Health Care

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. FOXX. Thank you, Congressman Gohmert. I still don't think you and I sound a lot alike, although people say that. You definitely have a Texas accent, and I know I don't have an accent from North Carolina. But I want to thank you for the leadership you've given on this issue. I know you've been here several nights, late at night, talking about the issues that the American people need to know about. It's so difficult to get the information out to them, and I appreciate what you're doing.

I find it very ironic that we are a couple of days away from Halloween. I'm not a great phrase maker, but today it hit me that we really need to talk about this in terms of Halloween.

This bill that Speaker Pelosi has introduced today is a tax increase bill masquerading as a health reform bill.

In this time of Halloween, the kids get really concerned about monsters and get afraid of them. But I want to tell you there is no scarier monster that has ever been conceived of by cartoon people, by movie people, than this 1,990-page bill. It is a monster. It is a monstrosity. It is something that should scare every American to death. It is frightening to me, I can tell you that.

I think my colleague from Texas has done a very good job of framing how a bill should come to the floor. Bills that are thoughtfully done go through subcommittees. People get a chance to debate them, look through them, find things that are not as well defined as they should be. We vote. That's the way legislation should be done, on a bipartisan basis, bringing in everybody's brain, bringing in everybody's aspect about it, and making sure that when we pass something, it's going to be as well thought out as it can possibly be, ``vetted'' sometimes it's called. That's what we should be doing.

But that is not what is going to happen with this bill because the President made a promise in his campaign that he would get passed a health reform bill. The people in this body think that they owe it to the President, not to the American people, their fealty is to a President, to help him meet his campaign promise. That is not where my loyalty lies. It did not lie with the President when we had a Republican President. My loyalty is to the American people. That is where all of our loyalties should be, and this bill is a betrayal of the American people because it takes away their freedoms. It promises something that it isn't. It is worse than a shell game, as I said. It is a tax increase masquerading as a health bill.

The one good thing that we have been able to accomplish with the great help of the American people in recent weeks is to really raise Cain about these bills being crammed down people's throats. So we will have 72 hours to look at the bill. The American people may think that we are not telling the truth. Sometimes the things we say are in the bill are hard for people to believe. The bill will be there and be able to be read, and we will be reading it and looking at every single aspect of it. And I want to encourage other people to do that. We will put copies in libraries. We want the American people to see it. We are not trying to mislead people about what is so horrible about this bill.

You all may remember that the President said in his campaign, ``We live in the greatest country in the world. Help me change it.'' To me that meant take what is good about this country and change it into something that is not good.

This bill will take us down that path very, very quickly. We will be losing our freedoms, and we will be beholden to a government that is not always the most benevolent and will get less benevolent the more power it has.

We have a fundamental difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. We believe that the American people should be in control of their lives. They believe that the government knows best, they and the government bureaucracy. It doesn't matter that the majority of the American people are opposed to this. They believe they have the wisdom and they are going to impose this on the American people.

But not if the American people speak up as they should. We are going to be fighting, as my colleague from Texas has said, we are going to fight every step of the way until there is a vote on this bill, probably next week, but we need the help of the American people to contact your Member of Congress and tell them this is not what you want. This is not what America stands for. This is not what we have men and women fighting for all over this world. They are fighting for freedom. But the greatest threat to the freedom of the people in this country is right here in this room. Ladies and gentlemen, I am not exaggerating. It is right here in this room, but we can defeat it, as we have before.

With that, I yield back to my colleague from Texas.

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