Floor Statements

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 47 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, November 20, 2024, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 5342, the Equal Treatment of Public Servants Act, which my friend from Texas introduced, which was modeled or introduced similarly to a bill that our fellow Texan, Kevin Brady, introduced, because it is a responsible piece of legislation designed to address a problem head-on.

Here is the problem. Everybody at home watching this needs to understand the joke. We are playing with house money yet again. We are playing with funny money. We are pretending and lying to the American people that the Social Security funds that are extracted from their checks are sitting in a lockbox, sitting in an account for them. It is not. That is a lie.

The money is taken out of your check now, and that money is then given to those people who are retiring now, those who have retired. That is the truth. It is a tax.

What happened here was we messed up because we are government. We mess up almost every single second. Government messed up, and now we are trying to fix the mess up.

In this case, my friend from Texas has introduced a bill that responsibly fixes the mess up. It actually tries to go in and say if you are a firefighter, if you are a cop, if you are a teacher and you have got the situation where you have got another job and that Social Security was taken out of your check but you are not getting the benefit of that because you have a pension, this proportional model, which is $25 billion, according to the Social Security Administration, would responsibly address it.

Now, I wish it was paid for. We don't pay for anything in this town. $25 billion at least addresses it responsibly.

What has happened, this legislation that we are voting on--the gentleman is correct--under suspension of the rules, without going to the Rules Committee, I disagree with that. It should not be being done under suspension. The reason it is being done under suspension is because a majority of people in this body discharged another bill, H.R. 82, which would spend $200 billion over 10 years to reinstate the windfall, to basically take money away from Social Security and make it be bankrupt 6 months earlier. That is what this town does.

My friend from Texas is trying to prevent that. We had to engage in political rulemaking warfare on the floor of the House, which we addressed today to try to fix it and put the genie back in the bottle, to guarantee that we would at least get a vote on this good bill instead of the disaster that is a $200 billion hole in the deficit that will bankrupt Social Security at least 6 months earlier, according to the Social Security Administration.

I thank my friend from Texas. I rise in support of it. We should not have to do this. This should have gone through the Rules Committee. We should have amended the bill. We should have a debate about it. We should pay for it. Instead, we are doing the same crap we always do. I support this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I claim the time in true opposition to the legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The last time we moved all 12 appropriations bills through the House, I believe, was in FY 2010. The last time that we did not have to use a continuing resolution to be able to fund government, I believe, was 1997. I think four times in my lifetime have we been able to pass all 12 appropriations bills through both bodies and get them signed by the President of the United States.

This institution is failing. It is failing to do the one core thing it is supposed to try to figure out what to do, and that isn't the spending bills. It is actually defending the United States of America, securing the border of the United States, doing what the Constitution actually prescribes, what the preamble lays out, securing the blessings of liberty. We are not doing that.

We end up in a vicious circle every single year, the same vicious circle. The American people are watching, and they are wondering why on Earth cannot the 435 people sent here to represent them figure out how to do what every other family and business and nonprofit in the United States has to do?

The short answer is because we can and do print money. We irresponsibly continue to spend money that we do not have, that we have not collected, and we continue to retreat to the corners of our safe political spaces and hide behind them in order to try to sell something to the American people.

My colleagues on this side of the aisle tend to hide behind national defense and say, well, we must do this, and therefore we must spend more money that we don't have in order to accomplish the goal of defending the United States which, by the way, I would question whether we are actually defending the United States when our borders are not secure.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have never met a program they don't want to advance to make

another promise that we can't fully honor to the American people in the form of some additional welfare payment or additional bunch of free stuff, but yet we never pay for any of this, not a dime.

We are taking in $4.5 to $5 trillion, and we are spending $6.5 to $7 trillion. What are we doing? I mean, it is absurd. The American people look at us and ask what on Earth is wrong in Washington. We end up back at the same spot every single year.

This year, the Speaker put forward a proposal that would have the continuing resolution extend into 2025 and then would have guaranteed that we know that only American citizens vote in American elections, in Federal elections.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle like to dismiss that as an issue that is not a problem, nonexistent, despite the data rolling in from States with their limited tools to go determine citizenship.

We had the secretary of state of Florida testify in front of the Constitution and Limited Government Subcommittee that they don't have the tools they need. They had to sue the Federal Government to get the limited tools they are using. Other States, Texas, identified people who were on the rolls that were noncitizens. We know it is a real issue.

Give us this simple measure that just reinforces existing law to ensure that issue, and we have violent opposition from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. Then, inexplicably, a handful of people on this side of the aisle wanted to oppose that measure out of some sort of deference to opposition to a CR and then set the circumstances for where we are right now, today, where we find ourselves with the Speaker putting a short-term CR into December, which was the natural outcome, the predictable outcome of the opposition of the plan put forward by the Speaker 2 weeks ago.

It is more of the same games that get bemoaned by the very people complaining about the games. You can't complain that the games are going on and then play games. That is the truth.

I appreciate the Appropriations Committee chairman for working and trying to work across the Conference, across the entire body, to figure out how to get something done.

We passed 5 appropriations bills--better than none, not 12. Last year, we passed 7 appropriations bills--better than none, not all 12. The Senate, led by our Democratic colleagues over there, passed zero, not one. Not one appropriations bill has the Senate sent out of that Chamber to this Chamber.

Who is it who is serious about wanting to do our job? I will say, despite my publicly stated concerns about some decisions on this side of the aisle, the truth of the matter is that had our Democratic colleagues been in charge of this Chamber, what we would have seen is a massive increase in spending. The nondefense spending would have gone up, whereas we have kept it flat. The defense spending that did go up we paid for out of the IRS expansion. We pulled that back so you didn't have IRS agents in your living rooms if you are a middle-class taxpayer.

We took COVID money and paid for that defense increase and were able to stop what the Democrats would have done, which would have passed legislation in the name of border security that would codify that dangerous release of individuals onto the streets of the United States that have led directly to the death of Americans, Americans like Jocelyn Nungaray, whose beautiful 27-year-old mom testified in the Judiciary Committee because her daughter went missing after she put her to bed on Sunday night and then, on Monday, she finds out that she was gagged, bound, and raped in Houston, Texas, and murdered.

Alexis Nungaray is a hero and had the courage to come testify about that, about what happened to her daughter. Are we doing anything about that? No. Our Democrat colleagues refuse.

Instead, they want to hide behind a bill in the Senate, which they couldn't even get out of the Democrat-controlled Senate, that never had any chance of passage. They want to say somehow that that was a grand bipartisan bill because--what?--a couple of Republican Senators had a couple of conversations with them about it.

The bill had no chance of moving, and that bill would have codified Kamala Harris', the border czar's, mass-release policies into the United States.

Laken Riley is dead. Jocelyn Nungaray is dead. Kayla Hamilton is dead. Rachel Morin is dead. I could go down the laundry list of Americans who have died at the hands of people released into the United States by this administration.

I could go down a laundry list of examples of noncitizens voting and our colleagues on the other side of the aisle not caring about it, wanting to continue to fund an executive branch that is refusing to follow the law, blatantly disregarding asylum laws, blatantly disregarding parole laws to endanger the American people.

That is why some of my colleagues here, by the way, didn't want to support a CR. They don't want to fund an executive branch that is at war with the people. If you are a Texan and now increasingly across the country, like Laken Riley in Georgia or Kayla and Rachel in Maryland, you can't help but believe that this administration is, in fact, at war with your well-being.

You have gangs now operating in Dallas and gangs operating in Colorado. You have expansive criminal activity and fentanyl pouring into our streets. We are not doing anything about it as the Article I branch that is sent here to check the Article II executive branch.

Here we are again, kicking the can down the road, to quote my friend--and he is my friend--the gentleman from Kentucky, Thomas Massie, with whom I disagree on our tactical strategy with respect to the CR plus SAVE Act.

The CR plus SAVE Act was designed for a reason. We should secure American elections. We should guarantee that only American citizens vote in American elections. We should not be kicking the can down the road to December 20, a mere 5 days before Christmas.

That is what this town always does because this town is built around K Street. It is built around people believing they need to spend more money, and when we do that, then we just take another chunk out of the hide that is the fabric of this country, racking up more debt.

Mr. Speaker, 2 years ago, in 2022, a $1.7 trillion omnibus bill was passed when? December 23. That is not an accident. It is by design. It is on purpose. That is what people in this town want. They want the pressure so that everybody will clap, get on their planes, and go home to open their gifts and be around the Christmas tree with their kids while they destroy the very country that they are here to represent.

That is what will happen unless we fight it. Now, we are going to have to spend a lot of time--and I will--fighting against whatever massive omnibus bill is tried to jam down our throats on December 20 before Christmas so that everybody can enjoy their jet fumes and role out of D.C. Last time, we threw in $45 billion for Ukraine for good measure in that massive omnibus spending bill right before Christmas.

We shouldn't be in this place. We shouldn't be in this position. I think the Speaker was correct. I think the Committee on Appropriations chair was correct in working with the Speaker, and our body was correct in putting forward a bill that would have extended spending into next year.

Allow the next President and allow the next Congress to deal with this issue while we try to preserve and protect American elections. That is what we should have done.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I would note that the reason that there is a question about veterans funding is because, despite the observation and protest of many at least on this side of the aisle that the PACT Act, which was passed, I believe, 2 years ago, was not going to be able to deal with the claims against it and would create funding problems in addition to this massive mandatory bloc of funding. This was all laid bare, and now here we are and we have to pay the piper.

You have to say, okay, we passed the PACT Act with this kind of open- ended amount of funding all in the name of doing something righteous that we all want to do, to care for veterans who were harmed with burn pits, but we did it the worst way possible because we are Congress, and that is what we do. We identify a problem, and we come up with literally the worst possible solution you can come up with. Then the American people kind of look at you and go, well, here we are again.

You have to go write a check like we did last week for $3 billion, and then guess what happens? The CBO, in all of its infinite wisdom, will come forward and actually, with a straight face, say something about the baseline and how that $3 billion that we needed to appropriate really doesn't cost anything, doesn't score. That is what your CBO will do because that is what it just did.

Guess what? The $12 billion that we are talking about in the additional veterans money that we know we are going to go ahead and fund, as the gentleman was just referring to, CBO will say the same thing. They will say it again. They will say that mandatory spending at baseline is already built in, that this doesn't cost anything. Then why do we have to appropriate it? Why do we come down here and write the check?

This is why you are $35.6 trillion in debt, Mr. Speaker, because nobody here is serious. They are literally not serious. If we were serious, then we would say that we messed up when we passed the PACT Act, and it is now costing more than they said it was going to cost.

If this were my home, I would say that I thought that if I spent this amount of money, it was going to all be fine. I bought the house, the mortgage, interest rates. Now, it costs more. Do I just walk away from that? Do I just go print some money to go pay for my bills at my house?

That is what we do. We just say let's go to the magic tree, print more money for the $3 billion that we messed up, and then we will go back and do it again and say: Well, $12 billion next year. Don't worry. It won't score.

Nobody in America knows what the hell that means. What it means is you are racking up more debt because of our incompetence. That is what that means, and it is done in the name of veterans because you are not allowed to oppose a bill if the word ``veteran'' is in the title. You are not allowed to oppose a bill if the words ``teacher'' or ``firefighter'' or ``police officer'' are in the title.

Do you know how many bills last week we passed on suspension, racking up more billions because it had something in there about autism or something in there for a study or more funding for something else because you don't dare oppose it because you put something like that in the title? Then all of the people are left holding the bag.

At what point are we going to actually be serious? My friend, the chairman of the Committee on the Budget, Jodey Arrington, posed this question of the Committee on the Budget a little bit earlier: Are we ever going to come together and have an actual conversation, or are we just going to say every tax cut, no matter what it is, magically pays for itself?

Let me give a little hint to Republicans: They don't all pay for themselves. They don't. It is simple math. Some tax cuts do because they create economic growth. Some tax cuts don't.

Can we be serious about that on this side of the aisle?

Can my colleagues on the other side of the aisle admit that there is any limit at all to another feel-good program that they want to pass to be able to go buy votes because they put a nice little title in the bill? I doubt it. That is why we are $35.6 trillion in debt.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the time, and I do say with respect to the Appropriations Committee--and by the way, a shout-out to their staff processing a lot of amendments this year, the hard work of the Appropriations Committee. When you process 1,000-odd amendments or whatever it has been, it is an extraordinary amount of work. I am deeply appreciative of the Appropriations Committee.

Those amendments are important. They are an important part of the process. I am proud of the fact that we process amendments.

I am proud of the bills that we produced, the five bills that we passed.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle are not wrong. There are some divisions on this side of the aisle. You know what, I am proud of those divisions, too, because at least we are having a debate. At least we are having a full-throated debate about how we can try to get out of this mess while our colleagues on the other side of the aisle bury their heads in the sand.

We are trying to figure out how you can possibly continue to spend money like this without consequences. That is why those 14, 16 Republicans opposed the CR, plus SAVE. I understand why. I am sympathetic to some of their arguments, but I don't believe that you can come down here, do that, and then complain about the result of where we now find ourselves, which is now we have before us the continuing resolution into December, which many of us wanted to avoid. It was the logical outcome of the tactics chosen by a handful of my colleagues.

I am proud of the Republican Conference. When we have been united over the last 20 months, we have done some extraordinary things. We have reopened the process with amendments in the appropriations process. We have passed appropriations bills, which we hadn't been doing for a while. We did pass a budget out of the Budget Committee. I wish we had brought it to the floor. We did pass H.R. 2, one of the strongest border security measures we have ever passed. It was vehemently opposed by our colleagues on the other side of the aisle while they hide behind legislation that had no chance of passing out of the Senate.

We passed strong National Defense Authorization Acts. We were able to

get real reforms, real changes in terms of policies through the National Defense Authorization Act, pulling back on DEI, pulling back on the excessive climate policies of this administration because we went through that amendment process both for appropriations and the

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the legislation before us here today, and I thank the gentleman for his work on this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, the fact is, what we just heard from the minority leader in trying to describe this as a so-called extreme MAGA partisan agenda, let's be very clear what we are talking about for the average American. To the average American listening, what the minority leader, what the radical, progressive Democratic Party, is saying is extreme is a spending freeze into the next year combined with legislation

that would guarantee that only American citizens vote in American elections.

Let's just be very clear. I think the American people need to know this: What our radical, progressive Democratic colleagues deem extreme is a spending freeze combined with only American citizens voting in American elections. That is a really important thing for the American people to know.

We are here, yes, because Congress is not getting the job done, but let's be very clear that the United States Senate, which is controlled by majority Democrats, has passed precisely zero appropriations bills through the body in the Senate.

The House of Representatives and the Republican majority have passed five bills. It would be my preference that we passed 12, but we sit here today trying to make a determination on how to proceed.

I don't think anyone in this body on either side of the aisle, nor my colleagues or friends around this country, to look at me and question whether I would prefer that we cut spending. I would like to cut spending. I don't think we should be funding the agenda that is being driven by Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, and my radical, progressive Democratic colleagues.

I don't believe we should continue to fund a Secret Service that can't protect the former President without reforms.

I don't think we should continue to fund at current levels a Department of Homeland Security that leaves our borders wide open so that Laken Riley is killed, so that Rachel Morin is killed, so that Kayla Hamilton is killed, and so that Jocelyn Nungaray is killed and her poor 27-year-old mother is left having to be a witness in a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee talking about the gagging, the raping, the binding, and the murder of her 12-year-old daughter in Houston, Texas.

The ultimate result of all of that is that we now have to wonder whether noncitizens are voting in our elections. The fact is we know they are. We have cleaned up rolls in Texas, 6,500, including the 2,000 we know voted in elections. In Virginia 6,300 were cleaned off with thousands who were included in the election. We have cleaned up 3,251 in Alabama, 300 in Oregon, and we can keep going down the list.

All we are saying is that American citizens should vote. That is it.

So my Democratic colleagues seemingly want noncitizens to vote, and they can't accept a spending freeze as being reasonable.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to say a word to my friends on this side of the aisle. One year ago, 21 of my conservative colleagues opposed a continuing resolution that would have cut nondefense, nonveteran, and non-Homeland Security spending by 30 percent for 30 days and included H.R. 2. A lot of those same people are walking away from a piece of legislation that we are putting forward right now.

I am asking them to stand up with the Republican Party, stand up with President Trump, and stand up with the American people to demand that we freeze spending, hold it in check, take the pen away from the radical, progressive Democrats of Joe Biden in a lameduck, and let's make sure that only American citizens can vote in American elections.

Mr. Speaker, as I come here to the floor tonight, we all recognize that today is September 11, a date that will never sound the same, a date that now means something totally different than it did prior to 2001.

We have seen the continued recognition of those lives lost. We saw it in New York today. We saw it in Pennsylvania. We saw it at the Pentagon. We saw the flag unfurled.

I give special recognition to my good friend, Senator Brian Birdwell, a State Senator from the State of Texas. A dear friend, Senator Birdwell was perhaps the individual closest to where the airplane hit the Pentagon in 2001, and he survived.

Senator Birdwell was burned across every part of his body. He was hauled out, taken to the hospital. He didn't think he was going to make it. He was praying. Assuming that he was leaving, he was saying good- bye to his family. He survived. He is a great patriot.

Mr. Speaker, if you have a chance, look up his video called ``I Am Second.'' Senator Brian Birdwell tells the story--it is about 7 to 10 minutes, I think--and it is well worth your time.

It is a testament to his faith, and it is a testament to his patriotism. It is a testament to all those who went through those terrible attacks that day.

Those of us who remember them, we remember them personally, closely. We had friends who were affected, and it reminds us, of course, of what happens when we leave our country wide open for attack.

We look back at September 11, and we tend to get wrapped up in the horrors of the collapsing buildings, the horrors of a plane flying into the Pentagon, but we don't spend a whole lot of time talking about the fact that the individuals who carried out that attack overstayed visas to stay in our country

because of our very broken system of border security.

Yes, ``border security'' I use broadly to include those individuals who we permit to come into our country and are released into our country on a visa or some other way, and they are in our country and then carry out harm.

We remember every year the almost 3,000 Americans who died in that southern part of Manhattan or in a field in Pennsylvania or in Arlington, Virginia, but where was the recognition today for the 75,000 Americans who died from fentanyl last year alone, 25 times the number of people who died on September 11? Where is the recognition of the thousands of persons who have been targeted by criminals released onto the streets of our country?

Just yesterday here in this complex, we had in the House Judiciary Committee the mothers of three Americans killed as a direct consequence of Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, their coordinated effort, their conspiracy to ignore the laws of the United States and put dangerous individuals on our streets that result in the deaths of Americans in real time as we speak.

Alexis Nungaray is a 27-year-old young Texas woman who chose life 12 years ago when her daughter was born, her daughter, Jocelyn, who was murdered. She was bound, raped, gagged, had her body thrown into a creek in Texas outside of Houston by two Venezuelan men who were released into our country in direct violation of our laws under parole on purpose.

Rachel Morin was murdered in Maryland. Her mother testified yesterday. Kayla Hamilton. We have had other stories like Laken Riley. There are dozens. There are hundreds. There are so many stories that I had my office produce a report that we put out last week titled: ``America Invaded.''

In that report, if you look at what is listed, you will find two full pages of 54 examples of Americans, headline stories, who have been killed, raped, assaulted, all of these, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Where is the commemoration for those Americans?

In the wake of September 11, what did we do in all of our infinite wisdom? We created a 250,000-person bureaucracy at the Department of Homeland Security. We didn't used to have this massive bureaucracy. Now we do.

Has that made us any safer or more secure?

If you are watching this as an American, do you feel more secure?

If you are an American in Springfield, Ohio, do you feel more secure with 20,000 Haitians who have been dumped into your community?

Do you feel more secure if you are in Buffalo, New York, where just 2 weeks ago, a man was finally apprehended by ICE after having been released into Texas from Peru, and we now know that he is wanted for 23 murders in Peru. We released him into the United States.

Every one of these examples I am talking about were specifically the result of having individuals released into the United States from other countries who then carried out a vicious attack, a vicious crime, a vicious murder.

We had a witness yesterday testify to the rape and murder of a beautiful, little, 11-year-old girl. I think her name is Maria Gonzalez. If not, I will correct the Record, but I believe that is her name. She was killed, again, by someone who was released here into the United States who then preyed on her. Where is the commemoration?

I am going to be very blunt. I appreciate that we commemorate September 11 every September 11. That is a good thing to do. I have heard the bell now ringing for these 23 years.

Who is ringing the bell for Jocelyn Nungaray? This is a serious question.

Kamala Harris was up where the World Trade Center once stood along with a bunch of other people, including former President Trump, current President Biden, former Mayor Bloomberg. Who was commemorating Jocelyn?

Will they be there next June--I think it was June--for the anniversary of her mother's pain when she woke up on Monday morning and her daughter wasn't in the house, and she ran down to the convenience store where there were police sirens and tape to find out that her little girl had been murdered? Who is commemorating that?

Who is paying attention to that? She is a devastated young mother.

Like September 11, where we failed, where we allowed visa overstays to stay in this country and then grab planes and fly into buildings, Jocelyn Nungaray is dead today because of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and radical, progressive Democrats who don't give a whit about whether your streets are safe, America.

Wake up. Wake up and know what the elections are about. Wake up and know what is happening in your country because your leaders in this country are failing you. Worse than failing you, they are purposefully endangering you. There is no other way to put it.

I am tired of listening to this garbage. Come up here to Washington. They say: Oh, why can't you just sit here and get along and go across to the other side of the aisle and shake hands and say: Why can't you guys just come together and solve problems? I will tell you why. I have done bipartisan bills. I have them right now, and I have friends on the other side of the aisle.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle, almost to a man and a woman, don't give a damn about the borders being wide open because, if they did, they would do something about it. That is the truth.

We should start acting like that is the truth. We should stop pretending that we don't have such a wide gulf between that side of the aisle and this side of the aisle.

We have a choice right now. What world view are you choosing for your kids and your grandkids?

Again, continued tough love for my colleagues on this side of the aisle. For decades, we have been complicit by allowing the chamber of commerce to use cheap labor as their excuse for wide-open borders, which set the stage for what we are dealing with right now.

Well, those days are over. When all of the corporate whores around this town come begging for their tax breaks, I want them to come explain to the American people why we should do it when their boardrooms are chock full of radical, progressive Democrats and liberals who want ESG and want their quarterly reports to do well so their stock portfolios grow, and they come in here begging for tax cuts so they can get richer while America gets screwed.

If you are living in Springfield, Ohio, right now, you don't give a damn about the guys in the corporate boardroom over in New York City, in Manhattan, or maybe in the tall buildings in Cleveland. You don't care about how rich they are getting, but you care that there are now 20,000 Haitian migrants sitting in your community, that your grandfathers and your grandmothers and your moms and your dads worked hard to build and now is being trashed.

I could promise you, if you are like those young women who were testifying at the Judiciary Committee yesterday, who were migrants themselves--a young woman talking about her dad who came here from Mexico and fought and worked hard and didn't take government handouts. He said he was going to do it the right way and that the American Dream wasn't about being given something from government. Then he had to sit here and watch his granddaughter get murdered because of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, every single one of them, own it.

Every single one of them should march their happy rear ends down to Texas and beg for forgiveness. Beg for forgiveness from Alexis Nungaray and Alexis Nungaray's father because Jocelyn Nungaray got raped, bound, gagged, murdered, by the people released by Democrats in the White House.

Let's not pretend that there isn't a mile of difference between Republicans and Conservatives and Democrats and radical Progressives. There is a mile of difference.

I am not going to sit here and pretend, let's all get in a room and talk to each other nicely, pat each other on the back and say: Oh, man, can't we just have these halcyon days of old, have a beer like Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan?

Not if you don't believe in America. Not if you don't believe in sovereignty. Not if you don't believe in the rule of law. Not if you believe it is okay to release 5\1/2\ million people into our country, utterly disregarding how many criminals you are releasing and allowing Americans to get slaughtered.

Why don't you get in the car, drive up here to Aberdeen, Maryland, and talk to Kayla Hamilton or Rachel Morin's family.

Why don't you beg for forgiveness, get on your knees in the House Chamber and say: I am sorry that I was so focused on my own political well-being that I would endanger the American people, because that is what you are doing.

Finally, my colleagues on this side of the aisle, in getting H.R. 2 passed, has finally forsaken the chamber of commerce's death grip on the Republican Party saying: we need our cheap labor.

We haven't even scratched the surface.

We haven't even begun to do what is necessary to take our country back because, when President Trump talks about mass deportations, he means it. I mean it. I hope to hell Republicans on this side of the aisle mean it because 5\1/2\ million people dumped into the United States without vetting, without knowledge of who the hell they are. We have the House Judiciary Committee recognizing 99 people on the terrorist watch list released into the United States, and 35,000 Chinese nationals this year, and the year is not even over.

Who are these people?

I flew out to Aurora, Colorado, last week. I went to an apartment complex area, met with the people who were there, talked to one of the residents of the building, talked to the tenant who put a camera on her door; she is not lying. Yet, we have Colorado Democrats who are trying to say it is a lie that Venezuelan gangs are running those apartment complexes. They get on Twitter, and they say: Not true. It is a figment of their imagination.

That is why I flew to Aurora, talked to the woman. She walked me through the fact that the manager of the apartment complex isn't there anymore.

The manager of the apartment complex left and fled and feared for his life. For 2 months, there was no manager there. They put the cameras up. The cameras then showed what the entire world has now seen, which is armed thugs running around the apartment complex. We are told they smashed doors down, changed the locks on the building.

We had a businessman who was there who helped the woman move out and said he basically stepped into the Third World for a number of hours while he was helping her move out.

This is coming to every street in America. Wake up.

We play up here, playing Tiddledy Winks, talking about CRs, and nobody even knows where the hell they are. We go around talking about all these different things. Let's get together and pass a resolution and a messaging thing this week.

What are we going to do to finally just say no?

You don't have to take this, you know?

We are supposed to be a free people. We are supposedly endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We established this government in the very preamble of the Constitution.

What does it say? It lays out the purpose of the government being to secure the blessings of liberty. It is not to give crap away. As I have said before on the House floor, we are not supposed to be the United States House of free stuff. We are not the United States Congress here to give you a check. We are killing the American Dream.

Congress, the administration, are actively killing the American Dream in real time. We voted on another bill for another program that spends more money that we don't have. We rack up more debt. We increase the interest. At no point are we actually securing the country.

We have been at war for a quarter of a century in some form or fashion. I don't even know how many trillions: 8, 9? I have lost count on how many trillions we have spent engaged in conflict, directly in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to tuck tail and run when Biden and the current brass bailed and left those 13 heroes stranded to die.

How many trillions? How many American men and women were injured, lost their legs, lost an eye, PTSD: 80,000, 100,000, or more with PTSD?

How many suicides a day?

We have been at war for a quarter of a century.

In this town, we can't even fight for you, the American people, to actually secure you with a secure border, with secure communities, and with an economy that isn't blown to hell by irresponsible government spending.

Do you want to know why? In the false name of defense and in the false name of securing this country because the defense world tells me every year, if I don't vote for one of these bloated spending bills, we won't get a new submarine.

We won't get a new carrier. What the hell are we trying to defend? What is left of the United States to defend? A school where I can't send my child to pray to God without spending $20,000 a year on top of the taxes I pay. A school that my friend sends her sixth grader to with a trans music teacher asking her kid to do some dance in class. Yes, it is a true story.

Is that what we are defending with carriers and missiles and endless wars? Are we defending a country where Jocelyn Nungaray gets raped and murdered, or Rachel Morin gets raped and murdered because we release dangerous migrants into the streets of America?

Since I literally released this 40-page report last week, I can't even keep up with the news stories since we put it out.

In Virginia, just 30 miles from here, a teenage girl was abducted by a Peruvian illegal immigrant, arrested, who had been released into the interior by this administration. A Palestinian migrant accused of beating a Jewish New York man, released into America because he claimed he wouldn't be safe.

We had two of the people in Aurora, Colorado, where I said I went to that were apprehended by ICE after they had been released into the country, arrested, released on bond because we can't detain them because our entire policies have been turned on their head.

We sit here in September, and we have this grand debate about whether we are going to do a continuing resolution for 75 days or 6 months or a year. Will we include the SAVE Act to ensure that American citizens vote? Heaven forbid that we stand up and say, only American citizens should vote in American elections. It is an 80 percent issue.

We have legislation that would fix it. We had a hearing yesterday in which Secretaries of State, experts on the matter, all acknowledged you need the law to guarantee that only American citizens vote in American elections.

Now, we are having a debate about that. What can we put forward on the floor? With all due respect to some of my conservative colleagues that gag on an add. I can't support a CR because 12 appropriations bills must be passed. Okay. Five have been passed. Now, what?

We actually have to figure out how to proceed. I think maybe we could just fund the government for a few months and try to make sure elections are secure, or let's pick a different fight.

Why don't we actually stand up and do something to make this country better? If we do get a CR to December and if Republicans do win the elections in November, what the hell are we going to do with it? Will we fight? I would like to go to the American people over the next 60 days and say, yes, we are going to fight, and you can believe us this time.

I would like to say that Republicans will be bold enough to do what our Democratic colleagues have done repeated times in the last two decades, which is risk your precious, risk your election certificate.

Stop starting off every Congress saying, well, if we do this, we risk our majority makers. What good is it to be in Congress if you don't do something with your election certificate and then go sell it to the people you represent as being the right thing to do?

I have been in tight districts. I have done that. Every single constituent that I represent are fed up. They are fed up with a country that they no longer recognize. They love their country, but the government that they have entrusted to maintain that country, that their fathers and grandfathers fought, bled, and died for has been turned into something they no longer recognize.

I am glad that we have people today on September 11 commemorating those

lost. I am glad that we show patriotism. I am glad that we put the flag on the Pentagon, but until we recognize that every single day because of our policies in this Chamber and in the other Chamber and at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Americans are suffering with high inflation, with houses that they can't afford, and with their own people getting murdered and slaughtered on the streets or in their homes.

I cannot imagine just 2 months ago, Alexis Nungaray waking up and her 12-year-old daughter not being in the house, only to find out she is dead after having been raped while the mom was sleeping in the house. This has all happened because Kamala Harris and all of her cronies in the administration chose and still choose, as I speak, to release dangerous individuals on the streets of our country.

I am sure I am going to get some sort of admonition for directing some of my venom to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue; but the fact is, the leaders of this country need to be warned. We better get busy fixing this country or the American people are not going to take it anymore, and I will be right there supporting them.

I am sick and tired of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle not showing up and not doing what we said we would do. I am particularly sick of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle daring to lie to the American people that they somehow believe in securing the border when they put forward legislation that would have codified the very parole policies that have, since they introduced the dang bill, been used to slaughter and kill innocent American citizens.

This is not a negotiation. You don't negotiate for your safety and your security. You just get busy doing it. I can promise you that whatever happens with this election, I am going to be a loud voice for the State of Texas to stick their middle finger up at this godforsaken city and say we are going to secure our State. All of the other people in all of the other States be damned because we have an obligation to do it.

When our people are dying and our people are hurting and we are spending $13 billion of our own money, where the hell is this Congress and this Senate backing up the people of Texas? When we joined this Union, we were promised something, and we are being denied it.

On behalf of every single one of those moms that come to my office in tears because their kids died from fentanyl or because their little girl was raped and murdered, and for every one of those tombstones that I drive by in Arlington coming to office every day, who either gave or risked the last full measure of devotion, they didn't do it for this. They didn't risk it for this.

They risked it to live free and secure and have opportunity in a country that is sovereign and safe. It is time for us to do our job, and it is time for the American people to do their job this fall and make sure that the right leaders are running this country.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to congratulate the Boerne All- Stars and their historic run in the 2024 Little League World Series.

After going undefeated in local and regional games all summer long, the Boerne All-Stars punched their ticket to Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

Representing the Southwest Region in the Little League World Series this year for the first time ever, the Boerne Little Leaguers came in fourth place in this year's tournament and came out of the winner's bracket undefeated.

Led by Coach Jonathan Collins, Coach Bert Munoz, and Team Manager Justin Newson, the 12-strong team showed the entire world the grit and excellence that Boerne has to offer.

This team is truly exceptional. One teammate, Kole Newson, underwent open heart surgery four years ago and still showed out to display what makes Texas so great. This entire team is full of amazing players. They went

undefeated in the winner's bracket and they all should be proud of their efforts.

All these boys, Kaleb Christ, Jett Matthews, Doc Mogford, Gray Collins, Dylan Burke, Aiden Munoz, Gage Steubing, Kole Newson, Julian Hurst, Ben Burkhart, Cooper Hastings, and Caden Guffey have performed an amazing feat. The coaches, parents, and everyone in Boerne who mentored these boys, built them up, and supported them have done a great job and should be proud of what these boys did.

I extend my heartfelt congratulations to the Boerne All-Stars; you have made all of Texas proud.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the military service of Sergeant Irby ``Corky'' Dyer III. He served during the Vietnam War as a member of the U.S. Army's elite Green Berets.

Sergeant Dyer is a native Texan born in Sweetwater--where my father was born--on December 6, 1943. He grew up and attended public school in Midland. Sergeant Dyer went on to attend Schreiner Institute in Kerrville. He graduated from Schreiner's military preparation program in 1961. Four years later, he married Bonnie K. Little. They have one daughter together, Deborah Denise.

Before enlisting in the military, Sergeant Dyer attended college in Odessa and later at the University of Texas at Austin. He trained as an Army medic and eventually became a member of the 5th Special Forces Group, Detachment B-52 under Project DELTA. Their top-secret assignments brought Sergeant Dyer into dangerous situations in Vietnam and neighboring countries.

While conducting Operation Hawkeye in December 1966, Sergeant Dyer and his fellow soldiers were shot down in a helicopter over Laos. This occurred one and a half miles west of the Demilitarized Zone.

As a result, Sergeant Dyer was declared missing in action and his body has not been recovered. He has been awarded a Purple Heart, the Bronze Star with V device, and other commendations.

Schreiner University in Kerrville will be honoring Sergeant Dyer in September, and I am honored to recognize Sergeant Dyer for his heroism and honorable service to our country. May all those who serve our Nation know how grateful we are for their dedication to securing the blessings of liberty.

May God bless Sergeant Dyer and his loved ones, and may God bless America.

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

Mr. Chair, the amendment I have at the desk is designed to prohibit funds for FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which subsidizes transmission to renewables. There is a certain order number, order No. 1920.

The thing is, a lot of Americans don't really know what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is or does, but it plays a massive role in their lives. It is an agency that regulates interstate transmission of natural gas, oil, and electricity, to which President Biden has appointed a lot of commissioners to advance his climate agenda.

In May, FERC approved order No. 1920 which will force everyday Americans to subsidize the cost of transmission lines so renewable energy developers can reap the benefits of billions of dollars in Federal subsidies.

Just so everybody can understand what is going on, Congress, in its infinite wisdom, while we are $35 trillion in debt, while our economy was reeling in the wake of a massive economic shutdown in response to the pandemic, in Congress' infinite wisdom, it passed the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, in which we massively subsidize and fund predominantly Chinese companies and billion-dollar companies here in the United States to advance openly what our colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to advance with respect to pushing their climate agenda.

We are going to subsidize our enemies, undermine our natural resources and strengths to produce American natural gas, American oil, American cars, the internal combustion engine, and in doing so, we are going to drive up the cost of all American families' goods and services and their ability to carry out their lives.

Now, in order to carry out the fantasy that our radical, progressive Democratic colleagues want to push on the American people--much like when they tried to jam the metric system on me when I was in elementary school--they want to jam this absurdity onto the American people.

They are going to say now not only do you have to eat a more expensive electric vehicle, not only do you have to have an unreliable grid, not only do you have to subsidize China and our enemies, oh, no, you get to go even further. This is going to force electricity rate payers--that means Americans--to pay for the cost of transmission lines to renewable projects which will make unreliable energy allegedly more available.

Guess what? On a cloudy, windless day, you still need that wonderful natural gas, coal, and nuclear power to power your homes or power all of your magic unicorn electric vehicles that power you around the country. Meanwhile, those electric vehicles are piling up on the lots of dealerships.

Now, you are reading articles where 50 percent of the people who own electric vehicles today are saying: Oh, gosh, I don't think I will do that anymore. I am going to sell them.

Yet, we also have this administration about to jam the American people with a rule saying you are going to have to have two-thirds of the fleet in our country be electric by 2032.

This is an administration, and these are radical, progressive, Democratic colleagues who are at war with the American family. I believe we should defund this. That is what my amendment does.

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

Mr. Chair, I would note that FERC Commissioner Mark Christie exposed this rule for what it is: ``The final rule inflicts staggering costs on consumers by promoting the construction of trillions of dollars of transmission projects, not to serve consumers in accordance with the Federal Power Act, but to serve a major policy agenda never passed by Congress, to serve the profit-making interests of developers of politically preferred generation, primarily wind and solar, and to serve corporate `green energy' preferential purchasing policies.''

Chuck Schumer basically admitted this, saying the order is: `` . . . what we need to see the clean energy revolution, we catalyze with the IRA come to fruition.''

This is an agenda. This is not about 1950. This is about 2050. You need clean-burning natural gas to actually power our homes, our hospitals, and our lives. You need to have reliable power. We ought to have more nuclear power. We can do that, and we are working on that, but you shouldn't be having these fanciful energy policies being put out there, mandated on the American people, that are crippling families.

That is the truth. In the quest for this radical agenda, you are empowering our enemies and absolutely destroying the American family who can't afford an electric vehicle that costs $17,000 more than the internal combustion engine.

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

Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

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

Mr. Chair, the amendment that I have put forward here would prohibit any of the funding in the Energy and Water Development appropriations bill from being used to carry out President Biden's executive orders on climate change.

Now, we have successfully gotten this amendment adopted in numerous appropriations bills last year and this year, and I hope we will again. The executive orders serve as the catalyst to--as I was referring to Chuck Schumer a minute ago--some of the Department of Energy's most radical actions.

The Justice40 Initiative is a radical environmental justice initiative that directs 40 percent of the Federal clean energy and energy efficiency spending based on race, migrant status, and other characteristics.

DOE's transition to carbon pollution-free energy sources, a zero- emissions fleet, and a net-zero building portfolio make our Federal agencies wholly dependent on China for energy and wasting taxpayer dollars in the process.

DOE's overall efficiency standards for almost every household appliance, from washing machines to dishwashers to refrigerators to gas stoves, all of this is designed with a purpose. It is all designed to advance this radical agenda by radical, progressive Democratic colleagues who are more interested in worshipping at the altar of this so-called climate agenda than they are at advancing human flourishing, as God gave us the resources to do, and to develop wisely and appropriately for the betterment of civilization and to make our world a better place.

We manage climate change. We don't run from it. We actually protect our people. We allow people to advance, to be able to live in heat and cool, to be able to move around the planet and engage in commerce and lift people up, create economic opportunity.

We don't do that by hiding. We don't do that by empowering our enemies. We don't do that by undermining prosperity and undermining all that made this country great, with the available and abundant resources God gave us in this great continent of North America. We don't do that.

That is what our radical, progressive Democratic colleagues want to do. That is what they are doing. They are sending us back to the Stone Age and making people suffer. They are making the American people suffer. They are driving up the price of goods and services. They are making it harder to afford a car. They are making it harder for a plumber or small business man or business woman to do their job or take care of their families.

The goal here is to say these orders have no place. Congress has a role here in telling the administration: You have yet again overstepped your bounds. You are ignoring the Court on student loans. You are making up policies on a daily basis, endangering Americans with wide- open borders. You are allowing Americans to get killed, fentanyl to pour into our communities, and here, with this radical agenda, you are bankrupting the hardworking American family who made this country great. That is the purpose of the amendment.

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

Mr. Chair, this is not about looking backwards. It is about looking forward. That is the whole point. We are going to talk about, oh, we are going to have 400 million people or 450 million people, great. Fine. We should grow as a country. By the way, we should have more kids. That is a different conversation and a different debate. Let's grow as a country. Fantastic.

Do you know what you need? Power.

Do you know what building we are sitting in right now?

One powered by natural gas.

Do you know what most of the hospitals and places in Texas that are functioning right now in the great State of Texas are powered by?

Natural gas.

Do you know what we could be powered more by?

Nuclear.

Do you know why we are not?

Crazy ideas mostly from radical, progressive Democrats who don't want to deal with the fact that we could actually safely have nuclear power.

The fact is, instead, we want to litter our continent with wind farms and solar farms which are inefficient and unreliable, demonstrably and proven to be so. That is the truth.

The fact here is we just want to have reliable power.

Even if you accept this trope that somehow we are having significantly more storms----

I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio.

Reclaiming my time. Yes, we do. Yes, Texas has significantly more wind and solar than a lot of other places in the world because we embrace the all-of-the-above approach, and, no, I don't believe that is a good thing. No, I don't believe that one-third of our grid in Texas should be wind and solar.

Do you want to know why Texas is now more wind and solar?

Yes, we started it. But guess what?

The Feds are subsidizing the hell out of it. They are making it so it is not cost-effective to be able to go build more natural gas and coal, and that is destroying our country. The Federal Government is making it where Texas and other States cannot have reliable power. That is the truth. You are causing taxes on the American people, making our grid unreliable, and this trope about storms is garbage.

The fact is over the last century, many, many more lives have been saved because of the availability of reliable power than there were a century ago when, for example, a hurricane demolished Galveston long before there was any kind of fossil fuel issues.

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

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

Mr. Chair, my amendment fully defunds the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, EERE.

I offered this amendment because we cannot, in my view, continue to fund the destruction of United States energy to satisfy the climate agenda that I have been describing over the last 15 minutes.

I do want to say, with all due respect, I believe that the Appropriations Committee did a good job in trying to pare this back, and they limited the funding of this particular office knowing that it deserves to be reduced.

I just want to take it a step further. I think when our country is $35 trillion in debt, I think when our country is bleeding $2 trillion a year, I think that our country needs to pinch every penny we can. I think we should pinch those pennies in offices that are designed, frankly, to undermine the very productivity and economic growth we need to drive ourselves out of the debt that this incompetent Congress and incompetent government created for the American people.

The fiscal year 2024 minibus, that is last year's spending bill, gave this office $3.5 billion. Again, I want to applaud the Appropriations Committee for reducing that down to about $2 billion, $1.96. I would like to strike it to zero. That is what this amendment would do.

This office's mission is to ``equitably''--that is already a big strike. Just start with equitably.

This office's mission is to equitably transition America to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050. It funds wind and solar which are actively destroying the power grids which I just described a minute ago, undermining the ability to have reliable energy, despite the Department of Energy claiming they would lead to ``enhanced reliability.'' They don't.

On EVs, it funds zero-emissions vehicles which I already described are significantly beneficial to the wealthy. Today, only the wealthy can afford them. Fifty percent of them are saying they don't even want them. They are piling up on dealerships' lots. We have the government now saying that you have to have two-thirds of the fleet being available by 2032. We shouldn't be funding an office to advance the thing that is already being advanced by a Congress that is messing up the ability of the American people to live.

Third, it is woke. It actively promotes divisive concepts like ``energy equity and environmental justice,'' whatever the hell that means, which allocates taxpayer dollars based on immutable characteristics.

This is, again, your glorious government at work, picking winners and losers, dividing us up by race, making up all kinds of policies in the name of wokeism while destroying our economy in the name of pursuing their climate activist agenda.

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

I respect the gentleman from Tennessee, and I appreciate the cuts as I already stipulated. I am glad to see it reduced by $1.5 billion. I still say that is $2 billion too many. I don't even know where we are getting the $2 billion. I won't engage the gentleman on that, but nobody on this floor can tell me where we are getting the $2 billion.

Mr. Chair, do you know what we are really doing? We are borrowing money from China. Believe it or not, in the appropriations bill this last go-round, we actually subsidized China. We borrow from China, we pay interest, and then we turn around and we subsidize China. That is what the geniuses of the congressional body do for the American people while we rack up $35 trillion in debt.

Let's move off of the fanciful, radical climate agenda that is destroying American entrepreneurial capability and abilities and driving down prosperity, and let's move straight on to debt.

What in the hell are we going to cut if you can't cut this?

Who on this floor is going to stand up and talk about Social Security and Medicare and everything else?

No. Everybody is going to preen and posture about it. Meanwhile, we are destroying the greatest country in the history of the world by putting a tax on the American people in the form of what? Inflation.

We are killing our own country while we spend money. Mr. Chair, $2 billion more is going to go to have this office advancing more of the very radical agenda destroying our ability to produce wealth and drive ourselves out of the debt. We are going to borrow $2 billion more so that we can advance energy, equity, and environmental justice and try to drive toward ``zero-emissions vehicles'' that I already described only the wealthy are driving that cost $17,000 more than the internal combustion engine, and we are going to drive up the price of a used internal combustion engine so that a plumber in 2030 is going to collapse. That is what is going to happen.

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

Mr. Chair, I will just add this. Every time I get my gas can out and I have to use the stupid spout that spills all over the place because it has been regulated by the Federal Government--we messed up an actual gas can--and then I have to stick the gas in with ethanol into it that goes into the engine that then clogs up the frigging fuel pump that I then have to replace because of all that garbage, I would just tell you that none of that stuff is there if it is not subsidized. That is the truth.

The American people are tired of the Federal Government subsidizing less than optimal energy, and that is what we are doing. Without those subsidies, they die.

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

Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Wisconsin for yielding, I thank his committee for their great leadership in moving this bill to the floor, and I thank the Speaker for his great work in leading this important piece of legislation, the SAVE Act, which is critical to ensure that only American citizens will vote in American elections.

It is really that simple, but our Democratic colleagues and the President of the United States are giving up the game. They are telling the American people very plainly and clearly that it is their preference that noncitizens vote in American elections.

That is their current position.

The fact of the matter is this administration and our colleagues on the other side of the aisle have been damaging and breaking American sovereignty for the entirety of this administration and before.

They are destroying our borders. They are allowing people to flood into our country. Millions of people are being released into the United States. Americans are getting killed. We are seeing abuse of Americans throughout the country, and now all we simply want to do is ensure the integrity of American elections.

What we see is absolute resistance and lies from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

They want to go do the normal scare tactics that we are going to be disenfranchising voters when, in fact, we are following the same procedures that we have got in place in States all across the country in requiring documentary proof that you are a citizen.

That is very simple. We do it on many different fronts. In this case, you can provide a passport; you can provide documentation of your military ID if it has your citizenship on it; REAL ID, you can go with your driver's license; and you can produce your birth certificate.

Nevertheless, importantly, we have procedures in place that allow for States to come up with ways to check Federal databases or to provide other mechanisms and means provided that the State officials then sign an affidavit saying that this is, in fact, a citizen.

The reality is there is going to be no disenfranchisement. The truth is our colleagues on the other side of the aisle do not want us to actually check citizenship.

I find it pretty amazing that the gentleman from New York is trying to make a case out of the stealing of elections when it is he who currently wants to be able to say right now that the current President should not be the nominee of a party that just nominated that President.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Florida for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, the reason we are here, the reason that the Attorney General of the United States has already been held in contempt, is because Special Counsel Hur interviewed the President of the United States and the Attorney General provided to Congress, at our request, a transcript rather than an audio recording.

We believe the audio recording is necessary for us to understand the extent to which the President was able to answer the questions before him and why Special Counsel Hur chose not to pursue charges directly as a result of what he put forward as the likelihood that the President would not be found effectively competent to stand trial. We believe that is central to the question.

In terms of legislative purpose, what we are talking about here, by the way, is an impeachment inquiry and the tools of the House through the Judiciary Committee includes our ability to go forward and get the appropriate information, and we have a purpose which is the impeachment inquiry. It is nothing more. It is nothing less.

Now, in the Judiciary Committee, the Attorney General of the United States in a question that I asked him, his response was that the evidence was the same. The transcript and the audio were the same.

If that is true, then the Attorney General has no real basis, having already waived privilege on the transcript, not claimed privilege on the transcript, has no real basis for not giving the audio to the United States Congress to carry out its duty for an impeachment inquiry.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Arizona for his willingness to come to the floor and talk about these important issues that, frankly, all of us should be talking about. He does so with regularity, and it is important.

The average American is hurting because they watch the price of goods going up and all the things that are happening as a direct consequence of what we are doing and not doing here--as the gentleman points out, our inability and lack of willingness or fortitude to focus on the issues that matter.

Right now, I think something the American people need to understand, as we head into the fall season, is that we are heading into the time of elections.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle come down to give a whole lot of rhetoric about the lack of agenda or lack of things that we are doing. We have legislation on the floor of the House this week to ensure that only citizens vote, something we call the SAVE Act. That legislation is necessary because anybody with eyes knows that we are getting overrun by open borders that are endangering the American people. We have millions of people flooding into the country and have thousands and thousands of people who are on the voter rolls who are not supposed to be. Those are facts. It is true.

We know States that are starting to cleanse their voter rolls are finding people who are noncitizens and are registered to vote. We saw it in Virginia. We have seen it in North Carolina. We have seen it in Texas. We have seen it across the country. The truth is, it goes far deeper than that.

The question that we have to ask ourselves is: What does it mean to be an American? What does citizenship even mean anymore?

We have an administration--Joe Biden, the people who work for him, and our Democratic colleagues on the other side of the aisle--that is at war with the whole idea of American exceptionalism and what it means to be an American. They are at war with the whole idea of what it means to be an American citizen. They are undermining the whole purpose, the whole intent, behind citizenship. Citizenship is supposed to matter.

This week, we are going to be voting on the floor on a bill to require a simple thing: that we know that only American citizens are voting in our American elections. That is what we are voting on this week, tomorrow.

Mr. Speaker, you would think that some number of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle would be willing to work with us on such legislation. They bemoan that they are not getting an amendment offered. Let's be very clear: They offered one amendment--one--in the committee of jurisdiction, the House Administration Committee. Do you know how many Democrats were present? One, the ranking member. The ranking member offered the amendment. It went down 6-1. There was no real debate from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle because the only purpose of the amendment was to gut the bill. That was the only purpose.

Then, I heard bemoaning from our Democratic colleagues and the ranking member of the Rules Committee when we were up in the Rules Committee, and he said they should be able to offer this amendment. Why? His Democratic colleagues didn't even show up to the debate in the committee, and the whole purpose of the amendment was to gut the bill.

The bill has been strongly supported by the Speaker on down, strongly supported by his staff, strongly supported by the people who have worked on it hard, but none of that matters to the American people. The only thing that matters to the American people is that it is legislation that would protect their constitutional right as a citizen to be the one who has a say in his or her government.

What is happening right now is we are undermining the integrity of our elections and undermining our very Republic by allowing noncitizens to vote. Indeed, some jurisdictions--Oakland, San Francisco, New York, and, indeed, our Nation's Capital--are purposely registering noncitizens to vote.

They say, wink, wink, nod, nod, don't worry about it. We are only going to do that in State and local elections. We will not, of course, put them over in Federal elections because that is against the law. My Democratic colleagues want to say we don't need this bill because it is already against the law for a noncitizen to vote in Federal elections. True.

However, number one, then what are you worried about? Why are you concerned? What is so problematic that you think it is bad that we try to put procedures in place to carry out the law you say is already in place?

The truth is you don't like that that law is in place. That is the truth about our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. We know this because Democratic jurisdictions across the country, as I said a minute ago, are registering noncitizens to vote in State and local elections.

They want them to vote in Federal elections. The problem is, they have this pesky little issue with the American people, 81 to 87 percent of whom believe that only citizens should vote in American elections.

We have a bill before us on the floor of the House tomorrow that I believe is going to be opposed by virtually all or all of our Democratic colleagues. We will see. I kind of dare them to vote ``no'' on a bill supported by 81 to 87 percent of the American people. I dare them to vote ``no'' against a bill that says that only American citizens should vote in American elections. I am going to dare them to go ahead and follow a President who has put out a policy against a bill, the purpose of which is to guarantee citizens are the ones who get to vote in American elections.

We will see if our Democratic colleagues want to go to the polls in November having rejected what clearly the vast majority of their constituents, even in the most liberal jurisdictions in the country, believe is right. That is what is likely to occur tomorrow.

Mr. Speaker, if you believe the news, believe the accounts, look at what the President has done, and look at the posturing of the House Democratic leadership, they are on the precipice of staking out a position of belief that noncitizens should be able to vote in our elections.

That, of course, is not too surprising, given the extent to which a number of

our Democratic colleagues have repeatedly talked about how it is beneficial for them to have noncitizens--indeed, sometimes illegal aliens--voting in elections.

The fact of the matter is, we know what has happened in the Biden administration as the American people have been endangered, as Americans have died, as Laken Riley has died, and as numerous individuals have been killed, raped, murdered, and assaulted across this country by people who have been let into this country illegally.

We know that some 8 million illegal aliens have crossed the border under Biden's tenure. We know that some 5.3 million illegal aliens have been released by Joe Biden. We know that we have had massive numbers of criminal gang members, massive numbers of people affiliated with terrorist organizations, and thousands of numbers of Chinese nationals who have come into our country.

We know that our domestic crime is increasing. We know that we are being endangered. We know that people are being released. We know that we have criminals coming to our country, yet we want to do one simple thing. We have been fighting them, trying to stop what they are doing by releasing people into the country. We passed H.R. 2. Democrats refused to do anything about it. They refused to move it. Chuck Schumer refuses to do it. Joe Biden doesn't even know what we are talking about.

Here, our Democratic colleagues are poised to reject a bill to protect our elections, to ensure that only Americans vote in our elections. That should give everybody in this country pause and give them a glimpse into the soul of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle and what they think about citizenship. They don't respect citizenship.

Our Democratic colleagues don't believe that citizenship matters. They don't believe that sovereignty matters because if they did, they wouldn't do this. If our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, our Democratic colleagues, had some small fix or even significant fix to believe that we could make our system better, we would be all ears.

If it was a legitimate exercise to say, yes, of course, we want to not only have it against the law for noncitizens to vote in our elections, as is currently the case, but we also want to make sure that we remove all Federal barriers and, indeed, improve the situation and have requirements in place to guarantee that we can check, know, and ensure that only citizens vote. That is not what they are doing.

The legislation that we put forward is pretty simple, the SAVE Act. It will allow you to come forward, prospectively. If you are going to vote this fall, you can go vote. You are in the system. If you move, your address changes, you get married, if something changes at some point over the next few years, we require States to clean their voter rolls.

If you want to register to vote, take a passport, take a military ID, take a Real ID, all of which demonstrate your citizenship. If you don't have one of those, take your regular driver's license, get a copy of your birth certificate, get a copy of an adoption certificate or naturalization papers and go down to say that you can register and are a citizen.

There are 400,000 tombstones on the other side of the Potomac River. They either gave the last full measure of devotion or risked the last full measure of devotion. I think you can take a few seconds to make sure that you demonstrate your citizenship to vote.

More than that, we put in massive safeguards. We give flexibility to States. We say that if they want to come up with a better way to do it, they can balance and check the Federal systems. They can sign an affidavit as a government official saying that they believe this is a citizen. They checked, and this is a citizen. They provided all the information necessary. Great.

There are no barriers, no undue burdens, no restrictions on the ability of an American citizen to vote under our plan. What it will do is give not just increased confidence but a return of belief in our system, a belief that they can actually trust elections, a belief that it is, in fact, their country.

Shouldn't we want this to be our country? Shouldn't we want to be proud and say this is our country, these are our rules, and that anyone is welcome to come here under the terms of our invitation only and will follow the rules. Criminals are not going to be allowed here, and they are not going to be allowed to carry out criminal activities. They are not going to be allowed to murder, rape, maim, or steal. However, if someone is coming here and is hardworking and follows our rules, God bless them, come on in, but they are going to vote only if they are a citizen.

The fact that our colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't want to guarantee that tells us everything we need to know. It gives up the whole game. It gives up the fact that our colleagues don't want sovereignty and security, and that is the truth.

There is a reason our colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to continue to throw money at international organizations, want to send an endless supply of funds and blank checks to the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and all the NGOs that are funneling people into our country, endangering our own citizens, and putting children into the sex trafficking trade.

All of that is being done on purpose. All of that is being done because our colleagues on the other side of the aisle want it all to occur. There is no other explanation for it.

I am tired. I have been sitting here watching for my entire time in Congress, watching this President--to the extent he even knows where the hell he is--destroy this country and endanger the people who I represent, destroy and endanger Texans. That is what has happened, nothing less.

The President of the United States and the people who work for him have endangered our country. The Secretary of Homeland Secretary has endangered our country.

Ask the now probably thousands, certainly hundreds of parents who are sitting there having lost loved ones, killed, raped, or maimed, the tens of thousands of parents who have lost their kids to fentanyl poisoning, ask any of them. Ask the cops. Ask the Border Patrol who want to do their job but are being told they can't and being accused of whipping Haitian migrants. That is what is happening. Here we are again.

We are not even talking about securing the border in this bill. We are not talking about doing the things we should be doing as a sovereign Nation. We are talking about doing the simplest thing if you are a sovereign Nation, and that is ensure the integrity of your elections and that only citizens can vote.

I am proud of the job the Republican Party has done and my Republican colleagues have done, and the Speaker of the House has done in putting forward legislation that will solve the problem, that follows the law, defers where appropriate to States, sets a Federal standard where it is appropriate with respect to Federal elections only, follows the constitutional parameters, and lays it all out in a way to protect our elections.

This is what we are supposed to do. We are supposed to protect our country. We are, in fact, the guardians of our country. When we sit in this hallowed Chamber, what on Earth are we supposed to do but do the work of protecting the country, which leads me to another point.

Our country is in danger right now because the President of the United States no longer has the mental capacity to carry out the powers and the duties of the office. I get no great joy in saying that. It is true.

It is appalling to watch the news media and my Democrat colleagues in this Chamber, in the Senate, and in the administration ignore the reality of the state of the President's mental acuity, endangering the American people, and now suddenly wake up because there is an election in a few months and suddenly go, oh, we need to do something about this. Why? Because there is an election in a few months.

Even at that, they are unwilling to call the question. I would posit that they are unwilling to call the question because the Democrats in the White House, indeed, the First Lady and the Vice President of the United States, are all complicit in covering up the lack of mental ability of the President, covering up the health, the mental health, the physical health of the

President. By doing this, they are endangering the American people. Indeed, they are unconstitutionally calling for President by committee.

I heard the former Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson; I have heard numerous current administration staffers; I have heard numerous Democrat colleagues in the House and the Senate talk about: Don't worry. The President has some good people around him. Don't worry. There are a lot of really good people that are advising him. There are committees of people.

First of all, I am not blown away by the quality of the people surrounding the President. Second of all, that is not how it works.

The Founders firmly rejected, from memory, I think it is Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 70, the notion of President by committee, that it would endanger us, that you needed an executive, you needed a Commander in Chief to make the decisions.

A brief note to my colleagues on this side of the aisle who are saying Chip, shhhh. Don't say anything. Don't bring it up. We are in election season. They are falling on their own sword. They are blowing up. Let them blow up.

What I am concerned about blowing up is our country if we are attacked and we have a President in the White House who can't respond. That job is not just from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. This matters. It matters that the President of the United States is, at best, questionable to make decisions when it matters.

It is why the 25th Amendment exists, which, of course, requires the Vice President to take action, which I do not believe the Vice President will do because the Vice President knows she is complicit in having hid from the American people the mental state of the President of the United States for years.

This is not a political statement. As I have just noted, some people on my side of the aisle would rather I not say it. Shhhh. Let's just get to November. I just want our country to get to November. I want our country to get to December. I want our country to get to the next century.

When the President of the United States can't carry out the powers and the duties of the office without a committee of staff around him, when the press secretary at the White House today literally answered the question when asked by a reporter what would happen at 11 p.m. if nuclear weapons were fired at the United States, and her answer was: Well, there are some really good people around him that would come and talk to him. That gives me a lot of pause.

All of us who are in elected office have advisers, people we trust, seek their advice, seek their counsel, but I can promise you, when you know what hits the fan, if I have to come down here and make a decision, I walk down here and make a decision because that is what we are hired to do. When you have to have a vote, you have to vote. When you have to come down and take action, you have to take action. The President of the United States is uniquely in that position.

The fact of the matter is this administration has been propped up, effectively, a Manchurian candidate, being propped up with committees of people around the President, hiding and obfuscating the truth, making decisions. That, frankly, should give all of us pause.

It is no wonder that the country is in such bad shape at the moment. Our country is being impoverished by the day. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found over the last year almost a million native-born Americans lost jobs on net.

Americans are spending over $12,800 more annually to buy the basics because of the inflation under this administration. Mortgage rates are up to 7 percent. Housing affordability has plummeted to record lows. Gasoline is up 55 percent, eggs up 40 percent, flour up 35 percent, electricity up 29 percent, baby food up 29 percent, breakfast cereal up 25 percent, bread up 25 percent, chicken and poultry up 25 percent, lunch meat up 24 percent, eating out up 23 percent, rent up 21 percent, used cars up 20 percent. Americans have lost over $4,400 paying higher energy costs under the President.

The Biden administration announced they paused all non-FTA exports for liquefied natural gas. What do you think that does? It doesn't help us. We are involved in endless conflicts, funding them. Nobody in this Chamber wants Ukraine to lose to Russia, but nobody in this Chamber wants to continue to fund a perpetual war by an administration that is out of touch while the American people are suffering. Biden has sold off more than 40 percent of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and in 2023, the SPR stockpile plunged to 40-year lows.

The fact of the matter is this administration is failing the American people. Republicans have for the last 18 months in this Congress for sure, if not the duration of the Biden administration, but certainly the last 18 months been putting forward responsible, strong policies that the President of the United States and my Democrat colleagues are rejecting.

We have worked hard to put forward Limit, Save, Grow, which would dramatically turn around the economic situation, dramatically reduce spending, dramatically reduce the size of the bureaucracy, dramatically improve our energy prices and competition around the globe, which, by the way, which would have had an impact in Ukraine, which would have helped us push back on Russia.

We passed responsible appropriations bills. We got caps enacted and put in place. The defense bill is funded. The increase in defense spending is funded out of taking cuts to the IRS expansion the Democrats wanted to foist on hardworking Americans and we took money out of remaining COVID funds. Nondefense was then held flat.

We passed H.R. 2, a responsible border security bill, which would have ended the release of people into the United States. It would have tightened down on parole and asylum. It would have ended the release of unaccompanied children. It would have treated them responsibly. It would have reduced the power of cartels. It would have reduced sex trafficking, and it would have kept people like Laken Riley alive. We did that. We passed H.R. 2. Our Democrat colleagues opposed it. They opposed it in the Senate, and they opposed it here.

This Republican Conference has passed appropriation bill after appropriation bill to be rejected by our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. We have passed thousands of amendments. We passed seven appropriations bills last year. We passed a number of appropriations bills this year, and we are continuing to pass them.

We are doing the work the American people sent us here to do with zero help from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, and, frankly, I am proud of the work that we have been putting forward that has been rejected by our Democrat colleagues.

I haven't always agreed. I have been very clear on this floor. You have to deliver results. You have to get some things across the finish line. You have to be willing to hold the line and fight and use the power of the purse. There is more that we can do but make no mistake about it. We have been putting forward good bills to make our economy stronger.

If our legislation had been adopted by our colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the President, inflation would be down. The border would be secure. People would be enjoying much more affordable energy. Job creation would be up. People's lives and quality of life would be better. More Americans would be secure on the streets.

This week, we have on the floor a bill that would protect voting and ensure that only citizens vote. Again, if our colleagues on the other side of the aisle would work with us, we could do that. We could restore belief in our system. These are all the things that we have been working on, working to try to do.

Right now, our Democrat colleagues are wrapped around the axle trying to figure out what to do about their President because with all due respect, they are not putting America first. The President of the United States right now is not putting America first. The Vice President of the United States is not putting America first. The Cabinet is not putting America first.

If you were going to put America first, if you were going to put Americans first, then you would call it like you see it. You would act. You would lead. You would do what everyone in America knows needs to be done.

Everyone with eyes who has been watching the President--and again, I take no joy in saying it. He is our President. I disagree with him a lot, but he is our President, and the President of the United States needs to be strong and coherent and capable and able to lead in an increasingly dangerous world.

Notwithstanding the horrible policies that have been promoted and pushed by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, can we not just agree that the President of the United States should be mentally aware and competent to carry out the powers and duties of the office?

Will our colleagues on the other side of the aisle and in the administration not look at this the way every American is seeing this right now?

Even the most politically biased people in the media and around the country are looking at this and throwing their hands up and saying what is going on?

Admittedly, it is because they are panicking about the election in November when what it should be is that they are panicked about the state of our country and whether or not we can be safe and secure.

In the Book of Acts, it is noted that Paul was a Roman citizen. The Roman authorities put him in chains and were about to flog him without a trial, but when he said that he was born a citizen, they let him go even though he was spreading the message of hate and distrust of a religious minority, but citizenship meant a great deal.

One of the things that eventually led to the downfall of the Roman Empire was the fact that over the next few centuries after that, citizenship meant less and less and less until it meant almost nothing. Its people no longer knew how to preserve the civilization their ancestors had built. We cannot let the same thing happen here.

Citizenship matters. Being a citizen of this country matters. It matters in observing the White House. It matters in citizens voting in elections. It matters in the policies we put forward to put the American people first. Citizenship has to matter again.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 7 o'clock and 15 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, July 10, 2024, at 10 a.m. for morning-hour debate.

Mr. Speaker, we were all saddened to learn today of the passing of the spouse of one of our Members, Thomas Massie, the gentleman from Kentucky. His wife, Rhonda, of many years--they were childhood sweethearts--suddenly passed away yesterday. Mr. Massie had to drive home to Kentucky and be home with his family, which is where he is today.

I ask everybody in the Chamber and everybody around the complex to please rise and observe a moment of silence and offer your prayers and thoughts and condolences for our good friend from Kentucky.

Madam Speaker, as we will be recessing tomorrow for the week, next week many of us will be celebrating America's Independence Day back home in our districts and throughout the country.

Very few of us will be here. A few may, but we are rarely, if ever, on the floor of the U.S. House on Independence Day.

It is obviously a day not just worth celebrating but that the Founders intended specifically for us to celebrate.

I recall now 4 years ago in the summer of 2020 in the midst of some of the protests and riots and burning of buildings, tossing of statues and damaging of statues throughout the country in the summer of 2020, there was a lot of effort to tear down monuments and memorials.

I took my staff, and I drove to Philadelphia on July 2. We were here late right up through that day. I think we finished voting on July 1.

On July 2, I drove with my staff, I went to Philadelphia, and I went to Independence Hall and visited with the National Park Service there who were caring for Independence Hall.

Fortunately, there was nobody at that point threatening to damage Independence Hall. There were some rumors and concerns.

I recorded a video there and talked about the importance of Independence Hall. In that speech or in that video, when I recorded that, I pointed out that it wasn't the bricks and the mortar. It wasn't the building itself. It wasn't the structure.

That is all interesting to go see from a historic standpoint, but it was what those men did inside of Independence Hall that changed the course of history forever.

The National Park Service was very gracious. They allowed me and my staff, the three staff members with me, to go into Independence Hall on July 2.

We were alone. It was just us because it was closed down for public tours because you will remember, this was during the time of COVID.

We were able to be in Independence Hall on July 2. Now, why is that interesting? Because students of history will know that that was the actual monumental day.

That was the day that our leaders of the colonies, but the Founders of this country, the leaders broke away from the crown. That was the day that they voted.

On July 3, the next day, John Adams wrote a letter to his wife, Abigail, back home in Massachusetts. Remember, of course, he couldn't call her. He couldn't text her. He couldn't send her an email.

He wrote Abigail a letter that would get to her saying, ``Yesterday, the greatest question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never was nor will be decided among men.

``A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, `that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, and as such they have, and of right ought to have, full power to make war, conclude peace, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which other States may rightfully do.''

``The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.

``It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.

``You will think me transported with enthusiasm, but I am not. I am well aware of the toil, and the blood, and treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States.

``Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is more than worth all the means, and that posterity will triumph in that day's transaction, even although we should rue it, which I trust in God we shall not.''

Again, that was July 3, 1776, the day after those men voted in Independence Hall to separate from the crown.

They had not yet adopted the Declaration of Independence. That would occur the following day on July 4, 1776.

Obviously, Mr. Adams thought July 2 would be the day that would be celebrated. Of course, as it turns out, because the Declaration was signed and dated July 4, that became the day on which we celebrate our independence and all that flows from it.

It might seem trivial, and in some respects, it is, so long as we are celebrating. In the midst of the parades and the fireworks and the hot dogs and the fun of next week, we should remember why. We should remember what Mr. Adams wrote to Abigail. We should remember what they sacrificed.

Much is made in this town often of the palace intrigue of what one Member says to another or who is endorsed by another. Much is made of relationships and who has angst with whom.

Shall we not remember that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were literally at each other's throats, fighting because they disagreed so vehemently about the power of government, Federal versus State?

Shall we not forget the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton? Shall we not forget the massive disputes our country has wrestled with?

I will just say this: Gladly. It is one of the great things about this country that we, with passion, shall engage on behalf of the people that we represent to come here and fight for them, to stand up and do something that we said we would do when we came to this town to change the trajectory, to preserve the Republic that these gentlemen met and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to defend. They meant that, and they knew what it meant.

I think it merits a debate here among our colleagues on both sides of the aisle in both Chambers, in the executive branch, in the judiciary.

What is it that we are doing? What are we doing on behalf of the people who sent us to this town? What animates us? Is it to get reelected? Is it to raise money? Is it to chair a committee? Is it to have a certain amount of power, or is it to fundamentally preserve and protect this great experiment for our children and our grandchildren? Is it to put all on the line?

Many great patriots in this Chamber wear the battle scars of lost eyes and lost legs, both sides of the aisle, for fighting and standing to defend this country and defend the flag that sits behind the Speaker's chair.

What are we doing? What are we doing as elected Members of Congress? I hear often now from people that I represent. I am tired of another sternly worded letter, and I am tired of yet another hearing when they see the country that they love being attacked, being attacked not by necessarily by enemies abroad but by our own people and in many cases our own leaders.

The people whom I represent who reach out to me, who pull me aside in an airport or pull me aside at home or pull me aside in the supermarket or at school when I drop my kids off, they don't come to me asking about some endorsement or some conversation had among Members of the floor.

They come to me, and they ask: Why am I not living free? What is happening? What is wrong with our country?

In this week in which we are going to celebrate freedom and celebrate independence, 248 years removed from what I just described in the letter from Mr. Adams to Mrs. Adams, are we free? It is a legitimate question. Are we a free people?

Some people might superficially just say well, sure, of course, you are free. You can walk out of the Chamber, Mr. Roy. You can walk out and say what you want, do what you want. Superficially speaking, compared to certain other places and times in history or other parts of the world, you could argue that we are free.

But are we free? Can we say what we want? Can we speak freely without the power of government being used against us? Can we pray at an abortion clinic without being put in jail for 2 years if you are 75 years old, as the Department of Justice just did?

Can you speak your mind and say that you believe in the institution of marriage without being threatened with losing your job or potentially punished with hate speech? Can you?

Can you speak freely about a man and a woman, the definition thereof, and that a man not be able to swim against a woman in a meet? You kind of can, but can you?

Can you send your kids to a school where your kids can pray to the God under which this Nation was founded? Can you, in that school, trust that your children are going to be taught the values of Western civilization and the founding principles that gave us this great country that indeed, ultimately, led to the abolition of slavery and freedom for people around the world?

Will you be taught about the bravery and courage of the men at Lexington and Concord, in Independence Hall, or in all the battlefields during the Civil War, World War I, or World War II and storming the beaches? Will you be taught about that great history, or will your kids be taught to apologize for being American?

Are you free if you are sending your kids to school with tax dollars for your children to be indoctrinated and taught that your Nation is not great or that your God does not exist? Are you free or are you slave to a tyranny of government that tells you that you must pay taxes to something that will save the secular world, itself its own religion, that that is something you must subsidize and you must bow down to?

Are you free if your military is more focused, as many reports have been showing, on advancing nonbinary, transgender, lesbian, gay issues than on a military focused on defending the United States of America?

Are you free if we are continuing to advance our military into war or fund wars abroad without actual declarations of war, with 20-something- year-old Authorizations for Use of Military Force without ever having a real, thorough, and full debate on the floor of the House? Are you free if you are continually funding war to the detriment of your own financial well-being and the death and destruction of many of your own colleagues?

Are you free if your daughter can be registered to be drafted, as the United States Senate just voted to require out of the Senate Armed Services Committee and sent down to the floor, and many Republicans voted for? Are you free if your daughter can be forced to register for Selective Service and be drafted?

Are you free if you have $35 trillion of debt and have $1.1 trillion of interest, if you are racking up $1 trillion of debt every 2 to 3 months? Are you free if the U.S. dollar is getting destroyed and you can't afford the groceries, the necessities of life, and the car to go take your family to their job or their school or to carry out your business if you are a plumber or an electrician or any other job? Are you free? Are you free if your leaders are spending your Nation into oblivion and undermining your economic freedom and well-being?

Are you free if your borders are so wide open that your own people are getting killed and murdered by those being let onto the streets out of the jail cells and the criminals from other parts of the world? Are you free? Do you think Laken Riley's parents feel free? Do you think the little 12-year-old girl who was just raped in Iowa by two illegal immigrants let into the United States and paroled by this administration, do you think they feel free? Do you think that the parents of the 13-year-old girl who was raped and murdered and the families of the Maryland women, Rachel Morin and Kayla Hamilton, these families who lost their loved ones, do you think they feel free? Without security, how are you free?

Do you think all the parents who have lost their loved ones to fentanyl poisoning, with fentanyl pouring into their communities, are free? Are we truly free?

Are you free to comment about Presidential elections without being targeted by the Department of Justice? Are you free to talk about schools without being targeted by the Department of Justice? Are you free to go forward and protest in favor of life without being targeted by the Department of Justice, as Mark Houck had happen to him?

Are you free to speak freely about the abuses of transgender surgeries in a hospital in Texas and Texas Children's Hospital and not have the Department of Justice come in and prosecute you, as just happened in Texas? Are you free?

Are you free if the Department of Justice wants to make you a criminal because you sell a single gun to another person in Texas and wants to create a national registry to be able to track those weapons? Are you free?

Are you free if you can't go buy the automobile of your choice because a bunch of people in Washington have

said, no, we have to regulate it, make it more expensive. We have to mandate electric vehicles, which are piling up on lots, and you can't afford the internal combustion engine that you used to be able to go get. Now, you are wondering how you are even going to replace the car you have that you need to get around to do your job and carry out your life.

Are you free? I would suggest to you that, in supposedly the freest and greatest country in the history of mankind, we are no longer free. I would suggest to you that, as we are heading into this week to celebrate the great birth of liberty that this country provided for the world, that we have been stripped of that liberty and that we have been trading it away, that we have been trading it away right here from the floor upon which I stand, and that we have done so even this year.

These are the questions with which we should wrestle. These are the great debates we should have.

I am exceptionally proud to be an American. I am exceptionally proud to be in Congress. I believe that this country can and must be free again, but a country that has no borders, a country that is $35 trillion in debt, a country whose government is weaponized against its own people, a country that doesn't even know how to define ``man'' and ``woman'' or pay honor to the God upon which this Nation was founded is not a free country.

If we are going to do anything in this body as Republicans or Democrats, if we are going to do anything in this election cycle, if we are going to do anything at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, it should be to restore our fundamental, God-given rights and to reduce the size, scope, and power of a government that is operating completely in opposition to those liberties.

The people who struggle today in this country struggle primarily because of the government that is operating against them, not because the government is protecting or helping them. The people who struggle in this country today, it is because of a burdensome, large, indebted government that has lost sight of the reason it exists and the fact that it is through the consent of the governed that it has its power.

The other thing that happened on July Fourth, somewhat miraculously, was that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams passed away 50 years to the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a document in which both had significant hands in writing, Jefferson obviously being the primary author.

On June 24, 1826, about 10 days before Jefferson died at his home in Monticello, he wrote the following to the Mayor of Washington upon having to decline the invitation to the 50th anniversary celebration due to his health, which obviously failed him 10 days later. He wrote, may our independence ``be to the world what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights and an undiminished devotion to them.''

As we go out as Representatives of the people in this great Republic over the next week and go home to our districts, I hope we will remember those words, but that ultimately doesn't mean much. I hope that when we come back to this Chamber, we will remember those words.

I hope that as we form our plans for the coming years that we will embrace with the seriousness and resolve of all those we celebrate and to whom we give lip service of our great admiration for their sacrifice and their courage, whether they have worn the uniform and stormed the beaches at Normandy or they fought for our freedoms at our founding, or whether they were these men in that room, or whether they are those who came before us representing the people in this Chamber. It has to be more than just simple words of recognition.

It can't be a fancy celebration at an 80th anniversary of D-Day. We have to actually carry out those words of affection by being willing to sacrifice our own well-being and good for the next generation because that is what we have lost. We have lost the willingness to sacrifice at all so that the next generation might live free to give up the comforts of promises from a Federal Government, of continued checks, continued welfare, to give up the trappings of, frankly, a heavily falsified world of comfort in suburban America, propped up by profligate government spending, waiting, waiting to teeter off the edge.

This is not about personalities in this Chamber. This is not about someone being too caustic or mean to one of their colleagues. Grow up. Wake up. Understand your duty. Understand that when you come here and you swear an oath and you sit before that flag and you sit in this Chamber and all the speeches that come before it, that we owe it to all of those 400,000 at Arlington National Cemetery and the thousands of cemeteries across this country in which those who gave or were willing to give the last full measure of devotion, we owe it to them and those who risked it all to risk it all ourselves.

What good is an election certificate that we are unwilling to use in fullness?

This next week, I will look forward to riding in a parade in central Texas and celebrating with my 14-year-old, my 13-year-old, my wife, and my friends and family, just like everybody else, and I will have a good time doing it.

When we come back here on July 8, let us set out to do the hard work that is actually required; not the pointing of fingers, not the recriminations, but actually set out to do the things we said we would do to cut the profligate spending; to secure the border of the United States; to make our military the strongest military they can be, sparingly used, giving them care when they get home, the tools to carry out their jobs; giving you healthcare freedom, going to the doctor of your choice; and giving you energy freedom, being able to get reliable energy and the cars of your choice without dictates from the bureaucrats in this town that are crushing the American Dream.

America is going to turn 250 years old in 2 years. As a birthday present for America turning 250 years old, are we going to give our kids and our grandkids their birthright or are we going to take it away from them?

I hope it is the former.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 31 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, June 28, 2024, at 9 a.m.