[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 103 (Tuesday, June 13, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2059-S2061]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Maiden Speech

  Mr. SCHMITT. Mr. President, it is an honor to be here with all of you 
to give this maiden speech, and I want to thank the senior Senator from 
Missouri. We may be the youngest combo. He is younger than I, but he is 
the senior Senator. He reminds me of that quite often as we speak to 
groups. But I want to thank him for his leadership. Senator Blunt is 
also here, whom I followed in the Senate.
  When Benjamin Franklin exited the Constitutional Convention, he was 
asked what type of government the delegates had come up with. He 
famously replied:

       A republic, if you can keep it.

  Those words are as significant today as they were a couple hundred 
years ago, especially as two major threats loom over our Republic: a 
supercharged administrative State and the unprecedented stifling of 
free speech.
  If you want to understand some of the frustration that is out there, 
a lot of it comes from the fact that people believe there is a 
narrowing of the bandwidth of acceptable speech--what they can say, 
what they can hear. As it relates to the administrative state, a lot of 
people are frustrated that no matter whom they send here, they feel 
like sometimes things never really change, and we must fix that.
  But first, let's back up.
  Years before Franklin's famous remark, ordinary folks--farmers, 
blacksmiths, laborers, leatherworkers--who made up the Continental 
militias achieved something extraordinary. Fed up with an increasingly 
tyrannical rule of an unaccountable despot thousands of miles away, 
these ordinary men fought and won our independence at a time that seems 
very far away but set the stage for the freedoms that we enjoy to this 
very minute.
  That is our origin story. The electrical cord of freedom that has 
been strung across the centuries is our national identity. We boldly 
declared to the world that freedom isn't granted to us by a King or a 
Queen or any government.
  We believe in individual rights, a very new concept at the time, and 
those rights were granted to us by God. Chief among those were life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If those words are a mission 
statement--and they are--the Constitution provides the structure to 
protect and safeguard those freedoms that we enjoy that have made us 
the envy of the world. That structure has allowed ordinary men and 
women to achieve incredible things, to pursue their dreams, to pursue 
happiness, which is a very uniquely American concept.
  I grew up in Bridgeton, MO. Bridgeton sits in North St. Louis County 
in the shadow of the airport. Bridgeton is a working-class, blue-collar 
neighborhood, and I grew up in a working-class, blue-collar family.
  My grandfather was an infantryman in World War II and returned from 
the war with little more than an eighth grade education and some money 
he won playing craps on the Queen Elizabeth on the way home. He started 
a butcher shop and raised a family. My dad and his brothers and sister 
all worked there growing up. When I was growing up, I saw my dad 
working 7 days a week on the midnight shift to provide for his family 
to give me and my sisters every opportunity to succeed.

  Speaking of family, my wife Jaime and my two beautiful daughters are 
here today, and I am very grateful that they are here to share this 
moment of this inaugural speech, this maiden speech today.
  From an early age, I understood the value of hard work. I saw the 
value of a society where hard work was rewarded, and I appreciated at a 
young age how the law provided guardrails for individuals to pursue 
their dreams. So I decided that I wanted to be a lawyer. I didn't know 
any lawyers growing up, and certainly nobody in my family had any power 
or prestige, but we believed in this country, and I wanted to fight for 
people who needed a voice, like the people I grew up around, hard-
working people who just wanted to be treated fairly, who did the right 
things, and worked really hard for everything that they had.
  Some of those folks are looked down upon in this town because maybe 
they didn't go to the right schools or they don't wear the fanciest 
suits. A lot of journalists will interview these people after elections 
and wonder what happened. These are my people.
  I thought that I could do some good and advocate for them and for 
protecting those God-given rights that are guaranteed and protected in 
our Constitution. So I went to law school. I went to college and later 
earned my law degree.
  When my son Stephen was born a few years later, in the mid-2000s, I 
was working at a law firm, made partner. Life was great. Then one day 
everything changed in my life forever. My wife Jaime and I noticed that 
Stephen

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had a birthmark on his leg. It looked like an angel's wing. We thought 
so little of this that Jaime actually allowed me to take Stephen to the 
doctor.
  But when I got there, the doctor had some pretty terrible news. He 
said Stephen probably had something--which he did--something called 
tuberous sclerosis, which causes tumors in different organs, including 
Stephen's brain. Stephen has epilepsy. He is on the autism spectrum and 
nonverbal. Going through that experience with my son, including a 4-
hour seizure, you start to evaluate things. What is important? What do 
you want to do? Through that process of discernment, I decided that I 
wanted to do more than what I was doing, and Stephen was my 
inspiration.
  So I ran for office. I ran for the State senate twice and won, was 
elected and served as State treasurer, was elected and served as 
Missouri's attorney general, and I am blessed for all the work that I 
have been able to do on behalf of the people I represented to be a 
voice for those who needed a voice.
  And so I decided to run for Senate, again, to be a voice for people, 
for all 6 million Missourians but especially the forgotten men and 
women whom I referenced earlier who work hard every day and just want a 
fair shake.
  So I appear before you today in the U.S. Senate, the most important 
and deliberative body civilization has ever known. And I believe that. 
It is an unbelievable story, and, quite frankly, I sometimes find it 
hard to believe it is my own.
  But only in America can a boy from Bridgeton make it here, all the 
way to the U.S. Senate. And yet each one of us has a uniquely American 
story to tell. I take this responsibility with great humility. I 
understand that I have very big shoes to fill--for God's sake, this is 
Harry Truman's desk. Senator Tom Eagleton, another Missouri attorney 
general--in addition to the senior Senator and myself who served 
Missouri in that capacity--also had this desk. When I graduated from 
the university named after Harry Truman, Truman State University, Tom 
Eagleton, in 1997, gave the commencement address.
  In addition to Truman, I stand on the shoulders of other innovators 
and leaders and pioneers from my State, the ``Show-Me'' State, from 
cities named Liberty and Independence and towns called Freedom and 
Defiance. Missourians have always blazed their own trail.
  Whether it was Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery headed west 
to see what was on the other side of the mountains or Mark Twain 
changing the world with his words or Edwin Hubble, who mapped the 
heavens, Missourians and Missouri proudly represent the best of 
America. Is Missouri a northern State? Is Missouri a Southern State? Is 
Missouri a Midwestern State? Is Missouri a Western State? The answer to 
all those questions is yes. We are all of them. We sit uniquely at the 
cultural and geographic crossroads of America. Missourians are tough 
and they are honest and have always been skeptical of the Federal 
Government, 1,000 miles away, telling them how to live their lives. And 
although we are skeptical of government, we love America.
  America was and is a bold experiment in self-government. Before 
America declared its independence from Great Britain or had a 
Constitution, the world believed that rights came from a King. The 
King, in turn, was handed down power simply by being born into a 
monarchy, certainly not by any achievement or merit. The King was 
sovereign and free; the rest of us, not so much. We were subjects.

  The Founders flipped the script on this concept that had been 
accepted for literally thousands of years. They challenged the King and 
boldly proclaimed to the world that everybody else had it wrong. Rights 
come from God, not Kings or government. This was truly revolutionary 
and a war was fought over it against the No. 1 superpower on the planet 
and we won.
  We won, which, of course, was a big deal, but the Founders also 
understood that unless we created something different, a government 
focused on protecting those rights and our national identity of 
freedom, we would end up being just like everybody else.
  So they brilliantly devised a system of separation of powers and 
federalism that would spread power out both vertically and 
horizontally, meant to protect individual liberty. In arguing for the 
adoption of the Constitution, Madison wrote in Federalist 48:

       The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and 
     judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, 
     and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may 
     justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

  He also notes in Federalist 47:

       [T]he preservation of liberty requires that the three great 
     departments of power should be separate and distinct.

  In Federalist 51, Madison famously notes:

       Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

  The Founders also created a republican--small ``r''--form of 
government never tried before on this scale and made it accountable to 
the people. And the virtues of this form of government were certainly 
extolled in Madison Federalist 10.
  The Founders understood human nature. They knew what tyranny looked 
like and understood that having a government where power is properly 
spread out and having elected representatives accountable to the people 
safeguarded liberty and freedom.
  They understood that freedom of speech and, more broadly, principles 
of pluralism were crucial to the survival of the Republic. They also 
understood that a Republic spread across a continent needed a pressure 
release valve to resolve political disputes, not through violence, as 
we see even in the world today, but through elections and free 
expression.
  It is in this vein that I want to return to the two grave threats to 
the Founders' vision, the principles of separation of powers, our 
republican form of government, and individual liberty: the 
administrative state and attacks on free speech.
  First, the vast expansion of Federal administrative power that we 
have seen in recent history is destroying representative government by 
placing immense power in the hands of the unelected. The article I 
branch, the people's branch, is being diluted of its rightful role--
willingly, I might add--and the power exerted by this class of experts 
is doing great damage to a government based on accountability. These 
unelected bureaucrats can issue rules, regulations, or guidance letters 
that can destroy people's lives and their liberty and nobody ever 
elected these folks to anything.
  This massive aggregation of Federal regulatory power is eating away 
at our freedoms and liberties, deepening political division, and 
cheapening discourse, and it is completely antithetical to the vision 
the Founders had. It is called the administrative state. And it falls 
on each one of us here in the article I branch, in this time and place, 
to fundamentally dismantle it.
  When I say ``administrative state,'' I mean the mess of alphabet 
Agencies that have slowly yet aggressively aggregated and amassed power 
over the years, promulgating rules and regulations with reckless 
abandon. See, you can send your elected representative home. You can 
send them there, send them back, send them home. But these so-called 
experts are not really accountable to anybody ever. It is out of 
control. In short, it is a runaway train with an invisible conductor.
  If left unchecked, they will continue to amass power bit by bit until 
our core principles and our liberties that make our country unique are 
a mere prologue to history. We need deep structural reform, and we need 
to return power back to where it belongs--in the hands of the Article I 
branch, the people's branch.

  A second major threat to the Republic is the unprecedented stifling 
of First Amendment rights in new, innovative, and modern ways. The 
freedom to speak your mind in the public square or in the virtual town 
square is vital to the health of the Republic. Far too many Americans 
are being told what they can say, what they can hear, and what they can 
see. Censorship--censorship--is on the rise. The desire of governments 
and powerful elites to control speech is hardly new, but America has 
always stood as the exception.
  Long before the Revolutionary War, Americans witnessed the oppression 
of speech. More than 1,200 times before 1700, the British prosecuted 
and punished Americans for what they called seditious speech. Sedition 
laws prohibited criticism of the government based

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on the idea that that criticism could inflame the public against the 
government. But as the Revolutionary War approached, colonists began 
standing up for free speech. Colonial juries began refusing British 
requests to issue indictments for criticizing the government. They 
acquitted individuals accused of criticizing the government. They 
tossed tea into the harbor to protest taxes, and we printed 
publications denouncing the King. We were on our way.
  We, the American people, wanted to protect the free expression of 
ideas, and we did so in the very first amendment to the Constitution. 
We protected it not just for peaceful times but especially in times of 
crisis or so-called emergencies. It is easy to forget how fortunate we 
are here in America to have the First Amendment and how terrifying it 
is to see how frequently now it is being violated.
  Recently, government actors colluded with big tech companies--some of 
the biggest companies and the most powerful companies in the history of 
the world--to censor and deplatform individuals for not buying in to 
the approved narrative. Whether you agree with that narrative or not is 
hardly the point. The point is it is incredibly dangerous. Suppression 
of speech and censorship is justified now as it has always been but 
with a new lexicon, calling it misinformation or disinformation; but 
the goal is still the same: power and control.
  We saw the Department of Homeland Security recently attempt to set up 
an Orwellian disinformation governance board. We saw individuals 
silenced and suspended from platforms at the government's behest for 
challenging the validity of mask mandates and lockdowns or for 
questioning the official narrative of the origins of COVID-19--for 
simply speaking their minds. It is not the government's job to tell us 
what we can hear or what we are supposed to believe. Each one of us can 
make those decisions ourselves--period.
  This vast censorship enterprise was at the behest of some of the 
highest ranking government officials in the country. For example, the 
Surgeon General of the United States was messaging with senior Facebook 
executives, demanding that they censor speech more stringently. 
Whatever your political persuasion is, this ought to scare the bejesus 
out of every American. Our government is supposed to be protecting our 
rights and liberties, not infringing upon them. And we have to ensure 
that this never happens again.
  As Justice Hugo Black wrote:

       The freedoms [of the] First Amendment must be accorded to 
     the ideas we hate or, sooner or later, they will be denied to 
     the ideas [that] we cherish.

  In short, we have to be willing to defend somebody's ability to say 
something we vehemently oppose. We must be willing to protect the 
rights of citizens to speak their minds free from censorship and 
fundamentally dismantle the administrative state.
  I mentioned that Missouri is at the crossroads of America; but in 
many ways, America itself is at a crossroads. It is up to us in this 
Chamber--the most important legislative body in the history of the 
world--to address these big issues that directly impact the people we 
serve. We need to fight back against this censorship industrial complex 
from controlling what we can say and what we can hear, and we need to 
ensure that the great wall of the administrative state that separates 
the people from their elected Representatives comes crumbling down.
  When I asked Missourians for their vote last fall, I promised them 
that I would fight for them. I believe that this is the fight, and the 
goal is to save our Republic and this grand experiment of self-
government.
  May God bless each one of you. May God bless the great State of 
Missouri. May God bless the United States of America.
  I yield the floor.
  (Applause.)

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