What We Will Fight for
Floor Speech
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for spending time here on the floor of the House commemorating the life of former First Lady Carter. We are reminded, as we heard his words and as we have commemorated her life, of the longstanding love affair and relationship between the First Lady and President Carter.
Regardless of my disagreements with them on policy and politics, they are two great public servants who committed to live out their faith, their Southern Baptist Christian faith, in real time, whether it was Habitat for Humanity or in numerous other ways.
We are reminded of how important it is for those of us in public service to have our committed spouses--in my case, my committed wife, who is at home carrying out all the tasks of keeping our family, with a 14-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter, going--how we could not be here without them, and how honored we are by their sacrifices on our behalf and cannot possibly convey what it means while we are up here doing the work of the people to have our wives or husbands back home supporting us from afar.
I would note, while we are commemorating our spouses--in this case, First Lady Carter--or the longstanding relationship between former President Bush and Barbara Bush, how important those relationships are for all of us in public service.
I would also be remiss if we didn't talk about our mothers. My mama turned 75 last week, and I was not able to be here to wish her a happy birthday, so I am going to wish her a happy belated birthday a week later and thank her for all she has done for me and all of her sacrifices and her love in raising me.
We in my family believe in the American Dream and believe in that generational transfer of love of this country and transfer of the work of one generation to the next, a generation that was working the fields that then became a generation that was working in the factories that became a generation that was then going to college to a generation that would then have a son that could go to law school and end up on the floor of the House of Representatives.
That is what is great about this country. That is what we need to restore in this country.
On that note of respect and love for our parents, our love for our moms, I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Williams), my friend, to be able to give him some time on the floor to commemorate the life of his mama.
Mr. WILLIAMS of New York. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I am pleased to be joined by my wife, who has supported me through this journey. She is in the gallery.
I will say that I love you because I can do that in real time.
Judith Kay Alguire was born in Duncan, Oklahoma. Her father was a self-educated carpenter who never finished high school.
She changed schools frequently as their family chased the postwar housing boom all over the Southwest, and she landed in Roswell, New Mexico, for her senior year in high school.
She married at 18 and narrowly missed earning a science degree in college. Instead, she took a job as a medical technician while she was 5 months pregnant right here in D.C. to allow her husband to attend law school.
Working up to the moment of labor and returning to work just 2 weeks later would be par for the course--whatever it takes, family first, never counting the cost.
What makes Judy remarkable is her powerful intellect. She reads medical journals for fun. Growing up poor, power and wealth don't impress her. Every person is measured by their own merits.
Raising children made her funny--well, humorous, I mean. Although, you may understandably imagine the effects of five strong personalities and having to care for them.
Perhaps Judy's most remarkable quality and the source of much of her renown is her generosity. Countless children have attended college, worn shoes, been clothed, and attended summer camp, and an endless number of anonymous blessings have flowed from her heart out to so many.
Judith Kay Alguire Williams passed from this life into the next just this morning. She passed in peace, and more importantly, she passed into peace.
I will miss my mom every day, but her humor, intelligence, and I hope her generosity will live on in me and my siblings. God bless her.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from New York for his touching remarks about his mother. We will be praying for him and his family, knowing that she is in a better place, knowing that we are all here for a brief period of time, and we are celebrating a life well lived. I am sure she was proud to see you on the floor of the House of Representatives. We will honor her life by doing our job.
To that point, you heard my friend from New York (Mr. Williams) talking about the life of his family, and it reflected what I started talking about, that generational transfer of the American Dream, the extent to which one generation sacrifices so the next can live that American Dream.
My grandmother was a single mom in West Texas with my father, who was a 7-year-old stricken with polio. She had just lost her husband, my grandfather, to cancer. She didn't run around asking for help. She didn't say: Where is the government? She got a second job. She woke up at 4:00 in the morning. She did all the rehab my father needed so that he could walk, got him through polio. She ran and became the first woman elected county clerk in Nolan County, Texas. She wasn't running around asking for some sort of handout because her father was an orphan, the bastard child of somebody that we don't know--we believe him to have been an American Indian in Mississippi--and was sitting in an orphanage and then moves to West Texas to figure out how to build a family, build the American Dream, farm. That is where my grandmother grew up.
She didn't ask for people to be giving her something because her family wasn't treated right, or she drew a short straw because her husband died of cancer, or her son had polio. She just worked. She just did what you are supposed to do.
That core aspect of the American Dream is what currently is increasingly unattainable for the vast majority of Americans. Too many Americans today are looking out and saying: I cannot live as my parents and my grandparents did. I can't afford to buy a house because interest rates are so high and houses are so high. I can't afford to buy a car. I can't afford to buy groceries. I can't figure out how to manage to keep my family safe and secure in my own home and community. They are looking out across the future and over the horizon.
For the first time in really our history, Americans are questioning whether this country will exist for their kids and grandkids, whether their kids and grandkids will be able to have a better life than they did. That is unacceptable, but yet that is what we currently face.
I want to be very clear. This is the direct consequence of radical leftist positions by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle in this body, in the other Chamber, and in the White House. It is the direct consequence of Democrats who refuse to sit down at the table to constrain spending when we need to, to secure the border of the United States, to determine foreign policy that is built on the national security interests of the United States and not the fad of wearing a pin.
They don't want to work with us on how to have a military focused on how to do its job rather than radical social engineering to reengineer the Department of Defense. They don't want to sit down and work with us to ensure that we are able to have the energy that we need to power our homes affordably.
All of these things that I am rattling off are actual existential threats that our country faces.
Spending: We are $34 trillion in debt. Nobody possibly knows what $34 trillion of debt means.
I can tell you what it means in terms of annual interest. We are now about to be spending more in interest on our debt than to fund the national defense of the United States. Imagine that.
How can a country succeed, how can we sustain ourselves, if we are paying more on interest because of our own debt, because of our irresponsible spending, than on defending our country? Yet that is what we are doing.
This year, we are spending $2 trillion more than we take in and we are doing nothing to stop it.
Republicans are trying to hold the line on spending. We get no support from our Democratic colleagues.
Speaker Johnson is trying to hold the line against the Senate that wants to keep spending more money, Democratic colleagues who want to spend more money, and a few of my own Republican colleagues who want to spend more money.
The Speaker should be congratulated and should be praised for holding the line on spending. We need to finish the job, and Republicans need to unite around the Speaker of the House to send a loud message to our Democratic colleagues and a loud message to the American people that we are no longer going to continue to spend money we don't have, destroying the American Dream, driving up inflation, driving up interest rates, leveraging our own security to the rest of the world, and making it to where the American dollar is worth nothing.
We have an obligation to hold the line on spending. Are we going to fight? Are we going to stop the dealmaking, the backroom deals, the side deals--in this instance, the $54 billion of side deals that my Democratic colleagues expect Republicans to pack into a spending bill in order to buy their votes?
Republicans should say no to side deals and gimmicks that blow the lid off spending.
Republicans should say no to unfunded supplemental spending for wars, no matter how meritorious.
Do I believe we should help Israel? You bet.
Did Republicans on this floor, with the leadership of Speaker Johnson, send $14 billion over to the Senate to fund Israel? Yes, we did.
Was it paid for? Yes, it was. It was paid for out of money set aside to expand the IRS to target Americans.
Democrats, on a party-line vote in the Senate, killed that bill.
Democrats in the Senate are more interested in siding with the IRS, expanding the IRS to target American citizens, than they are to stand with Israel or to be fiscally responsible by taking money already appropriated and moving it over to pay for an emergency, that emergency being our friends being assaulted, our friends in Israel being attacked, with young women being brutally raped, babies being killed, babies being kidnapped, and innocent civilians shot in the streets.
We saw it with our own eyes. Yet we have colleagues on the other side of the aisle who don't want to talk about that. They want to brush it aside. Oh, we can't talk about rape. We need to balance that we are told by the progressive left.
Republicans stood up alongside our friends in Israel, we passed a bill that would fund them, we sent it to the Senate, and Democrats in the Senate chose the IRS over Israel.
Are we going to do our job to spend responsibly?
We have a choice to make. When the funding of the government runs out in January and early February, we have a choice to make. I hope Republicans in this body will hold the line and force Republicans and Democrats alike in the Senate to stop spending money we don't have, mortgaging the futures of our kids and grandkids.
That is one existential threat. That alone is worth throwing everything we have at this place to fight to stop spending money we don't have, to hold the line on piling up debt.
There is another existential threat: wide open borders. Our borders right now are in crisis.
Just today, video footage of a breached border wall surfaced with illegal migrants rushing through an opening in the border wall with their human smuggler shrugging and just saluting the camera.
We have no rules at the southern border now. We have no border. We have people from all over the world bum-rushing the border of the United States from terrorist countries, criminals, and people on the terrorist watch list. We have millions that have been released into the United States under this administration, and the people in border States, like my home State of Texas, are the ones left holding the bag.
In this case it was Arizona. Yesterday, the port of entry in Lukeville, Arizona, was shut down. A port of entry had to be shut down because Border Patrol could not handle the mass flood of migrants coming across the border.
Last Monday morning, more than 5,000 migrants were in custody, far more than Lukeville's holding capacity. I got notices from people just today. In Eagle Pass, in Del Rio, people flooding into Texas, Border Patrol overwhelmed.
Last Thursday, while transporting illegal migrants, a human smuggler's car caught fire while driving 100 miles per hour through Kinney County, Texas, near where I live.
We can fix that. We can secure the border. We can do it in a matter of weeks. There is no magic. All we need to do is enforce the laws and fix some of the laws that have some loopholes.
House Republicans passed H.R. 2, the strongest border security bill we have ever passed. We sent it to the Senate, and it is sitting there. They refuse to take it up, because Senate Democrats, like my House Democratic colleagues, want open borders. They don't believe in sovereignty. They don't believe we should have a sovereign nation. They believe in world order. They believe that anybody can come here without following our laws.
Our bill expanded critical protections by fixing parole and asylum abuses that are being used by the administration to allow people to come in against both the spirit and the letter of the law. We have turn-away authority, and we empower State AGs to sue. We fix the abuses for unaccompanied children, and we treat all children like we currently do with Mexico and Canada, which would save little children from getting sold into the sex trafficking trade by the thousands, little kids getting abused because my Democrat colleagues want to cynically use open borders as a political stunt and for political power.
Right now in Texas, on I-35 going up the gut of Texas or across I-10, there are stash houses littered in San Antonio, littered in Houston, littered in El Paso and Dallas filled with children getting abused.
A thousand migrants died along the southern border last year while my colleagues on the other side of the aisle just sat back and did nothing.
We have acted. Republicans have acted. We sent legislation to the Senate, and Senate Democrats are doing nothing.
Existential threat 1: spending. We are acting. We are acting responsibly. House and Senate Democrats refuse to join with us.
Existential threat number 2: our border. House Republicans have acted. We have sent a bill over to the Senate. It sits there. The President ignores it while Texans die from fentanyl poisoning and Americans die from fentanyl poisoning. Our homes, our hospitals, our schools get overrun, migrants die, migrants get sold into the sex trafficking trade, cartels get empowered, and China gets empowered, all so my Democrat colleagues can pat themselves on the back in the false name of compassion saying that open borders are good for migrants, when it is a lie.
Existential threat number 3: American energy dominance. American energy independence and American energy freedom is being destroyed minute by minute, hour by hour, by an administration and Democrat colleagues in this Chamber and in the Senate that are undermining our ability to produce American, clean-burning natural gas, American nuclear power, reliable power that we need to fuel ourselves and the world.
Legislation we have on the floor this week that my Democratic colleagues refuse, in lockstep, to support would stop the tyrannical overreach by the executive branch to set a new rule requiring electric vehicles to be about two-thirds of the fleet by 2032.
Now, why does that matter?
Does the average American know that an electric vehicle takes basically the same amount of electricity as your air conditioner to charge up?
Have they thought through the fact that if you have an electric vehicle in North Dakota or in Alaska, it freezes up and takes an entire battery charge just to thaw it?
Have they thought through what happens if you are living in west Texas and it is a 400-mile drive and you need a 200-mile recharge?
Have they thought through that the average electric vehicle costs $16,000 more than the internal combustion engine?
Have they thought through that if you eliminate every internal combustion engine in America, it would be less than 1 percent impact on CO
India and China are spewing out CO
All of these EVs, those supply chains start now.
Toyota, General Motors, Ford, they are all going to be pumping out electric vehicles, starting now.
They are piling up on lots because the American people can't afford them. The American people don't want them right now. They can't get them charged. They cost more.
You want to know why you can't afford stuff at home? This.
What are we going to do about it? It is an existential threat to your way of life, America.
What are your Representatives going to do about an executive branch that is doing this unilaterally using executive power?
House Republicans are acting. House Democrats will not support it. The Senate will not advance it.
You will be left stranded--literally and figuratively--without the ability to get a vehicle to power your lives, your family, your jobs, advance prosperity, and achieve the American Dream, all so people can feel good about themselves that they have done something for the environment, which they never did.
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We have wind and solar being subsidized to the tune of a trillion dollars. My Democratic colleagues last August passed a bill that will subsidize a trillion dollars for EVs, for massive solar farms, for massive wind farms; almost all of that money going to billion-dollar corporations--mostly White, elite liberals who like to pat themselves on the back while they drive their Tesla around, feel good about themselves, and they drink some wine and eat some cheese while talking about how they are making the world a better place.
It is doing none of that. Zero.
I can tell you what it is doing. It is crippling the American Dream for young people. It is making hardworking Americans unable to afford their job.
If you are a painter or a plumber or an electrician, if you are a teacher, if you clean houses, how in the hell can you afford an electric vehicle that costs $16,000 more?
Then Gavin Newsom in California says: Oh, crap, we don't have enough power today because we are all wind and solar. So guess what, between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m., you can't charge your car.
You think that is made up? That actually happened. That is the world my Democratic colleagues want you to live in: one with mountains of debt, with open borders, with fentanyl pouring in, and expensive cars.
They will admit it. That is the amazing part. It is so brazen, they admit it. When we challenge them in the Rules Committee or on the floor, they admit it.
The Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, literally admitted we are going to have to force pain on American families to achieve production and promotion of electric vehicles; pain, while China builds two new coal-fired plants a week, and we do nothing but cede our ground to China, subsidize solar panels in China--which by the way, where do they get the minerals for solar panels? Where do they get the minerals for batteries? Child labor, cobalt mines, where children are exploited.
Where are my colleagues with their bleeding hearts when these children are being exploited for cobalt mines?
Oh, Chip, it doesn't fit the narrative. Oh, we are the compassionate ones. We are the green ones. We are living in our little unicorn land where everything is hunky-dory. Meanwhile, we have empowered our enemies, weakened our economy, made it impossible for people to achieve the American Dream, so you have to go beg for more government funding.
That is not the American Dream I started this speech with when my colleague from New York was regaling his mom who passed away today in that generational transfer of the American Dream.
It is not the American Dream of my grandmother, as a single mom in west Texas raising my polio-stricken father after losing her husband to cancer. She wasn't asking for handouts. She wasn't asking for subsidies for some electric vehicle. She just got up and did her dang job.
That is the American Dream that we want to pass down to our kids and our grandkids, but it is being taken away.
I cannot overstate, these are existential threats. They are killing the American Dream.
Debt: spending money we don't have.
Borders: wide open; endangering us; killing our kids; killing migrants; increasing the sex trafficking trade; empowering cartels.
Energy: Instead of having the dominance and independence to push back on China and Russia; growing our economy; affordable, competitive automobiles; reliable power; fueling grids; creating economic growth.
True, all of the above, where the market determines whether wind and solar or nuclear or coal or gas can create the best mix of power supply. Export liquefied natural gas, drive CO
We are not doing that. We are passing regulation after regulation unilaterally by an executive branch engaged in tyranny, the very tyranny the Founders warned us about, wrote about, and told us in Federalist 58, we should use the power of the purse to stop, which is my question for my Republican colleagues:
Will we use the power of the purse to stop an out-of-control Democrat administration, a recalcitrant Democrat Senate, and our Democrat colleagues in the House who are totally comfortable letting the American Dream get totally destroyed with existential threat after existential threat?
Those aren't the only ones. What about healthcare?
I would note that a dear friend of mine, a constituent, recently diagnosed with cancer, she got her coverage through ObamaCare.
What many Americans don't know is that if you are a Member of Congress, we are required to have our healthcare through ObamaCare, not some gold-plated fancy thing everybody accuses us of.
Nope, we get ObamaCare. Well, neither my constituent battling cancer--nor myself who fought cancer and won 12 years ago--can go back to MD Anderson--she cannot go to MD Anderson, for the first time--under ObamaCare, the best cancer hospital in the world.
Suddenly coverage doesn't sound that good, does it? Suddenly, the ObamaCare mandates that have radically driven up the price of healthcare, radically consolidated the healthcare industry, radically enriched the insurance companies, radically enriched the hospital corporations, radically enriched pharmaceutical companies.
Suddenly, all of that stuff doesn't sound so good when you wake up and you want to go to the doctor but you are told: Sorry, you are not on the plan. That is the fact.
Americans, a family of four, spend about $25,000 of their own money or their corporate match for health insurance. But it is not insurance, it is crappy managed care, where your insurance company picks your doctors, your winners, your losers, tells you what you can do or can't do, when you have to pay an expensive deductible or an expensive copay.
Mr. Speaker, 76 ObamaCare marketplace insurers are proposing to increase their rates by more than 10 percent even now; 8 want to go by more than 25 percent.
Let me be clear. Our healthcare system is a complete and total failure. It is a failure made only worse by ObamaCare.
We can fix it. Republicans have plans to fix it. If Republicans would grab the mantle and run on it, fearlessly, with expanded health savings accounts, allowing you to use that money, tax free, to go into a marketplace and shop for legitimate, affordable insurance; legitimate, direct primary care with doctors you can call up day and night, like the old black bag doctors that would come to your House, a burgeoning industry; healthcare sharing ministries that defray costs, the ability to go out and compete and save.
There is a massive explosion of technological benefits that we can now tap into if we were to empower patients and doctors rather than bureaucrats and health insurance administrators.
We can blow the lid off of it, drive prices down; save our ability to honor our commitments on Medicare by getting prices down, if we will just do it.
Instead, we sit around and we run into the corner saying: Oh, Democrats said something about preexisting conditions.
We are all walking preexisting conditions; we are humans. Set up a system that would work for that, and the best system is one in which I can take dollars and go get healthcare from a willing provider of that care and find a way to make sure that insurance is available in a catastrophic situation in which you can no longer afford to pay for the care.
It is the best model across all of the different options. We can do it, but we have to have the willingness to do it.
Instead, we are sitting here with existential threat 1, massive debt;
Existential threat 2, wide open borders, killing our sovereignty and killing our kids and our communities;
Existential threat 3, American energy getting destroyed, sacrificed on the altar to the almighty gods of green energy and unicorn energy;
Existential threat 4, healthcare bankrupting American families, bankrupting your ability to go to the doctor of your choice, bankrupting the number of physicians we even have available because nobody wants to go into this godforsaken industry run by insurance companies.
Yes, the corporate cronyism, replete in this town, where we just throw money at big corporations.
We empower the insurance bureaucrats to run our healthcare. Could there possibly be a more stupid way to create a health system? I can't think of one.
Finally, existential threat number 5, and there are more, is our national defense. Republicans passed the strongest national defense authorization that I have seen in my years of public service and certainly in my time in Congress. It would refocus our military on its core mission, which is to be trained to, if called upon, kill people and blow stuff up.
That is what it is there for. It is not there to build soccer fields, and it is not there to promote social engineering. It is there to defend us.
We passed the defense bill that would end the unlawful Biden DOD taxpayer-funded abortion tourism regulations. It would end the taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries at the Pentagon. It would end the radical climate agenda being implemented at the Department of Defense, which I have already addressed, and the market that is being embraced by the Pentagon so we can have EVs rolling around our defense complex.
``Hold on, guys. Stop shooting while we plug in our car. Hey, we need to charge up the tank. Give us a second.'' I am looking forward to the battery-powered jets.
We assist servicemembers who were discharged for refusing the COVID- 19 vaccine. Our Department of Defense is now begging them to come back because recruiting levels are so bad.
We end radical critical race theories and diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have created an inspector general for Ukraine accountability. We prohibit race-based admissions at military academies. We have refocused our military on its core mission and to get rid of the social engineering.
Our Democrat colleagues wouldn't support it, and our colleagues in the Senate won't advance it, so here we sit. They demand that our defense be a radical social engineering experiment rather than a lean, mean fighting machine to defend the United States of America. That is an existential threat.
Education is a threat.
The litany of regulatory morass in this town is all a threat, but right now, I am just focusing on debt, on our borders being wide open, on our destruction of American energy dominance and freedom, on our broken healthcare system destroying the American Dream and the inability to access doctors, and on a defense that has been turned into a social engineering experiment instead of defending the United States.
Each one of these things represents a clear and present danger to our well-being as a nation and as a people. It is our job and our duty to stand up and fight.
Mr. Speaker, I call on my Democrat colleagues to stop putting their heads in the sand and ignoring their duty to address these existential threats. Stop being a roadblock to the great bills and the great efforts of Republicans that we are moving to pass over to the Senate and send to the White House.
Nevertheless, I have to say to my Republican colleagues that when you predictably see our Democratic colleagues refuse to work with us, don't cave and don't capitulate. Hold the line. Pick one or two fights that we can deliver for the American people so that we can go home and look them in the eye.
I don't care about the campaigns, and I don't care about the ads. I don't care about any of that garbage. I care about looking at my 14- year-old son and my 12-year-old daughter or my 81-year-old father and 75-year-old mother or a veteran who has fought for this country and who is wounded and hurting. I want to look them and my constituents who sent me here to fight in the eye, and I want to be able to say:
We delivered. We fought. We forced the President to the table. We made him secure the border. We made him restore sovereignty. We did our job.
We held the line on spending. We reduced spending year over year. We ended the gimmicks. We stopped the games. We set the table for us to try to balance the budget and do our job and stop racking up debt.
We restored energy freedom. We opened up American natural gas. We stopped the regulations that were going to kill our country. We stopped the mandates on electric vehicles that were going to destroy the American Dream and drive up the price of automobiles.
We stopped the wokification and destruction of the American military that is driving down recruiting and making it to where our military morale is at its low point.
We stood up and fought for healthcare freedom so that, Mr. Speaker, you can go to the doctor of your choice, so that you can care for your family, so that you can make decisions, so that you can afford the care, and so that you can look at your kids and your loved ones in the eye and be able to take them to get that care without calling some bureaucrat on a phone and hoping.
It is our calling; it is our job; and it is the reason we run for Congress. These are existential threats, and they deserve the level of attention, fight, and dedication that we campaign on. They deserve us to do what we said we would do. Is it asking too much that we campaign on doing these things and then come here and actually do them?
It is long past time for excuses. It is time to meet the moment. It is time to rise to the challenge to do our job to make the people's House great again, to make Congress great again, to restore the balance of power, and to stand up and deliver for the American people so that we can, in fact, save the American Dream for our kids and our grandkids.
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