SAVE AMERICA ACT

SAVE AMERICA ACT

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 56 (Wednesday, March 25, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 56 (Wednesday, March 25, 2026)] [Senate] [Pages S1631-S1644] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] SAVE AMERICA ACT Mr. LEE. Mr. President, we are fortunate. We are blessed to inhabit a country where freedom is the norm, where popular sovereignty is the objective, and has been since the dawn of our Republic. We are celebrating this year the 250th anniversary of this country, [[Page S1632]] which, itself, was founded upon the idea that all human beings are created equal; that we have certain inalienable rights, among these, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. The consent of the governed--that is the key part. That is what differentiates a tyrannical government--which is to say most governments that have ever existed--versus a government in which men and women are allowed to be free, in which government exists for the specific purpose of serving the people. That is part of what was recognized in the document whose 250th anniversary we will be celebrating on July 4, that governments are indeed instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. So what does that mean to provide your consent? Well, among many other things, it means the ability to participate in selecting who may operate your government, who will wield the levers of government power. Government power is something that is easily misunderstood. These things don't necessarily occur to us automatically. To remember what government is, sometimes we are inclined to attribute to government qualities that it does not have and can never have, qualities that government can never have specifically because the government is not a person; the government consists of official power, the power to act in the name of an entire country or other body politic, in order to establish rules carrying the force of generally applicable law, enforceable with the immense power of government. Ultimately, it is, then, about power, and that is one of the many reasons why, even though we need to respect government and respect the authority of government--especially when it is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people--we should never lose sight of the fact that government is best understood as wielding authority that is dangerous. In other words, like other things that we rely on, that we need, that are necessary in some cases to sustain life, or in other cases to make life manageable or enjoyable, government is one of those many things that, while a key indispensable part of our lives, it is, at its core, dangerous because it is ultimately about force. And what differentiates government from other entities or other people--endeavors that can bring about force. Government has the ability to use force to enforce law, to enforce compliance with rules that we call laws because they are enforceable by force, with the degree of official sanction and impunity that goes along with being a government. And that is why--I believe it was George Washington who pointed out that, like fire, government is necessary, but it has to be carefully contained and constrained, less it take over and destroy those very same things that it is there to serve. James Madison explained it really well in Federalist No. 51, when he explained that if human beings were angels, we wouldn't need government because if we were angels, we would be naturally benevolent, kind, virtuous, and respectful of the law, respectful of order, respectful of each other. And that is not to say that human beings are not that way; I believe that human beings are fundamentally, generally good. But not all human beings are that way, and no human being is that way all of the time. So getting back to Madison's point, if all human beings were angels, we wouldn't need a government because we wouldn't harm each other; we wouldn't physically injure each other; we wouldn't try to take other people's possessions, things that don't belong to us; we would live in harmony. That is not the condition that we inhabit because, alas, we ourselves are not angels. So he said: If men and women were angels, they wouldn't need government. He also said: If we had access to angels to run our government, we wouldn't have a problem with government that would require us to subject government to rules. And that is where this document comes in, the document that was written 11 years after the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence, remember, in many respects, sort of helped kick off the Revolutionary War. It was sort of already underway a little bit anyway, but it made it really official. But after the Declaration of Independence was put in place, it took years for us to win that war. By most accounts, 6 or 7 years. I believe it was about 7 years before it was deemed officially won and we defeated the world's last standing superpower at the time. Now, this was a conflict as if between David and Goliath. Now the original conflict between literally David and Goliath was not a conflict in which the smart money would have been on David. David was a small shepherd boy. David was no match for Goliath. Had the Vegas oddsmakers been in business then, there is no chance that they would have given David good odds at all facing Goliath--this huge individual, armed to the gills, fiercely trained warrior; he was a professional killer. Nobody would have bet on David. Unless they were really, really thrill-seeking, risk-oriented gamblers, they would not have placed bets on David. Now had they done so, I am sure they would have made a fortune because nobody else would have believed that it was possible for David to win, but he did. So too with the American Revolution. We were David in that battle, and England was Goliath--the world's last-standing military and economic superpower. We chose to take them on. And despite all odds being against us, we won. Took us about 7 years to get through that, but we won, and we reflexively, instinctively put in place a weak system of national government under the Articles of Confederation, which ultimately failed, in large part because in our reflexive instinct to resist that which we had endured under British colonial rule. We had come to fear large, distant national governments--because, in many respects, that is what the American Revolution was about. It is not as though our American forbearers sat there one day and said: You know, we are tired of flying the Union Jack, or we are tired of having a Monarch. That didn't really explain what happened nor was it about them being tired of singing ``God Save the King'' or tired of the pronunciation they had over there. Actually, I have no idea whether, or to what extent, the pronunciations differed as much then as they do now, depending on which side of the Atlantic you found yourself on. It really had to do with this: We were subject to a large, distant, omnipresent, brooding, intrusive, heavily taxing, aggressively regulating national government, one that was so far from the people that it was slow to respond to their needs, even their urgent pleas. It became overly aggressive, and it knew no boundaries around its authority. That is really what the American Revolution was about. During the seasons, the decades--really, the nearly two centuries--in which we were in this pattern of being British Colonies, we went through cycles. There were seasons when the national government of Great Britain would withdraw and let us sort of govern ourselves. It was during those seasons, in particular, when our local self-rule--our Colonial governments--blossomed, and Americans learned the art of local self-government. Then there would be other seasons, often during or in the aftermath of a large conflict, a large-scale expensive war. The Crown and Parliament needed to raise funds for a war or to pay off war debts, and very often that is when they would send forth their swarms of regulators and tax collectors to the Colonies, and they would start to hold the Colonies with a tighter grip. And it was after several cycles of this drama--several cycles of this bipolar, passive aggressive pattern--that we faced from the Crown and Parliament that, in 1776, we decided we had had enough. So back to the early 1780s, we won the war. We instinctively put together a government that would not resemble the system that we lived under previously. And so we reflexively created this quite weak, anemic national government, and that too proved problematic. Within just a few years, it became apparent that we couldn't survive unless we had a national government that [[Page S1633]] was capable of functioning as such; and that our national government couldn't function effectively as a national government unless it had a few powers--including the power to coordinate and regulate commerce between the States and with foreign nations, including the power to raise taxes to, among other things, fund war efforts, fund national defense, assemble armies, and so forth. And so it was against that backdrop that our Founding Fathers came together in that hot summer of 1787 in Philadelphia. They tried the previous year in 1786. They assembled in Annapolis to deal with the same inadequacies of the Articles of Confederation. They tried to convene, but they failed because they failed to achieve a quorum. And they assembled in the late spring of 1787. It was still, ostensibly, with the mindset of amending the Articles of Confederation. It was not officially their objective to write an entirely new document and ordain an entirely new structure and framework for our government to operate, and yet that is what they came up with. I happen to believe that those men were special. They w