Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I looked at the video anime and was trying to figure it out. I couldn't see it. I am told if you stop it frame by frame, you can see what my Democrat friends are talking about. I couldn't see it. I tried to freeze-frame, and I saw what I was told was supposed to be our colleague, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez. I was insulted for her. If that is supposed to be her, that is really unfair.

Madam Speaker, I didn't see the violence being talked about. We should not condone violence. The reason it is so hard to sit here and listen to the condemnation from the other side is because when there was violence against us, there was no condemnation.

My wife and I went to a speech at the White House, and I have yet to hear anybody condemn the attempted violence on us. We were chased for two blocks. Rand Paul was on TV when he was chased because he had cameras and Secret Service around him. We didn't have that.

If it weren't for a guy popping up and opening a locked door, we would have--I told Kathy: Look, I am afraid they are going to get here before this door is opened. You run on down to Pennsylvania Avenue. There are cops down there. They will be beating on me; you just get away.

Nobody has condemned all that violence that I have ever heard.

This is where we ought to be able to come together. Oh, and by the way, people who committed violence and did crimes in this building need to be punished. For many of them, the most serious crime was obstructing an official session of Congress.

I didn't know it was a crime in 2016, but most of the Democratic Party committed a felony right here in this Chamber by obstructing an official session of Congress, not 6 hours like January 6, but 26 hours.

Madam Speaker, I certainly appreciate my friend General Bergman for using this time to pay tribute to veterans. I have seen the statistics from an article in 2018, 71 percent of young Americans between 17 and 24 are ineligible to serve in the military; 24 million out of 34 million people in that age group. The demographics of the military as of 2018 indicate that there is just under 1.29 million people serving, men and women serving in the military. That is less than 0.5 percent of the U.S. population.

We owe our military the deepest amount of appreciation and thanks. And I just went back to the office this afternoon and got another plea from another servicemember. These people are the very tiny, few volunteers willing to step up and defend America at all costs, including their own lives.

Jesus said that is the greatest love there can be. They love their country. They love those they serve with. They are willing to face anything, except corrupt, high-ranking officers who are so busy sticking their heads up the atriums of the White House that they are not concerned enough about their own men.

We saw that in the exit of Afghanistan. We saw servicemembers die because commanding officers didn't care enough about their own troops.

This notice says: You either take the vaccination--without regard to whether you have had bad reactions to things in there, like the warnings say--we want to experiment on you like we did the Tuskegee Airmen. This is wrong, and we should be standing up for our servicemembers, not only saying thank you, but thank you and you shouldn't have to serve and follow orders that are experiments that we have outlawed such experimentation on our servicemembers.

Thank you, we owe you a debt of gratitude, and we are going to be fighting for you here.

Mr. Speaker, in recent days, I have been doing some research. In fact, one of the things I was looking at is the average income over the last couple of decades going back to 1991, and this was average annual wage according to the Social Security Administration, so maybe somebody would take issue with their accuracy. But according to their numbers, during the Clinton administration, the average American's income went up each year about $1,000 a year. So over President Clinton's 8 years in office, the average income went up about $8,000 over those 8 years.

Under President Bush, it was a little more than $1,000 a year during his 8 years.

But during the Obama administration it was between a $7,000 and $8,000 increase during the Obama administration.

Then during the 4 years of the Trump administration, the average income went up about $2,000 a year. It was between $7,000 and $8,000 for the 4 years, a dramatic increase.

But I was shocked, as I was looking at different numbers, to find that the net worth for Black households in America during the 8 years of the Obama administration went down by 30 percent, on average. During the Trump administration, it didn't go down. It went up significantly.

As I look at what is being proposed in the Build Back Better program, and I see this administration having canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, which certainly was going to, and has, caused an escalation in fuel prices and energy prices, and of course, President Biden released the penalties that had been put on the Russian natural gas pipeline, so it is doing great now, and took off some of the penalties on Iran--anyway, we have seen the price of energy going up significantly.

It brought back to mind yet again the Honorable John Dingell's comment. He was looking forward to pushing through, in essence, a socialized medicine program through the committee he was chair of in 2009 and 2010, but he was famously asked about the cap-and-trade bill. He responded that the cap-and-trade bill is not only a tax, but it is a great big tax.

He explained before that when you raise the price of energy, you are not hurting the billionaires, the megawealthy. It is an inconvenience to them when you raise the price of energy, be it electricity, propane, natural gas, coal, whatever it is. It is an inconvenience to the very wealthy, but to those who are on fixed incomes, those who are scraping by working so hard every week and just getting by, if you increase the price of gasoline, electricity, energy, you just devastate those households. It is not just a little tax to them. It is devastating.

The inflation that comes with an upward explosion of the price of fuel and energy, but especially fuel, as this administration has done, it inflates the price of everything. There is just not much of anything, unless you are buying from some pickup truck or some roadside kiosk--otherwise, you are having to pay a lot of extra energy costs, whether it is for the ingredients of something you are buying or whether it is the product getting to market. But usually, it is all of the above. The energy prices inflate costs of everything, basically.

That is what has happened to the working poor in America. That is what has happened to seniors on fixed incomes. They are being devastated as prices continue to skyrocket, with no end in sight.

On a trip some years back during the Obama administration, some of us went to Germany, and we met with some of their energy leaders. In one meeting, the driver of our little van was from Berlin, and he sat in and listened. I was talking to him privately after the meeting, and he said I hear all these rich people talking about how great our green energy is in Germany, but I have had to go from having one job to having three jobs, hardly ever getting to see my family, so they could brag about our green energy. But it is

destroying my family. It has completely destroyed my family time. I am having to work these two other jobs just to cover our energy costs. So it is kind of hard listening to them brag about it when it is coming out of my hide. I am the one, and people just like me all over Germany are the ones, who are paying for them to be able to brag about our green energy because it is costing us a tremendous amount in the way of personal time, family time, and additional time working to pay for their bragging.

As we look at these issues and the costs skyrocketing in America, who has benefited? Well, China has benefited dramatically. We know they are still on course to have 100 new coal-powered energy plants go online over the next couple of years. They don't care.

Of course, when we had coal-powered plants here in the U.S.--there are not many left--but when we had them, they have scrubbers in there that are taking pollutants out of the air before it ever gets out of the stacks to the air.

If we are doing the coal burning here in the U.S., it is not so hard on our environment as it is in China or India, but especially China, because when people are just struggling to survive and to have enough money to put food on the table for their families, they are not that worried about how their yard looks or how things look, how the environment is. The same is true not only for an individual but for a country.

If the economy is struggling, the people in that country are not as interested in cleaning up the environment. We will have to wait, they think, until we are making decent money, and then we can worry about the environment.

Here in the United States, though, if you go back to 2007, every year since then, including through the Trump years, we have been producing 1.3 percent less carbon dioxide. We can debate about what that does to the environment, whether it makes the temperature warmer.

I have read where experts have said if you have a choice between the temperature getting slightly warmer or slightly colder, you want warmer because if it is getting slightly colder, that means there is less time for crops to grow. If it is slightly warmer, not too much warmer, then you have more time for crops to grow. You have more food, and you have fewer people starving.

There are a lot of areas for debate, but for those who are concerned about carbon dioxide emissions, we have been on the right track. We continue to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we are putting out in this country.

So there is nothing about building back better. This has been going on for a long time. Largely, we are told by the experts, that is because we have been converting coal plants to natural gas, and natural gas is such a clean-burning fuel.

For those who want to get rid of all fossil fuels, if they would just take a serious look at all the things in the room in which they are located or the car in which they are located, they will find that so much of what we have that has made our lives easier, helping people rest better, is as a result of the use of fossil fuel. There are so many products that cannot be manufactured without natural gas as part of the manufacturing process. You have to have natural gas to make so many products.

I was looking at getting some plastic composite boards for part of the area in our backyard so they wouldn't deteriorate so often, and they are expensive. But when they last for decades instead of a matter of short years, it looks like a good thing. That is using recycled plastic, finding more and more uses for that plastic, fiberglass.

There are so many things we can't produce. Synthetic fibers, so much of the carpets and rugs we have are synthetic. The toothbrush, you wouldn't have a modern-day toothbrush--and I realize that, yes, there are people who have used bark off of certain trees to brush their teeth. I get that, but I kind of like having a modern-day toothbrush myself. You wouldn't have that without fossil fuel, particularly natural gas.

People say we need more electric cars. We need to get rid of fossil fuel. You cannot currently manufacture an electric car without the use of fossil fuel. Even if you don't use fossil fuel to power the vehicle, you are going to have to use it in the production of things within the car or there will be no car. So, I don't know, maybe someday somebody will build a wooden car, but wooden batteries are not going to work.

For those of us that recognize how the length of life has gotten even longer during our modern history, medicine advances have just been extraordinary. There is a great book, ``The Five Thousand Year Leap'', that points out that when settlers came to America, they used basically the same type of farming methodology and tools that have been used for thousands of years. There hasn't been a whole lot of change.

But if you look at the last 150 years in the United States and in Western civilization, you see dramatic increases and advances in the way that we have progressed, whether it is farming, medicine. Heck, if you go back 100 years or so when medical historians say in the early 1900s, up to that point, for the whole of human history, you had a better chance of getting sicker after seeing a doctor than you did at getting better.

And then you look at the--since 1910, 1920--some say it might be the 1918 protocols during that pandemic--but around that time, you started having a better chance of getting better after seeing a doctor. And look at where we are now. People go to the doctor and expect to be made well because we have been able, by the grace of God, to develop some different cures. Life has gotten longer. Life has gotten better quality.

So much of what we have is made by the use of fossil fuels. We need to do it cleanly, as cleanly as possible. But, again, when you take an economy in the direction that the build back better Biden administration has been doing as we head to the toilet with this economy--and there is no end in sight for this race to the bottom--then you realize we have come so far and now we are going in the wrong direction.

There have been times, like World War II when we were struggling mightily, but we are not going through a world war right now. We should be doing well. And we saw, during the Trump administration for the first time in decades, something had happened.

In 1990, when I brought a friend to speak to our Rotary Club, he had said, We are going the wrong direction. We are becoming more and more reliant on foreign countries for our energy. It has been years, he said, since we have been energy independent, and we are going the wrong way and it is going to destroy this country, if we can't produce the energy we need.

Mr. Speaker, 30 years later--not even 30 years later--we were energy independent, the biggest producer of fossil fuels in the world. And we used it cleaner than anybody else. Virtually almost every other country, maybe some small ones, do a little better.

But China knows that they are not going to be breathing their own air, it turns with the planet, and we end up breathing as much as they do right here in America. Not the clean air we produce more of every year for many years, but the polluted air that China is letting off as they continue to move toward putting us in their wake as they move toward becoming the greatest economy in the world. And spending money, massive amounts of money we don't have, creates not only inflation but it weakens this country.

Mr. Speaker, I have heard some in recent days say if we are not careful, we are going to end up like Greece. And actually, if you look at the debt that we had at the end of the Obama administration, we were already Greece. The difference is, we got to produce our own currency. Greece was using the euro, so they didn't get to decide to create a lot more money in their system. And the dollar was the world standard. It was the world currency.

I know there are companies, including China, they are advocating against the dollar being the world currency and that it is used to buy oil in the world market, but that hasn't happened. I am very thankful for that. But if we were not the world currency, and we didn't produce our own money, then we would already be in as big a trouble as Greece is because of the recklessness. And we are seeing it like never before in this administration.

Yes, it is true the Obama administration, with the Democrats helping them, they hit between $1.5 and $1.6 trillion deficit in one year. Well, this administration, this Democrat majority are working very hard to eclipse that by a lot.

We were warned back when we had over a trillion-dollar deficit more than one year, the agencies that rate country's economies and their currency and their debt, they may have to rate, downgrade, our debt. Standard & Poor's did that because we wouldn't get our spending under control--not enough.

If any other rating agency had downgraded our debt, then the cost of borrowing money would have gone up dramatically and we would have ended up spending more paying interest than we were taking care of seniors who were counting on their fixed income. So there are some dark days ahead if we continue on this course of spending money we don't have. It is like everything this administration can see to throw money at that might help create more Democrat Party voters and they are throwing money at it.

So people were shocked, including Democrat friends, they were shocked to hear that this administration is proposing paying $450,000 to legal immigrants that were separated from a child. Well, we know that did happen some during the Trump years. We know that it has continued to happen during the Biden years; that it happened under the Obama administration. And it can be a good idea until we are sure that an adult with a child that is already breaking our laws by coming in illegally is actually related to and, hopefully, the parent of that child instead of part of the drug cartels that continue to use them in sex trafficking. And we have had people that turned out not to be related to the child they were claiming, and we have been able to interrupt that. And so it is important that we don't just take this at face value, especially when we have reports of children being recycled to come across with people over our border illegally.

So under the Biden administration, if you think, Okay, these people come in, they break U.S. law, we are going to give each one $450,000. And that might not mean much to somebody who has a son that sold paintings for $500,000, and I wouldn't object if the Biden administration wanted to give each illegal immigrant a painting that Hunter Biden had done. If they said, Here is your half a million; here is another painting that Hunter Biden has done. Enjoy it. Maybe you can sell it for half a million and you will be set for life. Let's try that.

Mr. Speaker, $450,000, if you look at the Social Security administration, the wages, well, for 2020, the most recent numbers we have, the average income for an American last year was $53,000--like $53,300 or something like that--but $53,000 a year.

Now, the rate is normally around 22 percent. There is data that indicates the effective rate paid for income tax may be around 13 to 14 percent. Let's just round it and say that the average American making $53,000 a year pays 20 percent income tax. That would be $10,600 a year that a person making $53,000 would pay in Federal income tax.

If you took all $10,600 of Federal income tax coming from the average wage-earner of $53,000 a year, and if you took that $10,600 and applied that toward the $450,000 President Biden wants to give to each of these illegal immigrants, it would take 42\1/2\ years of the average American wage Federal income tax to pay one person who broke the U.S. laws and came into the country illegally. That is what appears to be justice to the Biden administration.

And how is our President looking to the rest of the world? The story today, as he came into the G20 Summit, he came in--according to the article I saw--20 minutes late. He said, in essence, sorry to be late. He had been trying to get past the elevators--they had a problem with the elevators and that is why he was 20 minutes late. Somebody needs to help him.

I think it would be helpful not to leave people from the biggest countries, except for China and Russia, they didn't come--their leaders didn't come--but the rest, let's show them a little more respect by not making them wait 20 minutes for our President to show up. I think that would be a good thing. Kind of lend a better atmosphere to those type of meetings.

Perhaps then you wouldn't have foreign reporters saying things like: President Biden looks like he needs a nursing home and a hot bowl of soup. We need to help our President give a better image of America. I know there is no intention for our President causing problems like that, none whatsoever, so I am avoiding in engaging in personalities. But I think it would be good--there are so many people helping the President--to help him represent our country well.

So in an article here, a $450,000 payment to illegal aliens would exceed various programs for American citizens. And, of course, we, in Congress, did a good thing in recent years. We felt like the families of those people who have lost a loved one in combat, they should have been getting more than the measly thousands of dollars they were, so we increased the amount that the family of an American hero who was killed in combat would get. It was increased to $400,000.

Well, we find out that the Biden administration wants to provide more than we provide to the family who has lost a loved one in combat representing and defending our country and our national interests. Someone who crossed the border illegally, according to this administration, should get an extra $50,000 more than those who died for this country.

We also know--and I am pleased that Secretary Buttigieg is back from paternity leave because we do have a real crisis in our supply chain. We didn't have this problem during the Trump administration. It sure seemed to be a good idea the way we were manufacturing more of the things we need in America. I am not a big fan of tariffs, but as I told President Trump, since you are simply using them as a tool to get better trade deals then I will vote for those tariffs for such use, so that we can get more fairness in our agreements with foreign countries. That worked out. President Trump did make some good deals.

We are seeing all that fall aside as this administration seems to be more dedicated to helping China, Russia, Iran, and OPEC nations do better with their economy than we are here at home.

I realize there are some people here in Washington that feel like America has more than it deserves. I believe God has blessed us more than we deserve in America. We are seeing those things change as we have continued to forget more and more just who the source is for the blessings in this country.

In fact, what occurred to me is, instead of build back better, as we see the economy in shambles, prices going through the roof, more and more people now being fired, the economy appears headed in even deeper trouble the further we go. Maybe instead of build back better, we could call it Biden's bulldozings of our blessings.

Here is an article from Fortune. No sign of relief. The global supply chain crisis could last well into February. And as I thought back, Vice President Harris--it seems like it was back in August when she was speaking to some folks--somebody made fun of her for saying: You may want to order your Christmas presents early this year so you make sure you have them. I didn't know why anybody would make fun of her because, as it turns out, she was actually exactly right. Apparently she knew back in August we were going to have trouble getting the things we need in America.

I have been amazed to see car lots more empty than they have cars. Shocking. I have never seen some of these car lots with so few cars ever in my life.

There is an article from The Hill: More people in Manchin's, Sinema's home States want to hold off on new spending. That is from polls--an article by Mychael Schnell from The Hill.

People have been trying to convince Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema that they just need to sign off on spending trillions more dollars. But recent polls apparently are showing that people in their home States appreciate them not agreeing to more and more of the runaway spending that would just increase inflation.

One other thing people are noticing--a Washington Times story from Stephen Dinan titled ``Biden administration expands no-go zones where ICE can't arrest illegal immigrants''--so millions more are coming in, and fewer and fewer are being deported.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is important for people to understand that this feeling that we need to secure our borders doesn't come from any kind of xenophobia. I look at the Hispanic culture, and though generalizing can be dangerous, generally speaking, I see faith in God; I see a hard work ethic; and I see a devotion to family. Well, those are things I believe made America the great country it has been. We need more of that help.

Mr. Speaker, if you look at the contributions that immigrants have made from countries all over the world to this country, to make it as powerful and as great as it is, we want immigration. No country in the world, even those bigger than the United States, is as generous with providing visas as the United States is--over 1 million a year.

But as Milton Friedman pointed out, if we are going to provide welfare in this country, which started back in the 1960s, then we can't have open borders or this country will be over very soon. It will be overwhelmed with people coming in. It will destroy the golden goose that some look at the U.S. as being, and there won't be any country to flee to looking for a better life.

Some in allied countries tell me: If you lose your freedom in America, there won't be any freedom in the world. We will all lose our freedom pretty quickly if you lose yours.

This is critical stuff. But I think the biggest danger of people swarming across our border, as they have been doing this year unimpeded, is the danger that Benjamin Franklin pointed out. He didn't go into detail, but as most people here remember, he was asked by a lady as he left the Constitutional Convention at the conclusion: What have you given us?

And as most everybody here knows, he replied: A republic, madam, if you can keep it.

A republic, a republican form of government, that is with a little R, not the Republican Party. A republic is what the Romans came up with after they looked at democracy from the Greeks. They actually had a real democracy where most everybody participated in the big decisions. Fortunately, they realized you can't let everybody vote as a juror in law cases, so they restricted those law case juries to only having 501 people. As I understand it, it was 501 people on the jury that voted to make Socrates drink poison as his penalty.

That is what you see, Mr. Speaker, when you have too many participating in a process. It gets out of hand. You get a handful, they start running, and they get people fired up. Before you know it, Mr. Speaker, one of the finest men in the country is ordered to drink poison.

Mr. Speaker, you have to be careful. That is what the Romans realized, so they created a republic. We like the democratic idea that people get to vote and participate in government, but let's have them elect representatives, then the representatives study the issues, and they vote on behalf of the rest of the country. If we don't like how they are voting, then we throw them out in the next election and select another representative. That is the republic form of government.

Republics generally have not lasted more than 200 years. We are 30 years or so past the 1789 ratification of our Constitution. Some would say: Well, when we pass 200 years, we are living on borrowed time.

We know history, but not enough. Too many of our schools quit teaching history because the Federal Government got involved in education.

Is education an enumerated power under the Constitution for the Federal Government to be involved in? No, it is not. But in 1979, President Carter created the Department of Education. As a result, the percentage of teachers in education has dropped dramatically.

Nearly three-fourths of the employees in K-12 education in Texas were teachers. But then after the Department of Education comes along, you got more bureaucrats here making more requirements for the folks in Austin and every State capital. So those folks have to hire more people to answer the mandates of the Department of Education in Washington. And to get their information, they have to mandate more people in every school board in elementary school.

I had a fantastic public school education in elementary school, middle school, and high school. In elementary school, we had a principal, the principal had an assistant, then there was the janitor, then there were the people who worked in the cafeteria, and that was it. Now, every school has to have so many people working in the administration gathering information to send to the State capital so they can send it to Washington.

As I recall, it was either late eighties or early nineties, I think it was early nineties, but I was on the board of Former Students of Texas A&M. I was asking the president, we had some other people there who worked on analyzing SAT scores. I said: I understand the SAT test has now been recalibrated so that students will do better than they have in the past for answering the same number of questions right. Yes, it has been recalibrated. People were embarrassed that SAT scores were a lot lower now than they used to be.

If you took the SAT in the early seventies, your score now would probably be around 200 points higher than it was back then. I was intrigued by that.

Why did we have to recalibrate the SAT? Well, it was so people wouldn't think schools were failing during the nineties. So SAT scores came back up not because they were doing better but because the scoring was recalibrated.

That was a rather interesting illumination on education, but we continue to see problems.

As both Republican and Democrat Presidents have been pushing more control, I think President Trump tried to give more control back locally. But what has happened is the Federal Government has taken more and more control right here in Congress. We continue to pass stuff that says: You don't get your money back. Of course, we know the money comes from the States up here. But we are not going to give you your money back unless you do this, that, or the other like we tell you.

Well, one of the mandates has been you had to pass this federally mandated test, and the federally mandated test was extremely light on history. I am told that there are times when there isn't any history, maybe one history question, and it is not always good history, if a question is asked.

So I hear from schools back home: We have to teach to the mandated test because if any student doesn't pass the federally mandated test, we don't get all of that Federal money that came from us back to us. They keep it for that student.

So to avoid not getting back even as much of our own money as we should, we have got to get people prepared to pass the test. So some schools, they got rid of music, they got rid of art. And some of us are big advocates and we go: Wait a minute. Do you not understand that when it comes to music, it comes to art, you are getting synapses to fire in the brain that might not fire otherwise, and if you can get more synapses firing, then the student's brain can accumulate more, work better, and then overall do better scoring?

Look, we have got to get them to pass the test, I am told, and those things, music, art, are not on the test, so we have got to concentrate on making sure the students are ready for that federally-mandated test. Well, that is a shame.

Music and art add dramatically to life. And there are some awesome art teachers. They didn't do too well with me. Apparently, there is an art gene in my background. My dad was artistic; had a daughter that was very artistic. But it was a latent gene in me. I see what it adds in the art contests that all of the Representatives, I think most of us have in our districts, but you see the incredible products that these kids are able to create, and it is really inspiring.

Yet so many are having to cut back or get rid of art altogether. Why? Because of the Federal mandates from here on high, on Mount Olympus, on Capitol Hill.

It is important, also, on how we treat people. When I go to the border, I don't mistreat anybody that comes in illegally. I try to help all I can, but they have come into the country illegally.

And we need to get back to the Trump policies before we get overwhelmed. And going back to the point that Benjamin Franklin made: It takes work to keep a republic. It doesn't just happen. That is why it has happened so rarely. That is why the United States of America is such an anomaly in history.

There has never been a country like this. Even Solomon's Israel didn't have all of the individual opportunities, all of the individual assets and comforts that we have here in America. It is an amazing place, but it takes work. It takes education of our children, training them up so they understand what it takes to preserve a republic, a representative form of government, and getting stronger and stronger as we have done until more recent years.

When you have people flooding in, I mean, 2 million people this year, this administration has 3 more years, so are we going to have 8 million, at least 8 million more people enter this country illegally? They are not coming from countries that understand how to preserve a republic. And I will tell you some of the very best citizens we have in this whole country are people who went through the process of becoming legal citizens, and I hear from them a lot in my district.

They love America because they know how it can be outside of America, and they don't want our country becoming like those countries they came from. People from Venezuela, people from Central America, from Eastern Bloc countries are some of the best citizens we have got, some from Russia. My cousin married a Russian, and she knows. We were talking about it last week, and she is feeling a sense of urgency. We are losing what we have had. We are becoming more like the place I was so anxious to leave.

It takes work to keep a republic and to enjoy the blessings we have received. People who are flooding in, they have never been trained on what it takes to preserve a republic. And one of the big issues to so many people during the COVID pandemic has been the unprecedented grab of power that the Federal Government has never had before. Never. We have had pandemics that were a lot more deadly than COVID, but no one has ever had the nerve to tell people who were not infected, who had thriving businesses, that they had to close down their business. We are going to let these people open. We are not letting you open.

Thirty years ago, they would have opened anyway, probably 20 years ago, and they would have won in court without question. You can't shut down business. It is unprecedented. And for heaven's sake, to tell churches they couldn't open. For the huge majority of our history, when there was a time of emergency, including a pandemic, people felt like they needed to be in church praying; that they needed to be asking God for help. And for the first time in our history, we didn't have a President that issued a National Day of Prayer & Fasting, asking God to help us. For the first time in our history, we had a national proclamation: You have got to close businesses. You have got to close churches. You can't meet. In some places States said you can't even sing in church because you open your mouth. We can't allow that.

And I know there are still a lot of mixed signals on masks. It is interesting. There are cloth masks. I had a mask getting on a plane with, one of the SHEMA97 masks designed in Israel. It has four layers of cloth that are ionized to kill germs. They don't just catch them. They will kill germs.

The flight attendant said: I can see your nose, so that mask can't be any good. It can't be any good, she says. And she was wearing one of the little blue-and-white masks. Talk about not doing any good. Although, in fairness, I have read that there were some studies that said those little blue-and-white masks can decrease your percentage of getting COVID by 0.2 percent. So 0.2 percent, that is what it is, great. Wear one of those little, cloth masks.

But then we see down in Florida that has been the most open, that they have fewer cases percentagewise. They are doing better than any other State in the country and they have been the most open State we have had. So it is interesting. And I have an article here from The Gateway Pundit. ``It Wasn't Just Beagles and Monkeys--Fauci's NIH Also Funded Medical Experiments on AIDS Orphans in New York City.''

I read somewhere else that these were Black orphans that had AIDS, and the Fauci NIH was doing experiments on them, according to this article of Jim Hoft. They reported that 25 children, those Black orphanage babies, died during the drug studies they were doing on those poor little babies. An additional 55 children died following the studies while they were in foster care. Tim Ross, director of the child welfare program at Vera--I am looking for what that stands for--the Vera Institute, that as of 2009, 29 percent of the remaining 417 children who were used in drug studies had died; 532 children that are admitted to have been used now.

That was in the last 20 years. I don't know if Dr. Fauci has been asked if he knew about that. We found out he lied about funding gain of function in China.

Another article from Fox Business, Elizabeth Faddis, that Dr. Fauci is facing a demand from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to divulge information regarding the alleged use of an experimental drug on puppies.

I guarantee you, as more people find out that NIH was using orphan Black AIDS babies for drug experiments, that killed many of them, there will be even more cries from both sides of the aisle on answers. I thought we were so far past anything like that. I mean, after the outrageous Tuskegee experiments, I can't believe we have been doing that same stuff in the last 20 years. Somebody needs to be held accountable for these things.

We are in deeply troubling times, and there is a good chance that if we don't get back to making sure children in America know how to sustain a republic, we are headed for losing it.

It is because of a fear of that, a fear of the loss of freedom, that caused me to leave the bench and run and try to get elected to Congress so I could make a difference in legislation, so we could try to salvage this little experiment in self-government. But it seems pretty clear it is not going to last much longer.

You can't absorb 8 million people, who not only most of them don't speak the language, but they are adults who have no clue, have never been educated. They have certainly got the capacity to learn, but they have never been educated on what it takes to preserve self-government and the blessings that we have in this country.

If they are not educated on that, if they are simply handed $450,000 each, then that is all they know. Wow, this is a country where you come in, demand money, they give it to you. You can't sustain a country like that, and we won't. No one ever has.

In Rome, there was one Caesar that figured that bread and circuses were being given to keep people peaceable, and it was keeping them from working. He tried to do away with it. But by then, it was too late.

Let's act now before it is too late.

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

Madam Speaker, we are living through interesting times. I understood that was also a curse, ``May you live in interesting times.'' We certainly are enduring that.

An article from the New York Post, October 18, 2021, is titled ``Biden secretly flying underage migrants into NY in dead of night.''

Now, what we have come to see at the border in Texas is that this administration has learned that, gee, we have a record number of people pouring into this country illegally, but if we can ship them away from the border quickly enough, people don't see them amassed by the thousands. So if they don't see them, no harm, no foul.

I guess they are thinking if no one is in the forest to hear a tree fall, does it really fall? Well, the truth is, when you abandon the rule of law, then a Nation based on the rule of law will not last much beyond that.

This is devastating to the country, and some would say, well, you know what, it is so compassionate to invite people. Well, when you hear from doctors that probably 25 percent of the women they see have been raped along the way, you see children separated from their parents in order to come to this country to give them a better chance of staying in the United States so the parents can someday follow, you see people that become indentured servants of the drug cartels selling drugs, sex trafficking, human trafficking, that is not very compassionate.

It seems the most compassionate thing that the United States Government could do for our friends and neighbors to the south, would be to secure our southern border so nobody comes in illegally. That would keep out the drugs, the fentanyl, those things that are killing 70,000 people a year in the United States.

But the big thing for our neighbors would be that the tens of billions of dollars pouring across our border to the drug cartels that allows them to corrupt every level of Mexican Government would stop and people wouldn't have to live in fear of the drug cartels controlling Mexico, controlling countries to the south. That would be the compassionate thing to do.

I yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Good).

Madam Speaker, I couldn't agree more. And it is not compassionate to lure people, lure children into this country away from their parents with some hope down the road maybe they get back together. That is not compassionate when you lure people to their detriment.

In fact, if the U.S. Government were susceptible to being sued by people that have been lured into the country to their detriment and by the open border policy that ends up causing them to be basically, totally under the control of the drug cartels, then there would be attractive nuisance lawsuits against this President and against our Federal Government for not securing our border and drawing people in who are then harmed.

There are constantly people being found that are dead that tried to make it in, and yet, the drug cartels being so heartless, they don't care if they die or not. But they do want to continue to add employees or indentured servants all over the country.

It is just rather dramatic how this President, this administration is doing so much to aid and abet the drug cartels in getting their servants all over the country in cities and, yet, it is true we have Americans that are paying for the drugs, paying for sex trafficking, and we should be doing so much more as a Federal Government to prevent those things from happening.

There is an article here from Politico of all places: ``It's not just Republicans. Everyone's mad at Biden over migration.''

You have got Daily Mail from October 20: ``Facebook admits users can share information on illegal immigration and being smuggled: Arizona Attorney General calls for investigation into tech giant for `facilitating human and sex trafficking.'''

So, once again, just like with our elections, you have got the Democrats in positions of power in the government working hand in hand with the tech giants for something that is just terrible for human beings, and that is facilitating human and sex trafficking.

I yield to the gentleman from Virginia.

Madam Speaker, as my friend has noted, there are so many crises that are going on right now. We have the economy being harmed even more by policies of this administration with the President and all of those working with him and for him demanding that everyone be vaccinated.

And the President himself has said we need to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated, and he said the way to do that is to make sure all the unvaccinated are vaccinated.

So this administration's solution is we have got to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated by making the unvaccinated get the vaccination. That does not protect you from the unvaccinated. It makes no sense.

And some doctors have said, if somebody put out a vaccine that killed 200 people, they would immediately slam the brakes and say, Whoa, wait, let's hold up. We have got to find out what the problem is here. But we know from reports that have been made that there are people that have died from having the vaccination.

We are thrilled that the vaccines were produced so quickly. President Trump got a lot of the red tape out of the way. However, it ought to be a choice after talking, between a doctor and a patient, and the doctor understanding the risks inherent because of the biological makeup of this person for taking the vaccination, and then let the individual decide.

But if the vaccination works as good as we were told originally it did, then there should be no vaccinated person really concerned about those that are unvaccinated because they would be protected.

I am glad that the administration is starting to have cracks in their adamant position that having had COVID and having antibodies is just not nearly as good as having a vaccination. I am glad they are starting to--some of them at least--observe the science, that it is probably a little better if you had COVID, had the antibodies, as far as your future and fighting it off. So I am encouraged by that.

But then, I see this article from October 19. As we talked about before, the President, I believe, he is doing something illegal in saying you have got to have the vaccination. And then he comes out and says, we are going to have OSHA put together a rule requiring everybody to have the vaccination. But the President, himself, does not sign an executive order, which could be taken to court. It is just the general policy of blackmailing companies, private firms, that we are coming after you if you don't force your employees to have the vaccination. It is really a bit insidious. You don't even really give people a chance to file suit. You just state a policy you are going to follow and then have everybody follow it, it makes it much more difficult to sue.

But this article says, ``OSHA will not enforce 29 CFR 1904's recording requirements to require any employers to record worker side effects from COVID-19 vaccination.'' The Biden administration is forcing you to take the jab in order to work. And simultaneously, the Biden administration does not want the employer to tell them about workers who were injured by the jab. Simply more evidence that the vaccine mandate is not about your health.

So that is a little disturbing. You would think if anyone cared about science and really cared about people, you would want to know about every abnormality, every adverse consequence of taking the vaccination, because we are really concerned about individual health. But that is not this administration. They are putting out that we don't want to know things that are bad.

I was informed about a person that had the vaccination, and immediately died after the vaccination; was full of blood clots--not one, but many. And the physician noted the cause of death was blood clots from a vaccination. And then the family was told the health official will not certify a death certificate if it blames the vaccination for the death.

So the widow is in a real bind because you have got to have a death certificate in order to legally move forward and get things changed after the person died. You got to show proof. And yet, the health officer refusing to attribute the cause of death to what it really was, according to the doctor, the vaccination.

So that is pretty remarkable that the government does not want to do its job in protecting people. I would think that if someone in government really cared about people instead of caring about being a dictator, they would say, We want to know exactly what happened after a vaccination that went wrong and which vaccine was it so we can document which ones are safer than other vaccinations. But that is not, apparently, what is going on in this country right now.

So we really need people stepping up and letting this administration know, letting their Members of Congress, their Senators know that they expect them to speak up. We want complete transparency. What works; what doesn't work. We don't want the government hiding things from us anymore.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.

To some degree.

Will the gentleman yield?

I did read results of one study that indicated that if you wear a mask, you are two-tenths of one percent less likely to get COVID. So there is that. There is at least two-tenths of one percent that it is apparently helpful but we don't know the results of long- term wearing a mask, the additional CO2 that may be taken in, or germs that are kept in a mask that would have not been breathed in repeatedly. We don't know the results of all that.

That is fine, but that is still very different from forcing someone to have an injection, which we know can have very adverse effects. And that is why it ought to be an individual decision to make.

But then again, it also contributes to a crisis in enough people doing jobs that allow us to have a supply chain that is intact and getting people the things that they need.

Little did I know--you may have anticipated it--but there were people making jokes after the Vice President had said several weeks ago--it may have been in August--that people needed to get their orders in now so they would get things by Christmas. Wow. Apparently, they saw this coming.

But the point that has been made by my friend about the various opinions from the same people, when it comes to Dr. Fauci, when it comes to the President, it is hard to find an issue that they haven't been on more than one side of.

Fauci would say, no, don't use a mask. Yes, you should use a mask. And then he says, use a mask. And then he is saying at a baseball game you do not need to wear a mask, not social distance.

He has given different opinions, and it reminded me of Winston Churchill's comment about Keynes, the economist. Of course, a lot of people say that is Keynesian economics. But if you look back and do some research on the guy, often when he got into debate and was confronted that some theory he had wasn't true and didn't work, he would immediately take the other position and say he was not for that, he was for this.

So Winston Churchill had once said--I believe this is close to verbatim. He said if you put two economists in a room, you would have three different opinions unless one of them was Sir Keynes, in which case you would have an unlimited number of opinions. I am getting that impression from Dr. Fauci.

Apparently, even Dr. Fauci needs to come to grips with the fact that when he says the U.S. never funded any gain-of-function research--okay, the evidence is there. He had us going for a while, but the evidence is in, and that is absolutely not true.

Hopefully, in all the myriad of opinions he has, he will come around and find the truthful opinion when it comes to his group contributing to gain-of-function research that helped weaponize the COVID virus.

My friend has such a great point. To have the Attorney General of the United States jump into the issue of disagreements at school board meetings is absolutely astounding. We have record crime, especially in cities controlled totally by Democrats. Crime is going up tremendously.

I know that Merrick Garland knows the Constitution, or at least he has at one time. He knows that there is no mention in the Constitution of a Federal role in education. Yet, he sends out a memo saying-- basically, it is pretty intimidating--that we are going to start digging into these school board meetings and using the Justice Department to go after people who have differences of agreement that happen to agree with Dr. King that people should be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.

Who would have believed that 40 to 50 years after it seemed we were so close to Dr. King's dream being realized that you would have an administration totally committed to undoing Dr. King's dream and going back to judging people by the color of their skin instead of the content of their character? It is just shocking.

Of course, the saying in Washington is and has been for many years, no matter how cynical you are, it is never enough to catch up. Well, we find out, after Attorney General Garland sends out the letter that he is going to go after these people that are in disagreement, lo and behold, it turns out his son-in-law and daughter make a tremendous amount of money selling things in support of critical race theory, judging people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character.

It is Panorama Education Company founded by Xan Tanner. They sell surveys to school districts, according to this article from Callie Patteson, that has a nationwide focus on ``social and emotion climate,'' which is interesting. I guess they are wanting that climate changed as well.

With contracts in more than 50 of the 100 largest school districts in the U.S., Panorama Education claims to be supporting ``13 million students in 23,000 schools and 1,500 districts across 50 States.'' Panorama Education Company's cofounder Xan Tanner is Attorney General Merrick Garland's son-in-law.

It then goes on to talk about the 21 different States where they are spreading this stuff. Their surveys reportedly give justification for new curricula in schools, which parents have recently taken issue with, such as critical race theory.

But since 2017, the company has raised $76 million from investors. Just last month, Panorama Education struck a $60 million private financing raise with General Atlantic.

It is rather amazing. Just when you think you can't get more cynical about what this administration is doing, we find out, gee, there is pecuniary gain afoot here on this issue of the Attorney General weighing in on school board meetings. Of course, that is kind of flying in the face of the idea that white supremacy and climate change are the two biggest dangers to America.

For those of us that had incredibly good constitutional law professors, we know those professors would say: Where is the Federal nexus? There has to be some Federal reason, something that gives the Federal Government the right to come in and control school board meetings.

Of course, shortly after I got here, I had a law that I was working on. Having family involved in schools--my mother was a schoolteacher--I know back then the administrators had the teachers' backs. But now, because of so many lawsuits so easily and quickly filed, administrators would say things to teachers like: Look, I realize this student is a total disruption to your class, but his mother or father, or both, will file lawsuits, and we don't need a lawsuit, so just do the best you can. And that would disrupt the education of other students.

My thought was, as a judge, I had what was called judicial immunity. You might not like my rulings, but you can't just sue because you don't like the rulings. It was judicial immunity. I thought, what if we created an educational immunity? You may not like what a school does, or a teacher or principal, but unless they have committed a crime, you can't sue them. That would allow things to get to the place where they used to be.

When I was growing up, if you had a problem with a teacher or some issue in the school, you went to the school board meetings--like the Attorney General is trying to stop now. If somebody on the school board or too many on the school board didn't see it as a problem, then you ran for the school board, got elected, and fixed it.

But because of lawsuits, that has totally changed the way schools have had to approach things. So what if we gave them educational immunity? I had asked the national education folks. They came and I made the presentation, and I was totally shocked when they said: We are not sure that we could support that. I said, but it would keep your teachers from being sued at the drop of a hat. People could go complain to the school board, but you couldn't just go after a teacher.

Well, it turns out, they eventually got back to me and said they wouldn't be able to support that bill. I was just mortified--mystified, too. Why would they not be behind that?

Then one of my friends who spent his life in education said, Louie, do you not understand the biggest cash cow, the biggest moneymaker for the teachers unions, is liability insurance?

If you take away their liability, then the teachers unions can't sell and make money off of liability insurance. There goes that big cash cow.

Yes, it would make life easier for teachers, but the unions, the people who are making money from unionizing teachers, will not ever support something like that.

So, just, again, going back to the old adage: No matter how cynical you get around here, it is not enough to catch up. I am constantly being reeducated on that issue.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend from Virginia.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my friend from Virginia more than he can ever know, and I am glad he is here.

But along the lines of rights that we have had, and that the Constitution has assured, we are finding civil liberties still are being trampled.

I have an article here by Glenn Greenwald, and it is just an excellent summary on what the title tells us: ``Civil Liberties Are Being Trampled By Exploiting `Insurrection' Fears.''

We have people in this body who are constantly referring to the insurrection on January 6. We have heard the President and others say that it was the worst attack on democracy ever. Even a person whom I don't often agree with, FBI Director Christopher Wray, even he pointed out that, gee, it is kind of tough for those of us who recall 9/11 to say January 6 was a worse attack on democracy.

If you were just judging by time, I heard from Attorney General Garland and spinning the news, many, I think 2 to 300, were charged with obstructing an official session of Congress for 4 to 6 hours. But, Mr. Speaker, if you go back to June 22 of 2016, we had 26 hours of obstruction of an official session of Congress. Congress twice tried to go back into session and was prevented each time. It was about 26 hours before the efforts of so many to obstruct Congress finally were withdrawn so we could have Congress again.

I didn't realize back then that this offense was out there. I knew there were many violations of House rules that went on, but then, Mr. Speaker, when you see, oh, my gosh, just obstructing Congress carries up to 20 years in prison. I would be interested to know if any of those people who were obstructing an official session of Congress realized that they were committing a Federal felony carrying up to 20 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine.

But fortunately for them, Paul Ryan was Speaker and chose not to really do anything. Those are the kind of things that when the American public sees that people are doing things wrong who are supposed to be making the laws and following the laws and yet they are the worst violators, it is not helpful nor healthy for the country.

I know one of my constituents--and I am not defending any crimes that have been committed--but he is a guy, he was on Ellen after rescuing dogs in a hurricane; he was arrested for his role in the Capitol. What I have learned from him and his family, gee, these people are being so mistreated. We have heard from other people. But we had a Federal judge here who said: Enough is enough.

He finally held the warden in contempt. As I understand, the warden has lost the job of being warden.

There is an article from Sarah Lynch saying that the jail violated the civil rights of a U.S. Capitol riot defendant, but these folks not being allowed to--at least some of them--not to shave, not to get a haircut, and I thought we were decades past those days, because I know all the county jails with which I am familiar, they would make sure people were dressed out, had a haircut and shaved, if they wanted to, before they came to court, that they were not going to have them forced into an appearance like the Unabomber looking like some wild, crazy person making it easier for a jury to convict them because they looked like a Neanderthal. Yet, that is exactly what the D.C. Jail has been doing.

It was reported that after the judge held the warden in contempt, that there was a late-night effort by the people at the D.C. Jail that, as I understand it, is partially under the control of the Bureau of Prisons, but they sent people to start scrubbing the black mold that was causing problems for some of the prisoners, painted areas that were disgusting and that they let some of these folks who were arrested because of the January 6 events, let them know that we hold you accountable and you are going to pay for it. Then some noted the terrible smell of cleaning fluid on their food that they couldn't eat. Many are tired of eating bologna sandwiches for months and months in a row.

I do know this: the reports we have been getting indicate that the folks here who are being held in pretrial confinement and are being punished--although that is unconstitutional to punish somebody while they are awaiting trial and not having been convicted--that they are not treated nearly as well as bloodthirsty murderers who are being held in Guantanamo.

I have been down there more than once. I have seen how things go there, and it is rather tragic that American citizens are being treated so much worse than individuals who want to destroy America and who have killed and participated in the killing of thousands of Americans.

Here is one from Gateway Pundit: ``Newly Released Video Shows January 6 Political Prisoner Jeremy Brown Saving a Female Trump Supporter Who Was Trampled By Capitol Police.'' That is from October 20.

Here is an article that was this summer titled, ``Six Months Since the January 6th Attack on the Capitol.'' It points out that it works out to be an average of three defendants arrested every single day, including weekends, since January 6. Nearly 235 defendants have been charged with corruptly obstructing, influencing, or impeding an official proceeding, or attempting to do so.

And this article from Sarah Lynch, October 13, ``Jail Violated Civil Rights of Capitol Riot Defendant, U.S. Judge Says,'' and a copy of that order.

But AG Garland tried to blame D.C. for conditions at the jail and treatment at the jail when actually he is in charge of what happens to pretrial prisoners that the Department of Justice is going after.

So nice try, but we need people here facing up to their responsibility.

Mr. Speaker, I will just conclude with a comment that I never ever thought I would hear myself say, but after seeing the partisanship, the use of official position to help a daughter's and son-in-law's finances, thank God Mitch McConnell didn't bring him to be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice.

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

Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on September 30, 2021 due to not being physically present in the District of Columbia. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: NO on Roll Call No. 311.

Today I was unable to vote on the Continuing Resolution due to being at an important hearing outside of the District of Columbia on behalf of a highly decorated Marine who is currently confined. The Democrats had a conclusive number of votes to pass the bill in the House of Representatives and my recorded vote of ``no'' would unfortunately not change the outcome. However, with the liberties of an American patriot and service member, Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Stuart Scheller, hanging in the balance, I came to his assistance to testify in person on his behalf.

When a member of Congress with my prior experience can potentially help someone who has repeatedly risked his life for our nation, it seems I have a duty to fight for the liberty and rights of all American citizens. A weighty decision had to be made, but protecting the legal rights and liberties of Americans, particularly one who has sacrificed so much, was the only choice to make. It is unfortunate that Democrats continue to spend at unsustainable levels and without any appreciation of the fact that their irresponsibility today jeopardizes the freedom of all Americans--those living today as well as those not even born yet.

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

Mr. Speaker, in the 1980s, as Representative Nadler said, Congress enacted harsh penalties for Federal drug offenses, including mandatory minimum sentences. In the 1986 act, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, it did create 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, meaning an individual convicted of selling 5 grams of crack cocaine would receive the same sentence as someone convicted of selling 500 grams of powder cocaine.

Earlier, years before, Representative Dan Lungren--he had been here in the eighties--in 1986, when this was passed, said that Republicans were told in 1986--with a Democratic majority--by Representative Charley Rangel, that if they did not support the huge disparity, then they did not care about Black neighborhoods and the scourge that crack cocaine was creating and how it was ruining Black neighborhoods. So it easily passed because in 1986, no one wanted to be called a racist. This law contributed to the growth of the U.S. Federal prison population from the 1990s through 2000s.

In 2010, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine from 100:1 to 18:1. And as I recall, at the time, I thought it would be good to go 1:1; that is what we did in Texas when I was a judge. But if I recall correctly, there were some Republicans that said we can't go all the way to 1:1, but we will agree to 18:1. If that is not right, the chair can correct me, but that is what I recall. Because I didn't see why we didn't go ahead and go 1:1 back then and just fix it.

But that was what happened. It went from 100:1 to 18:1 disparity. But in 2018, Congress passed--President Trump signed--the First Step Act, which made the Fair Sentencing Act retroactive. This law allowed those sentenced for Federal drug offenses relating to cocaine prior to the passage of Fair Sentencing Act to move for a resentencing under the new law.

The EQUAL Act before us today truly lives up to the name of equalizing sentences for similar crimes and would eliminate the Federal sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine and allow those convicted under the prior law to move for resentencing under this new standard.

At the State level, more than 40 States do not treat crack and powder cocaine differently in their sentencing structures. Passage of the EQUAL Act now would align Federal sentencing laws with the vast majority of States.

And I would like to also say in a prior hearing Mr. Jeffries indicated that he intended to go forward and would try to push a bill, as the chair also had hoped, that would finally eliminate the sentencing disparity and go 1:1.

In that hearing, I made the comment that if Mr. Jeffries would draft a bill that did just that, then I would support that. And I am very pleased that Mr. Jeffries, who is a man of his word, he did exactly what he said. He prepared a bill that fixed this problem.

I am pleased to agree and to be part of what Mr. Jeffries prepared and what the chairman has seen through our committee, and glad we are finally going to deal with this problem and do right by the people that are sentenced under it.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my friend Mr. Jeffries mentioning Cedric Richmond and also Kelly Armstrong who were such an important part of bringing this bill to this place.

Of course, Congressman Cedric Richmond has passed on to his just reward.

Of course, that means going to the White House to work. Mr. Armstrong is still here laboring in the field. He was unable to be here and asked that I read this statement from him into the Record.

He said: ``I wish I could be here today, but I am grateful to Representative Gohmert for sharing my remarks with the Chamber.

``I am proud to support passage of the EQUAL Act, which will finally provide sentencing parity for Federal crack and powder cocaine offenses.

``This bill will also provide relief to those who have been sentenced under the previous unequal guidelines. In 1986, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act created a 100:1 sentencing disparity for crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenses. For instance, the law created a 5-year prison sentence for distribution of 5 grams of crack cocaine. At the same time, an individual would need to possess 100 times that amount of powder cocaine to receive the same sentence.

``The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced the disparity from 100:1 to 18:1. The First Step Act of 2018 was supposed to make the 18:1 change retroactive. The EQUAL Act not only provides sentencing parity for crack and powder cocaine offenses, it also solves the retroactivity and implementation issues.

``This is not being soft on crime. It is being smart on crime. Many Americans struggling with addiction are no stranger to the Federal prison system. We know that addressing substance use disorder and mental health challenges are the most effective way to help these individuals as well as improve our communities.

``The answer isn't to lock people up for crimes of addiction. We tried that method for decades, it does not work. In an increasingly partisan time, the EQUAL Act is an example of how commonsense legislation can receive bipartisan support from across the political spectrum. You don't have to look further than the prime sponsors of this bill.

``I am a conservative Republican from North Dakota. Congressman Jeffries is a Democrat from New York City. We disagree on a lot of issues, but we have come together to support this bill because it is the right thing to do. It is also why this bill has broad support from across the ideological spectrum.

``The House Judiciary Committee reported the EQUAL Act favorably by a vote of 36-5. The bill also is supported by dozens of group ranging from the ACLU to Americans for Prosperity.

``Thank you to everyone who has worked so hard to bring us to this point. I urge everyone to support the EQUAL Act.''

That ends the statement by Mr. Kelly Armstrong.

Let me just say in conclusion--and I appreciated the comments of Mr. Jeffries regarding treatment--what I saw during my decade on the bench was, whether it was crack cocaine or powder cocaine, it was incredibly additive. And every now and then somebody might be able to deal with their addiction in a 30-day program, but normally it took a lot longer than 30 days.

Something I thought Texas did right was have an up to 12 months substance abuse felony punishment facility. Some thought it was strange that a strong conservative, like myself, used that as much as I did. I saw that this is so additive and it needs a length of time to help people change their lives for such a time that they have got a better chance of making it out, understanding just how addictive those substances are, all coming from cocaine.

I know the second checks act dealt with some of those issues, but it might be something else we can do in the future, where if you are convicted of an offense where you are an addict, then a long-term substance abuse facility where you are only with people with your same problem. And it is a lockdown facility, you don't have a choice of going anywhere.

And as I have sat and watched some of the encounters in the meetings, like AA, that you have there in those facilities, boy, they have a BS- detector. They don't let people get away with anything. They have been there. They know, and it had a better success rate than any other program that I had seen.

So this is a great start toward getting the right thing done, and I appreciate Mr. Jeffries, and in the past, Mr. Richmond--I know it was his desire--and Chairman Nadler, for making this happen.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the chairman's efforts in regard to this bill.

Mr. Speaker, at this time, I urge my colleagues to support this bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, we had a bill today regarding abortion; and when I think about saving lives of innocent babies, one name that comes to mind is Henry Hyde, and another name that comes to my mind is Chris Smith.

We have some people that have worked tirelessly, selflessly on this issue, and one of those people is Chris Smith. He is a leader.

I am proud to yield to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith).

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate so much my friend Mr. Smith's dedication to this important--it is not just an issue; it is an important cause. It is so important.

We are told in law school that there can be nothing more noble than speaking up for those who are unable to defend themselves, and that is what I see when I see my friend, Mr. Smith.

This bill we took up today, to vote on, allows abortion right up to the moment of birth. I struggle with that. I mean, I understand there are people that really believe it is not a child; it is just a mass of tissue. But when the child can be seen, as we were talking about earlier before we began the Special Order, when you look at the TV screen, you know that is your child. And it is a child. You can make out all the parts. Then it is not just a mass of tissue.

But for heaven's sake, when it is a viable, living child, capable of living completely on that child's own--I have seen some tough things as a felony judge, some pictures, which I wish I had never seen. But to see what is done to a living child in the name of a right is just heartbreaking.

I appreciate so much my friend's heart on this issue.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my good friend, if he cares to share anything else.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate so much my friend talking about loving the ones alive, the baby, the mother, because so often the focus is only on mothers that have had an abortion and good for them and not on those times when their hearts are deeply broken and that love needed to nurture and care for them.

I am just grateful that we worship a God that believes in second chances, and there is nothing that we can do to separate us from that love.

I had the privilege of hearing a lady named Ramona Trevino. I was guest-hosting somebody's radio show, and I had her on so that more people could hear her story.

It is amazing. She is a brilliant, brilliant person. She was top of her class in high school, and I believe it was at 15 that she became pregnant. In the Hispanic community they had looked at her as a rising star, going to be a great leader, and then she became pregnant, and there were those who encouraged her to go ahead and have an abortion. She didn't.

But she was so smart. Eventually there was an opening she saw for director of Planned Parenthood in Sherman, Texas, and so she applied. And because she was obviously so smart, she got the job. And she continued to raise her daughter.

But they were teaching the people who worked at Planned Parenthood that the most important statistic that the directors reviewed in their directors' meetings were how many young girls are you able to get on birth control pills. That was a more important number than how many abortions you did that month.

The big money came from the abortions, of course, but the numbers that they really pushed at the directors' meetings: How young are you getting them on the pill? And how many are you getting on birth control pills?

And to do that, they were trained to tell the child: Look, your mother obviously, I am sure, will not approve of this, and you don't have to tell her. This is between you and me, and I will keep your confidence. I will let you know that I am your friend, and I will be here for you.

It was building to, as they were taught, the younger you get a girl on birth control pills, the more likely she is to forget some day and become pregnant, and that is when they made the big bucks, off the abortion. It began to bother Ramona so much that they were teaching their employees to come between somebody like her and her own daughter.

And then to really affirmatively get young girls on birth control pills because they were more likely to forget and get pregnant, encouraging them to have a really wild sexual life so that they could get pregnant became more than she could take, and she had to leave her position. It was just too much. She sounded the alarm on that for years.

But just the idea that you use dishonesty to try to make a customer-- not a patient, but a customer--out of a young child and our laws all over the country say this person is not legally eligible to make a binding contract without adult advice and supervision; and yet that is where the focus is, get those girls pregnant so that we can make money on an abortion.

I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

I appreciate my friend so much. Thank you.

I saw a podium out on the steps. There was going to be a great celebration for women. I was a little surprised because I was thinking we weren't supposed to talk about genders like men and women, father, mother, and all that under Speaker Pelosi's rules, but anyway, apparently it is okay today.

But it is hard to think about rejoicing when we are going to keep taking the lives of the most innocent among us.

I know the big hearts of some of my friends on the other side, and knowing their big hearts it is sometimes amazing to think: You surely can't feel good about this.

In a Judiciary hearing some years back, we had a doctor testify who did late-term abortions, up until his daughter was in a car wreck, and he became so nauseous when he went to do another abortion that he couldn't do them anymore.

I have said, in my days as a judge, I have seen pictures I wish I could get out of my mind. I recall one young lady that was a victim, and she had been put in a 50-gallon barrel to try to hide her body, lime poured on, and they couldn't tell, was this limb removed while she was alive or was it from deterioration.

But this doctor said, when it comes to the late-term abortion, the child is clearly too big to remove from the womb without assistance, and he described--in much more detail than I will be able to go into-- taking a clamp and feeling inside the womb until you find what you know is a limb, arm or leg, clamping on, ripping the arm or leg from the child at a time, like Mr. Smith said, they absolutely do feel great pain, perhaps more than an adult. Ripping one. Then you continue to feel for a limb and rip off another until you have done that four times. And then, in his words, you feel for something bulbous at that point. Then you know you have the child's head. You crush the head, and then pull what is left out and dispose of it.

There are just too many big hearts on the other side of the aisle not to at some point realize that that is something we probably should not be doing. Very, very tragic.

I remember, you know, reading in the Bible as I was young and the verses from the Old Testament about parents putting their child in an idol's hand, flames leaping up so that the child could be burned to death and that they began to be desensitized to the screams of the children as they burned to death. And I thought that is inconceivable, especially that a parent could do that to a child.

But when you hear about late-term abortions and you hear some of the things that our society is doing in the name of freedom and rights--I believe in God, but hypothetically, let's say anybody that doesn't, you just believe in karma, don't believe in God. Is it conceivable that good karma could come from tearing arms and legs off an innocent child who hasn't done one single thing wrong?

Even if you don't believe in God, you can't surely think that is going to bring you a lot of good karma. And, certainly, as you celebrate the ability to continue to take innocent lives, that surely can't bring good karma.

For people who believe in God, such as me, it is easy to understand why that is described as being so very, very infuriating to a loving God.

But that was passed today. I don't think it is constitutional. I think that surely there are people on the Supreme Court, hopefully five or six anyway, that have believed for years that should have been left to the States and the people.

And so for the Federal Government to jump in and say they are taking over, and they are knocking out all the power of the States and the people to legislate--as Mississippi or Texas or other States have-- surely now that will end up being found to be unconstitutional by this body. That is the hope and prayer.

When it comes to being callous, sometimes this body just is. And I heard my friend, the majority leader, say that Republicans don't like voting to pay the bills, and he is not quite right on that. I know he means well and wouldn't deceive intentionally, so this isn't engaging in personalities, but he doesn't have that quite right. What Republicans don't like voting on and voting for, rather, is our great- grandchildren having to pay our bills.

And if this body next week becomes successful in adding $3 trillion more to our national debt in the shortest amount of time in all of American history, debt that we can never pay back--well, I say never. Actually, the only way we can pay back the kind of debt that is being heaped up is if the Biden administration creates such runaway inflation that we start having the kind of inflation that Weimar Germany had where people were having to carry wheelbarrows full of cash just to buy a loaf of bread. If we had that kind of inflation then, yes, money would be so devalued that we probably could pay back our debt. But unless we go through something like that that is so economically destructive that there would be Democrats and Republicans alike wanting to have a revolution, we don't want that, we don't need that. We should never allow ourselves to start down that road of having that kind of runaway inflation. Even though it would enable us to pay back the debt, it would be at the cost of total destruction of the Nation we love.

So Republicans, we don't mind paying our own way. A good example is how many Republicans were upset back when President Bush was in his last couple years of office--and it may have been the last year we were in the majority as Republicans--but I remember we were $160 billion approximately in the red that year, about $106 billion or so in the red that was going to be added to the national debt.

And my Democrat friends across the aisle appropriately pointed out that we should have balanced the budget. We were within $160 billion or so. They were right. We should have balanced the budget. Some of us were upset that we didn't. We were so close. Why not just do it and set that marker and continue down that course?

So with a promise that Democrats would be balancing the budget they won back the majority, and who would have ever dreamed that that 160 or so billion-dollar debt in 1 year, in President Obama first year, would become

1.5 to $1.6 trillion debt in 1 year? Who would have ever believed that the people that said, oh, you had $160 billion in debt, we are going to balance it, we are going to fix it, just put us in the majority; they got the majority, and we ran up nearly $1.6 trillion in debt in 1 year.

And it was following that a year or two later Standard and Poor's said you can't keep running up this debt without us having to downgrade the quality of your debt, which means you will end up paying more interest, and you will end up having to pay more, a higher percentage of your overall revenue for just interest, which means less for Medicare, less for Social Security, less for those that are really in need and we need to help. And Standard and Poor's did exactly that. They downgraded our debt. And as I understand it, if any other rating service had downgraded our debt at the same time, interest rates would have shot up for the U.S. Government. But fortunately we got a break. That didn't happen. Didn't get another service. Maybe they were being dishonest in not downgrading our debt because they were right; under those Democratic majorities we were not being true to ourselves and our generation and future generations. We were creating debt that would be passed on for generations to come.

And I thought back then and said as much years ago, that would be like an adult going in to a bank and saying I need this massive loan. Well, what is it for? It is because I cannot control my spending. I just can't stop spending. I am out of control. So I need a big loan. Well, what do you have for security, for collateral? Well, I brought my children and grandchildren in here, and so I am going to make them sign off so that they will guarantee all the debt I am running up because I can't control my spending. Well, no banker in their right mind would loan money, but as the Federal Government we don't have to have a banker agree to it, we just agree to it.

And we even have people who become jubilant, wow, we were able to just add another $3 trillion to the backs of our great-great- grandchildren some day. Why? Because we just can't control our spending. That is surely immoral. That is what Republicans don't like voting for; putting more debt on future generations' children.

And so Republicans were wrong. We should have balanced that budget when we were within $160 billion of doing so instead of failing to do that, which enabled the Democrat majority to run up 1.5, $1.6 trillion in 1 year; and, boy, did that blow the lid off the debt. And, yes, after that both parties were just busy raising the debt, raising the debt, all kinds of gimmicks to raise the debt, but at some point we are going to have to either say this has got to stop or we are going to finish destroying this country.

And, again, I think it is a moral issue. Are you moral enough not to make future generations pay for what you refuse to? And I hope the answer is, no, we are not going to do that, we are going to at some point start being responsible.

But here in Washington it is a malady that seems to set in for so many, for either party that gets here and then finds, wow, we have got so much power, look what we can do. Since we know so much better than anybody else in the country, even though their IQ may be 40 points higher than our own, gee, we need to make decisions because overall we are smarter.

So it is hard not to get very cynical here in Washington. And I have used the quote before that, you know, Washington saying no matter how cynical you get, it is never enough to catch up. I think my chief of staff has caught up now. She has gotten pretty cynical.

But when you see the hundreds of billions of dollars that are at stake for pharmaceutical companies, who I have applauded the way the Trump administration got the red tape out of the way to get to a vaccine in record times, even though the current President and Vice President said as long as Trump was President they wouldn't trust it, now they are not only trusting what President Trump got done, but forcing people to have the vaccinations who have serious reservations, who are familiar with the issue of informed consent. One of the greatest developments in the history of healthcare that--maybe it has been only 100 years in the whole history of man out of the thousands of years of recorded history, maybe 100 years is all we have had--some medical historians say of living at a time when you had a better chance of getting well after seeing a doctor than of getting worse.

So you think about the thousands of years where you had a better chance of getting sicker after seeing a doctor than getting well. And we have now lived through an incredible handful of decades where not only do you have a better chance of getting well, you are likely to get well. And that continues to be the case as more and more lifesaving and life-enhancing developments are made in medical care, in healthcare.

And yet the concept I am talking about that was such a great development for not only healthcare but for freedom is called informed consent.

So we are going to be filing next week a bill that addresses this: The National Informed Consent Exemption, the NICE bill, N-I-C-E, that will allow people--in fact, mandate that each individual will make their own decision about vaccination after consulting with their own physician about their own biology of their own body, what they are at risk for, which conditions are more likely to occur with a particular vaccine, which vaccine to use, whether any of them are good for that particular person to use.

It troubled me deeply when I was told, gee, if an employer does what President Biden is mandating and says you are not going to work here unless you get a vaccination. And last I saw there were over 7,000 deaths that occurred right after getting a vaccination. CDC is careful to say, yeah, but that doesn't mean that just because they died right after the vaccination, that the vaccination caused it. Okay. But some of them surely did.

A friend in Carthage lost her husband after he got the vaccination. She said she didn't think he should, it wasn't a good idea because of his condition. He got it, died. And when they opened him up he was just full of blood clots, which was one of the risks for the vaccination he took. And she said: ``He would be with me today if he had not been vaccinated.''

Well, those are things a patient needs to talk about with their own physician, make those decisions, and then give informed consent to get the vaccination. That is what a free Nation should do instead of mandating things that could cause death or problems.

Thankfully, that is not the high percentage of what will happen, but it depends on your makeup what the discussion would be.

So I hope that we will get this bill passed at some point, whether it is in the next year and a half or in the session after that, but we need to get back to giving people freedom to make informed decisions rather than mandated decisions from a bloated Washington bureaucracy that doesn't know one thing about the biology of an individual patient about their risk of death.

But I started to mention, I was surprised even apparently from what I have been told that even if your employer mandates you cannot work here unless you get a vaccination, you are totally on your own. Even worker's compensation--from what I was advised, even worker's comp will not help you or your family if you become disabled from the vaccination. If you are one of the 7,000 plus that dies, nothing.

I would like to see it changed, but Congress has protected the pharmaceuticals, so you can't sue them.

Maybe we need to make it where any government official that mandates a vaccination that causes death or disability, maybe that government official--maybe we should open that up to tort reform that allows pursuit of that government official that forces somebody to get a vaccination. Because when somebody is forced into something and they are not allowed to have any input whatsoever, they, of course, lost their freedom. But at least give their family a chance, if you are going to force them to do something that kills them, at least allow the family a chance to recover for the loss of the person that the government official or the employer mandated take action that took their life.

Of course, we have the President--here is a story on September 21 by

Charlie Spiering--that Joe Biden boasted to the United Nations he restored the commitment to the World Health Organization. Well, for those that have not been following the news, that means that President Biden has restored the commitment of the United States to the best interests of the Chinese Communist Party because the Chinese Communist Party clearly has tremendous control over the World Health Organization.

That was one of the things President Trump found shocking, that we paid hundreds of millions of dollars to the World Health Organization and they did not act in accordance with the best interests of the United States. China paid, it seems like it was $30 or $40 million, and the World Health Organization helped cover up what occurred in Wuhan. They continued to lie for the Chinese Communist Party. They continued to do the bidding for the Chinese Communist Party.

This story makes clear that, actually, President Biden now has made sure that the United States is now fully supportive with and for the Chinese Communist Party along with the World Health Organization.

A great article from Justin Haskins with The Federalist discusses Joe Biden's vaccine mandate as blatantly unconstitutional, and then the article says it is flatly unconstitutional. It truly is, but we have come to a place in American history, which I guess these things have happened before, there have been ridiculously inane decisions about the Supreme Court in our history.

Well, until the Supreme Court acts, this blatantly unconstitutional action by the Federal Government is allowed to continue to keep taking place. So we will see what happens in the future.

But we keep hearing from the other side about how uncaring and hardhearted Republicans are because of our position about our borders. Well, it wasn't that important to have secure borders before we started providing welfare benefits to American citizens. Once that started occurring, as Milton Friedman pointed out, you must have borders if you are going to have a welfare state; otherwise, it will be a very short time before your country will cease to exist.

I understand the strategy. The more millions of people we get into this country, especially those that are easily duped and don't speak English, they are seen as new voters for the Democratic Party. I get that. But for Heaven's sake, have a little heart about and for the people that are being lured into this country. The 15,000, 16,000 Haitians that just came in recently weren't coming from Haiti. They were Haitians originally, but they had gone to South America--most of them, some Central America. When they got word that the Biden administration was slinging open the border, letting anybody come in-- terrorists, give us your tired, your poor. Terrorists that want to destroy our country, come on in. This administration is going to help.

Heck, we will even load up planes in Afghanistan and bring people that we are now hearing are likely terrorists. We will bring them on in because they may vote Democratic at some point.

But a caring person would understand these people left Haiti because they couldn't live under the conditions in Haiti. They went seeking a better life and found it in one country or another until they got word that the border is open: You can come into America because President Joe Biden is not going to send us back.

Then for 1,400 of those 15,000 to 16,000 Haitians, they were not sent back where they came from seeking a better life. They were sent back to Haiti where they hadn't lived in years. That is why you see some of them crying, weeping on television: How could they do this? They brought me back where I couldn't live. I couldn't make a living. I couldn't live. We left here. We were doing better. And then we come to the U.S. because you lured us up there, and now you send us back to the place where we couldn't make a living.

I mean, what kind of country does that? What kind of political leaders do that?

Well, the answer is this administration. If we had enough compassion for the people of Mexico, Central America, South America, if we had the right kind of compassion, truly caring about the people of those countries, what we would do is secure the border.

The hell going on in Mexico because of the corruption from the drug cartels doesn't need to be happening. Why is it happening? Because the United States of America, the home of the brave, the land of the free, we are sending tens of billions of dollars to the drug cartels in Mexico.

They are getting money for bringing people into the U.S. illegally from the people they are bringing. But they don't have enough, most of them don't have the money to pay the whole debt, so they are told you can work it off, because when you get where we are sending you, and we are going to get the U.S. Government to pay to send you where we, the drug cartels, need you to work.

As we have been told in testimony here on the Hill before, there are drug cartels in every city in America. The U.S. Government, as the border patrolmen told me down there, they call us their logistics. The drug cartels get them across the border, and then we ship them wherever the drug cartels want them to go.

This has to stop. This is an existential threat to America. As some friends from around the globe have said, we get upset with the United States but you have to understand, we see your light, light of freedom, we see your light going out. You have to understand, when the light of freedom goes out in America, it will go out around the world.

Reagan said no generation that lost freedom got it back in the same generation. I am telling you, if we are not more careful in this body, that light will be extinguished, and I don't think it will ever come back until the end of time.

We have to be careful what we are doing. We have tremendous responsibility. To whom much is given, much is required. We have an awesome obligation, and we are not filling it when we run up a $3 trillion debt, nor when we legislate to kill the most innocent among us.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of amendment 165. It creates a separate career track for military judges to prevent undue influence from command above.

In the 1970s it was seen that it would be good for trial defense attorneys to have a separate track so that they were not rated by the same person who was pushing to have a court martial. That created some problems and at times some abuses.

The separation and the creation of a trial defense service served a great purpose, but before 2004 each of the judge advocates general of the armed services subscribed to the policy that all judge advocates should have a broad career and move from job to job. They became quite good at all trades but masters of none.

So junior judge advocates would try a few court martials, then move from one job to another. It gave them a broad basis, but it was not helpful overall.

By giving the military judges a separate career track, it will ensure avoidance of undue command influence and will give our servicemembers the fair trials they deserve. I would encourage everyone to vote for this amendment.

Madam Speaker, tonight we paid tribute to the 13 fallen American military who died as Afghanistan was being abandoned by this administration to the Taliban, who are now more powerful than they have ever been, have more equipment than they ever had.

What we didn't pay tribute to tonight--it somehow got lost in the shuffle--is over 2,400 of our precious military lives that were lost fighting for their country in Afghanistan. They kept us safe, relatively safe for 20 years. But they should not be forgotten.

There are over 1,800 civilian contractors that were killed. There were 600 military killed in Afghanistan under Commander in Chief Bush; 1,800 under Commander in Chief Obama. They should not be forgotten. They served their country.

Madam Speaker, as has been said earlier by Darrell Issa, it was Rahm Emanuel that pointed out, don't let a good crisis go to waste.

So here we have a crisis on our southern border and Afghanistan, and what do we do? The majority comes in here and says, we don't want our Members to have to vote on a $3.5 trillion spending bill, so we will just pass a rule that says without anybody voting on it we pass a $3.5 trillion spending bill. And then we will immediately jump over to a noble man with a great name that did such great work for America along with Dr. King, John Lewis, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act bill.

Well, I was here when that was reauthorized, when that was redone, and I begged, after talking to some liberal constitutional professors of law, I begged Jim Sensenbrenner and John Conyers not to go forward with section 4(b) the way it was and section 5. Let's do this right so that it won't be struck down. Mr. Sensenbrenner was not open to that whatsoever; John Conyers, to his credit, was. I said, please talk to some professors, let them tell you, it is at risk of being struck down. And he said, well, they say there is a decent chance of that, but let's see what happens.

What happens now? We come in here, and we are going to disenfranchise American voters by taking over the voting across America. The Constitution reserves those provisions to the State legislature. We shouldn't be doing this.

Back after the 2000 election when there were some people in Florida that were not as smart as fifth graders because they couldn't figure out the butterfly ballots, this body jumped in, took over, and said everybody go to electronic ballots and electronic voting, and they have caused us misery ever since.

Let's let States and local government do the job the Constitution gave them.

Mr. Speaker, we got a couple of calls at the office today. We got numerous calls. But two veterans fighting in Afghanistan wept in the calls about the sacrifices that they made, the friends they had lost fighting in Afghanistan, and the Afghan people.

I have been meeting with Northern Alliance leaders for a decade or so. They have asked not that we stay forever. We couldn't do that, and they didn't want us to do that. But they said: Whatever you do, leave us in a position to fight the Taliban when you are gone because if you don't, they will kill every one of us who fought for you and with you, and then there will be nobody to fight them after you are hit worse than you were on 9/11.

This is an atrocity. Let's leave the Northern Alliance the weapons that the Taliban should never have, and let's get the Americans out.

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Florida for yielding. I was quite shocked at the treatment we received. When people who have oversight and are responsible for voting to fund or not fund Federal facilities like the one we visited, I am not used to having somebody make such an overt effort to hide everything they are doing to the extent that they would lure us outside so they could lock the door. And there were lawyers, there were defendants, there were people going through the main entrance we did, yet because we are Members of Congress, they locked the door after accusing us of being trespassers, which is a crime. And so, we may want to look at who it is that was calling us trespassers. Obviously they have got some serious training that they need to go through.

But this is nothing new and this has nothing to do with January 6, other than we have been alerted that there are people that are being mistreated.

I have been alerted to people being mistreated before and took action to see if that was true. I don't care what their political leanings are. If they are being mistreated, then something needs to be done.

Back when President George W. Bush was in office and there were abuses by the Justice Department, I was completely on the side of the Democrats. There is no place for that kind of thing, abusing people's civil rights. And we have been belittled here on the House floor, all of us here, and accused of trying to belittle what occurred on January 6. No, there were some atrocious things that happened, and there needs to be punishment for that. But there is and has been concern that there were people that didn't even know they were doing anything wrong, and in some cases were not doing anything wrong have had their homes invaded and had their door busted open.

One constituent last week called my office here in Washington to say that she was in east Texas on January 5, 6, and 7, all relevant times. She had no thought of coming to Washington. She did have a picture of Trump on Facebook. Her nephew texted her: Hey, I saw this picture. The FBI is asking who it is, and I wondered if maybe she looked familiar.

And apparently, it looked very similar to this woman, and he thought his aunt would get a kick out of that, so he sends the text with this picture. And she says: Gee, it does look like me. LOL. Don't turn me in.

Days later she has a visit from two FBI agents who demand to know where she was January 6.

Well, now as I understand it, the only contact she had with the events of January 6 was her nephew sending her that text message. And then FBI agents show up. She was not that woman, and you could see the difference. But somebody had to have been monitoring those text messages.

That was something that got me bent out of shape back in the second term of President Bush. You can't just go spying on American citizens. It is not right. And I guess it is possible that they got a FISA warrant to spy on an American citizen, but I would have hoped that the FISA judges would be a little more circumspect after we found out how abusive those FISA judges have been with just signing off on anything the DOJ wants in the way of warrants.

The Constitution requires specificity, particularity. You have got to describe the thing to be searched, the thing to be seized. And we had seen from one that WikiLeaks let go on Verizon, they said: Yeah, we just want everything Verizon has.

And the judge said: Oh, they want everything Verizon has on its customers; okay. Signs the warrant.

We cannot keep a republic with judges that have that much disdain or inconsideration of the Constitution they are sworn to follow. And the fact that no FISA judge got bent out of shape after being lied to by DOJ and the FBI is another indication we have got a tremendous amount of cleaning up to do to save our republic.

I appreciate my friend for the time, and I appreciate you having this Special Order and allowing me to participate.

General Leave

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

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate so much those observations. It is so important for everybody to understand, the IRS is feared, and we learn through people like Lois Lerner that it is not always honest, and yet nobody has been held to account. I am hoping that at some point that will occur. I am so grateful to my friend from Pennsylvania.

At this time I yield to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Bentz).

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Bentz, and I have to give a shout-out to Bruce Westerman as the ranking member on the Natural Resources Committee. This very morning, we had a Republican group, but we couldn't get the whole committee to do it on that very issue of forest fires and maintaining healthy forests.

Hopefully, we will get the majority to understand it is not enough to just let nature take its course. You trim the undergrowth. You have fire lanes so you can stop a fire when it gets started. There are so many things that Republicans understand is just good forest management.

So whether it is lightning or something else that starts a fire, we don't have to see 400,000 acres go up in flames. This administration is determined not to do proper management of the forests, and so many people get hurt.

I am proud to have a colleague like Mr. Bentz that will stand up for what is best for forests, for nature, and has a lot of common sense in the process.

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

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my friend from Georgia so much for making the effort to stand up for the constitutional rights of Members of Congress not to be detained from getting onto the House floor. We have metal detectors still at each entrance. We didn't used to have them at the Speaker's lobby. Those have been added.

We are co-plaintiffs in a lawsuit that will, hopefully, result in those being removed so that we won't continue to have Republicans miss votes because they get detained, even for the short time, when the Speaker has full discretion as to when to bring down the gavel. We have had a number of Republicans who have missed votes that they would not have missed were there no metal detectors, and especially since there is no intelligence from any source of any Member being a threat to another Member then this totally unprecedented subjugating of House Members below what their roles are and being sent by the same number of people that sent the Speaker.

It is time to get rid of the metal detectors, get rid of the subjugation and get back to the Nation's business.

Mr. Speaker, I have to say I am so excited about the freshman class that came in this Congress. We just heard from three freshmen, and these are folks, especially including my friend from Florida, Kat Cammack, that has been added, and I am thrilled. I have been so reassured by the freshman class that has come in and the common sense that came with them.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Cammack).

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my friend, Member of Congress, Kat Cammack. She has expressed so articulately what I have seen, what I have experienced so many times spending the night on the border, going down those dirt roads along the Rio Grande. It is incredible.

And some would think, Oh, well, isn't it compassionate to encourage people to come to the United States. It is the most unneighborly, uncompassionate thing that we could do. These are people who--other than the gang members, those who are part of the cartels, those coming from groups in the Middle East and other places that don't have U.S. interests at heart, but so many of them, they are looking for a better way of life.

Why do they not have a better way of life where they are, including, especially, Mexico? Well, it is because of the unsecured border we have that allows the Mexican drug cartels to make tens of billions of dollars every year coming from America for the drugs, for the fentanyl that kills, for the sex trafficking, for the human trafficking. We are funding the corruption in Mexico.

Mr. Speaker, when my wife and I had our honeymoon, we didn't have much money at all; $300 got us 5 nights, 6 days in a fabulous place in Mexico. But we don't go back because the drug cartels no longer say hands off of the tourism.

Mexico is being devastated by the drug cartels. And it is America and administrations like this that are allowing them--actually making it possible--not just allowing, making it possible. Some might say they are truly accessories to the corruption, to the criminality that is going on.

And in fact, evidence of that comes from the fact that as border patrol had told me before, before this administration when they used to talk to me and never ever tried to prevent me from getting to the border and seeing exactly what is going on--that has all changed now. This administration did not allow me, two nights in a row, trying to get to the border, as I have done countless times before--wouldn't let me get there. In fact, used the place where normally you get down from the embankment, go through the wall that is being constructed by the Trump administration, go down through the flat area, and then you come up to the levee road, and then that allows you to get miles and miles down the dirt roads along the Rio Grande where thousands of people are coming across.

And they didn't allow it this time. They used the wall, not to keep out illegal aliens, but to keep me from seeing the outrageous travesties and tragedies that are going along our border, because people are being lured to their detriment. In tort law, it would be called an attractive nuisance; like having a swimming pool and having no fence so that a child is drawn in and then drowns.

Well, this administration is luring people to their detriment. And I have been there many nights, it is not on the list of questions that is required to be asked, but so often the border patrol asks, How much did you pay, basically, to drug cartels to bring you into the United States? And it was usually between $5,000 and $8,000.

And then often they would say, You don't have that kind of money. Where did you get that money? And they would indicate, Here and there; get this much here, this much there. Friends in the U.S. sent this much.

So what about the rest of the money? The drug cartels, they are going to let them work it off when they get where they are going.

How do they get where they are going? Well, at that point, it is either Health and Human Services or ICE. Border Patrol, their job is along the border. They don't, once they transport to a facility, that is usually the end of their transporting. But ICE, Health and Human Services, and now we have the military that is also providing transportation. But as the Border Patrol officer said, cartels call us here in the U.S.--Federal Government. There are logistics. They get them across the border, and then--they don't use UPS or FedEx or even the U.S. Post Office--

they use the Federal Government and taxpayer money to ship these indentured servants of the drug cartels all over the country to cities all over the country wherever the drug cartel want them to be selling drugs, sex trafficking, human trafficking. The U.S. Government actually makes that happen. They facilitate that.

We have had so many Border Patrol--again, before this last visit to the border when this administration wants to hide what they are doing at the border--they say, Oh, well, if you give us enough notice, then we will put somebody--and this is effectively what--they want to put somebody--I am suppose to supervise--over me to watch what I am doing, prevent me from doing proper oversight down where they are supposed to be doing their job, prevent that from happening so that America does not see how absolutely tragic this invasion is.

Yes, they are gang members, but so many people are coming in, and the cartels know taxpayers in the U.S., who are funding the drug cartels, are also going to pay for the education, all the needs of those coming in.

This administration doesn't care. What they are looking at are future Democratic voters. But they have to act quickly because the longer the people are here, the more they realize, ``You know what? I am for hard work, and I am for making my own way. I don't want to see babies killed in the womb. I believe in working a full day. I do believe in marriage and strong family, devotion to family. I believe in God,'' and they start thinking, wait a minute, that sounds more like a Republican than a Democrat. They don't believe in abortion, most of the folks, and they do have faith in God and devotion to families.

If you read what BLM said they believed in, destruction of what they call Western-style marriage is one of their biggest tenets. Why? Because they are Marxist.

To get to Marxism, you have to create chaos. As Paul Harvey used to talk about, one of the best ways, and a critically important way, to create enough chaos so that you can move toward Marxism is to destroy the family, the nuclear family.

Of course, BLM has it wrong. It is not Western-style marriage. It is not something that North America or South America or Central America came up with, what is typically called the West. It didn't come from this side of the planet or this hemisphere, except in the Middle East.

A man named Moses had a revelation from God and let people know here is what God says: A man shall leave his father and mother, a woman shall leave her home, and the two will become one. That would be marriage, not Western-style. I guess Middle Eastern-style.

It didn't originate here. It has been found throughout history to be the best building block of a very strong society.

That is why surveys continue to find that although, of course, there are people that excel coming from broken homes and other avenues, the best chance a child has of succeeding in life is coming from a two- parent home and a strong nuclear family.

I have seen firsthand what Marxism does. I have heard the director of what we would now call daycare in the old Soviet Union bragging that these children don't belong to their parents: They are just temporary caretakers. We monitor what parents tell their children. If they ever say anything negative about the government, we immediately take the child away and give them to a more deserving caretaker.

I thought, at the time, thank God I didn't grow up in the Soviet Union. Thank God I grew up in east Texas, and I had a mother and father, and they cared deeply about me. I was so grateful for the blessings that I had had.

Wow, the Soviet Union. It failed because it was destined to fail. Marxism is always going to fail. People think: Oh, but it sounds so wonderful, share and share alike.

Now, you have a very small ruling class, and then you have everybody else.

I have been in those stores. Toilet paper so often, no, it was not available. But I learned, and I saw. Real luxuries, like real toilet paper, the store would get those in and put those in the back. If you were a government official, then when you came in, they would get you some toilet paper.

If it is a shoe store, when they got good shoes in, they kept those in the back for government officials. Why? Because they were sucking up to the government officials.

In Russia, it was called blat, political pull. You wanted to have some, so you kept the best of whatever you got in to sell for people that had power. You would do favors for them so that you might have a little power.

As one Soviet told me, a college student: In your country, you can get ahead. No matter who you are, you can get ahead by hard work, making more money, and then money will help you make your way up in society. Here, there are only two ways to move up in society. One is to suck up to people who have political power, and I guess maybe it is a subheading of that, but it is also by ratting out other people.

As he told me: You can get ahead by working hard and making more money here. The best way to move up is to step on other people. If you see them do something inappropriate, then you rat them out and that will allow you to move up.

Except for the very top people that have everything they want, the other people mostly get the same amount of income. That was also tried in Venezuela; it failed. It will always fail.

Anybody that was so stupid that they could not foresee what was emerging, and that is a very strong, powerful middle class in the United States and part of Europe, Marx couldn't see that coming. He was too blind. He couldn't foresee the formation of labor unions that could stand up to greedy Democrats, billionaires, such as we have here, the billionaires that, by the way, paid hundreds of millions of dollars to affect the election, who was able to vote, and how ballots were gathered.

Well, over in the Soviet Union, you don't have to worry about that. As Stalin pointed out, he didn't care who voted. He just cared about who counted the votes.

We will be seeing evidence continue to emerge from Arizona and Georgia, and, I think, eventually Pennsylvania. But to hear anybody say that there was absolutely no evidence of fraud, it is like John Fund said when he wrote the book about fraud in elections some years back: The biggest fraud about elections is the statement there is no fraud in elections. There has always been.

Lyndon Johnson certainly knew about that, as did people who tried to research allegations of voting impropriety, and the courthouse burned down, destroying evidence. These things have gone on.

Cook County, Chicago, you think there has not been fraud in Chicago? You would have to be either crazy or dishonest to say there has never been fraud in elections in Chicago.

It goes on. The trick is to try to minimize the fraud so you don't disenfranchise so many people.

But there is evidence of fraud. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of affidavits, sworn testimony, about fraud in the last election.

I know there is plenty in the media to say it didn't happen. Because they are saying that, out of either ignorance or dishonesty, others feel comfortable, including people right here on the floor, saying that it is totally debunked, that there was no fraud in the last election. That is a statement out of ignorance or out of being deceptive.

But we have to clean up the elections. We have to quit being a joke in the eyes of foreigners who have paper ballots.

Even as bad as things have gotten in Iraq, there for a while, they had free and fair elections. In 2005, having been over there right after the first election, talking to one of the chiefs of police there, he was telling about how--of course, the voters, when they voted, to avoid fraud, you dipped your finger into purple ink that would last for a couple of weeks so you couldn't vote a second time. If you didn't dip your finger in there and have proof of who you were, you didn't vote the first time.

He was telling me that a policeman who was monitoring the election saw someone suspicious. Upon checking, he saw that he had a bomb, a suicide vest. He threw the man down, jumped on top of him. Both of them were killed. I said, wow, I guess that sent all the voters scurrying, fleeing. He looked surprised and said, no, that they knew if

they got out of line, the policeman would have died for nothing.

The policeman died trying to secure the fair opportunity to vote. Yet, nowadays, that is being belittled: We shouldn't even utilize voter IDs. You shouldn't have to have an ID.

Well, that is the best way to ensure that there is not fraud in the election, just like it is the best way to ensure that someone is not illegally getting a gun or getting a cigarette or getting alcohol. People produce those all the time. Let's quit disenfranchising so many people that are voting lawfully by creating the ability to have people vote illegally.

We keep hearing about: Oh, gee, that is not true. We need to censor people and not allow them to speak or submit things online if they are not in conformance with what the liberal Democrat high-tech industry or the liberal Democrat media say is true or not true.

We listened to 4 years of lies about the Russian dossier when it was produced by a former MI6 agent in England, who even admitted: Yes, my sources, they could have been working for Putin.

It was a manipulation paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The FBI was in cahoots and, in fact, even lied to the FISA court.

It really got my attention, having been a judge, to see that FISA court judges had so little regard for their own status, their own courts, that they would not take action to hold in contempt people who held the court in contempt by lying, by defrauding the court, in order to spy on a Presidential political campaign. My goodness, there has never been a Presidential campaign treated as the Trump campaign was.

It even had a Democrat official on tape admitting: We are the ones who paid for violence to get started at Trump campaign events so that we could claim that Trump was stirring up violence.

That was in 2016.

For heaven's sake, we needed a Justice Department that would be just, and we don't have it right now. For heaven's sake, I heard from a constituent 2 days ago who that day was shocked to have two FBI agents show up at her place of work in east Texas. She had not come to Washington on January 6. She was at work in east Texas.

The only reason those FBI agents could have showed up at her place of work was because her nephew texted her a picture of someone who was here on January 6 in Washington and asked: Do you see anybody you recognize? Because it looked like his aunt.

She said: Wow, I thought that was me.

Then jokingly she said: Don't turn me in.

Unless the FBI were monitoring these text messages which was either by the grant of a warrant from a FISA court that, in my opinion, was breaking the PATRIOT Act and was breaking the law to grant such a warrant, or they were committing a crime and spying on people's text messages without authority.

This is getting out of control here. Of course, we don't hear any stories about the people who were looting and creating insurrections in cities around America last summer. We don't hear about them being arrested or having their homes wrongfully broken into by police or Federal officials. No. But we are hearing about it, and the illegality and the brownshirt tactics of the Federal Government needs to stop.

Mr. Hoyer says he was shocked 8 months was all somebody got for disrupting an official proceeding. Well, that also happened on June 22, 2016 for 26 hours on this floor, and I am surprised that Mr. Hoyer wants to see his fellow Democrats going to prison for more than 8 months for obstructing an official proceeding.

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

Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on June 29, 2021 due to an invitation from the Governor of Texas to travel to the border to observe the ongoing crisis that is happening there. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: YES on Roll Call No. 196.

I am exceedingly concerned with the Speaker's determination to pass H.R. 3005, To direct the Joint Committee on the Library to replace the bust of Roger Brooke Taney in the Old Supreme Court Chamber of the United States Capitol with a bust of Thurgood Marshall to be obtained by the Joint Committee on the Library and to remove certain statues from areas of the United States Capitol which are

accessible to the public, to remove all statues of individuals who voluntarily served the Confederate States of America from display in the United States Capitol, and for other purposes. This bill is Cultural Marxism brought to the House floor for a vote.

This bill attempts to strip individual states of their right to choose the statues they are paying for. In doing so, it seeks to erase their history--the bad, the good, and everything in between, that informs whom we've been and whom we are, as well as where we've been, so we can aptly navigate where we are going. As George Orwell presciently foreshadowed, ``Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.''

But is the Party always right? Surely it is not. This point highlights another grievous flaw in H.R. 3005. Although it purports to cleanse the Capitol complex of Confederate statues and busts, in doing so it actually removes only Democrat statues and busts. Yes, Democrats are removing their Democrat forefathers for the sin of their slavery, or other support for the Confederacy, committed in times past.

So why vote YES? Because having fought this battle for a state's right to choose--warning about the dangers of arbitrarily banishing history from our midst--I am sick and tired of defending states' rights so Democrats can try to rewrite history and say Republicans are defending racists. We are doing no such thing. In fact, I've even gone further and tried to get an amendment made in order that reveals the dirty secret of just how racist, pro-slavery, and anti-freedom Democrats have been in the past. They want their own statues removed for two unspoken reasons: (1) People won't look up their former heroes and find out how racist Democrats have been, and (2) A move to Marxism requires destruction of history first. If people don't know their nation's true history, they're more easily duped into accepting a totalitarian government. So, if Democrats want to remove all Democrat statues and busts in the Capitol, I will not stand in their way.

Mr. Speaker, I certainly appreciate my friend, Congressman Cawthorn, holding this because it is important.

You know, to some people, it is just about, ``Well, it is the economy. It is an inconvenience.'' Well, that is for rich people, like the billionaires that donated to the current President's campaign. They sure didn't help the former President.

Well, what are we talking about? We are talking about a President that is so out of touch. As he has said, ``I keep forgetting I am President.'' It is very unfortunate.

But if you go back to his days as Vice President, you find what this President, the current President, was doing in the previous administration, and these policies are now coming back.

It ran up the price of oil and gas--natural gas, propane. It ran up the price of gasoline. And unfortunately, for the working people in America, for those that haven't been in Washington for 50 years or so-- like the current President--they are getting strangled with debt. They are getting strangled with increasing prices because it just so happens, we don't have a lot of electric 18-wheelers. We don't have a lot of massive electric engines that are pulling countless numbers of cars down the train tracks.

That means every time this President takes another step to raise the price of oil--which raises the price of gasoline--he is economically crippling people that are working, people that are on Social Security, people that have fixed incomes. They are getting hammered. Yeah, it is an inconvenience to the mega wealthy that donated to the President, or people like here in Congress that are millionaires, but it is devastating.

And I go back to when President Biden was Vice President, and a lady from Panola County told me, she said, ``I am 80 years old, and my gas is getting so expensive, I am afraid I am going to end up in a home like I was born in, where the only energy we had was a wood-burning stove.''

And I said, Oh, ma'am, I am so sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but if Biden and Obama have their way, you are not going to be able to even have that wood-burning stove you had when you were born. You are going to be at home without any kind of energy. And that is where this President is now wanting to go back to.

We enjoyed the days of cheaper gasoline, cheaper energy. America was vibrant; and people spent and they went out to eat and they bought clothes, and it generated jobs. And this President is killing those. And he is devastating the people on fixed incomes. The people that are working and poor, he is devastating them--the people that he is supposed to care about.

Well, it is time for this administration to think about somebody besides themselves and their mega-billionaire donors. It is time to think about the American people and the damage that this administration is doing to them.