Ted Yoho: “I will try to tighten this up. Mr. Speaker, China, in the South China Sea, has started claiming property that is not…”

“I will try to tighten this up. Mr. Speaker, China, in the South China Sea, has started claiming property that is not theirs. It goes off to nine historical lines that come from antiquity, from 300 or 400 years ago. And they said: Well, we used to sail here, so this is our property. So they started building these islands, and they went off the coast of the Philippines, and the Philippines took them to the Court of Arbitration in The Hague, and China lost the lawsuit. China ignored the ruling of The Hague, an international norm that we are all supposed to follow. They ignored it, and here you have the Spratly Islands that were little atolls sticking shallowly out of the water at low tide. China has gone in there, and it is probably the biggest environmental insult to this world, where they have dredged up over 4,000 acres of land and they have built these land masses. I refuse to use the word ``island'' because that gives credibility to China. What they have done is built--illegally, against the environment, against the ruling of international law--land masses in the East China Sea. President Xi Jinping had the gumption to come here to the United States during President Obama's era in 2015, he went to the Rose Garden and claimed: We will never militarize these islands. Yet, today, there are runways on there that can accommodate military planes. Our satellites show that there are military barracks, offensive and defensive weapons, and radar systems.…”