Issues of the Day
Floor Speech
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I have been listening to my friend from Texas, the gentleman from New York, and other speakers, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, and I can't help but observe the reality of the Shelby County decision as it was offered by the United States Supreme Court's majority authored by Chief Justice Roberts.
Now, what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle fail to mention is the fact that the Voting Rights Act remains intact and the Voting Rights Act remains fully in effect, and its purpose to ensure and preserve the ability of Americans to vote remains fully the law of the land. The core question before the Court back in 2012 or 2013--I think it was argued in `12 and decided in `13--was whether section 5, the specific preclearance provision, was, in fact, constitutional.
Now, the fact of the matter is when this was reauthorized back in I think 2006, it was reauthorized based on a 50-year-old coverage formula.
Now, my friend from Texas knows that. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle know that it was using a 50-year-old coverage formula. Now, people may want to just kind of sweep that aside and say that doesn't matter, but then go back and read the Supreme Court's opinion in 1966 on the first challenge on the Voting Rights Act and what the Court was saying at the time, that when you set aside the fundamental role of the States in carrying out elections, when you set aside the 10th Amendment, Madam Speaker, as the 1965 Voting Rights Act was seeking to do, well, then there has to be a particularly strong purpose.
What was that particularly strong purpose?
Invidious discrimination of the kind of the Jim Crow South of the poll taxes and of massive disparities in voting rates among populations in districts where those prohibitions existed.
Fast-forward 50 years through several iterations of the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, and in 2012, 2013, when this was being debated and when the Court decided it, the Court said: Look, sorry, you can't apply 50-year-old data to uphold and reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.
Now, I know that, because I was a lawyer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and I pored over every one of those documents that came before us and read and reviewed them sitting as a staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee where we knew full well what the data was showing us and what the data looked like. But here we are right now and the American people are only hearing that part of the story that we are somehow unwinding the Voting Rights Act.
We have done no such thing.
Ms. JACKSON LEE. Will the gentleman yield?
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Mr. ROY. Out of enormous respect for my friend from Texas, despite the way these hours normally work, I yield briefly to the gentlewoman from Texas.
Ms. JACKSON LEE. The gentleman is always enormously courteous, and I will be brief.
Since I was on the committee the gentleman might have been staff, but I know in the House, for example, we had at least 100 hearings and 15,000 pages of testimony. It was chaired at that time by Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican, who was meticulous in making sure we had a record. So I am not sure where the gentleman is getting his information from.
I will just finish by simply saying that the voter suppression laws that we are dealing with today are all engaged responding to the big lie that there was not a legitimate election in 2020, and my good friend knows that President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were elected in 2020. So we wonder the basis of these voter suppression laws.
Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman, and I will not take more of his time.
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the gentlewoman. Let me just say, I think this body would do a wonder for the American people if we could engage in this for hours, not seconds. And I think the gentlewoman agrees that we should have this kind of debate back and forth so the American people can see so we can flush out our differences, because there are things we agree on, and there are things we disagree on.
What I would respond to the gentlewoman about the point of what occurred, poring over it as a staffer as I did, was that the Members, including the chairman of the Judiciary Committee then, Mr. Sensenbrenner, as well as on the Senate side--and I won't speak for the House, because I was on the Senate side--but I was in the room with Chairman Specter, I was in the room with all of those that were in 2006 going through all this, and I was in the room with about 15 Republicans who were sitting over there, each of whom said that it was unconstitutional, we can't really do this, but we dare not go down this political road.
Okay, well, that is what that is.
Fast-forward, and for my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to bemoan ``activist Courts,'' well, welcome to the club. Welcome to the party of being concerned about activist Courts. I would argue this is not activism, but, fine, let's have that debate about how much power we want to cede to the building over there across the street, because when we are talking about activism, we can go way back on activism in terms of our views in terms of Roe, in terms of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and other areas in which the Court has inserted itself into the public domain.
But, okay, here we are. The legislature acted, and the Court said: Whoa, whoa, you can't do that.
Why did they do that? Applying the 10th Amendment, applying fundamentals of federalism, and applying the fact that States have primacy over election laws.
That is what the Court did. If you believe in judicial review subsequent to Marbury v. Madison, as I believe my friend from Texas, who is now leaving the floor, does believe in, well, then that is actually what the Court was doing. That is what they did. That is what the opinion says. When you read the opinion, Madam Speaker, it is just dripping with all of the things that you would expect it to be filled with in terms of deference to what occurred in 1965, what the Supreme Court said subsequent to that about why it was in a particularly important time for Congress to step over the role of the States because of the nature of the invidious discrimination in Jim Crow South and other areas of the country.
It wasn't just the South, by the way, there were counties all over the country.
But, Madam Speaker, when you looked at the data--and I pored over the data--we showed places there were counties in Florida that were covered, counties in Florida that weren't covered, and you could see that the voting rates of Black voters, Hispanic voters, and other voters, that vast numbers of people were turning out and showing up to vote, those numbers were even higher in some of the covered jurisdictions.
So you had no reason or basis to cover one county versus another in the State of Florida, Madam Speaker.
But I would challenge all of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to go open up those views, go look in and look at the data, look at the tables, and what you will find, Madam Speaker, is that there were significant numbers of counties and States that were then at that time covered by the Voting Rights Act that had better turnout rates and better participation rates than those that were uncovered which left the Court looking at the law and said: Well, hold on a second.
The whole reason that the Court upheld the law was because there was a unique circumstance where there were mass disparities because of very direct actions by those States.
I want the American people to know that because that is what is being said right now.
So suddenly, if I say: Hey, we might want voter ID.
Now, why might we want voter ID? Just to ensure that the one person who is voting in one person, one vote is actually the vote.
I say I want voter ID. Maybe that is because I have witnessed reasons why that is so. Somehow that is voter suppression?
That is what is so entirely frustrating is that you come forward and you say: Hey, I think that there is a good reason for this that, in my mind, I see very clearly as being important for the integrity of the election.
Let's not get wrapped around in the 2016 or 2020 election cycles. I have said a lot on the floor of the House at various times about those matters. Let's just actually focus on voter integrity, election integrity, and wanting to make sure that the people who vote know that their vote is going to count fully, and that you are not going to have someone voting with your ID.
We know for sure that there are individuals who come to the United States and use the identification of others, of Americans. We know that for sure. That is a fact.
We know that we end up with multiple people voting. We end up with all sorts of different possible and potential fraudulent activity.
For example, The New York Times, in 2012: ``Yet, votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised, and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth.'' That is The New York Times, that bastion of rightwing conspiracy.
We know that the Carter-Baker Commission, Jimmy Carter, known rightwing conspirator from Georgia, and James Baker, again, not really known to be a rightwing activist, quote in their report, ``Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.''
That is just data. It is just analyzing it. It is just fact.
Then, you go through other examples of known fraud.
Madam Speaker, 2016, at least 83 registered voters in San Pedro, California, received absentee ballots at the same small two-bedroom apartment.
In a 2018 North Carolina congressional race, a Republican operative, L. McCrae Dowless, Jr., had allegedly requested more than 1,200 absentee ballots on voters' behalf and then collected the ballots from voters' homes when they were mailed out. That was a Republican operative. I am an equal opportunity presenter of the facts here of how fraud can occur.
I can go through item after item. In 2017, an investigation of a Dallas City Council election found 700 fraudulent mail-in ballots signed by the same witness using a fake name.
There is other voter fraud in Texas. Since 2005, the Office of the Attorney General successfully prosecuted 534 incidents of fraud against 155 individuals, et cetera, et cetera.
I can go through county by county. In Medina County, Texas, four people, including an elected justice of the peace, were charged in February with 150 counts of election fraud. The charges included ballot harvesting and illegal voting. I can go example by example.
Now, were all of those examples I just gave enough to turn an election? I don't know. That is the point. We would like to know wherever that truth may lead, in whatever State and whatever county, wherever that takes us. But those are the facts.
So, when somebody comes forward and says, ``Hey, I think we ought to have voter ID. I think we ought to have voter ID or a way to attach an individual to a mail-in ballot,'' suddenly that is voter suppression? Right.
So, suddenly, Major League Baseball walks in and says: I have an idea. Let's pull out the All-Star Game from Atlanta, Georgia, where we could celebrate Hank Aaron in a 50 percent Black city, and let's go move it over to Colorado, into Denver, which is a 10 percent Black city. And let's pat ourselves on the back for being so exceptionally in tune with what is going on in the world. Let's move the All-Star Game to Colorado.
Why? The laws that were put on the books in Georgia this year, that were being voted on in Georgia, would basically make parity with what Colorado already has on the books.
This is the kind of debate we want to be able to have. Can we just, like, all agree? Let's get a whiteboard up and put the facts up of what these things are, what the bills are, what these laws are, and then at least be debating from the same sheet of music.
I may have a few more things to say. I know I have some colleagues here. I want to be mindful of their time.
I digressed there a little bit because I was hearing my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. But election integrity is so critically important right now, and I have colleagues from Texas who are completely abandoning their duty--I should say State legislature colleagues, to be clear--who are abandoning their duty to represent their constituents in the State of Texas in the legislature and have a full-throated debate about S.B. 1 and H.B. 3, the current bills in the legislative session, the special session in Texas, and have come to D.C. They are not doing their jobs.
Look, man, I generally want to flee D.C. to go back to Texas. It is rare that I see people saying I want to flee Texas to come to D.C.
But these Democratic members of the Texas Legislature have fled Austin to skip out on working in the Texas legislative session and have an open debate. They are coming to D.C. to sit down with the Vice President to go push and promote H.R. 1 or other bills to say we need to federalize elections instead of actually doing their job, which brings me to my point.
I will say a few things here, and then I will recognize my colleagues. At some point, we have to decide what it is that is actually sacred about what we are doing here as a Nation and as a body.
Our borders, right now, are wide open. Opioids are skyrocketing. Massive numbers cross the border. I will get into some of these details in a minute. We do it. I have done it before.
We have the schools that are teaching so-called antiracism.
I walked through the Austin airport today and saw the book by Ibram Kendi, the antiracism book. I can't remember the title. I saw it sitting there in the bookstore BookPeople. I didn't see a whole lot of conservative books in there, but I saw that book, sitting there in the front.
On page 19 of that book, he writes: ``If racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor of or against an individual based on that person's race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.''
Interesting definition of discrimination. Not sure that fits within the Civil Rights Act, but I will leave that for another discussion.
But what I am saying is, we are heightening the level to which every single aspect of our lives is taken through a political lens, every single thing.
I am asking my staff to look at every hearing that this body has had since the beginning of January and tell me what percentage of the hearings has had a focus or something to do on race, on sexual orientation, or an issue in that type of framework. I guarantee you--I don't have to count them--that number is going to be massively high.
I will just go ahead and stipulate right now, without having done any counting, the percentage of hearings that this body has held, the percentage of hearings that focused on race, LGBTQ issues, sexual orientation, those issues will be extraordinarily high as a percentage.
So, the majority believes that is where our focus should be--while we just spent $6 trillion, while inflation is running through the roof, while small businesses can't hire people. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle know this because, assuredly, they have small businesses in their district, or they go to the restaurants, or they go to the places like I have gone to and they can't hire people because we are paying people more not to work than to work.
We have a principal focus on race-related issues, a complete abandonment of the responsibility of this body to secure the border of the United States. It is wide open, opioids running amuck. Cartels own it. People are pouring across it, to their detriment and ours. Ranchers are getting overrun in Texas.
Now, today, just yesterday, or, I don't know, the last few days, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted overwhelmingly to draft our daughters. Heck, we had 8 Republicans of the 13 vote for that nonsense, to draft our daughters.
Who are we? Genuine question: Who are we, as a people, as a country? Where are the sacred boundaries of being able to decide how to live and to recognize truths that man is man, that woman is woman, and that I, as a father, do not want to have my daughter get drafted?
You say, well, you can draft your son, use the power of the government to draft your son.
We can have a debate about ending the draft. Everyone comes back and says: Well, don't worry. There is not going to be a draft. There hasn't been a draft in 50 years, so don't worry about it.
What do you mean don't worry about it? When my daughter turns 18 in 8 years and she has to go sign a piece of paper to register, I shouldn't be worried about my daughter getting drafted and getting sent to a foxhole in Afghanistan or Iraq or somewhere else? What do you mean don't worry about that?
Yet, that is precisely what this body is doing. The Senate Armed Services Committee voted on it; the House already has that language.
Let me be perfectly clear. I will not be honoring whatever law says it is drafting my daughter. That is the fundamental problem. The rule of law depends on it being rooted in any basic understanding of who we are as a people, where we come from, what our values are, and then actually being able to get the consent of the governed in a way that actually connects with the governed.
It doesn't just come on down from on high, from a Senate Armed Services Committee that votes, by the way, behind closed doors, not in public viewing. And by the way, none of them will go out and enforce this garbage. But somebody one day will show up and hand a form to my daughter and say, ``I am sorry, ma'am, you are going to have to register for the draft.'' And I am going to be sitting there as a dad-- and I promise you, my wife is a little more fired up about this than I am. My wife is going to be sitting there saying: ``Over my dead, dang body.''
Now, this is what we do when we rip apart our society, when we forget where those sacred boundaries are, about what the role of this institution is, or how we are supposed to govern.
I am going to pause for a few moments. I think both of my colleagues who are here wanting to speak to the issues that we are seeing unfold in Cuba, maybe a few other matters of importance to them. I certainly appreciate their time. I think they share some of the sentiments that I am sharing.
Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Babin).
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas, my friend, for his words, and I am going to yield to the gentleman from California here in just a moment.
I would ask one question to the gentleman from Texas, and I will repeat that question to my friend from California.
I share your enthusiasm and commitment for wanting to help the people of Cuba who are seeking freedom and obviously have been living under the thumb of tyranny for far too long.
I was chief of staff to Senator Ted Cruz. His father is a dear friend, and he knew all too well what life was like under that murderous regime.
Our friend and our colleague, Alex Mooney, his wonderful mother, similarly, at the same rough timeframe, was subjected to the horrors of Cuba in that time in the late fifties, early sixties, and then came to the United States.
But I would ask my friend, that as we watch these individuals from Cuba seeking freedom--and God bless them; we need to support them--and/ or seeking to come to the United States seeking freedom, do you believe that our country is itself upholding and adhering to the ideals that they are seeking?
Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman.
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas. I will yield to my friend in California in a moment.
I couldn't agree more with respect to the current situation we find ourselves and our country in. A country where we are now talking about vaccine passports, where we are talking about diving into the private affairs of American citizens in the alleged name of health and welfare of the people, we are forgetting that fundamental, core liberty of being free from government coercion.
When you go look at the Constitution and when we talk about the President of the United States talking about going door to door--and I know it might have been a rhetorical statement, but you never really know. But when the Constitution contemplates going door to door, it does so only in a couple of contexts: the Census, and then protecting individuals against it, by, in the Third Amendment, preventing the quartering of troops in the homes of American people; by preventing, through the Fourth Amendment, unreasonable search and seizure.
That is what was on the minds of the Founders. That was why the Constitution was structured the way it was structured. It wasn't to empower government in the name of something supposedly greater, in the ``common good.'' How many hundreds of millions of people in this world have been slaughtered in the name of the common good? How many?
Let's ask the people of Cuba. Let's ask the people of Cuba, seeking freedom, seeking to either come to the United States or have the kind of freedom that they believe exists in the United States, and have that in Cuba, whether we should be empowering government, supposedly in the name of the good or the common good of the people.
Our Constitution exists to protect and preserve liberty. That is what it exists for. That is what this country was founded upon; a belief in the Almighty and a belief in liberty. And we are tearing that apart by the thread. Every single day we are tearing that apart by the thread.
Even as people today right now want to have a business, be able to employ people. They can't, because they are told by some bright-eyed leftist: Don't worry, just pay them more money. Without any concept of what that does to a bottom line. Without any concept what that does to an income statement, being able to actually raise money, risk capital, put their name on the line, borrow, and then hire people to engage in the business of their dream.
Maybe they inherited it from their family, their parents, their great-grandparents. What do we do? We just say: Don't worry about it, pay them $15 an hour. Like there is some magic fairy dust that tells people what the wage ought to be.
We destroy businesses in the name of being nice to people. You know what it does? It limits the numbers of jobs, drives up the prices of goods, causes people not to have jobs, causes people not to be able to get the job, and then be able to afford whatever it is they want to buy. All because somebody said, Oh, gee, I have got a magic number, $15 an hour.
Why not $20? Why not $50? I mean, if we are going to be all generous, hell, just make it $1,000 an hour. Oh, no, Chip, that is just crazy talk.
Child tax credits, why stop at $300? Modern monetary theory, just spend whatever you want to. Why not make it $30,000? Man, then everybody would be doing great.
My colleagues don't ever want to actually sit down and actually put pen to paper and figure out what in the heck can we actually afford as a country and what are we doing to the dignity of work? What are we doing to the American family? And what are we doing to freedom and the ability of the individual to prosper according to his or her hard work and according to what he or she wants to accomplish in their faith and what they want to put in, the toil they want to put in their life?
We are ripping that apart. We are ripping it apart in the name of compassion. Just like we are ripping apart the lives of migrants in the name of compassion, who are getting absolutely decimated by cartels. We do it and we say: Oh, look at us, how nice we are; when the little 7- year-old girl is sold into the sex trafficking trade because we put them in the hands of violent cartels along the border of Texas.
Does anybody care about the numbers? Does anybody look at what is actually happening down at the border? I know, there he goes again, there goes that crazy Chip Roy talking about the border again. Talk to my constituents. Talk to the people of Texas, who are getting absolutely crushed.
The numbers are astounding. We are not just talking about people and the problems that we are having with ranchers, and we are talking about the sex and human trafficking trade.
Right here we see the encounters by month. We have never seen anything like this. When Jeh Johnson headed up the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama, he said a thousand a month was a crisis. I was just looking at the numbers. We had a few thousand in a day just last week in the McAllen sector. We had 20,000 a week. We had a few thousand in a day in the Laredo sector, a few thousand a day in the McAllen sector.
We have had, I think--this is from memory--70 Border Patrol agents get COVID in the last month. We had 20 in Laredo.
All of this is happening in real time. All while the administration talks about unwinding title 42 and not worrying about what is happening at our southern border while telling us and preaching to us about vaccine passports. Oh, no, you better go mask up again.
Fentanyl. Right down here, fentanyl, 2021 versus 2020 fentanyl numbers. We are bringing in a thousand pounds of fentanyl in a month. A thousand pounds of fentanyl in a month. That is enough to kill millions of people. But that is happening right now. Nobody seems to care on the other side of the aisle. They say: Oh, don't worry, it is just fentanyl. No problem to see here.
Would you say that to my constituent who died with a valium laced with fentanyl recently? This is happening across the country. We are now at 92,000 or so opioid deaths in this country. I will come back to that in a minute, because I want to yield to my friend from California. But that is what we are facing.
Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. LaMalfa).
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Mr. ROY. Would the gentleman yield for just one second?
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Mr. ROY. Would it surprise the gentleman to learn that I share his concern about the state of the United States military, given the politically correct nature of the current leadership?
I just met with a bunch of parents of the individuals that I have nominated to go to the academies, and these parents are beside themselves. They are saying, please, can you stop this? It is going to endanger my kids who are going to go serve their country at the academies because they hear the facts. They see that the U.S. Special Forces hired their first chief diversity officer; that the Department of Defense just hired a chief diversity officer; that a Space Force guardian was fired for saying the ``diversity, inclusion, and equity industry and the trainings we're receiving in the military via that industry are rooted in critical race theory which is rooted in Marxism.''
This isn't just embarrassing and un-American. It is making us weak. Our diplomats are apologizing to the Chinese Communist Party for racism when Beijing is running concentration camps. This is the reality of what we are doing to our military, where we are running ads talking about LGBTQ issues instead of actually just recruiting warriors to go defend the United States of America. I yield to the gentleman.
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California for his words, and I appreciate the passion and the commitment to what the gentleman just shared with not just me and with my friend from Texas, but with the American people.
I ask the Speaker how much time I have remaining?
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I appreciate my colleagues for coming down and joining me. I would only add this: As we sit here and we hear so much negativity about what is going on, the virus, for example, and vaccines, we hear nothing from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, but everybody is stonewalling and so forth. We have administered 188 million individuals with the vaccine in this country; 340 or so million doses. About 57 percent of the total population, about 80 percent of those over 65 have had two shots, 90 percent have had one shot.
We are well above the vast majority of the world in terms of total numbers. As a percentage, we are a little bit behind, because we are a large country. When you look at what we have actually accomplished-- remember, our colleagues on the other side of the aisle who last year were saying: This vaccine stuff, that is all fool's gold.
We know that is true. We know that is what our Vice President said, and a lot of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle said: Don't touch the vaccine. That is crazy stuff. Well, now, all of a sudden it is like: You better go get the vaccine. Run and get the vaccine. You have to get the vaccine. Get the vaccine.
Okay, I am telling my dad, a polio survivor, 78-years old: Go get the vaccine, dad. But what if you have natural immunity? Should you go get the vaccine? What if you are a kid? Should you go get the vaccine? Those are questions, and they are reasonable questions.
This government, in its infinite wisdom, shut down businesses, shut down schools, mandated masks, created all sorts of mental health issues, prohibited people from going to get cancer screenings and take care of themselves and their families, forced elderly couples who have been married for 40 or 50 years not to be able to say good-bye when one of them was passing away, all in the name of the government taking care of us.
In the infinite wisdom of the government I should just go run down and say: Oh, sure, let me run down and get the vaccine when how much money has been given to the pharmaceutical companies? How many billions of dollars are they getting, and how much do they get for the boosters?
By the way, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle were going after the profitability of the pharmaceutical companies at an oversight hearing that I was in last year, 2 years ago.
The bottom line here is: This country is a great country filled with great people, doing great things, every single day, and when this body and this government gets out of the way of the American people, they continue to do great things. The greatness and the future of our country lies with them and with the people.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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