Floor Statements

I thank the gentlelady from Tennessee for yielding time.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor to rise in support of this bill. The Federal Government has a few constitutional duties, and we seem to have taken on a lot of Federal responsibilities. As time goes on, every time we see a need, we think we have to tap into the taxpayers and create another government function. But this is not one of those functions that is an enumerated power of the United States Congress. It is not something that we are compelled to do. It is something that is discretionary. We are into operations at a time of austerity, a time when we see what's happened as a prelude to the American economy, if we just look over to Europe, in places like, oh, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain, for example. That's the direction we're heading with our economy. And as we see this discretionary spending grow along with our entitlements grow and our economy contract, we also need to take a look at these items that are at our discretion as to whether or not to fund.

I think that the image that we have seen on the videos tells us something about the internal culture of NPR. If you haven't seen the videos, or if you've just seen the little text in there, that doesn't give you the real sense of what was going on in that conversation with Mr. Schiller at that table for 2 hours that day. If you look at the whole video, you'll see, the cast of the character and the content reflected, the culture of NPR; in the same way, in my view, that the videos of ACORN reflected accurately the actual internal culture of ACORN. We shut off the funding to ACORN for that reason. Of all the data that we've put out on ACORN, you couldn't be convinced to shut off the funding until you saw the reality of the video.

Then we looked into Planned Parenthood, and of all the data that was brought out here to the floor of the House, Mr. Speaker--and I compliment Mike Pence for doing so and all of those who stood with him and for life--still, the American people didn't understand the real culture of Planned Parenthood until they saw the video.

I thank the gentlelady.

Of all the data that we've seen, we still had not absorbed the real culture of NPR, until we saw the video of that dinner, those 2 hours that day.

So I stand in support of this act and this resolution, and I believe it's time for us to draw a bright line in our budget and cut this funding. I will be voting to adopt the cutting of the funding, as will my colleagues.

I thank the gentleman from Georgia. I tend to agree with all the Republicans from Georgia.

Mr. Speaker, I am here on the floor to speak to this issue of what frames this rule and the continuing resolution that flows behind it, Mr. Speaker. And I would remind the American people, I am here to talk about ObamaCare, about cutting off the funding to ObamaCare, and keeping our pledge. We have 87 new freshmen Republicans here in the House of Representatives. I believe all of them ran on the repeal of ObamaCare. I know all of them voted to repeal ObamaCare. And I know this House has the authority to cut off the funding to ObamaCare.

We passed H.R. 2, the repeal. Every Senate Republican voted to repeal ObamaCare, and H.R. 1 was the will of the House. We stood here, and we debated over 90 hours. And the components of that that affect the policy of this country within the rule of H.R. 1 are not part of the negotiations of this CR, not the 2-week CR that passed that we are operating on now, and not the 3-week CR that is the subject of this rule that we are debating here, Mr. Speaker. So I lament that we don't have the will of the House reflected in this CR, and it is trying the patience of at least the Republicans in this House.

A growing number have said that they are not willing to vote for another temporary spending measure in order to bridge it over until we get some kind of resolution. But the House can draw the line. There is not a dime that can be spent by this Federal government without the approval of the House. And my position that was reflected by the gentleman from Massachusetts is this: I'm willing to face the President because if we're not willing to face the President, he will get exactly everything he is willing to fight for. That means we have to confront the idea of the President eventually shutting the government down or giving him what he wants. It is more important that we stand on the Constitution and fiscal responsibility than it is to hand over to the President of the United States, who has the audacity to send us a budget with a $1.65 trillion deficit, and that level of irresponsibility, to just capitulate his demands. We must shut off the funding to ObamaCare, and I am ready to do that. I will vote ``no'' on the bill but not the rule.

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege and honor to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives and also to have listened in on the presentation over the previous hour, the Republican Women for Life, led by Congresswoman Schmidt, who has relentlessly stood up for the innocent unborn. I certainly support that cause and lend my voice to it, although I don't know that there's much to be added after the presentation that I've just heard. I'm just thankful that it's in the Congressional Record and that your ear has been tuned to it, Mr. Speaker, and that the ear of the American people is tuned to that message as well.

I have a couple of subjects that I wanted to discuss here within the upcoming 30 minutes that's been allotted. The first one is to speak to the vote that we've just had here on the floor on the continuing resolution for extending the funding for this government for an additional 3 weeks. It is known as a clean CR.

This House came together to work its will on H.R. 1. We debated that continuing resolution, which would be designed to fund this government for the balance of the fiscal year.

Mr. Speaker, I think it's really important that you and the American people are reminded that we're in this condition of this debate over this continuing resolution because the Pelosi Congress didn't do business as directed and as framed under the Constitution of the United States.

The Pelosi Congress continued to digress when it first opened up here in January of 2007, after the majority and the gavel was passed right behind me where you are, Mr. Speaker. This Congress functioned for the first few weeks pretty much the same as it had under the previous Speaker.

But in that transition that took place, the rules began to get changed, and there were fewer and fewer opportunities for Members to weigh in. The committees began to function less and less. More and more bills were written out of the Speaker's office, and as this unfolded, the rules changed. They took away--one of the things was an open rule under the appropriations process so that Members couldn't offer their amendments and force a debate and a vote on an issue of their concern.

The appropriations bills have always been the tool that allowed Members to work their will on the package that came from committee. Well, that went away. That was taken away, I just presume it was, by order of the Speaker, Speaker Pelosi.

So the House was no longer able to work its will. Bills came down under a closed rule. Appropriations bills came down under, well, modified closed rule, and then they didn't come down at all. Then they turned into omnibus spending bills or they turned into continuing resolutions, and this government limped along, without having the opportunity to gather together from across this country the collective wisdom of the 435 Members of Congress, as informed by our constituents.

So the Congress became dysfunctional. One of the things that is a result of that is the legacy today of having to be in this business now of seeking to put Congress back on its tracks again in the fashion that the Constitution frames and the tradition of functional Congresses direct us. That has been the mission of Speaker Boehner, and he has been very clear about this to make this Congress work again. Because of that commitment, it brought about the debate on H.R. 1, which debated all the funding of the Federal Government for the balance of this fiscal year and allowed it under an open rule.

There were hundreds of amendments that were offered by Members that had 4 years of pent-up frustration, Democrats and Republicans alike, that had a voice that wanted to be heard, votes that we wanted to see cast, and a message that helped shape, let's say, the political consensus of this body before a bill goes over to the United States Senate.

We worked through that bill for over 90 hours of debate. Of the hundreds of amendments that were offered, there were a good number that were passed, and some of them shut off funding to certain pieces of policy. But it was the will of the House wrapped up in the result of the passage of H.R. 1 that went over to the Senate. That was the first offer, and it was the best offer of the House so far, and it reflects the will of the House of Representatives and the House of Representatives designed, by definition, to reflect the will of the American people.

So I want to make it clear, Mr. Speaker, that we are in this debate and in this discussion over continuing resolutions: the continuing resolution that was passed in the lame duck session that carried this Congress until March 4 of this year and the 2-week ``clean CR'' that funded this government for 2 weeks that is set to expire on the night of March 18. They've extended now a 3-week ``clean CR'' that extends the funding an additional 3 weeks under similar terms, not identical terms, to the previous continuing resolution.

That is the scenario that we are in, Mr. Speaker, and we are in this scenario because Congress wasn't doing its job from 2007 on up until we gaveled in here in January of 2011.

There is a 4-year period of time where, in 2007, it wasn't too bad when it started. It digressed progressively until it became as close to completely dysfunctional as the Congress has been, at least in my understanding of the history. And I would say, Mr. Speaker, that I have lived a fair amount, and I have studied the rest of it, although I wouldn't present myself as being a congressional scholar and historian on all of the detail, but that is generally what has taken place.

Now we have Speaker Boehner putting this Congress back on the tracks. And, yes, there were some growing pains going through those 90-plus hours of debate on the continuing resolution under an open rule. And, yes, some of us compromised. Many of us actually compromised to take our amendments down and negotiated a unanimous consent agreement that was negotiated in good faith. I appreciate all the effort that went into that. It was a very, very good exercise.

Democrats and Republicans alike, I heard no one argue that the process of open rules and open debate was a bad process or that it wasn't fair or that it somehow should not have been done, that we should have engaged in a

closed-rule process. No, Mr. Speaker, that was the right thing to do. And the subsequent continuing resolution, the first one for 2 weeks, was designed to buy some time for the Senate to digest H.R. 1. The one that passed here on this floor, over my vote when I voted ``no'' on it, is an extension of a similar philosophy with another little slice out of the cuts. So maybe, just maybe, the Senate will swallow this one bite at a time when the whole loaf seems to be too much. But, on the other hand, the leverage is diminishing as the pages on the calendar turn.

Mr. Speaker, I didn't come here tonight to belabor this issue but just to make the point that there is a reason that we are at this position with debates over continuing resolutions, and it is because the Congress didn't function in previous years and handed over this CR scenario to be taken up by March 4. We are trying to resolve this with a Senate that has been cooperative and complicit in the downward spiral of the functionality of the House of Representatives. I am not speaking on the functionality of the Senate; although, I might not be complimentary of that either, should I dig into that.

So that is the scenario that we are in. It has brought about some leverage points. It puts the House in the position where, if we choose to, we can hold our ground, and we can direct policy across to the Senate and through to the President of the United States.

We should all understand that when the majority leader in the United States Senate speaks, he is speaking in such a way that is designed to be, in a way, a mouthpiece for the President, a shield to protect the President from public criticism and to protect the President from the initiatives that start here in this House.

If Members of this House will make the argument that we can't pass legislation here that we believe in because Harry Reid won't take it in the Senate, we should be thinking in terms of: The proxy for the President in the Senate is resisting the Republican initiative, which is the will of the people that was brought about by the 87 new freshmen that have come here to support the incumbent Republicans. All the gavels in the United States House of Representatives were passed from the hands of one party into the hands of the other party. That is what has happened, the will of the people.

Mr. Speaker, we have the obligation to carry out this will of the people in conformance, though, with our best efforts and our best judgment. And that works in consultation with Democrats, as it should. It hasn't always been the case working across the aisle, and there have been times that I have been accused of that myself. I will be a little more open than I have in the past, but in the end, the House should work its will.

I stand on that principle, and I compliment the Speaker for laying that standard out. It is not going to be an easy banner to carry. He knows that. He understands this organism of the House of Representatives. And, in spite of all of the stress that is going on here, the House is positioning itself to work its will on the Senate. Working its will on the Senate is working its will through the proxy for the President and on towards the White House.

If the President of the United States believes that all of the functions of government don't match up to his desire to protect his signature issue, ObamaCare, the American people need to know that that is his priority. My priority is to repeal it and defund it until such time as we can get a President to sign the repeal of ObamaCare. That has been my effort: to first kill the bill and then work to repeal it. We are about 1\1/2\ years into this effort, and I will continue my effort as intensively as I need to and for as long as it takes until the day comes when we can actually celebrate: free at last, free from the yoke of the socialized medicine policy called ObamaCare and free to exercise our liberty that I believe has been unjustly taken from us by the legislation. And something, too: two Federal courts have found it unconstitutional.

Now, Mr. Speaker, that is my little editorial here. I haven't worked out a smooth transition into the next subject matter, but it occurs to me, as I stand here, that it has been a little while since I addressed you on the subject of immigration and that it has been a little bit quiet in the House of Representatives on the subject of immigration.

So I want to raise this point and have this discussion, and it is this: We are looking at numbers that show still millions of illegals here in the United States, about 60 percent of whom came across the border illegally, about 40 percent of whom overstayed their visas. And it is odd that the number of illegals is reported by the Department of Homeland Security to be less than it has been over the previous 8 years that I have been here in this Congress.

When I came here, the number was 12 million illegals here in the United States. I have gone down to the border many times. I have sat in on hearings year after year, week after week, where expert witnesses come forward and testify, and they will testify that, of the net numbers of people that are interdicted coming across the border, they would perhaps stop one out of four of those. And it is not too hard to extrapolate those numbers: 3 to 5 years ago would come to 4 million illegal border crossings in a year, of which they contend that they stop about one out of four. I think they said perhaps they catch one out of three or one out of four. That would be the under-oath testimony of one of the representatives of the Border Patrol. I think that number may or may not be higher now.

But I would go down to the border, and the agents down there would tell me, 25 percent? 10 percent has to come first, a 10 percent effectiveness rate.

Now, one could argue whether 10 percent is the right number, and I hear numbers less than that, too, or whether 25 percent is the right number. What it says that, I don't think anybody contends that the effectiveness rate of the full list of Border Patrol officers we have all across our southern border is interdicting a number that would be approaching even half of those that attempt to cross the border. And those attempts to cross the border are probably down from the data that I have given you from 4 or 5 years ago.

But think of 4 million illegal border crossings. Think of those attempts. Think of stopping perhaps 1 million, and now there are 3 million in the United States in a year. And that 3 million number is going to grow. Now, some of them go back to their home country again, and they cross multiple times; that is true.

But if we had 12 million illegals in 2003 and we have less than 12 million illegals today, according to Janet Napolitano's Department of Homeland Security, what happened to all those people? We were accumulating people for all of these last 8 years. And if somehow by some miracle or some mystery of nature of humanity we don't accumulate illegals in America when we have large numbers of them coming in here, I suppose you could chalk it up to a death rate or a self-deportation rate.

But, Mr. Speaker, we got to 12 million somehow. They came from somewhere. And people agree that 12 million was the illegal number--at least it was the floor, not the ceiling. I have always thought it was higher.

But if in the years prior to 2003 we accumulated 12 million illegals, and if we are watching 4 million illegal border crossings a year, that might even be a peak, and maybe that number is down by a third or so now, and a large percentage get into the United States, and a significant percentage of them stay here, the 12 million gets to be a bigger number, not a smaller number.

How did Janet Napolitano come up with a number lower than 12 million? That is a question I would like to ask her, if she would stop before the Immigration Subcommittee so we could have that conversation. But I think the number is larger than 12 million. I have always thought it was larger than 12 million since I have been in this Congress, and I don't think that reduction shows the real population that is here.

And as we look at the enforcement ratio that they show us on the southern border, it will show that they are stopping fewer and fewer illegals on the border. The Department of Homeland Security contends that because there is less interaction with our agents and illegals, that that says that there are fewer illegals. Well, that might be the case. But it also might be the case that there are just less arrests, fewer interdictions.

But I do think that when you double the number of Border Patrol agents,

which we have done and then some on the southern border, they are out there competing to be able to make those arrests and make those pickups. So I think the natural order of our law enforcement officers, they will still be doing the enforcement.

But also it pushes people out away from those highly concentrated enforcement areas, those areas like El Paso, for example, and puts them through places in the desert that aren't watched as closely.

So I ask the question: I used to hear testimony that would show that there were several hundred people that died in the desert trying to sneak into the United States, and as that number would grow, it would be 200 a year, then 250 a year, and a number that I recall that went up to 450 a year. Now, that is data that is more than 5 years old, and I haven't been able to get my hands on that old data, but I do remember.

So if the number of deaths in the desert is going down, that would indicate that there are fewer people going through the desert, if the climate hasn't changed and other factors being all the same. But if the number of deaths in the desert of illegals is going up, that would indicate the traffic is going up.

So in a number of the sectors we have seen those deaths go down, but in the Tucson sector most recently we have seen the number go up, which would indicate a larger number of illegals coming into the United States through the Arizona desert.

As I traveled across New Mexico, the people there in a town hall meeting in Columbus, New Mexico, said almost unanimously that they believe there are more drugs coming through and more illegals coming through than they have seen before, and they believe that it is more dangerous for them than it has been before.

That, Mr. Speaker, is the circumstance on the border. In any case, whether we have 11\1/2\ million illegals here or whether we have 20\1/ 2\ million illegals here, I don't believe the number is shrinking. I think the number still grows. We know we have a significant number of illegal entrants into the United States. We don't have operational control of the whole border. We may have operational control of segments of the border, but there is much of it that we do not have. We've got a long ways to go.

But I do believe, I believe that we can get operational control of the border, and I mean operational control of the border as defined in the Secure Fence Act that was pushed through this Congress by Congressman Duncan Hunter of California, whose son now serves in this Congress, and I am grateful that he does. I want to do honor to Duncan Hunter's work that passed the Secure Fence Act. I want to complete that project, because there are some other things I know.

We are spending about $12 billion, let me see if I can get these numbers right, about $12 billion on our southern border, and that turns out to be about $6 million a mile; $6 million a mile.

Mr. Speaker, I think about, what is a mile? That is four laps around an old track. Where I live in Iowa, it is to my west corner, or any other corner, for that matter. Our roads are laid out in a mile grid pattern, every section, a mile to the corners, and there is a survey pin in the center of every intersection that is a mile apart each way. They surveyed the old way, and they got a lot of it very, very close.

A mile, $6 million a mile for every mile, all 2,000 miles of our southern border. Six million dollars a mile. And we are guarding that border with a 10 percent or 25 percent or maybe even a higher efficiency rate, but not up to 50 percent. And we think we are getting our money's worth in doing that? It doesn't mean that the agents aren't doing their job. It is, tactically, are we investing the right dollars into the right resources to get the best results that we can?

So I look across my west mile, for example, and I think what if Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano came to me and said, Steve, I'm going to make you an offer. I'll make you an offer for a contract for you to guard a mile.

How about a mile by my house? Guard that so that people that want to cross it cannot cross it unless they are authorized, and, if they are, direct them to a port of entry. And I'm going to pay you $6 million next year to see to it that no more than, say, oh, 75 percent of the people that try get across.

That's what we're looking at. If it is a 25 percent efficiency rate at our southern border, that means that 75 percent of those that try are getting through. I admit, it is a little bit of old testimony, but not that old, Mr. Speaker, and it has changed in some of the sectors, but not all of them.

So I am thinking in numbers that is the most recent congressional testimony that I know of, and that is a 25 percent efficiency rate, which was, some thought, a stretch then. So it is a 75 percent inefficiency rate.

So if Janet Napolitano came to me and said, I have this offer for you. Here is $6 million. Guard that west mile of your house, and you can only let 75 percent of the people that illegally want to cross it go across. The other 25 percent, you've got to turn them back.

Would I take that deal for that level of efficiency, especially if it's a 10-year contract? So now it's $60 million for 10 years? I would just hope I could live long enough to spend it all. Yes, I would take them up on that.

Now, if the offer was, you're going to get your $60 million for your mile, $60 million over 10 years for guarding a mile of the border, you'll get your $60 million, but you have to provide efficiency, and you don't get to build empire, and you're not going to grow an empire that gives you political clout by hiring a lot of people and giving them good benefits packages and marketing it off in that fashion. You're going to have to make the best efficiency with it you can.

I would look at that mile, and here is what I would do, Mr. Speaker. I would pick up the Duncan Hunter proposal and I would say, let's build a fence, a wall and a fence. Let's build a fence, a wall and a fence across that mile. And I would put the capital investment in it, and for a couple of million dollars, I would have that all done.

For about a third of my first annual budget I would have that all done, and it would cut my costs on the guard and manpower costs for the duration of the decade and beyond, if you build a fence, a wall and a fence, when you amortize it and depreciate it out about for 40 years, and it would yield benefits every single year. They built that kind of a barrier in Israel, and it is 99-point-something percent effective. If you look around the world, there is fence after fence after fence.

The people over on this side of the aisle as a rule will say, Don't you know that we don't do that? Don't you know that the Berlin Wall is abhorrent to us? My answer to that is, how did you get history so distorted in your mind that you would compare a fence to keep people out with a fence to keep people in? They are two opposite proposals, two opposite reasons.

You can't argue that the Berlin Wall is like building a fence on our southern border unless you want to argue that the people that were in the west wanted to get over that wall into the east. They did not. There was no traffic sneaking in behind the Iron Curtain. It was the other way around.

So we are trying to keep large masses of people out of the United States and force them all through the ports of entry and let them come in here the legal way. And there is no country in the world that is more generous than the United States. In fact, all of the countries in the world don't match up to the generosity of the United States from an immigration perspective.

So we are generous. We bring in about 1.5 million people a year legally, and we watch as every night we have dozens and hundreds of people that come into the United States. One calculation showed during the peak of this 11,000 a night, 11,000 in a 24-hour period. Most of that is at night.

Santa Anna's army was only about 5,000 to 6,000. It is nearly twice as large as Santa Anna's army every single night. No, they weren't in uniform, and a lot of them weren't carrying guns, and maybe they weren't a physical threat to us in a general sense. But that is a pretty large group of people, every night to see twice the size of Santa Anna's army coming into the United States illegally. And I will tell you, I believe it is at least the size of Santa Anna's army now, every night.

And we are letting this happen day by day by day, and we turn a little

blind eye to it, and we watch as we tragically pick up the bodies in the desert of those who are sneaking into the United States illegally that don't make it across that desert.

As the summer comes along, the numbers go up and up. But I asked the question a few years ago when they were testifying before the Immigration Committee about how many lives were lost in the desert while they were sneaking into the United States. How many Americans died at the hands of those who made it into the United States? How many times have we seen fatalities on the highway of someone who didn't have a driver's license? didn't have an insurance policy? that was in the United States illegally that didn't understand our laws? drinking and driving? had been picked up and had been interdicted by law enforcement?

We lost a nun in Virginia last year very close to home. Corey Stewart knows about that, the county supervisor down there in, I believe, Prince William County. That's an example.

We lost several kids in a school bus wreck in southwest Minnesota, north of me. That happened with an illegal that had been interdicted several times and turned loose into our society. And those families grieve for their lost children in a school bus wreck that would have been avoided if we'd enforced our laws at the border, if we'd enforced our law with local law enforcement here in the United States when we come across people in the United States illegally.

This is not a big ask. A sovereign nation has to have borders. And what do borders mean? They mean that you control the traffic that's coming into those borders. And we can actually decide. You control the traffic going out of the United States. But we don't have to do that because we've developed a pretty good country here, but we're going to lose this country if we don't adhere to the rule of law. And the rule of law is that, when this Congress acts, the executive branch is bound to enforce the law. It's a prudent decision that reflects the will of the American people.

The American people have said, We want our borders secure, and we don't want workers in the United States illegally taking jobs away from Americans or legal immigrants who become Americans. We want to have a tighter labor supply than that.

If we wanted to up our 1\1/2\ million immigrants into the United States, we could do that. We could double this. We could triple it. We could go tenfold. We can say that anybody could come to the United States. All you have to do is sign up at the U.S. Embassy in your home country, and we'll give you a visa to come to the United States. We could say that. We could bring anybody in that wanted to come in. But why do we say no? Because there's a limit.

We have asked the question here in this Congress, and a previous Congress has asked and answered the question: How many are too many? And what kind of people do we want to encourage to come here? And what kind of people do we want to discourage from coming here?

These are the questions. We have all kinds of people involved in this debate that don't have the slightest idea how to begin to answer those questions. They just say, Oh, my compassion compels me to be for open borders. My heart bleeds for people that aren't as fortunate as Americans are. So, therefore, I'm just going to be for turning a blind eye or granting amnesty so that I don't feel guilty that everybody can't live the American Dream like we all do.

Well, things have changed. Things have changed.

There was a time when we had high levels of immigration into this country and a zero welfare state. When my grandmother came over here in 1894, we weren't a welfare state. They screened people before they got on the boat, and they checked them out physically; they checked them out mentally. If they had a lot of resources, they got to ride first class and got unloaded in a different dock, but the rest of them went to Ellis Island.

And even though they screened a good number of the people out before they boarded the ship--and, remember, they didn't want to haul them back to Europe. It was Europe primarily at this time. But even still, after they were screened and they arrived at Ellis Island, they gave them a physical. They looked in their eyes. They gave them kind of a quick mental test. They looked underneath their eyelids to see if they had a disease that put little white spots underneath there. And if they weren't of physical ability or mental ability to be able to take care of themselves, they put them back on the boat--I should say ``ship''-- and sent them back to the place where they came from. About 2 percent were sent back.

Now here we are. We're interdicting 10 percent, 25 percent. We don't even get that many sent back because it's round robin. For a long time, we did catch and release, and we said, Come back and appear. Of course, they didn't appear. Then we did catch and return. We'd pick them up at downtown Nogales, take them up to the station sector location, and they would come in with their little Ziploc bag. We fingerprinted them, took the digital photograph of them, and sometimes we saw that same person came back. The peak one that I know of down there was in 27 times.

We had a really good return trade going on with people that were coming into the United States illegally. We'd pick them up, give them a ride up to the headquarters, and all they had to do is just have their prints taken again, get their picture taken again, and then they got a little van ride down to the port of entry where they turned that little white van sideways, opened up the side door, and they'd get out and walk back to Mexico. The van would take off and go get another load. Around and around and around we went. It was round robin, and it wasn't accomplishing very much.

Now we're at least bringing prosecution against most of them, which is providing a little more of a deterrent, Mr. Speaker. We've got to do a lot better. We've got to understand this mission. The mission is to protect our borders for this sovereign Nation. You can't have a border if you don't control the border.

We need to control the border--all of it. We need to force all traffic through the ports of entry. We can do it if we build a fence, a wall and a fence. Yes, we need to put sensory devices up there and use some of the other technology that's there. And yes, we have to have Border Patrol agents that are there that are manning the fence and running to the locations where they need to to make the proper interdictions. All of that needs to take place.

But we need to use our resources smartly, and we can. We can shut off all illegal traffic that's going to come across our southern border if we do these smart things. And I have not advocated, I will point out, Mr. Speaker, a 2,000-mile fence. I simply advocated that we build a fence, a wall and a fence, and build it until they stop going around the end--that's the standard--and force all the traffic through the ports of entry. Then we have to widen our ports of entry, beef them up so we can handle the increased traffic that's there so that it's not a significant impediment.

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

Thank you, Judge Carter. It's with honor I take the floor tonight. I very much appreciate your yielding, and I understand your great respect for the troops and the pain that you suffered down at Fort Hood and the involvement that you have had in each and every engagement standing up for our military, standing up for our country, standing up for our national security.

Tonight, I step to the floor with your acknowledgment, Judge Carter, to honor a real American hero. This American hero that we honor tonight here on the floor of the United States Congress is an American hero, Corporal John Michael Peck, who's with us here in the audience tonight up in the corner and watching the proceedings here in the House of Representatives. Corporal Peck is a United States Marine, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Division.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor this American hero who is from Rockford, Illinois. Corporal John Michael Peck is a member of, again, the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Division. His mother, Lisa Peck, is here with us tonight. She was a single mother for 16 years. Michael was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, and grew up in Rockford, Illinois. After graduating from Antioch High School, he went into the Marine Corps. On August 23, 2007, in Iraq, he received his first Purple Heart after an explosion and he received a TBI injury. Then, on May 24, 2010, he was in Helmand province in Afghanistan, where he received his second Purple Heart after an IED explosion nearly cost Corporal Peck his life. John lost all four of his limbs.

Against all odds, and with the help of his mother, he climbed out into the light. His progress has been incredible. His fellow marines talk of his prowess in the weight room. He is truly a man possessed. His attitude and his courage have made all the difference. Like all these young men and women, the ones who do the best are the ones whose loved ones are there with them each day. And Lisa has been there from day one. There should be a medal of honor for those who stand by their children and put their lives on hold to help them rebuild theirs.

John is one of three quads who are over at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital. The other two are Brendon Marocco and Todd Nicely. Their heart and their souls are something of beauty to behold. I ask that this Nation continue to stand with and for those troops who stood up for us; those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, those heroes, such as Corporal John Michael Peck, who paid such a high price, and who rewards us with his indomitable spirit. And the strength of family and the love of a mother, all here in this story, however sad, however tragic, it lifts my heart to know that we have Americans that will serve us in this way, and Americans who inspire us with their spirit in the aftermath of such a service.

God bless you, Corporal.

I ask that this poem penned by Albert Caswell in honor of Corporal Peck be placed in the Record.

What I Gave

On battlefields of honor bright . . . .

There are but all of those Magnificent's, who so fight!

Who but so bring their light . . . .

All in what they gave!

Who now so lie in such cold soft quiet

graves . . . .

Teaching us all how to behave!

Whose family's pain, is something that only heaven can take!

And then, there are all of those who are so left . . . .

So left with such pain, so close to death . . . . living day

by day!

All because of what they gave!

And the ones who live without arms and legs!

Without eyes and ears, and strong faces . . . . as they . . .

.

All . . . . for . . . . what . . . . they . . . . gave!

Whose, most brilliant valor no one can ever so take away!

And all of those children, who now so live without moms and

dads . . . . who wake!

And all of those parents who've so lost the greatest loves of

all, as have they!

As it's for them we now so weep, this very day!

All because of what they gave!

So in the night, as you lay your head down to rest . . . .

While, all of your loved ones you so

caress . . . .

And you realize why you are so blessed, and what you have . .

. .

Remember, all of America's very best!

And what they gave!

And John, on that morning after when you awoke . . . .

And somehow so tried to cope . . . .

And so saw, all what this war had

invoked . . . .

As your great heart, to you so spoke!

So spoke of what you gave!

Quivering, so back then . . . . oh how the tears you made!

As they rolled down your fine strong

chin . . . .

And your brave heart so began to pound, yes back then!

As somehow you so tried to comprehend!

Wishing somehow that it would all so go away!

All for what you gave!

As you I had to so make a choice!

Should, I live or should I die?

As you who so heard that most inner

voice . . . .

Telling you . . . . telling you to somehow stay!

As it so spoke to you, all about faith and courage!

Telling you, to somehow not to be discouraged!

As you, United States Marine . . . . so marched off all out

on your way!

While, your mother with tears in eyes . . . . so began to

pray!

And she stood behind you John, each and every blessed day . .

. .

All so you could have a fighting chance, and find your way .

. . .

As you Marine, all in your magnificent shades of green . . .

. got up on that very day!

As you took your very first steps, with your most courageous

heart leading the way!

The way to recovery!

As you so chose life on that day!

As your new war had just begun!

As from out of the darkness, you so marched . . . . our

Father's Son!

To so represent him, until your last and so dying days . . .

.

To So Teach Us All!

To So Reach Us All!

To So Beseech Us All!

So Each, and Every Day!

With what you gave!

For you were so surely put upon this

earth . . . .

To so teach us all what comes first!

All in your amazing grace!

As our tears roll down our face!

Because, each new morning as you

awaken . . .

One more step forward, yes dear John you so take!

All out there upon your most magnificent ways . . . .

Because, you will walk. . . . and you will

run . . . .

And it's no over, and your are not done!

You United States Marine, one of the best things this country

has ever seen!

Yes, arms and legs we all need!

But, without a heart one can not so surely breath!

As with your heart you now so lead!

Just moments are all we have!

Just seconds, to so find the path! Our way!

To crush hearts! To turn the good into the bad!

All in our thoughts, and deeds!

To win wars . . . . all in our parts we

play . . . .

To but give to this our world, but a better day!

Don't cry for me!

For I am the one who so made that choice!

And so raised my hand, and with my voice!

All for liberty . . . .

And for something far . . . . far . . . . greater than me . .

. .

But, to be A United States Marine! Oooha!

All to defend, my sweet Country Tis of Thee!

And I'd do all again you see!

For there are no regrets inside of me!

For wearing those most magnificent, shades of green!

As a United States Marine!

And, for all of my brothers who have so

died . . . .

Who in such cold dark graves of honor now so lie!

I live for thee!

As I go out upon my way!

I carry you all in my heart and soul but with me each day . .

. .

Listen closely, as you will hear God's voice inside of me . .

. .

As I make the best of what he has so left to me . . . .

And . . . . What . . . . My . . . . Life . . . . Has . . . .

So . . . . To . . . . Say . . . .

As a hero a was not trying to be, but this is what my Lord

has chose for me!

Yea, I'm not half the man I used to be!

For my true sum, has grown far much more greater don't you

see?

All with what is so left inside of me!

As this is but the high price we must pay to be free!

Were but my fine gifts . . . . my two strong arms and legs .

. . .

And all of this I so gave!

Don't cry for me!

Yea, Spider Man . . . . aint got nothing on me!

In life . . . . what steps, have you so taken?

What difference is your short life, upon this earth so

making?

All in the steps that you are taking!

Upon, your way!

You see, I rather run in Heaven with my Lord . . . .

And limp, here upon this earth each new morn!

For in Heaven, you need not arms or legs!

And, that's where I'm going when I finish my last and most

final days!

All because of . . . .

What . . . . I . . . . Gave!

Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate being recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I have come to the floor to raise some issues here, to address you and hopefully be able to penetrate with some rationale and logic that I think is essential that the American people benefit from, and that is this, that, for some time now, we have been making the case that there are automatic appropriations in ObamaCare in an unprecedented fashion with regard to the magnitude and the duration of them.

These automatic appropriations were written into the bill in preparation. The automatic appropriations were written into the bill in preparation for and anticipated, I believe, the loss of the majority by the Pelosi Congress, because I think they expected that this Congress would be handed over by the American people to a Republican majority that had been assigned the task by the American people to repeal ObamaCare, to defund ObamaCare.

That's what everyone ran on. There are 87 Republican freshmen here, all of whom have voted to repeal ObamaCare, and I believe all of whom, if they spoke to the issue at all, Mr. Speaker, also pledged to cut off the funding to ObamaCare.

I have sought to facilitate that happening and taking place. In doing so, I have drafted legislation that's patterned after the language that was written into a continuing resolution in April of 1974. That's the language in a continuing resolution that shut off the funding to the Vietnam War.

It says something very similar to this. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no funds made available in this act and no funds heretofore appropriated shall be used for offensive or defensive operations in Vietnam or the countries adjacent to it.

In other words, it's not really an exact quote, but it is the compression of the language, and it's an accurate depiction of what it said. What it did was it shut off all funding for anything that was used to support the South Vietnamese military, including M-16 rounds, 105 rounds, MREs, anything that was going to support a military operation offensive or defensive was shut off by this Congress by language in a CR.

Now, who could conceive, Mr. Speaker, that this Congress couldn't figure out how to write language on how to shut off funding to ObamaCare. They didn't find the Vietnam War unconstitutional. Two Federal courts have found ObamaCare unconstitutional.

I hear arguments that say, well, there is an obscure rule somewhere that says that this is written into a legislation that makes it what they call mandatory spending. Therefore, this Congress, this 112th Congress, is

prohibited from getting their hands on that and can't shut off the automatic $105.5 billion.

Please, Mr. Speaker. We all know that no previous Congress can bind a subsequent Congress. None of our predecessors can put up a vote in 2010--or 1810--that binds us here. We set the rules and we appropriate the money here. Automatic appropriations written into an authorization bill of the largest magnitude of any legislation that I know: ObamaCare. We expected the authorization, the authorization that says, we open the door up now and the discretion of the appropriators in the subsequent Congress will decide if those authorized categories are funded. Forty-eight places in ObamaCare, there's authorization written right in with appropriations. Unprecedented.

Yes, it does happen in small little ways. Ironically, National Public Radio has in the past gotten an authorization/appropriation that went in out-years as far as way out there to 2 years, Mr. Speaker. Some of the ObamaCare automatic authorization/appropriation language goes in perpetuity. There's a billion dollars set in a category that says Medicare Modernization Effort that is a billion dollars every year, that automatically spits out a billion dollars and goes to CMS to do Medicare modernization to the end of the world. In perpetuity. It takes it out of the hands of Congress. And this Congress is going to sit here and wring their hands and say, there's a mandatory piece of spending language that's here and we can't stop it in an appropriations bill?

This Congress stopped the Vietnam War in an appropriations bill, Mr. Speaker. Can't we stop an unconstitutional, irresponsible socialized medicine policy in an appropriations bill? Yes, we can. There is no rational reason why we cannot. I have faced straw man argument after straw man argument. These little things, they stand up a straw man and he's supposed to look like a whole demon himself that rules the road. And it might be an argument such as, ``King's language will violate the rules of the Senate. Therefore, they will never take it up.'' Not so. You take the language down to the Senate and they say, Bring it. We want it. We want the House to send language to the Senate that shuts off the automatic funding to ObamaCare.

And then they will say, ``No, the language isn't accurate enough. It isn't precise enough. It doesn't get at what we want.'' Show me some better language. It's patterned off the language that shut off the Vietnam War. That worked. They don't have an argument as to where there's a hole in my language. There isn't a hole in my language, Mr. Speaker. It says, no funds in this act, ObamaCare, and I list the two of them actually. It is 111-148 and 111-152. That's ObamaCare and the reconciliation package that came from the Senate to circumvent the filibuster rules that they have in the Senate. In both of those, we shut off any funding that's automatically appropriated. And it says: No funds in any previous act and no funds in the continuing resolution or in any fiscal year shall be used to carry out the provisions of ObamaCare, patterned exactly off the language that shut off the funding to the Vietnam War. If we can end a war in an appropriations bill, we can shut off an unconstitutional, irresponsible, $2.6 trillion in irresponsible spending bill, Mr. Speaker. And that's what we must do.

We pledged to the American people that we would repeal ObamaCare, and we won a huge majority here in order to repeal ObamaCare. Mr. Speaker, we have to act on it. We need to act on it now. Every day, every minute that goes by, we're seeing that $105 billion spent to send the tentacles of ObamaCare down, send the roots down. They're working night and day, 24/7, Mr. Speaker, they're doing that to establish and expand the dependency class in America and tell us that we can't live without ObamaCare, that we can't take responsibility for our own health care, and that the money that's spent and invested keeps our private sector and our doctor-patient relationship from functioning and growing and adapting to the markets that they must do so.

We're losing huge health insurance companies across the country. Principal in my State laid off hundreds. And that's true across the Midwest at least, on down to Texas. Insurance company after insurance company is pulling out because there's no certainty out there in the market anymore, and they understand that there are going to be fewer insurance companies if ObamaCare is implemented. They're calling upon this Congress, shut off the funding to ObamaCare. Yes, we passed the repeal. Every Republican and with Democrat support, bipartisan, passed the repeal of ObamaCare, H.R. 2, sent it to the Senate. Harry Reid found a way to force a vote on it where it didn't succeed over there, but 47 Republican Senators voted to repeal ObamaCare. And I cannot be convinced that those same legislators, House and Senate, would not vote to shut off all the funding to ObamaCare if provided the language in a continuing resolution.

I believe that we can look the President in the eye and say, Mr. President, we've demonstrated that we will keep the dollars there for the legitimate and prudent function of government available, as we have in a short-term CR that expires March 18, as is proposed by a short- term CR that is likely to be released later on today--after the whip team has already whipped it, by the way. We've demonstrated we want to keep the government open. But if the President, speaking through Harry Reid, decides that all the functions of government can be shut down unless he has his pet project, ObamaCare, the American people will side with those of us who side with them.

We want an America that has liberty and freedom and vitality, where people make their own choices, where we have the selection of 1,300 health insurance companies, 100,000 health insurance policies, and not government-at-the-Federal-level intervention into those decisions that are made by individuals and doctors and families and businesses.

America wasn't built by government plans, by one-size-fits-all, by socialized medicine. America wasn't built by people who sit in their lofty liberal towers deciding that they've been gifted with an intelligence and an intellect so that common, ordinary people can be taken care of by elitists. We were built by individuals, individuals that make individual decisions, to start a business, end a business, take a job, quit a job, to make a purchase or not make a purchase, to provide a service, to stop and help their fellow man. We're an America that lives on the American Dream, to leave this country a better place than it was when we found it.

Mr. Speaker, ObamaCare diminishes the future of all Americans. It shapes and diminishes the arc of history in a way that cannot be forgiven by those who follow behind us. This is a destiny issue for this country. This is a pivotal issue for this country. I stand and I have written a letter and I have joined with Michele Bachmann.

I see my friend from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is here. We agree that a continuing resolution that does not include the language that shuts off the funding that is automatically implemented in ObamaCare, we will vote ``no'' on that continuing resolution, Mr. Speaker. And I will continue to do so until such time as ObamaCare has met its end.

Some will say, the President will never sign a bill that repeals ObamaCare. He would never sign an appropriations bill that shuts off the funding for ObamaCare. I'm not suggesting that that's an easy decision for him. But when I look back through the arc of history and I think what Socrates did at the end of his life, I think the President can make a hard decision here. If Socrates can drink the hemlock, the President can sign the repeal of ObamaCare.

Mr. Speaker, I would be so glad to be able to yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. Speaker, it is again a privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. And it's a privilege to sit here in this Chamber and listen to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) talk about these critical issues for the United States of America.

Each of us that come down here on so many days come here for the purpose of bringing up these critical issues and informing you, Mr. Speaker. And while that's going on, there are people all across America that are listening in and deciding for themselves the priorities and deciding for themselves what kind of job we're doing here in Congress.

I'd love to step in on the immigration debate and burn up about 30 minutes talking about that, but Mr. Speaker, I need to have this discussion with you about ObamaCare. There are a fair number of different strategies that are working here in the House of Representatives--and perhaps a number of different strategies, to some degree, going on in the United States Senate--but the circumstances are this:

Almost 1 year ago, ObamaCare passed the United States Congress and was messaged to the President, where he eagerly signed the bill. It was a combination of legislative shenanigans that took place. The bill itself that came to the floor was not a product of committee; it was a bill that was written by Speaker Pelosi's staff and her office with who knows what input and it was dropped on us in a fashion that didn't allow us an opportunity to evaluate it there, then, or on the spot. It was a combination of two bills. One of them was ObamaCare as it went out of the House over to the Senate. The Senate then promised, on the condition that ObamaCare be passed--and the votes that were necessary to pass the basis of ObamaCare were generated because the Senate decided that they would, under a reconciliation plan, avoid the filibuster rules of 60 votes in the Senate. They sent us a reconciliation plan that altered and amended ObamaCare itself. And in that package was a promise from the President of the United States that he would issue an Executive order that would take care of the concerns of the pro-life Members--pro-life Democrats who wouldn't vote for ObamaCare as long as it funded abortion.

And so the audacity of the President of the United States to take the position that he could amend legislation that passed this Congress by Executive order--which is not a constitutional position, Mr. Speaker-- but that audacity was swallowed by enough people that they voted ObamaCare out of the House marginally. The reconciliation package that came from the Senate squeaked out of there because of the promises that were made and came over here and was passed because of the promises that were made. And the final cap on it was the President's Executive order that was supposed to amend ObamaCare.

And what do we have in all of this mess? We have 2,500 or so pages that are so convoluted--and if anybody in this Congress, any lawyers out there that propose to be experts, anybody that's staff on Energy and Commerce, or former Speaker Pelosi, or anybody else out here, I don't think there's a single person on the planet, no matter how good their background, no matter how intelligent, no matter how well read, no matter how many research books they might have to work with, if you would shut them in an office and cut the wires and the wireless to the outside world, not a single person out of these 6-plus billion people on this planet could read ObamaCare and be able to analyze all that it does or its implications on the lives of 300-plus million Americans. It's not possible to do so. We did, I think, a very good job of analyzing what it was in broad terms.

Some of us knew going in that there was deceptive language written into ObamaCare that automatically appropriated funds that would set up the implementation of ObamaCare--even if Congress appropriated no money to it, that would put the implementation in place and churn it on in perpetuity, Mr. Speaker. Some of that information I believe came out of some of the members of the Energy and Commerce Committee that had been analyzing this bill last fall. I believe that we had some verbal discussions on it--not here on the floor necessarily, but on-the-side conversations that I had with some of the better-informed Members of this Congress, and they aren't all here any longer in this 112th Congress.

But as we came into January, I'm thinking about how we unfund ObamaCare. And it has been my argument all along, Mr. Speaker, that the strategy is this: That first, a lot of us used all of our energy to do the best we could to kill ObamaCare. In spite of all of that, in spite of the tens of thousands of people that came from every single State in the Union to come in here and surround this Capitol and tell them keep your hands off of my health care, still the former Speaker of the House marched through the crowds with her over-sized gavel in her let-them- eat-cake moment and imposed ObamaCare on America.

Shortly after the moment that that vote went up on the board I went down to the people that had--and I say surrounded this Capitol; it wasn't just a human chain around the Capitol, it was a human doughnut around the Capitol. It was six and eight people deep all the way around the United States Capitol, unbroken, human doughnut around the Capitol, still with thousands of people left over in the corner, so to speak. If you envision a circle--there isn't one, I understand, but they were standing in clusters by the thousands. Still, not part of that human doughnut, they came here and said keep your hands off of our health care.

That bill finally passed here on the floor and was messaged to the Senate. And I went down with that group, as did Michele Bachmann and several

others--Pete Hoekstra of Michigan comes to mind as another individual that was back and forth communicating with the people that came here to peacefully petition the government for redress of grievances, exactly in line with the First Amendment to the Constitution. And I promised them, as did Michele Bachmann, that I would introduce legislation to repeal ObamaCare. That happened the very next day, and it happened for us within 3 minutes of each other.

So I laid out, though, the strategy over the next few days and weeks to repeal ObamaCare. And I'm going to refresh this now, Mr. Speaker, for the minds of those who are paying attention, and it's this: First, all energy was focused on killing ObamaCare. I didn't burn up 1 minute of media time that I can think of talking about what to do if it passed. I remember people asking me out here in the crowd, what will you do if it passes? And my answer was, ``I'm focused on killing it. We'll worry about that, that's another subject for another time, I'm focused on killing it.'' Well, it did pass. And we turned the focus, then, on repealing it. And the beginning of that was that opening of business--actually same day because this passed after midnight on a Sunday night, so it was Monday morning. This Congress opened for business at 9 o'clock. At that minute, there were two requests waiting in place to bring the legislation to repeal ObamaCare.

Then I began to lay out this strategy which was, get as many cosponsors on the repeal as possible. And as that number grew, sometime in June, or towards the summer, I introduced a discharge petition. That discharge petition was designed to gain 218 signatures. With that, the Speaker of the House and no one can block it. It must come to the floor, no amendments, for an up-or-down vote. Well, we got to 178 signatures on the discharge petition, which is pretty good. I believe that number was 178. I question that, because there were six Republicans that did not sign it, but all but six signed it. We had one Democrat that signed it. So I guess that takes it down there to maybe 173, looks more like the number. I would just correct that for the record, Mr. Speaker. Let that be 173 signatures on the discharge petition. We were working for 218, is the point. Yet the discharge petition that, if it had been brought to the floor, would have been voted on and could have passed, and if it had been forced to the floor under a discharge petition, it would have passed and we would have repealed ObamaCare from the House then.

But it always was a way to get people on record so we knew who was for repeal of ObamaCare and who was unwilling to go on record for repeal of ObamaCare. And it always was something that candidates for Congress could look at that and challenge the individual that they were running against: ``Why didn't you sign the discharge petition. Are you really against ObamaCare? Your name's not on there.''

It was useful for a good number of candidates, and some of them have said they wouldn't be here in this Congress today if they didn't have the discharge petition to measure their opponent with. So it always had a utility in two ways: seeking to repeal ObamaCare, and putting a marker down so that the American public could discern, who's for ObamaCare and who's against it and who's afraid to take a position.

All that was taking place last summer, all the way on up through August, September, October and into the election on the 2nd day of November, where, through the summer, continuing the strategy. It was not just the discharge petition. It was use it and other things, and win the majority here in the House. When we have the majority in the House, then we can bring the repeal of ObamaCare.

And I said for a long time: Repeal of ObamaCare needs to be H.R. 1. That's the highest priority for the Speaker of the House. The Speaker traditionally gets the first 10 bills to name, H.R. 1 through H.R. 10. You can look at the priority by their number. So number 1, I believe, needed to be the repeal of ObamaCare as the highest priority, Mr. Speaker.

Well, it turned out that H.R. 2 was the repeal of ObamaCare. All right. There's no complaint on my part. That's a very high priority, in any case, and we did pass the repeal of ObamaCare, consistent with the strategy that I laid out way last summer.

And then, way last summer, I was making the case that no money can be spent by the Federal Government unless the House of Representatives agrees to it. We can shut off all funding to ObamaCare here in the House of Representatives, and if the Senate disagrees and the House says no, then no money gets spent by the Federal Government, until we reach an agreement. That's what's going on right now, Mr. Speaker.

So, I argued then and I argue now that part of this strategy to undo ObamaCare has to be to unfund ObamaCare. To defund ObamaCare, to phrase it a little bit differently. It was always part of the strategy going back almost a year. And as we move forward to defund ObamaCare, we need to understand that there were automatic appropriations that were written into ObamaCare, and that's part of the dialogue that was going on last fall in a very quiet little way but no one had drilled into it that I know of and looked at all of the pieces, on our side. On the other side, they wrote it in.

So I'd like to hear from someone who was involved in that on the Democrat side, I'd like to hear from former Speaker Pelosi, or maybe I'd like to hear from the whip, Steny Hoyer: Did they know it was in there? Of course they did. Did they direct their staff to write it in there? Probably. Who on that staff devised this strategy to put in all of these threads that add up to $105.5 billion? I would like to know the answer to that question. That will emerge over time, as history has a way of uncovering these things.

But, in any case, the automatic funding was there. Another way to phrase it would be self-enacting funding was there. And I drafted language to cut off the funding to ObamaCare patterned off of the funding that was shut off to put an end to the Vietnam War. That's in the Congressional Record and in the media record some time back. But about 5 or so years ago, I got curious as to how I remembered the Vietnam War being ended versus what actually happened. I went back and read the Congressional Record and the debate on that, Mr. Speaker. The Congressional Record reveals this: There were about three different places and perhaps more, but we uncovered three different places in appropriations bills where Congress shut off the funding to carry out the war in Vietnam. It began in 1973. The most significant was on a continuing resolution in the spring of 1974. As I read through that language, maybe 5 years ago, it gave me an inspiration on how to bring language to shut off the funding to ObamaCare.

I'm going to go from memory here. It's in the Congressional Record. So it won't be precisely accurate but it thematically will be right. The language that was written into a continuing resolution in the spring of 1974 that shut off the American support in the war in Vietnam reads close to this: Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no funds in this act and no funds in any act heretofore appropriated shall be used for offensive or defensive operations in the land of Vietnam, in the skies over it, the seas adjacent to it or in the adjacent countries, and it names at least Laos and Cambodia along the side. I believe they also said Thailand. But it named the countries next to it and it said, no funds shall be used for offensive or defensive operations, Vietnam, the skies over it, the seas adjacent to it or the countries adjacent to it, and no funds in any act heretofore appropriated shall be used for such purpose.

In other words, whatever money was in the pipeline got shut off. They shut off all involvement. And you can imagine, and I don't know it to be factually true, Mr. Speaker, that there were bullets and grenades and munitions that were being unloaded on the dock at Da Nang that were loaded back up again on the ship and hauled away. I don't know that to be fact, but figuratively that's what happened. They shut off everything. With language written into a continuing resolution, they shut off a war here in the United States Congress.

Now if we can shut off a war here in the United States Congress and stop all the money that's in the pipeline and

any money that might be coming at the same time and all the funds that are in the act, none of them can be used to conduct the operations in Vietnam, we can sure as the world in a continuing resolution write legislation that will shut off all of this automatic funding that was written into ObamaCare. How could anyone imagine that somehow because the Congressional Research Services defined the spending that is automatic spending here in the ObamaCare act, they called it mandated appropriations and fund transfers. Mandated appropriations and fund transfers have been defined by some folks as mandatory spending. And then they go on to argue that mandatory spending cannot be addressed in an appropriations bill. I would remind them, this is the United States Congress, and the former majority in this Congress wrote all this into a bill. And it's automatic funding. It's self-enacting funding. It's not completely unprecedented as a tactic, but it is completely unprecedented in its magnitude. Therefore, this Congress can't be hiding behind a rule or defining a piece of legislation as mandatory spending. We're not mandated by any previous Congress. No Congress can bind a subsequent Congress. If this House of Representatives says no, then ``no'' means ``no.'' We sometimes have to remind the Senate over and over again, and we would have to do that under the proposal that I'm making.

But I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that this is an unconstitutional bill. It's been pushed through this Congress in an unprecedented fashion, with a series of shenanigans that this country has never seen before. Two Federal courts have found it unconstitutional, Judge Vincent found it completely unconstitutional, and it's on its way through the circuit and to the Supreme Court and it should be expedited directly to the Supreme Court, except the White House is holding the ball. The White House is holding the ball because their tactic is to try to get ObamaCare implemented to the maximum amount before such time, so that it becomes too late to pull it out by the roots. That's part of the tactic.

So from the litigation standpoint, the unconstitutional components are the unconstitutional mandates, compelling States in violation of the 10th Amendment that they have to comply with an act to provide these services, and compelling individuals that they have to buy insurance even though they're not participating in the system whatsoever.

That's never been done before. It's completely unprecedented, Mr. Speaker. So we see the Obama administration now offering a little carrot out there to the States, to the Governors, saying we will waive the mandate for the States. Now, the caveat is you have to provide an equal or better policy yourself in order to be able to qualify for the waiver, and you've got until 2014 to do that.

But that act, which likely won't come to any kind of fruition, is a means, I believe, to take away the argument that it's an unconstitutional mandate on the States. The White House has also had language that came out a couple of weeks ago that they would consider or entertain the alteration or perhaps the elimination of the individual mandate.

Now, that's the second component that might come out of the White House that would, if those two provisions were altered in practice, they can go before the Supreme Court and argue that it's not a constitutional violation because it's not really a mandate. And that's how they hope to walk through this thicket of constitutional prohibitions and hopefully they can find a decision at the Supreme Court level that will allow them to impose ObamaCare on the rest of America. That's their litigation tactic, Mr. Speaker.

Their legislation tactic is this: The pressure that grows, they're trying to take the pressure off. So when the House played into their hands a week or so ago by bringing legislation on the 1099 component of this, this outrageous requirement that people report to the IRS any cumulative transactions with any entity that meet or exceed $600 in a year, which means if you pay somebody to mow your lawn you have to turn in a squeal form to the IRS. And this is something that was put into ObamaCare, these extra requirements, because they were able to score it as, my memory is that it was then $17 billion it was supposed to generate in taxes because the IRS was going to go in and audit these squeal forms, the 1099 forms.

Well, in any case, that was the most objectionable component in the short term that came with ObamaCare. Therefore, this House picked this up and sent it to the Senate. And what happens? The Democrats in the Senate are going to take it and send it to the President. Why? Because they think that people shouldn't be required to file the 1099 forms and they can find another place to come up with $17 billion? No, Mr. Speaker, that's not it. It's this: They understand that the objections to the 1099 squeal forms that were written into ObamaCare are the most egregious of all in the short term, and they want to take the lid off the pressure cooker, let some steam out, put the lid back on, and they want to continue to frantically implement ObamaCare with the $105.5 billion that is written into it and the self-enacting automatic spending that is there.

So as the pressure builds against ObamaCare, they're willing to take a little piece off here, lift the lid off the pressure cooker there, and drain that heat down so that they can hang on to the major components of ObamaCare and get it implemented. And while we have a whole series of different initiatives that are going on around here driven now by the new Republican majority, five different proposals within Energy and Commerce to change the language from mandatory spending to, I suppose, optional spending or something, all of those are authorization pieces of language. There is no leverage to get them passed. If Energy and Commerce passes that legislation, it goes over to Harry Reid's desk where it probably goes directly into the trash, not into the desk drawer.

So we can't produce leverage to change the definition. We have to look at the leverage that we have, the leverage that we're gifted with. And it's this: This government comes to, runs out of money at midnight, March 18. We are all staring at that deadline. And the House of Representatives has demonstrated clearly that we want to avoid having the President or Harry Reid shut this government down. We want to keep this government functioning in a responsible fashion.

But I will say, Mr. Speaker, that functioning in a responsible fashion is not turning a blind eye to $105.5 billion. It is not wondering where this number came from. This number is in this CRS report. This is a Congressional Research Services report titled, ``Appropriations and Fund Transfers in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.'' It's written by C. Stephen Redhead, specialist in health policy, and it's dated February 10, 2011.

In this, now that the numbers are in here, when you go through and highlight the numbers, we put it into a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet, Mr. Speaker, this spreadsheet shows the total of all these automatic appropriations. They come to $105.464 billion, and that's over a decade period of time. This is the minimum. This is the threshold number. It's not the maximum amount that can be spent.

Just to give an example, here is one of the items in here of automatic appropriations, self-enacting appropriations that shows this. Let's see, it totals $10 billion through FY19. But this is for Medicare innovation. Medicare innovation. This is funds that goes to Congressional Medicare or Medicaid Services, CMS, FY11 it's $1 billion. And it's written in such a way that it's $1 billion every year, and here's the language, in perpetuity, Mr. Speaker.

This is one example of Medicare innovation that gets appropriated automatically, written and hidden into the bill, a billion dollars every year for Medicare innovation that goes on in perpetuity. And it doesn't require an act of Congress. It's not an act of an Appropriations Committee in the 112th Congress that funds the FY12 or 11 or any subsequent year. This is the perpetual motion machine that keeps spitting out money. It will spit out money forever. It will spit out money until Congress conducts an affirmative act to shut off this funding.

That's what I sought to do with the amendment that I offered in H.R. 1, which said, patterned off of the Vietnam War amendment, it said--and I'm

going to do this in summary, too--notwithstanding any other provision of law, no funds in this act, and no funds in any act previously enacted, shall be used to carry out the provisions of, in summary, ObamaCare. That language pulls out by the roots everything that's here in this CRS report and shuts off the automatic appropriations.

There is an issue, also written into ObamaCare, another sleight of hand that took place. There are many others, but this one is particularly egregious that grants the authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services to do transfers to fund the implementation of ObamaCare essentially at her discretion, and probably out of the U.S. Treasury, just to do the automatic appropriations; to grant that kind of authority to a bureaucrat, to circumvent Congress, to set up that authority, a transfer authority, which is the equivalent of an appropriations authority that goes on in perpetuity to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. While there are automatic appropriations to the tune of $105.5 billion for a decade that also go on in perpetuity without--so binding the future Congress in a way that requires an affirmative action on this Congress's part to shut it off.

So, Mr. Speaker, where I am is this: I am done dancing around with all of this. I've looked at it. I've analyzed it. I've joined with some of my colleagues. I thank my colleague Michele Bachmann for raising this up in the media and doing as much media as she has done over this last week or so. I drove this with all that I had back when we were working on and building up to and passing H.R. 1. I will continue to do so.

We must shut off this funding. We must do it affirmatively. We need to do it where we have leverage. There are only two places where there is leverage: that is in the continuing resolution in one place, and the other one is the debt ceiling. But what I have said is I will vote for no appropriations bill that funds Planned Parenthood. I will vote for no appropriations bill that should be shutting off the funding, the automatic funding especially to ObamaCare. That's where I stand. That's where I will stand.

If enough Members of this Congress stand with me, we will put an end to ObamaCare. And we need do so early. We've got a lot of good work to do in this Congress. We can either look forward to a long, protracted battle, a war of attrition over this that goes on over the entire 112th Congress and on through the elections of 2012, including the Presidential election of 2012, or we can pull this tumor out by the roots, this malignant tumor called ObamaCare that is metastasizing as we speak while this automatic funding is being poured in and likely being transferred. We can put the brakes on it.

We can pull it out by the roots, every bit of it, get rid of it lock, stock, and barrel. That's what we must do. It's our obligation, our pledge, and this House has voted to repeal it. This House has voted to unfund it, and every Republican in the House and every Republican in the Senate has voted to repeal ObamaCare. Two Federal courts have found it unconstitutional. It is irresponsible to tolerate the funding to ObamaCare while it goes on on our watch, while we have the power to shut it off, and while we understand that it is unconstitutional into the bargain.

So, Mr. Speaker, I came to this floor tonight to urge this House to stand together, to write the language into the CR that I asked be written into H.R. 1 so we can go forward and join with the American people, the supermajority of the American people that have rejected ObamaCare, that want their liberty back, that want constitutional legislation coming out of this place. The very reason that there are 87 new freshman Republicans in this House of Representatives: Every one of them ran on repeal of ObamaCare. Every one of them voted to repeal it. They brought a new mandate here. Many of us have been standing here fighting it.

I welcome them, God's gift to America, and I ask all, Mr. Speaker, to join with me. Let's shut off all of this funding to ObamaCare; that that is in the existing appropriations and that that is automatically appropriated, whether some might want to call it mandatory spending--I call it self-enacting automatic appropriations--written in a deceptive fashion, must be shut off, and I will continue to work on this cause with every effort that I have, Mr. Speaker.

I appreciate your attention and your indulgence.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 5 o'clock and 31 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, March 10, 2011, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

It is an honor and a privilege to address you here on the floor of the House. And I would say after listening to the presentation of my colleague from Illinois, it's been a little while since I've heard that; and I'm glad to hear the delivery you gave tonight. A little more time here on the floor would be good for this whole Congress. I appreciate the reference to our Founding Fathers and the years in the earlier foundation of our country, the principles that we agree on.

I'm happy to be here. I came here to speak about some subject matter, Mr. Speaker, that I think it's important that you turn your ear to and that the Members of this Congress turn their ear to and that the people in the United States do the same thing.

We are in very dramatic times in the history of this country. They encompass quite a continuum of a ride that we've been on. To go back and capture some of that, to frame the present moment that we're in, I take us back to a time, let's say back to a time in 1995. In 1995, shortly after Republicans won the majority for the first time in 40 years in this House of Representatives. There was a real test that took place. There was a test that took place on the determination on the part of the new majority after 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, so to speak, that had determined that they wanted to bring this budget under control. They wanted to cut spending and put us on a path to balancing the budget. That was initiated in 1995 with a real determination, and also with the benefit of having a majority to work in cooperation with in the United States Senate.

That determination to balance the budget brought about a challenge from President Clinton, a number of vetoes on the part of President Clinton that brought about the shutdown in the Federal Government. I remember those years. I was not in government at the time. I was a full-time owner of the construction company that I formed in 1975 that continues to this day. As I watched this in the news and I watched the debate on C-SPAN, I was inspired by the leaders that we had, the statesmen that we had, that stood and laid out the financial circumstances that we were in and the necessity to get Federal Government spending under control and the plan to bring forth a balanced budget.

While this government was shut down because of the vetoes of President Clinton, my recollection is that it was over a $300 billion proposed cut in Medicare that was the crux of this matter, where the whole issue pivoted on it and a Nation watched as there were threats that there were parts of the Federal Government that wouldn't be providing services and others were scared that they would lose theirs; that Social Security checks wouldn't be coming in on time, et cetera, the American public began to roil and boil and rise up and push back. And over a period of time, and I don't think at the fault of the Members of the House of Representatives but by the circumstances of the life and time, the public began to have a higher level of anxiety about what would happen if the Federal Government continued with the shutdown process that they were in. At a certain point there was a request made for a unanimous consent agreement to go ahead and approve the funding in the Senate side. When that happened and the Senate passed a unanimous consent agreement, it washed over the House here and the majority in the House was compelled to accept what had been delivered from the Senate on that day.

It was a sad day for me. As a businessman and a father and a person that was working to make my little part of the world as good as I could, I was disappointed that this Congress couldn't hold the line on spending, couldn't hold the line on this growth in government, and I believed that until I understood it from this perspective of standing here on the floor, Mr. Speaker, that the House had let us down.

Today, I think it's a little bit different equation. I think they did as much as they could have done and under the circumstances because of the UC agreement in the Senate, the House didn't have much choice but to concede to the push that came from the Senate. But here is the point that I've learned on that day and I stand on at this day, Mr. Speaker, and that's this: There's not a time that the Federal Government can spend that's not agreed to by the House of Representatives. We start the spending, we start the taxes, and if we say no, it won't be spent, which means that if we hold our ground here, we can shut off the spending to anything that we choose to shut off.

That's the way it was designed to be by the Founding Fathers, as was referenced by the gentleman from Illinois a little earlier. That's what the Constitution says.

By the way, it's our obligation because we're the closest to the people. Every 2 years, we're up for election or reelection, and if this House is going to change hands, it can change hands within a 2-year period of time. It's a 24/24/7 campaign, meaning for 24 months, 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week, we go on in perpetual campaign mode because we are always up for reelection.

That means that the House here is more responsive and more sensitive to

the people than is the Senate, which has a 6-year election span of time. They could put up a contentious vote, one that runs against the will of their constituents in the first couple of years or 3 or 4 years of their terms and can trust that the people might forget about it by the time they're up for reelection. Not so in the House. What we do here people are not going to forget about, and they should not. I want us to be accountable all the time, and I want a public that has a long memory, one that is very astute and very well informed and very well engaged.

We've been watching a populace that has been fitting that mold more and more. We've watched, Mr. Speaker, as the tea party groups across the country have brought themselves forward and filled up the town squares and filled up the town hall meetings and surrounded this Capitol, have physically surrounded the United States Capitol, I believe, for the first time in the history of America. We couldn't put a helicopter up there and take the picture because of air security concerns; but I walked around this building, and I saw Americans here surrounding the Capitol--yes, holding hands. It wasn't just a human chain around the Capitol but a human doughnut around the Capitol. It was six- and eight-people deep all the way around the Capitol--no thin spots in it--and thousands of people in the corners who weren't part of the human doughnut but who were around this Capitol.

They came here to say, Keep your hands off of my health care. We reject ObamaCare. We want no part of it.

This went on for days and days. There were people who wouldn't leave these Capitol grounds. Finally, on that sad day last March, when ObamaCare finally passed with all of the legislative shenanigans that enabled that to happen--and they were considerable and they were unprecedented, Mr. Speaker--the people around here put up a groan, not necessarily of despair but of agony, because they'd seen American liberty ripped out by its roots and taken over--our bodies nationalized by the Federal Government, our health care; the Federal Government taking over our bodies, nationalizing our bodies and our skin and everything inside it and putting a 10 percent tax on the outside if you go to the tanning salon. That's what happened with ObamaCare--a nationalization of the second most sovereign thing we have. The first most sovereign thing we have is our soul. The second most sovereign thing we have is our body, our skin, everything inside it, our health.

In the United States of America, we must have the right to manage our health to the maximum of our ability and not have the Federal Government diminish the options or take away the numbers of insurance policies we might buy or diminish the health care providers that are out there and put this into a one-size-fits-all. That's what ObamaCare did, and it's what it does if we let it continue to exist.

The circumstances of the government shutdown in 1995 were within an economic environment that brought us to where we are today, and we should understand what that is, Mr. Speaker.

We should know that, during that period of time, there was a dot-com bubble. There was this unnatural growth in the economy that was brought about because we had learned how to store and transfer information faster and more efficiently and more effectively than ever before. So there were millions of Americans who were investing in these dot-com companies who were involved in the technological era, in this modern dot-com era. They were investing because we could store and transfer information more effectively than ever before. They were investing in our ability to store and transfer but were not adjusting it to the necessity that that information and information transfer and manipulation ability helps our economy only to the extent that we can use it to provide a good or a service more effectively than before to provide efficiencies in our economy.

We found a lot of ways over those last 15, 16 years to produce more efficiencies because of the technology that had developed, but a lot of dot-com companies went under because they didn't add that substance to add to the value of our overall economy. It isn't enough just to be able to store and transfer information better than ever before. You have to store and transfer it and help the efficiencies so that companies can provide profitability. That was the only thing other than if you could market this information for recreational purposes. That was the other component. Only two.

So this dot-com bubble grew out of an overexuberance, an unnatural exuberance, that came from an optimism that we were going to take this economy someplace it had never been before. That bubble was bound to burst. I think it would have burst on its own, but there was a lawsuit filed against Microsoft which lanced the bubble, and the dot-com bubble burst. As it burst, it was like a blister on your skin, where it settles down into the hollow place underneath it.

There was a dip in the economy, and I believe there was a concerted effort at that point to fill this hole created by the bursting of the dot-com bubble with unnaturally low interest rates and long-term mortgages that would allow people to build or buy houses that they otherwise couldn't have afforded, and it created a housing bubble. If you think of the dot-com bubble that burst, then when it collapsed, it went into a trough, Mr. Speaker, and that trough was sought to be filled by an unnatural bubble of the housing boom which was created.

It was a housing boom that was in the process of unfolding and, I should say, of stretching itself to its max while President Bush was elected in 2000. Then the 2001 September 11 attacks came on our financial centers and this assault on America. That all came with this transition of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, with the growth of the unnatural housing bubble, with the assault on the United States on September 11 of 2001 on our financial centers, and with the attack on the American economy. That was coupled with all of the spending we needed to do to go to war in Afghanistan and subsequently in Iraq. Then in the middle of all of that, we spent billions on standing up the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, and all of the other security provisions that we put in place to make sure that America could be protected from more and more attacks from al Qaeda.

All of this was going against our economy.

Within all of that, there was also the passage of No Child Left Behind, which took more money, and there were other components of the growth in the compassionate conservatism that was driven by the Bush administration--all of this while we were at war. Now, if I add this all up, it's not a very good formula for a balanced budget, and we had that balanced budget in the late 1990s and rolling into the year 2000.

When I came here to this Congress, elected in 2002 and sworn in here in January 2003, I came down here and said to the chairman of the Budget Committee, Where is our balanced budget? He said to me, We can't balance the budget. It's not possible to balance the budget, and you'll not have a balanced budget to vote on.

I went back to my office, Mr. Speaker, and I began to put together a budget that would balance. My green staff was tasked with the job of putting together a budget that we could offer that would be balanced. We didn't get it completed. At that time, it was about a $2.7 trillion budget. To try to rewrite that in a balanced fashion as a freshman in Congress and with a staff that was at that point not yet experienced was a very, very difficult task. I got to the point where I wasn't confident enough to offer it.

I wish now, looking back on it, that I would have offered a balanced budget, and I wish every year I would have offered a balanced budget. The red ink that we had was getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and the American people have not been informed as to how difficult it is to bring this budget to a balance. One of the important components of offering a budget that balances in this year tells us how big the problem is, and it has been getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

I stood here and sat in this Chamber, and listened to the debate engaged in, and listened to the 30-Something Group. Night after night after night, they would come down here on the floor and make the argument that, if we'd just put them in charge, if they'd just have the gavels, they would fix this country.

So eventually, over time, the Republicans lost the majority. The Democrats won the majority in 2006. Nancy Pelosi came in as Speaker. Now they had what they wanted. They were going to fix this country--and they did all right. They began to take that rather minor deficit and turn it into a huge deficit. They began to make energy more expensive and to take the prospects of success in America down instead of up. They were working on their vision of America, which is the transfer of payments, to tax the rich, and to transfer those payments to other people who aren't as fortunate--or I'll just say not as productive. They may or may not be as fortunate.

While this was going on, the deficit was growing, the dependency class was growing, and that's what was going on.

There was a concerted effort to borrow money from the Chinese and transfer that money over into the pockets of a growing dependency class to create a bigger dependency class because that was the political base that was supporting the Democrats--and still does in this Congress. And we watched this effort to expand the dependency class in America take place during the Pelosi Congress that began in 2007 through 2008. In 2008, Barack Obama was elected President and now this Congress went on steroids because they had a President that would sign the legislation instead of veto the legislation that was sent out of this Congress. And what we saw happen was an accelerated debt, and more and more money borrowed from the Chinese and the Saudis, and that $2.7 trillion or $2.8 trillion budget raised on up another $1 trillion. We've seen an additional $3 trillion beyond our means that has been spent under this Obama administration, supported by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

The American people rose up, Mr. Speaker. They knew that it was irresponsible and they filled up the town hall meetings. They saw what was happening. The summer of, I guess, two or three summers ago--and the year might come to me and I can be confident enough to speak it into the Record--but we had an energy crisis. We had gas at $4 a gallon. I believe that was the summer of 2008 that gas was at $4 a gallon. I went back and did town hall meetings that filled up with people. And they saw what was happening.

And there was an effort in this Congress to shut down access to energy, a belief that if energy costs went up, people would use less. And I remember the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, saying ``I'm trying to save the planet, I'm trying to save the planet.'' Well, I think she believed that she was trying to save the planet. And what I saw happening was the actions were driving up the cost of energy. That $4 gas issue finally broke and it started to spiral back downwards by the time of the election in 2008.

But we had, in August of that year, a monthlong energy debate taking place here on the floor. When we were ready to go home for that August we had several Special Orders that were cued up for the end of business that day. Democrats offered a motion to shut the place down, which would have shut off the Special Orders about energy. Some of the Members here decided we're going to keep talking, and so we came one after another. Eventually the Speaker shut the lights down--not completely off--shut the microphones off, shut the television cameras off and turned them sideways. And still we stood here for the month of August all the way into Labor Day every day making the case that we needed all energy all the time. Now that argument diminished when gas prices went back down again. It's before us again. And we must do an all-energy-all-the-time bill. I want to compliment Congressman Devin Nunes from California for all the work that he's done on legislation that I believe he'll introduce tomorrow on all energy all the time.

America needs to have cheap energy. We need to have cheap energy in a way that--everything that we do costs energy. If you move anything, it takes energy. If you have any product, it takes energy to produce it, energy to delivery it, and energy to go pick it up and bring it home. And so the cost of energy is tied into the cost of everything that we have and do. America cannot be competitive with the rest of the world if we have high energy prices. And yet, that 2008 year drove energy prices up to $4 a gallon gas. We saw crude oil prices go way over $100 a barrel, and we're looking at that happening again.

We've had the President move to shut down drilling offshore by Executive order. We've seen Democrats, in large numbers, oppose opening up ANWR for drilling, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I've been for drilling up there for a long time. I've gone up there. We drilled the North Slope in the early 1970s, and if it did anything with the environment it enhanced it, it didn't diminish it. And the strictest environmentalist we had couldn't fly over that country and point to a well and tell you how it had even defaced the landscape or broken up the scenery. The wells are submersible, they don't show up. There are not roads to each of them. They go out on ice roads in the winter time to service them. It's a good place to go and develop oil in the North Slope, and we need to go get it.

We need to drill offshore. We need to drill in the Bakken region in North Dakota and Montana, and it spills over into Canada. And we need to continue to bring Canadian oil down into the United States and refine it here and be the best trading partner for the Canadians that they could possibly ask for. If we fail to do so, they will build a pipeline to the west, and they will pump that oil and the oil stands out to tankers that will take that oil over to China, Japan, and places in Asia. They will do the logical thing. We need to make sure the logical thing is here in the United States. Mr. Speaker, that's just the energy issue.

And as this rolls forward, another summer we had the issue of health care. And as the effort came to pass ObamaCare here in the House of Representatives, the American people began to realize what was happening to their liberty, and they filled up the town hall meetings. We had town hall meetings in Iowa that got so big that they had to be moved outside because there wasn't room inside the biggest rooms we could find for all the people that came to, in a constitutional fashion, petition the government peacefully for redress and grievances. And they came, and they were well informed. Some of them had read the whole bill. And with great passion--and sometimes with little tact and sometimes with great deference--they made the case to me over and over again, they didn't want ObamaCare. They still don't want ObamaCare. And when it was passed here in the House they rejected it. And so I spent not quite a year of my life fighting the passage of ObamaCare. And since that period of time I introduced legislation to repeal ObamaCare immediately after its passage on that late night last March. We're coming up on a little past 11 months since it's been passed into law. The American people still reject it. They want their liberty, they want their freedom. They want to manage their own bodies, manage their own health care. They want a free market system. They want a doctor-patient relationship. And they sent 87 new freshmen here to the House of Representatives to ensure that ObamaCare would be repealed, that the funding to ObamaCare would be shut off, and that we would see no more implementation or enforcement of ObamaCare.

And what has it brought us, these 87 new freshmen that stand together on that one square? Here's what it brought us, Mr. Speaker: H.R. 2, presumably the second-highest priority of the new Speaker of the House--it brought us a new Speaker of the House, Speaker John Boehner. And he sets the priorities, at least by tradition, for the first 10 bills that come out of the House, H.R. 1 through 10. And H.R. 2, the second-highest priority, was the bill that repealed ObamaCare.

The legislation that I introduced almost 1 year ago and teamed up with Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and others, including Connie Mack of Florida and Parker Griffith of Alabama--no longer in this Congress--and a number of others that were part of this original effort to introduce legislation to repeal ObamaCare, and many others that signed on as cosponsors, and 178 that signed the discharge petition to repeal ObamaCare--the message was very clear. H.R. 2 was debated and passed the House of Representatives in the early stages here in the 112th Congress

in January, when it sent it over to the United States Senate. That's an important step.

Another important step is to do as I've said since at least the middle of last summer: At every appropriations bill introduce language in that bill that cuts off all funding that would be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare. That's an essential part of this. I had gone back and read through the history of how this Congress shut down the funding for the Vietnam War and shut off a war that had gone on for over a decade. They did so by putting language in a continuing resolution that shut off the Vietnam War. And it was language that said, in 1974--and they started some of this in 1973, but in 1974 they said, Notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds in this continuing resolution for appropriations during the Vietnam War, notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds in this act and no funds heretofore appropriated shall be used to carry out offensive or defensive operations in the air over the seas adjacent to or the land of Vietnam or its adjacent countries. It's a bit of a paraphrase, but it makes the point succinctly, I believe, Mr. Speaker.

When I read the debate on that appropriations bill and when I read the language, that ``notwithstanding'' language that was put into the continuing resolution that shut off the funds going to Vietnam to the point where bullets that were being unloaded on the dock at Da Nang presumably were loaded back up again. None of the funds could be used to carry out offensive or defensive operations.

It cut off the supply support for South Vietnam's military. And we wondered why was it that they ran in the face of the North Vietnamese that spring in 1975? They had nothing left to fight with, Mr. Speaker. Their munitions were gone. They were played out. They didn't have heavy weapons; they didn't have light weapons that were well supplied. And it brought about the collapse of the South Vietnamese self-defense. And millions died in the aftermath--not just in Vietnam. In Cambodia and other places in Southeast Asia.

I disagreed with the decision that this Congress made, but I do agree that the language in the continuing resolution was effective in shutting off the funding to the Vietnam war; and similar language to the language that I've crafted to go into the appropriation bills from this point forward that says, essentially, notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds in this act and no funds previously appropriated shall be used to carry out the provisions of ObamaCare.

That's the language that I sought to introduce and asked the Rules Committee to grant a waiver for--unsuccessfully, I might add. That's the language that I asked be written into H.R. 1, the continuing resolution. It's the language that I tried to get offered here on the floor during H.R. 1 that was ruled out of order. And the amendments that I was able to get passed worked in compatibility with Denny Rehberg of Montana and others--Denny Rehberg, who did very, very good work on this appropriations bill, on H.R. 1. Without his work, we might not have had anything that was in order. Because of his work, we had eight amendments that were in order that were voted on. Each of them cut off funding to ObamaCare in some version or another. I compliment all of my colleagues who worked on that.

But now we've reached this point where we've got to draw a line. H.R. 1 took the hill. It said none of the funds in this bill are going to be used to implement ObamaCare. No funds are going to go to fund Planned Parenthood. No funds are going to be used to fund abortion anywhere in the world out of this continuing resolution.

But that language was not included in the continuing resolution that was passed night before last here in the House--or maybe it perhaps was last night. My nights blur together. That language was not included. We need better language that I'm suggesting here included in the next CR.

This government shuts down March 18 if we don't now extend its funding again. I'd like to get a solution that takes us to the end of the fiscal year.

But standing on the hill and defending the hill to shut off all funding to ObamaCare since every Republican in the House and the Senate has voted to repeal ObamaCare, everybody in the House has voted to cut off all funding to ObamaCare at every opportunity--and that's eight of them--we have this opportunity now to write a new CR and to write the language into it that does unfund ObamaCare. Not just what's in the CR, but what is automatically appropriated.

There are automatic appropriations, Mr. Speaker, that are in the ObamaCare legislation--I will say deceptively written--that appropriate funds that go forward whether or not this House acts, goes forward in perpetuity. Perpetuity. That means forever, if anybody out there is wondering what it is.

And for a 10-year period of time, there are automatic appropriations of $105.5 billion over 10 years that automatically fund the implementation and enforcement of ObamaCare. If this House doesn't act to shut it off, ObamaCare is implemented if we do nothing. Even if we pass the repeal, even if we don't authorize any new funding, $105.5 billion gets spent to implement it, which means that the roots of ObamaCare go deep. The deeper they go, the harder they are to rip out.

And I've said it must be ripped out by the roots. Let's rip it out, Mr. Speaker, in this next CR. Let's retake the hill that we took with H.R. 1. Let's hold the hill. Let's stare the President down. Let's stare Harry Reid down. If we're not willing to do that, they will get everything that they're willing to fight for.

This is the time for this new House with these new 87 Republican freshmen. Every Republican that's voted to repeal and unfund ObamaCare now needs to help us take the hill and hold the hill and stare the President down.

Let's fund the government so it functions legitimately, but let's not cave in to a President who may well shut down the entire United States Government in order to preserve his pet project, ObamaCare, which has been rejected by the American people and this Congress resoundingly.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your attention and yield back the balance of my time.

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 56 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, March 3, 2011, at 10 a.m.

Madam Speaker, the gentleman from Iowa is pleased to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the House, and I want to express my disappointment in the gentlemen who spoke before me. I usually come here to pick up my material for rebuttal. And as I listened to you talk about your affection for the Peace Corps, I didn't come up with a single thing that I seek to rebut here tonight.

So I'll go off on the subject matter that I came to address, Madam Speaker, and that is the situation where we are in this country today with debt and deficit and the growth in government and the things that we must do to turn this country back around and put it on the right track.

This House here this afternoon voted to pass a continuing resolution that has within it an aggregate of about $4.1 billion in cuts over a 2- week period of time that if you multiply or extrapolate that out to the end of the fiscal year, it comes in that neighborhood of about $61 billion in cuts which arguably holds the reductions in place. But it did specifically go in and make the cuts in areas where the President had recommended those cuts. It dialed down the contention and tried to find a way to find a solution and a resolution. A list of the President's recommendations I have, but I don't think I'm going to take the time or the trouble, Madam Speaker, to read them into the Record. I'll just say that it suffices to show that a number in the neighborhood of $2.7 billion would be to earmarks savings, and the termination of programs saving is about $1.25 billion, so we get to that number that's just slightly more than $4 billion.

It's perhaps a victory. It's perhaps a success. It's perhaps a temporary one. I think most likely that it is. These cuts that were offered here today will, most likely, be met with an agreement down on the other end of the Capitol Hill building in the Senate that is run by Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. I think I saw some language in this appropriations bill that might directly affect him. That might be what helps convince him as well.

Madam Speaker, this is a short-term piece that was designed to be a period of time that would allow the Senate to mull over the House position, which is H.R. 1. H.R. 1 is the bill that has the highest priority for the Speaker of the House. It's been traditionally the case. And 2 weeks ago, this Congress negotiated, debated, and offered amendments. Some 500 to 600 amendments were filed. Nearly 200 of them were debated and voted upon. And many of them that went in were cuts in spending or prohibitions from using that spending to implement certain policies that have been since rejected by this Congress.

And, Madam Speaker, we need to remember that there was an election last November 2 of 2010. And to quote the President of the United States, he famously said after the election of November, 2008: We had an election, and we won, which means that he dictates the policy. Well, Madam Speaker, to the President of the United States, I would say, we had an election November 2. You didn't win that one, Mr. President. In fact, you declared it to be a ``shellacking.'' It was a shellacking.

And the Republicans won the majority in this House by huge numbers. We're looking today at 87 new freshman Republicans and nine freshman Democrats, to give you a sense of the poor proportionality, or the disproportionality. The seats that were picked up have dramatically changed. The gavels all changed hands in the House of Representatives. The agenda changed. It has gone from an agenda that has been driven under the speakership of Nancy Pelosi for 4 years, of an agenda of accelerating spending, increasing government and pushing socialized medicine--which is what I have long declared ObamaCare to be. That doesn't shock anybody, Madam Speaker. It is common vernacular out in the central part of the United States at a minimum.

And so we saw this push to grow government. We saw the President participate in, as a United States Senator, and accelerate his efforts as the President of the United States in the government take-over, first promoting a $700 billion TARP bailout program that was designed to pick up toxic assets that could have been far better picked up by the private sector if he would have just identified them and we would have exempted capital gains taxes on the profits that would be have been made. We would have seen private money go in and pick up these toxic mortgages in a large way and be managed--managed for a better result that would have kept more people in their homes. The list of good things goes on that might have happened had we had more free market solutions and less government intervention.

But that $700 billion TARP plan was a mistake, in my view, Madam Speaker. And behind that came the call for the economic stimulus plan which was $787.5 billion that rolled up to around $816 billion for the economic stimulus plan. Not all of it was spent, but it was to keep unemployment below 8 percent. We know that it sailed up into the upper 9 percentile, 9.7 and above. It has dialed down now to around 9. But we have a lot of people who have given up and stopped trying.

It is clear that the stimulus plan didn't stimulate the economy at all in the way that it was described or the way it was promised to us, but it surely added to the debt. We have seen about $3 trillion in unnecessary spending driven by this President. We have watched as proud companies went into hock to the Federal Government and found the Federal Government engaged in managing some of those companies.

Three large investment banks were taken over by the Federal Government, at least by the power of management or influence--AIG, the insurance company, over $180 billion that flowed into AIG to protect other investors that had an interest in AIG, the insurance company, or in policies that they had offered that were guaranteeing the return on mortgage-backed securities, Madam Speaker. So there is $180 billion there. Three large investment banks and AIG, the insurance company.

We saw Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac transition from quasi-government to government, to taxpayer guaranteed, stepping in to play a role in the majority of the mortgage loans in the United States, guaranteed by the taxpayers.

I recall standing on this floor, the floor of the House of Representatives, October 26, 2005, listening to the most immediate past chairman of the Financial Services Committee arguing that he was never going to participate in bailing out Fannie and Freddie. And if anyone was considering buying stock in either one, they should not do so under the consideration that Barney Frank from Massachusetts would be engaged in bailing them out. And so he later became chairman of the committee, and that's what happened.

We saw Dodd-Frank become law, which gives the Federal Government massive regulatory control over the financial institutions in America. We saw the government, the White House, takeover of General Motors and Chrysler. And we saw ObamaCare pass, which I have declared to be the nationalization of our skin and everything inside it. And by the way, it includes a 10 percent tax on the outside if you go to the tanning salon. That is over 51 percent of our economy swallowed up by the Obama administration and supported by the Pelosi House and the Reid Senate.

And we come to this point where America can't take it anymore, Madam Speaker. We can't take it anymore. And all over the world they know that too much spending has put America in debt. It has put our currency in question. It has put our economy in an unstable position, and it guarantees that we will be in a long, drawn-out recovery because we have the overspending. We have the debt to service, which is pay the interest. And then we also have to eventually pay off the principal. And we are borrowing from the Chinese and begging them. And we are borrowing money from the Saudis and begging them. Yes, it affects our foreign policy. We are watching a foreign policy that is a conflagration in the Middle East. Country after country is blowing up and seeking to throw off the yoke of its long-term dictatorship ruler and replace it with--we are not sure what

their ideals are, but they have hit the end of their patience line.

So here we are. Here we are with a continuing resolution that the government is operating on today that was negotiated and passed here in the House and in the Senate in December. It extended the funding for the government over until March 4 of this year; midnight, March 4, which is somewhere around Friday night, I think. Maybe Thursday night.

So there has been an action here on the floor to pass a continuing resolution to do temporary stopgap funding to keep the government running for another 2 weeks, up until March 18. And that CR has now been messaged to the Senate. And the Senate can decide if they want to take it up tomorrow or the next day, get it to the President's desk. If the President signs the CR, the government keeps running; if the President doesn't, the government shuts down.

I am watching as my colleagues seem to think that there is one data point of message for them to learn from, that because there was a government shutdown in 1995, it was one that was pushed for by Republicans, it was driven by Republicans. They wanted to face President Clinton down and insisted that they pass a balanced budget and to get to a balanced budget. In spite of all of the things that happened in 1995 and in early 1996, that was the result, Madam Speaker. They shortly had a balanced budget, and that balanced budget came a lot sooner than it would have otherwise and it lasted at least until such time we were hit by September 11 and the calamity that sent this America into an overspending binge.

I think we could have faced the calamity of September 11 without having to blow our budget in the way we did, but that is not what happened. But what did happen in 1995, if that is the only data point, I want to make this point, Madam Speaker. First of all, there are thousands and thousands of students all over America who are studying political science. Some of them are watching tonight. Some of them are reading in the paper the things that we say and we do, and they are analyzing it. They are listening to their professors analyze what goes on here in Congress, and they are listening to the instruction of the rules, the standards, the axioms that come from certain data points along the line of continuum of political history. And that one data point on that line of continuum of political history is the government shutdown of 1995, and some of it drug over into very early 1996, and the argument is that House Republicans lost that because they had to concede their position to the President and to the Senate.

Well, it is a fact that the House had to concede. They did concede. It is also a fact that the Republicans that controlled the Senate at the time passed a unanimous consent agreement to go ahead and spend the money that was demanded by Bill Clinton and send it over here to the House. The House was in a position where they couldn't push that chain back uphill and President Clinton and the Senate got their way and imposed it over the House.

But I will still say that there is not a dime that can be spent by the Federal Government if the House of Representatives insists that it not be spent. We have to concede and go along with it at some point, or it won't be spent. And the negotiating position that was there for the House Republicans in 1995 was one that was marginally stronger because they had at least a majority in the Senate. That is the difference in the dynamics. But it was also about $300 billion, as I recall, on Medicare spending.

So whenever you put down a dollar figure and you try to stand on that as a principle, it is a different stance than if you put something that is principle down and stand on it. For example, whether we are going to spend $300 billion on Medicare in 1995, or 250 or 200 or 150 or 100 or no more, you will lose or gain people along that line of that continuum. If you want to cut Medicare by $350 billion, you would lose some people that might be with you at 300. And if you move the line up $400 billion, 450, you lose some people who might have been with you at 350 or 400.

Money is something that there is a sliding scale. You cannot find a principle there that you can stand on. It is like going to an auction and seeing something that you want. And maybe you go to the auction and you decide I want to buy a bicycle and I am willing to pay $100 for that bicycle. If you go to the auction and the auctioneer is crying out he has a bid for $100, now he wants $101, do you pay that extra $1 and go home with the bicycle, something to show for it? Or do you say, no, that was my principle. My principle was I am not going to spend more than $100.

Well, some people live by that principle. I do, occasionally. But it is not a principle that is tied to anything that is definable from a sense of right and wrong. It is a percentage scale. If $100 was the right number, it is only 1 percent wrong to pay $101. If you get it for $99, do you have any more virtue? No, you just got a bargain from what you anticipated.

But when you stand on a principle, it is a different story. The principle here that is better for the House to stand on than the principle of the $300 billion in 1995 is the principle that we must not be funding ObamaCare willfully with appropriations bills here in the House. We must not do so because every Republican and a handful of Democrats, and there will be more, voted to repeal ObamaCare.

We passed the repeal and sent it over to Harry Reid. Furthermore, now that that has happened, every Republican, with H.R. 1, has voted to shut off any funding that can be used to implement or enforce ObamaCare. That is also a fact. They are principled votes. They are not votes that are measured on the dollar figure. In fact, most people who voted in that fashion didn't know how much money it actually saved us for voting to repeal ObamaCare.

And it is hard for me to take a position on that. I'll just say that the chairman of the Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, has used the words about $2.6 trillion is the spending that is saved by repealing ObamaCare.

That is the best number we have, and I don't disagree with that. I accept that number, but it is hard to come down to something and then argue are we doing it because of the money savings. Did we vote to repeal ObamaCare because it would stop the spending of $2.6 trillion? I think not, Madam Speaker.

I think it's part of it. It's part of the equation--and we can't afford it--but there are many other principles. The most important one is: ObamaCare takes American liberty, and puts it into the hands of government to manage our, I'll say, the second most sovereign thing we have, which is our bodies and our health.

That's what's wrong with ObamaCare; it's a matter of principle. It's the takings of American liberty that must be stopped. No, we can't afford it, and it's money that's better spent by doctor-patient relationships and by individuals making decisions on their health insurance and moving on down the line with those conservative principles. We need to stand on principle.

We have this opportunity here in this 112th Congress to stand on principle. The stance needs to be that we will not vote to fund ObamaCare. I'm going to add to this that neither shall we vote to fund Planned Parenthood, and I shall be looking for ways to unfund every other entity like them that promotes abortion or provides abortion as a matter of practice in their facilities. Planned Parenthood has invested in promiscuity, but that's a longer discussion than I will engage in tonight, Madam Speaker.

I do think these two issues are tied very closely together going forward in that ObamaCare funding must be shut off, and we cannot be asking our Members to vote again to appropriate funds that can be used to fund ObamaCare. Some will be saying we didn't have ObamaCare funding in this short-term CR, just as they said there wasn't ObamaCare funding in the CR that passed at the end of December that takes us to the 4th of March, but here is the answer to this:

There are at least 21 different components to ObamaCare that are beneficiaries of funding that go into the various departments. There is no prohibition for that money going into or for being used to implement or to force ObamaCare. There are at least 21 different areas. Then when you look at

the money that's in there, we discover altogether the automatic appropriations. There was something like $4.9 billion for the balance of this year that was automatically appropriated. That's not prohibited in this CR. We didn't get it into H.R. 1, actually, either. But the 21 programs are there, and the money is there for them. I can roll those into the Record, Madam Speaker, but there is another component to this that is a blanket component:

It is language in ObamaCare that gives the authority to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, to do intradepartmental transfers so that she can use that money to implement and force ObamaCare at her discretion. We failed to shut that language off, too.

So this appropriations bill that passed today, H.J. Res. 44, the 2- week CR, has 21 places in it that could fund ObamaCare, and it still allows for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to take intradepartmental transfers to use at her discretion, at will, which funds ObamaCare.

Then the Pence language, the Pence amendment that he has worked on so valiantly and for so long to shut off all funding to Planned Parenthood, was passed by this House in H.R. 1. It became a component of the position of the House that was delivered here at about 4:30 on a Saturday morning, a week ago last Saturday morning.

Those components, I believe, need to be part of everything we do going forward. I will stand and promote those, and I will stand with those who will stand for life. I simplify it when I say the Pence language shuts off funding to Planned Parenthood, but there are other components that also were left out.

One is the Dornan amendment, which prohibits funding for abortions in D.C. There is the Mexico City policy that shuts off funding to abortions in foreign lands, which we've always done, which is not part of it. The international population control and planning fund gets money still, along with Planned Parenthood.

This is what has taken place, Madam Speaker, in this short-term CR. Boy, it's hard for many Members to vote for it. They want to be team players, and I appreciate that sentiment. From my standpoint, I have an obligation to my constituents and to God and country to do the best job I can to serve, and it goes in the opposite order: God, country. Constituents are right up there with country. Sometimes the best interests of my district are not always going to be the best interests of America. I haven't had that conflict that I can articulate yet, but if that comes, I'm pretty confident my constituents will understand the priority.

We have to do the right thing for the long term for our country, and the right thing is for us to stand on principle and to shut off this funding to ObamaCare, to shut off this funding to Planned Parenthood, to make sure that we are standing on solid, moral, principled ground so that we have a firm place from which we can then negotiate those things that are negotiable with the Senate, which, by the way, is a proxy for the President of the United States. So, if it can be negotiated with the Senate, it's also negotiated, in my view, with the President.

In a moment, I'm going to look forward to yielding to my friend from Texas, who has just arrived on the floor, but I want to also add this:

For weeks now, the Democrats in the House and the Democrats in the Senate have been clamoring for a government shutdown. They seem to be determined to shut the government down. They seem to think that, if there's a government shutdown, they're going to win that debate, and they're going to maybe pick up seats in the House and pick up seats in the Senate, and they'll be able to impose their government growth/ government spending/expansion of debt proposals that they've been pushing for the last 4 years, which have failed and which the American people have rejected.

We should not be deluded into believing that Democrats somehow want to go through this period of fiscal austerity. They want to drive this spending up, and they want to have more excuses for increasing taxes. If government grows and taxes grow, at some point the taxes grow to the point where they consume everything, and then those business entities that I talked about being taken over by this White House become the small part of a long list of business entities that are taken over.

I've spoken of this before. On the Web site, the Socialist Web site, they say: We don't want to nationalize everything like the Communists. We're just Socialists. We only want to nationalize the Fortune 500 companies. Thanks a lot. Give the barber, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker some relief. Thanks a lot for that. They want to manage the Fortune 500 companies ``for the benefit of the people affected by them.''

That's the unions.

The President handed shares in General Motors and Chrysler over to the unions, who had no skin in the game, no equity invested, but he handed the shares over to them anyway. It's right off the Socialist Web site, and the Progressives that are left in this Congress adhere to the agenda of the Socialists, which is on the Web site.

But Democrats who are clamoring for a shutdown fail to understand that the American people are more sophisticated today than they were in 1995. They've seen this movie before, and they fear it ends with Republicans giving in to the demands of tax consumers. I have that same fear, but I'm encouraging all of us on this side of the aisle and those discerning Democrats who remain--and there are some--to join with us in putting an end to ObamaCare, in putting an end to funding for Planned Parenthood, in putting an end to overspending.

Let's get serious about real cuts. Let's get serious about holding the line. When every Republican in the House voted to repeal ObamaCare and when every Republican voted to unfund ObamaCare, then, by golly, that's our obligation. That's what we must do. That's what we shall do.

Madam Speaker, I'd be happy to yield to the gentleman from Texas, my friend Judge Gohmert.

Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from Texas. He sparked some things in my mind that in about the 6 minutes we may have, a little bit of dialogue with regard to that.

One point that I wanted to make about what's going on with the strategy on ObamaCare is that I've spoken significantly about how this House has voted to repeal it, this House has voted to shut off the funding to it at every single opportunity.

And if there's a strategy out there that says we're going to do death to ObamaCare by a thousand cuts, I'd ask those folks that are concerned about a real showdown with the President on ObamaCare to think about what really happened not so much in the 1995 shutdown, which I said earlier I don't think is applicable under these circumstances. There's a better issue to understand.

And that is in 1998 when the impeachment of President Clinton was brought up, when America found out about what was going on in the Oval Office and in the room next to the Oval Office in too stark of detail for the children of America to be so rushed in to the birds and the bees discussion in the way that they were, Madam Speaker.

Madam Speaker, I apologize. I didn't hear your gavel earlier.

So even though it's abrupt, I am happy to yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on HHS, Congressman Rehberg, for yielding.

I want to declare my support for this amendment, and I think he is happy if I refer to it as the Rehberg amendment. I also want to thank Denny Rehberg for the work that he has done on this. America will never know, Mr. Chairman, how much work went into crafting this amendment to get this fix that does a little bit to take us down the road. And, boy, it is important to me to see $100 million cut out of the resources that would be used to implement ObamaCare.

Mr. Chairman, I am also very confident in declaring it to be ObamaCare. I listened to President Obama address it as ObamaCare on February 25 of last year at the Blair House during the health care summit. I thought that was the source of the moniker ObamaCare, was the President himself, and if anyone thinks otherwise, I think they should look back and check the record.

ObamaCare is this: It's not $1 trillion in deficit over 20 years if we don't go through with this atrocity; it's $2.6 trillion in spending in the first full decade, according to the chairman of the Budget Committee, Paul Ryan--$2.6 trillion in spending.

We are here in this CR to cut spending. We know that we have to go into a national era of austerity because of the overspending that has taken place over the last 4 years in particular and the last 2 years in a hugely significant way.

We're looking at a budget now that has a deficit proposed by the President of $1.65 trillion. And if you roll back to the full Federal outlays in 1997, $1.6 trillion. The on-budget items in 2002, $1.6 trillion. And we have that much deficit proposed by the President. We want to shut off $2.6 trillion worth of irresponsible spending. We want to preserve the liberty and the freedom of the American people and the best health care system in the world. That's why you see sheikhs' planes landing in places like Rochester, Minnesota to get health care that they can't get in other places in the world. If Michael Moore thinks Cuba has the best health care system, I suggest he swim there. This country, we need to preserve the system we have and expand it. The Rehberg amendment helps slow down this implementation that is going on in an aggressive fashion by the Obama administration.

I happen to have in my hand, Mr. Chairman, an excerpt from a CRS report that tells you how duplicitous this bill once one picked it up and read it, the 2,500 pages. And in here are multiple places, over 50 places where ObamaCare actually not just authorizes, but it also appropriates--not completely unprecedented, but it is the largest, most substantial effort to trigger automatic spending that goes on in perpetuity, Mr. Chairman.

The number here is not $100 billion. The number on this CRS report is $105.5 billion over the next 10 years. And in the balance of this fiscal year, it's $4.95 billion that we're having trouble getting at. Thanks to Denny Rehberg, we're getting at $100 million. I believe this amendment will pass today and it will go on this CR and it will become a significant leverage point over in the United States Senate.

Other components of this that need to be ripped out that--oh, wait a minute, I forgot to remind you. Again, H.R. 2, full repeal of ObamaCare. I was pleased to see language that I had worked on and drafted for all those months went over to the Senate where every Republican voted to repeal ObamaCare. Here we had bipartisan support for the repeal of ObamaCare--three times the bipartisan support described by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi. And we sit here now with Americans that have--two-thirds of them by the polling--rejected ObamaCare.

In this bill, another piece that reads deceptively is this: ``The authority for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to do interdepartmental transfers in any amount greater than the 2008 budget bill,'' which means slush funds all through that Department to aggressively implement ObamaCare. The Rehberg amendment shuts off some of that--probably not all of that, but it gets at it and it lays the point out. And I hope that we can do better on some of the others into the future.

We also need to understand that when America has rejected a piece of legislation that so upsets all of our lives and takes away so much of our liberty and freedom, takes away our ability to buy a health insurance policy that is high deductible, high copayment, and low premium, that we have many more good solutions that will unfold here.

This bill is unconstitutional in four places at least, two Federal courts have ruled, so we know that it will eventually get to the Supreme Court. And we can never say with certainty what the result will be, but we know the certainty of the two Federal courts, Mr. Chairman. We must have the Rehberg amendment so the American people are dealt with respect and honor of their opinion. H.R. 1 cuts the funding; H.R. 2 repeals.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank the gentleman from Montana.

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

Mr. Chairman, amendment No. 266 is the amendment that has had a lot of discussion around the Chamber and around this country. And what it does is it recognizes the results of the CRS report, Mr. Chairman, this report dated just last Thursday, February 10, 2011. It took a long time to put all the numbers together in an official document that identified the money that is automatically appropriated in ObamaCare. In digging that out, there are dozens of locations that automatically trigger appropriations that go on in perpetuity. And the total in this report is $105.5 billion. And here we are in this continuing resolution that the CRS reports at $105.5 billion. I had been working on that for some months, and finally we came with a total.

But if we are not able to shut off all of the funding that is automatically appropriated in the ObamaCare legislation, both components of it, the reconciliation package and the bill itself, then forever this money goes forward, and the administration aggressively uses it to implement ObamaCare.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Minnesota (Mrs. Bachmann).

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey).

Mr. Chairman, this amendment No. 266, someone put the moniker on it ``The Silver Bullet Amendment.'' And as much as we have all worked here to try to find the right way to shut off all of the funding to freeze in place the implementation and enforcement of ObamaCare, many of us have worked in a number of different ways. This is the amendment that looks at the pattern that was set, that I understood, back in 1974, when there was a CR before the House of Representatives that shut off all funding that would go to the Vietnam War for offensive or defensive operations, in the air, over the land of, the seas adjacent to, or the countries adjacent to it. That language covered everything, and it stopped bullets on the dock from going into the hands of people to defend themselves.

I disagree with the policy. But the foundation is here in multiple places in the history of this Congress. This is the language that shuts off the funding of ObamaCare until such time as H.R. 2 becomes law. That's the repeal legislation that becomes law. This is H.R. 1. It's completely appropriate--and H.R. 2 and H.R. 1 are married together-- that we shut off the funding for implementation of ObamaCare, all of it, the entire $105.5 billion that was slipped into this report that we just got back last February 10.

So I urge the adoption of this amendment.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Yes, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, this is a point of order that has been raised on my amendment that I referred to as the silver bullet amendment. I think it does not consider a duty that we have here in the House of Representatives, and that is we stand here and take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, each one of us. I bring in my Bible to do that. And I take it very, very seriously when we take an oath to uphold the Constitution.

We don't take an oath to uphold a rule, but we take an oath to uphold the Constitution. And as I look into this Constitution and read through it, Article I, Section 5 reads in pertinent part: ``Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings.'' And because each House can determine the rules of its proceedings here in this Constitution, you have in your hands the gavel, Mr.

Chairman, and the power and the authority to determine those rules, at least to make a strong recommendation to this body.

I would urge that we understand that two Federal courts have found this bill, ObamaCare, to be unconstitutional, and it is immoral and unjust and irresponsible to waive any opportunity to shut off the billions of dollars that are automatically appropriated in a deceptive fashion and continue for the implementation of ObamaCare because we might think somehow that a rule would trump the very Constitution itself.

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

Mr. Chairman, this amendment No. 267 is an amendment that is narrowed in its scope in anticipation of the point of order that was raised by the gentlelady from Connecticut, and I can't help but reflect on what it must have been like before in this body before the invention of television. But my Amendment No. 267 says this in pertinent part: ``No funds made available by this act may be used to carry out the provisions of ObamaCare.''

So what this does is, for the appropriations that go on outside of the scope of this continuing resolution, we have lost that point of order. But this amendment goes to those funds that are appropriated within it, down the exact same path as the Rehberg amendment, except it goes to the outside of the particular Department of Health and Human Services as the narrower scope of the Rehberg amendment. So this goes broader than just HHS, but it does go directly to shutting off all funds within this CR that would be used to enforce or implement ObamaCare.

I have made my arguments, Mr. Chairman, on that.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the doctor from Louisiana (Mr. Fleming).

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Garrett).

Mr. Chairman, may I inquire as to the amount of time remaining for each side.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Chairman, I really take issue with the gentleman that declared this to be nonsense. This is not nonsense. This is very, very serious business. This is the largest taking of American liberty in the history of this country. And the shenanigans that went on to put this bill in place, you could not have sent this bill out on the floor of the 111th Congress and had it pass if it were all packaged up together in one big stack. It was two pieces of bills. And we listened to Dr. Burgess earlier about all of the things that took place to represent this bill in one place or another, to put it together, including a promise of an executive order that was designed to trump the very Congress itself.

And here we are, with the first opportunity to put the brakes on ObamaCare--yes, we've passed the repeal, H.R. 2. This is H.R. 1. It's here because it's more important to the Speaker than H.R. 2. And that means that we must shut off this funding to ObamaCare.

This CRS report, $105 billion automatically appropriated over a 10- year period of time that goes on in perpetuity, sending the tentacles of this malignant tumor down. It is metastasizing as we speak, and American liberty is being strangled off by ObamaCare. This amendment is the amendment that shuts all of the funding within the CR. It must be passed by this Congress to keep faith with the American people.

I yield back the balance of my time.

I thank the gentlelady for yielding.

To the gentleman from New Jersey as to his question on the doughnut hole, I understand. Under the current circumstances of the doughnut hole, there are many people in the lowest incomes who are not affected by it.

To compress my response, I think it's a bit unclear because we don't know how the Secretary of Health and Human Services may respond when the funding is shut off.

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

I yield myself 30 seconds.

Mr. Chairman, amendment No. 268 goes to the end of the bill. It simply says that none of the funds made available in this act may be used to pay the salary of any officer or employee of any Federal department or agency with respect to carrying out the provisions of ObamaCare. It is that simple.

It is one additional way to slow down the implementation and the enforcement of ObamaCare until such time as we see that day that the full repeal is signed by, hopefully, the next President of the United States, unless the one we have today has a reconsideration.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Kingston).

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the judge and Congressman from east Texas, Mr. Louie Gohmert.

Madam Chair, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Minnesota (Mrs. Bachmann).

Madam Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I recall back at the beginning of the Obama administration when President Obama said that we are in an economic calamity, an economic mess, and we couldn't fix our economic problems unless we first fixed health care. And so his solution for spending too much money was to spend a lot more money, $2.6 trillion on health care.

So if we couldn't first fix the economy unless we first fix health care, let me take that philosophy and turn it this way. We can't fix health care unless we first repeal ObamaCare. That's where this country is today. We can't put the replacement in place, we can't put the fixes in place until we pull this thing out by the roots.

And the only way to do this today is to shut off the funding. The repeal is over there in the Senate. The House voted in a strong way to repeal ObamaCare. H.R. 1 is the unfunding of ObamaCare. It is the vehicle to do it. This amendment is one of the vehicles that contributes to that cause.

Again, I thank Denny Rehberg and the people that did this work and all those people that worked on this cause. I urge adoption.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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

I yield myself 2 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment that is before the House this evening is an amendment that shuts off the funding within this continuing resolution to what we know as the Davis-Bacon Act.

The Davis-Bacon Act is an old and archaic act that was generated during the Depression era, the early years of the Depression era, in about 1931. It was designed to keep the African American workers out of the trade unions in New York. That's the source of it. I have dealt underneath this law for my working life as a construction contractor, so my hands-on experience with Davis-Bacon, I believe, is as strong as anyone's in this Chamber.

The costs that are added to our construction projects are what we should be thinking about here in this 112th Congress, in this Congress of austerity, on this night that we've had of cutting spending and cutting spending, and it's this:

According to Heritage Study, the extra wages that are paid out unnecessarily total $10.9 billion. I have done this study within my own construction company, and have looked at the difference in the cost of the Davis-Bacon Federal wage scale. They will call it ``prevailing wage.'' I will tell you we know it's union scale, mandated by Federal law, and there is no reason for us to adhere to a union scale mandated by Federal law. My numbers show this:

It increases the cost of a project between 8 and 35 percent depending on how much is materials and how much is labor. Other data out there show an increase of 9 to 37 percent. Our numbers match well. The costs of compliance for contractors are over $190 million a year, and it distorts the relationship between management and labor. We are, Mr. Chairman, in an era where our question becomes this:

Do we want to create jobs or do we want to cost jobs? Do we want to build 4 miles of road under Davis-Bacon or do we want to build five? Do we want to build four schools or do we want to build five? Do we want to have an inflation of wages by an average of 22 percent, which is according to some of the wage and hour studies? Do we want to see the price go up? Do we want to see a construction industry that reduces workers by as much as 25,000 a year in minority workers?

I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield myself 30 seconds.

It's a little bit amazing to me that the gentlelady can get so focused on

this. I'm the one that should be focused on it in that way and animated. The taxpayers should be animated by this.

They should understand that, when the Federal Government sets union scale and drives the price up and the taxpayers can't afford it, it's not about a race to the bottom. The quality of work for my workers was always there. We take care of our people 12 months out of the year with a benefits package. We're not hiring them out of a union hall for a day, but you make us pay the price as if we were. We uphold our workers. We take care of them. We have the quality there. It's a matter of fact and it's proven, Mr. Chairman.

I yield myself 15 seconds to announce to the Chair that I have just been called a ``bottom-feeder''--a bottom-feeder for providing 12-months-out-of-the-year work, health care benefits and retirement benefits for my employees.

I take it as an insult, but I am not going to ask to take the lady's words down.

Mr. Chairman, I now yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Broun).

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett).

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Stutzman).

I yield myself 2 minutes.

I want to point out to the body also, Mr. Chairman, that I have lived under the Davis-Bacon wage scale for years. I've met payroll for 28\1/ 2\ years--over 1,400 consecutive weeks. I've worked for a wage underneath Davis-Bacon wage scales, and I've worked in merit shop operations. I've worked in shops in the wintertime and on construction projects in the field before it froze up, from the spring to fall. I've been on all sides of this. I've been a laborer on the pipeline. I've been a heavy equipment operator. I've been an owner and I've managed people, and I've watched what Davis-Bacon has done at every single level along the way.

It distorts the relationship between management and labor. It takes away from the individuals the ability or the willingness to contribute to the decision-making process.

When the government comes in and says, ``on one side of the road, you're going to pay your laborers $14 an hour, but on the other side of the road you're going to pay them $21 an hour, and if they climb in the seat of a motor grader it's going to be $35 an hour, but if it happens to be a finish machine then it's going to be $40 an hour,'' you watch your crews jockeying for the highest paying job there is.

What happens if you sit back at a bird's-eye view?

They will be scrambling over to climb onto the machine that's the least useful but that pays the most money. Then if you go away for a few days, you'll come back and find out they've rolled all the clods, that your wage price has gone up and that you're no longer competitive, and you'll have to go back on the job and essentially get out--this is figuratively speaking--the whip and make sure you crack it so you get people pushing as hard as possible.

It raises the tension, and it takes away a lot of the pleasure of taking pride in your work because now management is pitted against labor, and labor is pitted against labor in jockeying for the highest paying jobs.

This is no way to run a business. It's no way to run a company. It's no way to run a country to think that we here in this Congress should be one of the ones deciding what someone should get paid, or at least writing the rules for it, knowing that it's not prevailing wage but that it's union scale, and it takes 2\1/2\ years to get a ruling on what's prevailing wage and what isn't, and so we just don't know what it is for 2\1/2\ years.

I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield myself the balance of my time.

I will point out that there has been a misunderstanding here with regard to an agreement on the length of this amendment discussion. We'd agreed to take it down to 10 minutes each, but when the announcement was made, I think it was confusing to both sides.

So what I'd like to do is try to wrap up my side of this in 1 minute and yield to the gentlelady from Connecticut for as much time as she may think is appropriate to consume in order to close, if that would be agreeable. I'm going to move ahead with my part by picking up where I left off.

Mr. Chairman, the inefficiencies that are created by Davis-Bacon are multiplied in the costs that are in the jobs that we do. It is an 8 to 35 percent increase in the overall costs of our construction projects. We need to keep people at work. It means fewer people are working for more money, and it means a more distorted economy and inefficiencies that are built in that completely distort the cost of these wages.

So it is important for us to know that this isn't the first debate before this Congress but that it is the first intense debate that has taken place since the Republican majority took over here in 2011. Back in 1995, some of the cosponsors of the original Davis-Bacon repeal, a similar amendment, were Boehner, Bartlett, Coble, Dreier, Goodlatte, Herger, McKeon, and Wolf.

I would urge adoption of this amendment and a strong vote to cut the funding off to anything that would be enforcing Davis-Bacon wages under this CR.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

I would like to thank the gentleman from Louisiana for addressing the House and for yielding to me, and all of those who have spoken on this issue.

I recall back here on this floor in the early part of the session in 2007 when the Mexico City vote came up, and I remember that debate here on this floor. I remember watching the vote go up on the board, the language that would compel American taxpayers to fund abortion in foreign lands. For the first time in years, the Democrats lost the debate but won the vote. And I saw Members over on this side of the floor jumping up and down, hugging themselves, cheering, cheering because of what? Because you had taken a step to compel Americans who are conscientiously objecting taxpayers to fund abortions in foreign lands.

How could anyone cheer something like that? What was the moral standard that brought about such elation? It is a complete confusion to me to think that we can't even describe what this is.

I brought some posters to the floor of the House Judiciary Committee last week that showed what dilation and evacuation is. It is dismemberment. Abortion. I don't know if there anybody in this Chamber that could actually witness a real abortion and stand there, let alone lend their hand to such a thing.

But I remember buying the movie ``Silent Scream'' for my children when they were about 9, 10 and 11 years old and sitting on the floor in the living room and watching 8 minutes of parts of babies being put in a stainless steel pan and having an inventory done of a little foot, a little arm, a little leg, a little torso, a little crushed skull, until all the things added up, and then they sucked out the pieces that were missed.

That is what is going on. And we are asking Americans to fund this through Planned Parenthood, or any other organization?

Here is where I would agree with Mr. Cohen. I would go further than this. And he made the point--I know he wouldn't agree. I would say no funds should go to any entity that should perform such a ghastly, ghoulish and gruesome procedure, and this House cannot compel American taxpayers to do so. And we will stand tonight and we will put an end to the Federal funding of Planned Parenthood, and we will move on and we will shut off all of the funding to those entities that do that to our unborn children in this country.

I thank the gentleman from Georgia, and I'm very glad to welcome him to the United States Congress. He knows a little bit about what's going on around this organism that we live and work and breathe in.

I come to the floor during this rules debate to raise a subject that I think needs to be brought before this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and that's this: that even though this House in H.R. 2, the second priority of the Speaker, voted to repeal ObamaCare and sent that bill over to the Senate where it was taken up and every Republican voted to repeal ObamaCare--so every Republican in all the United States Congress has voted to repeal ObamaCare. It was bipartisan in this House, by the former Speaker's definition. And even though that took place, we did not shut off the funding to ObamaCare because in a--I won't say a legislative sleight of hand--there was written in the ObamaCare bill automatic appropriations that just last week we were able to pull all those pieces out and add them up and we received a CRS report last Friday that shows that $105.5 billion are automatically triggered for spending that will implement ObamaCare whether or not we shut off the funds in this CR going forward. These are automatic appropriations.

I believed--and I've seen it for a long time and worked on this thing ever since mid-last summer--that we need to shut off all funding to ObamaCare in every appropriations bill going forward. And we had the assurance that we would have regular order. Well, the regular order that we have is an open rule that closes out an amendment that would shut off the funding that's automatically appropriated by ObamaCare. If we'd actually had a full regular order, I could have brought that amendment before a subcommittee of Appropriations--asked someone to do--or the full Appropriations Committee. And actually, at the request, I followed all those paths until such time it wasn't written into the bill, as was shutting off funding to transferring people out of Gitmo or cutting off the 1099 or the stimulus plan of the President's.

All of that is written out in the bill, but nothing is in the bill that allows us to write out the automatic $105 billion dollars. So we're faced with the automatic institutionalization of ObamaCare even while we cut this budget $100 billion. So I went to Rules last night and asked Rules, Protect my amendment from a point of order so this House can work its will.

Even though I have great respect for all of the members of the Rules Committee, and the tone and tenor of the debate and the dialogue in there could not have been better, the Rules Committee declined to do that.

I am here on this floor now, asking myself: How do I vote ``yes'' on a rule that I so oppose?

That's my position, Mr. Speaker. I think that, if we fail to act now, now while we have the maximum amount of leverage and the one of two pieces of must-pass legislation--that is the CR, and next is the debt ceiling bill--to shut off the funding to implement ObamaCare, we will have missed our chance. By the way, every appropriations bill will come to the floor with the same kind of rule that will block out anyone from offering any legislation that will shut off the funding, the automatic appropriations to ObamaCare.

So as much as it pains me to be standing here at this point, I can't figure out how I can vote ``yes'' on a rule that I so oppose.

Offered By: Mr. King of Iowa

Amendment No. 550: Page 288, line 20, and line 21, after

the dollar amount on each such line, insert ``(reduced by

$750,000,000)''.

Page 359, line 15, after the dollar amount, insert

``(increased by $750,000,000)''.