Using the Power of the Purse
Floor Speech
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, we spend approximately $58 billion--I don't have it right in front of me--a year for the Department of Homeland Security, $55 billion, $56 billion.
We just approved earlier this year $58 billion for Ukraine, and now there is an additional $12 billion in the continuing resolution that passed out of the Senate today and is now sitting in the House. That puts it at almost $70 billion, which is well more than the entire annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security for the United States.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate what the gentleman just said.
I would say, for our constituents back home, I feel them. I feel the frustration of being in a Chamber where I can offer no amendment, where I have no power to have any input on what bill we are going to be debating on the floor. Literally, for 6-and-a-half years, no amendment has been offered on the floor of this body in open debate, meaning it wasn't precooked up in the Committee on Rules.
Think about that, in the people's House. That should infuriate both sides of the aisle. That is no way for the people's House to operate. It is being operated by dictate. That is a bipartisan statement, I want to say, over time.
I think, for the American people, they want to see us do something. I think we can.
To the fine folks in Pennsylvania that you ran into who said, ``What can we do? We can't do anything about it,'' do you know what? We can.
One, we can freeze spending to stop the complete disregard for the economic well-being of this country and the driving up of inflation by spending money we don't have. We can do that.
We can agree as a body that we have to make tough decisions like families and businesses do. Freeze spending. Let's just stop the bleeding.
We can take a second step, and we can actually demand that when we have debates about the spending of taxpayer money and the borrowing and printing of money that we actually deal with these crises in real terms.
I am really talking to my colleagues on my side of the aisle on this one:
We should demand that we get changes at the border.
We should demand that we turn away or detain fully at the border.
We should demand that we stop the forced jabs in people's arms in the military or they get fired.
We should demand changes in our energy policy so that we can free up American energy to increase our power on the world stage, make our grids reliable, make us more dependent on reliable energy, instead of unreliable energy, while making the environment better, by the way.
We should demand that we neutralize the power of the authoritarian state by pulling back on the reins of the FBI and the IRS.
There are things we can do. It is right here. We have the power of the purse. We should use it. I tell you, I am speaking to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. We have an obligation.
Look, I have run into the buzz saw of challenging the administration when it was Republican because I believed so much in Article I primacy. I introduced the ARTICLE ONE Act with my friend, Mike Lee, to say we should take away emergency powers from the President.
I did that when the President was using emergency powers to build a wall when there was an emergency and we needed to build it because my colleagues refused to. But I wanted there to be a limit into how much power the executive branch can use.
I subpoenaed records about unaccompanied alien children because I knew that when my colleague on the other side of the aisle was wearing a white pantsuit, staring through a fence that it was all theater. There weren't kids in cages. Those were set up by the previous administration under Jeh Johnson and President Obama, and they know it. They know it.
So you know what?
I subpoenaed information from HHS under a Republican administration because I wanted to know the truth.
We should care about Article I here. If we do, we can take power back and we can represent the people again.
We can use the power of the purse to check the executive.
We can stand up and defend the people of the United States.
We can secure the border.
We can rein in the tyranny of the IRS and the FBI.
We can get American energy going again by opening it up, so our people don't have to have inflation and the inability to have a reliable grid.
We can stop forcing our men and women in uniform to get fired if they refuse to take an experimental jab.
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Mr. ROY. Not one. And I will tell you that across the board, regardless of ideology, the people that come to me and are talking to me are concerned about the border.
They are concerned about fentanyl.
They are concerned about energy prices and their inability to pay their bills.
They are concerned about the extent to which they are in danger in their communities, the crime, and their relationship to the border.
They are concerned about the things that are impacting their lives, their inability to pay for their kids' school, their inability to afford healthcare because we have regulated it to death, and we have funded it and subsidized it to death, so that we are in a position where they can't afford to live the American Dream for their kids and their grandkids.
Our job in this body is to address that, not by spending more money and not by continuing to fund the very things that are undermining it.
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Mr. ROY. Will the gentleman yield?
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I will yield for the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert), but first I want to add to what the gentleman said because it is on point.
We are funding $5 million for the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry; we are funding $15 million for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and U.N. Framework Convention; $2 billion to the SEC, which they use to help advance the very ESG constraints on the flow of capital that is constraining our ability to produce energy; $3.2 billion to the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which funnels taxpayer dollars to unreliable green energy; $825 million for DOE's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, which gives credit handouts to massive oil companies; $450 million for DOE's ARPA; $29 million to administer a DOE loan program responsible for the Solyndra debacle.
I could go on and on. I have got a list here.
All that money to go to the Department of Energy to keep spending taxpayer money to screw up American energy and drive up their energy bills.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, we are talking about the drop-off of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
If you can see this here on C-SPAN, this top level is 750 million barrels. And you can see up here in 2020, there is this sharp drop-off? That drops down to 350 million barrels. That is the defense being exercised by a President trying to save his party. That is not being used specifically for the national security interest of the United States.
That is absolutely horrific. Dumping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, dumping it in order to drive gas prices down.
You know what? Those chickens are going to come home to roost.
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Mr. ROY. Close to $60 billion.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I mentioned this before, but I think it merits repeating, that we are at roughly $31 trillion in debt, as the gentleman said.
If you set out to count to 31 trillion at one Mississippi, it will take you 1 million years to count to that.
Just to put in perspective what that is, when I began running for office in December of 2017, our debt was $21 trillion; $10 trillion in 5 years since I began running for office.
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Mr. ROY. Well, I think we have got about 20 seconds left.
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Mr. ROY. All I would say is, if we want to do this, if we want an economy that is strong, stop spending money we don't have. Stop spending money to fund the bureaucracy that is going after the American people.
If you want a Nation that is safe, stop talking down your cops. Stand with your cops.
If you want a military that is strong, stop being woke. End the woke destruction of our military.
If you want a border that is secure, secure it. Turn people away. Accept the people that need help but turn people away and actually detain them and stop the control of our borders by cartels that are endangering the American people.
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