Floor Statements

I thank the gentleman from North Carolina for yielding, and I rise in support of the gentleman's amendment. And the reason for it is this:

As I watched the structure of the OCE be set up--and I'd say to the gentleman, for over 200 years we've had the Ethics Committee to take care of this business. If we want to amend the rules of the House, let's go back to what the rules of the House are. But the OCE has crossed the line over and over again.

And I would make this point: that they have gone on witch hunts. They have taken pieces of information that came from political opposition on either side and embellished that into things.

And they have violated Roman law, English common law, and the decency of the House by this: Classified confidential information used against Members of Congress who don't have an opportunity to face their accuser, whose reputations have been damaged by sometimes--I'll just say certainly leaks to the press, sometimes, I suspect, willful leaks to the press. We need to go back to the Ethics Committee dealing with this business as it has been for over two centuries.

This bill only passed by one vote a few years ago, and now we have a whole machinery out there whose sole purpose it is is to ask activist organizations on both sides to come in and send information in that would be used against Members of Congress.

I support the gentleman's amendment.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 229, I was delayed in leaving a Members meeting and was unable to reach the House floor to cast my vote before the vote was closed.

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

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 137 I was detained off the House floor during this 2 minute vote series and was unable to cast my vote before the vote was closed. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 138, I was detained off the House floor during this 2 minute vote series and was unable to cast my vote before the vote was closed.

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

Mr. Speaker on rollcall No. 44 I was detained off the House floor during this 2 minute vote series and was unable to cast my vote before the vote was closed. Had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the House of Representatives and be able to address you about the matters of the day and about the important issues that are before us here in this Congress and in this Nation.

And I am continually impressed by the quality of the young people that are attracted to this city, both as visitors, vacationers, but also from people that will get their college degree or degrees and many of them with a 4.0 grade point average, active in all kinds of extra curriculars. The stellar cream of the American crop are magnetized to come to this city. I am impressed with them--their intelligence, their patriotism, their dedication on both sides of the aisle, Mr. Speaker.

But I want to add something that is a perspective that I think those of us that have been around this planet a little bit longer have to offer, and that is, first, that some of us have lived a lot of history that others had to learn by reading the history book. And we know how the history books have been truncated. And there's not time to learn all the things that happened in history.

Some of us learned a lot of history from the front page, from the radio, from the television, from the news, or from being in the middle of that history. And that all is part of the collective memory of this House of Representatives and the Senate on the other side. Some will say they probably remember more history in the Senate than we do here in the House.

Mr. Speaker, my point is this: You can have very smart people with very good principles, and the experiences of their life are supportive of them understanding the underpinnings of the greatness of this country, understanding the pillars of American exceptionalism, but sometimes the definitions and as it's presented is taken at face value because they might not have had years to see things go wrong when good ideas come before this Congress.

And I look back and think of the time in 1995--actually, in 1994, when Republicans took over the majority in the House of Representatives here after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness of being in the minority and not being able to advance legislation. There were many here on the Republican side of the aisle that were complacent with that, Mr. Speaker, but accepted the idea that the majority would maybe never change in their lifetimes, and they operated in the zone that had been delivered to them and they didn't go and charge the ramparts or the windmill, so to speak, because the ramparts, to them, were windmills.

Yet there were others that were visionaries, that saw the vision, that realized that America was going in the wrong direction, and they built a coalition here in the House of Representatives that I watched on C-SPAN night after night after night, step down here on this floor at the very spot, Mr. Speaker, and make arguments to the American people, make arguments to me that moved me, moved me in my head and moved me in my heart and helped me understand that it wasn't me alone that was seeing that America was going in the wrong direction, that we were overspending and we had this massive welfare system and that we were expanding the dependency class in America. This spirited people that we are, this unique people that we are here in America were being diminished, were being diminished by the growth of the nanny state and the growth of the dependency class in America.

So in 1994, the inspiration came from many people that were hearing the inspiring words that were spoken into this very microphone, Mr. Speaker, but also across the country. On talk radio, across the backyard fence, over a cup of coffee, at work, at church, at school, at play, at recreation, in fishing boats and golf carts across America, we had a national conversation about where America needed to go. And the result of that consensus of the national conversation was a massive change in the seats here in the House of Representatives and a new majority in the House of Representatives that came sweeping in in November of 1994.

And there were big changes. The freshmen class that came in and was sworn in here on this floor in January of 1995 were revolutionaries, and they brought a difference and they forced a balanced budget here in the House that was not expected to ever be reached. They cut spending until they forced a balanced budget. And they reduced welfare and put more people in a position where they could earn their dignity and a paycheck at the same time.

Now, as this unfolded, they brought forth, as they said they would in the Contract with America, that they would vote on a constitutional amendment to produce a balanced budget. That was a 1994 promise that was fulfilled in 1995. A vote on a balanced budget amendment here in the House of Representatives that passed the House of Representatives, was messaged right directly down the hallway to the United States Senate, Mr. Speaker, where the Senate took up the vote for the constitutional amendment to balance the budget, and it failed in the Senate in 1995 by a single vote.

How different, how different might it have been, Mr. Speaker, if one more Senate seat had gone the other way, if one more United States Senate race had resulted in a victory for someone who believed in a balanced budget amendment, believed in the Constitution, itself, fiscal responsibility--those American exceptionalism principles that I have briefly mentioned--but believed in requiring a balanced budget constitutionally. How different it might have been if the Senate had voted with a two-thirds majority, as the House did in 1995, and sent a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget to the States, the 50 States for ratification.

Now, we know, Mr. Speaker, it takes three-quarters of the States to ratify an amendment to the Constitution before it becomes incorporated into our Constitution. We'll never know how many States would have ratified that amendment because they didn't get the chance to do so. Had that been messaged to the States in 1995, we can only ask the question: Would the States have ratified a balanced budget amendment? I think so. I believe three-quarters of the States, at a minimum, would have done so; and if they did not, I think it would have changed the politics within enough of the States so that they would have.

Imagine if this Congress here and now, today, this week, this month would pass a balanced budget amendment to the United States Constitution out of this House with a better than two-thirds majority-- equal or better than--to the Senate where they need 67 votes in the Senate, if that constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget gets messaged to the States. Some will say look at the makeup of the State legislatures. Let's put it this way, Mr. Speaker: There aren't enough Republican majorities to pass and ratify a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget. Maybe not, and not by an analytical judgment of this moment, Mr. Speaker.

But think of what happens in a State like my neighboring State of Illinois, for example, where Democrats control the politics and they insist on deficit spending and running themselves into the red. It seems as though the right of passage in Illinois is, if you are elected Governor, you go off to prison. But if we have a balanced budget amendment sitting on the docket of the Illinois State Legislature today, I don't think there's much of any chance that they would ratify an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to do such a thing.

But I do think, Mr. Speaker, that there will be hundreds of people all across Illinois that will decide that they want to step up and run for public office so that they can have the chance to vote to ratify a balanced budget to the United States Constitution in the State legislature. They would go out and campaign, and they would knock on doors, and they would talk to their friends and neighbors and say, I don't care if you're a Democrat. I don't care if you have some other interest. The best interest you can have is the long-term best interests of the United States of America. And it's becoming increasingly clear that the long-term best interests of the United States of America are to require that the budget

be balanced by the Constitution because this Congress has not demonstrated--and the President clearly has not demonstrated--that they have enough discipline to crank this spending down to balance the budget.

Part of the reason is we have elections every 2 years in the House and every 6 years in the Senate. So the incentive is be in a position to keep your job in 2 years or 6 years. There is not an incentive out there that tells the Members of the House and Senate that we should prepare the groundwork for our grandchildren, let alone children yet to be born. That's part of the dynamics. The other part of the dynamics is that this Capitol is full of bright, energetic people. A lot of them come to my office on a regular basis. A lot of them are honorable people with good intentions. But a lot of them are there because they want the tax dollars of the American people to go to their interests. And because there's a constant drumbeat of asking for more and more and more spending and the push for--well, I know that you are fiscally responsible and you want to balance the budget, but can you just make this exception because it's so important. It's so important issue after issue. You could be accused of voting against children and women and seniors and minorities and handicapped and combat-wounded veterans all together if we do anything other than increase the budget to the level that's hoped for and predicted by the President of the United States.

So when I stand up for fiscal responsibility, Mr. Speaker, I often get this statement which is, Well, you're a Republican. You Republicans spent too much money. And you have to admit that you are half the problem. Well, no, I don't, Mr. Speaker. First, I voted against a lot of that spending. I've been an original cosponsor of the balanced budget amendment offered by Congressman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia since I arrived in this town. And I'm sticking with him and the principles that are that constitutional amendment that we passed out of the Judiciary Committee that hangs on the calendar of the House today.

But aside from that, speaking from a party-by-party standpoint, the truth is this: Yes, Republicans spent too much money, and in the middle of the Iraq war, we came within $160 billion of balancing the budget. Now, that's not particularly impressive if you dial it back a generation or two or three, but it's very impressive when you think of it in terms of the President's budget, which is a $1.65 trillion deficit in a single year.

So actual, real numbers come down to we came within $160 billion of balancing the budget at the height of the Iraq war, and had it not been for the Iraq war, we would have balanced the budget. If the equation is there, it's that simple.

But the President has proposed a deficit, an annual deficit spending budget, of $1.65 trillion. Now, I have said the deficit of Republicans is $160 billion and the President's deficit is $1.65 trillion, and on his deficit, Mr. Speaker, I am not saying that this is a 10-year accumulated deficit. This is 1 year, $1.65 trillion.

Now, yes, Republicans spent too much money, but for every dollar that they went into deficit, the President proposes $10 of deficit spending into the same equation. I can't see that that's a shared responsibility. It looks to me like it's 10 times the overspending on the part of the President versus one-tenth of that on the part of the Republican Congress here in the middle of the Iraq war. Those are the facts as they are established by the Congressional Budget Office. We need to stand on facts here, not on emotions, and we need a level now of fiscal austerity.

Mr. Speaker, we need to get to this point where we can send another balanced budget across to the United States Senate and ask them to pass it with a two-thirds majority and message it to the States. Give the States the chance to ratify it this time. If they had the chance to ratify the balanced budget amendment in 1995, I might or might not be standing here. I might have realized that, listen, government did its job, and I can go ahead and raise my family and run my business and live the American Dream. But it didn't happen.

It didn't happen, and some of us, out of frustration, stood up and engaged in public service and public life, and we were elected to positions in perhaps our State legislatures and then came here to this Congress. I have seen this country going in the right direction. I have seen this country going in the wrong direction.

I have seen the spirit of America be diminished.

How many people today remember Jimmy Carter's malaise speech where he essentially said to us, You have to lower your aspirations. Yes, you are Americans, but it means something different in the future than it has in the past--that America is no longer going be a country with unlimited resources and prosperity and aspirations and realized dreams, but that we'll have to wear a sweater and turn the thermostat down and drive at 55 and be limited by government.

We have some of that going on now. We have the nanny state being reestablished under this administration. Now, I would suggest that there are a number of ways to illustrate that, Mr. Speaker, but I would point it out this way: that the food retailers sat down, along with a couple of other interests--and this is something driven by the First Lady, I believe. They have identified that about 3 percent of the kids in America are obese.

You may have seen in the news this week about some effort to go in and remove obese children from their parents because obese parents are a bad influence on the diets of their kids, and kids that are overweight are a health risk, and they are more likely to have diabetes. Statistically, that's true.

Mr. Speaker, I don't need a nanny state that is going to go in and weigh my kids and weigh me and my wife or my sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren and decide whether I am going to be able to manage my own children's lives. I need the nanny state out of my life, not in my life, Mr. Speaker. I don't need them deciding what my diet is going to be.

But this initiative that flows from the First Lady is about cutting 1.5 trillion calories from the diets of young people, because I guess that you run them across the scales and do an average and do the calculus that 3,550 extra calories over what you are burning amounts to a pound. Then they can do the math and figure out, if they can reduce 1.5 trillion calories from all the right places, these kids are going to lose weight in all the right places. It doesn't work that way.

How are you going to do this? I asked them.

They said, Well, you know, we're going to reduce the number of calories in a bag of Doritos, for example.

How do you do that?

Take a couple of chips out.

Okay. What do we think a kid is going to do if he's hungry and there are a couple of less chips in a bag of Doritos? He eats two bags.

Then they said, Well, we've got the power bars that have 150 calories. We're going to reduce them down to 90. That way, these kids aren't going to gain weight. They're going to lose weight because they're eating fewer calories in a power bar.

So, if you pick up a power bar and you're hungry, you're eating that because you want the energy, and your appetite calls for it. If there are only 90 calories in there, I will suggest that these kids are going to eat two power bars and consume 180 calories rather than settle for 90 when, before, they were getting 150 out of that previous power bar.

Kids are obese for two reasons. They have voracious appetites, and they don't exercise enough. It's that simple.

The former Secretary of Defense came out and said that 30 percent our youth that are overweight is a national security risk because they are too overweight. They don't quality for the military service, and we, therefore, can't recruit enough volunteers from the universe of people that are left that have a waistline that fits the standards for our military.

Now, I would suggest that being obese does not destroy one's skeleton or muscular tissue or nervous tissue; it's just extra weight to carry around. And if it's a national security issue, then let's extend basic training, and they can just stay there and do exercises and eat the diet in the mess hall until they make weight.

This is not a national security issue, and I am constantly hearing these arguments about national security. One of them is, well, national security is fresh fruits and vegetables, and if we don't have fresh tomatoes it is a national security issue. So, therefore, we must have cheap labor to pick the tomatoes. Never mind that tomatoes have been bred now to be picked by machine.

I ask the question, Mr. Speaker: How long did the Eskimos get along without any fresh fruits or vegetables?

They have lived for centuries on the high protein of the animal meat that they can harvest up along the Arctic Circle, but they don't have carrots or broccoli or lettuce or tomatoes or pears or apples or peaches. None of that grows up there in the Arctic Circle. They are carnivores. They have gotten along really well eating a meat diet, because the nutrients are in there, and they are concentrated. It's not a national security issue not to have guacamole even though it's a profitable thing to raise the avocados.

We get way out of balance here in this Congress and overemphasize things with all kinds of hyperbole, which brings me back around to where we need to go as a Nation, Mr. Speaker. We need to go down this path of a constitutional amendment to balance the budget. The President doesn't want to balance the budget or he would have offered one.

And the President wants to scare seniors. He did that on purpose. That's the statement that he made a couple of days ago when he said, if we hit the end of the debt ceiling limit, he can't guarantee that military pensions or Social Security would be paid on time. That was a calculated statement. It was calculated to scare the group of people who is the easiest to scare. That's our seniors.

The reason they are is because they have worked their whole lifetimes to get into the position that they are in, and most of them are on a fixed income. That fixed income might be a pension plan, other savings, Social Security or a rent check or an investment of some kind. But when the Federal Government interferes with that and starts to send a message that they can't count on any component of it, yes, they get concerned, rightfully concerned.

This system that we have, entitlements, cannot hold together if we continue down the same path we are on. We have about 40 million people that qualify for Medicare today. In 10 more years, it will be about 70 million people as the baby boomers come on line.

It isn't just that non-defense discretionary spending in this Congress is growing too fast. We can't solve the problem if we shut down the non-defense discretionary spending or if we ratchet it backwards. We must address entitlement. We also must guarantee to the seniors: You have organized your lives around Medicare--in fact, Social Security. We need to protect them and their interests. They are deserving of that. They may be getting greater benefits than they ever paid in, but they still have to be able to count on this Congress keeping its word.

Meanwhile, as a government that's spending itself into oblivion, however big a Nation we are, there is no one to back us up. We don't get to go to the European Union and ask for a loan to bail us out. We don't even get to go to the Chinese or the Saudis to ask for a loan to bail us out. We are the last stopgap in Western civilization, the free enterprise world.

Remember, there are a lot of entities outside that would like to see this country go down, tumble, collapse to some degree. We don't have friends all around the world. So we are the ones who have to hold the line. We don't get to go back for a backup of any kind. The Greeks could at least look to the European Union, and what did the European Union say? We will loan you some money to bridge you through this problem, but you have got to cut your spending to our satisfaction before we will loan the money.

Now we have a President that says he can't guarantee that military pensions are going to be paid or that Social Security is going to be paid because he wants to use that as leverage to try to get a debt- ceiling increase by making the least amount of concessions. And he would like to make no concessions. That's the scenario that we're in.

So I've introduced today, along with Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert with a growing number of cosponsors, an act called the PROMISES Act. What it does is it requires that our military be paid first and on time, every time, no exceptions, no hesitation. Whether it is a spending gap that is a result of the expiration of a continuing resolution or whether we hit the debt ceiling, the revenues in the United States Treasury--and there will be plenty there for this under all circumstances that we can envision--go first to pay the military.

They are our number one line of defense. Their lives are on the line. They should never have to wonder in a foxhole or on a ship or in the air and their families near the barracks or at home should never have to wonder whether that paycheck is going to be electronically transferred into their bank account on time every time. That's our guarantee with the PROMISES Act.

The military should never be used as a pawn in a political discussion here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

The second thing is we need to take care of the full faith and credit of the United States Government. That means we have to pay the interest on the necessary principal on our debt. We can do that with incoming revenue. And those who say we can't are wrong, and I don't care what their title is. We have $200 billion in anticipated revenue per month. It takes $11 billion to pay our military, and it takes $20 billion to service our debt. That's $31 billion out of a $200 billion average revenue stream. That turns out to be--and I know, Mr. Speaker, you have calculated this in your head--15.2 percent of the overall spending of the revenue stream per month--15.2 percent.

That means pay the military first, service our debt second, guarantee the full faith and credit of the United States of America, and there's still plenty of money in that funding stream left over to pay Social Security, pay Medicare, go on down the line and pay military pensions-- keep faith with those who have stood on the line for America--and keep faith with our senior citizens. And it takes the leverage out of the hands of the President. That's what the PROMISES Act is about.

And some will say, well, no, you can't. The money is not there. Tell me where that money is, then, the $200 billion a month--$11 billion to pay our military, $20 billion to service our debt, and it costs $58 billion per month for Social Security, and for Medicare it is $43 billion per month. We can even add defense on there, and we're getting up to the limit. I mean all defense, not just the military pay.

So, as you can see, Mr. Speaker, we have lots of options. I want to take the options off the table for the President. I don't want him to be scaring our seniors. I want that guarantee to be there, but I go just far enough in the PROMISES Act that we take care of the absolutely necessaries, and I'm open to the discussion on how we might add other priorities behind them. First priority: pay our troops first. Second priority: pay the interest and the principal to service the national debt.

And as we move forward with this, the brinksmanship gets more and more intense. And as the President of the United States is looking to try to get us to crack, we need to understand that decisions will be made on August 2. The President alone holds the most power to decide who gets paid and who does not. I saw a presentation this morning that proposed that unemployment benefits get paid, but our military not get paid. Now if that's something that's going to be proposed out of the White House and not just a hypothetical scenario, I think everybody in this country knows about the inequity of that. We would pay people not to work but not pay the people to put their lives on the line for us? But that's an option open to the President today. That threat is already out there drifting through the stratosphere--I should say cyberspace--in discussions, serious discussions about our priorities.

This Congress can pass priorities; and absent statutory language that requires the executive branch to pay our bills in a priority order, he has the discretion to pay them in any order, or

maybe just let them go in no order and see what happens out of a grab bag. He could sit in the Oval Office and toss a coin or throw darts at a dart board and decide who gets paid and who doesn't right now.

I'm calling upon this Congress to pass the PROMISES Act or pass another priority ``pay the bills'' act so that we keep faith with our military, we keep faith with our international creditors, and we keep faith with our senior citizens.

Furthermore, when I hear the language that says ``pay the military first and pay the national debt second,'' that means pay the Chinese first when you're servicing the national debt. If we borrowed the money from the Chinese, we have to pay the money back to the Chinese, unless they sell our debt to somebody else. That's the facts. And if we didn't intend to pay them back, we shouldn't have borrowed the money in the first place.

But if we're concerned about servicing 100 percent of our debt because the Chinese hold $1 trillion of it, they hold less than 10 percent of our debt. So when we put $10 out to service our debt, one of those $10, less than one of those $10 goes to the Chinese. Half of those dollars go to Americans that hold U.S. debt, and some of that goes to the Saudis and, of course, other countries around the world. But this isn't ``pay the Chinese first.'' This is keep faith--keep the full faith and credit of the United States Government first and keep faith with our military. We owe them more than we owe even our creditors.

I went through some of these things during the eighties, the farm crisis years of the eighties. That added clarity to it. Three thousand banks were closed during that decade in the United States. A good number of banks around my neighborhood, including my bank, was closed. And I remember when it happened. It was April 26, 1985, Friday afternoon, 3 o'clock, when the FDIC showed up at my bank, put a red tag, a red sheet notice on the door, taped it on there, and two highway patrolmen stood at attention on either side of that door to guard the bank. And at that instant, they froze every single account, including mine. I had payroll to meet, and my customers' accounts were frozen along with mine. We had to go to a barter system to keep the business running right in the middle of corn planting in Iowa. You could not have picked a worse date or time than they did on that Friday afternoon.

But, Mr. Speaker, I learned what was important. The first thing we did was go to a barter system. And I loaded and hauled hay to the auction to turn that into cash so I could pay my employees. They were first. I fed myself last. I paid the interest second and the necessary principal third. I kept full faith and credit with my creditors.

But the first thing that--the people that were on the line every day making the business run were like our troops are today. Without them, everything stops and you live in fear; you don't have anything going. Pay them first, those people on the front line first; pay the interest second, keep your credit; pay the necessary principal third. And then you can look around and maybe make some tough decisions and options. That's where this country is today.

I do believe we must balance this budget, and I believe we must pass a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget. And I believe the American people will support such an endeavor. And if we don't have the votes to pass a constitutional amendment to balance the budget among the States, then the people in America will rise up and elect their State representatives and their State senators to go to their statehouses and ratify the constitutional amendment to balance the budget.

The American people want this. This is a national movement. Some of this is coming out of the Tea Party; the constitutional conservatives with a cause are activated. They stood up against ObamaCare, and they'll stand up to balance this budget, and they will still stand up against ObamaCare.

And let me add to this, Mr. Speaker, that for this Congress to think about going down a path that would offer a balanced budget to the States in exchange for, let's say, some cuts in spending, increasing the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion and cutting our spending as a percentage of GDP, ratcheting it down to 19.99 percent, which is short of the constitutional amendment's cap, for this Congress to do this but still allow what we will know as $105.5 billion to go forward to implement and enforce ObamaCare is irresponsible.

There are $23.6 billion sitting there right now automatically appropriated for these times, this year, for Kathleen Sebelius and others to implement ObamaCare while the President delays the case that should be expedited before the Supreme Court that I believe will find ObamaCare to be unconstitutional. It's already been rejected by the American people by margins of 60 percent or better. There are 87 freshmen in this House of Representatives, all of whom ran on repeal of ObamaCare and all of whom voted to repeal ObamaCare. Every Republican in the House of Representatives voted to repeal ObamaCare, and every Republican in the United States Senate voted to repeal ObamaCare.

And it's unconstitutional in my view in four different areas of the Constitution, and the Supreme Court will eventually rule when the President can no longer delay the actions of the Supreme Court. And he is believing that he can implement components of this and that we won't want to let it go if the Court finds it unconstitutional.

He is believing that since there is no severability clause in ObamaCare, that somehow the Supreme Court will look at it, maybe find a component of it unconstitutional, but decide at their option not to throw it all out and recognize a nonexistent severability clause. And that would be, a severability clause says if any part is found unconstitutional, then the other parts are still retained. If it is missing that clause, if any part is found unconstitutional, then all parts are then not retained and essentially repealed.

The language that I have introduced, the language that Michele Bachmann introduced, and others, Connie Mack comes to mind, with all Republicans voting for it, is this. It is 40 words to repeal ObamaCare and it ends with these words: ``as if it had never been enacted.'' That is the language we must put on a President's desk who will sign it.

In the meantime, to spend $23.6 billion to implement an unconstitutional piece of legislation that is 2,600 pages long, that kind of money in a period that must be a period of austerity is an absolute waste. We know it is a waste. If we are at this point where we are going to cut down spending, we have to do it by cutting off the $2.6 trillion of outlays that are ObamaCare; and $23.6 billion of that is sitting now in the hands mostly of Kathleen Sebelius, and they are seeking to send the roots of ObamaCare into our lives and expand the dependency in us so we decide we can't get along without ObamaCare.

How much time do I have left, Mr. Speaker?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, this ObamaCare of $23.6 billion that is sitting there being implemented, and with Kathleen Sebelius, with the discretion to spend that and send the roots down and expand the dependency class, here is an example. One of those example is this. They advertised that we needed to do ObamaCare because we had so many people who had preexisting conditions, and they would be refused for insurance. So when they were refused, they didn't have any way to get health insurance and that it was a human tragedy.

So these huge numbers of people who were uninsurable would be brought into the fold of the new ObamaCare under the preexisting conditions language that already is law. But a month or so ago, they discovered that in spite of how hard they tried to recruit people with preexisting conditions, and I remind you, we have 306 million people in America. And of those 306 million people, the numbers were supposed to be large, impressive, maybe not astronomical, of those who had preexisting conditions and could not buy insurance.

And what they found, they could find only 18,000 people, in spite of them advertising preexisting insurance. All across this land, 18,000 people only who had signed up for the preexisting conditions component, 18,000. Divide that

out across the States. Put 50 into that 18,000 and see what kind of a problem that is. It's a small number when you divide it by the 50 States. And the States could manage those kinds of numbers after you distribute it by population. For example, the majority of the States, including Iowa, have a high-risk pool that we subsidize with tax dollars to buy the premiums down so people with preexisting conditions can buy a policy. I encourage that. I think that is a good, responsible thing to do.

But Obama's preexisting policy only had 18,000 people after a year of effort trying to get people to sign up. So Kathleen Sebelius took what she considers to be latitude within the law and decided to buy the premiums down another 40 percent, pay another 40 percent of the premiums out of this pot of money that she has that is automatically appropriated to her to a total tune of $105.5 billion, and they still couldn't find enough people to make it look like there was a reason to have preexisting conditions policy in the Federal code, and so they removed the condition that you have a preexisting condition.

Now we have an insurance policy for people that want to signed up with the Federal Government that may or may not have an illness. They may not have been sick a day in their lives. They don't even need to make the case that they have been turned down for insurance by a single company in America. They just have to sign up, and they'll put them on the policy and they'll buy the premium down by at least 40 percent. This is what government is doing. And they are seeking to expand Medicaid and collapse Medicare into Medicaid.

We saw what they were trying to do under Bill Clinton's era where-- and they started this SCHIP, which now is CHIP, Children's Health Insurance Program, and ObamaCare kind of does that in. But it was expanded within the States. It started out to be 200 percent of poverty. If you're at 200 percent of poverty or less, we'll help pay the health insurance premiums for your children. Those are low-cost premiums, by the way. Kids don't have a lot of problems. And on the upper end of this, Bill Clinton wanted to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 55, if you remember.

So if you can insure kids up to the age of 26, which ObamaCare does, and you can lower the Medicare eligibility age to 55, now you've only got that little window in there of 24 years, the most productive years of a person's life, presumably, and often is the case, that the government is stepping in requiring that you stay on or mandating that you be able to stay on your parents' health insurance until age 26. You can get elected to Congress when you're 25, come down here and swear in, still on your mommy and daddy's health insurance and come over on the government plan right away. That's what that means. I wanted my kids to grow up.

But if we are going to insure kids through SCHIP or CHIP or a Federal mandate up to age 26 and pay those premiums out of tax dollars, and then lower the Medicare eligibility age, as Clinton wanted to do, and it is impossible in this environment today, down to 55, it is only a 24-year window. Then they would add to those at the lower end and lower the upper end age until they got it to collapse altogether. In the meantime, collapse Medicare into Medicaid, you have the formula for socialized medicine. That would be the great bleed of most everybody on this side of the aisle, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, they want socialized medicine. John Conyers back in 1981 introduced a socialized medicine policy that forbade anyone from doing health care services on a fee-for-service. They had to be on the salary of the national health care system.

The Federal Government would hire and presumably fire everybody that worked in health care, and no one could charge a fee for it, and no one could be paid a fee-for-service. They would have to be working for the government within the health care system.

We know what happens when government takes things over. I ask the American people how is the service in the place when you go into government offices. It is about the same as it is where you go in where somebody has a monopoly. I'm not picking on government workers. Government, often by definition, has a monopoly. If you don't have competition, you don't have to be nice.

I learned that in the auto--what do I call it--the vehicle registration department in the county courthouse the first time I went in to register a vehicle at about age 16. I learned that. They had the market cornered. They didn't have to be nice. They could open the door when they wanted to and close the door when they wanted to. There was no motive for them to try to provide better service for me or anyone else. However long the line was, we stood in it. Anybody in Washington, D.C. who goes down to the vehicle parking department here in Washington, D.C., you will find the same thing.

When my wife goes down to get her annual $10 ticket so we can park our car for a short period of time on the streets of Washington, D.C., invariably it is a 4-hour process. And I have had to send my chief of staff and a driver down there through a 4-hour process just to get a $10 permit because they have got an attitude. Their attitude is we don't have to service anybody; we have the market cornered. That's the attitude. Go down there and go buy a parking permit if you think ObamaCare and a national health care act are good for you, Mr. Speaker, or anyone else.

I don't want to see monopolies; I want to see competition. And ObamaCare eliminates competition, and it prescribes a product that the American people have to buy for the first time in history, a product, a government-approved, or if they had their way, a government-created health insurance policy that a person has to buy unless you are of low enough means-tested income that they are going to pay the premium for you.

This has never happened in the history of America, how one lower court could come to a conclusion that the individual mandate is constitutional. It is appalling to me that a judge could sit on a bench and come to a conclusion like that--or a panel of judges, a majority of a panel of judges--and it was 2-1, I believe, on a three-judge panel.

Think of this, Mr. Speaker: think of when you get your paycheck. Let's just say you've got--let's keep it reasonable--$500 take-home pay for a week's paycheck. If your health insurance premium is $100 a week and if the government says you must buy a health insurance policy that is of a value that costs you $100 a week, what they have done is confiscated--confiscated--20 percent of your paycheck, of your take- home payroll, your after-tax dollars, and it is after-tax dollars.

Let's just say the government decides you need to buy a General Motors or a Chrysler because we have a vested interest in that and that you can't drive a clunker--we're going to outlaw those, so we have to buy a new car every 10 years or have one that's within 10 years of new. They could prescribe that with the same standards that they prescribe ObamaCare on us. Let's say that car payment takes another $100 a week. Now you've got $200 of the $500 that is swallowed up by the government. That's 40 percent of your take-home pay commandeered by Uncle Sam.

Then they decide that the appliance companies aren't making enough money and that you need to buy certain appliances--and I can go through this a little faster. They might decide you have to buy this diet food I talked about a little bit earlier. They might put a tax on the non- diet pop. Then pretty soon your paycheck is swallowed up. Your whole $500 is gone because the government has told you how to spend every single dollar.

If the government can commandeer a single dollar out of your paycheck that they direct you to spend on a product that's produced by government or approved by government, then they can commandeer the second dollar and the third dollar and 99 cents out of every dollar and 100 cents out of every dollar. That's what we're faced with.

That's the biggest reason why ObamaCare is unconstitutional, Mr. Speaker.

The American people are not adequately outraged. We have a character among us. We've got a history that the

product of the will of the people emerges out of the House and the Senate and goes to the President's desk for his signature or a veto and an attempt to override a veto. That happens once in a while. That's supposed to be the voice of the American people, and we expect it because of the structure of this republican form of government.

I want to emphasize the Constitution guarantees us not a democracy. The Constitution guarantees us a republican form of government.

That means representative.

That means we don't go out there and take the temperature of the public and do a poll and decide it's the will of the people today, so let's race in that direction. We have an obligation to listen to the people and understand what they want and have a very sensitive antenna to pick up on the will of the American people.

It doesn't end there, Mr. Speaker; it starts there.

Our job is to be full-time paying attention to all the facts and the figures and all of the components and to be making the best decisions possible because we are representatives here in a republican form of government. This Republic is not a democracy. It isn't two coyotes and a sheep taking a vote on what's for dinner.

We have liberty. We have American liberty.

We have rights that come from God that are guaranteed to us in the Constitution.

Now, I believe that God moved the Founding Fathers around like men on a chessboard to shape this Nation, and I believe that for a lot of reasons. One of them is I can't go back on this Monday morning of 2011 and redraw the course of history and even imagine that I could come up with a result that would be half of what has been produced by this great gift of liberty and freedom--freedom of speech, religion, and the press. All the people who came here to exercise their religious liberty, their free enterprise liberty, their property rights, to be protected from double jeopardy, and to have a jury of their peers and face their accusers, a lot of that comes from Roman law.

The reasonable Western Civilization culture that lets us analyze our problems is part of who we are. They landed on a continent with unlimited natural resources at the dawn of the industrial revolution and settled it from sea to shining sea in a blink of a historical eye.

That's America.

We are a vigorous people.

We've got the vigor of every donor civilization on the planet. And now they want to impose ObamaCare on us? They want to raise the debt ceiling by $2.4 trillion or $4 trillion and ask us to go further and deeper into debt and put that on our grandchildren and children not yet born?

My youngest granddaughter, Reagan Ann King, entered this world with $44,000 that she owed Uncle Sam. That has got to stop, Mr. Speaker.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to bring to the attention of this body some subject matter that doesn't often get a debate here on the floor but it does get some discussion in Special Order time and sometimes in the 1-minute and 5-minutes that Members present to you here in this great deliberative place that we have the privilege to serve in.

One of the things that I wanted to bring before your attention here this evening is the immigration issue here in the United States. It is something that I don't know has been discussed here for some time. I bring this forward because it is an important issue. It is essential that we maintain and sustain and enhance the rule of law here in the United States. So I bring this forward. A number of things are on my mind.

The first thing that comes to mind for me is a subject that was reported on Fox News on July 11. I picked up this article and I wanted to express this to you on what is going on.

I introduced early in January, one of the first days of business here in this new 112th Congress, the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2011. Mr. Speaker, I brought this act forward working with people who have been leaders on this issue for some time. One of them would be our friend, Nathan Deal, now Governor Deal of Georgia, who was the lead on this issue when he served in the United States Congress. And some of the successor people involved would be Congressman Phil Gingrey of Georgia and the incoming freshman from Georgia, Rob Woodall; from California, Congressman Gary G. Miller, one who has been a strong proponent of the rule of law and standing up for the rights of American citizens. These people and others have been strong supporters of the Birthright Citizenship Act. And because of my role on the Immigration Committee where I have been for now going onto the 9th year, it seemed to be a better fit for me to carry this legislation, so I stepped forward with it because we needed to take a position.

What is going on, Mr. Speaker, is that in the United States of America, there are people who erroneously read the 14th Amendment of the Constitution in the component that addresses what we call birthright citizenship. It says, in the 14th Amendment, that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are American citizens. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are American citizens.

Now, the circumstances are that it has created a misinterpretation. A misinterpretation of this section of the 14th Amendment has created birthright tourism. So we have, you might see a $30,000 turnkey operation going on where a pregnant woman in China, and she is probably going to have a benefactor that would sponsor this, could receive a turnkey operation for a little tourism trip into the United States, get her on an airplane and smuggle her into the United States one way or another where she would have a baby. She would be 8\1/2\ months pregnant or so, theoretically, and have the baby here in the United States. The baby would get a nice, new American birth certificate with his little footprint stamped on it. And then that baby might go back to China with the baby's mother, or the mother might stay here

in the United States with family and friends, whoever might want to harbor that mother and/or child. And when that child is old enough, the child can sponsor the entire family to come in the United States by virtue of that automatic citizenship that is conferred upon a child that is born here to an illegal mother and a who-knows father.

That is going on not just in rare circumstances, and certainly not just with Chinese. In fact, that is not one of the larger numbers. It is happening in this country someplace between 340,000 times a year and 750,000 times a year, Mr. Speaker. We have a people that sneak into the United States for the purpose of having a baby so that baby can become an American citizenship.

I believe, as the chairman of the full Judiciary Committee, Lamar Smith, believes, that citizenship should be precious. It should be precious. It shouldn't be dealt out. It shouldn't be something that you can buy a turnkey ticket to game the system to have a baby that then is automatically an American citizen subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

Mr. Speaker, I will argue that Chinese woman that flies into the United States with a $30,000 turnkey tourism for birthright is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, not in the way that was envisioned by the people that wrote the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution was put in place to guarantee that the babies born to formerly slaves, and then at that time of ratification freed slaves, would be American citizens, that the babies born to the freed slaves would not be denied all of the rights of citizenship as were guaranteed to them in the 13th and 14th Amendments. And it took into account that babies born on Indian reservations, some of them, would have lost their rights, their tribal rights on those reservations if they had become automatic American citizens. So some of the Native Americans said, no, they didn't want that conferred upon them.

The drafters of the 14th Amendment then wrote language in it to preclude automatic citizenship to any Homo sapien that was born within the territory of the United States. They also had to be subject to the jurisdiction thereof. And this Congress went through a great deal of debate in the House and in the Senate on what that actually meant in the clause, ``subject to the jurisdiction thereof.''

It was not contemplated that the children of diplomats would become automatic American citizens. It was not contemplated that certain Native Americans born on certain reservations would be subject to the jurisdiction thereof and become American citizens. But it was contemplated that the children born to freed slaves would be American citizens.

It is a guarantee, and it was written with a significant amount of wisdom. They could not have anticipated that America would get so lazy and so lax that this constitutional amendment would drift its way into a practice, an erroneous practice of conferring automatic citizenship on mostly any baby that would be born in America.

Now, here is how it is. If there is a plane flying through the United States, and let's just say this plane is bound from China to Toronto, which does happen, Mr. Speaker. And it was going to be a flight that was going to be a direct flight and drop into Toronto, but because of weather conditions or maybe mechanical problems, it had to land in Chicago. Let's just say if there is a woman pregnant on that plane who is flying into Toronto and the plane lands in Chicago and it is stuck there for mechanical repairs or a weather-related delay and the woman is inside security and has the baby, the baby is not an American citizen. But if she walks through the security, is outside the security during the layover and has the baby out there, this baby is an American citizen.

That is what has been going on in the practice of this automatic citizenship that I think is an erroneous misinterpretation, and I think a willful misinterpretation, or probably more often a lazy misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

And so I have introduced the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2011, along with the friends and colleagues that I have mentioned and many others, and a good number of cosponsors who take the position with me that if a child is born in America, has to be born to at least one legal parent in order to be a citizen of the United States. It is pretty simple. It clarifies the 14th Amendment. It clarifies the clause in the 14th Amendment, ``subject to the jurisdiction thereof.'' Congress has the authority to do that.

I got concerned about this when there were a couple of Senators who were talking about the need to amend the Constitution to fix this problem.

Mr. Speaker, it doesn't require a constitutional amendment to fix the automatic citizenship practice that is so flawed that it confers an automatic citizenship on as many as 750,000 babies born to illegal parents here in the United States.

To give you an example, as I said, it's not just a Chinese woman who comes over here, pregnant, to have the baby here--and that happens on a very regular basis. It's often someone who comes in from a neighboring country. We know, of the criminal aliens that are in our prisons, two- thirds of them come from Mexico. One might presume that of a similar number of these automatic citizenship babies also their mothers are citizens of Mexico who are in the United States illegally, having the babies here and picking up that automatic citizenship, that birth certificate. They may or may not go back to their home country, but you can bet that when the time comes that that child will already be programmed to petition for the family reunification plan, which has our immigration plan in America out of control--out of control.

So what do we do about this?

The Birthright Citizenship Act of 2011.

It should be a simple decision for this United States Congress to address this situation, but some will argue, well, ``subject to the jurisdiction thereof'' means nothing, that that clause in the 14th Amendment doesn't have meaning; therefore, it requires that they all be citizens. I think that is a very thin and a very marginal argument at best. The clause must mean something.

``All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,'' are American citizens. There is a reason that it says: ``and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.'' If everyone born in the territory of the United States is automatically a citizen, you would strike that language from the 14th Amendment ``and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,'' and it would simply read: ``All persons born or naturalized in the United States'' are American citizens. If that were the intent, if that were the understanding of the 14th Amendment, that's what it would have said, Mr. Speaker, but it says: ``and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.'' The definition of that phrase is subject to the interpretation of the understanding of what it meant at the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment, and it meant that ``subject to the jurisdiction thereof'' didn't mean that there was going to be automatic citizenship for illegals.

Granted, we didn't have much for immigration laws at the time. There wasn't enough human migration to be very concerned about it, but they clearly didn't intend to confer automatic citizenship on Native Americans born on reservations that were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. They clearly didn't intend to confer automatic citizenship on the children born to the diplomats or their staff, or for tourists for that matter. I mention the tourism part when I explain what happens if a plane lands in Chicago on its way to Toronto and a baby is born. Which side of the security? Here is automatic citizenship on the U.S. side of the security. That's nuts, Mr. Speaker, but we've gotten lazy and lax with the practice of conferring automatic citizenship.

So people don't challenge it, and I'm really worried about an administration--actually, I've been worried about a couple of those administrations since I've arrived in this town--that doesn't seem to have much vigor for enforcing immigration law. It's pretty frustrating to be here in the United States Congress, pounding away to have to pass legislation to fix something that's just a matter of intellectual laziness; but the people who are enforcing this, the people who are handing out birth

certificates almost like candy, aren't challenging it. They don't have a very good constitutional understanding or there would be some pushback out there from across the countryside.

In the OB ward of the hospitals around the country, they've got to have stacks of these birth certificates, and when a baby is born, it's almost an automatic process. Here is the footprint. Here is the data. Here is the birth certificate. Send that child off. He's an American citizen. What do we suppose happens if a diplomat or the wife of a diplomat or even a staff of the diplomat comes into the hospital to have a baby?

Do they meet them at the door and say, ``Do you happen to be a diplomat? Are you here on some kind of foreign immunity, and you're planning on having a baby here, and do you think that baby is going to be an American citizen?''

``No, we're not going to allow it. Citizenship is not going to be cheapened like that.''

That doesn't happen, Mr. Speaker. What really happens is the children of diplomats are often conferred with automatic citizenship because the whole system of America is so automatic that any baby born inside the U.S. territory is just given the paperwork and the documents.

Here is an article that came out on Fox News, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, reported on July 11--by good, thorough people, I might add. This is Elizabeth Robichaux Brown who has written this article.

The Center for Immigration Studies says: ``Foreign diplomats are obtaining U.S. birth certificates and Social Security numbers for their newborn children--effectively becoming U.S. citizens. On top of their new status in the world, these children carry an additional perk that most Americans do not have--diplomatic immunity.'' So it creates what the CIS describes as a ``super citizen.'' Just like their parents, most are immune to the criminal jurisdiction of the United States, creating super citizens. These super citizens are, of course, children of diplomats, and all they need to have is a U.S. birth certificate and a Social Security number, and they're effectively American citizens.

Who is going to challenge it? There's no question on the birth certificate that asks the question: Are you a diplomat? Is one of your parents legal? an American citizen, perhaps? Those questions don't get asked. They just routinely stamp those birth certificates and send those children off with automatic citizenship 340,000 to 750,000 times a year--some who are clearly not subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

In fact, in the concluding statement in the article, you've got a statement here from one of the proponents of the policy that I advocate, a statement that says: ``Despite Congress' clear intent to not create a completely universal and automatic birthright citizenship policy, the current application of the Citizenship Clause is so lax that the United States has a de facto universal birthright citizenship policy that denies U.S. citizenship by birth to no one, including children born to foreign diplomats.''

Mr. Speaker, that has to change. We intend to change that with the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2011--that's H.R. 140--and I intend to be engaged in that and to be helping to move that legislation forward.

It has gotten to the point where the children of diplomats, with diplomatic immunity, are getting automatic American citizenship just because they're born inside the territory of the United States--perhaps not even born on U.S. soil. They might even potentially be born in that sovereign territory of the Embassy itself, and they're still American citizens.

Then, Mr. Speaker, we also have an out-of-control legal immigration system, aside from the illegal immigration, which I talk about quite a lot. If we look back over the last decade, we'll see that we brought in, roughly, one and a quarter legal immigrants a year. Over that last decade, if you would look at the new jobs created by the United States economy, those new jobs created are going to average about one and a quarter million jobs a year. This is before the recession began. These numbers held up then, and they're even stronger now. The new jobs created by the American economy have been almost exactly the same number of jobs that would be taken by the legal immigrants who come into the United States.

If we had shut down, slowed down, the legal immigration in the United States over the last 10 years, there would have been just, say, roughly, 10 million fewer legal immigrants in America, and we'd have 10 million fewer unemployed Americans. That's just a simple way of looking at this. I don't propose that we eliminate all legal immigration, not by any means, Mr. Speaker. What I do propose is that we do an economic analysis of this. When we look at real numbers of testimony that have come before the committee, under oath data, here is what we have:

A country should establish an immigration policy that is designed to enhance the economic, the social and the cultural well-being of the United States of America. That should be our task. Yet, with our legal immigration, that legal immigration that is based upon merit, when we take a look at what these individuals have to offer the United States, when we take a look at what they have for capital to invest or their ability to assimilate or their educational background or their relative youth so they've got some years to contribute before they start to draw from the system, these are all logical things that we should ask for.

But it's only between 7 and 11 percent of the legal immigration in American that is based upon anything that has to do with what's good for America. And the balance of it would be 89 to 93 percent of the legal immigration in America is out of the control of the value judgment of the American people, in the hands of the legal immigrants-- or sometimes the illegal immigrants--themselves. It's out of our control.

Birthright citizenship is a piece of that that I'm not even sure is part of this equation that I've just described to you. There is a family reunification plan that takes up a big chunk of this, that once someone comes in they can start bringing in their family and their extended family, and it goes out like a tree to no end. We need to limit that family reunification plan. And we need to roll this thing back around and base the legal immigration in America on merit again-- what do they have to offer the United States?

And Mr. Speaker, I will say also, we had testimony before the committee, and there were a number of strong faithful representatives that testified there. Some of them are national leaders in the faith community who argued that we need to find a way to accommodate the 11 million to 20 million illegals that are here in America and give them a path to citizenship. And every one of them said that they thought they should go to the back of the line. They should go to the back of the line, the 11 million to 20 million illegals in America should go to the back of the line, but we should give them a means by which they can earn American citizenship. Well, think about it, Mr. Speaker, go to the back of the line. Which line? I asked them, which line? Well, the back of the line. Now that's a talking point that apparently wasn't thought about any deeper than that because if they can't answer the question which line, they surely don't know where that line is. Is it in the United States or is it in lines in the foreign countries, people waiting to come into the United States?

I would submit that if those who are in the United States illegally are to go to the back of the line, it's not a line in the United States. The people in line to come into the United States legally are, by definition, not in the United States. They're outside the United States, they're in their home country, they're following the laws of America, they're lined up to come in the right way--God bless them for doing that. But that line, that line of legal waitees--to maybe coin a phrase--the line of people who are willing to respect American immigration law, get in line and wait in line isn't just some short little old line that you can put 11 million to 20 million people behind and think you're going to process them through. That line of the people who are respecting American laws and are waiting to come into the United States legally, none of them are in the United

States. It's 50 million strong, Mr. Speaker; 50 million people have taken the trouble to line up to try to come into the United States legally.

We are the most generous country in the world by far, letting in around 1.25 million legal immigrants--a very small percentage of them actually come here because of merit, as I said--and meanwhile we've got 11 million to 20 million here in this country that have disrespected our laws. And I would suggest that I would much rather see the 11 million to 20 million who are in the line respecting American laws waiting to come in, I would like to see them come in and become American citizens ahead of those who have disrespected American laws. That sustains the rule of law. That upholds the rule of law. That strengthens us as a Nation. And rewarding law breakers weakens the rule of law and weakens us as a Nation and chisels away at that beautiful marble pillar of American exceptionalism called the rule of law. That's the equation.

And I hear constantly arguments from people that have their own interests, their own viewpoint. They need somebody to milk the cows or they need somebody to take care of their equestrian herd or they need somebody to do their gardening, they need somebody to be their butler or their maid. So they're saying, I can't afford to hire somebody in this country. You need to bring me some cheaper labor.

I would suggest that Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation is right: We have become a welfare state. And a household headed by a high school dropout, without regard to their immigration status, costs the taxpayer annually $23,449 a year. But it boils down to this: They will draw down $32,000 a year in benefits--a welfare state--they will pay $9,000 a year in taxes. And that's the change, that's the difference. And when you multiply it times 50 years of managing the household, being the head of the household, 50 years, it costs the taxpayers an average of $1.5 million to subsidize that household. And that's a high school dropout. Now it may not get worse when they're an illegal high school dropout, but it doesn't get a lot better. There is a net number, too, that he produces, I think that's around the order of $19,499 a year. In this area, let's say $20,000 a year, plus or minus a thousand or two, for a household headed by a high school dropout and/or an illegal immigrant.

Now the burden to the taxpayer, because we're a welfare state, can't be ignored. And the weight on the taxpayers, when we have an oversupply of cheap labor and an undersupply of taxpayers, and 47 percent of households don't pay income tax, we're living in a welfare state, and we're giving automatic citizenship to 340,000 to 750,000 babies a year that are born to an illegal mother who sneaks into the United States.

And then the President has the temerity to go down to the border in El Paso and make fun of people who think like I do, that say let's build a fence, a wall and a fence. He said some will want a moat, some will want alligators in it. He was standing down there within 220 yards of this, Mr. Speaker. This is El Paso, Texas. This is Juarez, Mexico. Some people would want a moat, some people would want a fence, some would want alligators in it--I don't think there are any alligators in here, Mr. Speaker. But this is the aerial picture that I had seen just a few weeks before the President gave this speech in El Paso. The records are good--not many people are getting across the border here. Why? Because we have--here's a fence right here, this is the Rio Grande River. We have a fence, a river, another fence--here is a patrol road that is patrolled by the Border Patrol. There is a Border Patrol vehicle right here, another one up around the curve--a patrol road, then another fence, then a canal that's forwarding a lot of water, and it flows pretty fast, then another fence. If you can get over that, you're in the United States, into El Paso, and maybe you can catch a ride here and you're home free.

Not a moat, not a moat with alligators; you might say two moats and four fences--a fence, the Rio Grande River, a fence, a patrol road, a fence, a canal with flowing water--and deep--another fence, and then you're off into the United States. Three of those fences you have to climb wet. This is very effective. And the President is standing within 220 yards of that making fun of Americans who think that physical structures help control illegal immigration.

So we're spending $12 billion a year on this southern border, enforcing it and chasing people across the desert 100 miles into the United States. And out of that $12 billion a year, that's $6 million a mile, on average, for every mile on our southern border. I can build you a fence, a wall and a fence for about $2 million a mile, about one- third of the annual budget. And I don't suggest that we build 2,000 miles of it right away, Mr. Speaker. I suggest that we start building it and stop building when they stop going around the end. That's the scenario, that's the logical way to address this. Build a fence, a wall and a fence; use the funding that we have, roll it into that kind of infrastructure. It is effective. And the President's staff didn't serve him very well if he was standing with his back to a fence, a river, a fence, a patrol road, another fence, a canal, and another fence. Those are the barriers to get into the United States, and he's making fun of it. And the Border Patrol is telling us this is effective. It is effective. It's been effective in El Paso, it keeps them in Juarez. It's been effective in San Luis in southwest Arizona. It's not effective where there is nothing. And we have to pay a lot of people a lot of time and money to chase all over the desert after people that walked around the end.

Let's build it until they stop going around the end. Let's pass the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2011. Let's make sure that the kind of security that is in El Paso can be applied in other high-traffic areas. Build a fence until they stop going around the end, and then, Mr. Speaker, we can also pass my New Idea Act, which shuts off the Federal deductibility for wages and benefits paid to illegals, brings the IRS into this mix, and gives the employer safe harbor. All of that. Simple solutions to a complex problem, Mr. Speaker.

I would conclude with that statement, thank you for your attention, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 9 o'clock and 20 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, July 13, 2011, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

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

Mr. Chairman, this amendment that decreases a line item by a million dollars and then increases it by a million dollars is the parliamentarily approved method by which we direct some intent into this appropriation legislation that we have.

As a lot of the world knows by now, and as I viewed from this morning as it was getting light as we took off from the Omaha airport, we have water that is a mile to as wide as 11 miles wide, and that's just getting to Missouri, and it may well be wider downstream Missouri. The Missouri River itself, which flooded in 1952, and in that year it was the last flood they hoped for all time. They built the Pick-Sloan program. That is six dams in the Upper Missouri River. The Corps of Engineers' construction of those was designed to prevent a flood of similar magnitude of 1952.

What has happened is that in 1952--for awhile this year they had the largest amount of water to flow down the Missouri River--came down in 1952 in April, and that was 13.2 million acre-feet of water. In May of this year, coming out of the Missouri River, it was 10.5 million acre- feet of water. And one might think we can deal with that. Well, we could not.

We are flooded, and this water is going to stay up now for another month or longer. And we got the records from June of this year, and that became not 13.2 but 13.8 million acre-feet, more water in a single month than to ever come down the Missouri River since we have been keeping records. And, Mr. Chairman, that is just 2 months, and this continues. This year will be the largest volume of water to go down the Missouri River since we have been keeping records.

Mr. Chairman, I might point out I didn't yield, but I would be happy to yield to the gentleman and hopefully get you a copy.

I will personally deliver it to you if this version is okay.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

This year, we will see more water come down the Missouri River than ever before in recorded history. And the result is the Corps of Engineers is releasing 160,000 cubic feet per second from Gavins Point Dam. That is the lowest one of the six dams. What it

brings about is massive flooding all of the way down the river for a sustained period of time.

Now I'm not here to take issue with the design, the engineering, or the management of this river; but what this amendment does is it takes a million dollars out and puts a million dollars back in. What I'm asking is to direct the Corps of Engineers to conduct a new study and come back and let us know how they would have had to manage this river in the event that they had been able to see this massive amount of water coming, how they would have been able to protect not only all of the people downstream from each of these reservoirs, but also the additional component of that is although a year ago last May we had record flooding in the tributaries downstream from Gavins Point, the dam that is the lowest. We need to be able to look at two catastrophic events. All of this snow runoff and rain that we got, particularly in Montana in the mountains, coupled with the record rainfall coming down the tributaries from below Gavins Point Dam that we saw a year ago last May, those two laid on top of each other, how do they have to manage the reservoirs for the purposes of protecting all of that valuable real estate and infrastructure.

My constituents have spent millions of dollars to try to protect themselves. They built miles of levee, watching the water come down the river. They have hauled dirt with water coming up on one side of the levee. This amendment urges and actually directs the Corps of Engineers to commence with that study. And we will have more information as it unfolds. I urge its adoption.

I yield back the balance of my time.

If the gentleman would yield?

I think the chairman has made a significant point here. Sometimes we are playing catch-up. I would like to have had the lead work done so that this information was out in front of the majority and the minority. I think you've seen the water coming down the river. But I would ask this, that if we are willing to work on this, Democrats and Republicans, to bring about a review of the master manual management, then I would ask unanimous consent to withdraw the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw the amendment.

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 24, I was delayed in leaving the Medal of Honor Recognition Ceremony for Staff Sergeant Salvatore Guinta and was unable to reach the floor to cast my vote before the vote was closed. Had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 25, I was delayed in leaving the Medal of Honor Recognition Ceremony for Staff Sergeant Salvatore Guinta and was unable to reach the floor to cast my vote before the vote was closed.

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

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I will start out first by associating myself with the remarks of the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), who I think laid this out clearly. This is a message that goes globally. This is a destiny message.

The Speaker of this House understands his role. He understands that all of America is watching us today. And even if I had a vote, I would have said, no, don't go into Libya. If I had an opportunity to amend this resolution, I would say let's limit the authorization to a shorter period of time so that the President can come do what he should do. But I believe that there are scores of Americans in their graves today because this Congress sent the wrong message in several conflicts that encouraged our enemy.

Clausewitz wrote: ``The object of war is to destroy the enemy's will and ability to conduct war.'' And I would shorten that up to say, if you can destroy their will, it doesn't matter what their ability is; you've taken their ability with it.

But this message encourages our enemy. This resolution says that Congress stands with the constitutional authority of the President to be Commander in Chief and to conduct our foreign policy. We should conduct our disagreement with the President domestically, not in our foreign policy and not by limiting an activity that could abrogate our NATO treaty.

Mr. Speaker, it's my privilege and honor to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I would say at the outset that it is also my honor and privilege to have been seated here on the floor of the House of Representatives as I listened to a Congressman and judge, Ted Poe, address you on the brave patriots from Texas that were on the poster and as he went down through and said choice morsels of each individual's life and what happened in their sacrifice and talked to us about the values that they defended and their reasons that they have put their lives on the line.

I'm impressed by the honor that Ted Poe did to those who have given their lives from Texas, and I'm very convinced that he would agree with me that he'd appreciate it if that honor could be reflected across all of the brave patriots who have given their lives in the defense of this country in this conflict and in past conflicts. We always pray that there be no future conflict.

Mr. Speaker, I came to the floor to address a different subject matter. Perhaps I'll digress or cross over into the national security side of this. But I find that I don't believe any Member of any delegation has yet come to the floor to talk about the natural disaster events that have been taking place in the Midwest, and in particular in the Missouri River basin area. I'm one who has grown up in that drainage basin area. I've lived there on that side of the great divide for most of my life. We have some circumstances today that eclipse the 500-year flood event of 1996.

In 1996, more water came down the Missouri River than ever before. It was the largest amount of cubic feet per second and the largest amount of over a million acre-feet that had come down. I will say there were a couple of events that would compete with that, depending on how you define it, Mr. Speaker. One would be a flood in 1943 that brought the attention of the world. We were in the middle of a world war. We didn't get to addressing the massive runoff in the Missouri River from the 1943 flood event.

In 1952, the huge floods came again and more water for a single month came down the Missouri River than ever before, or since. That amounted to a discharge in million acre-feet of 13.2 million acre-feet of water coming down in a single month, the month of April 1952.

That course flooded everything and put the water higher than it had been before, and it brought to it the attention of this Congress. The attention of this Congress, in paying particular attention to what happened in the flood event in '52, followed through on some plans that had been discussed after the 1943 flood, and they began to take action to move forward for the construction of what we now know as the Pick- Sloan Program.

The Pick-Sloan Program is the construction of six large dams on the Upper Missouri River. It starts at Gavins Point Dam in South Dakota, and it goes on up to Fort Randall Dam, to Oahe, and then on up into North Dakota where you see Garrison Dam and Fort Peck. I left out Big Bend. So we have Gavins Point, Fort Randall, Big Bend, Oahe, Garrison Dam, and then Fort Peck Dam. These are all built on the main stem of the Missouri River, but they collect water from all the tributaries.

The water that we have now coming down through the Midwest comes down out of Montana into North Dakota, where it's flooding now, and it's flooding also across South Dakota, all

across the bottoms, and is spilling out of the six dams one after another at discharge rates higher than we have seen at sustained rates ever before. It's the most water to come down the river since these six dams were built in this Pick-Sloan Program starting in the fifties and finishing in the early sixties. The discharge level at Gavins Point Dam, which is the lowest one--that's at Yankton, South Dakota--is now approaching 160,000 cubic feet per second. That's more discharge than we've seen before.

The result of this is we're in a flood stage all down this river in the areas that I've mentioned. From below the dams, the Missouri River is at a flood stage. Some of it has just not yet arrived in St. Louis in its peak form. But because of this, it has flooded some of our communities, and it has flooded hundreds of thousands of acres of our farmland. It has caused us to build many miles of levees that some would design as temporary and some would design as permanent; and some of them, I hope, do stay permanent because, again, the water is going to be semi-permanent.

This is not, Mr. Speaker, a short-term flood event that just happened because the clouds opened up and it gushed down into the river and it's going to wash by us and be gone in a few days like many floods are. This is a long-term national disaster flood event for the entire Missouri River basin all the way from Montana to St. Louis, Missouri. This is the highest water level that we have seen since the Pick-Sloan Program was built, and in some places, it's the highest water we've ever seen. It will certainly be the longest term that we'll have been underwater that has ever been.

So as I travel up and down the river--and I have the privilege, Mr. Speaker, of representing all of the Missouri River that Iowa touches, which would be from the Sioux City area where the Missouri River comes out of South Dakota and joins up and provides the border, the western border of Iowa, between Iowa and Nebraska. It's all Missouri River with Nebraskans on one side and Iowans on the other side; both of us are underwater on both sides of the river. It's also true in South Dakota.

The water that's coming down the river in this massive quantity has brought about a lot of criticism and a lot of scrambling. First, I want to say, Mr. Speaker, that the events that brought us to this are unprecedented in modern recorded history in that, of all of the area that the Pick-Sloan Program handles--all of the drainage area of the Missouri River and the Upper Missouri River in particular--the Corps of Engineers watches the precipitation; they watch the snowcap, and they anticipate how much water they will have.

We have gone through at least an 8-year record drought in the Upper Missouri River. These reservoirs--these six huge reservoirs that were not designed for the primary purpose at all of fishing and recreation but were designed for flood control and navigation and electrical generation and also to cool our generators where we have coal-fired generators along the river and for navigation--have been very valuable to the States--to South Dakota, North Dakota and Montana--because the tourism industry for recreation and fishing has so migrated to those beautiful areas that they have.

When they're out of water, when the pool drains down during an 8-year drought, which they have had, it might be three-quarters of a mile from where your dock was, where your boat was tied up to where the water actually is.

We've even engaged in a struggle here on the floor of the House of Representatives about who gets the water when there is a short water supply. Congressman Denny Rehberg has tried mightily to keep as much water as possible up in Montana when they've needed it. I found myself in disagreement with him, trying to get the water down the river so we have enough to cool our generators, float our boats, bring some barge traffic up, and provide for flood control.

So the 8-year drought is over, Mr. Speaker. It's completely over. It was actually over the last year and a half or so. In thinking of them as six huge bathtubs that are nearly dry; the water level in the six huge dams has been coming up over the last year and a half or more. As of last fall, it caught up to the designed pool elevations, and then they had enough rain in the Upper Missouri that it overfilled these six dams.

The Corps of Engineers, operating under the Master Manual guidelines, which is the playbook that they have to manage these six dams by, lowered the pool elevations in the dams so that they had storage in order to be prepared for any future floods. They're required under the Master Manual to manage these levels so that they have 16.3 million acre-feet of storage capacity to manage the flood. They drew it down to that level--to those normal pool elevations, I will call them. They did so over the wintertime, and that was fine. It was all throughout November, December, January, February, and early March: stability within those pool levels and a storage capacity of 16.3 million acre- feet. They're prepared for spring rains. They're prepared for the snow runoff. That's manageable.

Then in very, very late March and early April, heavy snows in the mountains began, and the snow pack began to build in the mountains--and it couldn't have been anticipated--to 140 percent of the anticipated volume of snow that would have to, of course, melt and come down the Missouri River. In addition to that, they had spring rains across the Upper Missouri basin--across the plains and the foothills of the mountains. Those spring rains flowed down into the reservoirs and overfilled them as well. Once it happened, it was a situation where the storage capacity in the reservoirs was diminished significantly and when an unusual event took place on May 22.

That's when Billings, Montana, got 8 inches of rain and when some of the other areas got 10 and 12 inches of rain, and it was across a vast area of the Upper Missouri basin. As that water came down into the reservoirs, the Corps of Engineers began to watch the rain gauges and the runoff, and concluded that they had a rare event, an event that the Pick-Sloan Program was not designed to handle with ease.

They announced to us on that day, May 22, that they would open up the gates of the dams so that the lowest one at Gavins Point in Yankton, South Dakota, which is the one we watch for all the flow of the rest of the river, would be flowing at 110,000 cubic feet per second. That was May 22 or early May 23. By the 26th of May, the Corps of Engineers had evaluated the flow rates in the tributaries and the rainfall reports that they had and the forecast, and announced that they had to increase that flow to 150,000 cubic feet per second.

That makes a tremendous difference, Mr. Speaker, because the result of that necessary decision that the Corps of Engineers made was that the water tables, the water levels, would go up in the river above flood stage for what turns out to be almost the entire flow and maybe, actually, the entire flow of the Missouri River downstream from the dams.

Also, the flow that's coming through upstream from the dams is flooding significant areas--residential areas, commercial property areas, ag land in vast amounts--all the way up through the Dakotas and Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, with some spilling over into Kansas. That's the situation that we have.

I should say also, Mr. Speaker, that my life's work has been the earthmoving business. We've gone in and built levees and dug ditches and built terraces and waterways and dams. We've bid work on the flood control work on the Missouri River; and I've watched the flows, studied the flows, floated the river for recreational purposes and engineering reasons. As a State senator in Iowa for 6 years and now as a Member of Congress into my ninth year, I've dealt with the public policies that have to do with the water coming down the river and the species that are affected by it.

With all of this together, if I look back upon it and try to become a Monday morning quarterback, Mr. Speaker, I'll come to this conclusion that, yes, knowing what we know today, it would have been possible to have prevented this long-term flooding that we have in the Missouri River bottom--but that's knowing what we know today. The Corps of Engineers could not have known that they were going to get the heavy snowfalls that would come down on the mountains, which would be

melting. Even now, perhaps half of that snow has melted today, and the balance of it has to still melt.

They couldn't have known that until the snow actually arrived in late March and earlier April. Neither could they have known that there would be this huge, unseasonal rain that would run off to the extent that it did and saturate the soil so that the big rain that hit Billings, as I mentioned, would run off to the extent that it did.

Once they knew about the flows coming in, they made the decision that they had to make, Mr. Speaker, and we are where we are. Now we're watching 160,000 cubic feet per second come out of Gavins Point. That's more than ever before. The water table is above the flood stage all the way along the Missouri River from below Gavins Point. And I presume that the gentleman who represents North Dakota and the gentlelady who represents South Dakota can speak to those issues up there, and I imagine that they can say that they have floods all the way up and down the Missouri River bottom completely throughout the Dakotas and likely Montana.

But, Mr. Speaker, these water levels are going to stay, and they're going to stay for all of the rest of June, likely all the rest of July, and partway into August, most likely. And, in fact, these water levels could stay into September or October, depending on whether we get unseasonably high rains. If we do, if there's additional rain to this, then these water levels or even, on the outside, higher water levels could be with us for a long time to come on into the fall.

The people that live in these States that I have mentioned have to live with high water for a long period of time, not like a tornado that comes and blows away your homes and your businesses and allows you to go back when the sun comes out and start to clean up the mess and rebuild. This flood is not like a tornado, not like a hurricane. It's not even like a flood, a normal flood. A normal flood will come up and wash over you and wash away some things and soak the rest, and the water table will go down.

Even on the Mississippi River, where the water comes up slow and goes down slow, this eclipses the duration of any flood that I know in that the Corps of Engineers, without a lot of choice, by June 14 this month, June 14, had opened up the gates to 150,000 cubic feet per second, now, as of about today, 160,000 cubic feet per second, and that discharge, that volume of water that floods the Missouri River bottom, I will say completely, will continue to be with us for 2 months perhaps, perhaps more. That's unprecedented in duration. It is unprecedented in volume. This is more water than has ever come down the Missouri River in a year that we know of since we've been recording these records.

I said 16.3 million acre-feet of storage capacity that they have, but the projected flow out of the Missouri River for this year is 54 million acre-feet, and that's more than even came down in the 1993 floods, which was a 500-year flood event or at least described to be the same. I lived under that, Mr. Speaker. It flooded four of my major projects and changed my life, and the long story I won't tell here, but I might not be in this Congress had it not been for the 1993 flood, which completely redirected my life.

This flood is redirecting the lives of thousands of people up and down the Missouri River bottom. It's changing businesses. It's changing residences. I'm convinced, Mr. Speaker, that we will lose businesses over the long term and we will lose people over the long term who can't get back into their homes.

To give an example--and it's a South Dakota example of the Dakota dunes. It is a region that was built around a golf course, the Dakota Dunes Golf Course, just outside of Iowa, outside of the north Sioux City side, which some might call it a suburb of Sioux City itself. But in that area, people that had, I will say, wherewithal and vision developed an area in there for residences, and it's a very nice area. It's close to the river. The nicer the homes, the closer to the river they seem to be. And when the Corps of Engineers announced on May 26 that these discharge levels would be coming down the river, they went to work with private money and began building a temporary levee alongside the Missouri River to protect their homes.

This is a neighborhood coming together with their checkbooks to do emergency work to protect their homes, and while they were doing that, the Corps of Engineers let an emergency contract to build a levee that protects about half of the homes in that area, but it is not stable enough for them to build that levee to protect all of the homes. And so you have two levees: one private money, good homes protecting themselves; another one, Corps of Engineers' money to protect the balance of those homes. If we lose that levee near the river, about half of the homes in the Dakota Dunes and probably the nicest homes will be under a massive amount of water.

And as I was up there to visit, they were building this temporary levee. And, Mr. Speaker, I've spent my life in the construction business, specifically the earthmoving business. We've had a fair number of our own machines running at a single time, but this operation in that area of the Dakota Dunes, a small population area, had 170 trucks hauling dirt into these temporary levees, about 50 trucks hauling into the Corps of Engineers' levee, 120 trucks hauling into the private money levee that was there, most of them belly dumps and side dumps, semi size--not little short straight trucks, but big trucks with a full load of dirt on each one of them--building a levee as the river comes up.

We've done that in South Dakota. We've done that on the Iowa side and also on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River where we built several miles of levees around our critical companies and critical infrastructure.

CF Industries, which is the fertilizer company, built a levee about eight-tenths of a mile long, and then all the way around their plant put in about 14 to 16 wells with pumps in them to dewater the inside of their levee as the river runs around the outside. That's true also with the protein company that's there, and they have been protecting the generating plants with sandbagging and pumps and temporary levees.

And as you go on down the river, Nebraska, Omaha, has its story. Council Bluffs has its story. They're protected by a pretty good Corps of Engineers' levee, but the water is high, and these levees are not built for 2 months of high water and fast flows and turbulence up against these levees. So they have to be monitored 24/7 all the way through until the water goes down. And if there's a little boil, somebody's got to be there to fix that, as happened in down in the southwest corner of Iowa. We can lose a levee in a matter of just a minute or two.

I know that there was a levee that ended up that almost spontaneously had a 30-foot boil in it where the earth just a disappeared, and then a little bit later it was 200 feet long, then it was 300 feet long. Then it couldn't be repaired any longer, and the backup levee is what is protecting the city of Hamburg right now.

There has been a courageous effort, Mr. Speaker, on the part of Midwesterners to build the temporary facilities they could, and the short notice that they had, when you think that the Thursday before Memorial weekend is when the word came from the Corps of Engineers that these historically high flows would be released, and it takes a couple of days for that water to get down. Of course, they weren't going to peak out on this until June 14, but they had maybe 2 weeks to be ready for the highest water, and they had to get ready while the water was coming up, sometimes a foot a day.

They've done a phenomenal job. And as I go into the emergency command centers in places like Sioux City, Council Bluffs, Iowa, as I go into the little town of Blencoe, Iowa, 270 people there in the flat bottom of the Missouri River who had been told that they would see 2 to 3 feet of water everywhere in their town and there wasn't going to be a way to save the town, they looked around and said, What do we do? Do we let all of our property flood and stay under water for a couple of months? And five contractors came together and put 11 machines on the job, and a few days later they had built 5 miles of levee. It goes all the way around the mighty little city of

Blencoe and ties it back in together, and they have pumps sitting there and they're protecting themselves from the flood. And that little Blencoe doesn't need to be the Alamo for the flood of 2011. They can fight this flood off, and we want to be there to help them all that we can.

I have a business owner that builds trailers in Missouri Valley, Iowa. He had gone in and bought a business in downtown Missouri Valley a few years ago, and because of the floods from the nineties built a new location above the floodplain just on the outside of the town by the interstate, Interstate 29, which, by the way, is closed today because of the floodwaters covering the interstate highway. Mr. Speaker, he built a new plant above the floodplain so that he didn't have to be flooded out again.

And about 3 years ago, there was a quirk of weather and one of the major streams backed up and flooded his new plant, and he's one of the top trailer salespeople in America. It flooded his new plant with about 4 or 5 feet of water and destroyed some of his property that was in there. He picked his chin back up and went to work and cleaned up the mess and fixed the trailers that he could fix and junked the rest and started all over and put a smile back on his face and said, That's life, isn't it? And went to work in a courageous, American way.

Now his plant that is built above the flood stage and was flooded 2 or 3 years ago is back under--and I can't confirm today that it's under water, but they predict it will be under 4 feet of water. And he has moved his equipment back down to the old plant. He has moved from the nonflood zone to the flood zone, where the old plant was, where they predict that one won't be under water. But his new plant that's out of the flood stage will be underwater.

The irony of all of this is not lost on him nor is it lost on me. Sometimes whatever you do, it's just going to end up to be wrong. This time, we have a lot of people that are suffering that maybe have done everything that they can do to protect themselves. We have farmsteads, Mr. Speaker, that are completely flooded, and we have hundreds of them that are under water.

All up and down on the west side of Interstate 29 in the southwest corner of Iowa, we've evacuated some 600 homes because they are all going under water. In the little town of Percival and two other small towns in that area, it has now been announced they will be underwater and flooded. And I hesitate to report exactly where that water is now. I am going tonight, and by the weekend, I will have looked at all that.

But the water that we have is unprecedented. It's strange in its nature in that floodwaters we see as silty, muddy water that is full of mud and silt and junk. Some of this is. Maybe 40 percent of this water is silt-laden water, but more than half of it, perhaps 60 percent, Mr. Speaker, is clear water. And when you fly over it and you look down, you can see through that water, and you can see the striping on Interstate 29. You can see corn stalks, corn stems, little sprouted plants that grew up about this far before the water flooded them, and they are standing there underneath 1\1/2\ or 2 feet of clear water. It goes on and on. Bean stubble is the same way, little fixtures. You will see also irrigation systems standing out in the water. In 8 feet of water, there's an irrigation system standing there.

But this clear water that has emerged comes because the pressure from the river, hydrostatic pressure from the river, pushes down on the entire aquifer around there. As it pushes down, the water seeks its own level, so the silt and floodwater pushes down into the soil. When it does that, water equalizes, and it comes up out of the ground, sometimes on the other side of the levy on the east side of the interstate, in my case. It would be like the kind of water you would find in a drainage tile or well. It comes up and sits on the surface everywhere, clear and clean as can be, shutting down our transportation units, our interstate highway, and flooding family farms and businesses all up and down this river, and most of it has yet to reach St. Louis. This is a problem all the way across Missouri, from St. Louis all the way up into St. Joe and north. It's a problem for the entire Missouri River bottom, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana.

To put it in perspective also, Mr. Speaker, the flow coming down this river, when people think that the Corps of Engineers could have done something different, marginally they could have, as I said, but they would have had to have been clairvoyant, and they would have had to have violated the terms of the Master Manual.

But the flow coming down the river at 150,000 cubic feet per second happens to be the amount of water that's just coming out of the Yellowstone River, itself. So those people who want to turn these American rivers back to what they were before we managed them and controlled them and built the Pick-Sloan Program, I would ask you all, Mr. Speaker, to think: If 150,000 cubic feet per second is flowing out of the Yellowstone River--and it is--and 150,000 cubic feet per second is flowing past out of Gavins Point and past down through Sioux City, if the Pick-Sloan Program had not been built, if we had no dams in the Missouri River, if all the tributaries of the Missouri River were completely dry except for the Yellowstone River, that little tributary up there in Montana, we'd still have the same amount of water there right now. It wouldn't last as long, but it would be as high as the levels we have today. That's how much this helps us. We know those other tributaries are flowing a lot of water. There's a massive amount. It's more than ever before. It's 54 million acre-feet for this year. It was a 500-year event in 1993. This is a 550-year event today.

So, Mr. Speaker, I have called upon the President to declare this entire area a national disaster area. I know that Governor Branstad has made that request. I know that the Governors in some of the States, such as Nebraska and Montana, have made that request. I believe that that request has been granted in a couple of cases, not yet for Iowa. I know that Governor Branstad has made this request for Iowa. And I thank the entire Iowa congressional delegation for joining with me in a letter to President Obama in making the request that he declare this a national disaster.

We have had a long time to be working with this water. A lot of sandbags have been filled. Some more will be filled. Many have to be emptied when this water goes down. And what we are going to need the most is the prayers of the American people and perseverance.

So, Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attention to this matter. I appreciate the Iowa delegation for standing with me and the delegations up and down the river who have stood together. We need to stand with the people whose property is under water and help them get through this. They are stoic people. They are determined people. They are not going to be standing there, complaining. They are going to be doing all they can to help themselves. And to honor their efforts, I and others are determined to do all we can to help them.

So that is the update on the 2011 flood, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate your attention.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 3 o'clock and 16 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until Tuesday, June 28, 2011, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to be recognized here on the floor of the House of Representatives to address you about the issues that are important, I think, to you and to all of us who serve in this United States Congress. As we know, the American public watches the work that we do here, and sometimes we need to send a message along on how we would like to hear that work interpreted.

Today I will take up two or perhaps three subjects. One of them is a piece of legislation that is an amendment that I offered on the Agriculture appropriations bill that did pass the House of Representatives today and became part of the bill, as final passage. That amendment was an amendment that had language in it that prohibited any of the funds in the bill from being used to support the telemed components of this, which are used to distribute RU-486, or the legal drug name for RU-486, which we know, Mr. Speaker, is an abortion pill.

It has become a practice in Iowa where Planned Parenthood is using Iowa as an experimental State to do what I call Skype robo-abortions. Under the Food and Drug Administration regulations under RU-486, they are required to have a physician present who can conduct a number of emergency procedures, if necessary, to examine the patient.

And Planned Parenthood has circumvented this. They've clearly violated the intent of the regulation. I believe they literally violate the regulation of the FDA on RU-486, the abortion pill, and have set up and have been practicing what I call Skype robo-abortions.

In other words, a young woman who is pregnant would go to a Planned Parenthood center in Iowa, sit down in a room where there is a computer screen monitor in front of her on a desk that has a drawer in it, usually. And there are a number of different practices. A physician who might be 1,000 miles away is on the other end of the computer Internet connection, and this physician would then ask questions of this soon- to-be mother. And once she answers the questions to his satisfaction, or her satisfaction, the physician's satisfaction, there is a button pushed, a little drawer opens up, and the abortion pill rolls out and is there for the individual to take the pill, where she's advised to go home now, and your body will go through some significant changes and will expel this little baby. This is Skype robo-abortions.

Under the grant program that is facilitated by funding within this Ag appropriations bill, there have been already some grants that have been offered and presented to Planned Parenthood that have been administered by Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius' agency.

I know this, Mr. Speaker, because I headed up a letter that was signed by 70 Members of Congress, asking for the documentation and a form from Health and Human Services: Are you providing grants to abortion providers? to Planned Parenthood specifically? That answer was ``yes.'' And are these grants for telemedicine? That's the category that's in the bill, an Ag approps bill that just passed this House. There is $15 million for telemedicine.

Telemedicine is supposed to help so we can do diagnosis or can remotely diagnose, not so that we can do remote Skype robo-abortions. So the amendment that passed here clearly says, You can't use any of the funds for telemedicine that would be used to distribute or used to facilitate the RU-486 abortion drug. And there's a little more precise language than that. Mr. Speaker, I want to make it clear that I put the precise language into the Record last night during the debate on that amendment, the precise language, which is the congressional intent for this amendment. There is no misunderstanding, however, Mr. Speaker, since Planned Parenthood also scored this vote and also interpreted it in the way that I have just stated.

So I just simply clarify this into the Record that these funds, under this appropriations bill, will not go to telemedicine grants that could be used for the purposes of facilitating the Skype robo-abortions that I've described. And I am grateful to the House of Representatives for a significant majority to pass that amendment. I am grateful for the strong pro-life majority that this Congress now has, the position that this Congress has taken a number of times, that it is, a lot of us believe, immoral.

Some others won't take that position. They say, It is unjust to compel taxpayers to fund abortions or to fund the facilitation of abortions through their tax dollars. In a way, it's the majority in this Congress now, the pro-life majority in this Congress, that has given the American taxpayer the voice of conscientious objection to the federally funded facilitation of abortions.

I am grateful that this Congress now has this majority. I am grateful that they've put this vote up again today, and there have been multiple votes in this new Congress that express the very sentiment that I have just expressed. So I am expressing, Mr. Speaker, my gratitude to the House of Representatives. And my commitment continues forward down this theme until we can one day see an end to the ghastly and ghoulish and gruesome procedures that sometimes are described as ``women's health services.'' They are not, and they are not good for women's health either, Mr. Speaker.

Pigford Farms

So then I would transition into the second amendment that I offered. Last night, the vote was rolled on until within the last couple of hours here in the House of Representatives. That was the amendment that addressed the Pigford Farms issue. Now, this issue is about the class action lawsuit that was filed by a gentleman by the name of Timothy Pigford in the aftermath of an announcement that was made by then- Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman in 1995.

The Secretary of Agriculture in '95 admitted that the USDA had been discriminating against black farmers. That opened the door for a class action lawsuit. The class action lawsuit has been known as the Pigford suit because it was Timothy Pigford that filed the suit, and his claim was that he was discriminated against. I believe that he has been, at this point, compensated, but I don't have a way to prove that because the records for Pigford are sealed. Congress at this point can't get at the records for the settlements in the largest class action lawsuit in the

history of the United States of America.

But here are the numbers, Mr. Speaker. The numbers work out to be this: In 1995, in anticipation of negotiations with a consent decree on the black farmers' discrimination case against the Department of Agriculture, they anticipated 3,000 would be the sum total universe of the black farmers who had been discriminated against who might file under the Pigford class action lawsuit, 3,000. That's out of a universe of 18,000 black farmers.

Now, whenever you are going to look at the potential for how many applicants there will be, you first look at the total universe to determine then what the percentage you think would be filing claims of that total universe and would actually have a claim.

The 3,000 was surely calculated as, I think, one-sixth of the overall total universe of 18,000 black farmers. They must have thought then, with an informed judgment, that one out of six black farmers had been discriminated against and would file. Well, it didn't turn out to be one out of six black farmers. It turned out to be about 1\1/2\ out of every black farmer that filed under Pigford I, not quite 1\1/2\. But there ended up being 22,000 and some odd claims with black farmers. So out of that came 15,000 and some settlements of, we believe, $50,000 at a minimum. And that, Mr. Speaker, was a number of claims that was greater than the number of actual black farmers.

Now, I don't have a problem with carrying this debate when I look at the universe of 18,000 and I see that 22,000 and some filed a claim. Surely some of those that filed a claim were not farmers, and surely some of those who filed a claim had not been discriminated against. It took both of those standards in order to pay out, presumably.

In any case, Pigford I was resolved. $1.05 billion was paid out under the Pigford claim of discrimination against black farmers. $1.05 billion with a ``b.''

I found out about this when a USDA employee who had been deployed to Washington, DC, in the very late nineties or maybe early 2000 came back home and was sick to his stomach that he had had to distribute these millions of dollars to people that he believed, 75 percent of them, at a minimum, had filed a fraudulent claim. He brought back the copies of those applications and presented them to me and said, please do something. This is an unjust payout of people that allege their victimhood of discrimination who were not farmers, never wanted to farm, didn't know where the Farm Service Administration was, the USDA office was. But yet they had been recruited to file the claim, and at least 75 percent fraudulent.

So I took all those applications, and I tell you, Mr. Speaker, I was blurred by it. I couldn't quite absorb all the implications by just reading the application and hearing the description of the individual that brought this back. He's not the only one. There are a number of others who willingly have come forward now and are willing to testify, and some of whom, especially in other States, that were directors of the Farm Service Administration who participated in the administration payout of the first $1.05 billion. But since that time, Pigford I was closed. It was then extended again for any late filers to get in, and then closed again. That's where we ended up with the 22,000 and change.

After that, Mr. Speaker, there was an effort that was brought forward here in Congress by Artur Davis of Alabama in one initiative, Bobby Scott of Virginia in another initiative to open this up under Pigford II. There was also an initiative in the United States Senate.

One of the people that introduced standalone legislation to open up Pigford II was Barack Obama himself as a United States Senator in the year 2007. The bill that he introduced was S. 1989. That legislation didn't go anywhere. It didn't have a single cosponsor, by my recollection, but it put the marker down.

There was a very, I'll say, urban senator from Chicago who was engaged in opening up a second round of Pigford when, in Illinois, the State that he represented--and truly he represented all of Illinois as a United States Senator--there were only 78 black farmers in the whole State. But the payout was 100 to 153 people. That's just a little snapshot measure of Illinois itself, without breaking this down county by county. Surely, I mean, it is certain that there were more claims paid out in Pigford than there were black farmers in Illinois. And probably, I'll say that's not necessarily true in every single case in every single county, but we know that's the case for Illinois.

At any rate, it became a political tool, in my view. And as they tried to open up Pigford II in the House, it didn't pass the House. When it did finally pass the House, it didn't pass the Senate. Finally in the Senate, during the lame duck session late last fall--actually, November 22--there was an action that put the Pigford issue in together with the Cobell issue and the other Native American claims on a bill called the Claims Act. The Claims Act included TANF funding, the Temporary Assistance to Needy Family supplemental, that went in with the Claims Act.

With all of this that was out there, the Pigford case didn't fit, but my back channel information tells me that the President ordered that Pigford be attached to the Cobell and Claims Act, which they did in the Senate. And because it rode along on a piece of must-pass legislation, it passed out of the Senate, was messaged over to the House in November of last year, and passed after the election so that the discredited Congress, the lame duck Congress, voted to now appropriate another $1.5 billion into Pigford II.

That, Mr. Speaker, goes on top of the farm bill, which was a 2008 farm bill. Sometimes I do better thinking about this chronologically. But in 2007, when we discussed and debated the farm bill here in the House, the chairman of the Ag Committee at the time, Collin Peterson of Minnesota, provided for and supported language in the farm bill that carved out a $100 million authorization for a second round of Pigford. When I objected and I said, Mr. Chairman, that will open the door for $1.3 billion in additional money to go into that fraudulent Pigford claim, his answer was, No, it's $100 million. That's the end of it. That's the limit. That caps it, and that settles all outstanding claims. You don't understand. This is the end of it, and it makes sure that it's done and it doesn't open up the door beyond $100 million. We had a disagreement--some would call it an argument--about whether that opened this up to $1.3 billion, which is what I said--that was my assertion, Mr. Speaker--or whether the then-chairman of the Ag Committee was right in that the $100 million was the cap.

Well, in any case, we know now who was right, because there is $1.25 billion in the pipeline for a second Pigford claim. $100 million of it was in the farm bill, and $1.15 billion of it was stuck into the Claims Act. And how did that number get arrived at? According to the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, he told me that I voted for the farm bill and directed him to go negotiate with the black farmers as a means of trying to put an end to this so that it limited the potential liability of the Federal Government.

No. When you go back and actually look at what happened, I voted ``no'' on the farm bill coming out of this House because, in part, it had the Pigford $100 million in it; and the language that's there says this is the end, that this is to resolve all outstanding unresolved claims over Pigford, $100 million.

As the chairman of the Ag Committee, Collin Peterson asserted that's the language that's in the bill. But the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, and the Attorney General, Eric Holder, took that and somehow interpreted the plain language of the bill to direct them to go open up a second Pigford claim, which now turned into an additional $1.15 billion on top of the $100 million that was in the 2008 farm bill.

Where we started out with 3,000 potential claimants--excuse me--3,000 projected claimants to Pigford I, which would be the total sum of the claims out of a universe of 18,000 black farmers, now we have 94,000 claims, Mr. Speaker, 94,000 claims that have risen to the bait of 1.25 billion additional dollars. I'd point out, Mr. Speaker, that if you just round that to the nearest tenth of a billion dollars, I was spot on in my prediction that it would be a $1.3 billion door that was opened by the $100 million in the farm bill.

It has come to pass, just as I have said. It has been slipped in, forced in, pushed in, partly by the President of the United States, I believe at his directive. Certainly, he was delighted to sign it.

According to the Secretary of Agriculture, he believes he was directed by the farm bill to go and negotiate with the black farmers and open this up and ask for an additional $1.15 billion. The language limits; it doesn't empower. But he claims also the authority to negotiate in any case and that the Attorney General has the authority to negotiate in any case.

So here we are. When I asked the Secretary of Agriculture, who has been disciplined for perpetrating a total of $2.3 billion of discrimination against 94,000 people who claim to be black farmers, ``who are they? who's been fired? who's had charges brought against them?'' the answer, after a few questions, is ``no one.''

Think of this, Mr. Speaker: $2.3 billion worth of discrimination allegedly brought against black farmers--agreed to, apparently, by the Secretary of Agriculture and the Attorney General. They're looking for justice, and they can't find a single perpetrator of discrimination, and they're the ones that hired them. The checks go out today to employees of the USDA under the guidance of Secretary Vilsack. In not one of them can he uncover as a discriminator or perpetrator as even a part of the $2.3 billion that they allege was discrimination that took place, not one perpetrator on his payroll, even though every perpetrator had to be on his payroll or the payroll of his predecessors.

They can find 94,000 victims where only the universe of 18,000 exists, but he can't find a single individual that perpetrated discrimination. And we are to believe in the United States Congress that somehow this is just an example of where government went wrong and discriminated, and we're trying to right a wrong with a checkbook that comes from money borrowed from the Chinese and goes to people that could not have been farmers in the first place and could not, all of them, been discriminated against.

I can go further in that we have a whole list of discrimination claims that come from a county where the supervisors in the USDA office were all black. It's kind of hard for me to get my mind around how it can be racial discrimination of people by the same race against people of the same race. That's a little hard to define. When the Irish go at each other, they don't call it racial discrimination--just to put that in a metaphorical position so that people understand it clearly, Mr. Speaker.

I am very concerned that too many Members of this Congress understand how much fraud exists in Pigford, and they just don't want to put up the vote; they just don't want to put up the words to correct this and call it what it is. I'll say that the fear of being accused of not having the will to face a difficult subject matter is superceded by the fear of being called a racist, so they walk away from it.

I believe this: We must have equal justice under the law. We cannot continue to be a great country unless we continue to have equal justice under the law. That means that you deal with people without regard to their race, their ethnicity, or their national origin--or their gender, by the way, or their disability or their age. All of those things are immutable characteristics. Well, almost all of them are immutable characteristics. But it's defined clearly in title VII of the Civil Rights Act, Mr. Speaker, and broadened in some of the civil rights sections that take place within our States, which I abide by and live by.

But we cannot, Mr. Speaker, be a great Nation if we're always going to shrink away from difficult subjects, if we are going to pay out borrowed taxpayer money. We're borrowing 42 cents on every dollar. Some of that money is borrowed from the Chinese; some of it's borrowed from the Saudi Arabians. And we would take that money and borrow it and hand it to people and say please don't raise a fuss. I know that you are a minority; therefore, you must have been victimized at some place along the line.

This is being sold and marketed in the South in a number of different ways--fish fries in the South, sometimes in black churches in the South. And they say to the people that attend those kinds of gatherings things such as this: You know, you don't have to be a farmer. If your granddaddy was a farmer, you're a farmer. If you're the grandson of a farmer, you were discriminated against because surely somebody discriminated against your grandfather, and surely he would have been a rich farmer had they not done that, and surely you would have inherited the farm or some of the money that he made from that, so you've been discriminated against. If your granddaddy was a farmer, you're a farmer. You file. It's natural that you were discriminated against.

The regulations and the standards on this and the proof is so low that all an applicant has to do is allege that there was discrimination and then find someone who is not a close family member who will attest that they complained about being discriminated against.

So Joe and George can get together and say, let's go file mutual applications and allege that we wanted to be farmers, we were discriminated against, and we complained. An automatic $50,000 check goes to them out of the borrowed money of American taxpayers, along with a $12,500 check that goes to the IRS to pay the tax liability. And they had the temerity, some of them, to complain that they weren't also getting their estate tax waived. So the money that would be settled goes into the estate if someone dies, obviously, and they didn't want to have to pay an estate tax on their inheritance. Now we can have a $1 million exemption, a $3 million or $5 million exemption. They still don't want to have to pay the tax beyond the exemption. That is not just temerity; that's audacity.

And another component of this, Mr. Speaker, is this part: that the largest civil rights class action lawsuit settlement in the history of the United States is Pigford. The single individual who has received the greatest settlement from that is Shirley Sherrod--Shirley Sherrod, the former USDA employee whom the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, hired 3 days after she received news that she was going to receive $13 million in her claim against Pigford. That was on July 22. He hired her on July 25.

Later on, when a speech that she gave before the NAACP came to light, then the Secretary fired her like that. I don't believe that that was an act that was his decision alone. I find the Secretary to be a wise, smart and a careful, well-prepared man--however often I disagree with him. I believe that order came from the White House. And he tried to hire her back. It didn't work until some weeks ago. Now she's back on the payroll, having filed a lawsuit against who? The guy who published the truth, Andrew Breitbart.

These are all things that this Congress needs to get to the bottom of, Mr. Speaker. This Congress needs to, if we have to, subpoena the records, go through the 94,000 applications, sort them, chart them, evaluate them, bring people under oath, gather testimony, do a complete investigation of what I believe is a fraud that's been perpetrated against the American taxpayer and done so within several different administrations. Some I believe was motivated for less than stellar reasons.

I think whenever someone has been discriminated against in these cases, we need to make them whole if we can. I support that. I think we did that for almost all of them in Pigford I. I think we made a bunch of people whole that did not have it coming, and then, by a legislative shenanigan and action of the White House, opened up a Pigford II that put the taxpayer on the hook for an additional $1.15 billion.

Now that sum is up to $2.3 billion, Mr. Speaker--$2.3 billion, 94,000 claims where there was 18,000 black farmers and an expectation of only 3,000 claims altogether, not a single identified perpetrator of discrimination, and Congress can't look at the records. Congress can't get a straight answer. A Freedom of Information Act request is denied by the USDA because it's sensitive? Sensitive? But the USDA releases as public all of the information that goes in farm subsidies. That's out there. And people go on the Web site and complain about the farm subsidies that are there. Why, if you're a farmer,

should the subsidies that come to your operation be public knowledge, but if you are one who has alleged you've been discriminated against, your records are secret even from the United States Congress?

That is all wrong, Mr. Speaker. We know that. The conscience of this Congress has spoken today; 152 of us have spoken up, and I think the foundation for legitimate hearings has been heard.