[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 200 (Tuesday, December 5, 2023)]
[House]
[Pages H6138-H6142]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         WHAT WE WILL FIGHT FOR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Kiley). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 9, 2023, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for spending time here on 
the floor of the House commemorating the life of former First Lady 
Carter. We are reminded, as we heard his words and as we have 
commemorated her life, of the longstanding love affair and relationship 
between the First Lady and President Carter.
  Regardless of my disagreements with them on policy and politics, they 
are two great public servants who committed to live out their faith, 
their Southern Baptist Christian faith, in real time, whether it was 
Habitat for Humanity or in numerous other ways.
  We are reminded of how important it is for those of us in public 
service to have our committed spouses--in my case, my committed wife, 
who is at home carrying out all the tasks of keeping our family, with a 
14-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter, going--how we could not be 
here without them, and how honored we are by their sacrifices on our 
behalf and cannot possibly convey what it means while we are up here 
doing the work of the people to have our wives or husbands back home 
supporting us from afar.
  I would note, while we are commemorating our spouses--in this case, 
First Lady Carter--or the longstanding relationship between former 
President Bush and Barbara Bush, how important those relationships are 
for all of us in public service.
  I would also be remiss if we didn't talk about our mothers. My mama 
turned 75 last week, and I was not able to be here to wish her a happy 
birthday, so I am going to wish her a happy belated birthday a week 
later and thank her for all she has done for me and all of her 
sacrifices and her love in raising me.
  We in my family believe in the American Dream and believe in that 
generational transfer of love of this country and transfer of the work 
of one generation to the next, a generation that was working the fields 
that then became a generation that was working in the factories that 
became a generation that was then going to college to a generation that 
would then have a son that could go to law school and end up on the 
floor of the House of Representatives.
  That is what is great about this country. That is what we need to 
restore in this country.

  On that note of respect and love for our parents, our love for our 
moms, I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Williams), my friend, 
to be able to give him some time on the floor to commemorate the life 
of his mama.
  Mr. WILLIAMS of New York. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for 
yielding. I am pleased to be joined by my wife, who has supported me 
through this journey. She is in the gallery.
  I will say that I love you because I can do that in real time.
  Judith Kay Alguire was born in Duncan, Oklahoma. Her father was a 
self-educated carpenter who never finished high school.
  She changed schools frequently as their family chased the postwar 
housing boom all over the Southwest, and she landed in Roswell, New 
Mexico, for her senior year in high school.
  She married at 18 and narrowly missed earning a science degree in 
college. Instead, she took a job as a medical technician while she was 
5 months pregnant right here in D.C. to allow her husband to attend law 
school.
  Working up to the moment of labor and returning to work just 2 weeks 
later would be par for the course--whatever it takes, family first, 
never counting the cost.
  What makes Judy remarkable is her powerful intellect. She reads 
medical journals for fun. Growing up poor, power and wealth don't 
impress her. Every person is measured by their own merits.
  Raising children made her funny--well, humorous, I mean. Although, 
you may understandably imagine the effects of five strong personalities 
and having to care for them.
  Perhaps Judy's most remarkable quality and the source of much of her 
renown is her generosity. Countless children have attended college, 
worn shoes, been clothed, and attended summer camp, and an endless 
number of anonymous blessings have flowed from her heart out to so 
many.

                              {time}  1600

  Judith Kay Alguire Williams passed from this life into the next just 
this morning. She passed in peace, and more importantly, she passed 
into peace.
  I will miss my mom every day, but her humor, intelligence, and I hope 
her generosity will live on in me and my siblings. God bless her.
  Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from New York for his 
touching remarks about his mother. We will be praying for him and his 
family, knowing that she is in a better place, knowing that we are all 
here for a brief period of time, and we are celebrating a life well 
lived. I am sure she was proud to see you on the floor of the House of 
Representatives. We will honor her life by doing our job.
  To that point, you heard my friend from New York (Mr. Williams) 
talking about the life of his family, and it reflected what I started 
talking about, that generational transfer of the American Dream, the 
extent to which one generation sacrifices so the next can live that 
American Dream.
  My grandmother was a single mom in West Texas with my father, who was 
a 7-year-old stricken with polio. She had just lost her husband, my 
grandfather, to cancer. She didn't run around asking for help. She 
didn't say: Where is the government? She got a second job. She woke up 
at 4:00 in the morning. She did all the rehab my father needed so that 
he could walk, got him through polio. She ran and became the first 
woman elected county clerk in Nolan County, Texas. She wasn't running 
around asking for some sort of handout because her father was an 
orphan, the bastard child of somebody that we don't know--we believe 
him to have been an American Indian in Mississippi--and was sitting in 
an orphanage and then moves to West Texas to figure out how to build a 
family, build the American Dream, farm. That is where my grandmother 
grew up.
  She didn't ask for people to be giving her something because her 
family wasn't treated right, or she drew a short straw because her 
husband died of cancer, or her son had polio. She just worked. She just 
did what you are supposed to do.
  That core aspect of the American Dream is what currently is 
increasingly unattainable for the vast majority of Americans. Too many 
Americans today are looking out and saying: I cannot live as my parents 
and my grandparents did. I can't afford to buy a house because interest 
rates are so

[[Page H6139]]

high and houses are so high. I can't afford to buy a car. I can't 
afford to buy groceries. I can't figure out how to manage to keep my 
family safe and secure in my own home and community. They are looking 
out across the future and over the horizon.
  For the first time in really our history, Americans are questioning 
whether this country will exist for their kids and grandkids, whether 
their kids and grandkids will be able to have a better life than they 
did. That is unacceptable, but yet that is what we currently face.
  I want to be very clear. This is the direct consequence of radical 
leftist positions by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle in 
this body, in the other Chamber, and in the White House. It is the 
direct consequence of Democrats who refuse to sit down at the table to 
constrain spending when we need to, to secure the border of the United 
States, to determine foreign policy that is built on the national 
security interests of the United States and not the fad of wearing a 
pin.
  They don't want to work with us on how to have a military focused on 
how to do its job rather than radical social engineering to reengineer 
the Department of Defense. They don't want to sit down and work with us 
to ensure that we are able to have the energy that we need to power our 
homes affordably.
  All of these things that I am rattling off are actual existential 
threats that our country faces.
  Spending: We are $34 trillion in debt. Nobody possibly knows what $34 
trillion of debt means.
  I can tell you what it means in terms of annual interest. We are now 
about to be spending more in interest on our debt than to fund the 
national defense of the United States. Imagine that.
  How can a country succeed, how can we sustain ourselves, if we are 
paying more on interest because of our own debt, because of our 
irresponsible spending, than on defending our country? Yet that is what 
we are doing.
  This year, we are spending $2 trillion more than we take in and we 
are doing nothing to stop it.
  Republicans are trying to hold the line on spending. We get no 
support from our Democratic colleagues.
  Speaker Johnson is trying to hold the line against the Senate that 
wants to keep spending more money, Democratic colleagues who want to 
spend more money, and a few of my own Republican colleagues who want to 
spend more money.
  The Speaker should be congratulated and should be praised for holding 
the line on spending. We need to finish the job, and Republicans need 
to unite around the Speaker of the House to send a loud message to our 
Democratic colleagues and a loud message to the American people that we 
are no longer going to continue to spend money we don't have, 
destroying the American Dream, driving up inflation, driving up 
interest rates, leveraging our own security to the rest of the world, 
and making it to where the American dollar is worth nothing.
  We have an obligation to hold the line on spending. Are we going to 
fight? Are we going to stop the dealmaking, the backroom deals, the 
side deals--in this instance, the $54 billion of side deals that my 
Democratic colleagues expect Republicans to pack into a spending bill 
in order to buy their votes?
  Republicans should say no to side deals and gimmicks that blow the 
lid off spending.
  Republicans should say no to unfunded supplemental spending for wars, 
no matter how meritorious.
  Do I believe we should help Israel? You bet.
  Did Republicans on this floor, with the leadership of Speaker 
Johnson, send $14 billion over to the Senate to fund Israel? Yes, we 
did.
  Was it paid for? Yes, it was. It was paid for out of money set aside 
to expand the IRS to target Americans.
  Democrats, on a party-line vote in the Senate, killed that bill.
  Democrats in the Senate are more interested in siding with the IRS, 
expanding the IRS to target American citizens, than they are to stand 
with Israel or to be fiscally responsible by taking money already 
appropriated and moving it over to pay for an emergency, that emergency 
being our friends being assaulted, our friends in Israel being 
attacked, with young women being brutally raped, babies being killed, 
babies being kidnapped, and innocent civilians shot in the streets.
  We saw it with our own eyes. Yet we have colleagues on the other side 
of the aisle who don't want to talk about that. They want to brush it 
aside. Oh, we can't talk about rape. We need to balance that we are 
told by the progressive left.
  Republicans stood up alongside our friends in Israel, we passed a 
bill that would fund them, we sent it to the Senate, and Democrats in 
the Senate chose the IRS over Israel.
  Are we going to do our job to spend responsibly?
  We have a choice to make. When the funding of the government runs out 
in January and early February, we have a choice to make. I hope 
Republicans in this body will hold the line and force Republicans and 
Democrats alike in the Senate to stop spending money we don't have, 
mortgaging the futures of our kids and grandkids.
  That is one existential threat. That alone is worth throwing 
everything we have at this place to fight to stop spending money we 
don't have, to hold the line on piling up debt.
  There is another existential threat: wide open borders. Our borders 
right now are in crisis.
  Just today, video footage of a breached border wall surfaced with 
illegal migrants rushing through an opening in the border wall with 
their human smuggler shrugging and just saluting the camera.
  We have no rules at the southern border now. We have no border. We 
have people from all over the world bum-rushing the border of the 
United States from terrorist countries, criminals, and people on the 
terrorist watch list. We have millions that have been released into the 
United States under this administration, and the people in border 
States, like my home State of Texas, are the ones left holding the bag.
  In this case it was Arizona. Yesterday, the port of entry in 
Lukeville, Arizona, was shut down. A port of entry had to be shut down 
because Border Patrol could not handle the mass flood of migrants 
coming across the border.
  Last Monday morning, more than 5,000 migrants were in custody, far 
more than Lukeville's holding capacity. I got notices from people just 
today. In Eagle Pass, in Del Rio, people flooding into Texas, Border 
Patrol overwhelmed.
  Last Thursday, while transporting illegal migrants, a human 
smuggler's car caught fire while driving 100 miles per hour through 
Kinney County, Texas, near where I live.
  We can fix that. We can secure the border. We can do it in a matter 
of weeks. There is no magic. All we need to do is enforce the laws and 
fix some of the laws that have some loopholes.
  House Republicans passed H.R. 2, the strongest border security bill 
we have ever passed. We sent it to the Senate, and it is sitting there. 
They refuse to take it up, because Senate Democrats, like my House 
Democratic colleagues, want open borders. They don't believe in 
sovereignty. They don't believe we should have a sovereign nation. They 
believe in world order. They believe that anybody can come here without 
following our laws.
  Our bill expanded critical protections by fixing parole and asylum 
abuses that are being used by the administration to allow people to 
come in against both the spirit and the letter of the law. We have 
turn-away authority, and we empower State AGs to sue. We fix the abuses 
for unaccompanied children, and we treat all children like we currently 
do with Mexico and Canada, which would save little children from 
getting sold into the sex trafficking trade by the thousands, little 
kids getting abused because my Democrat colleagues want to cynically 
use open borders as a political stunt and for political power.
  Right now in Texas, on I-35 going up the gut of Texas or across I-10, 
there are stash houses littered in San Antonio, littered in Houston, 
littered in El Paso and Dallas filled with children getting abused.
  A thousand migrants died along the southern border last year while my 
colleagues on the other side of the aisle just sat back and did 
nothing.

[[Page H6140]]

  We have acted. Republicans have acted. We sent legislation to the 
Senate, and Senate Democrats are doing nothing.
  Existential threat 1: spending. We are acting. We are acting 
responsibly. House and Senate Democrats refuse to join with us.
  Existential threat number 2: our border. House Republicans have 
acted. We have sent a bill over to the Senate. It sits there. The 
President ignores it while Texans die from fentanyl poisoning and 
Americans die from fentanyl poisoning. Our homes, our hospitals, our 
schools get overrun, migrants die, migrants get sold into the sex 
trafficking trade, cartels get empowered, and China gets empowered, all 
so my Democrat colleagues can pat themselves on the back in the false 
name of compassion saying that open borders are good for migrants, when 
it is a lie.
  Existential threat number 3: American energy dominance. American 
energy independence and American energy freedom is being destroyed 
minute by minute, hour by hour, by an administration and Democrat 
colleagues in this Chamber and in the Senate that are undermining our 
ability to produce American, clean-burning natural gas, American 
nuclear power, reliable power that we need to fuel ourselves and the 
world.

                              {time}  1615

  Legislation we have on the floor this week that my Democratic 
colleagues refuse, in lockstep, to support would stop the tyrannical 
overreach by the executive branch to set a new rule requiring electric 
vehicles to be about two-thirds of the fleet by 2032.
  Now, why does that matter?
  Does the average American know that an electric vehicle takes 
basically the same amount of electricity as your air conditioner to 
charge up?
  Have they thought through the fact that if you have an electric 
vehicle in North Dakota or in Alaska, it freezes up and takes an entire 
battery charge just to thaw it?
  Have they thought through what happens if you are living in west 
Texas and it is a 400-mile drive and you need a 200-mile recharge?
  Have they thought through that the average electric vehicle costs 
$16,000 more than the internal combustion engine?
  Have they thought through that if you eliminate every internal 
combustion engine in America, it would be less than 1 percent impact on 
CO2 production, because China has 1,100 coal-fired plants; 
America has 250.
  India and China are spewing out CO2 at increasing rates. 
We are unilaterally disarming and undermining our own economic strength 
while being our own economic prosperity, our own energy freedom, all in 
the false name of pursuing unicorn energy theories while my colleagues 
on the other side of the aisle that are killing the average American 
family, killing their budgets, and now on steroids, existential threat.
  All of these EVs, those supply chains start now.
  Toyota, General Motors, Ford, they are all going to be pumping out 
electric vehicles, starting now.
  They are piling up on lots because the American people can't afford 
them. The American people don't want them right now. They can't get 
them charged. They cost more.
  You want to know why you can't afford stuff at home? This.
  What are we going to do about it? It is an existential threat to your 
way of life, America.
  What are your Representatives going to do about an executive branch 
that is doing this unilaterally using executive power?
  House Republicans are acting. House Democrats will not support it. 
The Senate will not advance it.
  You will be left stranded--literally and figuratively--without the 
ability to get a vehicle to power your lives, your family, your jobs, 
advance prosperity, and achieve the American Dream, all so people can 
feel good about themselves that they have done something for the 
environment, which they never did.
  CO2 is going to continue to be spewed out.
  We have wind and solar being subsidized to the tune of a trillion 
dollars. My Democratic colleagues last August passed a bill that will 
subsidize a trillion dollars for EVs, for massive solar farms, for 
massive wind farms; almost all of that money going to billion-dollar 
corporations--mostly White, elite liberals who like to pat themselves 
on the back while they drive their Tesla around, feel good about 
themselves, and they drink some wine and eat some cheese while talking 
about how they are making the world a better place.
  It is doing none of that. Zero.
  I can tell you what it is doing. It is crippling the American Dream 
for young people. It is making hardworking Americans unable to afford 
their job.
  If you are a painter or a plumber or an electrician, if you are a 
teacher, if you clean houses, how in the hell can you afford an 
electric vehicle that costs $16,000 more?
  Then Gavin Newsom in California says: Oh, crap, we don't have enough 
power today because we are all wind and solar. So guess what, between 3 
p.m. and 9 p.m., you can't charge your car.
  You think that is made up? That actually happened. That is the world 
my Democratic colleagues want you to live in: one with mountains of 
debt, with open borders, with fentanyl pouring in, and expensive cars.
  They will admit it. That is the amazing part. It is so brazen, they 
admit it. When we challenge them in the Rules Committee or on the 
floor, they admit it.
  The Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, literally admitted 
we are going to have to force pain on American families to achieve 
production and promotion of electric vehicles; pain, while China builds 
two new coal-fired plants a week, and we do nothing but cede our ground 
to China, subsidize solar panels in China--which by the way, where do 
they get the minerals for solar panels? Where do they get the minerals 
for batteries? Child labor, cobalt mines, where children are exploited.
  Where are my colleagues with their bleeding hearts when these 
children are being exploited for cobalt mines?
  Oh, Chip, it doesn't fit the narrative. Oh, we are the compassionate 
ones. We are the green ones. We are living in our little unicorn land 
where everything is hunky-dory. Meanwhile, we have empowered our 
enemies, weakened our economy, made it impossible for people to achieve 
the American Dream, so you have to go beg for more government funding.
  That is not the American Dream I started this speech with when my 
colleague from New York was regaling his mom who passed away today in 
that generational transfer of the American Dream.
  It is not the American Dream of my grandmother, as a single mom in 
west Texas raising my polio-stricken father after losing her husband to 
cancer. She wasn't asking for handouts. She wasn't asking for subsidies 
for some electric vehicle. She just got up and did her dang job.
  That is the American Dream that we want to pass down to our kids and 
our grandkids, but it is being taken away.
  I cannot overstate, these are existential threats. They are killing 
the American Dream.
  Debt: spending money we don't have.
  Borders: wide open; endangering us; killing our kids; killing 
migrants; increasing the sex trafficking trade; empowering cartels.

  Energy: Instead of having the dominance and independence to push back 
on China and Russia; growing our economy; affordable, competitive 
automobiles; reliable power; fueling grids; creating economic growth.
  True, all of the above, where the market determines whether wind and 
solar or nuclear or coal or gas can create the best mix of power 
supply. Export liquefied natural gas, drive CO2 down with 
clean-burning American energy.
  We are not doing that. We are passing regulation after regulation 
unilaterally by an executive branch engaged in tyranny, the very 
tyranny the Founders warned us about, wrote about, and told us in 
Federalist 58, we should use the power of the purse to stop, which is 
my question for my Republican colleagues:
  Will we use the power of the purse to stop an out-of-control Democrat 
administration, a recalcitrant Democrat Senate, and our Democrat 
colleagues in the House who are totally comfortable letting the 
American Dream

[[Page H6141]]

get totally destroyed with existential threat after existential threat?
  Those aren't the only ones. What about healthcare?
  I would note that a dear friend of mine, a constituent, recently 
diagnosed with cancer, she got her coverage through ObamaCare.
  What many Americans don't know is that if you are a Member of 
Congress, we are required to have our healthcare through ObamaCare, not 
some gold-plated fancy thing everybody accuses us of.
  Nope, we get ObamaCare. Well, neither my constituent battling 
cancer--nor myself who fought cancer and won 12 years ago--can go back 
to MD Anderson--she cannot go to MD Anderson, for the first time--under 
ObamaCare, the best cancer hospital in the world.
  Suddenly coverage doesn't sound that good, does it? Suddenly, the 
ObamaCare mandates that have radically driven up the price of 
healthcare, radically consolidated the healthcare industry, radically 
enriched the insurance companies, radically enriched the hospital 
corporations, radically enriched pharmaceutical companies.
  Suddenly, all of that stuff doesn't sound so good when you wake up 
and you want to go to the doctor but you are told: Sorry, you are not 
on the plan. That is the fact.
  Americans, a family of four, spend about $25,000 of their own money 
or their corporate match for health insurance. But it is not insurance, 
it is crappy managed care, where your insurance company picks your 
doctors, your winners, your losers, tells you what you can do or can't 
do, when you have to pay an expensive deductible or an expensive copay.
  Mr. Speaker, 76 ObamaCare marketplace insurers are proposing to 
increase their rates by more than 10 percent even now; 8 want to go by 
more than 25 percent.
  Let me be clear. Our healthcare system is a complete and total 
failure. It is a failure made only worse by ObamaCare.
  We can fix it. Republicans have plans to fix it. If Republicans would 
grab the mantle and run on it, fearlessly, with expanded health savings 
accounts, allowing you to use that money, tax free, to go into a 
marketplace and shop for legitimate, affordable insurance; legitimate, 
direct primary care with doctors you can call up day and night, like 
the old black bag doctors that would come to your House, a burgeoning 
industry; healthcare sharing ministries that defray costs, the ability 
to go out and compete and save.
  There is a massive explosion of technological benefits that we can 
now tap into if we were to empower patients and doctors rather than 
bureaucrats and health insurance administrators.
  We can blow the lid off of it, drive prices down; save our ability to 
honor our commitments on Medicare by getting prices down, if we will 
just do it.
  Instead, we sit around and we run into the corner saying: Oh, 
Democrats said something about preexisting conditions.
  We are all walking preexisting conditions; we are humans. Set up a 
system that would work for that, and the best system is one in which I 
can take dollars and go get healthcare from a willing provider of that 
care and find a way to make sure that insurance is available in a 
catastrophic situation in which you can no longer afford to pay for the 
care.
  It is the best model across all of the different options. We can do 
it, but we have to have the willingness to do it.
  Instead, we are sitting here with existential threat 1, massive debt;
  Existential threat 2, wide open borders, killing our sovereignty and 
killing our kids and our communities;
  Existential threat 3, American energy getting destroyed, sacrificed 
on the altar to the almighty gods of green energy and unicorn energy;
  Existential threat 4, healthcare bankrupting American families, 
bankrupting your ability to go to the doctor of your choice, 
bankrupting the number of physicians we even have available because 
nobody wants to go into this godforsaken industry run by insurance 
companies.
  Yes, the corporate cronyism, replete in this town, where we just 
throw money at big corporations.

                              {time}  1630

  We empower the insurance bureaucrats to run our healthcare. Could 
there possibly be a more stupid way to create a health system? I can't 
think of one.
  Finally, existential threat number 5, and there are more, is our 
national defense. Republicans passed the strongest national defense 
authorization that I have seen in my years of public service and 
certainly in my time in Congress. It would refocus our military on its 
core mission, which is to be trained to, if called upon, kill people 
and blow stuff up.
  That is what it is there for. It is not there to build soccer fields, 
and it is not there to promote social engineering. It is there to 
defend us.
  We passed the defense bill that would end the unlawful Biden DOD 
taxpayer-funded abortion tourism regulations. It would end the 
taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries at the Pentagon. It would 
end the radical climate agenda being implemented at the Department of 
Defense, which I have already addressed, and the market that is being 
embraced by the Pentagon so we can have EVs rolling around our defense 
complex.
  ``Hold on, guys. Stop shooting while we plug in our car. Hey, we need 
to charge up the tank. Give us a second.'' I am looking forward to the 
battery-powered jets.
  We assist servicemembers who were discharged for refusing the COVID-
19 vaccine. Our Department of Defense is now begging them to come back 
because recruiting levels are so bad.
  We end radical critical race theories and diversity, equity, and 
inclusion. We have created an inspector general for Ukraine 
accountability. We prohibit race-based admissions at military 
academies. We have refocused our military on its core mission and to 
get rid of the social engineering.
  Our Democrat colleagues wouldn't support it, and our colleagues in 
the Senate won't advance it, so here we sit. They demand that our 
defense be a radical social engineering experiment rather than a lean, 
mean fighting machine to defend the United States of America. That is 
an existential threat.
  Education is a threat.
  The litany of regulatory morass in this town is all a threat, but 
right now, I am just focusing on debt, on our borders being wide open, 
on our destruction of American energy dominance and freedom, on our 
broken healthcare system destroying the American Dream and the 
inability to access doctors, and on a defense that has been turned into 
a social engineering experiment instead of defending the United States.
  Each one of these things represents a clear and present danger to our 
well-being as a nation and as a people. It is our job and our duty to 
stand up and fight.
  Mr. Speaker, I call on my Democrat colleagues to stop putting their 
heads in the sand and ignoring their duty to address these existential 
threats. Stop being a roadblock to the great bills and the great 
efforts of Republicans that we are moving to pass over to the Senate 
and send to the White House.
  Nevertheless, I have to say to my Republican colleagues that when you 
predictably see our Democratic colleagues refuse to work with us, don't 
cave and don't capitulate. Hold the line. Pick one or two fights that 
we can deliver for the American people so that we can go home and look 
them in the eye.
  I don't care about the campaigns, and I don't care about the ads. I 
don't care about any of that garbage. I care about looking at my 14-
year-old son and my 12-year-old daughter or my 81-year-old father and 
75-year-old mother or a veteran who has fought for this country and who 
is wounded and hurting. I want to look them and my constituents who 
sent me here to fight in the eye, and I want to be able to say:
  We delivered. We fought. We forced the President to the table. We 
made him secure the border. We made him restore sovereignty. We did our 
job.
  We held the line on spending. We reduced spending year over year. We 
ended the gimmicks. We stopped the games. We set the table for us to 
try to balance the budget and do our job and stop racking up debt.
  We restored energy freedom. We opened up American natural gas. We 
stopped the regulations that were going to kill our country. We stopped 
the mandates on electric vehicles that were going to destroy the 
American Dream and drive up the price of automobiles.

[[Page H6142]]

  We stopped the wokification and destruction of the American military 
that is driving down recruiting and making it to where our military 
morale is at its low point.
  We stood up and fought for healthcare freedom so that, Mr. Speaker, 
you can go to the doctor of your choice, so that you can care for your 
family, so that you can make decisions, so that you can afford the 
care, and so that you can look at your kids and your loved ones in the 
eye and be able to take them to get that care without calling some 
bureaucrat on a phone and hoping.

  It is our calling; it is our job; and it is the reason we run for 
Congress. These are existential threats, and they deserve the level of 
attention, fight, and dedication that we campaign on. They deserve us 
to do what we said we would do. Is it asking too much that we campaign 
on doing these things and then come here and actually do them?
  It is long past time for excuses. It is time to meet the moment. It 
is time to rise to the challenge to do our job to make the people's 
House great again, to make Congress great again, to restore the balance 
of power, and to stand up and deliver for the American people so that 
we can, in fact, save the American Dream for our kids and our 
grandkids.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________