Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 71.

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 1057 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

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

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

Last night, the Rules Committee met and produced a rule providing for consideration of four pieces of legislation. The rule provides for consideration of S. 1383, the SAVE America Act, under a closed rule with 1 hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on House Administration or their respective designees and provides for one motion to commit.

The rule also provides for consideration of H.R. 2189, the Law- Enforcement Innovate to De-Escalate Act, under a closed rule with 1 hour of debate equally divided among and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on the Judiciary and the Committee on Ways and Means or their respective designees and provides for one motion to recommit.

The rule also provides for consideration of H.R. 261, the Undersea Cable Protection Act of 2025, under a closed rule with 1 hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Natural Resources or their respective designees and provides for one motion to recommit.

The rule also provides for consideration of H.R. 3617, the Securing America's Critical Mineral Supply Act, under a closed rule with 1 hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce or their respective designees and provides for one motion to recommit.

Further, the rule provides same-day authority through Friday, February 13, for a rule providing for consideration of a continuing resolution related to the Department of Homeland Security funding.

Mr. Speaker, as the House of Representatives works to deliver on the critical issues our Nation faces, we urge our colleagues today to prioritize the passage of S. 1383, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or the SAVE America Act, which builds upon the SAVE Act introduced in previous Congresses that requires States to obtain proof of citizenship for Federal elections, ensuring only U.S. citizens are voting in those elections. In addition, the SAVE America Act requires individuals to present a valid photo identification before voting.

Our Founders set forth our electoral processes 250 years ago based upon the simple and ultimate principle that only Americans should vote. However, in this age of progressive, suicidal empathy, basic concepts such as voter ID and proof of citizenship have been attacked as suppression.

Let's consider the facts.

Fact one: Under the previous administration, the Biden-Harris- Mayorkas administration, some 10 million or more illegal aliens poured into communities across our country, adding to an existing foreign-born population, which totals upward of over 50 million people or close to 16 percent.

Fact two: While only U.S. citizens are legally eligible to vote in Federal elections, Federal law actually interferes with and prevents States from using Federal data to check their voter rolls to ensure that only citizens are voting, such that we end up in the upside-down situation where a State like Arizona has two different sets of systems, one for State and local and one for Federal.

Fact three: This is a recipe for fraud and a recipe for having people vote who shouldn't be voting. It undermines people's confidence in our electoral system. When combined with the fact that several jurisdictions offer driver's licenses and other benefits to illegal aliens and other foreign nationals, it provides opportunity for noncitizens to register to vote.

Fact four: Polling data is overwhelmingly in support of the SAVE America Act and its principles, that only American citizens should vote, and that we should use voter identification when we go to vote. Polling indicates that over 70 percent of Democrats across this country, over 90 percent of Republicans, and well over 70 percent of virtually every ethnicity and ethnic group in the country--Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, White Americans, men, women, rural, urban--overwhelmingly support voter identification and ensuring that only citizens vote.

Fact five: We passed the SAVE Act in the previous, preceding Congress. We passed the SAVE Act in this Congress focusing on citizenship. We now bring the SAVE America Act forward that adds voter identification, which is, again, overwhelmingly popular.

The SAVE Act passed on a bipartisan basis. Democrats joined with us in the previous Congress. Democrats joined with us in this Congress. In both instances, the House of Representatives affirmed that only U.S. citizens should vote in Federal elections.

Let's add voter ID to it. Let's pass the SAVE America Act. Let's send it over to the Senate and let the Senate move this legislation to the President's desk.

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

Mr. Speaker, that was a whole lot of words to say my Democratic colleagues don't want only citizens to vote and don't like voter ID.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Clyde).

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

Mr. Speaker, I am about to yield 2 minutes to my friend from Arizona, but I will just note that, as one of the lead sponsors of the legislation to deal with prohibiting Members of Congress from engaging in the act of trading in stocks, we are working on a bipartisan basis. We have legislation we are going to move. There will be a time to do that, and this is a complete substitute. In other words, this is fake.

It is a bunch of drama because my colleagues on the other side of the aisle do not want voter identification to be used to vote, and they do not want to guarantee that only citizens vote. It is that simple.

Mr. Speaker, we will deal with stock trading. I am one of the lead sponsors of that legislation. We will get it done but not as a substitute for what 80 percent of American people want, which is to guarantee only citizens vote and that they show up with a voter identification.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Palmer).

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I am proud that this administration is relieving the devastating costs on the American people by creating economic growth and undoing a lot of the damage of the previous administration. We are seeing that on a daily basis.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is simply incorrect with respect to the amount of evidence that has mounted over people who are voting and should not be. The record is replete. In one example, ICE arrested criminal illegal alien Ian Andre Roberts, who was serving as the Des Moines, Iowa, school district superintendent at the time of his arrest. After his arrest, it was found that Roberts was a registered voter in Maryland despite his illegal immigration status and long criminal record. It was a criminal record filled with narcotics trafficking, driving vehicles he shouldn't have been driving, unauthorized possession of a firearm, and other crimes.

Yet we act like this isn't occurring. I have dozens of other examples right here of arrests that have been occurring this year.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Jack).

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

Mr. Speaker, I note that a couple of things that are important for the American people to see is that this administration has driven unemployment down to historic lows. Economic growth is now back up to close to 4 percent, we believe, in the fourth quarter, and we get those numbers at the end of February.

We are seeing, importantly, a massive surge in employment among American citizens. That is among native-born American citizens. The fact is that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't care about that. They don't want to ensure that we are protecting American citizens. They don't want to have voter identification, and they don't want to ensure that only citizens vote in American elections.

That is what this is about. It is pretty simple.

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

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the article referred to by the gentleman from Virginia be included in the Record.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from South Carolina (Mrs. Biggs), my good friend.

Mr. Speaker, I would note that when the gentleman from Massachusetts tries to dismiss the supposed trivial or anecdotal or cherry-picked cases, there are so many that it would take me more time than I have to read through them all of prosecutions for voter fraud and individual instances of voter fraud.

We have one here of Angelica Maria Francesco in Alabama in 2024, an illegal alien charged by Federal authorities with nine criminal counts in connection with her fraudulent assumption of the identity of a U.S. citizen, including voter fraud.

We have Alford Nelson, as known as Alford Samuels, in Florida in 2024. Alford Nelson was known as Alford Samuels, among several other aliases. He was charged by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Broward County with two felony counts of voting as an unqualified elector. Nelson, illegal alien, unlawfully voted by mail.

I can keep on going on and on and keep going down the list. It is real. The only thing that we are putting forward is a common sense proposal to ensure that only citizens vote in American elections and that we provide voter ID at the polls.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Kennedy).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Palmer), my friend.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Alabama, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle made a number of claims about this legislation. With respect to the gentleman's question, I would tell you that what we are talking about with respect to voter identification is simply a presentation of voter identification.

Thirty-six States already have voter identification requirements. To the extent that we are able to get this passed, as I hope we will and signed into law in the next month or two, we will have the ability that States can immediately be able to implement voter identification, present true voter ID. That is it, present it.

With respect to the other claims, claims about the implications for married women, the fact is that the SAVE America Act does not, as is alleged, disenfranchise voters but, rather, it provides a very specific process for anyone who changes his or her name to register to vote, including by signing an affidavit.

We believe the original form of the SAVE Act would have provided ample ability for States to have taken care of it, but we went ahead and added an additional provision to ensure that the affidavit process was there for the small fraction of the population it might have impacted. We wanted to ensure there was no chance of issues.

Questions were raised about our uniformed personnel, our men and women who serve this country overseas. We believe our previous version would have made it fine for them to be able to do what they needed to do to register to vote and vote, but we made a clarification to ensure that UOCAVA governs what happens with our men and women in uniform. We have made every attempt to work to ensure that this bill is doing exactly what it is intended to do, which is ensure that only citizens vote and that we present voter ID at the polls.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia, (Mr. Palmer).

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

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

I would just like to offer, as I have done already, a number of examples, numerous other examples, of individuals committing fraud.

Laura Janeth Garza in Texas, a Mexican citizen, pled guilty to two felony charges of voter impersonation and ineligible voting. Garza stole the identity of her cousin, a U.S. citizen.

Another example is that of Mario Obdulio Orellana in Texas, a 57- year-old El Salvadoran national, who was indicted by the Department of Justice on Federal immigration and voter fraud violations.

Now, I could go down and give more and more examples. The fact is, yes, these are good examples in which we have been able to intervene and stop this voter fraud and identify the individuals and prosecute those individuals.

However, we know that there is significant additional fraud going on that we are not capturing and that we are not catching. There is a very simple and basic premise of those who have been in a prosecutorial function, which is that you only catch so many people. In this case, we have been going after some individuals, but we can certainly prevent any further abuse of our voter elections. Making sure that we have integrity in those elections is to make sure we have voter identification and ensure that only citizens are voting.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close if the gentleman from Massachusetts is prepared to close.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

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

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Massachusetts said that we are just doing this legislation because we are afraid of losing this election.

The fact of the matter is we are not. We want to ensure that we win this election by getting the votes of American citizens and not noncitizens. It is pretty simple.

I would note that the gentleman dismisses as trivial, or as the process working, the examples that we have given in the Record of the countless times where individuals have engaged in voter fraud and they have been caught and prosecuted. I would also like to point out that they were caught after they voted. That is the problem.

The core issue here is a very simple one. We all agree Americans overwhelmingly believe by polls and by all indication that only American citizens should vote in American elections. We currently have a problem. We even have problems where noncitizens sometimes don't know they are doing something wrong.

We should be very clear: When you register to vote, you are a citizen. When you show up to vote, you present voter identification. That is all that we do.

Mr. Speaker, in a few minutes, I will offer an amendment to the rule. The amendment will make a technical correction to the manager's amendment to reflect the intent.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 45 seconds to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern).

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to amend the pending resolution with an amendment that I have placed at the desk.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Arizona, and I would really just commend the people who watch C-SPAN, all 14 of them, the greatness of my friend from Arizona and how much he focuses on the spending concerns of our country and the vast amount of debt that we are passing down to our children and grandchildren and what we can do to fix it. He is one of the smartest guys on the subject, and I am deeply proud to serve alongside of him.

I appreciate his time here. I actually would like to sit here for 1 hour or 2 to regale him with charts, but I have to go do another thing.

Mr. Speaker, I am here right now because the American people are demanding that we, the elected leaders in Washington--that we in the people's House--that we secure the elections of the United States. They are tired of wondering whether their votes matter. They are tired of wondering if those who have no right to vote--those who are noncitizens--are actually packing our ballot boxes with illegal votes.

I am more determined than ever to secure our elections, but in an age of progressive, suicidal empathy, basic concepts such as voter ID and proof of citizenship have been attacked as suppression. Let me be clear: Nothing could be further from the truth.

Voter ID, voter identification, is arguably the single most commonsense proposal to ever grace this Chamber. A proof of citizenship requirement to register to vote is an idea so basic, so assumed, and so inherent to a functioning republic that opposition to it would offend every man who signed his name to our Declaration of Independence.

I have good news for the American people. No longer will our elections be governed by a check box if we do our jobs in this House Chamber and our colleagues in the Senate do their jobs. No longer will people pretend to be an American and, thus, influence our elected leaders. No longer will our elections be insecure if we do our jobs.

Last week, I joined with my friend, Senator Mike Lee, in the Senate Chamber to introduce a bill that we call the SAVE America Act. This legislation builds upon bills that we introduced last Congress, the SAVE Act, legislation that was focused on a simple idea of requiring demonstration of citizenship and for States to guarantee that their voter rolls are matched to guaranteed citizenship to be able to have an election in that State.

We had a simple bill to guarantee that only citizens are voting in American elections. Now we have added another simple concept: voter identification. Under the SAVE America Act, an individual will be required to provide that proof of citizenship in order to register and, on election day, required to demonstrate voter identification in accordance, by the way, with a majority of American States.

Mr. Speaker, the problem is that we passed the SAVE Act. We passed the SAVE Act in the previous Congress, and Chuck Schumer and Democrats stopped it. We passed the SAVE Act in this body last year, in this Congress. So far, Chuck Schumer and Democrats are saying that they wish to stop it in the Senate.

So the question is: What will we do here in this House Chamber? I am proud to say that our House leadership is working with us to advance the SAVE America Act as early as next week to be able to move that bill off of the House floor, to get it sent over to the Senate, and thereby allowing the Senate to be able to move that legislation, if--if the Senate will do what it can do, which is force those who are saying that they are going to filibuster to actually take the floor of the Senate and filibuster.

See, people don't understand Senate rules. They think that the ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'' version of the filibuster is the filibuster. But the truth is that Senators have, for a long time, hidden behind the rules to say that there is somehow a magical 60-vote threshold to move legislation through the Senate.

There is not. The 60-vote number is simply a fake filibuster--a zombie filibuster, as my friend, Mike Lee, calls it, meaning it is an arbitrary rule that was put in place to, yes, if you have 60 votes, you can shut off debate.

The core of the Senate--the core of the filibuster was about people being able to speak. Because on the Senate floor, you can speak, you can vote, or you can be assessing whether you have a quorum. Those are pretty much the things that you can do on the Senate floor.

So guess what. If you have a quorum, if you have 51 Senators sitting on the floor of the Senate demanding action for the American people, such as passing the SAVE America Act, then you can force the vote, unless a Member wishes to speak.

If Members in the Senate wish to speak against passing a commonsense piece of legislation that polls at 80 percent, then let them do it.

Let Democrats go to the floor of the Senate. Let them take the floor. Let them look at 51 Republicans sitting on the Senate floor who want to move a bill that 85 percent of White Americans, 82 percent of Hispanic Americans, 76 percent of Black Americans, 71 percent of Democrats, and 95 percent of Republicans believe we should pass so that we can have security in our elections.

We can pass the SAVE America Act. We will do that in the House Chamber next week. We will have citizenship. We will have voter ID. We will send it to the Senate, and if the Senate does its job, if Senate Republicans put this on the floor of the Senate, then we can force action and force Democrats to stand up on the Senate floor and oppose the will of over three-quarters of the American people.

I want to see them try. I think if we do it, I think we will win, and I think we will save this Republic, and we will save America.

Last year, we had five Democrats join with us and, this year, four Democrats joined with us. I think there will be pressure for a number of Democrats to join with us here and in the Senate.

Mr. Speaker, I want to yield the gentleman his time, but I will just close by saying: We sit here in this Chamber under the In God We Trust motto. We sit here in front of this flag. We think about all of the people who came before us who sacrificed for this country. This is the most basic of things that we can do to restore trust in a Republican form of government, where Representatives are sent to Washington to represent them.

They have to believe in it. They have to believe in us. They have to believe in the country. What more can you do besides guarantee that their votes

count by ensuring that it is only citizens voting in our elections?

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Arizona for yielding.

God bless you, brother.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chair, I thank the Chairman and the ranking member for getting these bills to the floor in a semblance of regular order, as I described in the Rules Committee yesterday.

Mr. Chair, Republicans rise to offer two amendments today, one of which is the amendment that I am bringing forward right now. That amendment is dealing with what we call general government. It is that portion of funding that deals with a number of areas including our judges and how judges are funded.

One of the issues we have been addressing is the extent to which the President, who is elected to fulfill a mandate, has been carrying out policies that he believes fulfills the mandate the American people gave the President and that Members, my colleagues on this side of the aisle, believe should be fulfilled.

Yet, there have been judges who have been putting their personal preferences and their activist tendencies in front of the will of the people and in front of the policies the President is putting forward in such a way that raises questions about whether they are carrying out their jobs responsibly and in accordance with normal judicial ethics and procedures.

Therefore, I offer this amendment that would reduce the budget of the district court, the D.C. District Court and D.C. Circuit Court, by 20 percent and would take away the staff funding for Judges Boardman and Boasberg.

These two individuals have been particularly egregious in their contempt of the President and have been putting their personal views in front of their duty as judges to carry out the jobs they hold

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

Mr. Chair, I thank my friend from Maryland for his comments. I wish him well on his retirement. I look forward to regaling that retirement often over the next 10 months.

Mr. Chair, I would just note that I am reminded of the line in ``A Few Good Men'' when they say ``strenuously object.''

Mr. Chair, I am reminded of that line in a ``Few Good Men'' when they talk about strenuously objecting and somehow that that makes a more emphatic statement.

I would also remind my colleague the way we have drafted this bill is to reduce the budget by 20 percent. Nowhere in the Constitution does it stipulate the amount of money that should be put----

Mr. Chair, at some point we might be able to get an argument out in some sort of fashion where the American people can see it. I would appreciate being able to engage somebody on the House floor.

Mr. Chair, the fact of the matter is, if I can keep my train of thought, Mr. Chairman, what I would say is that this has been drafted specifically--drafted specifically--to avoid the constitutional question the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) raises.

It was directed at the budget. Nowhere in the Constitution does it talk about the budget. It was directed at the staffs. It was not directed at the judges.

Mr. Chair, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs).

Mr. Chair, I yield an additional 15 seconds to the gentleman from Arizona.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Clyde).

Mr. Chair, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

Mr. Chairman, we created this court. We can dissolve this court. We can determine the funding for this court. The fact of the matter is that we have a situation right now where judges abuse their power, plain and simple.

The D.C. Circuit Court and the D.C. District Court are the locus of that abuse. In particular, they have harassed staff members because people raised the question about why you zero out staff.

Mr. Chairman, ask Dan Scavino. Ask Mark Meadows. Ask a number of the people who have been targeted and were harassed by these judges and January 6ers. We should make amends, and we should not fund this court to continue its lawlessness.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from South Carolina (Mrs. Biggs).

Recognizing the South Carolina National Guard

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from South Carolina, particularly for her shout-out to the National Guard from her own State that has been deployed to the District of Columbia.

Unfortunately, that has been necessary, and I am proud of the President for trying to make sure that we secure the Nation's Capital. They are one of the many National Guard units that have been deployed to do the job that the people of D.C. should be doing if they were competent and if they were doing what they are supposed to do as the Nation's Capital. The President is taking charge, and he is leading to ensure that our Nation's Capital is safe for the American people to come visit.

I will note that, relatedly, when we are talking about the state of law enforcement and the state of the security of the American people, we have heard a lot of criticisms from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, both in the House and Senate and generally around the country, directed at the great men and women of ICE, the law enforcement agency that is dedicated to the task of removing illegal aliens and, in particular, dangerous illegal aliens from the streets of the United States of America according to the law.

They are particularly focusing on and targeting those individuals--I believe the number is around 1.5 million people who are currently in the United States under orders of removal. That is, they have gone through the process. Judges in this country have ordered the removal of 1.5 million people, and ICE is tasked with removing them. Hundreds of thousands of them are dangerous individuals who have committed crimes in their home countries, who are trafficking narcotics, and who have been engaging in criminal behavior in the United States of America.

What do my Democratic colleagues do? They stand up in defense of criminals, of criminal illegal aliens, and are in constant attack on the men and women of ICE.

Let's just go through some recent criticisms of the great men and women who are working for ICE:

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz smeared ICE officers as a ``threat'' to the public, called ICE reckless, suggested the State is at war with Federal officers and under attack by ICE, and smeared ICE as the ``modern-day Gestapo.''

California Governor Gavin Newsom likened ICE to ``secret police,'' calling them authoritarian, and calling on the people to push back.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker claimed ICE is turning the country into Nazi Germany.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul accused ICE of ``terrorizing people.''

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro claimed ICE officers ``make our neighborhoods less safe.''

Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan said ICE officers caused ``chaos and terror.''

Senator Chuck Schumer declared that ICE does not belong in our neighborhoods.

Senator Tina Smith called ICE ``a clear and present threat.''

Senator John Hickenlooper smeared ICE as a ``reign of terror.''

Senator Jeff Merkley likened ICE operations to ``fascism'' and claimed officers are doing nothing but ``terrorizing our communities.''

Senator Bernie Sanders asked people to ``stop ICE from what they are doing as soon as possible.''

Senator Elizabeth Warren claimed ICE is ``intentionally stok[ing] fear and tear[ing] communities apart.''

Senator Ruben Gallego said ICE exists ``to scare the American public.''

Senator Mark Warner equated ICE officers to a brutal dictator.

Senator Dick Blumenthal accused ICE of spreading ``lawlessness and recklessness.''

Senator Alex Padilla accused ICE of ``indiscriminate violence.''

Senator Dick Durbin accused ICE's officers of committing ``atrocities.''

Representative Ilhan Omar said ICE is ``state violence,'' called officers ``vile and beyond cruel,'' and stated ``abolishing ICE is not enough.''

Representative Pramila Jayapal called ICE officers ``deranged,'' accused them of ``kidnapping,'' said ``resistance'' to ICE is ``inspiring,'' and claimed ICE officers will ``shoot at you and kill you.''

Representative Eric Swalwell smeared ICE officers as ``masked thugs,'' called them ``terrorizing bandit[s],'' said it was his ``priority'' to ensure officers are ``no longer faceless,'' compared them to the KGB, and demanded they ``stay the f-- out of California.''

Representative Jasmine Crockett compared ICE to ``slave patrols'' and called them thugs.

Representative Delia Ramirez said DHS ``is the single biggest threat to public safety right now.'' I will repeat: She said DHS ``is the single biggest threat to public safety right now'' and attacked ICE as a ``terror force.''

Representative Summer Lee said ICE is ``out of control'' and ``a police state.''

Representative Ayanna Pressley called ICE ``a rogue, violent agency'' that ``has no business in our communities'' and ``must be abolished,'' and accused ICE of ``terrorizing our communities.''

Representative April McClain Delaney called ICE ``lawless.''

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called ICE ``an anticivilian

force'' and said they ``should not exist.''

Representative Rashida Tlaib said ICE is ``terrorizing our communities'' and ``turning our country into a fascist police state,'' called it a ``rogue agency,'' and called for it to be abolished.

Representative Julie Johnson excused violence against ICE as people ``channeling that frustration.''

Representative Laura Friedman said ICE officers are ``terrorizing our friends and neighbors . . . and bringing chaos and violence to our streets.''

I have dozens more of these. I could continue to fill time on the House floor by going through the absolute vitriolic attacks on the people of ICE, literally another 30 in the list that I could read off. That is what is occurring on a daily basis and is directed at the people of ICE.

Now, I will give you a tale of two choices. I want you to look at and make a decision here about who you want to focus on. Over here, we have victims of dangerous illegal aliens that were in the United States of America. Over here, we have five Americans who are no longer with us.

We have Kayla Hamilton, a 20-year-old woman with autism living in Aberdeen, Maryland, who was savagely strangled to death by an illegal alien, an MS-13 gang member released by Biden at the border.

Mr. Speaker, we have Sergeant Brandon Mendoza from Arizona, a 13-year Mesa Police Department veteran, who was struck by a previously convicted illegal alien who was drunk when he struck Brandon.

Somewhat probably most infamously, we have Laken Hope Riley. Riley was a 22-year-old nursing student who attended Augusta University. She was killed by a Tren de Aragua gang member illegally paroled into the country under Joe Biden.

We have Rachel Morin, a 37-year-old Maryland mother of five. While going out for a walk, she was raped and murdered by an illegal alien who snuck across the border under Biden.

We have Jocelyn Nungaray, a woman whose mother I have gotten to know, a woman whose mother I invited to join us at the inauguration of President Trump a year ago because of her courage for standing up and calling out the lawlessness of the people who have been released on the streets of this country and that resulted in the death of her daughter, Jocelyn.

Jocelyn was a 12-year-old girl in Houston, who was out for a walk, when two Venezuelan illegal aliens released under Biden forced her under a bridge and forced her to take off her clothes before she was savagely killed in Houston, Texas, my home State.

Do you want to know what? Their lives mattered. Those individuals' lives mattered. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle, whether they are in this Chamber or in the other Chamber or in State houses across this country, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to ignore what has happened to these five Americans.

By the way, they are simply the faces of hundreds of thousands of Americans who have lost their lives violently through narcotics, through fentanyl, through drunk drivers, through murder, through rape, and through intimidation.

They represent a large block of Americans suffering at the hands of people who have been released on our streets purposely for crass political purposes by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. The fact is that has left us with a current situation that is even worse.

I will go through a few more. Then I want to bring my colleagues into this conversation.

Here behind me, after all of the eruption over what has occurred in Minnesota, where there has been a lot of vitriol directed at ICE in Minnesota, let us look at these individuals right here. These represent about eighteen individuals who are the people that ICE has been arresting in Minnesota. There has been a lot of news over one incident in Minnesota.

What we have here is a Somalian illegal alien convicted of homicide.

We have a Salvadorian illegal alien convicted of three counts of homicide with a deportation order since June of 2025.

We have a Mexican illegal convicted of homicide, who was previously deported in 2002.

We have a Sudanese illegal alien convicted of homicide.

We have a Laotian illegal alien convicted of two counts of homicide with a deportation order since 2009.

We have an illegal alien from Sierra Leon convicted of two counts of homicide with a deportation order since 2022.

We have a Mexican illegal alien convicted of homicide with a deportation order since 2015.

We have a Somalian illegal alien convicted of manslaughter with a deportation order since 2022.

We have a Sudanese illegal alien convicted of attempt to commit homicide, weapons possession, and DUI.

We have a Guatemalan illegal alien convicted of negligent homicide with a vehicle and a DUI with a deportation order since 2022.

We have a Burmese illegal alien convicted of negligent homicide.

We have another Laotian illegal alien convicted of the strong-arm rape of a 12-year-old girl and kidnapping a child with intent to sexually assault her with a deportation order since 2024.

We have a Laotian illegal alien convicted of strong-arm rape, aggravated assault with a weapon, and strangulation with a deportation order since 2012.

We have a Laotian illegal alien convicted of rape and child fondling with a deportation order since 2003.

We have a Laotian illegal alien convicted of rape, rape with a weapon, and sexual assault with a deportation order since 1996.

We have a Mexican illegal alien convicted of sexual assault of a child and DUI with a deportation order since 2016.

We have a Laotian illegal alien convicted of a strong-arm sodomy of a boy and a strong-arm sodomy of a girl with a deportation order since 2018.

We have a Laotian illegal alien convicted of sexual assault and sodomy of a girl under age 13 and procuring a child for prostitution with a deportation order since 2006.

These are the individuals in Minnesota that ICE--who is being attacked, criticized, and demonized by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle--went out, risked their lives, and put their lives on the line to remove these people from our streets so that our children and our families might be safe.

No, I am not going to apologize for ICE. No, I am not going to join in the bandwagon of criticism against ICE. Yes, you review procedures. Yes, you make sure you do things by the book and that people have due process.

When we are talking about people who are on our streets, as guests of our country, and they are committing violence against the people of our country, let's remember we have a duty to remove them, deport them, and do it immediately and swiftly.

Let's flip the page real quick. I have a couple more. Let's look beyond just Minnesota. Remember that when you have dangerous people in places like Minnesota and lawless States like California and New York, where you have sanctuary cities, then there are dangerous people throughout our country, too.

This is just the worst of the worst from yesterday, just yesterday.

In Virginia, a 20-year-old citizen of Guatemala was convicted for possessing obscene material of a minor and filming child porn.

In my home State of Texas, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico was convicted for aggravated assault of a family member in Harris County.

In New York, a criminal illegal alien from Jamaica was convicted for burglary.

A criminal illegal alien from Mexico was convicted for burglary.

A criminal illegal alien from El Salvador was convicted for false imprisonment and battery.

That was just yesterday. Let's look real quick at the worst of the worst from 2025 generally, not just yesterday.

In Louisiana, we have a sexual predator, an illegal alien from Honduras, whose criminal history includes active warrants for 394 counts of pornography involving juveniles and two counts of sexual abuse of an animal.

In Kansas, a violent criminal illegal alien from Mexico was sentenced to 20 years in prison for one count of forcible

assault on a Federal officer after he violently punched an ICE officer and attempted to strangle the officer with his own badge cord.

In Virginia, an Afghan national who entered the United States under Joe Biden's ``Operation Allies Welcome,'' provided support to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and his father is a commander of a militia group in Afghanistan.

In Nebraska, an illegal alien from Honduras and a leader of MS-13, also known as Fantasma, was wanted in his home country for a quadruple homicide. After being charged with firearms charges in Honduras, he allegedly bribed his way out of jail and illegally entered the United States.

In Houston, the criminal history of an illegal alien from El Salvador included convictions for sexual assault of a child under 17, multiple DUIs, child fondling, and illegally reentering the United States previously. When ICE conducted an enforcement operation in November to arrest him, he brutally beat an ICE officer with a metal coffee cup. He caused a severe laceration of the officer's mouth and burns to the officer's face.

Where are my Democratic colleagues' concern about the ICE officer who put his life on the line and gets mauled and has a laceration across his face because he is trying to stop murderers, rapists, and child pornographers from being on American streets?

In my home State of Texas, Jose Alfredo Uzeta, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico, operated a dental clinic and performed dental procedures on patients, despite not having a license for more than 20 years. His clinic was uncovered after one of his former patients reported he was convicted of a dentistry act violation and indecent assault.

Another criminal illegal alien and his family members ran a sex trafficking operation where they would approach women and girls, some as young as 14, and lure them to the United States under promises of jobs.

That is all these people right here. That is these people right here.

We have a criminal illegal alien from Vietnam who has been convicted 25 times for crimes including possession of a controlled substance; second-degree robbery; cruelty toward the elderly; arson property; taking vehicle without consent; and theft.

I could go on and on. Those are the people who ICE is trying to get off of our streets.

Here is the question. This is how I want to open up a conversation with my good friend from Pennsylvania, Scott Perry--a great American and somebody I am proud to serve with here in this Congress and proud to serve with in the House Freedom Caucus.

I will yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania in colloquy about how he views whose side we are on. That is what I want to know: Whose side are we on?

Are we on the side of American citizens--Americans, including some immigrants and immigrant families, like beautiful Jocelyn Nungaray--are we on their side or Officer Mendoza? Or are we on the side of violent criminals whom ICE is trying to remove from our streets?

It sure seems like my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are on their side. They are on the bad guys' side. There really are white hats and black hats, and you have to choose. They are on the bad guys' side.

They are not standing with ICE, not standing with law enforcement, not standing up to defend the law enforcement officers who are putting their lives on the line to keep these guys off of our streets so that these Americans aren't killed.

I just wonder if my friend from Pennsylvania has a similar view that it ought to be easy to choose sides, and if my friend from Pennsylvania, like me, chooses to side with Border Patrol and ICE and law enforcement and local law enforcement to protect Americans against violent thugs and criminals on our streets?

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania for the purpose of a colloquy.

Gang members. Tren de Aragua gang members who took her under a bridge in Houston, Texas, for the last moments of her life, raping her and killing her, and her beautiful mother today is standing up and saying: Enough. Enough.

We should enforce our laws. We should stand with law enforcement against the thugs and the gang members who are killing Americans, including Jocelyn, Officer Mendoza, Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, and Kayla Hamilton.

Why do I know their names? It is because I met their families, and I have talked to them, and they are human beings. They were Americans who were living their lives and going to college and going to school and serving their country, and they are dead because people decided, for political purposes, that they wanted to flood our streets with gang members from Venezuela and criminals instead of protecting Americans.

That is right.

And what we are talking about, again, at the risk of repetition: A Somali illegal alien convicted of homicide, a Salvadoran illegal alien convicted of three counts of homicide, a Mexican illegal alien convicted of homicide, a Sudanese illegal alien convicted of homicide, a Laotian illegal alien convicted of two counts of homicide, and I could go through all 18 again.

These are violent individuals. These were all on the streets of Minnesota. Minnesota ICE was on the streets trying to track down these people, and the radical left, our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, want to side with these guys.

Yes.

Yes.

I have not heard one, but I have heard--and I read 30 of them before. How about Boston Mayor Michelle Wu comparing ICE officers to a Neo-Nazi group.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson accusing ICE of being ``secret police'' who are ``terrorizing our communities'' and a lawless, racist force.

New York City's Zohran Mamdani said: ICE enforcement is ``an attack on us all.''

New Jersey State Senator Britnee Timberlake threatened that ICE officers `` . . . will find themselves in the same position as those who carried out the illegal acts in Nazi Germany. . . . ''

Minneapolis City Council member Robin Wonsley claimed ICE is carrying out ``terrorist attacks.'' I could go on and on. They have been calling on people to go out and attack ICE.

By the way, the man that was engaged in that incident in Minnesota-- and they will review all of that--he was dragged by a previous protester down the street by a car.

I read a minute ago about the ICE officer who was lacerated across his face when one of these thugs attacked him with a steel coffee mug. I talked about another guy that had this cord wrapped around his neck, and they tried to get him. One of these guys did that to an ICE officer.

Where is the concern for our law enforcement? My grandfather was the chief of police of a small town in West Texas back in the 1940s. Where is the concern for them? My great-great-grandfather was a Texas Ranger. I was proud to be in the U.S. Attorney's Office, proud to be the first assistant attorney general, and proud to work with law enforcement.

Does every member of law enforcement always get it right? No. They are human beings. Do we have ways to go through and punish, rectify, review, and ensure due process and that rights are protected? Yes. Should we? Yes.

I want to remind people these are not American citizens. These are guests in our home who are abusing that invitation--or noninvitation to the extent that they were legally here--invitation to the extent they overstayed a visa, invitation to the extent they were abusing a visa that they were issued. For whatever reason that they are here, they are violating that trust and engaging in illegal activity and carrying out the sickest and most heinous crimes.

It cannot be allowed to proceed, and we cannot allow people to side against our law enforcement that are trying to keep our streets safe so that we don't lose Rachel Morin, and we don't lose Laken Riley, and we don't lose Kayla Hamilton, and we don't lose Officer Mendoza, and we don't lose Jocelyn Nungaray.

Totally objectively--I have been to this floor, I come to this floor a lot, and I watch the House floor--I do not remember a single incident, a single time in my 7 years of being in the United States House of Representatives, not once have I seen it. In fairness, I might have missed one. Maybe somebody will find it in the Record. I have been down here countless times when it is an attack on law enforcement, countless times when it is an attack on President Trump and this administration.

I think this really matters. I am going to ask you another question that I think is important. Why are these people here? Why are these gang and thug members here? Why? Was it President Trump?

Did President Trump put them on our streets?

And, today, we have a flow of basically statistically zero at our border.

Do you remember when we were in this House Chamber, do you remember when we were debating legislation last year, and we were debating bills, and what did they say? They said: Well, we have got to pass comprehensive immigration reform in order to solve the problem and secure the border, when it

was Joe Biden as the President and Alejandro Mayorkas as the Secretary of Homeland Security. Now it turns out, somehow magically, without that being signed into law, magically President Trump is able to stop the flow at the border.

Do you think that is an accident?

Correct. A day. We had as many as 15,000 in a day, okay, and now we are getting far fewer than 10,000 in a month.

And was it not, in fact, true that under President Biden and under Alejandro Mayorkas' regime at the Department of Homeland Security, was it not true that these individuals--and you saw me reading off, by the way, a lot of the years when they had deportation orders, 2022 or previously. Was it not true that these individuals that were released into the United States were either released under parole. In an abuse of law that allows for isolated cases of parole, they released thousands en bloc.

Hundreds of thousands en bloc under parole, an abuse of the law, an illegal act, abuse of asylum to release people in our country, and then wide-open borders where people were flooding across the river.

Did that in totality, coupled with people overstaying their visas, coupled with, frankly, a far more liberal immigration system than we should have, result in all of these individuals being on the streets? None of my constituents asked for that.

None of my constituents wanted illegal aliens who were violent and committing crimes on the streets of our country. President Trump is stopping it. Tom Homan is stopping it. Stephen Miller, Secretary Noem, all of the great men and women in Border Patrol and ICE, they are stopping it.

Now, my question is: Why? Why do our colleagues on the other side of the aisle not want to stop it? Could it be for political reasons? Could it be that they want non-Americans to be in the United States to try to transform America and to politically motivate and to politically put Democrats in power? Could that be?

I don't want to be so cynical as to speculate here on the House floor, but what other motives would there be to allow dangerous individuals to pour into our communities and carry out what has been carried out?

The impact of illegal aliens being in our country or, frankly, those that were wrongly put in our country through parole, asylum, overstaying their visas, or expansive abuse of legal immigration, has a consequence, right?

It has a consequence in the form of lost lives. It has a consequence in the form of hospitals that are overflowing with individuals, particularly in Texas, but around the country, jail cells that are overflowing, and schools that are overflowing. All of that is a consequence in terms of costs and continued problems.

Just last week, two illegal aliens suspected of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were charged with allegedly weaponizing their vehicle against a Border Patrol agent in Portland. Both suspects originally crossed the southern border under Biden and were released into the interior. The driver wound up with a rap sheet, including DUI, while the passenger is linked to a shooting and a prostitution ring in Portland. That is what is happening.

Now, why do I mention that here? Because we just said that President Trump was able to use current law and current authority to secure the border and stop the flow. He is currently using current law, current authority, to remove illegal aliens, including the 1.5 million people here under an order of removal.

I want to remind everybody of that. We just blow past that little detail. There are 1.5 million people running around this country who have an order of removal from a judge. They have gone through all the processes. They have had all the fricking lawyers that are paid by the NGOs to try to keep them out of court and keep them in the country, and 1.5 million of them have an order of deportation, of removal.

What do we do about it? This is what I want to say. We, Congress, owe it to the President and to the great men and women of Border Patrol and ICE, to our constituents, and to future Americans, who could be endangered by a future administration with open borders, to codify that which President Trump has been carrying out to defend our country.

We owe it to all of them to pass a new and updated version of H.R. 2 that we passed in the previous Congress. We stood on this floor as conservatives and united this Conference behind a singular mission of passing laws to prevent the abuses that were being carried out by Biden and Mayorkas.

I promise you--remember, we had a President Trump in 2020. We had a secure border in January 2021, with low numbers of border crossings and enforcement of the law. What happened? Biden took over; Mayorkas took over; and we had an explosion. Then, we had dead Americans and dangerous, lawless people on our streets.

We, Congress, have a duty to lay it all on the line and to make sure that, this year, under this Congress, with the Republican majority in the House and a Republican majority in the Senate, we deliver to the President's desk the equivalent of H.R. 2 from the previous Congress, which would codify the changes to parole, codify the changes to asylum, codify the changes in catch and release, codify the permanent and continued development of the wall, all the tools necessary to stop the flow at the border that the current administration has put into action. We should demand it. We should change the law so that no future Biden and Mayorkas can endanger the American people.

Does the gentleman from Pennsylvania agree?

Right.

Zero. Now, if we are lucky--if we are lucky--we might get a handful if pushed to the brink. Remember, we got four or five of them to vote for, I think, the SAVE Act.

Let's bring that up for a second. Should we not--in addition to guaranteeing that we secure the border and codify the great work of President Trump to prevent the death and destruction of the American people, should we not also guarantee the integrity of our elections by passing yet again the SAVE Act, pushing our Senate colleagues to pass the SAVE Act, and send it to the President's desk, which would simply guarantee that only American citizens vote in American elections?

It is that simple. Shouldn't be controversial. Shouldn't be a really difficult concept. We have passed it in the House. The Senate is blocking it. The question is whether Republicans have the nerve to put it on must-pass legislation, to fight for it, to break the filibuster in the Senate, to move the bill and get it to the President's desk, along with some other good changes, like voter ID and other things we should do.

Does the gentleman agree that we should, in addition to codifying H.R. 2, secure American elections with these requirements under the SAVE Act to save America, as President Trump rightly said, as President Trump told us in our Conference meeting a week and a half ago, to get it to his desk? Do you agree?

I have one final question, one final point. In addition to protecting Americans with H.R. 2 to codify the President's actions, in addition to ensuring that American elections are secure and that you can trust the integrity of elections by passing the SAVE Act, voter ID, and what is necessary to guarantee the sanctity of our elections, should we not also consider something like the PAUSE Act to pause and take a break on immigration when, in fact, we legally have 1.1 million green cards, 1 million guest workers, and north of 1 million foreign students each year?

We have more immigrants than every other country in the world combined. We have a foreign-born population of 51.9 million, almost 16 percent, a record high. This is the important part. We have social welfare and social safety nets that are being used by noncitizens that are blowing out the rolls and driving up the cost of all of these goods.

My point here is that we have had massive amounts of immigration over our history. All of us love the actual melting pot that America represents, but here is the key issue: You actually have to be willing to assimilate for it to be a melting pot. It is not a melting pot if you are coming here and waving a Palestinian flag or waving the flag of Honduras or Guatemala instead of saying I am coming here to be American, to embrace Western civilization, and to embrace the greatest country the world has ever known that has bled around the world not for conquest but to liberate people, that has died for people around the globe to make it a safer and secure place.

People want to come here to be a part of that, God bless them, but the people who come here who want to change it, who want to turn it into an Islamic state, who want to undermine it and who want advance sharia law, who want to bring their flags of their country here instead of adopting and becoming an American--shouldn't we not take a total review of our immigration system, from top to bottom, in addition to codifying security of our border and ensuring the integrity of our election, that only citizens vote and that only citizens are counted for purposes of representation and how we apportion our Members of Congress?

All of these things that I am talking about are common sense to ensure a simple principle that American citizens are able to run this country.

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Pennsylvania for joining me tonight. I appreciate his commentary, I appreciate his leadership, and I appreciate his service in the United States military. I appreciate his service to his constituents, and I appreciate his great family.

It is a sacrifice for all of us. It is tough when you have young kids, Madam Speaker. Our kids are about the same age. We leave them at home, and we come here, but we are doing it because we want to save this country for our kids and our grandkids. That is why I am in public service.

I know when I had a diagnosis of cancer about 14 years ago, Hodgkin's lymphoma, I didn't know if I would be around days or weeks, and 14 years later, I am sure some of my colleagues, maybe they are happy to see me, maybe they are not.

I know that when I leave my kids, I know God gave me some more breath and some more time on this planet to try to make sure that we save this, the last great hope for mankind as President Reagan called it.

Madam Speaker, I will close with this, and I will turn it over, so my friend from North Carolina can take the floor.

We are here to represent the American people. The American people did not send us here as Representatives to give away our country. They did not send us here as Representatives to allow our friends on the other side of the aisle to empower dangerous tax cuts, thugs, gang members, and people who are killing Americans. They did not send us here for that.

Every time we vote on appropriations bills and every time we are putting forward legislation, we ought to be thinking about these Americans who lost their lives at the hands of these non-Americans. We ought to be thankful we have a President who recognizes that these non- Americans needn't be on our streets, that we should be siding with ICE and Border Patrol, and that we should be defending the men and women in our law enforcement across the country so we can protect these Americans. So that we can choose to side with the American citizens, not the non-Americans who are dangerous, and we can side with law enforcement to protect these.

We can act. This is my message to my Republican colleagues: We have a choice this year. We can retreat and get into the mode of elections. Or we can lead, we can work, and we can roll our sleeves up and right now codify the rules, the laws, and the actions of the President to secure our border and ensure that no future President can abuse them.

We can do that right now. We can pass H.R. 2. We can send it to the Senate. We can force the Senate to act if we just have the will to do it.

We can send the SAVE Act again. We can add voter ID. We can send it to the Senate. We can dare them to break the filibuster by forcing a talking filibuster instead of the fake filibuster of a forced 60-vote threshold.

Make them work. Make 51 Senators sit on the floor and have a quorum. Make them speak. Make them do their job so that we can defend our country and defend our people. Pass the SAVE Act, pass voter ID, and secure American elections. Secure our border permanently instead of just having it depend on the current President. Reform our immigration system. Pause it. We have done it before. Pause it, review it, and stop people from overstaying their visas. Fix the system.

Make sure we are not importing people who are adherent to sharia law and want to undermine Western civilization and create mayhem and be against our way of life.

Choose the path of leadership. Come here as a Congress and bind together. Don't sit around complaining about having a two- or three- or four-seat majority.

Lead, act, and go.

That is why we are here. That is why that flag exists. Madam Speaker, put your trust in God, and put the armor of God around you. Stand up and lead for this country.

If we do it, then the American people will send us back here in a bigger majority.

If we do it, then President Trump will be able to accomplish even more in the next 2 years than in these 2 years.

If we act now, then we can actually save this country.

If we act now, then we can secure the border.

If we act now, then we can secure our elections.

If we act now, then we can guarantee an immigration system that no longer imports people into our country who want to undermine it.

We can provide healthcare freedom, and we can balance the budget if we act and we lead. Right now, let's secure our country. We can do it this year. That is our calling.

We are not here to get re-elected. We are here to deliver for the American people.

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

Mr. Chair, I rise as the designee of Mr. Perry, and I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chair, this amendment revises the scope of review clause within the bill and strengthens the codification of the Supreme Court's Seven County decision issued earlier this year.

Now, my friend from Pennsylvania (Mr. Perry) is the author of this amendment, and I am offering it for him because he is in committee business. He was offering this amendment to further improve the bill and limit agencies from taking into consideration factors which are not within their authority to regulate. This is the core issue at the heart of what was going on in the Seven County decision.

Congress should continue to build upon that unanimous decision. Let me be very clear that the Seven County decision was unanimous and further improved NEPA. This bill that the chairman has brought here to the floor takes significant strides in improving NEPA, and improves upon it by limiting what agencies can regulate to what they already can by law. By ensuring that the scope of review is conducted within the sole legal purview of each Federal agency, we can drastically improve the current landscape of drawn-out, ineffective permitting.

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

Mr. Chair, this amendment would insert that Federal agencies ``may consider only those effects over which the lead agency or cooperating Federal agencies have jurisdiction by law and share a reasonably close causal relationship to, and are proximately caused by, the immediate project or action under consideration.''

There shouldn't be anything objectionable in that commonsense application, that commonsense phrasing. It is a commonsense change that strengthens the bill by narrowing the scope of NEPA to impacts that Federal agencies have the legal authority to regulate.

It is pretty simple. It avoids time-consuming reviews of impacts from paleontology to traffic patterns that agencies cannot even control.

By ensuring that the scope of review is conducted within the sole legal purview of each Federal agency, we can drastically improve the current landscape of drawn-out and ineffective permitting.

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

Mr. Chair, the goal of this amendment is in keeping with the unanimous Supreme Court decision in which the Court jumped in and reversed the D.C. Circuit. The D.C. Circuit had said, well, we are not going to allow this to proceed, despite you having this 3,600-page report, this environmental impact statement, gone through public comments, et cetera.

Everything had been approved, and then the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated that approval, finding that the environmental review overlooked a number of various impacts. The Supreme Court came in and said, No, let's reverse that. You have gone through the process, and what we are trying to do is codify that which would enable us to avoid the kinds of delays that have been hampering our ability to have energy projects.

There is a reason everybody's utility bills are up and energy costs are high. It is because we have constrained the ability of our States, communities, and businesses to be able to create and provide the ability for us to have power without getting hamstrung into decades- long disputes and fights going through all the back channels of a maze of bureaucracy. This is a simple, commonsense amendment to try to streamline that.

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

Mr. Chair, of course, they maintain discretion. Agencies will have full discretion if we adopt this language, the discretion to consider the effects over which that agency or the cooperating Federal agencies have jurisdiction. That is it.

What we are saying is that we shouldn't have courts making stuff up, and we shouldn't have agencies making stuff up. That is all we are trying to say. Let's get everybody in their lanes. Let's get the agencies in their lanes, and then, let's allow the American people to do what they do best.

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

Mr. Chair, I urge adoption of this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chair, my amendment shores up and strengthens the definition of what triggers an environmental impact statement.

I offer this amendment to further improve the bill and prevent agencies from keeping projects in permitting limbo.

Again, the driving force here is to try to free up the American people and free up free enterprise to be able to produce adequate and abundant energy for the American people, to be able to produce and create and develop projects that create and provide jobs and to be able to make sure the American people can prosper without being hamstrung by the bureaucracy of a Federal Government that has been limiting our ability to keep up and produce.

While the base text of the bill makes a great effort to reduce the length of NEPA review by placing caps on all parts of the process, further defining what constitutes a significant effect that triggers an environmental impact statement will make the bill stronger.

Performing an environmental impact statement is the lengthiest and most expensive part of the permitting process. The Government Accountability Office estimates the lengthy EIS process costs between $250,000 and $2 million every time there is a project.

My amendment inserts commonsense language that requires at least one significant effect be triggered before an agency subjects a project to the lengthy EIS process.

Specifically, my amendment defines a significant effect as: having a proximate and concrete harm that is directly caused by the proposed agency action and that materially impairs human health or property.

By adopting this amendment, House Republicans can actually demonstrate their promise to get Washington's bureaucracies out of the way of progress and fulfill, I think, the great intent of this legislation that the chairman has put together and my colleagues on the committee have brought to the floor.

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

Mr. Chair, the reason we are here, the reason that we have this legislation on the floor, is that NEPA is egregiously broken. The SPEED Act, which has been brought to the floor by the chairman, places commonsense caps on how long an EIS can take, and this amendment goes further to restrict what triggers this lengthy, onerous process.

Under the current runaway practice, NEPA reviews delay reliable energy projects by 3.9 years. Think about that. Want to know why we have difficulty getting affordable energy? All of these reviews, all of this cumbersome process, has delayed the ability for people to come together and produce energy for themselves, the energy that allows us to be in a heated facility and lit and living and having the benefits of modern life and having hospitals powered and having cars that function and homes that are heated and cooled.

You add this 4-year lengthy addition with an EIS, environmental impact statement, and you make it more difficult.

America must be able to get energy projects up and running and on the grid if we are going to compete on the global stage and continue to be able to live the benefits of modern life. This amendment addresses the most onerous part of the currently bloated NEPA process.

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

Mr. Chair, I will remind my colleagues that what this amendment does is defines a significant effect as having ``a proximate and concrete harm that is directly caused by the proposed agency action and that materially impairs human health or property,'' fairly common sense.

Mr. Chair, in closing, I am going to take 30 seconds, a point of personal privilege here, to respond to something that the gentleman alluded to earlier in another exchange with another Member talking about so-called frivolous litigation by our current President.

I find it absolutely extraordinary that in the same week that we found out that the FBI literally told higher-ups at the Department of Justice and the White House that there was not probable cause to engage in a raid at Mar-a-Lago on the former President of the United States, that we are somehow going to enter that fray and not acknowledge the extent to which the abuse of power and the abuse of authority by the Biden administration and by his Department of Justice was extraordinary, historic, corrupt, and worthy of note.

If my colleagues want to venture into a debate about lawfare, then we will be happy to talk about the Manhattan DA. We will be able to talk about Fani Willis. We will be happy to talk about Jack Smith. We will be happy to talk about Arctic Frost, not because we are happy that they occurred, but because the American people are offended about the assault on President Trump, on the Members of this body, and on the people of the United States.

Mr. Chair, I urge adoption of my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns today, it adjourn to meet at noon Monday next for morning-hour debate and 2 p.m. for legislative business.

Mr. Speaker, it was great to have had the chance last night to be at the White House with the President, his Cabinet, and my colleagues.

Obviously, we celebrated the Christmas season and our collective belief that this season is particularly important for the American people in recognition of who we are as a people in a Judeo-Christian society and celebrating the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

It is not just a holiday for white lights and garland and making merry. It is a holiday that serves as the center of who we are as a people.

As the Speaker knows, sitting there in the Speaker's chair under ``In God We Trust,'' it is that collective faith that we have in the Lord Almighty and our collective belief in his Son that has served as the core of the strength of this country from its founding. I will talk about two things today that are related to that.

One is a policy issue. That issue is the ability of the American people to get healthcare and care for one another. The other is defending our Judeo-Christian heritage in Western civilization from the onslaught of those who wish to push the Islamification of our country into the forefront.

Mr. Speaker, I will start on the point of the healthcare policy because I think it goes to the central problem we face as a people right now. A lot of folks are talking about ``affordability.'' It has become the political hot-button buzzword. It is affordability.

This is being driven intentionally by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle because they have got virtually nothing to run on. They made a choice to shut the government down in order to set up a fight and to try to elevate the issue of healthcare because they believe they can win on it politically.

Mr. Speaker, I want everyone to think about that for a minute. They shut down the government because they want to politicize the issue of healthcare and not actually work to solve the problem.

Republicans, in my view, have avoided the issue of healthcare out of political fear historically. I believe that this Republican Congress, this Republican House and Senate, and this Republican-led White House have the opportunity today to transform healthcare for the American people so that it can be affordable, so that they can have choice and they can go to the doctor of their choice, and to empower doctors and patients, not insurance bureaucrats and government bureaucrats.

I want to repeat that again because I am going to engage in a colloquy and yield to my friend from Missouri in a moment on this important topic.

Right now, the average American family is getting crushed and is unable to afford healthcare because Democrats broke our healthcare system.

I want to be very clear: Democrats knowingly chose to break the American healthcare system 15 years ago. We told the world what would happen, and it has come true.

American families and the businesses that employ most of them are spending about $25,000 a year for insurance premiums that give them fewer options and restricts them on what they can do, gives them higher copays, higher deductibles, and fundamentally makes it impossible for them to have actual care.

I go back to my point about In God We Trust and celebrating the Christmas season. As Christians, we are called to take care of those less fortunate than we are. We are called to help those who need help. That is why so many of our hospitals historically were nonprofits built up from faith-centered institutions. That is why so many hospitals are Saint Fill-in-the-Blank Hospital. It is because Christians came together to say that we should care for those who need help, but then came in government.

In all of its infinite wisdom, government came in and regulated healthcare, restricted our options and socialized the payments.

Now what is the result?

It is an impossibility of the average American family to be able to actually get healthcare from the doctor of their choice. It is the inability for them to go get insurance that will give them comfort that if the cancer that I got in 2011 hits them, that they will be able to go get care because they can't afford it. They can't afford it because we have broken it. We didn't break it, Democrats broke it.

Right now, Republicans have a choice: Go along with Democrats to continue to socialize healthcare, continue to enrich insurance companies and continue to take away options from the American people or we can stand up for healthcare freedom and stand up for the ability of an average American family to be able to go to the doctor of their choice, get insurance, and go on health-sharing ministries such as Medishare and be able to defray costs, rather than having constrained, regulated, no-option, expensive health management by bureaucrats.

That is what we have.

The fact is, Mr. Speaker, there is this big debate right now about so-called subsidies. I want to be very clear about what we are talking about. We are talking about COVID-era pandemic cash that was thrown out into our economy in this case for some plus-ups for some subsidies for the broken ObamaCare system.

Now we are 5 years removed from COVID, and my Democrat colleagues are trying to say that if we don't extend those subsidies that somehow we are denying people healthcare. That is just flat false. It is a lie.

The fact is, ObamaCare remains in place. Its subsidy structure remains in place for better or worse, and those subsidies that they are talking about would literally go into the pockets of insurance companies whose profits have gone up 1,000-plus percent over the last decade.

It is an insurance enrichment scheme.

My Democratic colleagues broke healthcare, and now they are down here saying: We must give more money to insurance companies.

That is what they are saying.

Any Republican who goes along with that needs to answer for doing the same thing.

Why would we give more money to the insurance companies that saddled up with government to enrich themselves rather than help the American people?

Mr. Speaker, 85 percent of all Affordable Care Act revenue insurers received comes from the Federal taxpayers. Mr. Speaker, 85 percent of all the revenue, I should say, that the insurers receive are coming from the Federal taxpayers. Insurers received at least $35 billion in Federal subsidies in 2024 for people who didn't use their plan a single time. Mr. Speaker, $35 billion went into the pockets of insurance companies for people who didn't even use their plan.

I want to say this, and then I am going to yield to my friend from Missouri: We have solutions. When people say that Republicans don't have a plan, it is false. We put out plans. We have put out solutions. We have solutions.

We believe in expanding people's access to care by empowering them with the same tax treatment, equal tax treatment, the corporations get. Individuals should get the same tax deductions and tax breaks to be able to have healthcare.

Mr. Speaker, we believe in expanded health savings accounts that you can use for direct primary care to go to a doctor, have that doctor's cell phone number, have a relationship with that doctor and not be put into some complicated scheme where you have to get approval for somebody who is in network or not in network and who may or may not be within 100 miles of your house.

We want the American people to be empowered. We want them to be able to go defray costs and share costs in health-sharing ministries and Medishare and all these different organizations that are, frankly, the last lifeboat that people have right now for access to care.

We want to allow providers to own hospitals rather than be restricted from being able to do that so that the corporate, monolithic hospitals are not the only option.

We want 1,000 flowers to bloom and for people to have the freedom option.

Guess what, Mr. Speaker?

You can leave ObamaCare, the Affordable Care Act, structure all in place. Leave it all sitting there, but just provide the American family with a freedom option. Allow them to have choice.

Shouldn't that be our right as Americans?

People talk about a right to healthcare. What they are really saying with that is that government should be providing healthcare rather than the individual, the family being able to have the right to get the care of their choice.

What on Earth kind of freedom do you have in a country where you literally can't go get healthcare and you are prohibited from it?

The government has stopped us from exercising our freedom.

We have plans. What we don't have is the backbone and the willpower to stand up and deliver.

I say: Do it now.

I say: Stand up and fight for healthcare freedom now.

I am tired of it. I don't want another election. I don't want another: Don't worry, we will do it next time. I want to do it now because too many people are suffering at the hands of a bureaucracy and the tyranny of government-run health management rather than the ability to get care.

The current situation with respect to healthcare exists entirely by record of vote and a record of policies because my Democrat colleagues put forward policies that the American people are having to live under today.

They broke the healthcare system.

My Democratic colleagues are proposing an insurance company enrichment scheme. Literally they are printing money in the Treasury and giving it to insurance companies.

Their solution for healthcare is enriching insurance companies. Our solution for healthcare is empowering doctors. Our solution for healthcare is empowering people. Our solution for healthcare is spreading costs out among people who want to help each other out in the American way.

It is why I started talking about Christmas.

The question for Republicans is: If not now, then when?

When are we going to stand up and deliver for the American people?

That basic right--I will say it--right to access healthcare of our choice without government interfering, without government regulating, and without government stealing our ability to care for our own families and loved ones in our community.

I know the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Burlison) feels the same way. He has done incredible work on this subject. We are aligned, I think almost entirely, on the opportunity for Republicans to lead, the opportunity for Republicans to stand up and deliver for the American people on healthcare freedom for every American. Every American should be able to do that.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Burlison).

Mr. Speaker, I know my friend from Missouri needs to head home, but before he heads out, I would ask him a couple of quick questions in colloquy.

For the average viewer out there who can't necessarily follow all this, if we distill this down simply, no matter what you call it, no matter how you define it, what we are simply proposing is that individual families, individuals, be able to get the same tax benefit as currently corporations get when they are putting their dollars into a Blue Cross, Aetna, or some other insurance plan, right?

I yield to the gentleman from Missouri.

Because of a broken system created by wage controls post- World War II, instead of employers only being able to get the tax break when they give dollars to pay Blue Cross to provide some sort of plans and then you have to then further subsidize that--so maybe your employer puts in $1,800 and you put in $900, in total, it is costing $2,700 a month.

Instead, we are saying: Look, get the same tax break, employer, but put it into a massively expanded, tax-free account, where you are able to use it for insurance, real insurance, that you can go get, a catastrophic coverage and/or direct primary care, all sorts of plans out there where you have a doctor who says: Look, for $100 a month, you can call me. I am at your call. I will do this kind of service.

Another option is health sharing, whether it is secular or faith- based, where you have, oh, wait a minute, I don't need catastrophic insurance for this problem. It is a broken leg, but I don't have $5,000 for the emergency room visit and all the care and whatnot, so you share and defray that cost across people often in a faith-based organization, but sometimes secular.

Isn't that the engine of what we are talking about?

Then, would it not require us to simply say that you can leave ObamaCare in place? That can sit there and keep doing what it is doing, but we are going to give people this option, so employers can put it in there.

If you are self-employed, you can get the same tax break. It is all equal tax treatment. Nobody is treated differently. We would have a product over here that would allow for true catastrophic insurance, right--not regulated, not all sorts of complications, not telling you what you can do, not do, but a risk-based product that says: Hi, I am a healthy 24-year-old. I would like to just know that, if I am in a bad accident or if I get cancer, that I will be able to have care. I will pay $100 a month for that risk assessment, and the insurance companies can figure all that out, or $200 a month, but not $2,000 a month.

Isn't that what we are talking about?

Correct.

The last point, to that point, when our Republican colleagues, in particular, and other colleagues talk about all these things--we need transparency, we need association health plans--I support that. I support transparency, right? We need to fix some particular technical thing with our existing plans, right? Whatever these little solutions are--PBMs, right? There are all these--oh, we are going to do something on PBMs. Well, sometimes, that works. Sometimes, it doesn't. Will any of that be transformative?

What will be transformative is giving individuals and patients the power to deploy the dollars in a tax-advantaged way, in a marketplace where they can go get the options that are best for them.

Correct?

Right.

Right.

Right. If you have an F-250 pickup, right, and you have a crappy, little engine in there that doesn't work, but you add four- wheel drive and leather seats, and you do all this stuff to make it a nice truck, but it has a lawnmower engine in it, would it work? Would it be effective?

That is what we are talking about. That is what Republicans do. They have fallen into the trap of saying: Please give me the leather seats on the F-250, or I really want the four-wheel drive, or I really want a good bed liner and bed cover, and, oh, give me all the options and music and speakers and, oh, it looks great, great running boards, but you have a frigging lawnmower engine. The truck is useless.

We have to actually transform healthcare, and we have the opportunity to do it with proposals like yours, like mine, like a number of proposals that our colleagues have. The question is: Will we have the willpower to do what the President has laid out-- Mr. BURLISON. Yes.

--which is to stop subsidizing insurance companies, stop enriching insurance bureaucrats, and empower the American people?

I thank the gentleman for his time.

I wish him safe travel back to Missouri, and hopefully, next week, we can get busy saving the American people from a broken healthcare system.

America Under Attack From Within

Mr. Speaker, I am going to take a few minutes in the time that I have remaining to talk about another issue that is critical to the State of Texas and this entire country.

That is the fact that America, Texas, and Western civilization are under attack from within. The cheap labor lobby, leftwing NGOs, radical progressive Democrats, Marxists, globalist organizations, and the United Nations have mobilized a coordinated effort to subvert our security and immigration system to harm the American people.

Particularly concerning is the threat posed by Islamists who are spreading sharia law into Texas, who are advancing throughout the country, and who have a stated goal of undermining American life, not assimilating into it.

This is a political movement, well funded, targeted at the American people, Western civilization, our rule of law, and the Constitution.

We should not be allowing more people into this country who are adherent to sharia law, period. The Muslim Brotherhood's own motto is: ``Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.''

Meanwhile, Europe has fallen. London and Paris are mere shells of their former strong selves. You watch veterans who fought to defend the United Kingdom in World War II. Those still alive tear up and cry, wondering what it was that they fought for when they watch the radical extension of Islam into the streets of London and throughout the United Kingdom.

In France, a majority of young French Muslims put sharia above their own national laws, and more than a third have sympathy for Islamification. French officials have warned President Macron that Islamists are infiltrating France's republican institutions and are a threat to national cohesion. The authors of the report to Macron identified the Federation of Muslims in France, FMF, as the main French emanation of the historic Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded 100 years ago to promote a return to core Islamic values.

They said that the FMF controlled 139 places of worship in France and a further 68 affiliated--in all, around 7 percent of the total. The organization ran some 280 associations.

Mr. Speaker, 7 out of 10 French voters would back a ban on the Islamic veil in public because of what is happening in France.

In the United Kingdom, Muslims are increasingly turning to Britain's sharia courts, which are not part of the U.K. law and operate as informal bodies. The number of sharia courts in Britain has grown to 85 since they first began operating in the country in 1982.

Polls have found that 41 percent of the British public believe that Muslim immigrants have had a negative impact on the United Kingdom. Nearly half think that Muslim women are pressured into wearing a hijab. Almost a third think that Islam promotes violence.

Parallel legal systems are not keys to a thriving society. There must be one rule of law for all the people.

All the way back in 1991--a lot of people won't know this--the Muslim Brotherhood issued a memorandum about North America, detailing a plan for the ``enablement of Islam in North America,'' establishing an effective and stable Islamic movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood, which adopts Muslims' causes domestically and globally and works to expand the observant Muslim base. It was a coordinated and specific effort to advance Islam into the United States.

Our Founders did not envision a Nation that remotely resembled today's Muslim world and the radical elements of sharia. America was founded as a nation grounded in a distinctly Judeo-Christian history and understanding of human nature.

It was Great Britain that led the ending of slavery.

John Adams said: ``One great advantage of the Christian religion is that it brings the great principle of the law of nature and nations . . . to the knowledge, belief, and veneration of the whole people.''

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams hinted at the incompatibility of America's Republican virtues with the values of Muslim nations after meeting with the Islamic Ambassador about the Barbary States' inclination to make war upon nations that did them no wrong after they were informed it was a requirement of the Koran.

In Jefferson's papers in 1786, he wrote: ``We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor given us any provocation.

``The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found and, to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman''--Muslim--``who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.'' That is Jefferson, 1786.

Our Founders knew that sharia law was not consistent with Western civilization and our values. Sharia law is a problem that is growing throughout the United States and certainly growing in Texas. My home State bore the brunt of a 4-year mass migration invasion under the previous administration, but there has been a quieter one of Islamists leveraging our immigration system and corporate interests to extend and use diversity visas, chain migration, and H-1B visas to flood our country with people who don't believe in it and have no intention of assimilating into it.

A new Muslim community in Texas, not even a few days old, with a 150,000-square-foot Muslim community center, was opened in Houston, called EPIC City. It is in Plano, outside of Dallas-Fort Worth and it has raised all sorts of questions about their intentions to create an effectively Muslim-only community where sharia law no doubt would and will be practiced. Now they have renamed it The Meadow rather than the East Plano Islamic Center. They continue to develop and grow it even as there are almost 300 mosques in Texas and more mosques being built in Texas every day than any other State in the Union.

Meanwhile, let's look at what is going on in the United States broadly. Our Nation's foreign-born population has reached 51.9 million people, comprising some 16 percent of our population. We are at the highest levels of percentage in our history. The last time we had a similar level of foreign-born population, in roughly 1920, we froze immigration. Largely for about 40 or 50 years we froze it, and then it has been exploding over the last 50 years.

I have introduced legislation called the PAUSE Act to pause immigration and to pause it until we get our hands around all of the problems that are currently plaguing our immigration system: the abuse of birthright citizenship, to have profit-centered ways to create American citizens, by people coming here, coming across the Rio Grande, having children, making citizens that then can use American resources, our hospitals, our schools, our legal system, our welfare.

We continue to allow a broken visa system to have extended family members be brought into the United States expansively and purposefully. The H-1B program has been exploited and abused now for years and must be abolished or massively reformed.

We obviously still have a very badly broken border that is only currently being held in check by a President and by leadership in the administration who are devoted to doing it, that are empowered to do it. However, all of the ways in which Biden-Mayorkas and that entire administration allowed our border to be wide open and have 10 million people flood our country, all of those things still remain in place statutorily.

Congress could fix it. We haven't. The House passed legislation 2 years ago--what it was called in that Congress was H.R. 2--to meaningfully change the law so that it can't be exploited to endanger the people. We have not brought that back up again this year. We should. We should codify these changes. Our priorities matter. The results of this are stark.

Thanksgiving week we saw what happened with the West Virginia National Guard servicemembers, Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, who was 20 years old, and Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, 24. They were savagely ambushed and shot blocks away from the White House. Specialist Beckstrom tragically lost her life. The attacker, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who was imported through the Biden-Mayorkas illegal Operation Allies Welcome parole program, drove from Washington State to carry out this diabolical act in our Nation's Capital.

According to DHS, over 5,000 Afghans brought to the United States through Operation Allies Welcome had either national security or public safety concerns.

We are importing people who want to undermine and destroy our country, and both sides of the aisle have been guilty of this. This is not a debatable reality. It is literally occurring.

For us to survive, we have to act. We need to pass the PAUSE Act. We need to pause immigration. We need to pass legislation like the bill that I introduced to preserve a sharia-free America that would prohibit the entry of people that are known to be adherent to sharia law, which is deeply in conflict with our values and our laws.

We should take away the tax status of CAIR and other radical organizations with ties to terrorists and a vast network of well-funded organizations, using American tax dollars, United Nations' funds, wealthy donors, George Soros funding, foreign funding, nation-states all pouring into organizations, NGOs driving this agenda, the Marxist- Islamist red-green alliance that wants to destroy America as we know it. I introduced legislation to take away CAIR's tax status.

Why are we giving them tax breaks to try to destroy America?

That brings me to the final point which I was alluding to before on H.R. 2, that is legislation designed to codify effectively what President Trump is doing: to stop the abuse of parole, to stop the abuse of asylum, to stop the abuse of catch and release, to stop all of the abusive ways in which an exploited border can undermine our security and endanger us.

We cannot rely on the administration to do it. Congress needs to act. Congress needs to codify it. Congress needs to change it. States and State leaders need to stand up and use the legislation that we did pass in January to enable suit against the Federal Government when they failed to secure the border that we included in the Laken Riley Act because States can no longer be beholden to a Federal Government that refuses to secure the border.

We have a reprieve under President Trump. That reprieve will no doubt one day come to an end, and States must be empowered and have leaders who are willing to stand up and fight.

States need to challenge things like Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court ruling that said that we must have taxpayer funding going to pay for the education of illegal alien children. If you want to choose to do it, that is for you to decide. We should not be forced to use taxpayer dollars to do that. We should challenge that Supreme Court ruling. We should stand up to defend our country.

The fact is you can't win a war that you are not willing to recognize exists. It is undeniably true after the election of the mayor in New York, Mamdani, with what is going on in Dearborn, with what is going on in Minneapolis, with what we are seeing happen in Texas, in Dallas and Houston, what we saw unfold in London and Paris, that there is an attack on the Western way of life. We must stand up and defend it if we are going to be able to pass down a country to our kids and grandkids.

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

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 2159) to direct the Attorney General of the United States to submit to the Congress a report on Federal criminal offenses, and for other purposes, as amended.

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.

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

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I thank the gentlewoman from Georgia for joining with me in this effort. I thank the minority leader for his past work on this bill, as well, from his position on the Judiciary Committee, like the gentlewoman from Georgia.

We may come at these things from slightly different perspectives on different issues that come before us, but we are bound and joined together here in wanting some commonsense, good government to make sure that we know what we are dealing with, with respect to criminal laws. For decades, the American people, Congress, and corners of the Federal Government have tried to grasp a reliable estimate of how many criminal laws exist either in statute or in regulation.

In the 1980s, the Department of Justice tried to count the number of Federal criminal laws that reside within the code and estimated there are ``about 3,000 criminal offenses.'' The American Bar Association, in the 1990s, said it was much higher than 3,000 but couldn't figure out the number. In 2019, the U.S. Code was estimated to have 5,199 Federal crimes, but again, that was uncertain.

In other words, the Department of Justice, the American Bar Association, and organizations within our government are guessing.

Now, to be clear, there are estimated to be thousands of criminal offenses, many buried in regulatory codes. For context, there are an estimated 300,000 Federal regulations that carry criminal offenses that could put an American citizen in prison.

We can debate the merits, and we would debate the merits no doubt among the Members of this body, of any particular statute that criminalizes a certain act or any particular regulation that comes with criminal penalties associated with an action. It might be something that involves OSHA. It might be something that involves environmental regulations. It might be something else.

There are thousands upon thousands of regulations and statutes, and the American people often have no idea that they might be in violation of something that would come with a penalty that might include jail time or sufficient fines, and so forth, and they potentially could become a felon.

This bill is pretty simple. It just directs the Federal Government and the executive branch to count the crimes, to come up with a list of the crimes that exist, put those in order, and make sure that we know what offenses are attached to those so that we can go through this and make decisions as to whether or not these crimes are duplicative, whether they might be contradictory, and whether maybe they go too far or not far enough.

We feel like the people's House, for sure--Congress in its Article I function--ought to know how many crimes there are and what penalties are associated with those crimes so that the American people can know this.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Georgia for her comments.

Mr. Speaker, I would just add, in agreement with her, that, as I said before, this simply says that the Attorney General should provide to us, the people's House and this Congress, a list of all Federal crimes in statute and regulation, along with pertinent information such as potential criminal penalty, the mens rea requirement for the offense, and the DOJ prosecutorial history of the statute.

I think this is the bare minimum that we should have as a body to ensure that we are protecting due process and the rights of the American people while ensuring that we have an ordered society.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs), my good friend.

Mr. Speaker, I don't have a whole lot more to add. I associate myself with the remarks of all of my colleagues who have spoken on this matter. I would only add that I think it is important to note that this legislation is supported by the Due Process Institute, R Street, Right on Crime, as well as the National District Attorneys Association and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, which I think tells you what is going on here in that everybody would like to have some clarity and some transparency so we can have a commonsense understanding of our criminal laws, the extent to which they impact--as the gentleman from Maryland, I think, wisely noted--our civil liberties, and the extent to which we are made aware of what actions we take might be criminalized.

Mr. Speaker, I note as James Madison said in Federalist No. 62 on the fundamental principles of representative government and the importance of accessible and understandable laws: ``It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow.''

That is precisely the situation we find ourselves in, and we should fix it. We may have again, as I said before, some disagreements as to what should be criminalized or not. Previous Congresses have decided to criminalize some action that today we might take a second look at.

I do believe that we need to know and have the debate, and then be able to allow the subcommittee on which my Judiciary Committee colleagues serve, be able to review these, have open debate, and then make some decisions.

Maybe some of these should be sunsetted. Maybe some should be aligned. Maybe there are penalties that are out of whack. Maybe there are things that should be done to have greater notice for the American people.

I come together in good faith with my colleagues across the aisle and hope that my colleagues in the Chamber will support it.

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Georgia for her comments. I thank the gentleman from Tennessee for his kind remarks, the gentleman from Maryland, all of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, and my friend from Arizona. I also thank Judiciary Committee Chairman Jordan. I thank the ranking member from Maryland who we have already engaged with, and all of my colleagues who worked on this in the Judiciary Committee.

This is not a long or major piece of legislation. I tend to think that speaks well of it. I think the shorter the bill, the better.

I do believe that this is an important step, but I do want to remind my colleagues it is just a step. I would hope that we would get swift action out of the executive branch in following this

legislation if we are to get it through the Senate and get it signed so we can make an understanding of what is happening with respect to our criminal laws and regulations, and then act on it, as a Congress, in a bipartisan fashion. Again, we will have reasoned debate over some of the matters, but let's act on it. Let's do some things.

I agree with the gentleman that we need to revisit Article I. I introduced that during the first Trump administration the first time, and then we had it, obviously, during the Biden administration. I want to revisit that. It is critically important.

I hope that the AUMF repeal for 2002 that was in the NDAA in the Senate will be allowed to stay in the NDAA as it is coming back over to the House. We shouldn't have a 23-year-old authorization for the use of military force continuing to be under use. I hope that we in the House will reclaim those portions of congressional authority.

I think this is an important step. It is critically important for due process. I hope my colleagues in the Chamber will support it, and I urge its swift passage. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to say to the American people: Well, Congress is back.

Congress is back because we were finally able to do our job after 43 days of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, our Democrat colleagues, parading around the country, acting like they were fighting for you when, in fact, they were preventing us from being able to do the work we were sent here to do.

They were fighting to make worse a broken healthcare system that they have been holding you, the American people, hostage to, as they were also holding our government funding hostage. They were fighting to protect a broken healthcare system on behalf of insurance companies and regulators and to fund healthcare for illegal aliens, transgender surgeries, and abortions.

Republicans said enough. We fought back, and we held the line. We funded the government through January with three appropriations bills because that is what we told you we would do. The President and the Speaker of the House deserve credit because we were able to deliver.

Throughout all the headlines that this place gets, House Republicans, Senate Republicans, and the President have done a lot this year to deliver tangible results and wins for the American people. Let's just take a look at a few.

On day one of his return to office, President Trump addressed many of the issues upon which he campaigned. He fought the powers of globalists, defunding UNRWA, the dollars that were going to Hamas against Israel and against our national security interests. He defunded the United Nations Human Rights Council. He defunded the World Health Organization.

Each one of these were things that I had introduced legislation on and many of my Republican colleagues had introduced legislation on, but our Democrat colleagues wouldn't allow us to move. The President came in and executed on those important items to get us removed from these world bureaucrats.

The President also signed a declaration declaring cartels as foreign terrorist organizations--again, a bill I introduced 5 years ago that the Democrats were blocking. The President was able to deliver. We should codify it, but we have to beat Democrats to do that.

The FACE Act: The President stopped the abuses of the FACE Act against pro-life Americans and people who have the Department of Justice abusing them for carrying out their faith, and then he pardoned the pro-life activists who had been targeted and given jail time for praying and standing in defense of life. I introduced a bill to get rid of this pernicious abuse of law. The President came in, and he executed.

January 6: Alongside pro-life observers, Americans who were charged and jailed, often unfairly targeted, were pardoned after the Federal Government conducted a massive sweep to openly punish thousands of Americans, including some of my constituents. Some of us had to go down to the jail to force them to release people who the President pardoned.

Gender sanity: In return to normalcy, the administration removed the Gender X designation on U.S. passports, a piece of legislation I was proud to introduce that JD Vance carried in the Senate when he was there.

Laken Riley Act: In March, the Laken Riley Act would ensure Federal immigration officials detain illegal aliens that commit crimes and would allow States to sue the Feds. I was proud to introduce, along with my colleague from North Carolina, Dan Bishop, the SUE for Immigration Enforcement Act, which was included in the Laken Riley Act. It will allow us to sue the government in the future when they fail to secure the border, a monumental change in allowing States to defend themselves against the abuses that we saw under Biden and Mayorkas.

Speaking of the border, perhaps the most comprehensive and consequential policy achievement under President Trump has been securing our border. With the leadership of Tom Homan, Secretary Noem, Stephen Miller, the President himself, Border Patrol, ICE, all of these great law enforcement officials, despite the criticisms of leftists and Marxist mayors and cities that refused to work with them, they have brought down the flow across our border to basically zero, a 92 percent reduction from the massive flow across our border that was endangering Americans, endangering the people.

Energy independence: Trump signed an executive order ending American dependence on unreliable energy sources and slashed $3 billion in bogus abuse of emergency spending that wasn't even being used for emergencies.

ICE officials were given access to data for the Nation's 79 million Medicaid enrollees to be able to look at it and go find illegal aliens that were using Medicaid.

The Interior Department announced today that all agency decisions related to wind and solar energy must undergo strict reviews.

The Treasury Department announced today that they are taking action to ensure no tax benefits will go to illegal aliens.

This year, we advanced a responsible budget, along with President Trump, to reflect our well-established goal to return to pre-COVID spending.

Let's look at more. This Congress, working with the President, has held spending flat for the last 2 years, and now it is flat through January. If we honor our commitments, it will be flat through next September. By holding government spending flat and growing our economy, we are reducing the size and scope of bureaucracy. We are reducing debt as a percentage of our GDP and honoring the commitment that we gave to reduce inflation and to take our country back from the grasp of debt.

We avoided a massive omnibus spending bill twice, the scourge of this town, where you have these huge omnibus bills in December, at the end of the year. We have now stopped that twice with a mix of appropriations work and continuing resolutions.

We achieved major rescissions in wasteful spending. We cut IRS funding. We gutted the Commerce slush fund. We boosted immigration enforcement and deportation operations. We set the stage for additional rescissions and pocket rescissions that the OMB Director, Russ Vought, has been able to carry out, as well as impoundments.

We delivered on cutting the Federal spending that went to the badly broken PBS and NPR. I would point out, for those who want to apologize, NPR didn't utter a word. In my district, in Kerrville, Texas, on the morning when the floods were underway, they were running ads trying to fight for their own funding, but the private radio stations were going out and putting out emergency alerts to help people. The President rightfully reduced their funding. If they want to survive, they can go compete, but they don't need taxpayer dollars for, effectively, leftist propaganda.

We were able to pass the big, beautiful bill, which is a monumental achievement in which we reduced taxes for the American people, ensured taxes wouldn't go up. We were able to secure over $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction, five times the original projection of $300 billion.

We were able to end over half of the green new scam subsidies that were enriching the Chinese and enriching massive leftist corporations at the expense of the ability of the American people to have reliable grids and affordable energy.

We were able to advance welfare and Medicaid reforms, SNAP work requirements, commonsense work requirements for Medicaid.

We phased down the Medicaid provider tax threshold to save money and save hundreds of billions of dollars, cracking down on States' provider tax money-laundering schemes--which were going to illegal aliens--we saved money, made the system better and going to American citizens.

We were able to protect life by defunding Planned Parenthood and Medicaid.

We were able to protect the Second Amendment by ending taxation for suppressors and short-barreled rifles.

We were able to ensure full funding for border security, when we knew Democrats were going to shut down the government, with $150 billion set aside for continued operations for border security, as well as $150 billion for our defense, knowing that they would risk defense and border so they could try to shut down the government for political gain. We did that. We did that with the President.

We were able to ensure that our men and women in uniform didn't miss a paycheck in October, because we did that. We were able to ensure that we are continuing to revamp and restore our Defense Department, our War Department now, to a fighting machine rather than a woke indoctrination machine. Now we have enlistments at record numbers, we have people wanting to go to the military academies, proud to be in the military again, and people around the world are respecting our military again.

Now let's talk about this November continuing resolution: Democrats orchestrated the longest shutdown in history. They did so because they have nothing to run on, because they have nothing to sell to the American people except for hatred of President Trump and wanting to play games with your healthcare.

Because they broke the healthcare system, you now can't afford either health insurance or healthcare. You can't go to the doctor of your choice. If you do get any insurance, you are told that you only have a handful of doctors and that you have a massive copay or some other kind of limitation on your ability to choose a doctor. For example, in my case, as a cancer survivor, on ObamaCare, I can't go back to M.D. Anderson, which saved my life, because ObamaCare doesn't have M.D. Anderson as an option.

That is not coverage. That is fake. Democrats sold you fake coverage, and now your premiums have doubled, your copays and your deductibles have doubled or tripled, and you have fewer options for less quality care.

However, we were able to defeat the Democrat-led effort to spend another trillion and a half dollars to fund healthcare for illegals, abortions, and transgender surgeries.

We kept the reduction in workforce cuts that were made prior to the shutdown in order to hold and save money back for you, the American people, rather than bureaucrats who are at war with you.

We affirmed the President's goal of reducing the size of the bloated Federal Government, which 90 percent of Americans share.

We crafted a responsible, short-term continuing resolution through January, and now we are going to do the work to continue our job of holding spending flat.

We have done a lot. We have delivered on a large number of the promises upon which the President campaigned, on tax policy, on border security, on reductions in spending, on trying to drive down inflation, on getting interest rates under control, and we are just getting started. That is the truth. The American people are going to be the beneficiaries of that.

However, my message to my colleagues in this Chamber, and generally, is: We have miles to go. We have so much more to do. We have to continue to undo the damage of the last 12 of the last 16 years under Democrat control of the executive branch and policies that have been destroying the average, hardworking American family. We have had 10 months. We are going to continue to fight and to make those changes, but it takes a little time to unwind those damaging 12 years.

For example, healthcare, which is almost 30 percent of our budget. Healthcare is destroying the average American family. I know businesses in Austin, I know schools in Austin that are having to increase prices and increase tuition and increase what they have to deal with simply because of covering insurance premiums, which are going into the pockets of insurance companies to provide you substandard options in healthcare.

They don't provide you care. They don't. They are a middleman, a funding mechanism that gets in the way of you going to the doctor of your choice.

Republicans have plans to fix that. We have put forward those plans to fix that. Democrats block it at every turn. The simple truth is we believe in patients going to doctors. We believe in being able to share costs across Medi-Share, health-sharing ministries, other options, direct primary care, and getting bureaucrats out of your way.

We believe in ensuring that you will, in fact, have coverage that you can actually afford. We do that through the expansive ability for you to have the same tax treatment as corporations and the same tax treatment whether you are self-employed or employed by a business.

We can do that tomorrow, literally. We can transform the healthcare system in a day if we would put the legislation on the floor and Democrats would get out of the way. That is the simple truth.

The American people deserve, in a supposedly free country, to be able to go and get insurance products that work for them, doctors that are best for them, care that is best for them, and to be able to provide and take care of their families. Democrats would rather you be beholden to insurance companies, government bureaucrats, and their political priorities.

They want to scare you into believing they have got plans. They tried to do it with a shutdown. We called their bluff, and now we need to deliver healthcare freedom for the American people. We have the legislation to do it, and we have got to deliver.

We need to make sure that we address the price of housing. We shouldn't have corporate and foreign ownership of our housing supply. It is that simple. I don't know why foreign nationals and major corporations, BlackRock or otherwise, are buying up single-family residences. We should stop that. We should, frankly, give tax advantages to get rid of the ownership of those from corporations and foreign nationals to get them to American citizens so they can own those houses and own their ability to have a future for their kids and grandkids.

There are other things we can do, but we have got to drive down the price of housing, and we can do it if American citizens are the ones who are able to get access. You can get it also if you don't flood the country with literally tens of millions of people that are illegally here or through an abused legal immigration system.

Congressional stock trading: I have got to be honest, my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, stop it. When you are serving out in the private sector, God bless you, do what you want to do, but when you come here and you want to serve, why don't you just pause and let's take our investments and put them in broadly held mutual funds, do our work for 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 years, and then go home.

If you want to day trade, get off the House floor because too many of my colleagues are day trading while we are voting on important issues. We could pass that tomorrow; we have just got to have the willpower to do it. The American people want us to. It is like an 85/15 issue.

Education: Give it back to the States, get out of the way, empower States and parents. Expand choice, expand those options, but don't fund bureaucrats. The President is right to dismantle the Department of Education. It was started in 1979. We put a man on the Moon in 1969. Why do we need the Department of Education? We don't.

Importantly, we need to codify what the President is doing on our border and go even further. We passed H.R. 2 in the last Congress, the most comprehensive border security plan we have ever had. It wasn't about future flow. It wasn't about amnesty. It was about securing the border. It was about fixing the broken asylum, the broken parole, the broken catch and release, all of the things that Biden and Mayorkas were using to abuse our system to flood our country with foreign nationals.

President Trump is delivering that through execution as President. We need to codify that and prevent a future administration from abusing it ever again. We could do that. We could do it tomorrow. We passed H.R. 2 in the last Congress. Let's pass it again. Let's send it to the Senate, and let's fix our broken immigration system.

I introduced legislation today to say that we should pause legal immigration except for very short-term tourist visas. Yes, pause it all. We have 51 million people in this country who are foreign born. We have massive abuses with diversity visas and chain migration in which tens of thousands of people come into our country.

We have serious abuses under H-1Bs, which are not really being used for high-skilled workers. They are often for entry-level positions. We are leaving American workers behind, and we need to reform it.

We need to reduce the magnets that are here. We need to end birthright citizenship as it is currently known and make it what the American people actually expect if you talk to them: that you are a citizen if you are born of an American citizen. You are not a citizen just because somebody walked across the Rio Grande. We have got to stop the Supreme Court's forcing of States from having to fund the education of illegal aliens, which brings me to my final point about legal immigration.

Mr. Speaker, we have got to stop allowing people who are adherent to sharia law from coming into the United States and then trying to force sharia law into our system. It is in direct conflict with Western civilization. It is in direct conflict with the Constitution and the rule of law.

If we want to see what America is going to look like across this country if we don't address it, look at Dearborn. Look at Minnesota. Look at Mamdani's election in New York. Look at London. Look at Paris. Look at Germany. Ask if that is what we want in Dallas or Houston. Ask if we want this in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ask if we want this in Atlanta, Denver, Phoenix, or anywhere else.

It is happening, and it is happening in Texas. I will fight it in Texas. I will fight it here. I have introduced legislation to deal with it, but this body has got to deal with it and speak up about it. That starts with ending the importation of people who want to undo our system. They openly say it. If they are adherent to sharia law, then they have no business being here. That is just the simple truth.

We have a country to save. We have the greatest country in the history of the world. We are making massive progress with a President who is bold and willing to lead. We need Congress to continue what we did with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and continue what we did with the Laken Riley Act. We need them to continue to do what Speaker Johnson did a great job of which is hold the line against Democrats who shut our government down for political purposes.

Now we need to drive forward and force Democrats in the Senate to deal with great legislation, to codify our border, make sure people can afford healthcare, make sure people can afford housing, and do the things we said we would do.

Mr. Speaker, I will close with this since today is Thursday and a week from today is Thanksgiving. I know that most of the people that I represent are deeply thankful to be Americans and to be Texans. Every Thanksgiving, The Wall Street Journal runs an editorial called, ``The Desolate Wilderness.'' To the best of my knowledge, I think it has run every year since 1960 or 1961. It goes like this:

``Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof:

``So they left that goodly and pleasant city of Leyden, which had been their resting-place for above 11 years, but they knew they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest country where God hath prepared for them a city and therein quieted their spirits.

``When they came to Delfs-Haven they found the ship and all things ready, and such of their friends as could not come with them followed after them, and sundry came from Amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leaves of them. One night was spent with little sleep with the most, but with friendly entertainment and Christian discourse, and other real expressions of true Christian love.

``The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other's heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears. But the tide, which stays for no man, calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend Pastor falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessings; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.

``Being now passed the vast ocean and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succor; and for the seasons it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

``Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? And what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: For which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.''

Mr. Speaker, this editorial appeared since 1961. That is what they did. They

came here. Then they went into the desolate wilderness and carved into it a great country, a country that has seen its fortunes rise because of our collective recognition of our faith in the Almighty and our willingness to acknowledge it, such that the Speaker stands below the phrase ``In God We Trust'' here in this Chamber.

If we dare to leave the faith that built this country, then this country will lose the blessings that have been bestowed upon it. We are ever thankful to live in a country where we are free to believe what we want, where we can think what we want, and where we can say what we want for the most part.

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to setting up a country and a system of laws, they must bind us together. They must bind us together as a community, the kind of community that could pull people from the four corners of a country to sit in foxholes together, to fight the most evil forces in World War II and beyond, without question, without fail, because we were bound together as Americans.

That is who we are. We must fight for it every day. We must fight to keep her. We do that here by stopping the ridiculousness and spending money we don't have to indebt our children and grandchildren.

We do it here if we pass policies that will allow the American people to prosper under their own devices, to be able to afford healthcare and houses and food for their families, without interference from people here who say they know best in the false name of compassion.

We do it here when we secure our communities with secure borders and security laws and to make sure criminals don't roam free on the streets but that law-abiding citizens can prosper by walking freely on the streets, knowing they will be safe.

We do it mostly if we adhere to our faith in the Lord Almighty, acknowledge that faith, and fight to defend our collective belief in him. We have people who wish to undermine that way of life. It is real. We cannot win a war that we refuse to acknowledge exists. That war is here. We either fight right now to save this country for our kids and our grandkids or we lose it forever.

This Thanksgiving, I will be ever thankful to be an American, to be a Texan, and to live free. I am evermore committed to double down to save this country for our kids and grandkids. It is the responsible action here on this House floor and as a responsible member of my community back home in Texas and in every step that I try to take.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 8 o'clock and 57 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, November 21, 2025, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Wisconsin for his leadership here and managing this bill on the floor on behalf of my friend from Georgia, who rightfully raised this issue in the Rules Committee on which he and I both serve. We both immediately raised this issue in front of the Rules Committee and for the entire body.

There is nobody, to the best of my knowledge, in this body who supports this language that was inserted in the end of the funding bill that we passed last week. I don't know anybody. I have yet to meet one person who supports it.

Mr. Speaker, rather than my colleagues on the other side of the aisle coming together in a bipartisan agreement that we are going to, as the House, hip-check the Senate for having put a provision in there that we disagree with, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to try to make this a partisan issue when, in fact, Senate Democrats were equally involved in making sure that this provision got inserted. In fact, they were very specific about only wanting a provision if it was only focused on the Senate.

They didn't want it to be used, for example, to help J6ers or FACE Act individuals who were abused by the Department of Justice under President Biden. They didn't want it to be a more expansive private right of action. Instead, they wanted it to be narrow and narrow for the Senate.

Rather than the House being in a bipartisan agreement, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to make it partisan. If we are going to make it partisan, let's be very clear: The reason we were in the position that we were in last week was that we had been shut down for 43 days. Why? Because my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have literally nothing to run on.

The only thing my colleagues on the other side of the aisle can run on is

shutting down the government, making up nonsense about health in which they are going to enrich insurance companies in the process, and have nothing to take to the American people other than trying to create division.

The fact of the matter is, we are going to pass this legislation within days. We are going to send it to the Senate. We are going to make clear to the Senate that they need to correct this issue because the American people rightly are with us. The House of Representatives, Republican and Democrats, are rightly checking the Senate.

There is one last really important piece to this which is the Arctic Frost investigation itself, which specifically targeted United States Senators in an egregious abuse of power. It was targeting those Senators for their information and their records. That is something that is an absolute affront to separation of powers and to our constitutional order to have the Department of Justice targeting those Senators.

Those Senators were rightly wanting to find ways to stop Jack Smith and the abuses of the Department of Justice. We in this Chamber just simply believe that if you are going to do something like that, it should apply to all Americans and not be something specific to the United States Senate.

We are correcting this now. We should pass it immediately. The Senate should take it up and pass it. Also, a little personal message to the Senate: Take this up and pass it, or you are not getting any support from this Member for any of your measures that come over to this body.

Mr. Speaker, today a united Republican Party and a bipartisan supermajority is going to pass a bill to increase transparency regarding the egregious abuses by Jeffrey Epstein, a goal that anyone of conscience desires. That is in totality an important statement to check the rich and powerful.

Remember how we got here. After decades, it was President Trump's Department of Justice that indicted Jeffrey Epstein in July 2019. It was President Trump's DOJ that arrested and indicted Ms. Maxwell. It was the Republican-led Oversight Committee, through 13 subpoenas, that has released 65,000 pages of files in just 10 months.

Meanwhile, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have largely ignored this issue. It was Democrats who redacted an email to mislead the American people about the truth of a witness that exonerated President Trump. It was a Democrat, Representative Plaskett, who literally texted with Jeffrey Epstein as we questioned Michael Cohen. It was Democrats who shut down the government, resulting in the delay of swearing in of Members.

As we vote to pass this legislation--and it will pass--it is impossible, however, to avoid problems with its politicization. One colleague has offensively gone so far as to say that to oppose this bill means you support pedophiles. Yet, I know good public servants, former law enforcement, and former prosecutors who never knew Epstein and never knew any visitors to his criminal enterprise who have genuine concerns about supporting this bill out of fear of creating new victims or harming existing victims or both.

That is what we have reduced Congress to, inserting itself into the prosecutorial process for political motivations, driven heavily by hatred of President Trump.

We should be concerned about victim privacy, risking disclosure of noncredible allegations of child sexual abuse materials, and future investigations. However, here is the deal: The leaders of this Nation must expose abuses by the rich and powerful. That is why President Trump and the House have been working for full transparency, but we should be motivated by truth and justice for all, not politics.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from South Carolina. I thank him for bringing forward this important resolution before the body.

Mr. Speaker, I do want to say that I appreciate the gentleman from Maryland, his commentary about the vote on removal, and his considered judgment with respect to Santos. I agreed with him at the time and made the same points.

I want to align myself with the remarks of the gentleman from Louisiana, but I want to note in doing so--and I think the gentleman from Maryland has shown respect to, I think, the judgment of the gentleman from Louisiana about his being the sole vote on the issue before this body before with respect to what we are making public because of the gentleman's, I think, very real concerns about what it might mean for victims.

We had that debate and a colloquy back and forth in the Committee on the Judiciary a few hours ago, about what we can do to ensure victims are protected and so forth, as we all go forward on what I believe is a unanimous view that we should go seek out truth and justice here with respect to Epstein and anybody associated with him, and them, and the nefarious affairs involving Jeffrey Epstein.

The reason that I support this resolution is--and I would note that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle could have tabled this resolution. They chose not to table it. They chose to refer it, which would suggest to me that there is a recognition that something here is not particularly good; that we have a sitting Member, in this case, a Delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands, who was sitting in the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform--and I actually have particular interest here because I was the one doing the questioning. Apparently my questioning was so riveting that she was engaging in text messages back and forth at that moment. While I was questioning Mr. Cohen, the gentlewoman was engaging in this back-and-forth on text messages with Jeffrey Epstein.

Again, I have listened for months as my colleagues on the other side of the aisle disparage and try to impugn the character of the President of the United States and other members of the administration in connection to an investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, which the President's administration in 2019 indicted Epstein. They actually moved forward and federally indicted him in 2019. Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested by the Trump administration.

I know the gentleman from Maryland will go on to say that the Biden administration then carried forward that arrest, indictment, and prosecution. True, but it was, in fact, the Trump administration that did what had not been done for a long period of time by taking forward that indictment.

I have been listening to all the preaching by my friends on the other side of the aisle about how any association, anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein, is somehow the dispositive moment here in terms of determining the character of this administration or what they are doing or not doing when they are leaning in to try to seek the truth.

Tens of thousands of pages have been released by Jamie Comer, and 13 subpoenas have all been put out.

Now the House just voted to have greater transparency. Time will tell what that means in terms of what the court does and how they deal with the grand jury secrecy and what they do to continue to redact and protect victims' names under existing laws and how the courts treat that. That is going to be a process, as the gentleman likely knows. This is going to be determined as to what gets released and how.

Here we have the gentlewoman sitting in the Oversight Committee texting with a known convicted felon, a convicted pedophile, that was very public and known, had served jail time, and is engaging not just in texts that were trivial, but texts involving advice about her questioning of Michael Cohen, all designed to figure out how to get Michael Cohen to be able to somehow go after Trump or Trump's advisers or people around the President.

That, to me, is what we talk about with censure, which is contemplated, of course, in our rules and in the structure. The gentleman talked about the Constitution. We are not removing her. We are simply saying censure. We are saying it is censurable conduct to say that this individual sitting on a committee taking advice from a known convicted pedophile, convicted felon, that that is conduct unbecoming of a Member of the United States Congress, engaging in real time, taking advice from someone that we have been listening to--being lectured to as someone deserving of all of the scorn of the entire world. He is. That is why we are here.

If my colleagues didn't think this was a concern, they would have simply made a motion to table, but my colleagues decided to refer it to committee because they know this is a problem. They know this is not the kind of conduct you want in a Member of this body.

I think that the gentleman from South Carolina is right to have brought this forward. I think that the body should hear this debate and that we should vote tonight to censure and refer to the Ethics Committee for further consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas for his leadership on this. I thank all my colleagues from Texas for their support not just on this resolution, but throughout the ordeal back in July and since, as we continue to work through the tragedy and find the lives that have been lost.

We are still looking for several, as the gentleman from Alabama noted. I appreciate the kind words from the gentleman from Alabama. There is no time for politics when you are dealing with moments like that. I appreciated engaging with him. I wish it had been a better outcome, but I do appreciate our engagement on that to try to do what we can for the families that were impacted.

I will say a few things about this. I have never done a resolution. I generally don't like to focus on resolutions. I feel like we are here to do the business of the people. In this instance, I felt compelled to bring a resolution to the floor on behalf of the people of the Hill Country and on behalf of the families affected throughout the country, as the gentleman from Alabama noted.

It wasn't just that. It was our colleague from Georgia, Buddy Carter, who had family impacted by it. Some survived, but at least one little girl didn't. I could go through the list, but it affected many people in this Chamber. The gentlewoman from Texas, Lizzie Fletcher, who herself went to camps in the Hill Country, had constituents who were affected by it and many others. I felt compelled to bring this resolution to the floor, and I will explain why in just a minute.

I thank the leadership of so many people in response to the floods that ravaged the community in the Hill Country. It is hard to put into words exactly how bad it was. Two days after the flood, I drove down the river with one of my staffers. It looked essentially like an F5 tornado just ripped down the valley. There were 100-plus-year-old cypress trees that were just laid flat. There is so much vegetation waste that has been piled up, I think it would cover something like 100 football fields 10 feet tall. There is so much damage that was done alongside the river.

I raise that because there are so many recriminations and questions-- it is not a political thing--since the floods, but it is hard to put into words the momentous event that it was when it struck at 4 o'clock in the morning on July 4.

There are things that no doubt could be done differently. A lot of this is going to be played out over time in litigation and legislation. That is not really the story for me. That is not what I will remember. That is not what I will carry forward.

I will carry forward, and I thank personally the President of the United States; Susie Wiles; the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem; and the leadership that engaged from the Federal level to the State to the local level: Governor Abbott; the Lieutenant Governor; the head of the Texas Department of Emergency Management, Nim Kidd; the head of DPS, Freeman Martin; all of the leadership in Kerr County, Sheriff Leitha in particular; the people in the community who stepped up; all of the first responders; and the Coast Guard, as the gentleman from Alabama mentioned.

All of these are people who responded and stood up immediately and didn't point fingers. They just got together at an emergency center and figured out what to do. They came together to deliver as quick a result as you could, saved many lives in the process, and then dealt with the loss of life that came from the flood.

We will manage through this as we go forward, whether it is in Texas or here, whatever policies we change. That is what you do. That is how you learn and you make policies and you adapt.

I want to make a point about the things that we know are impacted, things that will never be the same. Those cypress trees that were 100 years old, those are not going to be the same for hundreds of years. The damage that was done to the community, the buildings that were ravaged, the little girls whose lives were lost, the people who were down there vacationing whose lives were lost, the camps that were destroyed--Camp Mystic, Camp La Junta, Heart O' the Hills--that are now either moving or having to redo their entire models and plans, none of those things are going to be the same. All of those things are now forever changed.

However, there is one thing that is enduring. I talked about it when we talked about this the week after it happened when we came back into this Chamber, and that is the cross that sits on the hill in Kerrville. It is the faith of the people of Kerrville and Kerr County, Texas, that came together under that cross to stand up for something bigger and a vision that is much greater than the tragedy that we endured.

What is actually going to endure and carry forward is a strong faith and a commitment in honor of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, the people who came together in prayer along the streets of Kerrville that comforted families, the $150 million that was raised through the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country from all over the country and heavily from Texans, the concerts that were held, the events that were carried out.

All of this stuff came together so that people could not look to point fingers--look, there are questions that will be asked--but to come together in a tragedy to stand tall and to come together in a bond about something that is greater than the loss of life but that will carry forward and endure forever. That is what I will remember about this. We are going to rebuild. We are going to continue to work.

I appreciate this resolution. It is important for the United States House of Representatives to recognize this. I urge its support and adoption, and I am

deeply appreciative of my friend from Texas and all those who have cosponsored the resolution.