[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 100 (Thursday, June 13, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H4053-H4056]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
REMEMBER WHY WE SERVE THE PEOPLE
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. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlemen who were just speaking on
the floor, my friend, Mr. Wenstrup, and my friend, Mr. Palmer, for what
they were doing in reminding the American people what happened 7 years
ago.
It too easily gets glossed over for the politically motivated attack
on Members of Congress that it was. A lot of statements are made about
January 6, about things that have occurred, but not enough is made
about what happened that day when someone was targeting our friends,
our colleagues, for political reasons. It gets, frankly, ignored, with
all due respect, by some of our colleagues on the other side of the
aisle.
Steve Scalise and everybody who was a part of it stand as, I think,
a stark reminder of what is great and good about those who serve here
who are willing to move forward for the good of the country.
The country shouldn't forget about what happened and forget what
those gentlemen on that field went through and why that is so
critically important. I thank them for that, and I certainly thank them
for their continued service.
I do think it is really important that we remember, as a body, in
that vein, why we are here. Why do we convene as a Congress? Why do we
come here and engage from all over the country, from 50 States, and fly
in here each week and conduct business?
Too often, it turns into a clock-punching exercise where people come
in, fly in, do their votes, go to some meeting, go to some fundraiser,
go to some event, go to a quick hearing, do their thing, go back, vote,
and go home.
Yet, what we have to remember when we come here is that we are
supposed to be stopping for a moment and remembering that we are
representing 750,000-odd Americans each and that we have an obligation
to fight for them and do what we said we would do when we ran for
office to represent them in the first place.
When I go all over the country, doing campaign events or even a bunch
of personal business, I am reminded that a lot of American people do
watch what we say here. A lot of people do watch videos that get
circulated around on social media.
From time to time, frankly, quite often, people bring up to me a
speech that I gave about 6 months ago in which I asked rhetorically,
but importantly and emphatically, to name one thing that we have done,
name one thing that we accomplished. I was talking to Republican
colleagues, in particular.
I stand behind that question. It is an important question to ask. Of
course, it is often clipped to leave out the important part, which was
to name one thing we have accomplished besides doing something that is
equivalent to Democrat-lite or something that is the soft version of
what our Democratic colleagues want to do.
{time} 1915
I will remind people, because it is important, what we have been able
to accomplish as a united Republican Party, under now the leadership of
two Speakers over the last 18 months.
A little over a year ago, we passed the Limit, Save, Grow Act in
which we had Republicans unite across the body to pass an increase in
the debt ceiling that was relatively modest, $1.5 trillion is, sadly,
relatively modest, in exchange for very significant policy changes to
get our country on the right track.
We repealed the so-called Inflation Reduction Act subsidies that are
subsidizing and empowering multibillion-dollar corporations, empowering
China, and undermining our ability to produce energy effectively.
We implemented spending caps and put them in place to reduce the size
and scope of government and to limit the size of discretionary spending
and to cut back on the weaponized government at the Department of
Justice and at the FBI and at the Department of Education and in so
many other different agencies across the bureaucracy.
We passed the REINS Act to rein in the regulatory state and to say
that if regulations are going to have a certain impact, they must be
approved by Congress. We implemented work requirements on things like
SNAP and Medicaid. We worked together to try to transform this country
as we told the American people we would do.
We did that together. We united to do it. Again, we modestly
increased the debt ceiling, modestly relatively speaking, in exchange
for actual policy changes to take our country back and put it on the
right path. We did that.
We passed a strong border security bill that effectively said you
will be detained, as our current law contemplates, or you will be
turned away. It is that simple.
Most Americans support that. You will be detained if you have some
sort of a claim, asylum claim or something else or some humanitarian
exception, but you will be detained for the full time until we
adjudicate it, or you will be turned away. That is effectively what we
passed in what we call H.R. 2, our second big bill number.
H.R. 2, is our border security plan that we, Republicans, united to
pass. Again, for the first time in decades, if not ever, this body came
together and we passed a bill that would legitimately secure the border
of the United States and force the hand of an administration that is
refusing to secure the border while our country is being undermined and
endangered.
[[Page H4054]]
Even as we speak, I am seeing reporting pop up on my phone about the
number of foreign nationals, the number of Chinese foreign nationals,
24,000 last year, the amount of fentanyl pouring in, and the dangerous
individuals that are being encountered.
I am seeing reporting on a daily basis about this administration
leaving our country wide open and refusing to do anything about it, so
this Republican Congress voted last year to pass H.R. 2. We passed it,
we sent it to the Senate, and Chuck Schumer did nothing with it.
The National Defense Authorization Act, we are in the middle of
working on that bill, as we speak, for fiscal year 2025. We passed the
FY24 NDAA and this year we are working on a bill that is similar, that
is worthy of support by Republicans, by conservatives. I don't agree
with everything in it, to be clear, but it is a bill that is taking a
giant step forward to refocus our military on being a military.
Our military should be focused on killing people and blowing things
up, on doing the hard work of defending a country when called upon to
do it, hopefully, sparingly. We have a military that has now,
currently, gone off track. It has been turned into a social engineering
experiment. Recruiting is low.
We have individuals in our military who are tired of being told that
they have got to be a part of abortion tourism or transgender training
or whatever DEI planning and training that is being pressed upon them
rather than just learning how to jump out of a helicopter or fire a
gun.
Today, we passed amendments to the NDAA that will move it in the
right direction. It will pull back on the DEI, pull back on all the
transgender woke policies, pull back on the climate executive order by
the President of the United States that is undermining the readiness of
our military.
We passed that amendment today. We passed an amendment to end
abortion tourism, so you don't have taxpayer dollars funding abortion
because the Department of Defense should not be a social engineering
experiment. Republicans today united to do that, just as last year we
united to do that.
Just last week, we passed a bill to actually sanction, with teeth,
the International Criminal Court because it is wishing to and seeking
to issue warrants for the Prime Minister of Israel for simply defending
his country. We passed that. We passed that bill with unanimous
Republican support. I think there were two present votes, 42 Democrats.
We did that by uniting as Republicans to send a message to the world
that we believe that not only is the International Criminal Court
illegitimate, not only is the International Criminal Court wrong, not
only is it undermining our ally Israel, but that we should sanction it
with actual sanctions. Not watered down exceptions for the United
Nations, exceptions for all manner of these international organizations
so it doesn't have teeth, we passed sanctions with teeth. It is sitting
over in the Senate.
Chuck Schumer refuses to stand with Israel. Chuck Schumer refuses to
do the work that we are supposed to do as our country and allies are
being targeted. More importantly, the International Criminal Court is
carrying out activities that will be turned around and focused on us,
that will be used against our own military.
Again, a united Republican Party over the last 18 months, when we
have united, we have passed limits to spending, modest debt ceiling
increases for legitimate policy changes that would put us on the right
path, a border security bill that would actually secure the border, a
National Defense Authorization Act--now maybe twice, come tomorrow--
that would repurpose our military on the military end or limit/reduce
the social engineering and the woke policies. We passed an
International Criminal Court sanctions bill with real teeth.
Last year, we passed a significant number of appropriations bills
with significant policy changes, and we had 1,100 amendments processed.
We were moving things in the right direction, but here is the trick.
There are a lot of pieces to this, but here is the trick: How do you
get that turned into law? Here is the dirty little secret in this town,
most of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle would tell you, you
must win elections in order to get that done.
They are not wrong.
You cannot have the majority without elections. You cannot get the
votes you need without the elections going the way you want; to get the
votes you need to pass the law. I agree.
Here is the secret: You are never going to get stuff passed when you
always have an excuse for not passing it.
I will say that again. You will never get something signed into law
when you start with the excuse for why you won't get it signed into
law.
All of the good things I just mentioned, all of the good things that
I say that this united Republican Party has done in the face of
absolute abject failure by our colleagues on the other side of the
aisle and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we have done these great things,
but they have stopped. They have sat in the Senate because you have to
be willing to sacrifice something to fight to achieve and force these
things to a conclusion.
Now, my colleagues will say: Well, you got to win more votes and you
can't ask for too much.
There are times where you can ask for too much and there are times
where you can say, we simply don't have the votes. However, when you
have current Members of our own body saying: Well, Chip, we are not
going to have 60 votes in the Senate in January, so you have to go
ahead and factor that in to why we are not going to get appropriations
bills that we would prefer, why we should only have a continuing
resolution going into December, into a lameduck. Why? So we can then
have the powers that be use the pressure of Christmas to pass an
omnibus spending bill in December? I don't agree with that.
We are already being told that we don't have 60 votes in the Senate.
We won't get 60 votes in the Senate, so you must accept it.
The reason why I am focusing on this for a second is, the people that
I represent always ask me why. Why don't you get these things done?
The people I represent, frankly, people all across the country that I
run into, they ask me why. Why can't you secure the border?
It is a pretty simple question. Why can you not secure the border? I
then have to tell them, I am 1/435th of one-half of one-third of the
Federal Government. So we have got to go build the votes.
When you have the votes to pass something like H.R. 2 and you send it
over to the Senate, then the only question that is going to matter is
whether it is this year, right now, or whether it is next year. If you
hope to go out into the election season and get a bigger majority by a
handful of seats, get the majority in the Senate by a couple of seats,
and hope to get the White House, then you say, don't worry, we will do
it then. Some will say, oh, we can't even do it then because we are not
going to have 60 in the Senate.
The point is, you have to pick something and fight for it. You have
to pick some number of things and fight for them. You have to take the
message to the American people. You have to be willing to risk that
``precious,'' to quote ``Lord of the Rings,'' that election certificate
that you hold on to so tight that you don't actually use it.
I would rather serve one more term and jam through as much freedom
legislation as I possibly could than to serve 5 more terms or 10 terms
and not get passed what we need to get passed.
The average American family today is hurting. The average American
family today, the average young person in America today, can't afford
their healthcare because this government has destroyed the healthcare
market and made it impossible to afford. They can't afford a vehicle
because this government has regulated vehicles and made the price of
gasoline and the vehicles that they want to buy cost prohibitive. They
don't think they can afford houses, and as often is the case can't,
because this government has been blowing money, driving up interest,
and creating an environment in which housing costs are now
astronomically expensive.
They don't think that they can, frankly, bring a family into this
world and have children because of the things I just talked about as
they don't believe they can afford them.
[[Page H4055]]
We have a responsibility as leaders of this country, in this Chamber
and the other Chamber, in the executive branch, to actually deliver for
the American people, to preserve and protect the way of life that we
cherish.
We sit here on the floor and regale the men who walked into the wall
of bullets at Normandy or regale them on July Fourth or regale our
Founding Fathers or the Declaration of Independence.
We have an actual responsibility to preserve and protect the pursuit
of happiness. The ability to carry out and live your unalienable rights
given to you by God, but we are not doing that. I just want to be
blunt. We are not doing that.
I would say of late that I believe that the Republican Conference has
been doing some good work to make very clear to the American people
what we can and will do if entrusted with the majority, and a majority
in the Senate, and a Republican in the White House. I believe we have
been doing that.
I believe in the National Defense Authorization Act with amendments
and policies that reduce the woke social engineering and increase the
focus on military.
I believe in the H.R. 2 bill; the border security provisions.
I believe that the appropriations bills are moving in the right
direction and changing the process. They are not perfect.
I believe in last year's Limit, Save, Grow effort and a lot of the
policies we are trying to advance.
I believe in the International Criminal Court bill.
I believe in the bill that I hope to bring to the floor in a couple
of weeks, the SAVE Act, to make sure that only citizens can vote in
Federal elections.
I believe these bills demonstrate very clearly the difference between
Republicans and Democrats and demonstrate very clearly what Republicans
can do when we unite for a purpose to defend the American people
against the very swamp that we campaign against.
However, you will never, never achieve those results if you come here
and you capitulate on day one out of fear, whether fear of government
shutdown, fear of failure, fear of the slim majority, fear of the
possibility the President might veto it, fear of getting crosswise to
some politician who might say something about you on Twitter.
Instead, we should take this great work and take it to the American
people, take it through the elections, and then set up the fight. We
should set up the fight in 2025 to take our country back because this
country turns 250 years old in 2 years.
On July 2, 2026, we will be celebrating our 250th birthday of
separating from England, and then 2 days later we came to an agreement
on the language of the Declaration.
{time} 1930
What are we going to do for the people on our 250th birthday? What
are we going to be able to say to our kids and our grandkids on our
250th birthday?
Next year, what are we going to do to set the stage? If Republicans
go out and get elected, take the White House, take the House, take the
Senate, will we be able to take the policies that we came together to
pass but failed to force through the Senate and failed to force the
President of the United States to even move frankly halfway to our
demands? Will we use our power then?
Will we use our power in January to get any of them signed into law?
It doesn't matter if you keep getting elected, it doesn't matter if you
go out and win elections if you don't do anything with it.
Will we finally take H.R. 2 in its form now, tweaked as necessary
next January, hopefully made better and stronger, will we finally pass
legislation to secure the border of the United States that will force
the President and transcend time, not just in President Trump's tenure,
but once and for all, will we do that as Republicans? We better.
Will we ensure that our tax policy is geared toward working class,
hardworking middle-class families, small businesses that are struggling
to make ends meet around this country as opposed to the massive
corporations and K Street lobbyists? Will we do that? We better.
Will we actually cut spending? Will we address the $35 trillion in
debt that we currently have that will be no doubt $38 trillion or so by
the time we start the next Congress?
Will we try to alleviate inflation by ending the reckless spending
without any limit or will we just shrug and continue to borrow into
oblivion such that if you look at the interest that we just spent in
May, it is 79 percent of all of the personal income taxes collected
into the revenue, into the Treasury. Eighty percent of that which we
collected from the American people through their hard work, we took
their money, 80 percent of that is just used to pay interest expense in
May.
Think about that. Imagine if you were sitting at home, 80 percent of
your income from your job, imagine that, you have got 80 percent of
your income from your job in May was used to pay the interest on your
mortgage. What have you got left? What do you have left for
electricity, for water, for gasoline, for food, for your kids, for your
clothing? We don't.
Will we actually fundamentally finally deal with spending in the next
Congress?
Will we fully restore energy freedom, repealing the subsidies or
subsidizing massive corporations, undermining the ability of Americans
to afford energy, driving up the prices of automobiles, piling up EVs
on lots?
Will we repeal the disastrous Inflation Reduction Act, so-called,
$1.2 trillion in subsidies, will we repeal it?
Will we end the so-called tailpipe rule that is crushing American
families?
Will we take back our country and provide the energy freedom that
allows for human flourishing as it is doing around the globe? There are
still 3 billion people around the planet who don't have access to
reliable energy. Why would we move backward instead of forward?
Will we end, as we are starting to try to do in the NDAA, a toe in
the water, will we end the social experimentation at the Pentagon and,
instead, bolster our military with the confidence and the pride of
defending a country without being told you must follow a woke social
agenda or no longer be in the military, you must take a shot or you
will lose your job?
Will we make our military stronger but more sparingly used? Will we
end endless wars but use the power and the strength of our military for
peace through strength and use our diplomacy through the State
Department and our energy policies to stop wars before they start?
Will we use our spending power to end the weaponization of government
that right now has a 75-year-old woman facing 2 years in prison in
Washington, D.C., right here, 2 years in prison because she prayed at
an abortion clinic, because she dared to go to an abortion clinic at 75
years old saying, how much do I have left to give on this Earth? I am
going to give a little of my life to try to stand up for the unborn,
and even if you disagree with me, and even if she was carrying out a
misdemeanor or doing something that was stopping the flow and the law
enforcement needed to move them, 2 years in prison under the FACE Act?
Are we going to end the weaponization of government against its
people, against its politicians, to end turning this country into a
banana republic?
Again, I ask of my Republican colleagues: We have united in purpose
and produced these great results, whether it is Limit Save Grow, or
H.R. 2 and border security or the National Defense Authorization Act,
or the appropriations bills, sanctioning the International Criminal
Court, hopefully passing the SAVE Act, will we take those things and
turn those to victories that force them through the Senate so that the
President can sign them?
Will we finally take our country back and restore it to the American
people and give them energy freedom so they can afford the energy that
allows them to power their lives and afford the automobiles to go about
their work?
Will we drive interest rates down so they can afford a home again?
Will we make education affordable and useful again instead of
subsidizing it and then paying off the loans of those who haven't paid
their loans off and ignoring those who never took out a loan in the
first place?
Will we restore order on our streets and put criminals back in jail?
[[Page H4056]]
Will we secure our borders and stop the lawless from coming across
the Rio Grande?
Will we end the reckless spending that is indebting our kids and our
grandkids to a future in which the dollar is worthless, and their
country is destroyed because we didn't do our job here?
Will we pass tax reform that is good for families and small
businesses, not the K Street lobbyists and big corporations?
These are the questions the American people want us to answer. They
are tired of the excuses. They are tired of sternly worded letters.
They are tired of hearings. They are tired of speeches. I will look in
the mirror. I am giving another speech. They want to see us do it.
My call to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, but particularly
my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle, we owe it, we owe it
to the 400,000 tombstones sitting on the other side of the Potomac, we
owe it to all those who fought and died and bled for that flag and for
everything it represents. We owe it to our kids and our grandkids; we
owe it to the world so that America can continue to be the beacon of
hope. We owe it to restore American independence, restore liberty and
freedom, restore a faith and a confidence in a government that is doing
its actual constitutional job. We owe them that, not excuses.
We owe them to deliver, not to come back and say: Well, we tried. We
owe them every ounce of our being when we are here in this town to work
and get our job done; not to play politics, not to campaign, not to go
to another political event, but to be here and do our job.
It is an honor to serve in Congress, but there is no point in being
here if we are not actually going to deliver for the American people
who sent us here to deliver for them. We will win the arguments if we
will make them. We will lose the arguments if we are too afraid to
fight.
I am tired of the celebrations of all the people who have fought,
bled, and died for this country with an absence of a conviction
politically, with all due respect to the many veterans in this Chamber
who wore the uniform and fought and bled for this country, politically
are you willing to fight and bleed and politically die for your
country? Until you are, until you are willing to risk that, until you
are willing to take that election certificate and nail it up on the
wall and say: I am going to take this thing for a spin, I am going to
actually do what I said I was going to do, and then let the American
people decide. Until we are willing to do that, then we are going to be
relegated to, in Reagan's phrasing, ``the ash heap of history.''
I happen to believe that we can take this country back, but I happen
to believe that if we don't, if we don't take the steps right now to
rescue her, then we are going to lose her. We are going to be that
generation that Reagan talked about when Reagan said we are only ``one
generation away from extinction.'' The question for us is, what will we
do?
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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