[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 121 (Thursday, July 21, 2022)]
[House]
[Pages H6945-H6950]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Torres of New York). 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, it is always an honor and a privilege to 
have a chance to address the House. There is so much that is so 
critically important going on these days, especially this week, and I 
wanted the chance to address those.
  I have a friend from Texas who hopes to address the House, and I 
advised him I would yield him such time as he may consume. So my 
friend--people say that a lot, ``my friend.'' But Randy Weber is a dear 
friend, and I think he will be out at any moment.
  In the meantime, I think we had an 11- to 12-hour hearing yesterday 
in the Committee on the Judiciary, and I will get into that 
momentarily.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Weber), my dear 
friend from southeast Texas.
  Mr. WEBER of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I thank Judge Gohmert for yielding, 
my friend from northeast Texas. We are going to miss him. He has had 
quite a distinguished career both before he got into Congress and then 
when he got demoted to Congress. We appreciate him. I just can't tell 
you how much we really appreciate him.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the life of country music legend 
Mickey Gilley. Mickey Gilley passed away Saturday, May 7, in Branson at 
the age of 86.
  Born on March 9, 1936, Gilley was a native of Natchez, Mississippi, 
where he grew up around his two famous cousins, Jerry Lee Lewis and 
Jimmy Swaggart.
  In his career, Gilley earned 39 top 10 hits and 17 number one songs.
  With six Academy of Country Music Awards and a star on the Hollywood 
Walk of Fame, and as a member of the 2011 Texas Country Music Hall of 
Fame, Gilley was also one of only a few artists who have also received 
the Academy of Country Music's Triple Crown Award.
  But it was the opening of the country dance club bearing his name 
that changed the world of country music forever. It was 1971 when 
Mickey officially opened the doors of his famous honkytonk.

[[Page H6946]]

  Gilley's reputation grew so much that Hollywood even took notice of 
the hit movie ``Urban Cowboy,'' where he even made an appearance 
alongside none other than John Travolta, Debra Winger, and Johnny Lee.
  Inspired by the real-life romance of a pair of the club's patrons, 
``Urban Cowboy'' put Gilley's on the map, revived music careers, 
launched others, introduced two-stepping to a whole new audience, and 
created a lifestyle that has been adopted by millions.

  Following his role in ``Urban Cowboy,'' Gilley found himself 
performing in main showrooms in places like Las Vegas, Reno, Tahoe, and 
Atlantic City, and even traveling to Europe to perform. Gilley even 
performed for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
  Over the decades, Gilley appeared in a number of popular television 
series, including ``The Fall Guy,'' ``Fantasy Island,'' ``The Dukes of 
Hazzard,'' ``Murder, She Wrote,'' and ``CHiPs.''
  Not only will Mickey Gilley's music live on in the hearts of so many 
who loved his music, but his cultural influence cannot be overstated.
  ``Urban Cowboy'' became an American phenomenon, and it was influenced 
by the real-life stories of Gilley's patrons, Dew Westbrook and Betty 
Helmer.
  ``Urban Cowboy'' told the story of a west Texas farmhand who was new 
to the area and working his first job at a refinery. This film 
introduced country dance to America and created a lifestyle that has 
been adopted by millions.
  Even more surprisingly, it directly resulted in the most unlikely 
outcome of all: Country-and-western music became mainstream. Once 
considered outdated hillbilly attire, cowboy hats and belt buckles 
became high fashion.
  On Saturday, January 29, Mickey came to the Galveston Regional 
Chamber of Commerce's celebration, ``The 50th Anniversary of Gilley's 
and the 42nd Anniversary of `Urban Cowboy.''' It was a great 
celebration with thousands, and Mickey actually sang for us, to the 
delight of the crowd. We even presented him with a copy of the tribute 
that I had done to him right here on the floor of the U.S. House of 
Representatives and a plaque commemorating that event.
  Mickey Gilley will be missed, but his legacy will live on not only in 
the hearts and minds of those who loved his music but also in America's 
love of country-and-western music, Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, and, 
yes, pickup trucks. He has even been featured in the very popular Texas 
Hot Country Magazine. I know the publisher well, Leon Beck, a great 
guy.
  Gilley was preceded in his death by his wife Vivian, who passed in 
2019. He is survived by his wife now, Cindy Loeb Gilley; his children, 
Kathy, Michael, Gregory, and Keith Ray; his four grandchildren and nine 
great-grandchildren; and his cousins, Jerry Lee Lewis and, I believe, 
Jimmy Swaggart, although someone told me recently he might have passed 
already. My deepest sympathies go out to his family.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank Mickey Gilley for introducing our way of life to 
the world. He will forever be a legend.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my friend bringing that to our 
attention. That was a great tribute to a great man from a great man.
  I did attend and help things out at Gilley's on a number of occasions 
there in Pasadena--Pasadena, Texas, that is--not far from downtown 
Houston.
  I don't know. I guess I had the look that I could ride a bull because 
they turned it up as high as it could go wheeling, and it was 
something. I got better at it, but that was tough when they put that 
thing on full speed, yanking back and forth. I just knew I wasn't going 
to ride a bull in the rodeo.
  Rather prophetic, too, was Mickey Gilley with one of his biggest hit 
songs, ``Don't the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time.'' Quite an 
astute observation. But we were young then.
  It was interesting, hearing the colloquy exchange between 
Representative Scalise and Leader Hoyer, the discussion about 
inflation.
  I remember vividly the years under President Gerald Ford, and he 
adopted WIN and had WIN buttons, which stood for ``Whip Inflation 
Now.'' The failure of the policies at that point to whip inflation, 
along with Watergate, helped elect President Jimmy Carter, and things 
just got worse and worse. We lost our international standing. Countries 
did not respect us.
  Beginning in 1978, I was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia. As I 
have said before, we weren't in combat during my 4 years on Active 
Duty, but I still have deep regrets that President Carter did not 
respond more appropriately when an act of war occurred in Iran, in 
Tehran, when our Embassy was attacked and over 50 employees taken 
prisoner.
  We were put on alert. That went up at Fort Benning, and people 
weren't sure who all was going to be going if a group was sent.

                              {time}  1245

  But I still believe, having lived through those days, watching every 
development, that if President Carter had made clear to the Iranians, 
you will either release--initially, I think they started out around 
three days. The spokesman for the Ayatollah kept saying the students 
attacked the embassy, the students took the hostages.
  I mean, I was young, but I wasn't stupid. And it appeared pretty 
clear to me that the spokesman for the Ayatollah was giving himself a 
back door: The students did this. That way, if President Carter 
reacted, as he should have, and said you will either release those 
hostages, get them released from the students, play around with the 
ridiculous thing that we are saying, if you don't get those released 
within 48 to 72 hours, something like that, then we are sending as many 
people as it takes to get our people back, and to stop the active war 
you started.
  But if it is the students, you can just take care of that quite 
easily. But, again, if you don't release them, see that they are 
released, we are coming. And if you harm one hair on their heads, then 
we are going to take everyone associated with the Ayatollah Khomeini, 
including the Ayatollah Khomeini, out. They will not exist after we 
come.
  I really felt if President Carter had taken that strong position, 
they would have been released. He couldn't bluff; he had to be serious 
about it. But if he had said he wasn't bluffing, then I really felt 
like they would have been released. And nobody was dying to go to Iran 
at Fort Benning, but everybody I knew was willing to go and give up 
their lives, if necessary. That was part of being in the service.
  But that never happened. And it took getting a new President, Ronald 
Reagan, in office, before people around the world began to take the 
United States seriously. But some in this body have talked before 
about, Oh, no, we don't want to give the radical Islamists something to 
recruit with.
  Well, one of the best things they ever had to recruit with was 
President Carter and his unwillingness to take a stand and make a 
difference. And as a result, it is my belief that--having studied 
history my whole life, majored in it in college, never stopped studying 
it--that we lost thousands of American lives because we didn't have a 
President in President Carter that engendered respect. And respect 
carries a little element of fear. We didn't have that. And as a result, 
for decades, Americans have suffered.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Illinois (Mrs. Miller), 
my friend.


                       Democrats' Leftwing Agenda

  Mrs. MILLER of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for 
yielding.
  In just one week, House Democrats have managed to bypass the wishes 
of the American people and pass radical legislation that permits 
abortion through the ninth month, assures payouts to Planned 
Parenthood, attacks the traditional family, and eliminates medical 
supervision for chemical abortion pills.
  The American people who overwhelmingly oppose abortion through the 
third trimester are appalled by the radical leftwing agenda put forth 
by the Speaker. House Democrats are pushing an extreme leftwing agenda. 
They are trying to distract from the surging gas prices, record 
inflation, and the crisis at the border, which they created.
  It took less than 2 years for woke leftists to destroy the American 
economy, which was booming under President Trump's leadership. These 
same leftists have also openly advocated for open borders, transgender 
surgeries on

[[Page H6947]]

teens, and removing the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.
  All of these initiatives are deeply unpopular with the American 
people, and I will also vote ``no'' on the radical agenda of the left.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, when Mary Miller tells you something, you 
can count on her being truthful about it.
  Mr. Speaker, yesterday, we had many hours of hearings in the 
Judiciary Committee on a couple of bills. One of them, the Democrat 
majority and leaders in the Judiciary Committee and the Democratic 
Party were saying repeatedly that no one has gotten immunity from 
liability like the gun manufacturers. And that was said many ways, many 
different times, vilifying gun manufacturers.
  What it boils down to is in the Second Amendment, it makes very 
clear, in operative part, that the right of the people to keep and bear 
arms shall not be infringed. Well, it has been infringed many times. 
The Supreme Court has had to strike things down many times. So the 
effort to eliminate the Second Amendment through the courts has not 
occurred.
  You can be smart and not have commonsense, but we are dealing with 
some smart people here who have figured out, Okay, we have tried every 
which way to get rid of the Second Amendment. If we are ever going to 
get to the progressive, socialist, communist dream--whichever one of 
those you want to use, it is all pretty well the same thing these 
days--you are going to have to get rid of the Second Amendment.
  The left knows that. And they have made some strides. They have made 
some dents into the Second Amendment. But this is going to make use--if 
they get it passed into law--not of warfare but of what has come to be 
known as ``law fare.'' It is where you overwhelm someone or some entity 
with so many lawsuits that they cannot continue. And if it is an 
entity, you put them out of business, not because they are liable, but 
it is because they can't handle that many lawsuits. It just undoes them 
and puts them out of business.
  And if you look historically where that would take us is to the 
medieval-type thinking where you had this small group of elites. They 
rode everywhere they went, and us peasants would walk everywhere we 
went. Maybe there was a big wagon that would carry the peasants at 
times. But the ruling elite--which is what you get with socialism, 
progressivism--this tiny veneer of ruling elite that billionaires in 
America think, mistakenly, that they will be part of if they help get 
to that socialist utopia, being ignorant of the fact that every time a 
Nation moves to socialist utopia, once they are there, they thank the 
gazillionaires for all the money. They helped make the socialist dream 
come true. And then they either kill them or send them to a gulag and 
take all of their money.

  So these billionaires that are pouring in money, the socialist 
leaders are saying, Thank you very much; oh, we appreciate you so much. 
But if they get to that socialist utopia, those billionaires that made 
it possible will be dead, or wished they were, because they were in 
some prison, some gulag somewhere, doing work requirements. So that is 
historically what we are talking about.
  But I keep coming back to that vision of what is being pursued and 
what will the outcome be. Once you either eliminate the Second 
Amendment or you eliminate every entity that makes guns, then the 
ruling elite can get closer to their dreams of being the ones riding in 
private jets, in Suburbans, up-armored; being the only ones in America 
who have guns for their security forces while all the peasants, the 
masses, the unwashed--all of us--would have nothing. And we would have 
to kowtow and bow.
  Now, I got a little taste of that the summer I was in the Soviet 
Union as an exchange student back in the 1970s. And I thought it was 
crazy. We were told there were eight Americans allowed in on this 
program. We were told in orientation, Look, you have got to understand 
in a communist society like the Soviet Union, only the elite have cars. 
Everybody else takes mass transportation or walks.
  In the United States, pedestrians generally have the right-of-way. 
But don't think for a second we were told anywhere in the Soviet Union 
that you have the right-of-way of a pedestrian, because only the ruling 
elite have the cars. And it is a game to them. They will try to hit you 
because they know, as the ruling elite, if it ever came to court or 
there was some question about you as a pedestrian being hit, the 
ultimate result would be a ruling that you should have seen the car 
coming and gotten out of the way. Because these are the ruling elites 
and you are the peasants. Great socialist utopia. That is where we are 
headed if these kinds of bills get passed.
  If you can't get rid of the Second Amendment, their strategy that we 
lived through hours of yesterday, bankrupt the gun manufacturers. And 
then we will be on our way. And that way, only the ruling elite will 
have security forces with guns and everybody else will either walk or 
take mass transportation. The ruling elite gets the private jets.
  And it is okay to just have massive amounts of carbon emissions and 
private helicopters, private jets, big Suburbans, like Al Gore used. I 
read where he was seen having an entourage of big jets--this was long 
after he was out of leadership as Vice President--but they would all be 
sitting there, cooling for the Vice President--or former Vice 
President. So that is the kind of thing that will continue.
  The ruling elite, they get to pollute like crazy. Their yachts, their 
private jets, those will continue. In fact, there will be a lot more of 
them. And you see people like the Biden family--Hunter Biden that got 
close to oligarchs in Russia, in Ukraine--and made money off the 
Chinese Communist Party because they were in charge in China, let's 
face it.
  But isn't it interesting that if you look at the policies and the 
things that this administration has done, who has benefited?
  Yeah, they talk a lot of trash about Russia but at the same time, by 
President Biden basically going to war with energy companies in the 
U.S., he has so driven up the price of oil and natural gas that 
Russia's been able to fund their invasion of, and war with, Ukraine.

                              {time}  1300

  We got $13 billion passed in this House. Another $40 billion. I voted 
for 13; I didn't vote for the 40 because it didn't appear to me there 
was enough restraint on what President Biden could do with the money.
  It made big headlines in the last few weeks when the Biden 
administration announced: Gee, we are going to provide $820 million to 
Ukraine. Well, you have $53 billion to work with and you are trickling 
out $820 million while Russia is making big advances in Ukraine? For 
heaven's sake, that is one of the reasons I didn't vote for the $40 
billion because I figured that the Biden administration would find 
other things to do with it.
  Apparently, they want to have a lot more sex change surgeries in the 
military. They cost a lot of money--it doesn't cost $40 billion if you 
had a sex change for everybody in the military. By the way, that does 
put our military members in a category where they are not able to be 
utilized for military services. Last I saw, they stayed in that 
category where you couldn't deploy them until such time as a 
psychiatrist could certify that they were comfortable in their new 
gender. Amazing. No wonder we are losing respect around the world when 
we are not spending defense money on defense, we are spending it on 
social experimentation.
  We see these bills coming. We see what is happening. All you have to 
do is look from a historical perspective. The discussion about gasoline 
is actually cheaper now than it was at the end of the Bush 
administration. My gosh, we just went through TARP being passed, $700 
billion--well, yeah, that is going to cause some inflation.
  Along came the Obama administration--the Obama-Biden administration--
and they got another $900 billion on top of having a majority of the 
$700 billion still to spend. They were throwing money at things right 
and left that would help them get reelected. So I wouldn't be bragging 
about a whole lot.
  In fact, I have seen an article indicating that during the 8 years of 
the Obama-Biden administration, the average Black household in America 
during the Obama-Biden 8 years, the average Black household lost 30 
percent of their

[[Page H6948]]

net worth, which really helped bring a great deal of light and emphasis 
on candidate Donald Trump's question to a large Black audience:
  What do you got to lose by voting for me?
  What do you got to lose?
  You just lost 30 percent of your net worth under the Democrats. Lo 
and behold, the average gained net worth under the 4 years of President 
Trump.
  So people, I think, are starting to look at those kind of numbers 
again, and I think it is important to do so.
  Back to our hearing yesterday. They kept saying that gun 
manufacturers were given immunity like nobody else in America. It was 
my honor to get to illuminate that issue for those that hadn't thought 
through what they were saying and didn't realize that it was not true.
  First of all, a very timely topic that many of us think has long 
outlived its usefulness is the massive immunity that has been given to 
the pharmaceutical industry for the vaccinations that they have made 
tens of billions of dollars just in a year--they have made so much 
money off those.
  So much so that they looked around--most people have gotten the 
vaccination. I hate to see somebody have natural immunity from having 
COVID because they are not as vulnerable to getting COVID again as 
apparently people are that have had the vaccinations and all the 
boosters.
  So what do you do?
  Oh, let's go after the young people under 5 years of age. These are 
people that statistically, you would say, don't even have a statistical 
chance of getting COVID and passing away. They were the least 
vulnerable among us when it comes to COVID--and that is who they want 
to give a jab to and boosters--even though we are seeing more and more 
indications that immunity ends up being compromised in many people who 
get the boosters. It doesn't seem to help with immunity to new strains 
of COVID.
  The Democrats were more than thrilled, it seems, to give them all 
kinds of immunity. When I saw the huge, unfolded warnings that come 
with the vaccination, I said to the pharmacist: Where are all the 
warnings?
  They know about a lot of things that go wrong with these. We know 
about it from the VAERS reports of so many things that have gone wrong, 
starting with blood clots and going from there.
  He said: No. It says up there because it is emergency use 
authorization, not only do they have complete immunity to any lawsuit 
for damages or deaths they cause, they don't even have to warn you of 
all the damages that they know can result from the vaccinations or the 
boosters. They don't even have to warn you.
  My friends in the Judiciary Committee yesterday--because they kept 
saying, you know, nobody else gets this kind of immunity, they just 
weren't aware--I know the rules, we are here in the House of 
Representatives, you can't intentionally lie to anybody. That is why I 
am sure they just forgot or weren't aware of all the immunities that 
they provided to other entities--the pharmaceutical.
  They don't even have to warn you or give you a heads-up of what is 
coming potentially with the vaccination or booster. Then you got social 
media. Section 230 has allowed some of the richest companies in the 
world and individuals in the world to completely escape liability. They 
should be made to answer in court for fraud and for so many of the 
things that they have done--for censorship, for taking away people's 
rights that they were told they had under the social media.
  Anyway, even though I know that my Democrat friends were not talking 
about section 230 immunity--there it is. Of course, they don't want to 
bother that because that allows all the Democrats controlling these 
massive social media giants to censor and help at election time and 
help Democrats get elected.
  They want to leave that immunity in place when it needs to go. We 
need to just eliminate section 230. We were told, well, that was 
important to have to allow them to get started. Listen, they are 
started, and they are some of the most powerful companies in the 
history of the world--some would say more powerful than the U.S. 
Government itself because of all the information they have. It is time 
to get rid of their immunity from liability. Even fraud--you can't even 
sue them for fraud.

  Diamond and Silk, they were telling me how they had paid in order to 
have their name come up more often. Not only did it not come up more 
often, an algorithm was used to send it to the bottom. That is called 
fraud. They took money from them under fraudulent circumstances. They 
can't even sue over that.
  I am for getting rid of that immunity. I know that people knew, so 
they must have just forgotten. Members of Congress have immunity from 
being sued. You can come down here, you can accuse President Trump of 
all kinds of crimes--colluding with Russia, when it turned out that was 
not Trump, that was the Hillary Clinton campaign that was doing the 
colluding with Russia.
  You can accuse him of all kinds of crimes. You can call Trump guilty 
of all kinds of thing, and you can't be sued for it--for things you say 
and do here in the House. We have got that immunity.
  Heck, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris got the same 
kind of immunity. Even though we have lost more than 100,000 Americans 
in 1 year from fentanyl and drugs that have come across our southern 
border illegally, if they didn't have the immunity that my Democrat 
friends in the Judiciary Committee said doesn't exist, then they could 
be sued for their negligence or intentional failures.
  They both took an oath to uphold the Constitution. So allowing a 
completely porous border--that is not upholding their oath. Over 
100,000 people have died just from the illegal drugs that have been 
allowed in by this administration.
  If not for the immunity, President Biden could be vulnerable to 
lawsuit. Even with all the money that Hunter has helped bring in, it 
wouldn't be enough to pay all the judgments if it weren't for the 
immunity. Maybe somebody might--if they were not immune--somebody might 
try to allege that it was negligence and purely stupid to put someone 
in charge as border czar who would never go to the border to even 
investigate and see at the border what was going on. That would make 
her vulnerable to liability as well, except for the immunity.
  Those are rather important ideas to remember. Republicans didn't give 
gun manufacturers some kind of exclusive immunity. They are liable. If 
they are negligent--they even have strict liability. If there is a 
defect in manufacturing or design, they are liable. In one case, they 
paid out millions of dollars because they had advertised and targeted a 
specific audience they shouldn't have.

                              {time}  1315

  They clearly have liability. That was just a lot of information that 
was not accurate that was being tossed out yesterday as a reason to get 
rid of all guns except, of course, mark my words, if they were ever 
successful in doing that, that little veneer of ruling elite, their 
security would have the guns, and we the peasants would have no guns 
and no way to defend ourselves.
  Of course, we are seeing the abuses of law enforcement. We have had 
hearings on that before, massive abuse by law enforcement. With the 
bill yesterday, they were providing an exemption from getting rid of 
guns to bureaucrats in the Department of Agriculture and in the 
Department of Education. Bureaucrats, these weren't even the police 
force, were going to be exempt from the new laws the Democrats in the 
Judiciary Committee wanted to get passed.
  We said: Wait, it is probably just an oversight because you have 
given an exemption for law enforcement, but you have no exemption for 
military or veterans.
  The chairman of the committee--a Democrat chairman--said basically 
that, well, you have to keep in mind that they get PTSD, and they have 
all kinds of problems. We don't want to give that kind of exemption to 
carry guns to people who have been trained with them and who serve or 
have served in the military.
  This is just a real slap in the face to people who put their lives on 
the line defending our country.
  Do you want to dismiss them? Well, they have PTSD. They have all 
kinds of problems.

[[Page H6949]]

  It is a shame that those people who are the reason that we are 
allowed to be here and talk, they put their lives on the line for us 
and our freedoms, and then they just get dismissed.
  Bureaucrats in the Department of Education, who may not have ever 
been trained with weapons, are more important to give exemptions to 
than these current military or veterans. That is a mentality that is 
hard to understand.
  We look at Indiana, at the shooting in the shopping mall. It is 
incredible that a person with the right to carry, within 15 seconds, 
the guy coming out into the mall with an automatic weapon, and this 
guy, as I understand, at 40 yards and with a handgun--I mean, I had to 
qualify every year with a handgun and with an M-16--at 40 yards put 8 
out of 10 rounds in the shooter. That is incredible. But it sure did 
end the horror at the mall.
  If other shooters find out that they could have 8 out of 10 rounds 
put into them if they walk out and try to do that at malls, it would 
help stop a lot of people from being tempted to do something that 
criminally evil in other shopping malls. It is just incredible.
  We had this issue come up. I have page after page, over 50 pages, of 
recent history where people with right to carry have stepped up and 
saved so many lives because they were a law-abiding person, a selfless, 
law-abiding person willing to put their life at risk to save others. 
There is case after case, more than 50 in these documents.
  It starts with information from criminal research, July 11, 2022, and 
it goes on and on. Like I say, I know there are more than 50 pages. 
These are heroes stepping up and putting their lives at risk knowing at 
Uvalde they had hundreds of law enforcement there.
  I still don't understand that. They could hear the guy shooting 
children. You had a police chief while he is shooting children just 
asking him sweetly to put the gun down. The door wasn't locked. They 
could have gone in and taken him out at any moment.
  I know hundreds of law enforcement as a former judge and former 
assistant district attorney, and I don't know any who would have stood 
by while children were being killed. It turns out there were people in 
Uvalde who were stopped--some law enforcement--who couldn't go in and 
do anything.
  If a concealed carry, somebody with a constitutional carry, had been 
allowed to risk their life and go in, they would have. But people were 
being stopped and kept from going in. I recall an incident at our 
courthouse in Tyler and seeing the film when shots started being fired 
and the law enforcement starts running to the sound of the guns.
  I had one incident at the courthouse. As is often the case, it was a 
domestic situation, and a shooter started shooting. We had a concealed 
carry permit holder who took his gun. The active shooter would have 
killed a lot more people, but the concealed carry permit holder started 
shooting at him. He got shot and died from his wounds. The guy had to 
take off. There is no telling how many lives were saved by that 
sacrificial person being willing to put himself out there in harm's 
way, become a target himself, and stop the shooter.
  Law-abiding people have made a difference that way.
  We had a lady who took her gun out years ago and went into a 
cafeteria to eat in central Texas. A gunman ended up shooting her 
parents, among others. If she had been allowed to have her gun, she 
would have stopped him. Then, she led the charge in the State 
legislature to get concealed carry permits, and that was the basis of 
the start there.
  Mr. Speaker, you have to have people who have been taught that there 
are some absolute rights and some absolute wrongs. C.S. Lewis became a 
Christian from being, he would say, agnostic--seemed like sometimes 
atheist. But he liked to cajole Christians: Yes, yes, isn't easier just 
to admit there can't be a just God with so much injustice?
  It finally dawned on him, the brilliant Oxford professor that he was, 
how could he say that there was injustice if there were not some 
absolute, universal standard somewhere of right and wrong? If that 
existed, then there must be something like a God who put that in place.
  The more he wrestled with that, the more he came to understand that 
we all have innate in us this feeling of fairness and of justice. As he 
pointed out, it would be like someone born blind at birth trying to 
describe sight. How would you know that there is light or no light, Mr. 
Speaker, if there weren't something universal in it?

  It is the same with injustice. He realized that when there is 
injustice, we would know it, and we couldn't know it if there wasn't an 
absolute, universal justice and injustice. Then that eventually led him 
to further inquiries and further research, and he became a Christian.
  Well, Mr. Speaker, there is justice; there is injustice; and there 
are gray areas we argue about. But as John Adams said--and I will say 
it often because it was such a brilliant quote from one of the Founders 
who was there for the constitutional debate. He said: ``Our 
Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is 
wholly inadequate to the government of any other.''
  If we are not going to teach children that thou shalt not murder, 
then we can't have a Second Amendment right. We must teach children 
that these things, these commandments, are universal, that you are not 
to lie and you are not to envy other people, and that there are things 
that are just not healthy for you and not healthy for society and for 
the culture, and they are universal. They are not healthy, and they are 
not good.
  Honor your father and mother. Of course, fathers and mothers are 
supposed to be fair with their children. But if we are not going to 
teach that, if we are just going to teach that everything is relative, 
that it depends on your circumstances, that it may be right for you and 
wrong for somebody else, right for them and wrong for you, no, it is 
all relative.
  If we are not going to teach that some things are absolute, then we 
cannot have the rights that are provided that our Founders said were 
provided by our creator. We will have to get rid of them. We will have 
to go to being what some already want, and that is a totalitarian 
government. It is where it always goes. We are already breaking records 
every day that we continue to live under our Constitution, but we are 
no longer a religious, moral people.
  People thought, historically, when we got rid of slavery, we were so 
on the right track, and when Dr. King did so much to allow somebody, a 
little boy like me, to be able to treat like brothers and sisters my 
brothers and sisters, he did so much. Then somehow now we are 
regressing where we want to have segregated dorms and segregated this 
and that. I can't believe that people are wanting to regress.
  But, Mr. Speaker, if you are not going to teach some of these 
absolute moral truths, then we are going to have to give up our rights 
that our Founders--so many of them and so many over the last 240 
years--have died to make sure we had. I don't want to do that. I don't 
want to give them up.
  But Congress has to start using better judgment. Otherwise, it is 
very clear, historically, we are moving--we have people who are wanting 
us to move to that point where the rich ride private jets. In the old 
days, they rode horses and carriages. In the modern day, they will have 
their private jets. They will jet back and forth around the world, 
telling everybody how they can't even have a wood-burning stove anymore 
and that you can't fertilize your fields, so people are starving to 
death.
  Well, those are the peasants because the elite little ruling class 
has all the food they need. They have the guns they need. The peasants 
out there, for the good of the climate and for the good of the planet, 
you are going to live in your refuse, and you are not going to have the 
benefits that our wonderful ruling elites have.
  That is where it is going. That is what progressivism is. That is 
where it always goes, a totalitarian government, a little elite group. 
They get to ride, and they have all the food.
  Mr. Speaker, look at Sri Lanka. They have an over 90 percent grade in 
ESG, and now people are starving and the government has been 
overthrown.
  This is where it is going. I don't want to go there. We don't have to 
go there. Let's keep our rights under the Constitution.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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