State of the American Dream Today
Floor Speech
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Mr. PERRY. Mr. Speaker, I am honored to be with my good friend from Texas, standing up for all Americans and all of America in the face of this place known as the swamp.
There was a time when the country revered Washington, D.C., and no one ever would think of it as the swamp. I was listening to your comments about World War II and visiting the museum this summer. I hope to visit it myself.
I think about just recently the use of the Defense Production Act. In the past, it was used to build tanks, airplanes, munitions, the equipment that the American soldier and servicemember needed to go fight tyranny, fascism, and totalitarianism and be successful.
This government said to the factory that was building a car, that was building some other machine implement: Whoa, hold on a second here, bigger calling here. We have to save the world from tyranny, so you are no longer going to build a car. You are going to build a jeep. You are no longer going to build something for agricultural production. You are going to build a howitzer.
Where are we in 2023? Well, we are going to use the Defense Production Act to force companies--there is no declaration of war, but we are going to force companies to build solar panels and batteries and electric vehicles, windmills, all sourced--my good friend from Texas already talked about where the sourcing of these raw materials come from. Even if you are not buying the solar panel from China, 90 percent of polysilicon comes from China, so we are forcing companies to build these things that, by the way, don't help.
If you are talking about carbon, it actually costs more to produce these things than it does just to produce the energy that they in turn produce. That aside, it is using the Defense Production Act to force companies in America to do this because of a political whim.
I make the argument that this is not needed and is not needed at this time, and my colleagues on both sides of the aisle don't agree. I am astounded. I am astounded that some Okie from Muskogee, a guy from Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, who has read the Constitution and says, my goodness, it is pretty obvious. The Federal Government is limited in its powers--limited. We are not supposed to be telling people what kind of car they can drive or if they are a business and want to produce one thing, and we are telling them, no, they are going to produce batteries instead because we demand it.
Today in a hearing, the Energy Department is proposing rules for new efficiency standards on dryers, washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, you name it. If you have a gas stove in your home, they are going to exclude 95 percent of the market. They are saying, well, it is not a ban. I say to myself: Man, I am just a guy from Dillsburg who used to work with his hands underneath a car. I went to vo-tech school. If I understand that the Federal Government shouldn't be telling me this, why doesn't the rest of the country understand it? Am I missing something?
I am not missing anything because when I did spend a week home, just like Mr. Roy did, the great Representative from the State of Texas, I can imagine what he heard. I will tell you what I heard. Time after time at the gas station, when I came out of the movie theater with my wife, when I am at the grocery store, people walk up to me, and they say: Keep fighting.
They don't even tell me what to keep fighting on. They know what Chip Roy knows, what Scott Perry knows, that this country is rotting from the inside. They can't necessarily explain how it happened or what it is, but they know that they can't afford their groceries. They know that they can't afford to move to a bigger home. They know that they can't afford a mortgage on a car. They know that when their parents had a house, the biggest bill they had was their mortgage, and the second biggest bill if they decided to take out a car loan was a car loan. Now, the second biggest bill people have is health insurance. Health insurance--I thought we solved that problem in the United States of America.
Do you know who sounds like they are getting rich? It is not doctors. It is somebody in the middle. It is bureaucrats siphoning off all the money.
This town created it. This town solved the problem that it created by making the problem worse. Now my bosses and Chip's bosses, my constituents and yours, can't afford to live their lives in America and be healthy, take a vacation, have a decent car, a decent home, a decent education for their children.
They are making choices: ``Well, I don't know. My house has a gas stove in it. I can't afford to rewire it for an electric stove, but the bureaucrats at the Department of Energy''--I talked to her today. I said: Do you know what is involved in changing from a gas stove to an electric stove? Do you know what is involved? Well, she had no idea, but thank goodness my colleague on the other side of the aisle said, well, if you have to run electricity, we have a $4,000 grant provided by the Federal Government to do that.
The citizens who get up early in the morning, pack a lunch box, and kiss their kids good-bye are paying for that $4,000. They don't want to. They can't afford to. They want the $4,000 for their kids and their home, not the Federal Government to tell them how to spend it and what they are working for. It is absurd and obscene.
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Mr. PERRY. Mr. Speaker, I am thinking about Mr. Roy's comments. We say the Republic can't exist if our colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to dismiss the calamity that is happening on the border, the human tragedy, because it is not a dismissal. It is a collaboration. It is part and parcel to aiding and abetting. It is part and parcel to being involved in and supporting the largest human trafficking operation in recorded history. That is what it is.
If my friends on the other side of the aisle think that there is some political favor in knowing that they are doing nothing about 10-year- old boys and girls being trafficked into unimaginable circumstances, then I sure hope that God is with them because they are going to need something for their souls.
That aside, look, I get the politics of it, but I, like my good friend and colleague from Texas, cannot help myself. I cannot help myself in thinking about the Founding Fathers who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor knowing that mankind, that men and women, were flawed, that they fell short of the grace of God, and that they knew that power was corrupting.
They set up this system--for my good friends on the other side of the aisle--not as a democracy but a republic, a republic with competing interests to check the power of government, the power of the avarice of man and mankind so that the individual was preeminent.
The Founders knew. The Founders knew what the difference was, and that is why they called it a republic. People stand up, and I am happy that they do, and they pledge allegiance to the flag and to the Republic for which it stands. I would submit to you that many don't know what it means to be a republic. A republic means that individual citizens are preeminent.
I talk to my bosses, my constituents, and I ask them: When you can't buy the car that you want, when you are forced to subsidize the car that the other guy wants because he wants to virtue signal to you about how much more he cares about the planet, do you feel preeminent? They don't.
When they can't afford a home--Mr. Roy went through the price of new homes. Unimaginable. My children, I don't know how they will afford to be out on their own. I don't know how you start a business today. Yet, somehow we act like we are in a republic.
Mr. Speaker, our country is in trouble, and there is an urgency that Mr. Roy gets. There is the urgency that the people at the grocery store and the gas station and the movie theater, the people who get up early and pack a lunch box, they get the urgency. Do you know who doesn't? Folks in this town who somehow told themselves, well, look, if we save $12 billion and we spend $4 trillion, somehow that is a good deal.
Look, I am not a math whiz, self-admitted, but I can do arithmetic. We spend over a trillion dollars in a month around this place, so if you are saving $12 billion to spend $1 trillion, let alone $4 trillion, is that a good deal? Only in Washington. I mean, literally, Orwell thought he was writing fiction. He thought he was writing fiction. It is coming to fruition, and we are living in it.
We can't seem to convince our colleagues of the urgency of this situation, the peril that the Republic is in when people are not preeminent, when we lie to our citizens and tell them they can buy an electric lawn mower and it is just as good as your gas lawn mower.
I watch my neighbors mow half a lawn. Do you know why they mow half the lawn? Because they ran out of power and have to charge the thing back up. They mow it the next day.
Look, if that is your choice, God bless you, but we are lying to our citizens about all of this. This town is lying, and I for one won't stand for it. I will not help them pass bills that bankrupt our country, don't secure our border, and don't secure the virtues of liberty for our posterity--my children and theirs.
If they want to vote for it, they can deal with their constituents, their bosses, and the good Lord, but I am not going to bankrupt my country.
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Mr. PERRY. Mr. Speaker, I couldn't have said it better. I watched a movie that has been out for some time, but the question from the gentleman to his wife, he asked what he should do in a situation, and she said it is not what a Senator would do, not what a leader would do, but it is what a free man would do. That is the decision.
That is what drives me. That is what drives my colleague. That is what we think should drive everyone here.
Sure, we would love to have the approval of the body, of our compatriots here, but what is more important to us is that we do the right thing on every occasion, not because it is easy, not because it is tough to message it back home, or not because somebody is going to not have one of their programs funded at the level they want it funded at. We are way beyond that now.
Our country is perilously close. We are borrowing money to pay our bills. We don't even print the money anymore. They just create it digitally. We don't even print it, it is so much, and no one around here seems to care. When we talk about saving $100 billion in the face of them spending $4 trillion, they recoil.
How can we do that? Six months ago, we were spending that amount of money, and you would think that we were asking them to literally give their firstborn child or their right arm to try to get somewhere closer to living within our means. It is unacceptable.
The time is now. The urgency is now. You cannot be free if you can't afford to live free. You are not free if you are not making your own decisions. That is where we are, Mr. Speaker. It has to stop here. It has to stop now.
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