Thomas Massie Profile picture
May 6 9 tweets 2 min read Read on X
🧵I once had breakfast with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and about 18 other members of Congress in a private room at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington DC.

He was invited to speak on the topic of “restoring the constitutional balance of government.”
🧵 At the time of that breakfast with Scalia, John Boehner was Speaker of the House and Barack Obama was President.

There was concern that Obama was doing things we hadn’t authorized and Boehner had convinced most of my GOP colleagues there wasn’t anything we could do about it.
🧵 Scalia finished his breakfast and began to speak. He started by saying that being a referee between us and the executive branch was not his job.

He explained that his job as a jurist was to determine if there was harm and what the remedy might be.
🧵 Occasionally, constitutionality of a law was a question, but only as a side effect of Scalia’s job, which was to determine if someone had been harmed and what the remedy was.

He was adamant that his job was not to referee disagreements between the executive & the legislature.
🧵 Scalia then admonished us for asking him to fix any perceived imbalance, because after all he said, “Yours is the most powerful branch, and the tools you need are right there in the Constitution.”

/*paraphrasing from memory*/
🧵 One of my colleagues, a former representative from Arizona, complained to Scalia that impeachment was too unwieldy, impractical, and prone to political blowback.

Scalia said sternly, “I’m not talking about impeachment…”
🧵 Scalia continued, “You have the power of the purse. You fund everything you complain about. Quit funding it and the President won’t be able to do it.”

Most of my colleagues were dumbfounded. Boehner had convinced them the executive was too powerful for us.

I wanted to cheer.
🧵 I’m relating this story now because we find ourselves in the same situation today.

My colleagues, misled by our Speaker, tell you we are powerless against Biden.

They say we must win the White House or pray for the Supreme Court to save us. This is untrue.
🧵 What we need is a new Speaker willing to use our majority to wield the power of the purse for the benefit of America.

In just a few months, this Speaker has worked to give the Executive more authority and more money than even Pelosi granted.

Vacate this #uniparty Speaker.

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More from @RepThomasMassie

May 6
🧵 At the time of that breakfast with Scalia, John Boehner was Speaker of the House and Barack Obama was President.

There was concern that Obama was doing things we hadn’t authorized and Boehner had convinced most of my GOP colleagues there wasn’t anything we could do about it.
🧵 Scalia finished his breakfast and began to speak. He started by saying that being a referee between us and the executive branch was not his job.

He explained that his job as a jurist was to determine if there was harm and what the remedy might be.
🧵 Occasionally, constitutionality of a law was a question, but only as a side effect of Scalia’s job, which was to determine if someone had been harmed and what the remedy was.

He was adamant that his job was not to referee disagreements between the executive & the legislature.
Read 8 tweets
Apr 19
🧵 How does Lucy pull the football from Charlie Brown in Congress?

This $100 billion bill that moves us to the brink of war around the globe…

began as a House bill to help VETERANS get reimbursed for emergency care!

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🧵 The Veterans’ bill, HR 815, passed the House as a Veterans’ bill and went to the Senate.

The Senate stripped every word from it, inserted the foreign aid supplemental, and sent it back to the House.

The House will vote on 4 separate bills (Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, +other).
🧵 After the 4 separate bills pass the House tomorrow, a tricky Rule that passed in Rules Committee last night converts them into amendments to the Senate supplemental… HR 815, the bill that started in the House as a Veterans’ bill !

HR 815 then heads back to the Senate.
Read 4 tweets
Apr 11
🧵 Many people have been misled today.

There was not a vote on the FISA bill.

There was a vote on a resolution that would have allowed FISA, as well as 6 amendments to it, including a warrant requirement amendment, and three other pieces of legislation to come to the floor.
On partisan procedural votes like this, Democrats reflexively vote no and Republicans typically vote yes.

19 Republicans voted with all the Democrats to stop everything from coming to the floor today, including the warrant amendment to FISA.
Many of us who are adamantly opposed to warrantless surveillance voted for the resolution, wanting to get a recorded vote on warrants, and recognizing the Speaker can otherwise suspend the rules and bring anything to the floor without a resolution, like he did with the omnibus.
Read 7 tweets
Mar 2
🚨 CDC discloses they have at least a dozen medical industry LOBBYING GROUPS, officially SERVING alongside 15 voting members, on ACIP, the supposedly independent vaccine board that just approved the 9th booster shot.

CDC list of the ACIP board:

🧵 cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/…

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Here is CDC’s list of “liaison members” serving on the vaccine advisory. I will include publicly available lobbying activity from these organizations in subsequent posts. But pick any one of them and search for their name + lobbying, and you can research this yourself.


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BTW, @CNN has the temerity to call these folks independent vaccine advisers. Let’s see about that… Image
Read 9 tweets
Feb 16
We just scored a big victory against the woke takeover of American financial organizations. After Chairman Jordan and I called them out for potential violations of antitrust law, major corporations dropped their involvement with an Environment, Social, and Governance ESG group.
reuters.com/sustainability…
Chairman Jordan and I (as Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust) wrote
@BlackRock, @Vanguard_Group, @StateStreet, and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero about their ESG coordination.

This is one of the letters:


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.@Jim_Jordan, @RepDanBishop, and I warned these companies that their ongoing efforts "coordinating their members' agreements to ‘decarbonize’ their assets under management and reduce emissions to net zero" were potentially illegal under the Sherman Act.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 15
26 to 0!

The Judiciary committee passed my bill (HR 6824) requiring FBI to provide demographic data of persons ruled ineligible to purchase a firearm by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

False denials disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities.
The complete debate over my bill, the amendment discussion, and the roll call vote on passage are shown here unedited.

Thank you Chairman Jim Jordan for advancing this legislation and thank you Ranking Member Nadler and Representative Jackson Lee for supporting this bill.
As of 2024, the FBI reported over 2,000,000 denials of firearm purchases under the NICS background check system, but the vast majority of these denials were false positives. Research indicates NICS produces false denials for black males by a factor of 3-1 compared to white males.
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Read 4 tweets

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