[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 196 (Thursday, November 20, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H4868-H4871]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CONGRESS IS BACK
(Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. Roy of
Texas was recognized for 30 minutes.)
Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to say to the American
people: Well, Congress is back.
Congress is back because we were finally able to do our job after 43
days of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, our Democrat
colleagues, parading around the country, acting like they were fighting
for you when, in fact, they were preventing us from being able to do
the work we were sent here to do.
They were fighting to make worse a broken healthcare system that they
have been holding you, the American people, hostage to, as they were
also holding our government funding hostage. They were fighting to
protect a broken healthcare system on behalf of insurance companies and
regulators and to fund healthcare for illegal aliens, transgender
surgeries, and abortions.
Republicans said enough. We fought back, and we held the line. We
funded the government through January with three appropriations bills
because that is what we told you we would do. The President and the
Speaker of the House deserve credit because we were able to deliver.
Throughout all the headlines that this place gets, House Republicans,
Senate Republicans, and the President have done a lot this year to
deliver tangible results and wins for the American people. Let's just
take a look at a few.
On day one of his return to office, President Trump addressed many of
the issues upon which he campaigned. He fought the powers of
globalists, defunding UNRWA, the dollars that were going to Hamas
against Israel and against our national security interests. He defunded
the United Nations Human Rights Council. He defunded the World Health
Organization.
Each one of these were things that I had introduced legislation on
and many of my Republican colleagues had introduced legislation on, but
our Democrat colleagues wouldn't allow us to move. The President came
in and executed on those important items to get us removed from these
world bureaucrats.
The President also signed a declaration declaring cartels as foreign
terrorist organizations--again, a bill I introduced 5 years ago that
the Democrats were blocking. The President was able to deliver. We
should codify it, but we have to beat Democrats to do that.
The FACE Act: The President stopped the abuses of the FACE Act
against pro-life Americans and people who have the Department of
Justice abusing them for carrying out their faith, and then he pardoned
the pro-life activists who had been targeted and given jail time for
praying and standing in defense of life. I introduced a bill to get rid
of this pernicious abuse of law. The President came in, and he
executed.
January 6: Alongside pro-life observers, Americans who were charged
and jailed, often unfairly targeted, were pardoned after the Federal
Government conducted a massive sweep to openly punish thousands of
Americans, including some of my constituents. Some of us had to go down
to the jail to force them to release people who the President pardoned.
Gender sanity: In return to normalcy, the administration removed the
Gender X designation on U.S. passports, a piece of legislation I was
proud to introduce that JD Vance carried in the Senate when he was
there.
Laken Riley Act: In March, the Laken Riley Act would ensure Federal
immigration officials detain illegal aliens that commit crimes and
would allow States to sue the Feds. I was proud to introduce, along
with my colleague from North Carolina, Dan Bishop, the SUE for
Immigration Enforcement Act, which was included in the Laken Riley Act.
It will allow us to sue the government in the future when they fail to
secure the border, a monumental change in allowing States to defend
themselves against the abuses that we saw under Biden and Mayorkas.
Speaking of the border, perhaps the most comprehensive and
consequential policy achievement under President Trump has been
securing our border. With the leadership of Tom Homan, Secretary Noem,
Stephen Miller, the President himself, Border Patrol, ICE, all of these
great law enforcement officials, despite the criticisms of leftists and
Marxist mayors and cities that refused to work with them, they have
brought down the flow across our border to basically zero, a 92 percent
reduction from the massive flow across our border that was endangering
Americans, endangering the people.
Energy independence: Trump signed an executive order ending American
dependence on unreliable energy sources and slashed $3 billion in bogus
abuse of emergency spending that wasn't even being used for
emergencies.
ICE officials were given access to data for the Nation's 79 million
Medicaid enrollees to be able to look at it and go find illegal aliens
that were using Medicaid.
The Interior Department announced today that all agency decisions
related to wind and solar energy must undergo strict reviews.
The Treasury Department announced today that they are taking action
to ensure no tax benefits will go to illegal aliens.
This year, we advanced a responsible budget, along with President
Trump, to reflect our well-established goal to return to pre-COVID
spending.
Let's look at more. This Congress, working with the President, has
held spending flat for the last 2 years, and now it is flat through
January. If we honor our commitments, it will be flat through next
September. By holding government spending flat and growing our economy,
we are reducing the size and scope of bureaucracy. We are reducing debt
as a percentage of our GDP and honoring the commitment that we gave to
reduce inflation and to take our country back from the grasp of debt.
[[Page H4869]]
We avoided a massive omnibus spending bill twice, the scourge of this
town, where you have these huge omnibus bills in December, at the end
of the year. We have now stopped that twice with a mix of
appropriations work and continuing resolutions.
We achieved major rescissions in wasteful spending. We cut IRS
funding. We gutted the Commerce slush fund. We boosted immigration
enforcement and deportation operations. We set the stage for additional
rescissions and pocket rescissions that the OMB Director, Russ Vought,
has been able to carry out, as well as impoundments.
We delivered on cutting the Federal spending that went to the badly
broken PBS and NPR. I would point out, for those who want to apologize,
NPR didn't utter a word. In my district, in Kerrville, Texas, on the
morning when the floods were underway, they were running ads trying to
fight for their own funding, but the private radio stations were going
out and putting out emergency alerts to help people. The President
rightfully reduced their funding. If they want to survive, they can go
compete, but they don't need taxpayer dollars for, effectively, leftist
propaganda.
We were able to pass the big, beautiful bill, which is a monumental
achievement in which we reduced taxes for the American people, ensured
taxes wouldn't go up. We were able to secure over $1.5 trillion in
deficit reduction, five times the original projection of $300 billion.
We were able to end over half of the green new scam subsidies that
were enriching the Chinese and enriching massive leftist corporations
at the expense of the ability of the American people to have reliable
grids and affordable energy.
{time} 2040
We were able to advance welfare and Medicaid reforms, SNAP work
requirements, commonsense work requirements for Medicaid.
We phased down the Medicaid provider tax threshold to save money and
save hundreds of billions of dollars, cracking down on States' provider
tax money-laundering schemes--which were going to illegal aliens--we
saved money, made the system better and going to American citizens.
We were able to protect life by defunding Planned Parenthood and
Medicaid.
We were able to protect the Second Amendment by ending taxation for
suppressors and short-barreled rifles.
We were able to ensure full funding for border security, when we knew
Democrats were going to shut down the government, with $150 billion set
aside for continued operations for border security, as well as $150
billion for our defense, knowing that they would risk defense and
border so they could try to shut down the government for political
gain. We did that. We did that with the President.
We were able to ensure that our men and women in uniform didn't miss
a paycheck in October, because we did that. We were able to ensure that
we are continuing to revamp and restore our Defense Department, our War
Department now, to a fighting machine rather than a woke indoctrination
machine. Now we have enlistments at record numbers, we have people
wanting to go to the military academies, proud to be in the military
again, and people around the world are respecting our military again.
Now let's talk about this November continuing resolution: Democrats
orchestrated the longest shutdown in history. They did so because they
have nothing to run on, because they have nothing to sell to the
American people except for hatred of President Trump and wanting to
play games with your healthcare.
Because they broke the healthcare system, you now can't afford either
health insurance or healthcare. You can't go to the doctor of your
choice. If you do get any insurance, you are told that you only have a
handful of doctors and that you have a massive copay or some other kind
of limitation on your ability to choose a doctor. For example, in my
case, as a cancer survivor, on ObamaCare, I can't go back to M.D.
Anderson, which saved my life, because ObamaCare doesn't have M.D.
Anderson as an option.
That is not coverage. That is fake. Democrats sold you fake coverage,
and now your premiums have doubled, your copays and your deductibles
have doubled or tripled, and you have fewer options for less quality
care.
However, we were able to defeat the Democrat-led effort to spend
another trillion and a half dollars to fund healthcare for illegals,
abortions, and transgender surgeries.
We kept the reduction in workforce cuts that were made prior to the
shutdown in order to hold and save money back for you, the American
people, rather than bureaucrats who are at war with you.
We affirmed the President's goal of reducing the size of the bloated
Federal Government, which 90 percent of Americans share.
We crafted a responsible, short-term continuing resolution through
January, and now we are going to do the work to continue our job of
holding spending flat.
We have done a lot. We have delivered on a large number of the
promises upon which the President campaigned, on tax policy, on border
security, on reductions in spending, on trying to drive down inflation,
on getting interest rates under control, and we are just getting
started. That is the truth. The American people are going to be the
beneficiaries of that.
However, my message to my colleagues in this Chamber, and generally,
is: We have miles to go. We have so much more to do. We have to
continue to undo the damage of the last 12 of the last 16 years under
Democrat control of the executive branch and policies that have been
destroying the average, hardworking American family. We have had 10
months. We are going to continue to fight and to make those changes,
but it takes a little time to unwind those damaging 12 years.
For example, healthcare, which is almost 30 percent of our budget.
Healthcare is destroying the average American family. I know businesses
in Austin, I know schools in Austin that are having to increase prices
and increase tuition and increase what they have to deal with simply
because of covering insurance premiums, which are going into the
pockets of insurance companies to provide you substandard options in
healthcare.
They don't provide you care. They don't. They are a middleman, a
funding mechanism that gets in the way of you going to the doctor of
your choice.
Republicans have plans to fix that. We have put forward those plans
to fix that. Democrats block it at every turn. The simple truth is we
believe in patients going to doctors. We believe in being able to share
costs across Medi-Share, health-sharing ministries, other options,
direct primary care, and getting bureaucrats out of your way.
We believe in ensuring that you will, in fact, have coverage that you
can actually afford. We do that through the expansive ability for you
to have the same tax treatment as corporations and the same tax
treatment whether you are self-employed or employed by a business.
We can do that tomorrow, literally. We can transform the healthcare
system in a day if we would put the legislation on the floor and
Democrats would get out of the way. That is the simple truth.
The American people deserve, in a supposedly free country, to be able
to go and get insurance products that work for them, doctors that are
best for them, care that is best for them, and to be able to provide
and take care of their families. Democrats would rather you be beholden
to insurance companies, government bureaucrats, and their political
priorities.
They want to scare you into believing they have got plans. They tried
to do it with a shutdown. We called their bluff, and now we need to
deliver healthcare freedom for the American people. We have the
legislation to do it, and we have got to deliver.
We need to make sure that we address the price of housing. We
shouldn't have corporate and foreign ownership of our housing supply.
It is that simple. I don't know why foreign nationals and major
corporations, BlackRock or otherwise, are buying up single-family
residences. We should stop that. We should, frankly, give tax
advantages to get rid of the ownership of those from corporations and
foreign nationals to get them to American citizens so they can own
those houses and own their ability to have a future for their kids and
grandkids.
[[Page H4870]]
There are other things we can do, but we have got to drive down the
price of housing, and we can do it if American citizens are the ones
who are able to get access. You can get it also if you don't flood the
country with literally tens of millions of people that are illegally
here or through an abused legal immigration system.
Congressional stock trading: I have got to be honest, my colleagues
on both sides of the aisle, stop it. When you are serving out in the
private sector, God bless you, do what you want to do, but when you
come here and you want to serve, why don't you just pause and let's
take our investments and put them in broadly held mutual funds, do our
work for 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 years, and then go home.
If you want to day trade, get off the House floor because too many of
my colleagues are day trading while we are voting on important issues.
We could pass that tomorrow; we have just got to have the willpower to
do it. The American people want us to. It is like an 85/15 issue.
Education: Give it back to the States, get out of the way, empower
States and parents. Expand choice, expand those options, but don't fund
bureaucrats. The President is right to dismantle the Department of
Education. It was started in 1979. We put a man on the Moon in 1969.
Why do we need the Department of Education? We don't.
Importantly, we need to codify what the President is doing on our
border and go even further. We passed H.R. 2 in the last Congress, the
most comprehensive border security plan we have ever had. It wasn't
about future flow. It wasn't about amnesty. It was about securing the
border. It was about fixing the broken asylum, the broken parole, the
broken catch and release, all of the things that Biden and Mayorkas
were using to abuse our system to flood our country with foreign
nationals.
President Trump is delivering that through execution as President. We
need to codify that and prevent a future administration from abusing it
ever again. We could do that. We could do it tomorrow. We passed H.R. 2
in the last Congress. Let's pass it again. Let's send it to the Senate,
and let's fix our broken immigration system.
I introduced legislation today to say that we should pause legal
immigration except for very short-term tourist visas. Yes, pause it
all. We have 51 million people in this country who are foreign born. We
have massive abuses with diversity visas and chain migration in which
tens of thousands of people come into our country.
We have serious abuses under H-1Bs, which are not really being used
for high-skilled workers. They are often for entry-level positions. We
are leaving American workers behind, and we need to reform it.
We need to reduce the magnets that are here. We need to end
birthright citizenship as it is currently known and make it what the
American people actually expect if you talk to them: that you are a
citizen if you are born of an American citizen. You are not a citizen
just because somebody walked across the Rio Grande. We have got to stop
the Supreme Court's forcing of States from having to fund the education
of illegal aliens, which brings me to my final point about legal
immigration.
{time} 2050
Mr. Speaker, we have got to stop allowing people who are adherent to
sharia law from coming into the United States and then trying to force
sharia law into our system. It is in direct conflict with Western
civilization. It is in direct conflict with the Constitution and the
rule of law.
If we want to see what America is going to look like across this
country if we don't address it, look at Dearborn. Look at Minnesota.
Look at Mamdani's election in New York. Look at London. Look at Paris.
Look at Germany. Ask if that is what we want in Dallas or Houston. Ask
if we want this in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ask if we want this in
Atlanta, Denver, Phoenix, or anywhere else.
It is happening, and it is happening in Texas. I will fight it in
Texas. I will fight it here. I have introduced legislation to deal with
it, but this body has got to deal with it and speak up about it. That
starts with ending the importation of people who want to undo our
system. They openly say it. If they are adherent to sharia law, then
they have no business being here. That is just the simple truth.
We have a country to save. We have the greatest country in the
history of the world. We are making massive progress with a President
who is bold and willing to lead. We need Congress to continue what we
did with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and continue what we did with
the Laken Riley Act. We need them to continue to do what Speaker
Johnson did a great job of which is hold the line against Democrats who
shut our government down for political purposes.
Now we need to drive forward and force Democrats in the Senate to
deal with great legislation, to codify our border, make sure people can
afford healthcare, make sure people can afford housing, and do the
things we said we would do.
Mr. Speaker, I will close with this since today is Thursday and a
week from today is Thanksgiving. I know that most of the people that I
represent are deeply thankful to be Americans and to be Texans. Every
Thanksgiving, The Wall Street Journal runs an editorial called, ``The
Desolate Wilderness.'' To the best of my knowledge, I think it has run
every year since 1960 or 1961. It goes like this:
``Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of
the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records
of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime
governor thereof:
``So they left that goodly and pleasant city of Leyden, which had
been their resting-place for above 11 years, but they knew they were
pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things,
but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest country where God
hath prepared for them a city and therein quieted their spirits.
``When they came to Delfs-Haven they found the ship and all things
ready, and such of their friends as could not come with them followed
after them, and sundry came from Amsterdam to see them shipt, and to
take their leaves of them. One night was spent with little sleep with
the most, but with friendly entertainment and Christian discourse, and
other real expressions of true Christian love.
``The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where
truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear
what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did
gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other's heart,
that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators
could not refrain from tears. But the tide, which stays for no man,
calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend
Pastor falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery
cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and
His blessings; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took
their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many
of them.
``Being now passed the vast ocean and a sea of troubles before them
in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to
entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair
unto to seek for succor; and for the seasons it was winter, and they
that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent,
subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known
places, much more to search unknown coasts.
``Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness,
full of wild beasts and wild men? And what multitudes of them there
were, they then knew not: For which way soever they turned their eyes
(save upward to heaven) they could have but little solace or content in
respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand
in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of
woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.
If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had
passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all
the civil parts of the world.''
Mr. Speaker, this editorial appeared since 1961. That is what they
did. They
[[Page H4871]]
came here. Then they went into the desolate wilderness and carved into
it a great country, a country that has seen its fortunes rise because
of our collective recognition of our faith in the Almighty and our
willingness to acknowledge it, such that the Speaker stands below the
phrase ``In God We Trust'' here in this Chamber.
If we dare to leave the faith that built this country, then this
country will lose the blessings that have been bestowed upon it. We are
ever thankful to live in a country where we are free to believe what we
want, where we can think what we want, and where we can say what we
want for the most part.
Mr. Speaker, when it comes to setting up a country and a system of
laws, they must bind us together. They must bind us together as a
community, the kind of community that could pull people from the four
corners of a country to sit in foxholes together, to fight the most
evil forces in World War II and beyond, without question, without fail,
because we were bound together as Americans.
That is who we are. We must fight for it every day. We must fight to
keep her. We do that here by stopping the ridiculousness and spending
money we don't have to indebt our children and grandchildren.
We do it here if we pass policies that will allow the American people
to prosper under their own devices, to be able to afford healthcare and
houses and food for their families, without interference from people
here who say they know best in the false name of compassion.
We do it here when we secure our communities with secure borders and
security laws and to make sure criminals don't roam free on the streets
but that law-abiding citizens can prosper by walking freely on the
streets, knowing they will be safe.
We do it mostly if we adhere to our faith in the Lord Almighty,
acknowledge that faith, and fight to defend our collective belief in
him. We have people who wish to undermine that way of life. It is real.
We cannot win a war that we refuse to acknowledge exists. That war is
here. We either fight right now to save this country for our kids and
our grandkids or we lose it forever.
This Thanksgiving, I will be ever thankful to be an American, to be a
Texan, and to live free. I am evermore committed to double down to save
this country for our kids and grandkids. It is the responsible action
here on this House floor and as a responsible member of my community
back home in Texas and in every step that I try to take.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________