[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.

                          ____________________