Solid Start Act of 2022

Floor Speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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these decisions, and you don't have the VA arbitrarily making law and stepping over the 1992 law, which has never been repealed.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

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

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

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