Let's Do for the Next Generation What the Last Generation Did for Us

Floor Speech

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Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I just want to chime in in agreement with the last thing that my colleague across the aisle said. He said let's do for the next generation what the last generation did for us.

Mr. Speaker, I think that is incredibly important. What a great thing my Democratic friend said, because every generation before ours has tried to live within its means.

This generation that is in power in this Congress is the first generation that continues to spend not only children's money, but grandchildren's and great-grandchildren's money.

We have accumulated such debt that our children are not only not going to rise up and call us blessed, they are going to rise up and swear at our names. Because this is the generation that has felt that it was so incredibly important that we needed to put our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in hock just so we would not have to quit spending money so irresponsibly.

I could not agree more with that last statement. Let's do for the next generation what the last generation did for us. Thank goodness I have a friend on the other side saying that. He pointed out the verse of Scripture:

To whom much is given, much is required.

We have been given much. We have been blessed more than any nation in the history of the world. We have got more freedoms than Solomon's Israel could have ever dreamed of and more individual assets than any nation in history could have dreamed of. We have been given much.

As a result, this generation has become so self-centered, so narcicisstic, so self-indulgent, so obese that we want to engorge ourselves at the expense of future generations.

Let me just say I haven't decided what I am going to do about the Ryan budget. I am still going through it. Paul Ryan and I have had some very severe disagreements during my 9-plus years here, but I know this: he does not want to hurt future generations. He wants to do for the next generation what the last generation did for us.

And we will not--we cannot--do that if we are spending money so irresponsibly that generations to follow us will be paying the debts and the interest on those debts without getting a dime of the benefits that we engorged ourselves with in this generation. So it is time to be responsible.

I disagree with something my colleague said when he said, basically, the Ryan bill destroys Medicare as we know it. I don't know if I like what Paul Ryan has been able to do about Medicare. I would have handled it differently. It is one of the things I am struggling with.

What he is trying to do is what Democrats should have done for 40 years before the Republicans took office. They had the majority before the 1994 election. They put us on a course to destroying Social Security. Since the sixties, after Medicare was passed, we have been on a course to bankrupt Medicare so our children and grandchildren will have nothing for themselves because we spent it all on ourselves.

So I don't know if it was the best way to do it, but I know what Paul Ryan was trying to do. He is trying to make sure that we protect our seniors and we make sure that we can have future generations have some of the same protections. And from what I was reading, he is trying to do that. Some changes would come in Social Security, from what I am reading, but not for anybody 56 or older.

Anyway, I am still making up my mind on the bill, but I know what Paul Ryan was trying to do. He was trying to do an honorable thing for future generations, just like my colleague said he felt we should be doing.

I also want to get to another topic today that has been so much on the minds and hearts of people all over the country this week as Killeen, Fort Hood, Texas, has had another mass shooting.

The first one was in the civilian sector in a cafeteria. That caused Texas to rise up and pass a concealed-carry permit law, which was driven by a woman whose parents were killed there. She had to put her gun in the glove compartment and couldn't take it in. She could have saved her parents had we had a concealed-carry permit law in place at the time of that mass shooting.

I have had people ask, as I know my friend from Georgia has: What have you guys in Congress done since the last shooting at Fort Hood to protect our soldiers? What has the Commander in Chief done to protect the military members under his command?

Under this Commander in Chief, we saw in Afghanistan that in half the time he had twice as many fatalities--even more than that in injuries--of our military members in Afghanistan. That is half the time of the Bush administration and about twice as many fatalities.

We have seen what happened there. But what about right here?

After the first Fort Hood shooting, it was an outrage--as it should be to every military member and everybody that understands anything about the military--when this Commander in Chief allowed the incident to be called workplace violence when, clearly, Nidal Hasan, according to all the witnesses, stood up, made the universal cry that a radical Islamist terrorist makes, claiming, in essence, that he is going to kill innocent people on behalf of a god who likes people like him to kill innocent people, just as they think there is a god that liked planes being flown into buildings to kill thousands of innocent men, women, and children. That is a god I don't know, and I know that is a god I will never meet.

But I want to talk at this time about what we should be doing for our soldiers.

I have got a bill that legislative counsel is working on right now. We will be filing it early next week. We anticipate calling it the Save Our Soldiers bill, or SOS. They have been crying ``SOS.'' It is just that nobody in their highest chain of command has listened.

Well, Congress is listening and we are going to get something done, if there are enough people down the hall in the Senate who worry about their election next November that they will actually take this bill up and do something to protect our soldiers, other than lip service. Lip service doesn't really protect you against an incoming round.

At this point, I would yield to my dear friend from South Carolina (Mr. Duncan).

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Mr. GOHMERT. The gentleman from South Carolina has just made clear why I am such a big fan of his.

And, yes, I was in the Army. By naming the bill ``Save our Soldiers,'' I am not saying the Army is more important, because it is, generically speaking, inclusive of our soldiers, sailors, marines, Coast Guard, and everybody that is in the uniformed military. That is who it pertains to.

But we wanted a title that people would remember and think of all of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, Coast Guard, people that are protecting us.

The greatest irony still comes back to this: we have military members who are qualified to fire tank weapons. We have got military members--I think the largest thing I fired in the Army was a 105 Howitzer. But we have a massive number of weapons, rocket-propelled grenades of different kinds, SAM missiles. We have got all kinds of things that our military are able to utilize.

We have got airmen who operate airplanes that drop thousands and thousands of pounds of bombs, and yet for too long political correctness has said, even though they may fire 105 Howitzers or some of the most modern weapons we have, tanks, drop thousands of pounds of bombs, we probably can't trust them to carry a little pistol. Yeah, they may be on a ship. They may fire rounds that are bigger than I am, but, gee, we might not better trust them with a pistol.

And what we have seen over and over in the tragedies here in the United States, the norm is for a criminal who wants to shoot and hurt and kill people to go to a gun-free area. That is why the shooter in the theater in Colorado could have gone to much closer theaters, but those theaters did not restrict the right to have weapons in them, so they probably would have had someone who could have pulled a gun very quickly and ended the rampage.

From the reports of what happened this week at Fort Hood, when the hero, female military member pulled her weapon, he took his own life rather than risk ending up in a wheelchair or worse. He wasn't going to take chances on firing at anyone else once someone had a weapon leveled on him.

We have lost enough lives in gun-free zones. It is time to allow the law-abiding, the qualified, to protect themselves, to save our military.

I hope that our leadership will allow the bill to be brought to the floor here because I know good and well, if we bring it to the floor here--I am open to amendments, suggestions--we get a bill like that passed here, then the pressure will be on the Senate.

Yes, I know Senator Reid protects his Democratic Members all he can. If there is a bill that his Members would get defeated for voting against, then he just doesn't bring it to the floor for a vote. Protecting his Members from having to cast a vote for a bill that is a good bill or against a bill that would get them defeated because it was a good bill, he just keeps it from going to the floor. We have seen that in so many of the bills we have passed here from the House that would have an immediate helpful effect on our economy. It would have had an immediate helpful effect on our government.

For heaven's sake, I know the mainstream media will never get this right. Even our own Speaker didn't understand what happened that day, apparently. But last fall, our House of Representatives--a majority, at least--believed that ObamaCare was very detrimental to this Nation, to its economy, to people's health. So what did we do? We did what we believed, and we voted to completely defund ObamaCare. That is what we believed. That was the vote we did first.

But understanding that in Washington you have to have two Houses pass a bill, we passed a compromise measure that simply said, look, obviously ObamaCare is not ready for prime time. You have had going on 4 years to get ready, and it is not ready for prime time, so we are offering you a gift, Democrats in the Senate and Democrats in the House. We are offering a gift. Our compromise is this: we passed the bill. It said let's suspend ObamaCare for a year. Clearly, it is not ready. Many people will be hurt.

That was an incredible gift of a compromise to the Senate Democrats and the House Democrats and even to the President himself. But our Democratic friends down the hall had bought in to the mainstream conventional wisdom that if the Democrats could cause a shutdown, the mainstream media would protect them by blaming Republicans, and then that would help them win the majority in the House in the next election. So Harry Reid refused to even bring that gift that Republicans in the House offered to the Senate Democrats, the President, and House Democrats. He wouldn't accept it.

I bet there are times that their Democrats in the House and Senate really wish they had accepted our offer of compromise and said: Okay. All right. We don't want to do it; but, okay, we will suspend ObamaCare for a year.

There were some in our party that felt like, gosh, if we suspend it for a year, who knows what will happen in a year from now. Maybe we are better off letting America find out how bad it is so then we can get it repealed outright. But we knew the suffering that would ensue once that bill fully kicked in, and how could we want people to suffer like we knew they would once ObamaCare kicked in?

But Harry Reid wouldn't bring that to the floor. I didn't think it was wise when they rejected a clear offer of compromise down the hall by refusing to even bring it to the floor for a vote. We funded everything Harry Reid wanted. We just had a 1-year suspension on ObamaCare.

So then we came back and said, okay, the President has unconstitutionally signed an executive order that put off the business mandate for a year, so we will offer what was an incredible compromise. We will agree to postpone the individual mandate in a legal manner--not unconstitutional, but a legal manner--and we will go ahead and put in writing that the business mandate would be suspended for a year, and that would protect the President's order.

Harry Reid wouldn't bring it to the floor for a vote. He knew good and well if he brought either one of our compromise bills to the floor that there would be Democrats that would either have to vote for the bill or, for sure, lose their Senate seat come November--Democrats in the Senate, that is. So he protected them and didn't allow that to come to the floor. And his Members seemed quite happy to just sit back and let Harry Reid try to protect them by not allowing them to vote.

Then, at 1:10 a.m. on October 1, when it was clear to us here in the House that Harry Reid was not going to even accept a gift of a 1-year suspension or the following compromise offered gift of a year suspension of the individual mandate and a year suspension of the business mandate, then we did what was almost unthinkable--bid against ourselves for the third time. We voted to approve conferees from the House. These are people who would have reached an agreement if the Senate had bothered to even appoint conferees or negotiators.

It was understood here, if Harry Reid will go ahead and appoint Senate conferees, they can start immediately, and before even anybody is required to be at work at 8 a.m., we could probably have a deal worked out, get it passed, and people would have never known there was a shutdown for 8 hours. But HARRY REID was so determined to follow through on what was the mainstream conventional wisdom: HARRY, if you can just cause a shutdown, the Republicans will be blamed--they didn't even know the Speaker would accept the blame because he didn't know what we did that day--but they will be assessed the blame by the mainstream media, and then you can get the majority back.

So he forced a shutdown. Actually, he tried to do that a few years ago, and our leadership and the Republican side capitulated at 10:30 the night that the shutdown was going to begin at 12 midnight. Probably, if the truth be known, the Democratic Leader, Harry Reid, may have hoped that he would have a shutdown at midnight that night because he consistently said: It is my way or nothing, my way or nothing, no compromise whatsoever. Of course, our leadership came back and said: Well, we actually cut $26 billion. And it turned out we did no such thing. But, anyway, we came so close to a shutdown that night.

But some of us still have enough faith in the American people that we believe a majority will ferret out the truth, come to the truth, regardless of what the mainstream media says, regardless of what anybody on television who gets a thrill up their leg when they see certain Democrats, no matter what they say, eventually the majority of the American people will eventually come to the truth and that will save our Nation.

So, clearly, there are areas in which we agree, as my Democrat friend indicated when he said let's do for the next generation what the last generation did for us. That is all I want to try to do. Let's give our children and grandchildren a nation where they have the freedoms that we have enjoyed, where they have the privacy that we used to enjoy, where they don't have $20 trillion of debt from the prior generation because the prior generation was so selfish, so self-centered that they didn't even care to clean up the waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.

I read an article that talked in terms of the massive amount of fraud just at the State Department. Here is an article, April 4, today, from The Fiscal Times, Brianna Ehley:

The State Department has no idea what happened to $6 billion used to pay its contractors. In a special ``management alert'' made public Thursday, the State Department's inspector general, Steve Linick, warned ``significant financial risk and a lack of internal control at the Department has led to billions,'' that is with a b, ``billions of unaccounted dollars over the last six years.''

Mr. Speaker, by the way, that is while this President was in office.

The unaccountability is dramatic. Future generations will have to pay for the waste, fraud, and abuse that not only will we not clean up, but we borrowed money in our children and grandchildren's name to lavish on massive, wasteful, fraudulent government, abusive government, because we couldn't control ourselves.

There is going to be a price to pay for the irresponsibility of this government in the decades ahead. If we do not get this country turned around and back on a responsible track, then there will be books written about the rise and fall of the United States of America. And our generation will be blamed, and the line of my Democratic friend will be at the forefront in that book, that this generation refused to do for the next generation what was done for us.

Mr. Speaker, I had hoped--that is why I am still here. That is why I have run again. I have hoped that we are going to get back on track, that we will be able to rein in the government, that at some point, Harry Reid will be willing to bring bills to the floor that we have sent down there passed by a majority here in the House that do things like get the economy going, that allow businesses to start hiring again without worry about just irresponsibility and overregulation.

We need to be providing privacy for Americans that began deteriorating in prior administrations before this but that this administration has taken to an all-time high with regard to individual privacy information taken away and held onto by the government.

People want to know, gee, well just what does the government have that would be invasive of our privacy? Well, for one thing, we now know the NSA has logs of every call that every American makes. That is outrageous. It is unnecessary. And we can't go into classified briefings. But, Mr. Speaker, I stand here to tell you that even though there are some in our intelligence that have said, gee, if we had not gathered every log of every phone call ever made, we may not have stopped a subway bombing, like we did. And from the evidence that we know from the public arena, it was clear--it sure seemed to me, as a former prosecutor and judge and chief justice--that there was plenty of evidence for an officer of the law--Federal, State, or local--to go before a judge and swear this information and get a warrant from the judge and go after an individual that was about to try to set off a bomb. It looked like, to me, from just what is available in the public, that there was plenty of information that would have allowed a judge to sign a warrant. So not only are they getting every log of every phone call made, but we are not quite sure, even now, whether some are right to say, well, actually, they could pull the actual discussions of the conversation, or whether they couldn't.

But we also know that under ObamaCare, the Federal Government gets every record of everyone's most personal and private health insurance. And for so long in this body, I have heard my friends on this side of the aisle complain about, we don't want government in the bedroom. And then without a single Republican vote, they passed the ObamaCare bill that not only put the government in your bedroom, but it is in your bathroom, your kitchen, your living room, your garage. It is with your Realtor. It is just everywhere you can imagine. The government is there. That is with the health care law and the other bills that the Democrats have passed while they were in the majority.

So if it is not enough that the Federal Government--and, of course, we have to give credit to General Electric, because I understand they have got the contract to gather this information. So it is not just the government. It is cronies of this administration in private business that also have this information.

Anyway, the government has got your most private secrets, health care-wise. They know everybody you are calling. There is information in the public press that says they can comb through every email you send.

And then we find out that one of the bills that the Democrat majority in the House and Senate passed was involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That group has apparently decided that in order to protect us, they need to gather everybody's credit card, debit card information just so they can protect us.

So there we go. The Federal Government has got all of your medical information. They have got all of your credit card and debit card information, purchases, loans, all of those kinds of things. You have got regulators, Federal regulators going into banks, checking on your loans and things like that. I mean, is there anything left in the way of privacy that this Federal Government has not already co-opted and gotten access to without a warrant?

I mean, I was very serious, and the judges I knew were very serious about making sure there was probable cause because that is the constitutional requirement. You have to have probable cause before you get a warrant. And there were times when law officers would come to me in my judge's chambers or on the bench during a recess or at my home at 2 or 3 a.m., and I would read the affidavit and the officer would swear to the information. But if it wasn't adequate, I, along with other judges I know would say, I am sorry. Probable cause is not here. There are not enough facts provided to justify going after somebody's private property or private information. I can't sign the warrant. And there were times where officers would say, give us another chance, a little more time. We see your point. We will be back. And they would come back later, and then you go, okay, well, yes, this is probable cause. Certainly this raises probable cause. Sometimes they wouldn't be able to get it. But that was the constitutional standard by which law officers and courts are supposed to live.

And now, in the name of a little security, we have to stand there--I can't even count the number of times I have had to stand there with my arms open and be groped by Federal agents. Sometimes you can tell they have got a little bit of a grudge. And we giving that away because we want security.

Okay. We want health care, so let's let the government know every one of our most intimate private secrets in our health care records. And, you know, we want to make sure that some bank doesn't take advantage of us. Heaven forbid the investment banks take any more advantage of us. Man, the investments banks brought us to the brink of ruin.

And by the way, for those who don't know, Mr. Speaker, Wall Street executives and their spouses donate four-to-one for Democrats over Republicans. I know people think it is the Republicans that have all the rich people on their side. People are beginning to find out, it is middle class. And actually, poor people in America are coming to the conclusion, wait a minute. We have one party that keeps us dependent upon the government for the little crumbs it throws out. We have got another party over here that wants us to be president of the company, president of the country. They want us to have the best education possible. And they want us to be able to speak the language of this country that gets you to be president of the country, of the corporation, of the business, English. And gee, they want us to have a job. They don't want us to be beholden and having to beg the government all the time. They want us to be able to have independence and have our own money and make our own decisions. Gee, maybe, as a poor person, I would be better off supporting the Republican Party.

As I taught a combined sociology class at Texas College not that long ago--Texas College started as an African American college and is still prominently African American. But I am telling you, the African Americans in that class had some good ideas about how we straighten up welfare, how we get people more independent, how we get our government on track. Those are folks that had some good ideas. And some of the things that they proposed, like a work requirement, well, that was put on when Republicans took the majority back in January of '95. And then this President stripped that out--I would say unconstitutionally. He did it with an executive order. He changed a law that was duly passed and signed into law by Bill Clinton. And it ended up being one of his most proud accomplishments because what we saw after the requirement for work for welfare was, for the first time in 30 years, single moms' incomes, when adjusted for inflation, started going up. It had been flatlined for about 30 years, since aid to dependent children had started, since welfare had started, single moms' incomes, adjusted for inflation, had been flatlined for about 30 years.

And once the Gingrich-led Republican revolution took hold and a work requirement was put on for the first time in 30 years, single moms had more take-home money. They had more freedom. They had more autonomy away from the government, where they didn't have to be dependent on the government. They could make their own decisions without some law being passed by Congress to send them another crumb. It gave them money, more than they had ever had, and it gave them independence.

That is what the people I know want for women, for African Americans, for everyone in America, for Hispanic Americans, for anyone, Asian Americans. It is what we want for Americans.

One of the things that meant so much to me on 9/12/2001, as we stood out there, hundreds--maybe thousands of people in our town of Tyler--and I know it was going on in Longview. And actually, all over east Texas it was going on. People came out to the town square, and they prayed together. And no court would have had the nerve to tell America on 9/12, you have no right to pray in public. They wouldn't have had the right to say that on 9/12/2001. So we were praying together as citizens out there.

We sang hymns. We sang ``Amazing Grace'' and ``God Bless America.'' What is ``God Bless America''? It is a prayer asking for God's blessing to continue on this country. We held hands as we sang ``God Bless America.'' People by the millions did this all over America on 9/12/2001.

And as I looked around among all of those people, my American friends, there was not a hyphenated American in the group. We had all national religions, races, genders. I mean, we had all kinds of groups represented, but we were Americans. There were no Euro Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Irish Americans, Hispanic Americans. There were Americans. And we stood together. We prayed together. We sang together. And there was no mess out there. We were together, one people.

As that great speech given by Senator Barack Obama pointed out, there shouldn't be a red America and a blue America; a white America and a black America. There ought to be one America. But we have gotten into the politics of division. That is why the Senate refused to take up our repeated efforts at compromise to avoid shutting down the government.

The politics of division, that is why the World War II memorial was barricaded and massive man- and woman-hours were utilized to try to keep veterans out of the Iwo Jima Memorial for Marines, the World War II Memorial. I couldn't believe they had the nerve to put up a barrier to the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial.

And I, along with my friend from Mississippi, opened up the streets, opened up the barriers there at the World War II Memorial. I clipped the yellow ribbon, the crime scene tape. I moved one barricade. He moved the other. The World War II vets came in.

Steve King, a few others, and I went out to the marine memorial, and we opened up that memorial. We checked out their other days and made sure that that was accessible. One day, it turned out there was a bus of World War II veterans that had come out there. There was a big, plastic barricade shaped like the concrete barricades. This was plastic, and it was filled with water, a wooden barricade there. And that bus of World War II veterans--many of them that had fought in the Philippines, that had been to the top of the mountain and seen that flag be planted up there--their bus ran over that barricade.

I was so proud of them. I ran up there, and I got up there, they were already out there enjoying the memorial. These people that saw that flag that was planted there now were enjoying the memorial to them.

When we came back by, we were going to stop at the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. They had barricades up all up there. And I was so proud that there were a slew of Americans. Most were African Americans. I was so proud of them. They didn't let the barricades stop them. They climbed right over and went in to that wonderful memorial. And I didn't even have to stop to open that up. They had already taken care it.

That is the politics of division: try to make people suffer and blame it on the other party. We need to be back to being Americans, not hyphenated, not Republican Americans, Democrat Americans, Tea Party Americans. For Heaven's sake, the Tea Party, all it means and all it is is a group who have been Taxed Enough Already. They are tired of the waste, fraud, and abuse in government. They want a responsible government so that we can do, as my Democratic friend said just a while ago that he wanted for us to do, for the next generation what the last generation did for us. That is all the Tea Party wants. They are not racist. They got all races in the meetings I go to. They just want us to be responsible and do for the next generation what the last one did for us.

So, Mr. Speaker, I hope that we will be able to bring Save Our Soldiers to the floor. I know back 3 years ago, when I was concerned that our military was going to be used as a pawn to try to get people to vote for a bad continuing resolution under the threat that, gee, if you don't vote for this bad continuing resolution, our military members won't be paid, so shame on you. Well, I was furious that our military members had to even have it cross their minds that they might not get paid. So I filed a bill that would ensure that if there were a government shutdown that our military members' pay would be treated like Social Security is. I know there is a lot of fear mongering about that. But if there is a shutdown, the law is and continues to be and was 3 years ago, that it is basically on automatic pilot. If there is a shutdown, then the Social Security checks continue to go out. If someone is entitled to more Social Security during the shutdown, they don't get the increase until after the shutdown is over, and then they would get it. But that is what the bill would do for the military.

I am grateful--even though our Speaker did not let that bill come to the floor, I was grateful that so many millions of Americans came on to some Web site set up for that purpose to say put our military pay on automatic pilot just like Social Security is so if there is a shutdown, people that have their lives in harm's way don't have to worry about their loved ones getting paid.

Even last fall, we saw military members whose families--when they were dying in harm's way for us, this administration wasn't even going to let them get paid. It was really outrageous. We even passed a bill last fall to make sure that finally the military wouldn't have to worry about it, and the Defense Department and this administration interpreted it in such a way to inflict as much harm on survivors of our military heroes as this administration could. It was wrong. But they did it. It is the politics of division.

It is going to be important, Mr. Speaker, that we let people know who the real heroes are for this country. Heroes would include those who are willing to lay down their lives for others.

John 15:13:

Greater love knows no man than this, that a man lays down his life for his friends.

That includes generically men and women, anyone willing to lay down their lives, not to kill innocent people, but to save lives. That is what we have always attributed as a hero here in America. And yet we find out--I didn't know until I read an article by my friend, Andy McCarthy, about this on the President's Web site, but whitehouse.gov regularly profiles young, left-wing radicals that it calls ``Champions of Change.''

I am quoting from the article of Andrew McCarthy. It is dated today:

Now, in a space of just a few days, two of the President's champions have made news.

One is Linda Sarsour, described by the White House as a ``community activist'' who specializes in ``community organizing'' and ``immigrants' rights advocacy,'' and who ``conducts training nationally on the importance of civic engagement in the Arab and Muslim American community.'' Evidently, civic engagement need not be civil engagement. Ms. Sarsour has joined her voice to that of CAIR.

CAIR is the Council on American-Islamic Relations that two Federal courts have declared is a front organization for the Muslim Brotherhood, which has appropriately been declared as a terrorist organization by Egypt, and others are looking at doing the same, including even Great Britain. But not here. No. We take our lead from whatever CAIR says in this administration.

But this so-called Champion of Change, according to the White House Web site, has reacted to the widely viewed acclaimed film ``Honor Diaries,'' a film about the brutalization and systematic inequality faced by women in Muslim majority society. And this is what Ms. Sarsour had said:

How many times do we have to tell white women that we do not need to be saved by them? Is there code language I need to use to get through?

As Mr. McCarthy notes, he said:

I would note that the executive producer of ``Honor Diaries'' is the heroic Somali human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It features several courageous Muslim women, including Pakistani-born Qanta Ahmed, a medical doctor who has an important column about the film and the campaign to suppress it at NRO today.

He also points to Bonnie Youn as a Champion of Change as so named by the White House. And Matt Boyle with Breitbart has a column that says:

An amnesty advocate that President Obama's White House publicly promoted as part of its Champion of Change series has been indicted in Federal Court on charges of fraud.

And it goes on down. Part of it reads:

The second indictment count alleges that Youn violated a Federal immigration law that prohibits bringing illegal aliens into the United States and harboring them, alleging she did so ``for the purpose of commercial advantage and private financial gain.''

So, apparently, a Champion of Change is someone who there is probable cause to believe is engaged in human trafficking.

Mr. Speaker, this country has to reawaken. If we are going to do for the next generation what the last generation did for us, we have got to stop the indebtedness that is growing every second of every day. And we keep adding to the debt and the interest that mounts on top of that. We have got to get more responsible in protecting privacy and not allowing this administration to further go into people's bedrooms, bathrooms, credit card records, phone calls, and emails. We have got to stop the insanity, or not only will the next generation rise up and not call us blessed, they will curse our names.

I am here because I have hope. We are going to turn things around. We have just got to keep fighting. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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