Constitutional Duties

Floor Speech

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Mr. SALMON. Thank you very much.

First of all, I want to say what an honor it is to be sharing the dais with two such distinguished gentlemen who have given up their careers and sacrificed countless hours with their families to come to this body and not, as has been done before, be willing to ``kick the can down the road''; coming to make real change; coming to try to get our arms around the real problems that are confronting our society and us as a Nation.

I would like to say that it is just a debt crisis, that it is just funding for our government. But I think we all know it is much more than that. It is about the freedoms that we hold. It is about everything that we hold dear--everything that every military person for the last 240 years has fought to defend--and that is the freedoms that our Founding Fathers envisioned when they started this great experiment. We don't want to let that experiment die.

I am so honored to be able to serve with two gentlemen that take this seriously and are willing to do more than be politicians and risk those political careers to actually do what is right. What a novel idea for Washington, D.C.

I would like to talk just a little bit about the genesis of the President's health care law when we talk about the constitutionality. They cooked this thing up at a time when they knew that time was running short. A new Senator had just been elected from Massachusetts, so they had to act very, very quickly, or they wouldn't be able to get by the cloture vote. That is why Nancy Pelosi ended up saying, we have to pass it before we know what is in it and then we can read it afterwards, because virtually none of those Senators actually read it.

That is why I understand Wolf Blitzer just came on today and said: Mr. President, why don't you postpone ObamaCare for a year?

Why? Because we have seen over the last week it is a failure. Its roll-out has been catastrophic. We want to stop the hemorrhage and help the American people.

How did the bill eventually become a law? It happened because they did a ``strike all'' on a bill that was originated in the House. But they did a ``strike all'' with language that had nothing to do with the original language.

Why is that important? Because in the Constitution there is a provision called the origination clause. That stipulates that any revenue bill has to originate in the House of Representatives. It has to. That is a requirement for the Constitution, but this bill actually started in the Senate--ObamaCare started in the Senate. So constitutionally from day one it started out on shaky footing. They violated the Constitution right out of the shoot.

Now, let's fast-forward to where we are today. Congressman DeSantis, you have done a marvelous job describing some of the inconsistencies and the breaches of the Constitution that this President has done in actually changing his own law. We say it is his own law--it is Congress' law. It is a law that a President can't enact in and of itself and he can't change in and of himself. We don't have a line-item veto anywhere. The President can only change the law if it goes through Congress first. So like you said, Congressman DeSantis, he arbitrarily changed the date in the law from one year to the next, and you can't do that.

I have heard from the Democratic Party time and time again--the folks on the other side--that they can't support this pathway that we have been going through in the last week of putting bills up on funding various aspects of government, like funding for NIH and kids with cancer or funding our veterans or funding our national parks. They say that that is a process of creating winners and losers, and they can't have any part of that.

Well, what is President Obama doing when he is giving breaks to Big Business and to Congress, but he is not giving them to every other American when it comes to ObamaCare? Isn't that creating winners and losers? I think it is a tad hypocritical of them to even raise that specter.

But I want to talk for a little bit about what has happened in the last week and a half. Because while the President is very willing to exceed his constitutional authority to do certain things, when he does have the constitutional authority to do something, he doesn't do it.

What am I talking about? I am talking about what has happened over the last few days with the bill that we passed last Saturday before the shutdown funding our military, the Pay Our Military Act. It was clear in that bill, that very succinct bill, that they had the power to pay all of our military folks, including all of our civilians, and that they could go ahead and take care of the death benefits for these widows who have lost their loved ones in war. That was very, very clear. They had that ability all along.

So what does the President do? He wants to use this for political leverage and make this as painful as he possibly can. So what do they do? They furlough several hundred thousand civilian workers within the military, just so they could ratchet up the pain and make it a little bit tougher on the Republicans.

Then what happens? About a week later Chuck Hagel, the Secretary of Defense, comes out and says, Oops, my bad. I guess we had the power all along.

Wasn't that what we have been telling them all along? You have the power to go ahead and keep these people at work and not disrupt, but they did that for political gain so that he could make it as painful as possible.

One other example: in my own State, in Arizona, we have one of the greatest national parks, the Grand Canyon. It is not only a wonder for the entire world, but it is also a wonder for our economy. We have folks that are doing river raft trips, folks that do excursions and hikes down through the Grand Canyon; but they run into a closed park.

Well, let me tell you something: I was here during 1995 when we had that last government shutdown. And guess what? We had a Democratic President. His name was Bill Clinton. We had a Republican Governor, just like we do in Arizona right now. His name was Fife Symington. What happened with the government shutdown? President Clinton worked with our Republican Governor, Fife Symington, to allow them to use private and State resources to keep the park open.

So our Governor, Governor Brewer, writes a letter to President Obama thinking that he might be somewhat similar in nature to President Clinton as far as being willing to negotiate. I mean, these are people's lives on the line. What did they get? A big fat zero--no way, you can't open it.

We have seen that time and time again. We have seen it on the National Mall that when certain groups of people want to come and take a look at the monuments or go into the National Mall that, no, the government is shut down, you can't come in, everything is shut.

But yesterday, what happened in the National Mall? Fifteen thousand people came for a protest on immigration reform, and they opened up the National Mall.

It is a disturbing pattern. If you agree with the President and his policies, we are going to do everything within our power to use government to help you get where you need to be. If you disagree with me, we are going to use our government to bludgeon you and use it as a tool to further our political agenda.

That has happened with the IRS when it comes to the nonprofit status of various organizations. It happened with our Capital Mall and our Capital monuments.

All I am saying is that I find it so incredulous that the President is willing to overstep his boundaries and unconstitutionally do things through executive order, and yet when he has the power and we have given him the power he is not willing to do it. I find those inconsistencies extremely disturbing and a little bit Machiavellian.

I would hope that the President would look at what we are trying to do through this process. We have a responsibility to the people that elected us to make the laws as good as we possibly can.

The last proposal that we put on the table was that we would delay the individual mandate so that every American--as you said, Mr. DeSantis--every American could get the same deal that Big Business with their great lobbyists here in Washington, D.C., got and that Members of Congress got. They would get the same consideration.

The other part was that we would make sure that Congress lived under the same laws everybody else has to. A pretty commonsense approach, so much so that multiple Democrats agreed with us and voted with us to pass that and send it to the President. But what did Harry Reid do? He shoved it in his draw at the behest of President Obama.

It is time to stop these reckless games. Mr. President, you have already shown that you are very willing to use your executive powers far beyond your scope of authority given you in the Constitution. Is it unreasonable for us to ask you to use your powers when you are given them to do the right thing?

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Mr. SALMON. I thank the gentleman from Oklahoma. Yes, it has been something that we have been dealing with in a very up close and personal way.

As a matter of fact, about a month and a half ago, I had the good fortune to meet with Arizona's adjunct general. He's over the National Guard for Arizona. He was finishing up his term in office, and I said, Sir, what is your biggest concern when it comes to possible terrorist activity here in Arizona? We don't have a lot of the national weather pattern problems like they do in other parts of the country, like hurricanes and tornadoes. We have some dust storms every now and then,

and we have had some terrible fires. But I was truly interested, and I wasn't trying to lead him in any direction. But he said, without a doubt, the thing that keeps me up at night, the thing that worries me more than anything is the porousness of our border, and the fact that about 15 percent of the people that we apprehended last year were not from Mexico. Many of those people were from the Middle East. What I worry about is because it is so lax and so easy to get across our border, that some terrorist is going to be able to get across the border with a suitcase bomb and detonate it and a lot of people will be injured or killed. That was his big concern.

So then I had an opportunity to sit down with some of our ICE people that are stationed in Arizona. They are the ones responsible for interior enforcement. I had a long conversation with them. You know what they told me? They said, You know, we don't need a lot more assets to get the border secured; what we need is for this administration to enforce the law. We need them to let us do our jobs. We are law enforcement people. We see the law very, very clearly. We know what the laws state, but our hands have been tied by this administration. They won't let us do our jobs.

He then proceeded to tell me that we have done these surveys on a regular basis to try to determine where employee morale is at, and they said it's at an all-time low ever since they've been doing these surveys right now within ICE, especially in Arizona because they feel they are not empowered to do their jobs, and they wonder, what am I doing here. Many of them want to be transferred out or just kind of, you know, march in place and do their time and get out as soon as they can, but the morale is terrible. These are honorable, decent people who want to do their jobs.

The other side would have you believe that no, this is just about some honest people who want to come across the border and get jobs in the United States and take care of their families. It's not just about that. As we saw with Brian Terry, with the gun smuggling, Fast and Furious, guns are being smuggled across the border, drugs are being smuggled across the border, and unsavory characters who have bad ideas on what they want in the United States are coming across the border, and one day the piper is going to have to be paid. So the border is far from being secure. We have the ability to do it, but this administration will not let them do their jobs.

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Mr. SALMON. I thank the gentleman from Florida. Yes, I was right in the middle of all those debates. As a matter of fact, before I came to Congress, the Arizona Legislature, which I was part of, actually passed a bill called Workfare, which was very similar to what we passed in 1996. It recognizes the idea, I think the truth, and there is an old Chinese proverb: If I catch a fish for you, you'll have food for a day. If I teach you to fish, you'll have food for your life.

That was the model we tried to employ, and that was that people have to work. They have to give something back for the welfare payments that they are given. It was called Workfare, and that is what we decided to do here in the Congress.

And it did one other thing, Congressman, that no government program can or normally does really do, and that is help instill dignity in people. I think one of the things that has really broken our country is that we have become this welfare state, a bunch of dependents across the country. I think that giving somebody the opportunity to be able to give something back actually helps preserve, I think, the human spirit. We all want to feel like we have some worth, that we have some relevance to society. And the old traditional welfare program is almost like we'll pay you to stay out of society. We'll give you just barely enough to subsist, but you stay out of society. And that's the message, subliminally or otherwise, that it gives to those people.

We don't really have much to offer you. You don't offer much value to society, so we will pay you to stay home. We thought of a different idea, I think a vastly more compassionate idea, and that is to have people be able to give something back so they didn't get something for nothing. Also, along the way, they actually got skills and abilities that they didn't otherwise have so that they could learn how to work, they could learn how to hold down a job.

That was one of the key components of the welfare reform that we passed in 1996, that while we send that money out to the States, that there are work requirements. I think that's reasonable. You don't get something for nothing. You have got to get out and help pull the wagon instead of having everybody cart you around. That's reasonable.

What did this President do the moment he got in office? He started through executive orders granting waivers to each of the States, getting rid of those work requirements. Again, that was a law that was passed in 1996, signed by President Clinton, and the President coming after changes the terms of those laws. To me, as far as I am concerned, not only is that lawless, it is foolish, because it is hurting the very people he purports to help. I believe that rather than helping them, it is keeping them down.

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Mr. SALMON. I appreciate that.

When we talk about the rule of law, the rule of law means that it applies equally to everyone. Of course, today, we have talked a lot about how within ObamaCare the rule of law does not apply equally to everyone. Some people get waivers. Depending on what kind of company you work for, some companies get waivers. Some unions get waivers. When it comes to individual health care policies, some people get grandfathered and they get to keep their policy, and other people get letters saying their policy is canceled.

We have exchanged, in this country, at this point under ObamaCare, the rule of law for the rule of man, where you have nameless, faceless bureaucrats that don't represent anybody and make decisions that change the law for individuals. That's not what was intended by the Founding Fathers.

As the gentleman from Florida said, when you think about creditor rights and you think about the bailout for Chrysler, you have different classes of creditors. In the case of the Chrysler bailout, you had secured creditors. That means that in the hierarchy structure, they were superior to the shareholders. They were superior because they were lending the money. They weren't the owners of the company. They had rights that were above the shareholders.

In the case of Chrysler, what happened is the President came in, like you said, and they got very involved. In fact, they changed the rule of law for the rule of man, where you had bureaucrats coming in and making a decision that the secured creditors would be wiped out. In fact, they were bullied. I think they received 30 cents on a dollar for investment, if I remember correctly. But the secured creditors would be bullied to give up their investment, and the people who actually came out ahead were the unions, who were not secured creditors. This is a violation of bankruptcy law.

Again, the President's job is to faithfully execute the law, not change the law for political preference and not replace the rule of law with the rule of man, which is what they did in this case. Politically, they made a decision that the secured creditors would be wiped out, the unions would be made whole, and at the end of the day--here is the fallout from that: in the United States of America, all across this country, and in the world, people are making decisions about where they're going to invest money. If you look at the investment opportunities in the United States of America right now, if you're going to invest in Big Business, the whole too-big-to-fail mantra that we have heard over and over again, if you are going to invest in Big Business, you are going to have to take a risk, and that risk has nothing to do with the return on investment or whether or not the company is sound. That risk is now political risk. Because as an investor, politically you could be wiped out, even if you have a secured debt instrument.

When you replace the rule of law with the rule of man, especially as it relates to business, people make decisions to invest elsewhere. And if you look at our country right now and you look at the capital investment in our country, we could be doing much better. Of course, if we had a President that adhered to the law, rather than changing the law based on political preference, we might see more investment in our country.

Of course, investment is how businesses grow. It is how they raise money to open up a new plant or open up a new store, and capital investment is how new firms get created and it is how jobs get created and grow. So what we have right now is the replacement of the rule of law for the rule of man, and it is been detrimental for our economy as it relates to the securities industry.

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