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Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHMITT. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about the impressive pace by which this body is confirming President Trump's nominees to important Cabinet positions, to fulfill his agenda and his promises to the American people.
I think it is important to take a step back. November is a few months now in the rearview mirror, but President Trump completed the greatest political comeback in American history.
The Democrats did everything they could, including trying to jail him and bankrupt his family, to prevent him from stepping foot in the Oval Office--never again.
Well, guess what. On January 20, as we stood in that Rotunda, he completed that journey back--a journey that was highlighted by a reform agenda.
So what we see happening right now that the legacy media and my Democrat friends are losing their minds on every day was every single thing that he talked about: securing our border, being energy dominant, restoring accountability back in government, restoring our place on the world stage, after 4 years of humiliation, 4 years of lawlessness.
And just to give a few examples that the Supreme Court weighed in on, the student loan debt forgiveness scam--President Biden had no ability to do that. And I do find it interesting that my Democrat colleagues are, all of a sudden, talking about things that Presidents can and can't do.
Imperial Biden, with a stroke of his pen, tried to wipe out half a trillion dollars' worth of student loan debt. They were sued. I actually happened to file that lawsuit as attorney general of Missouri, and we won at the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court said: You can't do it.
Do you know what Joe Biden's response was? ``Yeah, I don't really care about that.'' He kept trying to do it, and then he would get struck down over and over with each failed attempt.
He tried to force a vaccination, the COVID shot, on 100 million Americans through OSHA. An Agency that was created to make sure forklifts beep when they back up was suddenly now forcing a medical procedure on a third of the country.
The censorship enterprise directed Agencies to coordinate, collude, coerce with Big Tech companies to silence conservative speech.
This all happened in 4 years, and the American people sat in a jury box and watched all this. They saw it play out. They didn't want to become a banana republic. They didn't want lawfare to be weaponized to take out political opponents. And President Trump won the popular vote, including sweeping all of the battleground States.
So now here we are with an opportunity for real reform. Some of those people are already in place. Pete Hegseth was already confirmed--I sit on the Armed Services Committee, along with Mr. President up here--and he promised to get rid of DEI. He is doing that. He promised to really, really focus in on China. He is doing that. He has talked about procurement reform. Our first hearing under Chairman Wicker was about procurement reform.
We have some serious issues to get at, but DEI is poison. It has hurt recruiting. It divides the room, has no place in our military. It doesn't have any place in our government at all, which is why I filed legislation this week to just get rid of all of it writ large across the government. It is discriminatory. It is divisive. And I think actually now the fever has broke. People see it, and there is an opportunity for reform.
Pam Bondi, who was confirmed yesterday and was just sworn in, was an excellent pick. I spoke on the Senate floor last night about why. I won't get into that all again, but we come from AG world. She is incredible, she is smart, she is respected, and she is going to restore credibility to the Department of Justice.
There are a couple more people I just want to mention to highlight I think why the American people are very excited about the reform that is happening.
We had the hearing of Kash Patel last week in the Judiciary Committee. I expect him to get confirmed as well.
The FBI was weaponized against its own citizens to score political points and to settle debts. It went after traditional Catholics. I happen to be Catholic. It went after traditional Catholics, set up a spy network. Because of the religious affiliation of another American, the FBI spied on them and viewed them as domestic terrorists because they went to Latin mass.
They also went after parents who had the audacity to show up at a school board meeting because they didn't like critical race theory in their classrooms. They were home during COVID. They saw what was happening. They didn't like it. They showed up to school board meetings. The teachers union complained. Joe Biden sent the guards out. Merrick Garland used the FBI to go after parents.
Then, of course, there is the lawfare that we saw against President Trump.
So Kash Patel is going to come in. He has a big job. The trust for the FBI is at an alltime low. It has plummeted. You can hardly argue with the reasons why. I laid out just a few. But, again, somebody that is going to come in and clean up.
Then the last person I want to mention, because there are a lot of great nominees--and to the credit of Leader Thune, we will have gotten to I think 13 maybe by the end of this week, which is the pace that we used to be on before the last 8 years or so, back to the Obama years, when the President actually could get his team in place--is Russ Vought to be OMB Director.
For those in the Gallery and those folks watching at home, the Office of Management and Budget deals with a lot of sort of the tentacles inside of government, where the wheels kind of turn, and you also get a glimpse of the opportunities to save money that have been neglected for far, far too long. We are $36 trillion in debt. We are going to have an opportunity to vote on him I think tomorrow. We will see.
But the ``hair on fire'' histrionics we have heard the last couple days about--whether it is DOGE or Russ Vought, I am afraid my Democrat colleagues--they haven't hit rock bottom yet. They don't really get what November was about. They continue to be the ones that defend the status quo, the guardians of permanent Washington, of the establishment that--in an election cycle that was decided between the disrupters and the establishment, the people have weighed in.
So let them defend it. I think it is a fight that we want because you can't really defend this kind of stuff: $45 million for diversity inclusion scholarships in Burma; $3 million for girl-centered climate action in Brazil; $125 million to racialize public health; $288,000 for diverse birdwatcher groups; USAID, which is in the center of the storm right now, and rightfully so, spent $1.5 billion to ``advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia's workplaces and business communities''; $70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland; $2.5 million for electric vehicles for Vietnam; $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia--not Columbia, MO, or Columbia, SC, the country of Colombia; $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru; $2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala; $6 billion to fund tourism in Egypt. This is what they are mad about, that the veil is coming down. Russ Vought is going to be part of this reform movement.
It is amazing to me the response I often hear on this floor: Well, what is $2.5 million? What is $6 million? What is $1.5 million?
Tell that to the truckdriver working his tail off. Tell that to the waitress who is working an extra shift to afford to send her kid to a school that she wants them to go to or a family saving up to go to Washington, DC, to show their kids our Nation's Capital. It is insulting. It is insulting to taxpayers.
So a reckoning, indeed, is coming. It is coming, and we have been waiting for far too long to have accountability in our government. Business as usual just isn't working for working families anymore. So this team that President Trump has assembled and put together--I am excited for them to get to work. I am excited for a golden age of America. And I am excited for accountability finally to make its way to our Nation's Capital.
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