Unite America

Floor Speech

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Mr. YOHO. Madam Speaker, I thank my good colleague from Arizona (Mr. Biggs) for putting this on. I really do appreciate it because it is so timely.

Growing pains, I think that is what we can say we are going through is growing pains again as a nation, a nation birthed over 200 years ago.

And for anybody who watched yesterday's debate, Madam Speaker, on the House floor, I think it was interesting to see the amount of, I guess, race-baiting that was coming from the other side, from my colleagues, which I found very unreasonable that, for some reason, if you are a Black man, you have to tell your children how to act with the police.

My mom and dad had that talk with me, probably for good reason, too, and they said: If you get pulled over, ``Yes, sir,'' ``No, sir,'' and then when you get home we want to know what happened and why you got pulled over. I had to have that talk with my children. So that is nothing new, and I think that we sometimes overplay that.

Does it happen maybe more with minority communities? Yes, I think it does, but nobody is immune to that. When I came into Congress, I got stopped multiple times to see if I had the right credentials. That has happened to me.

Since we have been up here, the divide in this country has gotten so much worse, and it has been since Donald Trump has gotten elected. And people will blame the President for doing this, but we can go back to other Presidents where we have seen this happen. We are Americans. We need to come together as a nation.

I have had the great fortune of being in Congress. This is my last term. I will have served 8 years. I was the chairman of the Asia- Pacific Subcommittee last year, last Congress; I am the ranking member this year. I have bean able to travel the world. I have been in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Africa is a continent of 1.2 billion, yet today, in the 21st century, 650 million people do not have electricity. I suppose they have a reason to protest. I suppose they have a reason to complain. But do they have the right to protest?

Being on the Asia-Pacific Subcommittee we got to travel to a lot of the Asian countries. We all know what is going on in Hong Kong today. Hong Kong is a province of China. There was an agreement of one country, two systems, where Hong Kong was supposed to be a semi- or a self-ruling area with an independent judiciary committee. Yet, 23 years into that agreement, Xi Jinping, the leader of the Communist Party, said that is null and void, and they have put the heavy hand of the Communist Party in there.

These young students are out there holding up that flag behind you, Madam Speaker, holding up that flag for liberty and freedom because they have tasted that. That is all they have ever known. Yet the Chinese Communist Party wants to take that away because it scares them. Free thought, independent thinking, freedom, they know the Communist Party cannot survive, so they are going in there to squash that.

These students are holding those signs up. Our flag is up. They have been in my office here in the Washington Capitol. They have a reason to protest, but they do not have the right.

You talk about Venezuela, somebody talked about it. Go down to Cuba and talk against the Castro regime. You don't have the right. Talk about religion in those countries. You do not have the right.

But then I look at this country, and I am as guilty as anybody else in this country. We have the right to protest, the First Amendment, but sometimes I think--and this is where I feel like I am guilty, like a lot of us. I think we take it for granted what we have in this country.

It was interesting because I was with the Ambassadors of both Malaysia and Indonesia, and they talked about the founding of their country. When they got their independence, when they broke away and they formed those countries, they told me that their founding fathers could have picked any system in the world. They could have taken Great Britain's system of government. They could have taken Germany's, Russia's, China's. But you know who they took? They took the principles of America because they had read our history, they had read those documents and what those documents meant.

And I heard people over and over here today, since I have been in Congress, America is not a perfect country because people are in it, and people are not perfect, but the ideals laid out there were the best ideals that have ever been laid out. If not, why are other countries adopting them? Why do people in Cuba come across the ocean, a 90-mile stretch, on inner tubes, on rafts, on surfboards to get to this country? It is called freedom. It is called justice.

But do you know what? We are not going to fix it if this side is accusing this side, and this side over here is accusing that side of pandering to our audience.

So what that meant to me when I was with those Ambassadors from Indonesia and Malaysia, what it meant to me was: Do you know what? America is bigger than a Presidency. It is bigger than the Democratic Party. It is bigger than the Republican Party. It is those ideals that this country stands for that we all need to fight to hold on to.

I want to read something that one of my constituents sent me. It says: ``The lesson taught at this point by human experience is simply this, that the man who will get up will be helped up, and the man who will not get up will be allowed to stay down. . . . Personal independence is a virtue and it is the soul of which comes the sturdiest manhood. But there can be no independence without a large share of self-dependence, and this virtue cannot be bestowed. It must be developed from within.''

I had an African-American man, a conservative Republican who is afraid to tell people he is a conservative Republican because he gets labeled Uncle Tom. You have been put on the plantation.

These are not my words. These are words coming from him.

But that quote came from somebody I wish we could go back and meet, Mr. Frederick Douglass, a person born into slavery who picked himself up by the bootstraps, who educated himself. He stood beside President Lincoln when they dedicated the Emancipation statue.

And I have got these people out here who loathe, despise, disdain this country, and it is being flamed by people--and I can't blame just people, the Democrats. There are people out there who just hate this country, but they are using that to tear this country apart instead of remembering the ideals that this country is built on. And those are American ideologies--not conservative, not liberal, not Republican or Democrat, American--and I think it is time that we all come together and realize we are Americans and we are on the same team.

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