Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the bipartisan nature of remarks tonight in remembrance of the importance of this week and Independence Day and our great Nation's history and this particular one, celebrating the 250th. I am going to first,…
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the bipartisan nature of remarks tonight in remembrance of the importance of this week and Independence Day and our great Nation's history and this particular one, celebrating the 250th.
I am going to first, though, focus a little bit on my home State of Texas. It was 1 year ago this week that we were in the throes of negotiating what was called at the time the big, beautiful bill, an important piece of legislation that I am very honored to have been a part of working through. It was difficult in working through all the complexities of the tax policy, dealing with the complexities of the reforms to Medicaid, to welfare programs, saving $1.7 trillion, pulling back some of the subsidies and unreliable power that was so critically important.
But all of that was going on--and my son, Charlie, who is here with me now, we were here. We were in the throes of the debates. We were at the White House on the 2nd, debating it. We were here on the 3rd, late night. We vote on this thing.
And then I was supposed to be in Kerrville, Texas, which is where I go every summer for the Fourth of July. There was a big concert down on the river, and I was supposed to be there, where my family has gone for, now, at least a decade.
I talked to the President about being here for the bill signing because of all the work we had gone through, and I ultimately told the President that I would stay here for the bill signing.
So I stick around, visited with some friends on the night of the 3rd, and I am watching the weather forecast. I wake up on the morning of the Fourth of July. My son and I were getting ready to go see some friends, and I see the news reports.
All of a sudden, it starts to sink in what had happened in Kerrville. We have had a number of moments here on the floor of the House, one in particular almost a year ago, in which we remembered those lives who were lost and what occurred there in Kerrville.
But now, 1 year since this coming Saturday on the Fourth of July, I do
think it merits reflecting on what occurred and, importantly, what occurred after.
That area of the Guadalupe River is surrounded by high cliffs in certain areas. It is a very beautiful part of the State. It cuts through the limestone, and so we had been in drought conditions. You have hard ground, limestone. A massive amount of water pours into that area. It is an area that was inhabited by thousands of people, celebrating, obviously--it was Fourth of July--but summer camps. That is what a lot of people came to focus on.
Remember that we lost 27 little girls from Camp Mystic, and, fortunately, we didn't lose any from any of the other camps, but we lost over 100 other people. A lot of people forget that part. They were people who were camping with their families, whole families that were swept down the river.
There has been a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking since then, people saying what could have been done and what should have been done, the force of the floodwaters, all that occurred, all that happened, ripping up 100-year-old Cyprus trees, but I just want to focus in on what I believe is the true story of what occurred after.
That is the faith of the community of Kerrville who came together to figure out how to rebuild through the great charity of people across not just the county or the State, but the entire country and the world. We raised over $150 million in private contributions, of which over half, pushing $80 million to $100 million, had been pushed out the door--the rest of it should be out the door by the end of this year--to help small businesses, to help people keep afloat, mental health, keeping people in houses and apartments, giving people the ability to stay on their feet, and all done through the power of the strong faith of the people of Texas.
In the town of Kerrville, there is a giant cross that sits up on the hill, and there is an entire garden there dedicated to the gospel of Christ. The extent to which Christian faith was driving the people of Texas and central Texas and the Hill Country to help their brothers and sisters and help families cannot be overstated.
I have to tell you that, as a Member of Congress, I don't tend to do a lot of the requests for funding. I don't come up here and try to file bills when there are disasters in my home State of Texas. My view is that we are the eighth biggest economy in the world. We have 31 million people, and the Federal Government is not an ATM for every ill that befalls the people.
I am proud of the people of Texas stepping up. Yes, FEMA was there. Yes, the Federal Government was a part of the effort in dealing and managing with the aftermath, getting assets there, the Coast Guard heroism.
But there were a lot of volunteers, too--colleagues, friends of mine, Morgan Luttrell, others who were literally in the water looking in search and rescue. The number of people who volunteered, I came in on the night of the Fourth of July, and I went to the facility where they were gathering in all of the experts and all the people who were there and all the volunteers, and the sheriff and all the local law enforcement.
This one young man was just sitting in the parking lot, and he had just driven down from Lubbock 5-odd hours and just came down on a whim as a volunteer with a bunch of drones so he could help.
I kept running into people from all over who had just driven there, the Cajun Navy who came over. All of the people who stepped up to help, I want to express my gratitude and thanks to so many different people, local volunteers, the people who helped out, but all the way up to the President of the United States himself; Susie Wiles herself; former Secretary Noem; Governor Abbott; the head of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, Chief Nim Kidd; the Kerr County sheriff, Sheriff Leitha; and countless local leaders.
More than 850 people were rescued from the floodwaters during those critical days, notably the Coast Guard, which President Trump had acknowledged at some point here. The $150 million of charitable contributions, all of the things that occurred, it is such a great place, central Texas.
There is a reason people from all over the country--my colleague Buddy Carter had one of his family members, even though he is a Congressman from Georgia, who was impacted by the floods. There were friends of mine and colleagues from other parts on the other side of the aisle who were reaching out to me because they had people who were affected by the floods.
At the end of the day, it is that cross sitting above Kerrville. It is the cross that reminds us that, even in our darkest moments as humanity, hope remains. The suffering is not the final word.
The love of Christ was on display there. The love of Christ is constantly on display there in the Hill Country and reflected in the actions and the compassion shown by Texans and Americans around the world.
I want to remember those people. I want to remember the lives lost. I want to remember the heroes. I want to remember the people who were there at the moment.
With all due respect to a lot of politicians, particularly in Austin, Texas, particularly some of the statewide, elected officeholders in the State of Texas--and they know who they are--they sit around pontificating and pointing fingers at people about what they should or should not have done from the comfort of your office and your perch in Austin, Texas, when good people lost their lives trying to help little girls who lost their lives.
Dick Eastland, who was swept away in the flood, and his family and the people who are maligning their family for what the camp should or should not have done--the fact of the matter is, they were there at 4 o'clock in the morning. They were there trying to figure out how to manage one of the most devastating floods that we have ever seen. Politicians who want to Monday-morning quarterback and want to try to point fingers are not helping.
The people who had faith in the Lord Almighty, the people who stepped up to help each other in the time of tragedy that we had last year, they are the ones who I want to lift up and thank because it is not about finger-pointing. It is about standing alongside our brothers and sisters when bad things happen because bad things have always happened, and bad things will happen again. It is how we respond to them. It is what we do in the wake of them. It is our faith in the Lord Almighty and our faith in Jesus Christ that is what perseveres, not political self-interest and self-motivation.
I also note here, as I think about what happened there and the greatness of Kerrville, the greatness of the Hill Country, and the greatness of the State of Texas and the whole world in response to that, from my perspective, I think about all the things that that day represents, July Fourth.
Now, so many of us are going to remember July Fourth there in Kerrville for that event, but I am going to be back in Kerrville this Fourth of July. I am not staying here in D.C. for the great celebration here. I have been to a bunch of them in this town. I am going to go back to Kerrville because I want to be with the people who I represent, and I am proud to represent them as the Congressman for the 21st Congressional District.
The Fourth of July, what I prefer to call Independence Day, is for me such a special reflection of who we are as a people, as a sovereign nation.
I was blessed during the window of COVID to road trip with three of my staffers to Philadelphia on July 2, 2020. People will recall that, at the time, much of our Nation was shut down. You couldn't go anywhere. You couldn't do anything.
At the time, there was a lot of turmoil, rioting in the streets, burning down businesses, statues being thrown in the water, and statues being defaced. I wasn't going to have any of it. I wanted to exalt the greatness of our country.
So, I grabbed my staff, and I said: You guys want to go on a road trip, the great American statue road trip? We drove to Philadelphia, and we went straight to Independence Hall. I recorded a video outside of Independence Hall, talking about how it wasn't the bricks, the building, the Liberty Bell sitting out there in front of Independence Hall--none of that. You could graffiti it, paint it. You could destroy it. You could throw it in a river or a harbor. It was what was done in that building.
I went over to the National Park Service, and I said: Hi. I assume the building is not open because of COVID. And they said no, God bless them. As a Member of Congress, they let me go in with my three staffers.
There we were there on July 2. Any student of history will know why that matters. It is, in fact, on July 2, not July Fourth, that we voted, that our Founders voted. That was the vote that mattered.
The words of the Declaration of Independence are awesome. I say that as a University of Virginia graduate and proud believer in all of those principles articulated by Thomas Jefferson and the other people who had a hand in that drafting. It was the vote--it was the willingness to vote and say we are leaving and breaking away from the Crown. Those last words in the Declaration of Independence, pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor--we talk about those words, but they lived them. They sat there in Independence Hall, looked each other in the eye, and voted to do it.
Again, at that time, in that summer, when statues were being torn down and stuff being thrown into the water, my point when I went up there and recorded video was: You can undo all of that, but you don't undo the courage of those who came before us to fight to give us this great Republic and great Nation in which our freedoms can be enjoyed by us and by our progeny.
I recorded a video at Independence Hall. We stayed there and visited. We got to be there in Independence Hall on July 2. I don't know if I will ever do that again, but certainly not in a building that was pretty much empty except for me and three staffers.
Then, we left and went down to Fort McHenry, where we were regaling the words of ``The Star-Spangled Banner'' and Francis Scott Key coming back down through Baltimore. You think about what that meant. I could sit here and give an entire speech on the words of ``The Star-Spangled Banner.''
People want to diminish ``The Star-Spangled Banner,'' saying that it is more difficult to sing or doesn't soar as ``America the Beautiful'' or something. I disagree wholeheartedly. The words echo when you are at a stadium and listen to the words and see what it means: that that flag was, in fact, still there. It is so important that we remember that and remember why that is our national anthem.
Then, we drove back down to D.C. and went to various monuments here in Washington. We went down to the Jefferson Memorial and Lincoln Memorial. We went to the Roosevelt Memorial. We continued to do that to honor the greatness of this country, even as some were trying to tear it down.
I say all of that to say that our sovereignty as a nation matters. It is not something that you can just sort of trivially dismiss.
I am going to make a quick political commentary here and then come back to our celebration of the 250th. I have about 15 minutes left. I want to talk about the Supreme Court ruling today, because it matters a great deal.
Today, the United States Supreme Court issued an opinion that I believe was profoundly misguided and undermines our national security and our sovereignty as a nation in a profoundly damaging way.
I have friends and people who have debated this issue for years, good friends on both sides of the aisle. This is the issue of so-called birthright citizenship. Are you an American citizen for simply and solely being born on American soil? I remember thinking a long time ago that there was something kind of magical about that concept, that if you are here and in America, and you are born here, you are an American.
It became clearer and clearer to me as that privilege--it is not a right; I want to come back to that in terms of what the 14th Amendment says--but what that privilege means to be an American. It was being abused. It was being abused by people for profit and being abused by people for some sort of monetary benefit or a benefit of some social welfare or benefit of going to a hospital or going to school, all things which I understand, as a parent, seeking, but we have turned on its head everything that is good and great about our Nation.
This opinion today by the United States Supreme Court, saying that the 14th Amendment, which was very clearly ratified to deal with the issue of slavery in a post-slavery world--to whom do these former slaves now owe allegiance? To factor that into determining how you define our character, as we are adopting the 14th Amendment, it was very clear that ``subject of the jurisdiction thereof'' was meant to deal with that.
For five Supreme Court Justices today to manufacture in whole cloth that the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, somehow conferred upon someone citizenship because a parent came to the United States and birthed the child on American soil, despite not being a citizen and despite not having any allegiance to the United States, is not just appalling, but it begs: Who we are as a nation?
The Chief Justice, no doubt, and Justice Barrett, and the other three Justices who joined that opinion no doubt believe they were doing some sort of great service by trying to establish that this means some great thing for the United States.
I would argue that what they are doing is destroying the United States because you no longer have a sovereign nation. If you are telling the world that all you have to do is flout our laws and break our laws, come to our country and have a child, and that child gets to have citizenship, which has things conferred upon it--voting and other privileges and access to welfare benefits--then all of those who bled and died for this great Nation, to just hand that over in violation of the entire text, spirit, and letter of the Constitution and the 14th Amendment, is detrimental to our republican form of government.
Roberts, emphasizing: Children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States satisfy both elements of the Citizenship Clause under the Constitution, he concluded, they are citizens at birth.
That is false.
The Supreme Court majority ruled that illegal aliens invading our country, having U.S.-born children, and is somehow legally sound even though the Justices in Wong Kim Ark rejected that notion.
This is something that has been debated for a long time, but when we think about this, an estimated 124,000 to 300,000 anchor babies--which are children born to illegal aliens--are born each year. In 2023, up to 250,000 children were born to illegal aliens, which accounted for 7 percent of total births.
I cannot imagine that if you told those men that were sitting in the foxholes in Bastogne, and they were storming the beaches in Normandy to scale the cliffs, had bullets firing at them, that they would say: Yeah, sure, let's turn over the country and our sovereignty as a nation to anyone who comes onto our soil and just tries to claim it.
It is being abused by our adversaries to undermine our national security.
The fact is, the United States Congress cannot just sit idly by and allow the Supreme Court to do this. People will say: Well, Chip, separation of powers. The Supreme Court is going to get the final word on what the law is.
Well, I would tell you that the Supreme Court has clearly made significant errors in judgment in the past. No one needs to look too far to figure out what that is: Plessy. There have been other opinions, Roe v. Wade, which the Court has now rightly gone in a different direction.
I would argue, though, that the Congress needs to react swiftly and make very clear that we define what ``subject to the jurisdiction thereof'' means, that Congress should act swiftly to say we are not going to fund this false notion of who citizens are; and, thirdly, that we are going to just pause immigration.
If the Supreme Court of the United States, in its infinite wisdom, says they get to decide as the final arbiter who is or is not a citizen, then why should Congress allow people to come into the United States to abuse it, to have children, to take advantage of a citizenship that is not actually allowed under the Constitution because the Supreme Court got it wrong?
If the Supreme Court were to order or interpret the law that the President of the United States or the Speaker of
the House or the majority leader of the Senate needs to appear before them unclothed to report to the Supreme Court, should those leaders of the other branches comply?
Well, Chip, that is absurd. Okay. Well, if the Supreme Court issues a ruling that is patently and factually unconstitutional, must the other branches follow it?
I say no. I say no.
Well, Chip, that is a controversial opinion.
I don't think so.
The Constitution of the United States does not stand for the proposition that the Court ruled today. It simply does not. I think even a basic reading of the Constitution would make that clear.
Justice Thomas and Justice Alito, both excoriating the majority opinion, made sure that it is very clear how wrong their opinion was. However, to make that determination begs the question of what this body, Article I, must do. Not can do, must do.
This is the people's House. I can tell you that the people who I represent have no interest in continuing to pay taxes to fund people who are coming to the United States to take advantage of our country for profit or for any other motive. They have no interest in doing that. So why should we continue to fund a government that would do that?
Look, I can tell you right now that for the decisions I have remaining in my time in Congress in this term, for the remainder of our funding decisions and appropriations, for whatever we are going to do in reconciliation, we better fix this. This Congress better fix this because I have no interest in continuing to fund the operations of a government that has been undermined by the United States Supreme Court.
We should pause all immigration immediately. And, by the way, they say: Chip, you can't get that through the Senate. We have 60 votes.
Well, let's keep having that fight, too, because the SAVE America Act is not the actual full nature of the fight. The issue here is whether there is in any way, shape, or form a 60-vote threshold that we have to follow. There is not.
The Senate, as a body, is, yes, to be a cooling saucer. Yes, as a conservative, I like there to be barriers to quick action for legislation, but under no circumstances does the Constitution or anything else contemplate 60 votes, besides rules arbitrarily set by Members of the Senate.
Here we are at a time when this body, Congress--the House and the Senate together--need to act to protect our Nation's sovereignty: By allowing only American citizens to vote in American elections; to require voter identification in elections of our Federal officials; to, yes, make very clear that ``subject to the jurisdiction thereof'' means what it means; and, no, we are not going to import people into the United States as long as we are being told absolutely you must grant citizenship for any child born here.
We have a choice, and we need to make it. We can pass the laws necessary to address what the Court did. We can also codify what the President has been doing to secure our border to stop the abuse of the American people that was happening under Biden and Mayorkas by codifying--as we did under H.R. 2 in the last Congress--that work, stop the abuse of asylum, stop the abuse of parole, stop the abuse of catch- and-release policies and all the policies that were being abused to undermine our country which, by the way, is also tied to the birthright citizenship issue.
You cannot have laws that are being openly exploited by certain Americans in conjunction with NGOs and outside groups and people who want to exploit us, including our enemies, to put people in the United States, have the Court just declare that they can be citizens because they decided so, have taxpayer dollars providing benefits to people who have no allegiance to this country, who come here and fly other flags, who come here and say we should change our country; that cannot be how a sovereign nation exists.
We are here this week in this town, and we are going to have a great celebration, and we should. This country has been able, more than any other country on the face of the Earth in history, to provide a better way of life, prosperity, freedom, and the ability to carry out one's faith. This country has led the world, but here we are, and this country hangs in the balance.
For 250 years, we have been that beacon of hope. God bless all of the people who want to come to our country. I am glad they do, and I want to be able to invite and have people come to our country. However, when our country has been badly exploited for decades, when there are people here right now who want to destroy the United States, who want it to become an Islamic state, who want to milk our welfare benefits, commit fraud against the country, and who don't want to raise the American flag with the flag of another country, I do not understand for the life of me why we do not continue to do what we are doing by this President and remove people and why this Congress will not act right now, immediately, to respond to the Supreme Court.
There is no criticism of leadership. I understand why we are leaving. It is July Fourth. I want to go to Kerrville. I get it, but right now I would rather be here. I would rather be here every day from now until we actually solve the problem.
If we do not defend this country, if we do not make sure that we can have laws that we can depend upon and a Constitution that we can rally around and believe in it, then what do we have left?
The other thing that is getting lost in the shuffle of this celebration--I do want to close with this. I have talked about it before. It is not just the 250th birthday of the United States, but the 200th anniversary this Saturday of the passing of both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on the same day.
I bring that up for a reason in closing. We have a duty to protect that which I believe was divinely inspired by the Lord Almighty. We put In God We Trust up there for a reason. We have Moses overlooking the Chamber for a reason.
You cannot tell me, Mr. Speaker, that Jefferson and Adams, both so central to both the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and its adoption by the Continental Congress on July 2 by a vote, July 4 by drafting, in 1776 to then pass both 50 years to the day on July 4, 2026, with Adams passing saying: Jefferson lives, only to find out, in truth, Jefferson had passed.
These were two men who squabbled, two men who fought, and two men who had different views in terms of federalism but who came together in mutual respect for what they had accomplished and 50 years later pass on the same day, you cannot tell me, Mr. Speaker, that this Nation was not divinely inspired and divinely created.
As we sit here in our 250th birthday and that 200th anniversary of the passing of those two great men, my ask of all Americans and the leadership of this great Nation is that we put it all on the line to save that which was, in fact, divinely given to us.
God gave this to us and to the world. The people of the world who want to come here will not have a nation to come to if it is no longer a nation. We have a duty to protect it. It is, in fact, compassionate to protect this Nation for everyone in the world.
That is our calling for our next 250 years. That is why we are here. It is why I wish we were all here right now, in full-throated debate, just as they were in the Continental Congress, at its each other's throats until they finally got unanimity to adopt the Declaration and to take that vote and to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
