[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 191 (Monday, November 1, 2021)]
[House]
[Pages H6064-H6068]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2045
                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2021, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, in recent days, I have been doing some 
research. In fact, one of the things I was looking at is the average 
income over the last couple of decades going back to 1991, and this was 
average annual wage according to the Social Security Administration, so 
maybe somebody would take issue with their accuracy. But according to 
their numbers, during the Clinton administration, the average 
American's income went up each year about $1,000 a year. So over 
President Clinton's 8 years in office, the average income went up about 
$8,000 over those 8 years.
  Under President Bush, it was a little more than $1,000 a year during 
his 8 years.
  But during the Obama administration it was between a $7,000 and 
$8,000 increase during the Obama administration.
  Then during the 4 years of the Trump administration, the average 
income went up about $2,000 a year. It was between $7,000 and $8,000 
for the 4 years, a dramatic increase.
  But I was shocked, as I was looking at different numbers, to find 
that the net worth for Black households in America during the 8 years 
of the Obama administration went down by 30 percent, on average. During 
the Trump administration, it didn't go down. It went up significantly.
  As I look at what is being proposed in the Build Back Better program, 
and I see this administration having canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, 
which certainly was going to, and has, caused an escalation in fuel 
prices and energy prices, and of course, President Biden released the 
penalties that had been put on the Russian natural gas pipeline, so it 
is doing great now, and took off some of the penalties on Iran--anyway, 
we have seen the price of energy going up significantly.
  It brought back to mind yet again the Honorable John Dingell's 
comment. He was looking forward to pushing through, in essence, a 
socialized medicine program through the committee he was chair of in 
2009 and 2010, but he was famously asked about the cap-and-trade bill. 
He responded that the cap-and-trade bill is not only a tax, but it is a 
great big tax.
  He explained before that when you raise the price of energy, you are 
not hurting the billionaires, the megawealthy. It is an inconvenience 
to them when you raise the price of energy, be it electricity, propane, 
natural gas, coal, whatever it is. It is an inconvenience to the very 
wealthy, but to those who are on fixed incomes, those who are scraping 
by working so hard every week and just getting by, if you increase the 
price of gasoline, electricity, energy, you just devastate those 
households. It is not just a little tax to them. It is devastating.
  The inflation that comes with an upward explosion of the price of 
fuel and energy, but especially fuel, as this administration has done, 
it inflates the price of everything. There is just not much of 
anything, unless you are buying from some pickup truck or some roadside 
kiosk--otherwise, you are having to pay a lot of extra energy costs, 
whether it is for the ingredients of something you are buying or 
whether it is the product getting to market. But usually, it is all of 
the above. The energy prices inflate costs of everything, basically.
  That is what has happened to the working poor in America. That is 
what has happened to seniors on fixed incomes. They are being 
devastated as prices continue to skyrocket, with no end in sight.
  On a trip some years back during the Obama administration, some of us 
went to Germany, and we met with some of their energy leaders. In one 
meeting, the driver of our little van was from Berlin, and he sat in 
and listened. I was talking to him privately after the meeting, and he 
said I hear all these rich people talking about how great our green 
energy is in Germany, but I have had to go from having one job to 
having three jobs, hardly ever getting to see my family, so they could 
brag about our green energy. But it is

[[Page H6065]]

destroying my family. It has completely destroyed my family time. I am 
having to work these two other jobs just to cover our energy costs. So 
it is kind of hard listening to them brag about it when it is coming 
out of my hide. I am the one, and people just like me all over Germany 
are the ones, who are paying for them to be able to brag about our 
green energy because it is costing us a tremendous amount in the way of 
personal time, family time, and additional time working to pay for 
their bragging.
  As we look at these issues and the costs skyrocketing in America, who 
has benefited? Well, China has benefited dramatically. We know they are 
still on course to have 100 new coal-powered energy plants go online 
over the next couple of years. They don't care.
  Of course, when we had coal-powered plants here in the U.S.--there 
are not many left--but when we had them, they have scrubbers in there 
that are taking pollutants out of the air before it ever gets out of 
the stacks to the air.
  If we are doing the coal burning here in the U.S., it is not so hard 
on our environment as it is in China or India, but especially China, 
because when people are just struggling to survive and to have enough 
money to put food on the table for their families, they are not that 
worried about how their yard looks or how things look, how the 
environment is. The same is true not only for an individual but for a 
country.
  If the economy is struggling, the people in that country are not as 
interested in cleaning up the environment. We will have to wait, they 
think, until we are making decent money, and then we can worry about 
the environment.
  Here in the United States, though, if you go back to 2007, every year 
since then, including through the Trump years, we have been producing 
1.3 percent less carbon dioxide. We can debate about what that does to 
the environment, whether it makes the temperature warmer.
  I have read where experts have said if you have a choice between the 
temperature getting slightly warmer or slightly colder, you want warmer 
because if it is getting slightly colder, that means there is less time 
for crops to grow. If it is slightly warmer, not too much warmer, then 
you have more time for crops to grow. You have more food, and you have 
fewer people starving.
  There are a lot of areas for debate, but for those who are concerned 
about carbon dioxide emissions, we have been on the right track. We 
continue to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we are putting out in 
this country.
  So there is nothing about building back better. This has been going 
on for a long time. Largely, we are told by the experts, that is 
because we have been converting coal plants to natural gas, and natural 
gas is such a clean-burning fuel.
  For those who want to get rid of all fossil fuels, if they would just 
take a serious look at all the things in the room in which they are 
located or the car in which they are located, they will find that so 
much of what we have that has made our lives easier, helping people 
rest better, is as a result of the use of fossil fuel. There are so 
many products that cannot be manufactured without natural gas as part 
of the manufacturing process. You have to have natural gas to make so 
many products.
  I was looking at getting some plastic composite boards for part of 
the area in our backyard so they wouldn't deteriorate so often, and 
they are expensive. But when they last for decades instead of a matter 
of short years, it looks like a good thing. That is using recycled 
plastic, finding more and more uses for that plastic, fiberglass.
  There are so many things we can't produce. Synthetic fibers, so much 
of the carpets and rugs we have are synthetic. The toothbrush, you 
wouldn't have a modern-day toothbrush--and I realize that, yes, there 
are people who have used bark off of certain trees to brush their 
teeth. I get that, but I kind of like having a modern-day toothbrush 
myself. You wouldn't have that without fossil fuel, particularly 
natural gas.

                              {time}  2100

  People say we need more electric cars. We need to get rid of fossil 
fuel. You cannot currently manufacture an electric car without the use 
of fossil fuel. Even if you don't use fossil fuel to power the vehicle, 
you are going to have to use it in the production of things within the 
car or there will be no car. So, I don't know, maybe someday somebody 
will build a wooden car, but wooden batteries are not going to work.
  For those of us that recognize how the length of life has gotten even 
longer during our modern history, medicine advances have just been 
extraordinary. There is a great book, ``The Five Thousand Year Leap'', 
that points out that when settlers came to America, they used basically 
the same type of farming methodology and tools that have been used for 
thousands of years. There hasn't been a whole lot of change.
  But if you look at the last 150 years in the United States and in 
Western civilization, you see dramatic increases and advances in the 
way that we have progressed, whether it is farming, medicine. Heck, if 
you go back 100 years or so when medical historians say in the early 
1900s, up to that point, for the whole of human history, you had a 
better chance of getting sicker after seeing a doctor than you did at 
getting better.
  And then you look at the--since 1910, 1920--some say it might be the 
1918 protocols during that pandemic--but around that time, you started 
having a better chance of getting better after seeing a doctor. And 
look at where we are now. People go to the doctor and expect to be made 
well because we have been able, by the grace of God, to develop some 
different cures. Life has gotten longer. Life has gotten better 
quality.
  So much of what we have is made by the use of fossil fuels. We need 
to do it cleanly, as cleanly as possible. But, again, when you take an 
economy in the direction that the build back better Biden 
administration has been doing as we head to the toilet with this 
economy--and there is no end in sight for this race to the bottom--then 
you realize we have come so far and now we are going in the wrong 
direction.
  There have been times, like World War II when we were struggling 
mightily, but we are not going through a world war right now. We should 
be doing well. And we saw, during the Trump administration for the 
first time in decades, something had happened.
  In 1990, when I brought a friend to speak to our Rotary Club, he had 
said, We are going the wrong direction. We are becoming more and more 
reliant on foreign countries for our energy. It has been years, he 
said, since we have been energy independent, and we are going the wrong 
way and it is going to destroy this country, if we can't produce the 
energy we need.
  Mr. Speaker, 30 years later--not even 30 years later--we were energy 
independent, the biggest producer of fossil fuels in the world. And we 
used it cleaner than anybody else. Virtually almost every other 
country, maybe some small ones, do a little better.
  But China knows that they are not going to be breathing their own 
air, it turns with the planet, and we end up breathing as much as they 
do right here in America. Not the clean air we produce more of every 
year for many years, but the polluted air that China is letting off as 
they continue to move toward putting us in their wake as they move 
toward becoming the greatest economy in the world. And spending money, 
massive amounts of money we don't have, creates not only inflation but 
it weakens this country.
  Mr. Speaker, I have heard some in recent days say if we are not 
careful, we are going to end up like Greece. And actually, if you look 
at the debt that we had at the end of the Obama administration, we were 
already Greece. The difference is, we got to produce our own currency. 
Greece was using the euro, so they didn't get to decide to create a lot 
more money in their system. And the dollar was the world standard. It 
was the world currency.
  I know there are companies, including China, they are advocating 
against the dollar being the world currency and that it is used to buy 
oil in the world market, but that hasn't happened. I am very thankful 
for that. But if we were not the world currency, and we didn't produce 
our own money, then we would already be in as big a trouble as Greece 
is because of the recklessness. And we are seeing it like never before 
in this administration.

[[Page H6066]]

  Yes, it is true the Obama administration, with the Democrats helping 
them, they hit between $1.5 and $1.6 trillion deficit in one year. 
Well, this administration, this Democrat majority are working very hard 
to eclipse that by a lot.
  We were warned back when we had over a trillion-dollar deficit more 
than one year, the agencies that rate country's economies and their 
currency and their debt, they may have to rate, downgrade, our debt. 
Standard & Poor's did that because we wouldn't get our spending under 
control--not enough.

  If any other rating agency had downgraded our debt, then the cost of 
borrowing money would have gone up dramatically and we would have ended 
up spending more paying interest than we were taking care of seniors 
who were counting on their fixed income. So there are some dark days 
ahead if we continue on this course of spending money we don't have. It 
is like everything this administration can see to throw money at that 
might help create more Democrat Party voters and they are throwing 
money at it.
  So people were shocked, including Democrat friends, they were shocked 
to hear that this administration is proposing paying $450,000 to legal 
immigrants that were separated from a child. Well, we know that did 
happen some during the Trump years. We know that it has continued to 
happen during the Biden years; that it happened under the Obama 
administration. And it can be a good idea until we are sure that an 
adult with a child that is already breaking our laws by coming in 
illegally is actually related to and, hopefully, the parent of that 
child instead of part of the drug cartels that continue to use them in 
sex trafficking. And we have had people that turned out not to be 
related to the child they were claiming, and we have been able to 
interrupt that. And so it is important that we don't just take this at 
face value, especially when we have reports of children being recycled 
to come across with people over our border illegally.
  So under the Biden administration, if you think, Okay, these people 
come in, they break U.S. law, we are going to give each one $450,000. 
And that might not mean much to somebody who has a son that sold 
paintings for $500,000, and I wouldn't object if the Biden 
administration wanted to give each illegal immigrant a painting that 
Hunter Biden had done. If they said, Here is your half a million; here 
is another painting that Hunter Biden has done. Enjoy it. Maybe you can 
sell it for half a million and you will be set for life. Let's try 
that.
  Mr. Speaker, $450,000, if you look at the Social Security 
administration, the wages, well, for 2020, the most recent numbers we 
have, the average income for an American last year was $53,000--like 
$53,300 or something like that--but $53,000 a year.

                              {time}  2110

  Now, the rate is normally around 22 percent. There is data that 
indicates the effective rate paid for income tax may be around 13 to 14 
percent. Let's just round it and say that the average American making 
$53,000 a year pays 20 percent income tax. That would be $10,600 a year 
that a person making $53,000 would pay in Federal income tax.
  If you took all $10,600 of Federal income tax coming from the average 
wage-earner of $53,000 a year, and if you took that $10,600 and applied 
that toward the $450,000 President Biden wants to give to each of these 
illegal immigrants, it would take 42\1/2\ years of the average American 
wage Federal income tax to pay one person who broke the U.S. laws and 
came into the country illegally. That is what appears to be justice to 
the Biden administration.
  And how is our President looking to the rest of the world? The story 
today, as he came into the G20 Summit, he came in--according to the 
article I saw--20 minutes late. He said, in essence, sorry to be late. 
He had been trying to get past the elevators--they had a problem with 
the elevators and that is why he was 20 minutes late. Somebody needs to 
help him.
  I think it would be helpful not to leave people from the biggest 
countries, except for China and Russia, they didn't come--their leaders 
didn't come--but the rest, let's show them a little more respect by not 
making them wait 20 minutes for our President to show up. I think that 
would be a good thing. Kind of lend a better atmosphere to those type 
of meetings.
  Perhaps then you wouldn't have foreign reporters saying things like: 
President Biden looks like he needs a nursing home and a hot bowl of 
soup. We need to help our President give a better image of America. I 
know there is no intention for our President causing problems like 
that, none whatsoever, so I am avoiding in engaging in personalities. 
But I think it would be good--there are so many people helping the 
President--to help him represent our country well.
  So in an article here, a $450,000 payment to illegal aliens would 
exceed various programs for American citizens. And, of course, we, in 
Congress, did a good thing in recent years. We felt like the families 
of those people who have lost a loved one in combat, they should have 
been getting more than the measly thousands of dollars they were, so we 
increased the amount that the family of an American hero who was killed 
in combat would get. It was increased to $400,000.
  Well, we find out that the Biden administration wants to provide more 
than we provide to the family who has lost a loved one in combat 
representing and defending our country and our national interests. 
Someone who crossed the border illegally, according to this 
administration, should get an extra $50,000 more than those who died 
for this country.
  We also know--and I am pleased that Secretary Buttigieg is back from 
paternity leave because we do have a real crisis in our supply chain. 
We didn't have this problem during the Trump administration. It sure 
seemed to be a good idea the way we were manufacturing more of the 
things we need in America. I am not a big fan of tariffs, but as I told 
President Trump, since you are simply using them as a tool to get 
better trade deals then I will vote for those tariffs for such use, so 
that we can get more fairness in our agreements with foreign countries. 
That worked out. President Trump did make some good deals.
  We are seeing all that fall aside as this administration seems to be 
more dedicated to helping China, Russia, Iran, and OPEC nations do 
better with their economy than we are here at home.
  I realize there are some people here in Washington that feel like 
America has more than it deserves. I believe God has blessed us more 
than we deserve in America. We are seeing those things change as we 
have continued to forget more and more just who the source is for the 
blessings in this country.
  In fact, what occurred to me is, instead of build back better, as we 
see the economy in shambles, prices going through the roof, more and 
more people now being fired, the economy appears headed in even deeper 
trouble the further we go. Maybe instead of build back better, we could 
call it Biden's bulldozings of our blessings.
  Here is an article from Fortune. No sign of relief. The global supply 
chain crisis could last well into February. And as I thought back, Vice 
President Harris--it seems like it was back in August when she was 
speaking to some folks--somebody made fun of her for saying: You may 
want to order your Christmas presents early this year so you make sure 
you have them. I didn't know why anybody would make fun of her because, 
as it turns out, she was actually exactly right. Apparently she knew 
back in August we were going to have trouble getting the things we need 
in America.
  I have been amazed to see car lots more empty than they have cars. 
Shocking. I have never seen some of these car lots with so few cars 
ever in my life.
  There is an article from The Hill: More people in Manchin's, Sinema's 
home States want to hold off on new spending. That is from polls--an 
article by Mychael Schnell from The Hill.

                              {time}  2120

  People have been trying to convince Senator Manchin and Senator 
Sinema that they just need to sign off on spending trillions more 
dollars. But recent polls apparently are showing that people in their 
home States appreciate them not agreeing to more and more of the 
runaway spending that would just increase inflation.

[[Page H6067]]

  One other thing people are noticing--a Washington Times story from 
Stephen Dinan titled ``Biden administration expands no-go zones where 
ICE can't arrest illegal immigrants''--so millions more are coming in, 
and fewer and fewer are being deported.
  Mr. Speaker, I think it is important for people to understand that 
this feeling that we need to secure our borders doesn't come from any 
kind of xenophobia. I look at the Hispanic culture, and though 
generalizing can be dangerous, generally speaking, I see faith in God; 
I see a hard work ethic; and I see a devotion to family. Well, those 
are things I believe made America the great country it has been. We 
need more of that help.
  Mr. Speaker, if you look at the contributions that immigrants have 
made from countries all over the world to this country, to make it as 
powerful and as great as it is, we want immigration. No country in the 
world, even those bigger than the United States, is as generous with 
providing visas as the United States is--over 1 million a year.
  But as Milton Friedman pointed out, if we are going to provide 
welfare in this country, which started back in the 1960s, then we can't 
have open borders or this country will be over very soon. It will be 
overwhelmed with people coming in. It will destroy the golden goose 
that some look at the U.S. as being, and there won't be any country to 
flee to looking for a better life.
  Some in allied countries tell me: If you lose your freedom in 
America, there won't be any freedom in the world. We will all lose our 
freedom pretty quickly if you lose yours.
  This is critical stuff. But I think the biggest danger of people 
swarming across our border, as they have been doing this year 
unimpeded, is the danger that Benjamin Franklin pointed out. He didn't 
go into detail, but as most people here remember, he was asked by a 
lady as he left the Constitutional Convention at the conclusion: What 
have you given us?
  And as most everybody here knows, he replied: A republic, madam, if 
you can keep it.
  A republic, a republican form of government, that is with a little R, 
not the Republican Party. A republic is what the Romans came up with 
after they looked at democracy from the Greeks. They actually had a 
real democracy where most everybody participated in the big decisions. 
Fortunately, they realized you can't let everybody vote as a juror in 
law cases, so they restricted those law case juries to only having 501 
people. As I understand it, it was 501 people on the jury that voted to 
make Socrates drink poison as his penalty.
  That is what you see, Mr. Speaker, when you have too many 
participating in a process. It gets out of hand. You get a handful, 
they start running, and they get people fired up. Before you know it, 
Mr. Speaker, one of the finest men in the country is ordered to drink 
poison.
  Mr. Speaker, you have to be careful. That is what the Romans 
realized, so they created a republic. We like the democratic idea that 
people get to vote and participate in government, but let's have them 
elect representatives, then the representatives study the issues, and 
they vote on behalf of the rest of the country. If we don't like how 
they are voting, then we throw them out in the next election and select 
another representative. That is the republic form of government.
  Republics generally have not lasted more than 200 years. We are 30 
years or so past the 1789 ratification of our Constitution. Some would 
say: Well, when we pass 200 years, we are living on borrowed time.
  We know history, but not enough. Too many of our schools quit 
teaching history because the Federal Government got involved in 
education.
  Is education an enumerated power under the Constitution for the 
Federal Government to be involved in? No, it is not. But in 1979, 
President Carter created the Department of Education. As a result, the 
percentage of teachers in education has dropped dramatically.
  Nearly three-fourths of the employees in K-12 education in Texas were 
teachers. But then after the Department of Education comes along, you 
got more bureaucrats here making more requirements for the folks in 
Austin and every State capital. So those folks have to hire more people 
to answer the mandates of the Department of Education in Washington. 
And to get their information, they have to mandate more people in every 
school board in elementary school.
  I had a fantastic public school education in elementary school, 
middle school, and high school. In elementary school, we had a 
principal, the principal had an assistant, then there was the janitor, 
then there were the people who worked in the cafeteria, and that was 
it. Now, every school has to have so many people working in the 
administration gathering information to send to the State capital so 
they can send it to Washington.

  As I recall, it was either late eighties or early nineties, I think 
it was early nineties, but I was on the board of Former Students of 
Texas A&M. I was asking the president, we had some other people there 
who worked on analyzing SAT scores. I said: I understand the SAT test 
has now been recalibrated so that students will do better than they 
have in the past for answering the same number of questions right. Yes, 
it has been recalibrated. People were embarrassed that SAT scores were 
a lot lower now than they used to be.
  If you took the SAT in the early seventies, your score now would 
probably be around 200 points higher than it was back then. I was 
intrigued by that.
  Why did we have to recalibrate the SAT? Well, it was so people 
wouldn't think schools were failing during the nineties. So SAT scores 
came back up not because they were doing better but because the scoring 
was recalibrated.
  That was a rather interesting illumination on education, but we 
continue to see problems.
  As both Republican and Democrat Presidents have been pushing more 
control, I think President Trump tried to give more control back 
locally. But what has happened is the Federal Government has taken more 
and more control right here in Congress. We continue to pass stuff that 
says: You don't get your money back. Of course, we know the money comes 
from the States up here. But we are not going to give you your money 
back unless you do this, that, or the other like we tell you.
  Well, one of the mandates has been you had to pass this federally 
mandated test, and the federally mandated test was extremely light on 
history. I am told that there are times when there isn't any history, 
maybe one history question, and it is not always good history, if a 
question is asked.

                              {time}  2130

  So I hear from schools back home: We have to teach to the mandated 
test because if any student doesn't pass the federally mandated test, 
we don't get all of that Federal money that came from us back to us. 
They keep it for that student.
  So to avoid not getting back even as much of our own money as we 
should, we have got to get people prepared to pass the test. So some 
schools, they got rid of music, they got rid of art. And some of us are 
big advocates and we go: Wait a minute. Do you not understand that when 
it comes to music, it comes to art, you are getting synapses to fire in 
the brain that might not fire otherwise, and if you can get more 
synapses firing, then the student's brain can accumulate more, work 
better, and then overall do better scoring?
  Look, we have got to get them to pass the test, I am told, and those 
things, music, art, are not on the test, so we have got to concentrate 
on making sure the students are ready for that federally-mandated test. 
Well, that is a shame.
  Music and art add dramatically to life. And there are some awesome 
art teachers. They didn't do too well with me. Apparently, there is an 
art gene in my background. My dad was artistic; had a daughter that was 
very artistic. But it was a latent gene in me. I see what it adds in 
the art contests that all of the Representatives, I think most of us 
have in our districts, but you see the incredible products that these 
kids are able to create, and it is really inspiring.
  Yet so many are having to cut back or get rid of art altogether. Why? 
Because of the Federal mandates from here on high, on Mount Olympus, on 
Capitol Hill.
  It is important, also, on how we treat people. When I go to the 
border, I don't mistreat anybody that comes in illegally. I try to help 
all I can, but they have come into the country illegally.

[[Page H6068]]

And we need to get back to the Trump policies before we get 
overwhelmed. And going back to the point that Benjamin Franklin made: 
It takes work to keep a republic. It doesn't just happen. That is why 
it has happened so rarely. That is why the United States of America is 
such an anomaly in history.
  There has never been a country like this. Even Solomon's Israel 
didn't have all of the individual opportunities, all of the individual 
assets and comforts that we have here in America. It is an amazing 
place, but it takes work. It takes education of our children, training 
them up so they understand what it takes to preserve a republic, a 
representative form of government, and getting stronger and stronger as 
we have done until more recent years.
  When you have people flooding in, I mean, 2 million people this year, 
this administration has 3 more years, so are we going to have 8 
million, at least 8 million more people enter this country illegally? 
They are not coming from countries that understand how to preserve a 
republic. And I will tell you some of the very best citizens we have in 
this whole country are people who went through the process of becoming 
legal citizens, and I hear from them a lot in my district.
  They love America because they know how it can be outside of America, 
and they don't want our country becoming like those countries they came 
from. People from Venezuela, people from Central America, from Eastern 
Bloc countries are some of the best citizens we have got, some from 
Russia. My cousin married a Russian, and she knows. We were talking 
about it last week, and she is feeling a sense of urgency. We are 
losing what we have had. We are becoming more like the place I was so 
anxious to leave.
  It takes work to keep a republic and to enjoy the blessings we have 
received. People who are flooding in, they have never been trained on 
what it takes to preserve a republic. And one of the big issues to so 
many people during the COVID pandemic has been the unprecedented grab 
of power that the Federal Government has never had before. Never. We 
have had pandemics that were a lot more deadly than COVID, but no one 
has ever had the nerve to tell people who were not infected, who had 
thriving businesses, that they had to close down their business. We are 
going to let these people open. We are not letting you open.
  Thirty years ago, they would have opened anyway, probably 20 years 
ago, and they would have won in court without question. You can't shut 
down business. It is unprecedented. And for heaven's sake, to tell 
churches they couldn't open. For the huge majority of our history, when 
there was a time of emergency, including a pandemic, people felt like 
they needed to be in church praying; that they needed to be asking God 
for help. And for the first time in our history, we didn't have a 
President that issued a National Day of Prayer & Fasting, asking God to 
help us. For the first time in our history, we had a national 
proclamation: You have got to close businesses. You have got to close 
churches. You can't meet. In some places States said you can't 
even sing in church because you open your mouth. We can't allow that.

  And I know there are still a lot of mixed signals on masks. It is 
interesting. There are cloth masks. I had a mask getting on a plane 
with, one of the SHEMA97 masks designed in Israel. It has four layers 
of cloth that are ionized to kill germs. They don't just catch them. 
They will kill germs.
  The flight attendant said: I can see your nose, so that mask can't be 
any good. It can't be any good, she says. And she was wearing one of 
the little blue-and-white masks. Talk about not doing any good. 
Although, in fairness, I have read that there were some studies that 
said those little blue-and-white masks can decrease your percentage of 
getting COVID by 0.2 percent. So 0.2 percent, that is what it is, 
great. Wear one of those little, cloth masks.
  But then we see down in Florida that has been the most open, that 
they have fewer cases percentagewise. They are doing better than any 
other State in the country and they have been the most open State we 
have had. So it is interesting. And I have an article here from The 
Gateway Pundit. ``It Wasn't Just Beagles and Monkeys--Fauci's NIH Also 
Funded Medical Experiments on AIDS Orphans in New York City.''
  I read somewhere else that these were Black orphans that had AIDS, 
and the Fauci NIH was doing experiments on them, according to this 
article of Jim Hoft. They reported that 25 children, those Black 
orphanage babies, died during the drug studies they were doing on those 
poor little babies. An additional 55 children died following the 
studies while they were in foster care. Tim Ross, director of the child 
welfare program at Vera--I am looking for what that stands for--the 
Vera Institute, that as of 2009, 29 percent of the remaining 417 
children who were used in drug studies had died; 532 children that are 
admitted to have been used now.

                              {time}  2140

  That was in the last 20 years. I don't know if Dr. Fauci has been 
asked if he knew about that. We found out he lied about funding gain of 
function in China.
  Another article from Fox Business, Elizabeth Faddis, that Dr. Fauci 
is facing a demand from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to divulge 
information regarding the alleged use of an experimental drug on 
puppies.
  I guarantee you, as more people find out that NIH was using orphan 
Black AIDS babies for drug experiments, that killed many of them, there 
will be even more cries from both sides of the aisle on answers. I 
thought we were so far past anything like that. I mean, after the 
outrageous Tuskegee experiments, I can't believe we have been doing 
that same stuff in the last 20 years. Somebody needs to be held 
accountable for these things.
  We are in deeply troubling times, and there is a good chance that if 
we don't get back to making sure children in America know how to 
sustain a republic, we are headed for losing it.
  It is because of a fear of that, a fear of the loss of freedom, that 
caused me to leave the bench and run and try to get elected to Congress 
so I could make a difference in legislation, so we could try to salvage 
this little experiment in self-government. But it seems pretty clear it 
is not going to last much longer.
  You can't absorb 8 million people, who not only most of them don't 
speak the language, but they are adults who have no clue, have never 
been educated. They have certainly got the capacity to learn, but they 
have never been educated on what it takes to preserve self-government 
and the blessings that we have in this country.
  If they are not educated on that, if they are simply handed $450,000 
each, then that is all they know. Wow, this is a country where you come 
in, demand money, they give it to you. You can't sustain a country like 
that, and we won't. No one ever has.
  In Rome, there was one Caesar that figured that bread and circuses 
were being given to keep people peaceable, and it was keeping them from 
working. He tried to do away with it. But by then, it was too late.
  Let's act now before it is too late.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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