The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“DE FACTO VETO SETS A DANGEROUS PRECEDENT” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H213-H214 on Jan. 14, 2020.
The State Department is responsibly for international relations with a budget of more than $50 billion. Tenure at the State Dept. is increasingly tenuous and it's seen as an extension of the President's will, ambitions and flaws.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
DE FACTO VETO SETS A DANGEROUS PRECEDENT
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa
(Mr. King) for 5 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be recognized and address you here on the floor of the United States House of Representatives.
I come before you this morning to remind this House and to speak about the procedure that is pending in the Senate and some activities that need to take place in this House before that is likely to happen, and that, of course, is the impeachment of the President of the United States.
It took place December 18, and we will have been waiting nearly a month before the Articles of Impeachment would be transferred over to the United States Senate which would then begin the enactment of a trial--hopefully a fair trial--with an opportunity for the President to defend himself over in the United States Senate.
I was here in this city for 3 days of the impeachment hearings before the House Judiciary Committee in 1998 and I was able to observe the activities here in this House and how people acted. I will say the people who were defending Bill Clinton were not serious outside the camera and in the House Judiciary Committee.
Here we have an impeachment that has been brought forward on two different charges and we have watched as from the beginning, from clear back in November of 2016, this discussion about impeaching the President of the United States began. It began on November 9 when the first Democrat stepped up and said: We are going to impeach this President.
We had people who ran for office to get into this Congress who announced: We are going to impeach the--I can't put those words into this Congressional Record, Mr. Speaker.
So this has been a driven agenda and it began as soon as the other side realized that Donald Trump was the duly elected and legitimate President of the United States.
There are two reasons that this impeachment is taking place here. One of them is because there is a deep, visceral hatred for Donald Trump among the hardcore left in this country that is driving the caucus on that side.
Another reason is because the investigations came about because of the weaponization of the executive branch of the United States. I mean particularly the Department of Justice and within it the FBI, some of the State Department, and much of the intelligence community working together to surveil President Trump's campaign operations and then President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration activities and communications before that and surveillance afterwards.
Also I mean the circumstances that came about when James Comey took information that was proprietary and many say classified and leaked it to a professor of Columbia University with directions to leak it to The New York Times with the objective of creating a special counsel that needed to be Robert Mueller who couldn't have been changed differently by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he had recused himself from Russia.
This is the backdrop of this. Impeachment puts a cloud up in front of the activities that took place that should appall this Nation at the highest level.
So what I ask, Mr. Speaker, is this: Let's get these Articles of Impeachment done in this House this week, let's send them down across the rotunda to the United States Senate, and let's ask the Senate then to go ahead and work your will under your rules.
But my ask is this: having lived through this as a witness back in 1998, we didn't get a clean verdict in the United States Senate. I am going from memory here, I didn't look up these articles and the actual vote, but I remember this: the public never knew from each Senator whether they believed that President Clinton was guilty of the various charges that were brought before him. All wrapped in one question was: If he is guilty, is he worthy of being removed from office?
When you package those things together and you had Democratic Senators defending Bill Clinton, they said: Well, I didn't have to wonder if he was guilty because if he was, it didn't rise to the level to remove him from office.
I would like to know, I think the public wants to know, and I think it is the constitutional duty of the United States Senate to give us a verdict:
Did the President actually obstruct Congress?
Did he actually abuse power?
What were the definitions of those things?
They are not crimes.
What were the definitions?
Let's find out the judgment of these Senators, yes or no, guilty or not guilty, and then the next question is: Should he be removed from office?
I say not. I didn't see the evidence here. I don't see any crimes, and there have been no crimes.
All it amounts to also is in delaying these Articles of Impeachment if the Speaker can block a majority action from the House of Representatives, then the Speaker can block every action from the floor of the House of Representatives. It is not a sustainable position for the Speaker to refuse to message and have a de facto veto because that would make the Speaker of the House all-powerful with a veto for any piece of action that would come through the floor of the House of Representatives.
Let's get this done this week, and I encourage the Senate to get it done quickly. I would like to see the President stand here before us at the State of the Union address February 4 and be able to announce to the world that he has been exonerated by the United States Senate.
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