn't put the taxpayers of Iowa at risk.

So it makes it not only the right decision for life, the right decision for law, the right decision for our Constitution and, in particular, our 14th Amendment, it makes it the right decision for the taxpayers.

When we look at the society we live in today, the last time we had unemployment numbers down as low as we are seeing now, I remember them bringing a bill into the State legislature that would require all of the health insurance policies in Iowa to cover contraceptives. One of the arguments they made was we can't be having women missing work because they are pregnant, having babies. We need the labor force too much.

Well, that didn't fit to my analysis at the time, which is why I remember it. Instead, we need babies that will go to work in 18 or 20 years, and we need to sustain ourselves and our society.

I tell young people constantly, good people need to have a lot of babies and raise them right. That fixes everything that can be fixed. If good people raise their babies right and have a lot of babies, there will be enough people here to do the work we need to do; and we will create the jobs for others, and we will see people picking up and carrying their share of the load, pulling the harness instead of riding in the wagon. That is what saves this society.

But, in any case, here we are, Madam Speaker, with a bill that passed out of the Iowa House that night, on about Wednesday night of last week, at 11:30 at night--might have been Tuesday night, 11:30 at night. May 2 was, let's see. About 11:30 that night.

And the dedication of our Iowa senators was such that they said: Well, let's just take this up right away. Why don't you carry that across the rotunda and we will take it up on the floor of the Iowa Senate.

And they did. And after a fairly short debate, they passed it in the Iowa Senate.

Again, there were so many missing, but 29 to--let's see. I remember the lower number of it. But it passed easily out of the Iowa Senate, and it was messaged to the Governor that night, which would have been, I believe, May 2.

So by the time we got around to Friday, I found myself in South Carolina, at the invitation of the Governor of South Carolina, to talk about sanctuary cities, and we ended up doing a press conference also on Heartbeat, interesting conversation.

I think we enjoyed a friendship, and I expect that South Carolina actually had a Heartbeat bill in front of them that was--it would have been very hard for it to survive reaching the sine die part of their session because they were about done.

The same with the sanctuary city bill. We tried to do what we could with that, but anything that didn't pass down there I think comes up again next year, and they have got an extra boost to get that done.

I really appreciate the leadership provided by Governor Henry McMaster on the sanctuary cities and on Heartbeat, and we will make sure that we are supportive down there, as we have been in Iowa.

Also, Governor Ricketts of Nebraska has said: Send me a Heartbeat bill; I'll sign it.

I know that there are people in the Nebraska Unicameral that are preparing to bring Heartbeat in next year in Nebraska, and I know that it is also part of the Governor's debate in the race in Florida. So there are other States that are looking as well.

This could be something that spreads out across the countryside in State after State after State, Madam Speaker, but it would not have had this kind of momentum had it not been for Governor Reynolds, who had a bill signing ceremony on Friday afternoon at 3 in her formal office in the capitol and filled the office up with lots of young kids and good, steady, stalwart legislators who deserve a lot of credit and to take a bow for this.

I looked at the pictures of that bill signing ceremony, and it occurred to me that they probably saved as many lives just during the debate for Heartbeat as were represented by the children in Governor Reynolds' office.

I thank Governor Reynolds for signing the bill and putting it into law.

She had put out a statement a week or a little more earlier that said that she is proud to be part of the most pro-life administration in Iowa history. Well, she can now, with confidence and, hopefully, at least, an inner pride let us know that she has signed the bill, and it makes Governor Kim Reynolds the most pro-life Governor in the history of the State of Iowa.

This accomplishment came about because of the work done by people I have mentioned here and many, many more who worked on this, who prayed for this, who relentlessly pushed in the right direction to bring about a bill that could go to the Governor's desk.

Governor Reynolds had such a magnificent bill signing ceremony that sent such a strong message to the rest of the country; and that message to the rest of the country would be this, Madam Speaker: that Iowa, this purple State, this State that voted for Barack Obama twice--we also went for Donald Trump, I might add. But Iowa actually launched Barack Obama's campaign for the Presidency. He slipped in there from Illinois and got a big bounce in the first-in-the-Nation caucus, and off he went to the Presidency and to his reelect as well, with strong support out of Iowa. But he won Iowa each time.

So prior to President Trump winning in the 2016 election, the time before that that went Republican was George Bush's 2004 reelect. We worked that hard, and he won Iowa by only 10,000 votes.

The other time, the next time prior that Iowa had gone for a Republican President was Ronald Reagan's reelect in 1984. So that is how rare those Iowa victories are.

We are a purple State, but Iowa Republicans have put up excellent leadership, and excellent leadership has emerged from a coalesced Republican Party that has been very strong and has hammered out the planks in the platform over and over again. They ring with utter clarity to me when I read that platform these days, Madam Speaker.

So I put out this challenge to the States and the rest of the country: If purple State Iowa can pass Heartbeat and have the strongest pro-life legislation in the United States of America--of the 50 States, Iowa has the strongest pro-life legislation passed into law, signed by Governor Reynolds--then the challenge that is laid out there for the rest of the States is see what you can do. Take a look at Iowa's legislation. Move the cleanest you can. No exceptions is best because that baby's life begins at the moment of fertilization, and we need to protect innocent life from that point on.

But we can define the beginning of life medically by requiring an ultrasound, and that ultrasound, if it picks up a heartbeat, if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected. That

phrase rings in the conscience of Americans nationwide. That is why 86 percent of Republicans support Heartbeat, H.R. 490. That is why 61 percent of Independents, and that is why 55 percent of Democrats do.

And, by the way, that 55 percent of Democrats is why no Republican will lose their seat for voting for Heartbeat, because Democrats won't dare attack you for that. If they do so, they are going against their own base, their own people, who are 55 percent pro-life, even though I can only count about three over here among the Democrats who will be cosponsors of this legislation and, I think, that can define themselves as pro-life.

So I thank all of these individuals who have worked so hard to put this whole strategy together, and I spent some time speaking to the issue, Madam Speaker, because I want the people to understand that things don't come easy and good ideas don't just float to the top and sail off to be passed. It takes real work and real organization to get things accomplished, and determination and conviction and people who believe.

I look back at Dr. John Willke, who was the founder, the original founder of National Right to Life, and that is the oldest and the largest pro-life organization in the country. He said this: ``When I founded the pro-life movement, it wasn't to regulate how abortions would be done. It was to bring the abortion killing to an end. We have waited too long, and that wait has cost us too much.'' That is Dr. John C. Willke, cofounder and former president of National Right to Life.

Now, in their mission statement, I am not sure if I have it here in my text, Madam Speaker, but I will get it as close as I need to from memory if I don't have it.

National Right to Life's mission statement says that they are dedicated to protecting human life from the beginning of life till natural death. The beginning of life raised a question with me, so I went through their website to find out how they define the beginning of life.

They define it on their website, National Right to Life, as from the moment of fertilization. Life begins at the moment of fertilization, according to National Right to Life, and ends at natural death.

I agree with that. I think their mission statement is correct. I think we need to defend life from the moment of fertilization until natural death, and I think National Right to Life should do the same thing.

But they believe that we should not challenge the Supreme Court. They believe that we have to accept Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and we have to accept the idea of viability that was framed within the Casey decision. That is why they have supported the 20-week bill, to get up there close to the edge of viability, this idea that a 24-week baby can survive outside the womb, a 23-week baby can survive outside the womb, a 22\1/2\-week baby can survive outside the womb.

So under the supposition that we work our way back to actually a 21- week baby can survive outside the womb--and I saw data that said a 20\1/2\-week also. So the 20-week is marked down there to try to stretch the definition of viability just about as far as they could bring themselves to do so, but they fear challenging the Supreme Court.

They are accepting of the Supreme Court decisions, those decisions from 45 years ago, 60 million abortions ago, and they are stuck in the idea that we can't challenge the Supreme Court.

Well, how could you not challenge the Supreme Court of the United States? This is the United States Congress. Some teach it has three coequal branches of government. I said earlier it is not three. There is a superior branch of government. There is a branch of government that is the weakest of the three, defined by our Founding Fathers, to be the judicial branch of government.

And we have a decision that is called Marbury v. Madison that came in in the first years of the 19th century, where the Supreme Court asserted their authority to define the Constitution and tell us all what it means, and we have acquiesced to that, decision after decision, for over 200 years.

And how can it be that a Supreme Court of lifetime appointees that conceivably could all be stacked under the terms of one President and live for decades after that and stay on the Court after that that could invoke all kinds of havoc on God-given liberties, and we would have no way to appeal a decision of the Supreme Court? We just have to accept those decisions as if they are the final authority? They are God to us?

I say we respect them. I think we respect their jurisprudence. I think we carefully observe what they do. And I think that most of the decisions they make are soundly founded, but some of them are completely wrong.

And they have reversed themselves in their own history, which is utter proof that they are completely wrong.

I would point out that the clearest one is the Kelo decision. They haven't reversed it yet, but Justice Scalia said he expected it would be reversed at some time.

But this was the confiscation of property. The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees property rights. It says: ``Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.''

The Supreme Court of the United States, in the Kelo decision, in about 2005, struck those words ``for public use'' from the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

Now, how can we tolerate a decision like that and accept it because it comes from the Supreme Court? And does it live forever that way?

Does the Obergefell decision, that legal, rational thought out of nowhere, they impose same-sex marriage on every union in America? How is it that a decision made by either the Iowa Supreme Court or the U.S. Supreme Court has taken away the rights of my sons to be married as husbands and wives? Why does the Supreme Court get to visit with that edict?

Because we respect them, we accept those decisions, we don't question them, because the culture is what the culture is.

Well, the culture has got to change, and we have got to change our way of looking at this issue of abortion. We cannot sit around and twiddle our thumbs or wait until the Supreme Court is configured differently.

But we can do this: we can anticipate it will be configured differently. We can call upon the Supreme Court to reverse their previous decisions. This idea of stare decisis, the concept that once decided, a subsequent court has to accept the decision made by their predecessors, this Congress can't do that. Well, we can. We don't. We say: No Congress can bind a subsequent Congress. No Congress can say: You shall appropriate X dollars going into the future and have that be irreversible.

All decisions made by our predecessors in previous Congresses and signed by any previous President can be reversed by the United States Congress if it is our will to do that. We don't accept as sacrosanct a decision made by a previous Congress, and neither should we accept a decision as sacrosanct made by a previous Supreme Court. They should all be open to question.

Yes, we should respect their judgment, their jurisprudence, but we can't allow ourselves to be bound by those decisions, even if we have to go all the way back to challenge Marbury at some point.

But we won't have to do that, Madam Speaker, because I believe the next appointment to the Supreme Court brings a strict constructionist, an originalist, to the Court, as promised by President Trump.

He followed through with Neil Gorsuch. I believe he will follow through with a second appointment to the Court, if given that opportunity.

We need to move Heartbeat legislation over to the desk of Mitch McConnell so we can begin to apply how we are going to get it off his desk and get it to the floor of the Senate and passed and over to President Trump's desk, where he will sign the Heartbeat legislation and where the very pro-life Vice President Mike Pence will be standing next to him when that day happens.

All of this needs to unfold here, Madam Speaker, and the obstruction really comes from the number one pro-life organization, the largest and the oldest: National Right to Life.

So I will put up only one poster here, Madam Speaker, and this is it. National Right to Life says, and this is off

of their site, they do not oppose the Heartbeat bill.

By my utilization of the English language, I don't know the difference between ``do not oppose'' and ``do not support.''

But what we need is support, not this intransigence that is going on, especially when the leadership in this House has essentially given the National Right to Life and two other organizations that, by the way, support the Heartbeat bill, a de facto veto that no pro- life legislation comes to the floor of the House of Representatives unless it is supported by the top three organizations in the country.

Supported by. Does not support. Why? Heartbeat matches their mission statement more closely than anything that they have supported before. And it is drafted with the anticipation that we would get it before the next appointment to the Supreme Court, not this one. And they fear that somehow we are going to lose some ground if we go to the Court before the Court is ready. And I say I fear for every year we fail to get the Heartbeat bill to the Supreme Court, we have on our conscience a million abortions in America taking place; a million little babies not born; a million little pairs of shoes that aren't going to be sitting there by that little bed, by that little crib; a million little children, as innocent as could be, who will never have the chance to live, to love, to learn, to laugh, to play, to fall in love, have children of their own, and raise their children with our American values in their hearts, our faith taught to them, their souls saved and demonstrated here as they lift our country up and the world up with the beliefs and the convictions that were passed to us from God through our Founding Fathers.

And we equivocate on something like this? And National Right to Life stands there, essentially in the way? Whether they do not oppose or whether they do not support, until that changes, this bill does not come to the floor, unless the Speaker changes his mind, the majority leader changes his mind, and the majority whip changes his mind.

So I call upon National Right to Life to take a look at Iowa. It may be news to them, Madam Speaker, that Heartbeat passed Iowa. It will be litigated. It will be on its way towards the Supreme Court, and maybe to the Supreme Court, but there is no acknowledgement that this has happened on the part of National Right to Life. It is as if it didn't happen for them, because they can't bring themselves to break out of the mold that they have been stuck in for years. This is a 45-year hidebound mold, and if it doesn't change, it is 1 million abortions a year, every year, until it does change.

This strategy, over the last 45 years, has cost the lives of 60 million babies. Now, I am not asserting that it could have been solved and reversed in the first year or 2, or 5, or even 10. But along the way, we have to make the case that the Supreme Court, if they don't change, cannot be allowed to be the final word on the lives of another 60 million babies.

So, Madam Speaker, congratulations to the State of Iowa, the Iowa General Assembly, the Iowa Senate, the Iowa House of Representatives, the Iowa Governor, the leadership in the House and in the Senate, all of those who teamed up and joined hands and worked relentlessly and persistently to bring this Heartbeat bill through, and the signature of Governor Reynolds. God bless them all for the job that they did. May we match their effort and their success here in the United States Congress.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 26 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, May 9, 2018, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege and the honor to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, and I come to the floor today to bring up a list of subjects that I think should be deliberated upon here in the House Chamber.

The first one that is on my mind is the moral calling that we have to step in to save the lives of the most innocent among us. And as I watched some of the discussion that took place here on the floor today, and I look over at the people that were a part of the privileged motion, as I reflect upon however strong they are in their verbal support for the Catholic Church, I didn't see one of them over there that actually will defend innocent, unborn human life. And we have tested it time after time here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

So the central principle of the Catholic Church, and many other Christian faiths, I will add, is to protect innocent, unborn human life, to oppose abortion-on-demand, and to respect the values that once a child is conceived, once fertilization takes place, we have a unique combination of DNA that is never matched again in history; and that unique combination of DNA is created in God's image, and I believe that he puts a soul in that little baby from that moment.

And as that little baby starts to grow in its mother's womb, we have a child that is a gift to the world and a gift here to America; a gift to that child's parents, grandparents, family, neighbors, community; a gift to our country.

Yet there is a policy here that allows for the Supreme Court to step in and intervene with the will of the people and establish what they seem to believe is a right to decide who lives and who dies and under what terms that might be.

In 1973, January 22 of 1973, two decisions came down from the United States Supreme Court. One was Roe v. Wade, which most everyone seems to know and understand; and that Roe v. Wade decision essentially was that they believe that the child wouldn't be protected until after the first trimester. Trimesters were part of the dialogue in Roe v. Wade.

Doe v. Bolton was the companion case; and in that companion case of Doe v. Bolton that was decided on the same day, it essentially said, except for all of these other things: the life or health of the mother, the familial relationship of the mother, the economic condition of the mother, of course the physical health of the mother. The list went on.

But it was so broad that it really said this: that Roe v. Wade says you can have abortion on demand after the first trimester. Doe v. Bolton said you can have abortion on demand for any reason or essentially no rational reason whatsoever.

And that stayed in place from 1973 until 1992, when the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision came down.

It is interesting that the son of Democrat Governor of Pennsylvania-- former Governor of Pennsylvania, since passed away, God rest his pro- life soul--Bob Casey, who was denied the opportunity to speak before the Democratic National Convention because of his pro-life credentials, was the subject of the lawsuit from Planned Parenthood to Governor Casey of Pennsylvania.

Out of that decision came a majority opinion that ratcheted the abortion issue a little ways, and it said: Well, you can't abort them after there is a viability.

But that viability was indistinct, and it settled in somewhere around 24 or 25 weeks. So it had litigation around that. We have had legislation around that. But, meanwhile, abortion on demand pretty much walked its way across this country.

In the late part of the 1990s, we had legislation that passed that banned partial-birth abortion. It was a big debate here on the floor of the House of Representatives, that ghastly and ghoulish practice--and I won't describe it here on the floor out of sensitivity, Mr. Speaker, to ears that might not be able to absorb this--but it is ghastly and it is ghoulish, a partial-birth abortion.

Yet that practice was going on around this country. This Congress banned it in the House and in the Senate. Then it was litigated; and, let's see, as it was litigated, the Supreme Court ruled that partial- birth abortion was a legal act because the Congress had failed to define the act of partial-birth abortion precisely enough that it was a vague description as to what that act actually was. So they said that that burden couldn't be upon the abortionist to know what Congress actually meant. Therefore, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.

They also added to it being indistinct that Congress had not established that it was never medically necessary to save the life of the mother.

So we went back to work here in this Congress, and I was part of that as a member of the Judiciary Committee. The chairman of the Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee at that time was Congressman Steve Chabot from Ohio, a very strong and principled pro- life Congressman to this day, and I hope the next chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and he is the central player in this, and I got to weigh in and maybe tweak the language a little bit, but we precisely defined the act of partial-birth abortion precisely enough.

We also held hearing after hearing that concluded that a partial- birth abortion was never necessary to save the life of a mother.

There were ghastly testimonies that came before the Judiciary Committee in that period of time, but we passed that legislation off the House, we passed it off the Senate, and it was litigated again. LeRoy Carhart was the lead abortionist who litigated this case. It was Gonzales v. Carhart, as I recall.

I went to Lincoln, Nebraska. It was heard in three circuits. The one in Lincoln, Nebraska, is the one I sat in on; and after a number of hours of listening to that case be heard before the court, I went out and did a press conference outside the Federal building because the judge had said that the two attorneys in the case, the opposing attorneys in the case, had done more due diligence than the United States Congress.

I knew what the due diligence was here. He did not. So I raised that issue: How do you do more due diligence than the United States Congress bringing in the wisdom of America and the American people and having public hearings and rolling that information out over and over again, and the due diligence of precisely parsing the language of the decision that went against life and for a ghastly and ghoulish abortion, and precisely defined that act so that it could no longer be argued that we didn't make it clear enough in our legislation?

And we made it very clear that it was never necessary to do a partial-birth abortion to save the life of the mother.

We established those principles; and once we established those principles, then I am there in Lincoln, Nebraska, to defend it. I could only speak to that court through the press. There wasn't a way for me to walk down and make a case before the judge, but I made the case to the press; and when he read the press clippings the next morning, apparently, is when he discovered this, he offered to recuse himself.

Well, I wish they had taken him up on that. But in any case, Judge Kopf

found against life and for abortion, as did the other two circuits, and we had now lost at two or three circuits in the previous legislation, we lost before the Supreme Court, the ban on partial-birth abortion had been struck down, and we have lost in three circuits when we came back with the better language and the congressional findings that it is never necessary to do a partial-birth abortion to save the life of the mother.

We lost in all of these areas. So that is two or three circuits the first time around, and a Supreme Court the first time around, and three circuits the second time around on our way to the Supreme Court.

Now, who would think we would be successful before the Supreme Court the second time through with Gonzales v. Carhart?

And I would say that, looking back on history, we should have been able to expect that. I don't know what I expected, I just knew what my job was was to do all I could do to save the lives of the most innocent among us.

So the Supreme Court found in favor of life and against LeRoy Carhart and said that Congress had successfully and legally and constitutionally banned the ghastly and ghoulish act of partial-birth abortion.

That is the only case that I know of where we have gone back to the court after we had failed the first time on the life issue, tried again. So when we went back to the court, we gained ground; we didn't lose.

And if you track the court along the way, I think that you see that there has been an incremental increase in their support for the authority, the constitutional authority of Congress and the State legislatures, to ban abortion or to limit abortion. And we are sitting there today with a Supreme Court that might well be a 5-4 decision against the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490; the Heartbeat bill that requires an abortionist who is contemplating committing an abortion to first check for a heartbeat, and if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. That is the standard that is within H.R. 490.

We don't make exceptions for rape or incest because I believe it is immoral to execute a baby for the sin and the crime of the father.

So we have a very clean, very precise, very well-worded--and it is not worded in anticipation of it going before this court, Mr. Speaker, but it is written in anticipation of going before the Court after the next appointment and confirmation to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch 2, I might say.

And even though this Court could be disposed to uphold Heartbeat, because their legal argument gets a little vague, they don't get to say a heartbeat is vague. We know if there is a beating heart, there is life. We know it is a human life. We know that an unborn baby with a beating heart has at least a 95 percent chance of experiencing a successful birth.

And some of those numbers go higher than that, not to 100 percent, but approach 100 percent. I use 95 percent because I am confident that that number does not overstate. It does not overstate the prospects for a child that has a heartbeat.

We know that a heartbeat designates life. We know that abortion stops a beating heart. And we know that, in the 14th Amendment, it requires that we protect life, liberty, and property, in that order, I might add, in a prioritized order.

And, Mr. Speaker, I take it all back to the Declaration of Independence when Thomas Jefferson penned the words that the protection for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are the words that are in our Declaration. A little bit different than John Locke's life, liberty, and property.

But the life, liberty, and property is deeply entrenched within the literature that brought us up to the Declaration and the Constitution and is enshrined in the 14th Amendment.

So I assert that our Founders understood, and nearly a century later, with the 14th Amendment, the Framers of the 14th Amendment understood, that they were prioritized rights. They didn't get this wrong. They never put property, liberty, and life; or liberty, property, life; or any other combination that might be conceivable with the three rights that are protected.

In every case that I can find in literature anywhere, it is always life, liberty, and then it either says property or pursuit of happiness.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Speaker, pursuit of happiness was understood by our Founding Fathers to be rooted in the Greek word ``eudemonia.'' E-u-d-e-m-o-n-i-a is how it is spelled, and I believe exactly how it is also pronounced.

And what it means is, that is the Greek word for pursuit of happiness, which they understood to mean the development of the whole human being. The development of a person's physical body, to get to exercise and stay in shape, get in shape, stay in shape, become proficient athletically so that you can use your body for all of the things you might need to use it for.

And the second component of this is to develop one's self intellectually, because God gives you a brain, after all, and that raw material, that brain, is a gift to you. You have an obligation to develop your intellectual capacity. So that is your education, your training, your cognitive skills, develop them to the max.

So develop yourself physically, develop yourself intellectually, and then the third component is develop yourself spiritually to put together the composition of the whole human being. That pursuit of happiness is understood by the Greeks and identified by the Greek word ``eudemonia.''

That is what the Founding Fathers understood when Thomas Jefferson took the quill and wrote: ``Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.'' Not a fun tailgate party, not putting your feet up and watching the ball game. Not a celebration among your family in that way. All those things are fine, but it is about developing the whole human being.

And even that, as important as it is to develop yourselves as a whole human being, the efforts and endeavors to do so could never step on the liberty of others; the liberty of others to have a speech, religion, assembly, the right to keep and bear arms, the rights to property. All of those things that are some of the liberties that are God-given liberties that are protected, they are protected even from someone else in their pursuit of happiness or their development of their own eudemonia, cannot take away someone else's freedom of speech, religion, right to assembly, freedom of the press, the right to keep and bear arms, the protection from unreasonable search and seizure, or the right to own property. All of those things are protected as God-given liberties in the Framers' documents, and particularly in the Declaration of Independence, and then they are additionally enshrined within the Constitution itself.

So pursue happiness, use your liberties to do that. None of those things are any good if you don't have life. Life is the paramount right; and in protection of life, especially the most vulnerable among us, innocent, unborn human life, and the protection of that life, no one can use their liberties to take someone else's life.

And no one can use their pursuit of happiness to take someone else's liberty or life. These are prioritized in that order: life is paramount, liberty comes second, and eudemonia--pursuit of happiness-- comes third.

That is the structure that was understood intellectually and intuitively by our Founding Fathers, by the Framers of our Constitution, and the drafters of our Declaration, and that is the framework that we must adhere to in this country if we are going to continue to enjoy God-given liberty in any of its forms over the long haul.

The sin that this Nation is committing with 60 million abortions-- these innocent little babies who are the future of our country, 60 million, and today we have what we call a full-employment economy. The unemployment rate is as low as it has been since 2001. And I am constantly hearing employers say: You need to get me a labor force.

Well, I remember 10 years ago the message was: You need to create jobs. The private sector creates jobs--not government, as a rule. But it was jobs 10 years ago. Today, it is: We have too many jobs and not enough workers.

Well, where are those workers? They are the aborted generations that we are missing today, the ghosts that sit between us when nearly a third of a generation is gone and 60 million are missing.

Not only 60 million are missing, but there is roughly another 60 million who

were not born because their mothers were aborted. And when you do the back-of-the-envelope calculation on that, it falls to roughly 60 million more. So somewhere between 100 million and 120 million Americans are missing because Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Planned Parenthood v. Casey--Planned Parenthood, that, itself, spends millions lobbying the United States Congress and State legislatures across this land, millions.

They are the number one abortion company--factory--in America, committing around 354,000 abortions a year of the right at 1 million abortions a year.

When I talk to people here on this floor, a gentlewoman from the other side of the aisle just spoke here some minutes ago, who said to me: Steve, why are you worried about abortion? We have got abortions down to under 1 million a year.

The peak was about 1.6 million abortions a year, so why am I worried about this?

They score the difference between the high watermark in abortions at 1.6 million and what appears to be a very stable, maybe low watermark of 1 million abortions a year. They think that somehow by messaging we have saved 600,000 babies every year is good because we are not aborting babies at the willy-nilly pace we were at the peak of abortions a couple, four decades ago.

I say instead, you don't get to keep score because there aren't as many babies being taken today by abortionists. You can only keep score by ending a ghastly, ghoulish, and immoral practice and protecting these innocent lives. These are innocent lives of all races. All of God's children, every one, created in His image.

And that unique piece of DNA that I mentioned at the beginning, Mr. Speaker, that will never be matched up again. Of all of the possible combinations, it is beyond our imagination to think how that unique person could become matched up in another generation. There are 7 billion people on this planet, and what are the distinctions between us?

Just think, how many times have you heard a voice from another room and recognized that voice because it is unique. You know who it is. It has to be somebody usually close to you or somebody you have heard quite often.

I know that I have come up behind a vehicle out in my neighborhood and the vehicle had probably been traded two or three times since I had seen the driver, but I come up behind that pickup, I see the back of his head, and I can tell by the way he sits behind the steering wheel who he is--even if I haven't seen him in 20 years--because we are that unique. There are 7 billion faces here, and they are all unique.

Even though there is identical DNA in the case of identical twins, triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, septuplets, sextuplets--I think I covered all that has ever existed--but whatever kind of combination of unique matches of DNA, they still look different enough. All of their mothers can tell them apart. And the older these identical twins get, the easier it is for all of the rest of us to tell them apart just by looking at their face, sometimes by listening to their voice.

Even the genetically identical are not identical. We can tell them apart because God has given us a unique visage, a face. And think what we do with it. I mean, can you imagine if you were going to create the world and invent all of the things that were put here in Genesis and then you put Adam and Eve down there on the planet, what kind of thought process that takes to give us a visage, a face, that is so unique that everybody can tell it apart from everybody else?

Think how hard it would be if we all wore a mask every day. We couldn't recognize each other. If we couldn't recognize voices or faces, or if we couldn't read facial expressions, how hard would it be to go do business? How hard would it be to express a feeling, a sense? How hard would it be to say: ``I am happy with you''; ``I kind of wonder about you''; ``I have my doubts about you''; and ``I am angry at you.''

All of those things come out of our faces, and little kids, from babies on up, recognize facial expressions. They know a smile means joy; they know a frown might not be; and we listen to them and watch their faces. It is instinctive in them, because God gave us those abilities to be unique and to express ourselves, each with our own unique visage.

And that is what we are eliminating with abortion, somehow believing that it is a mass of tissue that doesn't have identifying characteristics, that doesn' have a potential--and we all know in our hearts better than that. That is why I wrote the Heartbeat bill, because it does touch to our hearts, and we know what the sound of that beating heart is.

In my iPhone here, Mr. Speaker, I have a series of different little babies with beating hearts, and I can turn on that audio and listen to the beating heart of my little granddaughter that is due to be born in the latter part of July of this year. The baby is 26 weeks and 2 days along, today, as we speak, and the last heartbeat pulse I got was 161 beats per minute. I also have, of course, the ultrasound pictures in here of that little miracle that is waiting to burst forth and breathe free air here in America.

And I am far from alone. There are millions of Americans that experience the same thing.

I have what is now a former district representative that worked for me for a decade, and there framed in his office--a picture about this big--framed was the first picture of their firstborn son, firstborn child, and his name is Joseph Dean Anderson, and the picture is of his ultrasound.

The picture was there well before he was born, and they bonded with him from the beginning because they could see the facial expressions. They could watch him move. They could hear his beating heart. And today, that little guy is about 9 years old, a handsome, towheaded little boy that loves God and will be a fine American citizen.

We have an obligation to protect those lives, Mr. Speaker. This Congress has, I believe, the votes within it to protect those lives, but not the will, at this point, to move H.R. 490, the Heartbeat bill, to this floor--or even to committee, for that matter.

Now, I have gone to work on this and we brought the Heartbeat bill further and faster than any pro-life legislation of consequence since Roe v. Wade in 1973. As we entered into this Congress and we went to work on this--and my thanks to Janet Porter and Tom DeLay for their tremendous work that they have done--we built a whip team here in this Congress of about 12 to 15, and we fanned out throughout the Conference, and people brought their cards back in, and we ended up with 170 cosponsors on H.R. 490.

Well, I said, ``ended up.'' That is how many we had yesterday when the Sun came up. We added one more at the end of the day yesterday, and I am thankful that we are still making progress. And I expect there will be a trickling that will be added on to that, but it is a pretty good, long list of Republican Members that say: I will vote for it. I am just not quite ready to sign on the bill yet.

They have their own political reasons for that, but I believe the votes are here in this Congress to pass Heartbeat.

And if we pass Heartbeat, we will have taken the first step to saving the lives of nearly 1 million babies a year in America and starting to fill back up again that hole that is two or three generations old by now, 45 years old. Some would say that is two generations. It is probably closer--Thomas Jefferson declared a generation to be 19 years. Two, or a little more than two generations are missing in America. Some of those little girls who were aborted would have had babies by now, and there would have been roughly maybe another 60 million babies already born to that generation that is missing.

We have an obligation to defend their lives. We have an obligation to defend life. We have an obligation to restructure, again, the priorities of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

How can we sit here and say we are moral? How can we be indignant about a discretionary decision made by the Speaker of the House and not have a bit of a qualm about 60 million babies aborted because of the intransigence of the people who stood there just an hour ago to lecture the American people on a judgment call that they disagreed with form the President of the United States and, by the way, with the Speaker of the House.

That lack of a moral position over on that side of the aisle is why we still

have Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, nearly 1 million abortions a year, two missing generations, and a population that would be 100 million to 120 million stronger had that Supreme Court made the decision that was constitutional, true, right, and just in all of its aspects in 1973.

Information emerged years later at the retirement of Justice Blackmun that Justice Kennedy was prepared to vote on the pro-life side in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and that there were decisions that were made that will always be within the bowels of the Supreme Court as to why that didn't happen. But the information out there says it was very close, that the decision really was on the side of life; and for an unexplained reason, it went the other way in 1992, and that gave Kennedy the opportunity to write the majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That is why we came up with the viability nonstandard standard.

Now we have taken the Heartbeat bill up through the circuit court in North Dakota, and the court struck it down, as we knew they would. It just should be common knowledge by anyone who is involved in this discussion that with the Supreme Court precedent decisions, and especially precedent decisions that are as well-known and have extended as long as they have with Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Doe v. Bolton and Roe v. Wade, that with those precedent cases, no lower Federal court is going to attempt to defy the United States Supreme Court.

So any pro-life legislation that challenges existing Supreme Court precedent, which we must do if we are going to ever reduce the nearly 1 million abortions a year down to far fewer--by, say, 95 percent--will always lose at the lower court. At every level in the Federal court, we will lose, because those lower courts will not challenge the United States Supreme Court, Mr. Speaker.

That means we have to go back through this motion that we had again, go back through the exercise we had again that three circuits heard the ban on partial-birth abortions. Three circuits struck it down, even though we had rewritten the legislation to conform with the Supreme Court decision because they were not about to tell the United States Supreme Court that the inferior courts are superior to the Supreme Court. So we accept that.

I don't want to hear an argument from pro-life organizations that say: Well, the case is already settled. We tried Heartbeat before the circuit when it was passed in North Dakota, and the circuit struck down the North Dakota law, so we are defeated.

Really, that is not a defeat. When you know you have to accept that defeat in order to qualify to get to the Supreme Court, that is not a defeat. That is a process that you accept at the onset.

I accept that process at the onset to go forward through the lower courts to get to the Supreme Court, but the challenge isn't so much that, right now. The immediate challenge is this:

There are four windows that we have to get Heartbeat, H.R. 490, through if we are going to save the lives of these babies with the beating heart. The first window--by the way, these windows have to be opened in the right sequence. There are four windows, and I will name them: the House, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court opens up and we lose pro-life majorities in the House or Senate, if the Supreme Court opens up, it isn't going to do us any good because we can't get there with the case--at least, out of this Congress we can't.

If we lose the Presidency, say we wait until the year 2020 and lose the Presidency and we end up with a pro-abortion President again, it isn't going to do us any good. Remember, President Obama said he didn't want to see his daughters punished with a baby.

If we end up with a pro-abortion President, again, it won't matter if there is a pro-life majority in the House or the Senate, because the President would veto it.

By the way, Mr. Speaker, we do have a pro-life majority in the Senate today. It is a bare pro-life majority. It is a 51-49 pro-life majority in the Senate. That was proven with the 20-week bill that did not defeat the cloture vote over there, but it had a bare majority of votes. So it is close, but a pro-life majority in the Senate.

We have a pro-life majority in the House of Representatives. That is clear here. I believe we have the votes to pass H.R. 490, the Heartbeat bill, off the floor.

Window number one, pro-life majority in the House. We have it. Let's move H.R. 490. Let's move it now.

The second window is the pro-life majority in the Senate. Questionable. But if they suspended their rules, they could pass Heartbeat in the Senate. If that happened, H.R. 490 then would go to the President. The President will sign H.R. 490, the Heartbeat bill. He will sign it, and one of the things that I guarantee is that Vice President Mike Pence, who has a terrifically good heart himself, would be standing next to the President of the United States at that time.

The President would sign that bill. Now we can count on it, at that point. That is window number three.

Window number one, pro-life majority in the House; window number two, pro-life majority in the Senate; window number three, a pro-life President that will sign the bill.

Window number four is the Supreme Court. We have to walk through the swamp and the quagmire of the lower courts to get there, but we would get there at that point. A Heartbeat bill passed by this Congress would get to the Supreme Court, and they would have a very difficult time refusing to grant cert and they would hear the case, I believe, and it would be a landmark case.

We would be in a position to see Planned Parenthood v. Casey reversed, Doe v. Bolton reversed, Roe v. Wade reversed, and to see life respected in America again, as it was before 1973. That is the path we need to follow.

What is obstructing this path, Mr. Speaker?

I know that you are asking that yourself, but for me, I am prepared to answer the question that you are thinking.

There seems to be a perhaps longstanding rule, one that was probably continued by Speaker Boehner or created by him. It seems that it goes back further than the current leadership in the House, but I have talked to each one of the top three Republican leaders in the House and each have told me: We won't bring pro-life legislation to the floor of the House unless it is supported by the top three pro-life organizations in the country, that being Family Research Council, Tony Perkins; Susan B. Anthony List, Marjorie Dannenfelser.

Both of those people are good friends and powerful, committed pro- life workers. I have great respect for them and all of their organizations they have put together, and many others. By the way, there are 170 cosponsors on Heartbeat, plus 162 pro-life organizations or national leaders that are cosponsors on this. So I have named the two of the three, what some have expressed as the holy trinity of pro- life, so to speak.

The other is the National Right to Life, NRLC. @NRLC would be their Twitter handle. They say: We do not oppose Heartbeat. I say they do not support Heartbeat. They say they don't have veto power, but the Speaker, the majority leader, and the whip say they do. But the Speaker's spokesman said: No, there isn't any such rule. Well, it is being applied.

National Right to Life, when I say to them it is time to lead, follow, or get out of the way, they say: Well, we do not oppose and we don't have that kind of power.

My answer to that is: Then pick up the phone, call the Speaker, and tell Speaker Ryan you don't want to have that veto power; remove yourself from this. And I said specifically: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

It is probably too late to lead for them. It is probably not too late for them to follow--I hope they do--but at a minimum, get out of the way. Pick up the phone, call the Speaker, tell the public that you don't want to have veto power over Heartbeat, that you want to get out of the way.

If the Speaker wants to pick another organization, let him do that. That would be fine with me. There are plenty of good organizations out there.

Meanwhile, National Right to Life says to me: Why are you dividing the

pro-life community? We can't be pitting ourselves against each other. We will never accomplish anything if we fight among ourselves.

My answer back to that is, Mr. Speaker: Accusing me of dividing?

One hundred seventy Members of the House of Representatives say: I want Heartbeat to the floor for a vote. There are a whole bunch of others who want to vote for it that aren't yet ready to sign on.

The will of we the people is reflected in the votes in this republican form of government which is guaranteed to us in the United States Constitution. It is not what anybody says out here that controls what goes on in here. It influences, but it doesn't control.

We have an obligation, every one of us. All 435 of us owe our constituents our best effort and our best judgment. That best effort and judgment doesn't mean that we let unelected, outside organizations dictate against the will of the majority here in the House of Representatives. But that is what is going on by this rule that hangs up there in the Speaker's office that, unless National Right to Life comes onboard, the pro-life legislation is not coming to the floor of the House of Representatives.

I do not think that that is a defensible position. It is not defensible for National Right to Life, whose mission statement says they protect life from the beginning of life until natural death. If you look a little further on their website--because I wanted to know the technicalities--when they believe life begins, posted on their website: at the moment of fertilization.

I agree with them completely, with their mission statement, that we should protect life from the moment of fertilization until natural death, because human life is sacred in all of its forms. It begins at the moment of fertilization. It begins at the moment of conception.

In fact, former Governor Bob Casey, whom I spoke of earlier in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, said years ago--I clipped it out and put it on my bulletin board--before we had electronics, everything had to be saved; you couldn't go search on the internet--pre-internet, Governor Bob Casey said: Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure itself against which all other things are weighed.

Think of that. What is a life worth?

It can't be quantified because it is the measure.

When the Frenchmen created the metric system, they did a calculation of the distance either around the Earth or pole to pole--who knows if it is right or not--and they divided it down into increments and came up with the meter. Well, the meter is a standard for distance of measure.

How long is a meter?

Well, it is whatever the distance is that is identical to the platinum strap, I will call it, the platinum meter stick that is stored at standard temperature and pressure so that it doesn't expand or contract and it is always a standard length. They created it in kind of an odd fashion, but they established it as the measure.

That measure, that platinum stick at standard pressure and temperature that is a meter is the distance against which all other distances are measured and made within the metric system.

Well, that gives you an idea of what human life is. Human life is sacred in all of its forms. It is the measure itself against which we measure every other value that we have.

So how can we say that this life is not worth it when it is sacred and it is the measure?

We are here with the National Right to Life resisting--and I use that word as an informed word, not just a random one off the shelf-- resisting the movement of Heartbeat, because they believe that if we challenge the Supreme Court, then Kennedy would be--and I will use these words--Justice Kennedy, because I do respect him--using their words, would be forced to vote against Heartbeat and would be in a position to assign Justice Ginsburg to write the majority opinion, in which case she would likely take away all things that we have gained.

I say: What? What do we have to lose? What could we possibly lose?

All we know is this: 45 years of incrementalism has piled up 60 million dead babies. And we are afraid to challenge the Supreme Court, when every time we knock on their door, we have gained something rather than lost something?

Furthermore, society is moving. Society is moving in the direction of life, because we see the ultrasounds. We know.

I will say, Mr. Speaker, I always knew. I knew when I picked up my first little baby, little David King, on March 24, 1976, and I looked at him, that little miracle. There was an aura about him. I was so amazed at the miracle of that child, you could have convinced me that he was the second coming of Jesus Christ himself, that aura about him.

I was stunned. I was so drawn to him, drawn to that miracle. I had to go to work later on that day, and I was sitting there working and I was thinking: Could anybody take that little baby's life now, now that he is these few hours old? Could they take his life when he is an hour old? Could they take his life at the moment he was born when he burst forth into the delivery room and began to cry and gurgle and scream and experience the harshness of birth, which has got to be a stunning thing--I am kind of glad, maybe, I don't remember that myself--but I remember his. An absolute miracle.

If they couldn't take his life the minute after he was born, why could they take it the minute before he was born or the hour or the day? Or could we take his life the week before he was born or the month or the trimester or another trimester?

You can follow that all the way back to conception. There is no distinct moment in development of an innocent little baby. Once the sperm fertilizes the egg and you have that unique combination of DNA, from there on, there is no distinct moment or instant.

I would like to protect those babies from that moment on, but we can't prove that fertilization, conception today, medically, in that instant, but we can with a heartbeat. Anyone that has heard a heartbeat knows that that beating heart tells us there is life. It speaks to our hearts and it speaks to our consciences.

It is impossible to be a moral human being and make an argument that taking the life of a little baby with a beating heart somehow is justifiable, when we know the potential for that little baby is as great as our own in almost every case.

Even if they are not, we have a case that looks like its going before the Supreme Court that bans the abortion of a baby that might be diagnosed with a disease, particularly--an affliction, I should call it--Down syndrome. In Indiana, now-Vice President Mike Pence signed the bill. These are some of the most lovable human beings on the planet. They have a heart in them that seems to have more love than the average heart in the rest of us. They have banned the abortion of Down syndrome babies in Indiana.

Now, what is curious is, the way that is left, maybe that is upheld in the Supreme Court, maybe it is not, but if it is upheld in the Supreme Court, it leaves the door open for abortion on demand for others who are not diagnosed.

So does it say that there will be babies of whom they will deny the diagnosis of the affliction of Down syndrome so they can be aborted?

These moral questions should not be answered at all by a civilized society. They should be answered by this: a unique human being created at the moment of conception. We can be certain of that when that baby has a beating heart. If we stop that beating heart, we are ending an innocent human life. That is the question. I would like to start it at the moment of conception, but from a beating heart, that is the time that we can prove it.

Now, everybody knows it. Everybody knows it because we have ultrasounds and the audio of that 161 beats a minute. That little granddaughter of mine that, Lord willing, we are expecting her arrival the last week or so in July, that strong, purposeful heart is beating at 161 beats a minute. We can't stop that life because it is inconvenient, because somebody is inconvenienced by a pregnancy.

Why is it that abortion came along shortly after the contraceptives became so available everywhere, all the time, to anybody?

I remember when birth control pills came in, about the mid-sixties. Shortly after that, here is abortion on demand in 1973. If ever there was contraception

available on demand, they became available within the decade before Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.

Why did that happen? The least excuse possible was when contraceptives became the most available possible. That all happened almost simultaneously.

And by the way, it was my generation coming of age at the time that that happened, Mr. Speaker.

So I urge National Right to Life to lead, follow, or get out of the way. I would be awfully happy if you join in and follow, because we know this: there will be a turnover in the United States Supreme Court. We know that the President of the United States has pledged that he will make nominations to the Supreme Court off of the list of 21 that was approved by The Federalist Society, by The Heritage Foundation, and, if it matters, also by me.

The first appointment out of that list of 21 is Neil Gorsuch. I think we can be very optimistic about the decisions that he will bring down, from what I know of him and his history and the conversations I have had with the people who have known him for a lifetime. I am very, very impressed with Neil Gorsuch. I might have disagreed with him already on a case a week ago, but I am very impressed with him, with his juris prudence, and with the principles that he carries within him.

I would like to let the world know, Mr. Speaker, that when they interviewed the other candidates for Supreme Court, which I learned from White House counsel, they interviewed all 21 on The Federalist Society's list. And of those 21, they asked them all the same question, a whole series of questions, but they all got one same question, at least, and that was: If it is not to be you who would be nominated for the Supreme Court, who should it be? And of the other 20 who were interviewed, every one answered Neil Gorsuch. What a powerful endorsement of a man's juris prudence, of a man's character, of a man's support among his peers.

I say, Mr. Speaker, that I could easily find 20 Members among this Congress who would say those same things about me, but I would have to handpick them. Neil Gorsuch didn't handpick those 20. They were listed by The Federalist Society and supported by The Heritage Foundation. His peers, universally, said Neil Gorsuch is the best pick. ``If you can't pick me, Neil Gorsuch is the best pick,'' was their answer.

I would like to know what Neil Gorsuch said when he was asked that question. We may never know that, or perhaps that will be the next appointment to the Supreme Court.

But the rumors about Justice Kennedy retiring, not substantiated. They have been coming back a little more all along. We don't know what he might do, but we do know that time moves on. Turnovers do happen in the Supreme Court. They are eventually inevitable. When that happens, we need to be ready.

It won't do for us to sit on our hands in the House of Representatives, for the Senators to sit on their hands and to wait for a configuration of the Court to come around in such a way that we have great confidence that they will find in favor of life, no. Instead, we need to do our job; and our job is to move the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490, off the floor of the House of Representatives and send it over to the Senate.

It will take some serious work to get that done over there at the Senate, Mr. Speaker, and I think we can get there. But if we are knocking on the door in the Senate, then the Senators who are running for office, and especially a good number of them who are, some say, vulnerable in conservative States, States that Donald Trump won--they have been getting a little more conservative the closer they get to their reelection, and we have got a shot.

We have got a shot to put together, maybe after this next election, the 60 votes necessary; and we have got a shot, also, at the Senate changing the rules so they are no longer handcuffed by the filibuster rule and the requirement of 60 votes for cloture in the Senate. We can't control that, the other side of us. We can influence it perhaps, but we can't control it.

We can control what we do here. That means we have to bring Heartbeat to the floor of the House of Representatives, and we need to get the votes on it to do it. We need to send it over to the Senate. And a way to do that now is for National Right to Life to pick up the phone, call the Speaker, and say: Mr. Speaker, take this cup from me; I don't want this responsibility. The guilt will be too heavy if there is an appointment to the Supreme Court and the Heartbeat bill hasn't gotten there because we wouldn't let it come to the floor of the House of Representatives.

That is the guilt they have to carry.

By the way, this configuration hasn't existed in 45 years, where we had the windows open of a pro-life majority in the House and in the Senate and a President who will sign it and a Supreme Court that we have confidence will find in favor of life. It hasn't existed in 45 years. So, if we wait for a Court to get lined up in a way that pleases us, we might well wind up with no way to open up one of the other three windows necessary to get it to the Court.

So why wouldn't we move the ball down the road as far as we can get it, get this thing out of the House of Representatives. Sit it on the desk of Mitch McConnell. If Mitch can't get that up this year before the elections in November, or even before the transition takes place in lame duck session, fine. We will start again next January. We will bring Heartbeat here again. We will send it to the Senate again, and the new Senators can deal with it.

And maybe they change the rule at that point so that a simple vote-- even a 50-50 tie with Mike Pence there resolves this thing, sends it to Donald Trump. Donald Trump signs it with Mike Pence standing by his side. We send it to a Court that, by then, perhaps, has a new Supreme Court Justice there who would support our Constitution, the rule of law, we the people, the will of the people, and defend the obligation which we have, which is an obligation to defend life first, liberty second, pursuit of happiness third, or, according to the 14th Amendment, property third--those priorities.

It is our obligation by Declaration of Independence, it is our obligation by Constitution, it is our obligation by the 14th Amendment, it is our obligation by every measure of humanity that I know of to protect life.

I'll get to this closer, here, before I yield to Mr. Carter.

I was listening to Father Jonathan Morris of New York on FOX News one morning. He was talking about how, when he is celebrating mass in his home church, when the mothers who bring their babies in, when the babies start to cry, they get up and carry the babies out of the church. And he said: I don't know why they would carry those babies out of the church. They think those crying babies annoy me for some reason. But we should always remember, those babies, those gurgling babies, those crying babies, are the only innocent voices in the entire church.

And these babies are the most innocent among us, except the unborn babies don't have a voice. They can't cry out to us from anywhere except from Heaven. And they do cry out to us from Heaven, and we do have an obligation to hear them and to ask for forgiveness for what we have done.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to conclude my part of this, at least for the moment, and am happy to yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Carter). And I would note that the clock runs out at about 1:32, for the gentleman's information.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to Mr. Buddy Carter.

Honoring Patricia ``Trish'' DePriest

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk made in order by the rule.

Mr. Chairman, this is an amendment that this House has seen before in different configurations, but it is known as the Davis-Bacon amendment.

What it does, it provides that none of the funds made available by this act may be used to implement, to administer, or enforce the prevailing rate of wage requirements, commonly referred to as the Davis-Bacon Act.

Mr. Chairman, I think that we know what this bill does. It was in 1931, it was established for, I will say, trade protectionism, labor protectionism, to lock the African-American labor from Alabama out of the construction trades in New York City that were unionized at that time and strongly protected, and still are, actually, but the substance of it is this.

I have a letter here that was written by Grover Norquist, the president of Americans For Tax Reform, and in summary, it says this: Because the Davis-Bacon Act reduces the number of jobs, increases costs, and has a racist history, funds from the FAA Reauthorization Act should not be used to fulfill Davis-Bacon Act requirements. Americans For Tax Reform, therefore, strongly supports Congressman King's amendment.

That is one version of description of this bill.

Here is another one I thought was a little bit more descriptive. This is an article written by George Will, and it is dated June 19, 2017. He references back to River City, and he says a quote from that, ``The Music Man'': You really ought to give Iowa a try, provided you are contrary.

He starts out this article this way, and the quote is from ``Iowa Stubborn'', a song in ``The Music Man'', Mr. Chairman. It says:

Contrary does not quite capture Steve King's astringency.

The Iowa native and conservative Congressman was born,

appropriately, in Storm Lake, Iowa, and carries turbulence

with him. He also carries experience of actual life before

politics, when he founded a construction company, which is

one reason he has long advocated an excellent idea: repeal of

the Davis-Bacon law.

King came to Congress in 2003, and has been stubbornly

submitting repeal legislation since 2005. He would not have

succeeded even if he were less of a prickly cactus and more

of a shrinking violet.

Davis-Bacon is just another piece of government that is as

indefensible as it is indestructible. And so today, when

social hygienists are cleansing the public square of names

and statues tainted by historical connections with racism,

Davis-Bacon's durability is proof that a measure's racist

pedigree will be forgiven if the measure serves a progressive

agenda.

It is time to put an end to Davis-Bacon. We can do that here today, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining on each side?

Mr. Chairman, I hear these arguments constantly: lowest common denominator, nonunion shops.

We know it is union scale, there is a confession that it is, even though the law says that it is prevailing wage.

Exploiting workers, race to the bottom, people work hard. These are standard lines that come out every year, but I am the one that has lived this. We have met payroll for over 42 years, and we pay a competitive wage. We want to hire the best people we can and pay them the best wages that we can, and we want to have the lowest turnover possible. And we are in pretty good shape that way after 42 years. I think I know about this.

Davis-Bacon increases inefficiencies and it puts people in the wrong place doing the wrong thing for the wrong incentives.

And by the way, who is hardworking? The taxpayers are hardworking. The taxpayers are paying the bill for an extra 20 percent on every construction project in America. In a lot of cases, we are borrowing the money from China and putting the debt onto our children. That is what we are faced with here, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, in closing, I appreciate the gentleman's remarks, but I would add for the body that the Federal minimum wage really is not relevant at all to this Davis-Bacon wage scale debate. There is nobody working under Davis-Bacon wage scales who is making minimum wage. And by the way, that Federal minimum wage is becoming irrelevant as competition for wages is driving things up.

But here is another way to think about this: I have long said that if it is a road construction, you can build 5 miles of road instead of 4 if you get rid of Davis-Bacon; five bridges instead of four if you get rid of Davis-Bacon.

If it happens to be river construction--we lost a lock and dam on the Mississippi going into the weekend, lock and dam No. 11. These things cost money. There are 29 of those. We could either fix 23 of them under Davis-Bacon, or all 29 of them without Davis-Bacon.

There are 45 major airports in America; and if we are going to renovate those airports, we can renovate all of them, or we can renovate 36 of them, depending on whether this amendment passes or fails.

Mr. Chairman, I include in the Record a letter from Americans for Tax Reform and an article from The Washington Post.

Americans for Tax Reform,

Washington, DC, April 26, 2018.

Dear Members of Congress: I am writing in support of

Congressman Steve King's (R-IA) amendment (#63) to the FAA

Reauthorization Act, H.R. 4. The amendment prohibits the

usage of funds from the bill to ``implement, administer, or

enforce'' the prevailing wage requirements in the Davis-Bacon

Act.

The Davis-Bacon Act is a 1931 federal law that has a

history of high costs, lost jobs and racism. It requires

contractors and subcontractors to pay the local ``prevailing

wage'' on public works projects (over $2,000) for laborers

and mechanics. The ``prevailing wage'' is usually a wage set

by unions and is typically much higher than the average wage

for the job in the area. This leads to higher government

project costs, hurting small non-unionized contractors and

costing low-skilled jobs.

In fact, the Government Accountability Office (General

Accounting Office) in 1979 urged the repeal of Davis-Bacon

for these same reasons. Further, a 2011 study by the Heritage

Foundation found that the Act added almost $11 billion to the

deficit in 2011 in unnecessary expenses, while suspending the

Act would have added 155,000 construction jobs. Finally, the

Congressional Budget Office reported in 2016 that repealing

the act would reduce discretionary outlays by $13 billion

from 2018 through 2026.

In addition to raising costs and losing jobs, the Act also

has racist origins and was passed during the Great Depression

because minority migrant workers were taking jobs meant for

white locals at lower wages.

Because the Davis-Bacon Act reduces the number of jobs,

increases costs and has a racist history, funds from the FAA

Reauthorization Act should not be used to fulfill Davis-Bacon

Act requirements. Americans for Tax Reform, therefore,

strongly supports Congressman King's amendment.

Sincerely,

Grover Norquist,

President, Americans for Tax Reform.

Mr. Chairman, I urge the adoption of my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I first want to thank the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Goodlatte, for leading on this constitutional amendment for a balanced budget. We have fought this out in past years and brought this to the floor a couple of times that I can remember here.

But I would like to dial back your memory, Mr. Speaker, to 1998, when the House of Representatives did pass a balanced budget amendment to our United States Constitution and sent it over to the United States Senate. And late in the year of 1998, after a hard-fought whip team pulled the votes together, they put together the two-thirds votes necessary in the Senate to pass that constitutional amendment for a balanced budget off to the States for ratification in three-quarters of the States.

They had the votes, and at the last minute, one Senator walked down and, in dramatic fashion, voted ``no'' when he was on the whip card expected to vote ``yes.'' And that is what blocked a balanced budget amendment in 1998, within one vote, because I think all of us here are confident that the States would have ratified a balanced budget amendment, and then we would be living under the balanced budget amendment from sometime, probably pretty near the turn of the millennium, around the year 2000.

Think what a difference it would be today. This Nation might have a little debt left, but it would be a shrinking debt because, whenever you balance the budget, if it's balanced, you are always going to end up with a little black because the pencil doesn't work quite that precisely.

We missed that window. We have the window now in this year, in our time, and we have an obligation to pass this balanced budget amendment.

When I came here in 2003, we were at balance as far as the spending was concerned, but not with the budget that was approved. I asked the Budget Committee chairman: Where is our balanced budget amendment?

He said: We can't balance the budget. We are at war. We have been attacked in New York and in the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, and we have to set up TSA and spend all this money, and it is impossible to balance the budget.

I said: It can't be impossible.

I set about writing a balanced budget myself, as a freshman, in the first weeks here. I wasn't prepared to do that at that time. But had we gotten that done, had we tightened our belt, had we implemented the kind of discipline this constitutional amendment before us today will bring about, we wouldn't be talking about debt and deficit. We wouldn't be talking about 107 million Americans not in the workforce because they are of age but they are being tempted to stay home on the couch with more than 70 different means-tested Federal welfare programs.

We haven't demonstrated the discipline. If interest should increase by 1 percent, that is $200 billion a year. And if that goes up and up, we are, pretty soon, collapsed in an untenable situation with our spending. We need to make this decision in our time, force this discipline on this Congress, and we need to focus, also, on what failed the last time in 1998.

One vote has now accumulated to over $20 trillion in national debt, falling short one vote in the United States Senate. Let's not fall short here today. Let's send this over to the Senate. Let's send the message to America.