Money Doesn't Buy

Floor Speech

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Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, I so much appreciate my friends, the Honorable Mr. Yoho, Mr. Perry, and Mr. King, discussing the issue that is very dear to my heart. And I appreciate my very dear friend, Mr. King, quoting me accurately, because you don't have to pay people to hate you. They will do it for free.

We have spent billions and billions of dollars over the years paying people that have contempt for us. They don't like us. And from anybody that has ever tried to pay a bully their lunch money, they find they don't buy respect. They buy more contempt and more evil actions coming your way.

So it just makes no sense, especially when money is fungible, and we continue to send money to the Palestinians. We continue to see outrageous examples in the Palestinian textbooks of just raw, unbridled hatred and demeaning of the Jewish people.

And why should the textbooks among the Palestinians for their children be any different than what the adults are doing, when you find that Palestinian leaders are naming streets and holidays for people who have walked in and murdered groups of people with a bomb, children, innocent women, men, out with their families. They come in and kill them when they have done no harm, no wrong.

We still hear people talking about Samaria and Judea, written in the Bible hundreds, maybe 1,600 years before the birth of Mohammed, about the areas that were the promised land for the children of Israel.

So it becomes difficult for a people that didn't exist in 1000 B.C. to claim that someone who lived in that land, cultivated that land, had the prior claim to that land, somehow have a lesser right than people that came along hundreds and hundreds of years later.

But America has a financial problem, and we shouldn't be just squandering money, paying people that hate us to educate their children to hate us, to educate the population to hate us, to teach songs that glorify hatred against Israel.

As our dear friend Prime Minister Netanyahu has pointed out, Iran itself is developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, and they certainly don't need those to deliver a nuclear weapon to Israel. Those are coming for the Great Satan. That would be us.

So people wonder, well, what are we doing to protect ourselves?

Back after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States of America's leaders pressured Ukraine to deliver nuclear weapons in their possession to Russia. Now, the Ukrainians have never really trusted the Russians. And, yes, the Russians have put people out of their homes in some areas, filled them with Russian people. There are areas that today feel like they are loyal to Russia because they are Russians. They sent them there. They displaced the Ukrainians.

But the Ukrainians went ahead and turned over possession of nuclear weapons to Russians whom they distrusted because they trusted America. And the United States' leaders made sure they understood: we have got you covered. We will protect you. You don't have to worry. Go ahead and give nuclear weapons to Russia.

Now the trust that the Ukrainian people put in the United States' leaders is coming back, potentially, to haunt them. That should never be the case. If we want to be taken seriously in the world, we can't be breaking promises to countries who rely on our integrity. We can't be doing that.

So as people ask when we travel around the world in the past 6 months or so, they ask: What are you doing to prevent more terrorism when you won't even acknowledge the source of the terrorism? As one of the Egyptian leaders asked: Why are you not helping us in the war on terror? Now you are helping the people that supported the terror.

They don't understand, and neither do I.

I was asked today, Madam Speaker: What has the military done to avoid another Fort Hood incident since 2009? Madam Speaker, it appears the answer is quite embarrassing.

What have we done to protect the country when this President has made our military so much smaller?

What are we doing to protect the country when this President canceled agreements that had been made, promised, relied upon to other countries' detriment, missile defense? What are we doing to protect our country?

This policy that this administration has had internationally to think that evil, hateful people will love us and want to be very good friends if we just downsize our military, we tie our own hands, we don't let our military really protect themselves adequately, that surely they will come to appreciate and like us and they won't consider us divisive, derisive, dismissive, well, that is not what they are thinking. This Nation has lost respect around the world, and it is heartbreaking.

So they wonder, what are we doing to protect ourselves, because if we can't protect ourselves, how can we help stop evil people around the world?

Some say, and I think there are people in this administration that think we need to follow the European example where we don't have to have much of a military at all and we just show, look, we want to get along and go along. The trouble with that idea is the Europeans have had the benefit of downsizing their military and having smaller militaries because they knew the United States existed and that we would not let an evil power take over Europe, Britain, that we would stop it because we would not want another Hitler to get as far as he did last time.

We want to stop them before that happens because, assuredly, if Europe falls, England falls, they are coming for the United States. And now we know, because of radical Islam, they are more concerned about destroying America than they are even taking on Europe and England.

So these are serious issues. So what have we done to protect the men and women in our military who are protecting us?

It is heartbreaking. This administration, after 2009's horrendous accident--not accident--incident where a radical Islamist Muslim killed 13 fellow military members. They were not allowed to have weapons on post. And we start digging and we find out, well, gee, when the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate, apparently, back in 1992, there was a bill passed back around that time that prevented military members from carrying weapons on military installations.

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Mr. GOHMERT. And that really is amazing about the military in a military installation because, like the gentleman said, when I was at Fort Benning, we had to qualify every year. And here at Fort Hood, one of the largest military installations anywhere, it adjoins Killeen, Texas. And many people--most people, I think, in Texas recall that there was a terrible shooting incident in a cafeteria in Killeen that adjoins Fort Hood where a man went in and started killing people in the cafeteria.

And there was a woman there who had to put her gun in the glove compartment because we didn't have laws that allowed you to carry weapons around Texas. And she realized that she could have saved her parents from being murdered if she had been able to carry her concealed weapon. So she got elected to the State legislature. She is a hero. She got the concealed-carry bill through and signed into law. And that had been used in other States to get concealed-carry bills passed.

So when people say, well, how horrible, there had been a prior mass shooting before. Actually, there had been two right there, just right so close together. Killeen, though, civilians, who are not required to qualify with weapons every year, like you and I have been in the military.

Yet if, as someone trained with weapons, qualifying every year, you step one foot off that military installation, now you can start carrying a concealed weapon if you just got the permit. But if you step back on the military installation, where everyone is required to be qualified to use weapons, you can't have one.

We are working on a bill which will not just create the power, but it will require that military installations allow people there to go through and apply for and get a permit to carry a concealed weapon, just as they could in Fort Hood if they put one foot off post into Killeen. And they ought to be able to step back on the installation.

Mr. PERRY. If the gentleman would yield, I am just curious--you have spent more time here than I have--what was the impetus for the current law which restricts DOD and commanders, as an installation commander myself, from exacting our own authority based on the Constitution?

Mr. GOHMERT. And actually, that was back around the time I became a district judge in Texas. And I didn't learn until I was here in Congress just recently that they had ever passed such a law. There was a Democratic majority in the House, a Democratic majority in the Senate.

I can't imagine why they were thinking they had to protect our military members from themselves when we give them far more lethal weapons--I mean, you give somebody an RPG.

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Mr. GOHMERT. The gentleman makes so many good points. I would like to yield to the gentleman to answer a question.

Having been a commander, we have talked about how military were qualified, were required to qualify to use weapons. But as a commander, do you know of any one civilian in the civilian world who has more training about not misplacing your weapon or setting your weapon down or leaving your weapon than somebody in the military? The gentleman knows what I talk about.

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Mr. GOHMERT. I was talking with one of our Capitol Police yesterday after this shooting at Fort Hood, again. One of our great Capitol Police. We are so blessed with such great qualified protectors of the Capitol area. And he was in the military for 13 years and left the military and became a Capitol policeman. Well, I trust that gentleman now to have a weapon at all times. I am delighted if he will carry a weapon at all times.

But Washington, D.C., has these really well-intentioned laws. Let's eliminate weapons in Washington, D.C. They have been struck down by the Supreme Court because they are unconstitutional. But I want somebody like that, that I could trust, whether he was still in the military, as he was, or as a Capitol policeman. I am very comfortable with him carrying a weapon and feel better knowing that there were people like him around carrying weapons.

So when that question was asked, what has the military done since 2009's Fort Hood mass shooting to prevent this kind of thing from happening, I know that the military cannot do any more than the Commander in Chief orders them to do. I don't know of anything that the Commander in Chief has done, as the commander, where the buck stops, to provide more protection from an incident like as now happened again.

If the gentleman knows of anything that has been done.

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Mr. GOHMERT. Well, I would think, though, that at this point in time, with so many Senators of the Democrat persuasion being concerned about elections and the disaster ObamaCare has been, if we pass a bill that provides for military installations to allow permits to be applied for and obtained for a concealed-carry on a military installation, that the Senate will be in a difficult position if they don't take it up. And the President would hurt his party dramatically if it passed out of the Senate as well and he refused to sign it.

There will be other incidents like Fort Hood again. It appears that we have not been adequately addressing post-traumatic stress disorder. And you never know if someone is going to go off, like we see with Washington, D.C., having such a high murder rate. Just like the old bumper stickers have said in the past, When guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns. That is exactly what has happened at Fort Hood both times. It is what happened in Killeen with the mass shooting in the cafeteria. And the problem is not honest, honorable, law-abiding Americans having a gun under their Second Amendment rights; it is the outlaws having guns.

There were thousands of cases that came through my court as a district judge, felonies--all of them felonies. And I couldn't remember any cases involving guns where the guns were lawfully acquired. The criminals get guns, and they don't care. The name ``criminal'' comes from the fact that they commit crimes, and they don't care what the law is. They break the law. So the people that are disarmed are those law-abiding citizens.

I really think we cannot stand another 5 years of calling such a terrible disaster just ``workplace violence'' when it is a tragedy that can be prevented, can be stopped. And since the Commander in Chief has not taken action that would impede it or stop it, we need to do that.

And we need to reverse the law that was passed by the Democratic House and Democratic-controlled Senate back in the early nineties and get a bill to the President's desk. And if the Democrats--at least some of them in the Senate--are not willing to pass such a law or Harry Reid is not willing to bring that to the floor, the answer is very simple: We vote in Republican Senators so that they will bring it to the floor. And next January, then we can present it to the President.

And then if he does not and is not willing to sign it at that point, then we will either have enough to override the veto or we will have a President from a different party come November of 2016 who will allow the military to protect themselves instead of condemning them to helplessly watch while they and their friends are gunned down by an outlaw.

I yield to my friend.

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Mr. GOHMERT. In the 1 minute we have got left, I just want to thank my friend from Pennsylvania for all of his service to our country in the military and here in Congress. I hope that we are able to get a bill passed through the House, through the Senate, and to the President's desk.

Let me just finish by saying there was an atrocity here on Capitol Hill yesterday with the testimony of the former Acting Director of the CIA. Our military has become an international--it is tragic, but a laughing--

If they are not defending themselves, then how can we count on them to defend us? And after the testimony under penalty of perjury yesterday by a former acting director of the CIA, it has told the world that the only place there has been worse intelligence than we have had, particularly during Benghazi, would have been back at Little Big Horn by General Custer.

We have got to turn this place around so that Americans can protect Americans and Americans serving our military can protect themselves and our intelligence does start living up to the name instead of making it such a tragedy.

With that, Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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