[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 79 (Friday, May 7, 2021)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E487]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 AMERICA'S STRENGTH LIES IN THE RISE OF PROFILES OF COURAGE WHEN THEY 
                            ARE MOST NEEDED

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. SHEILA JACKSON LEE

                                of texas

                    in the house of representatives

                          Friday, May 7, 2021

  Ms. JACKSON LEE. Madam Speaker, I am a proud progressive Texas 
Democrat in the tradition of the late Governor Ann Richards and my 
predecessors Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland so it may hurt more than 
help them to say that Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-
ranking Republican in the House, Senator Mitt Romney, the 2012 
Republican standard-bearer, and President George W. Bush, the last 
Republican president to amass a popular vote majority, exceed 50 
percent in approval ratings, and win reelection all have my undying 
respect for the manner in which they have stood steadfast in defense of 
the Constitution, the country, and their principles in the face of 
brutal, withering, and unwarranted attack by their party's leadership 
and rank and file.
  All of them have repeatedly rejected and denounced publicly, 
unequivocally, and fiercely the Republican ``Big Lie'' that the 2020 
presidential election was stolen and rife with fraud. They are modern-
day profiles in courage.
  They all embody John F. Kennedy's dictum that ``sometimes party 
loyalty demands too much.''
  Like many Members of Congress, in the course of my service I have 
found often that vigorous debate and acceptance of different views, if 
allowed to be heard, can result in socially transformative and life-
affirming legislation, such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 
Voting Rights Act, and the 1994 Violence Against Women Act.
  Some might think it surprising for a member of an opposing party to 
go against the convention of non-interference when one's adversary is 
in the process of inflicting harm upon itself.
  I have chosen to ignore this convention because I am a firm believer 
in the promise of a more perfect union.
  And I believe in America and its future.
  Our children listen to and absorb what we say and do.
  We cannot let them see the brutalization of voices that are telling 
the truth about January 6 and the attack on the Citadel of Democracy 
without defending those voices.
  I believe these persons are patriots and I join them in my affection 
for the written values of this nation evidenced in our Constitution.
  I am a constitutional patriot who believes Bush, Romney, Cheney have 
put America first.
  Congresswoman Cheney, the House Republican Conference Chair, has 
drawn fire for being unrelenting in her defense of constitutional 
government and for not backing down one iota from her claim that the 
domestic insurrection led by terrorists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on 
January 6, 2021, for the avowed purpose of disrupting Congress from 
performing its constitutionally mandated duty to tally the votes cast 
by presidential electors and announce the results to the nation and the 
world was the intentional result of Donald Trump's handiwork:

       The President of the United States summoned this mob, 
     assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. 
     Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would 
     have happened without the President. The President could have 
     immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. 
     He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a 
     President of the United States of his office and his oath to 
     the Constitution.

  We cannot ignore the fact that these domestic terrorists were 
intending to kill officers of the Congress, the Vice-President, other 
Members, and law enforcement officers if need be.
  Sen. Romney of Utah, a state carried by Trump by more than 20 
percentage points and the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, is the 
only Republican senator who voted to convict and remove Trump from 
office for high crimes and misdemeanors. Twice.
  Former President George W. Bush was one of the first Republicans to 
congratulate President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala 
Harris on their election victory and has stated that the GOP is 
embarking on a ``suicide path'' with its adherence to the Big Lie and 
flirtation with the idea of forming a congressional ``Anglo-Saxon 
Caucus.''
  More Republican leaders are needed to join this ``Chorus of the 
Courageous,'' to put country over party, and to do their part to 
preserve and keep real the American boast that this is a land of 
government of, by, and for the people.
  At several moments in our Nation's past, men and women of principle, 
courage, and unyielding commitment to the Nation's founding ideals have 
stood forward at moments of maximum peril and danger in defense of the 
country's enduring values and principles.
  Men like Congressman L. Brooks Hayes of Arkansas, who alienated 
powerful governor Orval E. Faubus during the 1957 integration crisis 
when he refused to support Faubus' effort to keep the Little Rock 
public schools racially segregated.
  Or like U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., U.S. House Minority 
Leader John Rhodes, R-Ariz., and U.S. Senate Minority Leader Hugh 
Scott, R-Pa., who went to the White House to tell Richard Nixon, the 
winner of one of the greatest landslide victories in history, that he 
must resign, or he would be impeached by the House of Representatives 
and convicted by the Senate.
  Or women like U.S. Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, the first 
woman to serve both the House and the Senate and the first Republican 
senator to denounce the demagogue Sen. Joe McCarthy during the height 
of the Red Scare. In her famous ``Declaration of Conscience'' speech to 
the Senate, she said:
  ``Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making 
character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own 
words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism.'' 
[. . .]
  ``It is high time we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and 
Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as 
Americans about national security based on individual freedom.''
  In perpetuating Trump's Big Lie, Republican leaders are cravenly 
choosing narrow partisan interests over the national interest.
  They are rejecting the wisdom of the founding father of conservatism, 
the English statesman Sir Edmund Burke, who said:

       [The national state] is to be looked on with other 
     reverence; because it is not a partnership in things 
     subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary 
     and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a 
     partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in 
     all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be 
     obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not 
     only between those who are living, but between those who are 
     living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

  Burke understood, as did conservative statesmen, political leaders, 
and scholars that an elected official's duty was not simply to be an 
``instructed delegate,'' parroting and following their constituents' 
temporary and inchoate passions, but also to be an ``enlightened 
trustee'' bringing experience and judgment to elevate and inform the 
public discourse and understanding.
  What is needed today is a semblance of the will and courage of 
Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican of all. In his famous 1860 
Cooper Union Address, Lincoln exhorted and inspired adherents to hold 
true to their beliefs in equality and that slavery was a moral evil:

       What will convince that we do not threaten their property? 
     This and this only: cease to call slavery wrong and join them 
     in calling it right. All they ask, we can grant, if we think 
     slavery right. All we ask, they can grant if they think it 
     wrong. Right and wrong is the precise fact upon which depends 
     the whole controversy. Thinking it wrong, as we do, can we 
     yield?
       Let us not grope for some middle ground between right and 
     wrong. Let us not search in vain for a policy of don't care 
     on a question about which we do care. Nor let us be 
     frightened by threats of destruction to the government.
       Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that 
     faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty[.]

  This is the moral and political courage that is so conspicuous by its 
absence in Republicans leaders today. America's strength lies in the 
ability of everyone--Democrats, Republicans, and independents--to speak 
truth loudly and proudly in the face of adversity, and to power.

                          ____________________