Floor Statements

Offered By: Mr. King of Iowa

Amendment No. 36: At the end of the bill (before the short

title), insert the following:

Offered By: Mr. King of Iowa

Amendment No. 62: Page 12, line 17, insert the following

after ``technology'': ``: Provided further, That of the total

amount made available under this heading, $50,000,000 shall

be for carrying out section 102 of the Illegal Immigration

and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (8 U.S.C. 1103

note)''.

Mr. Speaker, it's my honor to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and this great deliberative body that we have, and especially immediately in the aftermath of this historic vote that has just gone up on the Patriot Act.

As we have debated this and worked with an amendment process and negotiations that took place in the Senate, we got down to the last minutes here. And I presume final passage of the Patriot Act is now on its way to the President's desk to be signed tonight so that there's not a window of vulnerability with regard to the intelligence that we can gather against our enemies that are evermore coming into the United States and plotting against us globally.

This is an issue that emerged when we saw our vulnerabilities in the immediate aftermath of September 11. And as that was dealt with here in this Congress--and I will say that of pieces of legislation that have been passed in a relative emergency situation, the Patriot Act among them stands out as something that came together with--it was clearly a bipartisan effort to put the Patriot Act language together; it was done so with the information that we had at the time. Some of that information was gathered in a hasty fashion--the smoke was certainly rolling up out of Ground Zero in New York while the Patriot Act was passed here in the House of Representatives.

It was also passed with the idea that it had sunsets on it so it required reauthorization so that Congress would come back and have oversight over the authority that was granted in the Patriot Act to do surveillance. For example, roving wire taps. Clear back in the 1980s it was understood with cell phones that when investigators were investigating organized crime, for example, the Mob had it figured out

where they could pick up a cell phone, use it for a while, dispose of it, go grab another cell phone, use it for a while and dispose of it. The old wiretap laws that would allow for a judge to grant a warrant to tap a land line at, say, a residence or a business of the suspected mobster were archaic in the 1980s because of cell phone emergence, and so Congress acted and provided for the roving wiretap for investigations domestically. But it didn't cover the investigations that had to do with noncitizens and terrorist activities, and so that's something that the Patriot Act addressed.

As I look at the components of the Patriot Act one after another, it comes down to this: That the constitutional protections that are there for the individuals that are being investigated are equal to or greater than those protections for American citizens in domestic investigations unrelated to terrorist charges. So the roving wiretap is a piece that was a natural, that had to be part of the Patriot Act, and it is. And we also have the FISA courts, the special courts that evaluate the investigations and yield a judgment as to whether they're in compliance. The national security letters, of which there have only been about 300 requested national security letters--yes, there is a confidentiality that's attached to that. If a Federal agent goes into an entity and issues a national security letter, first of all, that's reported later on to the court, and the individual or the company that's required to produce that information is bound by confidentiality for obvious reasons. If Osama bin Laden or Zarqawi or any of the plotting terrorists were planning against the United States, the subject of the investigation, they would be tipped off. They would be tipped off on the national security letter request, which means the investigation would be blown up by that lack of confidentiality, the lone wolf piece of this.

So there is piece after piece of the Patriot Act that has stood up very well. And one of the people that has stood up on this issue that understands this very thoroughly, and one of the people who is on the Select Committee on Intelligence--which will prevent her from talking about some of the things that are confidential because of the deep intelligence knowledge that goes on in a secure room in this Capitol-- is my friend from Minnesota whom I would like to yield to, Michele Bachmann.

Reclaiming my time, and thanking the gentlelady from Minnesota for coming to the floor on short notice to add clarity to this discussion and this debate and having the courage to stand up on these constitutional principles.

I have had it pointed out to me that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution limits the Patriot Act. It's the protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Unreasonable. And these searches and seizures that have been found to be reasonable, in many cases by our Supreme Court across this land, are very well settled law, and the Patriot Act fits within the parameters of existing domestic surveillance.

And I would add that this Congress has protected itself in this fashion: that the major components of this Patriot Act that have been extended are extended for 4 years. That means that this Congress comes back again and evaluates the Patriot Act for constitutional and functionality within this 4-year period of time, and it will require reauthorization again. So we're carefully walking down this path making sure that the abuses do not take place.

And I, as a member of the Judiciary Committee and as one who has gone up

to the secure room and gone through a number of secure briefings that had to do with the functionality of the Patriot Act--it's a requirement on some of our parts here in this Congress to do that. I have also made a pledge to a number of other Members that I'll keep an eye on these constitutional functions and the respect for this statute that's given by the Federal agents that are allowed to utilize the Patriot Act. And that will be a never-ending vigilance here in this Congress. It always is. And protecting constitutional rights is a never-ending vigilance.

One of the people who is very duly vigilant who, when the rest of us take a little break and catch some sleep at night, is back keeping his eye on the functions of government, one of the relentless and incessant providers of protection of liberty and constitutional protection and one of the scholars on the Constitution here is the gentleman from Texas.

I'd be happy to yield such time as he may consume to Mr. Louie Gohmert.

Reclaiming my time and thanking the gentleman from Texas, Judge Gohmert, who does do due diligence in this Congress, it occurs to me as I listen to the discussion here and participate in it, that there was a decided lack of enthusiasm for the Patriot Act on the part of Barack Obama when he was a partisan Senator. The most liberal Senator by voting record out of the 100 Senators in the United States Senate, and that includes Bernie Sanders, the self-professed socialist who voted somewhat to

the right of Barack Obama when they were in the Senate together.

This candidate for President then, Barack Obama, had a position that was less than favorable towards this Patriot Act, but as he became President, sat down with his briefings, which I presume and hope are daily briefings, and he began to understand the threat against the United States that exists domestically and abroad. His position on the Patriot Act began to migrate. And perhaps as we speak now he is picking up his pen to sign the Patriot Act, the extensions of the three provisions that were approved here tonight that extends them for a 4- year period of time.

That, Mr. Speaker, brings this back before this Congress. And it means also that all of the people that are utilizing the Patriot Act within the sections 206, the roving wiretap; and 215, the business records component of this; and section 6001(a), the lone wolf component, each of which were extended here by this Congress for 4 years, all of the Federal agents that would be utilizing these provisions will be very well aware that Congress will be reviewing these provisions within 4 years of today. So they will be very careful I think to comply with the law. And I think this is a prudent extension rather than the effort to make it permanent. I think it's prudent to temporarily extend these provisions of the Patriot Act.

As the gentleman from Texas alluded, and I will just say I would like to reiterate and emphasize this point, of all of the things that we have heard and the things that we have heard up in the secure room from the classified standpoint, the things that we have heard before the Judiciary Committee and the many hearings that we have had, the challenge that was put out towards President Bush in a partisan effort, I think, to undermine the Patriot Act before the last Presidential election in November of 2008, all of those efforts, not one individual was produced who had had their constitutional rights usurped. Not one. Not one had lost their constitutional rights under the Patriot Act.

It would seem to me that of all of the encounters that have taken place under the Patriot Act for all these years, if there had been serious abuses of people's constitutional rights, we would have heard from an individual. And then a statement is made that, well, we won't know because we don't have access to these records, that they are all secret. Well, but the records are reported to the FISA court, and the FISA court evaluates them. And the reason we know that those records exist is because there is a requirement of the court reporting. But still, not an individual has come forward who has had their constitutional rights and their civil rights abused.

Now, that doesn't mean I am not taking a position here, Mr. Speaker, that it has not happened. And I am not taking the position that it could not happen. My position is that if it had been endemic, if it had been something that was systematically grinding through the civil rights of Americans or individuals that are in the United States and under the protections of our laws and our Constitution, we would know some of those names, we would know some of those faces, we would understand those incidents.

And one of the hardest things you can do in this business is to try to explain something that is law without putting a face on it; to try to explain a flaw that they argue might exist within the Patriot Act without being able to give an example or an anecdote to put that face on it so people can see by example how things work.

We are only dealing with data here. We are dealing with data here because we don't have the individual examples. They have not come forward. They have not been identified, however mightily some have tried to produce them. So I support the extensions that we passed here tonight. It is something that I have worked with here in this Congress into my ninth year. It's very much something we have examined, I think, very thoroughly with hearing after hearing, and intense debate, and amendments that were offered, as well as the secure briefings that take us much deeper into the practices of the Patriot Act.

So the three components that were extended here tonight for 4 years, the roving wiretaps, which are just absolutely necessary. If you can imagine Khalid Sheikh Mohammed running around, or Moussaoui running around the United States with a gym bag full of disposable cell phones, using one for a little while and tossing it in the trash, and then another and another and another, you have got to be able to switch and have the roving wiretap follow the individual rather than follow a single land line that might be there.

It just makes simple sense. It existed since the eighties for domestic investigations of crime, including organized crime.

We have the business records component of this, also extended for 4 years, that allows those business records to be accessed, to be able to look for patterns, patterns that would indicate the acts, the planning of terrorism against the American people.

We have the lone wolf provision, which says an agent of a foreign power, if that agent of a foreign power is operating, under the suspicion that that's the case, they can go in and do investigations, that also is extended for 4 years.

It was a difficult negotiation here in the House and in the Senate. It did come down to the last minute. Sometimes here in Congress we can only do things at the last minute.

I would like to, Mr. Speaker, transition this subject matter into another subject matter that I understand the gentleman from Texas is prepared to discuss. In this brief segue, and I expect to yield so the gentleman from Texas can take this subject matter up, but in this transition and in this week, I think it's important that the House of Representatives and the American people consider what has happened with regard to especially the Middle East. Having come back from a trip through that area of the world and been briefed on a lot of our national security issues over in that part of the world, it comes to mind as I watched President Obama's speech last week about the Global War on Terror and about his efforts from a tactical, a geopolitical and a diplomatic effort in the Middle East, naming country after country that have gone through the Arab spring, as we now call it, the unrest in places like Egypt and Tunisia, and the list goes on. Certainly Libya is part of this. As I read carefully through President Obama's speech that I understand he delivered at the State Department about a week ago or so, if you take Israel out of the speech, the rest of it read like George W. Bush delivering the Bush Doctrine. A lot of that philosophy I support, that if you give people an opportunity to grasp and achieve and succeed with the beginnings of freedom, they'll turn their focus from hatred and from terrorism towards building their communities, their families and their countries and towards commerce. That philosophy is beginning to emerge with a level of success in Iraq, for example. It has been a belief of George Bush and known as the Bush Doctrine for a long time. As I listened to President Obama, who was critical of that approach and that doctrine and our involvement in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, I would point out that he gave a Bush Doctrine speech, with the exception of Israel. There, President Obama, I'll say, broke the mold and went down a new path, a bit of a surprising path, unless you are reading between the lines on his position on Israel in prior times, to make the argument that there would be a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, that the Palestinians would have a single contiguous country. Right now it's either two pieces, West Bank and Gaza, or three pieces, West Bank, Gaza and whatever their claim might be to the Golan Heights. If you look at the map, it's not possible to tie together a contiguous Palestinian state without severing Israel from its components.

It was interesting, also, that President Obama said, well, this is how we want to do this, a contiguous Palestinian state, a two-state solution, and the issue of Jerusalem, we'll just set that aside for now but they have to go back to the '67 borders. That had to have caused a lot of Israelis and American Jewish people and those of us who have a strong support and affinity for Israel to take a deep breath and gasp and wonder what did the President

mean? Why did he throw all that confusion into the situation in Israel? And the statement that he made resulted in putting Israel at even greater risk, undermining their security, making their negotiating position less stable and encouraging more pushback from the Palestinian effort and their sympathizers and the terrorists that are part of the government, the Palestinians, who refuse to acknowledge Israel's right to exist. You cannot negotiate with people who are determined to annihilate you, and as Binyamin Netanyahu said, they're not going to concede the strategic locations that allow Israel to defend itself.

When Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke behind where I stand right now a couple of days ago, I think it was an historic speech, I think that he laid out the parameters that can allow the Jewish State of Israel to survive and defend itself against its enemies--and there are many--and I think he went about as far as he could without openly challenging the President of the United States who, by the way, had to walk back some of his comments a few days after his speech. So I'm happy with what has happened in the aftermath of President Obama's speech that I believe erroneously said that Israel would have to go back to the pre-'67 war boundaries.

But I want to, Mr. Speaker, as I turn this floor over to the gentleman from Texas, say to you and here before the American people that that speech took place here in the United States Congress because of the activism and the foresight and the effort of Congressman Gohmert who put that request together and got a lot of us to sign the letter of invitation and with that support took it to Speaker Boehner who, as I understand it, issued the invitation, and the timing of it was impeccable timing in the aftermath of President Obama's speech, and at the time that there are critical issues taking place in the world, the Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, stepped here on the floor of the United States Congress and spoke before a joint session of Congress, and the joint session of Congress that received him as a representative of Israel with the warmest of welcomes that anyone could ask for, with instantaneous and spontaneous standing ovations, two or three of those before a word was uttered and several more before there was any word of substance uttered, the warmth and the bond and the commitment to stand up and support Israel not just in spirit, not just politically, but tactically and monetarily as well, was clearly demonstrated here in the joint session of Congress. That is thanks to the gentleman from Texas.

And so, Mr. Speaker, as I wrap this up, I would thank you for your attention and your indulgence, and I would yield back the balance of my time.

It's a privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, in this great deliberative body. I came here to talk about a different subject matter. But after I listened to my colleagues for a little while, I believe it's pretty important that we set some of this record straight. I don't know where they would be satisfied. It seems as though the attack is on anybody that's in free enterprise and the support goes to anything that is government. Anything that raises taxes and grows government is good, and anything that taxes free enterprise, and especially profits--those evil profits--are bad. That's the theme that I hear from the gentlemen who spent the previous half hour or hour demagoguing the issue of Big Oil and big insurance companies. This is particularly appalling to me when I walk in here on the floor and I hear a statement made by the gentleman from California saying this: You're going to turn them over to the most voracious sharks in the country--the health insurance companies. Well, if it happens to be that the health insurance companies are operating without competition, keeping their prices down, why doesn't the gentleman or others that might believe that engage in the health insurance industry?

The President of the United States made it very clear. He said he wanted more competition in the health insurance industry. He wanted to create a government-run, government-owned health insurance industry as part of ObamaCare. And he didn't realize, I don't think, when he uttered that statement, at least before ObamaCare was passed and began to knock the competition out of the way, that there were 1,300 health insurance companies in America--1,300--and over 100,000 policy varieties that one could choose from depending on the State that you might live in.

That's a lot of companies, and they've all been shot down here with a blanket allegation that they're voracious sharks. How can anybody be a voracious shark if there are 1,300 companies to compete against and 100,000 policies to choose from? Surely, there's something there that would satisfy the gentleman from the perspective of that array of variety that was available before the President decided he wanted to make the 1,301st insurance company be the Federal Government and perhaps give us a half-dozen or so policy varieties with a community rating that compressed it down, that raises the health insurance premiums for the youngest, lowest income people among us, and subsidizes the premiums for the highest income people among us.

That's ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, and it clearly is. The gentlemen seemed to have forgotten what they all worked together to do to America over the last 19 months. They worked to impose ObamaCare on 300 million Americans, 306 or so million Americans, and they come here on the floor tonight to talk about the effort on the part of Republicans to try to save this Republic from the voracious appetite of government, the voracious shark of government that feeds upon the sustenance of the American people, that puts into debt every single person, every man, woman and child in America, and puts the mortgage on their head the day they are born.

Last fall, I talked about my granddaughter, my most recent granddaughter, Reagan Ann King. She's about 7 months old now, 6 to 7 months old. On the day she was born, her share of the national debt was $44,000. Welcome to America; welcome to the world; welcome into life. You owe Uncle Sam $44,000, and the interest is building. The interest is building, and this young lady is going to have to work a long time to pay that off.

I hear the same Members over here, at least from the same party, talking about the average debt that a college graduate has, that student loans are costing too much money. They had to confiscate all the access to the marketplace for the free market on student loans and turn it completely into a government-run operation because they believed that somebody was making money off the interest, and they lamented that an average student loan when someone graduated from college was in the area of maybe $20,000 to $40,000. But it doesn't concern them that their policy and the President of the United States and the former Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the majority leader of the United States Senate, Harry Reid, the three of them, the ruling troika, President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, could get in a phone booth and do what they would to America, and they have driven up this national debt and deficit to the point where it is appalling to the fiscally responsible Americans who pay their bills on time with the paycheck that they have with the amount that's left after they pay their taxes and their payroll.

They want more government, more taxes, more irresponsibility. They want the nonproductive sector of the economy to feed on the productive sector of the economy, and they stand here and talk about a company that they claim made over, maybe the aggregate of all these companies, made over a trillion dollars in profits in the last decade. I'd like to see that data. And perhaps, if they have anybody on that side of the aisle that's ever actually engaged in business, they would do a calculation to see what the return on investment was, what was the capital investment that returned that kind of an investment, if those numbers would actually hold up under scrutiny, and I suspect they won't. Then, if they're going to do a legitimate measure, they would also take a look and see what have been the windfall profits of the Federal Government in collecting royalties off the product that has been produced by these companies that are doing high-risk exploration in deep waters to make sure, yes, for a profit--they should have a profit--but they also are making sure that there is cheaper energy here in the United States certainly than there would be otherwise if we didn't have these companies exploring for oil in places like the gulf coast and up in the Bakken region, and if we didn't have some kind of support here in Congress to open up offshore drilling, drilling on the non-national park public lands in America.

We're an energy-rich nation. We have a large share of the world's energy and a smaller percentage of the world's population, and we have that energy, I suspect, because we've actually explored for it, identified it, measured it and quantified it. But, of course, that stuff escapes the people on the other side that are making these arguments for political reasons.

The talking points of the Democrats are now, demagogue the Republican budget, attack the Republicans and accuse them of threatening senior citizens, and they completely deny the

fact that people 55 and up in the Republican budget are expressly protected from any kind of budgetary changes. It is truly an entitlement for those 55 and up.

I'm not going to take the stand that we should then transfer that all the way down and guarantee my little granddaughter, Reagan Ann King, that her anticipated Medicare and Social Security benefits will be what she expects them to be on the day she's born with her $44,000 worth of national debt that she has to pay off. Are we going to guarantee her that she gets her retirement benefits under Social Security in the amount that has been calculated in the actuarial tables and a promise? Is that an entitlement? Are we going to guarantee her the level of Medicare? Are we going to take away any incentive for all children born in America to establish themselves, to protect themselves, to plan for their own retirement, their own future, and perhaps be responsible enough to take themselves off the entitlement rolls so that there can be a future for America?

This economy collapses unless we address it. If we don't have the will, if we're going to listen to this kind of talk and cower before that and misdirect the American people with statements that clearly cannot be supported by the facts and think somehow there's a solution, my question is: What's your solution? More debt, more deficit, more demagoguery? For what? You'll put America into debt to exchange it for more political power? We saw what you did with political power and the American people rejected it in a resounding election just last November, and the large super-Democrat majority in this Congress turned completely over to a large Republican majority instead. Eighty-seven freshmen Republicans. You should be able to understand, none of them got elected because they want to grow government or increase the debt and deficit. Not one. Every one ran on the repeal of ObamaCare.

While I'm on the subject, Mr. Speaker, I would make this point. Of all that was said about what it is that allegedly Republicans would do with seniors, here's what ObamaCare exactly does with seniors. It cuts Medicare by $532 billion, a direct assault on seniors, a direct assault on their Medicare. Now. It's not a delay. It's as soon as they can get this monstrosity implemented, and they believe that they're going to take that money and roll it over into something else, and it was part of the smoke and mirrors to come up with a CBO score that they could allege that it was actually going to be a money saver.

But the American people threw a lot of people out of office last November because they knew when the President of the United States, the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader all say the same thing, we're going to insure 30 million more people with ObamaCare and it's going to be at no cost, 30 million more people insured at no cost, the American people know that's false. No matter how many times it's repeated, they know that that's false. You can't get more for less. Things cost money.

And they could understand this. That if you take the 306 or so million Americans and if you're concerned that there is a percentage of them that are uninsured, we should only be concerned about the Americans that were uninsured and remain uninsured, I might add, that don't have affordable options.

If Bill Gates is uninsured, I don't have any heartburn over that. Bill Gates can manage his own health care. He can be self-insured. He may well be, for all I know. If Warren Buffett is uninsured, I'm not concerned about that. He can manage his own health care. If somebody that's making $174,000 is uninsured, I'm not concerned about that person because they're making enough money to take care of their own health insurance. And on down the line. To what level?

But the people that they're trying to argue were uninsured, this larger number of around 46 million uninsured Americans, when you start subtracting from that those that are eligible for Medicaid but don't bother to sign up, those that are eligible under their employer but opt out, those who are here in the United States illegally. I don't want to cover them, Mr. Speaker. As you begin subtracting from the 46 million and you get down to the number of those Americans that are uninsured and do not have affordable options, that number turns out to be not 46 million but 12.1 million. That's making $75,000 or less. That's the measure. Those who are uninsured and don't have an affordable option.

Now, 12.1 million is still a lot of people, but it only amounts to less than 4 percent of the U.S. population. And ObamaCare completely transforms the best health care system in the world, the best health care delivery system in the world, and the best health insurance system in the world to try to get at a small percentage of the less than 4 percent of Americans who were uninsured without affordable options.

What do we have today? Do you hear any Democrats coming to the floor to tell us how many people are uninsured in America after ObamaCare was passed?

I can offer this guarantee. It's more. There are more that are uninsured today than there were on the day that ObamaCare was passed because more employers became more doubtful about what it would be that would be imposed upon them. There are fewer employees today than there would be if ObamaCare had never passed because the companies don't have the confidence that they can operate within the environment of an implemented ObamaCare.

And I listen to demagoguery on big insurance companies, Big Oil, big banks. Well, America is set up on competition, and if these companies have such a market share and such an advantage that now they can take unreasonable profits from the marketplace, somebody's going to get in the market and they're going to start a bank and oil company or insurance company.

But here's what I'm for within the area of health insurance. I want to allow people to buy insurance across State lines. I want the people in New Jersey, the young man that's buying a typical policy, in good health, roughly at age 23, for $6,000 a year--that's before ObamaCare passed--I want him to be able to go to Kentucky and buy that similar typical policy for a 23-year-old healthy male in Kentucky for about $1,000 a year. Isn't that a good solution? That way your 1,300 health insurance companies that we had are competing all against each other instead of being isolated within the States, operating under individual State mandates. And they can then afford policies that can have higher deductibles, higher copayments and significantly lower premiums.

And I want to see people get off the entitlement rolls, both of Social Security and of Medicare, and this can be done. And, Mr. Speaker, I will take you quickly down the path of how we get there with Medicare and HSAs.

Under the HSA legislation that was passed in 2003 under Medicare part D, a young couple, let's just say, they presumably fell in love and got married at age 20 and went to work on their life's work. I can do the math work with round figures. And over the course of 45 years of work, from 20 until 65, they maxed out on their health savings account. They started at $5,150 a year for that couple, and then it grows by COLA on up and just continues as long as there is a cost-of-living allowance that increases it. And if you subtract from that amount $2,000 a year that would come out of their health savings account in what we might call typical expenses of health care, going to the doctor, doing those things that you don't want to put on your insurance policy and if you compounded the balance of that health savings account at 4 percent, which is historically accurate--and I did this math before we had the downturn over the last 2\1/2\ years--it comes up to this.

That couple would arrive at Medicare eligibility age 65 with a health savings account that had $950,000 in it. $950,000, Mr. Speaker. Now, the liability, the present value, present negative value of an individual that arrives at Medicare eligibility age today is about $72,000. That's the average that the Federal Government would be paying for health care benefits for the duration of the life of the individual after they reach 65 Medicare eligibility, $72,000. So the couple then would be at $144,000, and you have to adjust it for inflation, but I just go without tonight for the purposes of mental figuring.

So you would take the $950,000 and you subtract $144,000 to take care of

what would be the premium for a Medicare replacement policy, a paid-up Medicare replacement policy similar to an annuitized health care plan for life. And now you're in this area of--let's just say $806,000 would be the balance in your health savings account, $806,000. And what's the Federal Government's interest in that health savings account after that point? They want to tax it as regular income as it comes out of that account as being spent by the individual, or they want to tax it as death tax later on if the people, once they pass away, to tax it on the way to their heirs, the death tax.

Why wouldn't this Federal Government offer to the people that have their health savings account, why wouldn't it offer them this? Buy a Medicare replacement policy, and you can keep the change tax free and you can will it to your children or you can use it as a pension plan.

Now, we're already solving this situation of Social Security, Medicare by allowing HSAs to grow and let people manage their own lives. That's the kind of thing that we need to have going on for solutions, not demagoguery, not trying to conflate the philosophy of a budget that's designed to get us to balance.

Where's your balanced budget over there on that side of the aisle? Is there a single one of you that will stand up and tell me that you have offered a balanced budget? You didn't even offer a budget when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker the last year or two here, and now you're here attacking this budget. You don't have a plan. You don't have a platform to stand on to criticize this platform, and you had plenty of opportunity to offer your own. But there's no balanced budget that's being offered on this side of the aisle. That's clear. That's why no one responds to me, or I'd yield to someone who wanted to allege that Democrats offered a balanced budget. If they did, it would be with-- what's that word? The voracious shark of tax increases would be what would happen, Mr. Speaker.

So I think perhaps we've dispatched what took place in the previous half hour or an hour, and I will then now, without segue, transition into the subject matter that I came here to talk about. That's this.

Day before yesterday, I listened to the President's speech that he gave in El Paso, Texas, and it was surprising in a way, a bit shocking in a way. It was a political speech on immigration. I mean, that's clear. And the people that analyzed it came to the same conclusion that I did, Mr. Speaker.

But as I listened to the President of the United States, who was standing in El Paso very near the border of the United States, begin to ridicule people who want border security, well, first, he uttered the breathtaking statement that the border fence is, quote, basically complete, close quote. Mr. Speaker, the border fence is basically complete, uttered by the President of the United States? I have a few data points I think he should go back and revisit.

One of them is, Mr. President, there are 2,000 miles of southern border, about 4,000 miles of northern border. But just dealing with the southern border, 2,000 miles of southern border.

Now, whatever it was that Janet Napolitano told you, Mr. President, here are the facts on the border fence as of today, as constructed. Out of the 2,000 miles, there are 350 miles of pedestrian fence. That's called primary fencing. That's a fence that you don't just walk through. It's a bit of a barrier. They get climbed all the time, but it's a single fence. Often it's a chain-link fence. I don't know if they're referring to the barbwire fence. I suspect not, because I think actually we've got a little bit more of that on the border. Even the Federal Government, the Department of Homeland Security claims the primary fencing, pedestrian fencing is 350 miles out of the 2,000 miles. Now, they add this all up and they say we've got all of these miles of fencing, but if it's double fencing or triple fencing, they count each mile of it even if it's layered. Then, if that's the case, it's all done, it's a triple fencing, then we've got 6,000 miles of fence, Mr. Speaker, but that isn't the case at all.

Here's the comparison. 350 miles of primary fencing or pedestrian fencing. Now, we know that a single fence doesn't do us a lot. It slows some traffic down and it gives a line of demarcation. Double fencing slows them down a lot better, and it sets up kind of a no man's land we can patrol and sometimes catch illegals inside of that before they climb the second fence and go off into the underbrush.

So of the secondary fencing they have, there's not 350 miles of that. Remember, 2,000-mile border. Secondary fencing, 36.3 miles. Now, remember the primary fencing, 350 miles; the secondary fencing, 36.3 miles. I'm going to tell you that we don't have a lot of effectiveness until we get to at least the secondary fencing component of this.

So of 2,000 miles of border, 36.3 miles of secondary fencing, 36.3 miles is kind of what you can say is somewhat built, but a lot of it requires also triple fencing. And I've been down to visit the triple fencing, and that exists in a number of places and it exists very effectively in some areas of Arizona, in the southwest corner of Arizona, of course on the Mexican border.

Now, when you look at the border, out of the 2,000-mile border, the fence that is--they call it tertiary, that's the third layer of fence. I have 350 miles of primary fencing, 36.3 miles of double fencing; and of that 36.3 miles, 14.3 miles are triple fencing.

The triple fencing, as far as I know, has never been defeated by anyone. They go around it. They may tunnel under it sometimes, but they've not defeated the fencing, and it's been pretty effective. But if you've got effective fencing at 14.3 of the 2,000 miles and within 220 yards of that triple fencing--and by the way, there is triple fencing in El Paso--the President is standing within 220 yards of triple fencing in El Paso, arguing that the fencing is basically complete, and he's ridiculing Americans who want border security by saying--now I'm just going to include myself in this--that we'll never be satisfied, that we keep raising the bar. Well, no. I always set the bar up pretty high. I don't think I need to raise it.

It reminds me of the way Margaret Thatcher once responded to a student when she was in Iowa and she was asked the question, What have you changed your mind on since you left office? She thought a little bit, and she said, Goodness. I was in office 11\1/2\ years. My principles were very soundly based. I saw no reason to change them.

Well, the principle that I've laid out for border security, as far as infrastructure on the border, is this: We've got 2,000 miles on the southern border through which comes 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America. I don't suggest that we have to build 2,000 miles of triple fencing. I want to build a fence, a wall, and a fence. Yes, that's effective. It's cost-effective as well. I only suggest that we build that fence until they quit going around the end, Mr. Speaker. That will be the measure. That's how we'll know if it's effective. If they're going around the end, we'll extend it a few more miles. If they keep going around the end, we'll keep building. If the illegals are still entering the United States, then we'll build it from Brownsville all the way up to San Diego or to Tijuana if you prefer.

The President said the fence is basically complete, that he's basically got 14.3 miles of completed fencing on 2,000. I don't think anybody is going to think that that's a very basic completion. I should have, perhaps, done this math, but if I just do 14.3 miles and if I divide that by 2,000 miles, I get--let me see--seven-tenths of 1 percent of completion. That would be the President's idea of basically complete. Seven-tenths of 1 percent of the entire 2,000-mile border has triple fencing on it and 2\1/2\ times more than that, so maybe you'd have, oh, let's say, 18 or 19--1.9 percent completed if you'd just consider the double fencing instead of the triple fencing.

And the President is making fun of people who might want a moat?

I have a picture here. I've flown that within the last couple of months in a helicopter to evaluate the border, almost all of it, all the way from El Paso across all of New Mexico and almost all of Arizona--I know I've flown all of it at one time or another--and it occurred to me that the President was standing pretty close to the moat at the time, 220 yards away from right there at the border. Not only does it have the triple fencing that Janet

Napolitano made fun of--she said, If you show me a 20-foot fence, I'll show you a 21-foot ladder--but in El Paso, here's what we have:

We have the Rio Grande River, moat No. 1, with water in it, flowing down. You have a fence. You have a patrol road. You have another fence. Then you have a canal that has a fairly fast current in it and a lot of water with concrete sides and bottom. Then you have another fence, so you have triple fencing. If anybody is going to come into the United States into El Paso, they've got to get across the river--sometimes swim, most of the time wade--climb a fence, avoid the Border Patrol that has a patrol road and stations posted along inside the column of the two fences, climb a second fence, get into the canal, swim the canal, get up over the top of the next fence and into El Paso.

Mr. President, it's not happening in El Paso because fences work. By the way, the natural water streams there have been really useful as well, and I think that, if I had any staff that stood me up within 220 yards of a structure like that to make fun of it, I'd probably have different staff the next day. I hope he takes note of that, Mr. Speaker. I make these points that the immigration situation in the United States is this:

We have a GAO study, and this study that just emerged here a few weeks ago tells us that there are a number of people who die in the Arizona desert while sneaking into the United States. The loss of every one of those personal lives is a tragedy, and it's of high proportion to their families, but I began asking the question: How many Americans die at the hands of those who do get into the United States? That study report comes out and tells us this:

In the Federal, State and local prisons in America--and this is a very minimum number. This is a floor, not a ceiling. We know the number is higher. We know it's no lower than this--there are currently incarcerated 25,064 criminal aliens who were arrested for homicide and who are currently incarcerated in those prisons that I mentioned in the United States. That's 25,064 homicide victims at a minimum that we know of, and that's some of the price for our not securing our border.

If we had 100 percent enforcement on our border and 100 percent enforcement over people in the United States illegally, then theoretically at least all 25,000 of those people would be alive. They would not be under the ground in the United States--one coffin at a time, one obscure village at a time, one tragedy in a family at a time. It's more than 25,000, certainly, which is a number that soars when you think of it, a number of multiples of the victims of September 11, and we sit here and say, Well, you know, it's only people who want to come here to make a better life.

It's not only that to the families who have lost victims to this.

I just sat down and had a discussion within the last couple of hours with Tiffany Hartley, whose husband was a victim of the vicious murder out on the jet skis on Falcon Lake, which is just north of McAllen, Texas, on September 30 of last year.

The tragedy of his death, the unwillingness on the part of this administration to go in and investigate his death, to find the perpetrators who killed her husband, and come to the truth of that incident is inexcusable and unconscionable. The Justice Department needs to drill in with this. They need to turn up their diplomatic pressure. The State Department, Hillary Clinton, needs to connect with the Mexican consul. Let's get to the bottom of this. Let's get the facts as they stand. Let's find out who investigated what and when, and let's take a look at the communications as they go back and forth so we can get a sense of the level of focus that maybe existed or maybe didn't exist.

I'm calling upon Eric Holder to take a look at the murder of David Hartley. Do so for Tiffany. Help her get some closure.

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

Madam Speaker, today Members of this House took part in a debate that addressed the issue of using taxpayer dollars to fund abortions. As an original cosponsor of this legislation, I commend Mr. Smith from New Jersey for his conviction in bringing this bill to the floor and for his leadership in the pro-life movement. Today, our debate extends the legacy of Congressman Henry J. Hyde, who was passionately pro-life and helped lay the foundation for the victory we celebrate today with the passage of H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.

In light of this debate, I think we should all take time to reflect on a bold statement made by Mr. Hyde, a statement that was printed in the program at his funeral. I attended Congressman Hyde's funeral and was touched by the wisdom of his words. He said, ``When the time comes as it surely will, when we face that awesome moment, the final judgment, I've often thought, as Fulton Sheen wrote, that it is a terrible moment of loneliness. You have no advocates, you are there alone standing before God, and a terror will rip through your soul like nothing you can imagine. But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not be alone. I think there will be a chorus of voices that have never been heard in this world but are heard beautifully and clearly in the next world, and they will plead for everyone who has been in this movement. They will say to God, `Spare him because he loved us,' and God will look at you and say not `Did you succeed?' but `Did you try?' '' I hope we find comfort in knowing that yes, we are trying. We are fighting to defend and protect innocent human life, and we will not stop until every life--born and unborn--is protected.

Madam Speaker, on rollcall No. 308 I was tied up in an elevator. Had I been present, I would have voted ``no.''

Mr. Speaker, it is my honor and privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to have an hour to invest in laying out some points here that I think are important for you to consider. And as America listens on, hopefully it will stimulate some of the thought process and help bring people to some conclusions.

The first thing that I think that any one of us wants to speak of and to is the President's announcement which took place very late on Sunday night that the Special Forces team had been successful in taking out Osama bin Laden.

Our first response to that news, that happy news for all of America, I think, is to congratulate the team that fast-roped down into that compound, those who put their lives on the line to put an end to the life of perhaps the most evil man on the planet, Osama bin Laden. And I congratulate the President of the United States for issuing the order and making the decision to go into that compound in the fashion that they did.

He had a number of options. As the news has reported, and I accept this to be fact, that the President sat in and led five different discussions to evaluate the quality of the intelligence that was available and the tactics that might be used in that compound and that he gave the order.

Some have said it was the most courageous order a President had given in their memory or lifetime. They were all from the administration. It was a good order, there's no question. I don't think it was the most courageous. It didn't lack courage. But there are a number of other big decisions that stand up there, I think, in a higher profile than this one. But it was the right decision, it was a good decision, and the President had to take a chance.

He could have ordered a massive bombing raid on that compound and, as some have said, turned it into a glass parking lot, which would have raised the level of the degree of success but firmly eliminated the chance to show that Osama bin Laden was in that compound. He could have dropped a single bomb, a one-ton-plus bomb from a Predator, that would have had a reasonable chance of succeeding in taking out the most evil man on the planet. Or he could have just done nothing. Or he could have ordered the Special Forces in to fast-rope inside that compound and do what they did. Of those options, I believe the President chose the right one, and I congratulate him for that decision.

Yet in sitting here and listening to the gentleman from California (Mr. Lungren) talk about the situation with the intelligence that we had, it is clear to me, and it has been clear to me for a long time, that one of the essential links in the intelligence that led us to Osama bin Laden in the compound in Pakistan was information that was given up in part by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in enhanced interrogation encounters that he had, probably before he went to Gitmo. That information then was worked, it was matched up with other information, and the thread was followed. In fact, the courier was followed to the compound in Pakistan.

It's ironic that the President of the United States campaigned against such enhanced interrogation tactics. It's ironic that many whom I serve with on the Judiciary Committee lined up against George W. Bush and accused him of ordering torture against people who had been attacking and killing Americans, terrorists of the like of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a very small number of others.

I agree with the gentleman from California. Waterboarding is not torture. If it were torture, we would be torturing our own Special Forces troops. I would be willing to wager--and this I can't verify not knowing the identities of the individuals who did fast-rope down into that compound--that a number of those very same forces that went into the compound that took out Osama bin Laden in their training were likely waterboarded as a part of their training. I've sat in my office and I've gone out in the field and I've talked to those Special Forces personnel who were waterboarded as part of their training. It is not a painful procedure, but it is one that gives one the sensation that they are drowning. It's easy enough to go on the Internet and read the material there, Mr. Speaker. It's an enhanced and effective interrogation technique, and in all of the research that I did--and I read back in story after story of this and had others dig down in it--I found one case where there was a fatality that was nearly a century ago that was because of the brutal tactics that they used in conjunction with the waterboarding. In any case, there are many Americans that are alive today because of the information that our people were able to acquire because of enhanced interrogation techniques, and it's ironic that President Bush approved the methods that acquired the thread, the significant thread of information, without which no one can explain to me how we would have found Osama bin Laden in that compound.

And so the very President who campaigned against the tactics that George Bush was employing is the one that was able to take the information from those tactics and make the right decision to take out OBL. I'm glad that George Bush made the decisions that he made. I'm glad that he was strong and courageous and defended America's ability to gain information in the fashion that they did, because anyone will tell you that was involved with the interrogations, especially of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that once he understood what waterboarding was, he sang like a canary. If he had not warbled in the fashion that he did, I don't think we would be celebrating in the fashion that we are the end of the life of the most evil man on the planet.

So, I agree with the gentleman from California that the cloud of investigation around the American interrogators who are being investigated for the tactics that they were assured by the Justice Department were constitutional and were legal and now we have a Justice Department with a different opinion, it's putting some of our interrogators through an investigation with the cloud of an eventual indictment hanging over their head for doing the same type of tactics that were used with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a very few others to gather the information that allowed us to take out Osama bin Laden. This paradox needs to be resolved, Mr. Speaker, and I am hopeful that the President will give the order for the Justice Department to accept the conclusions that were drawn by the Bush administration and adopt that policy so that Americans can continue to be protected and safe in the face of this threat that we have from without, this threat that comes from radical Islam.

We are fighting radical Islam. Radical Islamists are seeking to kill Americans on a regular basis because they

disagree with western civilization and our philosophy. It's why they attacked us on September 11. That's why they attacked the Khobar Towers. That's why they attacked the Twin Towers the first time in the early nineties. That's why they attacked the USS Cole, the Marine barracks, the list goes on and on, the times that we have been attacked by people who reject our free society. They feel threatened by the liberty and the freedom that is America. They're threatened by the free enterprise that we are. They're threatened by the robust nature of our culture and our economy and our innovativeness where we lead the world in patents and trademarks. Because of that, we need to stand strong and hold ourselves confident.

I point out, also, that the probability that the intelligence was correct and that Osama bin Laden was inside the compound where the attack came from our Special Forces on Sunday, the probability that he was there was a probability that was probably less than 50 percent chance. The President took the chance. If they had gone in and attacked the compound and Osama bin Laden had not been there, I would like to think we would have never heard about it, Mr. Speaker. I don't have any information that says that they tried any other compounds or tried any other locations, although I suspect that we have checked a few more places. I'd like to think we checked a lot of caves up there in the mountains in Pakistan. It's where a lot of us thought he was. That's where our intelligence was telling us that he was. So I would like to think that we were going into some of those locations. But if they had gone into that compound in Pakistan and Osama bin Laden had not been there, we would have never heard about it, which is appropriate and proper, because the odds of this kind of intelligence being spot-on are always less than 100 percent, and in this case I believe it was less than 50 percent. In fact, if you compare the value of the intelligence that said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before we went in there, when you had a universal intelligence conclusion that was drawn by the Israelis, the French, the Americans, as the universal global intelligence said, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The probability of those weapons being there in Iraq if you analyzed it from the intelligence we had at the time made that probability for WMD in Iraq greater than the probability that Osama bin Laden was even in the compound last Sunday when the attack came.

I make these points, Mr. Speaker, so that we can look back across this continuum of history and understand that intelligence isn't an exact science. It's a series of judgment calls. It's a series of connecting different threads of information together and following hunches and then coming to that and following the hunch and making the decision. President Obama made the right decision. The value of the intelligence we had, it wasn't a 100 percent piece of information that he had to work with, so whatever was the hunch, whatever was the conviction that caused him to make that decision, there's times you're going to be right and there's times you're going to be wrong. He was right this time. I'm glad he made the decision. I'm glad the world has seen the end of Osama bin Laden.

With regard to whether a photograph should be published of Osama bin Laden to give the world a higher measure of proof, I will give some deference to the opinion that came from the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Mike Rogers of Michigan, who said his measure is, does it make it harder for American military to work with, say, the Afghan people for intelligence and information on the ground in Afghanistan?

Does it make it harder or does it make it easier? Are the chances better or worse that our troops on the ground in Afghanistan will have a more successful time if the picture comes out or if it doesn't?

In addition to that position, I would say this, Mr. Speaker, that if the rumors that it's a hoax grow so great that they're able to use those rumors to recruit more al Qaeda, and if the rumors that it's a hoax strengthen the recruitment of the Taliban, then we should release the picture or the pictures or enough information that people can be completely convinced. I don't have any doubt Osama bin Laden was in that compound; Osama bin Laden is in the bottom of the Arabian Sea. And I don't have any doubt.

But we may have to get to the point where we have to erase the doubts, and I suspect it will be very hard to keep the pictures of this operation completely with a lid on them, although if anybody can do it, our Special Forces can. If that's their order, I expect that they will. I just don't know that the Pakistanis aren't sitting on something now that would get released.

Just another little irony I would point out as I transition, Mr. Speaker, into a little bit different subject matter. The compound is reported to have had 12- to 18-foot walls around it with barbed wire on top. It's pretty interesting that the Secretary of Homeland Security made a trip over to that part of the world to advise Afghanistan on border security and compared the Afghanistan-Pakistan border with the U.S.-Mexican border. It's interesting that the Secretary of Homeland Security has long said: You show me a 50-foot wall; I'll show you a 51- foot ladder.

It's interesting that the 12- and 18-foot walls weren't scaled by Special Forces personnel with 13- and 19-foot ladders. They put helicopters over the top of the compound and fast-roped down inside. The wall was effective and the wire on top of it was effective. That's why they put them there. They don't build all of these walls with wire on top all around the world if they're not effective. It isn't like ladders aren't available in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

My point is, and I often facetiously respond to this idea, that if you show me a 20-foot wall, I'll show you a 20-foot ladder, as if that just makes fun of anybody that thinks we can protect our borders with a wall. If anybody has been to a military compound, you will know there are fences and walls around the military compound. Why is that? It's to keep out enemy infiltrators. No, they don't keep out everybody. You have got to still guard it. People come along with wire cutters and they come along and dig underneath and they will detonate and blow a hole in a concrete wall. They did that in the wall around the Embassy in Saigon, if you remember. So it isn't that they're the only solution.

And when I say we need to build a fence, a wall and a fence on our southern border, Mr. Speaker, I'm not advocating that we build that and walk away and let somebody come up to the other side with a 21-foot ladder. I'm suggesting that, first of all, we don't have to build 2,000 miles of fence, wall, and fence, that we just build a fence, a wall, and a fence with a patrol road in between in those locations and build it until they stop going around the end.

If anybody has been down to the border, you will see the beaten path that goes through, sometimes right through what they're declaring to be fence, the 600-some miles of fence that they declare that we have. 646 I think is the last number that I saw. And when you go down and look at the real fence that's there, some of it is triple fencing that they call tertiary fencing. That's a little too sophisticated for me. If you go to the San Luis area in southwest Arizona, you can see 24-foot-high fences, triple fences. When I was down there last, I asked them directly, Has anyone defeated this triple fencing? Their answer, after several evasive responses and me point-blanking the question several times, was, No, they go around the end. Of course they do. It's a short fence. It doesn't go far enough. And so people go around the end.

So we just keep building a fence, a wall, and a fence until people stop going around the end. If we end up with 2,000 miles of fence, wall, and fence, we must have needed it because they were continuing to go around the end.

We can do this, and we can do this for a lot less money than we're spending today to chase people across the desert 70 and 100 miles north of our border.

Here's how the math works out, Mr. Speaker. We're spending about $12 billion protecting our southern border. That's 2,000 miles. Already, smart people have done this calculus and taken $12 billion and divided by 2,000 miles and come up with a unit price conclusion that we're spending $6 million a

mile to defend our southern border--$6 million.

Now, imagine this. For me, I'm an Iowa guy and I live out in the country on a gravel road, and it's a mile to concrete from where I live in any direction. So my west road, no one lives on it. It's a full mile of gravel.

If Janet Napolitano came to me and said, Congressman, I've got a proposal for you. I need you to guard this mile. Will you guard this mile and see to it that the people that go across it--you can let 75 percent of them through. No problem. Let 75 percent go through. And the 25 percent that you're required to stop, or you should be stopping, you just have to turn them around and send them back south again. And, by the way, I'm going to pay you, Congressman, $6 million a mile to defend this mile of your gravel road. I'd look at that and say, Could you give me a 10-year contract? That's what we do here in this Congress. We budget out for 10 years. That's $6 million a mile for 10 years. It's $60 million for the budget window of 10 years to guard a single mile.

The population that's going across that, 75 percent of those that try are getting through; 25 percent are being interdicted. This is a little bit dated information, but it's testimony before the Immigration Committee.

And so if they were going to pay me $60 million to guard this mile and I didn't have any kind of efficiency standard except turn 25 percent of them back, or so, first, I'm going to want an efficiency standard. I want a 100 percent efficiency standard. We ought to be developing infrastructure that gets us to that point. And so it wouldn't take me $60 million to build a fence, a wall, and a fence on that mile, that mile that runs from my house west. That's $6 million a year for 10 years, $60 million.

I would tap into the first year's annual budget and take one-third of it, $2 million, and I would build a fence, a wall, and a fence for the full mile. So it's 3 miles of structure. I would put a concrete wall in the middle of it. It would have a concrete foundation that made it difficult to dig underneath.

And one thing you know about concrete is you don't get through it with wire cutters. You don't get through it in a simple fashion like you might with a wire fence.

I would put a concrete wall in the middle. I'd have a fence down near the border. I'd move in about 60 or 100 feet and put a concrete wall in that's about 14 feet tall with wire on top, and I'd put another fence inside that. So if they got over my concrete wall, there's another corral. I would then hire fewer Border Patrol, and with needing less equipment, less pension plans, less benefit packages, I would put the first front money up in the infrastructure. You know that by the time they get through the fence, the wall, and the fence, you'll have a chance to catch them. We would put the sensory devices in, put the cameras up, put the vibration sensors in. Maybe we could get Boeing to perfect their system and add that to the fence, the wall, and the fence.

But it is foolish for us to think that we can just keep hiring more and more Border Patrol--we've more than doubled our Border Patrol--and then back off into the desert 70 or 100 miles and begin chasing people around in the sagebrush. That's not the way to do this. We need to shut off the bleeding at the border. This is not a recreational sport to be defending our border and chasing people down in the desert. If we can stop them before they get into the United States, that is the preferred way to go.

I have gone across the English Channel from England over to Calais, France, where the Brits have leased a chunk of ground because they want to stop the illegals before they get across the channel. They have leased this piece of ground from the French and they've set up a high security system there, and the trucks that come through go on ferries, and the ferries haul them across the English Channel, cars and trucks, just a constant rotation of ferries going back and forth across the English Channel.

The British have leased this piece of ground. They raised their technology and their manpower there to preempt access into the United Kingdom because they would rather deal with them on French soil than they would on British soil, because the British laws get a little sloppy like ours do. Once you pick somebody up inside the interior of the United States, they've got an opportunity to appeal, be adjudicated. It can cost us a lot of money.

The important thing is to keep them out of the United States. Let's build a fence, a wall, and a fence. We can do the whole thing for about $2 million a mile, and that leaves $4 million the first year left over to hire Border Patrol and to pay them wages and salary benefits and retirement packages and to give them some equipment with. Then the next year, there's another $6 million available every year--a little maintenance on that wall but not a lot. So that's a $60 million contract, Mr. Speaker, for a decade on a single mile. You put $2 million up front, and now you've got $58 million to play with.

I'll submit that we can do a better job by building infrastructure and using it to protect our border than we can by hiring a lot more personnel and chasing people around in the desert. It is a simple business equation. This political arena doesn't lend itself very well to simple business equations, but that is one, Mr. Speaker, and I'm going to continue to push to build a fence, a wall, and a fence; and yes, we need to put something on top of that. I don't care if it looks a little bit bad. If they don't want to see wire on top of the wall at the border, why do the Mexicans build walls at the U.S. border with concertina wire on top? They're not offended when they put up it up. Why would they be offended if we put it up, Mr. Speaker?

It's part of our immigration situation that we need to address, and I'll continue with that in that ``stop the bleeding at the border.'' That is the way to do it. We can force all traffic through our ports of entry, and we should beef up our ports of entry, widen them out, and invest in infrastructure there. We should put personnel there so that we can use surveillance techniques that are state of the art so that we can efficiently move through the traffic that is relatively safe and that is unlikely to have contraband in it. Then we can even better scrutinize those pieces of traffic that are likely to have illegal persons or illegal contraband in them. That would stop the bleeding at the border in a significant way.

We forget that 90 percent of the illegal drugs consumed in America comes from or through Mexico--90 percent. The drug enforcement people tell me that, of every illegal drug distribution chain in this country, at least one link in that distribution chain is someone who is here in the United States unlawfully. Many times, the whole chain is a chain of custody of illegal drugs going from Mexico through and up into the United States--pick Chicago--and all the way to the end user, and the drugs never go into any hand except of somebody who's here illegally in the United States. Imagine, 90 percent of the illegal drugs in America come from or through Mexico.

Headless corpses are showing up by the dozens in Mexico, and they're starting to show up here in the United States. I went to a meeting in Columbus, New Mexico, a town hall meeting. There were people there who, on their way to church, drive parallel to the border. On their way to church on a Sunday morning, four heads were on display for them to see, which was a warning to, apparently, the other drug cartel. This is spilling over into the United States. Those heads were on the Mexican side, I'll point out, Mr. Speaker, for the point of accuracy, but they're showing up on the U.S. side of the border.

The drug trade here in the United States is extremely lucrative. I've been trying to get these numbers from the drug enforcement personnel, and they've been very hard to get. Yet Fox News reported that the illegal drug trade in America is a $40 billion industry--$40 billion. It has been reported that at least $60 billion is wired from the United States into points south. A lot of that may come from the wages of people who are working here in the United States--and a lot of them working here illegally. There are around 8 million illegals working in America, taking jobs that legal immigrants or American citizens should be doing. But there is $60 billion a year wired south.

Half of it, $30 billion, goes into Mexico, and the other $30 billion goes into the Caribbean, Central America and some into South America-- $30 billion into Mexico, the other $30 billion scattered around in the rest of the southern part, south of us, in the Western Hemisphere.

We don't know and they don't speculate on how much of the $60 billion is just laundering illegal drug money. I don't know the basis of the $40 billion number that Fox News reported on the value of illegal drugs that are consumed in America. That's just the only number that's out there that I can find. I don't think we have the basis of enough intelligence to be able to bring a real solution to this.

I don't think our people at the top have done enough work to quantify the problem. They're not talking about the problem. Instead, I see an emphasis on our southern border, a shift that took place under the Obama administration, that causes some of our Border Patrol to pivot. Instead of looking south to say, Hold it. Don't come into the United States illegally, they started to turn around and look north and try to interdict cash and guns that are coming from the United States and going into Mexico. A lot of these guns, by the way, are perfectly legal in the United States but not legal in Mexico.

So do we have the personnel to filter that at the Mexican border?

It's fine to interdict the cash, because that raises the transaction costs of those who are smuggling drugs into the United States, and it's fine to work and cooperate with the Mexicans if they need a little help on guns that become illegal when they get across the border; but we need to focus on people who are smuggling illegal drugs into the United States. We need to focus on illegal people who are being smuggled into the United States. The value of this has not quantified the loss in American lives. Quantifying the loss in treasure is one thing: $60 billion wired south, $40 billion worth of illegal drugs consumed in the United States, violence in Mexico, and headless corpses by the dozen.

I began to ask these questions some years ago, have finally had some response, Mr. Speaker. It's as a result of two studies that I've commissioned over the years by the Government Accountability Office, GAO studies. One came out in April of 2005, and the other one came out just this past month--released within the past few weeks, actually, but it's dated March of 2011.

We've had witnesses come before the Immigration Subcommittee. First, they'll say America is a Nation of immigrants, as if that's the be all- end all of the conclusion we should draw and that we shouldn't try to limit illegal immigration into America, let alone eliminate it, because America is a Nation of immigrants.

My response to that, Mr. Speaker, is: Yes, sure enough. Could you point out for me a nation on the planet that is not a nation of immigrants? I asked that question of witness Ms. Hernandez some few years ago. I asked if she would care to tell me of a nation that is not a nation of immigrants.

She sat there at the witness table--under oath, mind you--and presented as an expert witness. Her eyes kind of rolled a little bit back in the back of her head; and she said, Well, that would be the Incas and the Aztecs.

So I said, Who, according to an anthropologist, came across the Bering Straits about 12,000 years ago. Would you like to try again, Ms. Hernandez?

Of course, she didn't want to try again, and no one has succeeded in pointing out a nation that is not a nation of immigrants. The closest you could come is with the Japanese, and there are two ethnic groups in Japan that are identified by their locales and by the accents and the languages that they have. They believe that both of them came from Polynesian origins centuries and centuries ago.

Every nation, Mr. Speaker, is a nation of immigrants. People have migrated around this planet since Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, and they always will. So we don't carry a certain responsibility towards setting aside the rule of law in America because we are a Nation of immigrants. We have a responsibility to preserve, protect and defend the pillars of American exceptionalism--and of course, the rule of law is an essential pillar of American exceptionalism.

So that question of, first, are we a Nation of immigrants, yes, we are; but we are a Nation of laws, and we must adhere to and protect the rule of law.

When we look at the policies that we have, it's important for us to shut off the jobs magnet here in the United States, not only control/ stop the bleeding at the border, but we have to shut off the jobs magnet here in America. One of the ways that we do that is to enforce our laws, of course. E-Verify is an important tool. It's a Web site- based software program that allows an employer to run, I call it, the name, rank and serial number--the Social Security number--of an employee through that database. It will go back, and it will search the Department of Homeland Security's database, the Social Security database, NCIC, and come back and tell you if that information represents that that individual can lawfully work in the United States. We use it. I've tried to fool it and I've tried to scramble it, and the longest delay I can get out of it is 6 seconds.

It's very fast. It's very accurate. The software package is only as accurate as the data behind it, and when we find a mistake in E-Verify, it's almost always because someone got married and forgot to change their name or some piece of information like that that needs to be upgraded. Easily fixed. The only way you make E-Verify even better is to use it and use it and use it so that database gets cleaned up, and it's set up to do that with a 72-hour notice of cure.

So using E-Verify is a good tool. I have a better tool out there that I will soon be introducing, Mr. Speaker, and I have introduced it in previous Congresses. I've been waiting for the right time, and we will set up a press conference and roll out a bill called the New IDEA Act. Now, they say there are no new ideas in this Congress, that it's a just repackaging of old ideas. This one I think actually is a relatively new idea, and it comes from this concept that, well, who enjoys enforcing the law? Who's effective in it? Who do the American people believe will come forward and enforce the law?

And as I was thinking that through, it occurred to me that the IRS probably has the maximum respect of all of the law enforcers in America. They have better tools to work with than many of the other agencies out there, and we expect they will come in and they will conduct an audit, and they're going to look to see if they can find something wrong with your tax return. Anybody that's been through an audit doesn't want to go through another audit. Frank Luntz put out some numbers that showed that a majority of Americans would rather be mugged than go through an IRS audit; 58 percent would rather have a root canal than go through an IRS audit. I'd like to have the IRS helping us with immigration law.

So I drafted legislation called the New IDEA Act. It's the New, and the acronym IDEA stands for Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. What it does is it clarifies that wages and benefits paid to illegals are not tax deductible, and then it gives the employer safe harbor if they use E-Verify. So, if the employer in good faith runs their employees through E-Verify, it will give the employer that credit that he used E- Verify, and he can deduct the wages if E-Verify should happen to be wrong, for example, and it won't be.

But otherwise, if the IRS then comes in during a normal audit--we don't accelerate audits, we don't initiate any more audits than we'd normally have--but if the IRS comes in during a normal audit, they would run the Social Security numbers and information of all the employees through E-Verify, and if any of those employees were kicked back at them as not lawful to work in the United States, the IRS then would take a look. They'd give the employer an opportunity to cure, but they would look at that data and say, all right, I'm sorry, the wages that you paid this illegal are not going to be a business expense for you, so they come off the Schedule C and they go over into the profit column in your tax form.

Imagine if you're an employer and you paid $1 million to illegals and the IRS came in to do the audit and they said, I'm sorry, that $1 million that you had as a business expense is not an

expense. You can't expense wages and benefits paid to illegals. So now that $1 million goes over into the profit side, and the IRS looks at that and says, you know, you're going to have to pay interest on that. You had a tax liability that you unlawfully claimed. You're going to have to pay interest on that tax liability, and you're going to have to pay a penalty, and you have to pay the principal, which is a tax liability.

So if it rolls it over to a 36 percent tax rate, plus the interest, plus the penalty, the net result is that turns your $10 an hour illegal into about a $16 an hour illegal, which means that there will be Americans out there that will be taking those jobs at $12, $13, $14, and $15 an hour that didn't have an opportunity to do that before because illegals were in there working for $10. This will open up jobs for Americans.

We saw a big number of new jobless reports pop up today. This unemployment number is not getting better. It is just zigzagging and stagnating at a number that hangs in there close to 9 percent. This is a very, very slow recovery. One of the things we can do to help recover is to pass the New IDEA Act, let the IRS come in and do their normal audits, and employers will decide that they don't want to wait for the IRS to get there. They will want to clean up their workforce as soon as they practically can.

That's part of the beauty of this. This isn't a hard and fast piece of legislation that requires employers to fire all their illegals at once. They can make their decision on when they will take the risk, but what it does do is accumulates a 6-year statute of limitations. So that if an employer gets by this year without an audit and he keeps illegals on the payroll the next year without an audit, he has to go a full 6 years before that first illegal year drops off, and he's still liable for the IRS to go back through the books a full 6 years, which means that employers are going to look at this, and they're going to think, I'm paying $1 million out to illegals; if I get to the end of a 6-year cycle and the IRS comes in and audits me, they're going to deny $6 million that I have written off as business expenses, put that over into the profit side, and you could be looking at $6 million worth of income, and all of that with interest and penalty attached to it. And so your $6 million probably becomes something greater than $3 million in penalties out of the $6 million that were formerly a writeoff.

That's how this liability accumulates with a 6-year statute of limitations. That's why employers, even though they may not be able to transition their workforce into a 100 percent legal workforce the first year, the pressure to do so every year will be so great because getting through 6 years without an IRS audit and knowing that you're going to carry with you a full 6 years of risk will cause employers to clean up their workforce on their own.

One of the problems we have is trying to get the administration to enforce immigration law. We can pass a law. We can make it mandatory that everybody use E-Verify. I will probably have an opportunity to vote for that, and I will. But we cannot require the executive branch to enforce the law. The President of the United States takes an oath to take care that the laws are faithfully enforced. That's part of the Constitution, and it's true for the executive branch employees, including Eric Holder, the Attorney General; including Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security. But we can't make them enforce the law.

I've been in the business of seeking to embarrass the administration into enforcing the law now into my ninth year here because we don't have the tools. We can call them forward now that Republicans have the majority. We can have hearings, bring the press into the hearings because the press helps us a lot. They convey that message back to the American people, and the American people understand that there are things they should be outraged about. But we have no tool other than to cut their budget or embarrass them, or I guess there's more Draconian methods that would not be used, and I won't mention those for fear that they will start an unnecessary rumor.

But all of that said, Mr. Speaker, the IRS will come in and do this work, and it won't be about us trying to embarrass them into enforcing the law. It will be about the IRS coming in to turn it into a revenue generator. It will be. The New IDEA Act, Mr. Speaker, is a tool that can do the most to bring our immigration laws in this country under enforcement and to reduce the numbers of illegals that are in the United States the most dramatically with the least amount of cost. In fact, it's a plus-up because it will generate more revenue for the Internal Revenue Service.

Another point on the border, to roll back down to the southern border, Mr. Speaker, and to make this point is that we have a tourism industry that has to do with anchor babies. Anchor babies are babies that are born in the United States to an illegal mother, and the practice over the years has been to grant automatic citizenship to babies born on U.S. soil. It is not a law. It is not a constitutional requirement. It's just a sloppy practice that began that's getting worse and worse and worse.

We have now in this country somewhere between 340,000 and 750,000 babies born to illegal mothers in America that get automatic citizenship. They're anchor babies. They sneak into the United States, many of them, for the purposes of having the baby. They get the little birth certificate with their little footprints on there. Then they either stay here or they go back to their home country and wait until that child comes of age, and they use that child to apply to bring in the family, the nuclear family, then the extended family, and it's out of control--340,000 to 750,000 a year automatic citizens to America that have essentially unlimited ability to bring their families into the United States.

We have testimony before the Immigration Committee that shows us that if you look at immigrants, legal immigrants, and base it on merit, you would think a country would want to establish an immigration policy that was designed to enhance the economic, social, and cultural well- being of the United States of America. Wouldn't any country have an immigration policy that was designed to help them? I mean, it is not selfish of America to want to have an immigration policy that's good for this country. We cannot be the relief valve for all the poverty in the world.

For every some 6.3 billion or so people on the planet--maybe it's more than that--they can't all live in America. There are more than 5 billion that have a lower standard of living than the average Mexican. So if we think we're going to be the relief valve of poverty in the world, and we bring into America 1 million to 1.5 million legally, and across the border comes--there are numbers that I have seen testified to that show as many as 4 million illegals in a year. Many go back and forth. They are carrying drugs on their back. Maybe they're visiting family. The net number I guess we don't know. It seems to shake out pretty odd that you can have that much border crossing, and the numbers don't accumulate.

When I came to this Congress 8-plus years ago, the number was 12 million illegals in America. Now they're giving us estimates that there are maybe 11 million illegals in America. How does that work? Did that many people die? Did we give that many people citizenship that came in here illegally? So I think that number is significantly higher than 11 million or 12 million. I think it's been growing every year for a generation. I think it continues to grow.

Anchor babies, babies that are born to illegal mothers in the United States that get automatic citizenship, cause people to sneak into the United States to have the baby because they see citizenship in America as cashing in to the giant ATM, the giant ATM which is America's welfare cash machine.

Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has done a lot of research on welfare benefits--he has broken it up in a number of different ways--that go to households where there is at least one illegal that's in it.

I need to come back at a later date, Mr. Speaker, and take up the cost to the American taxpayer of benefits that go to households that are oftentimes headed up by an illegal. When we look at what has happened on the floor of this Congress in the last 4 to 5 years, when the SCHIP legislation passed this

Congress, they weakened their requirements of proof of citizenship for Medicaid.

So free medical care for people who are lower income is being provided to people that should actually be deported back to their home country because the standard that you had to show proof of citizenship that was written into the old Medicaid legislation was struck and replaced with a requirement that you attest to a nine-digit Social Security number. That's the standard. They lowered it that low because the people on that side of the aisle wanted to pay Medicaid benefits to illegals. They want to give them a path to citizenship. They want to give them an opportunity to vote.

I look back at what Ronald Reagan said: What you tax, you get less of; but what you subsidize, you get more of. If you reward people for coming into the United States illegally, and you reward them with welfare packages and plans, you are going to get more people in the United States illegally, and you are going to get more people that are signing up for more welfare.

We have in this country 77 different means-tested welfare programs in the United States of America. There isn't one person in this United States Congress that could stand down here on the floor without a cheat sheet and name every one of them. And there isn't one person in this United States Congress that can actually understand how each one of these 77 means-tested welfare programs interrelates with each other, let alone how it affects the decisions of individuals on whether they are going to get a job or sit at home. If you are on rent subsidy and heat subsidy and food stamps, and list all the other Federal programs that are there, why would you work when you are rewarded for not working?

I look at the labor situation in America. There are 8 million working illegals in America. There are a number of others out there that we probably didn't find in the data that we have. So here we are with the unemployment numbers of about 15 million Americans who are registered as unemployed. There is another 6 to 8 million that are past the data. They've quit trying, so they're no longer technically called unemployed. They just quit looking for a job. There is another 6 to 8 million of those. You are up to over 20 million Americans that are on unemployment, drawing it, or have given up applying for it.

But when I start to add to that number of roughly 20 million, 22 to 23 million Americans that are unemployed or have given up trying and aren't working, and I go to the Department of Labor's statistics, their own statistics that come from the Department of Labor, and I begin to add up the American workforce--that workforce number is a little foggy in my memory--it's 140-some million people in America's workforce. If you start adding those who are not currently working--and I start at age 16 because that's a legitimate age.

You can collect unemployment at age 16 if you have earned enough that they paid in on your behalf--the teenagers between age 16 and 19, there are 9.7 million that aren't in the workforce at all, not even a part- time job of any kind. Yes, they may be students; but there's nothing wrong with working and going to school. That's what a lot of people did, and it builds character. You add to that those that are from 20 to 25 years old, and you go on up the line in different age categories. I went up to age 74 because we pay unemployment at age 74, and Wal-Mart hires at age 74 and so do a lot of other employers. So the age of the workforce I am using is 16 to 74. It's a legitimate bracket. We could narrow that in a little bit, and we would have fewer numbers.

But here's the point: Of the 8 million working illegals in America, there are 80 million Americans of working age that are not in the workforce; 80 million people of working age that are simply not in the workforce. They might have checked out. They are sitting back on some of the 77 means-tested welfare programs. They might be independently wealthy and decided to retire. If so, good on them. But they are not in the workforce for one reason or another, or they are working in the black market. It might be that some of those people are selling drugs who are not in the workforce. But if people say there are jobs out there Americans won't do, name one. Name one job that Americans won't do. I can take you and show you an American that's doing every single job definition that there is in this country.

The reason that you see people here illegally and they're out- competing Americans is because they'll work for less. They'll pile up in a house with many more people living in the same dwelling. They are not a threat to the employer to file workmen's comp or an unemployment claim.

So they are a lower liability for the employer. The employer can bring in a crew of illegals, get a job done, dispatch them down the line; and once they leave that job, they are no longer a liability to them. So it's like being able to lease a machine to come do a job. You say, take the machine back, and park it in the lot, and you are done. You don't have to worry about the depreciation or the maintenance. That's what has happened. In a way, it's a bit inhuman to see this going on.

If we enforced our immigration law, it opens up at least 8 million jobs for Americans or legal immigrants; and if people say there aren't enough Americans to do those jobs, nuts. We have to hire one out of every 10 that's sitting now on the couch and put them to work. Why wouldn't you want to increase and enhance the average annual productivity of our people? Why would you not?

What if we were on a big cruise ship, but it was powered by sails and oars? So many people have to be trimming the sails. So many people have to be pulling on the oars. Somebody has got to be in the kitchen cooking. Somebody has got to be swabbing the deck. Somebody has got to be up there in the wheelhouse navigating, and somebody has got to be steering. With all of that going on, if you didn't have enough people at the oars to pull the load, would you pull that cruise ship off on an island somewhere and load on a bunch more people to pull on the oars? Or would you go after the 80 million people that are sitting on the couch now and have some of those people get up off the couch and grab an oar and pull?

I want to increase the production of America. I want to increase the average annual productivity of Americans. If we do that, we increase our standard of living. If not, if more of us sit back and don't go to work and don't produce anything, and we bring others in to do the work that we say we are now too good to do, then our broader standard of living goes down, and you need more and more welfare programs to pay the people that are not working, and you still have to carry the social costs for the people that are working underneath the market value.

You can't sustain a household for some of the wages that are being paid to illegals. That's why they are tapping into welfare benefits. That's why they use their child that has been born in America as an anchor baby as a means to get access to the welfare program.

And so here we have an America that's underemployed, 80 million people of working age that are not in the workforce. A lot of them are living off of the sweat of the brow of somebody else in the form of the 77 means-tested welfare programs that are out there. They don't have an incentive to go to work, but we pay them with tax dollars if they'll just stay peaceful, stay in their houses, don't cause any trouble. Let's not have any violence in the streets. If you do all that, then we'll hire these other people that are in the United States illegally at substandard wages and subsidize them both.

What sense does that make, Mr. Speaker, for a Nation to not be upgrading its standard of living by increasing the average productivity of our people?

And why would we not be defending the rule of law? And why would we reward people that sneak into the United States to have a baby so they can tap into all this giant ATM?

We've got to put an end to anchor babies. I have the legislation to do it, Mr. Speaker, and I have scores of cosponsors on the anchor baby legislation that I introduced very early in this session with some good gentlemen from Georgia, in particular. Rob Woodall came in and was ready to step up on that, and there are others. Tom Graves is part of that. I appreciate the work that they are doing, and I'm happy to

join with them and work together on those issues.

But we have to have a Nation of laws and a Nation that respects the rule of law. We have to shut off the bleeding at the border.

We need to get more of our Americans to work. You notice I didn't say back to work, Mr. Speaker. We're sometimes into the third and fourth generation where they didn't work at all. They have learned how to game the system, and we've accepted it. We no longer require the welfare-to- work part of this; that you get 5 years total and then you have to go to work. What we see happen is 77 means-tested welfare programs. Nobody can monitor all of that. And the will of the American people isn't such because now half the households don't pay income tax. But they go vote. And they vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. They vote themselves welfare benefits. There are people here that pander to that, and they understand that their political base is expanded when they expand the dependency class in America.

So what did they do?

They passed legislation in here under Speaker Pelosi over and over again that expanded the dependency class in America because it strengthened their political base. ObamaCare is a huge key of expanding the dependency class. It says we're going to promise you that every American has access to health care, every single one. It wasn't an issue. But they conflated the two terms, the term health care and health insurance.

Anyone in America can show up in the emergency room and be treated. That's access to health care, and it's probably superior to most nations. I'm sure it's superior to most nations in the world. I don't know a nation that it's not superior to.

But then it was the promise that, well, it's really not very good. It's expensive that you show up in the emergency room without insurance, so what we really want to do is give everybody their own insurance policy and insure another 30 million people.

So I look at that, and I do the math and I ask the question, who's really not insured and doesn't have affordable options?

These numbers came from the United States Senate, the Republican Senate Conference, the Senate staff, and it came down to this. You start with about 306 million Americans, and then you begin to subtract those that are insured, those that are on Medicare, those that qualify, those that are on Medicaid, those that are qualified for Medicaid but don't sign up, those that are covered under their employer, and those that are eligible under their employer and don't sign up, and you begin to reduce this number of 306 million Americans down. First you take the insured, subtract that from 306, and then you begin to identify the Americans that are uninsured. That was those that are here illegally. I'm not interested in funding their health insurance package. I think it's wrong and immoral for us to do that. They're not on my list.

When you boil it down, Americans without affordable options numbered 12.1 million. Now, that is a lot of people, but it's less than 4 percent of our population. Yet ObamaCare sought to disrupt and transform and change and socialize the health insurance industry in America, 100 percent of it, the health care delivery system, 100 percent of that, in order to reduce the number of uninsured Americans without affordable options from some number that's less than 4 percent down to some other lower number.

At what cost?

The cost of American liberty, cost of the United States Constitution. The cost of our freedom.

ObamaCare is a malignant tumor, and it is metastasizing in the heart and soul of the spirit of the American people.

We are a vigorous people. We are a people that have skimmed the cream of the crop off of every donor civilization on the planet, Mr. Speaker. The vigor that came from people that had a vision and a dream, that came here across the pond in one way or another because they wanted to access the liberty and the freedom that we have here is a different kind of a vigor than saying, well, we got good vigor from Great Britain, and we got it from France and Germany and Italy, wherever else, Eastern Europe and around the planet, Greece, name it. No, we got the best of every donor civilization. We got the vigor from every donor civilization. We got the dreamers from every country that sent legal immigrants here, that gives America a unique vigor. It's different than any other country in the world. That's the reason why we succeed. It's the reason why we can take free enterprise and do something with it. It's why America has risen to become the unchallenged greatest Nation on the planet.

We have all of the rights that come from God that are defined so clearly and well, not just in the Declaration, but in the Constitution and especially in the Bill of Rights, and you add to that free enterprise, and you add to that this vigor that comes from legal immigrants from all over, from every civilization, and you have an America that has a spirit and an attitude that's unique on the planet.

It is unsuitable to take a free people and tie the yoke of ObamaCare around their neck. I will draw the line. I want to see shutting off all funding to ObamaCare tied to the debt ceiling bill, Mr. Speaker. Before we even discuss the debt ceiling, I want a guarantee that all of our troops get paid on time. In the event of a debt ceiling limit or a shutdown of any kind, uniformed troops in the United States or anywhere in the world serving Uncle Sam need to know their paycheck is going to be wired into their account on time every time, no matter what is going on here in the United States Congress.

Second point, Tom McClintock's full faith and credit bill that sets up the priority on how we would pay our debts in the event of a debt ceiling limit being reached. We can set those priorities, and it needs to be, pay the interest on those who have loaned money to America first and move our way on down the priority list.

Do those two things, send them out of this House, send them over to Harry Reid in the Senate, and he can decide. Pick them up and send them to the President of the United States and let him sign, let the President sign both of those bills, the Gohmert bill, the McClintock bill into law.

That, Mr. Speaker, would be the qualifier before we'd even begin to discuss what we would do about the prospects of raising a debt ceiling.

But for me, I'd put the cutting off of all funds to ObamaCare on that debt ceiling bill and say there can be no raising of the debt ceiling here by the House of Representatives unless we shut off all the funding that's going to implement or enforce ObamaCare, at least until such time as the Supreme Court should rule.

The President is delaying the action of the Supreme Court. He could have asked for an expedited review of ObamaCare. We all know it's going to the Supreme Court. The President is delaying the decision in the Supreme Court the same way that he delayed bringing his birth certificate out.

Mr. Speaker, it is so important that we not chase good money after bad, that the Supreme Court rule on ObamaCare. At least then, then let Congress decide when they might appropriate rather than these automatic appropriations.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I appreciate the privilege to come here to the floor and stand up for the rights of the innocent unborn in this country.

At the root of this issue is the question of what is human life and is it sacred in all of its forms and at what instant does it begin, and I think all of us with a conscience will recognize that human life needs to be sacred in all of its forms and it begins at the instant of conception, and once we come to that conclusion we stand up to defend every voiceless innocent miracle that's on its way into breathing free air into this country.

And to think that we are compelling the American taxpayer to fund abortions across this country and in foreign lands on occasion, because we can't quite hear that voice--Henry Hyde heard that voice, and we're standing up with and for Henry Hyde. I so much appreciate him and Chris Smith, who is the principal author of the underlying legislation.

I rise in support of this rule, Madam Speaker, and I rise in support of the innocent unborn. The conscience of America must be heard in this debate today, on this rule and on the underlying bill. The voice of the voiceless need to be heard, that of those people who were not heard in the life we will hear from in the next, as Henry Hyde so eloquently said. But an America that is a pro-life America, with over 60 percent that oppose Federal funding, taxpayer-funded abortions, this is a consistent position that reflects the will of the American people. We must draw this line not just with Planned Parenthood but every abortion provider in the country. If they can't make it in the market on their own, we have no business subsidizing them without regard to the impact on our overall economy.

Madam Speaker, I'm pleased and proud to be here today to take this stand, and I'm pleased and proud of the

entire Pro-Life Caucus that's here in the United States Congress, both Democrats and Republicans alike, who have done so much over the years to bring us to this point of consensus. And this is a consensus that will be reflected on this vote on the rule and on the vote on the underlying bill, a consensus of the American people with their resounding support for this rule and the underlying bill.

I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding, and I also thank Dr. Burgess for the leadership role that he has taken nationally in opposition to ObamaCare. His voice is essential to this and putting this unconstitutional bill behind us one day, taking us down the path of liberty and freedom with a constitutional path.

I rise in strong support for H.R. 1213, Mr. Chairman.

I would point out that much has been made of $105.5 billion in automatic spending that was written into ObamaCare. That is a number that was

kind of like a mirage; it was hard to pin down. Over time and working with CRS, we produced, finally, that number: $105.5 billion in automatic spending written into a bill that I don't think any Member of Congress--in fact, I am certain not a single Member of Congress--was aware of that figure when ObamaCare was passed about 13 months ago.

However, this bill, H.R. 1213, doesn't address that $105.5 billion in automatic, irresponsible, unconstitutional spending. It addresses an open slot where the drafters of ObamaCare just simply overlooked writing a figure in when they granted, there, unlimited authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, to spend the amount of money that she sees fit to carry out the provisions of this section that are repealed by H.R. 1213.

It wasn't just a blank check, Mr. Chairman. It is a series of blank checks--in fact, an infinite number of blank checks that an infinite amount of money could conceivably be written into. That is how bad this is. That's how unquantifiable it is. I know that CBO has attempted to put a number on it, but it requires some assumptions to even do that.

The 112th Congress has been bound by the 111th Congress by this term we call ``mandatory spending.'' I don't concede that there is anything such as mandatory spending in this Congress. No previous Congress can bind a subsequent Congress. This Congress has to approve all spending of every Federal dollar before it can be expended, and we need to stand on that principle, Mr. Chairman, this unlimited and mandatory spending that is unconstitutional.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

I would make the point also that the funding that would go to set up the State exchanges, we need to be very well aware of what that can be. If the States take this free money, so to speak, from this unlimited slush fund of Kathleen Sebelius and set up the State exchanges, even though they believe they have control of these exchanges, it sets them up to be nationalized by a far more powerful Federal Government. And even though they oppose ObamaCare, they might be complicit in its implementation if they accept this money.

I urge adoption of H.R. 1213, and I thank the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. Chair, on rollcall No. 276, I was detained by two (2) elevators which were in use by non-Members during votes. Had I been present, I would have voted ``nay.''

I thank the gentleman from Louisiana for his work and for yielding me time.

I want to also thank the gentleman from Montana, who has drilled into this deeply, and it is a big reason why we are able to be here today. I appreciate his representation of seniors in Montana as I may well have the privilege of representing the most senior congressional district in all of America.

I've watched what has happened not just with Medicare but with ObamaCare entirely, and when I hear the comments about the whims of the health insurance industry, that may well have been what helped write this bill in the first place--large health insurance companies. Yet we had 1,300 of them when we started this process over a year ago, and we have fewer today.

We had 100,000 possible health insurance policy varieties. We have fewer today. We are looking at $2.6 trillion in outlays over ObamaCare for the first full decade of its implementation, and we have seen two Federal courts rule ObamaCare unconstitutional.

We have uncovered what I think were intentionally hard-to-find numbers that were hidden in the automatic appropriations of ObamaCare to the tune of $105.5 billion to be laid out. We are sitting right now on top of $23.6 billion that is being used intensively to implement ObamaCare, all the while we expect, and the President surely must expect, the Supreme Court will rule it unconstitutional.

ObamaCare has been rejected by the American people. It sent 87 freshmen Republicans here to Congress to repeal it. Every Republican in not only the House of Representatives but in the United States Senate has voted to repeal ObamaCare in H.R. 2 and voted to cut off everything that could be ruled in order on the floor in H.R. 1 that would be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare.

This is the language that cuts off the automatic spending to ObamaCare. It puts a freeze on it so the courts can decide, so the will of the people can be reflected not just in the House of Representatives, but eventually in the United States Senate. And also, let's bring a President that will sign this repeal, this unconstitutional taking of American liberty that is known as ObamaCare.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to remove the name of the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) from H.R. 1093. It was added inadvertently due to a clerical error.

Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives and to once again bring a case before you that I believe will be overheard in an effective way by the American people and responded to you by, of course, your good judicial and prudential judgment.

I came here to the floor to talk about a number of things. I should always bring up the number one thing that is on my mind first. And I know that it's impossible for me to exhaust the subject, but I have given it a significant endeavor over the last year and a half. And now, as things move towards a head, with the continuing resolution negotiations and debate that is taking place and the major decisions that will be formed over the weekend by the leadership in the House and in the Senate in consultation, presumably, with the White House, we expect to see some kind of a proposal come before one or both Chambers next week before the clock ticks down on the continuing resolution that is temporarily funding this government in a piece of shell appropriations that should have never have happened. But that's a subject matter perhaps outside of what I should bring up today, and we should focus on the issues at hand, and they are this:

There was a strong pledge that was made that if Republicans win the majority, Mr. Speaker, that we would cut $100 billion out of this fiscal year's budget. I will submit that, recognizing that we were 5 months into this fiscal year before we had an opportunity to begin that process, that calculates out to be about $61.5 billion if you annualized $100 billion. Even though the initially proposed continuing resolution did not include those kinds of cuts, there was an intense debate here in this Congress driven by the 87 freshmen Republicans to get that number up to a number that was either $100 billion or $100 billion if you calculated it on an annualized basis.

We did come together on that number, and this House did pass H.R. 1, which included in it $61.5 billion worth of cuts out of fiscal year 2011, even though, let me say, the function of the House was not functional during the last 2 or 3 years at least of Speaker Pelosi's time, and there was no appropriations process that one could bring forward, and there was no budget that was brought forward and, therefore, government was being run on stopgap measures of continuing resolutions.

During the lame duck session--the lame duck session being the period of time when Congress comes together to meet after an election. I have said that lame duck sessions should only be to take care of the urgent issues that need to be handled before the new Members of Congress can be sworn in. The old Congress, at least in theory, is delegitimized by the elections that take place. Last year, it was on November 2. They no longer represent the will of the American people. That has been reflected in the election results all across the land. And this House was designed to be a quick reaction strike force to be responsive to the American people.

So our Founding Fathers put it within the Constitution, never amended out, that House Members are up for election every 2 years. And every 10 years there will be a census, and that census is designed then to be used to redistrict the districts. And we have now agreed that 435 is the maximum number of House Members. And as the population moves and as the population grows, every 10 years, we reset the congressional districts to as accurately as possible reflect the new population distribution in America. That goes on, along with every 2 years, there is an election.

So the elections have two purposes. Every 10 years, it is to reflect the population change; and every 2 years, including that 10-year census year election, which comes up in 2012, it's the quick reaction response to the will of the American people. Because our Founding Fathers understood that, if you put people in this office and let them have tenure for life like we are hearing about in States like Wisconsin or Ohio what tenure does to a person's due diligence, then there would be people that would sit here forever and never be responsible to the American people.

They recognize if they would set the Senate up in 6-year election cycles that the Senate wouldn't be accountable within a short period of time, not within 2 years or 4 years, but in 6 years. That was intentionally so the Senators would be more inclined to make long-term visionary decisions, and House Members could come in as the shock troops, so to speak, to bring the quick reaction if the Congress got out of sync with the people.

Well, it's pretty clear, Mr. Speaker, that the Congress got out of sync with the people last year. Actually, they began to get out of sync with the people well before that, more than 4 years ago.

But when President Obama came in he had huge majorities to work with in the House under Nancy Pelosi as Speaker and in the Senate with Harry Reid as leader, even to the extent that they had a massive majority in the House of Representatives, and they had a filibuster-proof majority in the United States Senate. And so they felt their oats, so to speak.

And their ideology, drove them, I think, to--maybe they didn't know it. I think some of them knew it, and I believe the Blue Dogs that were in this House of Representatives that lost their elections last November knew it. They knew they were walking the plank. They knew they were going down into political Davy Jones' locker if they voted for ObamaCare. But they did, because of leverage, because of legislative shenanigans, because--and I'll say it, Mr. Speaker, that to understand this, that ObamaCare, for a long time here in the House of Representatives, was H.R. 3200, a bill that came through the Energy and Commerce Committee in a fashion that was, at least envisioned, to be a functional fashion through our Constitution and by our Founding Fathers. But it came through, and there were long, long debates in committee, but H.R. 3200, which was the product of the House, didn't make it to the floor for a vote.

What came to the floor for a vote under ObamaCare was a bill that was written in Speaker Pelosi's office of 2,600 or so pages, plus or minus 100. It depends on the font type. But 2,600 or so pages of a bill that no, not one person had an opportunity to read it all before it came to the floor for a vote. And as much as it was studied by many, there are quite a few Americans now that have read it all.

But, Mr. Speaker, I'll submit this, that it has so many convoluted contraptions within it, that there isn't a single person on the planet, no matter how intellectual they might be, no matter how much experience they might have, there's not one person that has the capability of reading the ObamaCare bill and understanding all of the activities of that bill where it references other sections of the code and you have to read it and switch back and forth, zigzag in and out of existing code and look at the ObamaCare piece of legislation and, at the same time, understand the implications to Americans. It's one thing to understand what a bill does technically, and it's another to understand how people have to live underneath that legislation. So H.R. 3200 kicked off to the side. The product of the actual committee didn't come to the floor. The product of the Speaker's office, her staff, many of them young, junior people writing up a bill that they thought was right for America, dumped down on us here to be on a short period of debate and a vote be passed by the House, and could not and would not have passed the House the day it was brought to the floor for a vote except for a couple of little promises. One of those promises was that the Senate would pass a reconciliation package, which put other pieces into it in order to avoid the filibuster rule in the Senate. So in order to get that done, they had to bring some things that couldn't get passed under the filibuster rule in the Senate, write them up in a separate bill. Well, somehow that bill couldn't have been amended to the one here on the floor because that wouldn't have passed. And furthermore, the ObamaCare bill that was written in Nancy Pelosi's office couldn't have passed here on the floor because Bart Stupak had a dozen Democrats that locked up with the Republicans and said, we aren't going to vote for a bill that funds abortion. Nancy Pelosi wrote a bill that funds abortion. Harry Reid wrote a reconciliation package that they promised to send over to the House that did the things that his Senators needed to have happen and that House Members needed to have happen, and the piece of ObamaCare that was written by Nancy Pelosi that funds abortion was going to satisfy the Stupak dozen if the President signed an Executive order that amended the legislation that was before the House.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I wouldn't expect every American to be completely understanding this convoluted process. In fact, I'd expect most of them to be very confused about this. This was designed to be a confusing process. And the idea, the very idea that the President of the United States would take an oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, that everybody in this Chamber would do the same thing, and everybody in the Senate would do the same thing, and then believe somehow, all you have to do is read article I of the Constitution, and one can easily conclude that the President cannot amend a piece of legislation by signing an Executive order. He does not have the authority to do so. That is a constitutional violation.

And I have, in the very similar, if not exactly identical language that is in the Iowa Constitution, gone to court to prove exactly that when former Governor Vilsack thought that he could rewrite the code of Iowa by executive order. And the case of King v. Vilsack is in the books, Mr. Speaker, and the Court vacated the executive order of the Governor of the State of Iowa because he thought he could legislate by executive order. I said he couldn't. We went to court. The judge said he couldn't, and it's resolved in that issue, and the point is conceded by former Governor, now Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack.

That same tactic was used by the President of the United States, Barack Obama, when he signed an Executive order that was designed to amend the bill that was about to pass, actually he signed it after the bill passed. And the bill that passed on the condition that the President would sign an Executive order to take care of the funding for abortion and that the Senate would pass a reconciliation package that fit the other needs.

Why couldn't we do this under what we call here regular order? Why couldn't we have a committee process that would work a bill through?

Well, they did, but Nancy Pelosi dropped that one in the trash, wrote her own. Why couldn't they allow the reconciliation package, if it had any merit, to be amended on to the ObamaCare legislation, even if it's the legislation that was written in Speaker Pelosi's office, and rejected that out of committee? Why couldn't that have been an amendment that could have been voted on up or down here in the House of Representatives attached to the same piece of legislation?

Why couldn't they have put the language of Barack Obama's Executive order that supposedly says the Federal Government's not going to fund abortion. Why couldn't they have put that into the bill too and had an honest debate on an honest piece of legislation? Why not?

Well, because it wasn't. Because they could not pass it under an honest process. It had to be a legislative shenanigans process. That's what we got.

And as that bill went to final passage that night, I got a little bit of sleep that night, not much. I drafted legislation to repeal ObamaCare. Probably at the same time, me not knowing it, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota drafted legislation to repeal ObamaCare. We each got our legislation drafts down and they came to us shortly after 9 o'clock that morning, exactly the same 40 words, within 3 minutes of each other, that said we're going to--now, I'm going to do this a little bit in summary, but only 40 words--that this Congress would repeal the act of ObamaCare. And it references the two sections that are the components by number, by bill number, and the last words of that repeal bill is as if it had never been enacted.

So we introduced that legislation, actually separately. I joined on hers and she on mine, and we went to work to get signatures to move the repeal bill. That turned into a discharge petition with 173 signatures on it, and that would be throughout the summer and into the fall of last year that we were getting signatures on the discharge petition.

And Mr. Speaker, you will know that if there's 218 signatures, a majority of the House of Representatives on a discharge petition that represents a bill, that bill bypasses committee, and the Speaker can't block it, and it comes to the floor to be voted up or down without amendment. That's what a discharge petition does.

Well, it took us a long ways down the line of a commitment to repeal ObamaCare, and it was a tool that was used by several, and I'll say many candidates for Congress who now, some of them elected to this Congress, part of the 87 freshmen Republicans, all of whom ran on the repeal of ObamaCare. And I believe, and don't know this, and I've heard no exceptions, but I believe it's also likely that all of them ran on defunding ObamaCare, cutting the funding off, because we knew that a Republican majority here in the House could pass the repeal of ObamaCare, which we did in the second week here, under H.R. 2.

The second highest priority for Speaker Boehner was the repeal of ObamaCare. H.R. 1 was funding the government; H.R. 2 was repealing ObamaCare.

That legislation passed the House with a resounding solid bipartisan vote and went over to the Senate, where every Republican in the Senate voted to repeal ObamaCare.

We committed to cutting off the funding to ObamaCare, and that's the next step. And I said, since last July at least, to cut off all the funding to ObamaCare in every appropriations bill that comes out of the House of Representatives.

Well, H.R. 1 was the single piece of legislation where we had the maximum amount of leverage. That is the funding for the duration of the year for all of the functions of government.

We learned sometime last year that there were automatic appropriations

deceptively, I believe, written into ObamaCare that are designed to create this perpetual money machine that funds the implementation of ObamaCare. Some call it mandatory spending. I do not. I call it automatic spending. There is automatic spending in ObamaCare written into it. And the number is still on my hand in Sarah Palin fashion, $105.5 billion automatically appropriated, spent in an authorization bill completely outside of regular order of this Congress, with a handful of exceptions, in short term and few dollars. But in scope and in magnitude, no one has ever tried, no one has ever had the audacity to try to impose an automatic appropriation on this Congress that would be $105 billion.

Some of that money goes beyond that. That is just 10 years. Some of it is appropriated, Mr. Speaker, in perpetuity; $1 billion a year here and $1 billion there that goes on every year that can't be stopped unless Congress goes in and shuts it off. And that is what we need to do, Mr. Speaker. We need to do this in every bill.

This continuing resolution that is before us now must include within it the language that cuts off the funding to ObamaCare, the current and the previous, the language that cuts off the automatic spending in ObamaCare.

There is $18.6 billion for fiscal year 2010, most of it not spent yet, that implements ObamaCare, $18.6 billion of the $105.5 billion, and there is another $4.95 billion in 2011 that automatically appropriates to ObamaCare. That is $23.6 billion, Mr. Speaker, that goes in to kick ObamaCare in. It has been found unconstitutional by two Federal courts, and it has been rejected by the American people who sent 87 freshmen Republicans here to repeal ObamaCare, and we are sitting here looking at $23.6 billion in automatic spending. We are struggling to cut the budget by $61.5 billion. Well, let's do that. But over here is $23.6 billion in automatic spending that goes on.

And if, as I believe, Harry Reid is committed to shutting our government down--and by the way, the majority leader in the United States Senate speaks, I think, as a proxy for the President. What does the President want here? Well, he wants to delay, or he would be telling Harry Reid to pass something. And I believe Harry Reid wants to delay and then shut down.

They have convinced me that their intention all along was to shut down this government. That is why they agreed to a short-term continuing resolution until March 4, so they could posture themselves to be in a position to force a shutdown of the government. They think that they can blame it on Republicans, and then the public will punish Republicans at the polls.

Well, Mr. Speaker, I will submit that is not the way it is and not the way it will be now, because John Boehner and Eric Cantor's leadership have demonstrated clearly that this majority in this Congress, the Speaker's office, the majority leader's office down the line have three times--H.R. 1, 2-week CR, 3-week CR--demonstrated there are the dollars for the legitimate functions of government. There are the dollars for it. We have provided it three times here, and three times the Senate hasn't moved on anything of their own initiative.

So they have convinced me that their goal all along was to shut down the government. And if I didn't believe that, all I had to do was listen to Senator Schumer or Howard Dean or some of the language coming out of Majority Leader Reid. I am convinced that they are committed to shutting this government down.

If they do that, we need to say to them: Here are all the resources, again, and no money to implement ObamaCare.

If there is no money to implement ObamaCare but all the money that is necessary for other fiscally responsible, legitimate functions of government and they go in and shut this government down and point their fingers at us, the American people will know differently. They will understand that it always was the strategy to shut the government down by the Democrats in the Senate, and the White House, and that we are committed to keeping it open. But we cannot be allowing the funding to go forward to an unconstitutional taking of American liberty, which is ObamaCare on its face.

It is unconstitutional in four different ways: It is irresponsible; it is unsustainable; it can't be funded; and we can't find the funds to fund it all. It is $2.6 trillion in outlays in the first 10 years.

We must, Mr. Speaker, cut off the automatic funding to ObamaCare, and any funding going forward to ObamaCare let the courts decide. And we decide here in the House of Representatives to draw a line, draw a bright line and stand firm. That all needs to happen in that way.

And history tells us this, Mr. Speaker: That when there was a government shutdown, the argument last time was over spending, most of it within either Medicare or Medicaid. If my memory serves me correctly, it was over $300 billion in cuts. Whether it would be a plus-up or a plus-down from that, you can't take a stand on a money figure. You can't say, I'm going to stand and fight on $300 billion. But if they lower my cuts down to $299 billion, I'm going to be a ``no.'' Or, if they take it up to $301 billion, I will be happier yet. You cannot stand on a principle that is a dollar figure, because whatever you pick it is always going to be on a sliding scale. It is not a principle.

We are standing on $61.25 billion right now. Well, if they lower those cuts down to $61 billion, do we say ``no''? I think that the Democrats on the other side understand that. That is why they have floated this number of $33 billion in cuts. They haven't said whether they were willing to accept it yet.

They got to $33 billion in cuts this way: They took $61.5 billion, divided it by two, and rounded it up to $33 billion. That is how they arrived at the number. There isn't any question in my mind about that. And they want to be able to say, well, we met you halfway and a little more, so you should be happy that we are willing to compromise. To them, compromise is: Take the number, cut it in half, and then, if you can't get agreement, cut it in half again. And they call it compromise.

Well, I have said money itself is not a principle. You can't stand on something strongly unless you are standing on a principle. Well, a principle is an unconstitutional 2,600-page taking of American liberty, the nationalization of our skin and everything inside it called ObamaCare. That is a principle.

It is completely unsuitable for an American people that live with the liberty and freedom that God gave us, that our Founding Fathers so well articulated in the Declaration and in the Constitution, that is part of our tradition, part of our history, and part of the inspiration for the entire globe to be knocking on the door wanting to come to the United States of America. Because of what? Liberty, Mr. Speaker, listed out in the Bill of Rights: Freedom of speech, religion, and the press. Freedom to peaceably assemble, and petition the government for redress of grievances. The Second Amendment, to keep and bear arms. The right to own property. Protection from double jeopardy. To be tried by a jury of your peers. The philosophy of Federalism that devolves the powers down to the States or the people respectively. All of this and going on. Equal protection under the law and the 14th Amendment. On and on and on.

These are the inspirations for a vigorous people, a people that have a belief and a common cause and a common culture, a cultural continuity of belief in our liberty.

And they would impose us, what? Socialized medicine? A Federal taking of our right to manage our own health care? And part of that management would be to buy a health insurance policy that is driven by the marketplace that people demand and want? That would have any of the bells and whistles that the market demands and have every bell and whistle that the market demands, and should not have mandates imposed on it by the Federal Government that are imposed within the States.

People should be able to buy their own health insurance policy across State lines. The protection for the monopolies of State health insurance companies is anti-market, it is anti-free market, it is anti- freedom. And John Shadegg's bill that he pushed so hard while he was here needs to be something that goes to the President's desk, that allows people to buy insurance across State lines; so that a

young man 23 years old paying $6,000 a year for a typical policy in New Jersey, laden with mandates, could instead go buy that typical policy in Kentucky for not $6,000 but $1,000. Doesn't that help our costs? Doesn't that get more people insured? Doesn't that do the right thing and protect people?

That is just one. I could take you down through a list of seven or eight or nine good solid Republican ideas, most, if not all, of which can come to this floor as standalone pieces of legislation and be sent over to the Senate, where Harry Reid would push them off his desk into the trash can. They wouldn't have the respect of going in his desk drawer.

Why? Because they are liberty oriented; they are free market oriented; they are constitutional; they are principled, and it gives people back their liberty.

But this country, the United States of America, this vigorous people that we are, we have a vitality that is unique. We have all of the vitality that comes from the rights that I have talked about. We have the vitality of the free enterprise system, which is the foundation of our economic system.

I would point out that there are flashcards that newly arriving immigrants, or those, I should say, that are studying for their citizenship test, mostly that is 5 years in, studying for their citizenship test, flashcards. On one side it will say, Who is the father of our country? You snap it over, it says, George Washington. Next card, Who emancipated the slaves? Snap that card over, Abraham Lincoln. Next card, What is the economic system of the United States of America? Free enterprise capitalism. That is an axiom of faith of the American people, that we are free to spend our money as we choose.

ObamaCare commandeers our paycheck, Mr. Speaker. It takes it over. And they say you must buy this health insurance policy that is approved or produced by the Federal Government, and if you don't do that, we are going to send the IRS in to punish you, to fine you. It is a punishment if you don't buy it.

If they can pass a law that requires you to buy a product that is produced or approved by the Federal Government, if they can commandeer 5 percent or 10 percent, or in many cases 25 or 40 or even 50 percent of your payroll to pay for a health insurance premium, if they can commandeer any part of your earnings and force you to buy something, the next step is they can commandeer your money to buy a General Motors car because their investment may not be doing so well, or a Chrysler. Or maybe you could buy some shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They took that over, too, didn't they? Maybe they can force you to invest in the student loan program. They took that over, too, didn't they? They could force you to buy a certain kind of washing machine, a certain kind of shoes. And they can also force you, at that point, you have to buy so much diet pop instead of non-diet pop, so many ratios of carrots versus candy bars.

If they can commandeer 1 percent of your paycheck and force you to buy a product, they can commandeer 100 percent of your paycheck and force you to buy all products, to the point where you are enslaved by the Federal Government. How can that be constitutional for a free people?

Mr. Speaker, I will submit it is not and it cannot be, and that is why this House voted resoundingly to repeal ObamaCare. That is why every Republican here and in the Senate voted to repeal ObamaCare. That is why we must cut off all funding to implement or enforce ObamaCare in every appropriations bill, and that is why they deceptively plugged into ObamaCare the automatic appropriations of $105.5 billion, and that is why they front-loaded it with $18.6 billion in the FY 2010 budget to intensively implement ObamaCare, and that is why there is another $4.59 billion in this fiscal year. There is $23.6 billion sitting there in the pot.

And think of this, Mr. Speaker. If they are successful in forcing a shutdown of this government, and while they are busily trying to point their fingers at those of us who provide the resources to keep it open, we would still see $23.6 billion hard at work implementing ObamaCare. The lights could go off in Federal offices all over America because of a shutdown, but you could drive down and look at where the lights are on. Guess what? That is the $23.6 billion still there, still implementing ObamaCare, like Santa's little elves, making sure we have socialized medicine before the lights come back on.

That is what we are faced with, Mr. Speaker. That is where we must draw a line. We must stand and do this fight. The fight is inevitable. So choose the ground when the army is the strongest and on the ground that we can stand and fight on, and that is this: Provide the resources for the legitimate functions of this government, not for the illegitimate functions of this government. And if the President of the United States working through his mouthpiece, Harry Reid, or directly brings about a shutdown, it will be about a bright line between all of the legitimate functions of government versus perhaps a legislative tantrum, an act of audacity and narcissism that his signature piece of legislation called ObamaCare means more to the President of the United States than all of the functions of government put together, Mr. Speaker.

For all those reasons, I say, this is the week to draw the line. This is the week to do the fight. This is the week to do the battle. We have to have it. We can't avoid it. Let's get it over with so we can get on with the legitimate functions of the United States Government.

I thank the gentleman from Texas, the good judge, who has taught me a few things about all of this. One of those things is sitting on the Judiciary Committee with the gentleman from Texas is, and I haven't learned it very well, but at least I saw the demonstration on how to listen. One of the common denominators of the judges from Texas that we have serving in this Congress is they are all good listeners. They also have heard a lot of stories, some the truth and some not, and they sort that out pretty well.

When I hear Judge Carter come to the floor to tell us how it is, I'm pretty confident that he has listened really carefully and drawn a judgment as to what's the truth and what isn't and boiled it down to the essential facts of Constitution and law and common sense and rendered a verdict. So as I hear this verdict emerging here from the presentation this evening, it calls me to the floor to say thank you to the gentleman from Texas for bringing this up, for all the times that you've come to the floor and sometimes fought a lonely battle that turned out to stand on a good cause.

That's the way good things get started. It's usually one person starting this out and then truth seems to attract more people to a truthful and good and a just cause. I am interested in the gentleman's presentation here and not particularly informed but I came to listen. I would be happy to continue my listening.

I thank the gentleman from Texas.

As I listen to this presentation, a number of things occur to me about what happens when you have the Federal agencies and the Federal agencies are passing rules and regulations that even though there is a broad authority that's granted to those agencies by this Congress, some of the things that they do are beyond the imagination of the people that debated or voted for the bill in the first place.

I look at the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, which are more than 30 years old by now. They've turned into something way beyond the imagination of the people that passed them. The environmentalists that supported them then seemed to be on the edge of what would be considered mainstream. Looking back on that, they would be considered mainstream now. But the problem that we have, and particularly with EPA, would be that the mothers and fathers of the EPA employees that first implemented the rules and regulations of the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, now their children have picked this up and others from outside, a second generation of people.

They have come into these professions now with--like many young people do--and it's a very good thing to be idealistic and have a sense of a cause--but if you look at a law that was written in 1978, and you apply it with a vision of having a cause that you want to be championed for in 2011, quite often the second generation environmentalist is something entirely different than the first generation environmentalist. And they will interpret the law and write rules beyond the scope of the imagination of those who drafted it and ratified it and the President that signed it.

And so I deal with things back in an environmental perspective, having spent my life's work in the soil conservation business. We have gone out and done some drainage work. Mostly, it's been surface work, permanent practices--terraces, dams, and waterways--and I've envisioned that we would want to send all the raindrops down through the soil profile to purify that water in nature's intended way and keep the soil from washing down stream and ending up in the Gulf of Mexico.

And yet the regulations that come from some of the EPA initiatives are things such as--I can think of protected streams, an issue that came to many States, but it came to Iowa. It was one of the things that drew me into political life. They wrote a rule that said that these waters for these streams, these 115 streams that were designed to be protected for their natural riparian beauty, to quote the rule, some of them were drainage ditches that I had floated and walked those streams all through western Iowa. And some of those streams were just drainage ditches. There was no natural riparian left-over beauty because they

had all been changed. But they wanted to preserve them and protect them and call them endangered streams.

And so I began going to the hearings for the rules. And in the rules they wrote that these streams, and according to the geographical boundaries that are defined here, and--``waters hydrologically connected to them'' shall be declared protected streams and shall be under the purview of the Department of Natural Resources, which regulates for the EPA. And I began to ask the question. And here's how language gets stretched. I asked the question, What does ``waters hydrologically connected to'' mean? And the regulators would stand before the public meeting and they would say, We don't know. You're here presenting a rule and you don't know what it means, ``waters hydrologically connected to them.'' No, we don't know. Then take it out. We can't. Why can't you? We can't. How do you know you can't if you don't know what it means? Well, we're here to defend this rule.

So I followed that road show around the State, and they knew when I walked in actually the second meeting who I was and what I was there for. And I asked one question and I didn't get an answer. I just opened my mouth for the second question and they said, Only one question per person. And I said, I drove 2\1/2\ hours to get here. It's going to take me 2\1/2\ hours to get home. And I've got a lot more than one question. I'm going to stand here until I get them all answered.

Anyway, it came to this. They had decided what amounted to every square foot of the State of Iowa under rules that were ``slipperly'' deceptive. And it was the language that said ``waters hydrologically connected to.'' I know that moist soil will have in it a water content of 25, 28, 30 percent and still be fairly stable. So that would regulate us all the way up to the kitchen sink. Two water molecules touching each other are hydrologically connected. And that's one of the things that environmental extremists sought to impose upon us in the State that gave them all kinds of latitude.

And another one would be when they decided to declare wetlands by aerial photographs. And the aerial photographers would look down, take a shot, and if there were a certain amount of vegetation growing in the field, they declared it to be a wetland that otherwise would have been farmed.

And so there could be somebody missed with the herbicide on top of the hill and the foxtail would grow. It would show up in an aerial photograph. The Corps of Engineers would declare that to be a wetland on the top of the hill where water drained completely away. This is how government regulation gets out of hand and starts to take over the property rights of the individuals who have a right to use that property in a responsible way as a means of an income to produce crops, even if it happens to be cotton, which we don't have much of in my district.

So I just think here that this Congress should do this: we should bring every rule before this Congress for an affirmative vote before it can have the force and effect of law. We can do it en bloc. Bring them all in together. We need to give any Member an opportunity to divide a rule out and force a separate vote on it, and we need to give Members the opportunity to amend them.

And the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Davis) has a bill that addresses this in this fashion. It's not as broad in scope as I would go, but it is a very, very good start on getting this Congress under control and the regulators under control and giving Congress the authority that's vested in us in the Constitution rather than subcontracting it off to the agencies and letting them run this government at will.

So I appreciate the gentleman from Texas giving me an opportunity to vent myself on these frustrating issues. I appreciate your leadership.

If the gentleman would yield.

If the title of that bill is the king's X bill, I'm going to be very interested in signing on.

I thank the gentlelady for recognizing me here on the floor of the House, Madam Speaker, and appreciate the privilege to address you. I came to this floor, one, to hear from Judge Carter and to listen to the presentation that he made. And the other component of it is I came here to talk about one or perhaps two subject matters. One of them is ObamaCare, as one might imagine.

I would make this point that--first, Madam Speaker, if it's possible that there's anybody that doesn't know why ObamaCare is so bad, if they maybe haven't heard the argument in some time and they're forgetting about how bad ObamaCare is, and if they're starting to hear the language about what is redeemable about ObamaCare, I want to make it real clear: nothing. There is not one single component of ObamaCare that is worthy of us making any effort to do anything except to repeal it all, eradicate it all, pull it all out by the roots.

I listen to some Members of this Congress that will say, Well, don't you want your children to be on your insurance when they're 26? No. I raised them to grow up. I want them to take their own responsibility. If they can be elected to the United States Congress when they're 25, then I think that's a pretty good age to at least say you are free, on your on--well, first, you got your car keys when you were 16--your license, anyway.

Then you get to vote when you're 18 and choose the next leader of the Free World. Then you get to go out and, let me say, go into the tavern legally when you're 21 and get elected to the United States Congress when you're 25. Then they kick you off of Mommy and Daddy's insurance when you're 26? Somehow I think that delays the growing-up process.

I think that we need to have people growing up and taking personal responsibility at an early age rather than delaying it to a later age. If the States want to have it at 26, let them have it at 26. If insurance companies want to provide for that market, let them write the policies to provide for that market; but the Federal Government should not stick a mandate on this that requires all health insurance policies to keep the kids on until they're 26.

Let's just say there's a young person who gets elected to Congress, like--well, yes, I would think that there are some Members of the new class that would fit very close to that category. Would one really think that they would come in here at age 25 and transition from their parents' health insurance on over to the Federal opportunity of health insurance that they can access and pay their share of the premiums that come with this job of working in this Congress and maybe never have a window where they were responsible to go out in the marketplace and buy their own health insurance?

I think that's actually a bad idea, but if people want it, let them drive that through their States.

Some will say that we want to cover preexisting conditions so that children cannot be denied insurance on policies that their parents have. Well, that's a good idea, and it's one that can be sustained by demand in the marketplace. If that doesn't do it, it can certainly be sustained by mandates within the States, but it does not require, Madam Speaker, that the Federal Government get involved in mandating to the States, actually mandating to everybody in America, what shall be done with insurance.

So now I've used up, I think, the two things that had some popularity in ObamaCare. That's it--insurance for 26-year-olds and no denial because of preexisting conditions to children whose parents have policies.

If I want to go out and buy a policy that ensures that my children could stay on it, that policy is available in the marketplace. I will say this, that before ObamaCare wrecked the markets and drove out a number of health insurance companies, we had 1,300 health insurance companies in this country which were viable in the marketplace, competing, providing all kinds of policy varieties for customers to choose from--in fact, over 100,000 health insurance policy varieties and 1,300 companies. There were 100,000 policy varieties. We had plenty of competition. ObamaCare has driven out competition. It has not added to it. It has driven out competition. It has made it harder. It has driven up the cost of health care.

The indecision and the fear of what's happening has caused the entire health care industry to be frozen in place. Now they come along and say, Well, if you're not going to repeal it, can you accommodate me in some way?--perhaps in some way like granting them a waiver. I'm hearing individuals say, I want my waiver. They know that there have been 1,040 waivers to ObamaCare.

Madam Speaker, I know that there are people out there who are listening who maybe don't understand what that means. It is this: ObamaCare is the law of the land. It is imposed upon everyone in America. A law is to be applied to every individual in an equal fashion. We might sit in different categories. We might have Medicare that applies differently to somebody who's 65 than it does to somebody who's 60 years old; but these are waivers to statutes and to individuals and to entities.

From my standpoint, it's unheard of, and where that authority came from I did not see coming; but this administration has found out that they pushed a law that's so bad--so bad--that they are granting waivers to companies, to entities, and to entire States, like the State of Maine.

Now we find out that one of the people who has taken credit for helping to write ObamaCare, the gentleman from New York, who, I believe, is a candidate for the mayor of New York City, is now calling for a waiver for the City of New York to ObamaCare. So maybe, if he gets his way, it won't be 1,040; it will be 1,041 waivers.

That's appalling to think that you would sit in a strategy meeting/ session and try to drive a policy that, I believe, is flat out socialized medicine and argue that it's good for everybody in America because they're too ignorant to take care of their own health care and now find out that the policy is so ignorant you want a waiver from it for the largest city in America. That's appalling to think that that would happen.

1,040--1,040 waivers. Let me see. The IRS will enforce this. It will punish people with an extra penalty if they don't comply. Let me see. The E-Z formula. The E-Z form for the IRS is the 1040EZ. We've had 1040 waivers, 1,040 waivers. It's E-Z for them, Madam Speaker, but it's not going to be easy for anyone who doesn't get a waiver.

We have this thing called the equal protection clause. It's in the Constitution, the 14th Amendment. Everybody is going to be protected with equal protection. ObamaCare, itself, violates the equal protection clause because it gives some American citizens a different standard than others. I'm thinking of Florida and their Medicare Advantage, which they have an exemption from under ObamaCare. Even though the cornhusker kickback was removed because, actually, Nebraskans rejected it--to their great credit--Floridians didn't reject their exemptions so that they kept their Advantage. That was an existing policy that exempted them from the wipe-out of Medicare Advantage, which happened to people like Iowans, for example. The equal protection clause? Not hardly. It's a violation of the equal protection clause. It's an unconstitutional bill, ObamaCare.

But I forgot to tell you, Madam Speaker, all of the reasons why it's bad. It cannot be afforded. It's a $2.6 trillion total outlay for the first full 10 years once it would be implemented, and it increases taxes almost to that much over that period of time. It cuts Medicare, which is going to have a huge increase from 40 million to 70 million recipients of Medicare over the next few years. That huge increase cuts Medicare by $532 billion. It purports to reform Medicare. While this cut we know has got to actually happen, it just simply calculates it into the CBO score.

We can't afford ObamaCare. It's unsustainable therefore. It will reduce the research and development. It will increase lines and delays. It will ration care, and it will take that care out of the cost of many people and put it on a mandate that will force more people into Medicaid, and there will be companies that will be forced off the coverage they now provide for their employees and force those people onto a program that's federally subsidized, where there is a fund that will fund their health insurance premiums, which is also unaffordable.

All these things are bad. There are so many bad things about ObamaCare that I don't think there is any one person in the country who could stand up in 30 minutes and list all of the bad things about ObamaCare. It boils down, though, to this: it's unaffordable. It's unsustainable. It reduces research and development. It reduces the quality and lengthens the lines. It delays the service. It rations the care.

It takes away one more thing. The most important thing about ObamaCare is this: I believe it is the unconstitutional takings of American liberty. It is unconstitutional in numbers of ways, three or four ways at least. American liberty is something that is precious; and to think that the Federal Government would step in and commandeer, usurp, the God-given liberty and right that we have to manage our own health care and turn it into a rationed service, according to formula, in which only government would decide who would get what service and when and who would be on the waiting list for surgery and who would be on the waiting list to die without surgery, is a result of ObamaCare. It cannot be argued or refuted.

They put you on a waiting list for a hip replacement, or they put you on a waiting list to die without. That's one of the things that happens. They don't seem to think that's what they're doing willfully, and I don't accuse them of willfully wanting to do that. It's a consequence of the thick-skulled action of people who believe that there is a Socialist model to produce their version of Utopia rather than the individual dynamics that come from people who have free choices.

But we are a vigorous people, Madam Speaker. We're a unique people. We're the kind of people who recognize from the beginning that our rights come from God. We are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That pursuit of happiness wasn't the pursuit of hedonism; it was the pursuit of perfection, just the pursuit of perfection--both intellectual and physical improvements. That's the pursuit of happiness in the Greek form, and that's what our Founding Fathers understood.

They're unique, vigorous people with rights that come from God, and of all the things that flow through with this, these rights, many of them laid out in our Bill of Rights: freedom of speech, religion, and the press; freedom to peaceably assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances; the right to keep and bear arms--the right to keep and bear arms; the property rights that are the Fifth Amendment; the right to protection of trial by jury, to be tried by a jury of your peers, and the right to protection against double jeopardy; the rights that are endowed to the States and then the people, respectively, in the Ninth and mostly the Tenth Amendment.

All of those are unique things to Americans. They don't apply to Western European democratic socialist states or, should I say, social democratic states. They don't apply to people in Canada. They don't have that same level of rights. They don't apply to people in Mexico or anyplace in this hemisphere or anyplace else on this planet. These rights, as understood and envisioned by our Founding Fathers, apply only to Americans. And they are the foundation of why Americans are a unique and vigorous people, and they're the foundation of why we are the unchallenged greatest Nation in the world. And we have a unique vigor, and that vigor comes from the foundation of these rights.

But, Madam Speaker, I would take the position this, that you could take all of these rights that we have, that we identify as coming from our Creator, from God, and you can bestow them upon any other people on the planet and ask them to go out and build a vigorous society that would match and mirror that of America, and I will submit that that effort would fail. It would fail no matter if they had unlimited natural resources, if they had free enterprise to no end, if they had a reverence for the Constitution the way we do.

You could take this package, this vision of American rights and Constitution, you could put it in the richest land in the world or the poorest and offer it to any people on the planet, and I will submit that they could not succeed in producing another country that has the vigor and the success that this country has. And I'm not standing here, Madam Speaker, taking credit for this. I'm standing here giving reverence to this gift that we have that is America.

And I will continue, that of all of the rights that are foundations of those beautiful marble pillars of American exceptionalism and the free enterprise component that goes along with it--property rights, freedom of speech, religion, and the press, and the list goes on-- there's one other component that no other nation can have, and that is the unique vigor of the American people.

And we are a people that have been blessed by the vigor of every contributing, every donor civilization on the planet, no matter the country. The people that came here, the legal immigrants that came to the United States, came here with the vision of the American Dream. They were attracted to the vision of the American Dream. And so we were able to, by good sense of circumstance and forethought and vision, skim the cream of the crop off of every donor civilization on the planet: the people that had a vision, that had a dream, that had a vision, that wanted to test themselves, that wanted to build something that went beyond their generation; people that wanted to leave the world a better place than it was when they found it; people that wanted to prepare the ground for the next generation to farm, so to speak, and in some cases literally, these are the people that we got that came to America from every country, whether it would be England or Scotland or Wales or Poland or Germany or Italy or any of the countries on the planet, all across Asia, all across Central and South America; people that had a vision that they wanted to live free and breathe free and build something and have children and grandchildren that could benefit from their labors.

And their vision and their intuitiveness and their creativity and the entrepreneurial nature, they came to America, and that set up a natural filter, natural filter for people to save up enough money and to get passage to come to the United States. Some of them sold themselves for as long as 7 years of labor just to pay the passage to get here. That's a dream. You don't get any calls that come like that. You get people that are vigorous, and we attracted them, and that's the American spirit.

This vigorous American spirit is totally unsuitable for a social democracy or socialism or hardcore leftist communist Marxism or any of those other utopian philosophies that many of them emerged out of the non-English speaking portion of Western Europe, and their philosophies permeated a lot of the components of the globe because they're built upon class envy, but they're not built upon the truths of human nature nor are they built upon our rights coming from God.

And so here we are in this country, fantastic that we are the recipients of such gifts, and the gifts that we have and the vigor that we have, we need to understand what it's rooted in. And it's rooted in these freedoms and it's rooted in the filter, the filter that filtered out people that wanted to come here but didn't have quite the ambition to make it happen. It was hard to get here, and you had to have a dream to want to come here; and when you came here, we respected hard work and smart work and people that planned and invested and they were rewarded, and we admired them and raised our children to emulate them.

How many people like Donald Trump today, even though--like I said, I don't have anything bad to say about Donald Trump, not here into the Record. It's because he's been successful, people admire him. Bill Gates, because he's been successful. Steve Jobs, they admire him because he's been successful. They've been successful because they've been entrepreneurs. They've been creative. They've worked within the free market system. They have made our lives better and improved the quality of our lives and lowered the cost of the services that we need for our quality of life to be upheld and made those contributions and gotten rich in the process. That's the free enterprise system.

So here we are, these vigorous people, and some of the nanny state advocates here in this Congress--actually, it was a majority of them last year--decided they want to impose ObamaCare on us and take away our personal vigor. They wanted to take over the responsibility of managing our health care. What they finally did was, because ObamaCare is right now the law of the land, they nationalized our skin and everything inside it, a government takeover of my body. The government took my body over and the body of 308 million Americans, and now they're going to tell us when we get health care, under what conditions we get health care, that we must have their health insurance policy that they prescribe for us. They've taken away our individual responsibility. They've nationalized our skin and everything inside it.

And they had the audacity--and the President's fond of that word ``audacity.'' It was in the title of one of his books, ``The Audacity of Hope.'' The President of the United States had the audacity to impose a 10 percent tax on the outside of the skin that he nationalized inside of if you go into a tanning salon to turn yourself a little browner. That is a reach of the nanny state to impose a tax. They wanted to tax your non-Diet Coke. They want to manage our lifestyles in such a way that they will tax us if we eat fat foods and then presume we should get a discount if we eat healthy foods.

This is a nanny state personified. ObamaCare is so bad. It's bad because of all the things that I've listed about the cost and the quality and the lines and the rationing and the net result of all of that, Madam Speaker, but the worst part is it is an unconstitutional taking of American liberty. It takes from us the ability, the right to manage our own health care, and it must go.

And when that legislation was passed and signed into law--I believe the anniversary date was March 23 of this year--I laid awake most of the night and slept a little bit and got up in the middle of the night and drafted a piece of legislation to repeal ObamaCare. It was waiting at the door of the service team to be formally put into the form

of a bill when they opened up that morning.

Very interestingly, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota had done the same thing, and her legislation came down within 3 minutes of mine, exactly the same 40 words that said we're going to repeal ObamaCare and, ``as if it had never been enacted'' were the last words in the bill. Forty words, repeal ObamaCare, gives the names of the bill, the numbers of the bill, et cetera, the last line, ``as if it had never been enacted.''

Rip it out by the roots, Madam Speaker.

Now, that was not necessarily unheard of, but there aren't many precedents in the history of Congress for repeal legislation to be filed actually the next day after a huge piece of legislation has been passed. But that is what we did, and we started down that path immediately, working to get signatures on the bill and building up the support to repeal ObamaCare.

By mid-summer we had a discharge petition. By the end of the 111th Congress, going into the election as the only part that counted, we had 173 signatures on my discharge petition, people that wanted to see ObamaCare repealed come to the floor, bypass the committee process, bypass the Speaker's ability to kill the bill before it got here, and bring it to the floor for a vote. We had 173; we needed 218.

And the message that went out across America was useful in that some Members of Congress that are here today will say straight up they wouldn't be here if it were not for the discharge petition and they could challenge their opponent to sign it. And almost every Democrat refused to do so. And now there are 87 new freshmen Republicans. Every single one has run on the repeal of ObamaCare. As far as I know, everyone has run on the defunding of ObamaCare. And I know that every single Republican in the House of Representatives voted for H.R. 2, which is the repeal of ObamaCare. And I know that every single Republican in the United States Senate voted to repeal ObamaCare. The language that we generated then is the language that emerged into H.R. 2. And today every Republican and some Democrats are on record voting to repeal ObamaCare.

Now, that didn't stop there. The strategy that I put together almost a year ago was this: that we needed to win the majority, which we did; bring the repeal of ObamaCare, which we did. It didn't succeed in the United States Senate, but behind that always was this majority here in the House of Representatives has an obligation to cut off all funding that would be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare.

And I have been consistent with that language all the way through last summer into last fall and past the election and beyond. Repealing ObamaCare, then cut off the funding to ObamaCare. Stop the implementation of ObamaCare and stop the enforcement of it by shutting off the budget dollars and hold this waste of money to this unconstitutional bill of ObamaCare until such a time as we can elect a President who will sign the repeal.

The date for that to happen in my strategy is January 20, 2013, Madam Speaker. And that's the date that the next President of the United States will be inaugurated out here on the west portico of the Capitol Building.

And when that President stands there and takes that oath of office, it's my vision and my dream and my commitment to work towards it, I am going to ask him take your oath of office with pen in hand, Mr. President-elect, and I'm going to ask you to solemnly swear to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States to the best of your ability so help you God. And once that statement is made and it's completed and the oath of office is finished and he's formally the President of the United States, and before that new President on January 20 of 2013 shakes the hand of Chief Justice John Roberts, I want that pen in his hand to come right down to the parchment, and I want him to sign the repeal of the ObamaCare right there on the podium of the west portico of the Capitol, right out there as the first act of the next President of the United States. That's my vision. That's my commitment.

But until then shutting off funding to ObamaCare is a must-do. And most of America knows by now that there is $105.5 billion automatically appropriated in a deceptive way by the way the bill was drafted up in Nancy Pelosi's office, not going through committee, not having the work of the will of this Congress, but drafted up in her office and dropped on us with hardly any notice and certainly no time to inform the American people of what was in it, automatic, unprecedented in their scope, appropriations to the tune of $105.5 billion, Madam Speaker.

And already it automatically appropriated in the 2010 budget. So that's $18.6 billion and $4.95 billion in the 2011 budget. It totals up to $23.6 billion, already appropriated, almost all of it set aside for the purposes of implementing ObamaCare.

We must have a showdown. We must face the President down. If the President demands that ObamaCare be funded, what are we going to do? Say, no, Mr. President, that he vetoes legislation that would otherwise fund all of government?

And if President Obama does that or if Harry Reid continues to perform as his proxy and shuts off anything that we send over that way even though we've demonstrated our desire to keep the legitimate functions of government, all of them, functioning, if the President shuts it down or Harry Reid shuts it down and this government comes to a halt, here's the irony.

The irony is this: lights would go out in Federal offices around this land. Not all of them because essential services will keep going. But lights will go out. And as the lights go out in the nonessential service Federal offices, what will be going in the other offices? ObamaCare will continue even in a government shutdown to be implemented because there's $23.6 billion sitting in their pot to spend out of to implement ObamaCare, and we could have shutdown after shutdown, and ObamaCare is implemented and implemented.

We must hold the line. We must stand on this principle. It is our obligation. It is unconstitutional. We take an oath to uphold the Constitution too. And that includes defending the Constitution and opposing unconstitutional legislation with every tool at our disposal.

The President and the Democrats, I believe, Madam Speaker, plan to shut this government down. That's why they agreed to a continuing resolution in December that funds the government until March 4. It was to bring this to a head. They wanted to box us into a corner and then blame Republicans for shutting the government down.

Well, it's real clear: Republican leadership wants to avoid a shutdown. It's clear to me that Democrats are determined to provide a shutdown and try to blame it on Republicans. And it's clear to me that if we fund all the functions of government except ObamaCare and if the President brings about a shutdown, it won't be the House Republicans; it will be Harry Reid as proxy for the President.

If that happens, what we're going to see happen here is the President of the United States could veto an appropriations bill that funds everything except ObamaCare. It would be a Presidential executive tantrum that he would be throwing. That tantrum that he would be throwing would be saying this: that his signature piece of legislation, ObamaCare, means more to him than all of the other legitimate functions of government combined.

That's the scenario that we are in. The American people will render a verdict when that day comes that there is that kind of a showdown. And it must come. The American people will render a verdict. They will side with us. They are not going to side with the President who has imposed ObamaCare when 62 percent of Americans want it repealed, 51 percent intensely want to do so, and only 24 percent want to keep it in any kind of a vigorous way.

So, Madam Speaker, I will say this: we have an obligation to stand and hold our ground. This showdown will come. It must come. If it doesn't, we will be capitulating to the President in every way that he's willing to fight. I say let's stand our ground now. Let's have our fight now. Let's get it over with, and let's get on with the business of the 112th Congress.

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