Issues of the Day

Floor Speech

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Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, there was an interesting story in Politico this week titled: ``The Secret Story of How America Lost the Drug War With the Taliban.'' It was written by Josh Meyer. It says: ``As Afghanistan edged ever closer to becoming a narco-state five years ago, a team of veteran U.S. officials in Kabul presented the Obama administration with a detailed plan to use U.S. courts to prosecute the Taliban commanders and allied drug lords who supplied more than 90 percent of the world's heroin . . .''.

Mr. Speaker, that is incredible. I have been hearing from DEA agents, local police, deputies, so many law enforcement people, about how incredibly abundant heroin is in America. How we had so many people that would get hooked on opioids, and then they would ultimately find heroin was cheaper and more plentiful. It destroyed a lot of lives, and it continues to destroy lives in America.

To have this report come out that the Obama administration could have done something in a timely manner to have saved tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives from being lost or being wasted in this opioid epidemic of addiction, it is really staggering to think that our United States Government, the Obama administration, with all of its tools, had the chance to do something that would prevent the massive personal destructions that we have witnessed, it runs over into the unconscionable area.

This article says: ``The plan, according to its authors, was both a way of halting the ruinous spread of narcotics around the world and a new--and urgent--approach to confronting ongoing frustrations with the Taliban, whose drug profits were financing the growing insurgency and killing American troops. But the Obama administration's deputy chief of mission in Kabul, citing political concerns, ordered the plan to be shelved, according to a Politico investigation.''

Now, I have not always been the biggest Politico fan, but this is extraordinary.

``Now, its authors--Drug Enforcement Administration agents and Justice Department legal advisers at the time--are expressing anger over the decision, and hope that the Trump administration, which has followed a path similar to former President Barack Obama's in Afghanistan, will eventually adopt the plan as part of its evolving strategy.

`` `This was the most effective and sustainable tool we had for disrupting and dismantling Afghan drug trafficking organizations and separating them from the Taliban,' said Michael Marsac, the main architect of the plan as the DEA's regional director for Southwest Asia at the time. `But it lies dormant, buried in an obscure file room, all but forgotten.'

``A senior Afghan security official, M. Ashraf Haidari, also expressed anger at the Obama administration when told about how the U.S. effort to indict Taliban narcotics kingpins was stopped dead in its tracks 16 months after it began.

`` `It brought us almost to the breaking point, put our elections into a time of crisis, and then our economy almost collapsed,' Haidari said of the drug money funding the Taliban. `If that operation had continued, we wouldn't have had this massive increase in production and cultivation as we do now.' ''

This is a photograph showing scoring a poppy to extract raw opium in April of 2004.

``Afghan drug lords have pledged financial support to the Taliban in exchange for protection of their vast swaths of poppy and cannabis fields, drug processing labs, and storage facilities.

``Poppy cultivation, heroin production, terrorist attacks and territory controlled by the Taliban are now at or near record highs. President Ashraf Ghani''--who I have met. He seems like a very decent gentleman--``said recently that Afghanistan's military--and the government itself--would be in danger of imminent collapse, perhaps within days, if U.S. assistance stops.''

When we heard the Obama administration condemning the opioid addiction epidemic, we didn't know that that administration had a chance to end 90 percent of the heroin coming into this country. Apparently, so much of that flows across our southern border.

And I realize that the leaders in the U.S. Senate and the leaders in the United States House did not support the pillars of Donald Trump's platform that got him elected President of the United States. Every bill that we have brought out of the House or that has come out of the Senate, even a couple of times there has been a little bit of money for a border wall, it is not as serious as it should be that this Congress should be doing something about the travesty on our southern border.

As long as it remains so open, the drug cartels will continue to make tens, hundreds of billions of dollars. I read that just the drug money across our southern border last year was around $80 billion, and I have also understood that the projections are that the drug cartels may be making more from human trafficking across our southern border than they are even from their drug money. That money is being used to keep our Mexico friend and neighbor oppressed and in bondage.

The best thing that we could do, if we really and truly cared about the people of Mexico, about the people of Guadalajara, El Salvador, of so many countries in Central America, and even South America, that are caught up in human trafficking, drug trafficking, and sex trafficking that is going on and coming across the U.S. border is stop it. We stop the flow of the billions that are being spent, or made, by the drug cartels, then they don't have the money for the corruption that resides in so much of Mexico and south of Mexico.

That is what a good neighbor should do. That is what this House should do. That is what the Senate should do. Tell our rich lobbyist friends that we are going to save American lives, and we are going to make Mexico one of the 10 top economies in the world by gutting their corruption, because we are going to enforce a secure border to our south, and they need to get ready and used to it. But we are going to have to have leadership in both the House and the Senate that will step up to the task.

Enough lives have been lost, enough girls have been subjected to sex trafficking, enough lives have been wasted in drug addiction, enough lives have been lost in trying to get here, evilly lured here by the attraction of what might come. Fathers that would even provide birth control to daughters, knowing they are likely to be raped on the way to the United States. What kind of people are we that we would lure people into that kind of situation? Well, we are doing it.

And I hear it over and over from those people that guard our border and from the people that are not insane, they are not crazy, they are not stupid, they are just ignorant about the role of ICE in America. ICE does not protect our borders. That is the Border Patrol. We also have that supplemented by others that are assisting the Border Patrol.

ICE is really the one that sometimes has been referred to by--that part of Homeland Security, has been labeled by drug cartels, according to people on the border, as the drug cartel's logistics. Because they get people illegally across our border, and then Homeland Security, with the help of ICE--there are children involved that involves Health and Human Services, HHS--they ship them around the country to whatever address the drug cartels give the individuals and tell them that this is where you are going, and you can finish paying off your fee to us by working for us at the address where we send you, either in sex trafficking, drug trafficking, or whatever.

Yes, so we are taking United States Government money; we are prying it out of the hardworking hands of Americans; and we are using it to help the drug cartels build up their employee base all over America.

It is time that people in the Republican Party woke up and realized the amount of human suffering that our failure to secure our southern border is causing. President Trump is doing what he can, but he could do a whole lot more if we gave him the tools to do it.

How heartless can we be not to secure our southern border and allow the deaths, the rapes, the drug abuse that is overwhelming our country. We have got to stop it.

The Obama administration had a chance to cut it off at its root source. They killed the program.

So, Mr. Speaker, I think it would be a good idea--I know our friend Mike Pompeo is busy right at this moment, but there are others in the State Department, there are people in Homeland Security, Secretary Nielsen, others. We can do something about it. We have got to do something about it. It is what decent, caring people would do.

And those, including any judge who says you have got to give these children back to people who may not be their parents, people who have convictions for human trafficking and sex trafficking or child molestation, ought to come up on charges themselves.

Fortunately, one judge backed off of the deadline that had been set for getting certain children back to their parents, because Homeland Security and HHS is doing everything they can as quickly as they can to make sure if they give children to adults, they are not sex traffickers and they are not drug traffickers, there is a family relationship. And it appears a great deal of work has been done along those lines. So there are at least five or six children who have not been turned over to people who were not their family or people who had drug or child molestation offenses.

But this is serious stuff. It is what we do. It is why our Nation, so many of us, became outraged when we found out that young, beautiful little girls competing as Olympians for the United States in the world were sexually molested by an adult monster.

And then we have the wannabes, adult men who set records and won wrestling matches. They could take down the strongest and best in the country, take them down if they didn't like what they were doing. They could take them down if they got in a ring and the match started. They could take them down. And two guys like that come forward, say: Yeah. Okay. So I was an adult. So I could have been out in Afghanistan shooting and killing people. I was no match for some wimpy doctor who made come-on comments.

Somebody like that would be allowed to besmirch the name of Jim Jordan. It is disgusting. And any group that would glom on to something like that, it is disgusting.

Assassinating an honorable character used to be a virtually unpardonable sin in America. But what happens when you quit teaching about right and wrong, you quit teaching about the Ten Commandments, you quit teaching that we are all accountable for our own actions, and you start teaching, instead, that everything is relative? There is no right. There is no wrong. There is only convenient and politically expedient. When political expedience becomes more important in America, like it has for some, and right and wrong goes out the window, we have no business maintaining the same form of governance.

It is time to get back to teaching right and wrong, because there are such.

C. S. Lewis said he used to enjoy making fun of Christians when he was an atheist by saying: How can you say there is a just God in the world when there is so much injustice in the world?

And no matter what they would come back with as a response, these Christians, Lewis would say: Yes, yes, that is all well and good, but wouldn't it be easier just to admit there can't be a just God in the universe when there is so much injustice?

And then one day he finally realized: If there is not some absolute source of right and wrong in the world, justice and injustice, then how could he ever know there is so much injustice in the world? It would be like a man blind from birth being unable to know what light is.

But there is an absolute source of justice in the world, and that is why, in 1787, in Philadelphia, when our Nation's leaders struggled to come up with a new constitution, that Ben Franklin, who so many teachers across the country wrongly say was a deist, as some do about Washington, said:

I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: God governs in the affairs of men, and if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it possible an empire could rise without His aid?

We have been assured, sir, in the Sacred Writing, that unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.

Franklin said:

I firmly believe this: I also believe without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in our political building no better than the builders of Babel. We will be confounded by our local partial interests and we, ourselves, shall become a byword down through the ages.

He went on to move that they start having prayer to start each of their days at Independence Hall working on the Constitution, just like they did throughout the Revolution. But if you go back and look at the debate, you find the reason that was voted down. They didn't have anybody who everybody else would agree would do a fair prayer for all the different Christian denominations.

So during the Revolution, they hired a chaplain who always did what all the Christian denominations believed was a fair prayer, but as they explained in debate: We are not getting paid. We don't have a treasury. We can't hire a chaplain. We can't do that right now.

And so next they moved to Randolph of Virginia, his motion: Okay. Here we are at the end of June. I move that we recess--this is not his exact words, but in essence:

Let's recess, reconvene on our Nation's birthday, Independence Day, at one of the local churches. Let's worship God together. And after we as a group here have worshiped God together, then let's come back and try this again. We are not making progress.

That passed. They went to the Reformed Calvinistic Church in Philadelphia. And it must have gone well. You can find prayers that the presiding pastor, the Reverend William Rogers, prayed. He brought that group together through prayer by the grace of God, and they came back and gave us the greatest founding document in the history of the world.

We have got to get back to where we teach right and wrong. That is why John Adams in 1797, as President of the United States, said:

This Constitution was meant for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

And he was right. And when you fail to instill those moral understandings that brought C. S. Lewis around from being an atheist to being one of the most effective and greatest apologists for Christianity in its history, we have got to get back to that or the Constitution cannot work, and you will have administrations that commit heinous, reproachable acts as leaders of the Nation.

We ask that God bless America, but there are certain things a nation of people are supposed to do to be blessed people and merit the blessings of Heaven, as our Founders often referred to them.

Let's stand up for what is right. Let's stop the political vindictiveness, and the Nation will be better and be more likely to be blessed.

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