Issues of the Day
Floor Speech
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas (Mr. Arrington), he is a good friend and he represents--I will tell him, the second best part of the State, given that I represent the Hill Country in central Texas, and my dad grew up in west Texas and went to Texas Tech University.
I have a soft spot in my heart for my friend. He is consistent in bringing to this floor of the House the need for all of us to work together to deal with the spending problem. And it is a problem that we face in this country.
I was just thinking when I started running for office 5 years ago this fall, the national debt of the United States was $21 trillion. Today, 5 years later, our national debt is $31 trillion dollars.
Just think for a minute. We never know how big that number is--nobody understands. $31 trillion. Well, let me just tell you this. If you set out to count to 31 trillion--we would just say, let's go, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, it would take you almost a million years to get to 31 trillion. That is absurd.
We are spending money we don't have. This body believes itself to be the United States House of free stuff. We just write blank checks. We dole it out. Spending money we don't have, obliterating our children's future, devastating the future financial security and stability of the United States.
All for what?
So that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle can walk outside and give a fancy speech about free stuff they are doling out.
And with all due respect, colleagues on my side of the aisle can go say, well, I wrote a bunch of checks to fund our defense, so I got to vote for another big spending bill.
Every day. Just today, we had a whole bunch of votes on suspensions. There was $10 billion in there for global food security. We have men and women in uniform on food stamps, and this body writes another blank check to dole it out to global food security.
When are we going to stop.
But here is the problem. These blank checks, this spending that we engage in, it isn't just about debt, it isn't just about weakening our dollar, it isn't just about deficit spending, it is that we are funding the very government that is at war with its own people every day.
We have a Department of Homeland Security that refuses to secure the homeland with wide open borders and fentanyl pouring in killing Americans and empowering cartels, with migrants dying in the meantime.
We have an FBI that is targeting parents for domestic terrorism. We have an FBI that is targeting a father of seven in Pennsylvania for daring to have gone to speak out and exercise his free speech rights to defend the unborn.
We have an IRS targeting Americans--85,000 new IRS agents and personnel. We are funding an entire energy--I should say anti-energy agenda--that is destroying our energy independence, driving up the price of goods, driving up the price of gas, driving up the price of electricity, weakening the grid of the United States, decreasing the reliability of our energy sector, and decreasing the freedom of the American people.
All of that for what?
So that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and the President and the climate czar, or whatever the heck his title is, John Kerry, can go fly around the world in jets, spewing all sorts of garbage out of their jets to go hang out in Davos and pat themselves on the back that they are doing some sort of benefit for the world with respect to carbon dioxide, while China has 1,100 coal-fired plants and they are adding one new coal-fired plant a day. And my colleagues on the other side of the aisle just walk around like butterflies and hummingbirds, saying, aren't we great for the world?
Oh, isn't this great? Devastating the American economy and devastating the American way of life, devastating our national security for fake hummingbirds and fake unicorns, because they want to say they are doing something for the environment.
Well, they are not doing crap for the environment, literally. You could ban every single combustion engine in America, and you are not going to dent CO
So America, welcome to the world of the Democratic Party. Plug your car in. Use up your entire electricity bill that you use for your air conditioning unit to run your battery-powered car.
Oh, 60, $70,000, why can't you just go by a Tesla, the Secretary of Energy says; completely out of touch with the average hardworking American. But that is what we are dealing with.
But that is not all. Today, my colleagues on my side of the aisle, 22 of them in the United States Senate, voted for the continuing resolution. They voted for it, they will say, because, oh, no, the government funding will expire tomorrow, and we might have a government shutdown.
You can hear all of the people in America crying big crocodile tears over the possibility that the Federal Government might not have its lights on on Saturday morning.
But let's actually talk about what is really going on; that CR that 22 Republican Members of the Senate voted for contains $17 billion in emergency funding, unpaid for, another blank check.
That same CR will expire in December, on December 16, in a lame-duck Congress, which my colleagues on this side of the aisle know full well means it empowers my colleagues on that side of the aisle to continue to stick it to the American people with their radical leftist policies undermining their way of life.
That continuing resolution has nothing in it to secure the border of the United States when our border is wide open and fentanyl is pouring in, killing Americans; 72,000 dead Americans last year, from opioid, fentanyl-related poisoning, directly coming in at the hands of cartels, coming from China. That is more than every American who died in the Vietnam War.
Are we going to put a great big memorial out there for all of those 72,000? What about the year before? What about this year?
What about the four people in Hays County that I represent in Texas, the four kids who died from fentanyl poisoning because my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to turn a blind eye to cartels exploiting our border for the endangerment of Americans. That is the truth.
Americans are dead because of the policies of this administration failing to secure the border of the United States, and they know it. Migrants are dead. Migrants' bodies are piling up in south Texas, by the hundreds; 53 cooked in a tractor trailer in San Antonio, which I represent; 53 human beings cooked in the false name of compassion, while my colleagues on the other side of the aisle walk around going: Look at me, I love Brown people. I love immigrants.
Bull. It is a lie, and my colleagues need to wake up, because I can promise you that the Brown people--not my terminology, by the way--in south Texas, are fed up, fed up with being exploited, abused, and used for political purposes.
While my colleagues like to say, oh, well, Governor DeSantis and Governor Abbott sent some people to D.C., to Martha's Vineyard.
Well, welcome to the party. The country is now alerted. These were volunteers, volunteers who said yeah, I will take a ride to D.C. Fifty people in Martha's Vineyard, 53 dead migrants in a tractor trailer in San Antonio.
Just last night, the mayor of Uvalde, Texas--yes, that Uvalde, Texas--called up, there was a pickup truck with 10 immigrants in the truck that T-boned into a tractor trailer at an intersection; two of them dead, two in the hospital.
Every stinking day this is happening, and my colleagues the other side of the aisle turn a blind eye. That is the reality of our border.
But this continuing resolution that my Republican colleagues in the United States Senate, 22 of them, were all too happy to support, continues to fund that Department of Homeland Security of an annual budget of $57.5 billion; $8 billion for ICE. Even though it was a 70 percent reduction in removals last year for ICE.
Millions in grants each year, in that same continuing resolution, to nongovernmental organizations who are the ones actually transporting people around the United States, effectively subsidizing illegal immigration.
This CR empowers the authoritarian bureaucrats targeting Americans. It is not just the Department of Homeland Security leaving our border wide open and exposed, but the FBI, to the tune of $10.8 billion, to go after former President Trump, to go after parents concerned about schools, to go after a pro-lifer father; and IRS, $12.6 billion. We just gave them another $80 billion.
But no, no; we just funded a CR with an annual appropriation of $12 billion.
Oh, you think that is good enough? How about NIH, $45 billion. After NIH has been basically screwing the American people for the last two and a half years with their nonsense spewing out about COVID, resulting in our children being set back a generation; shunned to the corner of classrooms; forced to wear masks; unable to have proper speech. All so my colleagues on the other side of the aisle can run around wearing masks and scaring the bejesus out of the American people.
$45 billion. My Republican colleagues in the Senate said, sure, let's keep giving them more money.
What will my colleagues on my side of the aisle do tomorrow? I hope they will oppose it.
How about Pfizer and Moderna, who faced no liability; made $93 billion in 2022, $93 billion, Pfizer and Moderna, because the government was cramming shots into people's arms, and then forcing our men and women in uniform to lose their job and get fired if they dare not take a shot, which the current CDC says, you know what? It doesn't even help with transmission.
What the hell kind of a country are we living in? This isn't freedom; and we are funding it. Republicans are complicit.
NIAID, $6.3 billion, run by the COVID tyrant in chief, Dr. Fauci.
CDC, $8.5 billion, colluded with the teachers' unions to impose the lockdowns.
The World Health Organization, $122 million in this annual funding just approved; already got $280 million under the Democrats' COVID relief bill. They pushed a completely unfounded COVID narrative and partnered with the Chinese Communists to cover up their role in the COVID origin. This we know.
The Department of Defense and all of their glory--and no, don't say that over here on my side of the aisle because we have got to rush in and we have got to give the money for the Department of Defense, without any accountability, by the way, for how about forcing troops out with their tyrannical COVID-19 vaccine mandates; set to discharge over 75,000 Active servicemembers for daring to say no to a vaccine that doesn't even help with transmissibility.
How about a woke military informed policy? The DOD won't admit China is a greater threat than climate change, according to the leadership. They are preoccupied with diversity training; constructing training centers with mixed-sex restrooms and locker rooms and showers. The Air Force is going to spend $66 million for one in San Antonio, which I represent.
$56 billion for the Department of State and Foreign Operations budget, for U.S. embassies to fly pride and BLM flags; add unspecified X-gender designations to passports. $15 million for the State Department's Global Equality Fund sending tax dollars to LGBTQI whatever, whatever, persons around the world.
Empowers Biden's administration's anti-American, anti-biology ideology; $39 million for HHS Office of Civil Rights promoting gender transition surgeries for kids.
$76 billion obviously goes to the Department of Education, where we subsidize schools failing our kids; shoving them into the corners of classrooms; making them wear masks; and rewarding teachers filling their minds with anti-American teachings under critical race theory. Even in my own city that I represent in San Antonio, Northside ISD forced a radical equity exercise dividing people by their hair color.
$2 billion for the Student Aid Administration carrying out the Biden's $400 billion student loan giveaway.
$525 million for the public broadcasting. HHS, $94 million for diversity training; $64 million for the Office of Minority Health; $1.1 million for the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity in HHS.
Energy, $100 million for environmental justice. The EPA used this to create a new Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights in the Department of the EPA.
$20 million for the Department of Energy's Office of Impact and Diversity; $885 million for the Department of Education programs that fund colleges based solely on students' race and ethnicity.
$235 million for Federal apprenticeship programs that includes grants to equity intermediaries to hire CRT indoctrination consultants.
How about the United Nation's population funds, praising China's abusive population control program.
How about U.N. women, which can't even define women? What is a woman? Promotes trans and intersex athletes.
Climate, $15 million for the U.N. Climate Agency; $149 million for the global environment facility.
$125 million for the World Bank's Clean Technology Fund.
And my Republican colleagues in the Senate, 22, voted for it and, of course all the Democrats, for the most part, passed this through to get it to a lame duck in December, to then allow for even more. That is what we are funding.
At some point you would think that we would wake up on a bipartisan basis or, Lord willing, at least my side of the aisle, that we actually have the power of the purse; and we are actually supposed to use it, instead of giving massive blank checks to an administration that is at war with the American people on a daily basis.
When the Founders gave us this government, they knew that they didn't want to empower an executive with unfettered power, yet that is what we do every day in this Chamber. That is what the so-called people's House of the United States does every single day.
Federalist 58, James Madison, ``The House of Representatives cannot only refuse, but they alone can propose, the supplies requisite for the support of government. They, in a word, hold the purse. . . . `'
``This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any Constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.''
In other words, we are supposed to have the power. We are supposed to be the ones who can stop the funding of the tyranny against the people.
Oh, Chip, it is not tyranny. I am sure my friend from Pennsylvania has thoughts on that. Of course it is tyranny.
An FBI targeting parents for being domestic terrorists? An FBI targeting a father of seven, showing up with 25 to 30 armed SWAT team members to arrest him in front of his family? All true.
How is that freedom? How is that not tyranny?
How is it not tyranny to steal money from a plumber who worked his whole life, didn't borrow money to go to some fancy university, and go give it to somebody else to pay off their loan?
How is it not tyranny to steal money from a person who worked their whole life to do it right and pay their loans back after going to college, and give it to someone else who got a ridiculous degree from some ridiculous college and is sitting in their parents' basement on social media trying to be a social media influencer? That is what happening.
We are just going to take money from somebody else and go give it to another person. That is tyranny. It is theft, and we are doing it through executive fiat.
We didn't vote on it here. None of these people are going to go answer to their constituents for stealing money from them to go give it to someone else. The President just decided it by decree. That is tyranny.
It is tyranny to stick a needle in somebody's arm or tell them that you are going to get fired from your career in the military.
Well, I have had it. But I have not just had it with the tyrannical policies of a President. I have had with it with a United States House of Representatives that does not represent the people; and I have had it with a Republican Party who refuses to stop funding the very things they campaign against every single day.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I would just add that we are talking about, again, decisions we make with the money that we are taking from taxpayers, printing and borrowing to the tune of a trillion-dollar-plus deficit every year.
I started this by saying when I ran for office 5 years ago for the first time, our national debt was $21 trillion. Today, it is $31 trillion--$10 trillion in the mere 5 years since I have been here, $2 trillion a year, my friend from Pennsylvania. But we keep funding this stuff.
This is the nexus I want the American people to understand. The deficit spending isn't just about the deficits. The deficit spending is why our Nation is being torn apart.
We are supposed to be able to agree to disagree. We are supposed to be able to have 50 laboratories of democracy sewn together under a commonality, defending ourselves and having an economy that functions. Instead, we are funding the bureaucrats that are ripping us apart, thread by thread, IRS agent after IRS agent, FBI agent after FBI agent. I say that as someone who worked in the U.S. Attorney's Office with great men and women in the FBI, whose father was an IRS agent. My father worked for the Internal Revenue Service as an auditor.
I have no problem with how we try to set these things up to work. But hiring 85,000 new IRS personnel on the back of what we knew happened, targeting certain individuals with the power of the IRS, the FBI targeting a father, targeting Scott Smith in Loudoun County, saying he is a domestic terrorist, in coordination with the National School Boards Association, which 26 States' school board associations have now removed themselves from.
That is what the American people need to understand. We are funding that--$10.8 billion for the FBI, $12.6 billion for IRS, $1.5 billion for ATF. For public health, $8.5 billion for CDC, $6.3 billion for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, $45 billion for NIH generally, $3.3 billion for the FDA, $122 million for the WHO, $612 million for OSHA. Remember, it was OSHA that tried to force a vax mandate on private businesses.
How do you get any more tyrannical than the President saying: You, private entity, through OSHA, are going to require your employees to take a needle in the arm for a vaccine, by the way, that was unproven, untested, had liability protection, and enriched two pharma companies to the tune of $93 billion in 2 years.
Somebody tell me that is not tyranny.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, if I might inquire about the time remaining.
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