Protecting American Energy Production Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASTEN. Madam Speaker, we are in a constitutional crisis. The President of the United States is trying to delete the 14th Amendment, ignoring Congress' constitutional power of the purse to illegally block Federal spending, exposing the identities of our intelligence officers to our enemies, and sending Elon Musk's unvetted minions into our financial systems to steal Americans' private information.

In the normal course, these violations would be prosecuted by the Department of Justice, but their leadership has put personal politics over the rule of law. In the normal course, Congress would act as a check and balance, but Republican leadership in both Chambers is most charitably described as missing in action. We are only 19 days in.

The White House is now dismantling USAID, pulling back on our soft power at the precise moment when China and Russia are trying to increase their influence over global affairs.

Is this because of social media conspiracies, foreign influence operations, or just because Elon Musk is still angry that USAID helped to topple apartheid in South Africa? There are no good answers to that question.

They are targeting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, stripping our ability to make weather forecasts in the wake of rising seas, surging hurricanes, and ever more devastating wildfires. Take away our ability to give advance notice of those storms, and Americans will die.

They are opposing competitive markets, as they refuse to enact existing laws to build out EV charging networks and renewable energy because my colleagues on the other side of the aisle know that to do so would be to bring resources onto our system that would further erode the market share of more expensive and dirtier energy.

Madam Speaker, they have now stolen data from the Treasury Department files so that Elon Musk, a man who gives Nazi salutes and actively campaigns for the neo-Nazi party in Germany, can access personal information that could potentially be used to target his political enemies. This is the very foundation of fascism, all of which leaves us in this Chamber with a choice.

As we sit here on the fulcrum of history, we can act to make these 19 days a footnote to an otherwise noble history of these United States, or we can go to our graves knowing that we did nothing during the 19 days that forever destroyed this 250-year-old experiment.

We can choose evil in this moment. We can choose to ignore everything that Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount as we persecute the meek so we can enrich the merciless.

We can choose cowardice.

We can give $1 to a homeless man on the way to work so we can take away hundreds of millions of dollars from housing assistance once we get there, telling ourselves that to do anything else would be to cause our seat to be filled by a less compassionate soul.

We can decide that if we aren't in leadership, then our job is just to follow orders. Sometimes that excuse works. It didn't at Nuremberg.

There is no difference between any of those choices. They all lead to the same outcome.

For this reason, I will be offering a fourth option. At the appropriate time, I will offer a motion to recommit this bill back to committee.

If the House rules permitted, I would have offered this motion with an important amendment to this bill to say that it shall not take effect until the illegal freeze of taxpayer dollars that Congress appropriated to the Department of the Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other agencies has stopped; civil rights and employment protections for nonpartisan Federal public servants are restored; and DOGE and billionaires like Elon Musk no longer have unlawful access to Federal Government systems and the private, sensitive data of taxpaying Americans.

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Mr. CASTEN. Madam Speaker, that motion is a chance for all of my colleagues to choose leadership, to choose patriotism, to choose to honor the oath that we all took to the Constitution, to be remembered and honored by future generations, and, in the words of William F. Buckley, to stand athwart history and yell stop.

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Mr. CASTEN. Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

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Mr. CASTEN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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