Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding and for working this legislation through and facilitating that it comes to the floor this week.

This week, the event of ``Hold Their Feet to the Fire'' is being held where many of the families of those who have been killed by illegal aliens are here to contribute. They went to the White House, and the message has been sent across the country. They have gone and done radio shows, and they have been part of this for a long time.

I think of how far back this goes, Kate Steinle's law. From my perspective, she was murdered on the streets of San Francisco on July 1, 2015. It hit the news, I think, the next day. I sent out a tweet on July 3 that said it was a 100 percent preventable crime. Just enforce the law. This story will make you cry, too. And it happens every day.

What we are trying to accomplish with Kate's Law is sentencing that is enhanced for those who overstay or those who have been deported from the United States and come back into the United States.

I want to compliment former Congressman Matt Salmon from Arizona, who, after her death on July 1, introduced legislation only 8 days later, which was the foundation for what we are talking about here with this bill. That was H.R. 3011, introduced on July 9, 2015.

Matt is retired. I picked up that legislation in the first days of this year, and we have cooperated in this Judiciary Committee to get this here to this time.

But, also, Bill O'Reilly, who made this a national issue, it hit my heart as soon as I saw the story. It hit the hearts of America when it went out over television, and it is too bad that we can't look at data and come here and fix a massive problem that we have.

It is too bad it has to be focused on individuals and personalities, when there are many other families out there that have suffered equally with that of the Steinle family and the other families we have talked about here today.

Nonetheless, if that is what it takes to get America to move, we are here now. We are here this week. We have the right legislation in front of us. I urge its adoption.

Mr. Speaker, it is my honor and privilege to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and have an opportunity, in this great deliberative body, to bring up the subject matters of my choice, and the purpose is to inform you and the American people.

Before I go into the topics that I am prepared to speak of, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Rothfus).

Meaningful Accomplishments of the 115th Congress

I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for his presentation in bringing this topic together in a way that he has. And in his method of addressing the Declaration of Independence on the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I would expound on that as well.

Life is the most paramount. It is a priority right, and our Founding Fathers knew what they were doing. They set up life as the first priority, liberty as the second priority, and the third priority was the pursuit of happiness.

Mr. Speaker, I will start from the bottom because, of the three, I think it deserves the most explanation. That pursuit of happiness is often viewed as maybe a fun tailgate party or a bliss of some kind or maybe a barbecue outdoors with the family, the things that we love. That is the enjoyment of our life.

The pursuit of happiness, as it was understood by our Founding Fathers, came from the Greek word ``eudaimonia.'' And that is spelled, E-U-D-A-I-M-O-N-I-A. And under the Greek word ``eudaimonia,'' it means developing the whole human being. And it is not just the mental well- being, but it is developing the intellectual human being, the physical human being, the knowledge base that is there, and the spirit within us, and our theology and our souls--the whole package of what we are as human beings, developing that to the maximum, these God-given gifts, developing them for his glorification, and that is the concept of the pursuit of happiness that our Founding Fathers understood.

So the principle is that we have a right to pursue happiness, developing our whole human being, which includes the human enjoyment that we think of when we say pursuit of happiness.

But no one in their pursuit of happiness can trample on someone else's liberty because liberties are God-given. And the liberties that we have cannot be subordinate to the pursuit of happiness, but they are subordinate to the life of others because life is the most sacred.

Human life is sacred in all of its forms. It is the number one paramount right. So the protection of human life is the principle and is the highest priority in the Declaration of Independence.

And the liberties that we have--freedom of speech, religion, the press, the right to keep and bear arms, a jury of our peers, no double jeopardy, the whole list in the Bill of Rights--those are God-given liberties, as conceived by our Founding Fathers and enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and, of course, in our Constitution.

The rights that we have cannot be trampled upon or subordinated to someone else's pursuit of happiness. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, a well-thought-out, prioritized list in our Declaration that gives us the inspiration that was the foundation for our Constitution and the principles of our lives in America today.

So I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for his explanation of this and for giving me an opportunity to flesh this out a little bit in the concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But the segue that he has served up to me is this: that our debates today here in this Congress on the immigration bills that have now just passed the Congress have been focused on the right to life--the right to life versus the criminals that took the liberty to take them. They have violated the very foundations of our Declaration, and, of course, they violated our laws in a number of ways.

But I think, especially, of the onset of this discussion, and I think of Sarah Root. And her legislation that is Sarah's Law was introduced by me in this Congress. I have a copy of this bill today. We introduced it last year also, but in this Congress, it became H.R. 174, and it came about, and then we incorporated it into the broader bill today that we call the sanctuary cities legislation, Mr. Speaker.

Sarah Root had just graduated from Bellevue University in Omaha. Her hometown is Modale, Iowa. She had just finished her graduation the day before with a perfect 4.0 grade point average, and her major was in criminal investigation. She would, today, be investigating criminals if it hadn't been for the criminal that killed her the day after she graduated.

And the individual who is responsible here, Eswin Mejia, who ran her over, ran into her vehicle on the streets with triple the blood alcohol content that is legal. Eswin Mejia was on a first-name basis with at least two of his immigration attorneys. When he was taken into custody, interestingly, as bad as the accident was, Sarah was rendered unrecognizable and she was on life support for a little while while the parents were deciding what decision to make.

And she was also an organ donor. Sarah saved six. And many days I wear this bracelet that says, ``Sarah Root saved six.'' And this bracelet hangs on the antlers in my man cave. And when I walk down there in the morning, I often say a prayer for all of those bracelets that are hung on the antlers in my man cave that represent those individuals whose lives have been lost at the hands of criminal aliens who were unlawfully present in the United States and perpetrated violence against generally American citizens but others that are generally those that are at least lawfully present in America.

Sarah Root was one of those victims, a stellar young lady with a 4.0 grade point average and a fresh diploma from Bellevue University; her whole life and a world ahead of her, and run down on the streets.

Her father came to testify here in the Judiciary Committee in Congress, and he said: ``The judge bailed Eswin Mejia, this perpetrator, out of jail for less money than it cost to marry my daughter, and he was back home in his home country before we could bury my daughter.''

Those were some of the most powerful and moving and memorable words that I have heard in my time here in Congress. We think Eswin Mejia went back to Honduras, his home country. He had been incarcerated before. He had been encountered by law enforcement before, and they turned him loose on the streets.

This happens again and again in America every day, local law enforcement picking up people that are unlawfully present in America, violating our immigration laws. The law requires that they be placed into removal proceedings. That is the law, but they turn them loose anyway and turn them out on the streets because we have sanctuary cities and sanctuary cities policies. Some local jurisdictions that don't have a written policy, but they just simply--it is a practice that they have evolved into accepting.

So when I say every one of the Americans who died at the hands of someone who is unlawfully present in America, illegal aliens, generally speaking, every one of those are a preventable death. If we enforced the law, they wouldn't have been in America in the first place to commit the crimes they committed against our American citizens, our innocent people like Sarah Root, this beautiful young lady with a perfect grade point average, the world ahead of her, a happy, joyful young lady that, today, would be living, loving, laughing, and learning and contributing to our society. But she is in her grave today because Eswin Mejia got triple drunk, was unlawfully in the United States, and ran her car down and killed her on the streets and absconded for a $5,000 bond.

What we did with Sarah's Law--this is H.R. 174, the original language--and I wanted to assure the family of Sarah Root that this language is incorporated into the bill we passed today. It is incorporated into sanctuary cities legislation that we passed today. And what it does is it prohibits the judge from releasing an illegal alien on bond if they have been charged with or subject to a homicide or a crime where there is serious bodily injury.

Once this issue came up in Omaha, Nebraska, and the public knew about this, we tried to unseat the judge that released this criminal that may have done damage again. But the judge that had let him out on $5,000 had a similar case. The next time, the bond went way up into six or even seven figures. So I think he got the message, but the public got the message, too.

And I don't know whether he will be able to hold his seat or not, but we have got to bring the right things. We have got to put the fixes in place. You would think we would have a judge that would understand this, yet, somehow in the political culture of America, we are watching criminal aliens be turned loose on the streets over and over again.

I recall, Mr. Speaker, sitting in on immigration hearings in the Judiciary Committee. This is over a number of years now, and I suppose there are a couple of people in this Congress that have sat through more, not many. The witnesses would be--every week or so we would have a hearing and there would be witnesses that would testify about how many people died in the Arizona desert trying to sneak into America. And that number would be 200 in a year, 250 in a year, maybe the next year it went to 300. I remember that number going to 400 or more who died in the Arizona desert on the way into trying to sneak into America.

Finally, with this parade of witnesses that were experts on why we ought to open the border so they didn't have a difficult time getting into America--that is the lunacy that we have heard in the debate today over on this side of the floor, from my view, Mr. Speaker.

I began to ask the witnesses this question: You are an expert on immigration and you have come to testify on how many didn't make it through the desert. Could you tell me how many Americans died at the hands of those who did make it through the desert?

And I would ask the witnesses--generally four witnesses--and they would go down the line: I don't know the answer; I don't know the answer; I don't know the answer.

And that went on for a while.

And the fourth witness in one of those days was a former INS agent, Michael Cutler. And we are just a few years after September 11, 2001, when I asked him this question: How many Americans died at the hands of those who made it through the desert?

Which is the phrase to imply how many Americans died at the hands of those who were unlawfully present in America.

And Michael Cutler's answer was: I don't know the answer to that, but I can tell you it is in multiples of the victims of September 11.

Now, think of that. Three thousand Americans were killed that day. Multiples of that would be at least 6,000. If he is right--and he is confident he is right, and now I am confident he was right--that started me thinking.

So shortly after that, I commissioned a GAO study. That GAO study dug down deeply into the records that we had access to.

It is hard to get this Congress to compare apples to apples, so I began to ask the questions: Of the people in the prisons of America, what are they in prison for? How many of them are criminal aliens?

We did a report on that. They sliced and diced it and narrowed it down. It never actually became apples to apples, but it did come down to this substantial number that has been supported a couple of other times in other studies, in one subsequent that I had done in 2011. The number is very close to 28 percent of the inmates in our Federal penitentiaries are criminal aliens--28 percent.

So it is reasonable to do a calculation and an extrapolation off of this, if 28 percent of these inmates are criminal aliens, what percentage of the murders are they committing? What percentage of the rapes are they committing? What percentage of the violent crimes are they committing? Or are they in jail for just simply violating a law of immigration? You will find out very few are in prison for violation of immigration law.

They are the reflection on criminal aliens. They are similar, a very similar, if not identical, proportion of the crimes that are committed by others.

So when you put that on there and hit the calculator--I am not going to speak those numbers into the Record here, Mr. Speaker, because it is shocking and stunning how many Americans have lost their lives at the hands of people who shouldn't have been here in the first place--Sarah Root included, Kate Steinle included, and many more.

A few days after Sarah Root was killed, I sent out a tweet that just said: Sarah Root would be alive living and loving life if the President had not violated his oath and ordered ICE to stand down.

That is what happened during the 8-year period of time President Obama asserted that he had this thing called prosecutorial discretion. Now, that is something that is established in law, at least in precedent, but it has to be done on an individual basis, and he delivered it in a blanket basis. Janet Napolitano delivered the document. I questioned her on it in the committee.

They decided that prosecutorial discretion can be defined. They created four categories of people and essentially granted amnesty to all of them and turned them loose. They turned criminals loose on the streets in America--36,007 of them in one bunch. Some of them were murderers out on to the streets of America.

You can see what happens to the crime in this country. If you are importing people from the most violent countries in the world, and when they are encountered by law enforcement turning them loose, or if they are picked up for a taillight or speeding or getting in a fight or shoplifting, whatever the case may be, failure to signal, running a stoplight, they are picked up for that.

When local law enforcement encounters them, they look at their identification. They ask them a few questions. It isn't hard to figure out whether they are legal or not. Some are good enough liars. But any time that law enforcement encounters people unlawfully present in America, they are to put them in removal proceedings, and ICE is to do it. Yet thousands have been turned loose on the streets.

At least 300 cities in America have established sanctuary policies that they turn them loose. Some of the cities have passed policies that refuse to allow their law enforcement to even gather information or accept information on illegal aliens that they encounter.

So, for example, this is how bad it is even in a place like Iowa. One of my staff people who was involved in a car accident that was caused by an illegal alien who had no license and had no insurance but he did have an illegal job in the town where he caused the accident crashed into my staff and wrecked my staff's car.

So when I got the phone call on that, I turned to my then-chief of staff who is a lights-outs, University of Chicago School of Law lawyer. I said: I want you to go to this town and stay there until you can get this resolved. And I want to find out: What can we get accomplished to enforce the law?

This was our opportunity to learn if a Member of Congress' staff can be run into by an illegal alien without a driver's license and without insurance with an illegal job in town and owning a car, and I have a topnotch lawyer chief of staff to go up there and communicate with law enforcement to try to bring the law enforcement in place so we could at least deport the guy.

After 3 or 4 days up there and a number of phone calls from me down here, I finally got the message back that finally convinced me we couldn't crack through the code of local law enforcement to be able to deport the individual who was clearly illegal. He was unlawfully working--no driver's license and no insurance.

The practice of simply staying out of immigration law because they were local law enforcement and didn't want to touch it was so ingrained that we could not move the bubble off the center.

Finally, I said: Okay, we have got other people to take care of. We are not going to get this solved, so let's turn our focus back to other things.

That is so very frustrating. I tell this, Mr. Speaker, to let the world know the frustration of families who had a loved one who was killed by illegals and watched them turned loose on the streets, and then have them abscond and go back to their home country or go back into the shadows and hide.

That is the thing that happened with Sarah Root. Today, we did honor to her and her life by passing Sarah's Law as part of the sanctuary city law. How utterly appropriate to bring a ban on sanctuary cities, to pass it off the floor of the House, and wrapped up in the same bill is Sarah's Law to respect her; her life; the sacrifice of her life; the sacrifice of her mother, Michelle; her father, Scott; and her only sibling, her brother, Scotty, who carries the whole load now for the next generation--all of that.

Finally, Congress did some justice for Sarah Root. It is only a small piece of justice. It is the least we can do, but it is the right thing for us to do. What her family wants is that no other families have to suffer like they have suffered.

This is the story of Sarah Root whose name was elevated on the national stage by President Trump. As much as I push things out of this Congress, I don't come close to having as big a megaphone as Donald Trump. So I want to thank the President of the United States for picking up the case of Sarah Root when he came to Iowa to campaign for the nomination of the Presidency of the United States.

When he began to make his immigration cases and lay out the platform for his immigration policy, I noticed that it mirrored mine very closely. I mentioned to him one day: Mr. President, I have market tested your immigration policy for 14 years in Iowa. It shouldn't have been a surprise that they understand these issues. They support the rule of law, they support securing the border, they support building a wall, and they support banning sanctuary cities. That is not just Iowa values, that is at least heart of the heartland values.

Those are American values--American values that want to live in a country that has the rule of law, a country where our children can be safe, and where they can play in the streets and they don't have to be looking over the shoulder; or a mother or a father doesn't have to keep them indoors because the streets are too dangerous.

This morning, we have heard from Jamiel Shaw who has been in to this Congress and testified before my committee maybe as far as back as 8 or 9 years ago. He is from Los Angeles. His son, who was a star football player, Jazz Shaw, was shot down and killed by an illegal alien gang member who went on the hunt that day with an assignment, as I understood it, to go shoot a Black person.

Jazz Shaw was murdered on the streets close enough to his father, Jamiel's, house that his father said this morning on FOX News that he could hear the gun shots. He went out there to see his son laying on the street in the blood pooling in the street. A ghastly murder for the sake of what? A gang challenge and a race label.

That would not be the case if that murderer had been deported back to his

country. It would not be the case if he came back in and we picked him up a second time.

Under Kate's Law, the killer of Jamiel Shaw's son would not have been in America if we had had Kate's Law and had enforced Kate's Law because he had been encountered before and had been deported.

This is the evil murderer, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez. This is the beautiful young lady, 32 years old, Kate Steinle, who was down on the wharf in San Francisco with her father enjoying a day and was simply shot down and killed for no reason and at random by this individual who had been five times deported and convicted of something like seven different felonies in this country.

Under Kate's Law, that jacks that penalty up. He would have been locked up for a good, long time if that law had been in place, or the sanctuary city legislation we passed today outlawing sanctuary cities. They would be turning over these kinds of criminals to ICE where they would get their just sentence in Federal penitentiary and then be deported.

But even though we have these laws now passed, and if the Senate takes them up and passes them into law, the President will sign them. We are confident of that. He asked that these bills be brought before the House of Representatives as soon as possible. Of course, that was today. So if these acts that we passed today become law, then many Americans will be saved from the kind of carnage that we have heard about in case after case.

When I saw the story come through of Kate Steinle, I looked at that. It was the most tragic story. Here is a clip of what I sent out that day. This is July 3, 2015. It is a picture of Kate Steinle. The message in the tweet is: A 100 percent preventable crime--dated July 3, as I said, 2015--100 percent preventable crime. Just enforce the law. This will make you cry, too, and it happens every day. Every day in America, there are Americans that die at the hand of illegal aliens.

I recall the case in Cottonwood, Minnesota, where an illegal alien who had been encountered by law enforcement before and turned back on the streets of our country who didn't have a driver's license, didn't have insurance, and should have been deported at least once and probably more times than that ran a school bus off the road in southwest Minnesota.

Four kids in that school bus were killed. Two of them were siblings. Three families lost children in that bus accident where the bus was run off the road by the illegal criminal alien.

The dialogue that came from the left--the people that we heard debate over here today and voted against every one of these bills--was: this doesn't have anything to do with illegal immigration. It has got nothing to do with that. It is just the happenstance of life. In every society, there are car accidents, there are murders, there are rapes, there is assault, there is battery, and there is grand theft.

Every society has that to some degree, but every single victim of a criminal alien that is in deportable category is a preventable crime. I have made that case over and over again for years, Mr. Speaker. But I made the point. They will say that it was just an accident, it was happenstance, and it has nothing to do with immigration.

My district director looked at me. He is a mild-mannered, soft- spoken, and judicious kind of a person. He said: If they believe that, if they say that, then you say to them: then you go up there to Cottonwood, Minnesota, and tell their parents that their children would still be dead if we had deported the illegal that ran the bus off the road.

That hits home to me, too, Mr. Speaker. It rings so true. Any family that is suffering the loss of a loved one--the Steinle family, the Root family, and so many other families, the families in Cottonwood, Minnesota, the families in Omaha, and the families around in my district--those families know that if he had enforced the law then their child or their husband would still be alive.

So as part of the sanctuary city legislation that we moved through here today, and as in Kate's Law just passed--I need to make sure that I state that--and in Sarah's, they would both be alive today living, loving, laughing, learning, contributing to our society, sharing joy, and giving joy.

There is another case that I have just picked up. A teen charged in an Iowa woman's death may have fled the country. Authorities say a teenager who was at the wheel of a car that was involved in a crash in Omaha last month that killed an Iowa woman--that is Sarah--has missed a court hearing and may have fled the country.

Well, that is a little memo that says: He absconded, we think, to Honduras. He may be living in the shadows.

Here is another story, and that is addressed, Mr. Speaker, by legislation that was brought by Andy Biggs of Arizona. I thank him for advancing this legislation, also.

This is the story of Grant Ronnebeck. He was 21 years old. He was gunned down in January of 2015, while working at a QuickTrip in Mesa, Arizona. The man charged with killing him, Apolinar Altamirano, was 29 years old, in the country illegally, and had been released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement even though he had previously been convicted of a felony burglary charge.

Now, why are we turning people loose in the streets of America to walk the streets again when they were deportable before they committed the felony burglary charge, convicted of a felony burglary charge, and then turn them loose again? Does the judge decide that somehow he has a right to be in America? That is a clear deportation requirement.

I recall when we had John Ashcroft as the Attorney General. He testified before the committee that when they released criminal aliens on to the streets without bond with a date set for a hearing, 84 percent of them didn't show up.

And that was before President Obama sent the message that it didn't matter. Those numbers have gone up, not down.

Here is another one. This was just another ghastly, tragic story that happened in Omaha. Louise Sollowin died in July of 2013. Three days after the attack in her home, according to Omaha police, an officer sent to the south Omaha house Sollowin had lived in for 71 years found her body covered in blood in her bedroom about 9 a.m.

The officer said Sergio Martinez-Perez, 19--I am going to skip some of this, because it is too nasty to put into the Congressional Record-- was passed out there, having raped the 93-year-old woman. Authorities believed that Martinez-Perez entered the home through an unlocked door. He, too, was an illegal alien who had been encountered by law enforcement and was released and went out to rape and murder.

So when the President said that we have people who do these things among those who have come from some of those countries, that is clearly true. A lot of good people also, but we need to have the rule of law. We need to enforce the rule of law.

And when they are coming from these other countries that have corruption but don't have the benefit of the rule of law and the respect for the law that we have, they are importing those low standards in here.

We must sustain the rule of law, restore the respect for the rule of law. If we do that, we will sustain ourselves as a First World country. If we fail to do so, if we lose the rule of law, then we will devolve into a Third World country eventually. The core of this from the beginning for me, Mr. Speaker, has always been to restore the respect for the rule of law.

Ronald Reagan signed the amnesty act in 1986. I give him credit for at least naming it--calling it what it was, an amnesty act. It was a reward for law breakers. The cabinet around him encouraged him to sign the amnesty act.

Me, you know, I kicked my filing cabinet the day I heard on the news that he had signed it, and I kicked a dent in it because--well, out of frustration was why.

But I believe Ronald Reagan would see with clarity that you can't reward law breakers and think that somehow you are going to be able to put that behind you and that the law will be enforced and respected from that point forward.

There were to be a million people that received amnesty in 1986. Ronald Reagan signed the amnesty act, and it

became 3 million people because they probably counted a little wrong, and there was a lot of fraud, a lot of people who presented themselves and alleged that they were to be included. This was a faster track to citizenship for them.

Three million people received amnesty in 1986, and I said then that none of them should have, that they should not be rewarded for breaking the law. Yet they got their amnesty.

The signature that Ronald Reagan put on that amnesty legislation was supposed to be in exchange for enforcement of the law, but the law didn't get enforced. The amnesty was delivered triple what was expected. And I knew then that we would have a long, hard slog restoring the respect for the rule of law, but I have set about doing that since that period of time.

More than 30 years later, we are here on the floor strengthening the rule of law after all this time, after the amnesty that has been advocated by others.

Each decade we seem to have to have a battle. They want to come with what they now call comprehensive immigration reform. Just about anybody in America knows if you say ``comprehensive immigration reform,'' you really mean amnesty.

I say to them: Just be honest. If you think amnesty is a good idea, why do you say all those three words when you can say ``amnesty'' and be honest? People know what you mean. If the public is ready for amnesty, then you can pass it. If we are not, you can't.

The American people understand this intuitively, that we have got to stop the law-breaking and that we cannot be rewarding those who break the law.

Now, there are those who think that we should somehow find a path of amnesty for those individuals identified unconstitutionally by Barack Obama in his DACA program--Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. They aren't all innocent little waifs who have been brought in by their mother against their will, as many would say. Instead, many of them are prime gang-age recruitment, young men.

I have gone down there and watched that flow of epic humanity coming out of Central America, coming through Mexico, some from Mexico--a diminishing number from Mexico--coming into the United States. The numbers we looked at were 81 percent male. And if they are under 18, they are coming on their own--if they are 14, 15, 16 or 17 years old. And they don't always tell you the truth either, Mr. Speaker.

So this large group of people are prime gang-age recruitment youth. And these youth are coming from some of the most violent countries in the world. And 11 of the 13 most violent countries in the world are south of the Rio Grande, and one of those countries is not Mexico. So when they come into America, they bring with them the violence and the culture that is part of it, and we can expect our crime rates to go up.

The people from the inner cities, who generally sit over on that side of this Congress, want to get them out of places like El Salvador and Guatemala and put them into the inner cities, in places like east St. Louis and Detroit and Newark, and a number of other cities where the violent crime rate is very high, to get them away from the violence that is part of their neighborhood. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that we may be putting them into neighborhoods that are more dangerous than the countries that they come from, but we don't log those crime statistics very clearly because it is so sensitive to the people in the inner city, they don't want to talk about it.

So crime has been pervasive in these countries. They are sending young men especially that are prime gang-age recruitment. They are being recruited to MS-13. Judge Jeanine Pirro said the other day that 30 percent of them become MS-13 members.

Mr. Speaker, let me inquire, if I could, the amount of time I have remaining.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that response.

I wanted to roll through what our sanctuary cities legislation does that we just passed today, and it goes a pretty good, long, comprehensive way.

I pointed out that I brought the first sanctuary cities legislation into this Congress that I could find a record of. It was in 2005 when I brought an amendment through the Homeland Security appropriations to cut all funding to sanctuary cities. 2005. And then along the way, each opportunity that was there, I brought an amendment to cut off funding to sanctuary cities. Most of the time it was in the Judiciary, the justice appropriations bill. And I see a number of them here scattered in my memo that I asked staff to put together.

So as far back as 12 years ago, I have been working to end Federal funding going to sanctuary cities that defy local law enforcement. And we have gotten resistance from the other side of the aisle consistently. Barack Obama was never going to sign anything like that, but I kept beating the drum every year to cut off funding to sanctuary cities.

Finally, I introduced the legislation on sanctuary cities in 2015, and then again at the beginning of this Congress. And Chairman Bob Goodlatte was gracious enough to pull that together so we could bring it to the floor today. And we have had a lot of cooperation from many others on this.

I see the first date I introduced the sanctuary cities legislation as a standalone bill was November 4 of 2015, and here we are today finally passing it.

I thought I had been at it for a long time, Mr. Speaker, and it added up to 12 years that I have been actively engaged, at least--maybe 14-- until I talked to Congressman Lou Barletta from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, who, as a mayor in 1999, began to raise the issue and made it a national issue. He was selected to this Congress. He has been at it 18 years. Others have been at this a long time, too.

So many of us are grateful today that the sanctuary cities language has passed and that Sarah's Law, Kate's Law, all of that that I was able to introduce into this Congress has passed out of the House of Representatives and messaged to the Senate. And I hope the Senate picks it up.

The sanctuary cities language does this:

It bans their policies, for starters, Mr. Speaker.

It blocks the Department of Justice grants to the sanctuary cities that defy Federal law and refuse to cooperate with Federal law enforcement on immigration. And those grants would be generally grants that have to do with law enforcement that would be effected by DOJ.

It allows the Department of Homeland Security to refuse warrants from the sanctuary cities. The sanctuary cities might serve a warrant to someone in custody, and DHS can say: We are not going to hand this person over to you because we are pretty confident you are just going to turn them loose on the streets.

So that piece in there is a protection that keeps some from being released.

And then it requires ICE to take custody of these criminal aliens within 48 hours of the notice that comes from the State or local government that would have them picked up.

It also establishes a good faith provision that holds local government harmless for honoring ICE detainers.

Now, that is something that was undermined on February 25 of 2015 by then-Acting Director of ICE, Dan Ragsdale, who sent a letter out that just simply advised local law enforcement that an ICE detainer is a suggestion, not an order.

Well, the law and the rule says that it is an order, not a suggestion. This statute clarifies it and firms it up with respect to detainers.

And then if a local jurisdiction is sued by, say, the ACLU, as they are wont to do, it gives them a protection, and it lets the Department of Justice and the Federal Government substitute itself for local government, and it holds local government harmless when it comes to the case of ICE detainers.

Here is a very powerful piece, Mr. Speaker, and it is this: the sanctuary cities legislation passed today, H.R. 3003, provides a cause of action against any jurisdiction that releases an alien who subsequently commits a felony.

Now, that is a powerful provision, and it is something that moves me in my heart. As a former crime victim, it occurred to me when they announced the name of the case that I wasn't involved in that equation at all even though it nearly destroyed my business, and I began to think about how this is.

Our criminal law comes from old England. And in old England, if you committed a crime--the king owned everything. If you killed one of his serf, you killed the king's serf. That was the murder that took place. If you shot a deer, you shot the king's deer. If you stole something, it was a violation against the crown.

And we transferred the criminal law into America, and the State has replaced the crown. So when you commit a crime, that crime is committed against the State as if you had killed one of the king's deer, but it doesn't consider the victim hardly at all. We are doing a little better in recent years, but this allows the crime victims to have a recourse, Mr. Speaker. And I think we will hear a lot about this provision in the sanctuary cities law as this moves over to the Senate.

I think we made a lot of progress today. It has been a good day to do honor to the lives of Sarah Root, a beautiful young lady whose mother is here in this Capital City today and speaking and testifying and doing radio and meetings.

And one day I hope we hunt down Eswin Mejia, the killer of this beautiful young woman. And one day I hope we have the relationship with his home country where they will hunt him down and extradite him to the United States of America. That is, of course, a law we need to have in a civilized world.

And Kate Steinle, I thank not only Matt Salmon for bringing this forward, but Bill O'Reilly and the President of the United States.

Something this President has done is he asked the family members of the victims of criminal aliens in America to step up on the stage with him around the campaign trail over and over again. One would think that they were props for a campaign. That kind of criticism flowed out. But here is what he has really done: he illuminated the pain that they went through over and over again. When he came back to Iowa on a ``thank you'' tour, he had some of the crime victims there. He brought them up on the stage. You can tell by the look in his eye that they moved him.

He has said the thing that moved him the most in the entire campaign were the families who had an illegal kill their daughter, their son, their family member. That moved him the most. He has done honor to that.

He has asked that we bring this legislation to the floor. We have done so. We have passed it out of the House.

And the President, yesterday, met with a dozen or so of these families at the White House. He will continue to push this legislation till it becomes law. And I expect at the bill signing ceremony, these families will be invited back to the White House and they will get a closure on the pain that they are going through this day.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Roe).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 5 minutes.

Mr. Chairman, first of all, the statement that this bill caps or limits States on economic or noneconomic damages is incorrect. In fact, I would point the gentlewoman from Texas to page 6 of the bill, that says, under State Flexibility, that specifies a particular monetary amount of economic or economic damages, there is no provision in this section that shall be construed to preempt State law. We wrote that specifically to respect the States' rights.

I recall a number of these pieces of legislation that have come before this Congress. I can remember it back at least until 2007. I was uneasy about the constitutionality because it did reach in and preempt State law.

And I am a respecter of States' rights, but we have a Federal interest in healthcare. That is the provision that is written into the bill. If there are Federal dollars involved, if it is a Federal program, then the Federal Government has an interest in limiting these damages.

We capped the damages in this bill, not the economic damages. Those real damages that are economic damages are fully compensated, without limit, without cap, and without the interference of this law, unless States choose to cap economic damages.

Noneconomic damages, however, are capped at $250,000; and that $250,000 cap is something that has existed in California State law for more than 40 years, signed into law by the very durable Jerry Brown. But if the States want to change that, if they want to raise the cap beyond $250,000, that is their right to do so. We specify that in the bill.

I would like to discuss a need for this bill. It is necessary to preserve fiscal sanity in Federal healthcare policy. And I would like to point out, also, at the outset that this bill only applies to claims concerning the provision of goods and services for which coverage is provided in whole or in part by a Federal program, a Federal subsidy, or a Federal tax benefit. It is a clear, clear, Mr. Chairman, Federal nexus. Wherever Federal policy affects the distribution of healthcare, there is a clear Federal interest.

So, the bill's commonsense reforms, which have been the law in California for over 40 years and that the CBO has scored a couple of times here--the previous score was $54 billion; this score is $50 billion--is over $50 billion in savings to the people who are paying for healthcare in this country, and that includes our taxpayers and the healthcare users.

But the $250,000 cap is reasonable. It has sustained itself over those 40 years in California, and it is good enough for other States to emulate.

When I hear some pushback from Texas, I am kind of thinking they want to keep the system they have, and they don't want to have to compete with the rest of the country. I think we might lose a vote or two to from Texas on that alone: We have ours; we don't want America to have anything like that because then we have to compete with all of America.

This bill will allow courts to require periodic payments for future damages instead of lump sum awards. That helps limit bankruptcies so plaintiffs that might receive only pennies on the dollar can be prevented. And it includes provisions creating a ``fair share'' rule by which damages are allocated fairly in direct proportion to fault. That has got to help a lot when you are thinking about the cost of healthcare.

The bill does all this without in any way limiting compensation for 100 percent of the plaintiffs' economic losses, which include anything to which a receipt can be attached, including all medical costs, lost wages, future lost wages, rehabilitation costs, or any other economic out-of-pocket loss suffered as a result of a healthcare injury.

Far from limiting deserved recoveries in California, these reforms have led to medical damage awards in deserving cases, Mr. Chairman, in the area of the $80 million to $90 million range.

The Washington Post reported a few months ago: ``U.S. healthcare spending . . . is projected to accelerate over the next decade. . . . A study by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services projects that the average growth in health spending will be even faster in 2016'' on up through the decade of 2025. ``The projections are based on an assumption that the legislative status quo will prevail.''

If we don't change the law, we are going to see these costs going up.

As Nate Silver pointed out in The New York Times, not my favorite document: ``All the major categories of Federal Government spending have been increasing relative to inflation. But essentially all of the increase in spending relative to economic growth and the potential tax base has come from entitlement programs, and about half of all of that has come from healthcare entitlements specifically.''

Studies show that as healthcare costs rise, wages fall; and the more companies pay in healthcare costs, the less they can pay in wages. So when healthcare costs increase and that growth increases, wages stagnate; and when healthcare costs growth slows, wages go up.

Members who want to see wages increase should vote for this bill--it is good for the healthcare workers--because one of the drivers of higher healthcare spending is so-called defensive medicine.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself an additional 2 minutes.

That is a very real phenomenon confirmed by countless studies in which healthcare workers conduct many additional costly tests and procedures with no medical value. That is charged to our Federal taxpayers, and it is simply to avoid excessive litigation costs.

A survey published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that 91 percent of the over 1,000 doctors surveyed ``reported believing that physicians order more tests and procedures than needed to protect themselves from malpractices suits.''

The study also asked: ``Are protections against unwarranted medical malpractice lawsuits needed to decrease the unnecessary use of diagnostic tests?'' And the answer, an identical number: 91 percent of the doctors surveyed agreed.

But there is one Newsweek reporter who described the personal experience of individual doctors this way: ``Typical was one doctor, who had a list as long as my arm of procedures ER docs perform . . . for no patient benefit. They include following a bedside sonogram . . . with an ``official'' sonogram because it's easier to defend yourself to a jury if you've ordered the second one; a CT scan for every child who bumped his or her head, to rule out things that can be diagnosed just fine by observation; X-rays that do not guide treatment, such as for a simple broken arm; CTs for suspected appendicitis that has been perfectly well diagnosed without it.

``Although doctors may hate practicing defensive medicine, they do it so they don't get sued. . . . Nationwide, physicians estimate that 35 percent of diagnostic tests they ordered were to avoid lawsuits, as were 19 percent of hospitalizations, 14 percent of prescriptions, and 8 percent of surgeries. . . . All told,'' according to the Newsweek article, $650 billion in unnecessary care every year was provided by these doctors. Another ER doctor said he ordered 52 CT scans in one 12- hour shift for a total of $104,000 in a single day.

These are the things we are dealing with, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself an additional 1 minute.

One of the most recent studies, published a few months ago in the Journal of the American College of Radiology studied the effects of tort reform on

just radiographic tests alone and found that there were ``2.4 million to 2.7 million fewer radiographic tests annually attributed to tort reforms.''

Just imagine what savings would occur if such reforms were attached to all Federal healthcare programs, as this bill would do.

It causes me to think of an orthopedic surgeon who told me that he can diagnose an ACL almost every time, yet he is compelled by his liability insurance to do additional tests, 97 percent of which are unnecessary.

That is the kind of thing we are dealing with, Mr. Chairman, and it is time for us to bring sanity to this litigation that we have in this country.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Chairman, it is just interesting to me to hear this discussion about the Senate addressing the healthcare situation in America. I stood on this floor time, after time, after time, and in 2010, March 23 of 2010, the final passage of ObamaCare was sent out of the Congress to the President of the United States, who signed it immediately before the sun could come up in the morning.

And I was sick at heart at what happened to our Constitution, our rule of law, our individual rights. And now we have a mess of a healthcare system in America. This is a component of the fix. We don't have a single Democrat in the House or Senate that is willing to even commit to work with us to put up a single vote to try to improve the healthcare system in America.

They made a mistake, and they passed ObamaCare. They served it over to us and said: Now you fix it. Well, we are going to declare it a mess no matter what you do. We are going to fix it. It is going to take some time.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Chairman, as you listen to the stories that are here that have been delivered by the gentleman from Florida, I am wondering why we haven't heard these stories come out of California. Because this legislation essentially mirrors California legislation. That was the model that we followed. And they have had over 40 years to repeal or amendment it, and it has been sustainable.

There is a right to a jury trial under this. It is just that there are caps that are set, that are reasonable caps, and the States are free to change those caps up or down.

So I don't quite follow this, but I would say someone who is raped in a nursing home is not covered under this. This legislation doesn't affect it at all. It has to have an affect by a diagnosis, a prevention, or a treatment of a disease impairment; and a rape is not that. So it would not be covered under this legislation.

Mr. Chairman, I know that my opposition would like to have this legislation killed. I would just point out something that I heard on the floor of the House here about 10 years ago, and it was this: We can pass this legislation, but the Senate may not pass it. And I would urge them to take it up. There is a special interest, and it is the Trial Lawyers Association. They are the ones who will not come out of this very well.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Chairman, I point out also that this bill keeps these cases in State court. It doesn't move them to Federal court. Previous legislation that has been brought to this floor, a decade or so ago, did move a lot of these cases to Federal court. But it is carefully drafted to keep this with the maximum amount of respect for States' rights that can be held and still have a Federal interest.

There has to be a Federal interest in every dollar involved in this. In every single case, there has to be Federal dollars involved in it, or this bill wouldn't affect it at all. And so I am one who is also a great respecter of States' rights. And in this legislation, as drafted, there are provisions in there over and over again that protect as many of the States' rights as can be. And if you take the other side of this argument, then it is far stronger that the right of the Federal Government would be usurped by the States if we don't have this legislation.

That is what is taking place now--States that choose not to make a decision, not to set caps, and we are seeing huge settlements going on around the country. This is what we want to end, so that we can save the $50 to $54 billion for the taxpayers. But the thing that is even worth more than this is, how much of that $650 billion in defensive medicine will no longer be used in this country, and how much safer and less expensive will our healthcare be in America?

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Chairman, I was a little surprised to hear that a judge in the State of Washington had ruled that caps are unconstitutional. In fact, it is kind of curious to hear the same arguments--or conflicting arguments coming out of the other side. One of them says it is the States' rights to be able to set the caps. The other one says it is unconstitutional to set the caps. So I think that conflict, it would be good if that were resolved.

I think, in either case, that I disagree with both of those positions, Mr. Chairman.

If a Washington State judge says caps are unconstitutional, on what basis?

That would say, then, that a State legislature couldn't cap them; Congress can't cap them; that this is essentially, then, a function of the courts.

I remember a decision that came out of the State of Washington. It was a Federal judge that essentially ruled that the President's executive order on, let's say, migrants coming into the United States was unconstitutional, even though Congress specifically granted the authority to their President. So I am not going to defer to a single judge's opinion in that fashion.

I would point out, too, that we do protect States' rights. There is provision in this bill after provision, and it is titled State Flexibility. Look through their and find all the provisions of State Flexibility where we respect States' rights. And it is written as carefully as it can be to respect the maximum amount of States' rights.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 15 seconds.

I would just point out to the body that I didn't hear a single fact in the previous 2 minutes. It is all opinion and hurled accusations. But I think it is important for this body to deliberate over the facts themselves, and I have delivered a lot of that data.

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute.

Mr. Chairman, I would point out, first of all, the gentleman from Maryland must know that this isn't a criminal statute. This is civil law. It doesn't have anything to do with crime or criminal law, so let's keep our discussion to the civil actions that we are discussing here.

It is not propaganda. It is facts that we have delivered on this side. So I want to put this into the Record verbatim, Mr. Chairman. Regarding cases of rape or physical abuse, H.R. 1215 does not cover such cases at all. That is because the bill only applies to medical malpractice claims based on the provision or use of healthcare services; and healthcare services are defined in the bill as things related to the diagnosis, prevention, or treatment of any human disease or impairment.

Clearly, rape or any other physical abuse, and the neglect of basic sanitary conditions, is not related to the diagnosis, prevention, or treatment of any human disease or impairment. So in cases involving rape or physical abuse by anyone, or neglect of basic needs, the bill simply does not apply.

But it does respect States' rights. It is carefully written to protect States' rights. It is a significant and huge improvement upon some efforts we have seen in the past, and one of those reasons is because many of us care about States' rights, and we pay attention to the Constitution. There is a Federal nexus in everything that goes on here, and States are not limited from raising caps on economic or noneconomic damages or lowering those caps. We respect the States in every way possible, and still get a positive result out of H.R. 1215.

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

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

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds.

Mr. Chairman, I have heard the gentleman from Maryland say that this legislation would override the laws of 28 States. That was a surprise to me to hear that when I heard the number before Rules Committee, which I think I actually recall it was 27. But 28, 27, it doesn't override laws. It is the absence of laws.

There are States that don't have caps. That is what we are talking about here. So it is not overriding State laws in States where there are no laws. It simply is setting a Federal foundation and a guideline for them.

And if I am in a State legislature, I know I have the authority to raise or lower the cap on economic and on noneconomic damages, and that my laws are not being overridden, but they are being provided by the wisdom of the American people, then I am going to be thankful I have that to work with until I can amend it.

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

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

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

Mr. Chairman, I inquire as to the amount of time I have remaining.

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

First, I say in response to the gentleman from Maryland's discussion about the States courts that have prohibited caps. That is one of the reasons that we need this legislation, is that you have out-of-control liberal judges that have decided that even their State legislatures can't pass the laws. They want to come in and preempt the states' rights of we, the people, of the individual States who elect their general assemblies to make their decisions.

Often, the judges are set in lifetime appointments where they are not held accountable, so it would be interesting to look back into each of these States that the gentleman from Maryland has mentioned and address this thing from ``we, the people'' because we, the people, are the power in this country. Our rights come from God, and they are vested in we, the people.

I thought the gentleman from Pennsylvania's look at H.R. 1215 was a really deft way to focus on this and speak about the Magna Carta, but there wasn't anybody back in old England in that time that had any shot at filing a liability claim, let alone receiving a frivolous claim that would make one individual vastly wealthy at the expense of a lot of other folks. So this is something that has accumulated over the last 502 years since the Magna Carta was signed.

So I would say this: healthcare costs are out of control due in large part to unlimited lawsuits and other problems ObamaCare failed to solve or else ObamaCare made worse. H.R. 1215 is commonsense litigation reform legislation that will rein in overly aggressive and healthcare lawsuits while preserving the ability of plaintiffs to recover unlimited economic damages.

The bill applies only to claims concerning the provision of healthcare goods or services for which coverage is provided in whole or in part by a Federal program, a Federal subsidy, or a Federal tax benefit giving it a clear Federal nexus.

This isn't criminal legislation. It doesn't address the cases of rape. We should arrest those people and lock them up in prison and punish them to the max, but it is not the subject of this legislation.

So wherever the Federal policy directly affects the distribution of

healthcare, there is a clear Federal interest in reducing the cost of such Federal policy. This bill's commonsense reforms, which have been the law in California for over 40 years, are conservatively estimated by CBO to save at least $50 billion. The previous estimate was $54 billion in Federal healthcare dollars. At the same time, this bill doesn't in any way limit compensation for 100 percent of plaintiffs' losses.

As reported in The Washington Post last month, the U.S. healthcare spending is projected to accelerate over the next day. A study by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services project that the average growth in healthcare spending will be even faster between 2016 and 2025. The projections are based on an assumption that the legislative status quo will prevail. Studies show that, as healthcare costs rise, wages fall. H.R. 1215 will save billions of dollars in healthcare costs and will, thereby, increase wages for workers nationwide.

Mr. Chairman, as I look at the picture of how I watched this defensive medicine grow over the years and over the decades, $650 billion potentially, reported by a Newsweek article, in unnecessary defensive medicine tests that are done. A doctor that ordered CT scans in massive numbers in a single day, when I see 97 percent of the MRIs just to be sure that the diagnosis of an ACL knee injury is protected in the case of liability insurance, we are not going to see just $50 billion in savings here. We are going to see hundreds of billions of dollars in savings.

And as an anesthesiologist told me that--he was practicing in Texas-- when Texas passed the law that is roughly a mirror of California law, that his premium as an anesthesiologist was $26,000 a year; and after the law passed in Texas, it dropped to $6,500, exactly one-fourth. A 75 percent reduction in that particular case. He is now practicing in Iowa. Iowa passed mirror legislation as well.

Mr. Chairman, I urge all of my colleagues to join me in supporting this vital legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding.

I want to express, Mr. Chairman, how much I appreciate the work that has been done by so many people and their part in this bill.

I rise in support of this improving amendment--it comes out of the minds of Texas, I might add--which would clarify the timing of the statute of limitations in the provision base of the bill.

Mr. Chairman, I urge the adoption of the Sessions amendment.

Mr. Chair, I thank the gentleman from Texas for his leadership on the Rules Committee and in many other ways; and I also thank Dr. Burgess, another gentleman from Texas on the Rules Committee whose amendment is being offered by Mr. Sessions.

As I listen to this dialogue, Mr. Chairman, I am just thinking that States do have rights. They have the right to control any of the healthcare services that are funded by individuals or States. This only affects that because it has Federal dollars in it. We drive at a 55- mile-an-hour speed limit because the Federal Government sets that.

So I rise in support of this amendment, but the States are not funding Medicare, Medicaid, or ObamaCare.

Mr. Chair, I am happy to accept the time from the gentleman from Tennessee and make the point that hasn't been made very well here today that--apparently, not well enough or the gentleman wouldn't have yielded the time to me, I don't believe--where there are Federal dollars involved, there have been Federal regulations that have matched along with that.

We have written all kinds of legislation in this Congress, a lot of which I disagreed with. But there was a Federal nexus, and it hasn't been litigated successfully time after time after time.

We saw ObamaCare itself was litigated over and over again and the Supreme Court came down with rulings that let that legislation stand. That is one of the reasons why we have the angst that we have today.

But the case that this usurps States' rights is thin. It is not without some consequence, but it is very thin. We have gone way over to the other side, and we have written everything that we can possibly write into this bill that respects the rights of States. There is always a Federal nexus--we can count on that--and it is so small in comparison to so many other Federal things. Some of the things in our Federal Government are overreach. This is not. This is a minimal, de minimis reach in order to regulate over-the-top trial lawyers, who are the ones who are the only losers today, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, I thank Dr. Roe, the gentleman from Tennessee, for bringing this amendment.

Looking at the language here, it is interesting that the concern was that the witnesses may not be available within a large State. I notice, as I read the language, that unless the person was licensed for practice in the State or a contiguous border State--that is pretty good. If you are Hawaii, maybe not so good. But Dr. Roe, typical to his style, anticipated these things by putting the waiver authority in the last provision in the amendment, which says: ``The court may waive the requirements in this subsection if it determines that the appropriate witnesses otherwise would not be available.''

So this is a sound, well thought-out directive that ensures that we have a high level of professionalism.

When the gentleman earlier talked about a jury of your peers, what about having professionals who are highly credentialed that do understand the locality and the normal practices within the region?

So not only do I support this amendment, but I encourage its adoption. It requires expert witnesses to have knowledge of the standard of care in their local communities. It is a commonsense amendment, and I urge its adoption.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of this improving amendment which would save even more Federal taxpayer dollars by requiring the filing of affidavits of merit from an appropriately qualified specialist, requiring that expert witnesses have speciality backgrounds relevant to the case, allowing doctors to apologize without fear of penalty, and requiring a 90-day cooling-off period before lawsuits can be filed to facilitate voluntary settlements.

I urge its adoption by the House, and I would point out that, as the gentleman from Tennessee referred to a fraternity of healthcare professionals as if somehow they couldn't come to an objective decision on their own profession, there has to be a fraternity of lawyers that are making these decisions for all of America right now. What we are seeking to do today is to bring this back to common sense, bring it back to we the people, keep it within the bounds of the Constitution, and reduce the cost of healthcare across America $54 billion, and we are looking at a potential for $650 billion a year.

Mr. Chairman, I urge its adoption.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, I have a statement before me from Chairman Goodlatte, the chairman of the full Judiciary Committee. I am going to represent this as his statement, but the chairman thanks the gentleman from Kentucky for his clarification while he remains opposed to the amendment because it provides an overly broad definition of the eligible professional organizations authorized to issue the guidelines that would be used as an affirmative defense, and because it is not supported by the wider coalition of medical groups supporting the base bill. He looks forward to working with the gentleman to further refine and improve his legislative proposal.

That concludes Chairman Goodlatte's statement that he would like read into this Record.

And I would say on my own behalf, Mr. Chairman, that I very much appreciate the work that Mr. Barr has brought to this. The language that he presented originally, that had to be amended in order to conform with the parliamentarian, I believe, does define this with clarity. So I am inclined to support the gentleman from Kentucky. We will see what happens if there is a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, it is my honor and privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, this great deliberative body that we have and are, and this deliberative body that brings this Nation together to discuss our troubles, to discuss our triumphs, and sometimes intensively debate our disagreements here on the floor and in committee. We have seen a fair amount of that disagreement around the country.

There are a few things we see that brings this country together, and we join together in these efforts when we can be Americans, and reach out with the hand of the American heart and spirit and help others when they are in sometimes dire need and dire difficulty.

Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor this afternoon to discuss one of these circumstances where Americans joined together and reached out their hands--not only of friendship but physically reached out their hands--to deliver the kind of medical care that saved three lives from a terrible accident that took place in Tanzania.

This terrible accident in Tanzania was worldwide news. There were 39 people on a bus in Tanzania, and all but three were students, children, 12 to 13 years old. There were two teachers and a bus driver on the bus.

From the reports that I got, the bus was going too fast. It went around a curve and reached the peak of a bump in the road, a rise in the road. The bus went airborne off the road into a ravine, and it crashed nose down in the same fashion that a plane might crash into the Earth.

Of the 39 people on the bus, 36 of them children, there were only three survivors. These three survivors were in the back of the bus, and all others in the front were thrown to the front, where the engine and the front part of the bus, all the way back to behind the driver, was jammed into the fuselage, I might call it, of the bus itself. And as that was jammed backwards, they were all thrown into that.

The three survivors were in the back, and the violence to them was cushioned, to a degree, by those who had perished in front of them. Everyone else was essentially instantly killed, and these three children by the name of Wilson and Sadia and Doreen were survivors. The bus was crushed together like a tin can.

Three vehicles behind the bus were some missionary workers who are associated with STEMM, the Siouxland Tanzania Educational Medical Ministries, which was formed in Sioux City, Iowa, and it was formed by the inspiration of a long chain of, I will say, the Hand of Providence that arranges people together. They were there in Tanzania, following the bus three vehicles behind.

Mr. Speaker, the situation there was that, as they saw the bus go off the road and crash, the bus crashed down off into the ravine; they stopped. The three of them were trained medical personnel named Kevin Nygard and Jennifer Milby and Amanda Volkers. I believe there are also a couple that I don't happen to have their names in

front of me this evening, and I don't want to leave them out, Mr. Speaker, but they raced down the bank to the ravine where the bus had crashed nose down. They knew it was a terrible accident.

I don't think they could have imagined how bad and how terrible it was, but the only way to get in that bus was through the windows in the sides, schoolbus-type windows, as we know. Most all of us are familiar with those, Mr. Speaker.

So they climbed into that bus and began to look for survivors and to try to pull the survivors out and then the bodies of those who didn't survive, and they worked frantically there with other volunteers, also, who happened to come along to the scene.

They were able to remove the three survivors that I had mentioned, Wilson and Sadia and Doreen, and lay them out on the bank. They were all medically trained, and so they were applying first aid.

These three kids, these three students, 12 to 13 years old, two girls and a boy, were then transported by ambulance into the city in Tanzania.

Now, I didn't know that this had happened, even though it was international news, but I was on an international trip as well into the Balkans. I happened to be in Bosnia at the moment in Sarajevo. I received a phone call from Dr. Steve Meyer. Steve Meyer is the founder of STEMM, the Siouxland Tanzania Educational Medical Ministries.

His heart has gone out to Tanzania nearly 20 years ago. He spends about half of each year there doing missionary work and providing and conducting orthopaedic surgery because he is an orthopaedic surgeon. He has taught them how to farm. He is drilling wells for irrigation. He also is running an educational system there that, at least the last report I had, it was the largest nonpublic school in Tanzania.

This is all done by the drive and the inspiration and the heart of Dr. Steve Meyer and his wife, Dana. And so the people that work with him had contributed to the survival of the three students that they had helped pulled out of that bus.

Yet I received a call from Steve Meyer. I was with the charge d'affaires in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and I stepped out of that reception to take a cell phone call. When I pick up my phone and it says, ``Steve Meyer,'' I know I better answer the call. He is a friend. He is a pheasant hunting buddy. I guess he is a neighbor in the neighborhood, not technically a constituent, but we are brothers by faith, by head, by heart, and I know the level of conviction that Steve Meyer has.

So I took his call when I stepped out of the reception, and he said: ``You have already seen this on the news. I need your help. There are three students that will . . .'' He said: ``One, probably two, of them will not survive if we cannot get them out of Tanzania. The third one likely will be handicapped for life, but is more likely to survive.''

I know that he does orthopaedic surgery in Tanzania, and I said: ``Can't you help them there? Can't you fix them there?''

And he said: ``No, I can't. We don't have the equipment in Tanzania. We are not going to be able to save them unless we can get them out of Tanzania, get them back to Sioux City, where we can provide all the best medical care and perform the surgery necessary to put their bodies back together.''

And that was his medical prognosis.

Now, I know from previous times that I have been around Steve Meyer, the level of conviction that he has and, of course, the depth of his heart. So I said: ``I think I know what you need from me.''

And he said: ``Yes, their parents need to go along, too; and we want to send along a doctor and a nurse. I have only got just a little bit of time, and I am going to have to leave Tanzania, but we need to get them out of here while they are still alive.''

So my job was to accelerate the visas, acquisition of visas for the three patients, the kid patients, for each one of their mothers, and for the doctor and for the nurse that needed to accompany them back to the United States, and to promote and accelerate the issuance of passports, which nobody had that needed to travel here either, and that would be a function of the Tanzanian Government and a function of something that we might be able to encourage.

So that was the easy part. It doesn't sound easy, Mr. Speaker, but it was the easy part compared to the second part of the assignment Dr. Meyer gave me. And he said: ``I need a medevac plane, and we are going to have to fly them out of Tanzania in a medevac plane. I have got everything set up in Sioux City. It is at Mercy Hospital. All of us are going to donate our time, our medical care, the devices that will be used to do the reconstructive surgery. All of that is going to be provided. It is going to be at no cost, but we need to get them there and get them there fast.''

So this is a high emergency. I hung up the phone and I began to make phone calls. And the fortunate thing was I was leaving Bosnia shortly to go to Macedonia. Well, I would employ the staff at the Bosnian Embassy--the U.S. Embassy in Bosnia to pull some phone numbers together for me and start the outreach on this and to accelerate the effort to get the visas, promote the passports, and get the medevac plane. I want to thank the people there at the U.S. Embassy in Bosnia for their work and their cooperation.

I shortly arrived in Macedonia, where now I had a whole new embassy team to put to work; and they did. They pulled together phone numbers and made connections for me, too. I spoke--I believe it was from Macedonia--to the Tanzanian Embassy--the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania.

I want to thank Anthony Pagliai. Anthony Pagliai is the officer who issued the visas, and he was Johnny-on-the-spot. He couldn't have moved any more quickly or with any more conviction once I convinced him that this was for real.

And it was interesting how that happened, Mr. Speaker, that the--you know, when a congressman calls a staff person in an embassy in Tanzania, he doesn't have any way of knowing that it actually is a Member of Congress, for one thing, and what is the level of urgency and credibility of that call. But I told him I can vouch for Dr. Steve Meyer and I have known him for a long time, I know the level of his credibility and his conviction, his heart. I have spoken to that, Mr. Speaker.

I relayed that to Anthony Pagliai, and it seemed that the message wasn't clearly resonating because he didn't know of Dr. Steve Meyer. So I said to him that Steve Meyer is also working with Lazaro Nyalandu. Lazaro Nyalandu is an individual who ran for Prime Minister in Tanzania in the last election cycle--didn't win, but a fairly high name recognition within Tanzania. And when I gave Lazaro's name--you heard me hesitate already, Mr. Speaker. I have always had trouble remembering his name, but it is Nyalandu. And I hesitated on his name, but I said: ``Lazaro, the Prime Minister candidate in Tanzania, is working with Dr. Meyer, and I can vouch for Dr. Meyer. I know Lazaro, and I know, if the two of them are working together, this is a credible endeavor, and you should help them in any way that you can.''

And he finished up and he gave me Lazaro's last name. He volunteered it: Nyalandu. He said: ``We know him. He was the only candidate for Prime Minister that actually answered our phone calls.''

So I knew that he had a good relationship with the U.S. Embassy and that they had all of the incentive to move forward to expedite the visas. And I asked Anthony: ``Find me also a medevac plane.''

Well, that was a very big request for somebody that is in the business of issuing visas for travel. And he said he would go to work on that, but I knew it was very difficult.

So with the confidence that the visas would be moved expeditiously and that the encouragement to deliver the passports would be supported out of the U.S. Embassy, I moved on to begin looking for a medevac plane while the course of his lifesaving techniques were going on in the hospital in Tanzania, trying to save the lives of these three badly broken bodies.

Mr. Speaker, as I move then from Macedonia to Albania, I have been continually making phone calls trying to find a medevac plane. I talked to the

White House. I talked to the West Wing of the White House, and in particular, communicated with Steve Bannon and others who then did the outreach to the Department of Defense and went so far as to check with Stuttgart, where they command AFRICOMs out of Stuttgart, Germany. The assets to do this didn't really exist in an available way.

I reached even further into a security company that I worked with as head of my security in the Middle East, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and they found a plane. This plane was sitting on the tarmac in the Middle East. It could have gone down. It was set up well enough to be a medevac plane, but the price, because it was a leased plane, was $300,000.

So I told them: ``I don't think I want to spend that amount of money out of my kids' inheritance. I am not sure we could raise it to replace it, but put that plane on hold because I want to make some more phone calls and see if there is a better alternative.''

I kept making phone calls, and at about 4 o'clock in that afternoon, in a little back street in Albania, I had a phone call connection with Reverend Franklin Graham.

And I want to give credit in the Congressional Record to Elizabeth Soderholm, who was a staff person out of our U.S. Embassy in Albania, who made sure that that phone call made connection as the cell signals were bad and the batteries were going down, nearly down on my phone. We made the connection with hers, so I dialed, and I got an answer from Reverend Franklin Graham.

And over the course of less than a 5-minute conversation altogether, over the course of about 3 minutes, I explained the situation to him. And Reverend Franklin Graham of Samaritan's Purse said: ``I have a DC-8 that I can fly and move them out of Tanzania to Sioux City, Iowa. I am willing to do that. I want to help.''

And I said: ``Reverend Graham, I don't know that I can raise the money for that.''

And he said: ``You don't have to. We will take care of it.''

And at that moment I knew that we had the problem solved and we had a reasonable chance to save these three kids.

So, of course, I thanked him effusively. I texted Dr. Meyer's number to Franklin Graham, and Franklin Graham's number to Dr. Meyer. I said to each one of them: ``Call each other right away so that you can make this connection and get this plane set up and dispatched to evacuate these three patients out of Tanzania.''

And Dr. Meyer had no idea this was going on. He was 30 minutes from boarding his commercial flight out of Tanzania to come back to Iowa. Because of the obligations he had, he could not have stayed. And the phone rang, he answered it, and it was on the other end: ``This is Franklin Graham, and I want to help.''

And that is when Steve Meyer knew that the problems, the difficulties were going to be resolved. In any case, at that point they set up the logistics. The plane arrived in Tanzania, boarded these patients out of there, and flew them back to the United States--not without incident, but back to the United States.

Again, I am very grateful for all the people involved here. And I want to let this Congressional Record know, Mr. Speaker, that the driving force behind this was Dr. Steve Meyer. And it has been his heart to help the people of Tanzania for two decades, and anybody that has been around him like I have been, my pheasant hunting buddy, and the times that Marilyn and I have been involved in the fundraising efforts that go on with STEMM and Sioux City, you just know. You want to make sure that he is going to get it done. So why not make it as easy as possible on him and knowing that, when that calling comes from above, you answer that call?

So I wanted to point out some things here on the posters. This is how this came together. These pictures were taken, I believe, 2\1/2\ weeks ago, maybe 3\1/2\ weeks ago, but the accident took place May 6. So within a couple of weeks of the accident, they had finished the surgery of our three victims here.

Mr. Speaker, I will say, among these three, there were five broken arms and at least, I believe, three broken legs. There were two fractured spines. There were 17 broken bones altogether. There was a broken jaw over here in Doreen. And this is a fractured spine in her neck. And this is Sadia. And Wilson had a fractured femur.

And when you add this all up, it would have been--I guess I better not necessarily point out which one, but both of these girls were at great risk of death in Tanzania and likely would not have made it. Wilson here in the middle likely would have survived, but he had a fractured femur where, in Tanzania, would have required that they amputate his leg at the hip.

And now, as of a week ago Saturday, I went up to the Sioux City Bandits' football game--indoor football--and they were co-captains for the team, for the playoff game that took place that Saturday night. They wheeled all three of them out to the middle of the field for the coin toss. And after that, they came back, and we had a little stage on the end where we watched the game from the stage.

And they look a little fresher and more alert that night than they do in these pictures, Mr. Speaker, but they are now happy. Their parents are delighted and very grateful.

This is Dr. Steve Meyer here in the picture, and I just can't say enough about a man who inspires everyone around him and makes things happen by force of will and faith that would not and, we would think, could not happen otherwise.

And then of the patients here, Wilson is the one that cracks me up the most. On that Saturday night, this young fellow who would have, by now, lost his leg up at the hip, I leaned down and I said to him: ``Wilson, is what I heard about you yesterday true?''

And he looked at me and smiled a little bit, and said: ``Well, what?''

And I said: ``Did you really kick a ball yesterday? Did you stand up and kick a ball?''

And he got this grin on his face and said: ``Yes.''

So that is how far this has come. This is a happy result, Mr. Speaker, and I wanted to also show the picture. Here is Wilson and his mother. I will give you an example. He has got this ready smile. He is not the only one of the crew with a ready smile, but he has got a great ready smile. And part of it is he had got a big wound in his head that you don't see in the picture, too, but it doesn't suppress the grin on his face.

And we did a little press conference there. It was the first time he had been out of a hospital room. The only thing he had seen in America was the inside of a hospital room, and then wheeled down the hallway to the reception area of the hospital. And he is there with the two girls in their wheelchairs. That was also taken the same day.

And the press asked him: ``What is it you like best about America?''

Well, the only thing he had seen of America was the inside of the hospital, and he smiled and he said: ``Everything.''

And they asked him: ``What is your favorite food here?'' And he said: ``Everything.''

And they asked him only one more question: ``Is there anything else you would like to say, Wilson?'' And he said: ``Thank you.''

And that is something that the parents have been saying ever since, the three mothers that are here and the doctor and the nurse that are here also to take care of them.

They are now out of the hospital. They are at Ronald McDonald House there in Sioux City. They have been taking them out on occasion to get some fresh air and see what normal life is in our part of the country. And you can just see the heart, and Steve Meyer here in this poster.

I would be remiss if I didn't have this poster up also tonight, Mr. Speaker. This is Samaritan's Purse. This is the DC-8 that Reverend Franklin Graham dispatched to fly our three patients out of Tanzania and into Sioux City, Iowa.

These are the people that have gathered at the departure wondering if they are ever going to see these three Tanzanian kids again. Many of these people would be people that were at the state funeral for the 36 who were killed in that bus accident. Tens of thousands came to the stadium as those 36 caskets were all lined up side by side, and

the nation went into mourning in Tanzania because of that terrible loss that they had and the tragedy that was there, that was commemorated by the attendance of tens of thousands. Probably over 100,000 Tanzanians came to their soccer stadium for that huge funeral that they had. And now some of them come to the airstrip to see these three survivors, these miracle kids from Tanzania be flown off to the United States.

I can only imagine what it is like in their mind's eye, what they imagine is happening with their three children that have been flown over here to the United States.

And the father of one of these patients said to Dr. Meyer: ``Why? Why? Why?'' And Dr. Meyer said: ``Well, what do you mean `why?' ''

``Why do you do this? Why are you willing to do this for our children?''

And his answer is: ``We are Christians and we are Americans. That's why.''

And so it is the head and the heart of our country, our people. It does come to us to reach out and lift others up and help them. We can't help them all. We can't save them all. But every once in a while, there is a cry out and a need for a chain of individual miracles linked together.

Without a connection, by the way, between Steve Meyer and Lazaro, who met years ago when Lazaro was going to college in Iowa, Lazaro Nyalandu--as he went to college in Iowa, he was brought together by Steve Meyer's pastor and then Steve Meyer, and they got to know each other and they became friends. And because of that relationship, Steve Meyer went to Tanzania and became one of the lead people on mission to Tanzania. If it hadn't been for that, he never would have formed STEMM.

The Siouxland Tanzania Educational Medical Ministry would have never been formed had it not been for that connection more than 20 years ago. And if it had never been formed, the workers wouldn't have been behind the bus when it went off the road, and, likely, everybody would have perished in that bus rather than all but three. If they hadn't been behind the bus, we would have not heard about the injuries that they had and wouldn't have had the connection to fly them back to the United States.

I don't know Lazaro myself. I don't have that to use to convince Anthony Pagiliai that this is a credible act. Now, he might have done it anyway. His head and his heart sounds good to me, too, but it helped to have that series of networks already built.

I bring this up, Mr. Speaker, because I want people to know, the people that are listening here, and especially young people as they form and shape their lives, that networking is worth a lot. You can be the smartest person in the world with the best intentions in the world, but if you don't have relationships with people so that you can communicate, that you can share ideas, that you can connect and team up on projects, then you can't get a lot done.

The smartest person in the world in a phone book hasn't had much effect on our society. But people with good convictions and good relationships and positive attitudes and a good heart can get a lot done that is good if they are connected with the right people.

So I just encourage, especially, young people: Go out there and build those networks. Build them while you are young. Build them while you are in school, when you are in K-12, when you are in college, when you are after college, when you are building those networks of young people that are going into the profession together. And understand that 40 years later you are still going to have friends that you can call on to produce a good and positive result if you build those relationships and those networks, not be reclusive. Push yourself out there and build friendships with people. And that multiplied itself over and over again.

By the way, I am grateful that Franklin Graham took my call and I carried enough credibility that that actually worked that way, too. That is another piece of networking. But I can't thank Revered Franklin Graham enough.

I remember sitting in my living room watching a black-and-white TV while Billy Graham was preaching and calling for an altar call, and that is a little bit of how we grew up in our family, clear back then when TVs were black-and-white.

And now, his son, Reverend Franklin Graham, took a phone call from me from Albania that resulted in a DC-8 being dispatched to fly these three patients out of Tanzania to Sioux City, Iowa, where they received surgery that repaired 17 broken bones and, by the way, with all of the medical devices donated by the company that produced them as well.

When I look at this, Doreen was paralyzed, particularly in her right leg, and there was no confidence as to whether she would ever be able to have any feeling in that leg or ever be able to walk again. Today she has feeling in that leg. She has some movement in that leg, and my level of confidence that she will walk again is pretty high right now. All the other prayers have been answered; why not this one?

I think the day comes when these three arrive back in Tanzania, and I will predict the date. I think it will be the 18th or 19th of August that they will be flown back to Tanzania, and I believe that these three patients, with their mothers with them, will walk down the steps off that plane onto the soil of Tanzania; and I believe that there will be tens of thousands of Tanzanians there to welcome them back home again.

The completion of this series of miracles that came about because one person, Steve Meyer, had the right head and heart at all times, and he had the right networks, with people like Lazaro Nyalandu and people working in our U.S. Embassies like Anthony Pagiliai and Elizabeth Soderholm, who set up that call, and our Ambassadors within each of those places that promoted and allowed this to happen, including Ambassador Lu and also Ambassador Baily, whom I worked with.

I got the good news when I was in Kosovo that it was going to be, it was likely to be completed then, that they had reached that transaction. I called it a transaction. They had put together the logistics so that the plane was going to go and pick them up.

I found myself then at the Vatican shortly after that, and kind of as maybe a little extra frosting on the cake, I was offered the opportunity to do the Bible reading at St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican that Sunday. I don't know how that came to me unless it was just a little reward from God that said, ``Well done, well done,'' by a lot of people.

These young people are now reconstructed. Their reconstructive surgery is completed, and they are on the mend. Two of the three are standing and walking and getting stronger, and each of them are taking physical therapy, and their attitudes are good. Their pain levels are down, and the projection is that, by mid to late August, they will be ready to go back to Tanzania.

That is an American success story, Mr. Speaker, and it is one that I am happy to relay here on the floor of the House of Representatives and deliver the credit to so many people who did so much to make this work, particularly Dr. Steve Meyer, but all of that for three kids in Tanzania for whom it is a miracle that they survived the bus accident.

Now, for their futures, the three miracle kids of Tanzania have a legacy to live up to. I expect that in years going forward, 10 and 20 and 30 and 40 years from now, wherever they go in the world, especially in Tanzania, they will be known as the Tanzanian miracle kids, the ones who survived against such improbable odds.

Out of them should come the kind of ambassadorship that links together Tanzania and the United States, and who knows what gets built that helps them help themselves; who knows how much of their own agriculture will be expanded so they can raise their own food; who knows how much of their educational system will be built out because of the inspiration that can come from young people whose lives have been saved by the technology and education that we have here; who knows how much of their spirit of faith is going to be bolstered by the good hearts of people that only wanted to do something good, only wanted to reach out their hand and help.

So, Mr. Speaker, I am very happy and grateful that this story is on its way to a very happy conclusion, and I can't say enough about the children, about

the mothers who expressed their gratitude at the game.

One of the mothers continued to always offer some little chicken strips for my granddaughter, my 10-year-old granddaughter, Rachel, to eat. Rachel couldn't quite understand why she was supposed to be eating all the time. And whenever Rachel would take a bite of it, then she would hear: ``You like? You like?''

And I said: ``Well, Rachel, it is because there are only a few words in English that this girl's mother knows, and she wants to open up a conversation with you, and so she's offering you food. That is a way of her expressing gratitude, not only to us, but to our country, and a way of having a conversation and communicating.'' And so it was a good experience for Rachel, too.

But I can't say enough about Reverend Franklin Graham, Samaritan's Purse, this effort that is global, that didn't hesitate. Again, it was not a 5-minute conversation between me and Reverend Franklin Graham that was able to set up this transportation; and the conversation with Franklin Graham and Dr. Steve Meyer, not very technical. It is: ``Where are they?'' ``What do we need to do?'' ``How are we going to figure out how to get there?'' ``Can we set the plane up to be a medevac plane?'' He had expressed that also in the phone call with me.

So, Mr. Speaker, this is a story that is on the way to a very, very happy conclusion, and I hope sometime, maybe in September, I can come back to the floor and report on the return of the Tanzanian miracle kids to Tanzania and, hopefully, I will have some pictures then of the crowd that is bound to be gathered together in a great celebratory event to counteract, or to be juxtaposed against the terrible, terrible tragedy of that bus accident that killed 36. It was 33 students and 2 of the teachers and the bus driver. Only these three children survived, and they survived because they were at the back of the bus when the bus landed on its nose.

So 17 broken bones, 2 broken spines, 5 or 6 fractured arms, and 3 or 4 of the legs were fractured in one bone or another.

Also, I should say that Dr. Quentin Durward was the neurosurgeon who did a lot of that technical work on the spines along with Dr. Steve Meyer, and he is one, also, who I know that his head and heart are in the right place.

I know that I have left off many, many of the medical providers at Mercy Hospital in Sioux City who donated their time and are so dedicated to this. I regret that I didn't have a list to read into the Record, Mr. Speaker. But I also want to express my gratitude to those whom I left off the list.

With that, I believe that I should conclude my presentation here on the Tanzanian miracle kids and, again, thank all of those who are involved and transition my discussion over to a few other things that are part of the current concerns here in America.

Issues of the Day

Mr. Speaker, I want to transition over to the shooting last Wednesday at the practice ballfield in Alexandria.

I want to thank everyone across this country who offered their prayers for the recovery of all of those who were injured in this shooting and especially our whip, our majority whip, Steve Scalise.

His nickname for me and mine for him for years has been ``Scrapper.'' We just call each other ``Scrapper.''

Well, we know, Steve Scalise is a scrapper. He is a fighter. He took an awfully hard hit last Wednesday, and it did significant damage to him. All of the medical reports that we have been getting after the first 36 hours or so have been of improvement in his condition.

I don't suppose--and I say this for Steve's benefit--I don't suppose LSU's loss in the College World Series the other night by a score of 13-to-1 improved his condition that much, but he is a baseball player and a baseball fan, and he is a very dedicated LSU fan. They are still in the College World Series, as I understand it, and it is a double- elimination tournament. So they are the leaders in the loser's bracket, so to speak. So they have got a chance to battle back and still win.

But he is battling back, and he is a winner, and his strength is coming back. The day will come when he comes to this floor to cast a vote. I don't know how long that is going to be, Mr. Speaker, but I can only anticipate the cheers of joy that this House of Representatives will utter when the day comes that Steve Scalise comes back to this floor to vote, to count votes.

He is the vote counter for the majority in this House of Representatives. That is one of the most important jobs in this place. If you bring a bill to the floor and you can't produce the votes to get it to pass, it is a pretty heavy embarrassment, and Steve Scalise has gotten that art down pretty well.

I always want to make that job as easy for him as I can, provided I agree with him on the policy, of course. But Steve Scalise, whether you agree with him on the policy or whether you don't, he has the personal support and the prayers of a vast majority of the Members here on this floor, and across this country.

He is an individual who you have got to like him, you have got to like him personally. He is engaging. He is sociable. He makes sure that there is a meal back there for us on first votes of the week, and he is the host in the Lincoln room in front of the Lincoln fireplace where Lincoln used to sit back in the day as well.

His two kids and his wife are also certainly near him whenever they can be and by his bedside whenever they can be. It is a time when the family is going through a fair amount of grief and stress, too.

But Steve Scalise isn't the only story in this, and that would be that Matt Mika, the lobbyist for Tyson Foods, was the second-most seriously injured in the shootings last Wednesday. And without describing his wounds here in the Record, I just want to make sure the Record knows, Mr. Speaker, that it was a very serious wound that Matt Mika took, and his recovery looks positive at this point. It is also one of those things that, day by day, gets a little better.

But each one of these individuals, Steve Scalise and Matt Mika, had it been a different scenario, if it had been a more remote location, without an almost immediate medevac by helicopter out of there and to the hospital, I am going to say that if they had been in a remote location, we likely would have lost them both.

It is attempted murder by a fellow that we don't need to bring charges against now because he has gone to the morgue. And his death is as a result of the two officers who were there providing the security for Steve Scalise: Crystal Griner, I believe her name was, and also David Bailey.

One of the most uplifting things that I have seen was at the Congressional Baseball Game last Thursday night at the Nationals Park, when I saw Joe Torre come out to the mound, and I thought he was going to throw out the first pitch, and then they introduced--it was either Roberto Clemente's son or grandson, he was also at the mound--but then this fellow came out on crutches that had one leg up off the ground. And as he went out there, I realized who it was: David Bailey; the man who had actually taken the shooter out just the day before and took a wound himself in the leg came to the ball game on crutches and went out to the mound. He handed over one of those crutches, leaned on the other one, and threw out the first pitch.

It was a tremendous moment. It was the best moment of the evening, Mr. Speaker. It was the equivalent of Neil Diamond going back to the Red Sox stadium after the Boston bombing and singing ``Sweet Caroline'' at the seventh-inning stretch.

Those things, when we see that, have got a lot more meaning than just throwing a ball into home plate or singing a song at the seventh-inning stretch. It is something that uplifts and motivates all of us and should unify all of us together.

This ghastly attempted killing that took place by Hodgkinson was something that--we don't doubt that some of it was ginned up by the hatred and the vitriol that is part of the vernacular and part of the public arena today in politics. More examination of his Facebook page and his other communications and people who were

around him will go on as we try to understand what motivated this man, but there is no question it was political.

I believe that he was radicalized by the political dialogue that has been taking place in this country. And that radicalization took place in a way, in his mind, that we won't understand. I remember Speaker Pelosi saying that everybody is not as stable as we are, and that words weigh a ton on people who aren't stable, and sometimes they are motivated into violence.

That doesn't mean we can prevent the violence by preventing the dialogue, but it does mean that when we clash, we should clash on policy. We should disagree on policy and the best method to bring this policy forward, but it should not be personal. We should not be demonizing the other side.

There is going to be a disagreement in ideology. Our Founding Fathers understood that. They set up this competition here in this Congress to drain the stress off of the streets of America. And one of the results here is that we come to this place, on the floor of this House, and when we disagree, we don't challenge the motive of the person we disagree with. We challenge the ideas, and we try to present better ideas. And the best ideas are to prevail in the mind of the public.

That is how it was designed to be. That is why every 2 years we have an election here, and why there are no appointments to the House of Representatives. Everybody that has a vote card in this place, all 435 of us, that is a vote card earned in an election; not one that has been handed by a Governor's appointment, for example, which is the case in the Senate, from time to time, when there is a vacancy.

But we are elected every 2 years, and our Founding Fathers looked at this and said: We are going to be the hot cup of coffee--or hot cup of tea, perhaps, is what they were referencing at the time--so we could react quickly to the will of the people.

But the saucer that it cools in is the Senate--6-year elections instead of 2--so that the hot ideas that come here to the House of Representatives can be tempered in the cooling saucer of the 6-year terms in the Senate.

But it was about bringing ideas here, bringing them here quickly with the elections every 2 years for every one of us, every 2 years, and then those fresh ideas then wash across over to the Senate, and the Senate is designed to step back and take a look, and a deep breath, and then, with the judgment of both bodies, come together and conference committee, and conference report, and send those results to the President of the United States--elected every 4 years--who is, of course, the Commander in Chief, commands our military, has a full authority to do all kinds of things, Mr. Speaker.

But the point I want to make is this: During the ObamaCare debate in 2010, in that March period of time, when this Capitol was surrounded by the American people, and encircled, and they were six to eight people deep in a human doughnut around the Capitol--not just a human chain where you touched people and reached out as far as you could--six or eight deep, packed together all the way around the Capitol.

By the way, there are no pictures of that human doughnut around the Capitol, because there was no airspace allowed for anything to fly up there and take pictures of us standing around in that fashion. But during that period of time, I had walked from the Judiciary Committee over here to the House of Representatives. And on the way, I came by a lady who I had seen in the gallery of the Judiciary Committee quite a number of times, and I had never talked to her. But as I walked by her, I felt compelled to speak to her, Mr. Speaker.

And as I did, she said: You have got to stop arguing. You have got to stop debating. You have got to get to a compromise. You have got to get to a compromise and move on. We can't have these arguments in our country. We can't have this kind of stress, this kind of pressure.

And I hadn't answered a question of anybody the same as I did that day. I answered her differently, Mr. Speaker. And it just kind of clicked in my mind, and I said to her: Did you ever think that because we come to this city together, and we debate our disagreements here in open debate, and we air out our beliefs and our convictions, and we weigh our options, and we bring new ideas in, and we churn those ideas, did you ever think that because we do that this way in America, that it keeps us from being at each other's throats and fighting each other in the streets of America?

And I know that was how it was designed to be, to drain off that hot- bloodedness that comes through debate, and by public--not only by debate but by legitimate elections that reflect the voices and the will of the people. It is the biggest thing that keeps us from having revolutions in America. We have them. We have them every 2 years when we have an election. They are, in a way, a revolution.

New ideas come here. We weigh those ideas. We cast our votes. We change the policy. We adjust to the will of the American people, and that keeps us from having revolutions in the street of America.

But how long will that last, Mr. Speaker? How long can that last in a country where we had a legitimate election last November 8, and there is that ever-growing group of people who seem to be denying the very results of our legitimate election?

The constitutionally elected President of the United States is Donald J. Trump, and it is not an arguable or refutable point. You can say that Hillary Clinton won more popular vote than Donald Trump. Well, that is like saying, the Packers beat the Bears, but the Bears ran up more yards than the Packers, so they don't have a legitimate win. They are not playing by the rules on the football field of who runs up the most total yards. It is who has the most points on the scoreboard.

You can run the ball up and down the field, but if you can't get across the goal line, or kick it through the uprights, or if you can't score a safety, you don't score. And if you don't score and the other team does, you lose. If they score more than you do, you still lose. And that is how this constitutional election takes place, Mr. Speaker, is by the rules; the rules that are written into our Constitution and have been barely altered over more than 200 years because they were so wisely put in place.

The electoral college decides the President of the United States, and the ballots are cast here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and that is the official tally that rings up who is the President of the United States.

There is no part of this process that is legitimately refuted by the other side. Yet, they say, we are the resistance. And the loser in the last Presidential election wants to be the leader of the resistance-- the leader of the resistance, and one who has looked for a lot of reasons why she is not the President of the United States.

And I would quote Chuck Grassley on how you define that. In one of his elections years ago--this is a back-channel story about him, but he is a person I admire and have a great affection for, a senior Senator from Iowa, now the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee--they continually asked him when he was first elected to the Federal office here: ``Why did you win? Why did you win?''

And he didn't want to say anything anymore. He was just happy enough with the victory. And finally, as he walked away from the press, they said: ``But, Mr. Grassley, why did you win?''

And he turned, and he said: ``I got more votes than the other guy.'' And he walked away.

Well, that is a pretty good point, Chuck Grassley. And in this case, Donald Trump got more electoral votes than his opponent. That is why he won. But he earned those legitimately by elections within the States that converted those electoral votes to his side. That is how it is supposed to be.

And to deny that then subverts the constitutional results of an elected President. It subverts the mandate that comes with the election of a President. It diminishes the credibility of our constitutionally structured government that is there, and it bogs down our process.

So when I see demonstrations in the streets, Mr. Speaker, that say ``the resistance'' in the front, and then there is another big banner up there that says, ``be ungovernable,'' we don't want to be an ungovernable people, Mr. Speaker. We want to be a governable

people. And when we elect a President, and when we elect Senators and House Members, and our offices in the States for our State representatives and our State senators, when we elect our Governors, when we elect our other constitutional officers who are there, we need to respect the results of that, and give them their respect, and let them do their jobs.

I especially want to encourage them, keep your campaign promises. Follow through on those campaign promises. But when we have masses of people in the streets who go out to demonstrate against the results of a legitimate election, we start to look like the Third World.

Can't we have, on both sides of the aisle--can't we have Republicans over here and Democrats over here, and leftists over on the extreme there, and some Conservatives over here--that I think are as constitutional as myself--can't we have them respect the system enough to respect the duly elected Representatives who are there, including, and especially, the President of the United States so that there are not demonstrations in the streets?

In this city the next day, Mr. Speaker, 600,000 to 700,000 people swarmed the streets of this city in equal or greater numbers than those who came to witness the inauguration, to protest against the inauguration against the newly inaugurated President Trump.

Six to 700,000, the majority of them, were women wearing these knitted pink hats, carrying around some of the most vulgar signs I have seen anywhere--in fact, the most vulgar signs I have seen anywhere-- protesting against the inauguration of the President of the United States.

Why?

I talked to a lot of them--more of them than it was probably wise, Mr. Speaker--but I did take them down to this: that you are obstructing and subverting the constitutional results of this election, and if you want to live in a free country, if you want to live in a constitutional Republic, and if you want to be able to receive and earn the benefits of the free enterprise system that we have, the rule of law that we have, the constitutional government that we have, this American spirit that is a can-do spirit that brings the vigor of the planet here to America and that employs their industriousness, grows our GDP, and contributes to the living standard in America, if you want all that to happen, then you can't be obstructing the results of elections because we will end up in the Third World.

If you destroy the rule of law in America by protesting in the streets and being ungovernable and if you are an ungovernable people, then we are not going to be a constitutional Republic forever.

Remember what Ben Franklin said when they came out of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and a woman asked him: What have you given us?

His answer was: A Republic, Madam, if you can keep it.

Well, we have kept it for a long time, and we need to continue to keep it.

Ronald Reagan told us that freedom doesn't last more than a generation. It has to be fought for and it has to be defended.

We have fought for it and we have defended it. We also now have to defend it in the minds and in the hearts of the American people. If we fail to teach our young people the value of this constitutional Republic, if we fail to teach them the continuation of the history of this great Nation that we are blessed to be part of, then eventually they will build a disrespect. They are already building it in many of the colleges and universities across the land. That disrespect turns into contempt, and that contempt turns into, sometimes, violence in the streets that shuts down freedom of speech in America.

Charles Murray got drummed off the stage, and he couldn't give a speech because they disagreed with what they think he is going to say. That happens also to others along the way who aren't able to deliver the speeches they want to deliver.

Brigitte Gabriel is a proud Americanized citizen who lived in a bunker in Lebanon while they were trying to kill her because she is a Christian. She had been bombed multiple times and she was wounded in that process. As a little girl, she watched television on battery- operated black-and-white TV. She saw ``Bonanza'' and ``Dallas'' and some of the other programs that showed about the quality and the character of American life. She understood that we are a people. And she said this just last Wednesday morning, right after we learned of the shooting: that she learned as a little girl, 8 to 10 years old, watching television that Americans are people that can disagree without having that break down into violence or without hurling accusations and insults at the person we disagree with, that we are a people that have a quality of our character that we can disagree with each other and do so and still be friends and respect the opinions of the other.

That is one of those things that keep this Republic going and keeps it successful. But I am watching it digress. I am watching as people more often hurl insults and throw a tantrum instead of listening to a position and then issuing the counterpoints. In fact, that happened today in the Judiciary Committee. I will let others look that up for now, Mr. Speaker, but when our emotions rule our intellect, then we start to devolve towards Third World. When our intellect controls our emotions, then the age of reason can continue to improve and achieve.

We are a country that has a foundation of blessings in it. Some of that foundation is the foundation of Western civilization itself. The dominant component of Western civilization is the United States of America. If we let the rest of the world be subsumed by other sets of values that don't respect the success of Western civilization, then eventually the part that we are able to hold together here will be less because we will have fewer allies around the world. Eventually we will be surrounded by other ideologies that will want to consume or supplant us here in America.

So I want our children to know, Mr. Speaker, that this gift that is America is rooted in the pillars of American exceptionalism whose roots are in Western civilization and our rule of law. It is so essential that we restore that rule of law here in America.

You can trace the rule of law back to old England. One of the places that you can see that is just go down the road to Jamestown here in Virginia. Go there and look at the site where the Jamestown settlers landed. There, one of the first buildings they built was a church. But even before that, Mr. Speaker, they planted a cross there on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean where you can look across to the east to the old country, to England. There, they knelt and offered a prayer.

I think it would take me a little too long to call that up on my iPhone. I don't have it committed to memory. But they understood the destiny. They understood the gift of America. They understood the destiny to spread our freedom--freedom of religion--but spread also would be evangelism for the world. That prayer is so profound that I will grab that and put that into the Congressional Record a little bit later, Mr. Speaker. It is one of the first things they did at Jamestown.

Additionally, inside that church they built--and now there is a church that has been built just outside the old foundation that they laid at that time so you can walk inside of the church and stand there and see the old foundation of the church that was built maybe not in 1607, but very close to 1607--there is a poster, a sign inside. It is fitting that it is on the east wall of the inside of the church. It says: Here in this place, in 1607, English common law came to the New World.

It is a profound thing to stand there and read and understand that is what that meant to the earliest settlers in America: English common law arrived, the rule of law arrived with them.

That rule of law, what was it rooted in?

It is rooted in--once you go back to old England, you can trace the law to the Romans who occupied. And that Roman law can be traced all the way back to the birth of Christ and before. And that Roman law also can be traced back through Greece, who shared a fair amount of that respect and rule of law that they had to be successful nations, they had to have a rule of law.

It can be traced, then, from the Romans and the Greeks back to Moses

himself. Mosaic law is the foundation for law in America, and it is traceable. The Greek philosophers and the leaders in Greece would talk about the rule of law. They would be sometimes teased and ridiculed by some of their competitors. They would say: ``That is not your thoughts. You borrowed that from Moses. That is Mosaic law. I can hear it in your voice. I know that is where it came from.''

Mosaic law was traced to Greece and Rome, and from Rome then on to Western Europe where the Romans occupied much of that all the way to England and beyond. That is where the rule of law came from.

One of the pillars of American exceptionalism is the rule of law. If you would pull that out of the equation of the history of the United States of America, you would end up with an entirely different country, an entirely different culture, and an entirely different structure here.

We respect the law. We don't have police officers that pull us over because they need money for their children and accept a bribe because they said that you were speeding. If any of that happens, we look at their badge number, and that officer is soon out of a job. We clean our society up of those kinds of things. But that is not the case in Third World countries. They know what mordida means south of the border. That happens in country after country. But here, we respect the law.

We have open meetings laws where the function of government is out in the open so the public can be in and participate. That is rooted clear back in the Greek city-states.

I recall going into the National Archives to take a look and stand and gaze at the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, where you can get your hand within 8 inches of that parchment where they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. As I waited to step before the Declaration, there was a display of the artifacts from the Greek city-states where they would gather together all of the eligible-age men--at that time it was only men, but, of course, now, today, we fixed that--but as they would gather them together, they would all have a voice.

They had a situation where there would be what they would call demagogues. The Greek demagogues would be those who were so skillful in their oratorical skills that they could wind up the emotions of the other Greeks and sometimes get them to stampede in the wrong direction. If they consistently stampeded their fellow citizens in an ill-logical direction, eventually they would say--I don't know what the name would be of the Greek individual, but maybe it would be like: Demetrius is causing too much trouble for us, we are going to have to blackball him.

So if the demagogue was too effective and caused too much damage to the public policy, then they would go through, there would be one door there that you would vote in, and the next door would be the discard door. Each voter, each citizen, would get a white and a black marble. They would cast their ballot, blackball that Greek demagogue and banish him from the city-state.

There is much that is rooted as part of this country that is rooted back in this era. We need to teach it and we need to have respect for each other.

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

Mr. Speaker, I would like to recognize a very important day in U.S.-Taiwan relations. April 10th marks the 38th Anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA). This important statute has been critical in defining the diplomatic, economic, and strategic relationship we have enjoyed with Taiwan over the last four decades. In 2017, Taiwan is the United States' tenth largest trading partner. The TRA has strengthened our relationship and helped encourage a particularly strong economic partnership.

The growth of Taiwan is a living breathing example that trade benefits humanity, and not just economically. Particularly in light of the scheduled meeting between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, it is important for our nation to remember and commemorate the special relationship between the United States and Taiwan, a thriving and innovative economy that most countries envy. In this new and exciting era for our two nations, one that promises to emphasize bilateral trade agreements, I impress on the administration that a strong relationship between the U.S. and Taiwan is key to sustaining peace, stability and liberty in the Asia-Pacific region.

Mr. Speaker, I look forward to a continuing successful cooperation between the United States and Taiwan. I am also confident that if we continue to enhance our economic relationship, this dynamic partnership that we've built together will continue to thrive in the future.

Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized by you to address you here on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

I came to this floor this evening to take up a topic that I think is essential to the future of our country for our moral foundation. Yet, as I have listened to the gentleman from Maryland's presentation, there are a few moments I would like to spend with the other perspective before I move into the topic I came to address.

I go back as far as the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee), who used the reference and said that stare decisis is binding precedent. Well, Mr. Speaker, I want the American people to know that stare decisis is a Latin term, a legal term that means, once the case is decided, it deserves deference. It has already been decided; it deserves deference, but where it has never been a binding precedent.

There have been a number of times that the Supreme Court has turned 180 degrees on what the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee) has called a binding precedent. I could go through a list of those, Mr. Speaker.

I think it is important to note that accepting a decision of a previous Supreme Court as if somehow it were binding precedent and then settled law and then incorporate it into the Constitution itself would be a very erroneous concept to carry into the Supreme Court itself, because we have to go back and evaluate that these were mortals that made the decision in the Supreme Court and the other courts and they aren't always right. And if a case is not soundly reasoned, it needs to be reconsidered.

So I appreciate Justice Clarence Thomas' view on stare decisis. Essentially, it doesn't exist. If you want to evaluate the reasoning of a previous Court, that is a good thing to do because they have already thought it through and they have already written on it. There are already majority opinions and dissents that are generally written. Yet, to be bound by that, really handcuffs any future decisions. So it is worth looking at the decisions of the previous Court, but we can never be bound by them. So I take issue with the gentlewoman from Texas' position that stare decisis is binding precedent. It is never binding precedent.

Stare decisis is an indicator, and it is informative. We have to go back to the text of the Constitution and the various amendments, and we have to understand what they were understood to mean at the time of ratification. Otherwise, the Constitution no longer is a guarantee from generation to generation. It is just simply an artifact of history that allows the Justices to hold up and say: Hey, we are bound by stare decisis; we can only make a decision that narrows things down; and we are essentially trapped into a funnel of reason that brings about a predictable conclusion that might be completely erroneous.

To give an example, Mr. Speaker, I would say that the series of decisions that were made by the Supreme Court--and the first one I would start with, and I am going to get to abortion in this decision: Griswold v. Connecticut.

In the early sixties, the Court had a case before them where the State of Connecticut had banned contraceptives, not just contraceptives in the school, as one might say today, but contraceptives that would be used in marriages. So there was a case. Griswold took it all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court ruled that it was a right to privacy of married couples to be able to purchase contraceptives.

There is no right to privacy that is stipulated in the Constitution. But it was a decision that was made by the Supreme Court that, if respected as stare decisis, now the next Court would be bound by it, and the next Court was.

So the Supreme Court ruled that Connecticut couldn't ban contraceptives to married couples because they had a right to privacy to purchase those--as illogical as it sounds, even as I say it, Mr. Speaker, married couples had a constitutional right decided by Griswold v. Connecticut to purchase contraceptives within the State of Connecticut and the Nation, as the decision turned out.

Well, that decision didn't flow over into unmarried couples. So unmarried couples went to court, and they sued. And it became the Eisenstadt decision, which concluded that any rights that are bestowed upon married couples with regard to right to privacy in purchasing contraceptives also must be available to unmarried couples who might be cohabiting or having a relationship in whatever way and they should be able to purchase contraceptives, too.

So this right to privacy established by Griswold, expanded by Eisenstadt--see, how this is bringing us down to an irreversible conclusion, Mr. Speaker?

This right to privacy was then argued before the Court in 1973 in Roe v. Wade. And the Supreme Court of the United States concluded in the emanations and penumbras that there was this right to privacy that extended to abortion itself.

So when I hear the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee) say stare decisis is binding precedent--if we are going to accept as binding precedent that there is a Court-manufactured right to privacy in Griswold, reinforced by Eisenstadt that is the foundation for the irrational, illogical, and unconstitutional reasoning that has brought about the abortion of 58.5 million babies since 1973 and all because a Court chased the rationale down a narrower and narrower path that they were bound to make decisions only on the judgment of the previous Court--it left very little of the Constitution to be reviewed.

If we would have had nine Justice Thomases on that Court, they would have concluded this: first, that precedent didn't count. Eisenstadt, look at it if you like, look at the reasoning if you like, but they are not bound by it. Griswold v. Connecticut, they are not bound by it.

In the case of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, I might add, the combination of those two cases together gave abortion on demand in America for any reason or no reason at all from an irrational foundation that began with a stare decisis view that came from an activist Court that, I believe, wanted to come to that conclusion anyway.

I think they believed that society was moving along and that society was going to get to the place where they supported abortion. They just thought they would just go ahead and beat the Congress to the punch or beat the State legislatures to the punch and impose a right to abortion on America, and that is what they did.

We saw this happen in our country. We saw this happen in different places around the world, and now it is still being pushed in some of the countries in the world.

Mr. Speaker, if there is anybody listening from the nation of Chile, I would suggest to them: Back away from that push to legalize abortion in your country. We have seen what has happened in America.

Twenty percent of the pregnancies in America now end in abortion, and the death toll of a bell that would ring for 58.5 million babies that have been aborted since 1973. It is a missing component of two going on three generations.

And those little babies today, Mr. Speaker, had they been given that right to life that is guaranteed to any born person in the United States--if someone commits mass murder in the United States of America, mass serial murder in the United States of America, mass serial murder in multiple locations in multiple States in a ghastly and ghoulish and blood-thirsty way, we take them to court and say: You are innocent until proven guilty. You may have, by my description, committed capital crimes that would be facing the death penalty. Federal murder, it might be, in multiple States that have the death penalty.

No matter how ghastly a murderer we have, we give that murderer first the presumption of innocence. They are innocent until proven guilty. We give them an opportunity to be tried by a jury of their peers. They are sometimes tried in the court of public opinion on top of it. If they don't have their due process--and often it is concluded by a judge along the way that they don't--they can appeal their death penalty all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Why?

Because they have a right to life because they are deemed and legally are

a person not only in the eyes of God, but in the eyes of American law. In the eyes of American law, the most ghastly murderer that I can describe has a right to life and a right to due process until such time as the full appeals all the way up the board have been heard. If they are sentenced to death, then it must be the most merciful death that we can possibly devise in this country or the judges will rule that it is unconstitutional, cruel, and inhuman punishment. That is how we treat the most ghastly murderers in America.

But the most innocent among us, those 58.5 million little babies that are there curled up in an innocent little fetal position in their mother's womb with little fingers, little toes, feet, hands, eyes, nose, ears, and a mouth--no teeth yet, but that mouth has an expression on it; it smiles; it frowns; it twists itself around--those babies can feel pain. They can put their hands together, and they can move around. The expressions on their faces, we now see them through 4D ultrasound.

Mother after mother, father after father, grandparents, brothers, sisters, uncles, even before the baby is born, they bond with that little baby through the ultrasound. We have always known, the Catholic church has always known, and so have many of the other Christians organizations and many entities around this country and around this world have always known that that baby's life began at the moment of conception.

If you look at our society, we don't have a lot of sympathy, as our society is concerned, for those beings that can't scream for their own mercy. That baby is silent. That baby can't cry out from the womb. The ring of that baby's cries doesn't echo in our ears. We turn our mind away from it. We turn our eyes away from it. And we listen to people say: Well, it is choice.

Well, the baby is never given the choice.

This little baby that could be the next Einstein, the next Lincoln, the next Ronald Reagan, the next Billy Graham, how many of those gifts to the world are in that mountain of guilt that is poured upon the United States of America that numbers now over 58.5 million?

We will never know the answer to that question, Mr. Speaker. We will never know.

We cry out to the conscience of the American people, the conscience that especially now knows because of ultrasound that that baby's life begins at the moment of conception, and science can prove it when we can detect a heartbeat. When we can detect a heartbeat, we know that is life and we know that it is innocent human life.

For the purposes of the law today, it is innocent, unborn human life not protected by law, not even close to the first protection we offer the most heinous murderer that we can devise. Yet, they are the most innocent.

I remember Father Jonathan Morris was speaking one day as I was watching him in the morning, and he was talking about the ladies in the church. When a baby cries, they pick the baby up and they go outside the church in order to get that baby's cries away from the congregation so the rest of them can hear the sermon. He said it doesn't bother him when there are babies crying in his church because those are the only innocent voices in that church, the voice of babies.

The most innocent that we encounter are actually in the womb, not yet born, not yet with an opportunity to fill their lungs full of air and scream for their own mercy. We have to speak for them. We have to defend them. We have to protect them.

We know by our conscience, we know by our science, we know by natural law, we know by what is innate with us in our intuition that life has to begin at a moment. You can't take a life by accident. If there is going to be an error, it must be on the side of life.

I know that when I was able to hold our firstborn, I looked at him, and there was an aura about him. I was so amazed that that miracle was in my hands, and that was an extension into another generation from the long line of families that we all have and share and enjoy.

I looked at him, and I thought, could anybody take this little baby's life now, now that he is here, now that he is minutes old; could anybody take his life now? Of course they could not. Well, some can, and we do our best to lock them up or send them in the next life.

But to take the life of a newly born baby is one of the most ghoulish things that I can think of, and so I thought, this little life is sacred. I know there is a soul in him. I know there is. And so could anyone take his life the minute before he was born? Is he any different? What transformed him as he came through the birth canal? He is not transformed. He is the same baby.

He could be born by cesarean. His life is as sacred, and as unique, and as much created in God's image, and as much as a soul within him, born by cesarean as if he comes through the birth canal. So could anybody take his life the minute before he was born, or an hour, or a day, or a week, or a month, or a trimester, or two, or three?

What transforms this child through that period of time that I have described as 9 months? What transforms them? So if you think back through from the minute before a little boy or an innocent little baby girl is born to the hour of the week, the hour of the day, the week, the month, the trimester, there is no dramatic moment from the moment of conception, because conception is the dramatic moment. It is the instant, the moment life begins.

At that moment, if God doesn't already put the soul in that little baby, I am completely convinced that it happens at that moment of conception when the genetics of the father and the mother are joined together in a unique being has begun, that has such a robust growth that if we think of it in terms of the multiples of size from the fertilized egg until the 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, 9-pound baby is born, the dramatic growth that is there, that little baby has a soul in it from that moment. And that is human life. It is nurturable, and it must be protected, must be protected in law.

So what we have done is, we have introduced the Heartbeat bill here in the United States Congress, and we have two-and-a-half dozen or so cosponsors on the bill. This is the first time I know of that this legislation has been introduced in the United States Congress, but it protects the life of every little baby who has a heartbeat. It requires that if any abortionist seeks to commit an abortion, that they first check for a heartbeat.

That heartbeat can be discovered as early as 16 days from the moment of conception. I would like to have a bill that protected life from the moment of conception, and I would support such a thing. We can't scientifically prove conception, but we can scientifically prove heartbeat, and everybody knows, every mother knows, every father knows, every human being knows that if a heart is beating, there is life. And you can't describe this life as anything other than human life. It is human life. It is innocent life--nothing more innocent than a conceived little baby.

We need to protect human life in all of its forms, from conception to natural death. This bill, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017, protects those babies from the moment their heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected.

And if an abortionist is determined or decides to commit an abortion, they must first check for a heartbeat under this law, and they must keep the records to demonstrate that they have done so. If they fail to do so, they would be facing a Federal penalty of a fine, imprisonment up to 5 years. The mother is not penalized in this. She is not subjected to this. It is the abortionists who are subjected to this statute.

I would reiterate: if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected. Mr. Speaker, some people will be wondering--and they will be wondering, well, what kind of support does legislation like that have across the United States of America? So we have a poll here that is on this easel, and this is the question about the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490, and we went to over 1,000 adults in America and asked for their opinions.

Those 1,002 interviews were conducted, as a matter of fact, and this has a sampling error that is about as small as you get in a legitimate poll. Sometimes you will see them in 5\1/2\ percent or more, but this is down to a little over 3 percent accuracy, and it

says: Do you agree or disagree or have no opinion on supporting the Heartbeat bill that would outlaw abortion in America? If a heartbeat can be detected, it would outlaw abortion unless there was a physical threat to the physical life or health of the mother.

Sixty-nine percent of Americans agree with this legislation. That is across the spectrum. It is across the board, Mr. Speaker. That includes Democrats, no party, independents, and Republicans, and it includes 13 percent of the people who had no opinion.

Those that disagreed are 18 percent over here in the orange, Mr. Speaker. So we are sitting here with 69 percent of Americans who support legislation that would protect innocent, unborn human life from the moment that a heartbeat can be detected.

Because we know that life is precious, and every one of those lives contributes to the well-being of humanity. No matter what kind of life we may think they experience, they are a blessing to their father, they are a blessing to their mother, they are a blessing to their family, they are a blessing to this country. And I would point out, Mr. Speaker, that when you break this down, 69 percent in favor that support the Heartbeat bill, H.R. 490, only 18 percent oppose. And I think some of them will do that for political reasons, but they would have a hard time making the argument if they are looking in the eye of someone who has survived an abortion.

I have never heard one of the pro-abortion people look at one of the survivors of abortion and say: You should have never been born. No one does that. They don't have the nerve to do so because they know that each one of us contributes to the well-being of society, and each one of us are a gift from God. And His gift to us are the tools that we are born with, and our job is to develop them and utilize them for the well-being of everyone else.

Here is the breakdown politically: 86 percent of Republicans support the Heartbeat bill, only 6 percent of Republicans disagree. I don't know why they do, but 6 percent do. I don't know what their argument is. In the center, we have the graph of the Democrats; 55 percent of Democrats--they are the ones who would be lined up against this, I would think, but it is a significant majority. In fact, if this were a political election, Mr. Speaker, that would be a landslide at 55 percent of Democrats supporting the Heartbeat bill.

Now, we are looking for some Democrats to sign on it. Maybe they will reflect the will and wishes of their constituents. Fifty-five percent of Democrats support the Heartbeat bill, 25 percent oppose--more than 2 to 1. The undecided are in orange. That is 25 percent. So it is well over 2 to 1--2\1/2\ and actually, bordering on 3 to 1, support among the Democrats for this.

If you go to the Independents, 61 percent of Independents support the Heartbeat bill, and 13 percent of the Independents oppose, and 27 percent of the--so it is 61 percent support among Independents, and 55 percent support among Democrats, 86 percent support among Republicans. That is the party breakdown for those who think of this in politics.

I think of this in human terms, Mr. Speaker. I think of this in terms of picking up little babies and holding them in my arms, and feeling that love, and that special smell that a little baby has, and the gurgle, the laughter, and the crying. It is all part of life.

When I think of the privilege of being able to go to church with almost my whole family and taking up, well, I guess last Sunday, parts of three pews and not all of all three. And I think of this little baby that got passed back to me, and he is kind of an in-law shirttail relation. I had never held him before. He snuggled up in my arms there at the end of mass, and I was able to carry him out.

We have also little children who come out of the pews to run up front at the beginning of the collection to carry their dollar bill up and put it in that basket. They are being raised right, those little kids. They will be fine. But I see them bubbling out of the pews and coming, pouring down the aisle, and lining up there. Sometimes they trip and run into each other, and knock each other down, and help each other up, and little big brother or sister will go help the little 2-year-old back again.

When you see that joy and you hear that gurgling laughter, and you think: 58.5 million babies never even had a chance to do that--never had a chance to learn, to love, to laugh, to play, to fall in love, to have their own children, to feel that joy of family, to experience this life in this wonderful country that we have. All denied them, denied them because the Supreme Court came down with a ruling that said: Well, stare decisis, the right to privacy, extended right to privacy. In the emanations and penumbras of the Constitution is a decision that they would support abortion on demand.

Well, we know that the Court has also left room--and we will have a new Court soon--the Court has left room for us to make this argument before the Court. And if anyone should stand up and say that we shouldn't move this legislation to save the lives of the next 58.5 million babies because a Court might rule it unconstitutional, my challenge back to the Court, Mr. Speaker, is: it was an erroneous decision in Roe v. Wade. It was erroneous in Eisenstadt, it was erroneous in Griswold, and it was erroneous in Doe v. Bolton. And all of those together are bound up--don't be hiding behind stare decisis, Supreme Court.

Let's look at this right to life that we have, and the right to equal protection under the law that is guaranteed to us in the 14th Amendment, and that is extended out to all of the States. And if we can't execute the most heinous murderer without a due process all the way to the Supreme Court, and then do so in the most painless and merciful way possible while babies are being torn apart in the womb, then what have we come to as a nation?

We have the chance to rectify this, Mr. Speaker. We have an opportunity, an opportunity to move the Heartbeat bill, an opportunity to send a message from the House to the Senate and to all of America. Americans have an opportunity to weigh into us--to sign onto this bill, to move this, to save the lives of all of the babies who are born who have a heartbeat. If a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected.

That needs to be our rallying cry across this country and across this land. Forever.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 28 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, April 6, 2017, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and to once again continue this dialogue that we have with you, all of our Members and staff and the American people.

To initiate this dialogue, I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Gallagher) of the Eighth Congressional District, born in Green Bay.

American Exceptionalism

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Wisconsin for his statement here and for bringing up the topic of American exceptionalism and bringing us back through some of this history that we need to revisit from time to time. That statement is very valuable to us.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Babin), an exceptional American in his own right.

Terminate Grants to Sanctuary Cities

Reclaiming my time, I would like to pose a question to the gentleman from Texas.

The bill that you have proposed that mirrors the President's executive order to limit people coming in from those six countries, do you have the bill number for that? H.R.?

880?

Okay. And you also have H.R. 82.

For the record, I believe I am a cosponsor of both of those pieces of legislation.

Reclaiming my time from the gentleman from Texas, I appreciate the approach that you brought to this Congress. It is not hard for me to get behind, and I support legislation that is brought by Mr. Babin. He has been looking at the safety and security of the American people and coming up with good, solid, principled ideas on how to restore and strengthen our national security.

Each of those two pieces of legislation, the numbers which I did not know until now, H.R. 81 and H.R. 82, are pieces of legislation that I and many other conservatives have signed on to in our endeavor to make Americans safe again. This great America, making it great again, part of it is to make America safe again.

I would add to this, Mr. Speaker, that I am appalled at the audacity of the judges who are either out on the left coast or well beyond the left coast, as far west as Hawaii, who would just step in without any kind of a constitutional, foundational background in their arguments or decisions, without citing the statute is this, that Congress has the authority to control immigration in the United States of America.

If we want to pass a piece of legislation and it is in law that says the only people that we will let come into America are green Martians, then that is the law, and that is what a judge is obligated to determine when they read the law.

But on top of that, not only does Congress set the terms on what legal immigration is into America--and it is clear and it is defined-- but we grant the President of the United States the authority to determine those who will not be allowed to come into America, just like any other sovereign nation-state in the world that controls its borders.

And if we don't have the authority, if Congress doesn't have the constitutional authority that is clearly defined, and if the statutes that are produced by Congress and signed into law by previous Presidents do not set that statutory authority on who comes into America but a judge someplace in Seattle or Hawaii can supercede the will of the American people, can supercede the supreme law of the land, the Constitution of the United States, can supercede Federal law just because, in their whim, they think a law might mean something that it doesn't say, that is what we are dealing with, Mr. Speaker. I intend to move further on this and examine these judges more closely.

As a matter of fact--and I thank the gentleman from Texas. But we had a hearing either earlier this week or last week--and my weeks run together, Mr. Speaker--and this hearing was a hearing where we discussed some of this statutory authority.

In fact, it was this week. I remember one of the witnesses, and the witness was a Sheriff Hodgson out of Maryland; and he testified that a State legislator in Maryland had learned that there was likely to be an ICE raid into a particular community, and the representative posted on their Facebook, essentially: Don't go out of your homes. Be careful because you might be picked up and deported if you are illegally in America.

That heads-up from an elected State official, I asked him this question, and his answer concurred with my opinion, that it is a direct violation of 8 U.S.C. 1324, which is a Federal ban on harboring illegal aliens. To harbor them, to encourage them to come here or stay here-- and it can be either willfully or for financial purposes. If that is the case, they are facing a Federal felony of up to 10 years in a penitentiary; that is, if it is for profit. But if it is not for profit, then they are only facing 5 years in a Federal penitentiary for facilitating illegal immigration, harboring illegal aliens.

When I read the statute into the Record before the Judiciary Committee, it was clear to me that Sheriff Hodgson had read that statute multiple times. I don't know that he had it completely memorized, but he knew exactly what it meant; and he concurred with me that I believe the Justice Department should be investigating, should be looking into State legislators or any citizen--they are subject to the same laws as all the rest of us--who is harboring illegal aliens. We should bring this on the highest profile level that we can.

And furthermore, we have a judge out in Washington, again, who, according to news reports, helped facilitate an illegal alien who was before this judge's court to go out the back door when there were ICE agents waiting, guarding the front door. That also is a violation of 8 U.S.C. 1324, harboring illegal aliens.

So Congress passes laws, and these laws are to be respected; and we cannot be a real civilization if we don't have respect for the rule of law, Mr. Speaker. And not only has respect for the rule of law been so eroded, we had a previous President, and that is President Obama, who openly and blatantly violated the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, according to his definition.

Twenty-two times Barack Obama said he didn't have the authority to grant a legal status to the people who are defined as DREAMers, the deferred action for children of--I guess they say--well, it is children of aliens is what it really is. But President Obama, 22 times on videotape and who knows how may times it wasn't on videotape, said: I don't have the constitutional authority to change the law. Congress has to do that.

When he was pressed to change the law and he said he didn't have that authority those 22 times, then he concluded that he could get away with it

anyway. He issued the order, the DACA order--two of them that are really openly and blatantly unconstitutional. DAPA, the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, that is how they called it. Again, it is parents of those who were born here to illegal parents, and we need to move the birthright citizenship bill to put an end to that.

The President knew he didn't have the authority for that DAPA program, and he knew he didn't have the authority for the DACA program, and he said so at least 22 times. Then he issued those orders, and the executive branch of government began to carry out the President's orders, which are in violation of the law. So he has commanded the executive branch of government to violate the law.

Subsequent to the DACA order going out, President Obama went to Chicago and gave a speech and said publicly--and this is on videotape, too. He said this: I changed the law.

Mr. Speaker, no President ever had constitutional authority to change the law. It is Congress that writes all the laws in the House and in the Senate. The President gets an opportunity to sign them into law, and, as President, he is free to lobby the Congress to change the law. But no President should have the audacity to stand up in front of his hometown and the world and say: I changed the law.

Now, do we remember, Mr. Speaker, that there was a big national outrage over that statement or over the constitutional violations? No. There wasn't a great outrage. I am greatly outraged, and I remain outraged, but the American people were relatively complacent about this.

Now, there were plenty of them that did some work on this, true, but it wasn't like a big cultural movement. I would remind you about what happens when we are extremely offended by violations of law and decency. That is when Republicans and Democrats get together and do something about it.

One of those things I can think of, Mr. Speaker, is this. I reach in my pocket and I pull out--this is an acorn. I carry an acorn in my pocket every day, and I have done that for, oh, I don't know how long now--pretty close to 10 years.

But I brought an amendment to the floor of the House of Representatives to cut off all funding to ACORN about 2 years before we heard of the videotapes that came out of ACORN that were collected by James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles because I knew what was going on. I had had an investigator that was feeding me information. And I came to the floor and made an effort to cut off all the funding that was supporting ACORN, which admitted later on to 440- or maybe 444,000 false or fraudulent voter registration forms that they paid people commissions to produce.

Some of those forms included Mickey Mouse and the entire Dallas Cowboys football team, all registered to vote.

ACORN employees were paid on commission to collect the voter registrations. They were subverting our electoral process. They were advocating all kinds of things from within ACORN and helping to facilitate, as we know the allegation, prostitution and others.

This was so bad--this was so bad that Democrats were outraged. I know, Mr. Speaker, it is hard to fathom this now. But Democrats were outraged. Republicans were outraged. And when those videos became replete throughout the American consciousness, you--and I say, Mr. Speaker, I say the American people rose up and they called their Members of Congress, and they did interviews on TV, and they wrote letters to the editor. It was the talk of the coffee shop and the church and the school and the work and the town. America revolted at the idea that we would be sending hundreds of millions of tax dollars to an organization that was so immoral and so corrupt.

Underneath that was the corruption of our electoral process. So we came together here with moral and constitutional outrage and cut off all funding to ACORN or any of their affiliates or subordinates or successors, and that has been part of the appropriation process here ever since.

I carry this acorn in my pocket to remind me, to remind me not to ever let something like that happen again. But also, it is a point of pride for me when I hold this in my hand because I am proud of the American people, Mr. Speaker. It was the American people that got that done with bipartisan outrage about what was happening to our Republic and to the legitimacy of our elections in this Republic.

And I would remind people, Mr. Speaker, that we have a Constitution that I have said is the supreme law of the land. It is the foundation upon which our country is built. But that foundation sits on something. It sits on a bedrock, and the bedrock that it sits on is legitimate elections.

We can watch our Constitution erode by decisions in the Supreme Court and by loss of understanding of what its original meaning is and what it is to be a constitutional and contractual guarantee to succeeding generations, we can lose our Constitution that way, or we could just lose our country by allowing the bedrock that our Constitution sits on, legitimate elections, to be eroded and destroyed.

That is what I think the American people understood, maybe instinctively, maybe intuitively, maybe intellectually, what was happening to our country. All of that went together to build a giant snowball of public outrage that ripped the funding out from underneath ACORN, and we will hold that now for a long term and, hopefully, for the very long and increasingly healthy life of this Republic.

That is what needs to happen when we are outraged, when we see our Constitution being undermined. We did that with ACORN, and it is a symbol of what the American people should be doing.

But when you have a President of the United States that takes an oath of office to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States so help him God, and in that oath it is specified in another section of the Constitution that he, meaning the President, take care that the laws be faithfully executed--we call that the Take Care Clause--well, the President, President Obama, did not take care that the laws be faithfully executed. He refused to enforce the law. He refused to enforce the immigration law, and he issued orders that ordered his subordinates throughout the executive branch of government, including the Border Patrol, custom border protection, ICE, and USCIS, to defy the law.

The law of the United States says that, when law enforcement encounters someone who is unlawfully present in the United States, they shall--not ``may,'' but ``shall''--be placed into removal proceedings. That is the law.

Had that been the case and if the law had been followed, if the law had been followed ever since Ronald Reagan signed the amnesty act in 1986--which, by the way, was a legal act. I thought it was poor judgment on the part of President Reagan. He let us down on a principle of the rule of law. Thirty-plus years ago I knew that we would be fighting for a long, long time to restore the respect for the rule of law, particularly with regard to immigration.

When I watched the debate take place here in this Congress and in the House and in the Senate and I read what I could read about that, I reasoned that, even though we were losing in the House, the rule of law was losing in the House on the amnesty debate in 1986, and even though the rule of law lost in the Senate, I was confident that Ronald Reagan understood the principle that, if you reward people for breaking the law, there would have been more people that break the law.

If you say that this is the last amnesty ever, you also will have to continually fight the argument of we didn't really mean that; there are these other circumstances.

The three--well, it actually started out to be 1 million people that were going to get amnesty in 1986. And the rationale, which I don't actually think was rational, was we can't enforce the law against these million people that are here illegally, but we need to have the rule of law. So what we will do is we will grant an amnesty to the million people that are here illegally.

Then our promise will be, from this point forward, everybody who enters into the United States, or is unlawfully in the United States will have to face the law, and we will deport everybody that has violated our immigration laws. We will enforce the law from this point forward, from 1986.

Ronald Reagan believed he was going to get that; and, by the way, he did

command the executive branch of government, and the Republicans did run the executive branch of government not only from 1986, but all the way up until 1993, when Bill Clinton took office.

But what happened was they didn't get the enforcement. There was fraud. It was well over a million people--it was closer to 3 million people--who received amnesty under the 1986 amnesty act; and those 3 million people then were legalized in America, by law. And I don't dispute the validity of the law, but they were rewarded for breaking the law. That is what the amnesty did.

So I have talked to a number of them along the way, and they will argue: Yes, we deserved amnesty. We came to America. We wanted to live here. It is a good thing. My family is better off.

Well, is the rule of law better off, is America's Constitution better off, is our civilization better off because we decided that we would ignore the law and reward people for breaking it?

By the way, is the debate over? Did we restore the respect for the rule of law since 1986, Mr. Speaker? Or, instead, have we seen the respect for the rule of law be eroded day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, over the last 30-plus years since the amnesty act of 1986?

That is what happened. Ronald Reagan saw it in his lifetime. He recognized that and would have liked to have had that bill back again.

I have had the conversation with a glorious American, then-Attorney General Ed Meese, III, who also recognized that the advice that President Reagan got from his Cabinet on whether to sign the amnesty act in 1986, whether that advice was good, and I will tell you that the Cabinet members that I am aware of would like to have reversed that decision after they saw the actual results.

Well, it is not that I am the most clairvoyant Member of the United States Congress, but I can assert with great confidence here into this Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker, I saw this coming in 1986. I wasn't in public life. I just wanted to raise my family and run my business and live with the freedoms that are guaranteed to me as an American citizen under the Constitution, but I wanted the rule of law.

I had been raised with a deep and abiding respect for the law. My father would sit me down at the supper table with the Code of Iowa on one side and the Constitution on the other side, and he would lecture to me how this fits. He would say over and over again: This is the law, and you will abide by the law. If you don't like it, if you think the law is not right, true, or just, there are means by which you go about changing it.

You can go lobby your State Representative. You can lobby your Congressman. You can run for office, which is what I ended up doing. And I am here defending the Constitution and the rule of law.

But we also are a First World country. We are the leaders of civilization for the world. We are the leaders of western civilization for the world. We are the American civilization. The American civilization is a dominant component of Western civilization, and if we take the values that formed America out of the values of the world, we don't have a lot of science and technology in progress to work with. We don't have a lot of economic dynamism.

I know that there have been wars and there have been dictators that have popped up within Western civilization. But, fortunately, we haven't had a dictator pop up in our American civilization. And one of the big reasons for that is because of our Constitution, and because we have public debate, and we come here to the floor of the House, and over there to the floor of the Senate, and across America, again, in our coffee shops, in our churches, in our workplaces and out on our parks and our streets, and we discuss this openly.

We should listen to other people's ideas and we should consider what they have to say and we should evaluate that. That is what our Founding Fathers envisioned. And as these ideas merge, what will happen is that sometimes there will be people on the right that are never going to compromise, and there will be some people on the left that are never going to compromise.

Maybe that doesn't matter so much because the people in the middle get to hear both of those arguments and make their own decisions, and they can move left or they can move right. But over time, we build a consensus. And when we get to that consensus, that is when we can move legislation here in the House and over in the Senate and to the President's desk for a signature, and then America continues to become an even better place.

But we have to have open dialogue to do this, and we have to have the rule of law that gives order to our society. If the rule of law is sacrificed because people are ruled more by their hearts than they are their heads, I would say: Come back to the history of America. Study our Founding Fathers. Read the Federalist Papers. Deliberate on this Constitution that we have, deliberate on this supreme law of the land and understand how deep the thought that went into the words that are there that are our guarantees.

Our Founding Fathers understood that we had to continue to educate each generation and raise them up not only in an understanding of the Constitution--and I double assert its original meaning--but they needed to be raised with an American experience. That is why it is required that our President of the United States be born in America. And that ``born in America'' is essentially shorthand for we want to ensure that all of our Presidents are raised with an American experience. That is how to interpret that.

I am not here to slice or dice, Mr. Speaker, the actual locations of birth of any President. And we have seen that Congress has some authority to address it by statute, should we choose to do that. But I am asserting that it is essential that the American civilization be preserved, protected, and expanded; and that we have leaders that are raised with the American experience that will come here and defend the American culture and civilization. And that is so important, that the leader of our thought process, the leader of the destiny and the direction of America is the President of the United States, our Commander in Chief.

The words that our President says reset and redirect America. We saw it happen under the 8 years of Barack Obama. We are seeing it begin now under the beginnings of the 65 or 66 days of the Trump administration, Mr. Speaker, and we have noticed that the dialog in America immediately shifts to: What is the President thinking about? What is the President talking about? What is the President tweeting about?

I think there is a high degree of anxiety on the part of the mainstream media, because they are never really off the clock because this President might wake up at 3 in the morning and send out a tweet that resets things. And so I am fine with that. I think it is important that we understand the thoughts of the President.

By the way, he isn't all-powerful. I used to say to the previous President: You are only the President. It is the American people that run this shop, and through a lot of different mechanisms.

But the President does have a lot of authority and he gets to set the tone for the debate and he gets to define many things, but especially the foreign policy.

But we still have this constraint, and the power of the purse exists here, especially in the House of Representatives. If the House doesn't appropriate money, nobody gets any money. That is kind of like when they say: If mama ain't happy, nobody's happy. Well, if Congress doesn't appropriate money, nobody gets any money.

So that power of the purse was designed by our Founding Fathers to be the controlling factor of the things that go on in this country. And if a President is out of line, we are obligated to shut the money off to those things that are out of line. Of course, the Senate will have to concur with any spending that the House should initiate, but just the same, it is the power of the purse that controls much of this.

But we are to be guided and bound by the Constitution. Earlier this morning, as the chairman of the Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, I held a hearing on constitutional rights, in particular the Kelo decision that came down in--if I get my date right--June 23 of 2005.

That decision was about property rights in New London, Connecticut, that the local government had decided that they were going to act by condemning the private property locally so that they could hand that private property over for a private interest to do expansion and development on multiple homes within the area of New London, Connecticut.

I recall my outrage when the Supreme Court ruled that that was constitutional; for a local government to condemn private property for private use, all it had to do was be facilitated by local government.

I had not read the decision at that time. In fact, I hadn't read the dissent. I had read part of the decision. But within a week, we brought a resolution of disapproval of the Supreme Court's decision on Kelo to the floor of this House. And, yes, I was engaged in that debate and some of the shaping of the resolution.

But the Supreme Court of the United States, which is there to protect the Constitution itself, to interpret the Constitution and the law, effectively stripped three words out of the Fifth Amendment of our Constitution.

The Fifth Amendment reads like this: `` . . . nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.''

Well, the people in New London Connecticut, particularly the Kelo family, had their private property, their home condemned, confiscated under eminent domain and handed over to private use and through the entity of local government. So I was outraged. America was outraged.

By the way, that is another time like I showed you the acorn, Mr. Speaker, but the Kelo decision was another time that the American people rose up and said: We disagree with this decision.

And it was--the polling that I recall from the time, 11-1, opposed the Supreme Court's decision that would allow local government to confiscate private property.

I came to this floor to add to the debate. And at the time I was queued up to speak, the speaker ahead of me was over at this podium, the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Barney Frank. Now, he and I had a history of disagreeing on a lot of issues, and I expected to disagree with Mr. Frank on that issue. So I sat here in a chair in front with my notepad to take notes on Mr. Frank's statements so I would be prepared to step up and rebut him because my turn was coming next.

I am writing notes furiously, keeping up with his quotes. And while this is going on, and he was almost finished with his speech before I realized I agreed with everything Barney Frank said on Kelo. Everything.

So I spoke, I came down here to this podium and gave my speech, but my speech fully supported the statement by Mr. Frank. And I added to that, that the effect of that decision was to strip those three words out of the Fifth Amendment ``for public use.'' I made that argument as emphatically as I was prepared to do, that now the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution that guarantees our property rights says: ``Nor shall private property be taken without just compensation.''

In other words, they have to pay you for it. But you don't get to keep your home if there is a private interest out there that can convince a local government that they will pay more taxes on that property than you are paying on that property.

Stripping those three words out of the Fifth Amendment was the exact effect of the Kelo decision. I did not know it at that time because later on is when I picked up the dissent, one of the last dissents written by Justice O'Connor, who had exactly the same analysis in her dissent as I had in my speech and, as I believe without utter clarity of the statement, that Mr. Frank would have agreed with it if he didn't say it or not.

So here we are. The American people have risen up and we have said: We disagree with the Supreme Court. We want to restore our Constitution, but amending it is pretty difficult.

By the way, if you wanted to amend the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to fix Kelo, to have the Fifth Amendment mean ``nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation,'' if you want the Fifth Amendment to mean that--I asked a witness today: How do you rewrite the Fifth Amendment and amend our Constitution when the Supreme Court has so, I will say, subverted the meaning, they had de facto stricken those three words out?

How do you rewrite it? Do you start with: We really mean it this time that ``nor shall private property be taken,'' we really mean ``without just compensation,'' we really mean it ``for public use without just compensation''?

Do we keep adding? Do we really mean it? Or are there words in the language that can prevent a court from doing what they decide to do from an activist standpoint?

I don't think so. And a number of times I have tried to write amendments to the Constitution to fix problems that have been created by an activist court.

So I will say the Kelo decision in 2005 was a precursor to things that happened by the Supreme Court, although they are not connected and cited; and that would be June 2015--June 24 and June 25, 2015, as a matter of fact. It was King v. Burwell, the decision when the Supreme Court, on a Thursday--I believe if you look at the calendar, Mr. Speaker, it will be a Thursday, June 24, 2015, when the Supreme Court concluded and issued a decision that they could rewrite ObamaCare, that they could rewrite the statute--the law that was actually passed here by hook, crook, and legislative shenanigan, but still within the boundaries of the Constitution.

The law gave no authority to the Federal Government to establish exchanges under ObamaCare, but the Court considered this, and they concluded that: We must have really meant to say ``or Federal Government'' when Congress wrote that the States may establish exchanges. The de facto result of the King v. Burwell decision was that the States--and added these three words, in effect--``or Federal Government'' may establish exchanges under the law. The Supreme Court added words to the law. If they can add words to the law, then they can also subtract words from the law.

So I am appalled by this. This is Thursday, and before I can get my feet back underneath me, having been essentially knocked over by a Supreme Court truck believing that they would be bound by something within the Constitution, before that can happen, I am pulling into a Catholic church in Logan, Iowa, to do a 10 a.m. meeting with some priests and members of the parish synchronized just by providence or happenstance with former Senator Rick Santorum, who has been a definitive voice on marriage. We were both listening to the radio as we pulled into that church to do a joint event, and for the first time we had heard about the Obergefell decision, the decision that came down on Friday, June 25, 2015.

That decision goes even beyond the idea that the Court can insert words into Federal statute that was previously duly passed by Congress and signed by the President. And now under the gay marriage decision of Obergefell, the Supreme Court not only found a new right in the Constitution, they created a command in the Constitution--a command.

It is not in the Constitution about same-sex marriage. Our Founding Fathers never envisioned such a thing. There is no one that can assert that it was even in the imagination of any Founding Father. Neither can they assert that it was in the imagination of anybody that was in this Congress when the 14th Amendment was passed out of this Congress--out of the House and the Senate--and ratified by the American people with 75 percent of the legitimate States at the time.

No one can assert that that ever was out there in, let's just say, the emanations and penumbras of the Constitution or especially the 14th Amendment, the equal protection clause of the Constitution. They can't assert that.

They asserted in the Roe v. Wade decision that this right to privacy becomes a right to abortion under any circumstances to speak of--almost any circumstances, Mr. Speaker. They asserted that it was in the emanations and penumbras, and they kind of made it up. They found it in that shadowy area along the edge of the clouds that we all see something different if we see anything at all, but they could see something that nobody else had seen, and they wrote that into the decision.

But this Obergefell decision goes even beyond that, even beyond the audacity of Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Griswold v. Connecticut, and the Eisenstadt decision. It goes beyond all of those.

It is this: the Supreme Court created--not only found a right, but they created a command in the Constitution.

And here is the command: if you are a political subdivision in America that recognizes civil marriage, then thou shalt conduct same- sex marriages and recognize same-sex marriages, regardless of where they might take place, but they shall take place in your jurisdiction as well. That is the Obergefell decision.

Now, if this had been a decision of the United States Congress, it would have been litigated and found unconstitutional. We don't have the enumerated power or the constitutional authority to impose same-sex marriage on America. That is outside the reach of this Congress, and I think there are Democrats that will agree with me on that, Mr. Speaker. But if the States were to pass same-sex marriage laws, they do have that constitutional authority. If that had happened in a statutory way, I would accept that. I don't agree with it, but I would accept it as a constitutional function of a legitimate subdivision within the United States.

That is how we need to do things in this country, in a constitutional fashion, not bypass the will of the people and allow the Supreme Court to assert an authority that they do not have constitutionally. I can chase this all the way back to Marbury v. Madison and have to take that argument apart, I know, with some of the people that would carry on this argument. But in the end, it is this: We get into big trouble when we start establishing special rights for immutable characteristics.

If you look at Title VII of the Civil Rights Act--and I don't have it committed exactly to memory, but in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, there is protection there for religion, but that is a specific constitutional protection in the First Amendment. Beyond that, it is protection for immutable characteristics that have to do with race, ethnicity, and national origin. I am fine with putting in disability. That is an immutable characteristic. Age is another immutable characteristic. And sex is an immutable characteristic. Gender is not, and sexual orientation is not.

When you go into that zone, then you are giving special protected status for characteristics that cannot be independently identified and can, at least potentially, be willfully changed. That is a zone that is too blurry a zone for law, and it is a zone then for our culture to accept, embrace, and love people of all walks of life and recognize that we are all God's children, we are all created in His image, and because of our immutable characteristics, they are tied to our origins.

By the way, our rights do come from God and not from government. If we think somehow that rights come from government, then it is okay for government to take our rights away. But they don't come from government. Our Founding Fathers understood that. In fact, they articulated that better than anyone ever had. They had a tough job. They had to first understand this divine right of humanity, natural law, as they described it. They had to first understand it, then they had to articulate it, then they had to debate it among themselves. They had disagreements amongst themselves, but they reached a consensus that got to the Declaration and a consensus that got to the ratification of the Constitution.

We fought a gruesome and a ghastly civil war to put away the sin of slavery. That also was a movement that came from the people of America and the people of Western civilization and the world. Slavery is an institution that has been part of every ancient civilization back to the beginning. America stepped up pretty early in this process. Great Britain was ahead of us. Not many other nations beat us to that punch. It was a brutal thing that America went through, but it was a consensus of America in the end that ended that.

So, Mr. Speaker, I am making this point that this America that we are is built upon the pillars of American exceptionalism. Those pillars are inherited from Western civilization whose roots go to Western Europe, they go to Rome, they go to Greece, and they go back to Mosaic law. We have been a wise-enough civilization to adopt those values from outside of Western civilization that give us vitality, just like our English language has this unique vitality. One of the reasons for it is that it is adaptable, it is flexible. We are not stuck in time and place. We take on words into our language. Every year there is a list of new words that go into the dictionary because we create them to take care of the meaning that we need.

Daniel Hannan, a member of the European Parliament from the United Kingdom, has written a book about the English language. I think of Winston Churchill's book, ``A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.'' I read that book carefully forward and back and digested it so to speak. When I finished it, I remember I looked up at the ceiling, and it was about 1:30 in the morning, and I thought: My gosh, wherever the English language has gone, freedom has accompanied the language.

Now, Churchill didn't ever write that, that I recall, in his book, but that was a conclusion that came to me. I would call it an inescapable conclusion that might only mean ``if you think like I do.'' But he laid the case out without saying that the English language has carried freedom.

Well, Daniel Hannan's book--the title of which I forget at the moment, Mr. Speaker--goes further. He says that, as he sits in the European Parliament--and he is multilingual--he will have earpieces on listening to the interpreter while he is listening to another language in this ear, and the language he gets interpreted into his ear doesn't necessarily carry out the same values and meaning. His analysis is that the English language not only is a carrier of freedom, but it is a language that articulates freedom unique to any other, and that you can't really understand God-given liberty without having an understanding of the English language that has such a utility in our carrying out and talking about our values of language and liberty.

Liberty means something different from freedom. We have got two words, liberty and freedom. Many other languages only have one word, and they just use that word universally. But in our spirit is this-- freedom is this: a wild coyote has freedom. He can jump the fences and go wherever he wants to go. But freedom is different. He has that freedom. But liberty is bridled by morality. We have liberty in America. We are bridled by the morality of the obligation that we are a civilization and a culture that is part of Judeo-Christianity, descended, at a minimum, from Judeo-Christianity, and our values that are rooted in there, as I said, are traceable back to Mosaic law.

We have to have a morality within America if we are going to be an America that achieves and that we can aspire, that the arc of history takes us to soaring heights instead of flattening that arc of history out and perhaps diminishing into the Third World.

So I revere this country, Mr. Speaker, and I revere our Constitution and our rule of law. The people in this country, all of us who are part of this civilization and part of this culture, all of us who get up every day and go out and do things to lift others up, all of us who scrub out some of the things that aren't so great and elevate those things that are great and pull ourselves together, whether it is a mom and a child, a dad and a child, whether it is a church group, whether it is home school, public school, or parochial school, whether it is work, whether it is your volunteer group, if you are out there handing out pamphlets to advance your cause and adding to the civil dialogue in America, keep a moral foundation behind it, and add to that civil dialogue, if we continue to do that, and if we protect, understand, and teach the values of America, and in particular the understanding and the original meaning of our Constitution, we will continue to be an even greater country.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives. I am privileged to serve here and privileged to have the opportunity to go home and carry out some of the things that I have talked about here in this last hour.

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

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the chairman for yielding to me.

Seven years ago today, I brought the first repeal of ObamaCare here to this Congress. Forty words, to rip it out by the roots as if such act had never been enacted. I would like to be here today passing the full repeal of ObamaCare. We are not, but this is the first bite at the repeal apple in a process to hopefully get all of this thing done in one day.

If I thought we could do it all in one bite, I would stand for that, but instead, here is what we have got. We have got a $1 trillion tax cut. We have got a $1.15 trillion spending cut. We have got a $150 billion deficit reduction. We have got a bill that eliminates the employer mandate, eliminates the individual mandate, and it eliminates Federal mandates in the essential health benefits package of those 10 mandates--that I despise, by the way.

It expands health savings accounts--doubles them--it allows for us to pass selling insurance across State lines, and it enables catastrophic health insurance. That is a pretty good list, and that is the list of things that I am going to support here when this goes up for a vote.

Mr. Speaker, I urge its adoption.

Mr. Speaker, I missed three votes due to a meeting at the White House with President Trump. Had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 182, NAY Roll Call No. 183, and YEA on Roll Call No. 184.

Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``nay'' on rollcall No. 150.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado for yielding. I especially thank him for bringing this legislation before this Congress.

I rise in support of this rule and the underlying bill. We are addressing the topic that we used to call fraudulent joinder. I like the title of this bill better, as pointed out by Ms. Slaughter last night. We call it the Innocent Party Protection Act. It is more accurate and it is more descriptive. The other fraudulent joinder piece tends to put people to sleep who aren't operating in this arena.

I know that the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Buck) has operated in this arena. He has significant experience and frustrating experience watching innocent parties being drug into litigation just so that an opposing attorney can utilize that jurisdiction within a

particular State where they think they have a friendly venue.

First, Mr. Speaker, I make the point from the beginning, which we don't often enough do here, and that is our pledge we made some years ago that all of our legislation would be indexed back to the Constitution. We don't always address that in the debate.

I just turn my pocket Constitution to Article III, section 1. It says: ``The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.''

We agree with that. I have made this point that all of the Federal courts are completely under the jurisdiction of the United States Congress. If we decided that we wanted to abolish a Federal district, we could do that. In fact, it happened 200 years ago, two districts. I don't propose such a thing, but I am just asserting the power of Congress, which hasn't been questioned or challenged, I would point out.

Under section 2, it says: ``The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising . . . between Citizens of different States. . . .''

This is a tool, then, that the fraudulent joinder attorneys use to drag people into litigation who may have nothing to do with it whatsoever. It is a problem. It is a problem, we know, not just because there are complaints out there from innocent parties that have been wrapped up in litigation and required to defend themselves and hire attorneys and spend thousands of dollars--tens of thousands--hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to protect their economic interests even though they have zero involvement in the case and perhaps zero chance of having any judgment brought against them.

So apparently the judges who make these decisions look at rule 11 and they find enough latitude in there that they allow the defendants to stay on the case, and I will call them being fraudulently joined to the case. We need to tighten up these rules. We need to send a very clear message to the courts so that they have got some guidelines to live by because it is their job, of course, to read the law, take their directions from the United States Congress, and act accordingly. I think just this debate and the debate we had in the last Congress help us in that cause.

The next thing I pick up from the Constitution, the next thing is the bill itself, and prevention of fraudulent joinder is under section 2. It sets out four different categories that would be cause for the court to release a defendant. And it says the joinder of the defendant is described in this paragraph. It says it is fraudulent if the court finds that in one of four different categories there is actual fraud in the pleading of jurisdictional facts, which, with respect to that defendant, if there is actual fraud, that is pretty much a no-brainer, should be released from the case. That is pretty simple. I am glad it is now an opportunity to go into statute.

Second is if it is based on a complaint and the materials submitted under the paragraph, it is not plausible to conclude that the applicable State law would impose liability on that defendant. In other words, if it is implausible for the defendant to have a liability, then the court can release that defendant under this act should it become law. That is also, to me, a no-brainer.

As one who has been a defendant in lawsuits, I would reflect, Mr. Speaker, that when I first ran for office, there were some people who thought that I should just simply capitulate to whatever their legal demands were. Even though I have only been in the courtroom a couple handful of times throughout the 40-some years of business that we have done as King Construction, I had four of them lined up against me at the same time. They thought that I would just have to settle out of court. It is a frustrating thing to not see a liability but have that leverage brought against you. I have experienced that, and that animates me on this.

The third component is if a State or Federal law clearly bars all claims in the complaint against that defendant. All right, that is also a simple provision.

But the fourth one is another one that deserves consideration, and that is that there be a good faith intention. Otherwise, if there is no good faith intention to prosecute the action against that defendant or to seek a joint judgment which would include that defendant, then that defendant can be released from the case. We need to streamline our courts, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I would just summarize this case in that it is not only me, it is not Mr. Buck alone, it is not Mr. Sessions alone, it is the American people who are calling out for this kind of relief. It is not just the American people--we might consider them to be laypersons in this--but it is also the courts. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Harvie Wilkinson, as Mr. Buck quoted, spoke to this issue. The Supreme Court of the United States has spoken to this issue under ``plausible'' versus ``speculative.'' Professor Martin Redish also has spoken on this subject matter.

The Third Circuit spoke to the Briscoe issue. The final piece is the Fifth Circuit has essentially adopted a very similar, if not identical, policy. We need to codify this. This is our chance to do so. I urge adoption of the rule and support of the underlying rule.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives, and I have a number of topics I would like to bring up this evening.

First, I would comment that I heard the words ``Affordable Care Act'' multiple times in the previous hour, and it just caught me each time I heard that. Abraham Lincoln would have had a difficult time saying such a thing being Honest Abe, and George Washington probably couldn't have said it at all.

As we know this, it is not affordable care and that is the reason that we have to address it. We knew this was going to happen. Of all the horrible stories we have heard about ObamaCare--this thing they call the Affordable Care Act--many of them were predicted here on the floor of the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker. I predicted quite a lot of them myself, as did many of the Members who fought against that piece of legislation that was jammed down on us by hook, by crook, by legislative shenanigans.

We could see what was going to happen with this. It was slammed together by trying to circumvent the majorities, by pushing some things through on reconciliation. And we ended up with a piece of legislation that was the biggest bite they could get to create socialized medicine.

The worst part of ObamaCare, Mr. Speaker, was this: That it is an unconstitutional taking of God-given, American liberty. We are--and at least used to be and believe we are to be again--the freest people on the planet; and that our rights come from God; and that government can't take them away.

Many times here on the floor, I have said, Mr. Speaker, that the Federal Government hasn't figured out how to nationalize or take over our soul. That is our business, and we manage that. Our souls are the most sovereign thing that we have and are.

The second most sovereign thing we have and are is our skin and everything inside it. It is our health. It is the management of our health. And if Americans are not capable of managing their own health and making their own health decisions and pressing the marketplace to produce the health insurance policies that they desire, if Americans can't make those decisions, then it would just stand to reason, if that is true--and that is what Democrats seem to think--then there aren't any people on the planet who can manage their own health.

What I am pretty sure of is that if we don't think that regular, red- blooded Americans--especially those who are out there punching the time clock, running their business, starting a business, or working on commission, whatever they might be doing, the salt-of-the-Earth Americans--if they can't manage it, I am really sure that a bunch of leftists who are elected to office out of the inner cities of America aren't going to be able to do it.

And we have seen the success of that, the leftist agenda of ObamaCare, imposed upon America, commanding that we buy policies that are approved by the Federal Government. They would have liked to have established the Federal Government as being the single-payer plan and abolished all insurance whatsoever and simply taken care of everybody's healthcare needs so that one size fits all, and we could drift down into the mediocrity that most the rest of the world has exhibited for a long time.

This all started back in Germany in the latter part of the 19th century, when Otto von Bismarck decided that if he was going to get reelected, he had to make the Germans dependent upon him. And so he devised this plan called socialized medicine and he, more or less, trained the Germans to expect the federal government to make those decisions for them, pick up the costs for them; and, in doing so, that sense of dependency got Bismarck reelected in Germany.

Well, it is not that old a country in Germany, but this idea of Marxism comes right out of there. By the way, there is a bench in Berlin that honors Karl Marx, and a number of other statutes and monuments as well. That is where this came from, and we watched as other countries adopted it.

I once picked up--Mr. Speaker, I had a World War II veteran who came over to an event that I was doing in Hospers, Iowa, and he had gone up to his attic and he brought down these Collier's magazines. They were original Collier's magazines that started right at the end of the Second World War and went on through those years, for 2 or 3 or 4 years, and they were yellow and, of course, they were dated, and he presented them all to me.

He said: I want you to have these. I want you to read down through these

magazines and see what it was like in those days shortly at the end of World War II and in the Reconstruction era afterwards.

So I actually accepted all of those magazines, copied them, and gave him back the originals. I didn't feel right having them in my possession. But I read through them; and there were pictures there of doctors and nurses and healthcare providers in Great Britain that were haggard and tired and worn, and stories about how, because of the socialized medicine they passed in the United Kingdom, they had to see so many patients a day in order to make a living, and they couldn't pay attention to the patients so much as they had to pay attention to their schedule and turn them through quickly through the turnstiles in the healthcare system in Great Britain because health care was rationed in that way.

I have a friend who is a radio talk show host--and, actually, it is WHO Radio, one of Ronald Reagan's original radio programs where Ronald Reagan got his start--who comes originally from Great Britain; proud American. But both of his parents are gone, and both of his parents deaths can be attributed to the failed national healthcare system, socialized medicine that the United Kingdom has. He had told me several years ago: Once socialized medicine is established, you will not be able to undo it.

So, Mr. Speaker, I bring this up this way because this is our last best chance to turn this country in the right direction. It is our last best chance to throw off this mandate of socialized medicine that was established by hook, crook, and legislative shenanigan by the Democrats, and passed through in the final component in this Congress March 23, 2010. That event that took place, as I recall, I believe it was dated March 23, but it actually rolled over past midnight, but the Record showed March 23.

I went home that night worn out from days of fighting ObamaCare and doing all that I could do to put an end to it, to kill it off before it did what it has already done to the American people. And I laid down, thinking I would sleep the sleep of the dead, but I woke up in about an hour and a half and I got up and I wrote the repeal of ObamaCare, and it turned out to be the first repeal draft that emerged after ObamaCare had passed.

I certainly wrote it well before Barack Obama had signed the bill, although they hustled it out to him, I think, the next day, and that is when he signed it.

The repeal bill that I have introduced here--and it has passed the floor of this House a number of times; I have lost track of how many times, Mr. Speaker--it is only 40 words. And the last words in that bill are: ``As if such act had never been enacted.''

That is, Mr. Speaker, what we need to do. We need to send the full, 100 percent, rip-it-out-by-the-roots-as-if-it-had-never-been-enacted repeal out of the House and over to the Senate and set it on Mitch McConnell's desk and let Mitch McConnell figure out--Majority Leader McConnell, Senator McConnell figure out then how to get the votes put together in the United States Senate for a full, 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare.

The House will pass such a bill. It won't be hard to put those votes together. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a Democrat or two that was worried about their seat that would join us in such an endeavor.

Then, once that bill is over through the Rotunda and over on the desk of Senator McConnell, then we should start down through with the individual repairs to the healthcare system that we need to do, that we all know we need to do and that we have talked about for a long time.

Some of these have been out here debated for 10 years in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, and, instead, we have got a different configuration that has been served up to us. But I submit that it is not too late to do it right. Send the full repeal over. That repeal can have an enactment clause of, say, a year from now. That is enough time for people to make their adjustments for their own health insurance and get it taken care of, especially under the provisions that I propose.

I would point out that my ObamaCare--and, yes, we Members of Congress are obligated to own our own ObamaCare policies and pay a substantial portion of the premium. By the way, mine went up when ObamaCare was imposed upon me by not quite $4,300 a year additional. That was my privilege to own an ObamaCare policy, but we are compelled to own that policy.

For me, I got the letter, dated last September 28, that said, as of December 31, at midnight, my ObamaCare policy was canceled. And it turned out that I would have been without insurance from New Years, from the stroke of midnight, auld lang syne, until whatever time it would take me to get that put together. So we went to work, and there was only one policy that actually qualified under ObamaCare, only one.

Of all the counties in America, roughly a third of the counties there is only one choice available to the American people; compelled by law to buy a policy or be penalized by the Federal Government. And your options are not that you get to keep the policy that you like or that you get to keep the doctor that you like. You don't even get to choose from a menu of what kind of health insurance policy you want.

Instead, for a third of the counties in America, you only have one choice, and that is buy the policy that is the only option that is available to you. So there is no shopping for prices. There is no looking at the kind of options you might want covered by your health insurance policy.

There is no freedom to go out there in the marketplace, and there is no marketplace that actually exists because the consumers are not making the demands for the kind of policies that they would like. Instead, it is the Federal Government dictating by mandate what the policy shall cover. And when that happens, the premiums go up--which anybody could figure out--and the coverage goes down.

Now we have people that--I would just look back to shortly before the election. The Thursday before the election we had an event south of Des Moines on a farm, and there, soon-to-be Vice President-elect Mike Pence arrived, as did Senator Ted Cruz, back to Iowa. I'm grateful to both of those gentlemen and friends.

As I gave my speech, I pointed out that I have seen people's health insurance premiums go from $8,000 a year to $10,000 a year. And then as I saw people in the crowd started waving their arm, and I say $12,000 a year, $14,000 a year, we had an auction going on, Mr. Speaker, and it came up to $20,000 a year. Looked to me like these were ``Ma and Pa'' family farm operations that were facing $20,000 in health insurance premiums, where not that long ago they would have been looking at 6 or 7 or $8,000 in health insurance premiums.

That has swept across this countryside. I talked to a gentleman here on the floor tonight whose health insurance premiums were $24,000. That is just not sustainable. You have to finally decide: I am going to take a risk and go without health insurance with those kind of costs.

That is driven by ObamaCare. It is driven by the mandates in ObamaCare. It is driven by the guaranteed issue, no consideration for preexisting conditions, and it is driven by a mandate such as you stay on your parents' health insurance until you are 26.

It goes on and on and on. OB care, maternity coverage, contraceptive coverage, you can name it, and also, no additional cost for your medical checkups. All of these things cost money, and they are built into the premium, and every time you add another bell or whistle or accessory to your health insurance policy, the premium goes up and up and up.

When the insurers find out that they are losing money, they start to drop out of the marketplace. They drop out of the marketplace, and when they do, there is less competition.

When there is less competition, prices go up, Mr. Speaker. This is what we have seen happen over the years since the implementation of ObamaCare. It is a calamity. It will sink ObamaCare. If we don't touch it, it will sink and it will be gone. It will implode upon itself. It cannot be sustained. We know that on this side of the aisle from about here on over. They know it intuitively over on this side of the aisle from about there on over. But

the difficulty is that politically they have embraced ObamaCare and they have decided they are going to hold onto it and protect it.

Why?

I think part of it is they want to hold on and protect the legacy of President Obama, who, if all had gone well, would have ridden off into the sunset. He doesn't seem to be doing that, Mr. Speaker.

But now we are at this place where we have the votes in the House to do a full, 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare, and that is what we should do.

Tomorrow, I understand that the gentleman from Ohio, and perhaps others, will introduce legislation that will be described as a full repeal of ObamaCare. I wish it were so, but it is designed to fit within the reconciliation standards. It is a legislation that once made it to President Obama's desk and received a veto. This time, presumably, it could go to President Trump's desk and receive a signature. That is good. I favor that as an improvement in the right direction. But the full right thing we need to do is the 100 percent repeal.

We shouldn't be sustaining any kind of mandate whatsoever. Let the States determine what the mandates might be, but don't let them lock people into their States and refuse to let them buy health insurance from outside of those State lines. And it looks to me that the bill, as introduced by leadership, doesn't really allow for the facilitation of buying insurance across State lanes.

So here is what I suggest we do, Mr. Speaker. Send the full, 100 percent repeal over to the Senate. Pick up the bill that was a repeal just about a year ago, send it over to the Senate, too. Then, what we have is Mitch McConnell can choose from the menu on what he can get done, but the pressure for the full repeal will build if the House sends it to the Senate, and the odds of the full repeal get greater and greater.

Then the House, doing its job--and we are not obligated to negotiate a deal out of the House and the Senate and the White House. It is the judgment of the House that needs to be reflected here in this Chamber.

This most deliberative body that we have, the voice for the American people, we should never be trapped into thinking that we can't pass anything out of the House if we don't first have a handshake with the President and the majority in the Senate. That has handcuffed us for the last 8 or more years.

The strategic thinking has been that we don't even try to move anything out of the House unless we know they can take it up in the Senate and unless we know that we can get a signature from the President, because anything else is a waste of time.

Well, it is not necessarily a waste of time, Mr. Speaker, not necessary at all. In fact, we need to send out of here our highest aspirations. So I say this: send the full repeal over to the Senate, and then pick up the repairs, the replacements, and the reform, those things that we know we need to do, and they can stand alone with or without the full repeal of ObamaCare.

For example, we need to send Paul Gosar's bill that repeals components of the McCarran-Ferguson Act that allows for insurance to be bought and sold across State lines. Paul Gosar has done a lot of work on that bill, and his predecessor out of Arizona, John Shadegg, pushed that bill for about 16 years here in the House of Representatives. In his last week or so here in the House, he said: I have one regret, and that regret is I should have pushed harder for the repeal of McCarran- Ferguson so that we could be selling and buying insurance across State lines.

He should have pushed harder. I recall John Shadegg pushing very hard on that, and he just couldn't get it there. We all couldn't get it there. Now Paul Gosar has that bill out of the Judiciary Committee. We passed it out a week and a half ago, and it is hanging on the calendar now, and it should come to this floor. The votes would be here to pass Paul Gosar's repeal of McCarran-Ferguson, and we should send that over to the Senate. Passing that piece of legislation would enable insurance to be sold across State lines, and that would set the competition up between the 50 States.

I recall the debate here on the floor of the House in 2009 and 2010 when the data came out that a typical young man in New Jersey at the time, a healthy 23-year-old, would pay an average of about $6,000 for his health insurance premium for the year--$500 a month, $6,000. A similarly situated healthy young man in Kentucky would be paying $1,000 a year.

Now, what is the difference between those two States?

The cost of providing that care and the far fewer mandates in the State of Kentucky and a lot of mandates in the State of New Jersey.

So why wouldn't we let a young man in New Jersey buy a health insurance policy in Kentucky? What are the odds that he is going to be insured if he can get a policy for $1,000 as opposed to $6,000?

We know that far more Americans would be insured if they had the options and didn't have to buy all the bells and whistles. He probably doesn't need maternity. He probably doesn't need contraceptive. Maybe he is not too concerned about the preexisting condition component of this. If he is 23 years old and on his own, he is not worried about a 26-year slacker mandate. So that is the comparison of what could happen if we passed Gosar's bill and repealed McCarran-Ferguson and allowed people to purchase insurance across State lines. That should be number one.

Number two would be full deductibility of everyone's health insurance premiums. Today there is something like 160 million Americans that get their health insurance from their employer. When the employer sets up a group plan as a rule and they negotiate those premiums, whatever that premium might be, let's just say it is $10,000 a year per employee, they lay that $10,000 on the barrel head, pay that insurance premium, and that goes into the books as a business expense, and it shows up on the schedule C as a health insurance premium.

But if you are a sole proprietor, if you are a partnership, if you are a ma-and-pa operation and you have one part-time employee, that makes you an employer. If you are an employer, you can deduct the premiums to your employees, but you can't deduct your own premium.

There are 20.9 million Americans similarly situated in that scenario, Mr. Speaker, where that 20.9 million Americans are compelled under ObamaCare to pay for health insurance premiums and meeting those standards, and maybe they have only got one choice like one-third of America's counties; maybe they only have two choices like another third of America's counties; or maybe they have more than two choices like the other third. But at least 1,022 counties in America have only choice: buy the insurance policy--that is your only choice--or be in violation of the law and be fined and be punished, but do it with after-tax dollars instead of before-tax dollars. That is the burden that they are carrying right now.

Mr. Speaker, 20.9 million Americans are disenfranchised in that way. Yet they would be employers and they would be in the effort of trying to provide health insurance for themselves, trying to start up a business perhaps with maybe one part-time employee, with now this big disadvantage that they don't get to deduct their health insurance premiums.

Maybe they are that couple that is $20,000 or even $24,000 for a premium after-tax dollars, and by the time the Federal Government steps in and taxes the first, say, 36 percent, and the State steps in and taxes another 9 percent, now we are at 45. You can add a few more various and sundry taxes in there, but a round number is half. So your $20,000 premium takes $40,000 of earnings in order to break even with that premium. But the employer gets to write off the $20,000 as a business expense, so they have that advantage, and you are seeking to compete with an established larger employer. This is wrong. So the second bill we should pass out of this House is the full deductibility of everybody's health insurance premiums.

The McCarran-Ferguson repeal under Paul Gosar, then the full deductibility of everybody's health insurance premiums--oh, that is the King bill, by the way, Mr. Speaker, and I am hopeful that that can be passed through and become law. It is a superior approach to providing refundable tax credits.

We need to learn some things. For example, when we hear tax credits, it really means in this discussion refundable tax credits.

What is a refundable tax credit?

That is when the Federal Government sends you money whether you have a tax liability or not. So that would be that if--and the range in this proposal that emerged yesterday is between $2,000, $4,000, up to $14,000 in refundable tax credits to help people pay for their insurance premiums.

Well, that makes me feel good, the idea of trying to help people that can't afford it, but in the process of doing that, we are also helping a lot of people that can afford it. Nonetheless, when you are paying people's health insurance premium, that becomes an entitlement. If everybody is entitled to having a health insurance policy, and if you don't have the money to do so--and I think they use the standard of $75,000 or less--then the Federal Government will subsidize your policy and conceivably buy your policy. Now we have another new entitlement that grows the Federal Government, raises taxes, and spends hundreds of billions of dollars because we don't want to say no to people. They had a policy handed to them by ObamaCare, which the taxpayers cannot afford.

We have $20 trillion in national debt right now, Mr. Speaker, and we have a debt ceiling crisis coming at us within just a matter of days or, at a maximum, weeks. This Federal Government needs to get a handle on its spending and it needs to get back to balance. We will never get there if we keep growing entitlements here on the floor of the House of Representatives.

So that is two items that need to be brought through. The first is the full repeal. Item number one, the repeal of the McCarran-Ferguson Act, sell insurance across State lines. Item number two, pass the King bill for full deductibility of everybody's health insurance premiums so that everybody paying for health insurance is on the same standard as employers are.

Then the third thing is the medical malpractice reform, and that is the tort reform legislation that passed out of the Judiciary Committee on the same day with Paul Gosar's bill, Mr. Speaker. That legislation puts a cap on medical malpractice settlements of $250,000 in noneconomic damages--a lot of us would call that pain and suffering-- and pay for pain and suffering. That is a component of it, but it is not the whole picture. So we adopt language that is actually borrowed from California which passed this medical malpractice reform 40 years ago and capped it at $250,000.

By the way, that is still the law in California today. The individual that signed it into law, his name is--at that time he was the Governor of California, Mr. Speaker. Maybe people don't remember who the Governor of California was 40 years ago: Jerry Brown. The Governor of California today: Jerry Brown.

Is there an effort to repeal the tort reform legislation that has been part of California's law for 40 years? No.

In fact, Texas has borrowed from those ideas and implemented that into law, and they are finding that they have got doctors and medical practitioners moving to Texas now because they are not subjected to the outrageous medical malpractice claims that they have been in multiple States across the country.

So this tort reform legislation that just passed out of the Judiciary Committee a week and a half or so ago is another prime piece of legislation that should come to the floor for debate and vote, and I am confident it would pass the House and send it over to the Senate, and then give Mitch McConnell some tools to work with.

That is not the end of it, Mr. Speaker. I know that under the legislation that has been proposed by leadership and just rolled out yesterday, they expand health savings accounts. I think they nearly doubled them, as I understand, $6,000-some for an individual, maybe $12,000-some for a couple. That is close, but I know that it is not precise, Mr. Speaker.

I agree that we need to expand health savings accounts. I think we need to expand them more. My legislation expands them to $10,000 for the individual; $20,000 for the couple. But health savings accounts need to be expanded, and they need to be expanded so that people can use them and manage them. They can put money in tax free, take money out to pay their premiums, take money out to pay their healthcare costs, and grow the health savings account so that when it grows to a point where it becomes $50,000, $100,000, $400,000, $500,000, double that by the time of retirement or more. With that kind of money sitting in a health savings account, then there will be people that will negotiate a health insurance policy, but as a catastrophic policy. They will conclude that they want a policy that has got a high deductible, a fairly high copayment, and that they will take care of their own incidental healthcare costs out of pocket and try to grow their health savings account.

In the process of doing that, if you have got the capital in your HSA, then you can negotiate the premium or your monthly health insurance premium down by negotiating for a catastrophic plan, taking care of the incidental costs yourself out of your health savings account. To some degree, you become your own insured for the lower dollar items while you still have catastrophic insurance for the big things.

We have done the numbers on this. Even when it was down to the cap in 2003 that rolled out of here that was capped, the HSAs were capped at $5,150 for a couple. We did the math on that. If a couple started out at, say, age 20, worked for 45 years, round numbers, worked out to be age 65, Medicare eligibility, then they would conceivably be sitting there with $950,000 in their health savings account. I have well over doubled this. In fact, take it up to $10,000, $20,000 for a couple where 5,150 was the opening bid in 2003. So we are not quite four times that amount, yet healthcare costs have gone up. So I am not proposing that we end up with $4 million in the account, but maybe some number that is 2.5 or so million.

Arriving at Medicare eligibility with six--well, seven figures times some number in their health savings account leaves these couples in a position where they could go out on the open market and purchase a paid-up Medicare replacement policy for life, pay for that up front, and then the Federal Government wants to tax anything that comes out of the health savings account as ordinary income. But my answer to that is no, don't do that. If they will take themselves off the entitlement roll by buying a Medicare replacement policy, then let them keep the change tax-free.

Now this becomes a life management account. Not only is it a health savings account, it is a pension plan, and it is incentive to manage your health insurance premiums and your healthcare costs to get your checkups, to get your tests, to watch your weight, get your exercise, and manage your life because you are going to have a nest egg at the end of your working life that you want to be able to spend doing enjoyable things. If your health is a bad experience, then you have got the money there to cover it to make sure that you are taken care of.

This is where we need to get people in this country. We are just awfully short of people willing to think outside the box and to think about what we should do here in America. We are not just some regular, ordinary, humdrum, run-of-the-mill country, Mr. Speaker. We are the United States of America. We are the unchallenged greatest nation in the world. We didn't become this way because we are dependent upon government. We became this way because we have a robust appetite for freedom. People have gone out and blazed their own trails. In a lot of cases, settling this country, they literally did that, blazed a trail through the timber and went out and settled the West.

When our original Founding Fathers arrived here on our shores, they arrived in a land that had, as far as they knew, unlimited natural resources. They had unlimited freedom because they were a long ways away from King George. They came for their religious freedom as well. They were farmers, they were shopkeepers, they were individual entrepreneurs with a dream, and they forged the American Dream. They did it on religious faith, on free enterprise capitalism, and on God- given liberty. That created this robust country in this giant petri dish that was the only huge experiment that the world has ever seen: a nation that is formed on ideas and ideals.

Here we are, the descendants, the recipients, the beneficiaries of their risk and of their dream, beneficiaries of their ideals. All we have to do is preserve them. Our Founding Fathers had to hammer them out.

They had to conceive of these ideas about God-given rights, and then they had to articulate it. They had to write these ideas over and over again in many different configurations so that the populace began to understand what it really meant when you have rights that come from God. Then they had to sell this to the colonists. And then they had to defy King George and fight for that freedom.

All of that took place with the desks that were there and those who gave their lives for our freedom and our liberty. And what is our job, Mr. Speaker? Hang on to it, maintain it. Now, in this case, with ObamaCare, we have got to restore it. That is what we are faced with.

In my view, it is not that hard, if we just come together here and do that which we know is right, send the full repeal of ObamaCare across the rotunda to the Senate, pass Paul Gosar's bill selling insurance across State lines, the repeal of McCarran-Ferguson, make our health insurance premiums fully deductible, and expand our health savings accounts. Do those things and pass the tort reform legislation which will diminish the malpractice premiums that our doctors and practitioners are paying. If we do that much and eliminate the mandates that tie us down in such a way that we don't have the latitude to work any longer, we don't need a mandate that requires every insurance policy to keep your kids on until age 26. There are a lot of other ways to manage that. If you as a family want to buy such a policy, the insurance companies will provide it. You don't need to have the law.

The preexisting condition component of this, yes, we have compassion for people who are uninsurable. In fact, 37 of the States, by my recollection, had policies before ObamaCare, Iowa included--and I helped manage that as former chairman of the Iowa Senate State Government Committee--37 States, by my recollection, had established high-risk pools.

These high-risk pools used tax dollars to buy the premium down so that those who had preexisting conditions and could not be insured could have their health insurance premiums subsidized by the taxpayers.

Now, some States are more generous than others. That is how it will be. But it is a far better solution than the Federal Government being involved in preexisting conditions just because they think that is the right political answer, Mr. Speaker.

We will see how this unfolds as the days and few short weeks come forward here. I am hopeful that we will be able to get together in conference and the Republicans can hammer out a solution that can be signed off on by, hopefully, all of us.

I am hopeful there will be some Democrats that understand you don't want to go back home again and tell your constituents that you fought to defend ObamaCare, this thing that my colleagues, scores of times--in fact, thousands of times here on the floor--called the Affordable Care Act. We know, Mr. Speaker, it is not affordable and that the premiums are way out of sight; the coverage can't be used, in many cases, because the deductibles are too high for most people; and that the insurance companies are bailing out one after another. And perhaps a year from now, if we don't do something, there will be great chunks of the American people who will have no options whatsoever.

So I suggest we do this the prudent way: do the full repeal and send single components of the reform rifle shot out of the House over to the Senate. Let the Senate take them up. Or, if they think it is prudent, package them up and send them back to us as a package. If the House has once passed it, and it comes back to us in a package, I think we will pass it again, Mr. Speaker.

So these are intense times, and America's destiny is being determined. It is being determined because we have elected Donald Trump as President of the United States.

I think about what it would have been like if I had woken up on the morning of November 9 and we had someone other than Donald Trump elected to be President, and how the optimism that just poured forth since that day has been terrific.

You can recognize, right after the election, that people had a spring in their step, and they are more optimistic and more outgoing. If you would walk into the grocery store, people would come over and start a conversation. If you walked into a restaurant, they would do the same thing.

They were just more outgoing and more friendly and they wanted to engage with each other. They still want to engage with each other. The stock market has soared up over 21,000, and there has been over $3 trillion in wealth created just in the stock market alone, Mr. Speaker.

So this high level of optimism that we have brings with it a high level of responsibility. It is not only to the ObamaCare change, but the pledge that was made by Donald Trump many times throughout the campaign was a full, 100 percent repeal of ObamaCare. I always say 100 percent repeal will rip it out by the roots as if it had never been enacted. The language is a little different, but the meaning is identical. The meaning is identical, Mr. Speaker: a full repeal of ObamaCare.

President Trump has said many times we need to be able to sell and buy insurance across State lines. That is another Trump promise. Of course, he has got people he is working with. Tom Price is head of HHS. He is a good man whom I first met here on the floor of the House of Representatives when he came in as a freshman a number of years ago. I watched as he paid attention to the healthcare issues then. And the constitutional issues, I might add. My first encounter with Tom Price was on constitutional issues, and it was a positive one.

So we are at this place with a new President that has, halfway into his first 100 days, a number of campaign promises that he has yet to live up to, but a great many that he has lived up to. It looks to me like Donald Trump has at least somebody in an office somewhere in the White House that has a list of all the campaign promises, and they are checking those off one by one as he accomplishes the promises that he has made as a candidate.

That is a laudable thing, Mr. Speaker. Yet, he is being bogged down by a series of stories that have, to some degree--I don't want to quite say handcuffed his administration--but it has made it difficult to operate in a flexible and a fluid way.

This has to do with, I think, it is leakers within; people who should be loyal to the United States and, hopefully, loyal to the President of the United States, who have been leaking information out.

When The New York Times is publishing that they have got inside information that has been leaked to them from the intelligence community, nobody seems to be troubled that The New York Times is going to people in the intelligence community or receiving messages from them and taking information that is about classified activities of our Federal Government and printing the stories about that classified information in their paper.

It is not only The New York Times. I see Heat Street here, The Guardian, The Washington Post. That all comes to mind. McClatchy.

Here is a series of things that have taken place that bring into question the integrity of some people that work within government and some of them that work within our intelligence community. Here are just a string of events, Mr. Speaker, that bring us to a conclusion about what is going on in our Federal Government.

It was in the summer that Heat Street reported that the FBI applied-- in June it is reported--applied for a FISA warrant wiretap to survey people in the Trump campaign who had ties to Russia. Roughly late June, this report came out. FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Special warrants have to be achieved in a FISA court. These warrant requests are classified. The activity around them are classified. So, if it is classified, how is it that Heat Street reported that the FBI applied for FISA warrants to wiretap people in the Trump campaign last June?

Well, that is because classified leakage went into the ears of the Heat

Street reporters, or I suppose we could say they made it up. And if it were the only story out there, that might be the most likely, but we have a number of other stories.

The Guardian reported that a FISA warrant request was made to monitor four Trump campaign staffers for conflicts or for communications with Russia and Russians. That story in The Guardian matches up with the story in Heat Street roughly last June that there was a FISA warrant request to monitor four of Trump's campaign staffers for their communications with Russia.

So there is story number one and two. Heat Street writes one; The Guardian writes another. Both of them are writing about what, if we had the real information in front of us, would be classified: the application for FISA and the results of that.

The report comes back and says those applications were denied. They were not based upon a reasonable suspicion that there was, I will say, collusion with Russians.

So here is item number three. McClatchy reported that the FBI and five other agencies were investigating Russian influence on the U.S. Presidential election. So we have two stories--one from Heat Street, one from The Guardian--that says that there was an application for a FISA warrant. That FISA warrant was presumably turned down, by reports, but then there is a report that there is the FBI and five other agencies that are investigating the Russian influence on the U.S. Presidential election. That is a McClatchy report.

Now, this is starting to add up. I am starting to see here is a sign there is something going on and there is a leakage of classified information--a sign something is going on and leakage of classified information. Then, the report of the investigation of the FBI and five other agencies.

Now, here is the next story. The New York Times reports that the FBI is investigating Russian Government communications with Trump campaign, but there is no evidence of those communications resulting in any kind of collusion, at least. That is a New York Times report.

So these stories have been dropped in: Heat Street, McClatchy, The New York Times.

Here is another New York Times report. The Obama administration allowed the NSA to share globally intercepted personal communications with 16 other Federal agencies without a warrant. That, I believe, refers to a January directive that came from Barack Obama that opened up the ability to communicate between the intelligence agencies so that they could share classified information among them, rather than compartmentalize and share that information on a need-to-know basis. That is item number five.

Item number six, the Obama administration officials tried to spread information to media showing Russian involvement to help Trump and his election. That is a story that was pushed out and perpetuated. It was pushed out by, of course, the Hillary campaign and others.

So the weight of this cumulative effect of these stories is adding up.

I would add, also, that on October 31 of last year, just a little over a week before the election, Hillary Clinton sent out a tweet that said--I am trying to remember the words that she used--it was communication specialists or intelligence officials. It was a reference to experts in communications and computers and that they had identified that there were investigations going on and there were communications between the Russians and the Trump campaign.

It looked to me like that was an effort on the part of the Clinton campaign to spread these rumors that had been planted all the way along throughout the summer by Heat Street's report that there was a FISA wiretap warrant that was turned down, and by The Guardian's report of presumably the same event of a FISA warrant turned down because they didn't show that there was any activity there that was worthy of a warrant; the McClatchy report that said the FBI and other agencies are investigating Russian influence. Then you have got the two Times' reports.

Here is the third New York Times report. They reported that General Flynn talked to Russian officials about how Trump would handle Russian sanctions. This is presumably from a wiretap of the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Mr. Speaker.

Now, if that surveillance is taking place of a Russian official, a Russian Ambassador in the United States, if those activities are typical surveillance activities that would go on in most any country that had the capability, then that information is still classified. And if the conversation took place between General Flynn and the Russian Ambassador--and we all, I think, believe that it did--that conversation and the contents of it would be classified.

So how did this leakage come out to The New York Times about the phone call or calls that General Flynn may have had with the Russian Ambassador?

The leakage of that information would be a Federal felony because it is classified information, facing 10 years in a Federal penitentiary as a penalty. Yet America is hyperventilating about a tweet that Donald Trump sent out that said that Trump and Trump Tower had been hacked or wiretapped by the Obama administration. I know he said President Obama. He put the responsibility on President Obama. It is pretty easy to conclude he may have also just meant the Obama administration.

Do we think that this wiretapping is taking place?

I think so. I think the evidence, at least, of the telephone conversation between General Flynn and the Russian Ambassador is pretty strong. Since it has not been denied by General Flynn or by Vice President Pence, I am going to assert here in this Congressional Record that that took place, that it was surveilled, and that the information in the exchange, which they claim there is a transcript of the conversation, was leaked out to the press. The press didn't release the specific language that had been used but wrote the general narrative about it in much the same way that a Member of Congress might if they walked into a classified briefing, listen to the briefing, and come back and talk about their general understanding of what they saw in there rather than the specific language that was used and uttered.

I submit, Mr. Speaker, that we have at least one Federal felony that has taken place, that it likely is because of leak or leaks that came from the intelligence community. It is pretty clear that President Obama granted the authority--I don't know if I can quite say ordered-- granted the authority that all of our intelligence community, all 17 of them, could exchange classified information freely, and that vastly multiplied the number of people who had access to this information and dramatically increased the odds that there would be leakage about these communications that appear to be surveillance of--perhaps it looks like the Trump team, at least people who were on the Trump team, the Trump campaign perhaps, and that there was an effort that goes back as far as last June.

This team of the FBI and the five other intelligence organizations, agencies that are there, did they form that team in June?

It looks likely.

Did they get any real information due to lack of a FISA warrant from that point on?

We don't know, but we have got a pretty good idea that there was a FISA warrant that was approved in October and that information came out of that and maybe other sources that was leaked for the purpose of hurting this Presidency and hurting the effectiveness of then- President-elect Trump and now President Trump.

I submit that President Trump should purge from the executive branch all of the political appointees for whom there is any question about their loyalty. Any of those whose loyalty is beholden to Barack Obama, any of those who can't embrace a conservative government that is bringing us back to constitutional principles, they should all be gone. And those civil servants whose jobs are protected, there have been a good number of Obama people who have burrowed themselves into civil service jobs in order to handcuff President Trump. I say for them, when you can identify them, get a room somewhere, put them in it, pay them

their wages. They will get tired of their job over time, but the damage they will do if you let them have a desk will be far greater than what we get out of them for the paycheck we are giving them. I say purge as many as possible, Mr. President. Put those people in place who are loyal to you, who want to carry out your agenda.

Here is another news report. The Washington Post reports that U.S. investigators examined Jeff Sessions' contacts with Russian officials while he was a campaign adviser to Trump. This report from The Washington Post says that U.S. investigators examined Jeff Sessions' contacts with Russia. So he was under surveillance. He was at least under investigation, it sounds like, if this story is right. Here we have a seated United States Senator, a stellar individual.

If I were going to try to compare the character that I know Jeff Sessions is, and I look around this town, I ask: Who matches the character of Jeff Sessions?

Not many. I would say Vice President Pence, and then the list gets pretty short after that. Jeff Sessions has a very high degree of character, and he is imminently a constitutionalist, an adherent to the rule of law, a dedicated patriot, and one who makes his decisions within the bounds of the Constitution, of the law, of the rules that exist. He is a great respecter of the order of a civilized society and a terrific Attorney General.

There was no better choice that could have been reached by Donald Trump than Jeff Sessions. But here he is, subject to this kind of--at least a report that there is an investigation, Mr. Speaker. I think if I wanted to know about Jeff Sessions' activities, if I thought that it was my business, I would just ask him. When he answered the question from Senator Franken, the question was in the context of did you have any discussions with Russians with regard to any campaign activities that you might have cooperated or colluded with?

If Al Franken had asked that question precisely, then the answer would have been precise as well.

I can understand why Jeff Sessions' answer came back no, that he hadn't dealt with the Russians. I do a lot of meetings, and if I am asked a question about the context of a subject matter, I will answer within the context of that subject matter. I think that is what Jeff Sessions did. Most of the Senators--I will say all of the Senators sitting there on that committee who heard those questions asked and saw the answers of Jeff Sessions, and then they and their staff and the public, weeks went by, not a peep about anybody being concerned about the answer that Jeff Sessions gave.

Why?

Because all of those Senators sitting on that committee listening to his testimony and the other Senators who were watching that testimony either from in the room or around the Hill on C-SPAN, and their staff who were monitoring those hearings all understood that you have people from multiple countries come into your office on an irregular basis, and in a matter of months one might meet with the Greeks, the Russians, the French, the Germans, pick your country in South America or Asia. There is a constant flow of people coming through my office, and I know there is a constant flow of people from other countries coming through the offices of probably every United States Senator.

So when Jeff Sessions said that he hadn't met with the Russians within the context of discussing the campaign, which was the heart of the question asked by Senator Franken, no Senator was concerned about his answer that he hadn't met with the Russians because they understood the context within which he was answering that question. Had that not been the case, some Senator, like Chuck Schumer, would have woken up the first day instead of after they were able to gin it up and turn it into a media story, Mr. Speaker.

We have a country to save. We have an ObamaCare to repeal. We have a healthcare policy in this country that needs to be rebuilt logically by preserving our doctor-patient relationship, encouraging competition between insurance companies, letting people be in charge of the policy they want to buy, providing full deductibility, fixing the lawsuit abuse, being able to sell insurance across State lines and expand health savings accounts. All that needs to happen. I am hopeful that it can happen within the next couple of months, Mr. Speaker.

While that is going on, we need to look over at the White House and encourage this President: Purge those people from your midst who owe their loyalty to Barack Obama. They are undermining your Presidency. You have to fight the moles from within, the media from without, the George Soros-organized protesters who are on the streets of America every weekend with a different cause. They will continue this until the public gets tired of it.

Mr. Speaker, the President needs to understand that he has a lot of enemies in this country and a great big job. His ability to take on the mainstream media has been demonstrated. Now it is a little bigger hurdle that needs to happen, too. The intelligence community from within, there are a lot of good, dedicated patriots there. They need to purge those people from their midst as well who are not loyal to the United States of America and those who are working against the foreign policy agenda of this President.

We need to rebuild America. We need to make America great again. We need to restore our economy. We need to get our tax cuts done. We need to get some more regulatory reform. Let's have this robust, growing economy kicked off and see that 3, 3\1/2\, 4 percent growth that this country can do with the freedom that has been delivered to it, much of it by the pen of our new President, Donald Trump.

I am optimistic about our future, although we have our challenges in front of us, Mr. Speaker, and I urge that my colleagues step up to this task, keep it constitutional, keep it free market. Remember the individual freedom, the God-given liberty, and the legacy that we are leaving for succeeding generations. Let's get this job done and make America great again.

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

Mr. Speaker, due to traffic delay surrounding a Vice President Motorcade, I missed two votes.

Had I been present, I would have voted Yea on Roll Call No. 95 and Yea on Roll Call No. 96.

Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to be recognized to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, this great deliberative body.

To start this off, I yield to the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Fortenberry).

The answer would be a fair amount, and I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Fortenberry) for his presentation here today, his friendship, and the job he has been doing for a long time representing the eastern third of Nebraska, generally speaking.

I would point out also, Mr. Speaker, that we actually first met on the pro-life issue. As I was looking at the primary candidates that were vying for that position in eastern Nebraska, I wanted to measure their character, the content of their character, the value of their faith and their commitment to principle and planning and Constitution, but especially life. In looking at the candidates, it didn't take very long to figure that out.

I think Nebraskans have done very well with the representation that they have sent to this Congress, especially in the case of Mr. Fortenberry, who has exceeded my expectations. And I am pleased to say that here.

As the gentleman indicated, I came to the floor here this afternoon, Mr. Speaker, to speak about life, about innocent, unborn human life.

To start with, I will put it this way, Mr. Speaker. There are a series of values that we hold dear. Many of the debates here on this floor and in the committees and the various committee rooms around the Hill that we have are more or less working around the edges of the central issue. Sometimes, though, we do get to the central issue. The central issue was debated here on the floor earlier with a different piece of legislation.

When young people are growing up in America and they are listening to their parents, their teachers, other friends and relatives and schoolmates, the question will emerge--and you can't grow up in America without the question of abortion emerging; and sometimes they are counseled on one side of that question and sometimes on the other--but when I am talking to young people, I want them to shape their values around the most solid principles, as our Founding Fathers shaped the values of America around the solid moral principles.

It doesn't do to simply pass off the idea of abortion and say: I am not going to think about it; or I am going to leave it up to God to decide. He calls on us also to contemplate these things.

Our Founding Fathers wrote into the Declaration of Independence that we have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When I contemplate those words and the order of those words, often it is conflated together as equal or equivalent values as if life and the pursuit of happiness are equivalent values, with liberty in the middle of all that, and you can stir it up and no one's pursuit of happiness should be diminished by someone else's search for liberty or the exercise of their liberty or that no one's life should trump that of someone else's pursuit of happiness or liberty.

Mr. Speaker, in understanding the Declaration of Independence, the foundational document that undergirds our Constitution and the most beautiful document written in the history of the nation-state--and I believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were inspired with divine guidance, just a little bit lower standard of true than divine inspiration; a divine guidance--I believe our Founding Fathers thought deeply about that message that was coming to them from above and the words that were put down on that parchment by Thomas Jefferson.

The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were rights that were considered carefully to be prioritized in their order of what was the most important down to the least important of the three. Life came first. They didn't say right to pursuit of happiness, to liberty, to life. They didn't say right to liberty, pursuit of happiness, and then to life. They wrote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

To understand what that means, think of this. First, the definition of pursuit of happiness is understood by our Founding Fathers. Our Founding Fathers didn't see this pursuit of happiness as let's just say a tailgate party on a Saturday noon or early Saturday afternoon. It wasn't about going off to a party or sitting in your backyard with your family or doing the things we enjoy to do, enjoying sports, watching or participating; or being out on the water or down the ski slopes.

That was not imagined at all as the pursuit of happiness because they understood pursuit of happiness to be the definition of the Greek term that I pronounce eudemonia, pronounced with a Greek accent. But what it means is: in pursuit of happiness.

Happiness under the Greek understanding of the term was the whole person; to develop one's self as the whole person. That would be to develop yourself physically. As you grow into adulthood, keep yourself in shape, build your muscles up, eat healthy, sleep healthy, do the healthy things, make sure that this temple of our body is taken care of and respected and appreciated. That is the vessel through which we carry our values and are able to carry out many of the things we do in our lives.

So physical health was part of the pursuit of happiness, but also the mental development. And it is not just pursuing knowledge, not rote memorization alone, which has its value--always has, always will have-- but also the understanding of a philosophical person and an intellectually complete individual to complement the physically healthy and in-shape individual, philosophically sound, intellectually sound, but also theological sound.

That is eudemonia. That is the complete human being. That is making the most out of God's gift to us and developing ourselves physically, mentally, emotionally, theologically, and psychologically. The whole human being.

The understanding that our Founding Fathers had was that you have a right to pursue this. You have a right to develop yourself. In fact, the implication is that we have an obligation to do so. That means we have got an obligation to evaluate the moral questions in front of us with the brain that we are given and the values that we have developed and the education that we worked to earn.

That is pursuit of happiness. But that is the lowest of the three on the priority, Mr. Speaker.

The next value is liberty. With that value of liberty, there are certain things that are liberty. We take liberty with our speech. We take liberty with our religion. We take liberty with the press. We have our right to assemble and all of those things. If someone is in pursuit of happiness, they are not going to take away our rights to our liberty.

Most of our rights to liberty are wrapped up in the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment catches the most important ones early. Also, the liberty to keep and bear arms, the property rights that come along in the Fifth Amendment, the components of liberty that we have and the provisions that allow us to face a jury of our peers and no double jeopardy. Those are liberties. The liberties that are defined trump the pursuit of happiness. In other words, someone else can't take away our freedom of speech because they are in search of a good tailgate party.

We go from the lowest priority, the pursuit of happiness, to the next level up, liberty, and to the highest level up, which is the right to life. Life itself is sacred.

When I talk to young people, I ask them the question: Do you believe that human life is sacred in all of its forms?

They look around each other in the bleacher seats in the gymnasium, if it happens to be a school in that fashion, and they come to a consensus: Yes.

And I will ask them: Is your life sacred? How about the person sitting next to you, is their life sacred?

After a little while, they start to nod their heads and agree.

It is no trick question. Human life is sacred in all of its forms. Once we understand that and we accept that universal consensus that is here in this society of America, then the only other thing we have to say is: Well, if human life is sacred and we protect it with all that we have, then we need to know when life begins and we need to know when life ends.

We know that in 1973, 44 years ago, the Supreme Court came to a conclusion. Well, actually, they didn't know, but they spoke of viability and they used a vague, mushy definition of viability and trimesters, but that is not a way to define life. When you deal with something that is sacred in all of its forms, you don't use a definition that says maybe it is or maybe it isn't a life; maybe it is viable, maybe it isn't; maybe it has actually crossed this threshold of this trimester or this one or this one.

So what they ended up in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the combination of the two was abortion on demand and the person's right to life. That personhood that begins at the moment of conception is subject to the judgment of the mother, who may think that this life is inconvenient to her liberty or her pursuit of happiness.

That was when they crossed a moral line that needs to be examined by everyone in this country who goes to the polls and votes or conducts themselves in a fashion that is affected by the abortion industry itself.

So I say to them, students especially: Is human life sacred in all of its forms?

The answer comes back: Yes, it is.

And then I say: Then you have to choose a moment that life begins, and that moment, there is only one moment that we know, and that is the moment of conception. That moment of conception that life begins is a moment that I believe that God places the soul in that little being that is a full complement of a combination of the DNA of the father and the mother, the full complement of the human being, a unique human being, a unique human being that there will never be another one exactly like that little baby that is conceived.

There will never be another one. Even identical twins have their distinctions, Mr. Speaker. Mothers can tell them apart. Not always easily, but they can tell. Fathers can tell little babies apart. Even though they have got matching DNA that is exactly the same DNA, they are still unique. They are still a little bit different in certain ways. Their personalities develop in different ways, and they have physical characteristics that become more and more apparent as the years go on. There are no two human beings exactly the same. That is because God made it that way. Think of how unique this is.

There are over 7 billion people now on this planet. Our population has gone over 7 billion people. Of all the people who have gone to their graves throughout history from the beginning of time, from the Garden of Eden until today, and all the people who live on the planet, 7 billion today, and of all the people who will come, likely by the billions, into the future, there are no two faces that are the same. They sometimes look a little the same--more than a little--but there are no two faces that are the same. There are no two faces that anybody who knows them can't tell the difference.

Think how genius it is to create a species, Homo sapiens. We each have a unique visage that will never be matched again throughout the duration of time. It has never been matched before from the beginning of time, and no matter what any scientist might do in a laboratory, there is never going to be anybody exactly the same, even if the DNA matches exactly. That is a unique approach to this.

Think about this: The thing that we measure ourselves by and recognize ourselves by, our face, our visage, carries with it the package of all of the emotions and the thoughts and the expressions that bypass so much need to use the words in this very excellent language that we have.

Think of how you interact with your friends, your family, your neighbors, when you are sitting at a meeting, when you are giving facial expressions that don't require a sound. People read those facial expressions, and they react off of them.

I think of the days that I am out, as Mr. Fortenberry said, working on a crew, maybe laying pipe with my three sons, and we may not even have to speak all day long because facial expressions, a nod here and there, we know each other, we can communicate with our facial expressions, and that is enough. That is a unique thing that we have been blessed with.

Every one of us is unique. Our lives begin at the moment of conception. We can't measure and we can't prove scientifically when that moment of conception is. We just know. We know that that is when that baby, when the components of the DNA of the father and the mother come together in that fertilized egg. That is the moment of conception; that is the moment that life begins.

I would like it if we could identify scientifically, if a little bell went off and we knew, here is conception. There is a unique little life here in the womb of the mother--and, by the way, she is a mother at that moment. But we can't do that yet.

We have come a long way. When our family was born, at that time, we couldn't tell whether it was a boy or a girl, and so it was nice, in my opinion, to have a surprise on whether it is a boy or a girl. Of course, I always prayed that they would be mentally healthy and, after that, physically healthy, but never began to ask whether it should be a boy or a girl.

But today we know. We can measure if it is a boy or a girl. We can tell facial characteristics. We can see the personality of these little unborn babies in the womb. When they make faces, you can see them grimace. You can see them smile. You can see them suck their thumb. There are many, many people in this country today who have a 4-D ultrasound of one or more of their children that is taken well before they are born.

I can think of one of my district personnel who has, in his office in Sioux City, a framed picture of the ultrasound of Joseph Dean Anderson, my godson. It is there, framed, the

ultrasound of that little baby boy months before he was born. Now he is about 7 years old or so, perfect little towheaded, blond-haired kid running around, full of happiness, love, and energy. But he was first known in his mother's womb and first recognized as a family member there and his picture framed. It still is there in the office in Sioux City. He is about tall enough to see it straight on these days.

That happens all over America because we know that life begins at the moment of conception. We hold it; we cherish life as sacred to us.

These little babies are the future of America. They are God's will, and they are the future of America. Yet, nearly 60 million of them have been aborted over the years since 1973 and Roe v. Wade, nearly 60 million. Think of that, 60 million babies in 44 years. And we are watching a nation that has a birthrate now that is lower than the replacement rate.

You hear debate on this floor, Mr. Speaker, that says that we have to go to foreign countries to bring people in here to do the work that we don't have enough people to do. I don't accept that as a rational thing for a country to do in that way.

What we need in this country is we need good people to have more babies and raise them right, and yet we are missing 60 million. That doesn't include the second generation of those who were aborted in the first half of the 44 years of Roe v. Wade.

Thomas Jefferson concluded that a generation was 19 years. It is probably a little longer than that today. Generations turned over, by his estimation, in 19 years. It is just convenient for me, 44 years since Roe v. Wade, I am going to call that, divided by two, two generations, 22 years a generation. Two generations, a third of Americans, gone because of a court decision that unjustly found, unconstitutionally found, immorally found, irrationally found, and the guilt that this Nation carries for tolerating a Supreme Court decision and accepting that Supreme Court decision.

But it is not everybody in this country who carries that guilt because we have armies of pro-life workers who are out there on a daily basis doing all they can to bridge the gap for, let's say, a mother who is in a crisis and can't care for the baby that is on the way; the crisis pregnancy centers that are there; the lives that have been saved by the thousands and thousands by the pro-life workers, the lives that have been saved by the inspiration that comes from seeing hundreds of thousands of pro-life marchers come to this city and make that march from around the Washington Monument on up to the Supreme Court and to the west side of the Supreme Court to plead for justice for those who are voiceless in the unborn.

Well, Mr. Speaker, it is time for this Congress to address this. It is time for Congress to move along the issue. And so because we cannot medically prove when a conception begins, we believe profoundly that personhood begins at the moment of conception, and personhood needs to be protected in all of its forms. The closest we can get to verifying that personhood, that conception, is the measure of the heartbeat. We all know that a beating heart is life. When the heart stops beating, life ends.

Now, we can detect a heartbeat as early as 16 days from conception, and often the number is published to be 18 days from conception, Mr. Speaker. It may not always be detectible in every pregnancy that early, but it is entirely detectible early on in the pregnancy.

So I have introduced legislation, Mr. Speaker, to protect these innocent babes, these babes that can't speak for themselves, that can't cry out for their own mercy, but they are already formed in their mother's womb, and the unique individual that grows from the matching of those two DNAs. And when that heart starts to beat, a physician can detect that heartbeat, when they can detect the heartbeat, we need to protect the baby. With the understanding that when a heartbeat can be detected the baby must be protected, I have drafted and introduced legislation that is H.R. 490, Mr. Speaker.

Now, this bill is titled the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017. It makes a lifesaving stride in enshrining the rights, the rights of the unborn, into U.S. law. It ensures that no child for whom a heartbeat is detectible is aborted unless the life of the child's mother is endangered in fact by a physical disorder, by a physical illness, or by a physical injury.

Any abortionist who performs an abortion under this legislation, H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017, any abortionist who performs an abortion in spite of a detectible heartbeat and outside of the exceptions that I have defined, which is for a physical disorder, a physical illness, or a physical injury, any physician who performs an abortion outside of those exceptions would be subject to a fine or imprisonment--and that is for a period up to 5 years--or both. This is a serious piece of legislation, and it needs to be, because life itself is the number one thing that is sacred here on this planet, especially in this country.

This legislation, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017, will require all physicians before conducting an abortion to detect the heartbeat of the unborn child; and that means they have to maintain the records of their endeavor to detect a heartbeat, and if a heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected. That is the center of this law.

Ever since Roe v. Wade, which was unconstitutionally decided in 1973, 44 years ago, these 60 million babies--almost 60 million babies that have been ended by the abortion industry--have received a rubber stamp from the courts, from the Federal Government, not from this Congress and not from the States. The Supreme Court overrules the efforts in the States to protect innocent, unborn human life. The Supreme Court overrules this Congress to protect unborn human life, and we have been trying to find ways around that decision ever since 1973. But I have introduced the bill, and it will protect the lives of the voiceless innocents.

Then to make a point now, Mr. Speaker, there are probably some people who are thinking this is a little bit too big of a leap for where we are on the topic today. I would submit that it is not, that we have been working too patiently with what I will call incrementalism. When I came to this Congress more than a decade ago, I had been, at that time, already working to try to help pass legislation that banned partial- birth abortions, and the Supreme Court had found the partial-birth abortion ban to be unconstitutional based on a couple of things. One of them was the Supreme Court ruled that it was necessary to save the life of the mother or the health of the mother, and the other one was that Congress hadn't defined the act precisely enough.

So we went to work in the Committee on the Judiciary. I want to thank Congressman Steve Chabot of Ohio for taking the lead on this issue. We held hearing after hearing, and Congress had findings that a partial- birth abortion was never medically necessary to save the life of the mother; and that is with much, much testimony of experts before the committee for a long period of time definitively concluding such, and then the act itself was more precisely defined.

Then it went back before the courts, and each of the Federal districts that heard the case, three of them, simultaneously, all of them turned it down as unconstitutional. But it went to the Supreme Court, where the ban on partial-birth abortion was upheld. It has saved some lives but has put a small dent in this huge 60 million aborted babies industry.

We began to go to work on this in other ways. We have legislation that is introduced before this Congress that bans sex-selected abortions.

We know that there are mothers and fathers that will use the ultrasound to determine the sex of the baby. If they want a little baby boy and it is a girl, sometimes they will abort that little girl and try again for a boy. We know this is happening in places like China, where they have had, up until recently, the one-child policy, and the proportion of boys to girls is way out of whack in China because they are aborting little baby girls because they would prefer having a boy.

That happens in America, too, but not as statistically evident. It is immoral to do that. That piece of legislation has 77 percent support. That is the strongest support we have, statistically, for abortion legislation that

exists, as far as I know, in this Congress.

Then we have pain-capable legislation, little babies that can feel the pain of abortion when that needle with a saline solution is stuck into--Mr. Speaker, I am just going to bypass the details of how this functions. Babies can feel pain. They can experience joy; they can experience pleasure; and they can experience pain. We have legislation to prohibit abortion from the time that we can determine that that baby feels the pain of being aborted. But that is a definition of pain, not a definition of life.

If this is a unique life, as I have described at length here, then this unique life must be protected. We don't say this unique life which has this soul--and God put in this soul from the moment of conception-- doesn't deserve to be protected unless they feel pain. What we are saying is it bothers our conscience too much to have a baby killed that can feel the pain and suffering.

I support these other two pieces of legislation that I have described: the ban on sex-selective abortion and the ban on pain- capable abortion. But, Mr. Speaker, that doesn't get at the heart of this.

The heart of this is this: sacred human life. Human life, sacred in all of its forms, begins at the moment of conception. We need legislation to protect that personhood. And when we can define and clearly detect a heartbeat, a heartbeat in a baby from as early as 16 days, we must protect the life of that innocent baby.

So that, Mr. Speaker, is my conviction, my deep conviction, my very profoundly held conviction. But I wonder: What does the rest of the country think?

Sometimes I find myself out there right without a majority. Sometimes they will say: Well, you didn't have a majority because you weren't right. And this one, I have no doubt, Mr. Speaker, human life is sacred in all of its forms.

So we ask the question in polling across America: What do the American people think of the proposal to ban abortion once a heartbeat can be detected? Mr. Speaker, the polling that we have out there is very carefully done, and I am going to give you the numbers first. This is the general number that asks the question, if the heartbeat is detected, the baby is protected, and here is how the polling came together. Sixty-nine percent agree with the position that I have just taken here in the bill that I have introduced, which is H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017.

The data contained in this polling report are responses to a question that was commissioned by Faith2Action. That is in a Barna Group OmniPoll. 1,002 interviews were conducted of U.S. adults nationwide. The sampling error for this 1,002 interviews is plus or minus 3.1 percent. That is about as accurate as you get with polling. That means that there is a 95 percent confidence level that these numbers are right.

The data is weighted in the national distribution of U.S. adults. They took minimal statistical weighting and they used it to calibrate the samples--so, of known population percentages--and it is in relation to the demographic variables of age, gender. I bet it is age, sex, education, and region, so that it is scientifically applied. It is a poll that was run from January 19 until January 27. This is pretty fresh information, about as fresh as it gets.

These interviews were conducted over a majority landline--60 percent or so off landlines and 40 percent off cell phones or other mobile devices, so that we got a good cross section of people throughout that. They were conducted by experienced, trained interviewers. They were supervised at all times. They were monitored. They were computer- assisted telephone interviewing to make sure that the balance of this thing was as good and as objective as it could get, Mr. Speaker.

So this polling result says, among U.S. adults nationwide, a slight majority, 55 percent, agree strongly that, if a doctor is able to detect the heartbeat of an unborn baby, that baby should be legally protected--that is the core of the question that was asked--and 18 percent disagree either strongly or somewhat with this.

So when I look at the numbers here, 69 percent overall are packaged up within the agree strongly component--fifty-five percent. Now, that is landslide in a political election, 55 percent. And this will be a landslide in the polling that says 55 percent strongly agree that, if a doctor can detect a heartbeat, the unborn baby should be protected by law, a 55 percent landslide majority, Mr. Speaker. And then you add to that the 14 percent who agree somewhat with this.

So, from a general agreement standpoint, 69 percent, or as close as you can get and not exactly hit the number, 7 in 10 Americans say let's protect those lives of those innocent, unborn babies when you can hear their heartbeat.

The people who disagree strongly are only 10 percent. And then those who disagree somewhat are another 8 percent; 18 percent disagreeing on the other side, but only 10 percent disagree strongly.

So 55 percent say they strongly support a ban on abortion, once a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected, and only 10 percent disagree with that strongly. I am going to say that they are probably some of the hardcore leftists that I am engaged in debate with on almost a daily basis with here, Mr. Speaker. But you can divide 10 percent into 55 percent and say, for everyone out here who says we should not protect that innocent, unborn baby whose heart is beating, for everyone who says that, there are five and a half Americans who say we have to protect, we have got an obligation to, and they believe strongly that we protect the lives of those innocent, unborn babies with a heartbeat.

That is a huge majority on the side of life. I am very gratified to know that that is the position of the American people, with only a 3.1 percent margin of error in a scientific poll that I am happy now is part of the Record in the United States Congress.

I would say there is another way to analyze this poll. I am looking at this one that says there are 13 percent undecided, Mr. Speaker. So you have 69 percent who agree altogether, and you have got 18 percent that disagree altogether, and 13 percent that neither agree nor disagree. Now, I always wonder, when we are doing polling, why do we measure those without an opinion? If they don't agree or disagree, that is about the definition of ambivalent. They call that mox nix where I come from.

So if I take that out of there and calculate it the other way and put it together, you add together 69 percent and 18 percent, and then you say what percentage are those that agree, well, it is actually 79.3 percent say we should not abort a baby whose heart is beating, and 20.7 percent say, well, it would be okay with them if we did. That is another way of measuring this. And that is a 4-to-1 measure--5.5-to-1, 4-to-1 Americans are ready to protect innocent, unborn human life.

Mr. Speaker, think what this means. Think what it means that we are a society that seems to have plugged our ears to the understanding that life begins at conception. I have known this for a long time. It wasn't a mystery to me.

I see the beautiful little baby going out now. Mr. Speaker, that is a very gratifying thing to see from down here, parents raising their children right.

But from my standpoint, I have this memory. Marilyn and I were married in 1972. I remember sitting there in card club, and the discussion at that time was we have all these babies being born in Central America and why do they have these babies if they can't feed them? Why don't they just abort them? I remember that discussion around card club on a Friday night.

It didn't really trigger me at the time because we hadn't been very far into the abortion debate. I hadn't thought about it very much. We weren't parents, and Marilyn wasn't pregnant at the time. We were just married.

So I remember that discussion though, and it just didn't hit me. It just kind of went through. I don't even know if I engaged in it. I just remember that somebody at the table said, well, if they can't feed them, why don't they just have an abortion?

Well, not very long after that our first child was born. And I picked up that little baby--actually, he wasn't little. He was just a little bit short of 9 pounds. But I looked at him, and I

was in such awe of the miracle of that little boy, that little baby boy named David. There was an aura about him. He was a product of Marilyn and me from our love. And there he is, a miraculous little child in my hands, warm and squirmy and soft and beautiful and a miracle. It is different if it is somebody else's child, I suppose, because it hadn't hit me like that. But there was an aura about this little baby, and you could have convinced me he was the second coming of Jesus Christ, himself.

And I looked at him and I thought, how could anyone take this little miracle's life? How could they kill this baby now? He is minutes old. How could they take his life the minute before he is born? No one could do that--well, almost no one. Could they take his life the minute after he was born? Or could they take it the minute before he was born? Or could someone take his life an hour before he was born or a day? Or could they take it a week before he was born or a month or one trimester or two trimesters or 8 months or 36 weeks or 37 weeks before he was born? What changed? What changed throughout that time?

In a matter of minutes, it all fell into place for me. From the moment of conception he was formed in his mother's womb, and from that point on he is growing on the genetic configuration that he is, blessed with a soul placed in him at that moment. That little boy grew from that point on, and now he is the father of three of my grandchildren. They are all miracles to me. And our other sons are all miracles to me, and our other grandchildren are all miracles to me.

But I can't conceive of doing anything except sacrificing, if I needed to, my life to protect them because they are unique human beings, worthy of all of the protection that society can give them, just like every American is; and, in fact, everybody on this planet is seen in God's eyes.

There has to be a moment that our lives begin. We have to choose that because we can't have an immoral position coming out of law that says, well, it is up to the mother to decide whether this baby is going to have an opportunity to fill its lungs full of free air and scream for its own mercy. They can't do that from the moment of conception, but they can do that from the moment of birth. And if we could hear that inner womb scream at that moment of abortion, we would plug our ears in terror and fright at the crime that abortion is.

So it is our moral obligation to protect all human life from the moment of conception until natural death. That is what this bill does, H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017.

The polling that we have here says clearly that the American people agree. And it is not only, Mr. Speaker, the American people--well, it is actually in the polling. But I separated them out into categories so we could understand how people think about this and how they think about it from the categories of being Republicans and Democrats and no party or Independents.

As you can see, among the Republicans, 86 percent agree that, if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. That is 86 to 6 percent disagree. Eighty-six percent of Republicans, that is about as high a number as you see on anything.

I should run a little measure sometime when you ask, does the Sun come up in the east. That is probably about only a 97 percent issue. But it is 86 percent want to protect a baby with a heartbeat-- Republicans.

Democrats, still that landslide majority of 55 percent of Democrats want to protect a baby from the moment a heartbeat can be detected--25 percent say no, 55 percent say yes. It is more than a 2-to-1 support among Democrats to support the language that is in this bill for H.R. 490, the Heartbeat Protection Act.

And then when you go among Independents, they are a little more pro- life than Democrats are. I shouldn't be surprised at that. Sixty-one percent of Independents want to protect a baby from the moment that their heartbeat can be detected.

This is a huge issue for America. America is not yet informed enough about this legislation that is available. And sometimes we get stuck in a rut and we decide, well, we have been working on the sex-selective legislation or the pain-capable legislation, or we have been trying to get Planned Parenthood defunded--which this Congress must do--and we need to do it perpetually, not just annually.

Those are all things that we need to be working on, but it is time now for this Congress to swing for the fences, to move legislation that is based upon a clear and distinct principle of life. If that heartbeat of that little baby's heart, that innocent little baby can be detected, we have a moral obligation to protect that baby.

Then how do we measure the end of life? And how has it been from time immemorial? When the heart stops? When the heart can no longer beat?

Yes, we measure brain waves and we do other things. But when that heart stops and it can't be started and we can't sustain life, we call that death. And when an abortion is committed, that little baby's heart is beating. And you know that the abortion stops a beating heart. That is on posters by the Knights of Columbus and others all over this country. Abortion stops a beating heart.

We need to protect the lives of all of those little babies with beating hearts. We can detect them now with the ultrasound and the science that we have. It is time for this Congress to move.

In our March for Life here that I mentioned a little earlier, Mr. Speaker, when we have hundreds of thousands of people that come out here and gather on The Mall and then march to the Supreme Court building to plead for the court to protect innocent, unborn human life, what is happening is America is waking up. America is feeling the guilt, and we pray for the mothers who have had abortions. But America is also understanding that there is a life that begins at the moment of conception.

So of all of the families that have first bonded with this little unborn baby by seeing the ultrasound--sometimes by framing it, as exists in my Sioux City office for Joseph Dean Anderson's ultrasound-- but millions of those cases across the country are raising the awareness of the American people, and it is not just the mother and the father that see that ultrasound.

They see it in realtime, and they hear the sound for real. It is not just a picture that goes up on the wall that is framed, but it is a living, breathing, moving organism where you can see that innocent little baby squirming and moving around inside in the amniotic fluid, and you can see the expressions on their face and the movement that is there. That this is a real human being and you want to get your hands on that little baby and hold them and love them, but you have to wait until they grow enough that you can do that.

But family after family has this, and little brothers and sisters are shown that ultrasound and they say: This is your little brother or little sister that we expect on such and such date--we have become pretty close with that date. And so kids, brothers and sisters, the siblings are recognizing their brother or their sister, acknowledging that they are an innocent unborn human being well before they are born. And they grow up knowing this.

Now, for the 44 years since Roe v. Wade, we have millions of millions of pro-life people and millions and millions of anti-abortion people who understand this. They grew up understanding this. And no one can any longer tell them that it is just a blob of a tissue and that it is not alive.

I recall a World War II veteran, one who I admired and respected. He has passed away now, as many of them have. His name was Vic Lunsman. We were having this discussion while we were talking about building terraces and tiling, and he said: When the pro-abortion people say that this baby is not alive--if this baby is not alive, why then do you have to kill it? Why do you have to kill it?

I thought he put that into a package about as compressed as it could be. We know that abortion ends an innocent life of an innocent human being that is created in the same image that we are recreated in, in God's image. And now we know from 16 days on that--it is not just that we know that there is a heartbeat, but we can hear it. We can hear the beat, beat, beat, beat, beat of

that little heart. And to think of that little heart struggling for life; to think of that baby squirming to try to avoid the abortionist; to think of that baby feeling the pain; to think of that baby being aborted because the mother or the father wanted a boy or a girl; or because somebody told them that that baby wasn't going to be exactly perfect, none of that measures up against innocent, unborn human life, sacred life, that life that we have to protect from the moment of conception to natural death.

That is what is wrapped up in this heartbeat bill. And if we had the science to prove the moment of conception, I would be standing here with a moment of conception bill. We don't have that science today, but we do have the science of detecting a heartbeat.

And we know the sound of a beating heart is the sound of life. And if you can detect a heartbeat, if you can hear that heart beating in any of us, you know that person is alive; you know there is a spirit within us; you know that our soul is still within our body; and you know that there is a hope for us--at least whoever that might be whose heart we are listening to--to get up and to move about, to live, love, laugh, learn, reproduce, and contribute, to glorify this Earth in a way that we are challenged to do.

Yet, 60 million babies have been denied that opportunity and have been denied that gift of life.

What might they have done? What might they have done for America? What might they have done for the world? How many Presidents, how many Mother Teresas, how many Billy Grahams? How many people have lost their life before they ever had a chance to breathe and fight for it that might have solved the problems that we are facing today here in this United States Congress?

We can't deny that potential. We carry that guilt today, but the best we can do is end it as soon as we can end it. And we would end 90 to 95 percent of the abortions in America with H.R. 490 the Heartbeat Protection Act.

Mr. Speaker, I want to remind you here in this Congress that this is a bill that has strong support in the polling that we have rolled out here. Eighty-six percent of Republicans say that if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby should be protected. Fifty-five percent of Democrats agree that if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. Sixty-one percent of Independents say that if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. And of those who oppose it--at least those who oppose it vigorously--only 6 percent of Republicans, 25 percent of Democrats--and I am going to suspect that a fair amount of these 25 percent of Democrats, Mr. Speaker, are more for political reasons and that they wouldn't be able to sustain themselves in a moral debate on the topic. I think that may or may not be the case for the 27 percent of no parties.

But to put this back into summary, Mr. Speaker, here are easier numbers to remember: 69 percent of the American people, with only a 3.1 percent margin of error, believe that if a heartbeat can be detected, the baby is protected. That is 7 in 10 Americans that take that stand. And that is one of the strongest pieces of support you can get for any bill that would ever come to this floor or any discussion that we ever have if you get up to that level of 7 out of 10, and only 18 percent disagree vigorously.

So, Mr. Speaker, I hope that the people that listen in on this conversation between us have contemplated the central points that I have put into this debate and this discussion here this evening, and I hope they have thought about the principles that are involved. I hope they are able to carry this message along to their children and grandchildren, and into our schools and our classrooms, our churches and our synagogues all across this land, this profound belief that if Americans share; that we believe that human life is sacred and it needs to be then sacred in all of its forms.

The second question is: At what moment does life begin?

There is only one moment in the full development of a full human being, and that is the moment of conception. The closest we can scientifically get to proof of that conception is the sound and the detection of that heartbeat, which we all recognize to be the sound of life. That sound of life, that beat of that heart cannot be extinguished by a moral human being who believes that a human life is sacred in all of its forms, and knows that it begins at the moment of conception. And then we can measure the heartbeat and protect that baby from the moment that that heart has begun to beat.

Any doctor that fails to follow the directive in this legislation, in H.R. 490, any doctor that fails to search for a heartbeat and conducts an abortion without--or conducts an abortion in spite of that beating heart is facing a fine and a prison term up to 5 years, or both.

That is a respect for human life. By the way, we hold the mother harmless. She is also protected from any touch of this law. It is only the abortionist that is the subject of this piece of legislation that I have introduced. But it aims to protect human life from at least the moment that the heartbeat can be detected; the baby is protected. And this will gain momentum as we go forward.

The American people will understand what this means. I am hopeful that across our churches, across our schools, across our families, they begin to talk about the Heartbeat Protection Act of 2017. And our little kids that grow up, as mine did--having once seen the film, that families grow up respecting the heartbeat of innocent, unborn human life.

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