The publication is reproduced in full below:
ISSUES OF THE DAY
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Torres of New York). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2021, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, we had a bill today regarding abortion; and when I think about saving lives of innocent babies, one name that comes to mind is Henry Hyde, and another name that comes to my mind is Chris Smith.
We have some people that have worked tirelessly, selflessly on this issue, and one of those people is Chris Smith. He is a leader.
I am proud to yield to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith).
Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank him for his leadership. And I thank the gentlewoman from Washington (Mrs. Rodgers) for her extraordinary efforts on behalf of the unborn. It has been, frankly, a team effort, and what a team.
Mr. Speaker, the legislation under consideration by the House today is deceptively titled the Women's Health Protection Act of 2021. Abortion is not healthcare, unless one construes the precious life of an unborn child to be analogous to a tumor to be excised or a disease to be vanquished.
This bill is far outside the American mainstream and goes far beyond Roe v. Wade. This bill constitutes an existential threat to unborn children and to the value of life itself.
For the first time ever, by Congressional statute, H.R. 3755 would legally authorize and enable the violent death of unborn baby girls and boys by dismemberment, decapitation, forced expulsion from the womb, deadly poisons, and other methods at any time and for any reason until birth.
A significant majority of Americans are deeply concerned about protecting the lives of unborn children. A 2021 Marist poll found that 65 percent of Americans want Roe v. Wade reinterpreted by either sending the issue back to the States, or to stop legalized abortion. Of that 65 percent majority of Americans, 40 percent of Democrats would ``allow certain restrictions on abortions as determined by each State.''
If enacted, this bill will nullify nearly every modest pro-life restriction ever enacted by the States, including Women's Right to Know laws in 35 States, parental involvement statutes in 37 States, the pain-capable unborn child protection laws in 19 States, waiting periods in 26 States, and so much more.
Seventy percent of Americans, Mr. Speaker, according to the 2021 Marist poll, oppose abortion if the child will be born with Down syndrome. Of over half of those who identify as pro-choice, 56 percent oppose or are strongly opposed to abortion due to the expectation the child will be born with Down syndrome.
Americans seek to embrace and not erase those babies identified as having an extra chromosome.
H.R. 3755, however, overturns State laws that protect children with Down syndrome.
{time} 1300
Regarding international law, the bill falsely states that: ``Core human rights treaties ratified by the United States protect access to abortion.''
That is absolutely untrue. In fact, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the United States has ratified, is concerned about unborn children being killed. It states, in Article 6, that ``every human being has the inherent right to life'' and that ``no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.''
It goes on to declare that the sentence of death--in other words, capital punishment--shall not be carried out on pregnant women. Why? The ICCPR creates an exemption from execution for pregnant women, recognizing that their unborn children have an independent claim to legal protection, as do all unborn children.
Many women have been seriously harmed by abortion. The Silent No More Awareness Campaign and many other initiatives throughout this country--
and this never gets reported on by the press, never gets focused upon so people are more aware of this help out there, both within the church as well as in a nonsectarian point of view, to help women who are post-
abortive and who are suffering and suffering so immensely.
A few years ago, Linda Shrewsbury, an academic African American with a degree from Harvard, who had an abortion, said at an event right here on Capitol Hill: ``The lies that brought me to that day and to its sorrowful aftermath are crystal clear in my mind--falsehoods and deceptions that concealed the truth about abortion. Lies planted in my thinking by clever marketing and media campaigns and endless repetition led to a tragic, irreversible decision--the death of my first child.''
She goes on to say: ``I really didn't understand back then. At age 20, I had no inkling of the mental and emotional darkness I was about to enter. I couldn't have grasped the immense psychological toll'' abortion ``would take for years and into the future--unrelenting tears, guilt, shame, and depression. After spending many years in denial, I did eventually find healing.
``When I understood and rejected distortions about fetal development, doublespeak about choice, rights, and planned and wanted children, I understood the reality and victimhood of my aborted child.
``I understood the absence of moral basis for choosing to disentitle an innocent human being of life. When I embraced the truth, the truth set me free, and I, finally, gained inner peace.''
She goes on to say: ``It is past time to lance the national wound of abortion with truth. The high culture--thought leaders, media, celebrities--that brought us abortion seem vested beyond extraction. I dreamed of the volcano of abortion truth that could erupt one day from the grassroots--women and men and their relatives witnessing to their suppressed emotion, unspoken trauma, and lived pain. With abortion denial ended, we as a society could then reconnect with reality and life.''
Mr. Speaker, the United States Supreme Court majority in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, wrote, in pertinent part: ``We need not resolve the difficult question of when human life begins.'' Sidestepping that threshold question and giving no benefit of the doubt to the child, they went on to legalize and enable abortion on demand.
For decades, right up to this very moment, abortion advocates have gone to extraordinary lengths to ignore, trivialize, and cover up the battered baby victim. But today, thanks to ultrasound, unborn babies are more visible than ever before.
When a woman is carrying a child, the first baby pictures, those that often end up on the refrigerator in celebration, are of the ultrasound pictures, not of the newborns--they follow later--but the ultrasound pictures of that little boy or that little girl or the twins.
Today, science informs us that birth is an event--albeit a very important one--but an event in the life of a child. It is not the beginning of life.
Modern medicine today also treats unborn children with disability or disease as a patient in need of diagnosis and treatment. There has been an explosion in interventions that have saved children's lives and mitigated many, many problems that they may face when the disability, for example, was not caught early.
Unborn babies are society's youngest patients and deserve benign, life-affirming medical interventions. All unborn babies deserve our respect and our love, not death by abortion.
Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate so much my friend Mr. Smith's dedication to this important--it is not just an issue; it is an important cause. It is so important.
We are told in law school that there can be nothing more noble than speaking up for those who are unable to defend themselves, and that is what I see when I see my friend, Mr. Smith.
This bill we took up today, to vote on, allows abortion right up to the moment of birth. I struggle with that. I mean, I understand there are people that really believe it is not a child; it is just a mass of tissue. But when the child can be seen, as we were talking about earlier before we began the Special Order, when you look at the TV screen, you know that is your child. And it is a child. You can make out all the parts. Then it is not just a mass of tissue.
But for heaven's sake, when it is a viable, living child, capable of living completely on that child's own--I have seen some tough things as a felony judge, some pictures, which I wish I had never seen. But to see what is done to a living child in the name of a right is just heartbreaking.
I appreciate so much my friend's heart on this issue.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to my good friend, if he cares to share anything else.
Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend from Texas for his leadership.
I do believe and see this--I know it is not represented on the floor of this House when it comes to our good friends and colleagues on the Democrat side, but there is a serious movement in the direction of embracing life, including the unborn child.
Like I said, some of those polls that have come out in recent days, if you just ask the question pro-choice versus pro-life, you don't get much insight. But when you break it down under what circumstances that child's life could be lost to abortion, huge majorities--not just for late-term abortion opposition--but huge majorities in America are clearly trending in favor of life. That is, like I mentioned, those with Down syndrome, 70 percent want that child to be given life. For those who are without Down syndrome, there are huge majorities as well.
On funding, not only the Marist poll but the other polls show as well that 6 out of 10 Americans do not want their taxpayer dollars being used for funding of abortion.
Just a few weeks ago, we passed legislation and appropriations bills, during the summer, that are pending over on the Senate side that would eviscerate the Hyde amendment, an amendment I first offered in 1983 called the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program Abortion Ban, legislation to say that taxpayers don't want to be complicit in, as I said before, chemical poisoning, dismemberment abortions, the methods that are used routinely by the abortionists to kill that baby.
It is an assault on life. It is an assault on the weakest and the most vulnerable. We need to be caring for the weakest and most vulnerable.
You hold a child in your hand, and especially if you go to a NICU and look at these preemies--and you know that personally, Mr. Gohmert, through your personal experience. You look at those children, and they are in desperate need of love and concern and good medical interventions that affirm their life and not take it. They are just so helpless.
You know, all the glib talk about choice--choice to do what? Kill a baby. I think we have to be so honest.
As I said with Linda's story--and there are thousands of stories like that of women who have been harmed. Often, there is relief when the abortion is over--not all the time. But it kicks in over time, either whatever method was used or just how old would that child be today.
The beauty of these outreaches to post-abortive women is that they are nonjudgmental. It is all about loving the woman and helping the woman. My wife, Marie, and I know many post-abortive women.
Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, had two abortions. She is now strongly pro-life, and she made the statement in a speech where she asked how we can honor the legacy and the dream of her uncle, Martin Luther King, if we murder the babies.
But she and so many others reach out in love and compassion to those women and say: That is over. Yes, the baby is gone, but we love you, and we care for you.
I have been in this movement, the pro-life movement, for 49 years. I got involved in 1972, my first year in college. I have often thought if people just knew the truth, like Linda said in her testimony, they would run out of the abortion clinics.
Bernard Nathanson, the founder of NARAL, one of the biggest pro-
abortion organizations in the country, he is one of the three who founded it, along with Lawrence Lader and Betty Friedan. Bernard Nathanson wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that he came to the agonizing conclusion that he had presided over 60,000 deaths, and he became a pro-lifer. He said if wombs had windows--and that is what ultrasound is. We can now see that child moving, sucking his or her thumb. It just explodes the myth that somehow these children are not human and alive.
They have a wake and sleep cycle. They exchange the breathing that they have been doing with the amniotic fluid and building up of their lungs for air at birth. It is the magnificent continuum of life that starts at conception.
Again, as I said a moment ago, birth is an event, just an event that happens in life. We have many events. That is a big one. We all remember our birthday, but it is not the beginning of life. These children deserve respect.
Again, I thank Mr. Gohmert for his leadership.
I say to anyone who may be listening, there is Project Rachel, within the Catholic Church; the Silence No More Awareness Campaign; and all of these efforts being made across the country and the world to reach out to post-abortive women.
Then there are the pregnancy care centers, some 3,000 of them throughout the country, that do nothing but say we love them both. We want mother and baby to be assisted, and that includes after the child is born.
I have gotten to know many of those people. They are mostly women who run them. It is all about love in action. They care so completely for those women and their families, and they stay with them. Some of the women who run them are post-abortive themselves, so they know the agony that could occur if the abortion is procured.
The pro-life movement is all about affirming life in a nonjudgmental way. Like I said, I have been in it for about half a century. We need to do more, and we need to reclaim the protection of life in our law and policy.
Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate so much my friend talking about loving the ones alive, the baby, the mother, because so often the focus is only on mothers that have had an abortion and good for them and not on those times when their hearts are deeply broken and that love needed to nurture and care for them.
I am just grateful that we worship a God that believes in second chances, and there is nothing that we can do to separate us from that love.
I had the privilege of hearing a lady named Ramona Trevino. I was guest-hosting somebody's radio show, and I had her on so that more people could hear her story.
{time} 1315
It is amazing. She is a brilliant, brilliant person. She was top of her class in high school, and I believe it was at 15 that she became pregnant. In the Hispanic community they had looked at her as a rising star, going to be a great leader, and then she became pregnant, and there were those who encouraged her to go ahead and have an abortion. She didn't.
But she was so smart. Eventually there was an opening she saw for director of Planned Parenthood in Sherman, Texas, and so she applied. And because she was obviously so smart, she got the job. And she continued to raise her daughter.
But they were teaching the people who worked at Planned Parenthood that the most important statistic that the directors reviewed in their directors' meetings were how many young girls are you able to get on birth control pills. That was a more important number than how many abortions you did that month.
The big money came from the abortions, of course, but the numbers that they really pushed at the directors' meetings: How young are you getting them on the pill? And how many are you getting on birth control pills?
And to do that, they were trained to tell the child: Look, your mother obviously, I am sure, will not approve of this, and you don't have to tell her. This is between you and me, and I will keep your confidence. I will let you know that I am your friend, and I will be here for you.
It was building to, as they were taught, the younger you get a girl on birth control pills, the more likely she is to forget some day and become pregnant, and that is when they made the big bucks, off the abortion. It began to bother Ramona so much that they were teaching their employees to come between somebody like her and her own daughter.
And then to really affirmatively get young girls on birth control pills because they were more likely to forget and get pregnant, encouraging them to have a really wild sexual life so that they could get pregnant became more than she could take, and she had to leave her position. It was just too much. She sounded the alarm on that for years.
But just the idea that you use dishonesty to try to make a customer--
not a patient, but a customer--out of a young child and our laws all over the country say this person is not legally eligible to make a binding contract without adult advice and supervision; and yet that is where the focus is, get those girls pregnant so that we can make money on an abortion.
I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.
Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. The parental involvement laws which would be overturned by this legislation deal with abortion, not with birth control. Just abortion. There is a bright line of demarcation between the two.
I remember meeting with a woman from Virginia who testified here on Capitol Hill, and at the time she called her group Mothers Against Minor Abortion, and the way she discovered that her daughter had an abortion was when she was hemorrhaging in her bed.
She went into the young girl's room and was shocked to find that she was, you know, very, very, very at risk, and quickly got her to the hospital. Thankfully, things turned out okay.
You know, the modest bills that would be overturned by this legislation--I mean, I am the prime sponsor of the bill here in the House to protect pain-capable children. We have had votes on that in the past. Trent Franks sponsored that in the past. That is at 20 weeks. We know beyond any reasonable doubt that at least at 20 weeks, and maybe before, an unborn child feels pain.
Dr. Sunny Anand, who is not even a pro-life pain specialist, has said that sometimes that pain can be far in excess of what a newborn or any less would feel because the pain receptors are so close to the skin, to the exposed area.
When the dismemberment process begins, the arm or the leg or some other body part is literally hacked off that child. Nobody wants to talk about that. They talk about choice. That obscures the fact that it is a violent procedure. As that is happening, the child feels pain until that child, either through shock or death, no longer feels it, then a dismemberment abortion goes on, and they don't feel it anymore.
I mean, I don't like pain. I don't think anybody in this Chamber does. That is why we take analgesics and all kinds of pain relievers, to mitigate pain when we feel it.
That child gets no such intervention, and he or she suffers an excruciatingly painful process as they are being dismembered.
We need a national debate on abortion like never before. The news media needs to cease its enabling of a narrative that is truly false that completely trivializes the unborn child, acts as if they don't exist because, obviously, they do. We need to be, I think, trying to protect the weakest and most vulnerable.
I hope we have many more debates like today. Not less, but more. We need more light and scrutiny being brought to this issue. Many women have spoken up who have been harmed. At the annual March for Life, several of the Silent No More Awareness women have spoken. And what courage that takes to stand up and tell your story, and often with family present to see this. We are really, hopefully, going to pivot.
I respect our friends on the other side of the aisle. I believe that we need to always keep it civil. But, again, those children, they are facing a death sentence.
As someone who is against capital punishment, even when there is a commission of a capital crime, capital punishment for the unborn must end.
I thank you and I yield back to my friend.
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.
{time} 1330
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.
{time} 1345
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.
____________________
SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 166
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
House Representatives' salaries are historically higher than the median US income.
Alerts Sign-up