Crisis At the Border

Floor Speech

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Mr. PERRY. Of course I do. We have fought bitterly. I mean, even if you just look at the last few years here since the pandemic, the pandemic was unexpected, decisions were made, and in hindsight we obviously made some wrong choices.

Be that as it may, it was expensive. People were out of work. The government forced them out of work, forced them to close their businesses. It was only right, since the government had the authority and the power to do that, to make them as whole as possible.

Now, we can debate that as long as we want to, but subsequent to the end of the pandemic, it should have been reasonable for the people in this room on either side of the aisle to say: Well, let's just reset back to prepandemic.

Believe it or not, at that time, if we had just gone back to that number, the budget would have balanced.

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Mr. PERRY. We would actually have taken in enough revenue to pay for the things that we were buying, but a substantial portion of this body, unfortunately, my friends, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, said: No, no, no. We are going to keep spending now at the pandemic level even though the pandemic is over.

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Mr. PERRY. Right. It does.

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Mr. PERRY. Of course, I have heard it. I have heard it ever since I have been here. There is always some reason: We have a slim majority. We don't have a majority at all. We don't have 60. We don't have the Presidency. We have this House, not that body. It is the courts. There is always some reason to say we can't do it.

I was in a committee hearing today talking about waste and abuse on foreign affairs. I found out that we send money to Nepal to support atheism. We send some of your money to Nepal, which is a highly religious society, to support atheism.

What I am told is: Well, not all bills are perfect. Nobody agrees with that, but we had to get the bill passed.

Well, somebody agreed with it. It ended up in there.

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Mr. PERRY. Somebody wanted that, so I am supposed to go along with that. The people that I represent that wake up early in the morning and go to work and pay their taxes, their money is going for that when they can't afford their electricity bill, their food bill, or their daycare bill. It is insane.

This whole thing about a wide-open border, not only can they not afford to pay the bills, but their kids can't even get jobs now coming out of high school because they are competing with people who are here illegally who will take those jobs where you start out, where the only skill you have, Mr. Roy, is, I can show up on time with a good attitude. That is the skill I had when I was 13 or 14 years old, right? That is the skill I had when I started.

You start out doing things that maybe a lot of people don't want to do, but now there are other people in this country with a work permit. Your kids can't even get started anymore. That is the insult upon injury.

You are being taxed out of your homes. You can't afford your bills. Other people are taking your work. You are being told to sit down and shut up and just take it, whether you are in Congress or, Heaven forbid, you are at home and you are watching on TV and you are saying: What do I do about any of this? I told my Representative, and they said they can't stop it.

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Mr. PERRY. Mandated by the government.

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Mr. PERRY. Like the kill switch.

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Mr. PERRY. I do agree. I do agree with that completely. Protecting that, and, of course, what we are seeing right now is the protection or the attempted protection of that at the Presidential level.

For 3\1/2\ years, I have watched the President say: I can't do anything about a wide-open border. I can't take any action. There is nothing I can do. It must come from the legislature.

Yet, somehow, now that all the polls have turned around and it looks ominous in 5 months, somehow, he found the wherewithal to say: Well, shazam, I can take executive action.

Who knew? Well, the American people knew because, before he got there, executive action was taken, and the border was relatively secure, much more secure than it is now.

For 3\1/2\ years, it has been wide open, and, essentially, our President just acknowledged what we all knew, that this has been meaningful. This has been by design, the wide-open border has been intentional, and he could have done something about it, but he chose not to until he had no other choice politically.

Even at that, I am sure that my good friend from Texas, who is on the front lines in Texas, is going to talk about the provisions of this. The one I find interesting, we are going to stop these people coming in once we hit the threshold unless they are minors, unaccompanied children. Unless they are minors, unaccompanied children, we are going to let--so we are going to allow the sex trafficking of children to continue, even as we know that our Federal Government has lost track of literally tens of thousands of children illegally in our country, unaccompanied.

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Mr. PERRY. Yes, 85,000. Right. Yeah.

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Mr. PERRY. When is the invasion clause operable then?

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Mr. PERRY. When is it? Never?

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Mr. PERRY. If you came across with a gun and you were wearing a uniform with your name on it, that is an invasion. If you don't have a gun and you don't have a uniform, no matter what your intentions are or the scale, that is not an invasion.

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Mr. PERRY. Legally.

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Mr. PERRY. A day.

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Mr. PERRY. I agree completely. The historical perspective of what we accomplished in the House over a year ago now with the most righteous border security bill ever to pass out of the House is to give Members of the House of Representatives and the Senate the alternative, so when the President says: Well, you haven't done anything over there. You haven't passed anything, and you won't pass the bipartisan bill.

Madam Speaker, it doesn't matter. I mean, it is awesome when it can be bipartisan, but what is more awesome is when it can be correct, when it actually is the solution to the problem.

The Senate bill, the so-called border protection bill that allows 5,000 people every single day to hemorrhage across our border illegally, is not a solution. It is not a solution to an open border. It is just a codification of an open border.

The fact that some of my friends on the other side of the aisle didn't want to vote in favor of securing the border shouldn't be a reason for the President to say: You haven't done anything.

We get that he doesn't like it. He doesn't like it because it actually would have secured the border. That goes to the point. It was always his intention. It has always been his intention. It has always been the intention of my friends on the other side of the aisle to leave the border wide-open as long as they possibly could and get away with it. The only reason it is changing now is because the polls reflect that the American people are, number one, sick of it; and, number two, know they are being lied to and know that the President has the authority and the ability to secure the border.

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Mr. PERRY. I do, and I lament this. I say this often. The gentleman from Texas has heard me say that this is the Constitution of the United States of America, Madam Speaker.

It is a quick read. You can probably read that in less than an hour. Everybody can see it is a piece of paper. It cannot defend itself.

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Mr. PERRY. There it is, laying on the desk. This is the owner's manual. This is the operator's manual. This is the set of instructions for running your country. We all take an oath to follow this thing. However, if you are not going to, if you choose not to, this Constitution can do nothing about it. It can do nothing.

It takes people of integrity. People that are willing to sacrifice their own personal viewpoints on occasion or what I call the avarice of man, their own personal greed; the things that they want for the sake of this. When people refuse to do this, refuse to do that, and just use the awesome authority granted to them in a position whether it is electoral or otherwise in places like the Department of Justice, well, that is what we have today.

That is what we have today, which is a Soviet-style show trial to go after your political rivals. This is the thing of dictators and tyrants.

One of the practitioners I saw this week before I came in said: It is crazy. It is crazy. I said: It is not crazy; it is tyranny. It is tyranny.

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Mr. PERRY. No words that we can use today can adequately honor the sacrifices of those who gave the last full measure and signed up to do it. There is just no way you can describe what they endured and what they knew they were going to endure.

Many of them never made it off the beach. Many of them never made it out of the boat. So many of them even joined up and lied about their age so they could go fight for what they believed in: this country, this idea.

The idea is that everybody is equal under the law, that no one person is more important than another person, that you can make decisions for your life based on what you want to do. You can buy the gas stove that you want or not buy any stove at all. You can buy a car with a windshield sensor in it or no windshield sensor in it.

Madam Speaker, they didn't give their lives for this government that we have now that bankrupts families, that puts the fear of the government in them if they say something, that they are going to be hauled off to jail in the middle of the night or be drawn out on the lawn in their shorts in the wee hours of the morning. Yet, that is what we have right now.

Madam Speaker, we need to honor the commitment they made for the country that they loved that existed then. That is the best thing we could do.

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