Debt Ceiling Crisis

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I always appreciate hearing from the gentleman from Texas. Don't always agree, but he is a friend and he is a gentleman, and I always enjoy seeing him down on the floor.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Green).

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Mr. ROY. Amen. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the words from my brother, my friend from Texas. He is exactly right.

Just last night, I was on an interview on Fox with my friend Byron Donalds, and we have staked out two different positions in the primary fight for the Republican nomination for President, and we were talking about how we will be, you know, coming together in a year one way or the other carrying forward in the general election, but at some point we have got to remember that we can agree to disagree, that we can actually have a vigorous debate, vigorous disagreements, and engage in--I just wish we would have more of us down here on the floor engaging in actual debate.

I would ask any of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, we want to start turning some of our Special Orders into special debates. I think that would be a better use of our time, and actually go back and forth in 2 minute intervals and actually engage in debate on the body of the people's House.

Madam Speaker, I do have to take some issue with some of the 1-minute speeches that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle were engaging in about an hour ago. I saw that the Democrat majority leader was on the floor with a chart and that chart said, ``House Republicans are running out of town to cause an economic meltdown.''

Sounds ominous. Sounds terrible and threatening and all sorts of calamities are going ensue. Where are Senate Democrats? Where is Chuck Schumer? They have been MIA this entire week, not even in town, but, hell, they have been MIA all year not doing a thing in the Senate except for being the personnel office for the administration. That is all they do, run through nominations, and, heck, they are not even that good at that.

What do they do? They run out of town. Where was the President last week? Japan.

You see this ominous threat of a looming debt ceiling date, an X-date as it is being referred to of June 1, is all manufactured crisis and theater. We know that. Americans know that.

Secretary Yellen wants to figure out how we need to deal with whatever interest payments need to be paid in June, she can prioritize those payments. She can make decisions to figure out how to carry this country forward. She can walk on down here, brief us, meet with us long before the June 7 date she is currently planning to come down to talk to us and have a conversation about taking those COVID dollars back that are sitting in there unobligated to the tune of $50 billion.

How about taking the IRS dollars back that are there to expand the Internal Revenue Service, an IRS which, by the way, targets the poor and minorities three to five times more than the nonpoor and nonminorities. That is the truth.

Why don't they take that $80 billion, combine it with the COVID money, turn it into dollars right now that you can go pay loans with? No problem.

See, my Democratic colleagues won't do that because my Democratic colleagues prefer the fear created with a manufactured crisis. They prefer to use that crisis as Rahm Emanuel said: ``Never let a crisis go to waste.'' They prefer to manufacture a crisis to jack up more debt on our children and grandchildren to the tune of $4 trillion.

That is what they want more than anything on Earth is to spend more money, to increase the power of government, to undermine our freedoms, to destroy the American way of life, and they are doing it right now. That is what is happening.

The fact is, while some of my Democratic colleagues were on the floor, one individual said: ``Make no mistake, they,'' meaning Republicans, ``have no plan.''

Well, I am sorry. We passed a bill in April. We actually passed a bill off of the floor of the House that raises the debt ceiling $1.5 trillion, provides an actual path to fiscal responsibility, and we did that in April.

Oh, but see, we have no plan. We have got to have this manufactured crisis.

Another quote: President Biden already lowered the deficit by $1.7 trillion, they say. His budget would cut the deficit by another $3 trillion by eliminating wasteful spending on Big Oil and Pharma, we are told. It is, in fact, our Democratic colleagues who prefer to maintain their massive subsidies for the elites and the wealthy in their so- called ``Inflation Reduction Act'' just last year.

My friend from New York, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, said: ``I ask you to think about the last time a person has said in this country that the government does too much for them. . . . When was the last time anyone has heard or seen that?''

I will say it. I will say it right here. I don't want the government doing most of the things that the government is doing to interfere with the ability of the American people to carry out their lives; Federal, State, and local. When was the last time you had a bureaucrat show up and you said: ``Oh, joy. Thank you. I am really glad there is a bureaucrat here''?

When was the last time you were thankful for $32 trillion in debt, $100,000 almost for every man, woman, and child in America? Anybody thankful for $32 trillion in debt? Anybody?

Anybody thankful for a border that is wide open, being exploited by cartels, while fentanyl comes in and kills our children? Anybody thankful for that? A Department of Homeland Security that doesn't actually secure the homeland?

Anybody thankful for an FBI that went after Scott Smith and labeled him a domestic terrorist for daring to defend his daughter in a school board meeting because she was assaulted in a bathroom?

Anybody thankful for the IRS knocking on your door, auditing the poor, the minorities, three to five times more? People thankful for that?

Are you thankful for the EPA, or the Department of the Interior, that sent a man to prison because he had some ponds on his ranch in Montana?

We have a government that is weaponized against the American people and is undermining our liberties, and they want more of it. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle want more, more government. They want more taxes. They want more spending.

They want more bureaucrats knocking on your door, like Mark Houck in Philadelphia, when he woke up to his door being knocked on by local law enforcement, teamed up with Federal law enforcement, to go carry out a warrant to arrest him because he had defended his son exercising free speech, because he is a pro-life activist in Philadelphia. That is your government at work.

The fact is: We have a decision to make here. What are we going to do? Are we going to listen to the wailing and gnashing of teeth of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle projecting a manufactured crisis to exploit fear to try to raise our debt limit, a credit card limit, by $4 trillion? I want to be very clear, and I want to be clear to my colleagues on this side of the aisle. Anybody making a deal right now? $4 trillion? Are you out of your freaking mind?

When I came to this town as a lawyer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the entire debt was $6 trillion. What are we doing? We are having a conversation, blowing my mind, about raising our debt another $4 trillion. Why? So we can continue to fund the very bureaucrats that at least my colleagues on this side of the aisle campaign against.

Guess what? You have the power of the purse for a reason. You should use it. Federalist 58, James Madison, what did he say? He said the power of the purse granted to the people's House was the most powerful tool you could give against the tyranny of the executive branch.

My colleagues on this side of the aisle all too often like to go around and campaign against all of the things that the bureaucracy is doing or that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle support, but when it comes down to game time--and it is game time right now--when it comes down to game time, are we going to use the power of the purse to defend the American people against the onslaught of the tyranny of the executive branch, or are we going to tuck tail, take the first exit ramp off, and walk away?

What I am hearing right now being debated, being negotiated, is taking the first exit ramp off to cut a deal, because that is what we do in this town, cut a deal. But that deal is not a deal for our kids and our grandkids.

We passed a responsible bill in April. My message to my Republican colleagues is: Hold the line.

My message to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle: Quit lying to the American people, quit advancing this fraud of a manufactured crisis, stop telling people that you can just continue to spend money we don't have. Stop lying to them that there is more tax revenue to go get when we are at the highest level of tax revenue ever in our history, matched only two other times, World War II and in 2000 at the end of the dot-com explosion. Almost 20 percent of our GDP is taken in by taxes.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle hide behind that, and they refuse to acknowledge that this government is too big, too burdensome, and too weaponized against the American people.

So we passed a bill that would pull back discretionary spending $131 billion to 2022 spending levels. Now, that is what we were spending a mere 6 months ago. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle would tell you: Oh, my God, you are going to completely dismantle everybody's life and well-being. It is literally what we were spending 6 months ago.

More than that, you can maintain defense levels at 2023 levels, current levels, and you can return your bureaucratic state, your nondefense spending, to merely what we were spending right before COVID, recognizing, by the way, that our government is now 40 percent bigger since the beginning of COVID. We can return it to pre-COVID levels, which, by the way, polls at 76 percent. Most Americans say: Yeah, I think I can deal with that great efficiency of the bureaucracy, pre-COVID.

We can do that. That is what we passed. That is what Republicans stood up and passed and put into the Senate's hands.

By the way, if we did that, we could fund NDD--that is, nondefense discretionary--at the exact same level as that great MAGA extremist Barack Obama proposed for fiscal 2024 in his last budget.

Secondly, we passed measures that would repeal the grid-destroying tax credits passed in the name of--my colleagues on the other side of the aisle say ``green;'' I say ``unreliable''--energy in this so-called Inflation Reduction Act that will enrich leftists, enrich corporations, and enrich the Chinese Communist Party.

Last year, through reconciliation, which is not the way we should do business--that is how ObamaCare was passed--with a mere majority vote in the House and the Senate, with 158 proxy votes, people in this Chamber who were not physically present. During the August recess, on a party-line vote, Democrats jammed through a giant giveaway to the wealthiest Americans. Goldman Sachs estimates it at $1.2 trillion, over three times the original estimate.

If we do not carry through as Republicans, if we do not carry through with the measure we passed in April to reduce those subsidies, then the EIA, the Energy Information Agency, I think it is, estimates that the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act--we use too many acronyms in this town--could make wind and solar account for nearly 60 percent of the U.S. electricity generation by 2050.

Now, everybody is jumping up and down in joy in all the schools across America because they have been told that wind and solar is the magic unicorn energy. Don't you understand? Everything is great; it is clean; it is wonderful.

They don't ever talk about the side effects. They don't ever talk about the children, who are mining all of the minerals to be used in the solar panels, being abused around the world. They never talk about the environmental impact of the wind turbines in West Texas, or what happens to birds. They never talk about what it means to national security and empowering China. They never talk about the fact that you can't have a grid that stays up and powers your homes and your hospitals and your lives because you don't have gas-fired plants, you don't have coal-fired plants, and you don't have nuclear plants backing up the grid.

I can tell you, on a cloudy, windless day in Texas: We are in trouble. It is true.

Everybody is going to go around on the other side of the aisle--and I have seen them--they go give speeches to kids on the steps of the Capitol and they say: Oh, we are doing all of these great things for you. Don't you know? We care about the environment. We care about our planet. You now have all of this great, clean energy.

Well, enjoy being in third-world status with brownouts, like we are seeing in Europe and like we are seeing in other parts of the world, where they are retreating from the full embrace of so-called ``green,'' i.e., ``unreliable energy resources,'' because you create energy poverty. You undermine human flourishing. You undermine the well-being and the prosperity of the poorest of the poor in this world when you take away the ability for us to have energy. That is exactly what my Democrat colleagues did and in the process are enriching their fat cat friends. Ninety percent of the subsidies go to corporations of a billion dollars and up.

Oh, but I thought this was all of the good stuff, the unicorn energy stuff. No, rich people, financiers, making tons of money on the back of grift, of corporate cronyism, the worst kind of corporate cronyism you have ever seen on display happening right here.

What are Republicans doing? Running away, saying: Well, they will never give up their signature Inflation Reduction Act bill.

Bull. They will give it up if we take it to them and hold the line for the American people. Stand up and hold the line, to my Republican colleagues, against the worst form of corporate cronyism I have ever seen on the floor of this body.

How about 80 percent of the electric vehicle subsidies that go to people who make $100,000 or $300,000 as a couple? Yeah. So the poor guy out there who is a plumber, trying to drive his pickup around, is going to be told: You have got to go subsidize the little suburbanite family running around in their EV feeling good about themselves, patting themselves on the back, while they go plug their EV in to charge it using as much power as you use for your air-conditioning unit, which has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere ain't nuclear, ain't gas, and ain't coal anymore because they are destroying our ability to produce the reliable power that we need for the very EVs they want to subsidize.

Let's not even talk about how much that is empowering China directly. Chinese companies are eligible for these climate credits. A recent analysis found Chinese companies could end up with $125 billion in IRA subsidies.

You are giving them all the power, the Chinese Communist Party. You are subsidizing them with direct taxpayer money. You are allowing the Chinese to then sell us back the panels made with the minerals that they mined. How in the world is this good for our national security or our energy security? It is not.

Democrats should be ashamed. Republicans should be ashamed if we walk away, which is what they are about to do, cutting a deal that undermines the American people, taking the very first off-ramp, the very first exit ramp.

How about the third issue, overturning Biden's unfair deficit- increasing and tuition-increasing student loan bailout, which will cut the deficit by $400 to $500 billion dollars this year? We passed that. Yay, Republicans. They were all cheering down here.

The Republicans were all cheering down here. We should cheer it, but guess what we are doing? We are walking away from it. Do you know why, Madam Speaker? It is because my Republican colleagues say: Don't worry. The Supreme Court will strike it down as unconstitutional.

Guess what? One, don't count on it. Don't put all your eggs in the Supreme Court basket. Number two, there is this thing called the Constitution, which we are supposed to enforce and support. You don't walk away from your own view of the constitutionality of an unconstitutional act by a President. It is our job.

I don't want to hear one member of the Republican Party in this House use the term ``power of the purse'' and walk away from forcing Democrats to end this unlawful and unconstitutional act by the President of the United States to unilaterally choose to make individuals in this country pay off the loans of other individuals in this country.

How is that standing up for the people? How is that holding the line?

Eighty-seven percent of the American people don't have student loans, and of the people who do have student loans, 56 percent of them have graduate degrees. Yet, you are going to ask that same plumber who has to get in his pickup--and he is now subsidizing that suburbanite who is driving their little electronic vehicle, their little EV, going around saying look at how great they are--subsidizing that and also subsidizing that idiot's gender studies degree.

The plumber who started a business didn't take out a loan. He works hard and wants what is best for his kid, and he is now subsidizing the gender studies-degree kid sitting in a basement tweeting and sitting on their parent's healthcare plan that allows them to stay on it until they are 26. Then you wonder why we are $32 trillion in debt.

But what we are going to do, in all of our infinite wisdom, is cut a deal. Cut a deal to get what? More about that later, whenever we figure out what that is.

I would remind everybody that Speaker Pelosi herself said: ``People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.''

There was no act of Congress, yet we are funding it. We defunded it as Republicans, but now we are walking away from defunding that to cut a deal. We should not do that.

Number four, rescinding the $80 billion Democrats gave to the IRS to hire 87,000 agents that will target working- and middle-class taxpayers the most.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle say that Republicans just want to protect rich tax cheats. According to CBS, that great purveyor of rightwing conspiracy news, the IRS audits the poor at five times the rate of everyone else.

According to The New York Times, also a great purveyor of radical rightwing news, ``Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers.''

Rich people have lawyers. Rich people get subsidies from the very people who go out and campaign and say they are doing everything for the American people while they enrich their fat-cat buddies, as my Democratic colleagues did with the Inflation Reduction Act and which my Republican colleagues voted to end and now are walking away from eliminating.

Reform No. 5, implement the REINS Act to end the abuse of executive power by empowering Congress to approve major regulations that cost Americans billions of dollars.

President Biden's regulatory delusion in his first 2 years has saddled the American people with at least $318 billion in total costs and more than 218 million hours of paperwork.

More than that, there are massive regulations being carried out by this administration through executive fiat and order that have a massive economic impact and, more importantly, a massive liberty impact on the American people, turning millions of Americans into felons for daring to have a piece of plastic that attaches to a constitutionally protected weapon.

The student loan fiasco I just described, regulation after regulation by this administration, and all we want to do is pass the REINS Act, which we just passed out of the Judiciary Committee, by the way--are we going to make that a part of our deal? I am not reading about it in all the leaked reports I am seeing.

Let's kick that one aside. Let's allow the administration to continue to run roughshod over the American people through executive fiat because we want a deal.

Reform No. 6, strengthen and establish work requirements for able- bodied Americans who are receiving government assistance, just like President Biden supported.

I have gotten to one where I think there may be at least a little fight on this side of the aisle to try to get one of the things that we passed. I don't know how much. I don't know whether it will apply to Medicaid. I don't know what it will apply to.

However, I can tell you, Madam Speaker, that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't want people to have to work. President Biden voted for it 11 times, and President Clinton signed it, but your modern Democratic Party in 2023 wants to pay people not to work.

There is no other explanation for it. If they say otherwise, it is not true.

We want people to work. We want to give the benefit of getting people off the welfare roll. There is, in fact, dignity to work. Our country depends on it. Our society depends on it. Our children depend on seeing their parents work. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't want that.

Apparently, we do, and I, at least, think it is apparently part of whatever deal is being discussed. It ought to be, and it ought to be fully a part of it because we passed it already. We passed a deal.

Finally, reclaiming billions in unobligated COVID funds, that is just the peanuts left on the floor, the mere $40 billion or $50 billion of unobligated COVID funds left of the $5 trillion or whatever we blew through in the last 3 years decimating our economy and driving up inflation.

The fact of the matter is we have an obligation in this body, in the people's House, on both sides of the aisle, to do our job, to stop spending money recklessly, to stop printing money, to stop driving up inflation, and to stop denying our children their inheritance.

When everybody goes around on Memorial Day this weekend to stand up with veterans and salute the fallen, they go to Arlington National Cemetery, the cemetery at Fort Sam Houston, or any one of our other national cemeteries around this country--what did they fight for? Did they fight for us to cut a deal?

I ask because I am pretty sure the boys in Bastogne sitting in the foxhole freezing to death weren't interested in moving that line back to Normandy. They had gone from Normandy to Bastogne.

Hold the damn line. Don't back off, Republicans. Stand up for the country that you go out and campaign for. Hold the line for the American people because the bill we passed in April, I am going to be honest with you, is a downpayment on what we have to do. It is not everything we have to do. It is the beginning.

If we walk away from that, if we walk away from that because the people get weak-kneed about, ``My God,'' they are crying, ``My God, we are not going to make our debt payment,'' yes, we are. The President of the United States knows what you know. We can't walk away from our debt payments. We have to make those payments.

Secretary Yellen and the President know it. They will make the payment. We will not default, but we are defaulting on the American Dream every single day that goes by where we continue to spend money we don't have to fund the bureaucrats at war with the American Dream. If the Republicans walk away from this, then they don't deserve to stay in the majority any more than the Democrats do.

We should hold the line for the American people, and we should hold the line for the future of this country.

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

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