Bringing America Back to its Roots
Floor Speech
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, it was great to have had the chance last night to be at the White House with the President, his Cabinet, and my colleagues.
Obviously, we celebrated the Christmas season and our collective belief that this season is particularly important for the American people in recognition of who we are as a people in a Judeo-Christian society and celebrating the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
It is not just a holiday for white lights and garland and making merry. It is a holiday that serves as the center of who we are as a people.
As the Speaker knows, sitting there in the Speaker's chair under ``In God We Trust,'' it is that collective faith that we have in the Lord Almighty and our collective belief in his Son that has served as the core of the strength of this country from its founding. I will talk about two things today that are related to that.
One is a policy issue. That issue is the ability of the American people to get healthcare and care for one another. The other is defending our Judeo-Christian heritage in Western civilization from the onslaught of those who wish to push the Islamification of our country into the forefront.
Mr. Speaker, I will start on the point of the healthcare policy because I think it goes to the central problem we face as a people right now. A lot of folks are talking about ``affordability.'' It has become the political hot-button buzzword. It is affordability.
This is being driven intentionally by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle because they have got virtually nothing to run on. They made a choice to shut the government down in order to set up a fight and to try to elevate the issue of healthcare because they believe they can win on it politically.
Mr. Speaker, I want everyone to think about that for a minute. They shut down the government because they want to politicize the issue of healthcare and not actually work to solve the problem.
Republicans, in my view, have avoided the issue of healthcare out of political fear historically. I believe that this Republican Congress, this Republican House and Senate, and this Republican-led White House have the opportunity today to transform healthcare for the American people so that it can be affordable, so that they can have choice and they can go to the doctor of their choice, and to empower doctors and patients, not insurance bureaucrats and government bureaucrats.
I want to repeat that again because I am going to engage in a colloquy and yield to my friend from Missouri in a moment on this important topic.
Right now, the average American family is getting crushed and is unable to afford healthcare because Democrats broke our healthcare system.
I want to be very clear: Democrats knowingly chose to break the American healthcare system 15 years ago. We told the world what would happen, and it has come true.
American families and the businesses that employ most of them are spending about $25,000 a year for insurance premiums that give them fewer options and restricts them on what they can do, gives them higher copays, higher deductibles, and fundamentally makes it impossible for them to have actual care.
I go back to my point about In God We Trust and celebrating the Christmas season. As Christians, we are called to take care of those less fortunate than we are. We are called to help those who need help. That is why so many of our hospitals historically were nonprofits built up from faith-centered institutions. That is why so many hospitals are Saint Fill-in-the-Blank Hospital. It is because Christians came together to say that we should care for those who need help, but then came in government.
In all of its infinite wisdom, government came in and regulated healthcare, restricted our options and socialized the payments.
Now what is the result?
It is an impossibility of the average American family to be able to actually get healthcare from the doctor of their choice. It is the inability for them to go get insurance that will give them comfort that if the cancer that I got in 2011 hits them, that they will be able to go get care because they can't afford it. They can't afford it because we have broken it. We didn't break it, Democrats broke it.
Right now, Republicans have a choice: Go along with Democrats to continue to socialize healthcare, continue to enrich insurance companies and continue to take away options from the American people or we can stand up for healthcare freedom and stand up for the ability of an average American family to be able to go to the doctor of their choice, get insurance, and go on health-sharing ministries such as Medishare and be able to defray costs, rather than having constrained, regulated, no-option, expensive health management by bureaucrats.
That is what we have.
The fact is, Mr. Speaker, there is this big debate right now about so-called subsidies. I want to be very clear about what we are talking about. We are talking about COVID-era pandemic cash that was thrown out into our economy in this case for some plus-ups for some subsidies for the broken ObamaCare system.
Now we are 5 years removed from COVID, and my Democrat colleagues are trying to say that if we don't extend those subsidies that somehow we are denying people healthcare. That is just flat false. It is a lie.
The fact is, ObamaCare remains in place. Its subsidy structure remains in place for better or worse, and those subsidies that they are talking about would literally go into the pockets of insurance companies whose profits have gone up 1,000-plus percent over the last decade.
It is an insurance enrichment scheme.
My Democratic colleagues broke healthcare, and now they are down here saying: We must give more money to insurance companies.
That is what they are saying.
Any Republican who goes along with that needs to answer for doing the same thing.
Why would we give more money to the insurance companies that saddled up with government to enrich themselves rather than help the American people?
Mr. Speaker, 85 percent of all Affordable Care Act revenue insurers received comes from the Federal taxpayers. Mr. Speaker, 85 percent of all the revenue, I should say, that the insurers receive are coming from the Federal taxpayers. Insurers received at least $35 billion in Federal subsidies in 2024 for people who didn't use their plan a single time. Mr. Speaker, $35 billion went into the pockets of insurance companies for people who didn't even use their plan.
I want to say this, and then I am going to yield to my friend from Missouri: We have solutions. When people say that Republicans don't have a plan, it is false. We put out plans. We have put out solutions. We have solutions.
We believe in expanding people's access to care by empowering them with the same tax treatment, equal tax treatment, the corporations get. Individuals should get the same tax deductions and tax breaks to be able to have healthcare.
Mr. Speaker, we believe in expanded health savings accounts that you can use for direct primary care to go to a doctor, have that doctor's cell phone number, have a relationship with that doctor and not be put into some complicated scheme where you have to get approval for somebody who is in network or not in network and who may or may not be within 100 miles of your house.
We want the American people to be empowered. We want them to be able to go defray costs and share costs in health-sharing ministries and Medishare and all these different organizations that are, frankly, the last lifeboat that people have right now for access to care.
We want to allow providers to own hospitals rather than be restricted from being able to do that so that the corporate, monolithic hospitals are not the only option.
We want 1,000 flowers to bloom and for people to have the freedom option.
Guess what, Mr. Speaker?
You can leave ObamaCare, the Affordable Care Act, structure all in place. Leave it all sitting there, but just provide the American family with a freedom option. Allow them to have choice.
Shouldn't that be our right as Americans?
People talk about a right to healthcare. What they are really saying with that is that government should be providing healthcare rather than the individual, the family being able to have the right to get the care of their choice.
What on Earth kind of freedom do you have in a country where you literally can't go get healthcare and you are prohibited from it?
The government has stopped us from exercising our freedom.
We have plans. What we don't have is the backbone and the willpower to stand up and deliver.
I say: Do it now.
I say: Stand up and fight for healthcare freedom now.
I am tired of it. I don't want another election. I don't want another: Don't worry, we will do it next time. I want to do it now because too many people are suffering at the hands of a bureaucracy and the tyranny of government-run health management rather than the ability to get care.
The current situation with respect to healthcare exists entirely by record of vote and a record of policies because my Democrat colleagues put forward policies that the American people are having to live under today.
They broke the healthcare system.
My Democratic colleagues are proposing an insurance company enrichment scheme. Literally they are printing money in the Treasury and giving it to insurance companies.
Their solution for healthcare is enriching insurance companies. Our solution for healthcare is empowering doctors. Our solution for healthcare is empowering people. Our solution for healthcare is spreading costs out among people who want to help each other out in the American way.
It is why I started talking about Christmas.
The question for Republicans is: If not now, then when?
When are we going to stand up and deliver for the American people?
That basic right--I will say it--right to access healthcare of our choice without government interfering, without government regulating, and without government stealing our ability to care for our own families and loved ones in our community.
I know the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Burlison) feels the same way. He has done incredible work on this subject. We are aligned, I think almost entirely, on the opportunity for Republicans to lead, the opportunity for Republicans to stand up and deliver for the American people on healthcare freedom for every American. Every American should be able to do that.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I know my friend from Missouri needs to head home, but before he heads out, I would ask him a couple of quick questions in colloquy.
For the average viewer out there who can't necessarily follow all this, if we distill this down simply, no matter what you call it, no matter how you define it, what we are simply proposing is that individual families, individuals, be able to get the same tax benefit as currently corporations get when they are putting their dollars into a Blue Cross, Aetna, or some other insurance plan, right?
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Mr. ROY. I yield to the gentleman from Missouri.
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Mr. ROY. Because of a broken system created by wage controls post- World War II, instead of employers only being able to get the tax break when they give dollars to pay Blue Cross to provide some sort of plans and then you have to then further subsidize that--so maybe your employer puts in $1,800 and you put in $900, in total, it is costing $2,700 a month.
Instead, we are saying: Look, get the same tax break, employer, but put it into a massively expanded, tax-free account, where you are able to use it for insurance, real insurance, that you can go get, a catastrophic coverage and/or direct primary care, all sorts of plans out there where you have a doctor who says: Look, for $100 a month, you can call me. I am at your call. I will do this kind of service.
Another option is health sharing, whether it is secular or faith- based, where you have, oh, wait a minute, I don't need catastrophic insurance for this problem. It is a broken leg, but I don't have $5,000 for the emergency room visit and all the care and whatnot, so you share and defray that cost across people often in a faith-based organization, but sometimes secular.
Isn't that the engine of what we are talking about?
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Mr. ROY. Then, would it not require us to simply say that you can leave ObamaCare in place? That can sit there and keep doing what it is doing, but we are going to give people this option, so employers can put it in there.
If you are self-employed, you can get the same tax break. It is all equal tax treatment. Nobody is treated differently. We would have a product over here that would allow for true catastrophic insurance, right--not regulated, not all sorts of complications, not telling you what you can do, not do, but a risk-based product that says: Hi, I am a healthy 24-year-old. I would like to just know that, if I am in a bad accident or if I get cancer, that I will be able to have care. I will pay $100 a month for that risk assessment, and the insurance companies can figure all that out, or $200 a month, but not $2,000 a month.
Isn't that what we are talking about?
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Mr. ROY. Correct.
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Mr. ROY. The last point, to that point, when our Republican colleagues, in particular, and other colleagues talk about all these things--we need transparency, we need association health plans--I support that. I support transparency, right? We need to fix some particular technical thing with our existing plans, right? Whatever these little solutions are--PBMs, right? There are all these--oh, we are going to do something on PBMs. Well, sometimes, that works. Sometimes, it doesn't. Will any of that be transformative?
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Mr. ROY. What will be transformative is giving individuals and patients the power to deploy the dollars in a tax-advantaged way, in a marketplace where they can go get the options that are best for them.
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Mr. ROY. Correct?
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Mr. ROY. Right.
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Mr. ROY. Right.
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Mr. ROY. Right. If you have an F-250 pickup, right, and you have a crappy, little engine in there that doesn't work, but you add four- wheel drive and leather seats, and you do all this stuff to make it a nice truck, but it has a lawnmower engine in it, would it work? Would it be effective?
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Mr. ROY. That is what we are talking about. That is what Republicans do. They have fallen into the trap of saying: Please give me the leather seats on the F-250, or I really want the four-wheel drive, or I really want a good bed liner and bed cover, and, oh, give me all the options and music and speakers and, oh, it looks great, great running boards, but you have a frigging lawnmower engine. The truck is useless.
We have to actually transform healthcare, and we have the opportunity to do it with proposals like yours, like mine, like a number of proposals that our colleagues have. The question is: Will we have the willpower to do what the President has laid out-- Mr. BURLISON. Yes.
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Mr. ROY.--which is to stop subsidizing insurance companies, stop enriching insurance bureaucrats, and empower the American people?
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Mr. ROY. I thank the gentleman for his time.
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Mr. ROY. I wish him safe travel back to Missouri, and hopefully, next week, we can get busy saving the American people from a broken healthcare system. America Under Attack From Within
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I am going to take a few minutes in the time that I have remaining to talk about another issue that is critical to the State of Texas and this entire country.
That is the fact that America, Texas, and Western civilization are under attack from within. The cheap labor lobby, leftwing NGOs, radical progressive Democrats, Marxists, globalist organizations, and the United Nations have mobilized a coordinated effort to subvert our security and immigration system to harm the American people.
Particularly concerning is the threat posed by Islamists who are spreading sharia law into Texas, who are advancing throughout the country, and who have a stated goal of undermining American life, not assimilating into it.
This is a political movement, well funded, targeted at the American people, Western civilization, our rule of law, and the Constitution.
We should not be allowing more people into this country who are adherent to sharia law, period. The Muslim Brotherhood's own motto is: ``Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.''
Meanwhile, Europe has fallen. London and Paris are mere shells of their former strong selves. You watch veterans who fought to defend the United Kingdom in World War II. Those still alive tear up and cry, wondering what it was that they fought for when they watch the radical extension of Islam into the streets of London and throughout the United Kingdom.
In France, a majority of young French Muslims put sharia above their own national laws, and more than a third have sympathy for Islamification. French officials have warned President Macron that Islamists are infiltrating France's republican institutions and are a threat to national cohesion. The authors of the report to Macron identified the Federation of Muslims in France, FMF, as the main French emanation of the historic Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded 100 years ago to promote a return to core Islamic values.
They said that the FMF controlled 139 places of worship in France and a further 68 affiliated--in all, around 7 percent of the total. The organization ran some 280 associations.
Mr. Speaker, 7 out of 10 French voters would back a ban on the Islamic veil in public because of what is happening in France.
In the United Kingdom, Muslims are increasingly turning to Britain's sharia courts, which are not part of the U.K. law and operate as informal bodies. The number of sharia courts in Britain has grown to 85 since they first began operating in the country in 1982.
Polls have found that 41 percent of the British public believe that Muslim immigrants have had a negative impact on the United Kingdom. Nearly half think that Muslim women are pressured into wearing a hijab. Almost a third think that Islam promotes violence.
Parallel legal systems are not keys to a thriving society. There must be one rule of law for all the people.
All the way back in 1991--a lot of people won't know this--the Muslim Brotherhood issued a memorandum about North America, detailing a plan for the ``enablement of Islam in North America,'' establishing an effective and stable Islamic movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood, which adopts Muslims' causes domestically and globally and works to expand the observant Muslim base. It was a coordinated and specific effort to advance Islam into the United States.
Our Founders did not envision a Nation that remotely resembled today's Muslim world and the radical elements of sharia. America was founded as a nation grounded in a distinctly Judeo-Christian history and understanding of human nature.
It was Great Britain that led the ending of slavery.
John Adams said: ``One great advantage of the Christian religion is that it brings the great principle of the law of nature and nations . . . to the knowledge, belief, and veneration of the whole people.''
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams hinted at the incompatibility of America's Republican virtues with the values of Muslim nations after meeting with the Islamic Ambassador about the Barbary States' inclination to make war upon nations that did them no wrong after they were informed it was a requirement of the Koran.
In Jefferson's papers in 1786, he wrote: ``We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor given us any provocation.
``The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found and, to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman''--Muslim--``who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.'' That is Jefferson, 1786.
Our Founders knew that sharia law was not consistent with Western civilization and our values. Sharia law is a problem that is growing throughout the United States and certainly growing in Texas. My home State bore the brunt of a 4-year mass migration invasion under the previous administration, but there has been a quieter one of Islamists leveraging our immigration system and corporate interests to extend and use diversity visas, chain migration, and H-1B visas to flood our country with people who don't believe in it and have no intention of assimilating into it.
A new Muslim community in Texas, not even a few days old, with a 150,000-square-foot Muslim community center, was opened in Houston, called EPIC City. It is in Plano, outside of Dallas-Fort Worth and it has raised all sorts of questions about their intentions to create an effectively Muslim-only community where sharia law no doubt would and will be practiced. Now they have renamed it The Meadow rather than the East Plano Islamic Center. They continue to develop and grow it even as there are almost 300 mosques in Texas and more mosques being built in Texas every day than any other State in the Union.
Meanwhile, let's look at what is going on in the United States broadly. Our Nation's foreign-born population has reached 51.9 million people, comprising some 16 percent of our population. We are at the highest levels of percentage in our history. The last time we had a similar level of foreign-born population, in roughly 1920, we froze immigration. Largely for about 40 or 50 years we froze it, and then it has been exploding over the last 50 years.
I have introduced legislation called the PAUSE Act to pause immigration and to pause it until we get our hands around all of the problems that are currently plaguing our immigration system: the abuse of birthright citizenship, to have profit-centered ways to create American citizens, by people coming here, coming across the Rio Grande, having children, making citizens that then can use American resources, our hospitals, our schools, our legal system, our welfare.
We continue to allow a broken visa system to have extended family members be brought into the United States expansively and purposefully. The H-1B program has been exploited and abused now for years and must be abolished or massively reformed.
We obviously still have a very badly broken border that is only currently being held in check by a President and by leadership in the administration who are devoted to doing it, that are empowered to do it. However, all of the ways in which Biden-Mayorkas and that entire administration allowed our border to be wide open and have 10 million people flood our country, all of those things still remain in place statutorily.
Congress could fix it. We haven't. The House passed legislation 2 years ago--what it was called in that Congress was H.R. 2--to meaningfully change the law so that it can't be exploited to endanger the people. We have not brought that back up again this year. We should. We should codify these changes. Our priorities matter. The results of this are stark.
Thanksgiving week we saw what happened with the West Virginia National Guard servicemembers, Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, who was 20 years old, and Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, 24. They were savagely ambushed and shot blocks away from the White House. Specialist Beckstrom tragically lost her life. The attacker, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who was imported through the Biden-Mayorkas illegal Operation Allies Welcome parole program, drove from Washington State to carry out this diabolical act in our Nation's Capital.
According to DHS, over 5,000 Afghans brought to the United States through Operation Allies Welcome had either national security or public safety concerns.
We are importing people who want to undermine and destroy our country, and both sides of the aisle have been guilty of this. This is not a debatable reality. It is literally occurring.
For us to survive, we have to act. We need to pass the PAUSE Act. We need to pause immigration. We need to pass legislation like the bill that I introduced to preserve a sharia-free America that would prohibit the entry of people that are known to be adherent to sharia law, which is deeply in conflict with our values and our laws.
We should take away the tax status of CAIR and other radical organizations with ties to terrorists and a vast network of well-funded organizations, using American tax dollars, United Nations' funds, wealthy donors, George Soros funding, foreign funding, nation-states all pouring into organizations, NGOs driving this agenda, the Marxist- Islamist red-green alliance that wants to destroy America as we know it. I introduced legislation to take away CAIR's tax status.
Why are we giving them tax breaks to try to destroy America?
That brings me to the final point which I was alluding to before on H.R. 2, that is legislation designed to codify effectively what President Trump is doing: to stop the abuse of parole, to stop the abuse of asylum, to stop the abuse of catch and release, to stop all of the abusive ways in which an exploited border can undermine our security and endanger us.
We cannot rely on the administration to do it. Congress needs to act. Congress needs to codify it. Congress needs to change it. States and State leaders need to stand up and use the legislation that we did pass in January to enable suit against the Federal Government when they failed to secure the border that we included in the Laken Riley Act because States can no longer be beholden to a Federal Government that refuses to secure the border.
We have a reprieve under President Trump. That reprieve will no doubt one day come to an end, and States must be empowered and have leaders who are willing to stand up and fight.
States need to challenge things like Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court ruling that said that we must have taxpayer funding going to pay for the education of illegal alien children. If you want to choose to do it, that is for you to decide. We should not be forced to use taxpayer dollars to do that. We should challenge that Supreme Court ruling. We should stand up to defend our country.
The fact is you can't win a war that you are not willing to recognize exists. It is undeniably true after the election of the mayor in New York, Mamdani, with what is going on in Dearborn, with what is going on in Minneapolis, with what we are seeing happen in Texas, in Dallas and Houston, what we saw unfold in London and Paris, that there is an attack on the Western way of life. We must stand up and defend it if we are going to be able to pass down a country to our kids and grandkids.
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