Rep. Roy’s Remarks on the 200th Anniversary of the Texas Rangers, and Texas Independence Day

WASHINGTON DC — On Wednesday, Rep. Chip Roy (TX-21), spoke on the House floor, commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Texas Rangers and Texas Independence Day. In his remarks, he also called on his colleagues to stand up for freedom and protect our communities.

A transcript of his full speech can be found below.

“I appreciate my colleagues' remarks about the Texas Rangers and they're such an important organization in the world of law enforcement. I say that as someone who served in the Office of the Attorney General of Texas as the first assistant attorney general, where I had a large number of law enforcement, including former Texas Rangers working for me, worked in the US Attorney's Office for law enforcement. My grandfather was the chief of police of a small Texas town, Sweetwater, Texas, in the 1940s. And my great-great grandfather was a Texas Ranger.

As my colleague from Texas just discussed with respect to the history in 1821, Stephen F. Austin, the father of Texas, brought 300 families to settle land in modern day Texas. There was no regular army, so Austin assembled a fighting force to provide protection from Comanches and eventually Mexican Raiders giving rise to the Texas Rangers. Texans did what sovereign states have done throughout history, stepping up and protecting our communities. We stood up for the rule of law when there was none.

Much of the action seen by the early Rangers involved bloody conflicts with Comanche tribes and gangs of bandits who threatened the safety of Texas. Years following, the Rangers proved indispensable during major events such as the Mexican American War, the pursuit of criminals Bonnie and Clyde in 1934, and Hurricane Harvey rescue and recovery, as recently as 2017. Today, local law enforcement slowly assumed much of the day-to-day peacekeeping role that the Texas Rangers held before the turn of the 20th century. The Rangers now operate as a key investigative body for the State of Texas. Rangers are renowned for conducting major criminal investigations, suppression of organized crime, border reconnaissance, SWAT bomb squad, special rapid response, crisis negotiation, Joint Intelligence Center Management, and investigation of unsolved crimes.

The impact of the Texas Rangers on the Lone Star state cannot be understated. My home county, Hays County, is named for John Coffey Hays, a renowned Ranger appointed by Sam Houston, who fought one of the most notorious battles against the Comanche, near what is called Enchanted Rock today in the district I represent, a little west of Austin in Gillespie County. My great-great grandfather John Vaughan Roy served as a Texas Ranger in Hays, Travis, and Blanco counties, all three counties I represent today, protecting my future home, where I live now, in Hays County, and holding the line against lawlessness.

To the west, Captain Charles Schreiner of Kerr County served with distinction and went on to donate land for the Schreiner Institute, a military school in my district. Today I'm honored to represent Ranger Ray Martinez, a living legend in New Braunfels with a long history of heroism and service. The Ranger spirit is also alive and well today in my friend and longtime Texas Ranger David Maxwell, who I worked with in the Office of the Attorney General of Texas, who solved the over 35-year-old cold case in the unspeakable murder of his own sister. That is the spirit of the Texas Rangers.

“They were men who could not be stampeded.” That's how former Department of Public Safety Director Homer Garrison Jr. described them, and they have certainly lived up to that.

And with so many other great figures of our history, some today wish to rewrite the legacy of the Texas Rangers, focusing only on the harshest of narratives from the comfort of modern-day America, a comfort bought by the sacrifice the blood of Texas Rangers, all while ignoring those sacrifices that they made to settle the West and establish the rule of law.

The Scripture reminds us: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” These heroes wake up every morning and put their lives on the line to serve and protect their fellow Texans, as did their predecessors. The Texas Rangers are owed a debt of gratitude that cannot be fully repaid, but today we thank them, and we congratulate them on 200 years of selfless service. 

Tomorrow will be March 2nd, Texas Independence Day. On February 23, a Mexican force numbering in the thousands, and led by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, began a seige of the fort. The Texas forces held out for 13 days, outgunned and outnumbered, driven by the cause of liberty and their desire for free Texas.

William Barret Travis wrote this about the siege, “I am besieged by thousands or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna. I have sustained the continual bombardment and cannonade for 24 hours and have not lost a man. The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise the garrison are to be put to the sword. If the fort is taken, I've answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flags still wave proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then I call on you in the name of liberty, of patriotism, and everything dear to the American character to come to our aid, with all dispatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily and will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor, and that of his country, victory or death.”

This week also includes Texas Independence Day, as I said, the Texas Declaration of Independence reads, “When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement of whose happiness it was instituted.” The Texas Declaration of Independence states, “the first law of nature, the right of self-preservation, the inherent and inalienable right of the people to appeal to first principles and take their political affairs into their own hands, in extreme cases, enjoying it as a right towards themselves, and a sacred obligation to their posterity to abolish such government and create another in its stead, calculated to rescue them from impending dangers and to secure their welfare and happiness.”

What did they declare independence for? What did Travis and the rest of the Alamo sacrifice for? A federal government that opens our borders to cartels? A group of Republicans who campaign on securing the border, who run away in abject surrender, refusing to actually do it? That's the question before us right now. That's the question for every member of the Republican Conference. I'm speaking to you. If you do not secure the border now, you are giving up any argument you have for the American people to put their faith in you.

Will Republicans honor their campaign commitments to secure the border? Yes or no? What I am seeing right now for my Republican colleagues does not give me faith that they will stand up in the breach, as did those men who stood on the wall at the Alamo. I am tired of words. Things are going to change in this body. If my Republican colleagues believe that they're going to be moving through relatively meaningless provisions, doing little for the very people who sent us here to change things and they think that some of us are just going to go along for the ride. They are sorely mistaken. We will not. There will be no more games, as I saw unfold today on the floor of the House of Representatives, where lies and misrepresentations were made about legislation, specifically for personal reasons to take down an amendment. An amendment by the way, designed to ensure that the executive orders that are driving up inflation that this majority said they wanted to expose out of the current president and our Democratic colleagues the other side of the aisle, that they would exempt emergency executive orders, exempt national security related executive orders, the very kinds of emergency executive orders that had been killing this country for as long as I can remember, and specifically for the last several years, through the COVID pandemic and emergency responses, executive orders forcing needles into the people's arms. If they say no, they can't carry out their livelihoods, shrinking the labor supply, driving up the cost of goods and services by shutting down the greatest economy in the history of the world. My colleagues on this side of the aisle today ran away from actually holding the executive branch responsible. Why? For petty, personal political reasons. That isn’t going to fly. That's not going to be the way this works.

Leadership is something that is observed and followed. It is not an anointed position. We did not come to this chamber to continue to allow the executive branch to run over the American people. We are sitting today with a young man who served his country, and is being denied his commanding officer job, being forced to try to pay back student loans, because he dared to say no to a vaccine mandate that was politically driven. What is this side of the aisle doing about it? Not a damned thing. What is this side of the aisle doing about open borders? Nothing. Nothing. What is this side of the aisle doing about an ATF rule about to make felons out of 10 million Americans or more? Nothing.  What is this side of the aisle going to do about spending? Lip service. We have a debt ceiling approaching and we are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. We should say something right now. We should pass a bill off this floor saying that we will raise the debt ceiling, but only if you end the disastrous student loans that are going to cost $400 billion and drive up the cost of higher education. Only, if you rescind the $91 billion of an obligated COVID money. Only, if you rescind the $80 billion designed to increase the IRS to go after taxpayers, including by the way more often, the poorest among us and minorities. Only, if you will return spending to 2022 levels, getting our spending back to pre-COVID levels and make sure that we cap spending, so we stop funding the woke, weaponized bureaucracy that's going after the American people. Do that. Send that over to the Senate, send that over to the Senate and make Chuck Schumer and the President of the United States choke on it. Because the American people want us to cut spending right now. They don't want us dilly dallying around going out to focus groups and talking to Frank Luntz to figure out what the hell we're going to do for the American people.

But that is too often what this body does, and particularly this side of the aisle.

We are not going to have two more years of the usual crap that this body continually engages in. No more spending money we don't have, no more allowing lawlessness, no more open borders. No more mandates killing the American people, no more mandates driving up the price of energy, subsidizing unreliable energy driving up the cost of that energy. No more $32 trillion of dead wide-open borders, causing little girls to get sold into sex trafficking trade. The New York Times finally woke up and wrote a story about it this week. What do we do? We pass a three-page bill, asking the Democrats and say we'll give you reports on inflation, but not if there's emergency spending. Because everybody's got to have their precious emergency spending. Oh, gosh, there's a hurricane. Who cares if it's inflationary that you dump $40 billion? Who cares if it's COVID? You dump $5 trillion out in the name of an emergency, crashing the greatest economy in the history of the world? No, we can't have a report like that. The American people are sick and tired of the same old, same old. And so far, two months into the 118th Congress, I'm not seeing a hell of a lot different than the same old, same old.

The American people gave Republicans a majority, we ought to darn well use it. It is time to stand up for the American people. That time is now, that time is not tomorrow. That time is not after another retreat to go figure out how you're going to raise more money. That time is not up for another retreat to go look at poll testing. Come down to the floor of the House of Representatives and stand up for the American people who sent you here and stop playing games with the election certificate you are given to represent them.”

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