Louie Gohmert

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. I appreciate my friend so much. Thank you. I saw a podium out on the steps. There was going to be a great celebration for women. I was a little surprised because I was thinking we weren't supposed to talk about genders like men and women, father, mother, and all that under Speaker Pelosi's rules, but anyway, apparently it is okay today. But it is hard to think about rejoicing when we are going to keep taking the lives of the most innocent among us. I know the big hearts of some of my friends on the other side, and knowing their big hearts it is sometimes amazing to think: You surely can't feel good about this. In a Judiciary hearing some years back, we had a doctor testify who did late-term abortions, up until his daughter was in a car wreck, and he became so nauseous when he went to do another abortion that he couldn't do them anymore. I have said, in my days as a judge, I have seen pictures I wish I could get out of my mind. I recall one young lady that was a victim, and she had been put in a 50-gallon barrel to try to hide her body, lime poured on, and they couldn't tell, was this limb removed while she was alive or was it from deterioration. But this doctor said, when it comes to the late-term abortion, the child is clearly too big to remove from the womb without assistance, and he described--in much more detail than I will be able to go into-- taking a clamp and feeling inside the womb until you find what you know is a limb, arm or leg, clamping on, ripping the arm or leg from the child at a time, like Mr. Smith said, they absolutely do feel great pain, perhaps more than an adult. Ripping one. Then you continue to feel for a limb and rip off another until you have done that four times. And then, in his words, you feel for something bulbous at that point. Then you know you have the child's head. You crush the head, and then pull what is left out and dispose of it. There are just too many big hearts on the other side of the aisle not to at some point realize that that is something we probably should not be doing. Very, very tragic. I remember, you know, reading in the Bible as I was young and the verses from the Old Testament about parents putting their child in an idol's hand, flames leaping up so that the child could be burned to death and that they began to be desensitized to the screams of the children as they burned to death. And I thought that is inconceivable, especially that a parent could do that to a child. But when you hear about late-term abortions and you hear some of the things that our society is doing in the name of freedom and rights--I believe in God, but hypothetically, let's say anybody that doesn't, you just believe in karma, don't believe in God. Is it conceivable that good karma could come from tearing arms and legs off an innocent child who hasn't done one single thing wrong? Even if you don't believe in God, you can't surely think that is going to bring you a lot of good karma. And, certainly, as you celebrate the ability to continue to take innocent lives, that surely can't bring good karma. For people who believe in God, such as me, it is easy to understand why that is described as being so very, very infuriating to a loving God. But that was passed today. I don't think it is constitutional. I think that surely there are people on the Supreme Court, hopefully five or six anyway, that have believed for years that should have been left to the States and the people. And so for the Federal Government to jump in and say they are taking over, and they are knocking out all the power of the States and the people to legislate--as Mississippi or Texas or other States have-- surely now that will end up being found to be unconstitutional by this body. That is the hope and prayer. When it comes to being callous, sometimes this body just is. And I heard my friend, the majority leader, say that Republicans don't like voting to pay the bills, and he is not quite right on that. I know he means well and wouldn't deceive intentionally, so this isn't engaging in personalities, but he doesn't have that quite right. What Republicans don't like voting on and voting for, rather, is our great- grandchildren having to pay our bills. And if this body next week becomes successful in adding $3 trillion more to our national debt in the shortest amount of time in all of American history, debt that we can never pay back--well, I say never. Actually, the only way we can pay back the kind of debt that is being heaped up is if the Biden administration creates such runaway inflation that we start having the kind of inflation that Weimar Germany had where people were having to carry wheelbarrows full of cash just to buy a loaf of bread. If we had that kind of inflation then, yes, money would be so devalued that we probably could pay back our debt. But unless we go through something like that that is so economically destructive that there would be Democrats and Republicans alike wanting to have a revolution, we don't want that, we don't need that. We should never allow ourselves to start down that road of having that kind of runaway inflation. Even though it would enable us to pay back the debt, it would be at the cost of total destruction of the Nation we love. So Republicans, we don't mind paying our own way. A good example is how many Republicans were upset back when President Bush was in his last couple years of office--and it may have been the last year we were in the majority as Republicans--but I remember we were $160 billion approximately in the red that year, about $106 billion or so in the red that was going to be added to the national debt. And my Democrat friends across the aisle appropriately pointed out that we should have balanced the budget. We were within $160 billion or so. They were right. We should have balanced the budget. Some of us were upset that we didn't. We were so close. Why not just do it and set that marker and continue down that course? So with a promise that Democrats would be balancing the budget they won back the majority, and who would have ever dreamed that that 160 or so billion-dollar debt in 1 year, in President Obama first year, would become 1.5 to $1.6 trillion debt in 1 year? Who would have ever believed that the people that said, oh, you had $160 billion in debt, we are going to balance it, we are going to fix it, just put us in the majority; they got the majority, and we ran up nearly $1.6 trillion in debt in 1 year. And it was following that a year or two later Standard and Poor's said you can't keep running up this debt without us having to downgrade the quality of your debt, which means you will end up paying more interest, and you will end up having to pay more, a higher percentage of your overall revenue for just interest, which means less for Medicare, less for Social Security, less for those that are really in need and we need to help. And Standard and Poor's did exactly that. They downgraded our debt. And as I understand it, if any other rating service had downgraded our debt at the same time, interest rates would have shot up for the U.S. Government. But fortunately we got a break. That didn't happen. Didn't get another service. Maybe they were being dishonest in not downgrading our debt because they were right; under those Democratic majorities we were not being true to ourselves and our generation and future generations. We were creating debt that would be passed on for generations to come. And I thought back then and said as much years ago, that would be like an adult going in to a bank and saying I need this massive loan. Well, what is it for? It is because I cannot control my spending. I just can't stop spending. I am out of control. So I need a big loan. Well, what do you have for security, for collateral? Well, I brought my children and grandchildren in here, and so I am going to make them sign off so that they will guarantee all the debt I am running up because I can't control my spending. Well, no banker in their right mind would loan money, but as the Federal Government we don't have to have a banker agree to it, we just agree to it. And we even have people who become jubilant, wow, we were able to just add another $3 trillion to the backs of our great-great- grandchildren some day. Why? Because we just can't control our spending. That is surely immoral. That is what Republicans don't like voting for; putting more debt on future generations' children. And so Republicans were wrong. We should have balanced that budget when we were within $160 billion of doing so instead of failing to do that, which enabled the Democrat majority to run up 1.5, $1.6 trillion in 1 year; and, boy, did that blow the lid off the debt. And, yes, after that both parties were just busy raising the debt, raising the debt, all kinds of gimmicks to raise the debt, but at some point we are going to have to either say this has got to stop or we are going to finish destroying this country. And, again, I think it is a moral issue. Are you moral enough not to make future generations pay for what you refuse to? And I hope the answer is, no, we are not going to do that, we are going to at some point start being responsible. But here in Washington it is a malady that seems to set in for so many, for either party that gets here and then finds, wow, we have got so much power, look what we can do. Since we know so much better than anybody else in the country, even though their IQ may be 40 points higher than our own, gee, we need to make decisions because overall we are smarter. So it is hard not to get very cynical here in Washington. And I have used the quote before that, you know, Washington saying no matter how cynical you get, it is never enough to catch up. I think my chief of staff has caught up now. She has gotten pretty cynical. But when you see the hundreds of billions of dollars that are at stake for pharmaceutical companies, who I have applauded the way the Trump administration got the red tape out of the way to get to a vaccine in record times, even though the current President and Vice President said as long as Trump was President they wouldn't trust it, now they are not only trusting what President Trump got done, but forcing people to have the vaccinations who have serious reservations, who are familiar with the issue of informed consent. One of the greatest developments in the history of healthcare that--maybe it has been only 100 years in the whole history of man out of the thousands of years of recorded history, maybe 100 years is all we have had--some medical historians say of living at a time when you had a better chance of getting well after seeing a doctor than of getting worse. So you think about the thousands of years where you had a better chance of getting sicker after seeing a doctor than getting well. And we have now lived through an incredible handful of decades where not only do you have a better chance of getting well, you are likely to get well. And that continues to be the case as more and more lifesaving and life-enhancing developments are made in medical care, in healthcare. And yet the concept I am talking about that was such a great development for not only healthcare but for freedom is called informed consent. So we are going to be filing next week a bill that addresses this: The National Informed Consent Exemption, the NICE bill, N-I-C-E, that will allow people--in fact, mandate that each individual will make their own decision about vaccination after consulting with their own physician about their own biology of their own body, what they are at risk for, which conditions are more likely to occur with a particular vaccine, which vaccine to use, whether any of them are good for that particular person to use. It troubled me deeply when I was told, gee, if an employer does what President Biden is mandating and says you are not going to work here unless you get a vaccination. And last I saw there were over 7,000 deaths that occurred right after getting a vaccination. CDC is careful to say, yeah, but that doesn't mean that just because they died right after the vaccination, that the vaccination caused it. Okay. But some of them surely did. A friend in Carthage lost her husband after he got the vaccination. She said she didn't think he should, it wasn't a good idea because of his condition. He got it, died. And when they opened him up he was just full of blood clots, which was one of the risks for the vaccination he took. And she said: ``He would be with me today if he had not been vaccinated.'' Well, those are things a patient needs to talk about with their own physician, make those decisions, and then give informed consent to get the vaccination. That is what a free Nation should do instead of mandating things that could cause death or problems. Thankfully, that is not the high percentage of what will happen, but it depends on your makeup what the discussion would be. So I hope that we will get this bill passed at some point, whether it is in the next year and a half or in the session after that, but we need to get back to giving people freedom to make informed decisions rather than mandated decisions from a bloated Washington bureaucracy that doesn't know one thing about the biology of an individual patient about their risk of death. But I started to mention, I was surprised even apparently from what I have been told that even if your employer mandates you cannot work here unless you get a vaccination, you are totally on your own. Even worker's compensation--from what I was advised, even worker's comp will not help you or your family if you become disabled from the vaccination. If you are one of the 7,000 plus that dies, nothing. I would like to see it changed, but Congress has protected the pharmaceuticals, so you can't sue them. Maybe we need to make it where any government official that mandates a vaccination that causes death or disability, maybe that government official--maybe we should open that up to tort reform that allows pursuit of that government official that forces somebody to get a vaccination. Because when somebody is forced into something and they are not allowed to have any input whatsoever, they, of course, lost their freedom. But at least give their family a chance, if you are going to force them to do something that kills them, at least allow the family a chance to recover for the loss of the person that the government official or the employer mandated take action that took their life. Of course, we have the President--here is a story on September 21 by Charlie Spiering--that Joe Biden boasted to the United Nations he restored the commitment to the World Health Organization. Well, for those that have not been following the news, that means that President Biden has restored the commitment of the United States to the best interests of the Chinese Communist Party because the Chinese Communist Party clearly has tremendous control over the World Health Organization. That was one of the things President Trump found shocking, that we paid hundreds of millions of dollars to the World Health Organization and they did not act in accordance with the best interests of the United States. China paid, it seems like it was $30 or $40 million, and the World Health Organization helped cover up what occurred in Wuhan. They continued to lie for the Chinese Communist Party. They continued to do the bidding for the Chinese Communist Party. This story makes clear that, actually, President Biden now has made sure that the United States is now fully supportive with and for the Chinese Communist Party along with the World Health Organization. A great article from Justin Haskins with The Federalist discusses Joe Biden's vaccine mandate as blatantly unconstitutional, and then the article says it is flatly unconstitutional. It truly is, but we have come to a place in American history, which I guess these things have happened before, there have been ridiculously inane decisions about the Supreme Court in our history. Well, until the Supreme Court acts, this blatantly unconstitutional action by the Federal Government is allowed to continue to keep taking place. So we will see what happens in the future. But we keep hearing from the other side about how uncaring and hardhearted Republicans are because of our position about our borders. Well, it wasn't that important to have secure borders before we started providing welfare benefits to American citizens. Once that started occurring, as Milton Friedman pointed out, you must have borders if you are going to have a welfare state; otherwise, it will be a very short time before your country will cease to exist. I understand the strategy. The more millions of people we get into this country, especially those that are easily duped and don't speak English, they are seen as new voters for the Democratic Party. I get that. But for Heaven's sake, have a little heart about and for the people that are being lured into this country. The 15,000, 16,000 Haitians that just came in recently weren't coming from Haiti. They were Haitians originally, but they had gone to South America--most of them, some Central America. When they got word that the Biden administration was slinging open the border, letting anybody come in-- terrorists, give us your tired, your poor. Terrorists that want to destroy our country, come on in. This administration is going to help. Heck, we will even load up planes in Afghanistan and bring people that we are now hearing are likely terrorists. We will bring them on in because they may vote Democratic at some point. But a caring person would understand these people left Haiti because they couldn't live under the conditions in Haiti. They went seeking a better life and found it in one country or another until they got word that the border is open: You can come into America because President Joe Biden is not going to send us back. Then for 1,400 of those 15,000 to 16,000 Haitians, they were not sent back where they came from seeking a better life. They were sent back to Haiti where they hadn't lived in years. That is why you see some of them crying, weeping on television: How could they do this? They brought me back where I couldn't live. I couldn't make a living. I couldn't live. We left here. We were doing better. And then we come to the U.S. because you lured us up there, and now you send us back to the place where we couldn't make a living. I mean, what kind of country does that? What kind of political leaders do that? Well, the answer is this administration. If we had enough compassion for the people of Mexico, Central America, South America, if we had the right kind of compassion, truly caring about the people of those countries, what we would do is secure the border. The hell going on in Mexico because of the corruption from the drug cartels doesn't need to be happening. Why is it happening? Because the United States of America, the home of the brave, the land of the free, we are sending tens of billions of dollars to the drug cartels in Mexico. They are getting money for bringing people into the U.S. illegally from the people they are bringing. But they don't have enough, most of them don't have the money to pay the whole debt, so they are told you can work it off, because when you get where we are sending you, and we are going to get the U.S. Government to pay to send you where we, the drug cartels, need you to work. As we have been told in testimony here on the Hill before, there are drug cartels in every city in America. The U.S. Government, as the border patrolmen told me down there, they call us their logistics. The drug cartels get them across the border, and then we ship them wherever the drug cartels want them to go. This has to stop. This is an existential threat to America. As some friends from around the globe have said, we get upset with the United States but you have to understand, we see your light, light of freedom, we see your light going out. You have to understand, when the light of freedom goes out in America, it will go out around the world. Reagan said no generation that lost freedom got it back in the same generation. I am telling you, if we are not more careful in this body, that light will be extinguished, and I don't think it will ever come back until the end of time. We have to be careful what we are doing. We have tremendous responsibility. To whom much is given, much is required. We have an awesome obligation, and we are not filling it when we run up a $3 trillion debt, nor when we legislate to kill the most innocent among us. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of amendment 165. It creates a separate career track for military judges to prevent undue influence from command above. In the 1970s it was seen that it would be good for trial defense attorneys to have a separate track so that they were not rated by the same person who was pushing to have a court martial. That created some problems and at times some abuses. The separation and the creation of a trial defense service served a great purpose, but before 2004 each of the judge advocates general of the armed services subscribed to the policy that all judge advocates should have a broad career and move from job to job. They became quite good at all trades but masters of none. So junior judge advocates would try a few court martials, then move from one job to another. It gave them a broad basis, but it was not helpful overall. By giving the military judges a separate career track, it will ensure avoidance of undue command influence and will give our servicemembers the fair trials they deserve. I would encourage everyone to vote for this amendment.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, tonight we paid tribute to the 13 fallen American military who died as Afghanistan was being abandoned by this administration to the Taliban, who are now more powerful than they have ever been, have more equipment than they ever had. What we didn't pay tribute to tonight--it somehow got lost in the shuffle--is over 2,400 of our precious military lives that were lost fighting for their country in Afghanistan. They kept us safe, relatively safe for 20 years. But they should not be forgotten. There are over 1,800 civilian contractors that were killed. There were 600 military killed in Afghanistan under Commander in Chief Bush; 1,800 under Commander in Chief Obama. They should not be forgotten. They served their country.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, as has been said earlier by Darrell Issa, it was Rahm Emanuel that pointed out, don't let a good crisis go to waste. So here we have a crisis on our southern border and Afghanistan, and what do we do? The majority comes in here and says, we don't want our Members to have to vote on a $3.5 trillion spending bill, so we will just pass a rule that says without anybody voting on it we pass a $3.5 trillion spending bill. And then we will immediately jump over to a noble man with a great name that did such great work for America along with Dr. King, John Lewis, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act bill. Well, I was here when that was reauthorized, when that was redone, and I begged, after talking to some liberal constitutional professors of law, I begged Jim Sensenbrenner and John Conyers not to go forward with section 4(b) the way it was and section 5. Let's do this right so that it won't be struck down. Mr. Sensenbrenner was not open to that whatsoever; John Conyers, to his credit, was. I said, please talk to some professors, let them tell you, it is at risk of being struck down. And he said, well, they say there is a decent chance of that, but let's see what happens. What happens now? We come in here, and we are going to disenfranchise American voters by taking over the voting across America. The Constitution reserves those provisions to the State legislature. We shouldn't be doing this. Back after the 2000 election when there were some people in Florida that were not as smart as fifth graders because they couldn't figure out the butterfly ballots, this body jumped in, took over, and said everybody go to electronic ballots and electronic voting, and they have caused us misery ever since. Let's let States and local government do the job the Constitution gave them.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, we got a couple of calls at the office today. We got numerous calls. But two veterans fighting in Afghanistan wept in the calls about the sacrifices that they made, the friends they had lost fighting in Afghanistan, and the Afghan people. I have been meeting with Northern Alliance leaders for a decade or so. They have asked not that we stay forever. We couldn't do that, and they didn't want us to do that. But they said: Whatever you do, leave us in a position to fight the Taliban when you are gone because if you don't, they will kill every one of us who fought for you and with you, and then there will be nobody to fight them after you are hit worse than you were on 9/11. This is an atrocity. Let's leave the Northern Alliance the weapons that the Taliban should never have, and let's get the Americans out.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Florida for yielding. I was quite shocked at the treatment we received. When people who have oversight and are responsible for voting to fund or not fund Federal facilities like the one we visited, I am not used to having somebody make such an overt effort to hide everything they are doing to the extent that they would lure us outside so they could lock the door. And there were lawyers, there were defendants, there were people going through the main entrance we did, yet because we are Members of Congress, they locked the door after accusing us of being trespassers, which is a crime. And so, we may want to look at who it is that was calling us trespassers. Obviously they have got some serious training that they need to go through. But this is nothing new and this has nothing to do with January 6, other than we have been alerted that there are people that are being mistreated. I have been alerted to people being mistreated before and took action to see if that was true. I don't care what their political leanings are. If they are being mistreated, then something needs to be done. Back when President George W. Bush was in office and there were abuses by the Justice Department, I was completely on the side of the Democrats. There is no place for that kind of thing, abusing people's civil rights. And we have been belittled here on the House floor, all of us here, and accused of trying to belittle what occurred on January 6. No, there were some atrocious things that happened, and there needs to be punishment for that. But there is and has been concern that there were people that didn't even know they were doing anything wrong, and in some cases were not doing anything wrong have had their homes invaded and had their door busted open. One constituent last week called my office here in Washington to say that she was in east Texas on January 5, 6, and 7, all relevant times. She had no thought of coming to Washington. She did have a picture of Trump on Facebook. Her nephew texted her: Hey, I saw this picture. The FBI is asking who it is, and I wondered if maybe she looked familiar. And apparently, it looked very similar to this woman, and he thought his aunt would get a kick out of that, so he sends the text with this picture. And she says: Gee, it does look like me. LOL. Don't turn me in. Days later she has a visit from two FBI agents who demand to know where she was January 6. Well, now as I understand it, the only contact she had with the events of January 6 was her nephew sending her that text message. And then FBI agents show up. She was not that woman, and you could see the difference. But somebody had to have been monitoring those text messages. That was something that got me bent out of shape back in the second term of President Bush. You can't just go spying on American citizens. It is not right. And I guess it is possible that they got a FISA warrant to spy on an American citizen, but I would have hoped that the FISA judges would be a little more circumspect after we found out how abusive those FISA judges have been with just signing off on anything the DOJ wants in the way of warrants. The Constitution requires specificity, particularity. You have got to describe the thing to be searched, the thing to be seized. And we had seen from one that WikiLeaks let go on Verizon, they said: Yeah, we just want everything Verizon has. And the judge said: Oh, they want everything Verizon has on its customers; okay. Signs the warrant. We cannot keep a republic with judges that have that much disdain or inconsideration of the Constitution they are sworn to follow. And the fact that no FISA judge got bent out of shape after being lied to by DOJ and the FBI is another indication we have got a tremendous amount of cleaning up to do to save our republic. I appreciate my friend for the time, and I appreciate you having this Special Order and allowing me to participate. General Leave

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate so much those observations. It is so important for everybody to understand, the IRS is feared, and we learn through people like Lois Lerner that it is not always honest, and yet nobody has been held to account. I am hoping that at some point that will occur. I am so grateful to my friend from Pennsylvania. At this time I yield to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Bentz).

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Kelly).

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Bentz, and I have to give a shout-out to Bruce Westerman as the ranking member on the Natural Resources Committee. This very morning, we had a Republican group, but we couldn't get the whole committee to do it on that very issue of forest fires and maintaining healthy forests. Hopefully, we will get the majority to understand it is not enough to just let nature take its course. You trim the undergrowth. You have fire lanes so you can stop a fire when it gets started. There are so many things that Republicans understand is just good forest management. So whether it is lightning or something else that starts a fire, we don't have to see 400,000 acres go up in flames. This administration is determined not to do proper management of the forests, and so many people get hurt. I am proud to have a colleague like Mr. Bentz that will stand up for what is best for forests, for nature, and has a lot of common sense in the process. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Clyde).

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my friend from Georgia so much for making the effort to stand up for the constitutional rights of Members of Congress not to be detained from getting onto the House floor. We have metal detectors still at each entrance. We didn't used to have them at the Speaker's lobby. Those have been added. We are co-plaintiffs in a lawsuit that will, hopefully, result in those being removed so that we won't continue to have Republicans miss votes because they get detained, even for the short time, when the Speaker has full discretion as to when to bring down the gavel. We have had a number of Republicans who have missed votes that they would not have missed were there no metal detectors, and especially since there is no intelligence from any source of any Member being a threat to another Member then this totally unprecedented subjugating of House Members below what their roles are and being sent by the same number of people that sent the Speaker. It is time to get rid of the metal detectors, get rid of the subjugation and get back to the Nation's business. Mr. Speaker, I have to say I am so excited about the freshman class that came in this Congress. We just heard from three freshmen, and these are folks, especially including my friend from Florida, Kat Cammack, that has been added, and I am thrilled. I have been so reassured by the freshman class that has come in and the common sense that came with them. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Cammack).

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my friend, Member of Congress, Kat Cammack. She has expressed so articulately what I have seen, what I have experienced so many times spending the night on the border, going down those dirt roads along the Rio Grande. It is incredible. And some would think, Oh, well, isn't it compassionate to encourage people to come to the United States. It is the most unneighborly, uncompassionate thing that we could do. These are people who--other than the gang members, those who are part of the cartels, those coming from groups in the Middle East and other places that don't have U.S. interests at heart, but so many of them, they are looking for a better way of life. Why do they not have a better way of life where they are, including, especially, Mexico? Well, it is because of the unsecured border we have that allows the Mexican drug cartels to make tens of billions of dollars every year coming from America for the drugs, for the fentanyl that kills, for the sex trafficking, for the human trafficking. We are funding the corruption in Mexico. Mr. Speaker, when my wife and I had our honeymoon, we didn't have much money at all; $300 got us 5 nights, 6 days in a fabulous place in Mexico. But we don't go back because the drug cartels no longer say hands off of the tourism. Mexico is being devastated by the drug cartels. And it is America and administrations like this that are allowing them--actually making it possible--not just allowing, making it possible. Some might say they are truly accessories to the corruption, to the criminality that is going on. And in fact, evidence of that comes from the fact that as border patrol had told me before, before this administration when they used to talk to me and never ever tried to prevent me from getting to the border and seeing exactly what is going on--that has all changed now. This administration did not allow me, two nights in a row, trying to get to the border, as I have done countless times before--wouldn't let me get there. In fact, used the place where normally you get down from the embankment, go through the wall that is being constructed by the Trump administration, go down through the flat area, and then you come up to the levee road, and then that allows you to get miles and miles down the dirt roads along the Rio Grande where thousands of people are coming across. And they didn't allow it this time. They used the wall, not to keep out illegal aliens, but to keep me from seeing the outrageous travesties and tragedies that are going along our border, because people are being lured to their detriment. In tort law, it would be called an attractive nuisance; like having a swimming pool and having no fence so that a child is drawn in and then drowns. Well, this administration is luring people to their detriment. And I have been there many nights, it is not on the list of questions that is required to be asked, but so often the border patrol asks, How much did you pay, basically, to drug cartels to bring you into the United States? And it was usually between $5,000 and $8,000. And then often they would say, You don't have that kind of money. Where did you get that money? And they would indicate, Here and there; get this much here, this much there. Friends in the U.S. sent this much. So what about the rest of the money? The drug cartels, they are going to let them work it off when they get where they are going. How do they get where they are going? Well, at that point, it is either Health and Human Services or ICE. Border Patrol, their job is along the border. They don't, once they transport to a facility, that is usually the end of their transporting. But ICE, Health and Human Services, and now we have the military that is also providing transportation. But as the Border Patrol officer said, cartels call us here in the U.S.--Federal Government. There are logistics. They get them across the border, and then--they don't use UPS or FedEx or even the U.S. Post Office-- they use the Federal Government and taxpayer money to ship these indentured servants of the drug cartels all over the country to cities all over the country wherever the drug cartel want them to be selling drugs, sex trafficking, human trafficking. The U.S. Government actually makes that happen. They facilitate that. We have had so many Border Patrol--again, before this last visit to the border when this administration wants to hide what they are doing at the border--they say, Oh, well, if you give us enough notice, then we will put somebody--and this is effectively what--they want to put somebody--I am suppose to supervise--over me to watch what I am doing, prevent me from doing proper oversight down where they are supposed to be doing their job, prevent that from happening so that America does not see how absolutely tragic this invasion is. Yes, they are gang members, but so many people are coming in, and the cartels know taxpayers in the U.S., who are funding the drug cartels, are also going to pay for the education, all the needs of those coming in. This administration doesn't care. What they are looking at are future Democratic voters. But they have to act quickly because the longer the people are here, the more they realize, ``You know what? I am for hard work, and I am for making my own way. I don't want to see babies killed in the womb. I believe in working a full day. I do believe in marriage and strong family, devotion to family. I believe in God,'' and they start thinking, wait a minute, that sounds more like a Republican than a Democrat. They don't believe in abortion, most of the folks, and they do have faith in God and devotion to families. If you read what BLM said they believed in, destruction of what they call Western-style marriage is one of their biggest tenets. Why? Because they are Marxist. To get to Marxism, you have to create chaos. As Paul Harvey used to talk about, one of the best ways, and a critically important way, to create enough chaos so that you can move toward Marxism is to destroy the family, the nuclear family. Of course, BLM has it wrong. It is not Western-style marriage. It is not something that North America or South America or Central America came up with, what is typically called the West. It didn't come from this side of the planet or this hemisphere, except in the Middle East. A man named Moses had a revelation from God and let people know here is what God says: A man shall leave his father and mother, a woman shall leave her home, and the two will become one. That would be marriage, not Western-style. I guess Middle Eastern-style. It didn't originate here. It has been found throughout history to be the best building block of a very strong society. That is why surveys continue to find that although, of course, there are people that excel coming from broken homes and other avenues, the best chance a child has of succeeding in life is coming from a two- parent home and a strong nuclear family. I have seen firsthand what Marxism does. I have heard the director of what we would now call daycare in the old Soviet Union bragging that these children don't belong to their parents: They are just temporary caretakers. We monitor what parents tell their children. If they ever say anything negative about the government, we immediately take the child away and give them to a more deserving caretaker. I thought, at the time, thank God I didn't grow up in the Soviet Union. Thank God I grew up in east Texas, and I had a mother and father, and they cared deeply about me. I was so grateful for the blessings that I had had. Wow, the Soviet Union. It failed because it was destined to fail. Marxism is always going to fail. People think: Oh, but it sounds so wonderful, share and share alike. Now, you have a very small ruling class, and then you have everybody else. I have been in those stores. Toilet paper so often, no, it was not available. But I learned, and I saw. Real luxuries, like real toilet paper, the store would get those in and put those in the back. If you were a government official, then when you came in, they would get you some toilet paper. If it is a shoe store, when they got good shoes in, they kept those in the back for government officials. Why? Because they were sucking up to the government officials. In Russia, it was called blat, political pull. You wanted to have some, so you kept the best of whatever you got in to sell for people that had power. You would do favors for them so that you might have a little power. As one Soviet told me, a college student: In your country, you can get ahead. No matter who you are, you can get ahead by hard work, making more money, and then money will help you make your way up in society. Here, there are only two ways to move up in society. One is to suck up to people who have political power, and I guess maybe it is a subheading of that, but it is also by ratting out other people. As he told me: You can get ahead by working hard and making more money here. The best way to move up is to step on other people. If you see them do something inappropriate, then you rat them out and that will allow you to move up. Except for the very top people that have everything they want, the other people mostly get the same amount of income. That was also tried in Venezuela; it failed. It will always fail. Anybody that was so stupid that they could not foresee what was emerging, and that is a very strong, powerful middle class in the United States and part of Europe, Marx couldn't see that coming. He was too blind. He couldn't foresee the formation of labor unions that could stand up to greedy Democrats, billionaires, such as we have here, the billionaires that, by the way, paid hundreds of millions of dollars to affect the election, who was able to vote, and how ballots were gathered. Well, over in the Soviet Union, you don't have to worry about that. As Stalin pointed out, he didn't care who voted. He just cared about who counted the votes. We will be seeing evidence continue to emerge from Arizona and Georgia, and, I think, eventually Pennsylvania. But to hear anybody say that there was absolutely no evidence of fraud, it is like John Fund said when he wrote the book about fraud in elections some years back: The biggest fraud about elections is the statement there is no fraud in elections. There has always been. Lyndon Johnson certainly knew about that, as did people who tried to research allegations of voting impropriety, and the courthouse burned down, destroying evidence. These things have gone on. Cook County, Chicago, you think there has not been fraud in Chicago? You would have to be either crazy or dishonest to say there has never been fraud in elections in Chicago. It goes on. The trick is to try to minimize the fraud so you don't disenfranchise so many people. But there is evidence of fraud. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of affidavits, sworn testimony, about fraud in the last election. I know there is plenty in the media to say it didn't happen. Because they are saying that, out of either ignorance or dishonesty, others feel comfortable, including people right here on the floor, saying that it is totally debunked, that there was no fraud in the last election. That is a statement out of ignorance or out of being deceptive. But we have to clean up the elections. We have to quit being a joke in the eyes of foreigners who have paper ballots. Even as bad as things have gotten in Iraq, there for a while, they had free and fair elections. In 2005, having been over there right after the first election, talking to one of the chiefs of police there, he was telling about how--of course, the voters, when they voted, to avoid fraud, you dipped your finger into purple ink that would last for a couple of weeks so you couldn't vote a second time. If you didn't dip your finger in there and have proof of who you were, you didn't vote the first time. He was telling me that a policeman who was monitoring the election saw someone suspicious. Upon checking, he saw that he had a bomb, a suicide vest. He threw the man down, jumped on top of him. Both of them were killed. I said, wow, I guess that sent all the voters scurrying, fleeing. He looked surprised and said, no, that they knew if they got out of line, the policeman would have died for nothing. The policeman died trying to secure the fair opportunity to vote. Yet, nowadays, that is being belittled: We shouldn't even utilize voter IDs. You shouldn't have to have an ID. Well, that is the best way to ensure that there is not fraud in the election, just like it is the best way to ensure that someone is not illegally getting a gun or getting a cigarette or getting alcohol. People produce those all the time. Let's quit disenfranchising so many people that are voting lawfully by creating the ability to have people vote illegally. We keep hearing about: Oh, gee, that is not true. We need to censor people and not allow them to speak or submit things online if they are not in conformance with what the liberal Democrat high-tech industry or the liberal Democrat media say is true or not true. We listened to 4 years of lies about the Russian dossier when it was produced by a former MI6 agent in England, who even admitted: Yes, my sources, they could have been working for Putin. It was a manipulation paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The FBI was in cahoots and, in fact, even lied to the FISA court. It really got my attention, having been a judge, to see that FISA court judges had so little regard for their own status, their own courts, that they would not take action to hold in contempt people who held the court in contempt by lying, by defrauding the court, in order to spy on a Presidential political campaign. My goodness, there has never been a Presidential campaign treated as the Trump campaign was. It even had a Democrat official on tape admitting: We are the ones who paid for violence to get started at Trump campaign events so that we could claim that Trump was stirring up violence. That was in 2016. For heaven's sake, we needed a Justice Department that would be just, and we don't have it right now. For heaven's sake, I heard from a constituent 2 days ago who that day was shocked to have two FBI agents show up at her place of work in east Texas. She had not come to Washington on January 6. She was at work in east Texas. The only reason those FBI agents could have showed up at her place of work was because her nephew texted her a picture of someone who was here on January 6 in Washington and asked: Do you see anybody you recognize? Because it looked like his aunt. She said: Wow, I thought that was me. Then jokingly she said: Don't turn me in. Unless the FBI were monitoring these text messages which was either by the grant of a warrant from a FISA court that, in my opinion, was breaking the PATRIOT Act and was breaking the law to grant such a warrant, or they were committing a crime and spying on people's text messages without authority. This is getting out of control here. Of course, we don't hear any stories about the people who were looting and creating insurrections in cities around America last summer. We don't hear about them being arrested or having their homes wrongfully broken into by police or Federal officials. No. But we are hearing about it, and the illegality and the brownshirt tactics of the Federal Government needs to stop. Mr. Hoyer says he was shocked 8 months was all somebody got for disrupting an official proceeding. Well, that also happened on June 22, 2016 for 26 hours on this floor, and I am surprised that Mr. Hoyer wants to see his fellow Democrats going to prison for more than 8 months for obstructing an official proceeding. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, I was unable to vote on June 29, 2021 due to an invitation from the Governor of Texas to travel to the border to observe the ongoing crisis that is happening there. Had I been present, I would have voted as follows: YES on Roll Call No. 196. I am exceedingly concerned with the Speaker's determination to pass H.R. 3005, To direct the Joint Committee on the Library to replace the bust of Roger Brooke Taney in the Old Supreme Court Chamber of the United States Capitol with a bust of Thurgood Marshall to be obtained by the Joint Committee on the Library and to remove certain statues from areas of the United States Capitol which are accessible to the public, to remove all statues of individuals who voluntarily served the Confederate States of America from display in the United States Capitol, and for other purposes. This bill is Cultural Marxism brought to the House floor for a vote. This bill attempts to strip individual states of their right to choose the statues they are paying for. In doing so, it seeks to erase their history--the bad, the good, and everything in between, that informs whom we've been and whom we are, as well as where we've been, so we can aptly navigate where we are going. As George Orwell presciently foreshadowed, ``Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.'' But is the Party always right? Surely it is not. This point highlights another grievous flaw in H.R. 3005. Although it purports to cleanse the Capitol complex of Confederate statues and busts, in doing so it actually removes only Democrat statues and busts. Yes, Democrats are removing their Democrat forefathers for the sin of their slavery, or other support for the Confederacy, committed in times past. So why vote YES? Because having fought this battle for a state's right to choose--warning about the dangers of arbitrarily banishing history from our midst--I am sick and tired of defending states' rights so Democrats can try to rewrite history and say Republicans are defending racists. We are doing no such thing. In fact, I've even gone further and tried to get an amendment made in order that reveals the dirty secret of just how racist, pro-slavery, and anti-freedom Democrats have been in the past. They want their own statues removed for two unspoken reasons: (1) People won't look up their former heroes and find out how racist Democrats have been, and (2) A move to Marxism requires destruction of history first. If people don't know their nation's true history, they're more easily duped into accepting a totalitarian government. So, if Democrats want to remove all Democrat statues and busts in the Capitol, I will not stand in their way.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I certainly appreciate my friend, Congressman Cawthorn, holding this because it is important. You know, to some people, it is just about, ``Well, it is the economy. It is an inconvenience.'' Well, that is for rich people, like the billionaires that donated to the current President's campaign. They sure didn't help the former President. Well, what are we talking about? We are talking about a President that is so out of touch. As he has said, ``I keep forgetting I am President.'' It is very unfortunate. But if you go back to his days as Vice President, you find what this President, the current President, was doing in the previous administration, and these policies are now coming back. It ran up the price of oil and gas--natural gas, propane. It ran up the price of gasoline. And unfortunately, for the working people in America, for those that haven't been in Washington for 50 years or so-- like the current President--they are getting strangled with debt. They are getting strangled with increasing prices because it just so happens, we don't have a lot of electric 18-wheelers. We don't have a lot of massive electric engines that are pulling countless numbers of cars down the train tracks. That means every time this President takes another step to raise the price of oil--which raises the price of gasoline--he is economically crippling people that are working, people that are on Social Security, people that have fixed incomes. They are getting hammered. Yeah, it is an inconvenience to the mega wealthy that donated to the President, or people like here in Congress that are millionaires, but it is devastating. And I go back to when President Biden was Vice President, and a lady from Panola County told me, she said, ``I am 80 years old, and my gas is getting so expensive, I am afraid I am going to end up in a home like I was born in, where the only energy we had was a wood-burning stove.'' And I said, Oh, ma'am, I am so sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but if Biden and Obama have their way, you are not going to be able to even have that wood-burning stove you had when you were born. You are going to be at home without any kind of energy. And that is where this President is now wanting to go back to. We enjoyed the days of cheaper gasoline, cheaper energy. America was vibrant; and people spent and they went out to eat and they bought clothes, and it generated jobs. And this President is killing those. And he is devastating the people on fixed incomes. The people that are working and poor, he is devastating them--the people that he is supposed to care about. Well, it is time for this administration to think about somebody besides themselves and their mega-billionaire donors. It is time to think about the American people and the damage that this administration is doing to them.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Gaetz). Remembering the Life of Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Lombardo

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Iowa (Mrs. Miller-Meeks). Recognizing Muscatine High School

Mr. GOHMERT. It is wonderful to hear that about Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert). New Spending Initiatives

Mr. GOHMERT. Would the gentleman yield for a question?

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate Mr. Schweikert's ongoing analyses of the way we mismanage money around Washington, D.C. And I was reading about proposals to go after the billionaires, the mega- rich, and I recall what Ronald Reagan's economist, economic adviser, Arthur Laffer, had said. Dr. Laffer said--he told a small group of us years ago--if you want to produce money--of course, I am asking you this because I have such great respect for your monetary analyses. If you want to go after money, you want to produce tax revenue, the one place you will never get it is going after the super-rich because they are the only people in America who have the wherewithal to avoid whatever tax you put on them. What is your thought about that analysis?

Mr. GOHMERT. That would be people who would pay income tax if they didn't lose their jobs.

Mr. GOHMERT. I know you would have----

Mr. GOHMERT. No, no. I appreciate my friend from Arizona, Mr. Schweikert's excellent analysis, because we do want to have a vibrant economy. As the saying goes, it lifts all boats. And I really appreciate the analysis on where the Medicare spending is going. That is something we need to deal with. I hear solutions of throwing money at the problem, but the real problem is we don't have the proper money to throw at it because the economy is not doing as it should. And then I still hear our friends talk about the need to stop climate change. Unfortunately, the climate has been changing since the Earth ever appeared. And I have got a lot of friends out there. And I say friends facetiously. People on the left--I am beginning to understand that sarcasm is a tool that is appreciated by the intelligent. So the left, the alt-left, they don't get it. But this is an article from Ethan Hunt back in August of 2019. It says: NASA admits that climate change occurs because of changes in Earth's solar orbit; not because of SUVs and fossil fuel. Well, it really can be a combination of things. But having found out from the former NASA Director that the Moon's orbit is slightly changing and the Earth's orbit is slightly changing and, as the term was, it is becoming more squashed, well, that would mean there are times when we are closer to the Sun and we are further away from the Sun. And I know there are some leftists at NASA that said: Oh, no, changing Earth's orbit doesn't affect our climate at all. And I would humbly submit that you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that if you get closer to the Sun, or if you get further away from the Sun, it is absolutely going to affect your climate; just as more solar activity, more solar flares, they are going to affect our climate. And there is not a lot that we can do about more solar flares, solar activities, solar hot spots. And I would sarcastically ask a question regarding the Bureau of Land Management and National Forest Service, since they were going to be spending so much time on climate change, and we had heard the Earth's orbit was changing slightly and the Moon's orbit was changing slightly. Could they do anything about that? For those who thought I was really challenging BLM, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Forest Service, like they were going to do something about the Earth's orbit, the National Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, they are not going to do anything about the Earth's orbit because they can't. That is not their job. Although there is some professor that thinks we might could adjust our orbit, I think that is still yet to be arrived at scientifically. It is an interesting concept, but I had no belief that it was about to happen by the Bureau of Land Management and National Forest Service. It is interesting to look back. I missed this article back in 2019. It goes into much more detail about not only the changing orbit but the changing tilt from time to time. Then if you do more digging, you find out that actually, going back millions--some say 56 million; some say billions--that the planet was much hotter, and the planet's orbit was closer to the Sun. It has moved back some, according to some, over the millions or billions, whatever you believe, number of years. I also want to mention this article from The Washington Times, June 16, 2021, Stephen Dinan, about ``Smartphone smugglers: How social media is reshaping border crime.'' It is really intriguing. The author does an amazing job of pulling these things together. It is interesting. The drug cartels south of our border, apparently, we are informed, have workers in every city in America. Of course, we have heard before that the Border Patrol, ICE, the U.S. Government is considered to be the logistics for the multibillion-dollar drug cartels in Mexico because the drug cartels get them across illegally into the United States. And I have seen people in the middle of the night, as they are being processed by the Border Patrol, long lines of people. I have watched them comparing addresses and sometimes switching addresses. They are the addresses that the drug cartels have given them as to where the drug cartels want them to go work in order to earn enough money, either drug trafficking, sex trafficking, or human trafficking, to pay off the rest of their debt to the drug cartels for getting them into the United States illegally. Many times, it is the U.S. Government, which means U.S. taxpayers, that end up paying to send the drug cartels' employees, or indentured servants, to the cities where the drug cartels want them. It is incredible that we, as a U.S. Government, are helping the drug cartels in Mexico make the tens of billions of dollars that they use to keep different levels of government corrupt in Mexico, that keep the Mexican people from having the economy that would allow them to have across-the-board wonderful homes, have wonderful jobs, and be one of the top economies in the world. The corruption of the drug cartels keeps Mexico from having their true place in the top economies in the world. They have some of the hardest-working people in the world. They have incredible natural resources, a fantastic location--actually, better than the U.S. because they are between North and South America, and they are between the Pacific and the Atlantic. Incredible location, hardworking people, great natural resources, good ports, but the corruption that the American people are funding through their U.S. Government and through the purchase of drugs that are massively coming into this country--if somebody truly has compassion for the people of Mexico and Central America, they would demand that our southern border be secured, that we continue to provide visas in greater numbers than any country in the world, but we secure the border so that we cut the tens of billions of dollars from flowing to the drug cartels that then corrupt and destroy lives, kill Americans with fentanyl and other drugs that are pouring into our country. And the Mexican people would come to the United States on vacation to spend the significant, wonderful money they had earned without fear of the drug cartels and what they will do to them if they are not subservient. There was a time in Mexico when people who were wealthy knew the drug cartels would normally leave them alone. There was a time in Mexico when the drug cartels basically had a wink-and-nod agreement: Look, we won't have attacks in tourist attractions because we know how important that money is. Well, all of those days are gone. If we were really a compassionate neighbor, we would secure our border. We would stop drawing off people with the potential to be the best citizens that Guatemala, Mexico, other countries have, drawing them up here because of the corruption below our border that we in the U.S. Government are helping fund. It really needs to stop. But it is getting worse, much, much worse, as we are seeing numbers that no one has seen in many, many years. There has been so much appropriate concern about January 6 and what happened that day. Unfortunately, we don't know all that happened that day. There are some major questions that need to be answered. We know that the former chief of the Capitol Police testified that they got no intelligence from the FBI about potential violence on January 6. There were lots of stories about people who were here at the Capitol on January 6 that may have carried a Confederate flag, may have had red on and MAGA or Trump. But the Capitol Police had told me the day before: Hey, we have heard there are going to be people who hate Trump that are going to be trying to blend in, and there is going to be violence, and we are concerned about it. But the chief of the Capitol Police said they got no intel like that from the FBI. An article a few days ago from Revolver says: ``Unindicted Co- Conspirators in the January 6 Cases Raise Disturbing Questions of Federal Foreknowledge.'' That is June 14. I saw my friend Tucker Carlson covered this last night. But this is really disturbing, and this is something that I know from my time here in Congress has disturbed Democrats and Republicans alike across the aisle because we don't like to see government agents stirring up trouble or find that there are criminal acts that would not likely have occurred had not the Federal Government been participating, whether they were actual agents or undercover agents or informants that were working for the Federal Government. But this is scary stuff. This is kind of third-world stuff. This is not only third-world stuff, but this is like Putin kind of activity. If there were Federal agents that were involved on January 6, we really need to know what the FBI knew and when they knew it. Not only that, we need to know how much participation did any of our Federal friends, either at DOJ, FBI, or any of the intel community, what kind of role were they playing. There is information that came out about the effort to kidnap the Michigan Governor, and it has been said that there were Federal agents that were involved in that. It would seem, if you have 14 people that are involved in a conspiracy to commit a crime, and over a third of them, including people in leadership, are Federal agents, undercover agents, or people that are working for a Federal entity, that we have got some serious problems, and we have not done adequate oversight. It disturbs me greatly that there was not more information forthcoming from our Federal law enforcement intelligence, DOJ, than was received here on Capitol Hill because, surely, if they had known the level of planning by a small group to actually commit violence and break into our U.S. Capitol, they would have been better prepared. I know some of us have had extreme differences with the Speaker, but I just feel sure if she had known the level of violence that was being talked about and planned and monitored by DOJ and FBI, surely she would not have allowed the Sergeant at Arms to turn down National Guard support on January 6. This article pulls from documents, legal documents, that have been filed by the Federal Government in some of these different cases. This article says: ``To address the matter directly in the following three questions: In the year leading up to January 6 and during January 6 itself, to what extent were the three primary militia groups--the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters--that the FBI, DOJ, Pentagon, and network news have labeled most responsible for planning and executing a Capitol attack on January 6 infiltrated by agencies of the Federal Government, or informants of said agencies?'' Question 2: ``Exactly how many Federal undercover agents or confidential informants were present at the Capitol or in the Capitol during the infamous `siege,' and what roles did they play--merely passive informants or active instigators?'' And, third: ``Finally, of all of the unindicted co-conspirators referenced in the charging documents,'' the official Federal pleadings, ``of those indicted for crimes on January 6, how many worked as a confidential informant or as an undercover operative for the Federal Government--FBI, Army Counterintelligence, et cetera?'' ``If the narrative about January 6 does not conform to the questions above, the American people will never learn the most important truth about what January 6 is, and what kind of country they're really living in. ``If it turns out the Federal Government did in fact have undercover agents or confidential informants embedded within the so-called militia groups indicted for conspiring to obstruct the Senate certification on January 6, the implications would be nothing short of seismic. Especially if such agents or informants enjoyed extremely senior-level positions within such groups.'' And the thing is, like I said, they have got documentation, the Federal pleadings that the United States Government has filed in some of these cases, that really raised serious issues. Yeah, there is no question, there were radical groups there, and those three seem to be the most prominent. But from the pleadings from the Department of Justice itself, it appears that they had significant presence and participation in what went on. We do need to see the 14,000 hours of security video, seeing Ashli Babbitt killed by an officer standing off to the side. There were officers in front of the window, but then there were officers on the other side where Ashli was; and it appeared it was John Sullivan, a Trump hater, that told them if they will move out of the way they won't get hurt, and the officers appeared. Well, they moved out of the way, and these guys broke through the glass. And yet with all of the people that the FBI has sought information on and put up pictures--and it appears they were probably wearing masks, but there is another 14,000 hours of video. These guys were around in the Capitol, around the Capitol. They didn't have their masks up at all times. But it doesn't appear that the FBI has asked for assistance in identifying those people that broke through the glass or that were right there, at least when Ashli was shot in the neck and killed. And that normally means if they are not asking for help in identifying somebody that they know who they are--and maybe they are person 1, person 2, person 3, person 15--that are referred to in the pleadings of people that were working with the FBI or Federal authorities of some kind. But this is very unsettling stuff. It was bad enough to have our Capitol attacked. As a former felony judge, I would have no problem sending people to prison that broke into this Capitol, that literally broke in or that did damage or that stole things here. There is no place for that, and they do need to be severely punished. But were some of those people doing those things working for the FBI? Were they egged on by Federal authorities? Because it sure looks like from some of these legal documents they filed and the masking of names and referring to them as something other than their real names that we have a serious problem with some of the people that were involved that day that it appears were either working for Federal authorities or were informants for Federal authorities and had leadership positions in those groups and quite possibly, in some cases probably, helped to egg them on. This article says in many cases the unindicted co-conspirators appear to be much more aggressive and egregious participants in the very so- called conspiracy, serving as the basis for charging those indicted. The question immediately arises as to why this is the case and forces us to consider whether certain individuals are being protected from indictment because they were involved in January 6 as undercover operatives or confidential informants for a Federal agency. So another place further on in the article it points out: ``This would be far worse than the already bad situation of the government knowing about the possibility of violence and doing nothing. Instead, this would imply that elements of the federal government were active instigators in the most egregious and spectacular aspects of January 6, amounting to a monumental entrapment scheme used as a pretext to imprison otherwise harmless protesters at the Capitol--and in a much larger sense used to frame the entire MAGA movement as potential domestic terrorists.'' There is so much more. Let's see, further on, I guess this is page 8/ 26. ``In one of the plot's climactic scenes, in the main van driving up to look at Governor Whitmer's vacation home''--and that is of course the plot to kidnap the Governor--``three out of the five people in the van--60 percent of the plot's senior leaders--were Federal agents and informants.'' ``FBI infiltrators comprised, at the very least''--talking about overall in that plot--``26 percent of the plotters. That is, at least five FBI operatives have been disclosed, against just 14 suspects indicted.'' So looking at some of the pleadings by the DOJ themselves, but just to give an idea of what we are dealing with, it says, ``On December 30, 2020, Watkins and Caldwell exchanged the following text messages: ``Watkins: Looks like we are green light to come to D.C. on the 6th. The rally point still at your place? ``Caldwell: Not that I am aware. Have been contacted by no one. Typical (Person one). Here's the rub: (Person two) and I will be in a hotel within striking distance of the city starting on the 4th, so we won't even be here. There will be some stuff going on during the 5th, and we want to be a part of that whenever it shakes out.'' Person one and person two were apparently working for the Federal authorities, some Federal agency. Another place it references person two, person three, person one, and they seem to be significant leaders in what is going on. Another place: Person three--emailed person three several maps along with the message. These maps will get you from the hotel into D.C. I mean, person 10 checked into the Hilton Garden Inn in Vienna. Person three, another reference. Person 15 and person 20 are referenced. These are people that they are covering up their names because they are working for the Federal authorities. If you look at some of the video on January 6, there were a lot of people walking around. They had no business being in the Capitol. But it is quite concerning that people that were extremely active at all should have been or were working for Federal entities such that they have to cover up their names because of their complicity with the Federal authorities during that day. So that is United States versus Caldwell, Crowl, and then there is one Government's Opposition to Defendant's Motion for Reconsideration of Detention. They are holding some of these people still. Some with 23 hours, 24 hours a day in solitary. Some were just walking around, they did no damage. They should not have come into the Capitol, but it remains to be seen why the government has their stinger out so much for people no matter how mild their participation on January 6. And yet the biggest damage done to the United States in protests was last summer, and those folks aren't being treated the same way that others are. So there are some very serious questions that need to be answered. We do need the answers. We need to know how many Federal agents; how many informants had given information to Federal agencies and why in the world all of that information was not provided to people that needed to protect Capitol Hill. So we need an investigation. We don't need one that has an entire Democrat staff. It needs to be truly bipartisan to get to the bottom of just what happened that day and who caused it to happen. With that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, emails--as this headline says from Wendell Husebo--emails show Anthony Fauci scrambled at the beginning of the pandemic to determine the potential U.S. role in funding coronavirus research abroad, and that was because he provided money to a firm that provided money to the Wuhan lab. As this points out, after Fauci made that comment that we didn't do that, a couple months later, the man responsible for steering U.S. Government funding to the Wuhan Institution of Virology, Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, thanked Dr. Fauci on April 18, 2020, for publicly dismissing the theory coronavirus may have leaked from that lab to which they furnished money. Here is another story from the same person. Anthony Fauci said in released emails: Drugstore masks are not really effective. He told us, Oh, gosh, you know, we need to be taking a mask, everybody should be wearing a mask, but that was only after he had been against it before he became for it. And this points out and quotes him as just being one of the biggest hypocrites. And in fact, that he completely lied to the American people, because he says that ``Masks are really for infected people . . . '' He goes on further: ``The typical mask you buy in the drugstore is not really effective . . . '' and he says, ``I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location. Your instincts are correct, money is best spent on medical countermeasures such as diagnostics and vaccines.'' But as Fauci emails show, the U.S. scientists knew COVID looked engineered only days before insisting that the virus was natural. And that is another one of the reasons that Representative Taylor Greene filed the Fire Fauci Act, and I would encourage people to get on board. But the virologist who told Fauci that SARS-CoV-2 potentially looked engineered--he eliminated his Twitter account. That article is June 7th. And then we find out that ``weight-adjusted hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin boosted survival of ventilated COVID-19 patients by 200 percent,'' according to a study. We have had hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died while Fauci and others belittled a hydroxychloroquine regimen, and the good that it could do, and the good it has done for most of those who have taken it. So we know that in the 1950s President Eisenhower said: No, we got no U-2 flights going over the Soviet Union. And they shot one down. He had to go on TV and say: I am sorry, I lied. I am very sorry, I thought I was doing the right thing by the country. In the 1960s, President Kennedy, he went on television, and said: I am sorry. It is my fault, basically, that people died in the Bay of Pigs invasion. But who is going to come forward and say, you know what, this was my fault? It is not going to be Fauci. We don't know if it will be President Biden, but somebody owes a big apology to the American people.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, as I have told my friend--he wears that big shiny Super Bowl ring; he hasn't let me wear it yet--any time he comes to the floor, I will always yield to him. I appreciate anything he has to say. Having talked with Prime Minister Netanyahu on multiple occasions, I have very high regard for him. He is in such a difficult situation, and I don't think there is anybody who characterizes the situations that arise in Israel better than my friend--hopefully, it won't hurt her for me to say she is a friend--but Caroline Glick, just a wonderful perspective on the things in Israel. I know they were going through a tough time as far as organizing government. I hope it works out. But Israel needs a strong leader, in my humble opinion, like Prime Minister Netanyahu because they are under attack. Every time Israel has tried to placate people that hate them, it hasn't worked out well. In the Gaza Strip, it is controlled by Hamas. I bet there is an excellent chance that money that the United States has sent to Iran, and we know money that the U.S. has sent to the Palestinians, ends up funding schools that teach hate for Jews, to name holidays and streets for people that have effectively blown up innocent Israelis. But it is scary here in the United States to hear more and more anti- Jewish, anti-Israel rhetoric. That does not bode well for the future of the United States. John Adams had some great writings on importance of the Jewish people, and the importance of their existence to civilization. And there is a good chance if you see people that think the answer to their problems is blowing up innocent people that they hate, they are badly mistaken. And so, coming back around to January 6, anybody that engaged in violence here on January 6 should be punished, and any such violence should not be minimized. If I were still a felony judge and people that had engaged in violence on January 6 here came before me, I would have no problem sentencing them. We can't have that kind of conduct. And as I and so many of my friends have said repeatedly, the most effective protest is peaceful protest--learning from the incredible Christian man, a Christian minister named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Weather Underground, Bill Ayers' friends, they tried violence. It didn't work. They didn't accomplish anything. Of course, when they started moving into universities and getting tenure and teaching children to love socialism, they became much more effective than those days when they were blowing things up trying to kill people. But there is so much more to be helped by peaceful protest. Make your voices heard. And just as the President said on January 6, it needs to be peaceful, but make your voices heard. I would love it if our friends across the aisle had been as condemning of people in Antifa or BLM that engaged in violence, or people that chased my wife and I down the street after the President's speech at the White House last year. I wish the people on the other side of the aisle would condemn those things as well. Some of us condemn violence on both sides, no matter who it is supporting. It is wrong, and should be. But it turns out it wasn't all violence here at the Capitol. This is an article by Julie Kelly. She has probably done greater research and reporting about January 6 than anybody that I have seen. This article from May 16 says, ``Video shows U.S. Capitol Police gave protestors okay to enter.'' Now, we know that there was some violence here at the Capitol; there was. Of course, it was a Capitol Police that shot Ashley Babbitt, killed her, I think a Navy veteran--but a military veteran; she was unarmed. But we also know that after hearing they were armed, that these people came ready to shoot Members of Congress, that at least for weeks, there was no arrest, no charges of anybody in the Capitol for having a firearm. Some apparently used a flag, a couple other things, in an aggressive manner. And if they assaulted someone with those, they should be severely punished. But it wasn't an ``armed,'' as we think of now. Maybe if you were back in the 1500s, you would say they were armed if they had a little battalion like one 18-year old had that stayed in jail for weeks and weeks and weeks in solitary confinement, 23 hours a day, while people that have burned and looted and killed in other cities, part of Antifa and those protests, even the Vice President back then was trying to raise bail money for them to help get them out. Not so. No help for people that were jailed from the January 6 incident. And as I understand, there have been over 450 arrested, and many of those, it has been reported, we had many Federal agents show up. A couple from Alaska had their homes ransacked before the Federal agents finally accepted the fact that the woman was not the woman they had a picture of, who had stolen Speaker Pelosi's laptop. You would think as sophisticated as law enforcement is now, that our Federal agents, FBI would have been sophisticated enough to know whether somebody in the picture was the person whose house they were ransacking. But then again, FBI, it is the only law enforcement entity I am aware of that doesn't like to have any video of statements made by potential defendants. They prefer to write their own version of what the defendant or target says so they are not contradicted by having audio or videotape somewhere. But in any event, Julie Kelly's article says, ``newly obtained video shows United States Capitol police officers speaking with several January 6 protestors, including Jacob Chansley, the so-called Q Shaman, inside the Capitol that afternoon.'' One officer identified in the video and confirmed by charging documents as Officer Keith Robishaw, appears to tell Chansley's group that they won't stop them from entering the building: ``We are not against, you need to show us . . . no attacking, no assault, remain calm, Robishaw warns.'' And Chansley and other protestors instructed the crowd to act peaceful. ``This has to be peaceful,'' Chansley yelled. ``We have the right to peacefully assemble.'' The video directly contradicts what government prosecutors alleged in a complaint filed January 8 against Chansley. In the complaint: ``Robishaw and other officers calmed the protestors somewhat and directed them to leave the area from the same way they had entered. Chansley approached Officer Robishaw and screamed, among other things, that this was their House and that they were there to take the Capitol and to get Congressional leaders.'' Well, that is not on the video. And then when you see that, you have Feds that have made these allegations in writing and actually signed their name to them, well, that kind of gives us an indication why they don't want the 14,000 hours of video that would show everything that happened here at the Capitol. They don't want them released. They are fighting against releasing them. They don't want people to see them, which is a bit unusual because in the United States, one of the points of the revolution was to have an open government where you didn't have secret prosecutions and secret evidence like the Soviet Union would use, like Kafka talked about in his book, The Trial. And yet, often these days, you will have a SWAT team of Federal agents swarm and arrest people, like we had a hearing some years back. My friend, Bobby Scott, Democrat from Virginia, and I were both very concerned about the civil rights. And we didn't know what political party, if any, that these people that were being abused claimed, but we knew they were being abused regardless of race, creed, color. They were being abused and the Federal process was being abused. And that has gone on in Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican administrations. It ought to be a concern to everybody. And so, secrecy surrounding January 6 just should not exist. There is no reason for it. Let everyone see exactly what happened. Don't try to hide the facts. Don't pull an FBI and only give us a written account of your interpretation of what was said and done. Let us see the video. And don't edit it. Let us see the video. Quit trying to hide the 14,000 hours of videotape. Who are you trying to hide? Why are you trying to hide it? Well, this story gives an indication, perhaps, why these things would be hidden. And, yes, I am extremely conservative, but it doesn't matter who is being abused by abusive law officers. Truth and justice need to rule out. And this raises great concerns. So, under the rule of the House, we are not allowed to run videotape or audiotape, so the best we could do is have blowups. This is Mr. Watson--he doesn't look a whole lot like me--but Mr. Watson, and it says: ``The police here are willing to work with us and cooperate peacefully like our First Amendment allows.'' And the video reveals Officer Robishaw, and he is saying, ``We are not against--you need to show us . . . do you understand. No attacking, no assault, remain calm.'' And then you have Mr. Watson, who comes back, and he turns to the group there and says: ``We are not going to assault, we are going to be heard. Everybody--this must be peaceful.'' So there were people engaging in violence for which they need to be punished. And there were people who were trying to engage peacefully. And that was most of the tens of thousands who were outside the Capitol that didn't come into the Capitol, that had been down for the President's speech at the other end of Constitution or Pennsylvania Avenue that didn't even have time to get up here to the Capitol before some folks entered the Capitol. So there is a lot that needs to be learned, and I hope that we will have friends on the other side of the aisle who will join us in demanding the release of the 14,000 hours of videotape. There is a story from FOX News that a Politico reporter falsely suggests U.S. Capitol Police condemned GOP lawmakers for opposing the January 6 commission. That was an anonymous letter. We don't know if it was more than one, who it was, were they all Capitol Police, was there more than one. We don't know, because it was anonymous. And then the Capitol Police came out and said we are not taking a position in this whatsoever. Now, a New York Post reported--and this is Elizabeth Elizalde--she reported back January 13 that Mr. Watson was out on bond for trafficking marijuana and LSD at the time he traveled to Washington, D.C. He had been out on $103,000 bond on a drug trafficking case. Well, that is not somebody that should have been leading a protest here in Washington. But yet, here he was. And even then, he did not want to engage in any violence. But then, I ran across this story from May 7, and I had not seen this story until this week. I somehow missed it. The lame stream media did not appear to be reporting it. It is from The Orlando Sentinel, and it is an AP story, so I don't know why more places didn't get the story out there, but it is from Tallahassee. ``A Florida man was convicted Thursday of trying to organize an armed response to supporters of former President Donald Trump for an expected gathering at the State Capitol in January ahead of Joe Biden's Presidential inauguration. ``Daniel Alan Baker, 33, of Tallahassee, was convicted of two counts of transmitting a communication in interstate commerce containing a threat to kidnap or injure another person. Baker used social media to recruit people in a plot to create a circle around protestors and trap them in the Capitol, according to the FBI. The court documents describe what it said were a series of threats of violence made by Baker, along with a prediction of civil war. Baker was described as anti-Trump, anti-government, anti-white supremacists, and anti-police. Anyway, that is an interesting story that I didn't see played up by the media too big. This is an important story, and it does need to be addressed. Unfortunately, when we talk about rules violations, it turns out, on June 22 of 2016, Republicans in the majority were prevented from having an official proceeding. I didn't realize it back then, but I knew it violated all kinds of House rules, but when Democrat Members of Congress took over, and one of the Democrat Members grabbed the microphone and would not let a Republican have it. Anyway, we were prevented from having an official session of Congress, and they held the floor, held a sit-in down here for over 24 hours. And it turns out that a charge that is being leveled at some of the people, including people who were peacefully here, like some of those in Watson's group who actually were here peacefully, they are being charged with impeding an official proceeding under 18 U.S.C. 1512. I didn't realize it, but when that was signed into law before I got here back in 2002, it carried a 20-year potential sentence for impeding an official proceeding. It says ``corruptly,'' which in the definition of the statute means with intent to keep the official proceeding from happening. So it seems there were many violations of that criminal law back then. Probably the limitations has run out, and I am not suggesting we go back and arrest people for violating that law back in 2016. I am suggesting that when people violate the law that are in Congress--not just rules, but actually violate criminal laws--I would hope they would be a little less condemning of others for violating the same law that they did. Hopefully, we will see a little more bipartisan work. We had friends across the aisle saying, gee, the 9/11 Commission was completely bipartisan, both sides worked together well and wanted to get to the bottom of it. But it was clear the way the January 6 commission was being set up, where Democrats pick all of the staff, that this is not going to be a fair situation. It is not going to work out like the 9/11 Commission because this is a different time. I never thought I would see times like this when we really do have different goals. Some in this body will condemn Israel for defending themselves like they have, and not say one word about the rockets--the 4,000 rockets that have flown and killed innocent Israelis. And I know there are people in the United States who say there is no such thing as an innocent Israeli, we need to wipe them all out, we need to kill every one of them, the area from the river to the sea should be free of Jews. That gets really scary when people in America say that, feel that, because that really falls right into the same type of things that were being said in the 1930s in Europe, and we know what that led to. As Barney Fife used to say, that needs to be nipped in the bud. That needs to be stopped. It is getting dangerous not just for this country, but for all of civilization. There are people who want anarchy, including Antifa. There are people within Antifa who that is what they want. And then there are people who are Marxists, socialists, and BLM, their ultimate goal is to create a Marxist government. It is interesting, because Marx was so wrong about so much. He just missed it. He totally missed the idea that you could have a middle class that would be the real strength in a country, as it has been in the United States. He thought it was going to be a class revolution, that the workers of the world would unite and rebel against that small thin veneer of a ruling class. He didn't foresee that the real rulers would be the middle class. But as this country has progressed, we have seen billionaires arise, who think they are above the law; who think that, gee, if we move into a totalitarian government, they will be part of that thin veneer of a ruling class. Unfortunately, though, they are brilliant in business, creating monopolies and making billions of dollars, even though some don't even pay their workers enough that they can avoid food stamps. But they don't know enough about history. They don't know enough about Marxist movements. Because, sure, people who want a totalitarian, Marxist, socialist system, they are glad to have that money. $500 million to help in the Democrat effort to win the last election by just one of those oligarchs, they are glad to have that money. But history tells us that if the Marxists take over, the first thing they do is take all that money. Do you think Bernie Sanders is kidding about his disgust at billionaires? No. They will take your money. They will use it to win. And then after they win, they will take your money and you will either go to a Gulag or you are put to death. They are not going to leave billionaires around to manage things. They will take your money and you will go the way, as so many Soviets did. I hope they wake up in time to realize. But Marx was so wrong. Why are people following him? He was proven wrong in the Soviet Union. He was proven wrong in Venezuela. And then along came Gramsci. Back in the 1940s, he was put in Italian jail. He figured out, okay, Marx had it wrong; we can't get our revolution and overthrow Democratic Republic, like here in the United States, by having the middle class unite and overthrow the most wealthy. The only way to get it done in a place like that is not workers of the world unite, but it is to go into institutions and create an institutional war where you take over institutions. You pit institution against institution. You go to war against the culture. That is what we are seeing in America. That is what is being utilized. Things like the family, no matter how many studies repeatedly show that the best odds for a child to be very successful is to come from a two-parent family and a well-grounded family. That is it. That is the best chance to succeed in life. Thank God, there are so many of the most important people in the history of the United States who have come from single-mom families, single-parent families. But the odds are best if it is a traditional family, like Moses, Jesus, and the Apostle Paul talked about. And I will never forget a murder trial of the leader of a gang, over which I presided as judge. He didn't testify on the merits of the case. He was charged with murder. He murdered a Hispanic friend, but he thought that this guy had ratted him out to the police. He was convicted of killing this guy. As people testified during the trial on the merits of guilt or innocence, they were disparaging his gang and the gang members, and the violence in which they were engaged. So once he was convicted, his attorney, smartly and wisely, advised his client not to testify on sentencing, because once you start testifying, as I warned him outside the presence of the jury, you waive your right to remain silent. At that point, once you waive your right to remain silent, you are subject to cross-examination. You do have to answer the questions that are relevant and material. And you if you don't, you can be put in jail and kept in jail for not answering those questions. He understood all of that and he went against the advice of his attorney. He explained the reason he had to get up there and testify. He sat through the whole trial hearing people talk badly about his gang members, and it was an emotional thing to him. He told us, everybody in the courtroom, that he was sick of hearing the gang members being called names, being accused of things. And he said: They are the only family I ever had. They are my family. He didn't have a father, that he knew of. His mother was working and she was gone much of the time. And, as he said, that gang was his family. And I was thinking, that is what happens when you have a war on poverty that starts by bribing families to get the father out of the home. Now, I know that was not the intent. The intent was to help single moms, but the effect of the Federal Government paying people to not have fathers in the home, going back to the mid-60s, has changed this society, has eliminated fathers from the lives of children, and has prevented many from getting the education that was once so highly sought in America. When my youngest daughter was going into high school, one of the high school leaders, employees there, indicated that about 40 percent of her class would not graduate and would drop out of school. I couldn't believe those numbers. Forty percent in Tyler, Texas, will not likely graduate and drop out of school. You can't maintain an advanced society when 40 percent of a generation are not learning to read and write, and they are not finishing even a secondary education. You can't maintain a society like that. We are doomed unless we get that turned around. That is still the case if we don't get this turned around, where they get a better education. People will say: Well, more Federal Government is the answer. It hasn't been. Back when the States and local government were totally in charge of the education of students through high school, we had a higher percentage graduating back then. They were doing better on tests back then. I remember in the early nineties--I believe that is when it was--that there was a report that SAT scores had been getting lower than they were back in the seventies, when I took the SAT. So they had made an adjustment in the scoring of the SAT so that the scores appeared to be better. Back then, I asked the president at Texas A&M, when I was down there on the board of directors of the former student association: When they adjusted the scoring of the SAT, what did that do? He said: Well, there was a formula so you can't say it added a specific number of points, but, on average, it probably added 200 points or so to the current takers of this SAT scores. Also, that it wouldn't look so bad since the Federal Government basically started telling the States and local governments what to do about education. So apparently we were doing better back in the late sixties and seventies on our SATs until the Federal Government got more involved. We were doing better on our SATs until President Carter created a Department of Education. When I took it, I did very well. It got me into the honors program at Texas A&M. I am sure that shocks people who think that I am the dumbest guy in Congress. I was part of the honors program, and that was really nice. About 150 of the best scores on the SAT of the class of about 3,500, I think we were. But how in the world do students not get as educated after we create a Federal Department of Education that starts dictating what students have to do to be educated? It sounds like maybe we need to get back to the 10th Amendment observation that those powers not specifically enumerated in the Constitution are reserved to the States and people. It seemed like perhaps the best education control is local control, where the parents can be more hands-on. But I understand when, at the same time, the Federal Government is paying to have only a single parent and not paying for two parents to be in the home that the studies were right. It helps to have a two- parent home to increase the odds of success for the children. We are having a hearing that I left. I had finished my part in the hearing and came over here. But it is on guns and discussions about mass gun shootings that break your heart. Innocent people. There seem to be so many more now. But if you are going to have Weather Underground people in universities teaching that there is no right, there is no wrong, it is all relative; if you are going to have people teaching there is no God, there is no ultimate source of right, wrong, and justice; if you are going to be teaching that, then you are going to have what our Founders would have called an immoral and an irreligious people. John Adams was a fan of the Constitution, although there were lots of bitter fights. Back in those days, they could yell, they could fuss, and they could do like we do. I fussed at friends across the aisle, and I really like them. I just think they are wrong on some things. It doesn't keep me from liking them if we disagree. But as he said, ``this Constitution is intended for a moral and religious people; it is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.'' He is right. We have a Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, and it is not to be infringed upon by the Federal Government or the State Government. But the problem is when we quit teaching about right and wrong; when we started preventing the greatest, most purchased book in the history of the world, the Bible, from being utilized in schools, then it created a vacuum, it created a void. And that was filled by people who were a bit hedonistic and began teaching that there is no ultimate right or wrong. C.S. Lewis talked about he was proud to be an atheist. Or you could say agnostic, Mr. Speaker. He just didn't believe there was any way to determine that there really was a God. He used to like to goad people who would say they were Christians: Well, tell me, if there is a good God, how can there be so much injustice in the world? No matter what they said, especially these debates he would have with other Oxford professors or students when they would try to explain why there was a good God even though there was so much injustice, he would come back and say: Yes, that is all well and good, but wouldn't it be easier just to say there is no such thing as a good God? One day he realized, how could he possibly say there was injustice in the world if there was not somewhere some absolute source of right and wrong and justice and injustice? Because, as he said, it would be like a man blind from birth trying to describe light. You can't describe justice if there isn't an ultimate source of fairness and justice. And that ultimate source put a little of that in every heart. Some develop calluses. It is kind of like the olfactory. I have read that that is supposed to be the most sensitive sense, the best memory of any of our senses. I think Mr. Science or somebody was explaining one day on television that the olfactory nerves are a bit like a cup. Those cells fill up with a smell, and it is like filling up a cup with water. Once it fills up, you can't detect that there is more water out there because it is full. The olfactory, once it is full of a smell, it quits detecting the smell is there. It is the same way when we are around evil or wrongdoing long enough. I saw it as a judge many times. Mothers would say: Hey, don't hang around with those people, they are bad news. And they would hang around with them. And when I would sentence them, they would say: My mother said I shouldn't be hanging out with these guys; I did, and it ruined my life. Mr. Speaker, if you hang around with evil long enough, then you quit noticing the good. That has happened for too many people. They didn't have families and they didn't have churches and institutions that they were part of that taught them there is a right and wrong. Once C.S. Lewis realized there has to be some source of absolute right and wrong, then he realized there has to be a God, and then he went from there to becoming a Christian. As he said, just because there are different degrees of recognition and appreciation for justice doesn't mean that there isn't an absolute source of justice. He said that it is like music. Some people come closer to hitting the right note than others. It doesn't mean the music doesn't exist. But in this country, we had that as a solid basis. Our founding was not about 1619 or 1620. The Pilgrims didn't come over because of slavery. They came over for freedom of religion, as a place where Christians would not be persecuted. Despite different denominations battling and interdenominational battles, people, for most of our history, have not been persecuted for being Christians. Until recently, we didn't see a lot of anti-Semitism in the United States, but it is growing. As my friend, Brad Sherman, was pointing out, it is alarming to see the anti-Semitism growing in violence, as the event out in California. So I hope that we can come back to a place where people who may have violated the impeding and official proceeding, as happened January 22, 2016, will be a little more understanding of people engaged in peaceful protest, who didn't and wouldn't engage in violence. We will agree on the violence: they need to be punished. But I hope that we can work together to advance this country to the point where there is fairness, there is justice, and we are not going to discriminate against people because of the color of their skin. We will be a colorblind society. Dr. King had a dream, and people are turning it into a nightmare. Let's get back to his dream and make it happen so that he can be the luminary that God intended him to be. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I was speaking with my friend, Congressman Green. And he is my friend. We have differences on issues, but he is a brother, and, anyway, it is nice to have friends. I appreciated my colleague, Mr. Raskin, pointing to the violence in the Middle East. That is a tremendous problem. I am going through a new book right now by Os Guinness, ``Magna Carta of Humanity,'' and one of the points he makes early on in the book is that Christians should take note when Jews are under attack. When Israel is under attack, Christians are going to be next. And Israel should take note that when Christians are under attack, Israel is going to be next. Certainly, in my lifetime, what I have seen when the United States blesses, does things helpful to Israel, we seem to be blessed, and when we betray our ally Israel, we don't seem to be blessed. I have looked for a verse like that, that says those who betray Israel will be blessed, and I haven't found that one in the Bible. The Bible--those of us that have looked into the history of the House of Representatives and the Senate--is the most quoted book in the history of Congress in session on the Record. So it is worth looking to things like that. When I said that running for Congress years ago was a calling, a reporter asked if I heard voices, I told the reporter: ``I wish I heard voices.'' Life would be so much easier if I heard an audible voice telling me what to do. But since I don't hear voices, under my religious beliefs, I seek wisdom by reading the Bible, by praying, and by seeking wise counsel. That is what some of the leaders of Israel obviously have been doing, but they get put into a box. Four thousand rockets launched into Israel from the Gaza Strip, and why are there people in the Gaza Strip who would do such a thing? It is because Israel, in the hopes of peace, made the unilateral gesture of giving the Gaza Strip, a place where there were so many Jewish Israelis living there--they had wonderful homes, many had greenhouses. They could live there. They could provide for their food there. Thinking a unilateral gesture would be recognized as an ultimate effort at true peace, Israel handed over the Gaza Strip to Palestinians, and that is not necessarily the Palestinian homeland. But they handed it over, and it wasn't too long before most of the greenhouses were destroyed and tunnels were found. I think 9 miles of tunnels have recently been destroyed that were being used to smuggle things into Israel itself. That unilateral effort for peace by Israel has ended up being one of the worst nightmares for Israel. Most days, as I understand it, the rockets are launched. They never know when they are coming. Children live in fear every single day, not knowing if a rocket is going to come their way and kill them. Parents have to have a safe room where, when they hear the siren signaling that bombs are coming, they have to grab their kids and run to the safe room. Some years back, when I was in Israel and was having a conversation with a mom who lived in Israel, and they had had many rockets come their way, the siren went off. She was in the car. There was no safe room to run to. So her tiny boy--I think he was 5 or 6--she just leaned over and covered him with her body in case the car was hit. It wasn't hit. When the rocket attack was over, her son was really upset and said: ``Mama, please don't ever do that again. If you are going to die from a rocket attack, I want to die with you.'' That is something the Israelis live with every day. Rockets are far more sophisticated now than they were when the rocket attacks first started. But as I have pointed out to Prime Minister Netanyahu before, there has never been a time when Israel gave away land trying to buy peace that that land was not used as a staging area from which to attack Israel. That is the way they are rewarded every time they give away land that is under their control. In the Sinai attacks, they are not launching with rockets from there, but President el-Sisi told me that there were probably more guns per person in the Sinai when he took over as President than any other place he was aware of. There were so many weapons. Once Israel turned that over, it just became a place where there were lots of weapons. There were tunnels into Israel. So, of course, when there are tunnels that allow people to come into Israel with weapons, with ways to kill Israelis, then the Israelis have to use what is known as self-defense. As far as our history, I read last year that one of the basic goals of BLM was to destroy Western-Style families. And I shrugged to myself, Western-Style families? Those aren't Western-Style families. That came from Moses. Moses said it came from God. It wasn't Western civilization-style families. It was what Moses said when he said a man shall leave his father and mother, and a woman will leave her home, and the two will become one. Then when Jesus was asked about marriage and divorce, he quoted Moses verbatim, a man shall leave his father and mother, the woman will leave her home, the two will become one flesh. Then Jesus added a line that Moses had not used, and that is when Jesus said, and what God has joined together, let no one separate or put asunder. Later, the Apostle Paul quoted Moses and Jesus. So knowing all that, when I hear BLM wants to destroy Western-Style families, they are not Western style. They are Mosaic. They are from Moses, as confirmed by Jesus. This is the best building block for a society, for a civilization. Naturally, if anyone is going to take us into a totalitarian government, an Orwellian government where--we don't say Big Brother anymore. Orwell called it Big Brother, I will say that. But now, under the current rules of the House, we would say big sibling, big sibling totalitarian government with a ministry of truth that every day rewrites history to make the government look better. Then, of course, they had the Ministry of Love, so that if you say anything that is different from what the Ministry of Truth said you had to say, then you are picked up by the Ministry of Love and tortured for hours, days, weeks, months, or years until you disclaim what you said about the Ministry of Truth's inaccuracy. Those are the kinds of things that Orwell wrote about in the late 1940s. He had been through cancer treatment, so some think that is what gave him inspiration for the kind of torture that the Ministry of Love was putting people through. But he went up, as I recall, to Scotland and wrote from a friend's home there the book 1984. As I have said before, the only thing he appears to have gotten wrong was the year; it wasn't 1984. But we are seeing these tactics. We even have people proposing here at the Capitol that we should have a ministry that specifies exactly what truth is, and then anybody that says anything different than truth that the ministry here or the Federal agency here puts out, they should be able to be arrested for a crime. And I am like, wow, that is right out of Orwell. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Owens). I love Burgess Owens. I am thrilled that he is a Member of Congress, and every day I serve with him, I am more grateful he is here. Honoring Roger Morgan

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, look, things have changed a lot since the 9/11 Commission. Back then, we did not have a problem on either side of the aisle condemning anti-Semitic remarks. Now one side has a problem doing that. Back then, we had never, in the history of Congress, had one party commit what arguably is felony, up to 20 years in prison, by preventing an ongoing session of Congress, the exact charge, 18 USC 1512, that is being alleged against people that came in. As a judge, I would have no problem sentencing anybody that broke into the Capitol, anybody that committed a crime here. But let's be real. The partisanship has been dramatic. That is why it is different now than the 9/11 Commission. Let's get back to being bipartisan and not use every tool as a partisan stick to beat Republicans with.