Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to call up H.R. 9525 to extend the funding of government through February 3, 2023.

Mr. Speaker, every one of us here have significant groups of constituents and people across this country from the communities in question, from the Chinese-American communities, from the Indian- American communities, who have interest in wanting to make sure their communities can be represented and might well support some of this. But of course they do. Of course they do.

What are we going to do here but pick winners and losers? That is what this Congress does every single day, pick winners and losers.

Who are the losers on this? It is not Big Tech, it is not all the big corporations that are all happy to collude with the people's House in order to get their labor supply, what they need.

But who are going to be the losers? A lot of the hospitals. Why did the hospital association oppose this?

Could it be that there are Filipino nurses and others who are going to be left behind or are going to have to go to the back of the line? The Filipino nurses that were crowding the room in which I was being treated for cancer at M.D. Anderson, which is chock-full of Filipino nurses?

We are picking winners and losers here based on nationalities and specific countries.

The gentlewoman from California just tried to mount a defense that we are not going to open the door to Chinese Communists coming to the United States but conveniently leaves out of the code all of the exceptions: exception for involuntary membership, exception for past membership, exception for close family members. I mean, any idiot could drive a truck through those holes.

This is not a hard thing to understand what is happening. At the eleventh hour, at the end of the 117th Congress, while Democrats are colluding with a bunch of weak-kneed Republicans in the Senate to pass a bunch of money that we don't have, to borrow more money that we don't have, to jam through a massive omnibus spending bill at the expense of the American people, this body is about to jam through a garbage immigration bill that will undermine people around the world seeking to come here who are going to be put to the back of the line while colluding with Big Tech and big corporate interests to do it. That is what is happening right now on the floor of the House.

We never actually have full-throated debates about this stuff, contrary to what the gentlewoman said. She just dismissed it: Oh, we had a couple hearings.

One witness mentioned something in a hearing and that constitutes a hearing?

We are not having an actual debate here on the floor. We are having 30 minutes of each side getting up and saying their talking points. Then we will have a vote, and then we will move on.

We are not going to be able to offer amendments on the floor because nobody in this body, none of the leadership on that side of the aisle or, frankly, often this side of the aisle, gives a damn about my right to be able to offer an amendment on this floor of this House as my constituents gave me the power to do.

We are here trying to defend the interests of having an immigration policy that is not based on the interests of one industry at the expense of countless other industries and at the expense of an immigration system that actually works while our border is wide open, being exploited by cartels and China to kill 72,000 Americans last year, and my Democratic colleagues don't give a rip about a wide-open border exploiting the American people and migrants getting abused in the process.

Madam Speaker, I object.

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my friend from as Arizona being down here, as always, enlightening the American people and using the floor time in the honor of our soon-to-be-leaving-the-House friend, Louie Gohmert, and making sure that we use the time here to inform our constituents back home.

As usual, the American people understand I am speaking to a mostly empty Chamber, with the exception of the Speaker and my friends who are now leaving who were just here. This is pretty much what we get in terms of debate here in the House Chamber.

Earlier today we had a little bit of back and forth on a couple of bills, but they are pre-programmed, like 30 minutes a side, pre- designed, all designed to get right off the floor; and I want to talk about that. That is why I am coming down here today.

Today, we took up two bills on the floor of the people's House. We took up a bill that is ostensibly focused on marriage and allowing recognition of same-sex marriages from one State to another.

But in that bill is something that is pretty significant for the American people to understand, regardless of your views about how the bill is being sold, about it being about recognition of same-sex marriage. Actually, they say it is about codifying Obergefell and same- sex marriage. It does no such thing. It only deals with recognition across State lines.

But even if you think that is good policy, even if you voted for it-- and I didn't think it was good policy. I would have voted against it on the merits--in the bill is a sword, a private right of action, a private right of action able to be used and creating the ability of the Attorney General of the United States to go after individuals for actions they carry out, their closely held religious beliefs.

People in this Chamber voted for it, knowing full well that the language in that bill will allow lawyers and organizations to come sue Americans and force them into court; and their response is that, oh, don't worry, you have the Constitution of the United States and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Well, no kidding. I know the Constitution exists. And the Religious Freedom Restoration Act dates back to, I don't know, '93 or '94, sometime in the 1990s.

But now, if you dare, as an organization, a religious school, for example, say: ``Wait a minute. It is against our tenets of faith to hire a same-sex couple, or an individual who is part of a same-sex couple, as a teacher in our school,'' or maybe another organization makes a choice along those lines, now you are in court.

Now you are having to go defend yourself. Now you are having to go take this up to the Fifth Circuit and up to the United States Supreme Court, trying to figure out how they are going to interpret all of this, whether this law is even constitutional in the first place, all because our colleagues on the other side of the aisle wanted not to just provide for recognition across States--again, a proposition with which I do not agree. But not just that. They wanted to make sure that there was a sword to go after you if you disagree.

Earlier this summer, a member of Parliament in Finland was prosecuted for a pamphlet she distributed 20 years ago in defense of traditional marriage and in opposition to same-sex marriage.

Again, whatever your views are on the issue, let me be perfectly clear: What is happening today, what was decided today on the floor of the House, and all those Members on that side of the aisle and the 39 on this side of the aisle who voted for that legislation, voted for a sword to go after individual Americans, private citizens, and private organizations for daring to carry out their closely held, private religious beliefs.

We will be back here talking about that. We will be back here trying to pass legislation to make sure we can protect them.

I offered an amendment in the Committee on Rules to try to get a vote on the floor of the House, and I was denied even the ability to offer the amendment. We couldn't even offer the amendment. Lord knows, I don't have the power to offer an amendment on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Again, I want everybody out there in America to understand that not since May 2016 has an individual of the so-called people's House been able to walk into the well of the House and offer an amendment on a piece of legislation, this time as consequential as marriage and religious liberty.

Again, let me reiterate, whatever your views are on the issue--and I have mine--shouldn't we be able to debate marriage? Shouldn't we be able to debate religious liberty and the ability to protect your views and your closely held religious beliefs?

No, no, no. I was punted out of the Committee on Rules for supposedly, irony of ironies, on a day in which we just authorized $860 billion in a 4,400-page bill I got 40 hours before I voted on it, because it would score over half a million dollars--yeah, $500,000-- over 10 years.

That wasn't even actually what the CBO said. They said it could because it might create some revenues and some expenditures and, those expenditures, those outlays, would be what? Damages if you went to court and you succeeded.

I want you to be able to understand that my Democratic colleagues used a point of order to shut down an amendment to protect religious liberty if it would be successful to protect your rights. That is assuredly and 100 percent what happened, yet it was just blown over, disregarded here in the House Chamber, including by 39 members of my own party, because that is the way this town works.

The bill was dubbed a gay marriage codification of Obergefell bill. You had 39 members of my party go: Oh, well, I have to be for that because we have to be for our Libertarian-type principles. Never mind that you are trampling on the ability of States and communities to be able to decide how they want to live, how they want to set up their communities, trampling on millennia, thousands of years, of traditional marriage, which is designed very specifically for families and children. There is tons of evidence and research on this.

But, no. We have to do that. We have to ignore the sword and the attack on religious liberty. It was voted on today without debate and without an amendment. It is extraordinary.

What else did we do today in this august body, so much debate and interaction and discussion among the 435 Members here on the floor? What else was done today? I will tell you what was done today. On the desk on the floor of the House of Representatives was a stack of papers up on the second level, 4,400 pages stacked up right there, which I got at 9 p.m. on Tuesday night.

We have a rule in the House of Representatives that you are not supposed to vote on legislation if you don't have at least 72 hours to read it. Why might you have that rule? I don't know. Color me crazy. Maybe I should read what is in a 4,400-page bill. I know that is a radical position. I know that puts me over in the insane camp. Oh, there is crazy Chip ranting on the floor of the House because, oh, my God, he wants 72 hours to read a bill.

Whenever I say this, how many people go: You know what is in the bill. What is wrong? How long does it take you to read a bill?

How many Members do you think read all 4,400 pages?

Oh, but, Chip, they have staff for that. You have all the committee staff. The committee staff does that.

We hold the election certificate. How many of your staff do you think read the 4,400 pages? I know my staff was poring over it late night on Tuesday night and all day yesterday just to see what was in it.

Surprise, surprise. What do you find in it? 4,400 pages, $860 billion authorized under the National Defense Authorization Act. I had less than 40 hours before I was voting on it, in plain violation of the 72- hour rule, because we waive the rules all the time. We set up rules and waive them. Nobody seems to care. They just go: Oh, my God, I have a steak dinner to go to. I have a Christmas party to go to.

I was down here last night debating the rule on marriage. I was solo. I was one, even on my side of the aisle.

When I finished, the House Chamber closed. We were done. I rolled down the street and went to a Christmas party. There were a lot of Members there. There were a lot of Members all over this town rolling out down to their Christmas parties. They sure as hell weren't here debating marriage and religious liberty.

What do we get in getting this NDAA passed? We got a vaccine mandate repeal. Or did we? I think we got a really important step forward to say that the members of the military shouldn't be fired if they dare question whether they must take a needle in their arm for a vaccine that has not been proven to be actually effective in halting transmission and certainly not necessary for those who are young and healthy, by virtually any account by any doctor that we have had testify on this. So you reject the needle and you get fired from the United States military.

For 2 years, we have been calling to get rid of the vaccine mandates. Finally, in December 2022, right on the way out, Democrats say: Whoa, okay, in order to get this 4,400-page monstrosity across the finish line, we will accept that we will, in 30 days, undo the memo at the Department of Defense.

That memo could be reissued. In fact, the Democrat chair of the Committee on Armed Services effectively said that.

Are we going to get anybody reinstated? Are we going to get everybody honorably discharged? Are we going to be able to say maybe you shouldn't be harassed? Because that is what happens.

You didn't take a needle; you are not getting that job. You didn't take a needle; you are not necessarily getting that promotion. Retaliation, again, for a vaccine that doctors and the CDC today acknowledge does nothing for transmission, that is unnecessary for people who are healthy and young.

Here we are. We passed an NDAA in order to get--oh, man we finally got that vaccine mandate repeal language.

Look, I am glad to get it. We have been fighting for it. We didn't get half a loaf. We got the crumbs of one piece of bread. But it was so important so we could stop the next person from getting fired. We sure as hell didn't help the guy who got fired last week.

It is $860 billion, $45 billion above the President's request, 9 percent over 2022 levels.

I am for more money for lethality. I am for more money for a Department of Defense fully capable of killing people and blowing stuff up because that is what you want your Department of Defense to be capable of doing when called upon to do it. I am not for a social engineering experiment wrapped in a uniform. Unfortunately, that is what we are turning the Department of Defense into.

Authorizing a Department of Defense center for excellence in environmental security on how and why environmental stresses to human safety and water and energy will cascade to economic, social, political, or national security events; renewing the DOD's annual environment and energy reports; establishing a joint working group on prioritization for energy systems, which ``may reduce conventional air pollution''; creating a pilot program for electric vehicle charging stations; having zero emissions by 2035 for nontactical vehicles.

Meanwhile, China is just pumping out aircraft carriers and boats, building their military, building coal-fired power plants. We ain't building any coal-fired power plants. We are barely building any gas- fired power plants. They are out building their military, and we are focused on the coral reef, which appeared 286 times in the text of the

Mr. Speaker, obviously, I rise in opposition to the rule. I made my position clear in the Committee on Rules earlier this week, and I think it is very much a position held by a large number of my colleagues.

It is a shame that we are sitting here debating the institution of marriage but without actual debate. We are here, we are going to debate this rule, it will be a few minutes, and then boom, we are going to go vote. We are not going to have any real debate on this tomorrow either.

I offered an amendment in the Committee on Rules, an amendment to add protections for religious liberty, and it was killed on a budget point of order, a budget point of order that it said would cost around $500,000 or more. For what? For damages that an individual American might receive if successful in challenging the Department of Justice if their rights were being infringed.

Let me be clear. It was going to be killed on a point of order out of the Committee on Rules because it could be successful in protecting the rights of Americans, when you have got a piece of legislation that has a private right of action put into it, a sword to be used against the American people if they exercise their closely held religious beliefs. And that is the truth.

It is a bill that was passed off of this floor with no hearing in the House Committee on the Judiciary, sent to the Senate in July, with no protection for religious liberty in it, and then provisions were added in the Senate to provide some very bare minimum, narrow religious liberty protections, only for the solemnization of marriage.

When an individual tries to offer an amendment to try to protect the rights of all Americans to be free from persecution--if, for example, you are a school, a religious school, that might not want to hire somebody in a same-sex marriage because it is against your closely held religious beliefs, you might have to litigate that now. The response by the other side is: Oh, my gosh, the Constitution exists; oh, my gosh, RFRA, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, exists.

So the shield that people had before is now the thing that you have to go litigate in court and hire lawyers to defend yourself for exercising your closely held religious beliefs against the

sword that this legislation provides. That is the truth of what we are dealing with here.

We offered an amendment in good faith, just like Senator Mike Lee did, a bipartisan amendment, by the way. We are getting no debate, no ability to offer that amendment on the floor, no ability to have a debate on that amendment, no ability to actually have a conversation about the free exercise of religion and protecting people's closely held religious beliefs.

That is why people are sick of this institution. We do not debate. We do not amend. We simply jam stuff through the Committee on Rules and then we walk away and go give speeches on the steps. That is no way to do business. I hope we change that in the new Congress. But this is not the way to do business in the House of Representatives.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding.

I am proud to be here on the floor with my friend from Texas. He is someone that I have looked up to for a very long time. And to have served with him for the last 2 terms, for the last 4 years, has been an honor. I wouldn't be in Congress but for his support.

My parents live just down the road from Pittsburg where he grew up; they

live in Mount Pleasant, Texas. That is actually where I first got to meet Congressman Gohmert. Now, to sit and serve in this body alongside of him, is truly an honor.

The poster talks about the Gohmert hour. We used to make our interns watch the Gohmert hour so they could learn from the great Louie Gohmert.

One of our favorite moments was when he spent 30 minutes hammering the Architect of the Capitol because they told him not to grill his ribs on his office balcony. That was one of the greatest speeches delivered on the floor of the House, no doubt.

We already talked about 17,000 minutes, or whatever the number was, 12 days. I took it to heart watching the passion of Congressman Gohmert coming to the floor of the House and using this floor to speak to the people and using this floor to be able to communicate why we are here. We ought to do it more often. In fact, we ought to have debate and engagement with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

I was inspired by Congressman Gohmert to use this privilege, to use this time that we are given to be able to be the voice for the people who send us to Washington. That is what Congressman Gohmert has done. He has been a voice for the people of East Texas. He has represented them well. He is truly one of the most honest, honorable, and decent public servants that I have ever known.

In fact, the reason that he is leaving this body has a great deal to do with his honor and his integrity and wanting to defend the people of Texas and to do it the right way.

I will miss you, Louie, but I know you are not going to be too far away.

I will leave you with this: During a speech in one of the famous Gohmert hours, Congressman Gohmert said: My SAT score would shock people who think I am the dumbest Member of Congress.

Well, nothing could be farther from the truth. He is one of the smartest Members, one of the best lawyers, and one of the best human beings.

It has been an honor to serve alongside you, my friend. We will see you soon in other areas of life. God bless you.

Mr. Speaker, the House will be leaving town today, heading back to our States, heading back to our districts. Obviously, this will be a week of thanksgiving and, obviously, I wish all of my colleagues well and safe travel. We have much, of course, for which to be thankful in this great country.

But there are great concerns that we face. Today, obviously, we had the speech and the news about the future of Speaker Pelosi. The outgoing Speaker has had a long career in this body, and I wish her well. I wish her the best in the next chapter of her life.

Some are saying it is an end of an era; and I would say that it is only an end of an era if we choose to make it so.

Speaker Pelosi ran this Chamber not terribly unlike her Republican predecessors, and I don't necessarily mean that to be the right way to do things; bills that are cooked up in small rooms among leadership staff and Members of leadership; thousands of pages of legislation dropped on Members at the 11th hour; key pieces of legislation that are shuttled through committee without significant debate and then dropped on the floor.

Sometimes we have what is called suspension votes, where we suspend the rules and we have votes on the floor with no Members here to debate it or discuss it; just take the word of the committees on which I don't serve; amendments on the floor of this body restrained since May of 2016, under both parties' leadership.

Some people refer to this as a cartel. Some refer to it as the swamp. What it is, regardless of branding, we know that it takes power away from the legislators and, thereby, takes power away from the people who sent their legislators here to represent them.

The only way we are going to make this the end of an era is if we change the way we do things, and we should. I am saying this now that there is a Republican majority about to take the gavel. I believe we have to change the way this town works. I believe we have to change the way this body works.

The reason that I introduced the Article I Act in the first Congress that I served in this body, while President Trump was in office, to reclaim power from the executive branch, to say that we must have a voice in these ongoing emergency declarations, some of which date back to the 1970s. The reason that I did that was because I believed it, even though it would have taken power away from a Republican President.

I am wondering now if some of my Democratic colleagues will think, well, maybe that is not a terrible idea if we look ahead. I don't know.

Here, in this Chamber, I am, as a Republican, calling on a fundamental change in the way we do things here; how bills get to the floor.

Most people might not understand that the default rules that would go back to the Jefferson Manual and the basic rules of parliamentary procedure would be that I have the right to be able to offer a bill; and that then you would have the right to amend the bill here on the floor of this body; this being the floor of the House of Representatives.

But what the American people don't know is that every Congress we come in and we vote on new rules, and we vote on rules that, then, restrict the power of every Member of this body to be able to represent their constituents.

We restrict the power of a Member to offer a bill, to bring that bill to a vote, to have debate on that bill, to amend that bill here on the floor of the House of Representatives. That is the way it works.

Then we even go further. Every week, we fly in and then we have votes on rules, rules that are cooked up among 13 Members of the House of Representatives who sit up in a committee up here, behind these walls, and they vote a new rule, and send it down here; and then the body votes on the rule that then structures debate for the week.

Then can I offer an amendment here on the floor? No. You know why? Because people are afraid to vote.

Members of this body, sent to vote on legislation and to represent their constituents, are afraid to vote. Can you imagine, in the founding of this country, the establishment of this body, the people's House, to go get reelected every two years, to go seek re-election, that we are afraid to vote?

Do you know how many times if I bring up opening the process and opening up the floor of the House, colleagues on my side of the aisle, the other side of the aisle go, well, you know, don't you know that means somebody could bring up a really tough vote.

Well, if you vote ``no'' on a whole lot of tough votes, like I tend to do, you get kind of used to it, and you get used to what you have to do, which is go explain to your constituents why there ain't no free lunch.

This isn't the United States House of free stuff. You can't just keep passing bills to spend money we don't have to buy off votes. You can't keep voting for bills that have a nice title so that you don't have to go back and explain why you voted, as I did, against burn pit legislation for veterans who need support and help for burn pits. But you vote against it because you don't need another $675 billion mandatory spending item.

Yet, bipartisan support for a bill because nobody wants to go say no. Nobody wants to go look in a veteran's eye and explain the hard reality of what we need to do in this body.

Nobody wants to say no to a bill that says ALS research. Nobody wants to say no to a bill that says something about helping animals or helping old people or helping kids. You put a nice title on there, then everybody has got to vote for. It doesn't matter which side of the aisle you are on; you have got to vote for it because there is no spending limit. There is no restraint. There is no responsibility.

There is no leadership. There is no check on unrestrained power of the executive branch by this body because this body keeps funding the very tyranny of the executive branch that many campaign against. That is the truth.

My colleagues on this side of the aisle just went out and sought election, where we took the House back. My colleagues on this side of the aisle went out and campaigned against unrestrained Federal power in the Federal Bureau of Investigation; a Department of Homeland Security that refuses to secure the border of the United States; labeling of parents as domestic terrorists.

They went out and campaigned against an energy policy of an administration that is destroying American energy; driving the price of gas up; driving the price of electricity up; destroying the grid of the United States; making us more dependent on China, on Venezuela, on Russia, on Saudi Arabia, on Iran.

It is absurd. We ran against all that stuff, but you know what? A whole lot of my colleagues vote to fund all that stuff; have no problem writing a big old check, both sides of the aisle.

You know why? Because they always have something they want that they are willing to just sign off on a monster piece of legislation, irrespective of the debt that is piling up around the ears of their kids and their grandkids, the destruction of the American Dream that is happening because of that, or the funding of the very bureaucrats that are undermining the freedoms of the United States people every day.

Come to the floor. It has got a National Defense Authorization Act. You come to the floor, and you have got something you must pass. We have to pay for the pay raise for our troops. We must pay for some more planes and bombers and helicopters and missiles.

Don't you know, Chip, that we have got to go stand up against China. We have got to fund Ukraine. We have got to stand up against Putin.

Great. Let's have a debate on this floor about those things. If you are talking about war, maybe we should declare it. If you think that there is a proxy war with funding, maybe we should debate it on the floor of this body.

Maybe you shouldn't just keep writing blank checks and never have a debate about guns and butter. But that is what we do.

This is where I have got to have a little tough talk to my colleagues on this side of the aisle. What, pray tell, have you heard out of anybody on this side of the aisle that will change any of that?

Yesterday, we had all sorts of conference meetings, debates about our internal workings. I tend to like to keep those meetings confidential and private, but half my dadgum colleagues are tweeting that stuff out in real time.

The fact of the matter is nothing changed. The status quo remains because people want their power. They want their committee chairmanships. They want their gavel. They want the ability to control the power and the purse strings, but they don't want to look in the mirror to fundamentally change a broken town, a broken House, a broken body, a broken Federal Government that is stepping all over the dreams and the hopes and the future and the prosperity of the American people.

There is not a remote indication that my colleagues on my side of the aisle understand what time it is in America; understand what we are facing. It is not just a campaign statement. It is not just something to go rile up the American people to get elected; to get elected, to get power, to get on a certain committee.

You know what every conversation that has been had in this body, at least on my side of the aisle, since last Tuesday? Hey, what's going on in the Steering Committee?

Hey, who is going to get Ways and Means?

Hey, who is going to get on what committee?

Hey, did the freshmen have their votes? Who is going to be the head of the freshman class?

Hey, who is going to be the Speaker? Who is going to be the whip?

I don't know. Let's figure out what we are going to do; who is going to have power. Who is going to have power; who is going to have power?

The answer is, anybody but the American people. The answer is, anybody but the rank-and-file Members of this body.

The answer is the status quo. That is why people ran--that is why President Trump, by the way, did well in 2016 running against the swamp.

Say what you want about President Trump. He represented a large block of this country that were sick and tired of this town, of this place, of this body, of the people in this room, and it is high time we do something about it.

Stop kissing each other's rear ends, asking and begging for some slot on a committee. We didn't come here to be on committees. We didn't come here to get a title.

The titles around this place, who is in leadership? Leadership. Isn't leadership something you recognize and follow? It is not something you elect.

I didn't come here for second place. I didn't come here--I don't leave my family, I don't say goodbye to my son and my daughter and my wife every Monday and fly up here and spend, 3, 4, 5 days up here and fly back every week, just because I want to earn Southwest points.

I didn't fly up here because I want to sit in rooms and go have a steak dinner and go talk to lobbyists about what needs to be put in a bill.

I didn't come up here to say, well, we have got to make sure we get-- don't call them earmarks. No, don't call them earmarks. That is already bad out there. So we are going to call them community-directed spending. Okay, we will call them community-directed spending, the currency of this town.

How are you going to take care--how are you going to get a bridge back home? That is important. We have floods in Houston. We have floods in Louisiana. They need flood money, right?

We have tornadoes in the Midwest. Well, we need some tornado money.

Well, how do you think you get people to vote for all these appropriations bills that have left your country $32 trillion in debt?

By the way, 5 percent interest rates, do you know what is going to happen? I am sorry, interest rates going up where they are at 5 percent, do you know what is going to happen to the interest payments? It is going to be another $600 billion, $700 billion, $800 billion. You pretty much just bought a whole second Department of Defense, ladies and gentlemen, with money that you are printing.

How does that sound? Enjoy that, do you? And nobody here has any plan on what to do about it except more of the same.

We will have a lot of speeches about, ``Chip, don't you understand? Entitlements, mandatory spending, that is the problem. That is 70 percent of the whole thing.''

Well, as a technical matter, that is not incorrect, but we got here because we refused to deal with it. And that is not an excuse to write a blank check for discretionary spending.

Hey, we don't need to be responsible on discretionary spending because the actual problem is the rest of the spending, even though discretionary spending is still $1.5 trillion, $1.6 trillion, $1.8 trillion, $2 trillion, or is it $7 trillion? Does anybody know? Does anybody care?

Hey, we shut down the whole country under COVID-19, but hell, we will just write a $5 trillion check. Why not? That is what we do. We just keep writing checks that we can't cash.

So, what are we going to do? What are Republicans going to do to demonstrate that they get what time it is in America, that they get that there is $32 trillion in debt, that they get that our borders are wide open? That is not a political campaign speech; it is a reality.

Even Democrats who refuse to acknowledge that our border is wide open are panicked over the title 42 ruling by a district judge because even Democrats who want to ignore the 230,000 or 240,000 apprehensions in October, the 70,000-something got-aways, the 27 dead migrants, they ignore all that, but that 7,000 or 8,000 a day, they can just sort of barely process that.

You get rid of title 42--which, by the way, there is no pandemic reason for title 42 right now. It is literally a Band-Aid that Democrats are using as an, oh, my God. If we actually opened up the borders entirely, we can't deal with 17,000 a day. But that is the truth. That is the reality.

What are my colleagues on this side of the aisle going to do about it? ``Oh,

Chip. We will pass a bill in January. I don't know if it will be H.R. 1, H.R. 2, H.R. 5, but don't worry. We will pass a border security bill.''

Well, one, I will believe that when I see it. We don't have a great track record.

Two, so what? Are you going to pass that bill and walk over and convince that great stalwart of defense of our border Mitt Romney that he should vote for it? Are you going to convince any of the 12 who just decided to redefine marriage and stomp all over religious liberty over in the United States Senate? Are you going to convince any one of them to vote for a strong border security bill? And even if you do, do you think that Joe Biden is going to sign it?

The question for Republicans is: Are you willing to use the power of the purse, articulated by our Founders in Federalist No. 58 and broadly at our founding, to stop what is happening and the destruction of our sovereignty with wide-open borders that are endangering migrants, killing Texas, having fentanyl poured into our schools, or are you just going to continue the fraud that is the United States House of Representatives?

That is what it is. We don't represent anything at all when it comes to the core values of the American people. We represent power. We represent the quest for power.

Are we going to use the power of the purse to secure the border? Are we going to deal with the National Defense Authorization Act that is currently being negotiated and likely passed out of the United States Senate and sent over to the House of Representatives?

Now, it is hard to hear the Republican leader, Mr. McCarthy, say that he thinks maybe the NDAA ought to be pushed to the next Congress. I agree with that. But then what? Then what?

Is the Senate going to pass the same thing right back over, an NDAA that is chock-full of all sorts of non-truly defense-related matters?

Are we going to have an NDAA that is sent over to us that drafts our daughters without so much as a single debate here on the floor about what it means to actually add our daughters to Selective Service?

Are we going to have an NDAA and are we going to support an NDAA that continues to advance vaccine mandates? How many of our men and women in uniform need to be fired? Oh, don't worry, Chip. We took care of it. It is not a dishonorable discharge. Oh, really. Well, thank you for that grand leadership, GOP, because I am sure it really makes our men and women in uniform feel all that much better when they are forced to leave their service in the United States military with discharge--not honorable, discharge.

I am sure that makes them feel great. I am sure they are sitting around the table this coming Thursday after they got fired because they refused to take a jab in the arm of a vaccine that Moderna and Pfizer made over $100 billion on with all sorts of questions by legitimate, mainline doctors about the efficacy of the vaccine.

In a hearing that we held just last week off the Hill, because my Democratic colleagues won't hold a hearing on COVID on the Hill, where all three doctors sat on the panel, we asked them: Is there any basis, any reason, for our men and women in uniform to be required to take a vaccine for COVID? The answer was no, no, no. Unequivocal no.

This doesn't do anything significant for transmission. This doesn't do anything to truly help and protect young, healthy men and women who are in the military. They are precisely the population who are the least impacted by COVID.

Yet, here we are today, sitting here in real time while we adjourn for Thanksgiving, and an NDAA is getting debated in the Senate to be sent over here. What will Republicans do about that? I don't know. I don't know.

Are we going to have hearings in this body on COVID itself, the reaction and response to it, the power of government being used against the American people? Are we going to have hearings about its origins, hearings about NIH funding, hearings about mask policy, hearings about what Fauci and Birx knew and when they knew it, hearings about the efficacy of the vaccine, hearings about the side effects of the vaccine, hearings about why only now some of our leadership of this country is going out and saying: Oh, sorry. My bad.

I think it really was just kind of something bad for old people and maybe we really didn't see that maybe we didn't need to freak out and lock down our economy and kill our economy and send our kids to the corners and mask them and shut down our schools and set them back a generation in education. Our bad.

These are real people's lives. This is the greatest economy in the history of the world, and you just shut it down. What in the world? Is anybody on our side of the aisle going to do anything about that?

I haven't heard anything yet. I haven't seen anything yet. All I saw today was a hearing, a press conference talking about Hunter Biden.

Well, that is great. But what are we going to do about Scott Smith, who was targeted by the Department of Justice, the National School Board Association?

What are we going to do about Anthony Fauci? What are we going to do to make sure the American people know and fully understand the collective power of the Federal Government being pointed at and used against the American people?

Because it is happening--COVID tyranny, nurses and doctors forced out of the workforce, the effort under OSHA to try to force employers to mandate vaccines, the CDC regularly pushing Twitter, Google, and Facebook to flag any dissenters who dared question the orthodoxy and all that the powers that be said that they thought we must know.

How about the CDC purchasing $420,000 worth of Americans' location data to monitor compliance with lockdowns? Is anybody bothered by that? Is anybody bothered by the government looking at our information, looking at phone records?

How about guns? The FBI secretly coerced Americans to sign forms to voluntarily relinquish their rights to own, buy, or use firearms and permanently register them in the NICS system.

In Delaware, the ATF showed up unannounced to a man's home without a warrant for a surprise inspection. Under Biden, the ATF has revoked 500 percent more Federal firearms licenses.

How about DHS? Documents reveal DHS plans to target inaccurate information on ``the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines.'' Facebook created a special portal for DHS and government partners to report disinformation directly.

How about the environment? A 77-year-old veteran was sentenced to 18 months in Federal prison and $130,000 in fines for digging ponds on his Montana property in violation of the Clean Water Act.

The power of government is being used against the American people and our citizens every day. I have heard lots of talk by my Republican colleagues about oversight. Oversight doesn't do any good if you have a handful of hearings and nobody in America knows what is going on.

That is why we should have a coordinated Church Committee-style direct effort to bring together the entirety of the Federal Government's assault on the well-being of the American people and bring that to light to the American people and then specific changes to deal with it.

But I am not sure how much confidence a lot of the American people have that we are going to change anything because you have to actually change something.

We have, immediately following the election, the recoronation of Mitch McConnell in the Senate and the adoption of essentially the exact same leadership team on this side of the aisle.

What is the first thing that happens in the votes? What do Republicans do? In the Senate, 12 Senate Republicans voted for cloture just yesterday to codify other than marriage between a man and a woman and trample on the religious liberty rights of Americans to disagree. That happened yesterday.

Mitt Romney, Utah, Trump won 58 percent of that vote in Utah; Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming, a 70 percent Republican State; Shelley Moore Capito, a 69 percent Republican State; Todd

Young, a 57 percent Republican State; Roy Blunt, a 57 percent Republican State; Joni Ernst, a 53 percent Republican State; Rob Portman; Dan Sullivan; Lisa Murkowski; Richard Burr; Thom Tillis; Susan Collins--Republicans walking away from religious liberty, walking away from the definition of marriage. What better way to signal to the American people and your Republican supporters and voters that you got your personal thing pulled together and you are going to represent them and change what we are doing in this town? Hard to believe the American people are cynical. Hard to believe that.

Yesterday, we had a bunch of votes on rules and procedures in the Republican Conference. It was a private meeting, despite the fact that my colleagues love to leak it out. I don't like to get into what specifically was done behind halfway closed doors, but I will just say this: There wasn't an overall warm and fuzzy feeling about change.

Very little changed. In fact, one of the things that did change was to just pull away from a 200-year-old precedent, dating back to Jefferson's Manual, about vacating the chair. It is my belief that sitting in the Speaker's chair, you would want to make very clear that you are confident that vacating the chair would never be a problem.

Yet, Republicans circled the wagons yesterday. You know why? It is about power. It is about the fear of losing power. It is about the fear of change. It is about the fear of empowering the body to do its thing. It is about the fear of open debate. It is about the fear of regular order. It is about the fear of votes. It is about the fear of taking tough votes.

I don't fear tough votes. But I will say something to my Republican colleagues. Don't talk to me about change or what you think is changing until you tell me about the process you are going to use to bring bills to this floor. Because if I don't have the right to amend it, if I don't have the right to represent my constituents, if I don't have the right to have a voice and you are going to come down and whip me and whip my colleagues to support a bill crammed down my throat by a Rules Committee that I didn't vote for or select, if you are going to tell me I have got to eat that vote, then that is not representative government and that is not the way we should do things.

When you bring a bill to the floor of the House of Representatives through the Rules Committee and it is told to us to be must passed-- National Defense Authorization Act, which by the way is not must pass, but is always considered such. Appropriations bills--how many of my colleagues went to the microphone yesterday saying continuing resolutions are destroying our military; we need actual appropriations? You know what? I do not disagree. But when you offer a rule change to say, I tell you what, if our Senate colleagues will work with us to get the defense bill passed, then maybe we can consider the other things. They are saying: No, no, no, we don't want to bind our hands to the Senate. But that sounds nice, doesn't it?

The truth is, what they don't want to do is give up the ability to do what they always do, which is trying to jam through an omnibus spending bill, with backroom deals cut in order to try to drive up defense spending. I support our defense, I want them to be properly funded, but I don't want them to get more blank checks.

When are we going to have a debate about guns and butter? When are we going to stop spending money we don't have? When are we going to have an honest conversation in this body?

Is it when we turn off those dadgum cameras? Is it when we decide to actually offer amendments on the floor again?

You are not going to change anything if you keep doing the same stuff. That is the truth.

Two days ago, I stood up and nominated my friend Andy Biggs for Speaker of the House as the nominee for the Republican Party. Andy did not win that vote. He is my friend. My friend Kevin McCarthy won that vote and earned over a majority of the Republican Conference. That news has been reported.

Virtually everything that we did in that meeting or said in that meeting was literally verbatim tweeted out in real time or leaked to the press in real time. That is the truth.

I have a rule when reporters talk to me about what happened in a meeting, that I tell them it is a private meeting, and I don't think I should talk about it. But when things leak out in real time about what is being said and what is being done, you at some point have to go explain to the people you represent, to your supporters, and people broadly, what you were doing. Because if you can't have a private debate and a private conversation among family and it is going to be made public, then you have got to go explain it.

So allow me to read the speech that I gave in the Republican Conference meeting nominating my friend, Andy Biggs. It went like this:

I rise in support of my friend and colleague from Arizona to serve as Speaker of the House. Andy Biggs is a proven leader who has demonstrated leadership here in D.C., as well as serving as president of the Arizona State Senate in a slim two-seat majority. He is a committed conservative and a good man.

Andy's candidacy is not an attack on Kevin, with whom a number of us have been engaging and will continue to engage in good faith.

Andy's candidacy is about his courage to stand here today willing to take arrows, the courage to offer a debate rather than a coronation; the courage to say perhaps, just perhaps, we should consider changing the way we do things in this broken Congress, in this broken town. A town to which our constituents sent us specifically to change it.

While there are many factors impacting last Tuesday's elections, the outcome is not so much murky as convicting.

Our voters, Republican voters, expected a reckoning, and in so doing, they gave us nearly 5 million more Republican votes in congressional elections than my Democratic colleagues.

Yes, redistricting can explain why we gained perhaps a smaller margin than anticipated, but it is not enough. What did we run on?

In the 1990s, we ran specifically on crime and a bold agenda to transform Congress. In 2010 and 2012, we ran specifically on cutting spending.

Meanwhile, this year, bold conservative leadership outside of this city was affirmed enthusiastically by voters. No one better represents that than Governor Ron DeSantis' overwhelming dominance in Florida. But we also saw Governor Lee in Tennessee, Governor Kemp in Georgia, Governor Reynolds in Iowa, and Governor Abbott in Texas, and we saw our old colleague Lee Zeldin's powerful run for Governor in New York where he fell short but helped flip four seats, because Lee ran on something, crime and the rule of law in New York.

DeSantis ran on something: Fighting COVID tyranny directly and fighting woke-ism directly. Governor Abbott ran on something: Securing the border ravaging Texas.

Meanwhile, in a midterm election against the most radical, leftist, and dangerous White House in American history, we left the Senate in Democrat hands, and we are looking at a three- to five-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

So what do we do? I hear a lot about unity. Amen. But it has to be real unity. If we just say we are unified, it will not do a thing if the Rules Committee jams a disastrous immigration and border security bill, like happened in July of 2018.

Or consider that, to the best of my knowledge, the House Freedom Caucus, which represents about 20 percent of the body, has one member of the Steering Committee, which has 30 people, one member of the 20 standing committee chairs, or respectfully, how about all the PAC money that was spent around this town in favor of leadership-tapped candidates, for example, Rodney Davis over Mary Miller, two incumbents. That is why I give you that example.

But it is not about any one person or group. It is about empowerment of the whole Republican Conference, not just a select few.

We say we are for limited government, we Republicans, but how do you expect to decentralize the power of

Washington if we can't even decentralize our own leadership structure?

Our Republic is on the edge. Americans and their families are being crushed by a weaponized government, radical wokeness, vaccine mandates, open borders, crime, inflation. Yet voters don't understand how Democrats, who have championed such destruction, still hold so much power and largely avoided the reckoning that we talked about.

We talk a lot about accountability. I ask everyone in this room, how can we hold them accountable if we cannot hold ourselves accountable when we come up short?

Today's voting date--this being two days ago--is an arbitrary date, rushed in an environment where many of our voters believe the system is rigged against them.

A vote for Andy is a vote to shout ``stop'' and to stand to thwart the status quo. It is a vote to pause and debate. It is a vote to empower every one of us to have a say and to have the ability to use our election certificate to its fullest. It is not a vote against Kevin, but a vote to force us all to the table to figure out how--not if--how we will come together as a party to reshape the Conference rules; rethink the makeup of steering and the very structure and operation of the Rules Committee; and most of all, to lay out a specific agreed-to agenda and battle plan to which we can unite and to inspire and win the minds and hearts of the American people.

Now, that is an internal debate among Republicans. I think it is healthy. I think it is good. The question will be: Will Republicans stand for change, or will Republicans stand up for the continuation of the status quo?

The status quo ain't working. It is not. That is an indictment of both parties. That is an indictment of this institution. It is an indictment of this town.

We come here called to represent the American people. We come here called to engage in debate and discourse.

As I have said before on this floor, how often have you seen a legitimate and robust debate on this floor?

I would ask all the staff who sit in the room to answer, but that is not appropriate. They are the ones sitting here all the time, along with a handful of C-SPAN viewers.

Everybody knows, most of the time, we are preaching to an empty Chamber. Most of the time, if there are a lot of people on the floor, it is only for votes and a lot of back slapping and a lot of ``Hey, when is our dinner tonight?'' and a lot of ``Hey, what are we going to do tomorrow? When are you leaving town? How fast can we leave town? How quickly can we get to the airport? Chip, don't demand another vote, dang it. I have got to get to my tee time back home.''

Yeah, but when was the last time you saw a rigorous debate? Yeah, okay, I know we sometimes have the majority leader and the whip go back and forth on a Thursday afternoon or a Friday for an hour. But it is all talking points, it is all posturing, it is all back and forth to say, let's go out on the steps and give our speeches.

When was the last time you had--let's sit here for 3 hours and let's debate Ukraine. All of us, let's carve out time, how about 5 days? Let's debate Ukraine. We have given them $70 billion, and now the administration is asking for $37 billion more.

Any of y'all got $107 billion sitting around? Well, guess what, neither do we. We are just going to print more money. We are just going to print more money, send it to Ukraine, allegedly for a helpful goal of trying to help Zelenskyy stand up against Putin.

Where is all that money going? Is any of that money going into the hands of certain companies who are then turning around and sending it to certain politicians here? Certain stories seem to indicate so.

Any of that money going to oligarchs in Ukraine? Any of that money getting into the hands of China? A lot of stories about all of that.

I am not even talking about accountability yet. I am just saying that if we are going to vote on another $37 billion for Ukraine, shouldn't we debate it? Are we at war, or aren't we? Do we have advisers there or not? Is it in our national security or not? Is it helping stability around the globe or not? Is it actually good for the people of Ukraine, bad for Putin's power?

And there is a lot of good debates around all that. The answer might be ``yes'' to some of those, ``no'' to some of those. I will just throw it out there. Has anybody seen a debate like that on the floor of the United States House of Representatives? I have not. And I am here. A few people have come down and given speeches. That is not the same thing. That is not the same thing as an actual debate.

The American people expect us to do our job. I expect and believe that Republicans will end the absurdity of a closed-down Capitol; the absurdity of magnetometers to go onto the floor of the House; the absurdity of proxy voting, proxy voting extended by the current Speaker until December 25th, when Santa Claus is going to bring home the magic day when COVID disappears. Obviously absurd.

Our goal and our intent is to open up this body and to restore the people's House. That has to be our goal. That has to be our mission. Our mission as Republicans cannot be power for the sake of it. I would ask or suggest to my Democratic colleagues that their mission should not be opposition just for the sake of it.

I am proud that I have one of the higher voting records against my own party than most of the people in my party. I believe that is attached to some amount of consistency and not attached to the whip or attached to the party power structure. It doesn't mean I am right. I mean, I think I am. But what it means is that I have got some guiding principles that I think ought to guide how I vote. And it shouldn't be just because we are in shirts and skins or, you know, red shirts-green shirts, blue shirts-red shirts. It shouldn't be that way.

We should be able to be united on taking power back from the executive branch and restoring it to Congress.

We should be united on sovereignty of our Nation and defense of our borders to ensure that cartels don't exploit them for human tragedy, sex trafficking, fentanyl pouring in and killing American people.

We should be united on a strong national defense used sparingly but forcefully, not entangled in never-ending battles, and not blank checks to countries representing proxy wars.

We should be united in trying to figure out how to solve our fiscal crisis that is killing our country.

Every one of us should wake up, we should literally not be going home right now. We shouldn't even go home for Thanksgiving. It is so bad and such a crisis; we should not leave here until we have a plan to stop spending money we don't have.

I will go ahead and say it right here, everything should be on the table. But we won't do that because if somebody brings up mandatory spending, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle will run ads like they did against Paul Ryan saying, you are pushing granny off the cliff if you dare say something about Social Security or Medicare. You mean to say there is not a single dollar that we can save out of that without it being pushing granny off the cliff?

On my side of the aisle, they will not touch defense spending. If you do, it is sacrilegious. You cannot touch defense spending. Chip, we need more. It doesn't matter what we are going to do with that. We need more. You mean, there is not a single dollar we can't save at the Department of Defense? There is not a single dollar we can't repurpose? There is no way to make that run more efficiently, more effectively to have a strong military force that will kill bad guys and blow things up when necessary? I think we can do that. We should be united in that.

You can't keep spending money you don't have. You can't have open borders and a lack of sovereignty. You can't. If we can't unite on that, what in the world are we going to unite on?

This body is supposed to, even in our disagreement, stand athwart the executive branch extending beyond the powers given it in the Constitution. It is supposed to. Yet we routinely give the executive branch open-ended, long runways of power. And we both do it. And we know we do it. Why shouldn't we unite to restrain the executive branch if you actually believe in separation of powers?

I will say right here and stipulate, I don't care who is in the White House. I

don't want the President and the executive branch to have unlimited power. I introduced a bill under Trump. I will introduce that bill, and I have reintroduced it under Biden. I will introduce it again in January of 2025 if I am here, no matter who the President is.

We have got the American people right now trying to figure out what they are going to pass down to their kids and grandkids. I have got staff, 25, 27, 28, 30 years old saying, am I going to be able to buy a house? Literally. Look around the country. Pulling it up on maps, saying, how am I going to afford this? How do I afford a half million dollar house with 7, 8 percent interest rates? All the families across the country are trying to figure that out.

They are trying to figure out why they are increasingly concerned about their safety and well-being.

They are trying to figure out why kids in their schools are dying from fentanyl.

They are trying to figure out why we can't just agree that there are men and there are women, and we can acknowledge that we can build our society around that without that being hate.

These are fundamental truths, fundamental elements of our society and how we organize ourselves. We have got to find a way as a body, on both sides of the aisle, to bring back common sense, normalcy, and in this Chamber regular order. Or nothing will ever change.

I am strongly of the belief that we must change. I have tried to work with colleagues on the other side of the aisle. I have introduced legislation on a bipartisan basis. I have passed legislation on a bipartisan basis despite being, I think by any objective measure, on the more conservative end of the spectrum of this body.

I don't care whether there's a D or an R after your name, I am going to tell you what I think, and that is directed at my colleagues on my side of the aisle, running around back-slapping about getting the majority. The majority and having the majority is absolutely useless if we are unwilling to change. We have to change the way we do things around here.

We have to empower Members of this body to have a say in what is brought to the floor, to have a say to amend the legislation, a say in open and real and true debate that is driven by a desire to lead this country forward on the most basic of terms.

Open up the Constitution. Look at the powers granted in Article I, Section 8. Ask yourself whether what we are doing is connected to those powers, and then ask yourself if we are not a stronger, freer, better society if we can agree to disagree and push decisionmaking as close to the people and families and communities and local and State leaders so that we can actually have a Republic united around ideals and not at each other's throats because that is what we are, because we are trying to make decisions in this town for everybody. And that is both sides of the aisle.

Federalism is not just some quaint word you talk about. It is actually central to the health of this Republic. We cannot function if we can't agree to disagree, and you can only agree to disagree if you are not trying to solve every problem for every person and every family in every walk of life in this Chamber doing everything and actually accomplishing nothing.

The beauty and the structure of this Republic and its founding is in the diffusion of power away from any one person, any one entity, the diffusion of power across three branches of government, the diffusion of power among Federal, State, and local government. That is the greatness of this country.

It is the essence of the great American experiment, that we trust the people, that we allow the people to prosper according to their own work, that we help each other, that civil society matters.

But we fundamentally broke not just this institution, we are breaking our country because we believe that an unlimited checkbook gives us the right to buy votes with it. And by doing it, you are breaking the spirit of the country. You are taking away the value of work. You are taking away the value of responsibility.

It is not just a campaign effort to buy student votes by paying off student loans so you can be nice. You just destroyed the entire ethic of responsibility of a woman like my wife, the daughter of a single mom who went to college, made decisions about what college she would go to based on the cost of that tuition, who took on loans, who then took every step to pay them back, who drove a crappy little car in order to pay her loans off. What do you say to her and every other American like her who did it the right way? You just say, Here you go, we are going to pay off your student loans.

That is just one example of thousands, and my side of the aisle is just as guilty. Another blank check to solve something, a disease or an illness, another blank check because Ukraine, another blank check because you don't dare look a farmer in the eye when the farm bill comes up and say, look, man, I am sorry, but farm plus SNAP equals a whole lot of debt, and we can't keep writing a blank check.

How about another blank check for subsidies for unreliable energy? Here you go. Here is another check to buy off another company to destroy our grid, destroy our way of life, destroy American energy through a blank check.

We are literally destroying the soul of the country every day we walk into this Chamber, and that is not a good legacy. Everybody just walks around acting like, well, one day the think tanks and the world will come together, we will solve all the mandatory spending problems. That is the real deal. Stop writing blank checks. Actually have the responsibility to do your job.

I am optimistic about the American people and always have been, and there is a large bloc of the American people who are not going to just walk away from the Republic that they inherited from their parents and grandparents and those that fought, bled, and died for this country. They are not going to walk away from the American Dream for their kids and grandkids. But this body, every day that we meet, we make it harder for them.

Why don't we stop that? Why don't we agree together to sit down and do the hard work that is required of us to do it the right way? To spend within our means? To follow the constitutional order? To limit our affairs to the consequential things that unite our Republic rather than meddling in the affairs of every American and every State and every local government? Why can we not sit down and agree to disagree and push decisions of disagreement down to the people, where they belong, and do our basic duty step by step. That is our calling. That is our opportunity. When you have a change of power and a change of leadership, it is our duty to follow the constitutional order. It is our duty to do it the right way. It is our duty to use the powers granted in the people's House to stand up in defense of the people who send us here to represent them.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas (Mr. Arrington), he is a good friend and he represents--I will tell him, the second best part of the State, given that I represent the Hill Country in central Texas, and my dad grew up in west Texas and went to Texas Tech University.

I have a soft spot in my heart for my friend. He is consistent in bringing to this floor of the House the need for all of us to work together to deal with the spending problem. And it is a problem that we face in this country.

I was just thinking when I started running for office 5 years ago this fall, the national debt of the United States was $21 trillion. Today, 5 years later, our national debt is $31 trillion dollars.

Just think for a minute. We never know how big that number is--nobody understands. $31 trillion. Well, let me just tell you this. If you set out to count to 31 trillion--we would just say, let's go, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, it would take you almost a million years to get to 31 trillion. That is absurd.

We are spending money we don't have. This body believes itself to be the United States House of free stuff. We just write blank checks. We dole it out. Spending money we don't have, obliterating our children's future, devastating the future financial security and stability of the United States.

All for what?

So that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle can walk outside and give a fancy speech about free stuff they are doling out.

And with all due respect, colleagues on my side of the aisle can go say, well, I wrote a bunch of checks to fund our defense, so I got to vote for another big spending bill.

Every day. Just today, we had a whole bunch of votes on suspensions. There was $10 billion in there for global food security. We have men and women in uniform on food stamps, and this body writes another blank check to dole it out to global food security.

When are we going to stop.

But here is the problem. These blank checks, this spending that we engage in, it isn't just about debt, it isn't just about weakening our dollar, it isn't just about deficit spending, it is that we are funding the very government that is at war with its own people every day.

We have a Department of Homeland Security that refuses to secure the homeland with wide open borders and fentanyl pouring in killing Americans and empowering cartels, with migrants dying in the meantime.

We have an FBI that is targeting parents for domestic terrorism. We have an FBI that is targeting a father of seven in Pennsylvania for daring to have gone to speak out and exercise his free speech rights to defend the unborn.

We have an IRS targeting Americans--85,000 new IRS agents and personnel. We are funding an entire energy--I should say anti-energy agenda--that is destroying our energy independence, driving up the price of goods, driving up the price of gas, driving up the price of electricity, weakening the grid of the United States, decreasing the reliability of our energy sector, and decreasing the freedom of the American people.

All of that for what?

So that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the President and the climate czar, or whatever the heck his title is, John Kerry, can go fly around the world in jets, spewing all sorts of garbage out of their jets to go hang out in Davos and pat themselves on the back that they are doing some sort of benefit for the world with respect to carbon dioxide, while China

has 1,100 coal-fired plants and they are adding one new coal-fired plant a day. And my colleagues on the other side of the aisle just walk around like butterflies and hummingbirds, saying, aren't we great for the world?

Oh, isn't this great? Devastating the American economy and devastating the American way of life, devastating our national security for fake hummingbirds and fake unicorns, because they want to say they are doing something for the environment.

Well, they are not doing crap for the environment, literally. You could ban every single combustion engine in America, and you are not going to dent CO2 production, while we destroy our way of life and destroy our economy.

So America, welcome to the world of the Democratic Party. Plug your car in. Use up your entire electricity bill that you use for your air conditioning unit to run your battery-powered car.

Oh, 60, $70,000, why can't you just go by a Tesla, the Secretary of Energy says; completely out of touch with the average hardworking American. But that is what we are dealing with.

But that is not all. Today, my colleagues on my side of the aisle, 22 of them in the United States Senate, voted for the continuing resolution. They voted for it, they will say, because, oh, no, the government funding will expire tomorrow, and we might have a government shutdown.

You can hear all of the people in America crying big crocodile tears over the possibility that the Federal Government might not have its lights on on Saturday morning.

But let's actually talk about what is really going on; that CR that 22 Republican Members of the Senate voted for contains $17 billion in emergency funding, unpaid for, another blank check.

That same CR will expire in December, on December 16, in a lame-duck Congress, which my colleagues on this side of the aisle know full well means it empowers my colleagues on that side of the aisle to continue to stick it to the American people with their radical leftist policies undermining their way of life.

That continuing resolution has nothing in it to secure the border of the United States when our border is wide open and fentanyl is pouring in, killing Americans; 72,000 dead Americans last year, from opioid, fentanyl-related poisoning, directly coming in at the hands of cartels, coming from China. That is more than every American who died in the Vietnam War.

Are we going to put a great big memorial out there for all of those 72,000? What about the year before? What about this year?

What about the four people in Hays County that I represent in Texas, the four kids who died from fentanyl poisoning because my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to turn a blind eye to cartels exploiting our border for the endangerment of Americans. That is the truth.

Americans are dead because of the policies of this administration failing to secure the border of the United States, and they know it. Migrants are dead. Migrants' bodies are piling up in south Texas, by the hundreds; 53 cooked in a tractor trailer in San Antonio, which I represent; 53 human beings cooked in the false name of compassion, while my colleagues on the other side of the aisle walk around going: Look at me, I love Brown people. I love immigrants.

Bull. It is a lie, and my colleagues need to wake up, because I can promise you that the Brown people--not my terminology, by the way--in south Texas, are fed up, fed up with being exploited, abused, and used for political purposes.

While my colleagues like to say, oh, well, Governor DeSantis and Governor Abbott sent some people to D.C., to Martha's Vineyard.

Well, welcome to the party. The country is now alerted. These were volunteers, volunteers who said yeah, I will take a ride to D.C. Fifty people in Martha's Vineyard, 53 dead migrants in a tractor trailer in San Antonio.

Just last night, the mayor of Uvalde, Texas--yes, that Uvalde, Texas--called up, there was a pickup truck with 10 immigrants in the truck that T-boned into a tractor trailer at an intersection; two of them dead, two in the hospital.

Every stinking day this is happening, and my colleagues the other side of the aisle turn a blind eye. That is the reality of our border.

But this continuing resolution that my Republican colleagues in the United States Senate, 22 of them, were all too happy to support, continues to fund that Department of Homeland Security of an annual budget of $57.5 billion; $8 billion for ICE. Even though it was a 70 percent reduction in removals last year for ICE.

Millions in grants each year, in that same continuing resolution, to nongovernmental organizations who are the ones actually transporting people around the United States, effectively subsidizing illegal immigration.

This CR empowers the authoritarian bureaucrats targeting Americans. It is not just the Department of Homeland Security leaving our border wide open and exposed, but the FBI, to the tune of $10.8 billion, to go after former President Trump, to go after parents concerned about schools, to go after a pro-lifer father; and IRS, $12.6 billion. We just gave them another $80 billion.

But no, no; we just funded a CR with an annual appropriation of $12 billion.

Oh, you think that is good enough? How about NIH, $45 billion. After NIH has been basically screwing the American people for the last two and a half years with their nonsense spewing out about COVID, resulting in our children being set back a generation; shunned to the corner of classrooms; forced to wear masks; unable to have proper speech. All so my colleagues on the other side of the aisle can run around wearing masks and scaring the bejesus out of the American people.

$45 billion. My Republican colleagues in the Senate said, sure, let's keep giving them more money.

What will my colleagues on my side of the aisle do tomorrow? I hope they will oppose it.

How about Pfizer and Moderna, who faced no liability; made $93 billion in 2022, $93 billion, Pfizer and Moderna, because the government was cramming shots into people's arms, and then forcing our men and women in uniform to lose their job and get fired if they dare not take a shot, which the current CDC says, you know what? It doesn't even help with transmission.

What the hell kind of a country are we living in? This isn't freedom; and we are funding it. Republicans are complicit.

NIAID, $6.3 billion, run by the COVID tyrant in chief, Dr. Fauci.

CDC, $8.5 billion, colluded with the teachers' unions to impose the lockdowns.

The World Health Organization, $122 million in this annual funding just approved; already got $280 million under the Democrats' COVID relief bill. They pushed a completely unfounded COVID narrative and partnered with the Chinese Communists to cover up their role in the COVID origin. This we know.

The Department of Defense and all of their glory--and no, don't say that over here on my side of the aisle because we have got to rush in and we have got to give the money for the Department of Defense, without any accountability, by the way, for how about forcing troops out with their tyrannical COVID-19 vaccine mandates; set to discharge over 75,000 Active servicemembers for daring to say no to a vaccine that doesn't even help with transmissibility.

How about a woke military informed policy? The DOD won't admit China is a greater threat than climate change, according to the leadership. They are preoccupied with diversity training; constructing training centers with mixed-sex restrooms and locker rooms and showers. The Air Force is going to spend $66 million for one in San Antonio, which I represent.

$56 billion for the Department of State and Foreign Operations budget, for U.S. embassies to fly pride and BLM flags; add unspecified X-gender designations to passports. $15 million for the State Department's Global Equality Fund sending tax dollars to LGBTQI whatever, whatever, persons around the world.

Empowers Biden's administration's anti-American, anti-biology ideology; $39 million for HHS Office of Civil Rights promoting gender transition surgeries for kids.

$76 billion obviously goes to the Department of Education, where we subsidize schools failing our kids; shoving

them into the corners of classrooms; making them wear masks; and rewarding teachers filling their minds with anti-American teachings under critical race theory. Even in my own city that I represent in San Antonio, Northside ISD forced a radical equity exercise dividing people by their hair color.

$2 billion for the Student Aid Administration carrying out the Biden's $400 billion student loan giveaway.

$525 million for the public broadcasting. HHS, $94 million for diversity training; $64 million for the Office of Minority Health; $1.1 million for the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity in HHS.

Energy, $100 million for environmental justice. The EPA used this to create a new Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights in the Department of the EPA.

$20 million for the Department of Energy's Office of Impact and Diversity; $885 million for the Department of Education programs that fund colleges based solely on students' race and ethnicity.

$235 million for Federal apprenticeship programs that includes grants to equity intermediaries to hire CRT indoctrination consultants.

How about the United Nation's population funds, praising China's abusive population control program.

How about U.N. women, which can't even define women? What is a woman? Promotes trans and intersex athletes.

Climate, $15 million for the U.N. Climate Agency; $149 million for the global environment facility.

$125 million for the World Bank's Clean Technology Fund.

And my Republican colleagues in the Senate, 22, voted for it and, of course all the Democrats, for the most part, passed this through to get it to a lame duck in December, to then allow for even more. That is what we are funding.

At some point you would think that we would wake up on a bipartisan basis or, Lord willing, at least my side of the aisle, that we actually have the power of the purse; and we are actually supposed to use it, instead of giving massive blank checks to an administration that is at war with the American people on a daily basis.

When the Founders gave us this government, they knew that they didn't want to empower an executive with unfettered power, yet that is what we do every day in this Chamber. That is what the so-called people's House of the United States does every single day.

Federalist 58, James Madison, ``The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse. . . . `'

``This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any Constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.''

In other words, we are supposed to have the power. We are supposed to be the ones who can stop the funding of the tyranny against the people.

Oh, Chip, it is not tyranny. I am sure my friend from Pennsylvania has thoughts on that. Of course it is tyranny.

An FBI targeting parents for being domestic terrorists? An FBI targeting a father of seven, showing up with 25 to 30 armed SWAT team members to arrest him in front of his family? All true.

How is that freedom? How is that not tyranny?

How is it not tyranny to steal money from a plumber who worked his whole life, didn't borrow money to go to some fancy university, and go give it to somebody else to pay off their loan?

How is it not tyranny to steal money from a person who worked their whole life to do it right and pay their loans back after going to college, and give it to someone else who got a ridiculous degree from some ridiculous college and is sitting in their parents' basement on social media trying to be a social media influencer? That is what happening.

We are just going to take money from somebody else and go give it to another person. That is tyranny. It is theft, and we are doing it through executive fiat.

We didn't vote on it here. None of these people are going to go answer to their constituents for stealing money from them to go give it to someone else. The President just decided it by decree. That is tyranny.

It is tyranny to stick a needle in somebody's arm or tell them that you are going to get fired from your career in the military.

Well, I have had it. But I have not just had it with the tyrannical policies of a President. I have had with it with a United States House of Representatives that does not represent the people; and I have had it with a Republican Party who refuses to stop funding the very things they campaign against every single day.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend from Pennsylvania (Mr. Perry).

Mr. Speaker, I would just add that we are talking about, again, decisions we make with the money that we are taking from taxpayers, printing and borrowing to the tune of a trillion-dollar-plus deficit every year.

I started this by saying when I ran for office 5 years ago for the first time, our national debt was $21 trillion. Today, it is $31 trillion--$10 trillion in the mere 5 years since I have been here, $2 trillion a year, my friend from Pennsylvania. But we keep funding this stuff.

This is the nexus I want the American people to understand. The deficit spending isn't just about the deficits. The deficit spending is why our Nation is being torn apart.

We are supposed to be able to agree to disagree. We are supposed to be able to have 50 laboratories of democracy sewn together under a commonality, defending ourselves and having an economy that functions. Instead, we are funding the bureaucrats that are ripping us apart, thread by thread, IRS agent after IRS agent, FBI agent after FBI agent. I say that as someone who worked in the U.S. Attorney's Office with great men and women in the FBI, whose father was an IRS agent. My father worked for the Internal Revenue Service as an auditor.

I have no problem with how we try to set these things up to work. But hiring 85,000 new IRS personnel on the back of what we knew happened, targeting certain individuals with the power of the IRS, the FBI targeting a father, targeting Scott Smith in Loudoun County, saying he is a domestic terrorist, in coordination with the National School Boards Association, which 26 States' school board associations have now removed themselves from.

That is what the American people need to understand. We are funding that--$10.8 billion for the FBI, $12.6 billion for IRS, $1.5 billion for ATF. For public health, $8.5 billion for CDC, $6.3 billion for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, $45 billion for NIH generally, $3.3 billion for the FDA, $122 million for the WHO, $612 million for OSHA. Remember, it was OSHA that tried to force a vax mandate on private businesses.

How do you get any more tyrannical than the President saying: You, private entity, through OSHA, are going to require your employees to take a needle in the arm for a vaccine, by the way, that was unproven, untested, had liability protection, and enriched two pharma companies to the tune of $93 billion in 2 years.

Somebody tell me that is not tyranny.

Mr. Speaker, if I might inquire about the time remaining.

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

Mr. Speaker, we spend approximately $58 billion--I don't have it right in front of me--a year for the Department of Homeland Security, $55 billion, $56 billion.

We just approved earlier this year $58 billion for Ukraine, and now there is an additional $12 billion in the continuing resolution that passed out of the Senate today and is now sitting in the House. That puts it at almost $70 billion, which is well more than the entire annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security for the United States.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate what the gentleman just said.

I would say, for our constituents back home, I feel them. I feel the frustration of being in a Chamber where I can offer no amendment, where I have no power to have any input on what bill we are going to be debating on the floor. Literally, for 6-and-a-half years, no amendment has been offered on the floor of this body in open debate, meaning it wasn't precooked up in the Committee on Rules.

Think about that, in the people's House. That should infuriate both sides of the aisle. That is no way for the people's House to operate. It is being operated by dictate. That is a bipartisan statement, I want to say, over time.

I think, for the American people, they want to see us do something. I think we can.

To the fine folks in Pennsylvania that you ran into who said, ``What can we do? We can't do anything about it,'' do you know what? We can.

One, we can freeze spending to stop the complete disregard for the economic well-being of this country and the driving up of inflation by spending money we don't have. We can do that.

We can agree as a body that we have to make tough decisions like families and businesses do. Freeze spending. Let's just stop the bleeding.

We can take a second step, and we can actually demand that when we have debates about the spending of taxpayer money and the borrowing and printing of money that we actually deal with these crises in real terms.

I am really talking to my colleagues on my side of the aisle on this one:

We should demand that we get changes at the border.

We should demand that we turn away or detain fully at the border.

We should demand that we stop the forced jabs in people's arms in the military or they get fired.

We should demand changes in our energy policy so that we can free up American energy to increase our power on the world stage, make our grids reliable, make us more dependent on reliable energy, instead of unreliable energy, while making the environment better, by the way.

We should demand that we neutralize the power of the authoritarian state by pulling back on the reins of the FBI and the IRS.

There are things we can do. It is right here. We have the power of the purse. We should use it. I tell you, I am speaking to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. We have an obligation.

Look, I have run into the buzz saw of challenging the administration when it was Republican because I believed so much in Article I primacy. I introduced the ARTICLE ONE Act with my friend, Mike Lee, to say we should take away emergency powers from the President.

I did that when the President was using emergency powers to build a wall when there was an emergency and we needed to build it because my colleagues refused to. But I wanted there to be a limit into how much power the executive branch can use.

I subpoenaed records about unaccompanied alien children because I knew that when my colleague on the other side of the aisle was wearing a white pantsuit, staring through a fence that it was all theater. There weren't kids in cages. Those were set up by the previous administration under Jeh Johnson and President Obama, and they know it. They know it.

So you know what?

I subpoenaed information from HHS under a Republican administration because I wanted to know the truth.

We should care about Article I here. If we do, we can take power back and we can represent the people again.

We can use the power of the purse to check the executive.

We can stand up and defend the people of the United States.

We can secure the border.

We can rein in the tyranny of the IRS and the FBI.

We can get American energy going again by opening it up, so our people don't have to have inflation and the inability to have a reliable grid.

We can stop forcing our men and women in uniform to get fired if they refuse to take an experimental jab.

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

Not one. And I will tell you that across the board, regardless of ideology, the people that come to me and are talking to me are concerned about the border.

They are concerned about fentanyl.

They are concerned about energy prices and their inability to pay their bills.

They are concerned about the extent to which they are in danger in their communities, the crime, and their relationship to the border.

They are concerned about the things that are impacting their lives, their inability to pay for their kids' school, their inability to afford healthcare because we have regulated it to death, and we have funded it and subsidized it to death, so that we are in a position where they can't afford to live the American Dream for their kids and their grandkids.

Our job in this body is to address that, not by spending more money and not by continuing to fund the very things that are undermining it.

Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I will yield for the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert), but first I want to add to what the gentleman said because it is on point.

We are funding $5 million for the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry; we are funding $15 million for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and U.N. Framework Convention; $2 billion to the SEC, which they use to help advance the very ESG constraints on the flow of capital that is constraining our ability to produce energy; $3.2 billion to the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which funnels taxpayer dollars to unreliable green energy; $825 million for DOE's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, which gives credit handouts to massive oil companies; $450 million for DOE's ARPA; $29 million to administer a DOE loan program responsible for the Solyndra debacle.

I could go on and on. I have got a list here.

All that money to go to the Department of Energy to keep spending taxpayer money to screw up American energy and drive up their energy bills.

Mr. Speaker, we are talking about the drop-off of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

If you can see this here on C-SPAN, this top level is 750 million barrels. And you can see up here in 2020, there is this sharp drop-off? That drops down to 350 million barrels. That is the defense being exercised by a President trying to save his party. That is not being used specifically for the national security interest of the United States.

That is absolutely horrific. Dumping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, dumping it in order to drive gas prices down.

You know what? Those chickens are going to come home to roost.

Close to $60 billion.

Mr. Speaker, I mentioned this before, but I think it merits repeating, that we are at roughly $31 trillion in debt, as the gentleman said.

If you set out to count to 31 trillion at one Mississippi, it will take you 1 million years to count to that.

Just to put in perspective what that is, when I began running for office in December of 2017, our debt was $21 trillion; $10 trillion in 5 years since I began running for office.

Well, I think we have got about 20 seconds left.

All I would say is, if we want to do this, if we want an economy that is strong, stop spending money we don't have. Stop spending money to fund the bureaucracy that is going after the American people.

If you want a Nation that is safe, stop talking down your cops. Stand with your cops.

If you want a military that is strong, stop being woke. End the woke destruction of our military.

If you want a border that is secure, secure it. Turn people away. Accept the people that need help but turn people away and actually detain them and stop the control of our borders by cartels that are endangering the American people.

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

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

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

Madam Speaker, I appreciate my friend's service, and I appreciate his passion on this issue.

I listened here as my colleagues want to lecture us about making decisions about life. Who are my colleagues to decide when life begins? Talking about where the doctors are in the room, who are my colleagues, where is God in the room about determining when life begins?

It is my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who have out-of- step views about the extent of abortion in this country to terminate life right up to the point of birth. It is out of step with the entirety of the world. It is a radical position, and the entirety of this country knows it.

What we are talking about right now, when we used to be able to have some peaceful debates in this body, we had the Hyde amendment recognizing our differences on the issue and trying to pull it out of the debate of funding, but my colleagues on the other side of the aisle refuse to respect the Hyde amendment.

Now, you have an administration making up law. My colleague on the other side of the aisle wants to lecture about where you go to have a dispute about law. Oh, run to the courts, they say. Run to Article III.

Well, we are Article I, dadgummit, and we make decisions about the law every single day. As a Member of this body, I introduced the ARTICLE ONE Act under President Trump, questioning executive authority.

I subpoenaed records from the White House, questioning unaccompanied alien children data because I believe in the primacy of Article I.

But we should, dadgummit, on a bipartisan basis believe that we need to make these decisions, and you don't have the VA arbitrarily making law and stepping over the 1992 law, which has never been repealed. It has never been set aside, and to suggest that it has makes a mockery of the laws that we pass. We should agree on that on a bipartisan basis.

The ranking member is speaking for all of us when he says we are trying to stand up in support of the Solid Start program, but it has now been turned on its head by a radical decision by the executive branch, so now we are no longer going to support this program as it exists.

As the chairman said, 16 words are the hang-up. Then change the 16 words, and let's fix what needs to be fixed to honor what we know is the law from the 1992 law.