Duncan Hunter of President 2012 - Reasons 25 through 32

25. MANDATORY GUN SHOW BACKGROUND CHECK ACT -- (House of Representatives - June 18, 1999)

Mr. Chairman, in 1933, a young lady named Melba Loman was being robbed at gunpoint next to a high-rise building. During the robbery, a young man leaned out the window with a gun and shouted to the robber, drop that gun or I will shoot, at which point the robber ran off.

The young man's name was Ronald Reagan, and he knew something then intuitively that we have learned now; and that is that law-abiding citizens who are allowed to defend themselves will deter crime.

I want to talk in this amendment about something that we have not talked much about during this gun debate; and that is simply this, 2 million times each year, American citizens across this country successfully defend their lives and the lives of their family members and their property with guns.

In most cases, this does not involve a shoot-out, because FBI studies now show that when law-abiding citizens simply have guns in these confrontations, in 98 percent of the cases that alone deters crime. So American citizens throughout this country in almost every place, 2 million times a year, protect their families, protect their children, protect their wives, and protect their property with guns. There is one place where that does not happen, and that is here in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Chairman, I offer this amendment because I was talked to by residents of Washington, D.C. I just want to quote a couple times.

``If someone is breaking into your home, and you are being put on hold by 911, what should you do to protect your wife and children? Or how does my wife protect herself if caught in the same situation when I am out of town?'' D.C. resident.

``As a District resident for 10 years, I have been a victim of violent crime. It is a tragedy that the reality in the Nation's Capital is not if you will be a victim of crime, but when you will be preyed upon by the vicious criminal element that roams our streets and neighborhoods.'' D.C. resident.

``The memory of holding a sobbing hysterical woman after she, by the grace of God, warded off a rapist who managed to rip steel bars off her window and break into her home still sends chills in my mind.'' D.C. resident.

All these letters came in, Mr. Chairman, when it became known that I was going to offer this amendment. In my view, all law-abiding citizens should therefore have the option of being able to protect their homes with deadly force if they see fit. As it stands now, and we all know this, in D.C. only the crooks have guns.

Now, Mr. Chairman, that is the case. The D.C. government has successfully disarmed every law-abiding citizen in Washington, D.C. I have never seen the case made that there are crooks who want guns in Washington, D.C. who cannot get them.

So the only people that have guns in this community are the bad people, the people that want to rob, rape, and kill. The point was made in the FBI analysis that was done by the University of Chicago that guns in America are used five times as often to prevent crime, to keep somebody from robbing, raping, or killing than they are to commit crime.

We want to give to D.C. residents, whom we do have a constitutional responsibility to have oversight over, we do want to give those people the same rights that millions of other Americans have. So this amendment simply offers the right of law-abiding D.C. residents to have a registered handgun in their home for home protection. I think it is a very modest amendment. I think it is very basic.

26. THE CLINTON-GORE SECURITY GAP -- (House of Representatives - June 23, 2000)

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from California (Mr. HUNTER) is recognized for 5 minutes.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, the American people are viewing the Los Alamos tragedy, this latest tragedy of the losing of two hard drives in one of our most secure places in that nuclear weapons development institute, and having those hard drives lost for a long period of time, and it is still unclear exactly how long they have been lost, having them suddenly reappear behind a copy machine in a place that had been previously searched, and America debates what we should do with respect to this crisis; who should be fired, what reorganization should be made.

I think what we need to do now is to focus not just on this particular incident, but on four major occurrences that have taken place in the last 8 years that constitute in my estimation what I call the Clinton-Gore security gap.

First, Dr. Wen Ho Lee was focused on in August of 1997 after we discovered that plans for the W-88 nuclear warhead had been stolen, and it appeared to be in the possession of the Communist Chinese. Dr. Wen Ho Lee, we focused on him and determined that he was a suspect in the theft of nuclear secrets. This was a very serious thing.

At that time, in August of 1997, the head of the FBI, Louis Freeh, met with the Clinton-Gore Department of Energy head, the Secretary of Energy, then Mr. Pena, and the head of the FBI said, essentially, ``This guy appears to be a spy of nuclear secrets. Right now he is sitting there with total access to America's most critical nuclear secrets. Get him out of there. Get him out of there.'' He said that in August of 1997.

A few weeks earlier, he had met with Mr. Pena, Under Secretary of Energy, Elizabeth Moler, and according to Mr. Trulock, who was the head of security, told her the same thing, get this guy out of there, he may be a spy and may be accessing this very critical material.

Seventeen months later, somebody looked around at Los Alamos, after the Cox Commission had started to investigate and said, hey, the suspected nuclear spy, is he still in the nuclear weapons vault with access to our most important secrets; and somebody else slapped their forehead and said, yes, I guess he is still there.

In the series of hearings that we had on this incident, there was lots of finger pointing. Elizabeth Moler said Mr. Trulock was supposed to fire him. Mr. Trulock said that she was very definitely told to get this guy out of there and that he told her how to go about doing it. And yet the Clinton-Gore administration allowed a suspected nuclear secrets spy to stay in place for 17 months after the head of the FBI personally met with the Secretary of Energy and said these are the circumstances, get him out of there.

Secondly, Mr. Speaker, we saw one of America's corporations, Loral Corporation, transfer missile technology to China in 1996. They allowed their scientists to engage with the Communist Chinese scientists and tell them what was wrong with their missiles, the Long March missile, because a lot of them were failing. Now, that is important, because that same Long March missile, besides carrying satellites, also carries nuclear warheads, some of which are aimed at American cities. And the Loral Corporation, in fact, according to the Cox Committee, did help Communist China make their missiles more reliable. A very serious thing.

Yet a few months after that, against the recommendation of his own Justice Department, and after he had received $600,000 in campaign contributions from Bernard Schwartz, who was the President and CEO of Loral, President Clinton gave them another waiver to launch yet another satellite in Communist China.

Also, Mr. Speaker, the Clinton-Gore administration allowed 191 supercomputers between 1987 and 1998 to go to Communist China. Now, that is dangerous because they can use those supercomputers in making and designing nuclear warheads in their nuclear weapons complex. So they have an obligation, the Clinton-Gore administration had an obligation, under the law that we have, to go over and check on those computers and make sure they are not being used in the nuclear weapons complex. They have that right. Of the 191 supercomputers that were transferred to China in that 1-year period, they only checked on one supercomputer to make sure it was not being used to design nuclear weapons.

And lastly, Mr. Speaker, we have this case where these hard drives were taken out of this vault, and it has now been testified to that the vault custodian, the person who is supposed to identify that very small group of people who are allowed to come in, that vault custodian would sometimes leave for 2-hour time periods. This is the Clinton-Gore security gap. We have to close it with a clean sweep.

27. DISAPPROVAL OF MOST-FAVORED-NATION TREATMENT FOR CHINA (House of Representatives - July 22, 1998)

Mr. Speaker, a lot has been made about the label of this debate. Is it over `normal trade relations' or is it over `Most-Favored-Nation status?' In reality, it is over $64 billion. It is a $64 billion question, because we send to China $64 billion more each year than they send to us.

The second question we should ask is, is it in America's interests to send $64 billion a year to China? Well, let us examine some of the things they are doing with that money. They are buying missile cruisers that were designed by the then-Soviet Union to do one thing: kill American aircraft carriers and the men and women who operate those aircraft carriers. That is one thing they bought with the money we have given them.

What are some of the other things they have done with the money we have given them, some of that $64 billion? They have upgraded their strategic systems. That means the Long March missiles, some of which are aimed at American cities like New York, like San Diego, like Los Angeles. So they have built and deployed and aimed nuclear weapons at some of our cities with some of the money that we have given them.

What are some other things they have done with some of the $64 billion we have given them? They have proliferated poison gas components and nuclear weapons components to such adversaries of the United States as Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. They have sent poison gas and nuclear components with some of that $64 billion that we have given them.

Mr. Speaker, I say to my colleagues, if this is a business deal, the currency of this business deal may be death in the future for young Americans in uniform, and that is the worst kind of trade deficit. Vote up on this resolution.

28. THE RIGHT TO LIFE ACT OF 1997 -- HON. DUNCAN HUNTER (Extension of Remarks - February 06, 1997)

• Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak on an issue that is of great concern to many Americans, abortion. Mr. Speaker, approximately 1.5 million innocent babies are intentionally killed every year because of abortion. This represents 4,000 times a day that an unborn child is taken from its mother's womb prematurely and denied the opportunity to live. Section 1 of the fourteenth amendment to our Constitution clearly states that no State shall `deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.' I wholeheartedly believe that these constitutional rights should include our country's unborn children.

• Mr. Speaker, in the landmark case of Roe versus Wade, the Supreme Court refused to determine when human life begins and therefore found nothing to indicate that the unborn are persons protected by the fourteenth amendment. In the decision, however, the Court did concede that, `If the suggestion of personhood is established, the appellants' case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.' Considering Congress has the constitutional authority to uphold the fourteenth amendment, coupled with the fact that the Court admitted that if personhood were to be established, the unborn would be protected, it can be determined that we have the authority to determine when life begins.

• It is for this reason that today I am introducing the Right to Life Act of 1997. This legislation does what the Supreme Court refused to do and recognizes the personhood of the unborn for the purpose of enforcing four important provisions in the Constitution: First, the due process clause, section 1 of the fourteenth amendment, which prohibits States from depriving any person of life; second, section 5 of the fourteenth amendment, which gives Congress the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this amendment; third, the due process clause of the fifth amendment, which concurrently prohibits the Federal Government from depriving any person of life; and fourth, article 1, section 8, which gives Congress the power to make laws necessary and proper to enforce all powers in the Constitution.

• The Right to Life Act of 1997 will protect millions of future unborn children by prohibiting any State or Federal law that denies the personhood of the unborn, thereby effectively overturning Roe versus Wade. I urge my colleagues to join me in this very important endeavor.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter) is recognized for 5 minutes.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, we are in a race, and the participants in the race, along with the United States of America, are nations like North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Communist China, and to some degree, Pakistan and India. The other participants in this race seem to understand that it is a race because they are doing everything that they can to develop offensive missiles that have increasing capability and can go long distances, now almost to the point where this last shot that was fired over Japan by the North Koreans, the so-called Taepo Dong 1 missile, a 3-stage missile, had enough range to reach portions of the United States of America. That is the North Koreans now, years before the CIA ever thought that they would be this far, have now developed a missile that has ICBM capability. That means the capability to reach parts of the United States.

Now, on the other side of the race is the American effort to develop defenses against these missiles, and this American effort really started in 1983 when then President Ronald Reagan told the Nation that we were entering the age of missiles, and that we had to do something about it, and that rather than just have the ability to retaliate; that is, throw our missiles back at that enemy, whoever it might be, we needed to be able to develop the ability to shoot down incoming missiles. Now, that lesson that Ronald Reagan gave us in 1983 was driven home in the early 1990s during the Gulf War when we saw ballistic missiles, Scuds at that time, for the first time in the history of warfare, being delivered on a battlefield. My colleagues may recall, Mr. Speaker, those Scud missiles destroyed a number of American barracks and killed a number of American soldiers. We shot some of them down with our Patriots. Our Patriots were the Model T of missile defenses. They are very slow. According to MIT, they did not hit any of the Scud missiles. According to the U.S. Army, our Patriots shooting at those Scuds had close to an 80 percent success rate. Probably the truth is somewhere in-between zero and 80 percent.

But now, our potential adversaries, like the North Koreans, are racing to develop offensive missiles, and Mr. Speaker, we are stalled in the development of our ability to defend against those missiles.

If we look at the so-called PAC-3 upgrade, that is just an upgraded Patriot. That is maybe, if not the Model T, that is maybe the 1965 Chevy of our missile defenses. We are not going to even deploy that until the year 2000. And, Mr. Speaker, the so-called Navy Lower Tier, that is a system that cannot even shoot down the type of Dong I missile, 3-stage missile that the North Koreans just fired, that they now have and have the ability to fire right now. That Navy defensive system, so-called Navy Lower Tier, it is a fancy name for the Navy missile defense system, will not even be deployed until 2 years after the next century starts; that is, 2002.

The so-called Airborne Laser that we are working on, we do not deploy that until 2006, and the THAAD system, which has a very difficult time hitting any of its test targets today, even if it is successful and is not terminated, will not be deployed until 2007. And of course, the Navy Upper Tier, and that is a system that barely has enough capability, if everything works out, to knock down this North Korean Taepo Dong I missile, that is not going to be deployed until 2008.

So the North Koreans today have a missile that can out-perform the American defense, and that missile is capable today, and the American defense against that missile is not going to be on line until 10 years from now, in 2008.

So, Mr. Speaker, we have to redouble our efforts. We have to reorder our priorities. We may have to spend some billions of dollars, but we must have a defense against incoming missiles, whether they are incoming missiles coming against our troops who are in theater like our troops in Desert Storm, or coming into American cities.

The first question I ask the Secretary of Defense when he appears before our Committee on National Security is this: Can you stop today a single incoming ballistic missile coming into an American city? And his answer always, and this last year again was, no, we cannot stop a single incoming ballistic missile.

30. IMMIGRATION IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST ACT (House of Representatives - March 19, 1996)

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me and also thank him for his leadership and statesmanship in putting together what has been a very difficult bill but nonetheless a very necessary bill, perhaps the most important piece of legislation we will pass this year.

Mr. Chairman, I have got the gentleman from California [Mr. Bilbray], my friend, a fellow San Diegan, with me today. I am reminded that Mr. Bilbray lives just a mile or two from the border, and I am going to talk about border control because that dimension of handling the illegal immigration problem is a very important dimension.

This bill doubles the number of Border Patrol. To gain control of a border, we need a couple of things. We need an impediment which in this case is going to be a triple fence that the committee is building. It is a fence that was designed by Sandia Laboratories and a $600,000 study that was done for the INS by the department of drug policy. It has been endorsed by Sylvester Reyes, the most successful Border Patrol Chief in the United States who successfully held the line in El Paso. This triple fence, along with forward deployed 10,000 Border Patrolmen, will help to cut off those 12 smugglers' corridors across the Southwest.

Each place where we have an urban population on each side of the border, whether it is San Diego, Tijuana or El Paso or Brownsville, TX, in Juarez or Matamoros, Mexico, we have hotbeds of smuggling that is taking place right now. This bill addresses border control and does it in a very, very effective manner.

Mr. Chairman, I can understand now why the amendment was offered, because there are a number of mistakes with respect to the facts. The gentleman mentioned that Chief Reyes, Silvester Reyes, who is by far the most famous Border Patrol chief in this country because he actually did something in terms of stemming the tide and holding the line in El Paso, was represented by a San Diego Union editorial writer as being opposed to the fence.

After he testified before the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims of the Committee on the Judiciary, he stated that, if you had sufficient agencies and you had a triple fence, you could indeed stop illegal immigration. When I sent the editorial that the gentleman just read and another editorial to Silvester Reyes, he responded with a corrective letter to the newspaper admonishing them not to misrepresent his position.

His position just a couple of days ago was this: As a former chief of the El Paso Border Patrol sector, I testified last year before Congress on our efforts to control illegal immigration in the El Paso area. I might add that he testified with Mrs. Meissner, head of the INS, who opposed the fence, sitting right next to him and glaring at him as he testified. He said: Representative Duncan Hunter asked me if triple fencing along the border and additional staffing would provide us with the proper resources to control illegal immigration. I replied that it would.

Mr. Chairman, now, that is the word from Silvester Reyes. We can cable him, we can pass him on the street, we can phone him, but he has repudiated the statement by the San Diego Union that he really did not mean it when he said that the border fence would stop illegal immigration if it was erected and if it had sufficient staffing.

Now, the gentleman has talked about safety. I have had a number of Border Patrol agents to my town meetings, and they like the triple fence and the INS, which has tried to scare its agents, has not told them about the provision in this lengthy Sandia analysis that engineers the fence, which is dedicated to safety, and it said we are going to do a number of things for safety. It said we are going to make sure that the cars are armored that go in between. We are going to give them plenty of turn-around room. And most importantly, we are going to have safety gates that they can exit from on a moment's notice and that backup can proceed into if they are in-between these fences.

Mr. Chairman, the border is still out of control, despite the resources that we voted in this Congress. We need to have a secure barrier. The most famous and most knowledgeable and I think one of the Border Patrol chiefs with the best safety record supports this fence. We need to build it. It is in the bill.

Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I also want to talk about the bailout, the new Clinton unilateral, nonparticipation by the legislative branch bailout. And I was just speaking with my friend the gentlewoman from Ohio, Marcy Kaptur, who has really been a leader in trade and leader on this issue, about what is happening to our country and what is happening to American workers. And I hope that there is a silver lining to the cloud of this bailout issue which hovers over Americans right now, which the President is attempting to dismiss with this use of the Exchange Stabilization Fund, if he is to bail out Mexico without requiring Congress to vote up or down.

The silver lining that I am looking for is a realization in this body, in the House of Representatives, of the fact that our blind adherence to free trade, that is leveling all borders, all tariffs between us and the rest of the world, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of whether or not they let us into their borders, regardless of the displacement of American workers, relying on the blind adherence on the Republican side and the Democrat side in some cases.

Let us talk a little bit about the peso bailout and some of the conservative Republicans who recently have testified in our forums.

Bill Seidman is a conservative Republican renowned economic leader, former chairman of the FSLIC, a guy who knows bailouts, and he made a couple of good points in his speech to our forum when he said, `Do not bail out Mexico.'

First, he does believe in the free market and he could not understand why people who believe in a free market and who believed in NAFTA would now believe that somehow the politics and the economics of subsidies to Mexico now make sense.

He pointed out that Mexico has gone through in the last 10 or 20 years a number of devaluations, and they have not had these disastrous apocalyptic effects that all of the deep breathers tell us are going to happen now if we do not bail out Mexico with a $40-billion-plus package. Here is Bill Seidman, a renowned conservative economic expert relied on by this Nation in very difficult times saying we do not have to do it, let the market adjust it. He made a great statement. He said this issue should be resolved between Mexico and her creditors, let us resolve this between creditor and debtor.

Let us stay out of this as the United States of America. In listening to witness after witness on the Democrat side and the Republican side across the political spectrum coming up and testifying against the bailout, it occurred to me that this has revealed another aspect of national policy that should be looked at very closely.

If this is free trade, this is the result of free trade where a tiny nation economically like Mexico, which has approximately the economy the size of New Jersey's, can be in a position to pull the United States down because it has a downturn. Have our policymakers who have outlined a free-trade policy for the United States supposedly with a deep intellectual base really been right when the effect of their policy is to handcuff the United States to Third World nations in deep water that do not know how to swim? That is what we have done. If we have lost our independence and if we now are committed to bail out every nation which becomes inextricably linked with our economic well-being through our trade policies, is that smart?

Regardless of whether or not you like the trend lines on the exports and the imports, is it right for us to give up our independence and link ourselves with these nations? Does that mean we are now going to link ourselves with Argentina, we are so linked that we now have to bail them out if they have a problem, or any of the other dozens and dozens of Third World nations which now will call on the United States to help bail them out because we have a substantial trade relationship?

Now, let me just conclude by giving one `I told you so' and `Let's look at this thing in the future,' to all of my colleagues, my good friends, who supported NAFTA. The claim by the pro-NAFTA advocates on this floor was that Mexican workers were going to achieve a larger standard of living, go above that $1,900 per capita per year income, and they were going to get up there to the point where they were making enough money to buy large amounts of American consumer goods and increase our exports. This devaluation has decreased the capability to buy by about 30 percent. This proves that NAFTA was wrong.

32. H.R.482
Title: Federal Benefit Integrity Act
Sponsor: Rep Hunter, Duncan [CA-52] (introduced 1/11/1995)
Cosponsors (15)
Related Bills: H.R.4

Latest Major Action: 2/7/1995 Referred to House subcommittee. Status: Referred to the Subcommittee on Human Resources.

Federal Benefit Integrity Act - Amends part A (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) (AFDC) of title IV of the Social Security Act (SSA) to: (1) reduce the amount of AFDC currently being paid to families which do not include a U.S. citizen or national; and (2) prohibit AFDC from being paid to any family applying for AFDC which does not include such an individual.

Amends SSA title XVI (Supplementary Security Income)(SSI), the Housing and Community Development Act of 1980, and the Food Stamp Act of 1977 to make similar amendments with respect to the receipt of Federal SSI, assisted housing, and food stamp benefits by aliens and, in certain cases, phase-out such benefits entirely.