Our Free Enterprise System And The Role Of Big Government
Floor Speech
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Ms. FOXX. Well, I want to thank my colleague from Tennessee (Mr. Wamp), whose loss to this House is going to be immeasurable. His contribution here in the House of Representatives representing his district in Tennessee has been outstanding. Not only has he done a fantastic job as a legislator, but his leadership in our weekly prayer breakfast has been exemplary. I should think of some better adjectives to say, but exemplary will have to do. He is really a tremendous role model for all of us in his attendance, in his caring for others, and he is going to be very much missed in the House when he leaves here. He didn't pay me to say that. He didn't know I was going to say that, but it needs to be said. Fortunately, we have him for the next 17 months still in the Congress, and I'm very, very grateful to him.
He has set the stage very well on this issue of the cap-and-trade bill, which the majority in this House pushed through the House with no chance for people to read, a 300-page amendment brought to the Rules Committee at 2:30 in the morning, and then the bill brought to the floor later that day.
There is a lot of sentiment out in the public now by the American people about the fact that people voted for that bill without having read it. Now, fortunately for our side, most of us voted against the bill. We knew pieces of it, and we knew there was enough bad in that bill to vote ``no,'' because the bill is going to do a lot of negative things in this country.
It's going to raise taxes. It's going to raise the cost of utilities. The President warned during his campaign last year, he admitted it--and we're quoting him--he admitted that, you know, under his energy plan, utility rates would necessarily skyrocket. Well, skyrocketing means probably an average of $3,000 more to pay for energy for the average family. The average family is going to have to pay over $3,000 more a year for energy.
The American people deserve better, and as my colleague from Tennessee (Mr. Wamp) said, we are the most innovative people in the world, and the reason we are the most innovative people in the world is because we are the freest people in the world. This country was founded on the concept of freedom, founded on the concept of innovation. Many people don't realize that, until this country was formed, never before had a people believed that they weren't the property of another human being. We believed in freedom, God-given freedom, and that's what formed this country.
Now, through the people in charge of this Congress, the Democrats in charge of this Congress, and a Democrat President, they are working at every level of our lives, every aspect of our lives, to take away that freedom. They want to take away our ability to have low-cost energy.
Many people also don't make the connection between the fact that the reason we were such a manufacturing powerhouse for so long was that we had low-cost, reliable energy. India and China didn't have low-cost, reliable energy. They couldn't count on having the energy they needed to run their plants 24 hours a day, 7 days a week like we did. It helped us tremendously to become a manufacturing powerhouse. But with the cap-and-tax bill and the concepts that the Democrats have put forward, it's going to seriously undermine that ability.
Republicans want us to be energy independent, and I am highly insulted when over and over the President and the leadership of the majority party say that Republicans don't have an answer, that we just want the status quo, that we're the Party of No. We're not the Party of No. We're the party of doing things right.
Let's stick with what has worked in this country over the years. We can look at Europe and see what they've done. They've tried cap-and-tax, and what has it done? Bankrupted them. Spain wanted to create lots of green jobs, they said. They have the highest unemployment rate in Europe, over 15 percent.
We can look across the ocean and see how this has failed, and it just is mind-boggling that the people who are in charge of this Congress and in the White House think that they can replicate what was done in Europe and have a different outcome. It's never happened before. It's never going to happen again, and as my colleague from Tennessee said, we are facing one of the greatest takeovers of our freedoms through cap-and-tax and the health care plan that's being proposed.
But you know, the American people are still in charge. They stopped a bad immigration bill a couple of years ago that was being debated in the Senate. They stopped it cold. We can stop these things, too. And what I'm urging people to do is--you don't have to write to most of us, all of us are going to be on the floor tonight--and say, Don't vote for this health care plan. We know that. We're not going to do it.
Cap-and-tax has passed the House, gone to the Senate, but put the pressure on your Senators and write to somebody who lives in a district who is represented by someone who voted for cap-and-tax and tell them you're going to remember that, they're going to remember that. Encourage them to do that.
We have other very eloquent Members on the floor tonight who want to speak on this issue so I'm going to yield back to my good friend, Mr. Wamp from Tennessee.
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