00:00So, listen, seriously, as friends and colleagues, really, across the aisle, what we celebrate tomorrow is the nation's birthday.
00:08Let's put the politics aside for a minute, and let's reflect on our blessings. No kidding, really.
00:13Tomorrow is the 249th birthday of our nation. That's right.
00:18I mean this sincerely. I thank my colleagues for standing. We all should be united in that. We are.
00:47We are. We have squabbles. We have partisan debates and all of this, but at the end of the day, we're all Americans, man.
00:55And we've got to believe that. We've got to know it. We've got to recognize that we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world.
01:00It's not even close.
01:10My friends and colleagues, we are so blessed. We should not take it for granted.
01:14We live in the most free, the most successful, the most powerful, the most benevolent nation that has ever been on the face of the earth.
01:23And there's a reason for that.
01:26The reason that we are the greatest nation is because we were built on the ultimate foundation.
01:31And the bold declaration that my friend Hakeem Jeffries articulated earlier is true.
01:36We unite under that.
01:37The bold declaration that we do hold these truths to be self-evident.
01:41What is a self-evident truth? It's something that's obvious.
01:45We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.
01:48It does not say born equal. It says created equal.
01:51And that it is our creator. Yes.
01:56It is our creator that gives us our rights.
01:59See, the powerful thing about that is we're the first nation in the history of the world that acknowledged that our rights do not derive from government.
02:06They come from government. They come from God Himself.
02:21You see that, those words up there, that motto, it says,
02:25In God we trust, right above the speaker's rostrum.
02:28You know, a previous congress put that there in the early 60s in the height of the Cold War.
02:32There's a little visitor's guide that people get when you do tours late at night.
02:37You've probably seen your constituents and visitors and friends get the guide.
02:39If you turn, I think it's about to page 21, it explains why that's there.
02:43And it says Congress voted to put that there as a rebuke to the Soviets' worldview at the height of the Cold War.
02:51Why? Because communism, socialism, find their root in Marxism.
02:57And Marxism begins with the belief that there is no God.
03:01It's wrong.
03:02And this Congress made us stand those many years ago and we should do it again.
