Every American Wants A Strong Military

Floor Speech

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Mr. CLOUD. Madam Speaker, every American wants what every Republican wants, and that is a strong military. We realize that is our number one constitutional obligation.

We want the most capable, the most lethal military in the world. We need them to maintain peace and security. When we have to send them into harm's way, we want them to go with a clear mission and with every tool they need for victory. When they come home, we want to take care of the veterans and make sure they are welcomed and cared for. We want to make sure they have everything they need to succeed following their service in uniform to our country.

Unfortunately, what we have seen lately is our military has, in many ways, gone off its primary mission of protecting, securing, and preparing to continue to secure our Nation. They have gotten into social engineering, indeed, teaching CRT, DEI, and advancing things like gender ideology.

We have heard about drag shows at military bases, taxpayer-funded abortion travel, and taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries. It has certainly affected our recruiting. It has affected our capabilities. It has affected our readiness and ability to project power around the world.

I was happy to support the NDAA as it left the House and went to the Senate because it was focused on getting our military back to its focus, its purpose of protecting and securing our country; being that strong, lethal fighting force; and getting out of what we have known to become this woke move toward the military that has affected our capability.

Let's talk about the process it was supposed to go through. We understand that we send forth a good bill from the House, and then it goes to the Senate. There is supposed to be a conference on that. As a matter of fact, many Members worked to get on that conference committee. Many other Members worked to support people who would get on that conference committee in order to work and support different objectives that were in there.

A couple of things we were working on in our office was a bill that would let rank-and-file military be able to go into work in military contracting right after service. There has been a law that was meant to keep, for example, generals who were making big-time decisions about government, for example, from going to Raytheon and serving on a board because it wanted to make sure that their military decisions were not affected by future board positions. But the rank and file of our military kind of fell under that.

For example, we have an Army depot in our district. The rank and file cannot be employed there for 6 months after their retirement from military service. By then, they have often had to move on and find other careers.

We also had another provision that we were working on to make sure that the depots throughout our country that are tasked with the important duty of restoring and refurbishing our military hardware, supporting the warfighter and doing it in an efficient manner, that they continue to be able to thrive and survive. Those things fell off in what was our alleged conference.

This conference--instead of the Members that we elected to send there to represent this body--were instead four people who got together and the staffs probably of those four people made the decisions. Those two provisions were taken out of this bill, as well.

Let's talk about the House rules. All year, we talked about rewriting the muscle memory of Congress. We worked hard. I cannot tell you how many times we have heard the importance of single-subject bills and that we as Republicans were going to advocate for that. We were not going to marry things that were extraneous to each other. We were going to have bills that had to deal with germaneness. We added a germaneness rule in January that had never existed. We were going to say that any amendments to bills have to be germane. Anything we are going to add onto a bill has to be germane.

Come to find out that we now have the NDAA, which has come back from the Senate with a number of woke provisions in it, and added to that now is a FISA extension. In the Senate, the Parliamentarian says that is not germane to the NDAA. In the House, we actually have a tougher germaneness rule.

How are we getting around that? We are going to put it on the suspension calendar. We are just going to suspend the rules and say the rules that we said we were going to operate by, we are not going to operate by when it comes to this bill. This is a tragedy.

Finally, when it comes to the Constitution, the Constitution is clear that Americans should not be warrantlessly surveilled. We know we have a DOJ that has been doing that. They have well extended their authorities.

We had so much FISA abuse. There were literally hundreds of thousands of instances of FISA abuse. Yet, we are asking for a clean extension of these provisions.

The Constitution was not written to be shredded in times of crisis or urgency. As a matter of fact, the Constitution was written specifically to place limits on our government in times of crisis and urgency.

It is not a time for us to look away and say that we will shred the Constitution a little bit here. The very purpose that the Constitution exists is to protect us in times like this and to make sure that we continue to protect the rights of the American people.

It is extremely important that we do everything we can to make sure that we do not pass a FISA out of this House that does not protect the American people. We cannot continue to allow them to spy on the American people, to surveil them without a warrant.

Let's get back to what we are here for. We want an NDAA that is going to focus on our military. We realize the importance of the first constitutional responsibility of this House, and that is to fund a military that will defend our Constitution and protect this land.

We are willing to do that.

Let's revisit this NDAA. Let's send this back to conference. Let's get us focused on what needs to be done, and for goodness' sake, let's not put a FISA extension that does not protect the rights of the American people.

I am happy to be joined by my good friend from the great State of Texas.

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

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Mr. CLOUD. Madam Speaker, may I inquire how much time remains.

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Mr. CLOUD. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Clyde).

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Mr. CLOUD. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Good).

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Mr. CLOUD. Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

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Mr. CLOUD. I yield to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy).

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

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