Restoring Respect for America's Rule of Law

Floor Speech

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Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my privilege to have the opportunity to address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

I listened to a lot of discussion here with which I disagree, of course; but I keep hearing this term ``do your job'' that seems to echo out of the left constantly. ``Do your job.''

One of the arguments is that the President of the United States has a constitutional right to nominate to the Supreme Court. He does. That is pretty clear in the Constitution. However, the Senate determines what advice is, and the Senate determines that which is consent, and no nomination to the Federal court can move forward without the Senate's advice and consent. It is the Senate's job then to evaluate the President's nominations, and they can do so with or without hearings, with or without interviews. The Senate writes its own rules just like the House writes its own rules, Mr. Speaker. I would like to put this back in perspective here.

We have a lameduck President who has made appointments to the Supreme Court, which seems to believe that the Constitution means what they want it to mean, and they want to read it to say what they want it to say rather than what it actually says and rather than what it actually was understood to mean at the time of its ratification.

When you have Justices on the Supreme Court who embody that belief, who act on that belief, then we here who take an oath to support and defend the Constitution--and that is, actually, all of us here in the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker, and everyone in the United States Senate for that matter--recognize that, if we are going to support and defend the Constitution and encourage the nomination and the advice and the consent and the confirmation of the Senate and encourage then a Presidential appointment to the Supreme Court of someone, we know the President is incapable of nominating anyone to the Supreme Court who actually believes what the Constitution says and what it was understood to mean at the time of its ratification. He has demonstrated that in the past with his appointments to the Court. He will demonstrate that again.

We have a Constitution to preserve, protect, defend, and support and defend, so our obligation then is to say: Mr. President, you are a lameduck. Let's stick with the tradition; let's stick with the practice; let's stick with the statements that have been made by a number of Democrats in the past when the shoe was on the other foot. People like Joe Biden and Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer all would agree with Senator Chuck Grassley: no hearing, no confirmation in the Senate, no vote in the Judiciary Committee, and no vote on the floor of the Senate for this lameduck President's appointments because we have a Constitution that has got to be restored, and instead of being restored, it would be destroyed by another Presidential appointment.

We were sitting with a deadlocked Court that sat 4\1/2\ to 4\1/2\ out of a 9-member Court, and you could kind of toss a coin on whether you would get a decision that came down on what the Constitution said and what the law said or what they preferred the policy was. There are a couple of bad examples of that. This is even with the stellar Justice Scalia's sitting on the bench not even a year ago on June 24 and June 25.

On the 24th of June, the Court came down with a decision in King v. Burwell, in which the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court decided that he could write words into ObamaCare that didn't exist. They were not passed by this Congress--not by either Chamber of this Congress, as a matter of fact. It wasn't a phrase that was conferenced out or was something that was contested. It was never in the bill. It was the phrase that read, ``or Federal Government.'' Had that component been in ObamaCare, then the Federal Government could have gone into the States and established the exchanges in the States that refused to establish exchanges to comply with the suggestion that came from this Congress, by the way, by hook, by crook, by legislative shenanigans, just to quote some Democrats who lamented at the methodology they had to go through to push ObamaCare down the throats of the American people.

In any case, the law never enabled the Federal Government to establish exchanges in the States, and the Constitution doesn't allow that authority. In my opinion, there is no enumerated power for the Federal Government to create exchanges for health insurance policies within the States; but the Supreme Court ruled with the majority opinion, which was written by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, that they could add words into ObamaCare. Where it reads that the States may establish exchanges, they added that the States or Federal Government may establish exchanges. They made it up, and they wrapped themselves in the cloak of constitutional authority in Marbury v. Madison and in a whole series of, presumably, precedent cases along the line. That was June 24, on Thursday.

That would kick the breath out of your gut to hear that, if you are a constitutionalist, and it would bring you to a sad state of mourning. You would lay your head down on the pillow at night, having trouble sleeping, thinking: What am I going to do tomorrow? I couldn't react today. What am I going to do tomorrow? Lord, wake me up with an idea on how to preserve our Constitution.

The Supreme Court of the United States believes that they can write law when here, in Article I of our Constitution, Mr. Speaker, it reads: ``All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.'' That is here, in the House and the Senate. Article I, which are the first words of our Constitution, reads: ``all legislative powers''; but the Supreme Court, wrapped in the cloak of Marbury v. Madison and their imagination of what ``precedence'' and ``stare decisis'' might mean to them decides that they can write words into the law. A Supreme Court writing law.

Then the next morning--that morning that I was hopeful that I would wake up with an idea on how to address a Supreme Court that has overreached--there came the next decision at 9 my time, 10 D.C. time. It was the decision of Obergefell, in which the Supreme Court created a new command in the Constitution. Not just discovered a right that never existed--they manufactured a command.

There is no right in the Constitution for a same-sex marriage. There is no reference in there at all. There is not one single Founding Father who would have ever accepted an idea that they had founded a nation that embodied within our Declaration or our ratified Constitution or the subsequent amendments that there was some right, let alone a command, to a same-sex marriage. That is a completely manufactured--not just a right but a command--by the Supreme Court of the United States.

I have some history with this. The Supreme Court of the State of Iowa did the same thing to Iowans in 2009. I sat in the legislature and was an author of the Defense of Marriage Act in about 1998.

One of the pieces of debate was why do we need to bother to do this. Yes, it would make sense if marriage were threatened. But it was so far beyond the pale that why would we bother to do this. We saw litigation coming in Hawaii at that period of time that was trying to force same-sex marriage on America.

We wrote--and I was one of the authors of it--the Defense of Marriage Act and put it into Iowa law. And from 1998, 11 years later, the Supreme Court of the State of Iowa created a command for same-sex marriage in Iowa.

Iowans rose up and threw three of them off the bench the following election in November of 2010 not because of the policy decision, but because they had not kept their oath of office to support and defend the Constitution.

They are obligated to read and understand and believe the Constitution and then issue their judgments based upon the law, the text of the law, and, as an ancillary component of this, the intent of the legislature itself.

Because, after all, the legislature is the voice of the people. The judges are not. They are unelected. They are appointed for life. They are unaccountable.

So there it was on June 25, 2015, on Friday, that the Supreme Court manufactured a command for same-sex marriage. Now, this is appalling to me, Mr. Speaker, because I can read this Constitution and understand what it means. I could read the precedent cases along the way that have flowed from Marbury on down to today.

It is no longer possible to look at this Supreme Court and discern what a likely decision of the Court might be by studying the text of the Constitution and the text of the law because we have a Court that will make it up as they go along, write law as they go, and discover what they would call a new right in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, equal protection under the law. There is equal protection already. There has long been equal protection.

That amendment was about making sure that babies who were born to the newly freed slaves post-Civil war would be American citizens and they would enjoy all of the rights and all of the privileges of being a citizen of the United States. A person that enjoyed personhood in good standing, that is what the--the 13th Amendment ended slavery, and the 14th Amendment guaranteed equal rights.

Now this Court has twisted it into a command that there is not a difference between a man and a woman when it comes to joining them together in matrimony. Well, there is a difference. It has been husband and wife in every one of these States until such time as the activists got busy.

Those are the kinds of things that, if the States want to establish same-sex marriage, so be it. That is the voice of the people. It is constitutional, and it fits the structure of our United States Constitution, along with the various State constitutions and the structure of the rule of law.

But if a court wants to manufacture a new right, let alone a new command, that is wrong. And this Congress ought to speak up. We need a President that will appoint Justices to the Supreme Court that will rule on the text of the Constitution, its original meaning, and on the understanding of what the text of that Constitution says.

So I would back up to the King v. Burwell decision, Mr. Speaker, and add this for the benefit of those folks that are listening in. And maybe there are some staff at the Supreme Court that are listening.

If you discover a law, if it is a law like ObamaCare that comes before the Supreme Court and you the read the text of that and it doesn't include ``or Federal Government'' and you believe that Congress wanted the Federal Government to be able to establish the exchanges or intended to write that into the law, you don't get to just write it in and say that is what they really meant. You have to remand it back to Congress and tell us: This is what the law says.

So, therefore, if Congress wants the law to say something different, we have to amend it here in the House and the Senate and get a Presidential signature on it. That is the constitutional structure of this government that we have, Mr. Speaker.

It is a bit frustrating for me to listen to the dialogue otherwise that the Senate is not doing their job because they withhold a Presidential appointment when you have a President that has proven that he is not going to put up an appointment that will protect our Constitution.

This is the time we must defend our Constitution. We must nominate and elect a President of the United States who will make those appointments to the Supreme Court, who believe the Constitution means what it says.

Mr. Speaker, I didn't actually come here to talk about that. That is my rebuttal to what I have listened to for the last 40 minutes or so. Immigration

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Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I came here to talk about the rule of law, for sure. Part of this is stimulated by an immigration hearing that we had yesterday in the House Judiciary's Immigration and Border Security Subcommittee.

This is the type of hearing that I have listened to too many times. It was one of the hardest hearings I have sat through in my time here in this Congress, Mr. Speaker.

This was a hearing that had witnesses, such as Sheriff Jenkins from Frederick County, Maryland, who has been enforcing immigration law and standing up for the rule of law.

He has been prudently using the legal and justifiable evidence that he had before him, and he has been criticized for his effectiveness by the people that don't want to enforce the law. He is a good witness, Sheriff Jenkins.

Additionally, we had witnesses from two families that were suffering tragically. One of them was the mother of Joshua Wilkerson. Her name is Laura Wilkerson. She has testified before the Judiciary Committee in the past at least once.

I have met her at an immigration event in Richmond, Virginia, on another occasion and listened to the tragic, tragic story of her son, Joshua, who was essentially abducted from his school--he was about a sophomore in high school or so--and hauled outside of town where he was beaten mercilessly and bludgeoned and finally murdered.

The perpetrator, an illegal alien who law enforcement had encountered and released onto the streets of America, who had no business being in America in the first place and who law enforcement already had picked up at least once--this illegal alien beat this boy to death.

Then he went and bought gasoline and burned his body. He hauled his body out and poured gasoline on it and burned Joshua Wilkerson's body. Then he went and took a shower and went to a movie, as if it was just another day in the life of.

Well, Mr. Speaker, it was another day in the life of America and Americans. It was another life lost to an illegal criminal alien who was unlawfully present in America and who had no business to be here, one who had been encountered by law enforcement officers in the past, one whom I believe ICE declined to pick up and place into removal proceedings. This happens every day in this country. It happens hundreds of times in this country each year.

These incidents of illegal aliens that are arrested and turned loose on the street because the President has this idea of prioritization or prosecutorial discretion are costing lives in America. They are costing, in the end, thousands of lives in America.

It was a sad, sad story told by Laura Wilkerson yesterday. She had the courage and the heart to come here and share her story with us and to place that awful, brutal, ghastly memory again into her mind's eye and pour that forth into the Congressional Record so that some of us will soak that up and be mobilized to do something more, to do something more to resist the President's policy of amnesty, de facto amnesty, amnesty by executive edict, that has been part and parcel of the Obama policy since the beginning of his time here in office, and it has been getting worse and worse every month.

I thank God for Laura Wilkerson. I ask God to bless the life and the memory and the soul of Joshua Wilkerson, who has paid a tremendously high price because we have an ideological President who, I would say to the other side of the aisle, is not doing his job. In fact, he is ordering law enforcement officers not to do their job.

Federal law requires that, when immigration law enforcement officers encounter an individual who is unlawfully present in the United States, ``he shall be placed in removal proceedings.'' That is the law.

Our Border Patrol officers are told that, if you are here to enforce the law and you are determined to do so, you better get yourself another job. They have become the welcome wagon on the southern border.

Now, most anybody that crosses that border and makes it across the Rio Grande River or across the land border that stretches from Texas all the way across through New Mexico, Arizona, California, to the Pacific Ocean knows, if you just claim asylum, you can be a refugee and this Federal Government will roll out the welcome wagon.

Former Member of Congress Michele Bachmann and I stood on the banks of the Rio Grande River at Roma, Texas, here a summer and a half or so ago and watched as they inflated a raft on the other side of the river, two coyotes.

It was a fairly good size raft. They helped a lady into that raft on a Sunday afternoon in broad daylight exactly at the shift change for the Border Patrol.

They helped a pregnant lady into the raft. She had two little bags of her property. They brought that raft across the river, brought it up to the shoreline under the eyes of the city police and the Border Patrol, but it was shift change.

One of the coyotes got out of the raft while the other one stabilized it. They helped the pregnant lady out of the raft and onto U.S. shores and then handed her two little ditty bags. He then got back into the raft.

The two coyotes went back across the river, deflated the raft, folded it up, put it in the trunk of their car. It was a car that we had watched go around and around over there, knowing that it was a coyote car because they recognized it from the U.S. side of the river.

The lady stood there. She and her unborn baby and her two ditty bags were waiting for the Border Patrol to show up. It takes a little longer during the shift change, but they show up, no doubt. I didn't follow this case any further, and they would have preferred that I didn't.

Here is what I will predict happened: She applied for asylum, the baby is now born, and the baby is an American citizen. She is the parent of an anchor baby.

Well, that is the kind of person that Barack Obama has granted a de facto, at least a temporary, amnesty to for the Deferred Action for Parents of--I keep wanting to tell you what that word means to me, but the parents of Americans is what the President would like to call it-- Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, DAPA.

Well, I watched one of those parents of Americans--a parent now--come across the border in an inflatable raft with two coyotes. They got paid something to do that. I don't know how much.

Now the President has issued the edict that we grant this de facto permit, this amnesty, for the parents of anchor babies to be staying free in the United States.

That suspends the rule of law. It defies the rule of law. It defies the very law, the specified law, itself.

That case was heard before the Supreme Court this week, Mr. Speaker. The question is: Does the President have prosecutorial authority, prosecutorial discretion?

Well, the precedents along prosecutorial discretion--and I don't know that the Supreme Court has ever heard and ruled on a case of prosecutorial discretion. I believe they have not.

But the precedents that are out there in the lower courts and the practice has been that, if a chief executive officer can project his policy through his subordinates, they have to pick and choose which cases they will prosecute.

Well, when they do that, that is called prosecutorial discretion. It has to be on an individual basis only, and that is by the words of the former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who testified before the Judiciary Committee to that extent.

In the first Morton memo that brought out this prosecutorial discretion, it creates four different categories or groups of people.

So they are utilizing categories or groups of people, declaring it to be prosecutorial discretion, when, in fact, it is not prosecutorial discretion because it applies to groups of people. It created four different groups of people.

That is the story of Joshua Wilkerson.

The witness sitting next to Laura Wilkerson is Michelle Root of Modale, Iowa. Michelle Root is the grieving mother of a 21-year-old daughter who was a 4.0 student at Bellevue University.

She wanted to become a law enforcement investigator. She had the best grades that you could possibly have, living and loving life. She had graduated and enjoyed the graduation ceremonies the day before when an illegal, criminal alien, drunk-driving perpetrator, ran her down and rear-ended her in the street and killed Sarah Root.

Sarah Root was a 4.0 student with the world ahead of her, wanting to contribute to this country, to life, to society, living and loving life. Her life was abruptly ended by a criminal alien who had been encountered by law enforcement before whose immigration attorneys knew him.

Two of them have been quoted in the newspaper at this point. He had been released. He had been released onto the streets where he now had three times the blood alcohol content allowable by law, drag racing in the streets, killed Sarah Root. Her mother, Michelle, told the story yesterday of her daughter, whom she loved so deeply, and all through the rest of her life and her family's life, they will carry this hole, this ache in their heart that didn't need to be.

Sarah Root would be alive today if the President had done his job, if law enforcement had been allowed to do their job, if ICE had responded when local law enforcement called them, and if ICE--and on top of that, sometimes ICE issues a detainer, and local law enforcement releases them from a sanctuary city.

This is mixed up both ways. We have ICE, who is prohibited from doing its job, who sometimes won't when they want to; local law enforcement who won't cooperate with ICE because ICE sent out a letter a year-and- a-half ago or so that said ICE detainers are a recommendation, they are no longer mandatory.

Congress passed a law and directed the Department of Homeland Security to establish the rule that would have the force and effect of law that ICE detainers are mandatory. They wrote the rule that ICE detainers are mandatory, and Dan Ragsdale, the interim director of ICE, issued a letter that said to all local law enforcement: no, it is a recommendation, it is not mandatory.

Now we have in this confused, jumbled-up mess of the refusal to enforce the law, to take care that the laws are faithfully executed--we have the deaths of our children--our children--Joshua Wilkerson, Sarah Root.

And while Sarah Root's mother is in transit to come here to testify-- by the way, this drunk driving, illegal alien, homicidal accident that killed Sarah Root, the 4.0 student happened--I keep hearing about the valedictorians that come across the river. Sarah was very close to being the valedictorian of her college class. She didn't get a chance to live and love life beyond 1 day after her graduation.

While her mother is here with tears in her eyes, flying from Omaha where this tragedy took place, to testify before the United States Congress, there is another incident in Omaha, this time a very similar incident, another illegal alien who had been incarcerated before or picked up before and released again.

This illegal alien killed Margarito Nava-Luna, a 34- or 35-year-old man who was walking down the streets of Omaha. This driver, this illegal, had three times the blood alcohol content as well, as was the driver who killed Sarah Root.

Now, every one of these are preventable. They are preventable. Whether they are a willful homicide or whether they are preventable, but these are the cities, Mr. Speaker, where the Obama administration has released these criminals into. They have released over 30,000 of them. These are where their reoffenses have taken place, in multiple cities around, obviously, California and on up along the Pacific Coast. Where there is a lot of illegal immigration, that is where you see a lot of the recidivism crime. Here is Arizona. Here is Texas. You have got it in the heart of the heartland, though. That is Colorado. Over along the East Coast, something has happened in most of the States, and this is because of the prosecutorial discretion.

This President, his administration has released over 30,000 criminals, criminal aliens onto the streets of America. And of those that they released, there have been at least 124 of them who have been charged with homicide for 135 murders. That is 135 dead Americans who would be alive today if the President didn't have the policy of releasing criminal aliens onto the streets. Those are the ones we know of, those are the ones that are the recidivism within a 5-year window of time whose names we know, whose incidents we know, but that doesn't include anywhere near all of them, Mr. Speaker.

This is the locale. This is the face of one of these perpetrators, Mauricio Hernandez.

What did he do?

Mauricio Hernandez, a sexual predator who impregnated the 13-year-old daughter of his live-in girlfriend and repeatedly had sexual relations with her in ways that I won't repeat here on the floor, took her off to soccer games where he also gave her an abortion-inducing drug, and she went into a porta-potty and had a baby who was alive. He went in and saw that baby, and this girl was then hauled home. The baby was left to die. That baby died.

Mauricio Hernandez was the perpetrator. He is another illegal alien, another one who had been encountered by law, another one who had been granted this de facto amnesty because of the President's policy.

Mr. Speaker, I can stand here every night. I could come here and give you these stories, and I can give you the data on the thousands of Americans who are dead at the hands of the criminal aliens who have been incarcerated for a temporary period of time and released by multiple jurisdictions across this country, and every American who dies at their hands is a life that could be saved if we just followed our laws. That is what is at stake here.

But we are going to have to personalize it because people over on this side of the aisle have their fingers in their ears on data, but when they see the faces, when they hear the anguish in the voices, especially of the mothers--I will conclude with this, Mr. Speaker--or the voice of the father, Scott Root, who said when they arrested this perpetrator who killed his daughter, he was out before they could bury his daughter, he was out on $5,000 bail, which was less than it cost him to bury his daughter, and that individual absconded back out of the United States now, not to be reached again by the arm of the law, which is not long enough because they put him out on bail.

I don't want to see any more bail to criminal aliens. I want to see law enforcement. I want an expectation that when the law is broken in the United States, that there is going to be an enforcement, that it be applied equally without regard to any of these categories that the President encourages us to be members of, that being one of God's children is good enough to be protected by the law, but everybody treated equally.

Secure our borders. Restore the respect for the rule of law. Save these lives. Send these people into prison, and when they are done, send them back to the country that they can live in legally for the rest of their lives if they don't stay in our prisons for the rest of their lives.

Mr. Speaker, this is an infuriating topic that America needs to know a lot more about. I would ask, Mr. Speaker, that this country keep the families of these victims in their prayers every day until such time as we restore the respect for the rule of law again in America.

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