Mike Conaway: “a couple of my colleagues and I tonight are going to spend a little bit of time talking about our Constitution, the…”

“a couple of my colleagues and I tonight are going to spend a little bit of time talking about our Constitution, the founding principles on which this country is based, and a document that I am concerned that many of our colleagues in this Chamber are not as intimately familiar with as they should be. I have introduced H. Res. 883 to try to address this issue. The acronym for the act is called the AMERICA Act, A Modest Effort to Read and Instill the Constitution Again, which is a bit tortured, but at least it gets us going in the right direction. This resolution would require, or would encourage, each Member of the House and each staffer that works for a Member of the House to read the Constitution once a year. We hope to be voting on this in September during Constitution Week. But I want to talk about it tonight. Our Constitution sets forth the written set of fundamental principles about which this U.S. Government, the United States, is to be governed. It establishes the three branches of the government that function here at the Federal level. And it is considered the supreme law of the land. It is also the world's oldest written national constitution, and it confers upon Members of this body and the other body certain honors and certain great responsibilities. We in Congress write laws constantly to implement those fundamental principles, and every once in a while we propose amendments to change those fundamental principles.…”