[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 190 (Wednesday, December 12, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H15397-H15400]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              LET IT BLEED: RESTORING THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. McCotter) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. McCOTTER. Madam Speaker, as my Republican Party completes its 
first year in the minority since 1994, we find ourselves held in 
historically low regard by the sovereign American people.
  To end this trend, Republicans must accurately assess our party's 
past and present failings; and its future prospects of again providing 
Americans a meaningful choice between the major parties. This remain, 
after all, a party's duty to the citizenry.
  For my GOP to fulfill it, first we must bury our ideological dead. 
Safely on this side of the cleansing mists of memory, it is chic to 
eulogize the late Republican majority. From the chattering class few 
insights emerge, for in the aftermath, only poetry is an apt epitaph.
  ``The world is too much with us; late and soon; getting and spending 
we lay waste our powers; little we see in nature that is ours. We have 
given our hearts away. A sordid boon.''
  Such was the Republican bathos: A transformational majority sinned 
and slipped into a transactional ``cashocracy.'' Promises, policies, 
principles, all bartered, even honor. The majority now is of the ages. 
May it rest in peace. And be redeemed.
  Once, George Santayana cautioned: ``Those who do not learn the 
lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.'' If our current 
Republican minority guilefully refutes or gutlessly refuses to admit, 
accept and atone for the bitter fruits of its lapsed majority, it will 
continue to decline in the eyes of the American electorate. Thus, for 
the sake of our Nation in this time of transformation, we must fully 
and frankly examine and understand the cardinal causes of the 
Republican majority's recent demise, and, sadder but wiser, commence 
our Republican minority's restoration as a transformation political 
movement serving the sovereign citizens of our free republic.
  To begin, we must retrace our steps down a broken alley of broken 
hopes to glean the essence of our party's headier times, big hits and 
fazed cookies.
  Though many of its legislative leaders may moot the point, two 
Presidents caused the 1994 Republican revolution: Ronald Reagan and 
Bill Clinton.
  The members of 1995's new Republican majority were Ronald Reagan's 
political children. From President Reagan, Republican congressional 
revolutionaries inherited a philosophy of politics as the art of the 
possible: Cogently expressed by conservative intellectuals ranging from 
Edmund Burke to Russell Kirk, this philosophy's central tenet held:
  Men and women are transcendent children of God endowed by their 
Creator with inalienable rights.
  Government was instituted to defend citizens' inalienable rights and 
facilitate citizens' pursuit of the good and of true happiness.
  Over the generations, Divine Providence has established and revealed 
through tradition prescriptive rights and custom within communities how 
order, justice, and freedom, each essential, coequal and mutually 
reinforcing, are best arranged and nurtured for humanity to pursue the 
good and true happiness.
  Finally, human happiness is endangered by every political ideology, 
for each is premised upon abstract ideas; each claims a superior 
insight into human nature not revealed through historical experience; 
each proffers a secular utopia unobtainable by an imperfect humanity; 
and, each demands an omnipotent, centralized government to forcefully 
impose its vision upon an ``unenlightened'' and unwilling population.
  This is the political philosophy and resulting public policies a 
once-impoverished youth from Dixon, Illinois, Ronald Reagan, engagingly 
articulated to America throughout his Presidency in the 1980s. By 1994, 
the American people who have taken Ronald Reagan at Russell Kirk's word 
that ``conservatism is the negation of ideology,'' and remembering its 
beneficent impact upon their daily lives, yearned for its return. For 
self-described congressional Republican revolutionaries, this formed 
fertile electoral ground, one shaped as well, it must be admitted, by a 
host of unheralded and immensely talented GOP redistricting attorneys. 
But like all revolutions, the peace required a villain.
  Enter Bill Clinton.
  Exuberant at having defeated an incumbent President George H.W. Bush, 
Clinton mistook a mandate against his predecessor as a mandate for his 
own craftily concealed liberalism. In his first 2 years in the Oval 
Office, this mistake led Clinton to overreach on ``kitchen table'' 
issues, such as raising taxes and socializing medicine.
  Daily, the four-decade old Democratic congressional majority abetted 
Clinton's radical policies, and across the political spectrum, voters 
seethed.
  Congressional Republicans bided their time, planned their revolution 
and seized their moment. Led by their spellbinding and abrasive guru 
from Georgia, congressional Republicans unveiled their ``Contract With 
America'' to much popular, if not pundit, acclaim.
  Though much mythologized, if it is to prove instructive for the 
present Republican minority, this contract can and must be placed in 
its proper perspective. A musical analogy is most elucidating.
  When a reporter once praised the Beatles for producing rock's first 
concept album, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band, John Lennon 
curtly corrected him: ``It was a concept album because we said it 
was.'' Lennon's point was this: Yes, the Beatles had originally set out 
to produce a concept album, but early in their sessions the band 
dropped any conceits to creating a ``concept album'' and recorded 
whatever songs were on hand. Recognizing their failure, the Beatles 
tacked on a final song, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band 
(Reprise), to engender the illusion they had, after all, created a 
concept album. Importantly, when the band later tried to produce a true 
``concept album'' and accompanying film, Magical Mystery Tour, the 
lackluster result was one of the Beatles' few failed artistic ventures.
  Similarly, congressional Republicans' ``Contract with America'' was a 
collection of specific policy proposals and concrete grievances against 
the incumbent Democratic President and his legislative allies. It 
possessed merely an implicit philosophy, one obviously harkening back 
to Reagan. Even less than Sergeant Pepper, the individual tracks of 
which have mostly stood the test of time, today many of the Contract's 
specific proposals sound dated. But like Sergeant Pepper, what endures 
about the contract is the fact that it was marketed as a revolutionary 
concept in governance. Of course, it is not. The contract was a 
suitable period piece which served its purpose--the election of 
congressional Republicans in sufficient numbers to attain our party's 
first majority in 40 years. Nevertheless the contract's lack of a 
clearly enunciated political philosophy sowed the seeds of the 
subsequent Republican devolution.
  Therefore, if the current Republican minority buys into the myth and 
makes the contract the basis of a derivative ``concept'' agenda, the 
GOP will be condemned to another 40-year Magical Mystery Tour through 
the political wilderness.

  This is not to say the members of 1995's new Republican majority 
lacked a political philosophy or immutable principles. Quite the 
contrary: These Members were steeped in the Reagan tradition. But after 
an initial rush of laudable accomplishments, the Members found 
themselves trapped by the contract's inherent pragmatism and 
particularity. Absent a philosophical anchor in the contract, Members 
drifted into the grind of governance, which distorted Reagan's 
philosophical principles for public policy into nonbinding

[[Page H15398]]

precedents for political popularity. Exacerbating this process, the new 
majority's leaders, exuberant at having defeated an incumbent 
Democratic congressional majority, mistook a mandate against their 
predecessors as a mandate for their own finitely posited conservatism. 
In its first 2 years in control of the House, this led the majority's 
leaders to erroneously conclude it could govern as a parliament rather 
than as a congressional equivalent in power to the executive branch; 
and they over-reached on key issues, most notably in the shutdown of 
the United States Government over the issue of spending. Artfully 
framed by President Clinton with sufficient plausibility as an 
irresponsible Republican ideological attack on good government, this 
moment marked the beginning of the Republican majority's end. In point 
of fact, from the government shutdown to the present, the House GOP 
conference has never had as many Members as it did in 1995.
  Some persist in too facilely dismissing this Republican debacle as 
being due to Clinton's superior messaging of the issue from his bully 
pulpit. This analysis is errant. The reason Clinton succeeded is the 
kernel of truth he wielded on this issue: House Republican leaders had 
stopped governing prudently in accordance with Reagan's political 
philosophy of politics being the art of the possible and, instead, 
started acting belligerently in an ideological manner against the 
public's interest. It is not an accident this battle fundamentally 
affected Clinton's thinking and spurred his reinvention from a liberal 
ideologue into a pragmatic problem-solver and proponent of ``good 
government.'' Unfortunately, Clinton's publicly applauded posturing as 
a centrist incensed the Republican majority and accelerated their 
efforts to differentiate themselves from an unprincipled President by 
being increasingly ideological, which they confuted with being 
principled.
  As this ideological fever progressed through 1996, too late did the 
new majority's members intuit the political cost to candidates 
considered ``ideologues.'' The Republicans' majority did survive the 
partisan carnage of Clinton's overwhelming 1996 reelection, but the 
cycle's cumulative effect was lasting and damning. Without gawking at 
the gruesome minutia of each ensuing GOP ideological purge and internal 
coup instigated by this election, we can note it spawned the unseemly 
political perversion of the House Republicans' transformational 
majority into a transactional ``cashocracy.''
  Hubristically deemed by its leading denizens as a ``permanent 
majority,'' the GOP ``cashocracy'' was a beggars' banquet at taxpayers' 
expense. The cashocracy's sole goal was its own perpetuation; and its 
cashocrats and high priests of money-theism myopically chased the same 
through pragmatic corporatism and political machinations.
  Obviously, the cashocracy's cardinal vice was its conviction to 
survive for its own sake. Curiously, this was not the height of 
arrogance; it was the height of insecurity. Aware it stood for nothing 
but election, the cashocracy knew anything could topple it. This fear 
cancerously compelled the poll-driven cashocrats to grope for ephemeral 
popularity by abandoning immutable principles. Materialistic to their 
core and devoid of empathy, the cashocrats routinely ignored the 
centrality to governmental policies of transcendent human beings.
  This cashocracy's first cardinal error facilitated its second: 
Pragmatic corporatism. Ensconced in insular power, the cashocrats lived 
the lives of the rich and famous, despite their middling personal 
means, due to their newfound friends in the corporate and lobbying 
community. Cut off from Main Street, these cashocrats embraced K 
Street. The desire was mutual, and the corporatists' influence grew 
gradually but ineluctably. Closed within a corporatist echo chamber, 
the cashocrats became deadened to the tribulations and aspirations of 
real Americans, and came to measure the ``success'' of its pragmatic 
policies by their reception on K Street. Reams of measures spewed forth 
prioritizing the interests of multinational corporations over the needs 
of middle-class Americans.

                              {time}  2130

  In fairness, even without the Cashocrats' incessant inducements, 
blandishments and bullying, the majority of GOP members truly did feel 
they were promoting the interests of their constituents. This belief 
was insidiously sustained by the Cashocrats grafting their pragmatic 
corporatism onto the philosophy of economic determinism. It was not an 
unforeseeable development. Akin to their conservative brethren who 
after the fall of the Soviet Union proclaimed the ``End of History,'' 
House Republicans convinced themselves the ideology of democratic 
capitalism was an unstoppable deterministic force predestined to 
conquer the world; and on their part, they viewed their job as 
hastening its triumph and preparing Americans to cope with its 
consequences. Combined with the Cashocracy's insatiable need of 
corporate contributions for its sustenance, this adherence to 
ideological democratic capitalism reveals how the Republican House 
majority helped President Clinton (whom they had unknowingly come to 
emulate and likely loathe ever more because of it) grant the permanent 
normalization of trade relations to Communist China. With the enactment 
of this legislation, the Cashocracy reached its political zenith and 
moral nadir, for it did not shape globalization to suit Americans' 
interests; it had shaped Americans' interests to suit globalization.
  The handsome rewards for such ``courageous'' legislation fueled the 
Cashocracy's third vice, avarice. The process was both seductive and 
simple, especially in a materialistic town forsaking the qualitative 
measurement of virtue for the quantitative measurement of money. While 
this temptation is to be expected in a city where politicians ``prove'' 
their moral superiority by spending other people's money, it was 
equally to be expected Republicans would collectively resist it.
  They didn't.
  Earmarks, which began as a cost-saving reform to prevent Federal 
bureaucrats from controlling and wasting taxpayers' money in 
contravention of express Congressional intent, spiraled out of control 
once the Cashocrats and their K-Street cronies realized the process 
could be manipulated to direct any appropriation, however undeserving, 
to any client, however questionable. In turn, political contributions 
materialized from the recipients of these earmarks for the Members on 
both sides of the aisle who dropped them into legislation, oftentimes 
without the knowledge of or the appropriate review by their peers. The 
passage of policy bills, too, increasingly mirrored the earmark 
process, as special interest provisions were slipped into the dimmer 
recesses of bills in the dead of night. The outcome of this fiscal 
chicanery was an escalation of the K-Street contributions the 
Cashocracy required to attain its aim of perpetuating itself in power; 
and of the illegal perks required to sate the more venal tastes of some 
morally challenged members who are now paying their debts to society.
  Cumulatively, in addition to rendering it morally bankrupt, these 
three vices left the Cashocracy intellectually impotent. Tellingly, 
within this less than subtle and manifestly sinister system of earmarks 
and contributions, the Cashocrats greased the skids for their 
legislative ``favors'' by relegating the majority's younger Members to 
voting rather than legislating; ignoring these Members' qualitative 
virtues, ideals and talents; measuring these Members by the 
quantitative standard of how much money they raised; and, thereby, 
condemning these Members to the status of highly paid telemarketers. 
Having squandered this infusion of youthful energy and insight, the 
Cashocrats hailed the election of Republican President George W. Bush 
and handed him the Nation's legislative agenda.
  At first, the Cashocrats' subordination of their separate, equal 
branch of government to the executive branch bore dividends. But by 
2006, when the failures of the Iraq war's reconstruction policy and 
Hurricane Katrina's emergency relief torpedoed Bush's popularity, the 
latent danger to the Cashocrats of hitching their SUVs to the fortunes 
of a President was evident. Precluded from tying its vicarious 
popularity to Bush's coat tails, the Cashocracy teetered beneath the 
gale

[[Page H15399]]

force invective of the Democrats' campaign mantra the Congressional 
Republican majority was a ``culture of corruption'' slothfully fully 
content to rubber stamp the failed policies of an unpopular President. 
Panic stricken, the politically tone-deaf Cashocrats urged GOP members 
to tout America's ``robust economy'' and attack Democrats on national 
security issues. The innately materialist economic argument was doomed 
to fail because the ``robust'' economy was not to be found in regions 
like the Northeast and Midwest. The latter argument proved unconvincing 
to an electorate convinced Iraq and New Orleans were GOP national 
security fiascoes. And, finally, nothing could persuade an outraged 
electorate to return a Republican majority which, in the interests of 
perpetuating itself in power, failed to protect House pages from 
predatory Members of Congress.
  By election day the public had concluded the Republican majority 
cared more about corporations than Americans; and when the tsunami hit, 
the Cashocracy crumbled down upon many now former GOP members who 
became the last, blameless victims of its stolid cupidity.
  In hindsight, the Cashocracy would best have heeded President 
Theodore Roosevelt's warning: ``The things that will destroy America 
are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead 
of duty first, the love of soft living, and the get rich quick theory 
of life.''
  Straggling back to Washington for the Republican revolution's death 
vigil, the 2006 election's surviving GOP members bid anguished goodbyes 
to defeated friends and struggled to make sense of it all. Dazed and 
confused, some Members managed to grasp the reality of their newly 
minted minority, while some still grapple with it. Out of this former 
group, a distinct vision has emerged concerning how House Republicans 
can revitalize and redeem themselves in the estimation of their fellow 
Americans.
  ``Restoration Republicans'' are best considered Reagan's 
grandchildren. Like their Reagan-Democratic parents, Restoration 
Republicans were attracted to our party by the intellectual, cultural, 
and moral components and proven practical benefits of philosophical 
conservatism. Transcending talking points and political cant, these 
Restoration Republicans are devoted to restoring the human soul's 
centrality to public policy decisions; and focusing these policies on 
preserving and perpetuating the permanent things of our evanescent 
earthly existence which surpass all politics in importance.
  The enduring ideals of Restoration Republicans are succinctly 
enumerated by Russell Kirk in his book, The Politics of Prudence:
  One, conservatives believe that there exists an enduring moral order. 
Two, conservatives adhere to custom, convention and continuity. Three, 
conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of 
prescription, that is, of things established by immemorial usage. Four, 
conservatives are guided by the principle of prudence. Five, 
conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. Six, 
conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. 
Seven, conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property 
are closely linked. Eight, conservatives uphold voluntary community, 
quite as they oppose involuntarily collectivism. Nine, the conservative 
perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human 
passion. And finally, 10, the thinking conservative understands that 
permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous 
society.

  Given how the Cashocracy repeatedly violated these principles during 
its descent into oblivion, and how the Democrats' 2006 rallying cry was 
``change,'' this 10th ideal merits deeper contemplation. For to 
understand it fully is to fully understand why Restoration Republicans, 
who are convinced we live amidst a crucible of liberty, proclaim our 
minority must emulate and implement the philosophical conservatism of 
Ronald Reagan and the fiery integrity of Theodore Roosevelt in the 
cause of empowering Americans and strengthening their eternal 
institutions of faith, family, community and country. Again, I quote 
from Kirk: ``Therefore, the intelligent conservative endeavors to 
reconcile the claims of permanence and the claims of progression. He or 
she thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims 
of permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an 
endeavor to hurry us into some dubious terrestrial paradise. The 
conservative, in short, favors reasoned and tempered progress. He or 
she is opposed to the cult of progress whose votaries believe that 
everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.
  ``Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, 
just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to 
renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the 
change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and 
nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a 
cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that 
nothing in a society should ever be wholly old and that nothing should 
ever be wholly new. This is the means of the conservation of a nation, 
quite as it is the means of conservation of a living organism. Just how 
much change a society requires and what sort of change depend upon the 
circumstances of an age and a nation.''
  Kirk's words compelled Restoration Republicans to empathetically 
assess our Nation's age and circumstances, and ponder the direction and 
scope of the changes our American community requires. In making these 
determinations, Restoration Republicans draw parallels between, and 
inspiration from, America's greatest generation. Our greatest 
generation faced and surmounted a quartet of generational challenges 
born of industrialization: Economic, social and political upheavals; a 
Second World War against abject evil; the rise of the Soviet super-
state as a strategic threat and rival model of governance; and the 
civil rights movement's moral struggle to equally ensure the God-given 
and constitutionally recognized rights of all Americans.
  Today, our generation of Americans must confront and transcend a 
quartet of generational challenges born of globalization: Economic, 
social and political upheavals; a third world war against abject evil; 
the rise of the Communist Chinese super-state as a strategic threat and 
rival model of governance; and moral relativism's erosion of our 
Nation's foundational, self-evident truths.
  The critical difference between the challenges conquered by the 
greatest generation and the challenges confronting our generation of 
Americans is this: They faced their challenges consecutively; we face 
our challenges simultaneously.
  In response to these generational challenges to our free republic, 
Restoration Republicans have drawn upon the roots of their 
philosophical conservatism to affirm the truth America does not exist 
to emulate others, America exists to inspire the world, and to advance 
the policy paradigm of American excellence, which rests upon a 
foundation of liberty, and the four cornerstones of sovereignty, 
security, prosperity and verities.
  Individually and collectively, American excellence's foundation and 
four cornerstones are reinforced by these policy principals: Our 
liberty is granted not by the pen of a government bureaucrat, but is 
authored by the hand of Almighty God. Our sovereignty rests not in our 
soil but in our souls. Our security is guaranteed not by the thin hopes 
of appeasement, but by the moral and physical courage of our troops 
defending us in hours of maximum danger. Our prosperity is produced not 
by the tax hikes and spending sprees of politicians, but by the 
innovation and perspiration of free people engaged in free enterprise. 
Our cherished truths and communal virtues are preserved and observed 
not by a coerced political correctness but by our reverent citizenry's 
voluntary celebration of the culture of life. Restoration Republicans 
conclude, therefore, that we must be champions of American freedom in 
this challenging new millennium to keep our America a community of 
destiny inspired and guided by the virtuous genius of our free people, 
and forever blessed by the unfathomable grace of God.
  It will not be easy, given the root public policy question of our 
times. In the age of industrialization, President Theodore Roosevelt 
empathized with

[[Page H15400]]

Americans' feelings of powerlessness in the face of economic, social 
and political forces radically altering or terminating their 
traditional, typically agrarian lives. Writing years later in his book 
A Humane Economy, the economist Wilhelm Ropke examined the impacts upon 
human beings by these forces, which he collectively termed ``mass 
society'':
  ``The disintegration of the social structure generates a profound 
upheaval in the outward conditions of each individual's life, thought 
and work. Independence is smothered; men are uprooted and taken out of 
the close-woven social texture in which they were secure; true 
communities are broken up in favor of more universal but impersonal 
collectivities in which the individual is no longer a person in his own 
right; the inward, spontaneous social fabric is loosened in favor of 
mechanical, soulless organization, with its outward compulsion; all 
individuality is reduced to one plane of uniform normality; the area of 
individual action, decision and responsibility shrinks in favor of 
collective planning and decision; the whole of life becomes uniform and 
standard mass life, ever more subject to party politics, 
nationalization and socialization.''
  In that industrial epoch, the root public policy question was how to 
protect Americans' traditional rights to order, justice and freedom 
from being usurped by corporate or governmental centralization.

                              {time}  2145

  The advent of virtual corporations and transient international 
capital has ended the old industrial welfare state model of governance, 
wherein solutions to Americans' economic and social anxieties were the 
shared burdens of centralized corporations and government. The stark 
choice is now between increasing the centralized power of the Federal 
Government or decentralization of power into the hands of individuals, 
families and communities.
  In their urgency to replace their lost or slashed corporate benefits, 
Americans will be sorely tempted to further centralize the Federal 
Government to do it. But expanding the authority and compulsory powers 
of the Federal Government will be injurious to the American people. Big 
Government doesn't stop chaos; Big Government is chaos.
  By usurping the rightful powers of individuals between its 
bureaucracy's steel wheels, highly centralized government alienates 
individuals and atomizes communities. Once more, Ropke speaks to the 
heart of the matter:
  ``The temptation of centrism has been great at all time, as regards 
both theory and political action. It is the temptation of mechanical 
perfection and of uniformity at the expense of freedom. Perhaps 
Montesquieu was right when he said that it is the small minds, above 
all, which succumb to this temptation. Once the mania of uniformity and 
centralization spreads and once the centrists begin to lay down the law 
of the land, then we are in the presence of one of the most serious 
dangerous signals warning us of the impending loss of freedom, 
humanity, and the health of society.''
  Only liberty unleashes Americans to establish the true roots of a 
holistic American, the voluntary and virtuous individual, familial, and 
communal associations which invigorate and instruct a free people 
conquering challenges. In contrast, centralized and, thus, inherently 
unaccountable government suffocates liberty, order and justice by 
smothering and severing citizens' voluntary bonds within mediating, 
nongovernmental institutions, and so doing, stifles our free people's 
individual and collective solutions to challenges. In consequence, the 
temptation for more centralized government must be fought to prevent 
turning sovereign Americans from the masters of their destiny into the 
serfs of governmental dependency.
  Fully versed in this verity, restoration Republicans have made their 
decision: power to the people. Thus, in this age of globalization, 
restoration Republicans vow to empower the sovereign American people to 
protect and promote their God-given and constitutionally recognized and 
protected rights; promote the decentralization of Federal Governmental 
powers to the American people or to their most appropriate and closest 
unit of government; defend Americans' enduring moral order of faith, 
family, and community and country from all enemies; foster a dynamic 
market economy of entrepreneurial opportunity for all Americans; and 
honor and nurture a humanity of scale in Americans' relations and 
endeavors.
  Further, while these restoration Republicans will be releasing a more 
detailed program in the future, the above will form the basis of any 
concrete proposals brought forth.
  Madam Speaker, my constituents are honest, hard-working and 
intelligent people who are bearing the brunt of the generational 
challenges facing our Nation. They have lost manufacturing and every 
manner of jobs due to globalization and, especially, the predatory 
trade practices of Communist China. Throughout these economically 
anxious times, they spend sleepless nights wondering if they will be 
able to afford to keep their jobs, their houses, their health care, 
their hopes for their children.
  In the war for freedom, they have buried, mourned and honored their 
loved ones lost in battle against our Nation and all of civilization's 
barbaric enemies. And every day, they struggle to make sense of an 
increasingly perverse culture that's disdainful of and destructive to 
faith, truths, virtue and beauty, if the existence of these permanent 
things is even admitted.
  True, my constituents differ on specific solutions to their pressing 
problems, but they do agree Washington isn't serving their concerns. 
They agree this storied representative institution is increasingly 
detached from the daily realities of their lives. And they remind me 
that when we enter this House, their House, we enter as guests who must 
honor the leap of faith they took in letting us in and allowing us to 
serve them.
  With my constituents, I utterly agree. While it is not my purpose 
here to discuss the majority party, let me be clear as to my own. House 
Republicans have no business practicing business as usual. My 
constituents, our country and this Congress deserve better, and we will 
provide it.
  Our Republican minority has Members who know America isn't an 
economy; America is a country. Our Republican minority has Members who 
know the only thing worth measuring in money is greed. Our Republican 
minority has Members with the heart to put individuals ahead of 
abstractions, people ahead of politics, and souls ahead of systems. Our 
Republican minority has Members who have seen sorrow seep down a 
widow's cheek and joy shine from a child's eye.
  Yes, Madam Speaker, my Republican minority has Members who know our 
deeds on behalf of our sovereign constituents must accord with 
Wordsworth's poetic prayer: ``And then a wish: my best and favored 
aspiration mounts with yearning for some higher song of philosophic 
truth which cherishes our daily lives.''
  It is these Republicans whose service in this Congress will redeem 
our party by honoring the sacred trust of the majestic American people 
who, in their virtuous genius, will transcend these transformational 
times and strengthen our exceptional Nation's revolutionary experiment 
in human freedom.
  With these Republicans, I hereby throw in my lot and pledge my best 
efforts on behalf of my constituents and our country.
  May God continue to grace, guard, guide and bless our community of 
destiny, the United States of America.

                          ____________________