Richard K. Armey: “at the end of this Congress, I will have served 18 years in the United States House of Representatives. Mr. Speaker, I…”

“at the end of this Congress, I will have served 18 years in the United States House of Representatives. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the good people of the 26th Congressional District of Texas who nine times elected me to represent them in this body. How very privileged I am to have been given that trust, that responsibility and the opportunity to serve the values I share with these good people: faith, freedom, safety, security and peace, in that order. Mr. Speaker, I have come to love this place. This is the most marvelous democratic institution in the history of the world. It is true what we say about this wonderful House Chamber. Here the people govern; we, the House of Representatives. It is more than a place. It is we the people, working each in our own way to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. In my time here we have managed to secure many blessings of liberty. We have been the instruments of the American people during a special period when America led the world in a freedom revolution. As a lesson in how freedom works, we whipped stagflation and set a course of economic prosperity and growth unparalleled in the history of the world. America halted the march of communism in our hemisphere. We inspired the demise of its tyranny in Eastern Europe. The Cold War ended on our terms. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Berlin Wall fell. We won the Gulf War, and as we speak, we are removing the scourge of terrorism from the globe.”