Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I claim the time in actual opposition to the bill.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this legislation, and I do so reluctantly, because I know of the significant amount of work by my friend from Missouri; by those, frankly, on both sides of the aisle to reach agreement; and my friends on Ways and Means.

There are important provisions in this legislation that are critical for job growth, for economic growth, and critical for the well-being of our country. There are numerous businesses I know in Texas and around this country that understand the importance of the expensing provisions, the interest provisions, and research and development.

However, unfortunately, as happens in this town, this legislation comes with provisions that the people I represent are tired of. They are provisions that would continue to expand the welfare state--as The Wall Street Journal editorialized about--by expanding the child tax credit in ways that will continue to fund people directly through refundable credits, which we find to be problematic, and we think undermines the kind of economic activity and incentive to work and incentive to produce value that we think is critically important for economic growth.

Importantly, that provision is also available to parents who are here in this country illegally with children born in the United States. We think that is a problem. We think that is not just allowing, essentially, birthright citizenship anchor babies, but funding it. That is a problem.

Now, my colleagues on this side of the aisle will rejoin that that was a product of the 2017 bill that was pushed by and passed by Republicans, including President Trump, to which I say: Right. So what? It is still wrong. It is still bad policy. We shouldn't do it, and we should not be perpetuating it now.

All through the eleventh hour last night, I worked hard trying to find a way to come up with a provision that might be palatable on both sides of the aisle, this side of the aisle, to find a way to say: Let's get that provision pulled off so we can move the pieces that will be good for economic growth and prosperity that I think has bipartisan support and clear support on this side of the aisle.

Unfortunately, we have not done that.

I am getting a lot of correspondence from people that I represent who are sick of the same old game in this town. They are sick of everyone saying that we are just going to keep doing the same thing, and that we are going to, in this case, again, continue to expand the welfare state in a way that entices people to come and benefit from the United States illegally at a time when we have a heightened level of illegal traffic into the United States: 300,000 people crossing the border in December, and millions who have crossed under this President. We are now, in the middle of that crisis, going to continue to fuel the fire.

I think that is a mistake. I think it is a mistake for the country. I think it is a mistake on policy. I think it is a mistake politically.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Gaetz).

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Gaetz).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman Texas (Mr. Doggett).

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Massie).

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Sanchez).

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Gaetz).

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

Mr. Speaker, the truth is, illegal immigrants are eligible for the CTC expansion because they can get an individual taxpayer identification number in lieu of a Social Security number.

In fact, in the USA Today, somebody who is a proponent of this actually opined and wrote in the USA Today, ``How the Child Tax Credit Could Lift Undocumented Immigrants out of Poverty.''

That is just the truth. It is what we actually did in 2017. I don't care if my colleagues on this side of the aisle think that is a good idea. I don't care if they are willing to weigh that against what they believe is good for the corporate changes to the law, but don't try to snow the American people. That is what we are doing.

But my colleagues on this side of the aisle will thump their chest about being so great on the border, and yet,

the border is wide open. There was still 300,000 pouring across in December.

Oh, what have we done? We had some votes, but we are still funding it. Here, we are not just funding it, we are juicing it. We are actually encouraging it. We are supplementing it. We are saying: Come on over here, have children, and get a tax credit.

How is that a policy that the American people want to support?

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Perry).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Wisconsin (Ms. Moore).

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Good).

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro), the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee.

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, The Wall Street Journal editorial last week said about this bill:

``Up to $1,600 of the $2,000 credit is refundable, and the bipartisan bill would make $2,000 refundable by 2025.'' Now, in fairness, ``A $1,400 limit was tethered to inflation under the 2017 GOP tax law and is thus increasing over time anyway.''

The general point here is: ``But at least admit this is income redistribution, not `tax relief'. . . . '' It is income redistribution.

``Worse, the deal undermines the incentive to work in return for the credit. The current credit at least requires a small amount of income-- a mere $2,500--to begin to claim it. That means it gives low-income Americans an incentive to work more to earn more, which is good for them and their children.''

However, this would allow parents to ``rely on the prior year's income to trigger the credit for 2024 and 2025. Work one year--and earn benefits for two. The practical effect is to `cut the work requirement in half,' '' according to a report by the American Enterprise Institute.

The fact is the editorial closes: ``The business lobby wants the tax breaks.'' By the way, this is The Wall Street Journal editorial. ``The business lobby wants the tax breaks, and some Democrats in Congress want them as well. But those policies ought to stand or fall on their merits, not on a political trade that will do more harm than good.''

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time remains.

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

Mr. Speaker, I reiterate my appreciation to my friend, the chairman, and all those who worked on this bill in the Ways and Means Committee.

There are a lot of good provisions in this bill, many of which I support. There are good provisions in there to help economic growth-- the expensing provisions, interest, R&D--but I have serious reservations. The fact of the matter is for all those watching at home, to my constituents, this bill does not fix the problem that allows illegal aliens who have children who were born in the United States to claim the tax credit. It takes the problem we have with so-called birthright citizenship and anchor babies and doubles down on it, makes it worse. That was a mistake in 2017. We should rectify that mistake.

However, worse, it goes on and expands the credit.

Mr. Speaker, 91\1/2\ percent of the relief in this bill are cash welfare payments to families that pay no Federal income taxes. It provides a total of just $2.8 billion to working families that pay taxes over 3 years. The fact is, the credit does expand, and it gets to be refundable to the full tune of $2,000 by 2025.

These provisions undermine the benefits that we are trying to provide for economic growth which, I might add, are only a 2-year extension. It puts all of this in one big basket in 2025, taking away any leverage we are going to have by giving the other side what they want on the child tax credit.

The fact of the matter is, we should not be supporting this bill. We should be doing what we said we would do when we got into power: We should secure the border of the United States, we should cut spending, and we should honor what we campaigned on in this body.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas for his service. We will be missing him next Congress, but we still have some more time and work to do together.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't want to talk about the bills that are sitting here in front of them because they are going to vote against at least three of them. We know that because they did it in Judiciary Committee.

These bills are pretty simple. If you are here and you evade Border Patrol, you can't stay here or come here. If you are here and you have committed Social Security fraud, you can't stay here or come here. If you are here and you have committed a DUI, you can't stay here or come here. Judiciary Democrats voted against all three of those. Let's put aside that if you are here, illegally, you should be deported anyway.

Then there is if you are here and a member of Hamas, or participated in, or facilitated the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, you cannot stay here or come here. Now, on that, it was passed unanimously. We will see what happens when it comes to the floor when some of the folks not on Judiciary Committee look at the bill.

I find it interesting that a blanket statement is made that some of us take our orders from former President Trump. Well, if somebody has a phone line into Mar-a-Lago, why don't you give him a call? I think he would be surprised to hear that I take orders from former President Trump, in light

of the recent time I have spent around the country.

I would tell you this: I don't take orders from the former President. I know that we shouldn't make this a political issue. I know this is an issue we should solve, but I don't think that is what the former President was saying.

I think the former President was saying this bill in the Senate is garbage, that it will make the problem worse; that we have all the power we need now to secure the border, and that the current President and current administration are ignoring it, and, indeed, purposely avoiding the law in order to flood America, which is endangering Americans; fentanyl flowing in; empowering cartels; empowering China; terrorists coming into our country; and criminals coming into our country. That is the truth. What the former President knows is that the bill being negotiated in the Senate is not a good one. He is calling that out.

However, I can assure you, I don't take orders from the former President, nor do I take orders from Somalis in Minnesota, but some people do. That is the truth.

The fact here is, we have legislation before us right now to address real problems for the people that we represent. I can tell you we do in Texas. We have a bill being negotiated in the Senate that is being deemed by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle as, Oh, a reasonable solution. A reasonable solution, when we had a bill last year that would actually secure the border with H.R. 2, which would close loopholes being exploited by our Democratic colleagues.

I had witnesses in a recent hearing on the Constitution and States stepping into the breach. The first assistant attorney general of Texas and the former attorney general of Arizona, they all testified under oath that there is an invasion. They all came forward to say that it was the right of the Governors, the right of the States to step in.

I had the ACLU witness acknowledge to me: I said, Hey, if cartels are coming guns a-blazing, they come across the river, can you defend yourself?

He said, Well, if it is a violation of State law, sure.

I said, Oh, really? That is an interesting piece of information to hear from the ACLU, that the State, that the Governor can, in fact, do what is necessary to defend the people of his State based on the laws of that State and, frankly, based on every understanding of what a leadership of a sovereign would do, and that is the truth.

Right now what we have are Democrats in the Senate wanting to hide behind a bill they know has no chance of moving through because, frankly, if it were passed, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are concerned about us campaigning on this, making it a political issue.

If that legislation were passed, the issue would still exist because the legislation wouldn't do anything to stop it. It sets a floor, not a ceiling. It sets a standard of 5,000 a day. Come on in, 1.8 million folks. That is the truth, if you read the bill.

The reality is, the gentleman talks about, Oh, we have 38,000 people in detention. Well, the truth is, we had 900,000 people get released last year; 900,000 got released. That doesn't count the ICE releases, that doesn't count the 50,000 a month of got-aways. These are the numbers we are talking about, and they are on an extraordinary level.

I remind everybody that here before us is legislation that all it does is try to layer on a commonsense ability to remove bad actors, DUIs, those affiliated with Hamas, Border Patrol having to chase people in high-speed chases, and those committing Social Security fraud. My Democratic colleagues don't want to talk about it because they are not going to support those commonsense measures.

Madam Speaker, I rise to claim the time in opposition.

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

Madam Speaker, I do rise in opposition to the legislation that was just sent to the United States House of Representatives from the United States Senate.

I just spent a good deal of time going around the country, traveling to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Madam Speaker, you might imagine why.

I spoke to thousands of Americans. Not one American said: Please, Congressman Roy, add more money to the debt. Please, Congressman Roy, keep spending money we don't have. Keep deficit spending every year, bankrupting our kids and grandkids.

Nonetheless, that is precisely what we are doing yet again, kicking the can down the road. That is what we do. It is what we do best in this Chamber. It is what we do best in Congress. It is why the American people are so frustrated with this town and with the swamp because it is a swamp that is entirely not drained.

We are sitting here doing the same thing again. It is Groundhog Day in the House Chamber all the time, every day, yet again spending money we don't have.

Last year, an agreement was reached with spending levels and caps. Now, I didn't particularly love those levels

and caps. A number of us didn't. There were supposedly some side deals.

Madam Speaker, does that sound swampy? Side deals. What was written into the law? What was written into the law was a level that was somewhere around a 1 percent reduction over last year's enormously bloated omnibus spending level, a 1 percent cut.

Can this body possibly adhere to those caps? No. We can't do that.

Last year, we tried to fix this place. We tried to do appropriations bills. We passed 10 appropriations bills out of the committee and 7 appropriations bills off the floor. We tried to restore regular order. We had about 1,100 amendments. We tried to process those so the American people could see their Chamber working again.

Nevertheless, what happened? Everything reverts back to the mean in this town, the same old story because a side deal is cut. We have to spend at a higher level, you see, Madam Speaker, and that is what is going on back and forth between the Senate and the House.

The American people need to understand what is happening. This continuing resolution will fund their government at the same level as last year's massive omnibus spending bill that all of my Republican colleagues, all of them with the exception of two in this Chamber, were adamantly opposed to, voted against, spoke out against, put press releases out against, and campaigned against, and they are going to vote for it.

Right now, they are going to vote to continue to spend at that level. Not only that, they are going to vote to continue to fund the radical progressive policies embedded in it, continue to fund the bureaucracy that is at war with the American people, continue to fund open borders, and continue to fund Alejandro Mayorkas even as we attempt to impeach him in the Homeland Security Committee.

We are going to fund him. We are going to fund those open borders. We are going to fund the United Nations. We are going to fund the World Health Organization. We are going to fund UNRWA to give money to the Palestinians to give to Hamas.

We are going to campaign against those things, but we are going to fund them.

My Democratic colleagues want to hide behind side deals rather than adhere to the agreed-upon caps that would at least modestly reduce spending by 1 percent.

That is what is happening in this Chamber, and we are going to do this CR in order to buy time to cut a deal that will increase spending, that will increase spending past the caps in order to honor side deals and to actually increase the funding for a Federal Government that is at war with the people whom I represent.

That is shameful. Under no circumstances should we vote for that. Under no circumstances is this something that we should be supporting. We should stay here and do our work, but, instead, people said: Why can't you give the time back, Congressman Roy, so we can go catch our planes before the snowstorm gets in?

I am sorry. I think maybe we should stay here and do our job and actually find a way to cut spending like we campaign on over and over again.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

General Leave

Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Crane).

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

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Arizona for his comments.

I would note that, in this bill, we will be voting to fund, as I said, a Department of Homeland Security responsible for the border crisis with wide-open borders and continued funding for the CBP One app being used to use parole abusively to flood the zone into Texas where Texas is having to spend $12.5 billion doing the job of the Federal Government.

We will fund the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement, which lost track of 85,000 migrant children, and the Environmental Protection Agency's electric vehicle mandate to make two-thirds of new cars EVs by 2032, destroying our economy and piling up EVs on the lots of car dealerships around the country. We will fund the EPA's natural gas and methane rule, destroying access to reliable energy. We will fund the EPA's power plant rules aimed at knocking off coal and natural gas power plants, making us wholly dependent on wind and sun for energy, the unreliable energy that it is.

We will fund the IRS doling out billions in IRA tax credits to corporations, many of them billion-dollar corporations.

We will fund the World Health Organization undermining our own sovereignty and cozying up to the CCP.

We will fund the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA, which supports Hamas over our ally Israel. Even as we go out and give lip service to supporting Israel, we will be voting to fund their enemies right now, today, on the floor of the House.

We will fund the pro-China, anti-Israel United Nations Human Rights Council.

We will fund a weaponized Department of Justice and FBI going after parents like Scott Smith and Mark Houck.

I have more.

That is what we are doing. We are voting to fund a Federal bureaucracy that is at war with the American people while we indebt our children for generations.

Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Good).

Madam Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from Virginia.

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

Madam Speaker, there are other things that we are funding that we shouldn't: The ATF rule banning up to 40 million pistol braces; the ATF rule massively expanding background checks without the consent of Congress; the Department of Education's student debt cancellation schemes, despite the Supreme Court ruling against them; public health agencies like the CDC, the NIH, and FSA held unaccountable for COVID tyranny, enforcing masks and vaccines upon our children; the Department of Veterans Affairs vaccine mandate, which I have introduced legislation to get rid of; the chief diversity officers at the Department of Defense and throughout government, indoctrinating people, pushing out a radical, leftist agenda with critical race theory and DEI; the Pentagon's abortion travel fund; the FDA's rule allowing abortion drugs to be shipped by mail; taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries at the Department of Defense.

We are funding all of that with taxpayer money and borrowed money. We are indebting our kids and our grandkids to fund the bureaucrats that are undermining the freedom of the American people, preventing them from being able to prosper, according to the rights given to them by the Almighty because this government is failing to do its job, and worse, is interfering with their God-given rights to do what they want to do for their families.

Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Davidson).

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

The American people are tired of getting a complete lack of representation from their Representatives. Nobody in this country looks at Congress and says: Wow. Heck of a job, guys and gals. Well done.

Who would do that? Would we do that?

By the way, it does not matter who is sitting in the Speaker's seat or who has got the majority. We keep doing the same stupid stuff.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have no problem with wide-open borders endangering the people that I represent. None. My constituents are the ones left holding the bag, and the people of Texas are the ones left spending $12.5 billion. My people are the ones who have had six kids die from fentanyl poisoning in the school district that I represent.

It is not fun to smirk at that, is it? We are talking about dead children from fentanyl poisoning because of wide-open borders because of the policies of my Democrat colleagues who refuse to do anything about it. My colleagues won't do anything about the

wide-open borders. I will continue to speak to my colleagues.

Madam Speaker, I am addressing my comments to the Chair. I am addressing the Chair on behalf of the people that I represent who are dying in Texas because of Democrats, directly because of Democrat policies. They can shake their heads all they want, but the blood of the people in Texas is on their hands.

My colleagues flippantly dismiss the fact that people in Texas are dying because of their policies, and the migrants that they pretend to care about are dying because of their policies. Then they lie and say that Texas is responsible for migrants who die in the Rio Grande River when their own Department of Justice offers the truth, which is, those migrants died in the river and were pulled out by Mexican authorities before Border Patrol was ever contacted.

The Democrats have no problem lying to the American people just like Alejandro Mayorkas lied to the American people about Border Patrol agents whipping Haitian migrants.

It is something that happens over and over and over again, but the question for my colleagues on this side of the aisle is: What are we going to do about it? Are we going to keep writing them a blank check? Are we going to keep saying: Here is more money, Secretary Mayorkas? Leave us exposed. Leave people dying. Leave children dying from fentanyl. Migrants are dying in the Rio Grande, so we can go out and campaign on border security.

Why don't we do something about it?

Here we are, again. Catch your flights. Get on out of Washington, D.C., before the snowstorm comes in, but give them all the money in the world they need to endanger the people that we represent.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, everybody in this country expects us to do our job, and yet, we continually fail to do it.

We continue to spend money we don't have, undermining our own national security, and our own well-being, funding a bureaucracy that is at war with the people that we represent.

At some point, we ought to actually do what we campaign on. At some point, on both sides of the aisle, we should actually recognize that the American people expected a republic for the Representatives that they send to the United States House of Representatives to actually represent them.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona for yielding to me. I, too, wish our friend from Ohio well in his future endeavors and appreciated serving with him in the Chamber and appreciate the same sacrifices with respect to our family, our children, and our wives when we are here traveling and the things that we miss out on. I do wish him well.

Today, in the House of Representatives, we voted by suspension of the rules what is called a continuing resolution to continue the funding of government at its current levels. Now, that is just another way in D.C.-speak of saying we aren't doing our job to pass appropriations bills through what we call regular order, the way that you would expect us to do it, send it to the Senate, negotiate back and forth, and then take that and do our job to do the work of the people on how we spend their money.

Last year, we set out to change the way the House works, the gentleman from Arizona knows. We made some progress actually. I had hope. We had moved in the right direction. We passed 10 appropriations of 12 out of committee. We had two ready to go. Seven we passed off the floor of the House.

We passed them not at the level I would prefer--a lower level--but we did pass them at the agreed-upon level last year under the FRA, the debt deal that capped spending. Again, we should have capped it a lot lower. It represented a mere 1 percent cut from last year's bloated level of spending under Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed at the eleventh hour in December of 2022.

Every member of the Republican Conference here today except for two opposed that bill, voted against that omnibus spending bill. They spoke out against it and put out press releases against it. They said that it was enormously expensive, adding up to our debt, passing policies we didn't agree on, done at the eleventh hour right before Christmas. There was massive opposition. Only two in this Chamber on the Republican side voted for it.

Fast forward. Last year, a deal was made and caps were put in place. We got our appropriations bills sent over to the Senate trying to do it at those levels, even though it was a mere just 1 percent cut. I would like to see a 10 percent or 20 percent cut. We wanted to get to pre- COVID spending levels, but this body on a bipartisan basis--a majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats--sent to the Senate a debt deal, lifting the debt $4 trillion. For that, we were supposed to get a 1 percent cut.

Then there is something in this town called side deals.

Does that sound swampy? It is.

There were side deals, agreements saying, no, no, no, that won't be the real deal.

Do you know how I know that? Because the Democratic ranking member on the Appropriations Committee appeared before the Rules Committee about a month ago and said: Well, I voted against the FRA, the debt deal, because the side deals weren't written in it.

Now, she only admitted that after she had said you are not following the law. I said: Well, where in the law are the side deals? Oh, well, they are not in the law. In fact, in her public statement last year, she voted against it and said: I voted against it because they weren't in the law.

Yet today, Senate Democrats and House Republicans were negotiating spending at the level of not the caps, but the caps plus the side deals. That is to say, in plain English, Pelosi spending levels plus another $30 to $40 billion. That is what is happening in the swamp.

However, they couldn't get it done. They couldn't get it done fast enough. So here we are again after we have twice extended Nancy Pelosi's spending levels without getting the appropriations bills done, not getting our job done, not getting the work finished, and today we just agreed--the Senate sent over here another continuing resolution to fund government at Nancy Pelosi's levels, and we concurred in that.

Now, it is not just the debt. It is not just the spending. It is not just the fact that we are $34 trillion in debt. It is what we are funding. It is the policies we are continuing. That is the problem.

Here are just a few. The continuing resolution that we just voted for, a near perfect divide down the Republican Conference, 107 to 106. House leadership had to scurry around to whip up the votes to ensure a majority of Republicans supported this terrible bill.

What did we fund? Again, spending at the level of $1.6-something trillion, Nancy Pelosi's levels, we funded Biden's border crisis while we are currently trying to impeach the Secretary of Homeland Security for failing to secure the border, ignoring his duty to maintain operational control and endangering Americans. Fentanyl is pouring in. We are empowering China, empowering cartels. He lied to us under oath. We are giving him the money. Let's impeach him, but let's keep giving him the money.

A weaponized IRS, an Internal Revenue Service targeting the American people.

A weaponized Department of Justice and FBI that targeted Scott Smith in Loudoun County and Mark Houck, a dad in Philadelphia. Give them the money. Build them a brand-new headquarters. Give them the money.

EPA, electric vehicle mandates. We are piling up electric vehicles on the lots of car dealerships around the country. We have a mandate going into

place to mandate two-thirds of all vehicles will be EVs by 2032, which will massively create inflation for the American people, make goods and services more expensive, and make getting cars more difficult.

The average electric vehicle is about $16,000 more expensive, and where the heck are you going to charge it? The Governor of California actually told people with EVs recently: Please don't plug in your EVs between the hours of 4 and 8 o'clock.

What are you supposed to do if you can't take your car to go do your job?

EPA rules killing coal and natural gas power plants. China has got 1,100 coal-fired plants. We have 250. We are building none; they are building two a week. We are going to kill our own power supply chasing unicorn energy policies. But guess what, we are funding it. Every Republican in this Chamber who campaigns against these things just voted today to fund it.

The World Health Organization, anybody think that is doing us any good besides getting us involved with anti-American sovereignty and undermining our own ability to maintain health policy and our national security? We are funding it.

We are funding the pro-China, anti-Israel United Nations Human Rights Council. We are funding UNRWA, through which dollars flow to the Palestinians--that is Hamas; that is the enemies of Israel. We are going around saying: ``We stand with Israel.''

How many Republicans wear the little pins, ``We stand with Israel''? They are funding opposition to Israel.

ATF rule banning pistol braces. Unconstitutional, unlawful, executive tyranny, not getting congressional approval. We are funding it.

Over here, we are funding the Department of Education's student loan scam. The Supreme Court says you can't do that. The administration does it anyway. Lawlessly. We are saying: Here you go, here's more money.

We are funding the CDC, the NIH, and the FDA. No accountability for COVID tyranny, no restrictions.

We are funding the Department of Veterans Affairs vaccine mandate. I introduced legislation today to say we shouldn't do that. We should get rid of that mandate. We are funding it.

We are funding the chief diversity officers, DEI, critical race theory at the Pentagon and throughout the Federal Government.

The Pentagon's abortion travel fund, transgender surgeries at the Pentagon, funding sex changes.

I could go on and on the number of things that we are funding, but I want to be mindful of my colleague's time.

I will end by going back to the border crisis because it is the number one thing that galls me that Republicans complain about and continue to fund. Our borders are wide open. Our people are in danger. It undermines our national security. Texas and Arizona take it on the chin. We are spending the money to do what the Federal Government is supposed to do. Our people are getting absolutely decimated.

Ranchers are getting killed. Livestock are getting out. Children are dying from fentanyl. Cops are having to go do the job of the Feds. Migrants are dying, dying in the river, in the Rio Grande, dying along the border in Arizona, and we are funding it.

I just don't understand the logic of my colleagues campaigning about these things. I will close with this: Federalist 58, the Founders gave us the power of the purse in the House Chamber to stop an out-of- control executive branch. We should dang well use it.

Mr. Speaker, I unfortunately missed three votes today. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on rollcall No. 11, ``nay'' on rollcall No. 12, and ``yea'' on rollcall No. 13.

Mr. Speaker, I unfortunately missed two votes today. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on rollcall No. 9 and ``yea'' on rollcall No. 10.

personal explanation

Mr. Speaker, with respect to the discussion about who is controlling the time, I would rise in true opposition to claim time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the National Defense Authorization Act, and I say that respectfully to both sides who negotiated the bill, but I think the points that have been made here make my point.

The fact of the matter is what is being stated is that it is impossible to oppose the National Defense Authorization Act because we put a pay raise in it, or because we put something in there that is seemingly so important that we have to ignore the critical destruction of our civil liberties by adding FISA extensions right on the top of it, without doing the reforms necessary to protect the American people.

We do this every year. Then we are told: Oh, congratulations. We just had a conference committee.

No, we didn't. Five people didn't even sign the conference report.

What happened was a deal was cut by leadership, by the four corners, to shove down a predetermined bill into the conference, and said: Take it.

Five people didn't sign it. They sent that conference report back to us, and they said: Take it, pass this before Christmas or you are going to leave our men and women in uniform stranded.

That is what occurred. That is what is actually happening.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Gaetz).

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

I want to clear up one misconception, that somehow there was a block of us who were denying the ability to have a rule on the floor with respect to FISA 702.

The fact is, the question was, was there going to be a rule for something called queen of the hill, in which two bills would have been put forward with no amendments, none. There would have been no debate on the House floor. There would have been no ability to amend it here on the floor.

As usual, it would have been the people who say they are the only ones who know the information needed to make the decisions for the American people to do it in a committee, behind closed doors, often in the SCIF, without half of us knowing any of the information, and then bring it to the floor and say take it or leave it. That was what was going to occur.

We said we shouldn't do it that way, that what we should do is bring a bill to the floor that would reform FISA, allow us to offer amendments, have a debate on the warrant requirements, have a debate on who it applies to, and decide whether or not we are going to actually protect the civil liberties of the American people.

Instead, no, no, what we are going to do is pile on an extension of FISA on the back of our defense authorization; that is, on the back of our men and women in uniform. We are going to allow it to be extended and the procedures extended until April of 2025. That is what your people's House is going to do.

Madam Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Montana (Mr. Rosendale).

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

I would note that even if section 702 lapses at the end of December, the intelligence community will remain able to conduct 702 collection and queries until April 11, 2024. By the way, that is even setting aside Article I authority, which the President of the United States can go exercise under the current FISC certification.

Number two, if the NDAA is passed with a FISA extension, as I said before, to April 19, 2024, it will enable the Biden administration to seek another yearlong certification which would kick it until April of 2025.

Both of those points have been independently corroborated by CRS attorneys as recently as August of this year and by Trump administration attorneys under similar circumstances as reported in The New York Times in 2017, an article that laid that out.

Madam Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Perry).

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

The question is: Who gets to decide? That is the question. Who gets to make these grand pronouncements of who is going to compromise? It sure as hell wasn't any of us. That wasn't the deal.

What was tried to be done with FISA was to bring two bills to the floor unamendable and decided by only small groups of people. That is what was occurring.

With respect to this, it was decided by leadership, both sides, to take and jam the FISA extension on the back of our men and women in uniform and bring that to the floor in violation of our rules for single subject, and then they say take it or leave it. That was what was done. That was the compromise.

If you poke the bear in this town, they don't like to be poked because it changes the way this town works, heaven forbid. It has been going so well and so beautifully that we are $34 trillion in debt, and we have rampant spying on the American people that is occurring.

In 2020 and early 2021, the FBI conducted 278,000 improper searches of Americans, according to the 2022 FISC report. We are supposed to trust the FBI to fix that.

In June 2022, an FBI analyst conducted four queries of section 702 information using the last names of a United States Senator and a State senator based on information that a foreign intelligence service was targeting those individuals.

We have rampant abuses going on, and this body is just going to extend

the very mechanism of those abuses on the back of the National Defense Authorization Act. They say: Have a nice day. Merry Christmas. Go home and have your turkey. Go home and be with your families.

That is what is actually occurring.

Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Gaetz).

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Madam Speaker, we are here because it is right before Christmas and everybody says we must pass this. Okay, we should pass the National Defense Authorization Act.

We should deal with FISA, but it shouldn't be an extension of FISA that continues the same procedures that have been abused. It extends those procedures through April 2025. That is what we are going to do.

The fact of the matter is, there was an NSA analyst's backdoor search for the communication of two individuals the analyst had met on an online dating service. There was an NSA analyst's backdoor search for the communications of a prospective tenant of a rental property they owned.

A backdoor search was conducted for the names and dates of birth of individuals who were registered competitors at an athletic event, a backdoor search for 1,600 Americans who had flown through an airport during a particular date range and were either traveling to or returning from a foreign country, all according to a report from the Privacy and Civil Rights Oversight Board.

The FISA Court issued opinions in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022 decrying FBI agents' persistent and widespread violation of such safeguards.

Now, I do believe we have bipartisan reforms. We just passed a good bill out of the Judiciary Committee. I believe it was a good bill that was passed out of the Intelligence Committee. I prefer the Judiciary Committee bill. I think we should be debating those. I think we should have one bill on the floor, and I think we should amend them.

We have 18 days remaining in the calendar year before FISA allegedly expires, which I already detailed. CRS attorneys and other outside experts are detailing how they will continue to be able to collect data under 702. Nevertheless, we could get it done by December 31 if we actually did our job.

Instead, what we are going to do is kick the can down the road, and we are going to empower the court to be able to set the procedures in place for another 16 months because that is what we do. We are the House of kicking the can down the road. That is what we do every year. We are doing it right now, and we are doing it today.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

I yield myself the balance of my time to close.

Madam Speaker, another point that I think merits observation is that, as we speak, with the 18 days remaining, the Senate, rather than working on ensuring that we get a better NDAA--but, more importantly in this context because that process is kind of played out--rather than figuring out how we are going to deal with FISA and reform it to make sure Americans' civil liberties are protected, we have the Senate in negotiations with the White House on figuring out what crumbs can be given for border security to be attached to Ukraine funding while Zelenskyy is paraded around Washington trying to demand more money for Ukraine when our border is wide-open.

So the Senate has plenty of time to hold themselves here in negotiation with the White House so we can beg for crumbs for the protection of our sovereignty and security of the people of Texas and the people of this country, but we don't have time to figure out how to fix FISA. It is pretty extraordinary. It is pretty extraordinary.

In the meantime, in this very bill is $600 million authorized for Ukraine. Now, I am actually not personally all that troubled by those provisions. We supported them in the authorization bill in July, but I would note, importantly, to my colleagues on this side of the aisle, a majority of Republicans opposed an amendment for the continuation of that funding to Ukraine in a September vote on the floor.

A majority of Republicans opposed that funding, and, yet, we are authorizing it here on the back of a number of provisions that we don't support and on the back of FISA being piled on the top of that Defense authorization bill. For the life of me, I do not understand why this is how Republicans think we should end the year heading out for Christmas.

Madam Speaker, in closing, we have come to the floor today on a bill that all of us want to see passed. Every single one of us wants to pass a National Defense Authorization Act. Every single one of us wants to ensure that our men and women in uniform are paid appropriately, have the tools they need to carry out their job, have the care they need when they get home, and that we do our job. Every single one of us wants to make sure that we do that.

Nevertheless, we are doing a terrible disservice to the people of this country by piling on an extension of a FISA regime that was abused--notably and clearly abused--against American citizens without reforming that piece of legislation by kicking the can down the road and by extending it not just through April but through April of 2025.

A vote for this bill is not just a bill for pay raises and support for our men and women in uniform. A vote for this bill is a perpetuation of the woke policies undermining our military, breaking down morale, driving down recruiting, and now undermining the civil liberties of the American people by not reforming FISA.

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

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

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

Mr. Speaker, this is an impeachment inquiry, defined as an act of asking for information--nothing more, nothing less.

The inquiry is to further investigate at least three things: One, the extent to which Joe Biden as Vice President was involved with the flow of millions of dollars from foreign companies and interests in China, in Ukraine, into the Biden family, into numerous shell companies, including Hunter and his involvement. Devon Archer testified the Vice President was, in fact, at Hunter's business meetings and there are numerous emails and other evidence indicating that the ``Big Guy'' or ``Dad'' was involved.

Two, the extent to which Joe Biden has lied about his involvement, involvement that Hunter all but acknowledged today when avoiding his deposition in a show press conference on the Capitol steps by carefully saying his dad was not involved financially in his businesses.

Three, the extent to which Biden and his administration have obstructed justice by preventing Jack Morgan and Mark Daly with the Department of Justice from testifying to their involvement in DOJ and IRS deciding to slow-walk 2014 and 2015 tax charges so the statute of limitations would lapse.

This is made all the more interesting in light of Hunter Biden being indicted just last week on nine counts of tax offenses for failing to pay $1.4 million in back taxes after writing off hookers and sex clubs. All of this was only brought to light because the judge called the bluff of Weiss' sweetheart deal; second, by only providing 14 of 82,000 emails with pseudonyms of which 29,000 were tied to Biden's family businesses; third, by limiting the scope of witness testimony from Department of Justice witnesses over and over and over again.

This is an impeachment inquiry. That is all. What are my Democratic colleagues afraid of if there is nothing to see there? Maybe that is all the more reason for the inquiry.

Madam Speaker, I appreciate my friend from Texas yielding, and I appreciate his remarks because we share a committed interest to defending the United States, defending our military, and ensuring that our military is able to do its job.

Just in the last 24 hours, I saw that one of our generals put forward a report basically detailing the extent to which our recruiting levels and morale levels are low and that it is a particular time of difficulty for them in terms of recruiting.

I have been engaging with my colleagues, particularly on this side of the aisle, about the National Defense Authorization Act. It is, I believe, going to be on the floor tomorrow under a suspension of the rules. That means we are not going to go through regular

order, we are not going to be able to amend it, and we are not going to be able to have any real significant debate on it.

We are suspending the rules of the House, and we are going to try to jam this bill through by basically trying to get two-thirds of the Chamber to just say: Let's get this done, let's get out of town, and let's go home for Christmas, and send it to the Senate.

That is wrong.

That is a problem. To my colleagues who think we need to do this for our men and women in uniform, the truth is this is undermining our men and women in uniform. We are destroying the soul, we are destroying the culture, and we are destroying the morale of those men and women who signed up to serve and who are frustrated.

They are frustrated by being put in indoctrination classes on diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are frustrated by critical race theory being pushed. They are frustrated by abortion tourism being funded by taxpayer dollars and transgender surgery. They are frustrated by being fired from their job because they dared to say no to getting a COVID vaccine. They are frustrated about the state of affairs when our military is being turned into a social engineering experiment instead of being committed to its core function, which is to defend this country when called upon to do so.

That is the truth.

Our men and women in uniform want change. They want us to stand up and change it.

So what did Republicans do?

In one of the great demonstrations of what a body can do with a bare, thin, and razor-thin majority, we passed a National Defense Authorization Act in July that was a responsible bill and that would fundamentally make sure our military is focused on its core responsibilities and would ensure that our military is able to do its job without being focused on engineering.

I appreciate getting the message from those who delivered it. We have more people than just the two of us on the floor, I am pretty excited. It is a great night in the House Chamber. This is fantastic. We had a great audience. I am not just speaking to the echo chamber, as it were. We have a couple up in the bleachers up there.

Madam Speaker, here is the thing: Republicans passed a responsible National Defense Authorization Act that will make sure our military is focused on its mission.

Madam Speaker, you can see here the House GOP's bill. All of the green checkmarks are what we are talking about here. We ended President Biden's taxpayer-funded abortion travel fund which enables abortion tourism with taxpayer funded dollars. We ended taxpayer-funded gender transition surgery. We ended Biden's radical climate agenda in the carrying out of his executive order, which will promote and push his radical agenda into our military so that we will have a forced migration to electric vehicles and all of the mandates of the Biden executive orders in the Pentagon.

It would protect servicemembers who were discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine. It would ban the drag shows and drag queen story hour on DOD installations and prohibit critical race theory. It would create an inspector general for Ukraine aid. It would prohibit race-based admissions at our military academies, and it would eliminate the chief diversity officers and all these positions that are divvying us up by race.

Here is the thing: Senator Schumer and the Democrats created a bill that did none of those things because they want our military to be a social engineering experiment.

Now, to my colleagues on this side of the aisle who have said: Chip, you are just focusing on the social issues. That is not true. That is not true.

COVID vaccines that force some of our men and women in uniform off of their duty is not a social issue. That is their job. They have got shoved out of their job because they didn't want to have an experimental vaccine shoved in their arm.

It is also not true if you go look through all of the things, Madam Speaker, for example, the Inspector General with respect to Ukraine and other issues, none of the changes that we embraced to try to get our military focused where it needs to be were embraced by Democrats.

So then what happens?

At the end of the year when everybody is panicked, they go around this town, and all the defense lobbyists and all the people go around saying: Oh, my God, you have got to pass the National Defense Authorization Act, or the entire world is going to end, and we are not going to be able to defend the country.

That is not true. It is not true. We believe we should pass such a bill, but that is not true. That is legislating by fear.

Nevertheless, what you see here, Madam Speaker, is this NDAA compromise, National Defense Authorization Act compromise.

Now, Madam Speaker, you would think that we went through some regular process that we have been fighting for this year. Go to conference committee between the Senate and the House.

Wrong. That didn't happen.

There was a conference set up, but what happened is the leaders all got together, they decided what they wanted to jam through before Christmas, they went to the conference, and they said: Take it or leave it. Basically they said: Take it.

Then their conferees sent it back to us. Five of them didn't sign it. That is the truth.

So what do we get?

Madam Speaker, do you see the red Xs?

You see the one green check bans critical race theory which, by the way, is hard to enforce, but, okay, we got that. We have got some weak reforms here with respect to the vaccine issue with COVID-19, and we have got weak reforms with respect to the Inspector General of Ukraine.

In other words, we got one piece of it. We didn't get everything we had put in there, and that is it. We didn't get the other stuff. Nonetheless, that is not what they are telling you, Madam Speaker. They are going around telling you saying: Oh, yeah, we ended the drag queen story hour.

That is not true. What they did is they are accepting the Defense Department's characterization of the rules they are going to follow. They didn't actually include the language that restricts it.

So here is the way this town works, and then I am going to yield to my friend from Georgia because I just want everybody to understand, this is the way this town works: you govern by fear. You go up to a deadline, and you say: You must do this because I haven't got to the whipped cream with the cherry on top, which is this Defense bill watered down that not one Republican should support.

Let me be clear. There is no justification for supporting a bill that does not materially change the direction of our military away from being social engineering back toward its mission.

Nevertheless, what did they do?

They added the extension of surveillance, what we call FISA.

What does that mean?

Madam Speaker, you have read about all of the surveillance that has been carried out on American citizens. You know all about it through Carter Page. You know about the extent to which there has been rampant abuses by the FBI targeting American citizens and backdooring the ability to gather information on non-Americans and use that to target Americans. It happened.

They took January 6 names, they stuck them into the database, the query, the database that was collected on these non-American targets, and they have put the names of January 6 people into the database. Oh, the FBI says: Don't worry. We fixed it.

Nevertheless, Madam Speaker, can we really see what it was that they fixed?

Can we really look under the hood?

We are trying to pass reforms to what we call FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. We should pass reforms right now before we leave town.

If we don't, then we should all be eating our Christmas dinner on the floor of this House, but, no, what are we going to do tomorrow?

We are going to take the National Defense Authorization Act with all of these red Xs--yes, it is true, all of you leadership hack staffers who are running around and saying that it is not true, come down and debate me on it

because it is true--they are going to add a FISA extension that will take it to April of this next year, and, worse yet, the procedures under that will extend all the way until April of 2025.

Then my colleagues get frustrated, and they say: Well, Chip, why do you say things like name one thing we have done?

It is because of this. It is because we extend the same stuff and kick the can down the road. We do a National Defense Authorization Act which changes precious little, we jam it through, violating our own rules with respect to germaneness and single subject bills, we pile on FISA, we extend it to April of 2025, and then we go to the American people. We lie to them, and then we say that we did something great.

We should reject this. My colleagues should reject it tomorrow. We should stand up for the American people and do what we said we would do.

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas. He is one of my best friends in the House, and one of the best Members we have in this body. His constituents are blessed to have him.

Madam Speaker, I am proud to stand here with these gentlemen here on the

floor. I will say in firm defense of our men and women in uniform and in firm defense of our appropriate use of intelligence surveillance on foreign subjects, on foreign targets, that is what we should be doing, but instead it has been abused by the FBI, abused by our intelligence apparatus to target Americans.

What are we going to do when we finally get the chance to deal with the reauthorization? We kick the can down the road, extend it to April, and that means extending it until April 2025; thus, the same procedures, the same abuses can continue with nothing but the promises of reforms within the FBI.

That is not good enough. This is the people's House. We are supposed to stand up and defend the people who sent us here.

I want to read something. In a Christmas Day 1944 letter to his mother and sister Rose, living in Washington, D.C., Sergeant David Warman, 1st Infantry Division, wrote: ``This is Christmas morning, and I'm writing from a foxhole. The weather is very clear and sunny and there is slightly over two inches of snow which fell the other day. It is way below freezing, and I am wrapped in blankets as I write.

``As you know from the papers, the Germans have come out of their holes to put on a great drive to push us off their soil.''

He later writes in that letter: ``Let's hope the end is near and peace again comes to Earth quickly and this time permanently.

``How are you both? I hope you have a happy holiday season and don't have too many gloomy thoughts about me. True, my life is very uncomfortable and, I might say, uncertain, but I'm still around and who knows--I may get out without a scratch. So don't worry about me.''

He and the men next to him in those foxholes knew why they were there. Those of us in this body need to pause and consider whether we know why we are here, whether we are doing our duty with the seriousness demanded by the sacrifices like theirs.

When we get on our planes and fly home for Christmas, rather than doing our job to protect the civil liberties of the American people by reforming FISA and doing our job here, we are doing a disservice to those men who sat in the foxholes on Christmas Day in 1944 and to the men and women in uniform we ask to go around the world defending us.

I get a little sick and tired of the preaching on the floor about what we need to do to defend our men and women in uniform by saying, you must pass the NDAA and you must do it now, but never mind the reforms you need to do to ensure we are doing it the right way; to make sure our military is focused on its mission rather than social engineering, so you can boost the morale, boost recruiting, boost the effectiveness, undo the damage being done, and not layer on it a disastrous kicking the can down the road by putting more surveillance power still on the back of our men and women in uniform. That is not the way that we should be conducting business.

I implore my colleagues on this side of the aisle, don't do that. Don't use our men and women in uniform as an excuse to shirk our responsibility to actually reform the laws we were sent here to reform.

We have bipartisan legislation sitting right before us--Judiciary Committee, Intel Committee--that would reform these things. We should put them on the floor--or put one of them on the floor--we should amend them, and then we should send it to the Senate and tell them to do their job.

We should stop governing by fear and the false pressure of deadlines. Let's do our job for the American people. Let's send them a Christmas present that we are going to stand up and defend them and their civil liberties. That is what we should do tomorrow.

Madam Speaker, I implore my colleagues to oppose the NDAA with FISA added on it.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I noticed that the gentlewoman from New Mexico just posited that it is Republicans who want to drive up the prices and costs of everything for the American people. However, Mr. Speaker, what she doesn't tell you is that what she means is that we don't believe that government funding is how one measures how people prosper in this country. In fact, it is our Democratic colleagues who force through regulations, policies, and programs that are making the American Dream completely out of reach for the American people. We are seeing it every single day with a President and administration that literally don't care what the impact is on the average American family.

Mr. Speaker, 87 percent of Americans do not have student loans. Large numbers of Americans have paid off their student loans or are still working to do so. My wife, who is the product of a single mom and who put herself through school and figured it out, is still paying off her loans, which she has done for 20 years now. That is the truth.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to ignore the Supreme Court. They want to end-run both common sense and the law. They want to find ways to subsidize the handful at the expense of the many.

They are doing it not just with education. While they destroy our education system and undermine the American Dream for the American public, they are also doing it with respect to chasing unicorn energy dreams while they subsidize billion-dollar corporations. They subsidize the wealthy with EVs, electric vehicles that cost $16,000 more than the average internal combustion engine. Now, they have a rule being carried out by executive fiat by the administration that they want to put in place that will force, by 2032, approximately two-thirds of the fleet of automobiles being built for the American people to be electric vehicles.

That might be concerning if you are a working-class American given that they cost $16,000 more, given that they are demonstrably more expensive to repair, and given that they are demonstrably less flexible for your life, Mr. Speaker. If you live, for example, in Texas, you might need to drive from Austin to Midland or Austin to Dallas or Houston or need to be able to move around the State. You might be a farmer and need to haul goods and services.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't seem to care about people who live in the northern States, where it is cold and where batteries take a full charge just to defrost--in Alaska, for example.

That mandate doesn't seem to matter to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, so the American people are going to be the ones left holding the bag, unable to do their jobs, unable to carry out their livelihood, and unable to afford the basics of life.

The average American family is spending $11,000 a year more just to make ends meet since the beginning of this administration in January 2021. Now, this administration wants to pile on.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to stop us from doing our job in Article I to check an out-of-control executive branch and an out-of-control Biden administration that is bankrupting the American family and destroying the American Dream.

Republicans in this body, in this Chamber, have been advancing bill after bill that would help the American people, secure the border, have a strong national defense, help them afford education, and stop the ridiculousness of these mandates driving up the cost of vehicles. They send them over to the Senate, and they die.

The only question is whether Republicans are going to stand up and jam down the throats of recalcitrant Democrats and this administration changes to this administration's policies that are undermining the American people and the American Dream.

That is the truth. That is the actual truth.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for spending time here on the floor of the House commemorating the life of former First Lady Carter. We are reminded, as we heard his words and as we have commemorated her life, of the longstanding love affair and relationship between the First Lady and President Carter.

Regardless of my disagreements with them on policy and politics, they are two great public servants who committed to live out their faith, their Southern Baptist Christian faith, in real time, whether it was Habitat for Humanity or in numerous other ways.

We are reminded of how important it is for those of us in public service to have our committed spouses--in my case, my committed wife, who is at home carrying out all the tasks of keeping our family, with a 14-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter, going--how we could not be here without them, and how honored we are by their sacrifices on our behalf and cannot possibly convey what it means while we are up here doing the work of the people to have our wives or husbands back home supporting us from afar.

I would note, while we are commemorating our spouses--in this case, First Lady Carter--or the longstanding relationship between former President Bush and Barbara Bush, how important those relationships are for all of us in public service.

I would also be remiss if we didn't talk about our mothers. My mama turned 75 last week, and I was not able to be here to wish her a happy birthday, so I am going to wish her a happy belated birthday a week later and thank her for all she has done for me and all of her sacrifices and her love in raising me.

We in my family believe in the American Dream and believe in that generational transfer of love of this country and transfer of the work of one generation to the next, a generation that was working the fields that then became a generation that was working in the factories that became a generation that was then going to college to a generation that would then have a son that could go to law school and end up on the floor of the House of Representatives.

That is what is great about this country. That is what we need to restore in this country.

On that note of respect and love for our parents, our love for our moms, I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Williams), my friend, to be able to give him some time on the floor to commemorate the life of his mama.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from New York for his touching remarks about his mother. We will be praying for him and his family, knowing that she is in a better place, knowing that we are all here for a brief period of time, and we are celebrating a life well lived. I am sure she was proud to see you on the floor of the House of Representatives. We will honor her life by doing our job.

To that point, you heard my friend from New York (Mr. Williams) talking about the life of his family, and it reflected what I started talking about, that generational transfer of the American Dream, the extent to which one generation sacrifices so the next can live that American Dream.

My grandmother was a single mom in West Texas with my father, who was a 7-year-old stricken with polio. She had just lost her husband, my grandfather, to cancer. She didn't run around asking for help. She didn't say: Where is the government? She got a second job. She woke up at 4:00 in the morning. She did all the rehab my father needed so that he could walk, got him through polio. She ran and became the first woman elected county clerk in Nolan County, Texas. She wasn't running around asking for some sort of handout because her father was an orphan, the bastard child of somebody that we don't know--we believe him to have been an American Indian in Mississippi--and was sitting in an orphanage and then moves to West Texas to figure out how to build a family, build the American Dream, farm. That is where my grandmother grew up.

She didn't ask for people to be giving her something because her family wasn't treated right, or she drew a short straw because her husband died of cancer, or her son had polio. She just worked. She just did what you are supposed to do.

That core aspect of the American Dream is what currently is increasingly unattainable for the vast majority of Americans. Too many Americans today are looking out and saying: I cannot live as my parents and my grandparents did. I can't afford to buy a house because interest rates are so

high and houses are so high. I can't afford to buy a car. I can't afford to buy groceries. I can't figure out how to manage to keep my family safe and secure in my own home and community. They are looking out across the future and over the horizon.

For the first time in really our history, Americans are questioning whether this country will exist for their kids and grandkids, whether their kids and grandkids will be able to have a better life than they did. That is unacceptable, but yet that is what we currently face.

I want to be very clear. This is the direct consequence of radical leftist positions by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle in this body, in the other Chamber, and in the White House. It is the direct consequence of Democrats who refuse to sit down at the table to constrain spending when we need to, to secure the border of the United States, to determine foreign policy that is built on the national security interests of the United States and not the fad of wearing a pin.

They don't want to work with us on how to have a military focused on how to do its job rather than radical social engineering to reengineer the Department of Defense. They don't want to sit down and work with us to ensure that we are able to have the energy that we need to power our homes affordably.

All of these things that I am rattling off are actual existential threats that our country faces.

Spending: We are $34 trillion in debt. Nobody possibly knows what $34 trillion of debt means.

I can tell you what it means in terms of annual interest. We are now about to be spending more in interest on our debt than to fund the national defense of the United States. Imagine that.

How can a country succeed, how can we sustain ourselves, if we are paying more on interest because of our own debt, because of our irresponsible spending, than on defending our country? Yet that is what we are doing.

This year, we are spending $2 trillion more than we take in and we are doing nothing to stop it.

Republicans are trying to hold the line on spending. We get no support from our Democratic colleagues.

Speaker Johnson is trying to hold the line against the Senate that wants to keep spending more money, Democratic colleagues who want to spend more money, and a few of my own Republican colleagues who want to spend more money.

The Speaker should be congratulated and should be praised for holding the line on spending. We need to finish the job, and Republicans need to unite around the Speaker of the House to send a loud message to our Democratic colleagues and a loud message to the American people that we are no longer going to continue to spend money we don't have, destroying the American Dream, driving up inflation, driving up interest rates, leveraging our own security to the rest of the world, and making it to where the American dollar is worth nothing.

We have an obligation to hold the line on spending. Are we going to fight? Are we going to stop the dealmaking, the backroom deals, the side deals--in this instance, the $54 billion of side deals that my Democratic colleagues expect Republicans to pack into a spending bill in order to buy their votes?

Republicans should say no to side deals and gimmicks that blow the lid off spending.

Republicans should say no to unfunded supplemental spending for wars, no matter how meritorious.

Do I believe we should help Israel? You bet.

Did Republicans on this floor, with the leadership of Speaker Johnson, send $14 billion over to the Senate to fund Israel? Yes, we did.

Was it paid for? Yes, it was. It was paid for out of money set aside to expand the IRS to target Americans.

Democrats, on a party-line vote in the Senate, killed that bill.

Democrats in the Senate are more interested in siding with the IRS, expanding the IRS to target American citizens, than they are to stand with Israel or to be fiscally responsible by taking money already appropriated and moving it over to pay for an emergency, that emergency being our friends being assaulted, our friends in Israel being attacked, with young women being brutally raped, babies being killed, babies being kidnapped, and innocent civilians shot in the streets.

We saw it with our own eyes. Yet we have colleagues on the other side of the aisle who don't want to talk about that. They want to brush it aside. Oh, we can't talk about rape. We need to balance that we are told by the progressive left.

Republicans stood up alongside our friends in Israel, we passed a bill that would fund them, we sent it to the Senate, and Democrats in the Senate chose the IRS over Israel.

Are we going to do our job to spend responsibly?

We have a choice to make. When the funding of the government runs out in January and early February, we have a choice to make. I hope Republicans in this body will hold the line and force Republicans and Democrats alike in the Senate to stop spending money we don't have, mortgaging the futures of our kids and grandkids.

That is one existential threat. That alone is worth throwing everything we have at this place to fight to stop spending money we don't have, to hold the line on piling up debt.

There is another existential threat: wide open borders. Our borders right now are in crisis.

Just today, video footage of a breached border wall surfaced with illegal migrants rushing through an opening in the border wall with their human smuggler shrugging and just saluting the camera.

We have no rules at the southern border now. We have no border. We have people from all over the world bum-rushing the border of the United States from terrorist countries, criminals, and people on the terrorist watch list. We have millions that have been released into the United States under this administration, and the people in border States, like my home State of Texas, are the ones left holding the bag.

In this case it was Arizona. Yesterday, the port of entry in Lukeville, Arizona, was shut down. A port of entry had to be shut down because Border Patrol could not handle the mass flood of migrants coming across the border.

Last Monday morning, more than 5,000 migrants were in custody, far more than Lukeville's holding capacity. I got notices from people just today. In Eagle Pass, in Del Rio, people flooding into Texas, Border Patrol overwhelmed.

Last Thursday, while transporting illegal migrants, a human smuggler's car caught fire while driving 100 miles per hour through Kinney County, Texas, near where I live.

We can fix that. We can secure the border. We can do it in a matter of weeks. There is no magic. All we need to do is enforce the laws and fix some of the laws that have some loopholes.

House Republicans passed H.R. 2, the strongest border security bill we have ever passed. We sent it to the Senate, and it is sitting there. They refuse to take it up, because Senate Democrats, like my House Democratic colleagues, want open borders. They don't believe in sovereignty. They don't believe we should have a sovereign nation. They believe in world order. They believe that anybody can come here without following our laws.

Our bill expanded critical protections by fixing parole and asylum abuses that are being used by the administration to allow people to come in against both the spirit and the letter of the law. We have turn-away authority, and we empower State AGs to sue. We fix the abuses for unaccompanied children, and we treat all children like we currently do with Mexico and Canada, which would save little children from getting sold into the sex trafficking trade by the thousands, little kids getting abused because my Democrat colleagues want to cynically use open borders as a political stunt and for political power.

Right now in Texas, on I-35 going up the gut of Texas or across I-10, there are stash houses littered in San Antonio, littered in Houston, littered in El Paso and Dallas filled with children getting abused.

A thousand migrants died along the southern border last year while my colleagues on the other side of the aisle just sat back and did nothing.

We have acted. Republicans have acted. We sent legislation to the Senate, and Senate Democrats are doing nothing.

Existential threat 1: spending. We are acting. We are acting responsibly. House and Senate Democrats refuse to join with us.

Existential threat number 2: our border. House Republicans have acted. We have sent a bill over to the Senate. It sits there. The President ignores it while Texans die from fentanyl poisoning and Americans die from fentanyl poisoning. Our homes, our hospitals, our schools get overrun, migrants die, migrants get sold into the sex trafficking trade, cartels get empowered, and China gets empowered, all so my Democrat colleagues can pat themselves on the back in the false name of compassion saying that open borders are good for migrants, when it is a lie.

Existential threat number 3: American energy dominance. American energy independence and American energy freedom is being destroyed minute by minute, hour by hour, by an administration and Democrat colleagues in this Chamber and in the Senate that are undermining our ability to produce American, clean-burning natural gas, American nuclear power, reliable power that we need to fuel ourselves and the world.

Legislation we have on the floor this week that my Democratic colleagues refuse, in lockstep, to support would stop the tyrannical overreach by the executive branch to set a new rule requiring electric vehicles to be about two-thirds of the fleet by 2032.

Now, why does that matter?

Does the average American know that an electric vehicle takes basically the same amount of electricity as your air conditioner to charge up?

Have they thought through the fact that if you have an electric vehicle in North Dakota or in Alaska, it freezes up and takes an entire battery charge just to thaw it?

Have they thought through what happens if you are living in west Texas and it is a 400-mile drive and you need a 200-mile recharge?

Have they thought through that the average electric vehicle costs $16,000 more than the internal combustion engine?

Have they thought through that if you eliminate every internal combustion engine in America, it would be less than 1 percent impact on CO2 production, because China has 1,100 coal-fired plants; America has 250.

India and China are spewing out CO2 at increasing rates. We are unilaterally disarming and undermining our own economic strength while being our own economic prosperity, our own energy freedom, all in the false name of pursuing unicorn energy theories while my colleagues on the other side of the aisle that are killing the average American family, killing their budgets, and now on steroids, existential threat.

All of these EVs, those supply chains start now.

Toyota, General Motors, Ford, they are all going to be pumping out electric vehicles, starting now.

They are piling up on lots because the American people can't afford them. The American people don't want them right now. They can't get them charged. They cost more.

You want to know why you can't afford stuff at home? This.

What are we going to do about it? It is an existential threat to your way of life, America.

What are your Representatives going to do about an executive branch that is doing this unilaterally using executive power?

House Republicans are acting. House Democrats will not support it. The Senate will not advance it.

You will be left stranded--literally and figuratively--without the ability to get a vehicle to power your lives, your family, your jobs, advance prosperity, and achieve the American Dream, all so people can feel good about themselves that they have done something for the environment, which they never did.

CO2 is going to continue to be spewed out.

We have wind and solar being subsidized to the tune of a trillion dollars. My Democratic colleagues last August passed a bill that will subsidize a trillion dollars for EVs, for massive solar farms, for massive wind farms; almost all of that money going to billion-dollar corporations--mostly White, elite liberals who like to pat themselves on the back while they drive their Tesla around, feel good about themselves, and they drink some wine and eat some cheese while talking about how they are making the world a better place.

It is doing none of that. Zero.

I can tell you what it is doing. It is crippling the American Dream for young people. It is making hardworking Americans unable to afford their job.

If you are a painter or a plumber or an electrician, if you are a teacher, if you clean houses, how in the hell can you afford an electric vehicle that costs $16,000 more?

Then Gavin Newsom in California says: Oh, crap, we don't have enough power today because we are all wind and solar. So guess what, between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m., you can't charge your car.

You think that is made up? That actually happened. That is the world my Democratic colleagues want you to live in: one with mountains of debt, with open borders, with fentanyl pouring in, and expensive cars.

They will admit it. That is the amazing part. It is so brazen, they admit it. When we challenge them in the Rules Committee or on the floor, they admit it.

The Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, literally admitted we are going to have to force pain on American families to achieve production and promotion of electric vehicles; pain, while China builds two new coal-fired plants a week, and we do nothing but cede our ground to China, subsidize solar panels in China--which by the way, where do they get the minerals for solar panels? Where do they get the minerals for batteries? Child labor, cobalt mines, where children are exploited.

Where are my colleagues with their bleeding hearts when these children are being exploited for cobalt mines?

Oh, Chip, it doesn't fit the narrative. Oh, we are the compassionate ones. We are the green ones. We are living in our little unicorn land where everything is hunky-dory. Meanwhile, we have empowered our enemies, weakened our economy, made it impossible for people to achieve the American Dream, so you have to go beg for more government funding.

That is not the American Dream I started this speech with when my colleague from New York was regaling his mom who passed away today in that generational transfer of the American Dream.

It is not the American Dream of my grandmother, as a single mom in west Texas raising my polio-stricken father after losing her husband to cancer. She wasn't asking for handouts. She wasn't asking for subsidies for some electric vehicle. She just got up and did her dang job.

That is the American Dream that we want to pass down to our kids and our grandkids, but it is being taken away.

I cannot overstate, these are existential threats. They are killing the American Dream.

Debt: spending money we don't have.

Borders: wide open; endangering us; killing our kids; killing migrants; increasing the sex trafficking trade; empowering cartels.

Energy: Instead of having the dominance and independence to push back on China and Russia; growing our economy; affordable, competitive automobiles; reliable power; fueling grids; creating economic growth.

True, all of the above, where the market determines whether wind and solar or nuclear or coal or gas can create the best mix of power supply. Export liquefied natural gas, drive CO2 down with clean-burning American energy.

We are not doing that. We are passing regulation after regulation unilaterally by an executive branch engaged in tyranny, the very tyranny the Founders warned us about, wrote about, and told us in Federalist 58, we should use the power of the purse to stop, which is my question for my Republican colleagues:

Will we use the power of the purse to stop an out-of-control Democrat administration, a recalcitrant Democrat Senate, and our Democrat colleagues in the House who are totally comfortable letting the American Dream

get totally destroyed with existential threat after existential threat?

Those aren't the only ones. What about healthcare?

I would note that a dear friend of mine, a constituent, recently diagnosed with cancer, she got her coverage through ObamaCare.

What many Americans don't know is that if you are a Member of Congress, we are required to have our healthcare through ObamaCare, not some gold-plated fancy thing everybody accuses us of.

Nope, we get ObamaCare. Well, neither my constituent battling cancer--nor myself who fought cancer and won 12 years ago--can go back to MD Anderson--she cannot go to MD Anderson, for the first time--under ObamaCare, the best cancer hospital in the world.

Suddenly coverage doesn't sound that good, does it? Suddenly, the ObamaCare mandates that have radically driven up the price of healthcare, radically consolidated the healthcare industry, radically enriched the insurance companies, radically enriched the hospital corporations, radically enriched pharmaceutical companies.

Suddenly, all of that stuff doesn't sound so good when you wake up and you want to go to the doctor but you are told: Sorry, you are not on the plan. That is the fact.

Americans, a family of four, spend about $25,000 of their own money or their corporate match for health insurance. But it is not insurance, it is crappy managed care, where your insurance company picks your doctors, your winners, your losers, tells you what you can do or can't do, when you have to pay an expensive deductible or an expensive copay.

Mr. Speaker, 76 ObamaCare marketplace insurers are proposing to increase their rates by more than 10 percent even now; 8 want to go by more than 25 percent.

Let me be clear. Our healthcare system is a complete and total failure. It is a failure made only worse by ObamaCare.

We can fix it. Republicans have plans to fix it. If Republicans would grab the mantle and run on it, fearlessly, with expanded health savings accounts, allowing you to use that money, tax free, to go into a marketplace and shop for legitimate, affordable insurance; legitimate, direct primary care with doctors you can call up day and night, like the old black bag doctors that would come to your House, a burgeoning industry; healthcare sharing ministries that defray costs, the ability to go out and compete and save.

There is a massive explosion of technological benefits that we can now tap into if we were to empower patients and doctors rather than bureaucrats and health insurance administrators.

We can blow the lid off of it, drive prices down; save our ability to honor our commitments on Medicare by getting prices down, if we will just do it.

Instead, we sit around and we run into the corner saying: Oh, Democrats said something about preexisting conditions.

We are all walking preexisting conditions; we are humans. Set up a system that would work for that, and the best system is one in which I can take dollars and go get healthcare from a willing provider of that care and find a way to make sure that insurance is available in a catastrophic situation in which you can no longer afford to pay for the care.

It is the best model across all of the different options. We can do it, but we have to have the willingness to do it.

Instead, we are sitting here with existential threat 1, massive debt;

Existential threat 2, wide open borders, killing our sovereignty and killing our kids and our communities;

Existential threat 3, American energy getting destroyed, sacrificed on the altar to the almighty gods of green energy and unicorn energy;

Existential threat 4, healthcare bankrupting American families, bankrupting your ability to go to the doctor of your choice, bankrupting the number of physicians we even have available because nobody wants to go into this godforsaken industry run by insurance companies.

Yes, the corporate cronyism, replete in this town, where we just throw money at big corporations.

We empower the insurance bureaucrats to run our healthcare. Could there possibly be a more stupid way to create a health system? I can't think of one.

Finally, existential threat number 5, and there are more, is our national defense. Republicans passed the strongest national defense authorization that I have seen in my years of public service and certainly in my time in Congress. It would refocus our military on its core mission, which is to be trained to, if called upon, kill people and blow stuff up.

That is what it is there for. It is not there to build soccer fields, and it is not there to promote social engineering. It is there to defend us.

We passed the defense bill that would end the unlawful Biden DOD taxpayer-funded abortion tourism regulations. It would end the taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries at the Pentagon. It would end the radical climate agenda being implemented at the Department of Defense, which I have already addressed, and the market that is being embraced by the Pentagon so we can have EVs rolling around our defense complex.

``Hold on, guys. Stop shooting while we plug in our car. Hey, we need to charge up the tank. Give us a second.'' I am looking forward to the battery-powered jets.

We assist servicemembers who were discharged for refusing the COVID- 19 vaccine. Our Department of Defense is now begging them to come back because recruiting levels are so bad.

We end radical critical race theories and diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have created an inspector general for Ukraine accountability. We prohibit race-based admissions at military academies. We have refocused our military on its core mission and to get rid of the social engineering.

Our Democrat colleagues wouldn't support it, and our colleagues in the Senate won't advance it, so here we sit. They demand that our defense be a radical social engineering experiment rather than a lean, mean fighting machine to defend the United States of America. That is an existential threat.

Education is a threat.

The litany of regulatory morass in this town is all a threat, but right now, I am just focusing on debt, on our borders being wide open, on our destruction of American energy dominance and freedom, on our broken healthcare system destroying the American Dream and the inability to access doctors, and on a defense that has been turned into a social engineering experiment instead of defending the United States.

Each one of these things represents a clear and present danger to our well-being as a nation and as a people. It is our job and our duty to stand up and fight.

Mr. Speaker, I call on my Democrat colleagues to stop putting their heads in the sand and ignoring their duty to address these existential threats. Stop being a roadblock to the great bills and the great efforts of Republicans that we are moving to pass over to the Senate and send to the White House.

Nevertheless, I have to say to my Republican colleagues that when you predictably see our Democratic colleagues refuse to work with us, don't cave and don't capitulate. Hold the line. Pick one or two fights that we can deliver for the American people so that we can go home and look them in the eye.

I don't care about the campaigns, and I don't care about the ads. I don't care about any of that garbage. I care about looking at my 14- year-old son and my 12-year-old daughter or my 81-year-old father and 75-year-old mother or a veteran who has fought for this country and who is wounded and hurting. I want to look them and my constituents who sent me here to fight in the eye, and I want to be able to say:

We delivered. We fought. We forced the President to the table. We made him secure the border. We made him restore sovereignty. We did our job.

We held the line on spending. We reduced spending year over year. We ended the gimmicks. We stopped the games. We set the table for us to try to balance the budget and do our job and stop racking up debt.

We restored energy freedom. We opened up American natural gas. We stopped the regulations that were going to kill our country. We stopped the mandates on electric vehicles that were going to destroy the American Dream and drive up the price of automobiles.

We stopped the wokification and destruction of the American military that is driving down recruiting and making it to where our military morale is at its low point.

We stood up and fought for healthcare freedom so that, Mr. Speaker, you can go to the doctor of your choice, so that you can care for your family, so that you can make decisions, so that you can afford the care, and so that you can look at your kids and your loved ones in the eye and be able to take them to get that care without calling some bureaucrat on a phone and hoping.

It is our calling; it is our job; and it is the reason we run for Congress. These are existential threats, and they deserve the level of attention, fight, and dedication that we campaign on. They deserve us to do what we said we would do. Is it asking too much that we campaign on doing these things and then come here and actually do them?

It is long past time for excuses. It is time to meet the moment. It is time to rise to the challenge to do our job to make the people's House great again, to make Congress great again, to restore the balance of power, and to stand up and deliver for the American people so that we can, in fact, save the American Dream for our kids and our grandkids.

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

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 4 o'clock and 36 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, December 6, 2023, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

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 topic of this Special Order.

Mr. Speaker, we are sitting here on the precipice of entering December, a month in which those of us who profess the Christian faith and belief in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, celebrate his birth into this world to give the world, and each and every one of us in it, hope for eternal life and eternal salvation.

We are immeasurably blessed to live in a country where we can carry out our faith and exercise our beliefs.

It is critically important that we just came out of the weekend of Thanksgiving. At Thanksgiving, of course, we are thankful to live in a country in which we have In God We Trust emblazoned over the dais on which the Speaker sits in front of the American flag.

The Wall Street Journal eloquently prints every Wednesday before Thanksgiving ``The Desolate Wilderness'' editorial that has run in that paper for--I don't know--probably some 60 years.

It eloquently lays out all of the hardships that faced those Europeans who came to the North American Continent, and what it was like, and what they experienced going out into the desolate wilderness, and what that meant for mankind throughout the world.

I am always struck at how often we, as Americans in this generation and in this day and age, are too often either actually apologetic or forced to be apologetic or taught to be apologetic for being American, for our existence as Americans because of both actual and, frankly, perceived or taught past wrongs.

I started this talking about my Christian faith. My colleagues and constituents and people across this country who share that faith know that we are taught in Romans that we all fall short of the glory of God for we are all sinners.

That is inherently true. It is true in the United States. It is true in Great Britain. It is true in Russia and China and throughout the world. We are all sinners and fall short of the glory of God.

The thing that is unique about this country is that we have set up a system that is designed to protect us against the worst impulses of man in terms of the centralization of power in the hands of a few to be used tyrannically against the many.

That is the great gift that we have inherited from our forefathers who bled, died, and fought so that we could live here and live free, so that we could exercise our conscience, so that we could live according to the dictates of our conscience.

That is why I am thankful. That is what I was thankful for over Thanksgiving because that is what it is supposed to be about.

It is not just about the football game. It is not just about the turkey. It is not just about Friendsgiving or whatever people talk about these days.

It is a specific holiday about our thankfulness as Americans and why that is so critically important to the ethos of being an American because you aren't an American simply because of DNA or blood.

You are an American because of the idea that is embodied in this Chamber, in the people's House. It is for that reason that I came to the House floor on the Thursday before we adjourned for Thanksgiving week, after this body had passed by a suspension of the rules--that is, without the normal debate process, without the regular order that was such a central part of the debates last year in this body--we passed through suspension of the rules some $400 billion to $500 billion of additional spending up and through late January and early February of 2024.

I found that then, and I continue to find it to be repulsive, that that is how we would conduct business, that that is how we would carry out the business of the people's House.

I made clear then that I thought that it was destructive and that it was carrying on the continued policies of the previous regime passed last December over the loud objections of my colleagues on this side of the aisle to pass a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill chock full of leftist priorities that are destroying the American Dream--nothing short of that.

A Wall Street Journal poll from this month found that only 36 percent of voters said the American Dream still holds true.

The American Dream is dying because Americans' government is failing them. It is actively working against them, and our people feel it.

Our country, our society, our culture, our people, the people we represent, are in deep despair. $11,400. According to ``CBS News,'' the typical American household must spend an additional $11,434 annually just to maintain the same standard of living they enjoyed in January of 2021.

That is a problem. The average American family in this country is hurting. I watched the Democrat White House press secretary walk up to the microphone and just dismiss it and just pretend that the average American family is totally fine and can walk right out and go buy their Thanksgiving dinner, and there is no harm, no foul. They are all good. The Biden administration policies and the Democrat policies, they are having no negative effect. Ignore these numbers. Ignore the cost of goods and buying food. Ignore the cost of housing. Ignore the cost of car ownership. That is what this administration wants the American people to do.

Our constituents are literally being priced out of the American Dream of owning a home. My staff, making decent money relative to some people in the world, come to me and say, I don't know how to buy a house. I don't know how I can possibly ever buy a house, certainly not in the Nation's Capitol.

Housing prices have nearly doubled since 2010. In the second quarter of 2023, the median home price was $416,100. In 2010, it was $219,500.

In May of 2023, median mortgage payments hit an all-time high of $2,165 a month. According to The Wall Street Journal, the buyer of a typical home faces a monthly principal and interest payment of nearly $2,200, more than double the level of early 2021. Goldman Sachs' Housing Affordability Index hit a new record low in August.

That is just homes. What about cars, kind of the second biggest expense? Americans can't even afford to purchase a car because of the efforts of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and this administration to ban the internal combustion engine in pursuit of unicorn energy policies that are going to do nothing to actually reduce CO2, and they are driving the American people into bankruptcy with an inability to afford an automobile to go about their lives and their jobs.

A new car costs $50,000, nearly double the cost just 10 years ago. Electric vehicles are piling up on the lots of dealers across this country because the American people know they can't work for them. They can't afford them. They can't stop to charge like the Secretary of Energy did when she showed up and made a pregnant woman and her family get out of the way for a photo op while she charged her EV driving across the country.

That is the truth. The truth of this administration and my Democratic colleagues is they are perfectly content, as they have admitted to me in the Rules Committee and on this floor, to drive the American family into bankruptcy so they can pursue climate change reform.

That is absolutely a dereliction of duty on the part of the leadership of this country. When we have 250 coal-fired plants in this country and China has 1,100, and they are building two a week and we are building none, and we think we are going to dent CO2 by forcing American families into expensive electric vehicles, the batteries for which are produced by our enemies in China with elements that are mined by child labor across the world, that is what this Democratic Party stands for.

They are bankrupting American families, empowering our enemies, undermining our national security, and exploiting child labor, all in pursuit of things cooked up by radical leftists and universities, all enriching, by the way, through the so-called Inflation Reduction Act massive billion-dollar corporations with subsidies from taxpayers. That is the truth.

We are destroying the American Dream through the policies specifically chosen by my Democratic colleagues in the White House, in this body, and in the Senate.

This administration's EPA has issued a rule to make two-thirds of new vehicles electric by 2032. That is in a mere 8 years.

This body didn't vote on that. The administration could do it by fiat. That is not how this is supposed to work.

That was my point in the opening of this speech. This country is designed to protect against power resting in the hands of a few being exploited against the many.

There are 330 million people in this country whose lives are getting decimated and destroyed while this administration tyrannically uses its power in the bureaucratic and executive branch to level the American Dream.

The average EV costs $16,000 more than an internal combustion engine equivalent.

When I asked my colleagues on the other side of the aisle in the Rules Committee: Well, do you think that is worth it? They say yes. They say yes.

They want every American family to have to cough up another $16,000 for an imperceptible, ineffective, alleged reduction in CO2 production. Meanwhile, we haven't done anything to produce nuclear power, which is actually reliable.

The American people fully recognize that their lives have been upended. They are not 100 percent sure why, although I think they are starting to figure it out as they watch the President of the United States dawdling along, completely unaware of what is going on, while the bureaucrats in the administration are cooking up all these schemes to use their bureaucratic powers to undermine the American Dream and drive up the price of cars; drive up the price of oil; vehicles; drive up the goods and services; drive up the price of houses; spend money we don't have; rising interest rates.

The Federal Government spent $2 trillion more than it took in in fiscal year 2023. We spent a total of $4.4 trillion in 2019. In 2023, we spent over $6 trillion. Our national debt is somewhere around $33.865 trillion, and we are doing nothing about it.

Earlier this week, my friend Jodey Arrington, the chairman of the Budget Committee had a hearing on debt commissions. It is important and it is good that we have those hearings and figure out what we are going to do on a bipartisan basis. However, I have to be very honest, if we cannot in this body figure out how to limit even just the discretionary spending being used to fund bureaucrats and laws and regulations that are undermining our freedom--driving up the price of cars; driving up the price of houses; funding a Department of Justice to go target a guy like Scott Smith, a dad in Loudon County; funding an EPA to go shut down people's livelihoods; arrest a guy on his ranch for building a pond; funding a DOJ to go after some of my colleagues--if we can't reduce that spending as Republicans, then how in God's green earth are we going to sit down and stare an elderly American in the face and tell them that we are going to do something with their Social Security benefits or Medicare benefits.

We are not. I have to be honest, we have been profoundly unserious in this body, on both sides of the aisle, about spending and about the abuse of power that we fund with taxpayer dollars and borrowed dollars to fund a bureaucracy that is at war with the American people and at war with the American Dream. That is the truth.

In my Thursday speech just prior to adjourning for the Thanksgiving recess, I noted fairly explicitly and pointedly that we had not produced a significant win for the American people in this Chamber this Congress.

I asked the question: What have we done? And all of my colleagues that are sitting around the complex, I asked then and I ask now: Come to the floor and come tell me what we have been able to do through this body, the Senate, and the White House. What have we been able to do in the last year to make the lives of the American people better, to make them more free, to secure their border, to make their country more secure, or to make their military more focused on its mission rather than social engineering?

I know what we have done here on the Republican side. We have passed a lot of good stuff through the hard work of my colleagues unifying around passing a strong National Defense Authorization bill that undoes the abortion tourism, the transgender surgery, the DEI, the critical race theory that is destroying the mission and the soul and the culture of the United States military, driving down recruiting and making us less safe and secure.

We passed the strongest border security bill we have ever passed. We did that here united as Republicans. We passed seven appropriations bills. We are on the precipice of passing more appropriations bills to take the power out of the hands of a few and return it to the body.

We have done a number of great things fighting here as Republicans, but they don't mean a thing if we are not willing to sit down at the negotiation table and look at our Democratic colleagues in the Senate and look at the President of the United States and tell him: This is how it is going to be done or you are not going to get your funding. This is how it is going to be done or don't even think about another dollar for Ukraine.

That is my message to my Republican colleagues who, frankly, are getting a little too wound up at that question I asked: What have we done?

The simplest solution to your frustration about that question being asked is to have an answer.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Perry), my friend, and wonder if he might agree.

Mr. Speaker, my friend from Pennsylvania is 100 percent correct. This was a point that I made in the remarks I made right before Thanksgiving, which is what are we going to say that we have accomplished, other than to say that we are less bad than Democrats.

That is my question here for my Republican colleagues. When we are getting zero help from our Democrat colleagues, who are intent on spending money we don't have to fund bureaucrats; to undermine our freedom; our way of life; our ability to afford our lives; our ability to have jobs; our ability to have a secure border; our ability to have secure streets; our ability to have education that is controlled by parents and not by leftist bureaucrats; our ability to have a military that can defend our country rather than being woke and socially engineered, we get zero help from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

Which means what? It means that this Republican majority has to unite and ensure that we are going to force Senate Democrats and the President to come to the table using the leverage that we have for the things that they want.

The Senate majority leader has professed a desire that we continue to fund a proxy war in Ukraine. It is very well documented. The President of the United States, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, our colleagues on the other side of the aisle in this Chamber, want us to continue to fund a proxy war in Ukraine.

Now, we can have that debate on the floor of the House. We can debate the merits of it. We can debate how much it should be lethal aid versus not. We can debate how to make it more transparent; debate how to make it more focused, or whether to do it at all, but a fundamental and core question that ought to be asked: Why would we ever debate giving another dollar to Ukraine when our borders are wide open, Americans are being killed and endangered by cartels and fentanyl and violence and terrorists and gang members that come across our border, and this administration refuses to do a thing about it?

Why, to my friend from Pennsylvania, would we even utter the word Ukraine on the floor of the House ever again until we have H.R. 2, the strong border security bill that we passed, signed into law by the President of the United States, metrics guaranteeing and demonstrating that we do not have continued flow and automatic entry and releases into the United States?

Why would we do that?

Mr. Speaker, I agree with my friend from Pennsylvania.

While he is still on the floor, I will close with a couple of questions.

I assume that the gentleman from Pennsylvania, my friend, when he ran for Congress, and when he has run every term since, he ran under a promise to fight to reduce and cut Federal spending. I assume that is correct.

To my friend from Pennsylvania, do you think that it is a fulfillment of your promise and pledge to work here to try to cut spending to pass continuing resolutions that fund government at the preceding year's astronomically high spending levels, particularly that of Nancy Pelosi's $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill? Does my friend think that gets it done?

That woman, your constituent, recognizes the impact from the policies of this current administration and, frankly, I must say, the policies that are perpetuated by this body, including some on both sides of the aisle that have resulted in families having to spend $11,400 more just to break even to where they were at the beginning of this administration.

The question is, what are we going to do about it? I mean, I think that is the fundamental question. Did your constituents send you here to file bills, to file amendments, to simply vote, and then say: Oh, isn't it so great that we voted and passed something out of committee? Do your constituents know when we pass something out of committee, as a general matter? Do they know how many bills you have filed? Do they know whether or not you got some amendment inserted in whatever unless you tell them? Or are they looking for results? Do they want the border to actually be secure? Do they want spending to actually go down so there is less inflation and they can afford to live?

Do they want us to have a military that is focused rather than woke? Do they want us to deliver results, or do they just want us to sit up here and pound our chest about how we got certain bills introduced and I got some vote on some measure on the floor of the House?

I assume your constituents, like mine, totally understand that we don't have both Chambers and the White House. They know that we can't move all the mountains. Nevertheless, they want us not to just shrug and give up and send a bill over to the Senate and say, ``Sorry, we don't have the Senate. Blame Chuck Schumer,'' and then go campaign.

Even when we had the majority in the House, had a majority in the Senate, and had the White House, how many times did you hear the excuse: ``Oh, I am sorry, Congressman Perry. We don't have 60 votes in the Senate.'' Did you ever hear that one?

Mr. Speaker, I thank the good gentleman from Pennsylvania. He is a good friend, and I am honored to serve with him. I agree with him.

I will say that our constituents don't send us to Washington to campaign. They don't send us to Washington to run around trying to figure out how we are going to score some political victory and set up votes so we can run against our colleagues.

Our constituents recognize that our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are continuing to leave them behind and ignore them in pursuit of fantasy energy policies, woke ideology, and radical leftist views of open borders that empower our enemies and endanger Americans. They fully get that.

They expect us to stand up and fight for them. They expect us to do the right thing and then let the voters decide.

I would submit that it is a critical juncture in this country, that we are facing existential threats, that it is critical that the 200 and however many Republicans we have right now unite together and go over to the Senate to tell the Senate that we have to solve problems for the American people, secure borders, strengthen our military, reduce spending, get inflation down, make the American people believe that the American Dream exists again.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that. I know my colleague is about to leave. I know that he appreciates and we share our faith in the good Lord and our faith in Jesus Christ. He will appreciate the words of Paul in 2 Timothy: I have fought the good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved him appearing.

That is obviously a spiritual reference and speaking in spiritual terms, but they are the kind of words that I think my friend agrees with me should be inspiring us as Members of this body, regardless of party, that we advance, that we move forward, that we defend this country.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Pennsylvania. When I started this speech, I talked about The Wall Street Journal poll from this month finding that only 36 percent of voters said the American Dream still holds true and that our country, our society, is in deep despair and needs help. I talked about the $11,400, according to CBS, that the typical American

household must spend additionally every year just to maintain the same standard of living that they enjoyed in January 2021.

The fact of the matter is, the American people are suffering. We in this body know it, yet we are doing nothing about it. All we are doing is making it worse by spending more money we don't have, indebting our children and grandchildren.

We are now $34 trillion in debt, and all I get from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle is lip service about taxes when we have been bringing in revenue to the Treasury at the top level we have ever done in the history of this country, 19.2 percent. We have plenty of revenue. What we refuse to do is deal with our spending problem, promises that we have made but cannot honestly deliver on without printing money.

I talked about the extent to which the average American family can no longer afford a car. A new car costs $50,000, nearly double what it cost 10 years ago. Why? Because of absurd regulations and mandates coming out of this administration unilaterally, through bureaucrats, backed up by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle passing legislation to mandate EVs that are piling up on the lots of dealerships that people can't afford and that don't allow them to do their job. Debt is piling up. Interest rates are going up. Houses are unaffordable.

With healthcare, Americans are expected to spend $6,500 for a family policy and $1,400 for an individual. They are expecting 2024 premiums to increase 8 percent for group rates. Healthcare is completely unaffordable for the average American.

All this is happening as Big Healthcare gets richer, and the Federal Government continues to flood more money into the market. Big Insurance revenue is $1.25 trillion. The CBO estimates Federal subsidies to health insurance for Americans under 65 will reach $1 trillion.

Nobody in America knows what these numbers mean. What they mean is you can't afford healthcare, can't go to the doctor, and can't choose the doctor of your choice.

We are enriching bureaucrats and healthcare companies. We are enriching bureaucrats, pharma, hospitals, and Big Insurance. We are doing it through crony capitalism that was inflated under ObamaCare.

I have a constituent who came up to me last week who is on ObamaCare and can't go to MD Anderson for the cancer that is killing her, yet my colleagues on the other side of the aisle pat themselves on the back for coverage.

I would like to know if any of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to call up my constituent and congratulate her for having coverage she can't use. She can't use it to go get healthcare while we enrich the insurance companies at levels they were never enriched before, while we devastate them. She literally can't go get the care she needs under the coverage of ObamaCare, while healthcare companies are rolling in money.

I can't go back to MD Anderson, if my cancer comes back, on the plan that I would have under ObamaCare as a Member of Congress. That is the truth.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle pretend that it is not devastating the American family that we are driving up the cost of healthcare, making it impossible to get the doctor of your choice, making it impossible for people to live and enjoy the American Dream.

On the southern border in Texas, my constituents text and call me every single day--every day. I have constituents and friends in south Texas calling me about the devastation being wrought in south Texas.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't care. They don't care about the little girls getting sold into the sex trafficking trade, the almost 1,000 migrants who died along the Rio Grande and southern border last year. They don't care about the fentanyl pouring into Texas that is killing my constituents. Last year, I had six kids die in the school district I live in from fentanyl poisoning. It is pouring into our communities through wide open borders, and everybody knows it.

Mayorkas goes down to the border and won't even apologize to the Border Patrol agents he accused of whipping people, which didn't happen.

Mr. Speaker, there have been 6.6 million illegal aliens since January 21 and 1.7 million known got-aways. That is bigger than the entire population of San Antonio, Texas, which I represent and is the seventh largest city. We don't know who they are.

I had members of the Texas legislature showing me videos of people they saw over Thanksgiving weekend in south Texas, single adult males running away from Border Patrol. If you are running away from Border Patrol in 2023, I assure you it is because you are up to no good.

The entire world knows that if you come here and you go up to Border Patrol and you say the word asylum, you are going to get released into the United States.

Texas is under siege. We spent $12.5 billion of our own money to do the job the Federal Government refuses to do, while my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, Secretary Mayorkas, President Biden, Senate Democrats, and Chuck Schumer ignore the crisis and pretend that sending more money down to process more people will make a damn difference. It won't.

Texas would be well within its rights to tell this Federal Government to go straight to hell. Stop sending any tax receipts and do what we need to do to secure Texas. Frankly, Governor Abbott should do that. Shut off the flow across the border because this Federal Government refuses to do it.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't care. The fact of the matter is, this current Democrat administration and my Democratic colleagues are all too fine while the American family suffers, losing the American Dream. They have $11,000 of additional costs every year under this administration. Kids die in their schools from fentanyl. People pour into communities in Texas and Arizona and throughout the country. They are piling up in New York, so bad that they had to cut a deal to move them onto military installations and Federal properties.

All of our streets are unsafe because DAs refuse to enforce the laws--funded by George Soros--DAs in Texas and throughout this country. Literally, the DA in San Antonio, it was just reported, has dismissed more than 6,000 criminal cases in the first 3 months of 2023. That is a 50 percent rise in dismissed cases.

One of these dismissed cases led career criminal Michael Kirkland to be free to shoot at police officers and motorists in San Antonio while evading arrest, leading to an officer being injured this past August. Those are the policies of this Democrat regime and of Democrats across this country.

Violent crime is surging, borders are open, fentanyl is pouring into our schools, inflation is up, interest rates are up, and life expectancy is down.

The fact of the matter is, Republicans have a duty to check this administration and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. It is why I demand and implore my Republican colleagues that we answer the question: What have we done?

I can assure you my Democratic colleagues--the answer to what they have done is destroy the Republic by passing legislation that bankrupts the American family, pursuing unicorn energy policies, forcing EVs to pile up on dealership lots, driving families into bankruptcy, and now they are unable to afford houses.

Democrats are actively doing that. Republicans basically say, well, we got elected, we are at least stopping that. We are at least stopping the passage of really bad bills, like the so-called Inflation Reduction Act or the American Rescue Plan. These bills all spend money we don't have. It is driving us into debt, funding and enriching White, elitist liberals in their big, supposedly, green corporations.

Every time Republicans run for office we make a lot of promises about things like cutting spending, shrinking bureaucracy, or securing the border. That is what you do when you run for office, you make a lot of promises. You make a lot of pledges.

We don't have the luxury of grading ourselves on our intentions. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The American people, the history books, and the good Lord are going to

judge based on the actions we take and the results we deliver and whether or not we deliver for the American people.

To deliver for the American people, Republicans must force the Senate Democratic leadership, Majority Leader Schumer, and President Biden, to understand a handful of very key truths. Under no circumstances should we give another dollar to Ukraine. No bills should come to the House floor until H.R. 2 is signed by the President and the flow stops across our southern border.

That ought to be the very clear message that is sent to the President and Majority Leader Schumer. If my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the Senate want to choose to refuse to secure the border, then they can call up Mr. Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine and explain why.

They can explain that it is more important to keep open borders in America and undermine our sovereignty and our security and our well- being. They can call up Israel and explain to Israel that they refuse to actually fund support for Israel because they are more interested in funding Internal Revenue Service bureaucrats to go after the American people.

That is what our Democratic colleagues in the Senate have chosen to do, and they know it. They know it. We pass a bipartisan bill that chooses to move dollars that were allocated to expand the IRS to go after the American people, take those dollars and give it to our friends from Israel. Our Democratic colleagues in the Senate, on a party-line vote, voted no.

They refused to fund our friends in Israel because they were more committed to the leftist makeover of this country. They are more committed to open borders than they are to securing the communities of the American people and allowing us to have a full and open debate about Ukraine and how we can proceed to fund our government.

Mr. Speaker, the American people are sick of excuses. They want us to do our job. I understand the difficulty of dealing with a razor-thin majority with colleagues on the other side of the aisle who have no interest in doing the things that we want to do to secure the United States, secure our border, reduce spending, reduce inflation, focus the military on what it needs to be focused on, and to do our job under the Constitution in our limited powers. I understand the difficulty of that.

We have done a great job and we have been united as a Republican Party to send good bills over to the Senate. Now we should hold the Senate accountable to doing the work of the American people to follow up on what we have already done. To send a border security bill, H.R. 2, that would do the job of securing the border. Sending a National Defense Authorization bill that would restore our military to its mission rather than social engineering.

There are seven appropriations bills, and others that are ready to go if our Democratic colleagues on the other side of the Capitol in the Senate will sit down with us to actually reduce spending year over year from 2023 to 2024. We can constrain spending. We can constrain inflation. We can constrain the bureaucrats that are interfering with the lives of the American people and undermining their freedom and their ability to produce and prosper according to their God-given talents.

Voters are watching what we are doing. They are watching whether we are going to stand up and actually do our job, and whether or not we are going to deliver for them rather than engaging in lip service. I think we need to do our job.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Wisconsin for making those really important points.

I think the commentary by one of the Republican candidates for President, the former Governor of South Carolina, was a mistake.

As another candidate, the Governor of Florida, pointed out, anonymous individuals were key to the founding of the United States. The authors of the Federalist Papers and many of our key founding members wrote anonymously to put out ideas into the public domain.

To have the government think that they should step in to censor free speech because they think it might be something that is expedient to achieve other aims, aims which I share, about trying to ensure that we don't have vitriol being shared in the domain in social media and making sure that we do not pollute the minds of our young, we can achieve focusing on protecting our young and protecting the world against the scourge of these electronic devices and social media without trampling the very free speech that helped found this country.

It is a mistake to do that. It is a mistake to empower governments over the mind of man, as Founder Thomas Jefferson pointed out in saying that he would swear eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

The fact of the matter is the Republic is in trouble. This country is in trouble, and the time for excuses is over. No more excuses. No more excuses from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, but, most importantly of all, no more excuses from my colleagues on this side of the aisle.

We have had a tumultuous year of sorts, but in the eyes of the American people who have been watching from afar, they have been wondering when this body, the people's House, will stand up in defense of the people who sent them here.

When are we going to do what we said we would do?

When are we going to stand athwart and stop the reckless spending that is bankrupting a country that can no longer issue debt without having Moody's downgrade our rating and without having a Treasury auction that is a borderline failure just last week because the people around the world no longer believe in American debt?

That is because we are now spending so much money and have so much debt. We have more debt than we have ever had in the history of mankind. We have more debt than we had at the end of World War II after we exercised wars in two theaters to free this world of tyranny.

If we have to exercise our defense against foreign enemies today and ratchet up more spending to defend not just our country but to defend the very freedoms under which we operate, we don't have the resources to do it.

We don't have the supply chains to do it because we are sitting around here twiddling and talking about setting up offices of equity. That is what we are doing.

My colleagues on this side of the aisle utterly refuse to actually do what they say they are going to do. They are going to campaign against critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion and campaign against Mayorkas and campaign against open borders.

What do they do? They come into this Chamber and vote down amendment after amendment to cut spending and stop funding the very bureaucrats who are undermining the freedom of this country.

We have an administration that is at war with the people of the United States, nothing less. The current administration is undermining the prosperity of the American people, and they are doing it on a daily basis.

The current administration, the Biden administration, is undermining our ability to defend ourselves under the Second Amendment. They are undermining our ability to carry out our free speech rights and First Amendment rights. They are undermining our ability to live free from crime and free from dangerous cartels and dangerous gangs flooding across the southern border of the United States.

Every single day, another Texan dies from fentanyl poisoning. Every single day, another Texan dies. Last week, two Hispanic Texans died tragically in a car accident when we had an illegal immigrant moving people across our border into Texas. We had somebody who was human smuggling and who was speeding kill these two American citizens.

When is this going to stop? When are my Republican colleagues going to put up or shut up?

We have bills impeaching Alejandro Mayorkas. They go down. We have bills trying to cut spending, and we have games being played by appropriators. Right here, sitting in the Rules Committee the night before last, I had appropriators looking at me and talking about the side deals that were cut to keep spending money to set up funds in slush funds. That is the way this town operates--slush funds, backroom deals, and continuing to spend money we don't have.

I am sick and tired of it. I didn't come here for second place. I didn't come here for more excuses. I didn't come here to have the Speaker of the House assume the position and, in 17 days, pass a continuing resolution off the floor of this House through suspension of the rules with $400 billion, including an extension of the farm bill that doesn't do anything about the Chinese Communist Party's ownership of our lands. It doesn't do anything to protect small ag and protect small ranchers from Big Ag and all the big corporate ventures getting rich based on the policies from this body.

When is it going to be enough?

Is $34 trillion of debt not enough? Is $2 trillion in deficits not enough?

When is another American dying from fentanyl or from cartels or terrorists coming across our southern border not enough?

Are babies being put in ovens in Israel not enough?

We had the Senate yesterday who chose expansion of the Internal Revenue Service over standing with Israel, and what are my Republican colleagues doing? They are all too happy to have this vote go down today and get on their airplanes and go home for turkey at Thanksgiving.

Why aren't we putting another bill on the floor of the House right now and sending it over to the Senate to shove it down their throats, and say we, as Republicans, stand for cutting spending; we, as Republicans, stand with Israel; we, as Republicans, stand for securing the border of the United States?

No. Let's just go back and raise some money. We can do more fundraisers, so we can then try to get elected so we can come back here and offer more excuses for why we don't get the job done.

Do you know what the excuse will be next year? Oh, we won the House and we won the Senate, if we can even do that, but we don't have 60 in the Senate ship. We can't do what we want to do because we don't have 60 votes in the Senate.

I have heard nothing but excuses for the 20 years that I have either been a staffer in this town, back in Texas watching it closely, or now back as a Member. I have heard nothing but excuses. I have heard nothing but empty promises.

The time for those excuses is over. Today, we took down a rule, yes, because it was a closed rule. We had a closed rule which means you can't amend it. The Rules Committee put forward a bill for Iran to go ``freeze'' the $6 billion sitting in Qatar through a closed rule. We were not allowed to amend it. Such is the way things operate in the people's House if we don't police it every single day.

We changed things in January. We have been opening the place up, but that was a reversion right back to the mean. You can't amend it, little boy. You are just a backbencher.

You know what? Yes, we will. We will force amendments because we had a better approach than a simple freezing of the $6 billion.

Do you know what we wanted to do? We wanted to tell Iran no more. We are going to force the administration to stop issuing waivers to sanctions against Iran so we can stop the enrichment of Iran at the expense of Israel and at the expense of our own national security.

Just yesterday another $10 billion of waivers for Iran to sell electricity to Iraq. We are enriching Iran to be at war with us. We are enriching Iran to fund the killing of Jews in Israel. Yet, Republicans just whistle by, saying, let's just introduce a little bill. Let's just do $6 billion of freezing these assets in Qatar.

Why don't you stop the actual blood money? Why don't you actually stand up and stop Iran from making billions of dollars giving oil to China?

We talk a big game about Ukraine. We wear little blue and yellow pins and say look at us. Look at how compassionate we are to help people. What the hell are we actually doing?

Blank checks go to Ukraine to go into the pockets of oligarchs, massive corruption, all getting documented by the day.

We send a bill over to the Senate; Democrats kill it because they would rather side with the IRS than Israel. We can't even move a bill to hip check the Iranians who want to kill us and exterminate the Jews in Israel.

They don't hide behind it. They don't shy away from it. They openly say it, and here we are.

I am in an empty Chamber because everybody wants to go home and have their turkey and we haven't done anything.

Literally, the House Republican majority, what we have accomplished this year is the following: We have increased the debt of the United States $4 to $6 trillion. We don't actually know the amount because we set a date to January of 2025 with skyrocketing interest rates, so it is going to be a $4 to $6 trillion increase in your debt. Check.

What else have we done?

We passed two continuing resolutions of the Nancy Pelosi spending bills and priorities, something to the tune of probably about $6 or $700 billion worth of spending when you add the farm bill into it.

That is what we have done. That is what the Republican majority has done.

When are we going to act like a Republican majority and start fighting?

When are we going to do anything to truly cut spending instead of playing games?

Yes, we passed seven appropriations bills. Yes, we have adopted some cuts, and I am proud of those cuts. Yes, we have adopted some strong policies in the NDAA and passing H.R. 2, the border security bill, but all of that is a tree falling in the forest if we are unwilling to lock arms and fight.

It does you no good to get all your ammunition ready and get all prettied up and get in the boats and when you get to the beaches at Normandy, say, sorry. I don't think we can climb the cliffs because now is not the right time.

When is the right time?

Nobody is just going to stand up one day and say, guess what, boys? It is June 6. It is time to get up and fight.

Right now all I am hearing is excuses. All I am hearing are reasons why we can't do what we campaigned on doing.

I have heard that we can't have a shutdown. Okay. Then just take your voting card, walk over to the other side of the aisle, and say, thank you, sir, may I have another? That is what we are doing.

There is going to be a moment where we are going to say, we are sorry. You don't get to use taxpayer dollars and, more importantly, borrowed money to continue to stick it to the American people every day with open borders, dangerous communities, skyrocketing interest rates, skyrocketing inflation, an inability to educate your children without them being indoctrinated, an inability to have a job without being told you have to get a vaccine, an inability to have your business open during a pandemic because a bunch of tyrants shut your livelihood down and now we do nothing about it, an inability to have a national defense that isn't woke and focused on, you know, diversity, equity, inclusion, and transgender surgeries and abortion tourism rather than actually killing people and blowing things up, which is what the military is supposed to be trained to do.

What in the hell are we doing in this Chamber?

We talk about these leaders of the law that are put up on the walls around the Chamber, including Moses, and we are walking away from Moses and the people of Israel by not standing up and defending Israel by ensuring that we force the Senate to do their job.

I would have shoved down the throats of the United States Senate a funding bill that included Israel and dared Chuck Schumer to shut the government down and go home and eat turkey. Instead, we walk away with another continuing resolution, Mr. Speaker. We will fight in January.

It is enough. Enough of continuing to do the same old, which is all we are doing. We give tours over at Arlington National Cemetery. When you fly into Washington, D.C.--as one of my friends, the Governor of Florida, Governor DeSantis, likes to point out as a man who wore the uniform, as a man who served his country, when he flies into Washington Reagan, DCA, and you fly along the Potomac and you look to your left, he says in stories: You see the monuments. You see the Washington Monument. You see the Lincoln Memorial. You see the Jefferson Memorial. You see this Capitol Building sitting up on the hill as a symbol for freedom, and what a Republic looks like for the world to understand and see.

Then on your right, when you are flying down that river, you see a whole bunch of other monuments. They are a lot smaller, and they are little stones of marble that are cut out to represent all of those who died so that we could be here, who died so that we could live free, who died so we could stand under that flag, and we are pissing it away. We are giving it away.

All that they fought for, all of those freedoms, we are giving it away. Why?

Because we are too cowardly to stand up and do our job. Are you freaking kidding me?

Oh, we can't have a shutdown heading into Thanksgiving. What will they say or do?

How about we stand up and fight and go to the American people and tell them that we believe we should be doing what they sent us here to do--limiting spending, securing the border of the United States, standing with Israel, but paying for this stuff as we go so our kids and our grandkids don't inherit a bankrupted country and have to wonder what freedom used to look like while they are speaking Mandarin, but that is what we are going to get.

We went through an entire month of drama about a Speaker, and we just did the same damn thing we have been doing. The people I represent are sick and tired of it. People ask why I get so animated on the floor. It is because somebody has to stand up for the people whose voices want to be heard in this town.

If I see another bill, another measure, another amendment, another office focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, focused on all of these nonsensical programs that we can't even afford, much less if they are good for the United States of America, rather than figuring out how to have bullets and planes and boats to stand up and defend this country and defend freedom, rather than standing up and securing our border and giving the Border Patrol what they need, rather than making them show up to the border every day outmanned, outgunned, and with a mission to usher people into the United States falsely under the name of compassion, using false interpretations of the law, expansive uses of asylum and parole, to allow terrorists and criminals to come into the United States and endanger the American people-- The police officer in Austin, Texas, that I went to the vigil for on Sunday night, he was killed by somebody on the terrorist watch list.

What in the hell is wrong with this country?

Are we not sovereign? Do we not believe that we should secure this country for the people of the United States?

If this body were serious, we wouldn't leave town without ensuring that we are secure. We would not leave town without forcing Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden to the table because Republicans control this Chamber or, at least, they say they are Republicans.

For the life of me, I do not understand how you can go to the trouble of

campaigning, raising money, going to events, talking to people, coming to this town, as a Member of a party who allegedly stands for something, allegedly stands for reducing spending, allegedly stands for eliminating debt, securing the border, strong military, ending the wokeness that is killing and corrupting our schools and our kids, and then do nothing about it.

Mr. Speaker, I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing, one thing, that I can go campaign on and say we did.

Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides saying, oh, it is not as bad as the Democrats.

That reminds me of the line from ``Patton,'' when he said: You won't have to say, well, I was shoveling crap in Louisiana. That is what we are doing. No offense to my friends from Louisiana. My mom grew up in Louisiana.

I don't understand how we can watch a world building up to take us out--China, Iran, places all around the world--who want to undermine the United States of America and we are doing nothing about it.

We are not moving manufacturing capacity to the Western Hemisphere and to our own country.

We are not eliminating the debt problem that is crippling our ability to finance our own existence, finance freedom, and ensure that the dollar remains the currency of the world.

We are doing nothing to secure our own border and establish our own sovereignty and defend ourselves from dangerous fentanyl pouring into our communities.

We are doing nothing to ensure that our kids are educated to believe in this country, believe in freedom, believe in Western civilization, believe in God.

We have walked away from every single principle that made this country great, all in the name of being politically correct and woke. It is a damn shame for all of the people who have stood up and fought to make this country great--to defend its principles, defend our freedom, to defend limited government, to defend the principles in the Constitution, to defend the bill of rights.

What good are they if we are going to throw them all away? We are doing it on a daily basis.

Just today, we were going to be told it was sufficient to freeze $6 billion for Iran, give a press statement, and say, look at us, when that would do nothing to stop what Iran is actually doing every single day to fund Hamas, to fund Hezbollah, to undermine Israel's security and, therefore, undermine our security, all with open public pledges to want to take us out.

You think that these protests around this country on college campuses or on the streets of New York are an accident?

Are you not looking around? Are your eyes not open?

We are going to crumble under our own weight in the very name of the liberties that we say we want to protect. We are not protecting them. We are going to crumble under them because we are going to be blind to the enemies coming across our border.

It is happening in real time, and we know it. We are having to force every bit of information we can get out of the administration, but there are known terrorists, known terrorist sympathizers who are coming across our border. They are looking at us and laughing. They are seeing our border, and they know they can exploit it.

We are worried about FISA? I had some of my colleagues preaching about the need for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to go stop our foreign enemies. Okay, I will spot you. I think we need to make sure we have the tools so long as they are protecting American civil liberties. However, you are worried about FISA when our border is wide open?

You can waltz across the Rio Grande, look at the Border Patrol and say, hi, I am here, and get released into the United States, and we don't do anything about it. That is not a sovereign nation. That is not a free nation. You are not free if you are not secure. You are not free if your border is open and exposed to terrorists. You are not free if you are spending money you don't have to indebt your children and grandchildren to a future where you are no longer able to fund freedom.

How are we going to fund the national defense with a dollar that is not worth anything?

Has anybody seen the absolute devastation in countries with skyrocketing inflation that goes off the charts? Zimbabwe or other countries that have had this over the years. That is where we are headed.

We are not free if we are not sovereign. We are not free without secure borders. We are not free if our military is not strong and not woke. We are not free if we are not able to exercise our First Amendment rights without being censored, which is happening every single day.

How are you free if you lost your job because you didn't want to take an experimental vaccine that had zero to precious little testing, depending on who you listen to? Now with massive amounts of evidence demonstrating vaccine-oriented injuries, somehow you weren't free to be able to go exercise your rights as a human to go carry out your livelihood so you could take care of your family.

You are not free. That is not a free country.

What have we done? How many hearings have we had about COVID tyranny? A couple? We kind of brushed it aside. What have we done? Have we done anything to hold Anthony Fauci accountable? Have we done anything at all to uncover how a country like this could shut down the largest economy in the history of the world, shut down people's abilities to live their lives, force people to take vaccines, force people to walk around with masks on their face or get fined on the very floor of the House of Representatives? Have we done any kind of expose for the American people about how that should never happen again? No.

The American people didn't send us here for this. They didn't. They didn't send us here to keep doing the same thing. Nobody runs for Congress to keep doing the same thing that they think is wrong. People wonder, they say, Chip, you are criticizing Congress, you must not like Congress very much.

Congress polls at like 17 percent, so I feel like if I am against Congress, I am with 83 percent of the American people, and I am right.

Every time I go back to Texas, and I am starting to think, gosh, man, are you crazy? You are up here, you are beating your head against the wall; you are talking to people, and they go, Chip, you are crazy. We can't get that done. We can't force the Senate to do that. You are living in a--no, we have got to win the Presidency. We have got to win more seats in the House. We have got to do better in the Senate.

I have been hearing that my whole life, and we have never done anything, whether we had 56 Members in the Senate or 47; whether we had a majority with 260 or whether we have got our thin majority now; whether we had someone in the White House or not.

With all due respect to former President Trump, they sure as hell didn't get border security done when we had the White House and the House and the Senate. Nothing. Talked a big game about building a wall and having Mexico pay for it. Ain't no wall, and Mexico didn't pay for it, and we didn't pass any border security.

We had Goodlatte 1 and Goodlatte 2. Nobody in America knows what the hell those are. What they know is, our border is wide open.

This year we actually passed an excellent border security bill. Everyone in Washington wants us to walk away from that and do something, Chip, you can't get that done in the Senate. You will never get Joe Biden to sign that. Well, with that self-fulfilling prophecy, you are correct. With that self-fulfilling prophecy, you are right.

If, instead, you look at Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer and say, you are not going to get a damned thing at all until we secure the border of the United States properly and we stop letting people flood into the United States and endanger us--because, I don't know, gee, let me think, that is our job.

When we swear an oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States, that includes the laws that say that we must secure the border. I don't know a single Hispanic

Texan, a single Brown person in Texas that I talk to who is down there saying, oh, please, more open borders. Oh, please, more fentanyl. Oh, please, more cartels.

We have got to actually do something about it. When we come back from Thanksgiving, I am hearing lots of promises about what we will do. Well, let me just lay down a marker and lay down a gauntlet here, we better damn well do it. It is time. It is time to use the full power of the majority of the House of Representatives to ensure that the President of the United States and the Senate Democrat majority understands that the era of excuses is over and that we are going to reclaim the mantle for Americans of having a secure and sovereign nation with a secure border, with a strong military, and stop bankrupting the future for our kids and grandkids because that is actually our duty under the Constitution.

Instead of promising things we can't deliver, instead of creating programs that undermine American effectiveness and American prosperity, instead of continuing to bow down to world authorities to take away our sovereignty at the United Nations or the World Health Organization, instead of empowering our enemies like Iran and China, we have a duty, a responsibility under the Constitution, and standing before that flag to actually defend the United States of America.

That is what I want to hear that we are going to be doing when we return on Tuesday, November 28. It happens to be my mom's birthday. Happy birthday, Mom. We are going to fight for a free America when we come back from Thanksgiving. That is what I want to hear. That is what I want this Republican majority to stand up and do.

I want to see 220 Republicans standing on the steps of this building pledging to lay it all on the line. I am tired of speeches. Don't give me your crap about putting Christmas wreaths walking around Arlington National Cemetery or in the national cemeteries across America, don't give me your speeches on Veterans Day, your speeches on Memorial Day. Why don't we put everything we have got, all of our political lives, on the line and say we are going to stand up for this country?

Who cares if you lose your election? Why does it matter if you are here if you don't do something? We don't have anything to risk. Mean tweets? Who cares? Put it all on the line. Fight for the country and maybe, just maybe, the American people will look at that and reward you for it; but who cares?

We came here to do what is right. No one believes spending money we don't have and indebting our kids and grandkids is right. Nobody.

Nobody believes, no rational person, no sane person believes that an open border with terrorists and cartel members and fentanyl pouring across it is right.

Nobody believes that Hamas going across a border into Israel and putting a baby in an oven while people are raping that baby's mother is right.

Nobody can possibly believe that, and I want to be perfectly clear about this: If you do, you have no business being in the United States of America protesting against us standing up in defense against that.

Moral clarity matters. Moral clarity in the face of evil matters. I am sympathetic to wanting to stand up against Putin and the evils and the horrors against the people of Ukraine. I just want a mission to know how it is going to be accomplished and how the money is being used. And I am very sympathetic to what happened on October 7 to our friends in Israel. We should help them. I was fine with helping Ukraine until I started learning about all the corruption and the improper use of the money.

However, we have got to pay for it. We have got to actually have sacrifice. You can't write blank checks because then there is no moral authority behind the blank check. If you are the world's ATM, all you are doing is perpetuating the very violence and the wars without sacrifice. That is the whole point.

When I think back about that police officer last week, he was alive on Friday, and on Saturday he was not. His family--his wife, his stepkids--they now don't have their husband, their father. He went into a house to go protect two people. His partner got shot, sent to the hospital. He was fighting for his life all week.

Later that day, a police officer, a woman, committed suicide in the same department in Austin, Texas.

Later that night or the next morning a recently retired police officer in that same department died in a tragic car accident.

In a matter of 48 hours, the Austin Police Department lost two of their own, one of their recent own, and one was in the hospital fighting for his life. It was a rough 48 hours.

These are strong men and women. They are resilient. They will stay on watch, but it makes me think about what are they doing? They are putting their lives on the line, standing on that thin blue line to protect us in the face of disparaging remarks about how they are evil, about how they are biased, defunding by the Austin City Council of $150 million which, by the way, is a part of the mental health issues, a part of the danger that some of these guys face, a part of the danger that we send these guys into dangerous situations, into a house, and they are questioning can they shoot, can they act.

We are doing that to them. We are. The leaders of this country are doing that to them. They go out, they defend us. They get in a car. They walk and they put their bodies in front of gangs, between gangs and us. They fight drug lords. They stand up against the most violent and insidious evil, and we are back here questioning their plays. We are Monday-morning quarterbacking everything they do, so of course they have got issues, of course it is more dangerous for them.

What are we doing about it? What? What are we doing about it? That cop still has to get in the car today. The cop still has to walk the street today. What are we doing to defend them, to protect them?

What are we doing for our men and women in uniform who are wondering what they are doing when they have to sit in sessions about social engineering and wokeness training? They are doing it. I have exposed it, put it out on social media, all of the different classes, all of the stuff they have to go through.

All they want to do is get trained on how to jump out of helicopters and shoot guns and fly planes and drive boats and figure out how to defend the United States of America which, by the way, is its mission.

You want to know why recruiting levels are in the toilet? It is because we are turning it into a social engineering experiment.

When we set out in January to change the House of Representatives, we set out to make this place get back to what we would call regular order. We have had some successes and some monumental failures in doing that. We have had a brief spell where we had something sort of close to resembling open amendments on the floor. We have had some increases in some of the structured rules. That means amendments that we kind of approve certain ones, not others. We go to the Rules Committee, we have a debate about it and sort of get some debate. We have had seven appropriations bills pass off the floor. We have had another, I don't know, three or four get debated fully. We will see if we can get all 12 done.

However, we are still miles away from the deliberative engagement about ideas and about how we are going to carry the country forward that the Founders envisioned. We are miles away from being able to have a process by which people can believe that the House of Representatives is actually representing them. The election certificate for every Member of Congress is just as good as the Speaker or any chairman or any member of the Appropriations Committee or Rules Committee, but for too long that is not how this place has operated. It hasn't, and we saw that unfold this week.

The continuing resolution that was brought forward yesterday suspended the rules, so there was no real debate, there were no amendments. It was brought to the floor. It had a vote, and it was kicked off the floor and sent to the Senate by suspension of the rules. A total of 209 Democrats voted for it, 2 Democrats voted against it. A total 127 Republicans voted for it, 93 Republicans voted against it.

For my constituents back home, you might look at that math and say that

it doesn't sound like a very good bill. You would be correct. You would be right.

It is a bill that continues the Pelosi funding levels that I would point out last year. Then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy called this bill ``a slap in the face.''

All of my Republican colleagues who were in this Chamber today, except for two, voted against it, calling it what it was: a bloated omnibus spending bill passed right before Christmas.

What we did on October 1 was continue that for 45 days and spend an additional $16 billion for disaster FEMA funding--unpaid for.

What we did yesterday, which the Senate will presumably take up and pass, is continue it for another 60ish days until January 19 and another 75ish days until early February.

Again, we are talking about $500 billion or $600 billion that we passed with these continuing resolutions, funding government at levels that Nancy Pelosi set and policies Nancy Pelosi put in place.

This bill yesterday, House Progressive Caucus Chair Jayapal called maintaining the spending levels ``a very big win.'' I guess that would be, from a Democrat's standpoint.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, Congresswoman Tlaib, and Congresswoman Omar all voted for this bill. Mr. Speaker, 93 Republicans voted against this bill.

Another point about this omnibus spending bill that we are continuing, do you know how it was passed last December? The floor staff probably remembers. It was passed with 226 of the House of Representatives not even here. Mr. Speaker, 226 of the House of Representatives voted by proxy last December to pass $1.7 trillion of disastrous funding to continue to advance the bureaucracy that is at war with the American people, and we Republicans are voting to continue it.

That is what a continuing resolution is. We are voting to perpetuate what I would say was an unconstitutional bill.

Litigation is currently underway in Texas v. Department of Justice. I filed an amicus brief in that, saying it was unconstitutional.

You are supposed to have a quorum. How can you have a quorum if 226, a majority of the body, are literally not even here? That is the whole definition of quorum.

We have what I believe, regardless of what the court ultimately says because the court doesn't like to stick its nose in the business of the House--it should in this case because it is plain, black letter I would say English, but it is really Latin, what a quorum is.

It is, nevertheless, unconstitutional. You didn't have 226 people; 226 weren't even here. They voted by proxy.

You have an omnibus spending bill that is, in my opinion, unconstitutional that we have been operating under since last December. Now, we are perpetuating an unconstitutional bill by voting for a continuing resolution of unconstitutional funding to fund the government at war with the American people at levels that are indebting our kids and grandkids.

Congratu-friggin-lations. Well done, us. We will see what happens. That litigation is currently underway. I think it is going to go before a district judge sometime here in December.

My friends here on the floor and in the Parliamentarian's Office, we might have a fun December if the court makes a decision that that omnibus bill is unconstitutional. We will see what happens then.

Nobody is under the delusion that it isn't a difficult environment in this current day and age in Washington to get things done. Nobody here is saying that we need to get everything we want. Nobody is here saying that we need to change this town overnight or in a day.

I know what I am saying, which is we are never going to change this town meaningfully if we don't stand up and fight to change it. It is just not possible. You have to take risks.

You can't just sit back while Moody's downgrades the U.S. Federal debt outlook to negative and a Treasury auction goes south and just shrug your shoulders and say, sorry, too hard to do. We don't want to have a shutdown over Thanksgiving; they might say mean things about us. Oh, no. Mean things.

They say, Chip, you don't understand. The truth is, what that means is that, by November 30, our troops won't get paid.

I am sensitive to that. There are, of course, solutions and alternatives to that. You can offer legislation to fund the troops. Does Chuck Schumer not want to fund the troops? You can offer legislation to fund Border Patrol. Does Chuck Schumer not want to fund Border Patrol? Call his bluff, and if he won't do it, let the American people decide.

No, Chip. We don't have the media. Ronald Reagan didn't have the media either. You can't sit back and watch your country burn, complain about it burning, and then come here and provide the fuel for the fire. That is what we are doing.

The national debt hit $33 trillion. It is now approaching $34 trillion. It has grown by $2.2 trillion since President Biden signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act.

We come up with these cute names. The Fiscal Responsibility Act--who can oppose that? $2.2 trillion later, I am not sure exactly what was responsible about the Fiscal Responsibility Act.

We head into Thanksgiving. Every, I think, Wednesday before Thanksgiving, The Wall Street Journal, in their editorial section, reprints an editorial that was written decades ago, probably in the fifties. I think it is called something like ``The Desolate Wilderness.'' It talks about the early American settlers, the Pilgrims, if you will, coming to the United States and going into the desolate wilderness.

They knew the dangers. Some dangers that they didn't know about, they learned about. Obviously, the history you know is replete with knowing and dealing with disease and the difficulty of traversing the Atlantic in the boats coming here, dealing with the engagement with the natives here in North America.

We have for too long now been shunning the bravery and courage of those founding settlers who came to this country and gave us the chance to have this, the greatest hope the world has ever known, the freest and greatest country and one for which I will never apologize.

We are now an apologetic generation, not a prosperous and genius one. Perhaps we should get back to being genius and engaging in prosperity and advancing the world rather than retreating in a mist of apology. All of those people came here courageously to settle that desolate wilderness, and all of those who died and bled did so to preserve and protect the values and freedoms that this country not just represents but embodies.

The soul of our country is not blood. The soul of this country is freedom. If the freedom that this country represents is no longer able to be lived, then the country is dead.

My goal in this brief spell on this planet--and it is brief--is to try to give some honor and glory to the God who created this Earth and gave me life, and to stand up for the freedom of my children to do the same.

Living free is more important than a constitution or a country. Living free is why we set up this country. If we can't unite, at least as Republicans, to defend freedom for our kids and our grandkids, then the country is, indeed, not going to survive.

If instead we go into Thanksgiving and head into Christmas thankful for the world that God gave us, uplifted by the knowledge that Jesus Christ died on the cross so that we could have eternal life, uplifted by what we can accomplish when we come together and live in prosperity and live in freedom, then we can again be the shining city on the hill and be the greatest country in the history of the Earth. We can drag this world forward and defend freedom for ourselves and establish stability and prosperity for not just us but around the world because everyone knows what we stand for.

We have to reclaim the banner that the world looks to to know what the rule of law means, to know what living under freedom means. That is our calling. That is why we are here.

We are not here for second place. We are not here for apologies. We are not here for excuses. We owe it to the poorest among us who look to this body to secure the blessings of liberty as the Constitution outlined.

The Constitution doesn't promise you an outcome. It doesn't promise you

a certain way of life. It doesn't promise you prosperity. It gives you the freedoms and the structures or the honors, I should say, the freedoms and the structures in place so that you can prosper and live free--nothing more, nothing less. When we promise more, we are giving people less.

Let us head into the holiday season thankful that we still live in the greatest country in the history of the world but resolved to protect it, save it, advance it under the principles that made it great, not under the false accusations for which we should somehow crawl into the corner and apologize rather than recognizing that through the turmoil, through the mistakes, through the sins, we have thrived and stood tall to pursue righteousness as a country.

I am, indeed, thankful as a cancer survivor, as a father, as a husband. I am thankful to live in the greatest district in the greatest State in the greatest country in the history of the world. I am proud of it. I am unapologetic for it.

I am unapologetic for our Nation's founding. I am unapologetic for our Nation's advancements. I am unapologetic for the prosperity it has produced. I am unapologetic for the blood that we have shed around the world, not for tyranny, not for world domination, but for freedom. I will never apologize for that.

I will hold my colleagues on both sides of the aisle accountable-- including myself--for what we promise to do when we take the oath, when we campaign, when we come here, when we give speeches, because it is our duty to protect this country for our kids and our grandkids.

We are called in 2 Timothy to finish the race. I am going to leave it all on the field, I can tell you that, for my kids. Every time my son or my daughter calls me and says, Daddy, when are you coming home--we have been here for 10 straight weeks. We were here for 10 out of 12 weeks before the August break. It has been a long run. It has been a run that, as I just articulated, has not produced all the things that I would like to produce, but it has produced an observation for the American people that we are not going to be deterred in continuing to fight for what is right and to change this institution to restore it to the people's House.

I am not going to fly home, look at my kids and say, well, I tried. I am going fly back home, and I am going to tell my kids, we are just beginning. We are just starting. When I am away from you, just like our men and women in uniform are away from their kids when they are serving overseas, fathers who went away throughout World War II--my father didn't know his father until my father was 3 years old. My grandfather was in the Pacific. All my colleagues say, oh, I have got to get home. I have got to get home for the fundraiser. I have got to get home for the football game. We have a job to do. And when I go home and I look at my kids, I am going to tell them that the reason I come here is for them, and they know that.

My friend Pat Fallon, who was thinking about not running for reelection--a Congressman from Texas in the district where my parents used to live, they now live in my district--Pat wasn't going to run for reelection. He was going to go back and run for State senate so he could be closer to his family and be in the State of Texas.

His son, according to Pat, convinced him not to do that. Pat's father was very proud of him for running for Congress before his father passed away a couple years ago. His son said, Dad, you are up there trying to do something bigger, and when you are away from here, we miss you, but we know why you are doing it.

To all of our families, to all of our wives, to all of our husbands, to all of our children, to all the staff who have been here for 10 straight weeks, I thank you. I mean that. As a former staffer I know it is not easy, especially if you're having to recite a lot of names. Thank you for your work.

To the parents of staff like Lynne Dayer, Jordan's mom, hi, the staff is always here. They are always working hard. They always serve us respectfully, regardless of what our views are, and I appreciate it. I appreciate my staff who work night and day tirelessly trying to defend this country just as much as we do.

It is an honor to serve in this House, but we owe the courtesy to the people that we represent to honor them by fighting for them.

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