On the recordFebruary 8, 2012
Fellow colleagues, when you first took this office, you held up your hand and swore to uphold the Constitution of America. I hope you read the Constitution. You say it's not relevant. It is. What we're doing here is transferring the power-- and I've watched this for 40 years slowly creep into this body-- transferring the power to the President's regulatory law. Now we're going to give him the power to line-item veto. Shame on you. Shame on you. This is a Congress of the people. It's up to us to do the job, and the chairman has done the job this time. I'm looking down the road. The idea that we're going to let this House give this power to this President or any other President in the future, you've lost the Constitution in America as we have today. Let's think about this, ladies and gentlemen. That's what you're doing. You're transferring it to a monarchy to control it by executive orders, and now control the purse strings of this great Nation to the Congress, saying you can't do it when we're the representative of the people. You talk about the debt. The debt is terrible; it's awful. But it would be worse to have our body, in fact, transfer the power of this House, under the Constitution, to the President of the United States.
