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“SNAP AND IMMIGRATION REFORM” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Agriculture was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2479-H2482 on May 7, 2013.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
SNAP AND IMMIGRATION REFORM
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) for 30 minutes.
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address you here on the floor of the House of Representatives and also the times that I've had to be here on the floor and listen to the dialogue and the debate that's delivered by Members of both sides, the Republican and the Democrat side of the aisle. I listened with interest as my friend and colleague on the Agriculture Committee, Mr. McGovern, talked about the SNAP program and the necessity to maintain the dollars that were there.
I was a little surprised that he didn't ask for more dollars going into the SNAP program as opposed to opposing any reduction in the programmed increase in the SNAP program. We have about $78 billion a year that are going into food stamps now--$78 billion, a little more than that. And by next year it will be $80 billion.
Now, we do calculate our budgets and spending in a 10-year budget window, so that means $800 billion is the universe of money that he's talking about, and he's pleading with us not to reduce that growth from a little bit more than $78 billion a year up over $80 billion a year. So of that $2 billion a year that's programmed between this year and next year over the period of time of 10 years there would be $20 billion trimmed off of $800 billion, which comes to about a 2\1/2\ percent decrease in the overall projected expenditures of the food stamp program known as SNAP.
Now, after all of that technical gibberish, the bottom line is a $20 billion cut is a $2\1/2\ billion cut in the increase. $20 billion spread out over 10 years is not something that's going to be noticeable. When the gentleman speaks of how we would ``literally take food out of the mouths of hungry Americans,'' Mr. Speaker, it's important to point out, literally taking the food out of hungry Americans has never happened as an action of government in the history of the United States. It is very unlikely to ever happen into the future of the United States. And it certainly isn't something that would be the result of a piece of legislation that would come out of this Congress and specifically out of the Agriculture Committee and specifically from the subcommittee which I chair.
No, Mr. Speaker. There is not going to be any literal taking food out of the mouths of hungry Americans, to quote the gentleman from Massachusetts. Literally means ``really.'' It means ``actually.'' It means it physically happens. Now, if you're literally going to take food out of the mouths of hungry Americans, you would have to think in terms of some way to extract it once they have put it in their mouth. That's what the man has said. That's a little bit perhaps over-the-top rhetoric, and I understand he's passionate about the issue.
But even figuratively speaking, it's a little bit of a stretch to argue that a 2\1/2\ percent reduction in anticipated expenditures of the food stamp program over a 10-year period of time is going to do something to starve kids when we're addressing the eligibility for the food stamp program. And we are seeing narratives--facts, actually--of people that are using their EBT card--that electronic benefits transfer card, that card that has spawned rap music about its easy accessibility and its marketability on the street--to get tattoos, and using that food stamp EBT card to bail at least one individual out of jail.
There has to be a place where the gentleman from Massachusetts and I would draw the line and say, enough. Enough. We've taxed the taxpayers enough. We've punished the producers enough. We've borrowed enough money from the Chinese and the Saudis. We should not be borrowing money from the Chinese and the Saudis to fund somebody's tattoos, to hold up a tattoo parlor that in the neon sign says, we take EBT cards. No, Mr. Speaker, there has to be a place to draw the line and actually say no. The gentleman from Massachusetts gave me no indication, even though I listened to every word, of where he would say enough is enough, or even an amount being too much.
So I would suggest that I have watched as the numbers of Americans that have signed up for the food stamp program have gone from 19 million people to 49 million people. Think of that. Thirty million new people on the food stamp program, millions of dollars being spent by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to advertise food stamp sign-ups so that we can expand the numbers of people that are on another government program and encourage them to sign up. What for? It grows the empire of dependency which grows the empire of politics of the people on the left. They know that. They are not stupid. They have a whole different set of motives than I have, but they understand what they're doing.
Not any longer are there 19 million people on food stamps. There are 49 million people on food stamps, and the Secretary of Agriculture has an advertising budget spending millions to go out there and recruit more to sign on.
Now there are communications going on and publications popping up from Mexican consulates that in Spanish say, in foreign countries even that you can--we don't have to ask you and will not ask you about your status in the United States. If you are here illegally, sign up anyway and we'll do that in your native language, and we'll give you American benefits and advertise in Mexico to get people to sign up on the food stamp program here or there. Do they send the EBT card through the Mexican consulate? Or does it just go in regular mail? Or do you have to show up to claim it?
I question all of these things, Mr. Speaker. In the question about what do ``they''--and he means Republicans--what do ``they'' have against poor people? Here's what we have. We have an aspiration for everybody to be the best they can be. We have an aspiration for everybody to have an opportunity to succeed to the limit of their God-
given abilities and to demonstrate their ambition and to be challenged out here in this society. That's why people come here. It's not because we offer 80 different means-tested Federal welfare programs, and we advertise that if you come here, you don't have to be responsible, you don't have to work, and you don't have to carry your share of the load. You might have thought that America had a safety net. No, sir; it's a hammock. It's a hammock with 80 different means-tested welfare programs in it, and they're out of hand. And this administration is promoting the expansion of them for political purposes, whatever the level of compassion might be of the gentleman from Massachusetts.
By the way, when he said arbitrarily and indiscriminately cut, and that there are 17 million kids that are hungry and 50 million Americans that are hungry, this reduction of this 2\1/2\ percent over the next 10-year period of time that's in the anticipated formula for food stamps is not going to be arbitrary, and it's not going to be indiscriminate.
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It is going to be a number close to $20 billion. But instead, it's going to lower the eligibility so the people that need it less--in fact, many of the people that don't need it at all won't qualify. So that we're not paying for tattoos and we're not paying to bail people out of jail, and that we're not sending food stamps along with everybody's LIHEAP claim. Where in the past, if you qualify for $1 and the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program, you qualify for the full array of SNAP benefits. That's going to be adjusted upwards so that the evaluation of LIHEAP raises the bar a little bit. That's a tiny little trim and a little haircut that is 2.5 percent, but it's not arbitrary and it's not indiscriminate. It will be those that don't need this nearly as much as others.
We're going to protect hungry kids, and we're going to protect people that need the benefit; but we're not going to be paying for tattoos and we're not going to be bailing people out of jail. By the way, I don't think we're either going to be paying for the deposits on those $7 water jugs that people are going in and using their EBT card to buy a big old jug of water, take it out in the parking lot of the grocery store, dump it upside down and dump the water out and carry it back in and turn it in for the $7 cash refund for the deposit. That is a place where millions of dollars have been wasted by people who have EBT cards. If they're hungry, they're not going to be spending that EBT money on water, dumping the water out in the parking lot, and converting the empty jug into $7 worth of cash. The gentleman from Massachusetts, I'd like to see him look at some of the fraud that's going on here and have some compassion for the American taxpayers.
Several hundred thousand kids will lose their school meals, he said. Mr. Speaker, that may or may not be true. I don't know about the basis of that statement, but I know this: that decision is not going to be made by the Ag Committee; it's not going to be made under the SNAP program. The school lunch program is a product of the Ed and Workforce Committee. That will be authorized out of that committee. It will be appropriated out of a different committee than what we'll expect this farm bill is appropriated under. Several hundred thousand kids will lose their school meals, that he's worried about this being part of the markup that's coming up of the farm bill in the Ag Committee this month. That won't be a subject matter--as much as I'd like it to be.
If the gentleman from Massachusetts is concerned about hungry kids, then I would think he would sign onto my bill--my bill, Mr. Speaker, which prohibits the U.S. Department of Agriculture from rationing food to our children in the school lunch program. That is what they're doing, Mr. Speaker.
There was a piece of legislation that passed through this House in the lame duck session of 2010. It was the First Lady's bill, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. They always have a way of putting these real nice labels on bills that do something else. I understand her initiative on this. She wants people, especially young people, to get good, healthy, well-balanced meals, get some get exercise; and I think that's a good message for the First Lady to send.
When you promote a piece of legislation, however, and that legislation then requires that there be a certain mix of vegetables and fruit and carbohydrates and that kind of thing spread out through the USDA school lunch program--which the Ag Committee doesn't have jurisdiction over--that recommendation on its basis was relatively sound, Mr. Speaker. And even though I didn't agree that we should be dictating that at the Federal level, I didn't have a major objection to that initiative either.
But we've seen what's happened. The Secretary of Agriculture has taken license that doesn't exist within the bill and capped the calories to our kids in schools. So they have put a lid on the amount of calories that can be served in each of the categories of elementary, middle school, and in high school. That cap on the calories, at least in one case with the middle schoolers, the calorie limitations that they had as a minimum coming into this school year was greater than the maximum that they allow for some of those middle school kids today. They have put every kid on the school lunch program in this country on a diet, Mr. Speaker.
The administration--a policy supported by the gentleman from Massachusetts, a policy driven by--manufactured, I think, out of thin air, but with a self-assigned license by the Department of Agriculture--is rationing food to our kids in school.
I listened to the gentleman from Massachusetts and he said that if you're hungry in school, you can't focus. I agree. I think kids need to go to school, and they need to have food in their belly. They need to go to lunch knowing they can get all the nutritious food they want to eat because for many of them that's the only decent meal they're going to get all day.
They need to be fed in school. I will make this statement, Mr. Speaker: there is not a single kid in America that's getting fat on school lunch. That's not where it's happening. It's in the junk food afterwards because they can't wait to get out of the school door because they've been starved at the school lunch program, shortened on calories.
So if I were going to set up a new franchise and try to make money today, I would set up a little junk food wagon like the ice cream truck out there in the parking lot outside of the school and as soon as those kids are released, sell them all the junk they're going to be out there clamoring for. That's what they do: they race to the convenience store, they jam themselves full of junk food, then they sit down in front of the TV and continue to eat junk food.
And somehow this administration thinks our kids are getting fat on a school lunch program, and so they ration food to all kids. Same level of calories to a 70-pound freshman in high school as there is in a 250-
pound high school football player with a high level of activity and energy requirement. How is it that one size fits all for four grades in school, a 70-pounder and a 270-pounder need the same amount of calories? You know that you're going to be starving the biggest kids and probably not providing enough opportunity for that younger one to grow. Meanwhile, we're not just inhibiting their mental growth; we're inhibiting their physical growth as well.
If you think that you can reduce calories and ration food to kids that are growing and are active and somehow they're going to grow physically and mentally in an environment like that, that is a tragedy. I'd say to the gentleman from Massachusetts, that's a tragedy we should be able to work on together is starving kids in the school lunch program.
I point out that North and South Korea--let me say as close as you can get ethnically speaking and genetically speaking--have been separated for over 60 years. The people in North Korea don't get a lot of diet. The people in South Korea have been successful, and they do get a far more healthy diet. The people in South Korea are, on average, 3\1/2\ inches taller than the people in North Korea.
So if we're going to starve our kids in school under some myopic idea that we're going to train them to eat their raw broccoli and their raw cauliflower, and that they'll somehow get enough to eat and that they'll be active and healthy and grow, that's a mistake. Give them all the healthy food that they want to eat at least once a day. Do not starve them. I could go on with the gentleman's statement.
We're going to write up and mark up a good farm bill that does the prudent thing, and it doesn't starve people. It doesn't take food out of the mouths of babes or adults or anybody else. It just prohibits the utilization of these EBT cards, food stamps, SNAP program, from being used by people who aren't needy or by people that use it for something that it wasn't intended for.
That's just the beginning of my response to the gentleman. But this fits in with the broader theme, Mr. Speaker, that I came here to speak about, and that is the issue here in the United States of this massive dependency that's been growing in this country.
The gentleman is worried about 50 million people that are hungry--I don't know where that number comes from. I think we've all been hungry at one time or another, so that would be a subjective number. But I would point out that we have over 100 million Americans that are simply not in the workforce. When you add the unemployed to those who are not in the workforce by the definition that's put out by the Department of Labor, that number is over 100 million Americans.
The highest levels of unemployment that we have in the country are at the lowest skilled jobs. No skilled jobs, low-skilled jobs, double-
digit unemployment. This isn't a country like it was back in 1849, when we needed to build the transcontinental railroad and we brought people in from across the ocean or the Pacific to drive spikes and lay ties and lay rail coming from the West. We brought people in from Western Europe to go build the train tracks from the east, and they met at the golden spike territory in that period of time. This country needed labor then. We needed low-skilled labor then, people that would put their hands and their back to this work.
Some folks think that America needs that kind of labor today. Well, if we did, we wouldn't have double-digit unemployment in the low-skill jobs. And here we have the United States Senate that seems to be poised--and too many people in the House of Representatives that seem to be prepared to support them--to move an immigration bill out of the Senate that would be this: it would grant instantaneous amnesty to everybody that's in America illegally, with a few tiny exceptions--
maybe later, not right away. It would send an invitation off to everyone who has been deported in the past that, why don't you apply to come back into the United States. We really didn't mean it when we bought you a ticket to wake up in the country that you were legal to live in. And it's an implicit promise that anybody that's in America after the cut-off deadline--December 31, 2011--or anybody that should be able to come after that date--today, tomorrow, next year, next decade--all would be granted a presence in America where they didn't have to fear that the immigration law would be applied against them unless they committed a felony and were brought to the attention of law enforcement or unless they committed a series of three misdemeanors--
undefined in the law. That would be the discretion of--I suppose it would be ICE or Janet Napolitano. And this open borders policy would be perpetual.
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I knew in 1986 what this meant, Mr. Speaker. Ronald Reagan only let me down twice in 8 years. One of them was in 1986 when he gave in to the advisers around him and public pressure and signed the amnesty bill of 1986. I knew then that the stroke of Ronald Reagan's pen did severe, severe damage to the rule of law in this country and that to restore it and reestablish the respect for the law was going to be a very difficult task indeed.
But I also lived in fear that if I had job applicants coming into my company and I didn't have all of the I's dotted and the T's crossed on the I-9 form, if I didn't review the proper identification documents, fraudulent or not, and keep my records to protect myself, I expected ICE would be knocking on my door at any time--actually, it was INS at the time, Immigration Naturalization Services--and that they would be scouring through my records to make sure that I didn't violate one of the details of the Federal law of the 1986 Amnesty Act.
Of course, Mr. Speaker, we know the INS agents, later on to be ICE agents, never showed up in my office. They didn't show up at thousands and thousands of companies where there are employers in the United States. And that the roughly a million people--it started out to be 800,000--roughly a million people that were estimated to be the beneficiaries of this Amnesty Act--which at least they were honest and called it amnesty then--that that million people became, not a million, 3 million people because of underestimates and because of a massive amount of fraud, including document fraud.
So the rule of law was eroded in 1986, and Ronald Reagan really did intend to enforce the law to the best of his ability. It was undermined by leftist and ``open borders'' people in America that didn't really want to let that happen.
Each succeeding President enforced immigration law less and less and less from 1986 through Bush 41 through Bill Clinton, who accelerated a naturalization process of a million people in 1986 just in time to magically vote in the reelection of that year. Following that, George W. Bush in his two terms, and now Barack Obama, who says, I refuse to enforce immigration law.
There are 300,000 people on the list that had been adjudicated for deportation, and with a stroke of his Presidential edict pen, he forbade that the law be enforced and required that they simply waive their applications, on an individual basis, I might add. That gets a little tiring to read that when it is group and it is class.
Nonetheless, the President got away with that. He told a high school class here in town--if I remember the date correctly, it was March 28, 2011--that he didn't have the authority to grant the DREAM Act by executive order, that had to be a legislative act. And a little over a year later, by the stroke of his Presidential edict pen, he did so, however, created four classes of people, and gave them a legal status by Presidential edict by a memorandum from Janet Napolitano and John Morton, supported by a Presidential press conference, gave people a legal status in this country unconstitutionally, unlawfully, and granted them also a work permit manufactured out of thin air.
Every document that allows people to be in the United States who are not American citizens is manufactured by the Congress of the United States, except the President took it upon himself to take on article I activity legislation from article II, the executive branch.
So ICE and the president of ICE, Chris Crane, sued the President, sued the executive branch. They had the first decision that came out of the circuit in Texas. And the answer is, on 10 points, the judge held with the ICE union on nine of the 10. And the 10th one, I think today is the deadline for them to come back with their response to this in a cogent fashion so the judge can also rule again.
I'm hopeful that he'll be consistent in the theme. The theme of his decision is this: Mr. President, executive branch, all who we will see and hear, ``shall'' means ``shall.'' When Congress means ``shall,'' they don't mean ``may.''
That doesn't mean that the President may do whatever in the world he may wish to do. If Congress writes it into law and it's signed by any President, it's going to be a preceding President, that means
``shall.'' You shall enforce the law. You shall follow the directive in statute. If you don't do that, you undermine this constitutional Republic that we have.
Tomorrow morning, Mr. Speaker, at 8 in the morning in a ``Members only'' gathering, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation will be delivering his report that was released yesterday around 11 or so. This report is about 101 pages, of which the executive summary is around five. I have read through this. It is definitive economic data that I believe will be assailed, but it's logically unassailable.
He says in this document that ``at every stage of the life cycle, unlawful immigrants on average generate fiscal deficits.'' That's benefits that exceed taxes. ``Unlawful immigrants on average are always tax consumers. They never once generate a fiscal surplus that can be used to pay for government benefits elsewhere in society.''
This situation, obviously, will get much worse after amnesty. And if you believe that the second generation will make up for the first, if they were all college graduates, they would still have a tremendous struggle to make up the $6.3 trillion deficit that's created by this in expenditures minus taxes collected from this group of people. But only 13 percent of their children will go to college, so that will tell you how difficult this will be.
This is a generational economic burden taken on, proposed out of the Senate. If the American people take this on, there is no undoing this. We must get this right. We must have a Congress that's informed and educated and pays attention.
I urge all to take a look at the Heritage Foundation report by Robert Rector released yesterday. It is titled, Mr. Speaker, as I close, ``The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer,'' dated yesterday, and that is May 6, 2013. I would urge that you and all pay attention to that, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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