Issues of the Day

Floor Speech

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Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend, Dr. Burgess, for all the hours of work. It is not just a lot of fun up there on the Rules Committee, but I appreciate the work on behalf of our Conference.

Mr. Speaker, it has been a tragic number of days emanating from Santa Fe, Texas, due south of my home in east Texas, down in Randy Weber's district. It truly is tragic.

It is tragic, as well, when people in this country have become so comfortable persecuting Christians, demeaning Christians, that they put no stock, in fact, belittle anyone's mentioning of praying for the families or even praying for the country, which is where we have got to be.

There is a God. It is the same God that is referenced above my head and behind me, that same God in whom a lot of us trust. It just says: ``In God we trust.'' That is the national motto, but I guess it would be more accurate to say, ``In God, whom a lot of us trust'' because of the condescending, demeaning comments made about Christians, about praying.

Prayer does work, it does matter, but not when a majority of the country is prevented from discussing Christianity publicly. I mean, this was a country where Christians from different parts of the world fled to. It was a destination, a glorious destination where people could come and live as Christians and not be persecuted, because Jesus himself said we would be hated, but he said: Remember, they hated me first.

We were told we would suffer for His sake, and He has certainly shown how brutal that could be. But as the oligarchs in black robes have taken over legislating, executive activities, as well as their own judicial activities, they have walked our country to the brink of despair. They have taken prayer--and I am talking about the oligarchs in black robes, the judges.

I was once a judge, felony judge, then a chief justice of a court of appeals, and I know how easy it is to think so highly of oneself. When a black robe is donned, our imperfections are covered up. And by our office, we are supposed to have some higher form of reason than our fellow people.

It is just not so. It is not so.

People have had it forced down their throats that, when it comes to education, it can't be education about religion, particularly Christianity. Oh, you can talk about Islam. You can talk about Buddhism. You can give glowing reports about such things and what it takes to believe about the four pillars of Islam, but you don't dare talk about Christianity, because that is when the courts go nuts, say you have exceeded your bounds.

Schools have been told that they need to reinforce in a child's mind the relativism of different positions, where right to some may be wrong for others, and wrong for some may be right for others. There is no black and white, right or wrong. There is simply relativism.

John Adams, in 1797, as our second President of the United States, gave a warning that cries through over 200 years, over 220 years. He said it clearly:

This Constitution is intended for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

He was a very wise man. This Constitution of ours, the one we took an oath to follow here in this very Chamber, it doesn't work in a country where the people are not taught morality.

When John Adams said morality and religion, he was particularly talking about Christianity and Judeo-Christian morals as one finds in the Ten Commandments, as symbolically evidenced by the fact that Moses' supposed likeness directly above and in front of me is the only face of all of those profiles that is full face and not the side, because at one time he was considered to be the greatest lawgiver of all times.

At the time, it was the Ten Commandments that were considered to be so vital that those who came before us believed were the greatest laws ever given. But through the oligarchs across the street in black robes, they have said: Don't mention God. It is okay to use ``Jesus'' as long as you use it as a one-word exclamatory statement. It is fine to take God or Jesus' name in vain, that is fine, that is okay, but don't use it in a statement that you have sincerely with all your heart chosen to follow Jesus. That is just too inappropriate.

So Adams, he was right. Whether you call them oligarchs, multiple monarchs, they have helped lead this country in a direction it really didn't want to go, been ahead of the country forcing us down this road to the dustbin of history.

It is just so clear. If you are not going to teach the Judeo- Christian morality on which this country was founded, on which the revolution came about--without the churches of the day and the Great Awakening of the 1700s, there would not have been a revolution. Without a Second Great Awakening in the 1800s and some of the churches' leadership, we would never have seen the end of slavery in America.

The world will never see the end of slavery. There will always be slavery in the world, but it is such a hideous form of people mistreating other people, I literally pray that it will not revisit this Nation, this once great Nation.

I do believe we can be great again, but not when we fail to bow our head in reverence to the God that we once trusted, most of us.

But if we are not going to teach the morality that would lead to a revolution, that would lead to an end to slavery, that would lead an ordained Christian minister to bring about another peaceful revolution of civil rights--read letters from the Birmingham jail. This man, Martin Luther King, Jr., was an ordained Christian minister. It was the biggest part of who he was and whose he was.

And as we have removed those things that motivated a country toward freedom and motivated a Nation toward freedom for everyone, and an end to slavery, and then motivating them yet again through the words of the Bible through leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., we are headed in a moral declination that ends in the dustbin of history.

I just caught a few things that were said by my colleagues across the aisle before I came up. My friend Bobby Scott from Virginia indicated something to the effect that the lack of discipline robs students.

We have come a long way from the days where students got paddlings. I have been paddled. I was an A student, honor student, head of the National Honor Society. I still got paddled.

I had friends on the football team and other athletic teams, who had coaches that cared about them enough to take the time out of their busy schedule, not to give a time out to the offending student, but actually apply the board of education to the seat of knowledge.

And I really believe that I had friends, both white and black, in sports that would have headed for prison if not for a coach caring enough to paddle them when they got out of line, even though they were grown; not adults by law, but certainly full-bodied adults. They got them on the path that would lead them away from prison and lead them to being productive.

So when we claim, well, we have a Second Amendment right to bear arms, we have a First Amendment, very first amendment we have, a right to freedom of religion and freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, but when we have forsaken God and the teachings found in the Bible that were such a foundational part of our Nation's founding, then the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, don't work.

You have got to give up the freedom of speech because some things you say motivate others to commit acts of violence. So instead of condemning and punishing the violence, we silence the offending speaker, because those days when we defended what others said that we disagreed with them, those appear to be a distant memory.

Not only do we disagree with what others say, but we will offend to their death to try to prevent their right to say them. It is a long far cry from the calls during the Revolution often attributed to Voltaire, maybe it was him, maybe it was some other, but ``I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.'' They thought this would be a country where that could happen.

But schools, public schools at least, are not allowed to teach the kind of morality that was taught for at least the first half of our country's existence.

Yes, Thomas Jefferson had slaves. I have often pondered the incredible irony how Thomas Jefferson could have slaves, and yet in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, put on paper how offensive slavery was and make that as an enumerated grievance against King George for ever allowing slavery to begin here in the United States.

That was taken out before the Declaration of Independence was finally agreed to and signed.

But the only discussion, it seems, about the Bible in public schools is when it is demeaned and belittled.

So are we shocked that there is violence? Yes, we are still shocked. We still grieve for the families that have lost loved ones that will never be there again.

Put ourselves in their places. Think what could have been done differently.

Well, everybody is pretty safe in this building. Going back to 1998, when two law officers were killed, when it was so easy to come into the Capitol, they were by the majority leader's office, and one was able to shoot the shooter, though it cost him his life.

So we have had metal detectors. We have had people screened to come in here, but not in the schools.

It is unfortunate, but if we are not going to teach biblical morality, then to be free, we just can't be. We have got to give up freedoms of speech, religion, assembly. We have got to give up our right to bear arms. Not only give up our right to keep and bear arms, but we have got to give up our right to keep pressure cookers, our right to have fertilizer that could be used for bombs. We have got to give up knives.

It is amazing to me. I went to school in elementary school where we prayed most days, said the pledge of allegiance every day, were not afraid to talk about lessons from the Bible, and I carried a pocketknife to school. There probably weren't 5, 10 days in all my growing up where I didn't carry a pocketknife to school.

And I just noticed in my bedside stand I have got three knives that belonged to my grandfather that he carried for much of his life, because they didn't have a problem with kids having knives in school.

But when you don't teach Judeo-Christian morality, then you better take people's knives, guns, anything that might be used as a weapon. Vans. We will have to make it tougher to ever get a van. Maybe have a cooling off period before you can apply for and get a van or something that can run people down.

Eventually we will have to have cars that are driverless that only the government can set in motion so that we can protect ourselves and only go where the government will allow us to go. That is where we are headed. And it is where you have to go if you are not going to teach the morality and the religion that John Adams spoke of as our second President in 1797.

But that has also seen its way into our Federal Government. It is okay to lie if it helps your political team. It is okay to violate the law if it is for your team. It is okay to violate the Constitution and your oath to the Constitution if you are the head of the CIA or are intelligence and you want to stop the opposing party's candidate from winning or remove that candidate from office after he has fairly won.

This May 12 article from Andrew McCarthy, National Review, he points out that ``The Steele dossier author told Fusion GPS' Glenn Simpson about a human source.

``Something tells me Glenn Simpson did not make a mistake. Something tells me the co-founder of Fusion GPS was dead-on accurate when he testified that Christopher Steele told him the FBI had a human source, i.e., a spy inside the Trump campaign, as the 2016 Presidential race headed into its stretch run.

``When he realized how explosive this revelation was, Simpson walked it back: He had, perhaps, `mischaracterized' what he had been told by Steele, the former British spy and principal author of the anti-Trump dossier he and Simpson compiled for the Clinton campaign.

``Simpson gave his testimony about the FBI's human source at a closed Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on August 22, 2017. He did not try to retract it until the uproar that followed the publication of his testimony on January 9, 2018. The latter date is significant for reasons we will come to.

``Simpson's testimony on this point is worth revisiting because of a pitched battle between the House Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department. Essential reporting on the controversy has been done by The Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel. On Thursday, she related that, yet again, Congress had faced down a DOJ/FBI attempt to stonewall the committee's probe of investigative irregularities during the 2016 election season--particularly, abuse of government surveillance powers, which the Obama-led agencies used to monitor the Trump campaign.

``Unable to get voluntary cooperation, committee chairman Devin Nunes issued a subpoena demanding the Justice Department disclose information by the top secret intelligence source who is said to have assisted the Russian investigation. That investigation is now being run by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But more interesting is how it got started.

On that question, officials have been surprisingly fuzzy in their explanations, and hilariously inconsistent in their leaks: initially settling on an origination story that hinged on the Steele dossier and a trip to Moscow by the obscure Trump campaign adviser Carter Page; later pivoting to a tale of boozy blathering by an even more obscure Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, when the first story proved embarrassing--the dossier allegations having been unverified when the Justice Department included them in warrant applications to the FISA court.''

Mr. Speaker, it has become clear to me, as a former judge, that the FISA courts have got to go.

For some reason, these judges that have been nominated by a President, confirmed by the Senate, do an okay job when their court proceedings are open, obvious, and they have some accountability, reaction from the American public. But apparently, when they act in secret, they don't care so much about the Constitution. They have no pride in their own courts so that people can come in, take an oath, lie to them, create a fraud upon the court, and we don't hear a peep out of those judges. Not one lawyer or witness has been held to account by the courts that they offended by their fraud and deception.

And that includes Rosenstein and, apparently, at least the fourth application to renew the warrant that should never have been issued in the first place--and surely would not have been if the FISA court had not been meeting in secret away from public eyes.

Is there any secret this country has that is worth the destruction of our judicial system as we have seen through the fraud and the misrepresentations that have been allowed with no consequence? No offended judge is offended.

It tells me that this pitiful little gathering we have allowed to be called the FISA court needs to stop. They are doing more damage to our country than they could ever possibly help by their secrecy. And the more we find out about what has been kept secret, the darker it appears for this country and for our future.

We have Brennan and Clapper who perjured themselves multiple times before Congress and didn't seem bothered by it in the least. And then Brennan makes clear that, if you come up against them, you can do so at your own peril because they have ways of making you pay the price.

That is exactly what our Founders were concerned about. The King had his ways, too, King George III. And, apparently, that is the kind of kingdom we have come into here in the 21st century when an opposition campaign for President can pay for a warrant to be issued for no just cause, no probable cause, and no consequences.

We have seen the Justice Department, these career people, they weren't interested in ensuring that justice was done. If they had been, they would have gotten some Republicans to investigate. They were interested in being political to the damage of this country and our judicial system. It has got to stop. Mueller needs to resign, and Rosenstein needs to be fired.

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