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We're members of the House Freedom Caucus. The US must choose: either $20 trillion in debt or Medicaid reform

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 05:00:49 -0400

In 10 years, the United States is on course to add $20 trillion to the national debt, setting the total sum owed by American taxpayers at over $56 trillion. Every year we spend in the red, interest on the debt continues to accumulate, until by 2051, when interest alone will be the largest line item in the federal budget. Put simply, we are on a collision course with a total financial crisis, and Congress may only have a handful of chances left to turn back. To prevent a total collapse of the U.S. dollar and give the American people the opportunities they deserve, lawmakers must reform Medicaid. To do anything less borders on malfeasance.

While the urgency of our nation’s debt crisis is lost on many, cutting waste, fraud and abuse has been a priority of President Donald Trump’s administration since day one. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk have already uncovered billions of dollars in waste. From excessive Politico Pro subscriptions to Democrat pet projects overseas, taxpayers have been totally robbed.

But, even if DOGE meets its quota for cuts and the freezes on wasteful federal grants aren’t dragged out in litigation, these savings won’t scratch the surface of what’s required to save America from its looming debt crisis.

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For lawmakers who claim to be on board with cutting the waste, fraud and abuse — and delivering on Trump’s historic mandate — this is it. Nothing you do in the next two years will come close to the importance of implementing the $880 billion required in savings to programs under the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s jurisdiction.

We are not asking you to slash Medicaid, only turn back the clock and reverse its explosive expansion in the last few years that has put it on an unsustainable course.

In the last five years, federal Medicaid spending has skyrocketed from $409 billion in 2019 to $618 billion in 2024, a 51% increase. Despite being 60 years old, a third of Medicaid’s growth has occurred in those same five years. And in the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office projects that Medicaid will cost more than $1 trillion annually, rivaling the size of Saudi Arabia’s current economy.

When Obamacare introduced an entirely new class of able-bodied adults to Medicaid, the program exploded, and the federal government took on the majority of the costs. Under President Joe Biden, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) withdrew 13 waivers for Medicaid work requirements, once again dramatically expanding the program and costing taxpayers billions.

Medicaid was never meant to be this expansive.

Medicaid was intended to assist vulnerable populations like the disabled, pregnant women, children and people in poverty. Today, able-bodied, working-capable adults are on course to become the largest subgroup on Medicaid.

Nationwide, there are an estimated 24.6 million able-bodied, working-capable adults on Medicaid, 60% of whom report no earned income. Coupled with the Biden administration’s unilateral expansion of food stamps, the federal government is effectively discouraging a substantial portion of the able-bodied American population from seeking employment altogether.

The "safety net" has become a full-blown poverty trap, keeping Americans in an endless cycle of dependency and diverting resources from those who truly need help. In some states, higher provider rates for expansion enrollees have created an explicit financial incentive for healthcare providers to discriminate against traditional enrollees. Single moms, infants and the disabled are being pushed aside in favor of able-bodied adults without dependents.

Medicaid was meant to be a temporary bridge, not a final destination. You want to help your constituents? Give them the proper incentive structure to grow and thrive. Put them on the path to financial stability.

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We have a duty to safeguard taxpayers and ensure that Medicaid does not bankrupt us. Cut the waste. Cut the fraud. Cut the abuse.

Reimplementing Clinton-era work requirements alone would save roughly $120 billion over 10 years and put more workers back in our economy. Site neutrality could save over $471 billion. Normalizing the federal reimbursement rate for the expansion population under Medicaid would save nearly $600 billion. You could even take Biden’s advice and eliminate Medicaid provider taxes that he called a scam and save the taxpayer $612 billion over 10 years.

Even if lawmakers are hesitant to make these changes, many of these measures can still be phased in — saving taxpayers hundreds of billions without cutting anyone’s benefits. Not to mention the additional hundreds of billions that could be saved by cracking down on improper payments, which have reached a rate of over 25% in recent audits.

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We need to bring the rhetoric back into reality. Medicaid reforms are not the end of entitlement programs. They are a necessary step toward real solutions to address our nation’s debt crisis and secure the financial future of generations to come. By making targeted reforms, lawmakers can execute President Trump’s mandate for change.

A deal to help save the country is on the table. Take it.

Republican Chip Roy represents Texas' 21st Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives. He is the former first assistant attorney general of Texas.

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Rep. Andy Harris, a Republican, represents Maryland's 1st Congressional District.

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We need to SAVE our elections from abuse and here’s how

Tue, 28 May 2024 07:00:38 -0400

It would be easy for non-citizens to abuse our elections and find ways to vote

Biden’s moral equivalency between Israel and the Palestinians will result in failure — again

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 05:00:41 -0400

President Joe Biden is trying to have it both ways with his post Oct. 7 Israel policy. It won’t work, especially after Iran’s game-changing attack on the Jewish state over the weekend.

Biden still claims to "stand with Israel." But he doesn’t want to stand with Israel too much because he risks losing the votes of those who support the Palestinians — including, apparently, his own wife. So now he’s encouraging Israel to stand down instead of standing up to the Iranians.

Consider too what his administration has been doing at the United Nations. Ambassador Lisa Thomas-Greenfield abstained on March 25 from voting on UN Security Council Resolution 2728, which calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza during Ramadan, a release of the hostages Hamas holds, and the facilitation of humanitarian aid into Gaza. In a twist, the administration had recently proposed its own draft resolution regarding a ceasefire.

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But the resolution that did pass differs in two important respects.

First, gone is the condemnation of Hamas’s barbaric actions on Oct. 7 as terrorist outrages against humanity — a condemnation that apparently prompted Russia and China to veto the Biden version. Second, while 2728 calls for the release of the hostages, it removes the language making any ceasefire contingent on their release.

In other words, this UNSCR turns a blind eye to Hamas terrorism and opens the door to the group getting a ceasefire while keeping the hostages — and the United States let it pass.

Sadly, the Biden administration can point to previous and bipartisan U.S. dalliances with UNSCRs to persuade the Palestinians that the United States has not really taken a side in the conflict and is sincerely committed to their cause, even while paying lip service to America’s commitment to Israel. But such twisted logic, along with the canard that an abstention is somehow different than an affirmative vote, is too cute by half.

This disgraceful equivocation began in January 2009, when President George W. Bush’s then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice considered voting for UNSCR 1860, which the U.S. Mission to the UN had helped draft during that round of violence provoked by Hamas.

Like 2728, 1860 called for an immediate ceasefire and humanitarian aid to Gaza, while providing no security assurances to Israel. Perhaps in the hopes of completing a peace deal in the final days of the Bush administration, Rice ultimately abstained, and 1860 passed.

In December 2016, this pattern repeated with UNSCR 2334 at the end of the Obama administration, which condemned the settlement activities of the "occupying power" Israel in the Palestinian territories, thus perpetuating the fantasy that there is an equivalency between the two parties.

Then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power abstained, allowing the resolution to pass, with the cover that she was only doing what the Bush administration had done.

None of the UNSCRs in question have done anything material to either reduce violence or produce peace in the Middle East. But they have all contributed to the counter-productive impression among the Palestinians that violence against Israel is somehow legitimate — as is their support of the perpetuators of this violence, first and foremost Hamas.

And while that belief remains pervasive, they will not take the concrete steps necessary to end the conflict that they have lost if anyone has the courage to tell them so.

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Despite all these contortions at the United Nations, the United States cannot have it both ways on Israel. In 1923, the pioneering Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in his essay "The Iron Wall" that until the Palestinians accept that Israel is not going away, and engage in legitimate negotiations, the only way a Jewish state could survive is through impenetrable defenses that would render the inevitable future attacks futile.

If the Iranian attack on Israel and Oct. 7 have taught us anything, it’s that Jabotinsky was correct. Given the Biden administration’s reluctance to unequivocally support Israel’s self-defense, it stands with Congress to do so — and just as failure on Israel policy has been bi-partisan, success can be so as well.

Late last year, a stand-alone, paid-for request for emergency funds for Israel passed the House of Representatives, and similar legislation could be passed again on Monday. Pro-Israel senators on both sides of the aisle should then insist it be taken up and passed immediately to demonstrate that American support for Israel is indeed ironclad.

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What is needed in the current crisis is not Biden’s default to the uni-party failures of the past, but rather a fresh appreciation for Jabotinsky’s clarity. President Donald Trump understood this wisdom, and his administration’s unabashed commitment to the U.S.-Israel alliance resulted in the first peace deals with Israel and the Arabs in a quarter-century, not the grinding misery and violence we see today.

Any future American administration that values the U.S.-Israel alliance should make it clear Israel isn’t going away because America won’t permit it to be destroyed. Only when the Palestinians — and the Iranians — accept that as an incontrovertible fact will there be any hope that they might finally lay down their arms and sue for a just and lasting peace. Until then, only a joint U.S.-Israel Iron Wall will suffice at the U.N. and beyond.

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Victoria Coates is vice president for foreign policy and national defense at The Heritage Foundation.

This prosecutor targeting Christians, putting Bible on trial, again

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 10:00:37 -0400

Last March, people of faith around the world breathed a collective sigh of relief when Päivi Räsänen, a well-respected member of Finland’s Parliament, was found "not guilty" by a Helsinki court in a case of legal persecution of her and Bishop Juhana Pohjola for their Christian beliefs about marriage.

It seemed, then, that the nightmare was over; it was not.

Now, Räsänen and Pohjola head back to court, Bibles in hand, on Aug. 31 to stand trial once again for simply being Christians. Everyone who values the perseverance and preservation of Western Civilization should be gravely concerned by this trial.

For more than four years, Räsänen has been investigated by a rogue Finnish prosecutor’s office for the "war crime" of "agitation against a population group" for criticizing her own church for sponsoring a gay pride parade and writing a pamphlet supporting a biblical view of marriage 20 years ago. The prosecution levied an additional charge against Juhana Pohjola, a bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, for merely hosting Räsänen’s pamphlet on his church’s website.

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She faces criminal charges over a single tweet – not one inciting violence, but sharing a Bible verse. And this isn’t in North Korea or Communist China, it is in a so-called "free" country.

It is readily apparent to all people of good faith that the trial’s intent was not to bring about justice by prosecuting Räsänen or Pohjola for the so-called "war crime" of "agitation against a population group." In fact, the prosecution had to search far and wide to find a single Finn even offended by the tweet or the pamphlet.

No, this case features a deeper acidic agenda: to fundamentally undermine the foundations of modern Western Civilization, freedom of expression and freedom of religion.

In court, the prosecution did not focus their case on the grandmother of ten or the bishop almost at all, but rather, put the Bible itself at the forefront of its legal attacks.

The prosecution quoted Old Testament Bible verses, asking questions about basic Christian theology, and even dismissing the notion that there could be any distinction between "sin" and the "sinner." These questions were appropriate for an introduction to theology course or a seminary lecture – but not a courtroom in a supposedly free country that purports to respect the religious rights of its citizens.

Reflecting on the first trial, Räsänen stated, "Under oath, the prosecutor grilled me in court on my religious beliefs and basic theology."

The Bible was on trial.

PROSECUTOR IN FINLAND'S ‘BIBLE TRIAL’ QUESTIONS LAWMAKER OVER BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION, DOCUMENTARY SHOWS

Eventually, the three-judge panel found the defendants not guilty in a unanimous decision and ordered Finland to pay more than 60,000 euros in legal costs to the Christians. The judges openly questioned the very reasoning behind the prosecution’s case, stating, "It is not for the district court to interpret biblical concepts."

Across Finland and the world, people of faith felt instant relief. However, that relief would last just weeks.

Unsatisfied with its resounding defeat, the prosecution upped its harassment of Räsänen and Pohjola. They appealed the decision – on the mere grounds that the prosecution disagreed with the outcome.

But it underscores the point – the process is the punishment.

Ahead of the re-trial, Räsänen remains steadfast and confident that justice will prevail. Her words are inspiring:

"I believe free speech is the cornerstone of a free and democratic society. I will keep fighting for this right however long the prosecution continues its campaign to silence peaceful beliefs."

WAR ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: WE MUST STAND UP FOR FINNISH CHRISTIANS FACING TRIAL FOR THEIR FAITH

Unfortunately, this pattern is all too familiar to Americans, as government officials have misused state law to coerce people they disagree with. In recent memory, Americans have watched a website designer, cake artist and many other artists threatened with punishment for expressing what they believed. They have faced court after court for years seeking the freedom to say what they believe without fear of government punishment – proving the process is often the punishment.

Across the world, the message these aggressive prosecutions want to send is clear – you must conform to the prevailing dogma of the day.

Don’t believe us? Take it from the Finnish prosecutor who has claimed the Bible’s teachings on human sexuality "incite hatred" and compared the Bible to "Mein Kampf."

The harassment of Räsänen and Pohjola is designed not simply to punish them, but to cudgel into silence them and anyone who agrees with them. To chill their thoughts, expressions, faith and their freedoms.

The implicit deal being offered is censor yourself or face fines or possibly even jail time. A deal we too may soon be offered.

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The goal is clear: to make the cost of standing firm on a clean conscience so great that most people will simply give in and soil their conscience rather than face the social and legal fallout of holding to the truth. This anti-Christian agenda berates the average person - you will be silent or face the consequences. You may no longer live free but must live their lie.

Put simply, the Bible is on trial, as it has been in countless places and countless times throughout its history. The delusion that it could not happen again in a modern and allegedly free country has been smashed.

As the next court date approaches, it is once again time to join in fervent prayer for Päivi Räsänen and Bishop Pohjola.

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Now, the consequences of this trial will reverberate throughout the world. Bishop Pohjola puts it best, "The Gospel of Christ is at stake."

To Päivi and the bishop, we stand with you. We stand for freedom. We stand with the Gospel.

Sean Nelson is Legal Counsel for Global Religious Freedom at ADF International, the legal advocacy organization supporting the legal defense of MP Päivi Räsänen.

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This San Antonio charter change means more chaos and crime in city

Tue, 02 May 2023 06:00:16 -0400

In 2022, San Antonio experienced a spike in violent crime and property crime, including the most homicides in 30 years. Cartels and gangs are smuggling humans and deadly drugs in record amounts through San Antonio – including the 53 migrants who cooked alive in a tractor-trailer last June. These trends are tragic and unacceptable; but they stand to get much worse.

With public safety in San Antonio sliding in such a dangerous direction, one might expect a change of heart from the activists who demonized police just a few years ago while local businesses were looted and vandalized. Unfortunately, radical anti-cop activists are poised to take the City of San Antonio down with them to advance an agenda that is out of touch with reality and the city’s residents.

Proposition A is at the center of their plans. The so-called "Justice Charter" is a political Trojan horse designed to fool naïve liberals with fantasy initiatives to decriminalize marijuana possession and abortion, both illegal measures that will not override Texas law.

The proposed charter poses a direct threat to the future of public safety in San Antonio. Proposition A expands "cite and release" policies – which immediately put dangerous criminals back on the streets – for a broad range of crimes and creates a woke bureaucratic "Justice Director" position that will be weaponized against the men and women of law enforcement.

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I spent years working directly with law enforcement as a federal prosecutor in North Texas and first assistant attorney general. I can assure you – if you incentivize criminal behavior, you will get more of it.

Property theft, simple assault, criminal mischief, vandalism, graffiti, voyeurism, aka "peeping toms," and other nefarious crimes suddenly become harder to enforce and prosecute in San Antonio overnight. Prop A puts police officers in an even worse position to keep our streets and communities safe.

Earlier this month, during Congress’ Easter break, I spent the day meeting San Antonio Police officers to better understand the challenges they face. I rode along with a young SAPD officer for a few hours and saw firsthand his dedication to public safety and the rule of law. Almost every San Antonian I spoke to that day expressed concerns about the rising crime in the city, ranging from violent pit bull attacks to record levels of car thefts.

These problems aren’t in their heads; last year’s crime statistics support their concerns.

Misguided initiatives like these harm San Antonio’s vulnerable communities the most; enabling lawlessness and disorder will not make these neighborhoods safer or improve their quality of life. Do we really want San Antonio’s children, the next generation, exposed to damaging behaviors and their personal safety at greater risk?

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The men and women of the San Antonio Police Department deserve support, not another woke bureaucrat who will seek to defund and demoralize the police force. SAPD currently cannot meet its recruiting goals, and more retirements are on the horizon. Based on my conversations with officers across the city, I fear this dangerous charter could be a point of no return.

If Prop A passes, more small businesses will be victimized and vandalized, more families will move away, and San Antonio will begin to go the way of rapidly deteriorating California cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The people of San Antonio face a choice on May 6. Will they choose safety and security or a slow creep toward lawlessness and chaos?

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Municipal elections are infamous for low turnout, which presents a political opportunity. Fundamentally this will come down to which side turns out the most voters. If you feel inclined, I encourage you to activate and volunteer to get out the vote. This proposition could be decided by a few hundred votes.

Texans love where we live, and rightfully so, if we want to keep it that way, then we have to take a stand for the rule of law. The people of San Antonio can send a clear, decisive message they stand for public safety and common sense, by voting against Proposition A on Election Day. I stand right alongside those who do.

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3 years after COVID, it's past time taxpayers stop funding this corrupt organization

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 06:00:28 -0400

It seems that long repressed truth about COVID is finally allowed to trickle out. The Wall Street Journal broke the story that the Department of Energy’s intelligence now indicates that the COVID-19 virus "likely arose from a laboratory leak." FBI Director Chris Wray is now saying the same in public. Despite the FBI’s opaqueness with the American people while "assessing the origins," for "quite some time," most people – not religiously devoted to the government/media/Big Pharma-approved narrative – could see the writing on the wall years ago.

Still, vindication of the truth alone is not enough. Justice demands accountability for all those who withheld and helped obscure information on the origins of this pandemic — especially the World Health Organization (WHO), which no longer deserves a scintilla of America’s trust, another penny of her tax dollars, or another second of her membership.

WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently lashed out at people asking questions about COVID origins for supposedly turning "what should be a purely scientific process into a political football." Such obvious defensive deflection makes sense; after all, while China was doing its best to cover up the virus’ origins, the WHO was the regime’s loudest cheerleader on the international stage, despite all indications of wrongdoing.

The WHO parroted Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda from the earliest days of the pandemic. It told the world there was "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" of COVID-19 after ignoring Taiwan’s warnings about human-to-human transmission. The WHO praised Beijing for its COVID-19 transparency, while the CCP simultaneously silenced whistleblowers like Dr. Li Wenliang for "spreading false rumors" about the virus. The WHO even provided false information to Congress in its pro-Chinese communist PR campaign. Meanwhile, the WHO nevertheless had the audacity to preen about the dangers of "misinformation" throughout the pandemic.

But this long train of abuses does not end with lies and propaganda.

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The WHO’s stated mission is "to promote health, keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable" but COVID-19 showed us that this failure of an organization is riddled with rot and corruption. The WHO and its enablers in so-called public health agencies were architects of a pandemic "response" that shattered lives, shuttered businesses, impoverished humanity, harmed future generations, a decimated trust in our institutions.

President Trump recognized the WHO for what it is and rightly withdrew from the organization in 2020, citing all of its failures. But defying logic, President Biden rejoined and restored funding to the WHO on his first day in office. Then the Biden administration and congressional Democrats doubled down by giving the organization a $280 million taxpayer-funded windfall, on top of the millions of dollars we provide to the organization each year.

As if this wasn’t enough, the Biden administration is now supporting the creation of a new international agreement that will fork over even more power and legitimacy to globalist WHO bureaucrats in Geneva. Officially tabbed as the "WHO Convention, Agreement, or Other International Instrument on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness, and Response" or "WHO CA+" this "zero draft" of the proposed agreement, set for final consideration in 2024, would further empower the WHO by granting it more power to craft worldwide "public health" policy.

Specifically, this accord would recognize WHO as the central authority on "international health work" and give it the power to commit signing nations to squash free speech by tackling so-called misinformation through the "promotion of international cooperation." Further, the WHO Director would have the power to "declare a public health emergency" and be tasked with implementing "health equity," which effectively means further hamstringing the American peoples quality of and access to care to satisfy the WHO’s woke, global agenda — all on the taxpayer dime.

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Enough. This nation was founded by defying the will of an unaccountable foreign power. President Biden and his handlers prefer to resubmit the American people to serve the international elite. Congress must not let them.

One of the first bills I introduced this Congress would defund the WHO. H.R. 343, the "No Taxpayer Funding for the World Health Organization Act" would prohibit the United States from providing any contributions to this corrupt organization.

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Further, simply defunding the WHO is not enough. Congress must ensure that the public health bureaucrats here at home – from Anthony Fauci, to Rochelle Walensky, to Francis Collins – who shredded the Constitution and subjected the American people to years of tyranny be held accountable too. We can do this through hearings, reforms, and overhauls of their bloated agencies through the appropriations process.

It ought to be a simple rule of thumb that we don’t give money to organizations that lie and undermine our interests. The WHO completely failed at the very thing it was designed to do while bolstering the biggest foreign threat to our national security in the process. It will never hold itself accountable; that job belongs to the American people and those elected to serve them.

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House Republicans can fix border, end Biden's border crisis and reclaim control from Mexican cartels

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 13:56:28 -0500

America is under siege by both cartels and our own politicians. Since day one of his presidency Joe Biden has made it clear that he would rather allow cartels to control our border than be vulnerable to political attacks from the left.

As a result, we have experienced the largest border security crisis in modern American history. The Secretary of Homeland Security has perpetuated this crisis through "encounter and release" policies that ignore our laws and put both Americans and the migrants seeking to come here in danger.

Now, House Republicans have a chance to force the President’s hand to end the crisis and reclaim control of our border from cartels. H.R. 29, the Border Safety and Security Act, will immediately reverse these "encounter and release" policies by requiring DHS to instead "detain or turn away."

This is the border security equivalent of the pandemic-prevention deterrent known as Title 42, which all Republicans have supported – somewhat imprudently – as the solution for the border. It was only a Band-Aid solution during the pandemic and a health policy is not a border policy, but it powers make clear the border solution.

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The problem is that the Biden administration has used asylum as the exception to swallow the rule of border security; now hundreds of thousands arrive at our southern border each month.

Secretary Mayorkas has released between 1-2 million illegal migrants into American communities, heavily through an abuse of parole authority which is supposed to be used on a "case-by-case" basis.

We know that in just the first 15 months of the Biden administration, DHS released 836,225 people encountered of the more than 1 million illegal migrants apprehended by CBP not turned away under Title 42 – some 80 percent.

Immediate release of migrants before adjudication of claims is not only a problem in each case, but also represents a "pull-factor" for more illegal migrants. An incomprehensible 4 million migrants have been encountered under the Biden regime, overwhelming border patrol.

Agents have been taken away from patrolling to "processing" and this creates security gaps for cartels to traffic in drugs like fentanyl, which killed at least 72,000 Americans in 2021. More, it has allowed cartels to move some 1 million "got aways" who evade arrest and are often the more dangerous individuals – sometimes affiliated with gangs or terrorist organizations.

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We should not accept this. Our laws surrounding asylum were never meant to encourage migrants to make the dangerous journey through hundreds of miles of desert terrain — driven by cartels that are basically terrorists for hire. Our asylum laws were meant to be a last resort for those fleeing legitimate persecution and had no other options — not the blueprint for a human trafficking pipeline.

The Border Safety and Security Act is the solution.

First, the bill provides the Secretary of DHS with the authority to turn away illegal migrants without admissible documentation if the Secretary sees it necessary to obtain operational control of the border. Operational control is not a controversial idea and is already required by the "Secure Fence Act of 2006, which then-Senator Joe Biden and current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer voted for.

Turning away illegal migrants is not a new concept — the public health authority commonly referred to as "Title 42" has allowed DHS to do so since March of 2020. In fact, the Biden administration actually appealed court decisions that would have terminated the policy. Biden’s DHS admits the potential need to turn migrants away because "we anticipate migration levels will increase as smugglers seek to take advantage of and profit from vulnerable migrants once the Title 42 public health order is lifted."

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Further, H.R. 29 will require DHS to use this "turn-away" authority if someone cannot be detained through the pendency of an asylum claim or placed in a program consistent with Migrant Protection Protocols. Current law already requires illegal migrants seeking asylum to be detained through the adjudication of their claim; this closes Biden’s loopholes.

There will be some who spuriously claim this bill would somehow eliminate asylum, and that is flatly false. Those who claim it are either misinformed or seek to misinform. H.R. 29 corrects the abuse of our asylum laws and allows for migrants to claim asylum – which is good for America and good for immigrants. Further, it does not do anything DHS is not already either allowed or even required to do under current law.

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From before time of the Declaration of Independence or our Constitution, America has been a refuge for those seeking freedom from oppression. She should remain so. But we cannot allow laws meant to serve the oppressed to create even more oppression in the false name of compassion.

We will never solve this border crisis if Congress is not willing to step in and fix the policies causing it. The Border Safety and Security Act is the single best policy we would put forward to do that today.

Mayra Flores is a former Texas Congresswoman and is now a Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

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Defending marriage: Will Senate Republicans display courage and uphold truth?

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 04:00:33 -0500

In late July, the House of Representatives gaveled in and, within hours, rushed through legislation that purported to "codify the findings of Obergefell v. Hodges and its 2015 redefinition of marriage.

Rather than defend the institution of marriage, many Republicans chose to run for the hills – calling the move a political stunt, opting to criticize only the absence of regular order or a semblance of the legislative process in lieu of defending a basic natural truth.

Worse yet, Senate Republicans seem even more bent on surrendering than before the election, when a handful of Republican senators announced their support for redefining marriage. Now a window-dressing compromise amendment that simply restates that people of faith have existing religious liberty and conscience protections in the Constitution and federal law threatens to provide the 60 votes necessary for passage.

Simply regurgitating that which already exists does not and will not stop the radical left from dragging good people through the court system and a public tarring and feathering in the media for those simply living their lives in fidelity to God.

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It's bad enough that five members of the Supreme Court wrongly claimed that the U.S. Constitution requires a new definition of marriage, but if the Senate votes to codify this redefinition of marriage, all it will do is add fuel to the fire of those harassing and penalizing citizens and organizations that hold to the truth about marriage.

The Senate bill pays lip service to religious liberty and conscience rights, but it does not offer any meaningful protections for those rights. Had the Senate sponsors wanted to, they could have explicitly stated that no individual or organization could be penalized by the government for operating according to the conviction that marriage unites husband and wife – particularly that the IRS may not strip any such organization of its nonprofit status.

But the bill offers no such protections. It is not a compromise, not even a bad compromise. It enshrines a false definition of marriage in our law and then tells people they can have their day in court if and when they get sued. That's not public policy for the common good.

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Republican senators must hold strong and defend what is true and good. Marriage is a natural and supernatural institution before it is a political institution. Human law should reflect the natural law and eternal law. No senator should vote to allow the government to redefine what marriage is.

Marriage serves as the cultural pace car that both determines and reflects the health of American society and culture at-large. The future of this country depends on the future of marriage.

Marriage is a natural institution that predates government. It is based on anthropological truths that men and women are distinct and complementary. It is based on a biological fact that reproduction requires both a man and a woman. And it is based on a social reality that children deserve both a mother and a father. Or, as Pope Francis once said, that children have a right to a mother and a father. Marriage increases the odds that a man will be committed to both the children he helps create and to their mother.

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Because it is so vital to our society, and especially its most vulnerable members, marriage is not something that can be legislated about in a day without consequence. In the seven years since the Supreme Court short-circuited a national conversation on marriage, American culture has changed at a breakneck speed; it would be virtually unrecognizable to even recent generations.

Despite the continued insistence by members of Congress and unelected justices, millenniums of truth cannot simply be overruled or redefined to fit the socially pressured activist views of the day.

The law cannot be neutral on marriage. It can either affirm truth or promote distortions.

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The foundational truth will always remain – marriage is between one man and one woman. No act of Congress can change that, though it can make it harder for citizens to understand and embrace the truth. Even worse, it can lead to the government penalizing those citizens and organizations who do embrace the truth. This is why it is so outrageous that the bill includes no explicit protections for such citizens.

Those who see and know the truth have a moral duty to stand firm in its defense and to defend the institution of marriage. Doing so against the grain of cultural and political pressure to cower and compromise takes courage; the question is how many Republicans will display it when this bill comes to the floor for a vote.

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Ryan T. Anderson is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author of several books, including "What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense."

Don't draft our daughters for front-line combat

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 02:00:07 -0400

Last year, thanks to hard work from dozens of conservative groups, a handful of congressional Republicans managed to kill a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would have required America’s young women to register for the draft.

Yet, here we are again. With the Senate Armed Services Committee passing this provision in the yearly NDAA bill and the House set to consider legislation next week, we will see if Democrats — with the potential support of Republicans — will once again push forward legislation to force our daughters to the front lines.

This legislation will harm the American family, undermine our military readiness, and is an overt attempt to advance a radical agenda that seeks to eliminate all distinctions between men and women. Republicans knew that last year; it’s no different now.

MILITARY RECRUITMENT LAGS DESPITE REDUCED TARGETS, RECORD INCENTIVES TO BOOST INTEREST

Last year’s victory proved that if conservatives fight for family values in the NDAA, we can win. There’s no excuse for any member of Congress — especially a Republican — to support an NDAA that, in the name of "national defense" sets the stage to conscript mothers and daughters to the battlefield.

This is not, and has never been, a question of whether women can serve effectively in our armed forces; the answer is obviously yes. Thousands already do voluntarily, and they deserve the utmost commendation for their service and sacrifice. But today there are around 17 million men of draft-registration age and some 60 million of "fighting age" (18 to 49), the vast majority of whom are able-bodied.

Many of my colleagues argue that women will never be sent to the front lines. Oh, really? Much of the left can no longer define what a woman is and is working to destroy any and all distinctions between the sexes. They teach children that girls can become boys, boys can become girls, and that men can become pregnant. Even in the military itself, they applaud radical gender ideology and force biological women to share living space with anyone else who identifies as one.

Worse, many of those same colleagues say we won’t need to draft women unless it’s "really bad." Well, which is it? If it’s "really bad," then everyone’s going to the front lines. The truth is that this a question of whether we as a nation, and we as Republicans will unnecessarily force young women to fight wars through conscription in the name of political correctness. That’s it.

Chasing "equity" over military readiness threatens the fabric of our nation by playing into the radical left’s anti-science gender ideology; it will undermine the very security of our nation that our armed forces are charged with defending. Men and women are innately different, they bring with them different physical capabilities. While of course some women are as capable as men on the battlefield, on average they are not. In 2015, the U.S. Marine Corps spent over $30 million to conduct a study on this question, unsurprisingly finding that all-male units outperformed mixed-gender units nearly 70% of the time in ground combat tasks.

Or more recently, take into consideration the controversial Army Combat Fitness Test (ACFT). After changing the test multiple times, the Army decided to drop the gender-neutral standards after nearly 50% of female soldiers could not pass previous versions. More disturbingly, these standards were eventually dropped for physically demanding combat roles. When Senator Tom Cotton, R-AR, asked about this decision, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth admitted they abandoned these standards because "we didn’t want to disadvantage any subgroups."

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Incorporating women into the draft is just another step in the left’s long quest to eliminate distinctions between the sexes and impose their extreme agenda on the rest of us. They failed last year, but if they fail again this year, they’ll try again next year. They won’t give up, and we can’t, either.

A military that cares more about "equity" than military readiness will waste no time putting your daughter on the front lines. The purpose of the Selective Service is to ensure the availability of combat replacements for casualties on the battlefield. When the United States is in peril, not pulling replacements from the strongest subsection of our population disadvantages all — including "subgroups."

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Republicans must never fall prey to the notion that we "must-pass" legislation at the expense of our future and must always stand up for our daughters and our country’s security. Last year’s NDAA showed that we can win this fight, if we commit.

Word on the street is that there is an understanding by Republicans that drafting women is not the right path to take. Lord willing, that is the case. But make no mistake: if Congress passes legislation to register our daughters to be drafted, it will be Republicans who make it happen.

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Finnish prosecutor's decision paints picture of hostile path towards free speech and Christianity

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 16:18:03 -0400

At the end of March, a Finnish criminal court delivered a unanimous decision of "not guilty" in what has become widely known as the "Bible Trial." The court found Christian member of Parliament and grandmother Päivi Räsänen and Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola not guilty of "hate speech," striking a major blow against an increasingly aggressive secular worldview and a win for the very foundational values of Western Civilization – freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

At least, for now. Last week, the Finnish prosecutor announced she would appeal Räsänen and Pohjola’s acquittal.

Since 2019, activist prosecutors in the Finnish legal system have systematically targeted Räsänen and Bishop Pohjola for their public confession of their deeply held religious beliefs.

FINNISH LAWMAKER BEING CHARGED FOR EXPRESSING HER RELIGIOUS VIEWS SPEAKS OUT, CALLS THE CASE 'DANGEROUS'

The Finnish general prosecutor has accused Räsänen of three counts of "ethnic agitation": the first for a tweet directed at the Evangelical Lutheran Church for their sponsorship of Helsinki Pride 2019 and containing a picture of a Bible quote, the second based on a 2019 radio debate, and the third for a 17-year-old pamphlet describing her Christian views on marriage and sexuality.

The prosecutor charged the bishop with "hate speech" merely for publishing the "controversial" booklet online. The court threw out each of these charges, again unanimously.

As news of the Bible trial spread around the world, millions of people, both of faith and non-religious, were equally outraged that in a supposedly liberal, free, and democratic society like Finland’s prosecutors would bring criminal charges against a Christian politician and bishop merely for stating a belief that Christians — as well as those of other faiths — believe, and have believed for millennia, about marriage and sexuality.

The court’s ruling took the prosecutor to task for trying to criminalize straightforward beliefs based on widely shared Christian views, even if some might object to them: "It is not for the district court to interpret biblical concepts."

WAR ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: WE MUST STAND UP FOR FINNISH CHRISTIANS FACING TRIAL FOR THEIR FAITH

The court should be applauded; they got it right. The prosecution brought a frivolous case to the court and sought a decision that would have had a disastrous impact on both free speech and freedom of religion in Finland and across the West.

However, three years of dragging Räsänen through hours of police interrogation and court preparation was not enough for these prosecutors.

Despite a unanimous "not guilty" verdict, and politicians and international organizations across the globe calling this prosecution a travesty of justice, anyone of sound mind would think that the prosecutor would simply move on.

But this isn’t over yet.

The prosecutor’s decision to appeal the case is not only absurd. It paints a clear picture of what is to come for people of faith if the West continues barreling down a path that is increasingly hostile to free speech and, especially evident in this case, Christian belief.

Opponents of freedom of speech and religion never shy away from an opportunity to silence debate and snuff out open discussion, which are the foundations of a free society. Increasingly, they use whatever tools are at their disposal to harass those who simply disagree with them.

We have seen this in the repeated lawsuits against Jack Phillips — a humble Colorado cake artist — because his conscience will not permit him to create messages that go against his beliefs, as well as efforts to shout down and censor people over disagreements or expressions of Christian faith.

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When the curtain is pulled back, the anti-free speech and anti-religious ideology simply cannot win on the merits of the arguments. The purpose of politicized prosecutions like this one, win or lose, is to chill free speech and scare religious expression out of the public square.

Others who have little power or financial resources will feel the need to self-censor to avoid persecution via prosecution. Everyday people will naturally fear harassment, prosecution, the inconvenience of massive legal fees and court dates, and the whole cornucopia of social punishments associated with an increasingly aggressive "cancel culture."

Fortunately, the ridiculous crusade against Räsänen and Pohjola has failed – for now. Rather than silencing them, the prosecutor has turned them into international voices for liberty, eager to tell the world about their fight against persecution.

We call on all people of goodwill to join us in praying for Päivi Räsänen and Bishop Pohjola and stand with us all in defense of our cherished fundamental rights, including freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

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On hearing the verdict of "not guilty," Päivi Räsänen said that it had been "a privilege" and "joy" to "speak about the Gospel," even as the investigations and trial have proved difficult.

She is encouraging "all Christians to be open about their faith." Her resilience and fortitude are reminders that we must never shy away from the fight for those persecuted for exercising their fundamental rights.

Sean Nelson is Legal Counsel for Global Religious Freedom at ADF International, the legal advocacy organization supporting MP Päivi Räsänen and Bishop Juhana Pohjola in this case.

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It's time to impeach DHS chief Mayorkas

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 12:40:28 -0500

Those sworn to uphold the United States Constitution are given a sacred trust by the American people. When people violate that oath, they attack the principle of government by consent of the governed. In the case of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the ongoing border crisis, violations of that oath can endanger American lives. As representatives whose state has come under siege by these policies, we are calling on Congress to begin impeachment procedures.

The case against Mayorkas is as lengthy as it is clear. In simplest terms, he has failed to faithfully execute America’s laws, and harmed Americans as a result, all to achieve a political outcome not supported by the law: establishing a wide-open border to issue legal status to as many illegal migrants as possible.

FOX NEWS FOOTAGE SHOWS MASS RELEASE OF SINGLE ADULT MIGRANTS INTO US

Nearly every month since Mayorkas took office, border encounters have increased as enforcement has deteriorated. There were roughly 1.96 million enforcement actions in fiscal year 2021 – the highest yearly total on record. Just last December, there were over 178,000 encounters at our southern border – the highest December on record.

During this time, Secretary Mayorkas terminated construction of the border wall, despite Congressional appropriation. Worse still, the already purchased construction materials are rusting while paid-for contracts go unfulfilled. The secretary has caused CBP to become overwhelmed and less-capable to enforce the law – primarily by failing to utilize tools such as Title 42 and the "Remain in Mexico" policy. Secretary Mayorkas can enforce the CDC public health order 42 U.S. Code § 265 (Title 42) and is choosing not to do so for tens of thousands of illegal migrants, turning away fewer than 60% under the provision last FY.

Mayorkas has released migrants, despite the law, into the United States. Generally, any individual who illegally crosses our border is required by statute to be detained and placed in removal proceedings. However, reports show that border patrol directly released 283,000 migrants into the U.S. in FY21, 95,000 without the statutory requirement of a "Notice to Appear." This doesn’t include the estimated 400,000 known "got-aways" or the roughly 120,000 Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) released by HHS in FY21.

MIGRANT ENCOUNTERS INCREASED AGAIN AT THE SOUTHERN BORDER IN DECEMBER: COURT DOCS

Since Secretary Mayorkas has been in charge at DHS, almost 14,000 pounds of fentanyl have been seized by federal agents at the southern border – for comparison, in combined years FY19 and FY20 roughly 7,600 pounds were seized. These drugs are killing Americans. In the 12-month period ending in April 2021, an estimated 100,306 Americans died from drug overdoses. According to the CDC, synthetic opioids (like fentanyl) are the primary driver of overdose deaths in the United States. In fact, fentanyl deaths are now the leading cause of death for 18- to 45-year-olds.

Mayorkas has empowered cartels and allowed illegal aliens to destroy private property, placing American citizens at risk of physical harm and endangering livelihoods. In May, a Carrizo Springs, Texas, rancher reported that chases and "bailouts" – when migrants jump out of a vehicle and run away – had been happening on her property multiple times per week since January, often damaging her property. Ranchers in South Texas regularly find the bodies of dead migrants on their land. For counties like Brooks County, Texas, which found over 108 dead migrant bodies last year alone; factoring in autopsies, burials and special equipment to retrieve individuals, each one can cost a county $13,100 by one estimate.

In sum, the secretary’s brazen dereliction of duty is directly harming the American people by endangering their lives and livelihoods on a daily basis.

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Article II of the Constitution requires that the president "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Though "faithfully executing the laws" is not explicitly written to apply to Cabinet secretaries, their duties and the responsibility of the president to faithfully execute the laws are intertwined – thus, each secretary must likewise fulfill the duty to faithfully execute the laws.

The DHS secretary’s oath requires Mayorkas to "well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which [he is] about to enter." Congress has enacted border security laws that require the secretary of Homeland Security to "achieve and maintain operational control over the entire international land and maritime borders of the United States."

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Mayorkas has not only failed to maintain operational control of the border, but his actions also have directly facilitated the loss thereof.

While Mayorkas has violated many laws in letter and spirit, impeachment does not require a criminal offense or a violation of statute per se: rather, the Constitution leaves the question of impeachable conduct ultimately to Congress. The encroachments described have undermined the rule of law, violated the Constitution, and placed the lives and inalienable rights of Americans in danger. His impeachment should begin right away.

Reps. Roy, Budd, Hice: HR1 is Pelosi, Schumer's dangerous ploy to cancel Republicans at the ballot box

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 07:00:30 -0500

We all know that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer want to cancel your voice in public debate, but now they also want to cancel your choice at the ballot box.

Sitting atop Pelosi and Schumer’s "to-do" list for the 117th Congress is not getting your children back to school, helping the small business you’ve spent decades building reopen its doors, or getting vaccines in the arms of your grandparents. Rather, their top priority is HR1, the so-called "For the People Act."

The same Declaration of Independence that established America as a country based on unalienable rights also established us as a country based on government by the consent of the governed. This legislation would undermine that sacred principle by fundamentally rewriting the rules of American politics and campaign finance laws to ensure Democrats control Congress and the White House for years to come, if not forever.

Their main goals are threefold. First, they want to put the Democratic stronghold of Washington, D.C., in charge of running elections -- stripping the states of their constitutionally delegated authority to run elections in order to expand the number of potential Democratic voters.

Second, they want to fund political campaigns with taxpayer dollars in order to bolster their candidates' campaign coffers.

MCCARTHY WARNS DEMOCRAT-BACKED HR 1 IS PELOSI POWER GRAB MEANT TO ERODE ELECTION CONFIDENCE

Finally, they want to weaponize federal agencies to target and silence conservatives and their donors.

To put Washington in charge of elections, Pelosi and Schumer’s bill would strip your state of its ability to draw congressional districts, opting instead for an ‘independent’ commission.

As we have seen in California, Colorado, New Jersey, and other states, these commissions have failed to take partisanship out of redistricting and have favored Democrats over Republicans. Additionally, the bill will prohibit your state from choosing its voter qualifications and will wipe out election laws your state has on the books.

The federal overreach doesn’t stop there. States will be required to automatically register any eligible voter based on inaccurate, duplicative federal databases, give 16-year-olds and felons the vote (contradicting the 14th Amendment), institute Election Day and online voter registration, and provide "no-fault" absentee ballots, meaning voters can cast an absentee ballot for basically any reason they choose.

EVERY HOUSE DEMOCRAT SIGNS ON SWEEPING HR 1, GOP ARGUES IT WOULD 'UNDERMINE' ELECTION INTEGRITY

And on the off chance that doesn’t completely handicap Republicans from ever taking back control of Congress, the bill changes the Federal Election Commission (FEC) from a panel of six to five members, helping to all but guarantee one political party (Democrats) controls the enforcement of the "For the People Act." Will they treat Republican states the same? If the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) under former President Obama tells us anything, we highly doubt it.

On the campaign finance front, Pelosi and Schumer want to use your tax dollars to fund political campaigns. Their bill will create a six-to-one taxpayer matching for individual campaign donations up to $200. If you donate $200, the federal government will spend $1,200 of taxpayer funds. That means millions of your taxpayer dollars would fund candidates you despise. If that isn’t disturbing enough, the bill would allow politicians to take a salary from their campaign donations (i.e. your tax dollars).

If you are concerned about voter fraud, the "For the People Act" will cause you to lose sleep. The bill wipes out states Voter ID laws, opening the door for voter fraud. Additionally, the bill will codify fraud-prone mail-in ballots based off of inaccurate voter files and nationalize the practice of ballot harvesting, making it such that such that campaign staffers and political operatives can deliver, collect, and drop off absentee ballots. What could go wrong?

And, by the way, while conservatives fight the cancelation of our voices in American politics, Pelosi and Schumer are weaponizing the IRS to deny tax-exempt nonprofit status to entities whose political and policy positions do not align with the Left’s agenda.

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Time and again, when provided the opportunity to lead, Pelosi, Schumer, and congressional Democrats show us what their view of leadership really is – putting themselves and their insatiable need for power over the American people.

The "For the People Act" is about taking away the rights of Republicans to have their voices heard, choose their candidates, and participate in free and fair elections. We say, unequivocally, "no."

Republican Ted Budd represents North Carolina's 13th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives.

Republican Jody Hice represents Georgia's 10th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives.

Reps. Roy, Biggs, Budd, Perry & Cline: Congress lurches from crisis to crisis — here’s how to fix it

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 07:00:46 -0500

Americans have become used to two things in December: the holiday season and a looming government shutdown right before Christmas.

Like a scripted play, the media always portray this in a similar fashion — shirts and skins, the bad guys versus the good guys, those who want to govern and those who want "obstruct." It’s so predictable at this point that we ought to call it the Capitol Hill Christmas Pageant.

In reality, these so-called "crisis" moments are often manufactured in order to force members to support spending they would otherwise oppose. Bills are presented as "must-pass," but only because congressional leadership lets them linger until the last minute.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS URGE TRUMP TO VETO OMNIBUS SPENDING BILL, CALL IT EXAMPLE OF ‘SWAMP POLITICS’

A small handful of power brokers hammer out massive, complicated, trillion-dollar bills behind closed doors, only to release them to members hours before they must cast an up-or-down vote.

Don’t like it? Tough. If you choose to stand against the broken legislative process, you’ll be attacked — at times from some in your own party — and set yourself up for attack ads.

Those who raise reasonable, principled objections are labeled "obstructionists." They are chastised for trying to do their best to represent the needs of their individual constituencies. The only thing that ever really changes when all is said and done is how many zeros are added to the price tag — a buck reprehensibly passed to future generations of Americans.

The truth is that real legislating is difficult. It’s supposed to be.

The House of Representatives is a consensus-driven body, meaning it should require broad coalitions to get a bill across the finish line. The body accomplishes said consensus working diligently through the committee process — but even more, the full body is supposed to have a full debate on the House floor.

Members should then be able to raise substantive objections, debate them, and amend the bill being considered. Once their voices have been heard, every member should have the chance to cast an up or down vote.

Unfortunately, Congress hasn’t operated this way in a long time. Thanks to a process governed primarily by an authoritarian Rules Committee, the House has not had an open debate, nor has it allowed rank-and-file members to amend bills since May of 2016.

This includes any bill you could name in the past four years — the CARES Act, which spent trillions of taxpayer dollars; the National Defense Authorization Act; or even last week’s bill on ceiling fan regulations.

This past September, for example, members received the legislative text of the stopgap government spending bill just minutes before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., scheduled it for a vote on the floor.

Four months later, as we are about to recess for the holidays, the House hasn’t even gotten that far. Last week we voted on another stopgap bill to avoid a government shutdown in order to give congressional leadership another seven days to drum up some sort of "deal," which the vast majority of members won’t know the details of likely until the day of the vote.

Two days before the government shuts down unless we approve funding, we have no legislative text and are all but guaranteed there will be no real debate, no amendments, and no time to vet the legislation before we are forced to cast our vote.

Even worse, now our colleagues don’t even have to show up to shortchange the American people, since so many have decided to vote by proxy instead of coming to work to do the people’s business in person. One even decided to phone in his vote from the comfort of his boat.

The framers of our Constitution — the ones who spent months carefully deliberating and debating the ends and means of government in a stuffy room with the windows closed in Philadelphia over 200 years ago — never intended for us to do business this way.

Congress, due to its nature and design, was given the responsibility of thoughtfully deliberating on behalf of the American people. That’s why we were elected to ensure that we address the needs and desires of the whole American people, not just the ones whose representatives have a seat at the table of congressional leadership.

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And if they could see us now, you can be certain that the creators of this body would be disgusted both at our laziness as legislators and the dereliction of our duty to the American people.

The current process is nothing short of legislative oligarchy masquerading as representative government.

In this upcoming session, Congress should pass no bill that has not gone through committee for a full hearing and markup. We should not pass anything we haven’t been given at least 72 hours to review, or that we cannot openly amend and debate on the floor.

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We should ensure that bills cover single subjects so that we can deliberate them on their merits alone, and not on the merits of must-pass provisions that leadership has attached to them. Finally, we should come to work to do our jobs, rather than allowing this chamber to establish quorums with members voting from their boats or elsewhere.

That is how representative government based on the consent of the governed is supposed to work. That is how Congress used to operate. And that is what the American people should demand that their government do again.

Rep. Andy Biggs represents Arizona in the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Ted Budd represents North Carolina, Rep. Scott Perry represents Pennsylvania and Rep. Ben Cline represents Virginia. All are Republicans.

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Rep. Chip Roy: To honor our veterans and active duty military members, Congress should take these actions

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 08:00:11 -0500

Veterans Day is a day of celebration and commemoration for all those who have worn the uniform of the United States armed forces. As you come together with family and friends, remember not only those who have served, but those fighting halfway across the globe in America’s longest war.

In response to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Congress authorized the president just days later — on Sept. 18 — to go after “those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

Since that day, America has been at war.

VICE PRESIDENT PENCE: VETERANS DAY IS A TIME THANK AND APPRECIATE HEROES WHO HAVE PRESERVED OUR LIBERTY

The men and women who have deployed in Afghanistan and the Middle East under the 2001 authorization have done a remarkable job combatting terrorism abroad, keeping American soil safe, and bringing enemies of the United States to justice.

Usama bin Laden is dead, as are Saddam Hussein, Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Abu Muhsin al-Masri. Al Qaeda 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is standing trial. Afghanistan has held democratic elections.

Despite those accomplishments and the Trump administration’s efforts to decrease our troop presence, we are no closer to defining what “victory” in Afghanistan and the Middle East looks like.

What is the cost of our indecision?

Today, 18-year-olds are on deployment to fight in a war they weren’t alive to see begin. We have a generation of soldiers with no living memory of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers. They weren’t alive when Congress declared war in 2001, and they were still crawling when Congress passed the second authorization of force in 2002.

In some cases, the next generation of fighters are joining their parents, who first deployed nearly two decades ago on the same battlefield.

We’ve lost more than 7,000 brave patriots and seen almost 70,000 physically wounded — plus hundreds of thousands suffer the invisible wounds from post-traumatic stress (PTS) that our veterans still carry with them. These wounds and scars have led to an unacceptable rise in veteran suicides. We lose an average of 17 veterans a day to suicide, which is 150% of the non-veteran rate.

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But with no clearly defined end-state or objectives, the deployments continue and so do the casualties. Sadly, the health care infrastructure at the Department of Veterans Affairs leaves them, far too often, without the care they need and deserve.

And while there is no monetary valuation for a human life, the American people have spent more than $2 trillion funding the fight, which will continue in perpetuity without action from Congress.

Less than half of 1% of the American people serve in the armed forces, many of them within the same family. The stories of soldiers deploying four, five, or even as many as 12 times are so common they barely raise eyebrows. As are the stories of veterans returning home and struggling to transition to civilian life.

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These stories should be a sobering wake-up call for members of Congress — the vast majority of whom didn’t serve in Congress when the authorizations of force passed — to act. If we are going to expend the blood and treasure of America in pursuit of objectives that serve our national interest, we should make that clear to the American people — and most importantly — our troops.

Congress should honor our veterans and those currently serving in the military with a clear mission, the tools to carry it out, and the steadfast commitment from Congress and the American people that we will have their backs when they get home.

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Rep. Chip Roy: Coronavirus shutdowns and rising unemployment causing economic pain that must be considered

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 06:00:22 -0400

Over the past several weeks we’ve seen America come together to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

From my constituency in Austin to New York City and to Seattle, our nation’s first responders and medical professionals have performed above and beyond the call of duty under grueling and stressful circumstances. We must continue their important efforts to save lives, but in doing so, we must also think more broadly about what that means.

While government leaders have shut down much of our economy in response to the coronavirus, we should recognize that those efforts could cost lives in other ways. Multiple psychological studies have found a strong correlation between an increase in unemployment and a rise in the suicide rate.

US EMPLOYERS SHED 701,000 JOBS IN MARCH, UNEMPLOYMENT JUMPED TO 4.4%, AS CORONAVIRUS RAVAGES ECONOMY

For instance, a 2014 Oxford University study estimated that the Great Recession led to 10,000 additional suicides in Europe and North America from 2008 through 2010.

Moreover, the effects of a prolonged downturn do not just affect those who have lost their jobs. A 2015 study found that workers who remained employed increased their use of inpatient and outpatient mental health services during the Great Recession – a sign of the way financial turmoil in the country increases stress on most American families.

In many ways, the effects of the Great Recession remain with us, in the forms of a still-raging opioid crisis and too many young individuals we have lost far too soon.

One analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention death statistics found that the overall death rate for Americans ages 25 to 44 rose by 8 percent from 2010 through 2015. The financial crisis did not create the opioid epidemic, but accelerated it along with other related "deaths of despair" – from homicides to suicides to abuse of prescription drugs, narcotics and alcohol.

The emphasis on "flattening the curve" aims to save the lives of individuals affected by the coronavirus pandemic, but these important efforts cannot and should not discount other Americans’ health.

The White House and the media focus incessantly on daily coronavirus case counts and deaths. But what will come from the recent increase in calls to suicide hotlines stemming from the dangerous combination of economic stress and increasing social isolation? What of the HIV clinics forced to shut down, temporarily halting our efforts to confront that ongoing pandemic?

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President Trump’s health advisers, including Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, understandably operate with a single-minded focus to push the country to address the coronavirus pandemic.

But this limited focus, to the exclusion of other important conditions, runs the risk of harmful unintended consequences. Instead, our goal should be to pursue a comprehensive path to overcome the pandemic with the least amount of total overall human harm.

The president should add to the Coronavirus Task Force ranks a group of economists, criminologists, psychologists, sociologists and primary care doctors to focus on the second-order implications of our response to the virus.

These experts could examine the consequences of 20 to 30 percent unemployment and financial chaos on addiction, mental health, domestic violence and related issues. They could monitor the raw value of the current shutdown’s impact on our economy, and examine how those effects might ripple through our society and affect Americans’ health.

By giving the president’s Coronavirus Task Force a broader perspective, this group could hopefully offer constructive solutions to avoid the adverse effects of our effort to fight the virus.

Such an approach would help clarify the importance of plotting a path back to normal as soon as possible to restore confidence and hope in the American people.

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We must learn from the tragic rise in "deaths of despair" we’ve seen over the past decade. They reflect a growing segment of American society that feels forgotten and abandoned.

As our country unites to combat the coronavirus pandemic, we must remember that our lives – the very lives our front-line health care heroes are working to save – also depend on each other and our economic, social, and spiritual interconnection as a people.

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Rep. Chip Roy: Helping our border security agents forge a 'clear path' forward

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 11:16:34 -0500

It’s midnight in Laredo, Texas. A Border Patrol agent is on patrol along the border when he hears the crack of bullets across the Rio Grande. Most likely it is another skirmish involving a Mexican drug cartel in Nuevo Laredo. He begins moving his vehicle and a few moments later, hears the clear sound of voices from down along the river, but he cannot be sure because thick, tall carrizo cane is blocking the view.

Without a cell or radio signal and with no way to call for backup, he moves up to higher ground. It could be a caravan of migrants from Central America. It could be members of the warring Cartel del Noreste (CDN) vying for territorial control. It could be drug or human traffickers. He sees movement a few hundred yards down the river, and hits the gas, but must come to a hard stop because the road ends at a gate locked on private land. They get away into the night.

One of the lesser-known but serious obstacles impeding Border Patrol and local law enforcement from doing their jobs is the lack of their ability to see and move freely along the river. Border Patrol has told me that in the Rio Grande Valley sector of the border, which covers 171 miles along the Rio Grande river, they only have 2 miles of navigable, paved road. The 2 miles were built by the government and meant to allow for lateral access along the border.

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What does the lack of roads look like in reality? I’ve spent hours with Border Patrol agents as they drive zigzagging on makeshift roads between public and private land and making circuitous detours to get them only a few hundred feet from where they were. They hit gates and have to drive miles out of the way to get where they need to go, ultimately making it impossible to do their job effectively.

Equally harmful to their job on a daily basis is carrizo cane -- an invasive weed that can reach heights of over 25-feet and grows across roughly 60,000 acres along the Rio Grande. The cane does more than simply block visibility. It makes it impossible for law enforcement to navigate large swaths of territory along the river. That means even if law enforcement identifies a group of migrants or a shipment of drugs coming across the border, they don’t have the ability to get there in a time frame that would allow them to intervene.

Don’t believe me? Ask Border Patrol.

Border Patrol Agent Hermann Rivera clearly laid it out last Fall: “[Cane] has actually gone out of control, to where it's grown and grown and it is controlling a lot of the stuff that happens along the Rio Grande Valley Sector. Getting rid of the carrizo cane will give the agents an advantage in apprehending people who are trying to make illegal entry into the United States. We’ll be better able to secure the people and the community as well.”

Drug cartels and human traffickers know that the cane is handicapping Border Patrol and are using it to illegally smuggle migrants and narcotics into the United States. They are exploiting our weaknesses for profit off the backs of migrants because we refuse to do our job.

Moreover, Border Patrol agents rescued almost 5,000 migrants last year, and eradicating the cane will help them in their efforts to save migrants left for dead in the Texas heat and dangerous terrain by smugglers who value profits more than life. Perhaps even more importantly, we must build access roads for Border Patrol, law enforcement, and medical professionals to navigate along the river. New roads will lower response times for Border Patrol, which translates into more seizures of dangerous narcotics, more apprehensions, more lives saved, and a greater ability for law enforcement to do its job.

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Last week, I filed the “Border Visibility and Security Act of 2020” to get the job done. My bill provides for the eradication of cane growing along the Rio Grande and construction of navigable roads along the entire Southwest border. These actions are necessary to gain operational control of our southern border and provide CBP with the tools and resources needed to achieve that goal.

My legislation is not meant to replace border fencing -- which I support completing in full immediately -- but is designed to complement and work in tandem with all ongoing efforts to secure the border. Importantly, it provides a funding mechanism that allows for action, rather than rhetoric, to get the job done.

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Congress should pass this important legislation, and then get busy addressing the many problems catalyzing our insecure border. We should support President Trump’s efforts to crack down on sanctuary cities, end "catch-and-release," fix the broken Flores settlement, address loopholes in the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) so we can return folks safely home, fully fund ICE and CBP, target cartels as the terrorist organizations they are and get busy reclaiming full operational control of our border.

The border is not secure, and we must remain vigilant to secure operational control to protect our national security and the migrants who seek to come here.

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Rep. Chip Roy: California's homeless crisis could be migrating to Austin – Here's how to tackle it

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 15:36:28 -0500

In my hometown, the phrase “Keep Austin Weird,” popularized on T-shirts and bumper stickers, symbolizes the funky, and historically offbeat, culture of the people and businesses of Texas’ capital city. But over the past several months, an ordinance approved by the Austin City Council and defended by Mayor Steve Adler has produced “tent cities” for the homeless and a surge in violent crime.

As droves of Californians move to Texas for jobs, it appears they and their values are turning parts of Austin from merely “weird” to potentially dangerous mirror images of failed California cities.

Beginning last July, the city implemented a new policy allowing homeless people to sleep and camp in public spaces. To be clear, we should do all we can in our community to make sure everyone has a home. But this policy does nothing to address the growing problem of housing affordability in Austin, has endangered the community, and is a bandaid approach that actually perpetuates homelessness.

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News from California about that state’s housing problems provides clear evidence that allowing the homeless to camp in the open creates public health and safety crises. Poor sanitation for homeless individuals living on the streets led to an outbreak of Hepatitis A in 2017 that grew to include communities up and down the state.

It is one of the reasons that so many Californians are seeking refuge in the state of Texas.

As the congressman representing much of downtown Austin, I have seen and heard the impact of the homeless problem. Local business owners have told me about their increased security needs and of finding needles in their parking lots. These developments not only endanger the local community but also will have an impact on visitors’ perceptions of the city, threatening the vitally important tourism dollars that come to Austin every year.

The changes in Austin came at the same time that the downtown area experienced an 18 percent increase in violent crime during the first 10 months of 2019.

The tragic incidents of last week—when a homeless man fatally stabbed two individuals at a restaurant and subsequently died of his own injuries—speak to the trauma the homeless problem causes for all Austin residents, including the homeless themselves.

In response to the murders last week and the surge in violent crime in downtown Austin, Gov. Abbott wisely directed the Texas Department of Public Safety Thursday to patrol sections of downtown, as well as areas near the University of Texas campus.

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The city can and must do better to solve the problems of homelessness and make sure all Austin residents feel safe. City officials and community organizations can work together to provide individuals with access to temporary shelters, mental health care, and social services that will provide not just short-term assistance to displaced individuals, but long-term plans to get them in stable, permanent housing.

More broadly, Austin must do a better job on the issue of housing affordability. As one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities, our housing stock must grow to accommodate our burgeoning population. Otherwise, a shortage of houses will push prices and rents ever-upward, making any “solutions” to the homeless problems temporary and short-lived.

Anti-growth zoning restrictions and crushingly burdensome tax rates do not help “solve” the problem rather— as we have seen in recent weeks, have only created more problems by increasing the homeless population.

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As a proud Texan who once enjoyed living downtown – I know our city can come together to solve this problem. The residents of Austin deserve to walk the streets in safety and peace—and the homeless themselves deserve better than the “promise” of a tent in a public park.

Working together, we can prevent California’s homeless and housing crises from migrating to Texas’ capital.

Rep. Chip Roy: Criminals get rich bringing in illegal immigrants – But Dems refuse to work with Trump

Wed, 12 Jun 2019 20:36:04 -0400

The state of the southern border of the United States is weak and the political class is to blame.

If you believe we should enforce the rule of law and know who is coming and going from our nation while screening for criminals and terrorists, then our border situation should cause you immediate alarm. The chances are that you are alarmed and are asking yourself, just as The New York Times editorial board asked this past weekend — why have our lawmakers failed to act?

First, it is important to note that the immigration crisis we face today wasn’t born overnight. For decades, Republicans and Democrats have botched border security and much-needed immigration reforms. Republicans, despite it being one of the party’s key promises in 2016, didn’t secure the border or do much of anything border-related when they had power last Congress.

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Under the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Democrats, the 116th Congress has refused to so much as entertain anything to address the border, including funding for the Unaccompanied Alien Child Program run by the Department of Health and Human Services, because my Democratic colleagues fear giving the president and the minority party a "win."

The reality is that while Congress has historically failed and continues to fail, several powerful cartels have operational control of our southern border and are exploiting our asylum laws for profit. Those cartels are making upwards of $2 billion — an amount greater than the $1.375 billion my Democratic colleagues provided for border security earlier this year —trafficking hundreds of thousands of human beings across our border.

Politicians created a power vacuum. Cartels saw it, exploited it, and — frankly — are profiting off our ineptitude. With more migrants settled in the United States, cartels are seizing on the opportunity to make billions of dollars moving families to join them.

As you read these words, we have an unprecedented number of people flooding across our border. For three consecutive months, the Border Patrol has apprehended 100,000 or more migrants each month, culminating in 144,000 in May.

In excess of 675,000 migrants have been apprehended or deemed inadmissible at the southern border in the first six months of this Congress – a figure nearly double the number seen during the same period last year. We are on pace to apprehend 1 million migrants this year, of which roughly 90 percent are likely released at some point in the process because Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection are at max capacity.

It should come as no surprise that ICE and CPB are overwhelmed, as well as the facilities we have in place to process those who come here illegally. Just this past week in my district in San Antonio, Texas, hundreds of migrants from the Congo, who passed through our southern border, are being housed in the city because shelters they listed to immigration officials in the Northeast as their point of destination are at capacity. Now, San Antonio is scrambling to house, care for, and transport the migrants.

As if the sheer volume of migrants flowing across the border is not enough, large quantities of narcotics continue to pour into our communities and our homes both between and at ports of entry.

We know that we’ve apprehended 144 pounds of the dangerous narcotic fentanyl — a drug so dangerous that one sugar packet full can kill a room full of people — between the ports of entry alone from October to April this year.

A total of 6,162.99 ounces of heroin have been seized between ports of entry by Border Patrol agents alone in FY2019. Ninety-six percent was seized along our nation’s southern border. CBP has seized 9,235 pounds of cocaine between ports of entry in the last five months. The opioid crisis is skyrocketing, and most reports concur that the spike is now a direct result of illicit narcotics from China and other places traveling through Mexico.

As the most powerful nation the world has ever known, we have an obligation to set aside partisanship and decide whether we are going to do anything or continue, as so many Congresses have in prior years, to bury our head in the sand and pretend there is not a problem.

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The truth to anyone being honest with themselves is that there is a humanitarian problem. It is far past time this body addressed it. We should act immediately in the following ways: fund President Trump’s $4.5 billion emergency supplemental spending request; end catch and release; ensure that parents and children are kept together in custody while their cases are pending; close all loopholes in our broken asylum system; and ensure unaccompanied illegal immigrant minors are quickly and safely returned home.

If we choose to do nothing, we have the blood of migrants — suffering at the hands of cartels — on our hands.

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Reps. Roy, Jordan, Biggs: Pelosi, Dems just don't care about our national emergency

Wed, 22 May 2019 11:38:20 -0400

House Democrats spent two years in the minority last Congress admonishing Republicans for not doing enough to protect and care for migrant children crossing the nation’s southern border. Now in the majority with control over the House floor, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her conference are poised to let funding for the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program run out. Why? They never cared in the first place.

White House OMB Director Russ Vought sent congressional leadership a letter May 1 requesting $4.5 billion in emergency funding, citing an unfolding “humanitarian and security crisis” that is becoming “more dire each day.” While Vought’s request included funding for additional ICE beds, resources to care for migrants, including mothers and children, who are apprehended by law enforcement, the majority was for humanitarian aid, which includes the care and placement of unaccompanied alien children, otherwise known as the UAC program.

The volume of UAC seeking to enter the country has increased to unprecedented levels in recent months. From October 2018 to April 2019, the number of unaccompanied alien children nearly doubled. Border Patrol estimates its agents have apprehended 44,835 unaccompanied minor children this fiscal year alone. According to OMB, the number of UAC referred to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has increased over 57 percent compared to this time last year, while the appropriation for the program has not increased.

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Before so much as reviewing Vought’s request and without regard for the UAC figures, House Democrats went to the media to sully it before the American people. House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita M. Lowey called it an attempt “to double down on cruel and ill-conceived policies,” a bailout for ICE for “overspending on detention beds,” and accused the administration of “locking up people who pose no threat to the community.”

After some Democratic preening and over two weeks with no response from House leadership, Vought sent leadership another letter last Friday. Vought warned congressional leadership that the situation at the border has “continued to deteriorate” and that, without action from Congress, HHS will quickly burn through its funds -- set to expire at the end of the fiscal year--that involve the “immediate welfare” and “safety for human life.” Vought specifically referenced the $2.88 billion in supplemental funding for the UAC program included in his original request.

House Democrats have remained silent. Their silence is either out of ignorance, or it is deliberate. Given the level of media coverage, and the repeated, direct requests from OMB about the need to fund the UAC program, it is clear this is a deliberate choice from our Democratic colleagues.

Democratic leaders have no intention of responding to the Trump administration’s request. The truth is they never cared about the children in the first place. It was all pure politics. They have zero interest in securing the border. They want open borders and have shown a blatant disregard for the rule of law.

Pelosi claimed in 2018 that, “Democrats have taken full responsibility for the border.” Now, as Speaker, while she controls the House floor, Pelosi can lead and take responsibility. What has that ‘leadership’ gotten us? A paltry $1.375 billion for less than adequate border security funding, two-consecutive months of over 100,000 apprehensions at the southern border, hundreds of pounds of dangerous narcotics flowing across our border, and cartels remain in operational control of our immigration system.

First, Pelosi and Democrats denied the existence of the national emergency. Now, they are willing to let federal agencies run out of money to care for migrant children. How bad does it have to get for Pelosi to care?

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Because Republicans failed to act while in the majority, Congress should act now and provide more than the $4.5 billion the Trump administration is requesting in supplemental funding. If Pelosi and House Democrats are unwilling to have the serious debates needed to address the humanitarian crisis at our southern border, they are forcing President Trump to take all necessary steps to secure the border, stop the abuse of migrant women and children, and shore up American sovereignty.

President Trump was right to declare a state of emergency at our border. If a recalcitrant Congress refuses to act, he would be right to move forward securing our border.

Rep. Chip Roy & Robert Henneke: Trump is right to decline to defend ObamaCare

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 09:34:08 -0400

President Trump has had a very good week. But no decision he has made is more consequential or more correct than his decision to stand with Texas and 19 other states in challenging the constitutionality of ObamaCare.

While the left and the center-right “intelligentsia” often malign the president for acting thoughtlessly or impulsively, the defining characteristic of his leadership is understanding what they do not. The president knows that politics, at its core, is pretty simple – good vs. bad. In the case of health care, for most voters, ObamaCare is bad. It has reduced options, forced millions of people off their private coverage, caused prices to precipitously rise, and has placed extraordinary strains on Medicaid in the name of “covering” more people.

The president accomplishes two things by throwing his weight behind the legal challenge to ObamaCare. First, he is recommitting our nation to health care freedom and to removing the constraints placed on market forces. Second, he is putting the force of the Department of Justice behind the very legitimate constitutional issue originally raised, because in the words of Federal Judge Reed O’Connor, “[t]he later-in-time TCJA does not render the ACA unconstitutional – it abrogates the ground on which the Supreme Court concluded the ACA could be saved.”

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Legally, the lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the Texas Public Policy Foundation is correct. So is O’Connor’s judgment declaring the ACA invalid, because it strictly follows the most recent U.S. Supreme Court precedent on point. In NFIB v. Sebelius in 2012, the Supreme Court ruled the individual mandate unconstitutional, saying Congress has no power to order Americans to buy a service.

Importantly, in the NFIB ruling, the four justices who addressed it held the mandate not severable. When Congress set the shared responsibility payment to zero in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, it voided the basis with which the Supreme Court declined to strike down ObamaCare as unconstitutional because SCOTUS construed this payment as an exercise of taxing powers, since it generated revenue to the federal government.

In their opposition to the lawsuit, the supporters of ObamaCare led by California and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, seek to reverse the Supreme Court’s precedent about this law. But their arguments fail when they fail to follow the controlling case law. When ObamaCare was adopted in 2010, Congress intentionally built the law around the individual mandate as the lynchpin. When the law was challenged, both the Supreme Court and the federal government granted that the mandate was essential to and inextricably intertwined with the regulatory scheme, which could not function without it. The severability doctrine does not save the ACA.

It seems some critics of the case are actually fearful of winning. Because of this, they incorrectly use reasonable sounding legal doctrines to argue why it should fail. The reliance doctrine is one of these. But under that doctrine, courts look at longstanding precedent, not public dependence on a law. Here, the precedent is exactly what the plaintiffs seek to uphold, but the change in facts results in repeal of the ACA.

The truth behind all this is much deeper than law. The truth is that the vast majority of the “center-right” inside the beltway are afraid to talk about health care freedom. They would rather nibble around the edges of ObamaCare and declare a political victory of “repeal.” They are paralyzed by fear – plain and simple.

Instead of letting fear and tepidity rule the day, we should embrace the opportunity to present a third way for health care in America, a way past the current broken regulated “managed” care system – made worse by ObamaCare – and the top-down, budget-busting “Medicare-for-All.”

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The third way is health care freedom led by states, not the federal government. That freedom should include direct primary care, health savings, expanded health sharing organizations, a robust market for actual portable catastrophic insurance unconstrained by mandates, and a functioning safety net to ensure no American falls through the cracks.

The president is right to lead on this – and if conservatives will follow with a message of health care freedom, there is nothing to fear in supporting Texas v. Azar.

A health care bailout for insurers paves the way to single-payer

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 05:00:00 -0400

As the Senate continues to work on its health care bill, the legislation continues to move further and further away from full repeal of ObamaCare and the fundamental goal of the freedom for all Americans to choose their doctors, care, and methods of insuring themselves.

Whether it’s reinstating some of the ObamaCare taxes, further delaying the repeal of Medicaid’s enhanced federal match rate, or total aversion to states being able to regulate their insurance markets outside of the ObamaCare framework, the Senate debate is shaping up to be more moving around of the proverbial deck chairs.

However, there is a significant concern materializing in the context of this debate that will be front and center very soon. That’s the potential for Senate leadership to attempt to bail out insurers in the name of “stabilizing” the ObamaCare exchanges.

Far too little attention has been paid to statements by some senior lawmakers to prop up insurers utilizing billions in taxpayer funds. While the Senate bill already includes a new and highly problematic $112 billion stability slush fund, the unconstitutional cost-sharing reductions (CSRs) are increasingly being touted as essential for “stabilizing” the ObamaCare exchanges.

As a reminder, the CSR payments were never authorized by Congress and have never received an appropriation, nor should they ever receive one. The Obama administration unconstitutionally provided these funds to insurers after ObamaCare was implemented in 2013 to offset spiking costs due to the sudden increase in the number of sick people on the exchanges. Congress rightfully filed a lawsuit arguing the administration had overstepped its bounds.

Now, senior Republican senators want to continue these unconstitutional payments (the ones they previously sued to stop) because of the rapidly deteriorating ObamaCare exchanges. This is both poor policy and utter hypocrisy. It is also a greasing the skids toward single-payer, government-run health care.

Keep in mind that ObamaCare’s coverage mandates and regulations forced insurers to meet certain requirements that have driven up the cost of care, narrowed networks, and resulted in billions of dollars in financial losses for carriers in the exchanges. The answer by the central planners in Washington has been to utilize taxpayer dollars to subsidize these losses and coerce insurers to remain in a highly-regulated system.

Such a morally repugnant scheme is entirely unnecessary and avoidable. Congress should be fully repealing ObamaCare. Short of that, they should at minimum repeal ObamaCare’s onerous regulatory architecture responsible for causing such financial disruption for patients and providers. Indeed, the Texas Public Policy Foundation has even suggested as a compromise a pathway for states to re-adopt these provisions if they so choose.

But more importantly, if Congress wants to prevent a single-payer system, it should not appropriate the CSR payments and should also repeal the poorly conceived Patient and State Stability Fund.

As insurers become more and more reliant on taxpayer funding for their bottom line, America moves closer toward a single-payer, government-run health care system. Any senator who supports the false notion that the cost-sharing reduction payments or the Patient and State Stability fund are needed for “stability” will ultimately be complicit in destroying free-market health care for good and creating a health care system that mirrors the DMV.

For those following the Charlie Gard tragedy, such a government-run system ultimately leads to bureaucrats determining the value of both your care and your life—and ultimately taking decision-making out of your hands and putting it in the hands of the system.

All Americans should have the best health care in the world and lawmakers should make good on the promises they have made for over seven years so that an actual market can emerge to deliver better care at lower costs. That begins with repealing the premium-busting regulations, but what shouldn’t be lost in any of the debate over repeal is the critically important need for the Senate to put a permanent end to the notion that taxpayers should subsidize the profits of insurers.

We must not continue to have insurers serve as nothing more than another long arm of the state. Single payer health care is hardly distinguishable from that involving highly subsidized “third parties,” and yet that is precisely where the current GOP train is heading.

Chip Roy is the Director of the Center for Tenth Amendment Action and Drew White is Senior Federal Policy Analyst—both at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

ObamaCare repeal: GOP leaders are missing their chance

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0400

America has endured for generations because our Constitutional framework and our collective commitment to liberty protects us against the inevitable failures of our government and its leadership. Yet, when it comes to the current debate over health care, GOP leaders are abandoning these safeguards and risking not just our access to quality health care but something far greater.

To be sure, most tangibly for the many Americans for whom rising health care costs and diminishing access to quality care is a very real, daily concern, the decisions we make will have lasting and very serious consequences. These are the reasons to fully repeal ObamaCare immediately and to then respect the states and the free market to give us the options to get the best health care possible.

Yet, incomprehensibly, Congressional leaders are choosing not to do so and have abandoned their constituents in a series of negotiations – most recently for state “waivers” and other crumbs of liberty – that have little actual hope of meaningfully honoring their campaign commitments to fully repeal ObamaCare and reform health care markets. Unfortunately, there are much larger implications to their lack of boldness.

First, Congress is turning away from the free market. Republicans talk a big game about believing in free enterprise and capitalism. But the grassroots out in real America see their actions as more cronyism than principle. Whether it’s subsidizing big corporations through the Export-Import Bank or the more recent $100 billion insurer slush fund included in the American Health Care Act, the grassroots understandably consider Congress’ actions to be political pay-offs and more of Washington picking winners and losers rather than the free market at work.

So when those who claim to promote freedom refuse to legislatively repeal market-constricting regulations and then “replace” ObamaCare subsidies with new -- and arguably more expansive -- subsidies in the form of refundable tax credits, it makes one wonder. Which party is for less government intervention?

Second, Congress is continuing the trend of ceding its Article I legislating powers to others, in particular the administrative state. The Legislative Branch – hiding behind the intricacies of Senate rules and the Budget Act – has been selling “repeal” in a future second phase at the hands of the Department of Health and Human Services and Secretary Tom Price’s ability to repeal ObamaCare administratively. Setting aside the fact little meaningful repeal can be accomplished administratively beyond tinkering at the margins, the more troubling concern is why our elected leaders refuse to just do what they have the power and duty to do and have repeatedly promised to do.

This is a pattern. Congress frequently punts. Take President Obama’s illegal Executive Amnesty. The Congressional GOP could have used its Article I powers to stop funding any implementation of that executive action. But it didn’t even entertain that idea, choosing instead to leave it to states like Texas to fight in the courts. Moreover, during the 2013 defund fight, Republican Congressional leaders hid behind not having 50 votes in the Senate and not having a GOP-controlled White House. The conservative grassroots being skeptical of their position questioned their sincerity. And here we are. Since the repeal effort stalled, a possible “deal” is being floated to permit Governors to seek “waivers.” The simple truth is Republicans seemingly would rather hide behind conjecture and procedural theory while punting responsibility.

Third, the health care debate today centers almost entirely on the word “repeal,” and while it has been a rallying cry for conservatives, it is too much now an end to itself. It’s just a word. And it’s a word that is all about process and politics, not really substance. Congressional leadership is so wrapped up in the idea of “repeal,” that it has become a political box-checking exercise rather than a commitment to ensure Americans actually receive better health care at more affordable costs.

Worse, this exercise is not actually checking the box! If one aims to repeal ObamaCare – a law built upon subsidies, regulations and Medicaid expansion – how can one honestly look at your constituents and claim to have repealed it with a new law built upon subsidies, regulations and continued, albeit slightly limited, Medicaid expansion? Even if they allow a theoretical waiver for states, it defies common sense to claim this is repeal.

Finally and most importantly, GOP leaders are missing their chance to win the minds and hearts of the American people. They are denying a new generation of Americans the ability to understand and embrace constitutionally limited government, federalism, free markets and the opportunities those ideals create.

The Republican Party has been afforded a historic moment in time to transform America’s health care system to one that offers the best we could dream of – plenty of doctors, low cost insurance options, affordable medicine - all while maximizing the number of individuals receiving the care they need.

Instead, Congressional leaders are defining the debate in terms of tax reductions and supposed out-year cost savings instead of how to increase the supply of high quality health care that is available and affordable to actual human beings.

This fight over health care reform will come and go, but the lasting impact of how it is fought will be significant.

If Congress is nothing more than a box-checking regime that will overstate its own actions to claim success while further ceding its own Constitutional powers and abandoning the free market – then America will completely lose its identity.

This is what is at stake.

Congress has a choice – and it ought to choose the principles that made this country great and that they claim to believe in, not the failed Washington-centric policies that have been the problem all along.

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