In House floor remarks on Thursday, Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) discussed the level of discourse by members of Congress.
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00:00and the United States under the speaker's announcement policy January 3rd
00:092025 the gentleman from Arizona mr. Schweikert is now recognized for 60
00:16minutes as a destiny of the majority leader thank you mr. speaker pro tem and
00:23as always I apologize to the board staff who I will try not to speak like a
00:28machine gun mr. speaker I we're going to do basically three things I'm going to
00:35make fun of us I'm going to actually walk through some debt deficit numbers
00:42interest those things that are scaring my economists myself half to death and then
00:49I'm going to touch on some of the and it's a it's a technical economics term the
00:56bedwetting in regards to the reconciliation budget how people are making things up
01:02so let's let's have at it I because I sit in an airplane 10 hours a week and I have
01:09some weird reading habits I actually came across a paper written last year
01:15published just recently it's in natural or excuse me nature human behavior so one of
01:21those quirky excuse me those academic but it actually what they did is they went
01:27back to the eight late eighteen hundreds and they took all of our congressional
01:31speeches up till 2022 and they ran a data set on them they ran AI and could you
01:41believe mr. speaker can you believe it they figured out that our congressional
01:48speeches have become less and less and less based in facts I know this is hard for
01:57us to believe but apparently the quality of idiots I mean people like me getting up
02:04in front of these mics and doing presentations and walking through our job has
02:12crashed in quality in facts matter of fact they use the word intuition I basically
02:20say we make public policy now by our feelings because God forbid we go to our
02:27voters and tell them the truth about the math so it made me feel better because I
02:34have mocked us for years about how much in the way public policy we now make on
02:39feelings because it's great television it gets your followers on social media you
02:45get a hit on cable television tonight if you're willing to make crap up but do it
02:50with passion and feelings but if you actually want to talk about the math of
02:56what's going on in this country turns out it's how we're rewarded now as elected
03:04officials now what was interesting is they had the curve actually starting to fall in
03:091970 and it's just gotten steeper so part of it and part of my is conclusion is
03:15television then moving to cable news and then moving to social media we have
03:23crashed the diet of robust facts in our speeches so now that we're gonna