I couldn't help but look at y'all's y'all's memorial that was up there on the levee.

And yes, trying to do anything with the Corps of Engineers is is such an incredible challenge.

And this is simply trying to get permission to put a memorial there.

And you can imagine what it's like trying to actually build a project with them.

I mean, one of the most frustrating experiences you could ever imagine.

But hey, look, thanks for the opportunity to come back in and join you today.

Today, my my wife is here and I want to make sure I'm right in early.

I acknowledge that my wife, Chris is here.

And thank you for being here and she's fantastic.

And last time I was here, I talked about how she was the one who talked me into running for Congress.

And I was, you know, just kind of honored by that.

And so this is amazing.

She thinks I'm really smart, bright and all that.

Then I realize once I actually get the job that I'm in Washington four days a week and, you know, it's like, here's the smart one.

Now, she just got out of the house.

And in any case, thank you for sticking with me.

And then also another quick story.

Her father and mother lived up on this island in Washington state where our kids would go every summer in the morning.

Let me say it again.

In the summer, it would be in the low fifties and in the afternoons it would maybe hit 72.

And so the kids would go there every summer and they'd be like, Oh, summers are great and all that.

And and we recently talked about moving here and and I think we had to move here in August.

And yeah, just, just if any of you think about doing something like that, I wouldn't recommend August.

So I don't even know his real name.

But Poppy, thanks for.

Thanks for being here.

So.

All right.

So look, you all are in Rotary, all right?

You're in Rotary.

I want to ask somebody a question.

Anybody can answer this.

Why are you in Rotary?

Why are you in the organization?

Anybody?

People, service people, Networking.

What else?

Good speaker.

That's right.

Next week, l are going to have a You joined Rotary for a purpose.

You're it.

You talk about service.

You want to serve your community.

You want to make the Baton Rouge area, the capital region, a better place.

You talk about networking and you talk about the fact that you want to help develop a network of of friends, of people that business associates.

So you join this place for a reason.

Well, let me ask you a question.

Why do you have a congressional representative?

Why do you have somebody up there?

Is it so I can come back down and explain to you models of efficiency, use your corporate and your businesses?

No, that's not it.

You have a member of Congress because it's our job to represent And as Brian just said, we represent the capital region down the river region, down in New Orleans Airport through the Bay region over to Morgan City in southern St Mary Parish, 12 parishes, 800,000 people.

Our job is to represent and just like you and your job and your business, you've got a job to do, you've got a purpose, you've got a reason.

And if you don't do it, you shouldn't be there.

You shouldn't.

And if I don't do my job in representing, I shouldn't be there.

And y'all all have the ability to make that decision every two years.

Thankfully, not this year, but I was here last year and I wanted to go through and just give you a few updates on things that we've worked on over the last year.

Let you know how we've worked to represent and and the things that we've accomplished.

When I was here last year, I gave you a statistic.

I told you that the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University did an analysis and they looked at the most effective officers in Congress effectiveness based on who's getting bills through, who's getting amendments to who's actually negotiating projects, breaking logjams with the administration and agencies and getting things done, and more than just getting a permit to build a memorial.

And they went through and they evaluated all the officers and they found that our office was in the top five in terms of the most successful in delivering results, getting things done for home and trying to represent.

And look, I'll tell you, be the first one to tell you we don't date a thousand.

We're not perfect.

We start with our objectives at the beginning of the year.

It ends up changing as opportunities open up and other doors close.

But we do have a fantastic group of people and the guy hold up the phone back there filming this in the back.

Paulson is our chief of staff, great guy and does an amazing job.

We have Maggie Area who runs our Washington, D.C. office and just an amazing team of Louisianians.

So in the last year since I was here, some of the things that we've been able to do, look, we have a crime problem that I'm sure if you know that we're a crime problem in our community, we've been able to bring millions of dollars for law enforcement, helping everything from investigative support unit, additional resources to DNA, rapid DNA technology.

It takes over one year to process evidence in our community, one year to process evidence, which means the people that are the suspects, they get to sit out there for a year on bond or longer.

They get to sit out there.

And so we've brought additional dollars developing rapid DNA technology right here for our community so we can hold these people accountable.

We brought in millions of additional dollars for less than lethal technologies.

What that means is I've watched in communities like Lafayette and others, in fact, right here where people have gone, where officers have gone to a Taser, to a bullet, there's a big gap between the two.

There are a lot of technologies today that the Department of Defense uses and others.

Why aren't we getting those in the belts of officers, giving them those resources and using less than lethal technologies?

In some cases, we're developing a national training center right here at Louisiana State Police, and we provided funding for that Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

What an amazing, amazing asset we have right here.

They are the ones who have developed a nutrition along with MRIs, the meals ready to eat that we give our military, but they think they can actually take it next level.

And so we're working with them in the Department of Defense right now because they think they can develop meals for our military men and women that can actually prevent injuries, improve mental health, improve resiliency and endurance.

Again, happening right here in Louisiana, we've provided $10 million for them in this program and working closely with Department of Defense traffic problems.

We brought in additional resources for L.A. 30th over on the east side, this the Mississippi River, which is Nicholson to do engineering, a design to open up and widen that road.

If you're in Ascension Parish, L.A. 30 is a parking lot.

And we've got to make sure that if we're going to build a new bridge, we've got to have somewhere for those people to land.

Bringing in additional resources for environmental, for engineering and design, both on a new bridge and only 30.

And we're continuing to work on L.A. one as well.

Right here in Baton Rouge, somebody refers to as the grasshopper building, right on the what is that?

The south side of the Mississippi River Bridge on the old Baton Rouge dock.

There's a really interesting building out there.

There's the water campus.

That building that's out there on the dock is called the water Institute of the Gulf, something we started years ago when I was working for the state of Louisiana's coastal program.

And we did it because we knew we were investing billions and billions of dollars in resiliency and hurricane protection, coastal restoration, flood control projects.

We wanted to make sure we had a center of excellence here.

And so we recently started a Center for Resilience.

And the idea is, is they're developing new technologies and processes that help to identify the most efficient way, the most efficient way to in terms of building codes, zoning standards and things along those lines to where we can have resilient communities.

And when we have the flood of 2016, we have Hurricane Ida, we still have communities that were able to withstand these challenges.

And so we've we've done that in the past year.

The Mississippi River, we drain Montana and New York and Canada, one of the largest watersheds in the world.

But what happens is all these other communities put water in the river and they really don't care because it all comes down to us.

We're at the bottom of the funnel.

And so this year it's projected we may have record high water.

We've had record water, and probably six of the last ten years we've had high water and had to put emergency measures in place.

So what we've done is we've started this new initiative working with the Corps of Engineers and the states from Missouri down developing an entirely new way to to manage the water in the Mississippi River, looking at retention of reserve opportunities, we're looking at building additional spillways or openings or diversion projects that can actually help the restoration and sustainability of coastal Louisiana that's underway right now, including how we operate the old river control structure that diverts our 30% of the water down the Atchafalaya and 70% down the Mississippi.

So that's moving forward.

We brought about $1,000,000,000 in new resiliency funds.

We've raised a $90 million, the amount of money that can be funded through the Corps of Engineers for water and wastewater projects, i.e.

stormwater feed right here in East Baton Rouge Parish.

We've gotten tens of millions of dollars from the Department of Agriculture to buy shrimp from our our wild shrimpers here in Louisiana to offer those products around the United States and different food and nutrition programs.

We've provided millions of dollars and worked closely with the ports in Baton Rouge, in New Orleans, doing container on barge.

What that means is that you're taking these containers instead of putting in an 18 wheeler.

And I-10, you put it on a barge and ship it up the Mississippi River, helping to the freight traffic to reduce traffic problems in our community, as well as a more efficient way to ship up through Baton Rouge or even all the way up to Saint Louis.

And so we've been able to provide those funds.

We've been able to provide broadband access for communities that didn't have it.

And one last example of something that we've done in the last year is we were able finally and I'll tell you this, when took too long to change the law, what is going to result in an entirely new VA clinic right here in Baton Rouge?

Instead of having these separated services, we're going to have a new combined VA clinic right here in Baton Rouge with expanded services, everything from visual vision, dental and mental health into traditional medical services right here.

So let me say it again.

Our team myself, we haven't dotted a thousand, but we've worked to represent this area, to represent this community.

This is home.

You live here deliberately.

This is one of the greatest places in the world in regard to the culture, in the community.

But we've got to make sure that we're all working together to address some of the challenges and opportunities that we have.

And I want to transition to Congress this year.

I'm going to come back to what I just said about how we're all going to work together.

So Congress this year starts out with a new majority.

And so the spirit that the House of Representatives is supposed to be electing a speaker of the House, it took 15 different votes.

And I'm sitting here watching this on TV, and all that came to mind is we look like a bunch of idiots.

We can't even figure out how to take the reins of a majority, elect a speaker and start actually governing.

And so look, without any asking or prompting, I started talking to different factions and started talking to hardcore conservatives and moderates and everybody in between and said, Hey, look, we've got to figure this out.

We were given a mission, a charge to actually govern, not to sit here and fight, not to sit here and say on C-SPAN till two and three in the morning with this theatrical with these theatrical votes.

And we started working together.

And over a few days, we actually worked out an agreement among a diverse group of people where we made some commitments.

Effectively, we're going to do things like work on a on a balanced budget and put this country on a trajectory, things like taking a new look at some of the spending from COVID and making sure that we rein in some of the excessive spending.

There's still $150 billion out there that hasn't been spent that was appropriated years ago.

We talked about making sure that our committees have the diverse representation of the House to where you don't have a committee with maybe only conservatives, and then a bill comes out and can't pass the floor and just becomes a debacle again.

We made all sorts of commitments on securing the southern border.

We made commitments on on making sure that we take a fresh look at our tax code.

These are all things that everybody in this room should agree upon.

And at the end of the day, we have a Speaker of the House, his name is Kevin McCarthy.

He's from California.

I'll tell you, he's the only guy that was going to get across that goal line.

He is he's the only person.

That's why we started working to get him in there.

And so after all this ended, he came to me and he said, oh, my gosh, you know, I saw what you did in negotiating with all these diverse factions.

He said, What do you want?

And I want you to be a good speaker.

I want you to lead this country in a direction.

I want you to take the charge that the voters gave us.

And I want you to lead this country in a direction of actually solving problems.

They said, no, no, no.

What do you want?

What do you.

I said, No, that's what I want.

That's what I want.

I didn't do this to get something.

I did it because we've got problems in this country and we've got to address them.

And I'm and I'm I'm, I guess, excited to say that he kept coming back and he kept saying, what do you want?

What do you want?

And I shouldn't say this, And it's his TV cameras, but I finally these are I want something.

He's a guy.

What do you want?

I said, I want a key to the speaker's balcony.

And he looks at me and he's like, You're kidding.

I was like, No.

He's like, When y'all come up to D.C., I have my own keynote.

Let me tell you what else he did.

He also asked me to lead what's called the Elected Leadership Committee, which is the speaker of the House and the majority leader, our own Steve Scalise, the whip, the conference chair and others, all the leadership team.

And so every week we have about four or five meetings talking about what we're doing in Congress, the crisis of the day, what our priorities are going to be, how we're going to address the nation's problems.

And look, I'm not there for one reason.

I'm up there for here for south Louisiana.

And so I thought long and hard about whether this was the right thing to do to to get in this position with a little bit more of a national focus.

But I'm confident that it is because it gives us an opportunity to be in the room to help Louisiana.

And so let me go through some of the things that we're focused on this year.

One of them, I made mention of immigration.

This this issue of immigration has become very volatile, very radioactive, very polarizing.

And I'm going to chastise both sides on this one.

On the one hand, we're a different country than Mexico.

We need to have a separate border.

We need to have a secure border.

We need to enforce our laws and we need to reform our legal immigration process.

But we can do this in a way that does not attack these human beings that are looking for a better life.

And you have seen I have seen where people have come out and attacked these people.

They're human beings.

And I think that it isn't necessarily the role of government to go in and save every person around the world.

But I do think as fellow human beings, we can treat these people with respect.

We can work through our churches and other organizations to try to be helpful and offer humanitarian assistance and a better pathway in getting them out of harm's way whenever they're seeking asylum in some of these countries that are awful right now that are being run by gangs and drug lords and others.

So let me say it again.

We're going to move forward with legislation that's going to secure our southern border, with legislation that's going to ensure we're enforcing our laws.

And I am hopeful that reforms the legal immigration process.

But we're going to do it in a way that reflects compassion and the fact that these are fellow human beings.

Secondly, I talked about debt and balancing the budget.

Good people in the House of Representatives one every two years.

And it's really easy to sit there and say, you know what, we're just going to do these little things that give you the sugar high because it's every two years, you know what that sugar high has resulted in?

It's resulted in a national debt of 23 excuse me, 32, $32 trillion, $32 trillion, because interest rates are going up.

Just the debt service on that 32 trillion over the next ten years, over $10 trillion.

All right.

So what do we get for that 10 trillion?

Nothing.

It's debt service.

It's just paying interest.

So I'm looking right here at these juniors in high school.

Sparks, was it number 42 on the ballot when your vote?

I'm kidding.

Juniors in high school.

I want you to think for just a minute, all these things that we're doing in Congress, we're spending all this money on, you're inheriting a debt of $32 trillion for what, interest payments of 10 trillion.

We're trying to build a bridge across the Mississippi River that's probably going to cost pick a number 1.2, 1.4 billion.

We can't even find the money to do that.

But we're going to spend over 10 trillion just on debt service or interest payments over the next decade.

This is outrageous.

And we're we're leaving you with a debt that you didn't create and you can't afford it.

And it's unjust.

And so everybody who's out there saying, oh, well, look, you can't cut this and you can't cut this and you can't cut that, but they're trade offs and all this stuff.

And if we don't come in and truly balance the budget, what we're doing to these people is unjust.

What we're doing to you, the problem, the crisis we're leaving you with, it's unjust.

And this shouldn't be a conservative, a liberal Republican, Democrat.

This is an American issue.

You can't live like this as a family.

You can't run a business like this.

Having a debt that's a deficit that's 100% of your GDP, of the economic activity of your country.

This is crazy.

And so I'll say it again.

This shouldn't be Republican or Democrat.

We should have a constitutional amendment that requires that we balance the budget like the state of Louisiana does.

And this is going to be a huge issue because what's happening and they're projecting sometime perhaps around July that the credit card limit for the country is going to be met.

So if you make your credit card limit, you can't buy anything anymore.

You can't swipe it.

That's what that's what we're facing as a country right now, sometime around July.

So let me be clear.

We're not going to default on the debt.

We're going to raise the debt limit.

But just like if your son or daughter came to you and said, mom, dad and uncle, I'm in a jam, I've hit my limit and I can't afford to pay the bill this month, you're probably going to help, but I'm going to guess you're probably going to have a conversation about spending as well.

And that's all we're trying to do right now, because we cannot continue on this trajectory and it's going to be a huge issue.

One of the other big issues we're going to work on this year is energy.

You talk about something that profoundly affects Louisiana in our economy.

You can take all of the offshore energy production.

In the case of Alaska, California, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, all the other states that produce offshore energy, all five of them, you have to multiply it times about four or maybe even five to get as much energy production as we have in our offshore in the federal waters.

We blow away everybody.

And so whenever we have energy policy that says we're not going to use oil and gas anymore, we're not going to lease oil and gas anymore, it has a big impact on us.

And it's one of the reasons because they've cut off or reduced supply and demand hasn't really changed.

It's one of the reasons why gasoline prices were as low as a dollar 74 a gallon in Louisiana in in January of of 2021, a dollar 74 a gallon.

You'll find that right now this has a big impact on us.

It's one of the major drivers of inflation because everyone uses energy, whether it's to drive cars, fly planes, trains, delivery trucks, whether it's to heat and cool homes, pay utility bills that companies and manufacturers, Amazon, everybody uses it and it has a big impact on us.

So let me give you a few numbers that are nerd out for just a minute.

All of this is being done under the auspices of climate change.

Let me give you some numbers and let me ask you what you would do.

Contrary to all the rhetoric out there.

Yes.

Which country has reduced emissions more than the next seven emissions reducing countries combined over about the last 17 or 18 years?

That would be America was the leader in reducing emissions.

Now, during this same period of time, for every one ton of emissions we've reduced, China has gone up by four.

This is a global issue.

You can't solve it just in the United States and cause any disproportionate impact in our country.

It's a global issue.

So for every one ton we've reduced, China has gone up by four.

Studies have been done looking at the cleanliness of or the emissions associated with oil and gas.

One study says the cleanest oil and gas in the world is in the OCS, the Outer Continental Shelf off the coast of Louisiana.

Another study says that it's the second cleanest by the administration's.

Department of Energy says that we're going to have up to an 80% increase in natural gas demand over the next 27 years, up to an 80% increase in developing countries, up to 59% in developed countries.

Let me ask you a question.

If we know we're going to have increased demand for oil and gas, if we know where the cleanest sources are, if we know what's going to help out our economy and put people back to work, why in the world would you not produce energy off the coast of Louisiana?

And so we have legislation that we just started moving last week that's going to require that we start again with these known as lease sales, offering up this acreage for energy production.

You would have to go back to the Carter administration, Jimmy Carter administration, to find anything that's even remotely close to the acreage that they've leased out.

They've leased out 1/100 of the acres that were leased out during the Carter administration.

And I will tell you, I have never heard anyone say bring back that Jimmy Carter energy policy ever.

Let me say this again.

This should not be partizan.

This is using math and science and dated informed decisions.

This bill also does something else because I'm a big fan of new technology and using newer energy sources where they make sense and emphasize that where they make sense.

But when you start looking at all the lithium and copper and cobalt and nickel and other critical minerals that are needed for renewable energy technologies, whether it's battery storage or it's the transmission lines to transmit the new electric energy sources, you could take all of the minerals in the world that are produced and you don't have enough to address just what we're going to need here based on the targets that have been set.

So we've got to have a mining, a refining and a processing strategy in the United States.

And our bill does that.

It looks at the demands that are that are there for all of these different critical minerals and make sure that we can meet the demands that are there.

Because, look, this is one of those things that's inescapable.

Everybody's paying higher fuel, higher electricity cost, and we can be part of the solution right here in Louisiana, where we can continue a trajectory of lower emissions.

We get more money through the revenue sharing program to restore our coast for flood control and hurricane protection projects and and providing more economic or employment opportunities for our citizens.

That bill will pass the House of Representatives in the next few weeks.

Louisiana is going to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of that legislation.

We have some other things, and I know the Baton Rouge Air Force located here, is here right now.

And we're going to be moving a major FAA bill this year.

Aviation is going to be making some major reforms there.

It is remarkable.

Right now you have six states across the United States, 32 Wal-Marts.

You have to go Wal-Mart online.

You say, hey, I want to pick it up same day.

I want you to deliver it to my house.

I'm going to go pick it up at the store in a week or whatever.

There's a fourth option, a 32 Wal-Marts around the country.

I want you to drone delivery to my house in 30 minutes.

You think for just a minute?

Right now you have this this FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration, they have to approve and certify every single aircraft that goes there.

And you may have one 3737 a month that comes out.

They do a type certification process.

Well, we're going to have 5000 drones kicking out in a week every single week.

How in the world is this going to work?

So we're going to be making some major changes.

They're making sure that we can approve them, that we can certify that we can integrate them into the aviation system.

We're very thoughtful about privacy, sound and other things that are going to be really important as we move forward.

So those are some of the big things I'm going to be working on this year, as well as flood insurance reform.

Now, let me let me close with this.

When I was here last year, I talked about five things that I thought were important.

When I started this, I asked you why you're in Rotary asked you why you have a member of Congress, are effectively what my job is.

We have probably the most important governor's race of our lifetime this year, probably the most important race.

This state is blessed with some of the most amazing natural assets.

But my gosh, we have squander them 18 to 25 year olds.

The greatest resource we are losing in the state.

We've got to create economic opportunity for them.

Use these cards in a way that lifts boats, that all boats that lifts opportunity for everyone.

We can't continue watching them go to Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina.

We can't continue to lose our best and our brightest.

And there are five things that we've got to do.

And let me say something that is so important.

If this was easy, it would have been done a long time ago.

And what people do all the time is they just get frustrated.

They express their frustration.

You are the single most important vote in this race because everybody's votes worth the same.

Participate, study the candidates.

And I think if we don't address the five things I talked about last year, our infrastructure problems, whether it's traffic, whether it's flood protection, restoring our coast or livability of communities, we're in big trouble.

Not going to lure economic investment here in a place that floods a place.

It's not a good community to relocate.

Folks are crime.

And I know you're the chief coming.

You can't have the murder capital of the world.

You can't not good for business.

It's not.

And this is home.

It needs to be a safe place.

We deserve better and we've got to hold people accountable.

And importantly, we've got to have crime diversion programs go into these high crime communities, work with the youth, and make sure we help them understand the different paths our careers, our futures that they have available.

A key part of this strategy and we've provided $400,000 to the Truth program right here to to to fund those types of crime, diversion and education programs.

Number three, education.

These folks deserve the best education possible.

They do.

All of our kids do.

And we have got to make sure we're investing in our schools.

We're using the best technology that we have, some of the highest paid teachers, because we can't look at this like a second rate job.

It is absolutely critical to our future investing in our schools, in our teachers, in our future.

The next one is, is our state tax code.

We can't continue to watch as Texas and Florida win all the economic development projects.

We can't continue to watch as even Mississippi reform their tax code to reflect more modern tax codes around the United States.

And our state legislature has got to prioritize this.

And lastly, we've just watched as nine property and casualty insurers have left our state, and we continue to have some of the highest auto insurance rates in America.

How in the world are we going to lure people here when you can't even afford to insure your business, ensure your home, insure your cars?

Those five things, We've got to make sure that our next governor has a vision for the state.

We've got to make sure that our next governor is someone who actually has has a has a resume that they've proven that they can actually deliver results.

And it's not just some speech and look, it's really easy for me to stand here and say this, but let me tell you why this is so important to me.

One, I have three kids, too.

What we do at the local government level, the state government level and the federal government level, we have got to be working together.

We may not like each other.

We may disagree.

We have got to be working together.

And I view the governor as the quarterback of that team.

So whoever he or she is, this isn't some popularity contest.

This isn't something where you you just you just elect him because you recognize the name.

I want to encourage all of you take this vote and study.

Look at the candidates that are out there.

Make sure these people have a vision, make sure that they're smart and make sure that they have a record of doing more than just talking.

The future of our state is at stake.

So, hey, look, thank you all very, very much for the opportunity to join you again.

And if there's time to look forward to questions.