[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 95 (Tuesday, June 4, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H3646-H3650]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          CRISIS AT THE BORDER

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. 
Roy) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. 
Schweikert), my colleague and friend, for his steadfast dedication to 
ensuring

[[Page H3647]]

the American people are informed, at least the 72 people that were 
watching C-SPAN while you were extemporaneously educating them.
  Mr. SCHWEIKERT. My own family doesn't watch.
  Mr. ROY. In all seriousness, we were able to push this out. We were 
able to do clips. It is important that we continue to have this 
conversation.
  The gentleman is correct, in very broad terms and very specific 
terms, about the extent to which we have a fiscal crisis looming. It is 
incumbent upon this body to do something about it.
  We have structural reforms we could put in place that the gentleman 
is talking about. I think we just covered that quite nicely, but we 
also need to be aware of what we need to do with our discretionary 
spending and using the power of the purse, both to constrain the 
bureaucracy that is still a third of that annual spending and constrain 
that spending also for the purpose of limiting tyranny over the 
American people.
  This is one of those things that frustrates me among my colleagues, 
both Democrat and Republican. The gentleman from Arizona is not in that 
group, by the way, because the gentleman from Arizona, I think, largely 
would agree with what I am getting at here. I have colleagues who will 
always slip into saying: It doesn't matter. Stop worrying about 
discretionary. Stop having a fight about $100 billion or $30 billion or 
whatever your debate is about constraining discretionary spending.
  When I say that to the average listener, what I mean is what we spend 
every year on the stuff you see in the bureaucracy, such as the 
Department of Justice, the Department of Commerce, the Department of 
Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense, all of those things 
that make up the alphabet soup of government that, frankly, are the 
things impacting your life every day, or undermining, frankly, your 
freedoms every day.
  The thing that drives me crazy in this town is you will hear Members 
of Congress who come down here and they say: Chip, we have a razor-thin 
majority. Don't you understand? Chip, it is all mandatory spending. You 
don't have to focus on this $100 billion. We are talking about $35 
trillion in debt.
  That happens all the time. I assume the gentleman from Pennsylvania 
(Mr. Perry) would agree with me. I assume, in his career, since he has 
been here a few years longer than I have, that we hear that as an 
excuse for ignoring our job to constrain the bureaucracy, using the 
power of the purse, almost every single day that we come down here to 
the floor, when we are in committee or in our conference meetings. I 
assume the gentleman agrees with me on that point.
  Mr. PERRY. Of course I do. We have fought bitterly. I mean, even if 
you just look at the last few years here since the pandemic, the 
pandemic was unexpected, decisions were made, and in hindsight we 
obviously made some wrong choices.
  Be that as it may, it was expensive. People were out of work. The 
government forced them out of work, forced them to close their 
businesses. It was only right, since the government had the authority 
and the power to do that, to make them as whole as possible.
  Now, we can debate that as long as we want to, but subsequent to the 
end of the pandemic, it should have been reasonable for the people in 
this room on either side of the aisle to say: Well, let's just reset 
back to prepandemic.
  Believe it or not, at that time, if we had just gone back to that 
number, the budget would have balanced.
  Mr. ROY. You are quite right.
  Mr. PERRY. We would actually have taken in enough revenue to pay for 
the things that we were buying, but a substantial portion of this body, 
unfortunately, my friends, my colleagues on the other side of the 
aisle, said: No, no, no. We are going to keep spending now at the 
pandemic level even though the pandemic is over.
  Mr. ROY. The gentleman is correct. I think that is one of the things 
I want to stress. I came down here not to talk about spending. However, 
on the heels of our friend from Arizona, I want to make the point and 
then pivot to what I think is important to talk about. I am sure the 
gentleman will agree.
  In the context, it matters, right? What we fund matters. We are 
funding the Department of Homeland Security and for them to utterly 
fail to secure the homeland and endanger our own people and empower 
migrants to be able to actually flood in and get dumped into the United 
States, including the individual who was paroled into the United States 
and killed Laken Riley, including individuals who were dumped into the 
United States and shot those two police officers in New York just 
last week, including the individual who killed a woman named Lizbeth 
Medina in my own State--killed her, and her mom found her in the 
bathtub when she was supposed to be cheerleading on the streets. I can 
give example after example. We are funding that. We are funding the DHS 
that does that.

  We are funding the FBI that has been politicized against the former 
President, against our own people, like Scott Smith and Mark Houck and 
other people around the country. We are politicizing the FBI and the 
Department of Justice that is using the FACE Act to put a 75-year-old 
woman in jail for 2 years for praying at an abortion facility.
  You are paying for that, ladies and gentlemen. You, the American 
taxpayer, are paying for that, and guess what? With all due respect to 
my Republican colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans are funding 
it.
  They are funding it, and they come down and they say: Well, we have a 
duty to do that.
  Our Democratic colleagues will say: We must do all these things. You 
are politicizing this. You are making it this way.
  My Republican colleagues will say: Well, Chip, of course, we would 
like to do that. Of course, we would like to fix it, but you don't 
understand. You can't do math. We have a razor-thin majority. We can't 
possibly get it done.
  By the way, when did they ever talk about the razor-thin majority in 
the Senate, which exists?
  Mr. PERRY. Right. It does.
  Mr. ROY. One last point. Has my friend from Pennsylvania heard the 
same issues? I won't say who, but I have already heard very important 
Members of this body, in terms of their rank and committee, already 
talking about the fact that, no matter what happens in November, if we 
win the White House and President Trump is in the White House and if we 
win the House of Representatives, even grow our majority, and if we win 
back the Senate and have a majority of two, three, or four, depending 
on how you go look at the scoreboard, that we will not have 60 votes.
  We are told: Unless you can do something on reconciliation, which is 
a maneuver--for all you Americans out there--to find a way to bend 
around the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, well, then you are just 
stuck. We are sorry. You just have to accept it, Chip.
  Does the gentleman hear that all the time, and has he already heard 
Members already setting the stage for January to say: We can't do the 
things that we said we would do?
  Mr. PERRY. Of course, I have heard it. I have heard it ever since I 
have been here. There is always some reason: We have a slim majority. 
We don't have a majority at all. We don't have 60. We don't have the 
Presidency. We have this House, not that body. It is the courts. There 
is always some reason to say we can't do it.
  I was in a committee hearing today talking about waste and abuse on 
foreign affairs. I found out that we send money to Nepal to support 
atheism. We send some of your money to Nepal, which is a highly 
religious society, to support atheism.
  What I am told is: Well, not all bills are perfect. Nobody agrees 
with that, but we had to get the bill passed.
  Well, somebody agreed with it. It ended up in there.
  Mr. ROY. Right.
  Mr. PERRY. Somebody wanted that, so I am supposed to go along with 
that. The people that I represent that wake up early in the morning and 
go to work and pay their taxes, their money is going for that when they 
can't afford their electricity bill, their food bill, or their daycare 
bill. It is insane.
  This whole thing about a wide-open border, not only can they not 
afford to pay the bills, but their kids can't even get jobs now coming 
out of high school because they are competing with people who are here 
illegally who will take

[[Page H3648]]

those jobs where you start out, where the only skill you have, Mr. Roy, 
is, I can show up on time with a good attitude. That is the skill I had 
when I was 13 or 14 years old, right? That is the skill I had when I 
started.
  You start out doing things that maybe a lot of people don't want to 
do, but now there are other people in this country with a work permit. 
Your kids can't even get started anymore. That is the insult upon 
injury.
  You are being taxed out of your homes. You can't afford your bills. 
Other people are taking your work. You are being told to sit down and 
shut up and just take it, whether you are in Congress or, Heaven 
forbid, you are at home and you are watching on TV and you are saying: 
What do I do about any of this? I told my Representative, and they said 
they can't stop it.
  Mr. ROY. In the meantime, I want to pivot to the border point you 
just raised, but I would like to make the point. We are funding all 
those rules and the requirements that are driving the American family 
out of the ability to afford a life.
  Just today, I had a crack in my windshield, and I was just there at 
the dealer's getting it looked at and getting it worked on. We couldn't 
go do a nondealer part for reasons I won't get into. It was $1,100 for 
a windshield. They used to be 200 bucks. You would call Safelite or 
somebody to come out, and they would replace the glass. Now they say: 
Well, you can't just replace the glass because it has all these sensors 
in the windshield.
  Mr. PERRY. Mandated by the government.
  Mr. ROY. Right. Guess what? Now, increasingly, all of these things 
are mandated by the idiots in this Chamber.
  Mr. PERRY. Like the kill switch.
  Mr. ROY. Right. The idiots in this Chamber voted to cause that to 
happen and back up what the regulators down the street are forcing on 
the average American.
  Here is what I don't get, right? All my colleagues here, if I forced 
my colleagues, one by one, to go down to the microphone on any one of 
these issues and explain to their constituents: I am going to vote--as 
some Republicans did last fall--I am going to vote against eliminating 
a kill switch in a car, which is going to dramatically increase the 
cost of that car, dramatically increase the cost of that windshield, 
dramatically increase the chance that that car is going to shut down in 
the 20-below-zero cold in North Dakota and leave you on the side of the 
road because you have a computer determining whether you can start the 
car, if I made every Member go defend that, they would start to think 
twice about it because that is a hard thing to defend.

  However, they didn't want to vote against it because MADD came around 
and lobbied for it. They didn't want to be against that, so 19 
Republicans say: No. Sorry. I can't vote against killing the kill 
switch.
  If you put it out there and start really telling the American people: 
Hey, should we have something in there that protects people from drunk 
driving, they will say: Well, I guess so.
  What if that would cost you another $10,000 for the car?
  They would say: Are you out of your freaking mind?
  However, we do it, and we do it for the same reason Mr. Schweikert 
was talking about why our healthcare costs are high. It is because 
there is an army of lobbyists in town, or there is an army of people 
who are going to go out and say certain things. The one thing Mr. 
Schweikert said, when he talked about how we are going to make sure 
that we are protecting incumbents, he didn't mention about protecting 
the incumbency of the people in this room, people who hold onto their 
election certificate like it is the most important damned thing they 
will ever have in their life, instead of the opportunity to come here 
and do what we said we would do.
  Does the gentleman agree?
  Mr. PERRY. I do agree. I do agree with that completely. Protecting 
that, and, of course, what we are seeing right now is the protection or 
the attempted protection of that at the Presidential level.
  For 3\1/2\ years, I have watched the President say: I can't do 
anything about a wide-open border. I can't take any action. There is 
nothing I can do. It must come from the legislature.
  Yet, somehow, now that all the polls have turned around and it looks 
ominous in 5 months, somehow, he found the wherewithal to say: Well, 
shazam, I can take executive action.
  Who knew? Well, the American people knew because, before he got 
there, executive action was taken, and the border was relatively 
secure, much more secure than it is now.
  For 3\1/2\ years, it has been wide open, and, essentially, our 
President just acknowledged what we all knew, that this has been 
meaningful. This has been by design, the wide-open border has been 
intentional, and he could have done something about it, but he chose 
not to until he had no other choice politically.
  Even at that, I am sure that my good friend from Texas, who is on the 
front lines in Texas, is going to talk about the provisions of this. 
The one I find interesting, we are going to stop these people coming in 
once we hit the threshold unless they are minors, unaccompanied 
children. Unless they are minors, unaccompanied children, we are going 
to let--so we are going to allow the sex trafficking of children to 
continue, even as we know that our Federal Government has lost track of 
literally tens of thousands of children illegally in our country, 
unaccompanied.
  Mr. ROY. There were 85,000 documented in one case, for sure.
  Mr. PERRY. Yes, 85,000. Right. Yeah.
  Mr. ROY. And I am glad the gentleman brings this issue up because I 
would note that, today, while I was sitting in the House Judiciary 
Committee with the gentleman from California (Mr. Kiley)--who just came 
in to join us, who is going to take the microphone, I am sure, in a 
little bit--we had the Attorney General before us. We were questioning 
the Attorney General in the House Judiciary Committee.
  In that exchange, I was asking the Attorney General about the extent 
to which he believes that it is wrong for Texas to have passed what we 
call SB4 in Texas to empower Texans to do the job of stopping people 
from being released into the United States, contrary to law, and 
endangering the people of Texas that has led directly to the death of 
Texans, does he believe, as the Attorney General of the United States, 
that it is wrong for Texas to do that?
  The reason I asked him that question is because, as the Attorney 
General of the United States, he is, of course, leading litigation to 
stop us. He is suing Texas, taking us to court to try to prevent us 
from doing it because of the Supremacy Clause. The Federal Government 
is supposed to do this, and you don't have a say.
  Well, hold on a second. If the Federal Government is supposed to 
secure the border of the United States and manage this inflow of people 
and it is violating the laws and dumping people into the United States, 
are we saying that the people of Texas can't, under the invasion clause 
or otherwise, say: It is our duty as the people of Texas to protect our 
citizens and our people?

                              {time}  1815

  The Attorney General, of course, said no. He has got to take us to 
court and go sue us. The fact is he is, therefore, ignoring--
  Mr. PERRY. When is the invasion clause operable then?
  Mr. ROY. I think he would say it is not.
  Mr. PERRY. When is it? Never?
  Mr. ROY. I think he would say if you have got a literal army of 
people coming across the river, I suppose. I think they would probably 
fight us on that.
  Mr. PERRY. If you came across with a gun and you were wearing a 
uniform with your name on it, that is an invasion. If you don't have a 
gun and you don't have a uniform, no matter what your intentions are or 
the scale, that is not an invasion.
  Mr. ROY. I am not sure that they have stipulated the former, but they 
certainly want to try to stop us from identifying and recognizing the 
latter. The reality is that the people of Texas are fed up and they are 
asking their leaders to do the job the Federal Government won't do.
  I will compliment Republicans. I am not afraid to criticize both 
Republicans or Democrats. I will compliment Republicans for having done 
a year ago what we have never done, which is set

[[Page H3649]]

aside the absurdity of saying you have got to do amnesty and setting 
aside the absurdity of saying you have got to open the floodgates to 
more people coming into the country, even though we allow about a 
million people a year to come in.
  Mr. PERRY. Legally.
  Mr. ROY. Legally.
  Even though we have 51.5 million people in the United States who are 
foreign-born. You have the Chamber of Commerce and all of the big 
interests coming down here saying: You guys have got to open up more 
immigration. You have to do it.
  We always bow down. We always say: Okay, we will do that. We will do 
amnesty, but can we just get some security? We beg for crumbs.
  A year ago, we did something different. We came together as 
Republicans, and we passed the most comprehensive and strongest border 
security bill we have ever passed.
  Frankly, I don't think my colleagues fully understand the historical 
importance of that, even many who support it and talk about it and 
tweet about it.
  I have been here in some various forms, now 5 years as Member of 
Congress. I was here as chief of staff for Senator Ted Cruz. I was on 
the Senate Judiciary Committee as a lawyer. I watched the debates and 
the failures and the Gangs of Eight and all of the machinations. I 
watched in 2017 when we had two different bills, so-called Goodlatte 1, 
Goodlatte 2. We left President Trump stranded. We blew it.
  Last year, we came together, we set the terms of what we will now do 
next year. That matters.
  When Republicans unite to achieve something, not unity for the sake 
of it. I get so tired of hearing my colleagues talk about unity. I say 
something like: To do what?
  It doesn't matter. We have just got to unite. To do what? Right?
  When we unite to say we are going to stand up and say we are going to 
secure the border of the United States, we did it. We didn't always 
agree, by the way. People swept aside our differences of opinion a year 
ago.
  We fought through it. We met, we worked, and we passed the best 
border security bill we have ever passed. The Senate has sat on it. 
They tried to pass a sham bill, which the President today went to the 
microphone and gave up the game. Remember the Senate bill? The Senate 
bill said: Oh, don't worry, guys. We are going to cap the flow at 
5,000.
  Mr. PERRY. A day.
  Mr. ROY. A day. Which, by the way, Obama's Secretary of Homeland 
Security, Jeh Johnson, said a thousand a day was basically a crisis.
  We are going to cap it at 5,000 a day, rest easy, but we are going to 
have all these exceptions. We are going to have exceptions for 
unaccompanied children; exceptions for parolees when we are violently 
just dumping people into the United States under parole; exceptions for 
foreign nationals who use the CBP One app, which is another version of 
parole.
  We objected. All the Democrats said: You guys are not doing this 
bipartisan bill.
  Guess what the President did today? He went to the microphone, and he 
looked at America and he said: ``We need to regain control of the 
border.''
  The President of the United States today acknowledged to everybody 
watching and to every American that we do not have control of the 
border. That is what the President did today.
  The President also went to the microphone today and said: ``I will 
cap it at 2,500.'' If the President of the United States has the 
authority today to issue an order to cap it at 2,500, did he not have 
that authority 2 months ago or 6 months ago or 2 years ago or 3\1/2\ 
years ago? Of course, he did. That gives up the game on the Senate bill 
when they said they would cap it at 5,000 and the President comes in 3 
months later, why?
  It is because he is looking at the polls and he is looking at his 
butt getting kicked and he is looking at losing the House and the 
Senate. Now, he is, like, oh, crap. I have got to do something to 
actually look like I care about the border when everybody in America 
knows I don't.
  Madam Speaker, so he did it. He went to the microphone, and he said 
it and he made a joke of the Senate bill that all of those Senate 
Democrats and all of our Democratic colleagues have been lying to the 
American people that we have been obstructing good bills when they are 
the ones that put forward a sham bill and the President made it clear 
today.
  Does the gentleman agree?
  Mr. PERRY. I agree completely. The historical perspective of what we 
accomplished in the House over a year ago now with the most righteous 
border security bill ever to pass out of the House is to give Members 
of the House of Representatives and the Senate the alternative, so when 
the President says: Well, you haven't done anything over there. You 
haven't passed anything, and you won't pass the bipartisan bill.

  Madam Speaker, it doesn't matter. I mean, it is awesome when it can 
be bipartisan, but what is more awesome is when it can be correct, when 
it actually is the solution to the problem.
  The Senate bill, the so-called border protection bill that allows 
5,000 people every single day to hemorrhage across our border 
illegally, is not a solution. It is not a solution to an open border. 
It is just a codification of an open border.
  The fact that some of my friends on the other side of the aisle 
didn't want to vote in favor of securing the border shouldn't be a 
reason for the President to say: You haven't done anything.
  We get that he doesn't like it. He doesn't like it because it 
actually would have secured the border. That goes to the point. It was 
always his intention. It has always been his intention. It has always 
been the intention of my friends on the other side of the aisle to 
leave the border wide-open as long as they possibly could and get away 
with it. The only reason it is changing now is because the polls 
reflect that the American people are, number one, sick of it; and, 
number two, know they are being lied to and know that the President has 
the authority and the ability to secure the border.
  Mr. ROY. I will ask the gentleman a quick question, then I will leave 
both of us a little time at the end. We have got about 9 minutes left.
  I will give a chance for us to talk about June 6, which is coming up 
in a couple days. I want to ask one thing today, in that we just talked 
about the border. We just talked about the extent to which they are 
wide-open, being ignored, endangering the American people. It is 
purposeful.
  We just talked about the attorney general suing to get in front of 
Texas trying to secure our borders. I just want to point out the extent 
to which the current administration is defying and undermining the rule 
of law on a daily basis.
  As we sit here in this Chamber and we sit here under Moses and we sit 
here in recognition of the importance of the rule of law, this 
administration is at war with the rule of law: the borders are open, 
ignoring the law; student loan repayments, ignoring the Supreme Court 
and the law to try to buy votes. You have got wide-open streets and 
criminals on the streets, and we are not prosecuting crimes that we 
need to prosecute.
  More importantly, you have an administration hell-bent on trying to 
use the political apparatus to target a former President and to use it 
in direct violation of everything we understand and know about the 
importance of blind justice. You cannot get away from that reality.
  Today, we have an attorney general who is choosing to target one 
President and say: I am going to charge you with a crime. Right? And 
then choosing not to charge the other President for basically the same 
crime with the classified record stuff. You have got the Attorney 
General of the United States saying, I am not going to turn over audio 
of the very rationale for why Special Counsel Hur said: No, we 
shouldn't go after the current President because, frankly, he is not 
mentally able to do it, and he will be a sympathetic figure.
  They don't want to turn over the audio, even though it is the same 
material, and the attorney general testified to that today.
  That is an abomination to the rule of law that you have got the New 
York prosecutor in complete and obvious coordination with the attorney 
general, where the deputy to the number three goes up and works with 
the D.A. in

[[Page H3650]]

New York and they prosecute the former President of the United States.
  They prosecute him on a State law charge, but then they bastardize 
and shoehorn in a Federal charge they won't even define. Then they use 
that to run through multiple charges that most observers say may not 
even get through the State system without their supreme court in New 
York throwing it out.
  We have got 6 minutes. I will get to this other issue.
  Does the gentleman see the problem with what is happening to the rule 
of law, the very foundation that causes migrants to want to come here 
and the strength of this economy and this country?
  Mr. PERRY. I do, and I lament this. I say this often. The gentleman 
from Texas has heard me say that this is the Constitution of the United 
States of America, Madam Speaker.
  It is a quick read. You can probably read that in less than an hour. 
Everybody can see it is a piece of paper. It cannot defend itself.
  Mr. ROY. Correct.
  Mr. PERRY. There it is, laying on the desk. This is the owner's 
manual. This is the operator's manual. This is the set of instructions 
for running your country. We all take an oath to follow this thing. 
However, if you are not going to, if you choose not to, this 
Constitution can do nothing about it. It can do nothing.
  It takes people of integrity. People that are willing to sacrifice 
their own personal viewpoints on occasion or what I call the avarice of 
man, their own personal greed; the things that they want for the sake 
of this. When people refuse to do this, refuse to do that, and just use 
the awesome authority granted to them in a position whether it is 
electoral or otherwise in places like the Department of Justice, well, 
that is what we have today.
  That is what we have today, which is a Soviet-style show trial to go 
after your political rivals. This is the thing of dictators and 
tyrants.
  One of the practitioners I saw this week before I came in said: It is 
crazy. It is crazy. I said: It is not crazy; it is tyranny. It is 
tyranny.
  Mr. ROY. I assume the gentleman would agree with me--and I am going 
to switch topics, but it is a transition that makes it more 
meaningful--that when the boys walked into the wall of bullets that 
they walked into at Normandy in 1944 that they weren't doing it to toss 
aside the rule of law and the Constitution, all that this country 
stands for.

  I have chosen not to go to Normandy and to make the trip. I didn't 
wear the uniform. I want to leave it to those who did. Some who wore 
the uniform aren't going. I want the gentleman to comment on this as he 
has served for almost three decades or something along those lines in 
the United States Armed Forces--just so everybody knows, today is June 
4.
  In 2 days, it will be 80 years since those men got in those boats, 
jumped out into the stormy seas, ran on to the sand, ran into a wall of 
bullets, went up the cliffs, and then went all the way to Bastogne, to 
Germany, went through all of what they went through, this is the 
message from General Eisenhower on the order of June 6, 1944:
  ``Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
  ``You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we 
have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The 
hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In 
company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you 
will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the 
elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and 
security for ourselves in a free world.
  ``Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well 
equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
  ``But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi 
triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans 
great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has 
seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage 
war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming 
superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal 
great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free 
men of the world are marching together to Victory!
  ``I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill 
in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
  ``Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon 
this great and noble undertaking.''
  Those words speak for themselves. We honor and tribute those who lost 
their lives, those who fought, those who came home, those few World War 
II veterans who remain with us.
  I will turn over the remaining 1\1/2\ minutes to my friend who wore 
the uniform that I did not wear.
  Mr. PERRY. No words that we can use today can adequately honor the 
sacrifices of those who gave the last full measure and signed up to do 
it. There is just no way you can describe what they endured and what 
they knew they were going to endure.
  Many of them never made it off the beach. Many of them never made it 
out of the boat. So many of them even joined up and lied about their 
age so they could go fight for what they believed in: this country, 
this idea.

                              {time}  1830

  The idea is that everybody is equal under the law, that no one person 
is more important than another person, that you can make decisions for 
your life based on what you want to do. You can buy the gas stove that 
you want or not buy any stove at all. You can buy a car with a 
windshield sensor in it or no windshield sensor in it.
  Madam Speaker, they didn't give their lives for this government that 
we have now that bankrupts families, that puts the fear of the 
government in them if they say something, that they are going to be 
hauled off to jail in the middle of the night or be drawn out on the 
lawn in their shorts in the wee hours of the morning. Yet, that is what 
we have right now.
  Madam Speaker, we need to honor the commitment they made for the 
country that they loved that existed then. That is the best thing we 
could do.
  Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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