Congressional Record/Volume 167/Issue 4/House/Counting Electoral Votes/Arizona Objection Debate/Roy Speech
Mr. Roy. Madam Speaker, today, the people’s House was attacked, which is an attack on the Republic itself. There is no excuse for it. A women died. And people need to go to jail. And the President should never have spun up certain Americans to believe something that simply cannot be.
I applaud House leadership of both parties for bringing us back to do our job, which is to count the electors and no more.
The problem we face, though, is even bigger. We are deeply divided. We are divided about even life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The words which used to bind us together now, at times, tear us apart because we disagree about what they even mean.
My constituents at home in Texas are genuinely upset. I say to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, we have a constant barrage of those who wish to remake America into a socialist welfare State, efforts to attack our institutions, tear down statues, erase our history, defund our police. We have seen the debasing of our language. We teach our children that America is evil. We destroy our sovereignty, empower cartels. We attack our Second Amendment. We destroy small businesses through lockdowns. We divide ourselves by race. We can’t even agree that there is man and woman. We extinguish the unborn before they even have a chance to see daylight.
But at the heart of our path forward lies the essence of our Republic, its cornerstone. That we are a union of States bound together for common defense and economic strength, and more so bound together through federalism in which we may live together peacefully as citizens in this vast land agreeing to disagree, free to live according to our own beliefs and according to the dictates of our conscience.
Now, many of my colleagues were poised this afternoon to vote to insert Congress into the constitutionally prescribed decisionmaking of the States by rejecting the sole official electors sent to us by each of the States of the Union. I hope they will reconsider.
I can tell you that I was not going to, and I will not be voting to reject the electors. And that vote may well sign my political death warrant, but so be it. I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and I will not bend its words into contortions for personal political expediency.
Number one, rejecting the electors certified to Congress by sovereign States violates the 12th Amendment and the entirety of the Constitution it amends, notwithstanding claims that you must read certain sections first. It is clear, it is black and white, we count. It is ministerial. And our only job is to count the electors before us. We have only one slate of electors per State sent to us under color of law, and no more.
Number two, to the extent you believe we do have constitutional authority to reject, we are arguing using incomplete and often misleading data points to prove it. I am not afforded time to go point by point, but there are more misleading claims than legitimate ones.
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Three, rejecting the electors ignores the Founder’s specific admonition that Congress not choose the President, as articulated in Federalist No. 68.
Four, indeed, the Founders drafted the inclusion of a phrase specifically putting Congress into the manner of the election process then specifically rejected it.
Five, if more than a trivial bloc of this body votes to reject a sovereign State’s electors, it will irrevocably empower Congress to take over the selection of Presidential electors, and doing so will almost certainly guarantee future Houses will vote to reject the electors of Texas or any of our States for whatever reason.
Six, voting to reject the electors is not remotely consistent with our vote on Sunday, a vote I forced to highlight the very hypocrisy: to accept the outcome of the election of ourselves through elections conducted under the same rules, by procedures put in place by the same executive branch officials, impacted by rulings from the same judges, State and Federal. To do so is entirely inexplicable on its face.
Seven, the argument for rejection most given by my colleagues is based on the allegations of systemic election abuse by executive or judicial branch officials interfering with the “legislatures thereof” in Article II.
Many States made poor policy decisions. Whether these poor policy decisions violate State laws is a contested matter and a matter for the States to resolve for themselves.
More, five of the six legislatures are controlled by Republicans. Not one body has sent separate electors. Not one body has sent us even a letter by a majority of its whole body. The only body, the Pennsylvania Senate, who managed to come up with a majority of Republicans to complain only did so yesterday in an eleventh-hour face-saving political statement. Not one GOP statewide official has formally called on us to change. Not one law enforcement organization, State or Federal, has presented a case of malfeasance.
History will judge this moment.
Let us not turn the last firewall for liberty we have remaining on its head in a fit of populist rage for political expediency when there is plenty of looking into the mirror for Republicans to do for destroying our election systems with expansion of mail-in ballots.
I may well get attacked for this, but I will not abandon my oath to the Constitution. And I will make clear that I am standing up in defense of that Constitution to protect our federalist order and the electoral college, which empowers the very States we represent to stand athwart the long arm of this Federal Government by its very design.