Access to Reliable Energy
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I first recognize and commend someone who has been working in my office most recently as director of operations, Corinne Schillizzi, who is unfortunately going to be leaving us after tomorrow, her last day here in the office, but she has been a wonderful part of our office. She is heading over to work with the former Vice President and do some work with his organization.
We will all miss her. I know the scheduling operation is always complex. I know the floor staff will miss working with her because she has been fantastic.
She will be joining another staffer of mine, Jonah Wendt, who was with me from the time I first ran for office in the summer of 2018, all the way until December. Jonah also left to work with the Vice President's organization. It means I need to have a word with the Vice President about taking my staff.
I am very delighted that they have this opportunity, and I thank them for their service.
I have the benefit of Corinne for the next 24 hours. I thank her, Jonah, and all of my staff, all of the great staff on the Hill--maybe almost all of the staff; it depends on the day.
I joke as a former staffer, but we can't do this without our staff. We can't do it without the floor staff, all the great employees here that keep this place operating. They tolerate us when we are holding the floor open late, forcing votes, and--I don't know--maybe giving a long speech on the floor of the House, which occasionally I might shorten just to make sure they can get home in time to have a reasonable night. I am ever thankful for their support and work.
I would note that my colleague from Texas was just complaining about the alleged weakness of the Texas grid.
Well, the only reason that there is any weakness to the grid is because we have had radical leftists embracing power schemes that have been funding our enemies in China and trying to promote a radical leftist agenda with unreliable energy--that is the truth; promoting windmill power in Texas, which on a windless day, oddly enough--hard to predict this, I know--doesn't produce a whole lot of power; or solar power, which, on a cloudy day--I know, again, hard to predict--doesn't produce a whole lot of power.
Therefore, if you have a deep freeze in the State of Texas that shuts down the windmill capacity and you have some other events going on, like some frozen gas lines, you end up having some difficulties. When you have had a war on reliable power, as my radical leftist colleagues have been doing for as long as I can remember, you end up with problems with the grid.
It is not just in Texas, it is nationwide. We have had rolling blackouts in California. Texas has been able to stave off those kinds of blackouts because we are trying to fight through the Federal mandates and the laws that come out of this body and the regulations that come out of the Federal Government that prevent us from being able to provide the power we need for the people of Texas.
Just last year, my colleague from Texas joined with my radical leftist colleagues on the other side of the aisle to advance the so- called Inflation Reduction Act, which has done none of that, and which, by the way, is empowering China.
By the way, my colleague talked about enriching corporations. Well, guess what the Inflation Reduction Act does by subsidizing massive companies? Ninety percent of the subsidies go to billion-dollar corporations. That is the truth.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle like to pretend they are doing something green when what they are doing is enriching fat cats and big corporations, sending money to China to build solar panels rather than burning clean-burning natural gas.
We voted today to advance a bill so that we could have liquefied natural gas being exported out of Texas. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't want to do that. They want to make us weaker. They want to hurt our economy. They want to make Russia more powerful.
They want to undermine Ukraine, even as they complain that we are not taking more borrowed money or more taxpayer money to give it to Ukraine to fund a war that doesn't have a mission. They want to undermine our ability to help Ukraine with liquefied natural gas. That is the truth.
Those are the actual facts of what is going on right now because my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are trying to advance a radical notion of unicorn energy, where we can have endless unreliable energy and then wonder why the grid might have a problem.
Why aren't we building nuclear power?
Why aren't we building more natural gas, of which we have an abundance in this country?
Why aren't we exporting more liquefied natural gas?
Around the world, half the world doesn't have access to reliable energy. Three billion people live in what we would call energy poverty. Why don't we export our energy so we can lift people out of poverty?
The fact is that China has 1,100 coal-fired plants, probably more than that now; they are building two a week. They are producing the vast majority of the CO
Meanwhile, the average EV costs $16,000 more than an internal combustion engine automobile. The price of used cars is going up. We now have a mandate by this administration that the EVs are going to need to be two-thirds of the fleet by 2032, which means every American out there watching this, you are going to spend more for automobiles.
If you live in the cold, your battery is going to take longer to charge. If you plug it in at your house, your electricity bill is going to double or triple, because it uses as much electricity as your air conditioner.
Yet my leftist colleagues think that is okay. They have said so sitting in the Rules Committee. They have said so here on the floor. That is just the price of fighting climate change, they say. Except it is not going to actually fight what they claim they want to stop.
Why? Because around the world, other countries are producing CO
They undermine the very hardworking American family who wants to buy a car. The plumber who wants to have a truck. The family who wants to be able to have two vehicles to get around in; however, they can't afford them anymore because we are regulating them out of existence.
We are making it to where you can't even afford it, and then we are adding all sorts of requirements like kill switches.
Can you believe this? If your eyes dart because you are allegedly under the influence of something, your car is going to shut down. What if it is wrong? What if it is 10 below zero? What if you are across a railroad track? You are going to have cars that just shut down because of a kill switch. You are going to have the government telling you, you cannot get a car that doesn't have the expensive technology built into it to determine whether or not you might be under the influence. That is what we are doing to people.
We are going to make that car twice as expensive, and we are going to make it to where they might be unable to move their vehicle. This is unconscionable what we are doing.
I had a friend who went to replace a windshield the other day. It was $1,500 because it has some technology in it so you can see the speedometer in the glass and some other stuff.
I mean, who cares? What if I just want to have a windshield? It used to be 200 bucks. We have made everything more expensive. We are making everything so regulated that you can't possibly afford it.
You want to know why families are struggling, it is because of that. My colleagues live in unicorn land and pretend there are no consequences to regulation; there are no consequences to writing checks that we can't afford, funding and subsidizing big corporations all the time to advance their radical agenda.
They act like there are no consequences to open borders. The fact of the matter is, we have a problem in this town. I think I saw the Capitol Hill reporter Jake Sherman report today that somehow Republicans are in disarray and it has been the least effective Congress in history.
Let me just tell you something about the people I represent. They don't want this body to keep passing more laws and spending more money for the sake of it. They want us to actually stand up and fight for them. Standing up and fighting for them means doing something different.
I promise you that reporter and every other Capitol Hill reporter would judge success as continuing the status quo that has delivered us $34 trillion in debt, has delivered us stacks of laws that nobody can even count, literally.
I looked up the Department of Justice to count all the criminal statutes. They tried to do a study in the eighties, but they ran out and just gave up because they couldn't find all the laws. Yet we keep passing more laws. Just today, we passed more programs. We passed more stuff on the floor.
They say, Chip, why are you always voting no? Because we are $34 trillion in debt, and we have reams of regulations and reams of laws. What are those things doing to make the average American family's life better? That is the truth.
I will say something else. I am prone to being critical on a bipartisan basis or nonpartisan basis. The defense complex, the people that want to scare you to death that we are all going to die--yes, there are bad enemies in the world and we need to prepare to defend them. I will talk more about that in a minute, but we have a problem in this town that we will always spend more money because under the fear that people are going to say that we are going to be blown up, somebody is going to attack us.
Let me quote our former General Dwight Eisenhower, former President Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address in 1961. He said: ``In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military- industrial complex.''
I will remind you that this is 1961. This is 63 years ago almost to the day.
``The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.''
That is not happening today, Mr. Speaker. We saw it on full display this week right here in this body. We saw it in full display, because we were trying, on a bipartisan basis, to pass reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
The fact is that FISA has been abused. Section 702 of FISA is a particular provision designed for us to collect information abroad to look outward in order to try to stop a future 9/11. That is its general purpose.
And it plays an important role in doing that. We have been gathering intelligence and been able to use it to prevent bad actors, but the fact is there has been enormous abuses.
The ODNI reported that the FBI conducted an estimated 204,090 United States person queries. That is 559 per day in 2022. An NSA analyst searched for the communications of two individuals the analyst had met on an online dating service. The government conducted a batch query for over 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign.
Mr. Speaker, that is your intelligence community and your FBI that is abusing laws designed to look abroad, to stop foreign enemies, and they are looking at you. They are using the power of government to surveil you, the American people.
That is wrong. It is why we have a Fourth Amendment. It is why we have rules about warrants.
When I was a former Federal prosecutor, I would have loved to have unfettered access to information. I had a bad guy who was sitting there, and I had a phone. The cop had the phone--and I had him on other stuff, but that guy had a phone, and he pulled the information off the phone and it had guns and drugs and pictures that were incriminating. He didn't get a warrant.
Well, the fact that we had had him for something else didn't mean that he still didn't need a warrant to look at his phone.
It matters. I couldn't use any of it. I couldn't give it to law enforcement to go look at the house or go try to track down what was on the phone. You know what? We are a better country for it because there were other tools to go after bad guys. I was able to put that bad guy in jail for a considerable number of years, but we weren't going to violate the Fourth Amendment to go further.
Yet, we violate the Fourth Amendment every single dadgum day against the American people in the name of foreign intelligence. Why would we do that? We do it because it is easy.
This week we had the opportunity to bring forward bipartisan legislation. When do you ever see Jim Jordan and Jerry Nadler hugging each other in agreement in the Rules Committee or in the Judiciary Committee, but they were.
We had bipartisan agreement, 35-2 I think was the vote out of the Judiciary Committee to say we are going to continue to allow the 702 tools to be able to go after bad guys abroad, but we are going to protect people here at home. We are going to use the Constitution. We are going to require that you have warrants to be able to get information, search databases on American people.
We haven't been able to bring it to the floor. You know why? Because the intelligence world, including some in our own Intelligence Committee, both sides of the aisle, the intelligence world that have worked over in the executive branch and the CIA, DNI, DOD, FBI, they all said, whoa, whoa, you can't do that or bad things will happen.
It is always behind this cloak, this veil. They say, oh, trust us. We see all the classified information. We know all the truth. You will be in danger. We will be in danger if you pass something like a demand-- that you have a warrant to get information on an American citizen.
Imagine that? If I walked around Washington, D.C., with a dog sniffer from every house going up and down the streets of Capitol Hill or through Georgetown or up through northwest or northeast or any part of this city, how many times do you think I would run across narcotics?
I can't do that, and we are not supposed to do that. Of course, law enforcement wants every tool it can have to go after bad guys, it makes their job easier; however, the Constitution says for a reason that you can't do that.
Every single one of us are mortified about September 11 and every other terrorist attack on our soil, but we should not give power to the Federal Government and the tyranny that can then be deployed upon the American people because we are afraid of what might happen. Freedom matters.
It is why we exist. Yet here we are with an opportunity with this bill that is expiring to make reforms that can protect the American people, and we are not going to do it. We only do token fixes that will make modest improvements but without the full protection of the Constitution wrapped around the American citizens. This body, the people's House, should do better.
I believe there is a full, strong majority of this body that would want to do that. We should bring that bill to the floor, and if my colleagues want to vote against it or take down the rule, make them go explain it to the American people. That is what we ought to do.
I don't mind defending my votes. Just last week, I was forced to vote on a suspension of the rules, a vote to give clean funding to Israel. Well, God bless America, I support Israel and I want to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel, but I cannot go back to the people of Texas and say I am going to send a $17.6 billion check, even to our best friends, when we have not secured the border of the United States.
By the way, we are not paying for it. We cannot continue to write checks with borrowed money. We will not have a United States of America remaining to stand next to Israel. It won't exist. We won't have a dollar that is strong enough.
It is not just FISA. It is what we saw unfold in the Senate when they passed, cynically, taking out border security, sending $60 billion over to Ukraine, additional funding for Israel, a total package of almost $90 billion.
By the way, that is $60 billion for Ukraine. Do you know how much our entire budget is for the United States Marine Corps? $53 billion. Was one penny of that $60 billion paid for? No. It is just printed money.
We are printing money every year to the tune of $2 trillion just to keep the lights on, and we are going to write another $60 billion check to Ukraine?
God bless the people of Ukraine. I want them to push back. I want them to win. I want them to hold the line and preserve their country, but coming to us to write them blank checks is not a strategy. The Senate sent us over a $90 billion bill with $60 billion for Ukraine, billions for Taiwan, billions for Israel, and they do so without any mission defined.
We have gotten multiple different missions told to us by the administration. They have no clarity of what we are trying to achieve there.
Are we funding something that might result in victory for NATO, for Ukraine, for the United States or are we funding, yet again, a never- ending conflict in a proxy war that none of the people voting for this are going to go put themselves in danger for after we have already spent $113 billion, by the way, unpaid for?
Are you noticing a common theme here? Almost everything we do around here is unpaid for. Hell, if you look at our annual tax revenues--which in 2022, by the way, were as high as they have ever been--those tax revenues only pay for mandatory spending. That is D.C. swamp-speak for Social Security, Medicare, increasing amounts of veteran spending, all of the things that are on autopilot. All of that basically adds up to the revenues we bring into the Treasury, which I think is somewhere around $4 trillion.
All the other stuff--the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, HHS, this building, Congress, Senate, the White House, the FAA--is borrowed money. Every penny of it is borrowed money.
How can we look our kids and grandkids straight in the face and say: We are not killing the country that was given to us? Because we are.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle always blame it on tax policy. As I said in the Budget Committee, I will absolutely have any conversation about tax policy my friends on the other side of the aisle want to have, but what I will not allow my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to do is blame deficits on tax policy.
In 2022, 19.6 percent of the American GDP was sent back to Washington, D.C. That is the highest level in history. It ain't a revenue problem. It is not. We have always, since we have had tax policy, been somewhere around 17\1/2\ percent of American GDP--that is everything we earn--comes back here to Washington. Last year, I think it was about 17\1/2\ percent. It peaked in 2022, and then came back down. You have all that money, yet we can't fund all the stuff we have promised or that we decide to do.
I had friends, people back home, constituents, say: Why did you vote ``no'' on a bill for ALS? Why did you vote ``no'' on a bill for cancer?
I am a cancer survivor. I have friends with ALS. I voted ``no'' because we don't have any money. I voted ``no'' because we are lying to the American people--both sides of the aisle, but, with all due respect, particularly my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who just blame it on tax policy and then ignore spending like drunken sailors.
It is all on our watch. The footnote in history for my tenure in the House of Representatives is going to be that I destroyed the country. I mean, I am proud that I voted ``no'' for most of this garbage, but for this moment in time, the legacy of every Member of this body, their tombstone, is going to be that they destroyed the United States of America, the greatest country in the history of the world. That is going to be the legacy of this House of Representatives, of the next House of Representatives, of last Congress' House of Representatives because we utterly refuse to responsibly do our job.
We are $34 trillion in debt. When I ran for office in 2018, it was $21 trillion. I have been here for 5 years, and it has gone up $13 trillion. I voted against virtually every penny of it, but that doesn't make me feel any good because we are still up $13 trillion.
I will say to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle: What are we going to do about it? Will we have another study? Are we going to put together another working group? Or what if, maybe, we actually did our damn job, set a cap, and spent under that? Novel concept, I know, that every business, every nonprofit, every family in America largely has to contemplate.
We are going to have legislation that is going to come before us in 2 weeks. Do you know why? Because the government funding is going to expire in 2 weeks.
Again, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have been driving an agenda through the administration, the Senate, and my colleagues here in this Chamber that spends more money, regulates the heck out of the entire country, shutting down the internal combustion engine, leaving us with wide open borders, letting immigrants out without bail, making our streets unsafe, perpetuating endless wars, driving up inflation.
My Senate Republican colleagues, unfortunately, too often want to join with them. On the Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel funding bill, there is no border security. It is unpaid for, has no mission, but 22 Republicans decided that would be a good bill to join. With friends like these, as they say.
We will get a bill in 2 weeks to keep the lights on and keep funding government, something most of my constituents question. Most of my constituents come up to me and say: Shut down the border or shut down the government. They are sick of open borders. They are sick of fentanyl deaths. They are sick of their livestock getting out. They are sick of having people break into their homes. They are sick of their schools getting filled, their hospitals getting filled, their jails getting filled. They are sick of what is happening to their country.
However, here is the thing: My Republican colleagues rightly, properly, impeached Alejandro Mayorkas for a total failure to carry out his duty, a total failure to faithfully execute the laws of the United States, lying to me under oath at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, lying to the American people about whipping Haitian migrants. The House of Representatives, led by Republicans, impeached, for the second time in history, a sitting Cabinet Secretary.
That is not a bright moment for our country, but it was the right thing to do. It will go over to the Senate. They will hold a trial. He almost certainly will not be convicted. I don't know if it will be a party-line vote. It takes 67 votes to do it.
However, here is the thing. That is not enough. It is not enough for Republicans to send over an impeachment and then walk away, say we did what we could. It is not enough to pass H.R. 2, the strongest border security bill I have ever seen move off of this floor or any Chamber on Capitol Hill. It is not enough to do that. The American people want results.
Here is the question: When we have a funding bill that comes before us in 2 weeks, there will be two versions of it, probably--a big omnibus spending bill, multiple minibus bills, a continuing resolution. Are my Republican colleagues going to agree to continue to fund the government that is at war with them? Are they going to fund the salary of Alejandro Mayorkas when Alejandro Mayorkas was just impeached, has been lying to them, and is endangering the American people with wide open borders?
That is the power of the purse that James Madison eloquently stated in Federalist No. 58 is our power to check the executive branch. That is why we have it. Are we going to defund any of that? Are we going to withhold that funding for a Secretary run rogue? Are we going to keep allowing funding to be used for the education of illegal aliens flooding our country, for the $53 million that was funded in New York?
I don't know if it is all State money, local money, Federal money, whatever. All I know is $53 million, with cards going out to illegal aliens--illegal aliens in schools, illegal aliens in hospitals, illegal aliens in emergency rooms. We are the ones left holding the bag, in Texas, in particular, but also New York, also Chicago.
Are we going to keep funding it? Every Republican should have to answer that question if you are going to go campaign on saying that you are trying to secure the border. Why are you funding this?
We know our Democratic colleagues don't give a rip, and they want borders to be wide open to flood the zone with people from all over the world. There is no other reason for it. There is no other defense for it. It is a total abuse of asylum laws, a total abuse of parole laws, a total abuse of exceptions to the rule that you are supposed to have operational control of the border. We all know that. Anyone who can read knows that.
However, our Democratic colleagues are totally fine with wide open borders, endangering the American people, endangering migrants, empowering cartels, empowering China.
What will Republicans do about it? Pass an impeachment bill? Good. Pass H.R. 2? Good. Funding the very mechanisms that are at war with the people of Texas and the American people? Bad.
Stop doing it. Stop allowing those funds to be abused. Stop funding the NGOs that are working in consort with the cartels and the people in Mexico to move people up all the way from the Darien Gap, all the way up through the Northern Triangle, through Mexico, into the United States. Stop funding them.
It is a fact. We see it. Reporters have embedded with them. We know it is true, and we are funding the United Nations $12.5 billion a year. $12.5 billion to the United Nations, this body, including Republicans, is voting to fund.
Why? That same United Nations is working with NGOs to move people up from the Darien Gap all the way through Mexico to here. That same United Nations is funding Hamas.
Everybody says, Chip, you must give $17 billion to Israel. Well, why would I vote for $17 billion for Israel while we are funding our enemies, their enemies? That is what we are doing. Stop doing that. Stop funding our own enemies.
We are funding the mechanisms of the Inflation Reduction Act. We are funding billions going to China. We are funding billions going to China through Iran and the sale of oil. We are funding all of those operations. We are empowering all of those operations that are acting in direct opposition to our well-being.
We are funding the implementation of the liquefied natural gas ban on exports. We are funding the implementation of the rule that is going to require that EVs be two-thirds of our fleet by 2032, which will kill the American family with higher priced cars, cars that are less functional. We are funding that.
We are funding the FBI, which is out of control. We are funding all of the intelligence bureaucracy that is using the FISA laws designed to target our enemies to spy on the American people. We are funding that.
We are funding the EPA's natural gas tax and methane rule, destroying access to reliable energy. We are funding the EPA's power plant rules aimed at knocking off coal and natural gas power plants, making us wholly dependent on wind and sun for energy when you don't always have wind and sun.
We are funding the Internal Revenue Service, doling out billions in those IRA tax credits to the corporations I described before.
We are funding the World Health Organization, which is continuing to advance policies in direct conflict to our own well-being.
We are funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, which I described before as funding Hamas and funding our enemies. Totally fine. Don't worry about it. We will go campaign against Hamas and go campaign that Israel is great, but we are going to fund them.
That might be the one we don't fund because now everybody's head is exploding because even though some of us introduced legislation 3 years ago to stop it, and everybody ignored it, now they find out, lo and behold, those people were actually there. They are actually employed by the United Nations. They were actually working with Hamas to attack Israel.
October 7 exposed what we already knew but were too stupid, lazy, and unprincipled to actually do something about it instead of funding it.
We are funding a pro-China, anti-Israel United Nations Human Rights Council. Why? We are $34 trillion in debt, yet we are going to write that check. I literally don't understand it. It just makes no sense.
Oh, Chip, bipartisanship. You have to understand. You don't have the Senate. You don't have the White House. Just say no and go explain it to the American people. Hi, America. Do you think that we should borrow money that we don't have, indebting your children in the future, weakening the dollar, increasing inflation so we can fund our enemies and Israel's enemies while also wanting you to borrow more money to fund Israel to fight the enemies that you are funding?
That is what we do. That is what Republicans do. That is what Democrats do. Republicans at least try. That is the difference.
We are going to fund an ATF rule banning up to 40 million pistol braces. We complain about it, we talk about how bad it is, but we are going to fund it. We are going to fund the ATF rule massively expanding background checks.
We are going to fund the Department of Education's student loan cancellation scheme. Despite the Supreme Court ruling against them, we are going to keep funding it. We will keep writing the check.
We are going to fund the public health agencies like the CDC and the NIH and the FDA, all still unaccountable for shutting down the greatest economy in the history of the world, foisting $8 trillion of debt on us, sticking our kids in the corner of the classrooms, undermining our economic prosperity, destroying healthcare freedom. We are going to keep funding them. Hold a couple of hearings, walk away.
We are going to keep funding the Department of Veterans Affairs' vaccine mandate. I have a bill, but who cares if I have a bill? So what? Pass a bill. What, so I can go campaign that I had a bill? Who cares?
We should ban the ability to introduce legislation until we actually stop funding all this stuff, so people can't hide behind passing a bill, saying I did something when you didn't.
I passed a bill to fund a new position at the State Department that will go after and stop bad things from happening. No, you didn't. You funded another bureaucrat who hates you. You funded another bureaucrat who wants to undermine your way of life. That is what you just funded, and it costs more money.
When we vote in 2 weeks to fund the government--because people will say you have got to fund the government, can't shut the government down, all the usual stuff.
We are going to fund chief diversity officers at the Department of Defense and throughout government. We are going to fund abortion tourism. We are going to fund transgender surgeries.
Yeah. Your tax dollars. I am sorry. We have already established your borrowed dollars are going to go to fund all those things that you don't even want.
The vast majority of Americans don't want that stuff. We are going to do it. We are going to fund endless arrays of bureaucrats who are at odds with your way of life.
The Democratic Party wants to end as much as humanly possible western civilization as we know it. They want to undermine our way of life.
They are totally good with wide-open borders. They are totally good with endangering the American people, totally good with indebting our children and grandchildren with trillions of dollars of debt, totally good with advancing radical energy policies that will result in energy poverty and the destruction of human life as we know it, totally fine with unreliable power, totally fine empowering China and our enemies in the name of unicorn energy. They are totally fine with an empowered government being used against the American people, all of that stuff.
I will say this in response to the chattering class here on the Hill that are attacking Speaker Johnson, or for that matter, were attacking Speaker McCarthy for the dysfunction of the House.
This Republican-led House is the only institution in the world right now standing up and yelling stop, to quote William F. Buckley. We are the only institution in the world right now standing against a radical leftist agenda.
Yes, I gave a speech saying name one thing because I want to get victories. I want to stand up and stop the radical left.
Well, we did something. We impeached Alejandro Mayorkas, and that is good. We did something last year in passing H.R. 2, but we ought to hold the Senate accountable and make them come to the table with us and stop what this administration is doing with tyrannical executive overreach, endangering the American people with wide-open borders.
We ought to use the power of the purse to stop funding 1, 2, 10, 50 of the things that I just described. We should use that power of the purse in 2 weeks. We shouldn't run scared.
We should embrace the caps that were passed last year in the so- called Fiscal Responsibility Act. It wasn't as good as I wanted, but there are caps.
Why are we running away from the caps?
Why would we honor side deals that were done behind closed doors, which even the Democrat appropriations chairwoman acknowledged in the Rules Committee were literally not in the text of the FRA. In fact, she voted against the FRA because those side deals were not in the text.
Why would we walk away from that?
We have the ability to constrain spending by about $100 billion less than what the powers that be want to try to negotiate over in the Senate.
If we passed a continuing resolution for the rest of this year funding government, it would be at $1.564 trillion.
If we advance the minibus using the side deals that the Senate wants us to do, it will be $1.66 trillion. That is $100 billion we could save; $100 billion you take away from the bureaucracy that is at war with your way of life.
That is what Republicans should do, but the reason we won't, most likely--we will keep trying. The reason we won't is because of what I started this conversation with: the defense industrial complex.
Everybody in this town says we are going to die if we don't fund defense and if we don't have FISA out there or an abused FISA because the intel community is out there wanting to collect all the information under the Sun, including against American citizens.
It will be as Dwight Eisenhower said: ``In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.'' That was 1961. That was 63 years ago. He was correct.
The general that helped us defeat Nazi Germany, that led us to D-day who became President of the United States foretold 63 years ago what we are seeing right now--that we will hide behind defense, we will hide behind the intelligence community, and we will do that to indebt our children and our grandchildren
In the name of security, we will undermine our security. We will not have the money to defend ourselves, much less the world.
We will not be able to stand side by side with Israel because we are not going to have a country left to stand next to them.
We have the opportunity as Republicans to stand and thwart a radical left that wants to kill our country. We should do it. We should do it proudly. We should run on it. We should stop dancing.
We have caps in place. Use them.
We have policies we know we need to achieve. Fight for them. We won't get them all. We may only get a few.
For the love of everything holy, fight for them because the other side wants to take away your way of life and is destroying this country. That is what is happening.
We have a duty to stand up for the people who sent us here. I embrace what Jake Sherman is saying. I embrace what the Capitol Hill reporters are saying. When we stand up and yell stop, to stand athwart the massive power and scope of government that is strangling the prosperity and the well-being of the American people, I am proud of it.
On that point, I am proud of what we have been doing under both Speakers this Congress because we have been having the debate that needs to be had on this side of the aisle. We have been having the debate the American people want us to have.
Unfortunately, we get no help from our colleagues on the other side of the aisle who are beholden to a radical left vision while they just allow America to slip through their fingers like sand--or our fingers-- while we watch it unfold.
I hope that when we come back from this recess, we will take up the mantle, stand athwart the tyranny of the radical left, band together, stop spending money we don't have, stop funding the tyranny against our way of life, stop allowing open borders, stop allowing our streets to be dangerous, stop funding wars without a mission with endless borrowing, stop doing everything we campaigned against.
Every single person that campaigned on this side of the aisle campaigned against those things. Stop continuing them. That is our duty. That is our calling. If we do that, we might be able to pass down this country to our kids and our grandkids.
When our country turns 250 years old in just over 2 years, are we going to be able to look at them and say that they have inherited a free country?
When those 56 men walked out of Independence Hall, signing their death warrant, we praise that every July Fourth. Are we going to honor it, or are we just going to use it as a parade symbol on July Fourth?
Are we going to honor the lives of the men that stormed the beaches at Normandy that were led by Dwight Eisenhower who foretold what we are now doing with the defense industrial complex?
Are we going to stand up and stop spending money we don't have and preserve liberty?
Are we going to do that, or are we just going to talk about them every June 6; about how great it was that they stormed the beach and walked into a wall of bullets?
We can't go around and help the world if this country isn't strong.
I keep hearing Ronald Reagan being raised up. Oh, look. He went over and stood in front of the Berlin Wall. You bet he did.
Yes, we had funded activities around the world in Afghanistan and otherwise.
First of all, we didn't have a hundred percent debt-to-GDP which we do now. We weren't $34 trillion in debt.
Second of all, and importantly, peace through strength meant peace through strength. Peace through strength. Not peace through endless wars, not peace through spying on Americans in the name of intelligence gathering against your enemies, not peace through unlimited borrowing, making our country financially insolvent. That is not what that meant.
Too many people in this town are totally fine hiding behind defense and hiding behind intelligence in order to undermine our well-being as a country in the false name of security. We should stop that. We should make this country secure by actually doing our job.
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