Immigration

Floor Speech

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Mr. FLEMING. Well, I thank my good friend from Iowa for yielding and for his words. And I'd like to build a little bit upon what you were saying, and that is that everyone speaking in this room this evening opposes amnesty--we've already said that each and every one of us opposes amnesty--but we all celebrate immigration. We come from immigrants. We're a Nation of immigrants.

Going all the way back to the 1700s, my forefathers were immigrants from Scotland. They farmed the land. They were farmers all the way up until my dad left the farm to go to World War II. I'm very proud of that fact, and I'm very proud that other people want to come to this country. I celebrate that. And I want to encourage them to come, as long as they come lawfully.

We have a place for migrant workers, for guest workers to come. We need them. They will do jobs that many Americans won't do, and it benefits them and advantages their families back home, and they send that money back. It's a great working relationship, but it must be done legally.

And then we have the high-end STEM workers who come either with high degrees or earn high degrees here. They bring them with them oftentimes their capital. They start businesses. They start companies. And we want to attract those and keep those. We don't want them taking back our innovations to other countries and then competing with us. We just simply ask that they come here legally. We, of course, as Members of Congress have a responsibility to make sure that we do what's in the best interest of the citizens who are here, whether they were born here or naturalized here.

But I want to shift just slightly to this, and we've touched upon this. One of the biggest fears we have about the Senate amnesty bill--and there's no question about it, it's amnesty by any measure, by any metric--is that we can't trust the President. We can't trust him. Whatever we pass into law, we know he's going to cherry-pick.

How do we know that? Well, look at the Defense of Marriage Act. He refused to defend that to the courts. Appointees to the NLRB, he did that when, of course, the Senate was actually not in session. It's against the Constitution to do that. ObamaCare, he's picking and choosing the parts of the law that he wants to implement.

So I think we can create a long list here tonight of the fact that this President is doing something I have never seen a President do before. In a tri-partite government with its checks and balances, we have lost the balances. We have a President that picks and chooses the laws that he wants to obey and enforce. We have a head of the Department of Justice who does exactly the same, even to the point that Congress has held him in contempt.

And so for lack of any better term, that makes him a ruler. He's not a President; he's a ruler. Because if he can just pass whatever laws that are going to be passed and then pick and choose the laws that he's going to enforce and he's going to obey, then we no longer have the checks and balances that go along with the Presidency.

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