Preserving Choice in Vehicle Purchases Act

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 680 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Ms. Leger Fernandez), my very good friend, pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks on House Resolution 680.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, last week the Rules Committee met and reported out a

rule, House Resolution 680, consideration of H.R. 4365, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2024, under a structured rule.

It provides 1 hour of general debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking member of the Committee on Appropriations or their designees. It also makes in order 184 amendments; more than 75 percent of those eligible for consideration. Finally, it provides for a motion to recommit.

I rise today in support of the rule and the underlying legislation.

Mr. Speaker, our democracy remains a beacon of hope to the entire world. Billions of people across the globe look to the United States as a leader in freedom and liberty and as a protector of peace. From the very moment our Nation was conceived, a strong national defense has been a differentiator of democracy. Essential to protecting the homeland, international order, and the American people from those who would seek to do us harm, we must never lose sight of the need to maintain a strong defense.

Although our men and women in uniform give of themselves every day, they cannot do their jobs unless Congress does its job. Only Congress can provide the funding our military needs to fulfill its duties. That is our responsibility. Today we move forward with that commitment as we take up H.R. 4365, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2024. We must do our duty and make sure that our brave military members can move forward with theirs.

With evolving threats, we continue to face a struggle seen throughout time. The contest between freedom and tyranny is not far from us. From Vladimir Putin's unjust and illegal invasion of Ukraine, to China's posturing in the South China Sea, to continued threats posed by extremists and terrorists, hostile actors are looking for weakness. Yet, America's Armed Forces remain ready to meet any challenge wherever it may arise. Continuing to meet those threats requires an appropriate investment of national resources. With today's measure, we fulfill that commitment and ensure that our Armed Forces will have the resources they need to meet any foe anywhere in the world at any time.

The bill before us provides full funding for the national defense. It appropriates $826 billion in new discretionary spending, which is a modest increase of $300 million over the President's budget request and nearly $29 billion, or 3.6 percent, over the fiscal year 2023 enacted level.

H.R. 4365 makes targeted investments that support critical priorities. Perhaps the most important of these priorities is to reinvest in our servicemen and -women. The bill provides a 5.2 percent pay raise for our servicemembers. For junior enlisted servicemembers, we provide an historic pay increase of an average of 30 percent, ensuring that we not only offset the effects of President Biden's inflationary crisis for these younger and most junior servicemembers, but also ensuring that we can retain servicemembers who are at the beginning of their military careers.

I would be remiss, Mr. Speaker, not to give credit to the gentleman from California (Mr. Mike Garcia), my good friend and fellow defense appropriator, for this particular measure, both in the appropriations bill and, frankly, in the NDAA, as well. His work on behalf of younger servicepeople has been exemplary, relentless, and effective.

The bill also makes continued and necessary investments to ensure that we will continue to have the best equipped and best-trained fighting force now and into the future. We fund continued expansion of the Navy, making sure that we will be able to continue to protect freedom of the seas around the globe and fund development and acquisition of next-generation weapons systems.

However, it doesn't stop there, Mr. Speaker. H.R. 4365 also ensures that the Biden administration cannot continue to put politics ahead of national security. It preserves existing and longstanding bipartisan bans on taxpayer funding for abortions. It also ensures that Federal dollars cannot be used to indoctrinate our troops with progressive ideology like critical race theory training, and instead ensures that the Pentagon's focus is where it should be: on military readiness and preparedness so that our warfighters can defeat aggression and defend freedom anywhere in the world.

All in all, there is much to like in today's bill, Mr. Speaker. I look forward to advancing this measure through a robust amendment process on the floor and onward to final passage. I urge Members to support both the rule and the underlying legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I begin by returning my deep respect, my deep regards, to my good friend from New Mexico. It has been a delight to have her on the Rules Committee, and we have found a lot of common ground working on Native American issues, where, frankly, she is an acknowledged national expert. I look forward to a long and good relationship with my friend.

When it comes to this rule and bill, obviously, we have disagreements. Let me talk first about the point my friend makes about timing and how many bills have gotten done and where we are in the process. There is actually a great deal that I agree with her on.

Sadly, we ought to also remember the Democratic Congress of last year didn't finish the appropriations process until December. If you looked at it the year before, it didn't finish until March the next year, after the end of the fiscal year. Being late around here is not new for either party, but our friends set the standard last time, I think. We will see how we end up.

My friend made a comment that we had only done one bill. I will say that is one more than the Democratic United States Senators managed to do.

The reality is the Senate didn't produce, under Democratic control, any bills for the last 2 years--none out of subcommittee, none out of full committee, none across the floor.

We are dealing with a very difficult body on the other side of the rotunda. These timing issues, hopefully, we can all get better at this and work together. I actually think we have something this year in the debt ceiling agreement that will be helpful in that regard.

The reality is if we don't get our work done by January 1, which is about the time Democrats got their work done last year, we will have a yearlong CR with a 1 percent across-the-board cut.

I don't know any appropriator on either side of the aisle who wants to see that happen. I don't think most people who care deeply about the defense of the United States do. We have some forcing mechanisms in place. Hopefully, we will continue to make some better progress there.

In terms of my friend's point about divisive social policy, I will point out where this started. It is the executive branch that made decisions to do things much differently than we have done before, and usually with no consultation with the Congress of the United States.

Most of the things my friend disagrees with we consider corrective of executive overreach, including violation of the Hyde amendment, which is essentially, in my view, what the Department of Defense has decided on its own to do without discussion or consultation with the Congress of the United States. That is unfortunate. That is something, hopefully, we can work through and resolve in the months ahead.

I will also say that we are just very different in terms of where we think the focus ought to be. This bill focuses on weapons acquisition, training, and readiness. We live in a very dangerous world. We think there is a big difference, for instance, between climate resilience and actively pushing climate change legislation, which we believe the original administration budget does.

We want to refocus on the things that we think matter. We are not going to beat our adversaries if, God forbid, we find ourselves in a contest with any of them and our forces aren't well trained, aren't well armed, and aren't well prepared for the challenges they are going to face. That should be the main focus of the Department of Defense. We think the administration has lost its focus. We see this bill as a useful corrective.

Finally, I point out to my friends on both sides of the aisle that, quite frankly, whatever we pass, we are going to sit down and negotiate with the United States Senate and with the President of the United States. As my friends know, the Democrats control the United States Senate, and we have a Democrat as the President of the United States. Wherever we end up, it is going to be a process of give-and-take and discussion, but it is important that the House have an opening position.

The last point to make on this is if we get this bill across the floor--and I do say ``if'' because there is some controversy about whether or not we will make it, even on our own side. Even though nobody disagrees with the rule or disagrees with the bill, they have other points sometimes they want to make. Sadly, it shouldn't be with this bill. However, my friends never got the Defense bill across the floor by themselves when they were in the majority. There were too many divisions and splits within their Caucus to even bring it to the floor.

If we manage to get this bill across the floor, we will actually, in that single action, have moved across the floor a larger percentage of the discretionary budget of the United States than my friends were ever able to do when they were in the majority.

It is a complex bill, over half of the discretionary spending of the United States. There are lots of barriers and flash points where we disagree, but it is important that we continue the dialogue and the motion forward.

I think we have the opportunity, in passing the rule and the underlying legislation, to do that today, and I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to vote accordingly.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I both agree and disagree with my friend from New Mexico about shutting down the government. I personally could not agree more with her. I think it is a dumb thing to do. I think it is a dangerous thing to do.

I have never favored shutting down the government, and I have argued against it. The tactic doesn't work. I think it won't work this time. The American people expect us to keep the essential services of government going while we negotiate and get to a final solution.

I will correct my friend on one thing. The Democrats have shut down the government. Frankly, they shut it down over DACA in 2017.

Now, I always hand the Democrats this: When they shut it down or do something stupid, they are pretty quick to realize it, and they back off. I think they shut it down on a Friday and reopened it on a Monday, but they did indeed shut it down.

It is simply an inappropriate tool in the toolbox, in my opinion. I have seen both sides use it. My side, sadly, has used it more. I hope we don't do it this time.

Certainly, the great majority of our Members and the Speaker do not want to see a shutdown, and I think they have made that apparent over and over again.

I hadn't particularly intended to comment on the ranking member's amendment because I know how passionately my good friend feels about this. I respect those feelings. Honestly, I respect the feelings of all those who hold that view.

I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with President Biden when my good friend, the ranking member, is disagreeing with him. It shows it is not really a partisan issue. I think it is an issue of judgment.

I have no doubt the President of the United States agonized before making this decision. It was clearly a decision he did not want to make, but I think he was compelled by two factors that probably decided the case for him, although I don't presume to speak for the President.

Number one, we ought to always remember the enemies of Ukraine, Russia, introduced these weapons on the other side first and was using those weapons indiscriminately.

Second, Ukraine is using these weapons in defense of its own territory and its own people in its own territory. That is not what the Russians are doing. They are aggressively, on the other side, using these in another country.

Finally, again, just to be fair about the President's dilemma, we have used an extraordinary amount of ammunition trying to support Ukraine. I think we have some strains on our own stockpiles, and I suspect that was part of the decisionmaking. When you are in a war, you are in it to win it.

Frankly, it was not the Ukrainians or the Americans that introduced this first. It was not the Ukrainians or the Americans or the European allies, who were there in vast numbers, that started this conflict. It is to the advantage of all that it ends as quickly as it can. The level of casualties on both sides is horrific, but the person who bears responsibility is Vladimir Putin. Frankly, the country that is the aggressor is Russia, and I am not going to begrudge the Ukrainians for getting what they need.

As critical as I can sometimes be of President Biden, I will certainly not criticize him in this case because I think, in this case, he reluctantly made a tough decision, a decision he probably didn't want to make, but I think he made it for the right reasons. Therefore, I won't be supporting my friend's amendment later on today.

Although, again, I am glad we were able to make it in order. I think it is an important issue for us to discuss, and I look forward to a very vigorous debate on that later this afternoon.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Again, there are some areas where I agree with my good friends and some areas where I disagree. Nobody disagrees on the importance of the fentanyl crisis and the importance of dealing in any way we can through whatever means we have with those who engage in trafficking that illegal drug that has killed tens of thousands of Americans.

Quite frankly, I suspect later this week or next week we will give our friends the opportunity to work with us on homeland security measures that will deal with just that.

I would point to, frankly, the abject failure of the Biden administration to defend the southern border. The green light that has been put out there is a huge cost for this massive influx of drugs into our own country.

We passed H.R. 2 on this floor, Mr. Speaker, to try and deal with that, and we are going to provide our friends with some opportunities where maybe we can find some common ground. You can be pro-immigration and pro-border security at the same time. I think this administration has had a hard time doing that, and quite frankly, most of the policies that it reversed--whether it was building the wall or remain in Mexico--from the last administration were effective. You can tell by the record numbers of illegal entries we have, the record amount of trafficking we have in drugs, and sadly, in human beings across the border to know that the Biden border policy, which my friends have supported, has been a disaster. It is one that, again, we hope they not only recognize that disaster, but will work with us to correct some of those measures.

Again, I am going to agree with my friend from New Mexico. I don't believe in shutting down the government. I know we occasionally have some people who believe that, although it is a very small number, it can be a very influential number in a House that is very narrowly divided.

We are going to provide some opportunities both to our own Members and to our colleagues on the other side to avoid that and to negotiate in good faith, but again, I just reiterate a point where I know my friend and I agree: It is not an appropriate tool. It does not work. I would hope that we can avoid that.

We also need to sit down and work together where we can, and there are a lot of areas in this bill that we can work on.

The last point I will make--my friends talk about the conflicts that we have in the Defense bill--remember, we had a conflict in the last Congress when my friends in the House tried to unilaterally overturn the Hyde language, a bipartisan agreement that goes all the way back to 1975 or 1976, as I recall, Mr. Speaker, and when that was struck, there were less than 150 Republicans in the House, so it was genuinely bipartisan. It wasn't just something we crammed down.

My friends have changed their mind over the issue of using Federal dollars for abortion over the years. We have not changed our position, and we were able to beat that back even when we were in the minority because, at the end of the day, they couldn't pass the bills without Republican support.

I think the administration has tried to go around Congress in this case and use Federal dollars without congressional consent to facilitate abortion, other than in cases where we are talking about rape, incest, or the life of the mother. We have no debate over the appropriate use of Federal dollars in those cases. We do in others. It doesn't mean people can't travel; we just shouldn't be using Federal dollars in this area. That is a longstanding principle that I would argue the Biden administration is trying to subvert.

By the way, it is a principle that President Biden, until 2019 when he was running for President, accepted throughout his entire career. He was a champion of that until 2019 when his own party moved so far left he had to change his longstanding position in pursuit of the nomination.

Again, this is politics, people are allowed to do what they want, but please don't chastise us for being consistent with a position we assumed in 1975 and have not changed. It is our friends who have changed their mind on this issue, and frankly, it is the administration that tried to subvert the will and the authority of Congress by moving around it.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Nobody is arguing against diversity in the military. The American military has actually usually been the leader in this area, whether it was desegregation or certainly addressing the inequities between men and women, and we haven't gotten it right, but I think broadly it has worked in the right direction and quite often ahead of the rest of society.

The real problem here is we want to focus on training and weapons, not on culture wars. We think the administration has gone around Congress in some cases--the Hyde amendment being one of them. My friends have their lawyers, we have our lawyers. I guess they will go to court and sort that out.

There wasn't any consultation with the Congress, any discussion on this. That was a decision made unilaterally by the administration. I think Congress has every right to be consulted. They don't have money by their own right in the executive branch. They have what we give them for the purposes that are specified by the Congress of the United States. They don't get to just make it up on their own.

I know there was at least some discussion back and forth where people warned: Don't open this door without a discussion and without a green light from Congress. That didn't occur, and so we are in this discussion.

Now, over the course of reaching a bill, I suspect we will find some sort of solution or work it through one way or the other. I hope we do, because I don't think anything is more important, in what I think is a very dangerous world, than equipping, training, and preparing the men and women who protect us all.

On that, we have a lot more common ground than division. Again, I think this was a choice by the administration. It provoked a response by Congress. We will try to work it through

by normal legislative means and see where we end up.

Mr. Speaker, I will reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I have great affection and respect for my friend, the ranking member and formerly the chairman of the full Rules Committee.

I will start where I began this debate. Remember, my friends, Democrats didn't finish the appropriations process on their side until December of last year, and Democrats controlled all three parts of government. They had the Senate, the House, and the Presidency, and they didn't get done until December. The year before that, they didn't get done until March of the year after.

I wish the process went easier and smoother as well, but I don't think it goes much differently, regardless of who happens to be in control. I do think that we are trying to make some progress here.

Now, my friends are worried about what is cut. They ought to be worried about what was spent. We are running a $1.7 trillion deficit. That deficit is bigger than the entire discretionary budget of the United States of America. It is not just bigger than the defense budget; it is bigger than everything.

It got a lot worse when my friends controlled the executive branch and both houses of Congress. You did over $3 trillion worth of spending outside the normal appropriations process; $1.9 trillion for an unneeded American Rescue Plan when we were coming out of COVID, roughly $700 billion from the much-misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which even the President now says was misnamed because it really had to do more with climate change. That was money we didn't have, money that fueled inflation that made life worse for every single American.

I don't even get to the knockoffs, like transportation bills that don't pay for themselves. I had voted for every other major transportation agreement in my time here, two of them under President Obama, but they paid for themselves either through gasoline taxes or ticket fees, what have you. Now, we have got a trillion dollars here, but it is not enough. We will just throw another several hundred billion dollars on in debt. We are paying for that now.

I am not going to be critical of my party for trying to push down some of the spending; $1.7 trillion this year. You guys can't find anywhere to cut.

Now you want to talk about defense? I am happy to talk about defense. My dad was a career noncommissioned officer at the height of the Cold War. You know what we spent on defense then? Fifty percent of the Federal budget, 9 percent of the GDP. You know what we spent during the great Reagan buildup? Six percent of the GDP, about a third of the Federal budget. You know what we spend today? About 3 percent of the GDP and about 15 percent of the budget.

Believe me, there has been an explosion of domestic spending over the decades, largely driven by my friends, and it is unsustainable. We cannot stay on the path we are on.

We can argue about this or that. I have a bill I would invite my friend to look at, try and go back and do with Social Security what we did in 1983 on a bipartisan basis. We need to start getting the spending under control. The spending that is driving us out of balance is largely not in the Pentagon. It is largely in entitlement spending, which I would be the first to say that both sides have been reluctant to deal with. Neither of the last two Presidents have been willing. This President actually voted for a Social Security commission that reformed and stabilized it when he was a Senator. Now,

the White House rules these things out. No, we can't talk about it, can't do it. By the way, his predecessor was exactly the same, so Republican and Democrat alike.

I would love to be more restrained in the spending, and I think that is what my colleagues are trying to do, even when I don't always agree with the tactics they use. They are motivated in the right direction, which is to deal with a $1.7 trillion deficit.

We are trying to make some appropriate decisions. Again, we work in the legislative process. I remind my friends, they control two-thirds of it. By the way, the Defense bill last year, which was passed almost exclusively with Democratic votes, the omni, to be fair, actually had a larger increase in the defense budget than my friends pushed, $45 billion--I actually agree with that, by the way--than this year, where we are basically at the President's number.

We can all play this game with numbers and what have you. Let's try to work toward a deal. I think we can get there, but I don't have any illusions it will be easy along the way. I certainly have seen both sides make missteps, in my view, in handling these situations over the years. I hope we don't do that again.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time to close.

I urge all my colleagues to support the resolution.

Today's rule will make in order the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for fiscal year 2024. It will provide full and complete funding for our national defense needs, ensuring that our servicemembers are fairly paid, and supporting the well-being of military families.

It also makes certain that our troops will never face a fair fight by giving them every advantage possible. We make appropriate investments in the development and acquisition of weapons systems needed to preserve and defend freedom around the globe and restrict the Biden administration from forcing progressive ideology on the Armed Forces and circumventing the authority of Congress when it does so.

Bottom line, the bill targets resources to its new core mission, protecting our homeland and security interests and making sure that our forces are the best trained, the best equipped, and the best prepared in the world.

To my friends, it has been an interesting debate, as always. I enjoy exchanging observations with my good friend from New Mexico, and we strayed sometimes off this bill and off this rule.

I do want to mention a couple of things. The rule, I think even my friends would agree, is a pretty robust rule. We are going to have 184 amendments, a very thorough debate, so I look forward to that.

Second, it is lost sometimes, but we actually basically fund the military at the level that the President requested, so those people who think it is over the top probably should have their argument with the White House as opposed to us. Personally, I would have liked to have done more, but we are going to go with the President's number, essentially.

Finally, we do disagree about the manner in which the administration is using the military. We think they are advancing progressive ideology when they ought to be focused on weapons acquisition, training, and warfighting, and we think that ultimately weakens the country.

We live in a very dangerous world right now. I would actually argue we are not spending enough on defense when we look at what is happening in the Western Pacific with China; when we look at what the Russians are doing, the acts they are engaged in, in Ukraine. I want a robust budget, and I want one that we come together on.

In the end, I think we will be able to achieve that, and I look forward to working with my friends to accomplish that objective.

The material previously referred to by Ms. Leger Fernandez is as follows:

An Amendment to H. Res. 680 Offered by Ms. Leger Fernandez of New

Mexico

At the end of the resolution, add the following:

Sec. 7. Immediately upon adoption of this resolution, the

House shall proceed to the consideration in the House of the

resolution (H. Res. 178) affirming the House of

Representatives' commitment to protect and strengthen Social

Security and Medicare. The resolution shall be considered as

read. The previous question shall be considered as ordered on

the resolution and preamble to adoption without intervening

motion or demand for division of the question except one hour

of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and

ranking minority member of the Committee on Ways and Means or

their respective designees.

Sec. 8. Clause 1 (c) of rule XIX sha11 not apply to the

consideration of H. Res. 178.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order.

Mr. Speaker, barring declarations of war, impeachment is the most awesome power that Congress has. It shouldn't be a threat. It shouldn't be a political exercise. It is certainly not a pledge to be made on the campaign trail.

This is the most serious business that we can engage in. No one should want to impeach a President or take any pleasure in that. However, after months of blocked investigations by agencies in this administration, it became clear that an impeachment inquiry was the only course of action to complete our necessary and important investigations.

Let me explain why because there has been some confusion and some controversy about this.

Mr. Speaker, there are three irrefutable facts that have taken us to this point.

One, President Biden lied directly to the American people.

Two, President Biden's family and their associates profited millions through shell companies.

Three, President Biden's Federal agencies are stonewalling our legitimate congressional inquiry.

That is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many scandals. There is so much corruption that is being uncovered. Every stone that we overturn leads to more and more corruption.

Because of that, Mr. Speaker, a lot of the American people are simply getting lost in the barrage of evidence, in the barrage of allegations of corruption, and the evidence itself.

Let me go through just a couple of highlights here to bring everybody's attention to this to help explain why we are doing what we are doing.

In August 2019, President Biden said: ``I have never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything having to do with their businesses, period.''

Two months later, he said: ``I never discussed a single thing with my son about anything having to do with Ukraine. No one has indicated I have. We have always kept everything separate.''

He then doubled down on those claims during the debates, and both Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre have echoed that straight from the White House press briefing room.

Make no mistake about this: Everyone now knows those were all bald- faced lies.

While President Biden was Vice President, we know now that he had dinner at least twice with his son, Hunter, and Russian and Kazakhstani oligarchs. He spoke on the phone at least 20 times with Hunter's associates.

He met with CEFC, a Chinese energy company, while Hunter was working on their behalf.

Here is a text message from Hunter Biden that alone is justification for an inquiry: ``Z--Please have the director call me, not James or Tony or Jim. Have him call me tonight. I am sitting here with my father, and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.''

A confidential human source, known well to the FBI and relied upon often, alleged that President Biden received a $5 million bribe for services rendered.

The House Oversight Committee investigation has been going on for a while, and the investigation has yielded many important facts. Here are a couple of examples the investigators have found.

They found that Hunter Biden flew on Air Force Two at least 15 times and engaged in activities that Devon Archer testified were to sell the brand and enrich the Biden family.

They found an email from Biden associate James Gillar that breaks down the profit agreement for a deal involving the Chinese Communist Party-linked CEFC, including ``10 held by H for the big guy.''

They found a text message later that month from Gillar to Tony Bobulinski, which read: ``Don't mention Joe being involved. It is only when you are face-to-face. I know you know that, but they are paranoid.''

This is just a sampling of what we already know. This impeachment inquiry will offer House investigators greater subpoena authority to receive information from evasive Federal agencies.

We have been impeded in the collection of all this evidence because the Federal agencies under the executive branch are openly, aggressively trying to protect the President. We are going to have advanced authority now and a larger platform to share this information with the American people.

Mr. Speaker, remember how we arrived here. When the New York Post reported the existence of the Hunter Biden laptop, now-Secretary of State Anthony Blinken organized a group of 51 former intelligence officials to claim the laptop was Russian disinformation. Social media accounts were banned from sharing the story, and individuals who believed it were labeled Russian assets and conspiracy theorists.

We now know that not only was the laptop not Russian disinformation, of course, but it was known previously to the intel community and many of the individuals who signed that letter. They knew it was legitimate. They knew it was not Russian disinformation. They knew it came from Hunter Biden, and they hid it from the American people.

On July Fourth, just a couple of months ago, the Federal district court in the Western District of Louisiana, my home State, issued a 155-page court opinion. The State of Louisiana and State of Missouri sued the Biden administration because they had a hunch and knew that the White House and its agencies, including the FBI, the DOJ, and other Federal agencies, were engaged in a coverup. They were censoring and silencing the viewpoints of Americans they disagreed with. They would not allow conservative speech on the social media platforms.

We know from the evidence produced in that case and listed in the 155-page court opinion that issued an injunction against the White House. By the way, just last Saturday, that was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The court points out that Elvis Chan, the FBI official in the San Francisco field office, was meeting regularly with the Big Tech platforms in Silicon Valley leading up to the election and telling them things that they had to pull off the internet, conservative voices and social media postings that they didn't want people to see. The FBI coerced, the court said, and then coordinated with the Big Tech giants to make sure that on Facebook, Google, and Twitter at the time, and all these other platforms, you couldn't see that information.

It wasn't just the Hunter Biden laptop story. It was a lot of categories of things. It included negative information about the economy. It included people's opinions, conservative's opinions about the efficacy of COVID vaccines and the lockdowns, how crazy that was, and what they were doing to schoolchildren. All that was censored.

They even took down jokes about the President. If you posted a parody about President Biden, even as a candidate or after he was elected, it was pulled off the internet.

It is unbelievable. It is staggering. The judge's words in the court that this is arguably the largest and the greatest attack on free speech in U.S. history. He called it Orwellian. He said it was dystopian.

This is what we are facing. This is what this White House has been involved in. They did not want the American people to have the facts, and that is one of the reasons that we have to go to this next step.

That is why, Mr. Speaker, we have to follow these facts where they lead. The facts are irrefutable. They have understandably set Washington ablaze, even though the American people weren't able to see it. The judge said that millions of free-speech-protected postings were taken down from the internet and not seen. Yet, it has set Washington ablaze. Why? Because we are bringing these facts to bear. We are laying them out for people to see.

Our colleagues here, some of them, don't want to see it. As John Adams said, ``Facts are stubborn things.'' As expected, the D.C. and national press corps have blindly accepted the White House's spin and are trying to convince the American people that our inquiry, even the impeachment inquiry, is illegitimate just 3 years after they carried the water for Adam Schiff and the Democrats on their crazy impeachment quests against Donald Trump.

Here is a sampling of the headlines so far. Now, remember, we just announced the impeachment inquiry step yesterday. Here it is so far.

From Time magazine: ``Biden inquiry may be weakest in history.''

From CNN: ``The most predictable impeachment investigation in American history.''

From Reuters: ``McCarthy opens long-shot impeachment probe of Biden.''

From MSNBC: ``McCarthy's Biden impeachment inquiry is the Benghazi investigation on steroids.''

These headlines are going to increase. We know it is coming. We know that they are working against us, against the American people, in this case, and for the White House. They are on their team. We get it.

CNN is reporting this week that the White House is urging news executives to ramp up scrutiny of our investigation. In fact, now there is a memo going around that they sent to all the big news agencies. As if weaponizing the Federal agencies wasn't enough, President Biden is now publicly directing the free press to play defense for him. Do you know what? They are willingly going along with it.

Mr. Speaker, why? I am just going to ask this question. It is a rhetorical one. Nobody can answer it here, of course, but we are trying to seek the answer to this. I think we know. If there was no impropriety, why wouldn't the President provide congressional investigators with all the information we have requested? What do they have to hide?

The President could make the short trip from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue tomorrow. He could sit down with our committees. He could clear his name. We could do that behind closed doors. We could do it very discreetly, with all the protection he needs. In fact, we would welcome it.

Let this be an open invitation to President Biden. I know the White House is recording all this. They are watching what we do here. Here is the open invitation: President Biden, Secretary Blinken, any of the Biden family members and associates, or anyone who seeks to clear their name, anybody involved in this investigation at all, you can come right here. You are welcome here in Congress to our committees.

We on the House Judiciary Committee, House Oversight Committee, Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the Ways and Means Committee, any of them--pick your committee--and we will bring you in and you can clear your name.

Mr. Speaker, we would love to return our full focus to our regular and important work here, but the fact is our sworn oath to defend the Constitution

requires this inquiry. I will close with this--and I am going to bring up a couple of my colleagues who will share their thoughts, as well-- but remember that Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution itself expressly states that the sole power of impeachment belongs here to this House. Then Article II, Section 4 says--listen to the language carefully. It is expressly written in the Constitution. These are not political talking points. We are not making this up. It says in Article II, Section 4 that the President shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

Mr. Speaker, I listed just a small sampling, just the tip of the iceberg of the credible allegations and the mounting evidence that shows that Joseph Biden has engaged in bribery schemes, pay-to-play schemes. This is what the evidence shows.

We have to follow it. We took an oath to uphold the Constitution. The Constitution requires this action. The inquiry is the appropriate step. We have no choice but to pursue the facts wherever they lead, and we will leave no stone unturned.

Mr. Speaker, I yield next to the great gentleman from Utah (Mr. Owens), not only a Super Bowl champion but also a wonderful Congressman.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Idaho (Mr. Fulcher).

Mr. Speaker, I ask the gentleman before he leaves the podium today: I was told by automobile dealers who were in my office from the district that the State of California has banned the combustion engine. Is that a rumor or is that true?

I yield to the gentleman from Idaho.

Isn't it true then that if California, which is one of the largest markets for vehicles, bans the sale of the combustion engine, then the car manufacturers, if they want to do business in California, are going to have to shift lots of their production lines to these vehicles that, by the way, no one wants, and they are not affordable or maintainable. As I understand it, if the battery goes it costs you another $100,000 for an already overpriced vehicle that no one wants or can charge up. Isn't that then going to affect the automobile market in every other State, and your ability to get a truck or a car?

Exactly.

Mr. Speaker, I think the people are calling upon us to bring common sense to this equation because this team on the other side who is pushing this radical climate agenda is engaged in fantasy economics.

The people in my State of Louisiana need their trucks and cars. They are not going to buy electric vehicles. They can't afford them, first of all. It is not practical because there is nowhere to charge them in my State.

If we have a shortage of vehicles on the market that is going to be a real problem. I am told delivery trucks are involved in this in California, and if you can't get the fruit shipped from California, that means the prices at the grocery store are going to go up, as well. Everyone is going to suffer from this; isn't that true?

Mr. Speaker, it is about government control. I thank the gentleman for his work on that, and we urge our colleagues to support the bill.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. LaMalfa), the gentleman from the northern portion of California.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend for his remarks.

Sadly, what happens in California, that giant market out there, affects the entire country. I appreciate him shining light on that.

Mr. Speaker, I will wind down our Special Order hour just by returning to the issue of the impeachment inquiry.

Even as I have been sitting here, I got a question from a Hill reporter about some of the Senators in the other Chamber and their reaction to our bringing forward the impeachment inquiry.

I just want to say that, to speak very frankly, whether or not the Senate is courageous enough to confront the alleged corruption of President Biden is not really the House's concern.

As I mentioned earlier, it is Article I of the Constitution, Section 2, that gives the sole power of impeachment to us in the House. We are supposed to investigate these things. We have to do it. It is our constitutional responsibility. They will later try the matter, if it comes to them.

If our committee uncovers evidence, if our investigations uncover evidence that lead to an impeachment vote indeed, then it will be incumbent, when we send it over to the Senate, to decide if they want to engage with those facts. They will have to answer to their own constituents and voters and the American people, but we will have done our job here.

If the inquiry comes up fruitless, say some evidence is determined and uncovered that completely exonerates

President Biden, then we will have concluded a legitimate congressional inquiry as directed by the Constitution, and we will be satisfied with that and the American people will be satisfied. Some will be frustrated whatever happens at the outcome of this, but the Constitution will have been followed and upheld. On our side, that is the most important thing here.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Indiana for yielding me the time, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, it is good to be back on the House floor with the gentlewoman from Indiana. It is great to be with her, and so far, she is allowing me to actually speak and hasn't called for me to be silenced.

The last time we debated, I stated an uncomfortable fact about he who shall not be named and the gentlewoman had me silenced, had my words stricken from the Congressional Record.

You just have to love that, Mr. Speaker. The party of free speech that rails against woke this and cancel culture that, and calls us snowflakes, can't handle it when someone comes down here and tells the truth. They try to silence the people they disagree with. It is really quite stunning.

Here is more of the truth, and let's see if I am allowed to talk this time.

Mr. Speaker, under Republican control, the House of Representatives has become a place where trivial issues get debated passionately and important ones not at all. What we are dealing with today is a bunch of weird, whacky, poorly drafted culture war nonsense.

This is all just a waste of time. These bills aren't going anywhere. It is not even political theater. It is theater of the absurd.

The government shuts down in a few days, and instead of actually working with Democrats to keep the lights on, instead of actually doing something to fix the problems that the American people want us to fix, my Republican friends are doing nothing.

The roof is on fire, and instead of calling 911, they are sweeping the floors. I mean, it is beyond nuts.

Last night in the Rules Committee, during our hearing on this rule, I had some Republican Members telling me they didn't like my tone. They didn't like the fact that I said we don't share the same values.

I am sorry I hurt people's feelings, Mr. Speaker, but the truth is the truth. We don't all believe in the same things. When it comes to my friends on the other side of the aisle in this Chamber, we really don't share the same values. I know many of my friends on the Republican side are nice and good people, but their ideas are not nice and are not good.

Let me just give you a couple of examples.

Democrats want to make sure that our kids go to college and get a good education that prepares them for the workforce, and instead of working with us, Republicans go on and on about woke this and woke that in our schools.

Apparently, anyone who wants to teach facts is woke nowadays. They want colleges to stop being ``woke,'' even though they can't quite define what that even means. It is all political BS, Mr. Speaker.

Here is another example. Democrats actually want an economy that works for everyone, and thanks to the Biden-Harris administration, we are fighting to grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, but not Republicans. They are talking about woke economic policies.

I don't even know what they are talking about or what they mean, but do you want to know what people back home talk to me about? They are asking me: Why are Republicans trying to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires? Why are Republicans trying to go after Social Security and Medicare?

Another example, Mr. Speaker, is that Democrats actually care about strengthening and protecting the Violence Against Women Act, but not Republicans. A majority of their Conference voted against extending the Violence Against Women Act. Let me say that again: A majority of their Conference voted against extending the Violence Against Women Act.

Now, they have the nerve to come down here and talk about violence against women and use it as part of their sick ploy to go after immigrants. Give me a break. Their bill is so poorly written that it could hurt survivors of domestic violence.

I could go right down the list. It is obvious to me that, at some point, the RNC talking points went out to everybody, and those talking points said woke, woke, woke. Now, we have to waste time on this trash.

It is just another week of the GOP circus. As I have said before, calling this a clown show is an insult to actual working clowns.

Most of all, it is an insult to the American people for Republicans to use these hallowed Halls and to spend hours and hours of time this week on these absurd, awful bills. Again, none of them are going anywhere.

The reason to be in Congress is to help people. That means putting people over politics. It means not caving in to the most extreme members of your party. It means getting stuff done, which is a radical idea.

None of these bills, as I said, are going anywhere. Yet, here we are, playing these absurd, ridiculous games.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed listening to the chairman of the Rules Committee, but let me just state for the record that nothing he talked about will be at all impacted by any of the stuff that we are talking about here today. None of these bills are going anywhere.

If you want to pass legislation to address some of the issues that were raised, maybe we ought to work in a bipartisan way. Maybe it ought not to be ``my way or the highway.''

These aren't serious pieces of legislation. These are press releases. Let's all be honest with the American people about that. This is not serious legislating. We haven't done serious legislating here in a long time.

Mr. Speaker, I will zoom in a little bit on this Congress in general. I just mentioned that this is the most dysfunctional Congress in history. If anyone wants proof, look no further than this resolution: five more closed rules that allow zero amendments to come to the floor.

Mr. Speaker, for folks who don't know, a closed rule means no amendments. It means: Take it or leave it. If you have a good idea and want to improve a bill, too bad.

This is how they govern in Russia and China, and that is what the Republicans are turning this place into.

With these five closed rules they are bringing to the floor today, Republicans are breaking their own record for shutting down debate. With today's vote, there will be 106 closed rules in this Congress-- 106. This is now officially the most closed Congress in the history of the United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, what gets me is that my friends on the other side have been totally fooled. They were tricked by their own leadership, first by Speaker McCarthy and now Speaker Johnson.

The gentlewoman from Indiana and her colleagues on the Rules Committee were promised a more open process. They were told the Rules Committee was going to be different, more open, would have more regular order and more amendments, and more debate.

Speaker McCarthy was even blackmailed into putting members of the Freedom Caucus on the Rules Committee to guarantee a more open process, but apparently, it didn't matter because he totally broke his promise, and now Speaker Johnson is shredding it.

During the first 9 months under Speaker Johnson, we saw 64 closed rules, even more than the 42 closed rules we saw under Speaker McCarthy. They traded a bad Speaker for an even worse one. Republican leaders have blocked 5,799 amendments from even coming to the floor. Mr. Speaker, 5,799 amendments have been blocked from coming to the floor by the Republican majority.

By the way, they are not just Democratic amendments. They blocked Republican, bipartisan, and Democratic amendments. They blocked an amendment to disrupt the smuggling of U.S. firearms across the Mexican border. They blocked an amendment to combat fentanyl trafficking at ports of entry.

Holy hell, Mr. Speaker, they even blocked my amendment to protect food for seniors who participate in the Meals on Wheels program. They have even blocked over half of their own Republican Members' amendments.

Let me say that again. Most Republican amendments have been blocked by this Congress. These amendments have been prevented from even seeing the light of day or getting a debate on the House floor. There have been 98 amendments that Rules Committee Republicans had either authored or supported that have been blocked by their own majority.

When you are on the Rules Committee, you like to have a little juice, but 98 of your amendments, Republican amendments, have been blocked by your own party. That is almost 100 amendments, and that is just Rules Republicans.

I am sure they would have loved to have had the opportunity to debate their amendments on the floor. If Rules Committee Republicans can't get amendments, how the hell do you think the rest of us are doing?

Republicans said they wanted an open process in this Congress. They want an open process, my foot, Mr. Speaker.

Under this majority, the Rules Committee has become a place where democracy goes to die. Their Members should be outraged with the Speaker and this leadership just as much as Democrats should be. Again, 106 completely closed rules blocked all amendments--a shameful statistic, an all-time authoritarian high set under this Republican majority.

Let's look at the results. Look at what they have to show for it. Republicans had the most unproductive Congress in the history of the United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, 26 days we went without a Speaker because they were fighting with each other. Weeks were wasted with failed rule votes while they argued among themselves instead of negotiating with Democrats.

There were broken promises on the appropriation process where they kicked the can down the road with another failed CR, bringing us to the brink of catastrophic debt default and then asking Democrats to bail them out. Mr. Speaker, 10 months of passing no legislation through the Rules Committee that ever became law.

I congratulate my friends. In addition to being the most incompetent, dysfunctional, unproductive Congress in American history, they now have also presided over the most closed Congress in American history. Well done, well done, and they are not done yet. We have to live through 3 more months of this. God help us.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, again, I reiterate what the gentleman from South Carolina just said. We have different viewpoints and different values.

I am sorry that he feels he lives in a wrecked country. I don't believe that. I think the United States of America is the greatest country on this planet, and I am proud to serve in Congress to try to help the people of this country. I would never refer to this country as a ``wrecked country.''

Again, the gentleman who just spoke, I thought when he was appointed to the Rules Committee, he was appointed to make sure that we had a more open process.

I regret to inform the gentleman that 106 closed rules slipped by him this Congress. I appreciate him standing in the breach.

By the way, when he refers to all the amendments that were rejected as being dumb, 50 percent of them were Republican amendments.

I think 27 of your amendments were denied. I wouldn't classify them as dumb, even though I may disagree with the intent.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to include in the Record a list of the 106 closed rules issued by the Republican majority in the 118th Congress.

Mr. Speaker, beneath all these statistics about closed rules are actual ideas that are being blocked from being debated on the House floor.

These are thoughtful proposals that Members have worked hard to develop, ideas to help actual people, and they deserved a debate in an up-or-down vote.

They are proposals like this: An amendment to disrupt the smuggling of U.S. guns across the Mexico border to help cartels, an amendment authorizing funding for DHS to combat fentanyl trafficking at our ports of entry, and an amendment to prevent cuts to Meals on Wheels.

Those are home-delivered meals to seniors, Mr. Speaker, and that was my amendment, by the way, so I can assure you that it was a very, very good idea.

They even blocked an amendment to provide postpartum mental health information to pregnant students, and that was a Republican amendment.

Mr. Speaker, Republicans haven't just blocked amendments by reporting out closed rules. Their structured rules, the rules that allowed a few amendments, have also continually blocked thoughtful, rule-complied amendments.

They seem especially focused on blocking Democratic ideas from a debate in an up-or-down vote on the floor. A quarter of their structured rules--get this--blocked all Democratic amendments.

Now, let me quickly just list a few ideas that Republicans were either too afraid to debate or couldn't spare 10 minutes for consideration on the House floor: An amendment to protect children from getting asthma; amendments to ensure the regulation of dark money in politics, and to prevent corrupt pay-to-play political donation deals with Federal contractors; and an amendment to provide cancer screenings to Federal firefighters as part of their DOD annual physicals, when we know they are exposed to cancer-causing chemicals as part of their jobs. There is simply no excuse for this, Mr. Speaker.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, after listening to the gentlewoman from Minnesota, I was confused when she said, you don't offer alternatives. That is what amendments are. They are alternative ideas.

I just went through a list of some of the alternatives we wanted to offer dealing with firefighters and cancer screening, dealing with children with asthma, and dealing with making sure senior citizens have adequate access to nutrition. Those are alternatives. Those are ideas.

My friends, unfortunately, are in control of this place, so they get to bring the bills to the Rules Committee.

We try to present alternatives through the amendment process, but here is another alternative. If we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up H.R. 16, the American Dream and Promise Act of 2023.

Mr. Speaker, the bigoted hatred that we are seeing directed at immigrants in Ohio and across the country is sickening. According to research done by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, there has been a rise in conspiracy theories that stigmatize minorities and promote hatred of ethnically diverse communities.

Get this. Politicians' use of bigoted rhetoric can also play a role in hate crime incidents. It is sad, but to be frank, we didn't need researchers to tell us this.

We can see and we can hear it from the Republican Party every single day, and it does a grave disservice to the Dreamers, to TPS holders, and to DACA recipients in this country who only know America as their home.

These are taxpayers, small business owners, educators, and critical parts of our communities. Dreamers were brought to the United States as children through no fault of their own, and it is past time to grant them the pathway to citizenship that they rightly deserve.

Mr. Speaker, let me be clear. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to fix our broken immigration system and secure our border, but unlike the messaging bills before us this week, this is a bill that actually does something, and it is actually bipartisan. It sends the message that we are sick of the vitriol and hate crimes against this community and that we value their many contributions that make this country a better place.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment into the Record along with any extraneous material immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Escobar), a great leader, to discuss our proposal.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I just happen to be speaking about the subject of California.

Now, California is a beautiful place, beautiful climate and terrain and territory. It is just that its politics have gotten so upside down in the last--pick a number of years--40 years, 50 years. I am not really there to serve the people anymore but to serve climate agendas and other crazy agendas I will not go into here tonight.

I live in the rural part of California. I like to say, I live in the normal part still in the far north where we farm and we ranch--we still attempt to do mining--in order to produce the products that city people need. If they didn't have us around to do those things then, I don't know--they want to, I guess, import all of it, which seems to be the direction here. Let's import it all from China.

One of the interesting things--I won't say funny, although the people watching might think it is funny because we do this to ourselves--but our California Air Resources Board released a rule requiring all new cars in California that will be sold new to be zero-emission vehicles by 2035.

Now, this was tried back in the eighties where they said, well, we want--I believe maybe it was 1990--10 percent of all cars sold by the year 2000, if my memory is correct, to be zero-emission vehicles.

So what did we end up with? Car companies are trying to make battery- powered vehicles that look like glorified golf carts or maybe those little rigs you saw on ``Fantasy Island'' that Tattoo was driving around in to be legitimate vehicles you would have out on the roadway. You saw basically oversized golf carts with license plates on them trying to somehow meet this mandate.

Well, CARB figured out at the time it wasn't going to get there so they relented on it, but now they are not relenting.

So we have this mandate--not actually passed by legislature, signed by the governor but made by the California Air Resources Board, which is famous around the country for being heavy-handed on truckers and off-road vehicles and everything else.

Here is the funny part: Just a few days after this mandate came out, our esteemed Governor Newsom had to publicly beg electric vehicle owners to not charge their cars due to concerns about the power grid and blackouts. He told them, hey, please don't charge your cars right now because our grid is overstretched during that particular time.

You have also a few months later when the winter came in residents in Sierra Nevada lost power for many days due to heavy snowstorms knocking the power out, so they couldn't heat their homes and do normal things there. But if they had also had an electric vehicle they couldn't even have gotten out of there to go someplace where it was warm or for other needs, maybe emergency medical care or what have you.

We also have rolling blackouts that are common in the State due to overuse and not enough power on the grid to keep things going. Industries in California, many of them have agreements with the utilities that they will voluntarily shut down if they are called upon if the grid looks like it is going to be overtaxed at a particular point. So you have manufacturers that have to lay off their workers for the rest of the day, stop production in order to pull off-line and not use power because we don't have enough of a power grid in California.

Then up in my area because we have a forest issue--which our forests aren't managed as well as they should be, especially Federal land by the U.S. Forest Service--where the power lines have been run through for many decades, where there is hydrogeneration, et cetera, power may be coming in from another State, we don't get to maintain around the power lines like we used to because it might be an environmental concern. We can't take the trees down that you need to to make sure that they can't swing if they are falling; they might fall within the path of those power lines if the tree, you know, is taller than what the clearance is, right?

So I had to pass a bill a couple years ago to make the process just a little bit easier to get a permit from the Forest Service to do that on Federal land. It is still not easy, and it is not very timely, but it got a little bit better. So we have that to deal with. They call it a public safety power shutoff.

It especially affects part of my district. It seems like when I drive through Tehama County sometimes during that time of year--now, they have improved it a little bit--the whole county would be shut off because the wind blew, and it might cause branches to blow into the power lines, therefore, bad things happen such as the Camp fire, which 85 people died in Paradise, California, due to a power line problem a few miles east of there with the wind blowing through. Then other fires like the Carr fire near Redding, the Zogg fire, and many others.

Then we saw, of course, the effects, tragically, in Hawaii that we just mourned this week--and that is what this red ribbon represents-- because we are not managing the lands around power lines.

This is happening right in California at the same time they are mandating more and more electricity use, forcing us into vehicles we can't afford or don't want. Also, they want to ban gas stoves and gas water heaters and make them be on the grid, as well. I mean, you couldn't get any dumber with the stuff we are doing in my home State, my beautiful home State of California. Rolling blackouts.

By a miracle last year they decided we have to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant going for another 5 years instead of maybe a 40- year permit--it was put in in about 1982 when I was going to school down there in San Luis Obispo. It had a much longer life than what they were allowing because, oh, we don't like nukes, nukes are scary, even though they make zero CO2, as does hydropower.

Right now they are in the process of tearing dams out to make hydroelectric power in my district, and they have their eyes on more up in Washington and other areas because, oh, it might be an environmental issue. It is really absurd what we are doing to ourselves. We are putting ourselves into the Stone Age so we can go live in caves and eat insects that these guys are prescribing for us, you know. It is disgusting.

Now, they want to apply this toward our vehicles. We have got the cleanest burning, most efficient vehicles ever being put out by the car manufacturers, but they don't look at it that way. They don't give credit for how much better and cleaner it is. The Los Angeles Basin's air is cleaner than it has been. You remember the 1950s and 1960s and all that. It is so much cleaner now. We have made so much progress on this, yet they want to because they have the power to or arbitrarily think it is a feel-good policy to take these vehicles away, to take car choice away from people.

I remember the EPA under Andy Wheeler, just a few years ago, was trying to make it where people could have more affordable cars and not have this 54.5-mile-per-gallon mandate. What does a 54.5-mile-per- gallon vehicle look like to you? Is that a car choice to you when that mandate was going to be fully fleshed out?

I mean, most cars that get pretty good gas mileage get 30, 35, somewhere around there. A lot of others get 20, 25, depending on what you want, but it isn't about your choice. It is about government deciding what you need or what you should have; what is your neighborhood going to look like; how much do you get to travel anymore, all of these massive control issues.

We have public safety power shutoffs. We have them tearing down the hydroelectric dams. The dams they still do have, they are requiring more and more of the water to go out in such a way that they don't even turn the turbines. Instead, we want the cold water to go out to lower the temperature of the river maybe by 1 degree and it will be a little bit better for the fish in the river or we want the water to come off the top of the lake that can't go through the turbines because we want to save that colder water for later in the season so it can be 1 degree colder down the river for the fish. I mean, it is crazy.

When this first was announced by CARB, the Governor of California, we sent him a letter and his CARB chair,

Liane Randolph, asking them to consider alternate policies to reduce emissions that do not add additional strain to the State's energy grid or restrictions on consumer choice. Choice, we all like that around here, don't we?

I thank my California Republican colleagues for joining me on sending a unified message, and I believe that this letter has helped us get a bill on the floor this week, which is known as H.R. 1435. The bill would prevent the U.S. EPA from issuing a waiver to California Air Resources Board in order to enact that rule the State is trying to do, without, again, legislation by the elected legislators.

This is what they have been using for a lot of years to put California even under a tighter scrutiny than a lot of the rest of the country, and it makes us uncompetitive in many aspects.

Though 95 percent of the vehicles on America roads are run on internal combustion engines--they are using the acronym ICE these days--States like California are trying to pass these egregiously unrealistic emissions mandates to force American car manufacturers, and foreign ones, too, to prioritize EV manufacturing.

Where are we going to mine the materials to make these? Are we going to have the power on the grid to run them? You are going to change the power grid in neighborhoods to have the massive amounts of transformers and the wires and the poles and insulators and all of that in order to have these charging units inside people's homes and in their garages. They aren't taking that into account. It is just that la-di-da, pie-in- the-sky deal. We will just mandate it, and it will be great by 2035.

The idea that people just can't afford these vehicles, as many of them are sometimes $17,000 to $20,000 more for the equivalent, same size, same usage type vehicle, they don't care.

A whole bunch of the country's economy would be affected by this because probably a bunch of other States would follow California's ideas on this, with this waiver that they are seeking.

It is a real market manipulation that nobody has asked for other than the do-gooders in Congress, at the State level, and others that are forcing us in many ways in our lives. They want to force what kind of home we live in, what we eat, what we drive, and how we power our stoves and our water heaters.

Now, I mentioned a little bit ago how the grid got knocked out in some of the mountainous areas after the storm there. You think, well, at least people can go turn on their generator in order to provide some electricity and some heat in their home perhaps. No, no, they want to ban gas-powered or fuel-powered generators, too. I am wondering: What are you supposed to run a generator on if you can't run it on gas or diesel or natural gas or a propane tank or something you might have nearby? What are you supposed to run it on when the power goes out?

If you live in a rural area where there are frequent public safety power shutoffs or fire or other things happen that knock out the grid, what are you supposed to do? They just make up the mandates. Governor Newsom, who is maybe inspiring to be President--I warn people across the country who are watching, don't fall for this stuff.

I like to joke around a little bit. I am from California. People, don't do what we do, okay? It is going to affect your privacy. It is going to affect your freedom. It will affect basic choices. It will affect your economy of your household and of your State.

We don't even nearly have the EV charging systems that it would take to have them close enough or enough of them onsite. You ought to see the lines there. There is one place down in San Luis Obispo where you can see the cars all lined up, all the Teslas and all these other folks lined up waiting for the opportunity to plug onto one of these things for 2 hours and then go on about their way, about their business as they travel.

Mr. Speaker, you probably heard the story about the guy from, I think, Michigan who bought the new Ford electric truck and was going to go camping with it. He made it about one or two States away and finally had to give up on it. I think he went and bought a Dodge Cummins diesel in order to complete his family camping trip, because it was way oversold as to what it could do versus what it could actually do.

Getting back to the bill. We don't want to empower California, and perhaps up to 17 other States, with this EPA waiver, that they can force this stuff upon the people and take away their choices, their mobility to do what they need to do.

Ask a guy who is a contractor or a roofing company or a farmer or a rancher or a miner or a logger if they need their F-250 or if they want to get a fleet of five Priuses to go do the same job. They need to have choices. This is at a time when we have got, as I said, the cleanest running, most efficient vehicles we have ever made.

Oh, we have got to cut down on the CO2. Climate change. Climate change, give me a break. CO2 is only 0.04 percent of our atmosphere. They act like it is the end of the world. CO2 is an important building block for plant life. Everything is made out of carbon. They act like, because they have been able to dream this up as a killer, that we have to stop all things that make CO2.

I tell you what, if we are too good at this and we go below 0.2 percent, plant life starts dying off. Now, we will never be that good getting rid of CO2, but we are going to spend trillions doing it, and we are going to make ourselves a Third World country here while China and others keep going ahead.

Our Governor Newsom is running over to China for a visit to talk about climate change. Meanwhile, we have one of the worst homeless problems in the State of California, and our economy and our water isn't that greater either. Even though we were blessed with so much rain this year, we need to build water storage for people. We need to build that for our agriculture so we can supply this Nation with the food it needs from California, with so many of our crops, 90-plus percent, coming from California.

You wouldn't have your almonds. You wouldn't have your tomatoes. You wouldn't have your pistachios. You wouldn't have many things that come from California, but we are prioritizing this nonsense of taking away people's vehicles.

Climate change gets preached on half the time around here, and every policy in this place has to be run through a climate change filter, even though it is nonsense that CO2, once again, is only .04 percent of our atmosphere and it is not a killer, because carbon is a building block of everything we live off of.

Please, call your Congress Member and tell them to support H.R. 1435. Don't empower California to control your State and your economy by mandating what kind of vehicles you can drive because it is going to affect you and it will ripple out from our whacked-out State to your State what vehicles you are going to drive and how you are going to do your business. Please check that out and support the bill.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Chair Cole for the dignity and respect that he shows each of his colleagues on the Rules Committee. It is a great honor to be debating this rule with him this afternoon.

I must, however, rise in opposition to the rule because we only have six legislative days left to fund the government, and we are considering only one of the eleven bills that we must pass to fully fund our Federal Government.

I completely agree with our chair that our country is a beacon of hope and that we must, indeed, fund our military in the way that they need in order to continue to provide that beacon of hope and that strength that we must communicate both to our allies and those who would do us harm.

Indeed, America is facing significant security threats from a rampaging Russia, the Chinese Communist Party, and a soon-to-be nuclear North Korea. Instead of uniting us, however, against those very real threats, extreme MAGA Republicans are putting Americans at war with each other with this divisive Defense appropriations bill.

Extreme MAGA Republicans are weakening our military readiness. In the Senate, Republicans are refusing to allow votes on flag officers, so we don't have the generals, admirals, and top military officers we need to lead our troops. Here in the House, instead of passing what should be and has historically been a bipartisan Defense appropriations bill, extreme Republicans are inserting the kitchen sink of culture war issues that we have seen too often.

Indeed, when we talk about women, this bill is another step in their march toward a national abortion ban. If this bill is enacted, a servicewoman in a State with a total abortion ban that doesn't have exceptions for rape would not be able to take leave and get help to travel to a place like New Mexico where a woman's right to receive the full access to reproductive healthcare is honored. Fourteen States have a total ban on abortion. In each of those 14 States, we will find servicewomen who are honorably serving our Nation.

In addition, this bill sets up minorities and our servicemembers who are gay, lesbian, and all individuals of the LGBTQ community to harassment.

At a moment when we know that some of our bases are under threat from climate change, this bill cuts $714 million from climate resiliency programs. I have been to our bases in the Pacific islands, and I recognize that we must have climate resilience if we don't want our bases to be under water. By giving up on preparing for climate resiliency, we are giving up a strategic military advantage that we should take advantage of.

Instead of focusing on how we can improve recruitment from our diverse communities in America when we are failing to meet our recruitment goals, this appropriation prohibits funding for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

We know that people of color answer the call to service at disproportionately higher rates, and those numbers are not reflected in military leadership. This bill tells my Latino and Native American communities they are not valued.

Congressman Neguse asked the Defense Subcommittee chair why he would cut funding for the chief diversity officer, a position that he had voted to create. The chair responded that it was the best way to get attention.

That is how we legislate now, to get attention?

Last week, in the Rules Committee, we tried to remedy some of these awful and unnecessary riders. Republicans voted our amendments down.

All of these divisive riders harm our military readiness and hurt our servicemembers, servicemembers who put their lives on the line to protect us. It is never enough to just thank our servicemembers for their service. We need

to provide them with the benefits, quality of life, and respect that all of them deserve.

These extreme provisions are a trend this year, however. Perhaps that is the reason we have passed only one appropriations bill under Republican leadership in the House this year.

This Defense appropriations bill is the only one that we appear to be considering today. We are not considering a short-term funding package to ensure our government doesn't shut down. We are not considering something to cover all the appropriations bills.

Today, we are considering the Defense appropriations bill, and it should be focused solely on national security. It should be about making sure our Nation has the best and brightest force. It should be about serving all the individuals who protect us.

We should be unified in making sure our servicemembers have the resources they need and the respect they deserve. Instead, this bill attacks access to reproductive healthcare for our servicewomen and their families. It devalues the minorities, the Latinos, Black Americans, Native Americans, who serve and are looking for us to help them address the racism that still exists, unfortunately.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose this rule, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I am also thinking about last week's committee hearing and this discussion about the history of where we were with regard to the appropriations process. I think there is a very different mood this year than we had in the last cycle, and that is the fact that Democrats have never called to shut it down. That is exactly what we are hearing from Republicans on the other side of the aisle.

We never took that position. We were always trying to work it out, not shut it down. Even though we might not have passed all the bills by September 30, we were working across the aisle with our colleagues, working with the Senate on the other side, so we never had a shutdown. What we had was constant movement toward an agreement.

Indeed, the passed appropriations bills passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, both in the Senate and the House. We had hundreds of Republicans voting with the Democrats to pass the last appropriations bills.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), the ranking member of the Committee on Rules and my good friend, who I hold in high regard.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

As we just noted, the chair of the committee has once again showed both his dignity and respect to his colleagues.

I do want to point out that you are right, I did forget about that 72-hour shutdown because it was very brief, and I agree with you, it is a stupid thing to do. No, I am sorry, I think you said it is a dumb thing to do, and it is because it causes so much pain for the people back home. They expect us to do our job, and the primary thing we are supposed to do is fund our government because it is not just the really hardworking employees who keep our airplanes flying in the air, who make sure that our food is inspected so we don't get sick, it is also the teachers in our schools who receive Title I funding in New Mexico.

So many of my schools receive Title I funding. Those are the schools that have the fewest resources, so the Federal Government helps them out to make sure all our children, wherever they live, can get a good education. Those are the things that will be lost if we shut down the Federal Government.

I point out that in contrast to the 72 hours, in 1995 under Republican leadership, 21 days the government was shut down; in 2013 the government was shut down for 16 days; and then in 2018 they shut it down for 35 days. This is a refrain we hear over and over again. It happens under House Republican leadership so often as we just saw.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Salinas), a wonderful Member of our freshman class this year.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The concern that we have with the bill with regards to a woman's right to be able to determine for herself in conversation with her own faith, her own family, and her own doctors what kind of reproductive healthcare she wants access to is the fact that this bill would prevent servicewomen and their families from taking paid leave or traveling to obtain an abortion or related services if those services are not provided where she is assigned.

Remember, servicewomen don't get to choose where they live and where they work. There have already been multiple legal opinions that using paid leave and traveling and getting assistance to get to a State where you can get medical care does not violate the Hyde amendment.

Indeed, the Hyde amendment would allow you to get that kind of care if you were raped. Well, guess what? In 14 States if you were raped, you cannot get that care. That would violate the Hyde amendment in a sense when you cannot get access to it.

Last week in the Rules Committee, Representative McCollum told the story of a woman in Texas who was told by her doctor that she would not perform a surgical procedure to remove a dead fetus because of the State's abortion ban. That servicewoman did not have the options she was entitled to.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to enter into the Record the 2023 New York Times article: ``As Abortion Laws Drive Obstetricians From Red States, Maternity Care Suffers.''

Because what has changed is that now we have 14 States that have total bans on abortion, so we must do more to honor our commitment to our servicewomen.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Virginia (Ms. McClellan).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), our ranking member on the Rules Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I think what Americans know is that for too long, Republicans have been protecting the rich and the corporations who do not pay their taxes. When we start talking about spending, we need to talk about what we are spending that money for.

Democrats are investing in rural America. They are investing in our children. They are investing in our infrastructure. What are Republicans doing? Yes, they are adding to that deficit. Republicans put $2 trillion on that credit card in tax cuts for the rich.

The leader they worship, Donald Trump, put $7.5 trillion onto that deficit. The very first bill they brought to the floor of this Congress, what did it add? $114 billion to that cut.

That is what we need to talk about, not just how they want to cut investments and important things like heating for our families who need it, our seniors, and our veterans. What are they doing? They are trying to make sure that they don't have to tax the rich and wealthy corporations. Many, as we heard last night, don't pay anything in taxes.

Yes, we do want to talk about Social Security. I am so glad the chair brought this up because, Mr. Speaker, Republicans often swear that they are not going to cut Social Security and Medicare. Last night, when we met on the continuing resolution, there is an 8 percent cut across the board for everything but defense and veterans. Their continuing resolution has a 66 percent cut to heating assistance. They have said border security is their top priority, but the very CR we are scheduled to consider cuts funding for DHS by over 8 percent.

While they claim they won't cut Social Security and Medicare, their own continuing resolution, the language in the bill itself, demonstrates that nothing is sacred to them.

I am going to offer my friends, my dear friends, a chance to show the American people that they are serious about preserving Social Security and Medicare.

I urge you all to join us in defeating the previous question. If we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to provide for consideration of a resolution which plainly states that the people's House won't cut a single cent from these crucial programs that so many of my constituents, so many of your constituents, rely on.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment into the Record, along with any extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Mullin) to discuss our proposal.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I think what we need to do is look at this appropriations bill, look at where we are in our discussions about funding the government and recognize that nothing exists in a vacuum.

Last night, as we were talking about the Committee on Appropriations, we were talking about the extreme cuts that are being made, and we know that our military, when they sort of show up at our bases, they are not showing up at a base that is not connected to the rest of the places they live in.

In Clovis, New Mexico, where we have Cannon Air Force Base, and in Alamogordo, where we have an Air Force base, those communities are connected, and we need to recognize that the other bills that they are looking at are going to cut funding in a way that is going to hurt our readiness.

The Agriculture appropriations bill is a good opportunity to talk about this. The bill that they have brought forward would fund world development programs, right? Nope. That is going to get cut. It would also cut nutrition to women, infants, and children. It would cut the funding we need for our ranchers and farmers.

Indeed, the cuts that they are proposing would be $8 billion in cuts, in the Agriculture appropriations bill. This would bring the funding level for the Agriculture appropriations bill to a level not seen since 2007.

The bill would cut broadband programs by 23 percent. It would hurt something that is incredibly important to my district, which are rural electric co-ops that serve 268,403 residents. Well, those rural electric co-ops, they serve people throughout our districts, and they serve our military bases. We must fight these kinds of threats.

Mr. Speaker, in closing, we cannot talk about readiness; we cannot talk about what we need to do in this country to support our military if we don't talk about our servicemembers and what we must do to protect them and to respect them, because they are protecting us.

So when we are talking about our servicewomen, we must remember the number of servicewomen who are serving. It is about 20 percent right now, and the number of women who are serving in those 14 States which have a total ban on abortion is significant. It is 80,000 women--80,000 women, who, if something happens to them like what Representative McCollum discussed, they could die of sepsis.

For those of us who have given birth, for those of us who have had to make really difficult decisions about our health and how we are going to deal with the complications of pregnancy, we feel it viscerally, because we know that it is such a wonderful thing to give birth, but it is such a dangerous thing to be pregnant.

And what they would do to our servicewomen is deny them the ability to

go to a State like New Mexico when they want reproductive healthcare services.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.