[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 108 (Thursday, June 27, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H4405-H4407]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CELEBRATING INDEPENDENCE DAY
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, as we will be recessing tomorrow for the
week, next week many of us will be celebrating America's Independence
Day back home in our districts and throughout the country.
Very few of us will be here. A few may, but we are rarely, if ever,
on the floor of the U.S. House on Independence Day.
It is obviously a day not just worth celebrating but that the
Founders intended specifically for us to celebrate.
I recall now 4 years ago in the summer of 2020 in the midst of some
of the protests and riots and burning of buildings, tossing of statues
and damaging of statues throughout the country in the summer of 2020,
there was a lot of effort to tear down monuments and memorials.
I took my staff, and I drove to Philadelphia on July 2. We were here
late right up through that day. I think we finished voting on July 1.
On July 2, I drove with my staff, I went to Philadelphia, and I went
to Independence Hall and visited with the National Park Service there
who were caring for Independence Hall.
Fortunately, there was nobody at that point threatening to damage
Independence Hall. There were some rumors and concerns.
I recorded a video there and talked about the importance of
Independence Hall. In that speech or in that video, when I recorded
that, I pointed out that it wasn't the bricks and the mortar. It wasn't
the building itself. It wasn't the structure.
That is all interesting to go see from a historic standpoint, but it
was what those men did inside of Independence Hall that changed the
course of history forever.
The National Park Service was very gracious. They allowed me and my
staff, the three staff members with me, to go into Independence Hall on
July 2.
We were alone. It was just us because it was closed down for public
tours because you will remember, this was during the time of COVID.
We were able to be in Independence Hall on July 2. Now, why is that
interesting? Because students of history will know that that was the
actual monumental day.
That was the day that our leaders of the colonies, but the Founders
of this country, the leaders broke away from the crown. That was the
day that they voted.
On July 3, the next day, John Adams wrote a letter to his wife,
Abigail, back home in Massachusetts. Remember, of course, he couldn't
call her. He couldn't text her. He couldn't send her an email.
He wrote Abigail a letter that would get to her saying, ``Yesterday,
the greatest question was decided, which ever was debated in America,
and a greater, perhaps, never was nor will be decided among men.
``A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, `that these
United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent
States, and as such they have, and of right ought to have, full power
to make war, conclude peace, establish commerce, and to do all other
acts and things which other States may rightfully do.''
``The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epocha in
the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated
by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.
``It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn
acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp
and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and
illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this
time forward forevermore.
``You will think me transported with enthusiasm, but I am not. I am
well aware of the toil, and the blood, and treasure, that it will cost
us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States.
``Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light
and glory. I can see that the end is more than worth all the means, and
that posterity will triumph in that day's transaction, even although we
should rue it, which I trust in God we shall not.''
Again, that was July 3, 1776, the day after those men voted in
Independence Hall to separate from the crown.
They had not yet adopted the Declaration of Independence. That would
occur the following day on July 4, 1776.
Obviously, Mr. Adams thought July 2 would be the day that would be
celebrated. Of course, as it turns out, because the Declaration was
signed and dated July 4, that became the day on which we celebrate our
independence and all that flows from it.
[[Page H4406]]
It might seem trivial, and in some respects, it is, so long as we are
celebrating. In the midst of the parades and the fireworks and the hot
dogs and the fun of next week, we should remember why. We should
remember what Mr. Adams wrote to Abigail. We should remember what they
sacrificed.
Much is made in this town often of the palace intrigue of what one
Member says to another or who is endorsed by another. Much is made of
relationships and who has angst with whom.
Shall we not remember that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were
literally at each other's throats, fighting because they disagreed so
vehemently about the power of government, Federal versus State?
Shall we not forget the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander
Hamilton? Shall we not forget the massive disputes our country has
wrestled with?
I will just say this: Gladly. It is one of the great things about
this country that we, with passion, shall engage on behalf of the
people that we represent to come here and fight for them, to stand up
and do something that we said we would do when we came to this town to
change the trajectory, to preserve the Republic that these gentlemen
met and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to
defend. They meant that, and they knew what it meant.
I think it merits a debate here among our colleagues on both sides of
the aisle in both Chambers, in the executive branch, in the judiciary.
What is it that we are doing? What are we doing on behalf of the
people who sent us to this town? What animates us? Is it to get
reelected? Is it to raise money? Is it to chair a committee? Is it to
have a certain amount of power, or is it to fundamentally preserve and
protect this great experiment for our children and our grandchildren?
Is it to put all on the line?
Many great patriots in this Chamber wear the battle scars of lost
eyes and lost legs, both sides of the aisle, for fighting and standing
to defend this country and defend the flag that sits behind the
Speaker's chair.
What are we doing? What are we doing as elected Members of Congress?
I hear often now from people that I represent. I am tired of another
sternly worded letter, and I am tired of yet another hearing when they
see the country that they love being attacked, being attacked not by
necessarily by enemies abroad but by our own people and in many cases
our own leaders.
The people whom I represent who reach out to me, who pull me aside in
an airport or pull me aside at home or pull me aside in the supermarket
or at school when I drop my kids off, they don't come to me asking
about some endorsement or some conversation had among Members of the
floor.
They come to me, and they ask: Why am I not living free? What is
happening? What is wrong with our country?
{time} 1815
In this week in which we are going to celebrate freedom and celebrate
independence, 248 years removed from what I just described in the
letter from Mr. Adams to Mrs. Adams, are we free? It is a legitimate
question. Are we a free people?
Some people might superficially just say well, sure, of course, you
are free. You can walk out of the Chamber, Mr. Roy. You can walk out
and say what you want, do what you want. Superficially speaking,
compared to certain other places and times in history or other parts of
the world, you could argue that we are free.
But are we free? Can we say what we want? Can we speak freely without
the power of government being used against us? Can we pray at an
abortion clinic without being put in jail for 2 years if you are 75
years old, as the Department of Justice just did?
Can you speak your mind and say that you believe in the institution
of marriage without being threatened with losing your job or
potentially punished with hate speech? Can you?
Can you speak freely about a man and a woman, the definition thereof,
and that a man not be able to swim against a woman in a meet? You kind
of can, but can you?
Can you send your kids to a school where your kids can pray to the
God under which this Nation was founded? Can you, in that school, trust
that your children are going to be taught the values of Western
civilization and the founding principles that gave us this great
country that indeed, ultimately, led to the abolition of slavery and
freedom for people around the world?
Will you be taught about the bravery and courage of the men at
Lexington and Concord, in Independence Hall, or in all the battlefields
during the Civil War, World War I, or World War II and storming the
beaches? Will you be taught about that great history, or will your kids
be taught to apologize for being American?
Are you free if you are sending your kids to school with tax dollars
for your children to be indoctrinated and taught that your Nation is
not great or that your God does not exist? Are you free or are you
slave to a tyranny of government that tells you that you must pay taxes
to something that will save the secular world, itself its own religion,
that that is something you must subsidize and you must bow down to?
Are you free if your military is more focused, as many reports have
been showing, on advancing nonbinary, transgender, lesbian, gay issues
than on a military focused on defending the United States of America?
Are you free if we are continuing to advance our military into war or
fund wars abroad without actual declarations of war, with 20-something-
year-old Authorizations for Use of Military Force without ever having a
real, thorough, and full debate on the floor of the House? Are you free
if you are continually funding war to the detriment of your own
financial well-being and the death and destruction of many of your own
colleagues?
Are you free if your daughter can be registered to be drafted, as the
United States Senate just voted to require out of the Senate Armed
Services Committee and sent down to the floor, and many Republicans
voted for? Are you free if your daughter can be forced to register for
Selective Service and be drafted?
Are you free if you have $35 trillion of debt and have $1.1 trillion
of interest, if you are racking up $1 trillion of debt every 2 to 3
months? Are you free if the U.S. dollar is getting destroyed and you
can't afford the groceries, the necessities of life, and the car to go
take your family to their job or their school or to carry out your
business if you are a plumber or an electrician or any other job? Are
you free? Are you free if your leaders are spending your Nation into
oblivion and undermining your economic freedom and well-being?
Are you free if your borders are so wide open that your own people
are getting killed and murdered by those being let onto the streets out
of the jail cells and the criminals from other parts of the world? Are
you free? Do you think Laken Riley's parents feel free? Do you think
the little 12-year-old girl who was just raped in Iowa by two illegal
immigrants let into the United States and paroled by this
administration, do you think they feel free? Do you think that the
parents of the 13-year-old girl who was raped and murdered and the
families of the Maryland women, Rachel Morin and Kayla Hamilton, these
families who lost their loved ones, do you think they feel free?
Without security, how are you free?
Do you think all the parents who have lost their loved ones to
fentanyl poisoning, with fentanyl pouring into their communities, are
free? Are we truly free?
Are you free to comment about Presidential elections without being
targeted by the Department of Justice? Are you free to talk about
schools without being targeted by the Department of Justice? Are you
free to go forward and protest in favor of life without being targeted
by the Department of Justice, as Mark Houck had happen to him?
Are you free to speak freely about the abuses of transgender
surgeries in a hospital in Texas and Texas Children's Hospital and not
have the Department of Justice come in and prosecute you, as just
happened in Texas? Are you free?
Are you free if the Department of Justice wants to make you a
criminal because you sell a single gun to another person in Texas and
wants to create a national registry to be able to track those weapons?
Are you free?
Are you free if you can't go buy the automobile of your choice
because a bunch of people in Washington have
[[Page H4407]]
said, no, we have to regulate it, make it more expensive. We have to
mandate electric vehicles, which are piling up on lots, and you can't
afford the internal combustion engine that you used to be able to go
get. Now, you are wondering how you are even going to replace the car
you have that you need to get around to do your job and carry out your
life.
Are you free? I would suggest to you that, in supposedly the freest
and greatest country in the history of mankind, we are no longer free.
I would suggest to you that, as we are heading into this week to
celebrate the great birth of liberty that this country provided for the
world, that we have been stripped of that liberty and that we have been
trading it away, that we have been trading it away right here from the
floor upon which I stand, and that we have done so even this year.
These are the questions with which we should wrestle. These are the
great debates we should have.
I am exceptionally proud to be an American. I am exceptionally proud
to be in Congress. I believe that this country can and must be free
again, but a country that has no borders, a country that is $35
trillion in debt, a country whose government is weaponized against its
own people, a country that doesn't even know how to define ``man'' and
``woman'' or pay honor to the God upon which this Nation was founded is
not a free country.
If we are going to do anything in this body as Republicans or
Democrats, if we are going to do anything in this election cycle, if we
are going to do anything at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, it
should be to restore our fundamental, God-given rights and to reduce
the size, scope, and power of a government that is operating completely
in opposition to those liberties.
The people who struggle today in this country struggle primarily
because of the government that is operating against them, not because
the government is protecting or helping them. The people who struggle
in this country today, it is because of a burdensome, large, indebted
government that has lost sight of the reason it exists and the fact
that it is through the consent of the governed that it has its power.
The other thing that happened on July Fourth, somewhat miraculously,
was that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams passed away 50 years to
the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a document
in which both had significant hands in writing, Jefferson obviously
being the primary author.
On June 24, 1826, about 10 days before Jefferson died at his home in
Monticello, he wrote the following to the Mayor of Washington upon
having to decline the invitation to the 50th anniversary celebration
due to his health, which obviously failed him 10 days later. He wrote,
may our independence ``be to the world what I believe it will be (to
some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of
arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and
superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves and to assume the
blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have
substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason
and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights
of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid
open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not
been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and
spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These
are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of
this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights and an
undiminished devotion to them.''
As we go out as Representatives of the people in this great Republic
over the next week and go home to our districts, I hope we will
remember those words, but that ultimately doesn't mean much. I hope
that when we come back to this Chamber, we will remember those words.
I hope that as we form our plans for the coming years that we will
embrace with the seriousness and resolve of all those we celebrate and
to whom we give lip service of our great admiration for their sacrifice
and their courage, whether they have worn the uniform and stormed the
beaches at Normandy or they fought for our freedoms at our founding, or
whether they were these men in that room, or whether they are those who
came before us representing the people in this Chamber. It has to be
more than just simple words of recognition.
It can't be a fancy celebration at an 80th anniversary of D-Day. We
have to actually carry out those words of affection by being willing to
sacrifice our own well-being and good for the next generation because
that is what we have lost. We have lost the willingness to sacrifice at
all so that the next generation might live free to give up the comforts
of promises from a Federal Government, of continued checks, continued
welfare, to give up the trappings of, frankly, a heavily falsified
world of comfort in suburban America, propped up by profligate
government spending, waiting, waiting to teeter off the edge.
This is not about personalities in this Chamber. This is not about
someone being too caustic or mean to one of their colleagues. Grow up.
Wake up. Understand your duty. Understand that when you come here and
you swear an oath and you sit before that flag and you sit in this
Chamber and all the speeches that come before it, that we owe it to all
of those 400,000 at Arlington National Cemetery and the thousands of
cemeteries across this country in which those who gave or were willing
to give the last full measure of devotion, we owe it to them and those
who risked it all to risk it all ourselves.
What good is an election certificate that we are unwilling to use in
fullness?
{time} 1830
This next week, I will look forward to riding in a parade in central
Texas and celebrating with my 14-year-old, my 13-year-old, my wife, and
my friends and family, just like everybody else, and I will have a good
time doing it.
When we come back here on July 8, let us set out to do the hard work
that is actually required; not the pointing of fingers, not the
recriminations, but actually set out to do the things we said we would
do to cut the profligate spending; to secure the border of the United
States; to make our military the strongest military they can be,
sparingly used, giving them care when they get home, the tools to carry
out their jobs; giving you healthcare freedom, going to the doctor of
your choice; and giving you energy freedom, being able to get reliable
energy and the cars of your choice without dictates from the
bureaucrats in this town that are crushing the American Dream.
America is going to turn 250 years old in 2 years. As a birthday
present for America turning 250 years old, are we going to give our
kids and our grandkids their birthright or are we going to take it away
from them?
I hope it is the former.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________