Scott Perry

Mr. PERRY

Mr. PERRY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy), the other gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert), and my good friend, the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Higgins). Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. PERRY. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. PERRY. Mr. Speaker, Mr. Roy is absolutely right. Before I turn it over to the gentleman from Texas, I want to prime the pump here a little bit. The Department of Energy was created for one sole purpose, one purpose and one purpose only: To make the United States energy independent. My good friend from the State of Texas just went through the list. We were energy independent about 1\3/4\ years ago. It took that long to not only make us energy dependent, but your bills are going through the roof. Look, I know that people will say, well, gas prices are actually coming down now. Ladies and gentlemen, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the President has been unloading that. It was created, set aside for natural disasters. What is happening right now today? What has been happening over the last 48 hours in our country with our friends from Florida, right? They might be able to use some of that, but, of course, it is at the lowest level it has been in the history of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It wasn't meant for political disasters. It was meant for national security and natural disasters. But yet, this is what is happening. If you don't like the look of your electricity bill now--now, when the weather is pretty temperate in the United States--just give it about 3 months and see how you are going to like it. You can blame it on one thing, one thing and one thing alone: The left, the Democratic left, the Democratic Party, and those in it that are forcing and imposing this on you. I yield to the good gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert), my other friend.

Mr. PERRY

Mr. PERRY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the good gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy). He is spot on. It is tyranny. We use euphemisms around this town. We call it loan forgiveness. You took out the loan, and we are going to forgive you paying it back using someone else's money. That is not loan forgiveness. That is socialism. Socialism is tyranny. Taking it, like you said, from some hardworking individual--maybe they wanted to go to college and didn't have the opportunity. Maybe they didn't have the opportunity because they didn't have the money, maybe because of their family situation. It doesn't matter. Maybe they chose not to go to college. They chose not to buy something they didn't want to pay for. Now, the President says we are going to use the Heroes Act. This is a fascinating example. I told my colleagues around here who want to keep on helping, we have to establish comity here--comity, not comedy. It is a comedy, unfortunately. But we have to work together. What will it take for them to understand that every step in good faith that we take is abused by the folks who hate this country and hate us? I hate to use that terminology, but that is where it is. They use the Heroes Act, enacted after 9/11, for those who were sent, who went to fight, who had to give up some of their time to pay for their student loans, pay for their education, use that to forgive these loans for other people who made the decision but apparently didn't intend to pay. That is the definition of tyranny. The good gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy), my friend, mentioned the arrest in Bucks County. I just remind everybody that, today, this place voted on sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the Department of Justice, like they don't have enough, right? The Department of Justice raided this pastor's house--not just a father of seven but a pastor--at 7 o'clock in the morning, beating on the door. When you don't answer fast enough because maybe you are upstairs in bed and it takes you awhile to figure out what is going on and get your clothes on and get down the stairs because you don't want to be standing out on the front lawn in your skivvies in front of the neighborhood--that is what the FBI does. If you don't get there fast enough, they are going to break down your door. These agents all rush in, arms drawn, pointed at this poor individual. Kids are up on the stairs crying. I don't know how many. Mr. Roy says 25, 24, something. Maybe it was that. Whatever it was, here is what I know it wasn't. It wasn't a phone call to the magistrate. Understand that the court, the State court, already threw this thing out. This gentleman, this individual, was exercising his First Amendment rights. Somebody made a claim. The State court and the police said there is nothing here. The Federal Government said: Look, you people are all domestic terrorists who disagree. You disagree with us, so now you are domestic terrorists. Instead of calling the guy up and saying: Look, the Federal Government wants to arrest you for this. You have never had a record. You are nonviolent. You are going to have to show up at the magistrate's office to be arrested, or we can do it the other way. Which way would you like? Offer the opportunity. The guy is not a convicted drug felon, not a murderer. He has nothing violent in his record. But they break into the house as a show of force, as a show to make sure everybody else in the country knows if you have a differing opinion, don't you dare say it. Don't you dare. That is the definition of tyranny. That is exactly the definition of tyranny. What else can it be? Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. PERRY. Mr. Speaker, I can't tell my colleague that it is not tyranny. It certainly is. This is the same OSHA that at some point required reporting of adverse reactions to the so-called vaccine, the jab. In the dark of night, in the middle of the week, when no one was paying attention, that requirement went away. They still tried to make private employers force their employees to take this jab, but they didn't want to know. They have to report everything else, right? They have to report every single slip and fall, every industrial accident. We want people to be safe. But we never gave them a license to tell us what to do with our own bodies and make those decisions. For goodness' sake, if they had the temerity to force us to do it, the least they can do is keep records on the adverse effects. Mr. Speaker, they didn't want to know, did they? They didn't want to know. They don't want you to know their tyranny. They are not for medical freedom. They are not for education freedom. They are not for economic freedom. They are not for any of our freedoms. That is where we are today. That is why Chip, the good gentleman from Texas, and I are here this evening, to talk about the tyranny that this place, this room, the body that we serve in, the body that we fought to serve in, the institution that we revered growing up, we are so upset with because this institution, this body, is aiding and abetting this tyranny. This is the body that is supposed to be ending the tyranny, that is supposed to be fighting the tyranny. Yet, here we are.

Mr. PERRY

Mr. PERRY. Mr. Speaker, I would just ask my colleagues, how many more times do we need to see it, the abuse of power by the Department of Justice? I am sure, just like I do, you travel your district, you talk to people. Some agree with you; some don't agree with you. You know what not one person has said to me? Agree or disagree, not one person has said to me: You know what we need, Perry, we need more money for the Department of Justice. Not one. I don't know why that is, but maybe it is because of the abuse of power. I appreciate my colleagues that want to do something with Big Tech. I sure want to do something, too. In about 3 months, the folks who are destroying this country are not going to be in charge around here, and then we can do something meaningful. We don't have to take the bad to get a couple good things. We can just do the good things and leave the bad things out in 3 more months. We do a lot of things in good faith around here, Mr. Speaker. We do a lot of things in good faith. I am tired of having those things abused. People will say: Well, what are you talking about, Perry? I will give you an example. President Biden used the HEROES Act--the HEROES Act made after 9/11 to support people that were called to duty to go and get their education, but they were called to duty. He used that to forgive the loans of all these people that incurred student debt. It is an abuse. First of all, it is not forgiveness. It is Marxism, right? Because you are not forgiven, you are paying for it. It is not forgiveness. How many more times do we need to see it? In good faith. In good faith. In 3 months, Mr. Speaker, under new management here, we can get a great bill instead of some mediocre thing where we have got to accept something terrible, $280 million a year, $1\1/2\ billion more for the abuse of power. Two dozen agents raid a guy's home, a pastor, 7:00 in the morning in Bucks County. Oh, yeah, DOJ needs more money for that, right? You know what they could have done? They could have saved a lot of money. They could have picked up the phone, called the magistrate. The magistrate could have called the pastor and said, You know what, the Federal Government is going to charge you. Show up down here at the office, we need to charge you. And I bet he would have shown up. The guy is not a criminal. More money for that? No way, Mr. President. I urge a ``no'' vote.

Mr. PERRY

Mr. PERRY. Madam Speaker, this is what we have. We are not the executive branch. We don't enforce the laws. But when the executive branch governs against the will of the people--and ladies and gentlemen, what we hear all day around this place is, oh, they are trying to destroy democracy because they have a disagreement, they have a political disagreement, they are trying to destroy democracy. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a Republic. Madam Speaker, this is a Republic. And the power of the purse, the power of taking from the people a portion of what they earn and distributing it through the Federal Government through its policies resides right here, right here in this House of Representatives. It is the only thing we have. We can't arrest people. We can't prosecute people. We can say enough is enough. You are governing against the will of the American people. You are governing against the best interest of your country. We are not going to help. We signed up not to help. You are not going to get our vote. If you want to do it, you can own it. You can go explain to the American people why they can't afford their bills; why they can't find things on the grocery shelves; and why their police aren't on the streets; and why they are worried about when they step out somebody from some other country who doesn't belong here is going to kill their children or abduct them or rob their store. You can explain it because we are not going to because we are not going to vote to continue this charade, this assault on the American taxpayer and American citizens.

Mr. PERRY. Madam Speaker, I thank the good gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) for bringing this to light. He is absolutely right. We didn't come here, none of us came here on either side of the aisle, because we thought Washington was perfect. We came here because we know it is broken. If you know something is broken, why do you keep doing the exact same things that have broken it? Yet, we are being asked, once again, when we come here--well, this is what we always do. We are running out of money. We have to pass this. I remind everybody, we are, what, $32-, $31-, $30-something trillion in debt. They don't even print this money anymore; they just digitally create it. We don't have the money to do this. Not one more penny to rule against the consent of the govern is what I say.

Mr. PERRY. Madam Speaker, what my good friend from Texas who joins me in the Freedom Caucus is alluding to is we are being asked to fund a government for a period of time in which the election will occur. We are going to run out of money here in 9 days, and we are being asked to fund the government, and all things that my good friend from Texas has already outlined, all those atrocities, but not until the rest of the year, just until sometime in December after the election when people have lost their election and there is no accountability. You know what they are going to do then? They are going to waltz right in here, and say: Oh, you know what? We are running out of money again. We got to do it again. You know what? I don't have to stand for election. So if you think this one is bad, if you think all the things that Mr. Roy has outlined that are in this one, more money for COVID when there is no more pandemic--so says the President of the United States--if you think that is bad, just wait until these folks don't have to stand for election in December. We are saying, if we are going to fund a package, first of all, it has to fix these things. First of all, it has to fix these things. Second of all, send it into the next term so that the people's voice can be heard after November's election. But that is not going to happen. That is not going to happen. There is no way--as my good friend from Texas says, not one more penny. Not one more penny to support these failed policies, these policies that go against the people that are governed by this town.

Mr. PERRY. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for the time and for bringing up what we know is wrong, what we clearly know is wrong. Our finest and the absolute healthiest population, by the way, in the United States of America is in the military. We are down to less than half a percent of Americans who even serve in uniform. And recruiters, even before the pandemic, were telling us they were concerned about what they were looking forward to because the population really just couldn't meet the recruiting goals because people were either criminals, overweight, or what have you. So we already have a problem, and then you get this vaccine mandate. It is experimental, and they force the best of the best to leave the service. Meanwhile, we can't defend ourselves. China is on the rise, Madam Speaker, you have got Russia threatening nuclear war, and the President declares the pandemic over while we are kicking our finest people, people who said: Put me on the front line, I will sign the blank check and give everything, including my life, in defense of our country. And we say, no, thank you. Unless you get this jab and bend the knee--and bend the knee--your service here is not wanted.

Mr. PERRY. How about this: anybody who has served, anybody who has worn the uniform knows that as important as recruiting is, to replace those who are retiring after spending the best years, their most productive years, and their most healthy years of their lives in uniform, the most important thing is retention. It is how you treat the people who are going into battle. We are not interested in retaining anybody, apparently, unless they bend the knee. So we are going to kick someone out after the American taxpayer has spent a boatload of money training someone. Madam Speaker, do you know what the cost of training an F-18 pilot is or an AH-64 pilot or the ultimate weapon, the American infantryman? Do you know what the cost of that is, Madam Speaker? After 18 years of service, the best years of their life, right before they are ready to retire because they won't take the jab, we say that we are not interested in retaining you, even knowing that we can't meet our recruiting goals. This is a complete dereliction of duty, and it is inviting to the enemies of the United States. This weakness is provocative, and you are seeing it all around the globe. This is all done by the Biden administration and leftwing Democrats who somehow think that the control that comes from the emergency pandemic order is better than securing our Nation. And even under the circumstance where the President himself said the pandemic is over, yet as my good friend from Texas just said, while we stand here at this very moment, while the pandemic is over, we are processing people out of the military at this moment.

Mr. PERRY. Madam Speaker, in Pennsylvania, of course, we stand on top of hundreds and hundreds of years of our natural resources that are abundant and readily available. They are cleaner than any other place on the planet, and we have got an administration that says: Keep it in the ground, don't use it. Madam Speaker, half of Pennsylvania if you had gone back 20 years ago looked like the 1950s, maybe not half of Pennsylvania, but a good portion of the north central portion of Pennsylvania because there were no jobs. The leftist policies, of course, in Pennsylvania chased all the opportunity away, and families were struggling to hold on to their farms. Then horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing came into favor, and these farms and these communities were saved and brought into the 21st century. The Obama administration and this administration has come in and said, oh, no. Back to poverty for you. You are not going to be able to afford to heat your home. And if you are, guess what? You are going to be making a choice between heating your home this winter and feeding your family, all by design, all on purpose, and all intentional by this administration. It is unacceptable, and as my good friend from Texas said, we are being asked in the next few days here, whenever they come up with whatever they come up with, to keep funding this and to keep funding that kind of policy. Why would we provide one vote for it? There is not one Republican vote. Quite honestly, not one Democrat should vote for it if they love their country, if they love the people in their communities, and if they care about the people who are suffering and struggling to pay their bills.

Mr. PERRY

Mr. PERRY. Madam Speaker, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted NAY on Roll Call No. 440.

Mr. PERRY

Mr. PERRY. It is an egregious failure. I have to remind everybody that that oil, that strategic reserve, was put in there at rock bottom prices.

Mr. PERRY. With about the minute-and-a-half we have left, I will turn it to Mr. Good. He can close it out or I will. I think, Mr. Hice, you have characterized it correctly. It doesn't matter whether you live in the country or the city or the suburbs. Doesn't matter what your background is. Everybody is feeling this.

Mr. PERRY. I think that is well put. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. PERRY. I can't imagine that our colleagues don't care. We can't imagine that. We are not here to fearmonger. We are talking about real-life situations that are occurring. This is not about trying to invoke fear in the people that pay our salary, our bosses, our constituents. But we are here to defend them and to be their voice and to echo in these Halls the things that they tell us, the things that they are enduring every single day, the things that they are having to live through. When you talk about it happening right now, it is happening right now. My concern, among others, that is happening right now is there is no end in sight. None of these things are fixed overnight. This has been a--I wouldn't say a slow-moving train. It has actually been a fairly quickly moving train for about a year-and-a-half where we have watched the decline of our purchasing power, we have watched the increase of everything that we can't afford, lack of things on the shelf, like peanut butter, basic staples, baby food. We have watched all of that. These things take time to be resolved. And if they are going to be resolved at any point in the future, we have to get started now; sometime. I don't know when it is going to be. We are here this week, and then we are going to be gone in August. Then everybody is going to come back in September to see how much more money we can spend before the end of the year, right? And nothing on the agenda that I see, nothing so far that we have voted on this week, has done anything to lead us to believe that we are going to address this problem. So we are frustrated for the people that we have to face every single day who come up to us at the grocery store. We are buying gas, too. We are at our grocery stores. We are at the hardware store. We are at the feed store. We are at the clothing store and retail outlets. They walk up to you and say: What are you doing about it to stop it? We don't have the executive branch, Mr. Hice. We certainly don't have this branch. The power of the purse belongs in this branch. Look, you don't want to disparage sailors, but they are spending like somebody who doesn't care about how much money they spend. It is very, very frustrating. So all we are left with, Mr. Good, my friend from Virginia, is the rhetoric we have to let the people at home know that we think enough of them, and we care enough about what they are dealing with to come in and make sure that it is put on the record for all posterity, for all time, that we recognize what is happening to them. We do not agree with this. If we were in charge here, things wouldn't be happening this way.

Mr. PERRY. Go ahead, Mr. Good.

Mr. PERRY. And not to mention selling portions of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China. To China. Again, the national security threat.

Mr. PERRY. That is exactly right, it is an adversary. Because they say so. We wish it weren't true, but they say so. I am reading that 26 million low-income households who had managed to put aside a nest egg over the term of the last Presidency and the last economy before a year ago have had that savings wiped out just trying to keep up with the prices that are now occurring, and we are only 1\1/ 2\ years into this. You know, we heard in the beginning, well, inflation is transitory, don't worry, it is not going to last. Then we heard, it is only going to be a point, a small interest rate raise here or there to control this inflation. When are we going to stop believing these lies? This is not transitory. Now, of course, they are saying, well, look, this is not a recession. A recession is two quarters of declining GDP, that is what it has always been described as. Now, since the left is in charge, it means something else. Here is what it means to families who are struggling. They see no light at the end of the tunnel. They don't know where this ends. They are having a hard time paying their mortgage, their car payments, and trying to figure out if they can afford their insurance payments which the government has really messed up by being involved in--too involved in--healthcare. There is no free market there. There is no price competition there because the government is too involved. People have to pay their bills. And they didn't have this stress 1\1/ 2\ years ago, but they have got it right now. The worst part is, there is no end in sight. They don't see anything changing, right? They just saw basis points go up again today. Look, if you are a young couple that is trying to start out--look, maybe you are an older couple and you are trying to downsize and you got preapproved for a loan, then the Fed goes ahead and raises the interest rate, and you start the process all over again because you are not preapproved anymore because your buying power just went down, I don't know, maybe about $100,000, which is significant when you are trying to buy a home and get started or when you are trying to downsize from the home you can't afford now. Go ahead, Mr. Hice.

Mr. PERRY. Madam Speaker, thank you for recognizing the time. I also thank my colleague, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Good), for being here with us. I am going to talk this evening and kind of follow up on my good colleague from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert). Some astounding information, and I know that he offers it on a regular basis, and I wish more people would tune in. Of course, I wish more people here would hear his message and, more importantly than hearing his message, take some action in that regard. It is astounding that, in a year and a half, the people who are working, and everybody is that can do it, they have lost a month and a half of wages. Think about how long you work every year, essentially for free, because you are still working but you don't get the money because you have to pay your taxes, and that date moves a little back and forth. Sometimes it is in May. Sometimes it is in April. But then add another 2 months. If you add another 2 months onto that that you are working, but you are not being paid, that is astounding. As I understand it, the average wages under the President for a typical family--and I represent typical families. The average wage of a typical family right now has dropped $450 a month. Now, that might not seem like a lot of money to people in Washington, D.C., people that invest on Wall Street, people that drive fancy cars and belong to the country club. But where I live, $450 is real. That is groceries. People are trying to pay the bill for daycare so that they can be at work. Of course, the cost for that is going up. People are paying more every single day to drive the vehicle that they are struggling to afford. I talk to people every single day. Every single day, they tell me: ``I can't pay my bills right now, and I am not sure what to do. I am trying to decide how much to spend on food because I know I have to have enough for gas, and it is not just enough for the end of the week. I am never going to catch up at the rate we are going. I am not going to catch up. What is happening? What are we doing?'' I mean, look at the price of gas. I mean, the President just released another day's worth of supply from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Mr. Good, you haven't been here very long, but you know the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is meant for natural disasters or national security events. It is not meant for political crises. A day's worth of oil sold on the open market, I imagine so that the President can say, ``Look, I am trying to help.'' But it is like the fireman saying, ``Hey, look, I am putting out the fire,'' when the fireman started the fire in the first place. Nobody says, ``Well, that is great. We are happy you are putting out the fire, but if you hadn't started it in the first place, we wouldn't be in this problem.'' Mr. Good, are you talking to folks like this where you live?

Mr. PERRY. We filled it up and paid as little as possible for it, probably the lowest prices in decades, and now it is out there being spent at the highest prices ever.

Mr. PERRY. Mr. Good, you are right. Mr. Hice, with all due respect, you live in Georgia, but Mr. Good mentioned heating your home. Now it is the height of summer, right? The dog days of summer are upon us. Right now we are trying to cool our homes, and we are in fear of blackouts across these United States of America in the 21st century. Unnecessary, but a reality. California, Texas, coming across the country, all due to policy. But what is coming up is going to be devastating. It is going to be devastating to people across the country, especially in the northern portions of it where I live, where Mr. Good lives, and you are going to suffer a portion of it, too, the inability to afford to heat your home because electricity prices are going through the roof as well. People realize it now, and they see it now as they pay for their air conditioning, and they probably raised the temperature in the home a little bit to try to help defray the costs, but heating your home is different, and being very, very cold in the wintertime, people die from that. People die from that, especially in places where I live where winters can be harsh, and they are much harsher in points further north. That is coming. When you talk about the rise in the cost of living, inflation, and essentially taxation, when you talk about that with no end in sight-- people are trying right now, they can't pay their bills now. They certainly can't put anything aside to plan for what they know is coming, it is going to be a long, tough winter. It starts getting cold, it starts going below freezing just right here in Washington, D.C., mid-October. It is right around the corner, and it is going to last until the end of March into April and May of next year. It is coming, and right now there is no end in sight. We haven't heard anything from the administration about how people are going to be helped to afford to pay their bills. You are not going to be able to sit in the car and turn it on and turn the heater on, because you can't afford the gas. You are not going to be able to sit in your home and turn the heat on. That is coming.

Mr. PERRY. Not only that, as the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Good), my friend, knows--look, I am from Pennsylvania, we have got a lot of natural resources right under our feet. Instead of coming to Americans to say, ``Can we produce more?'' he is going to people that hate America--Venezuela, Saudi Arabia--even as much as saying that, even though we have sanctioned Iran's oil with this potential Iran nuclear deal pending, they would go there and ask Iran. But we are getting too far afield here. Look, people are struggling every single day. This is not due to incompetence. This is not due to negligence. This is a plan. This is on purpose.

Mr. PERRY. Yeah, they are executing the plan. This is by design. We live in an energy economy. Whether you like it or whether you don't, whether you agree with it or whether you don't, whether we can get to more clean energy at some point in the future than we have now or whether we can't get there as fast as we would like to, we are where we are right now. Most of us are reliant on the natural resources that are beneath our feet that the Earth provides for us. We have done a great job in America of doing it more cleanly, more professionally, more ethically than any other country on the planet. But yet there is this war on these natural resources and a failure or a refusal to acknowledge that in raising those prices, when the policies raise those prices, they touch every single American citizen, every single one. So it is not just the gas at the pump, because that is tough enough, but the guy that is driving the truck that brings that stuff, he has got to pay a higher price, and so he has got to charge you a higher price. And the electricity that is generated, that costs more. So every single means of production, every single point along the way raises the price. How is that manifested? People go to the store, whether it is the grocery store or whether it is a retail outlet--you saw one of the major retail outlets just talked about, just issued their report that their sales are down on regular consumer goods because people can't afford them--people cannot afford to buy them. People are having to make difficult choices, not because this is just happening, but because this is being imposed on them. It is being imposed on them. I saw the Fed today increased the rate 75 basis points. Most people say, well, what does that mean to me? That means the value of your dollar, every dollar that you get is worth less, right? Inflation. People say, well, what does inflation mean? Inflation is taxation. Inflation is the cost of living. Inflation is when you go to the grocery store, if you can find peanut butter on the shelf and you could afford two jars of it for your children last month, you are going to have to pay more this month and maybe you are going to have to cut back on toilet paper that you couldn't get 2 months ago or maybe you are going to have to cut back on baby formula that you can't afford to cut back on because your baby is crying. That is what it means. The whole way up and down the chain, everybody, the value of every single dollar you earn is worth less, not to mention the fact, as my friend from Arizona mentioned, that you are already working about 1\1/ 2\ months more without pay because of this. This is what is happening to the American people, and nothing is being done to reverse course to change this. Nothing is being done. I see my good friend, the gentleman from the great State of Georgia (Mr. Hice) is here. I just wonder if he wants to comment on any of that.