[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 5 (Wednesday, January 10, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H21-H22]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       TRUE THREATS TO DEMOCRACY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, President Biden marked the third 
anniversary of the January 6 Capitol riot by calling it a ``day that we 
nearly lost America,'' and he asked: ``Is democracy still America's 
sacred cause?''
  That is an important question. What happened on January 6 was a 
national disgrace. A riotous mob disrupted the Congress and its 
congressional responsibility to observe the counting of the votes of 
the electoral college. To conclude that ``we nearly lost America'' to a 
lunatic wearing buffalo horns that day is hysterical hyperbole, to say 
the least. True insurrections are made of sterner stuff.
  When the last of these yahoos was kicked out of this building a few 
hours later, Congress calmly completed the electoral count and 
confirmed Joe Biden's election.
  Nevertheless, Mr. Biden is correct to raise concerns about the 
growing threats to our democracy, and he is right that democracy 
depends on the loser of an election accepting its outcome as the 
legitimate will of the majority. Many Democrats refused to do that in 
2016 and many Republicans in 2020.
  Why do so many voters no longer trust the integrity of our elections? 
Could it be that so many of the safeguards that assure a fair election 
and an accurate count have been stripped away?
  For hundreds of years, we all looked our neighbors in the eye as they 
handed us our ballots. We all cast our votes in curtained booths where 
no one could influence us. We all watched our ballots placed in locked 
containers. At 8 p.m., we knew exactly how many votes had been cast, 
and a few hours later, we knew the outcome of all the elections.
  We all had our say during the campaign, and we waited until the 
debate was over to make our decision on election day. It was very hard 
to cheat, and everyone could trust that process.
  All that has changed. In recent years, the leftist Democrats have 
rigged election laws to extend voting over an entire month, accept 
ballots after election day, harvest ballots by political operatives, 
use mail-in ballots where there is no chain of custody, prevent 
observers from unobstructed views of ballot counting, and suppress 
debate and hide critical information from voters.
  Freedom of speech is the beating heart of democracy, yet the left-
leaning bureaucracies, increasingly independent of the will of the 
voters, actively colluded to influence elections by intimidating 
political opponents, starting with the Tea Party. They have

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promoted utterly false narratives, most notably the Russian collusion 
hoax.
  Courts have recently found the government guilty of violating the 
First Amendment by actively pressuring social media platforms to censor 
the very political dialogue that is central to the functioning of a 
democracy. The President even attempted to establish a disinformation 
czar to decide what information could reach voters.
  Our fundamental democratic institutions are also under growing 
attack. The left has been very clear that it intends to pack the 
Supreme Court by creating new seats for leftist appointments and to 
pack the Senate by creating overwhelmingly Democratic States, like 
Washington, D.C.
  Less than 2 years ago, leftist mobs descended on the homes of Supreme 
Court Justices in an illegal attempt to pressure and intimidate them, 
yet Mr. Biden's Department of Justice refused to enforce the law that 
protects jurists from such bullying.
  The President has opened our borders and produced an illegal mass 
migration unprecedented in our history while his party has pushed to 
permit foreign nationals to vote in our elections, making a mockery of 
Americans' right to self-determination.
  How does Mr. Biden explain the unprecedented acts of his agents 
seeking to ban from the ballot candidates who directly challenge his 
candidacy? It is not just the brazen and unconstitutional attempt to 
keep his leading Republican challenger from the ballot. The agents of 
his party have been aggressively working to ban Democratic primary 
challengers as well and seizing from Democratic voters in Iowa the 
right to have any meaningful say in next week's election, for fear they 
would not vote for him in sufficient numbers.
  Mr. Speaker, our democracy is indeed under attack from the lunatic 
fringe on both extremes. When we ask which presents a clear and present 
danger to our democracy, I would respectfully but earnestly suggest the 
President remove the log from his own eye before he criticizes the 
speck in his neighbor's.

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