[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 3]
[House]
[Page 3976]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1845
                         THE PRISON OF TYRANNY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Poe) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, ``These are the times that try men's 
souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this 
crisis, shrink from the service of their country. But he that stands by 
it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like 
hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, 
that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.''
  Thomas Paine spoke these words at another crossroads in this Nation's 
history, back when Americans were fighting the tyranny of King George 
and the British Empire. The question to be asked today is: Will we 
stand up to government tyranny as our Founding Fathers did over 200 
years ago?
  Government is taking over every aspect of our lives, and it's not 
just the big things, like the automobile industry, the banking 
industry, student loans, home mortgages. They're telling us what kind 
of cars we can drive, what kind of lightbulbs we can use, and they're 
even telling us how much water we can put in our toilets. We are living 
under the ever-growing oppression of government. The government has 
stolen our liberty one right at a time. They are building us into a 
prison of tyranny. Brick by brick, that wall of tyranny increases every 
day as the Federal Government intrudes into our personal liberty and 
takes over every single aspect of our lives.
  Have we forgotten about the unaccountable czars who work in the 
shadows? At last count, we have 45 czars that rule over us. Most of 
them have not been confirmed by the Senate, as required by the 
Constitution. We've got a behavioral science czar that's studying human 
behavior. The government wants to know how they can influence human 
conduct. It sounds a bit like the book ``1984'' to me. We have a 
bailout czar. We have a border czar, but nobody knows whether the 
border czar is to secure the border or open it up.
  We don't know what these czars do. We have a climate change czar and 
a communications diversity czar. We have a disinformation czar. It 
sounds like he should be called the ``government propaganda czar'' to 
me. We have two economic czars. We probably could use a few more of 
those. We have an energy czar, a food czar, a Great Lakes czar, and a 
Gitmo closure czar. We have a pay czar, and we have a religion or God 
czar. With our government, we don't know whether he's for or against 
God and religion.
  We have a safe school czar, a science czar who wrote a controversial 
book from promoting population control. Now isn't that lovely. What are 
all of these people doing? Why are they working in the shadows, 
controlling our liberty?
  Today as we debate health care, the government wants to take over 
America's health care system. We'll have a health care czar and a 
health choices czar because we're not smart enough, according to the 
government, to sit down with our own doctors and decide what's best for 
our own health care. So some bureaucrat here in D.C. has to decide for 
us. The health care takeover gives the Federal Government access to our 
bank accounts and our private medical records. The IRS will get 16,000 
new agents to snoop around in these records. Whatever happened to the 
right of privacy?
  This is not about health, and it's certainly not about care. This is 
about government control over every aspect of our lives without 
accountability and against the will of the people. In the long, 
lamentable catalog of human history, a person or a people yearning to 
be free have had to make tough choices. Will we stand at this hour for 
government tyranny or personal liberty?
  As Patrick Henry once so famously said: ``I know not what course 
others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.'' Now 
our choice today is the prison of tyranny or the frontier of freedom. 
Let us choose wisely or suffer the abominable chains of the oppression 
of tyranny.
  And that's just the way it is.

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