Chip Roy and Thomas Massie debunk the "Great Book-Banning Lie," arguing Democrats like AOC spread misinformation to avoid due diligence on H.R. 5, which empowers parents rather than restricting curriculum. They credit Speaker Kevin McCarthy for removing federal control over education via amendments, contrasting this with their preference for abolishing the Department of Education entirely. While criticizing the $5 trillion money supply and ineffective moderate Democrats, they praise Ron DeSantis's leadership against woke culture, asserting that true freedom requires projecting confidence in fundamental principles despite deepening political polarization. [Automatically generated summary]
Because we had already discussed that the day before in the Rules Committee, before the debate came to the whole house.
They knew it didn't ban books, but they went down there and said it anyways because they knew a lot of their constituents wouldn't do the due diligence to find that.
You know, some people have a pacemaker up here, a lot of these old senators.
I've got an anxiety maker.
I'm trying to make their hearts skip beats and become concerned by looking at the debt increasing each day.
It goes, I wrote the software in here, I made the case, I've got some 3D printed ones I'm working on so Chip Roy can have a copy.
But it goes to the Treasury's website once a day, gets the actual debt to the penny, and then makes its best guess based on the average debt per second over the last year about what the debt is at this very moment.
I'm going to guess that when you're back home in Kentucky, or I should say Kentucky and Texas, of course, when you're back home in Kentucky, people probably dig it.
You come here and everyone's like, could you put that thing away?
I mean, I'll say that I think that is certainly, there's more of an appetite for that among a larger block of the Republican Party.
That doesn't necessarily mean that's the overall direction.
We still have a lot of people we've got to get there, right?
There's still an enormous dominance of what I would call the War Caucus in this town.
And I say that as someone, a child of the 80s, and very much believe in a very strong military.
Used sparingly, but forcefully.
But we've got a kind of stranglehold on this place of the way we've always done things.
And part of the issue here with freedom is reminding people why we have a limited government of diffused powers and why that's important for preserving and protecting our rights.
Nothing illuminated that more than COVID.
Nothing illuminated the dangers with centralizing power and giving power to a handful of cronies like Anthony Fauci than what we just witnessed.
Thomas has been one of the leaders on that along with Rand Paul.
I've tried to help and others.
Let's be honest.
Let's be honest, though.
to elevate that. There is an increased appetite for it, but in part because
these people in Washington respond to their constituents, there's a lot of
Americans who want us to preserve and protect liberty.
Let's be honest. Let's be honest though. The fight that happened the first
week of January over who would be the next speaker was very consequential.
And a lot of people say, oh, that looked so bad.
You know, the Republican Party was in disarray.
No, that is how it's supposed to work.
We're not supposed to, like, have all these backroom deals and everything's baked.
And what came out of that is actually Chip Roy and I ended up on the rules committee.
Along with Ralph Norman.
So conservatives, the people who are most likely to advocate for freedom through legislation, have a blocking position on every bill that comes to the floor now.
And also, for the first time since I've been in Congress, we're actually imposing time to read the bills.
Like, here we are three months into this session, and every bill that's come to the floor, you've had 72 hours to read.
Now, 72 hours, I know people back home are like, there's not time to read a bill in 72 hours.
So to that point, I sat down with Speaker McCarthy at the Capitol yesterday and I sensed actually now, maybe it wasn't when you guys were in the fight, that he kind of is happy with the results.
I think he does feel like maybe it empowered him a little bit by you guys pushing.
I mean, yesterday he sent a letter to the President of the United States detailing some spending restraint that a lot of us have been pushing for.
He did uphold his end of the bargain in ensuring that several of us got on the Rules Committee, that we have more conservatives on the Appropriations Committee and other committees.
that we've been adhering to a number of the rules that we'd asked for back in December.
So all of that's good and I think when that happens, there's a unity that builds around
that.
Now, getting to 218 on anything is hard and you can only lose four, five, six guys or
gals and it's difficult.
But I think what we saw coming out of January was a renewed spirit that when some people
stand up on what they believe, you can prove that the sky's not going to fall.
You can have 435 people in the chamber debating stuff and actually move the needle rather than just kind of retreating to your corners doing press conferences and walking away.
And I think we showed that and I think Kevin's a beneficiary of that.
Yeah, let me give an example of how the new system actually works out for Kevin.
So he, to get the majority, he went out and did a lot of campaigning and one of his signature issues that a lot of people care about is reclaiming our schools.
Basically letting parents know what their kids are learning.
And so there was a bill that was coming to the floor, H.R.
5, that would impose a requirement on every school system in the United States that you publish your curriculum and the books and the list of the books that are in your library.
Well, believe it or not, Chip Roy and I had a small issue with that bill, which a lot of members of our conference did.
We were like, well, you know, we prefer the Department of Education doesn't even exist.
So the question, like, if by reforming it or directing it, are we violating our principle of federalism and leaving things up to the states?
And so they asked me, is there any way you can vote for this bill?
And I said, yeah, if we have an amendment on the bill that eliminates the Department of Education.
Like, if I can show a preference legislatively through my votes on the floor, not just say something on a website, that my preference is to get rid of this department rather than reform it, I could vote for the final bill in regards to how it turns out.
And what surprised me is Kevin voted to remove all the power from the federal Department of Education.
Yeah, to micromanage elementary and secondary education.
So for the first time since Jimmy Carter set up this Department of Education as a re-election ploy that failed, we had a referendum in the House of Representatives on whether they should exist or not in our schools back home.
And Kevin joined us on saying no, they shouldn't give it back to the schools.
So this might sound sort of Amateur hour, but so the department obviously is still going to exist, but it just won't have authorization when it comes to these types of issues That's and let me be clear before everybody gets really excited Our amendments didn't pass and but we still voted for the final bill Because we got a chance to put everybody on record and now people back home can say would I rather have a congressman?
That wants to take the federal government out of my kids education or congressman who wants the federal government Well, and one finer point on that, to your point.
We passed legislation, as Thomas described, that empowers parents to know what their kids are being taught.
We put out on the record a whole bunch of garbage books with all sorts of total smut and ridiculous things that were in libraries and in curriculum, and we were demonstrating that.
But for me to get comfortable with federal power being used to go tell a local school district, you're going to require parents to be able to see this stuff, I need to demonstrate that my personal preference is to get the feds out of it altogether.
But in the absence of that, then yeah, a parent ought to have a right to at least know how these dollars are being used and what's being taught to their kids.
And so I think getting that series of votes, restoring the way things work, which is a part of that agreement, empowered Kevin and empowered us to come together.
unidentified
Yeah, just to cap all that, that bill probably would have failed.
And Kevin, one of his major initiatives that he campaigned on, wouldn't have been able to pass in a majority if we didn't help him put into the process an ability for conservatives to express their preference.
So was the calculation by you guys that yes, you would prefer that the federal government not do anything, but not every state is going to do what perhaps Texas and Kentucky and certainly Florida, Iowa, Arkansas, a couple other states are doing right now.
So it was sort of your only way in essence, right?
Because Cali is never going to do this sort of thing, New York, et cetera.
I would rather just get the feds out of it and say, if you want to be insane in California, go ahead, but don't mess with my kids in Texas.
Don't mess with the kids in Kentucky.
But in the absence of that, if we're going to, as we do currently, have federal dollars flow, I think it is within reason of me being able to say I would prefer this other outcome to be able to go in and say that, yeah, Parents have a right.
And frankly, even in Texas and Kentucky, it's not like every parent in Texas knows exactly what's going on.
So where those federal dollars are flowing, now they'll have a little bit more ability to push for that.
So when you guys see AOC afterwards talk about how this bill was basically passed by fascists, and it's like, man, she needs some better education because you don't know what it means.
Or Hakeem Jeffries, they don't want to teach about the Holocaust.
I mean, these were the responses you got out of these guys.
I've asked this to every Republican I've sat down with for the last three days.
Are you talking to these guys in the back rooms going, what the hell are you talking about?
You know that's not legit.
unidentified
I mean, in the Rules Committee, we debated this, and Chip was right to point out, they knew that this bill didn't ban books, okay?
Because we had already discussed that the day before in the Rules Committee, before the debate came to the whole house.
They knew it didn't ban books, but they went down there and said it anyways because they knew a lot of their constituents wouldn't do the due diligence to find that.
Did you guys see the, on TV, was it about a week ago, DeSantis is going through the books that they've removed.
It's basically two books that were pretty much pornographic and the media, the mainstream media, had to cut away because they can't show pornography on ABC.
Yeah, if you look at right now, right, and there are places in the Northeast or in certain sectors of this country where the people are still masked.
I mean, you flip on, like, the NBC control room, right?
The control room, they're all sitting there in masks.
Good grief, man.
Like, four years ago, we weren't wearing masks in Texas.
I went out to Lakey, Texas, which I represent, which is, you know, about two and a half hours from my house.
They were doing goat roping and it was a Labor Day weekend in 2020.
Of course, the Northeast elites and all that stuff, many of them are cowering in their corners and hiding and masked up.
These guys were all out, you know, the kids and everybody were out in the rodeo and they're roping goats and we were all getting together and having food and dinner.
It was totally different worlds, two different worlds, truly.
And that still exists today, like that divide, that difference, that different view about how you do these things.
And I think that is reflected in the representatives in Washington.
The reason I believe in federalism and the reason I hedged a bit on the parents' rights bill and wanted to go well, because all things being equal, the only way this republic survives is if we can literally agree to disagree under our federal system.
If we're going to tell each other what to do, it's going to break us apart.
You know, look, one thing I do believe in though, right, is that there's an ebb and flow to things.
I do believe in the power of ideas.
I believe in the power of freedom.
I believe in the power of the fundamental principles upon which this country was founded and that leaders of this country have an obligation to project confidence in those principles and go fight for them.
You know, I was talking to a group this morning.
And, you know, all these folks that get, you know, June 6th and D-Day, and they talk about their dads and granddads and their family that were, you know, storming the beaches of Normandy to wallow bullets.
They talk about Washington crossing the Delaware and Texas, the guys on the Alamo.
And, you know, I said, oh, you're talking about all that pride.
And then they go, man, you were real courageous in that speaker's fight, because they were tweeting mean things about you.
Look, come on guys.
If you want to fight for freedom, just get out there and say what you believe.
Stand up like I did at a Chamber of Commerce event today and said DEI is garbage.
Stop promoting it.
It's hurting our recruiting at the Department of Defense.
We've just got to start being honest because I think people want it.
I think DeSantis shows that in Florida.
He wins by a million and a half votes, 62% of Hispanics, 50% of single women.
Why?
Because he led.
He wasn't afraid of Disney.
He isn't afraid of the universities.
He isn't afraid to take on the establishment and take on all this woke stuff.
He wasn't afraid to send a shipment of folks to Martha's Vineyard.
And then he won 62% of Hispanics.
People are tired of people who are trying to buy their votes.
People understand that the former President Trump hired a lot of people that should have been fired, and we thought he would have fired them, but he didn't.
And so I haven't waded into the race yet, but I will say Governor Ron DeSantis, the best governor in the United States, there's no close second.
And I had the privilege of serving with him for six years in the House of Representatives.
And people can go back and look at those votes if they want to know where he stands on federal issues.