Crisis At the Border
Floor Speech
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert), my colleague and friend, for his steadfast dedication to ensuring the American people are informed, at least the 72 people that were watching C-SPAN while you were extemporaneously educating them.
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Mr. ROY. In all seriousness, we were able to push this out. We were able to do clips. It is important that we continue to have this conversation.
The gentleman is correct, in very broad terms and very specific terms, about the extent to which we have a fiscal crisis looming. It is incumbent upon this body to do something about it.
We have structural reforms we could put in place that the gentleman is talking about. I think we just covered that quite nicely, but we also need to be aware of what we need to do with our discretionary spending and using the power of the purse, both to constrain the bureaucracy that is still a third of that annual spending and constrain that spending also for the purpose of limiting tyranny over the American people.
This is one of those things that frustrates me among my colleagues, both Democrat and Republican. The gentleman from Arizona is not in that group, by the way, because the gentleman from Arizona, I think, largely would agree with what I am getting at here. I have colleagues who will always slip into saying: It doesn't matter. Stop worrying about discretionary. Stop having a fight about $100 billion or $30 billion or whatever your debate is about constraining discretionary spending.
When I say that to the average listener, what I mean is what we spend every year on the stuff you see in the bureaucracy, such as the Department of Justice, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense, all of those things that make up the alphabet soup of government that, frankly, are the things impacting your life every day, or undermining, frankly, your freedoms every day.
The thing that drives me crazy in this town is you will hear Members of Congress who come down here and they say: Chip, we have a razor-thin majority. Don't you understand? Chip, it is all mandatory spending. You don't have to focus on this $100 billion. We are talking about $35 trillion in debt.
That happens all the time. I assume the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Perry) would agree with me. I assume, in his career, since he has been here a few years longer than I have, that we hear that as an excuse for ignoring our job to constrain the bureaucracy, using the power of the purse, almost every single day that we come down here to the floor, when we are in committee or in our conference meetings. I assume the gentleman agrees with me on that point.
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Mr. ROY. You are quite right.
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Mr. ROY. The gentleman is correct. I think that is one of the things I want to stress. I came down here not to talk about spending. However, on the heels of our friend from Arizona, I want to make the point and then pivot to what I think is important to talk about. I am sure the gentleman will agree.
In the context, it matters, right? What we fund matters. We are funding the Department of Homeland Security and for them to utterly fail to secure the homeland and endanger our own people and empower migrants to be able to actually flood in and get dumped into the United States, including the individual who was paroled into the United States and killed Laken Riley, including individuals who were dumped into the United States and shot those two police officers in New York just last week, including the individual who killed a woman named Lizbeth Medina in my own State--killed her, and her mom found her in the bathtub when she was supposed to be cheerleading on the streets. I can give example after example. We are funding that. We are funding the DHS that does that.
We are funding the FBI that has been politicized against the former President, against our own people, like Scott Smith and Mark Houck and other people around the country. We are politicizing the FBI and the Department of Justice that is using the FACE Act to put a 75-year-old woman in jail for 2 years for praying at an abortion facility.
You are paying for that, ladies and gentlemen. You, the American taxpayer, are paying for that, and guess what? With all due respect to my Republican colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans are funding it.
They are funding it, and they come down and they say: Well, we have a duty to do that.
Our Democratic colleagues will say: We must do all these things. You are politicizing this. You are making it this way.
My Republican colleagues will say: Well, Chip, of course, we would like to do that. Of course, we would like to fix it, but you don't understand. You can't do math. We have a razor-thin majority. We can't possibly get it done.
By the way, when did they ever talk about the razor-thin majority in the Senate, which exists?
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Mr. ROY. One last point. Has my friend from Pennsylvania heard the same issues? I won't say who, but I have already heard very important Members of this body, in terms of their rank and committee, already talking about the fact that, no matter what happens in November, if we win the White House and President Trump is in the White House and if we win the House of Representatives, even grow our majority, and if we win back the Senate and have a majority of two, three, or four, depending on how you go look at the scoreboard, that we will not have 60 votes.
We are told: Unless you can do something on reconciliation, which is a maneuver--for all you Americans out there--to find a way to bend around the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, well, then you are just stuck. We are sorry. You just have to accept it, Chip.
Does the gentleman hear that all the time, and has he already heard Members already setting the stage for January to say: We can't do the things that we said we would do?
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Mr. ROY. Right.
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Mr. ROY. In the meantime, I want to pivot to the border point you just raised, but I would like to make the point. We are funding all those rules and the requirements that are driving the American family out of the ability to afford a life.
Just today, I had a crack in my windshield, and I was just there at the dealer's getting it looked at and getting it worked on. We couldn't go do a nondealer part for reasons I won't get into. It was $1,100 for a windshield. They used to be 200 bucks. You would call Safelite or somebody to come out, and they would replace the glass. Now they say: Well, you can't just replace the glass because it has all these sensors in the windshield.
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Mr. ROY. Right. Guess what? Now, increasingly, all of these things are mandated by the idiots in this Chamber.
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Mr. ROY. Right. The idiots in this Chamber voted to cause that to happen and back up what the regulators down the street are forcing on the average American.
Here is what I don't get, right? All my colleagues here, if I forced my colleagues, one by one, to go down to the microphone on any one of these issues and explain to their constituents: I am going to vote--as some Republicans did last fall--I am going to vote against eliminating a kill switch in a car, which is going to dramatically increase the cost of that car, dramatically increase the cost of that windshield, dramatically increase the chance that that car is going to shut down in the 20-below-zero cold in North Dakota and leave you on the side of the road because you have a computer determining whether you can start the car, if I made every Member go defend that, they would start to think twice about it because that is a hard thing to defend.
However, they didn't want to vote against it because MADD came around and lobbied for it. They didn't want to be against that, so 19 Republicans say: No. Sorry. I can't vote against killing the kill switch.
If you put it out there and start really telling the American people: Hey, should we have something in there that protects people from drunk driving, they will say: Well, I guess so.
What if that would cost you another $10,000 for the car?
They would say: Are you out of your freaking mind?
However, we do it, and we do it for the same reason Mr. Schweikert was talking about why our healthcare costs are high. It is because there is an army of lobbyists in town, or there is an army of people who are going to go out and say certain things. The one thing Mr. Schweikert said, when he talked about how we are going to make sure that we are protecting incumbents, he didn't mention about protecting the incumbency of the people in this room, people who hold onto their election certificate like it is the most important damned thing they will ever have in their life, instead of the opportunity to come here and do what we said we would do.
Does the gentleman agree?
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Mr. ROY. There were 85,000 documented in one case, for sure.
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Mr. ROY. And I am glad the gentleman brings this issue up because I would note that, today, while I was sitting in the House Judiciary Committee with the gentleman from California (Mr. Kiley)--who just came in to join us, who is going to take the microphone, I am sure, in a little bit--we had the Attorney General before us. We were questioning the Attorney General in the House Judiciary Committee.
In that exchange, I was asking the Attorney General about the extent to which he believes that it is wrong for Texas to have passed what we call SB4 in Texas to empower Texans to do the job of stopping people from being released into the United States, contrary to law, and endangering the people of Texas that has led directly to the death of Texans, does he believe, as the Attorney General of the United States, that it is wrong for Texas to do that?
The reason I asked him that question is because, as the Attorney General of the United States, he is, of course, leading litigation to stop us. He is suing Texas, taking us to court to try to prevent us from doing it because of the Supremacy Clause. The Federal Government is supposed to do this, and you don't have a say.
Well, hold on a second. If the Federal Government is supposed to secure the border of the United States and manage this inflow of people and it is violating the laws and dumping people into the United States, are we saying that the people of Texas can't, under the invasion clause or otherwise, say: It is our duty as the people of Texas to protect our citizens and our people?
The Attorney General, of course, said no. He has got to take us to court and go sue us. The fact is he is, therefore, ignoring--
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Mr. ROY. I think he would say it is not.
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Mr. ROY. I think he would say if you have got a literal army of people coming across the river, I suppose. I think they would probably fight us on that.
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Mr. ROY. I am not sure that they have stipulated the former, but they certainly want to try to stop us from identifying and recognizing the latter. The reality is that the people of Texas are fed up and they are asking their leaders to do the job the Federal Government won't do.
I will compliment Republicans. I am not afraid to criticize both Republicans or Democrats. I will compliment Republicans for having done a year ago what we have never done, which is set aside the absurdity of saying you have got to do amnesty and setting aside the absurdity of saying you have got to open the floodgates to more people coming into the country, even though we allow about a million people a year to come in.
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Mr. ROY. Legally.
Even though we have 51.5 million people in the United States who are foreign-born. You have the Chamber of Commerce and all of the big interests coming down here saying: You guys have got to open up more immigration. You have to do it.
We always bow down. We always say: Okay, we will do that. We will do amnesty, but can we just get some security? We beg for crumbs.
A year ago, we did something different. We came together as Republicans, and we passed the most comprehensive and strongest border security bill we have ever passed.
Frankly, I don't think my colleagues fully understand the historical importance of that, even many who support it and talk about it and tweet about it.
I have been here in some various forms, now 5 years as Member of Congress. I was here as chief of staff for Senator Ted Cruz. I was on the Senate Judiciary Committee as a lawyer. I watched the debates and the failures and the Gangs of Eight and all of the machinations. I watched in 2017 when we had two different bills, so-called Goodlatte 1, Goodlatte 2. We left President Trump stranded. We blew it.
Last year, we came together, we set the terms of what we will now do next year. That matters.
When Republicans unite to achieve something, not unity for the sake of it. I get so tired of hearing my colleagues talk about unity. I say something like: To do what?
It doesn't matter. We have just got to unite. To do what? Right?
When we unite to say we are going to stand up and say we are going to secure the border of the United States, we did it. We didn't always agree, by the way. People swept aside our differences of opinion a year ago.
We fought through it. We met, we worked, and we passed the best border security bill we have ever passed. The Senate has sat on it. They tried to pass a sham bill, which the President today went to the microphone and gave up the game. Remember the Senate bill? The Senate bill said: Oh, don't worry, guys. We are going to cap the flow at 5,000.
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Mr. ROY. A day. Which, by the way, Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, said a thousand a day was basically a crisis.
We are going to cap it at 5,000 a day, rest easy, but we are going to have all these exceptions. We are going to have exceptions for unaccompanied children; exceptions for parolees when we are violently just dumping people into the United States under parole; exceptions for foreign nationals who use the CBP One app, which is another version of parole.
We objected. All the Democrats said: You guys are not doing this bipartisan bill.
Guess what the President did today? He went to the microphone, and he looked at America and he said: ``We need to regain control of the border.''
The President of the United States today acknowledged to everybody watching and to every American that we do not have control of the border. That is what the President did today.
The President also went to the microphone today and said: ``I will cap it at 2,500.'' If the President of the United States has the authority today to issue an order to cap it at 2,500, did he not have that authority 2 months ago or 6 months ago or 2 years ago or 3\1/2\ years ago? Of course, he did. That gives up the game on the Senate bill when they said they would cap it at 5,000 and the President comes in 3 months later, why?
It is because he is looking at the polls and he is looking at his butt getting kicked and he is looking at losing the House and the Senate. Now, he is, like, oh, crap. I have got to do something to actually look like I care about the border when everybody in America knows I don't.
Madam Speaker, so he did it. He went to the microphone, and he said it and he made a joke of the Senate bill that all of those Senate Democrats and all of our Democratic colleagues have been lying to the American people that we have been obstructing good bills when they are the ones that put forward a sham bill and the President made it clear today.
Does the gentleman agree?
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Mr. ROY. I will ask the gentleman a quick question, then I will leave both of us a little time at the end. We have got about 9 minutes left.
I will give a chance for us to talk about June 6, which is coming up in a couple days. I want to ask one thing today, in that we just talked about the border. We just talked about the extent to which they are wide-open, being ignored, endangering the American people. It is purposeful.
We just talked about the attorney general suing to get in front of Texas trying to secure our borders. I just want to point out the extent to which the current administration is defying and undermining the rule of law on a daily basis.
As we sit here in this Chamber and we sit here under Moses and we sit here in recognition of the importance of the rule of law, this administration is at war with the rule of law: the borders are open, ignoring the law; student loan repayments, ignoring the Supreme Court and the law to try to buy votes. You have got wide-open streets and criminals on the streets, and we are not prosecuting crimes that we need to prosecute.
More importantly, you have an administration hell-bent on trying to use the political apparatus to target a former President and to use it in direct violation of everything we understand and know about the importance of blind justice. You cannot get away from that reality.
Today, we have an attorney general who is choosing to target one President and say: I am going to charge you with a crime. Right? And then choosing not to charge the other President for basically the same crime with the classified record stuff. You have got the Attorney General of the United States saying, I am not going to turn over audio of the very rationale for why Special Counsel Hur said: No, we shouldn't go after the current President because, frankly, he is not mentally able to do it, and he will be a sympathetic figure.
They don't want to turn over the audio, even though it is the same material, and the attorney general testified to that today.
That is an abomination to the rule of law that you have got the New York prosecutor in complete and obvious coordination with the attorney general, where the deputy to the number three goes up and works with the D.A. in New York and they prosecute the former President of the United States.
They prosecute him on a State law charge, but then they bastardize and shoehorn in a Federal charge they won't even define. Then they use that to run through multiple charges that most observers say may not even get through the State system without their supreme court in New York throwing it out.
We have got 6 minutes. I will get to this other issue.
Does the gentleman see the problem with what is happening to the rule of law, the very foundation that causes migrants to want to come here and the strength of this economy and this country?
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Mr. ROY. Correct.
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Mr. ROY. I assume the gentleman would agree with me--and I am going to switch topics, but it is a transition that makes it more meaningful--that when the boys walked into the wall of bullets that they walked into at Normandy in 1944 that they weren't doing it to toss aside the rule of law and the Constitution, all that this country stands for.
I have chosen not to go to Normandy and to make the trip. I didn't wear the uniform. I want to leave it to those who did. Some who wore the uniform aren't going. I want the gentleman to comment on this as he has served for almost three decades or something along those lines in the United States Armed Forces--just so everybody knows, today is June 4.
In 2 days, it will be 80 years since those men got in those boats, jumped out into the stormy seas, ran on to the sand, ran into a wall of bullets, went up the cliffs, and then went all the way to Bastogne, to Germany, went through all of what they went through, this is the message from General Eisenhower on the order of June 6, 1944:
``Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
``You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
``Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
``But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
``I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
``Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.''
Those words speak for themselves. We honor and tribute those who lost their lives, those who fought, those who came home, those few World War II veterans who remain with us.
I will turn over the remaining 1\1/2\ minutes to my friend who wore the uniform that I did not wear.
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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