Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I take issue with the characterization of what has transpired with respect to the legislation before us. We have passed, by voice vote even, four bipartisan en bloc amendments with items like China, Taiwan, readiness, munitions, and Israel--a host of issues that do not fall into the category that the ranking member raises, which I am happy to address in a moment.

There are countless other amendments that we have raised and addressed. For example, my friend Mr. Rosendale's amendment, which I know is near and dear to the heart of Mr. Griffith from Virginia, limits indefinite detention.

There are other amendments. For example, Mr. Norman's requires that any Department of Defense component that fails to pass an independent audit have 1\1/2\ percent of its budget returned to the Treasury for deficit reduction.

These are a lot of very good, commonsense amendments. We went through the process, combed through 1,500 amendments, and made decisions in the Rules Committee on how to equitably bring them to the floor. They cover the gamut of issues that the American people are concerned about when they see their Department of Defense no longer able to defend the United States.

That is the question.

I hear the ranking member talking about how we are injecting culture wars into the National Defense Authorization Act or injecting culture wars into the military when, in fact, it is this administration that has turned the Department of Defense into a social engineering experiment wrapped in a uniform. That is what is happening. That is what the American people see.

When the American people see advertisements in June with rainbow bullets strapped to helmets, when they see surgeries for transgender people being funded by taxpayers at the Department of Defense, and when they see the Department of Defense ignoring existing law, existing precedent, and existing traditionally historic bipartisan agreements on Hyde amendment protections, then they see the Department of Defense being turned into a social engineering experiment.

Of course, the people's House is responding to an executive branch that is making policy by executive fiat not just, of course, in this area but across the entirety of the Federal Government. So, yes, we are offering amendments to address these things.

An Air Force Academy deck slide instructs cadets to use language like ``parents and caregivers'' instead of ``moms and dads.'' Well, that is a really great use of time for the Air Force Academy. Don't refer to the phrase ``mom and dad.'' Boy, that will do it.

The United States Special Operations Command's diversity and inclusion strategic plan claims that diversity and inclusion are operational imperatives. The Marines tweeted a Pride Month image, as I pointed out, with rainbow-tipped bullets. This stuff is happening every day.

When I go talk to military recruits and talk to the recruiters, they are struggling. They are not even able to make their recruiting goals. They are well under their numbers. Why? Because the target audience of people who want to serve in the military don't want to be preached to. They don't want to have their entire worldview being questioned by the leaders and the brass in the military.

We are trying to stop that. We would like to make the military focused on killing people and blowing stuff up again because that is what a military is supposed to be for--sparingly used and not in endless wars, but ready and able to defend the United States of America.

The American people I talk to back home don't want a weak military. They don't want a woke military. They don't want rainbow propaganda on bases. They don't want to pay for troops' sex changes. The American people want a military that can provide for security and win wars.

Mr. Speaker, that is what we are doing with this legislation, and I am proud to support the rule.

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

Mr. Chair, the House Armed Services Committee adopted an amendment to repeal the statutory requirement that the Department of Defense have a chief diversity officer, a senior adviser for diversity and inclusion. I applaud that. It is a good thing. That is getting rid of the requirement. I also believe that we should prohibit the ability of the Department of Defense to have said position.

My amendment No. 30 seeks to amend section 904 to prohibit Federal funds from being used to establish anything similar or any position that is comparable to the chief diversity officer or senior adviser of diversity and inclusion.

People say, well, why is that? The fact of the matter is we have a situation right now where we are not even able to pay the kinds of bonuses that are necessary.

We are not able to pay to retain our men and women in uniform. The Air Force has been having budgetary problems, and we have got positions that are being put out there, for example, that will pay $183,500, multiple positions scattered all over the country in the name of diversity.

The fact is the United States military is one of the few institutions where the skills of the men or women on either side of you could mean the difference between life and death.

The Department of Defense should be focused on one thing only: securing the defense of the Nation. It is not in our national security interests to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for diversity training that continues to try and divvy us up by race.

That is the opposite of the direction we should be going, and in fact, it sows constant division into the Department of Defense.

Does a person's race or skin color help them overcome hostile forces? Does it allow us to win the next battle? Do rainbow bullets and flags scare away folks?

Yet, that is what we are spending our time on, and we can't even pay our men and women in uniform. Literally, the Air Force is saying sorry, we can't give you bonuses right now because they have mismanaged their budget, and they are having to spend money on positions like this.

China and our other enemies do not care about feelings. Why are we funding divisive programs and divisive positions rather than positions focused on advancing and training the strongest and best military in the world?

That is the purpose of the amendment. It is great that this bill eliminates the statutory requirement that we have such a position, but we ought to end this divvying us up by race.

It is, in the words of the Chief Justice, a sordid business to divvy us up by race rather than to ensure that we have the best trained and finest fighting force in the world.

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

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

The fact is these positions are consuming precious dollars that our Air Force can't even use currently to pay their own personnel. Many in the military are struggling to even find a way to pay the bonuses for our current personnel and can't even meet their own recruiting needs right now, falling woefully short in all of their recruiting needs.

The fact is we are struggling in recruiting, in significant part, because we are turning the Department of Defense into a social engineering experiment wrapped in a uniform. That is the truth.

Instead of focusing on killing people and blowing stuff up and having the finest fighting force in the world, we are focused on dividing people up by race. That is what we are doing.

If you look at all of the training materials at the Air Force Academy, the training materials at West Point, the training materials at the Naval Academy, they are chock-full of this, spending time on that, and it is driving people away from wanting to serve.

It is driving people of all races away from wanting to serve because we are focusing on race and division rather than unifying our United States military behind the flag of the United States.

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

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

Mr. Chair, in closing, a recent story indicated: Servicemembers forced to pay back signing bonuses after being removed after COVID vaccine. They see it as a kick in the face.

The Air Force delays bonuses. Higher-than-projected personnel costs are driving a shortfall in FY 2023 military personnel appropriation. Meanwhile, we have jobs and notices under the chief diversity officer and myriad other positions at $183,500. Why?

Why can't we get it right? Why can't we do the right thing and use the dollars that we have appropriated to fund the men and women in uniform to do their job? That is the question.

The fact is what we are doing is we are funding things like a professor at the Air Force Academy posting about her desire to make students learn how to ``identify the structural racism and inequality that has been endemic in American history.''

A West Point slide obtained by FOIA stated that: ``White people and people of color live radically different structured lives, and that in order to understand racial inequality, it is first necessary to address Whiteness.'' That is what we are paying for rather than paying for men and women to defend this country.

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

Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

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

Mr. Chair, the Department of Defense Education Activity, an agency under the Department of Defense, runs 160 schools on military bases across the globe, serving more than 69,000 children of military personnel.

The amendment that I am offering would prohibit the Department of Defense schools, DODEA, from using funds to promote or compel teachers to adhere to critical race theory.

Specifically, this is what I on the floor was accused of offering as being racist by the ranking member of the Rules Committee a little bit earlier, but I was not on the floor to have the words stricken.

Here is what the language is in the amendment--compel teachers to adhere to critical race theory, specifically the idea that:

``(1) Any race is inherently superior or inferior to any other race, color, or national origin.

``(2) The United States is a fundamentally racist country.

``(3) The Declaration of Independence or Constitution of the United States are fundamentally racist documents.

``(4) An individual's moral character or worth is determined by the individual's race, color, or national origin.

``(5) An individual, by virtue of the individual's race, is inherently racist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.

``(6) An individual, because of the individual's race, bears responsibility for the actions committed by other members of the individual's race, color, or national origin.''

Instead of working to empower parents, our education system is using critical race theory outside of the Department of Defense, but in this case inside the Department of Defense, to turn schools into a propaganda machine dedicated to raising students up that judge one another by race and hate our country's founding principles.

Teaching kids to hate the country they live in, to view their fellow citizens as enemies because of the color of their skin is wrong. It is anti-American, and it is societal suicide.

Critical race theory is an anti-American ideology that seeks to pick winners and losers based on skin color. We are seeing a large-scale effort to impose this tyranny over the minds of men and our children through taxpayer-funded indoctrination of this ideology.

I believe we must preserve the foundational American truth that people are valuable regardless of their skin color and prevent critical race theory from being used to divvy us up by race further.

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

Mr. Chair, an article written by the spouse of a member of our military in The Federalist and the mother of a former Department of Defense education student talked about the training that she discovered when she dove into what their students were being taught.

She saw that there would be an equity and access summit for teachers and administrators. She said: Knowing that equity means different things to different people, I wanted to get a sense of what it meant, and I was floored.

They released a video of summit clips in which a principal talks about a student who felt like he had done something wrong because he is a young, White male. The teacher said she didn't know what to tell him, but she seemed pleased with the breakthrough. Perhaps she was just following the lead of DODEA's diversity, equity, and inclusion chief, Kelisa Wing, who is currently under investigation or at that time was under investigation by DOD for a history of disparaging comments toward White people.

The fact here is, the sordid business of divvying us up by race is what we are trying to move past, and having our Department of Defense schools teaching the children of our men and women in uniform to focus on race and the divvying us up by race is inherently wrong and undermines the future cohesion of not just the military but the country. The purpose here is to say that we don't need our Department of Defense schools to be engaged in this indoctrination.

I heard earlier the questions here about all these stats about how this improves all of our recruiting. If that is so, why is our recruiting in the toilet? It is in the toilet because if you talk to recruits, they are sick of it. They don't like the indoctrination. Their friends listen to it, and they say: ``I don't want any part of it.''

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

Mr. Chair, in closing, we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Life. I can't help but notice the focus of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle of terminating life.

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

Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, earlier today the ranking member of the House Rules Committee accused me of offering a racist amendment. It was racist and that was because it said that we shouldn't have policies under DEI encouraging that any race is inherently superior or inferior to any other race, color, or national origin; the United States being a fundamentally racist country, the Declaration of Independence or Constitution of the United States are fundamentally racist documents; an individual's moral character or worth is determined by the individual's race, color, or national origin; an

individual, by virtue of the individual's race is inherently racist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; or that an individual, because of the individual's race, bears responsibility for the actions committed by other members of the individual's race, color, or national origin.

The fact is we have DEI positions like that held by Kelisa Wing where she talked about ``CAUdacity'' to say that Black people can be racist too. That is what is happening. We are inculcating racist positions at the Department of Defense.

I support my friend's amendment to strike these racist positions. The Department of Defense should be colorblind so we can defend the United States of America instead of having social engineering experiments that are wrapped in a uniform.

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 529 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 to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. Speaker, last night, the Rules Committee reported a rule to refer H. Res. 503 to the Committees on Homeland Security and the Judiciary. H. Res. 503 lays out articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden for his failure to secure the southern border of the United States.

We do a lot of things in this body, and we say a lot of things--I certainly do--about our beliefs and about what we think is happening to our country. What we are talking about here is, indeed, solemn. We are, in fact, talking about the mechanism provided by the Founders in the Constitution of the United States to check and hold the executive branch responsible.

The border crisis that we are experiencing today is extremely significant for the people in my home State of Texas. It is significant not just for Texas, of course, but for the entire country--but, in particular, for the people in my home State of Texas.

Since President Biden took office, there have been well over 5 million illegal migrant encounters along the southwest border. More than 204,000 illegal immigrants were encountered at the border in May alone. Those numbers are changing post-relaxing enforcement of title 42.

Mr. Speaker, 2 million aliens have been released into the interior of the United States, and 1.5 million, probably 1.7 million, maybe 2 million now, got-aways have successfully evaded border agents, by relatively conservative accounting.

Most concerning right now is the data we have shows that 125 individuals from the terrorist watch list have been encountered this fiscal year alone, and that compares to about 98 in all of last fiscal year and about 10 in the last year of the Trump administration.

The fact is, the people I represent are sick and tired of a Federal Government that is abdicating its fundamental duty to defend the border of the United States. That is what is happening.

The Federal Government exists primarily, borderline entirely, but certainly primarily, to defend the United States. That is why it exists. It is failing to do so not through maladministration, not through incompetence, but through dereliction of duty and a refusal to actually follow the laws of the United States.

The laws of the United States are there, expressly and specifically laid out, to ensure that our border will be protected, that our Nation will be secure. That is the fundamental question before us. When the executive branch fails to follow the law, when the executive branch fails to adhere to its duty to defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States, then what is it that the Congress, the people's House, is supposed to do in response?

The Founders gave us a mechanism. Here today, we are talking about putting forward and referring these articles to the Homeland Security Committee for determination of the extent to which the homeland is, in fact, not secure as a direct consequence of the refusal of the administration, well beyond maladministration but very specifically the refusal to follow the laws of the United States that is resulting in the direct consequence of the death and damage to the American people.

That is the truth. That is what we are experiencing. That is what we are experiencing in real time in Texas. My colleagues in Arizona, my colleagues throughout this entire country, are experiencing that in real time.

Just a few weeks ago, a Federal judge in the Northern District of Texas, Judge Reed O'Connor, issued an opinion, an order, and in it, he lays out: ``Defendants, illegal aliens, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport and harbor illegal aliens. The sentencing information shows that on behalf of the Juarez cartel, defendants participated in an alien smuggling conspiracy. . . . The smuggling organization charged $10,000 to smuggle an adult illegal alien into the United States and between $12,000 to $14,000 to smuggle a child illegal alien.''

It goes on to lay out how they discovered that there was an illegal alien in Baltimore who was being held for ransom so that his family wouldn't be abused by the Juarez cartel in a stash house in Fort Worth.

The members told the husband that they would do things to his daughter he would not like if he did not make this payment of $23,000, which he had not bargained for.

This is the state of affairs in our country. This is the consequence to those migrants who are seeking to come here, when my colleagues in the false name of compassion state that open borders are somehow good for them. This is causing crime to extend into our communities. This is causing us to experience the dangerous hand of cartels.

Just this morning, we had more news about cartels and their reach into Texas, into the United States. It is an everyday occurrence: bailouts, damage to ranches, harm to Texans, death to Texans, fentanyl. How many more fentanyl moms, how many more angel moms, how many more Americans need suffer because this President refuses to follow the laws of the United States that he raised his hand and swore an oath to defend?

That is why we are here, and that is why I support the resolution.

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

Mr. Speaker, I just note that this morning Texas DPS troopers arrested a Gulf cartel operative in the Rio Grande Valley smuggling people across the river. After having been paid thousands of dollars, they were moving five illegal immigrants into the United States.

This is somebody that had been affiliated with a dangerous cartel. It is happening every day in the State of Texas because this administration refuses to do its job.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 6 minutes to the gentlewoman from Colorado (Mrs. Boebert).

Mr. Speaker, I am moved by the references to solemnity after the chanting on the floor of the House yesterday for 5 minutes disrupting the Speaker of the House from carrying out his duties. I find it extremely moving.

I am also moved by the references to how we have not passed legislation, despite the fact that we passed H.R. 2, the most impactful border security legislation that has been moved off the floor of the House, without a single Democrat vote because they are ignoring what the administration is doing to the State of Texas, to migrants, and to the security of our country.

I am moved by the concerns for climate change which I am sure will assuage the angel moms and the fentanyl moms who have lost loved ones and the 72,000 Americans dead from fentanyl because my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the President of the United States refuse to secure the border.

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Norman), my good friend.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Ogles), my good friend.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mills), my friend and an Army veteran.

Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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

We are here today not actually talking about the botched exit from Afghanistan that my friend from Florida rightly raises as a massive criticism of this administration, nor the Biden crime family syndicate that we are now dealing with with the son of the President of the United States. Nor are we dealing with the weaponization of government against the American people, including Scott Smith in Loudoun County for daring to stand up in defense of his daughter. Nor are we talking about energy production getting killed, leaving people stranded with high inflation and the inability to afford energy and unable to carry out their lives and prosper.

We are here talking about the border.

We are here talking about a dereliction of duty.

We are here talking about the violation of the fundamental first principle of the executive branch of the Federal Government of the United States led by the President to actually secure and defend the United States of America.

``All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency.''--Washington's Farewell Address.

``Energy in the executive is . . . essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice.''--Hamilton, Federalist No. 70.

``Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.''--Lincoln, Lyceum Address, 1838.

We are here precisely because the Constitution contemplated separation of powers, which is being violated every single day by an executive branch undeterred.

Our job in the House of Representatives is, in fact, to deter the overreach and abuse of authority by the President of the United States refusing to carry out the laws of the United States in detriment to the well-being, security, and lives of the people of this country.

That is our job in the House of Representatives. That is why we are here. That is why I support this rule. That is why I support this resolution. That is why I support this inquiry. We are just beginning.

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

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, I notice that my friend and colleague from Texas talks about the current system discriminating. Well, the current system discriminates against small businesses and people who can't afford the massive cost of insurance or care. That is the truth.

My colleague refers to an icky kind of coverage. The fact of the matter is

that we have a large segment of the American people who are trapped in so-called coverage, but they are not able to get care.

That is why we are here. We are trying to increase options for the American people.

My only concern about what we are doing with this legislation, which I wholeheartedly support, and trying to encourage small businesses and give them options to be able to provide better options for their employees, is I don't believe that, in America, you should only be able to get insurance through government or your employer.

We should be freeing up the system. We should be embracing healthcare freedom. We should be creating an environment where the American people control their healthcare rather than employers and government. That is the truth.

I offered an amendment to simply spell that out in the form of a sense of Congress, a sense of Congress that the future of healthcare lies in healthcare freedom, not in socialized medicine; that Congress should take steps to address the broken healthcare system by restoring free market practices to lower costs; that coverage is not care and expanding direct access to healthcare should be prioritized over expanding access to coverage; and that patients and doctors, not government bureaucrats or insurance bureaucrats, should make healthcare decisions.

Why do I think that? Well, the deals that are struck with the government by big corporations are the problem. For example, most recently, ObamaCare guaranteed their actual growth and profit. For example, Anthem had a 344 percent increase in government revenue from 2010 to 2020. UnitedHealthcare had a 198 percent increase. Cigna, Anthem, UnitedHealthcare, and Humana have seen an average increase of 562 percent in their stock prices from January 2011 to January 2021.

Here is the kicker. In 2018, for at least three of these companies, the majority of their revenue came from the government: UnitedHealthcare, 53.4 percent; Anthem, 58.7 percent; and Humana, a whopping 86.9 percent.

It is that corporate cronyism that is reducing options. They are making it more difficult for the American people.

The fact is, for Americans who are trapped in coverage through ObamaCare--for example, when I came to Congress as a Member of Congress, I was put on ObamaCare, not some gold-plated plan that flies around on the internet that we supposedly have, but on ObamaCare. The place I went to cure the cancer that I had a decade ago, MD Anderson, I wouldn't be allowed to use. What kind of coverage is that?

That is what we are telling the American people. That is the best we can do in the freest, greatest country in the history of the world. Bow down to the altar of government and corporate America to be able to figure out how you should get care.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, do you know who should decide what an essential health benefit is? The consumer, the American, not a government bureaucrat or a corporate bureaucrat. I will stand up for the 5,000 babies that have been born in Texas greater than last year's number of babies in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

Let me just say this. According to the CBO, Federal subsidies for health insurance coverage for Americans under the age of 65 will hit $1 trillion this year. The average American family spends more than $22,000 a year on premiums for themselves through their employees. Again, coverage is not care.

There are other healthcare models that work. The Wall Street Journal showed what cutting out the middleman in healthcare can do for costs: $150 a month to cover a family of five on a direct primary care model.

A DPC practice in my district charges only $50 to $80 for an X-ray compared to the national average of $125. MRIs are $300 to $450 compared to the national average of $1,325.

It is not just primary care. For example, at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, a direct care model, a knee replacement costs $18,000 compared to the average cost of $50,000 in the United States.

Healthcare sharing ministries are driving down costs for the American people, giving them coverage and giving them options.

The fact is we should imagine an America where, through a health savings account, your employer can give you real dollars, rather than a faceless insurance company, to pursue real care of your choice, so for a flat monthly fee, you and your children have unlimited access to the physician of your choice. You could still get insurance for the big stuff, walking into a doctor's office and knowing how much things are going to cost.

Right now, the American people do not have options. I support this bill, but this amendment is important because we need a trajectory change in this country in favor of healthcare freedom, in favor of personalized care, in favor of patients and doctors over bureaucrats and corporations that are getting rich because the government is subsidizing their corporate cronyism.

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

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, it has been a treat listening to my colleagues with their newfound respect for private business and not wanting to have regulatory interference with private business.

Well, here we are talking about the REINS Act. What we are trying to do is ensure that you can't have unelected bureaucrats making decisions that have massive economic impacts and have major impacts on the lives of the American people.

With all due respect to the ranking member from Judiciary, what we are talking about is not saying you are ending what the folks in the administrative state are saying about regulations. What we are saying is that they have got to come to Congress if it is going to have a major impact. They have got to come demonstrate what it is they are proposing.

If they have got some issue that involves radiation, if they have got some issue that involves some complexities, come make the case if you are going to have a massive economic impact, like $100 million.

Here I am offering an amendment that goes a little bit beyond that; not just the economic impact, but the impact on our society, the impact on businesses to be able to function, the impact on people to be able to go out and carry out their lives.

Amendment No. 14 that I am offering here expands the definition of a major rule in the REINS Act to include any rule that references one of President Biden's major so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion executive orders.

This means that Congress would vote up or down on any rule promulgated by the executive branch that pushes radical gender or racial ideologies regardless of whether it is estimated to carry a fiscal or economic impact.

Why? Because the American people are tired of this stuff. They are tired of seeing this radical agenda being promoted by the Federal Government and pressed upon the private citizens of this country.

The executive orders covered in this amendment are meant to sow division among the American people in pursuit of radical racial and gender ideologies. For example, Executive Order 13985 is designed to ensure racial equity and support for underserved communities throughout the Federal Government.

That sounds nice in a title, but the fact is, it has directed every Federal agency to conduct equity assessments to determine whether new policies, regulations, or guidance documents may be necessary to advance equity in agency actions and programs. It has effectively made diversity, equity, and inclusion one of the most important factors, including at the Department of Defense.

We are not focusing on making sure our Department of Defense can defeat China; we are focusing on making it a social engineering experiment wrapped in a uniform. I wonder why we are having trouble recruiting people.

It has been referenced that CMS rules on health equity flirt with forcing providers to prioritize healthcare based on race. There are news articles about this. It has been referenced that the EPA and the Department of the Interior have rules that advance so-called environmental justice. Executive Order 13988 is titled: ``Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.'' Again, the title sounds, oh, that must be all nice and good. Well, it led to an HHS proposed rule that could compel hospitals receiving Federal funds to perform gender-affirming care, including surgeries. It has been used to justify moves by the VA to provide

gender-affirming care to veterans on taxpayer dollars.

Executive Order 14021 is titled: ``Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free From Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, Including Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity.'' However, the problem is, it is discriminating against women, which Riley Gaines knows all too well because she was forced to swim against a dude, and we all know she was forced to swim against a dude.

It was referenced in the Department of Education's proposed rule to leverage Title IX to restrict schools' ability to prohibit biological males from competing in girls' sports. Ironically, the rule recognizes schools may need flexibility to issue such a restriction for ``fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.''

The fact is, the American people are sick and tired of politicizing our entire culture through the executive actions that are being executed by this President without check from Congress, which we don't believe would have a chance of getting through the people's House.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, if my Democratic colleagues support these executive orders so much, if they believe that these are the best things since sliced bread, that we need to have all of these orders that are turning our entire society upside down, that are redefining traditional roles in society that we understand the difference between men and women; if they are so excited about those policies, then why are they worried about voting on them? What is the problem?

Why must they just be executed by a faceless bureaucrat at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue or in the alphabet soup of agencies in this town?

Why shouldn't this body, the people's House, and the Senate, speak? That is all we are talking about in the REINS Act and these amendments.

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

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, with respect to what the gentleman was just talking about with the marriage vote last year, regardless of one's belief and vote on the outcome of that policy, the point is, Congress voted.

The fact is, here we have rules being promulgated by bureaucrats that the people's House never gets a chance to speak to other than through a Congressional Review Act, which you are only allowed to do in a minimal amount of time. The REINS Act actually gives power to the people's House and Article I under the Constitution.

I want to do that here on another issue.

We would like to expand the definition of ``major rule'' to include any rule likely to result in an increase in mandatory vaccinations. This means Congress would vote to approve any rule promulgated by the executive branch to push mandatory vaccines.

Last Congress, remember, we were told to wait for the courts to save the American people from an unconstitutional vaccine? While we fiddled and waited for the courts to catch up, millions of Americans were forced to choose between their job and a jab, that they likely didn't need and that didn't stop transmission.

On September 29, 2021, President Biden announced vaccine mandates for upwards of 100 million Americans, forcing Americans to choose between their jobs and a jab.

On March 11, 2023, Biden finally ended his unconstitutional vaccine mandates at the end of the COVID emergency, frankly, because we were forcing it and forcing the question.

The OSHA mandate, which was struck down by the Supreme Court and formally withdrawn on January 28, 2022, a year prior, required all businesses with 100-plus employees to either vaccine or test.

Why should we wait on the Supreme Court to check the unconstitutional, unlawful, and tyrannical actions by an executive branch that shut down the greatest economy in the history of the world, forcing people to choose between their livelihoods, their ability to make money, their families, their ability to go to school, the ability of a nurse to be able to go in and perform her job in a hospital? We did that. Let's not forget that we did that.

We watched Secretary Becerra fumbling yesterday, fumbling in a hearing, unable to answer the question: Can you tell me, sir, whether or not it was any benefit whatsoever for 2-year-old kids to be forced to wear masks and we had mandates through the Head Start program? He refused to answer the question in committee because he knew full well he had no good answer to that question.

He knows it, and everybody in America knows it. This is about wrestling power away from a bureaucratic state that shut down this economy, harmed the American people, and it should never happen again.

That is the point of the REINS Act, to wrestle power back from Article II and the executive branch no matter who is there.

The Trump administration's hands: Unclean.

The Biden administration's hands: Unclean.

This is a nonpartisan statement.

The people's House should speak. We should stand up to the tyranny of an executive branch that overstepped its bounds and restricted the freedom and liberties of the American people and harmed them.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, well, I am tempted to yield all my time to the gentleman from New York because he is basically making the case for me more effectively than I can.

The gentleman from New York is basically acknowledging everything that I am here saying that I am trying to do to protect the American people from the tyrannical state of the executive branch, but in this case, my Democratic colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

I want everybody in America to understand what they just heard from the ranking member of the House Committee on the Judiciary in the United States House of Representatives.

Your 2-year-old should be forced to be masked.

That is what the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee just said here on the floor of the House of Representatives, that the power of the government, the full power of the Federal Government should be a part of ensuring and forcing your children, your 2-year-old child to be masked.

We heard it yesterday when the Secretary of HHS refused to actually answer that question, so I am really glad to hear that the ranking member of the House Committee on the Judiciary acknowledges what everybody in America understands, which is that the Democratic Party led by the President and by my Democratic colleagues in the House and the Senate are fully comfortable with the power of the government being used to shut down your businesses, force you out of work, unless you take an experimental vaccine that has not been proven to actually do what the gentleman just said, which is with respect to transmissions.

More importantly, my father, who is 80 years old, is dealing with the ravages of polio. I firmly understand the importance of vaccines, and I am proud that my children and I have been able to be protected by those vaccines, fully tested after years of testing.

To say that this politicized vaccine should have been used to shut down the economy and to kill the ability of my constituents to be able to go about their lives, and to force children into the corner wearing masks to get set back years in their education, that is precisely why this amendment matters. It is precisely why we are here reining in the Federal Government, and it is precisely why this amendment would make this a better piece of legislation, and why I hope my colleagues would support it.

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

Madam Chair, I move that the Committee do now rise.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from Kentucky for yielding me time.

Mr. Speaker, here we are engaging in the theater of the absurd, yet again, from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle just blatantly denying the power grab being carried out by the executive branch yet again. They don't seem to care so long as it suits their ends in terms of policy.

Everybody who follows this understands that the court is almost certain to strike this down. We have already seen it happen in the Fifth Circuit. We are pretty clear about the extent to which this is an abuse of the Administrative Procedures Act, the extent to which this is an unconstitutional violation of our Second Amendment rights, and the court, no doubt, like the Fifth Circuit, will follow suit.

That is just the simple truth, just like we expect the court to most likely rule that the President's power grab to extend a bailout for student loans will also be struck down. That is almost certainly true.

However, what is also true is that it is incumbent upon the United States Congress--the House of Representatives in particular--to stand up in defense of the Constitution, in defense not just as might seem most apparent here, a defense of the Second Amendment which this most certainly is, but, in fact, a defense of separation of powers, that, in fact, it is not the executive branch that makes law.

When the Speaker of the House actually says that the President doesn't have power to do something and then refuses, as the previous Speaker, Speaker Pelosi, did to do anything about what the President is doing to exercise that authority unconstitutionally--as was the case with the student loan--then it begs the question: Do any of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle give a whit about separation of powers or about the fact that it is a clear abuse of the power of the executive branch?

The answer is no. That is the clear truth. They don't give a whit about that, nor do they give a whit about it here because they like the outcome of the policy: the banning of a piece of plastic. That is the truth.

However, it is not really about the pistol braces, is it? Because really that was, in fact, something created by marine and Army veteran Alex Bosco inventing the pistol stabilizing brace to help his friend, a disabled combat veteran, at the shooting range.

At the time, the ATF--President Obama's ATF--advised Mr. Bosco that a stabilizing brace did not convert a pistol into a short-barreled rifle. He relied upon that.

Now, here we are a decade later, and the Biden ATF wants to reverse that by executive fiat, not through the congressional powers, not by legislation, as was possible last summer when my colleagues had the House, the Senate, and the White House. No. No. They prefer to go ahead and use the unaccountable and unelected bureaucrat at the ATF to make policy.

We are here to say that that is a bad idea. It is a bad idea for the Republic, it is a bad idea for freedom, and it is a bad idea with respect to our fundamental rights.

The reality here is my colleagues on the other side of the aisle know full well what they want to do. It is not just to ban an accessory. They want to ban firearms. They want to ban firearms from top to bottom, and this is a step to do it. I have always been taught that if your opponents say something, you should believe them. That is the reality.

I hope my colleagues on this side of the aisle will stand up to the CRA and send it over to the Senate where it most assuredly might end up being a message amendment because the President of the United States will almost assuredly veto it because he doesn't care about separation of powers either.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my friend from Kentucky for yielding.

The gentleman from Massachusetts was questioning why he hasn't heard from any veteran groups in support of this.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to include in the Record an article titled: ``Wisconsin veterans sue ATF over new rule for stabilizing braces.''

Mr. Speaker, there are others. The fact of the matter is there are many veterans groups--that is one; we will get you some more--who are supportive of this bill and who are supportive of this effort to protect their Second Amendment rights.

That is a fact because my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want registration because they want to take guns from the American people because they know that liberty rests with the people.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Wisconsin who frequently comes down to the floor and engages and uses the Special Orders, as we call them. It is great to see him down here.

I often state I wish we would have more engaged debate on the floor of the House, actual debate, not just the kind of fake debate where we go back and forth for an hour equally divided over a bill that we pretty much predetermined will be passed on a partisan basis but actually pick an issue and engage in thoughtful debate back and forth about a topic.

I would encourage any of my colleagues who are willing to do so on, frankly, either side of the aisle where we have reasonable disagreements that we could engage and try to deal with.

The fact is for too long, in this country, in the House of Representatives, we have been dealing with a uniparty.

We have been dealing with essentially not a lot of difference in terms of the total output of what this town does.

We have strong disagreement here on the floor. We pass bills. We get them passed that nobody on that side of the aisle is going to vote for and vice versa, knowing they are going to go to the Senate and die or knowing they are going to get to the White House and not be signed or knowing they are not going to have 60 votes in the Senate.

When push comes to shove on the things that matter, when we come to a spending bill, it is all the same. It ends up being effectively the same. It is the only explanation for being $32 trillion in debt.

Now, by virtue of the bipartisan effort of this body, the bipartisan effort of the Senate, the signature of the President, we now know we will be roughly $36 trillion in debt in January of 2025.

We know this, and we did it. We embraced it, but we didn't materially change the trajectory. Yeah, we dented it a tiny fraction.

We had a spending freeze for 2 years that is a part of a deal that isn't even yet consummated because we haven't done the appropriations process.

We patted ourselves on the back--some of us did--for oh, well, we had to get this done because we might default.

Every time we talk about this effort, it is that we must raise the debt ceiling, or we are going to get to a place where we are going to default on the debt.

The fact is, it is just simply not true. We were never going to default on the debt. The President of the United States was never going to choose in terms of the prioritization of payments to end up in a place where we were not going to make the payments on the interest on the bonds. That is just a fact.

We play this game. To raise the debt ceiling and increase the borrowing level, we say, wait, maybe we should get some changes for that.

We get up to the date, and what happens? People say we are going to default. All of Wall Street calls all the folks and say, well, you are going to do that, aren't you? Everybody hops, both sides of the aisle.

Here we sit, yet again, going from $32 trillion to now, predictably, $36 trillion in January 2025. As sure as the Sun coming up, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the President just agreed to mortgage your children's future again because that is what we do. That is what the House of Representatives does.

The point here is, as I said, we were never going to default on our debt. What we are going to do with almost the same amount of certainty as what I just described is default on the American Dream. That is where we are headed, a full-scale, unequivocal default on the American Dream.

This is all led by the people who are supposed to be representing the American people in this great Republic but who are barreling us right down the path, if we are not there already, to default on the American Dream.

The hardworking American family right now, today, is sitting out there in this country unable to afford groceries, unable to afford gas, unable to afford housing, and unable to afford healthcare.

I talked to staffers in this building in their twenties, and they looked at me and asked: How am I ever going to afford to buy a house?

They genuinely mean it. They don't know.

The hardworking plumber in the district I represent in central Texas who never took out a student loan is now being forced to pay for his neighbor's master's degree.

The veteran is paying for some liberal arts major to get the same student loan benefits he earned by risking his life for America.

The nurse wants to save lives without a Federal bureaucrat telling her she needs to take a needle in her arm to keep her job.

The blue-collar workers are watching their way of life sacrificed to the climate cult and billions of corporate crony tax subsidies in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, enriching elite, wealthy investors-- true--and corporations--true--all while empowering the Chinese Communist Party, weakening our own grid, and undermining our own national security--all true.

The rancher right now in Texas who is putting diesel in his truck is forced to subsidize a tech worker making six figures to buy a Tesla hundreds of miles away. This body just encouraged it.

Minority and poor taxpayers are trying to make ends meet but have expanded IRS audits, three to five times more than other Americans.

The fact is, we are on the verge of defaulting on the American Dream.

It is not enough to play politics and just pass something and then try to point the finger at the other party. Well, we just got this, and it is better. That ain't working. It is simply not working.

We had a rather raucous meeting in our Republican Conference this morning. I make it a practice not to talk

about what we do in private meetings. Some of my colleagues do not adhere to that same standard or rule. It tends to leak like a sieve. A lot of the conversations we had in that private meeting are not fully private now.

To my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, but particularly my colleagues on this side of the aisle, my Republican colleagues, let me be very clear: I will be happy to engage personally anytime, anywhere, on any of these issues. We can have disagreements, and we can reasonably disagree. I am going to say emphatically right here in front of God, in front of all the people I represent in this hallowed Chamber, I don't give a rat's rear end what you think compared to what my constituents think. I don't.

My job is to care what my constituents think. My job is to care about people on the airplane or down the street who pull me aside every day and thank me and thank a few of my colleagues for daring to stand up against the uniparty and an institution that is trampling their way of life. I will stand with them.

I will stand with the American people sick of having the American Dream pulled out from under them. I will stand with them.

I will be happy to work with my colleagues. I love and respect many of my colleagues. I do not answer to my colleagues. I answer to the people I represent, and I am going to darn well stand up and defend them.

I am going to fight to stop spending money we don't have. I am going to fight to secure the border of the United States. I am going to fight for all the people I just described who are losing their ability to afford a home, afford groceries, to be able to carry out their livelihood, their job, without being forced to take a needle.

I am going to fight for the guy trying to put diesel in his truck and not have to subsidize a Tesla. I am going to fight for people to have a stable grid. I am going to fight for the national security of this country. I am going to fight to stop China from encroaching on this country.

I am not going to give lip service for ads to go win political campaigns when you did nothing. I am not going to do that. I am not going to try to sell the American people on something that didn't occur.

That is what we do in this body all the time. It is time that stops. We have a duty--yes, a bipartisan duty.

If any one of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle would actually like to join the party of standing up for the American people and standing up in defense of this country instead of a radical leftist ideology that results in a pride flag being hung at the same level as the United States flag on the front of the White House and people parading around topless in front of the White House, the people's house for their President--have we no respect? Does the flag of the United States mean nothing?

It is the flag of the United States. Men and women have died for that flag, and they put that flag up to the side, flanking a pride flag on the front of the United States President's house. It is despicable. They did that right on the eve of Flag Day.

Tomorrow is Flag Day. The flag of the United States stands for something so much bigger than any of these people running around pretending like they are standing up for, oh, we can't have established religion, and we are for the separation of church and state. Yet, their religion is represented by that pride flag on the front of the White House. It is a religion, just like the cult of climate fetishism is a religion every bit as much as any religion.

How many lives have been lost with that flag on a patch on the arm of one of our men and women who have fought for this country, and that is what they do? I am at a loss for words. I really am.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to read one thing here, and then I am going to yield to my friend from Pennsylvania. It is going to take me a couple of minutes.

One of my favorite songs is ``The Ragged Old Flag'' by Johnny Cash. I will not do this nearly as cool as Johnny Cash does.

It goes like this:

I walked through a county courthouse square.

On a park bench, an old man was sitting there.

I said, ``Your old courthouse is kinda rundown.''

He said, ``Naw, it'll do for our little town.''

I said, ``Your old flagpole has leaned a little bit,

and that's a Ragged Old Flag you got hanging on it.''

He said, ``Have a seat,'' and I sat down.

``Is this the first time you've been to our little town?''

I said, ``I think it is.''

He said, ``I don't like to brag, but we're kinda proud of

that Ragged Old Flag.''

``You see, we got a little hole in that flag there

when Washington took it across the Delaware.

And it got powder-burned the night Francis Scott Key sat

watching it writing `Oh, Say Can You See.'

And it got a rip in New Orleans with Packingham and

Jackson tuggin' at its seams.''

``And it almost fell at the Alamo beside the Texas flag,

but she waved on through.

She got cut with a sword at Chancellorsville

and she got cut again at Shiloh Hill.

There was Robert E. Lee, Beauregard and Bragg,

and the south wind blew hard on that Ragged Old Flag.''

``On Flanders Field in World War I

she got a big hole from a Bertha gun.

She turned blood red in World War II.

She hung limp and low by the time it was through.

She was in Korea and Vietnam.

she went where she was sent by her Uncle Sam.''

``She waved from our ships upon the briny foam,

and now they've about quit waving her back here at home.

In her own good land here she's been abused--she's been

burned,

dishonored, denied and refused.''

``And the government for which she stands is scandalized

throughout the land.

And she's getting threadbare and wearing thin,

but she's in good shape, for the shape she's in.

`Cause she's been through the fire before

and I believe she can take a whole lot more.''

``So we raise her up every morning

take her down every night.

We don't let her touch the ground and we fold her up right.

On second thought, I do like to brag,

'cause I'm mighty proud of that Ragged Old Flag.''

On tomorrow, Flag Day, I hope we will honor the American flag. I know that my friend from Pennsylvania is proud to be a Member of Congress, but certainly I would think more proud to have worn the uniform of the United States military and devote his life in service to his country.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Perry).

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Pennsylvania.

Again, I want to reiterate on this eve of Flag Day my appreciation for his service to this country wearing the uniform and in Congress. He understands what citizenship means.

I am deeply appreciative of him for that. I am deeply appreciative of his friendship. I am deeply appreciative of the friendships I have here in this Congress, my colleagues whom I am proud to serve with across the spectrum, but particularly those colleagues who are willing to stand in the fire when it is needed.

We don't have much time left, Mr. Speaker. I don't say that lightly. You cannot look at this country with objective and clear eyes and believe that we are on the right path. We are not. We are so far off the right path that it is going to take a massive course correction and trajectory change to save this great Republic for our kids and grandkids.

That is not hyperbole. Our children and our grandchildren are on the precipice inheriting now--booked, as I said before--$36 trillion of debt guaranteed, give or take a few billion, in January of 2025.

I am just going to be honest. To be lectured by some of my colleagues this morning, to be lectured about my motivations for why I am here on the floor of the House and standing up and speaking right now and for it to be alleged that it is for clicks or for money, the only thing that would have made it more ironic is if that meeting had occurred in the NRCC.

The fact is it is our job right now to stand up and defend the country and not wait for some time in the future.

I don't want to hear another thing about, Well, we will do it when. We will do it when we have the Senate. We will do it when we have 60 in the Senate. We will do it when we have a bigger majority. We will do it when we have someone in the White House.

Why don't we do it right now? Right now?

Let's have these debates. Let's have these fights out on the floor of the House right now, because I can promise you, the debt deal that we just passed ain't going to get the job done. It is not, and everybody here knows it.

Yet, they are going to go out and sell it as if it is something that it isn't; thinks, well, that is water under the bridge. Well, that is a hell of a lot of water under the bridge. There is $4 trillion worth of water under that bridge.

Now we have got to go to work to pass appropriations bills. Will those appropriations bills turn the trajectory of this country away from the iceberg? That is my question for my colleagues.

We should appropriate to the FY22 levels that we have been talking about since last December, that we told the American people we were going to do.

We should appropriate the Federal bureaucracy back to pre-COVID levels because nobody in America thinks we should continue to spend at post-COVID levels. I am going to stand on that. I am going to keep fighting for that. I believe the American people want us to do that. I believe they want the bureaucracy to be shrunk. I believe they want their country back. I believe they want their lives back. I believe they don't want any more bureaucrats interfering with their freedoms, and I think we should stand united, yes, united in defense of the American people in fighting for their freedom. That is what I believe we should do.

Does my friend from Pennsylvania have anything else he wishes to add?

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Pennsylvania. I am going to close with this: An opinion in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division.

``Defendants, illegal aliens, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport and harbor illegal aliens. The sentencing information shows that on behalf of the Juarez cartel, defendants participated in an alien smuggling conspiracy. Their participation included operating an illegal alien stash house in Fort Worth, Texas, and transporting those who had been smuggled into the United States to their desired destination upon full payment. The smuggling organization charged $10,000 to smuggle an adult illegal alien into the United States and between $12,000-$14,000 to smuggle a child illegal alien.''

I am going to stop there. More money to smuggle a child illegal alien.

``Law enforcement discovered the Fort Worth portion of this smuggling operation after a man in Baltimore, Maryland (the husband) paid the organization to have his wife and 2-year-old daughter smuggled into the United States after they arrived in Mexico from Honduras. The husband contends that he paid the smuggling organization $1,000 to smuggle his wife and child into the United States. They were then transported to the stash house in Fort Worth, where the husband contends a member of the smuggling organization demanded he pay an additional $23,000 before his family would be released. The member also told the husband, `they would do things to his daughter he [would] not like' if he did not make the payment.''

It goes on to describe the absurdities of cartels in active engagement in this Republic, in this country, and we are doing nothing about it. The judge closes out: ``The guidelines--the sentencing guidelines--do not adequately take into account these facts when recommending an appropriate prison range. The current prison guideline calculation of 51-63 months fails to meet the requirement that any sentence provide adequate deterrence and just punishment. Accordingly, the parties are provided notice that the court intends to vary upward from the applicable guideline range so that they may address this at the time of sentencing.''

My point is, a Federal judge is having to step in to do the work that we are supposed to do here, to stand up and defend this country, not just for ourselves, but for the people being abused in our name. These are human beings.

Texans are getting absolutely ravaged in south Texas, ranches getting overrun, people dying from fentanyl, and here, migrants getting abused in the false name of compassion. Literally, thousands of dollars to have to pay to get out from a stash house.

As we head into Flag Day tomorrow, and we think about what that flag represents for people around the world seeking to come here, is that what it is?

Is it to be in a stash house where a little girl is being threatened?

Why won't we do anything about it?

Why should we appropriate money to a Department of Homeland Security that refuses to secure the homeland?

We have a job. We have a job to represent the people of the United States and to actually do what we are supposed to do to defend the United States and ensure that we have a sovereign nation. We should think about that tomorrow as we head into Flag Day.

While the White House flouts the United States flag, we should honor it. We should honor it right here, and we should honor it, remembering that the flag consists of 13 horizontal stripes, 7 red alternating with 6 white. We know that the stripes represent the original 13 Colonies; the stars, the 50 States of the Union.

A lot of people don't know, though, that the colors of the flag are symbolic as well. Red symbolizes hardiness and valor, white symbolizes purity and innocence, and blue represents vigilance, perseverance, and justice.

Are we going to stand up for those tomorrow?

Are we going to stand up those for the rest of this Congress or are we going to continue to punt for some future date when everything magically works out politically so that you can finally stand up and do what you know is right today?

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 9 o'clock and 57 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, June 14, 2023, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to observe Women Veterans Day on June 12th and thank all the American women that have directly and indirectly served with our Armed Forces.

Seventy-five years ago, in 1948, the Women's Armed Services Integration Act was passed.

On June 17, 2023, my constituents in Kerrville will gather to salute the military service of female veterans in my district.

Over the summer, I will highlight 20 accounts of military service from Texas's 21st Congressional District, including veterans:

Lt. Colonel Edith Shacklette Haynes, Captain Earlynn Black Harding, Private First Class Rae Tausig Weisbruch, Petty Officer 3rd class Virginia Lewandowski Saip, Specialist Mary Redmon Casillas, Staff Sergeant Ruth Neely

Cremin, Staff Sergeant Shirley Adams Hill, Technical Sergeant Leslie North, Airman Katherine Anderson, Colonel Vicki Taylor Marsh, Chief Master Sergeant Cheryl McCall Bunyard, Corporal Lillian Southern Stovall Beard, Storekeeper Second Class Diann Sutton, Major Dolores A. Putnam, Technical Sergeant Jennifer Dwyer Dewey, Sergeant Nikki Johnson Caines, Colonel Susie Jones McCalla, Captain Deborah A. Dombeck, Lt. Colonel Kimberly Rhoades, Petty Officer 3rd class Kristy Putman Harris, Petty Officer 1st class Keri D. Camella.

On behalf of 21st Congressional District of Texas, I want to thank our veterans, including these incredible women, that have served our country with honor and distinction. A grateful Nation thanks them.

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

Mr. Speaker, he is completely correct. The only constitutional infirmity is the extent to which we are allowing bureaucrats to make up the law and make up policies without being checked by the branch represented by the people in this body and in the Senate to check them under our Constitution. That is the constitutional infirmity.

To my friend from Texas, who was regaling us on the absurdity, apparently, of our desire to protect the American people from the regulatory state clamping down on their ability to choose how they want to live and have the energy of their choice: Which is it?

The gentleman from Texas sat down in the well and was trying to say, no, we are not trying to ban this, and we are not going to do anything about that, when, by the way, the administration literally said: Ban stoves. It was a literal quote, and I think when they say something, you should actually believe them.

Then the gentleman from Texas went on to say: They want to protect all manner of pollution. We want to stop the scourge of global warming.

Well, which is it? Are we banning stoves in pursuit of unicorn energy theory, or are we actually going to allow the American people to be free?

The reality is, my friend from Texas gave up the joke. Everybody gets it. Everybody knows it. We know exactly where our Democratic colleagues are. They do want to ban the internal combustion engine. They have effectively said so. They do want to get rid of the burning of fossil fuels. They do want to make energy more expensive for the American people. They literally say so. That is the truth.

The fact is, it is not just energy. We have the REINS Act trying to restrict the power of the executive branch so we can stop things like a half-trillion-dollar student loan bailout, which Nancy Pelosi said: The President ``does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.''

They want to force schools to allow biological men to compete in women's sports under Title IX. We have an amendment to address that.

The executive branch wants to force 10.4 million healthcare workers to take a COVID jab or lose their job, use taxpayer dollars to provide abortions at the VA, unilaterally turn potentially millions of Americans into felons overnight for owning a piece of plastic attached to a constitutionally protected gun, use the EPA to regulate gas and coal-fired power plants out of existence, and use the Department of Energy to tell Americans what type of gas stove they can and can't buy.

We get the joke. The REINS Act is necessary, and I support it. However, I have to use my last 30 seconds to say this: It is ironic that we are voting on the REINS Act just 1 week after Republicans gave up our debt ceiling leverage to actually get it signed into law. That is precisely how the swamp works, Mr. Speaker.

The REINS Act was in our good bill, the Limit, Save, Grow Act, in April. We walked away from it last week to cut a deal, and we shouldn't have. Instead, we are engaging in theater where we are going to send it to the Senate for it to die. We should be serious about forcing votes to get it done in this body.

Madam Speaker, I always appreciate hearing from the gentleman from Texas. Don't always agree, but he is a friend and he is a gentleman, and I always enjoy seeing him down on the floor.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Green).

Amen. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the words from my brother, my friend from Texas. He is exactly right.

Just last night, I was on an interview on Fox with my friend Byron Donalds, and we have staked out two different positions in the primary fight for the Republican nomination for President, and we were talking about how we will be, you know, coming together in a

year one way or the other carrying forward in the general election, but at some point we have got to remember that we can agree to disagree, that we can actually have a vigorous debate, vigorous disagreements, and engage in--I just wish we would have more of us down here on the floor engaging in actual debate.

I would ask any of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, we want to start turning some of our Special Orders into special debates. I think that would be a better use of our time, and actually go back and forth in 2 minute intervals and actually engage in debate on the body of the people's House.

Madam Speaker, I do have to take some issue with some of the 1-minute speeches that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle were engaging in about an hour ago. I saw that the Democrat majority leader was on the floor with a chart and that chart said, ``House Republicans are running out of town to cause an economic meltdown.''

Sounds ominous. Sounds terrible and threatening and all sorts of calamities are going ensue. Where are Senate Democrats? Where is Chuck Schumer? They have been MIA this entire week, not even in town, but, hell, they have been MIA all year not doing a thing in the Senate except for being the personnel office for the administration. That is all they do, run through nominations, and, heck, they are not even that good at that.

What do they do? They run out of town. Where was the President last week? Japan.

You see this ominous threat of a looming debt ceiling date, an X-date as it is being referred to of June 1, is all manufactured crisis and theater. We know that. Americans know that.

Secretary Yellen wants to figure out how we need to deal with whatever interest payments need to be paid in June, she can prioritize those payments. She can make decisions to figure out how to carry this country forward. She can walk on down here, brief us, meet with us long before the June 7 date she is currently planning to come down to talk to us and have a conversation about taking those COVID dollars back that are sitting in there unobligated to the tune of $50 billion.

How about taking the IRS dollars back that are there to expand the Internal Revenue Service, an IRS which, by the way, targets the poor and minorities three to five times more than the nonpoor and nonminorities. That is the truth.

Why don't they take that $80 billion, combine it with the COVID money, turn it into dollars right now that you can go pay loans with? No problem.

See, my Democratic colleagues won't do that because my Democratic colleagues prefer the fear created with a manufactured crisis. They prefer to use that crisis as Rahm Emanuel said: ``Never let a crisis go to waste.'' They prefer to manufacture a crisis to jack up more debt on our children and grandchildren to the tune of $4 trillion.

That is what they want more than anything on Earth is to spend more money, to increase the power of government, to undermine our freedoms, to destroy the American way of life, and they are doing it right now. That is what is happening.

The fact is, while some of my Democratic colleagues were on the floor, one individual said: ``Make no mistake, they,'' meaning Republicans, ``have no plan.''

Well, I am sorry. We passed a bill in April. We actually passed a bill off of the floor of the House that raises the debt ceiling $1.5 trillion, provides an actual path to fiscal responsibility, and we did that in April.

Oh, but see, we have no plan. We have got to have this manufactured crisis.

Another quote: President Biden already lowered the deficit by $1.7 trillion, they say. His budget would cut the deficit by another $3 trillion by eliminating wasteful spending on Big Oil and Pharma, we are told. It is, in fact, our Democratic colleagues who prefer to maintain their massive subsidies for the elites and the wealthy in their so- called ``Inflation Reduction Act'' just last year.

My friend from New York, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, said: ``I ask you to think about the last time a person has said in this country that the government does too much for them. . . . When was the last time anyone has heard or seen that?''

I will say it. I will say it right here. I don't want the government doing most of the things that the government is doing to interfere with the ability of the American people to carry out their lives; Federal, State, and local. When was the last time you had a bureaucrat show up and you said: ``Oh, joy. Thank you. I am really glad there is a bureaucrat here''?

When was the last time you were thankful for $32 trillion in debt, $100,000 almost for every man, woman, and child in America? Anybody thankful for $32 trillion in debt? Anybody?

Anybody thankful for a border that is wide open, being exploited by cartels, while fentanyl comes in and kills our children? Anybody thankful for that? A Department of Homeland Security that doesn't actually secure the homeland?

Anybody thankful for an FBI that went after Scott Smith and labeled him a domestic terrorist for daring to defend his daughter in a school board meeting because she was assaulted in a bathroom?

Anybody thankful for the IRS knocking on your door, auditing the poor, the minorities, three to five times more? People thankful for that?

Are you thankful for the EPA, or the Department of the Interior, that sent a man to prison because he had some ponds on his ranch in Montana?

We have a government that is weaponized against the American people and is undermining our liberties, and they want more of it. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle want more, more government. They want more taxes. They want more spending.

They want more bureaucrats knocking on your door, like Mark Houck in Philadelphia, when he woke up to his door being knocked on by local law enforcement, teamed up with Federal law enforcement, to go carry out a warrant to arrest him because he had defended his son exercising free speech, because he is a pro-life activist in Philadelphia. That is your government at work.

The fact is: We have a decision to make here. What are we going to do? Are we going to listen to the wailing and gnashing of teeth of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle projecting a manufactured crisis to exploit fear to try to raise our debt limit, a credit card limit, by $4 trillion? I want to be very clear, and I want to be clear to my colleagues on this side of the aisle. Anybody making a deal right now? $4 trillion? Are you out of your freaking mind?

When I came to this town as a lawyer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the entire debt was $6 trillion. What are we doing? We are having a conversation, blowing my mind, about raising our debt another $4 trillion. Why? So we can continue to fund the very bureaucrats that at least my colleagues on this side of the aisle campaign against.

Guess what? You have the power of the purse for a reason. You should use it. Federalist 58, James Madison, what did he say? He said the power of the purse granted to the people's House was the most powerful tool you could give against the tyranny of the executive branch.

My colleagues on this side of the aisle all too often like to go around and campaign against all of the things that the bureaucracy is doing or that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle support, but when it comes down to game time--and it is game time right now--when it comes down to game time, are we going to use the power of the purse to defend the American people against the onslaught of the tyranny of the executive branch, or are we going to tuck tail, take the first exit ramp off, and walk away?

What I am hearing right now being debated, being negotiated, is taking the first exit ramp off to cut a deal, because that is what we do in this town, cut a deal. But that deal is not a deal for our kids and our grandkids.

We passed a responsible bill in April. My message to my Republican colleagues is: Hold the line.

My message to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle: Quit lying to the American people, quit advancing this fraud of a manufactured crisis, stop telling people that you can just continue to spend money we don't have. Stop lying to them that there is more tax revenue to go get when we are at the highest level of tax revenue

ever in our history, matched only two other times, World War II and in 2000 at the end of the dot-com explosion. Almost 20 percent of our GDP is taken in by taxes.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle hide behind that, and they refuse to acknowledge that this government is too big, too burdensome, and too weaponized against the American people.

So we passed a bill that would pull back discretionary spending $131 billion to 2022 spending levels. Now, that is what we were spending a mere 6 months ago. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle would tell you: Oh, my God, you are going to completely dismantle everybody's life and well-being. It is literally what we were spending 6 months ago.

More than that, you can maintain defense levels at 2023 levels, current levels, and you can return your bureaucratic state, your nondefense spending, to merely what we were spending right before COVID, recognizing, by the way, that our government is now 40 percent bigger since the beginning of COVID. We can return it to pre-COVID levels, which, by the way, polls at 76 percent. Most Americans say: Yeah, I think I can deal with that great efficiency of the bureaucracy, pre-COVID.

We can do that. That is what we passed. That is what Republicans stood up and passed and put into the Senate's hands.

By the way, if we did that, we could fund NDD--that is, nondefense discretionary--at the exact same level as that great MAGA extremist Barack Obama proposed for fiscal 2024 in his last budget.

Secondly, we passed measures that would repeal the grid-destroying tax credits passed in the name of--my colleagues on the other side of the aisle say ``green;'' I say ``unreliable''--energy in this so-called Inflation Reduction Act that will enrich leftists, enrich corporations, and enrich the Chinese Communist Party.

Last year, through reconciliation, which is not the way we should do business--that is how ObamaCare was passed--with a mere majority vote in the House and the Senate, with 158 proxy votes, people in this Chamber who were not physically present. During the August recess, on a party-line vote, Democrats jammed through a giant giveaway to the wealthiest Americans. Goldman Sachs estimates it at $1.2 trillion, over three times the original estimate.

If we do not carry through as Republicans, if we do not carry through with the measure we passed in April to reduce those subsidies, then the EIA, the Energy Information Agency, I think it is, estimates that the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act--we use too many acronyms in this town--could make wind and solar account for nearly 60 percent of the U.S. electricity generation by 2050.

Now, everybody is jumping up and down in joy in all the schools across America because they have been told that wind and solar is the magic unicorn energy. Don't you understand? Everything is great; it is clean; it is wonderful.

They don't ever talk about the side effects. They don't ever talk about the children, who are mining all of the minerals to be used in the solar panels, being abused around the world. They never talk about the environmental impact of the wind turbines in West Texas, or what happens to birds. They never talk about what it means to national security and empowering China. They never talk about the fact that you can't have a grid that stays up and powers your homes and your hospitals and your lives because you don't have gas-fired plants, you don't have coal-fired plants, and you don't have nuclear plants backing up the grid.

I can tell you, on a cloudy, windless day in Texas: We are in trouble. It is true.

Everybody is going to go around on the other side of the aisle--and I have seen them--they go give speeches to kids on the steps of the Capitol and they say: Oh, we are doing all of these great things for you. Don't you know? We care about the environment. We care about our planet. You now have all of this great, clean energy.

Well, enjoy being in third-world status with brownouts, like we are seeing in Europe and like we are seeing in other parts of the world, where they are retreating from the full embrace of so-called ``green,'' i.e., ``unreliable energy resources,'' because you create energy poverty. You undermine human flourishing. You undermine the well-being and the prosperity of the poorest of the poor in this world when you take away the ability for us to have energy. That is exactly what my Democrat colleagues did and in the process are enriching their fat cat friends. Ninety percent of the subsidies go to corporations of a billion dollars and up.

Oh, but I thought this was all of the good stuff, the unicorn energy stuff. No, rich people, financiers, making tons of money on the back of grift, of corporate cronyism, the worst kind of corporate cronyism you have ever seen on display happening right here.

What are Republicans doing? Running away, saying: Well, they will never give up their signature Inflation Reduction Act bill.

Bull. They will give it up if we take it to them and hold the line for the American people. Stand up and hold the line, to my Republican colleagues, against the worst form of corporate cronyism I have ever seen on the floor of this body.

How about 80 percent of the electric vehicle subsidies that go to people who make $100,000 or $300,000 as a couple? Yeah. So the poor guy out there who is a plumber, trying to drive his pickup around, is going to be told: You have got to go subsidize the little suburbanite family running around in their EV feeling good about themselves, patting themselves on the back, while they go plug their EV in to charge it using as much power as you use for your air-conditioning unit, which has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere ain't nuclear, ain't gas, and ain't coal anymore because they are destroying our ability to produce the reliable power that we need for the very EVs they want to subsidize.

Let's not even talk about how much that is empowering China directly. Chinese companies are eligible for these climate credits. A recent analysis found Chinese companies could end up with $125 billion in IRA subsidies.

You are giving them all the power, the Chinese Communist Party. You are subsidizing them with direct taxpayer money. You are allowing the Chinese to then sell us back the panels made with the minerals that they mined. How in the world is this good for our national security or our energy security? It is not.

Democrats should be ashamed. Republicans should be ashamed if we walk away, which is what they are about to do, cutting a deal that undermines the American people, taking the very first off-ramp, the very first exit ramp.

How about the third issue, overturning Biden's unfair deficit- increasing and tuition-increasing student loan bailout, which will cut the deficit by $400 to $500 billion dollars this year? We passed that. Yay, Republicans. They were all cheering down here.

The Republicans were all cheering down here. We should cheer it, but guess what we are doing? We are walking away from it. Do you know why, Madam Speaker? It is because my Republican colleagues say: Don't worry. The Supreme Court will strike it down as unconstitutional.

Guess what? One, don't count on it. Don't put all your eggs in the Supreme Court basket. Number two, there is this thing called the Constitution, which we are supposed to enforce and support. You don't walk away from your own view of the constitutionality of an unconstitutional act by a President. It is our job.

I don't want to hear one member of the Republican Party in this House use the term ``power of the purse'' and walk away from forcing Democrats to end this unlawful and unconstitutional act by the President of the United States to unilaterally choose to make individuals in this country pay off the loans of other individuals in this country.

How is that standing up for the people? How is that holding the line?

Eighty-seven percent of the American people don't have student loans, and of the people who do have student loans, 56 percent of them have graduate degrees. Yet, you are going to ask that same plumber who has to get in his pickup--and he is now subsidizing that suburbanite who is driving their little electronic vehicle, their little EV,

going around saying look at how great they are--subsidizing that and also subsidizing that idiot's gender studies degree.

The plumber who started a business didn't take out a loan. He works hard and wants what is best for his kid, and he is now subsidizing the gender studies-degree kid sitting in a basement tweeting and sitting on their parent's healthcare plan that allows them to stay on it until they are 26. Then you wonder why we are $32 trillion in debt.

But what we are going to do, in all of our infinite wisdom, is cut a deal. Cut a deal to get what? More about that later, whenever we figure out what that is.

I would remind everybody that Speaker Pelosi herself said: ``People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.''

There was no act of Congress, yet we are funding it. We defunded it as Republicans, but now we are walking away from defunding that to cut a deal. We should not do that.

Number four, rescinding the $80 billion Democrats gave to the IRS to hire 87,000 agents that will target working- and middle-class taxpayers the most.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle say that Republicans just want to protect rich tax cheats. According to CBS, that great purveyor of rightwing conspiracy news, the IRS audits the poor at five times the rate of everyone else.

According to The New York Times, also a great purveyor of radical rightwing news, ``Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers.''

Rich people have lawyers. Rich people get subsidies from the very people who go out and campaign and say they are doing everything for the American people while they enrich their fat-cat buddies, as my Democratic colleagues did with the Inflation Reduction Act and which my Republican colleagues voted to end and now are walking away from eliminating.

Reform No. 5, implement the REINS Act to end the abuse of executive power by empowering Congress to approve major regulations that cost Americans billions of dollars.

President Biden's regulatory delusion in his first 2 years has saddled the American people with at least $318 billion in total costs and more than 218 million hours of paperwork.

More than that, there are massive regulations being carried out by this administration through executive fiat and order that have a massive economic impact and, more importantly, a massive liberty impact on the American people, turning millions of Americans into felons for daring to have a piece of plastic that attaches to a constitutionally protected weapon.

The student loan fiasco I just described, regulation after regulation by this administration, and all we want to do is pass the REINS Act, which we just passed out of the Judiciary Committee, by the way--are we going to make that a part of our deal? I am not reading about it in all the leaked reports I am seeing.

Let's kick that one aside. Let's allow the administration to continue to run roughshod over the American people through executive fiat because we want a deal.

Reform No. 6, strengthen and establish work requirements for able- bodied Americans who are receiving government assistance, just like President Biden supported.

I have gotten to one where I think there may be at least a little fight on this side of the aisle to try to get one of the things that we passed. I don't know how much. I don't know whether it will apply to Medicaid. I don't know what it will apply to.

However, I can tell you, Madam Speaker, that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't want people to have to work. President Biden voted for it 11 times, and President Clinton signed it, but your modern Democratic Party in 2023 wants to pay people not to work.

There is no other explanation for it. If they say otherwise, it is not true.

We want people to work. We want to give the benefit of getting people off the welfare roll. There is, in fact, dignity to work. Our country depends on it. Our society depends on it. Our children depend on seeing their parents work. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't want that.

Apparently, we do, and I, at least, think it is apparently part of whatever deal is being discussed. It ought to be, and it ought to be fully a part of it because we passed it already. We passed a deal.

Finally, reclaiming billions in unobligated COVID funds, that is just the peanuts left on the floor, the mere $40 billion or $50 billion of unobligated COVID funds left of the $5 trillion or whatever we blew through in the last 3 years decimating our economy and driving up inflation.

The fact of the matter is we have an obligation in this body, in the people's House, on both sides of the aisle, to do our job, to stop spending money recklessly, to stop printing money, to stop driving up inflation, and to stop denying our children their inheritance.

When everybody goes around on Memorial Day this weekend to stand up with veterans and salute the fallen, they go to Arlington National Cemetery, the cemetery at Fort Sam Houston, or any one of our other national cemeteries around this country--what did they fight for? Did they fight for us to cut a deal?

I ask because I am pretty sure the boys in Bastogne sitting in the foxhole freezing to death weren't interested in moving that line back to Normandy. They had gone from Normandy to Bastogne.

Hold the damn line. Don't back off, Republicans. Stand up for the country that you go out and campaign for. Hold the line for the American people because the bill we passed in April, I am going to be honest with you, is a downpayment on what we have to do. It is not everything we have to do. It is the beginning.

If we walk away from that, if we walk away from that because the people get weak-kneed about, ``My God,'' they are crying, ``My God, we are not going to make our debt payment,'' yes, we are. The President of the United States knows what you know. We can't walk away from our debt payments. We have to make those payments.

Secretary Yellen and the President know it. They will make the payment. We will not default, but we are defaulting on the American Dream every single day that goes by where we continue to spend money we don't have to fund the bureaucrats at war with the American Dream. If the Republicans walk away from this, then they don't deserve to stay in the majority any more than the Democrats do.

We should hold the line for the American people, and we should hold the line for the future of this country.

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

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas for yielding. A lot of conservatives believe in conservation. For example, the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has expanded the Everglades more than any Governor in the history of the State because that is actual conservation--instead of the nonsense being spewed by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

When they say, oh, we do something. Let's just be clear to the American people what doing something actually is. It is giving billions of dollars of subsidies to your fat cat corporate cronies, enriching them at the expense of hardworking American families. That is the truth.

Madam Speaker, 90 percent of subsidies are going to billion-dollar corporations and 80 percent of electronic vehicle subsidies are going to people making well over $100,000. That is the actual truth of what is going on.

Here today we are talking about several bills. We are dealing with the fentanyl crisis, which my colleagues on the other side of the aisle refuse to address by allowing our border to be wide open, exploited by cartels, driving

fentanyl into our communities on the back of the Chinese, making money doing so, and killing 72,000 Americans last year alone, including 5 children in Hays County where I live south of Austin. It is happening every single day.

My colleagues don't care about securing the border. They want to hide behind the fact that they say that fentanyl comes through ports of entry. What they don't acknowledge is that there is no patrolling of the border by Border Patrol because they are all processing human beings being smuggled here for profit by dangerous cartels.

This bill is designed to take a step forward. It takes an important step forward in ensuring that we are dealing with the fentanyl precursors and that we are doing what we need to do to recognize how deadly it is. The fact is, our colleagues don't want to actually secure the border, which is where fentanyl pours across every single day.

On student loans--need we go any further than looking at the quotes from Speaker Pelosi when she said: ``People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.''

That was that grand MAGA extremist, Nancy Pelosi.

She also added: ``Suppose . . . your child just decided they, at this time, [do] not want to go to college, but you're paying taxes to forgive somebody else's obligations.'' She continued, ``You may not be happy about that.''

Are American families supposed to be happy that they now must cover the cost of someone else's education? Again, that great MAGA extremist Nancy Pelosi.

The fact is, the American people understand that making other Americans, plumbers or people who paid off their loans, pay off other people's student loans is inherently un-American and inherently unfair.

One last message to my Republican colleagues, passing a CRA to die in the Senate and die at the President's desk is not enough. We should defund the student loan fiasco in the debt ceiling bill. Don't blink.

Mr. Speaker, I hereby remove my name as cosponsor from H.R. 1844 through H.R. 2364.