The Honorable Richard K. Armey
Co-Chairman
FreedomWorks

Oh me. Well, we’ve had quite a line-up at this meeting and it’s not over yet. We have a very special presentation that will happen before dinner tonight. hen Dick Armey graduated from high school, he went to work climbing power poles for the REA. And one cold winter night while atop a thirty-foot pole, Dick had something of an epiphany regarding the value of a college education. At 3 A.M., and with the temperature thirty below zero, Dick thought to himself, “I’m not so sure I want to be doing this when I’m forty.” And he decided to go to college on the spot. In fact, he went on to get his Ph.D. in Economics and was chairman of the Economics Department at the University of North Texas for thirteen years.
I mention these scholarly credentials because I don’t think that it’s an accident that one of the most effective congressmen of the last two decades was also firmly grounded in ideas. In the study of freedom, illuminated in the classical economics of Adam Smith and his successors, it is precisely those politicians with philosophical understanding who remain constant in the buffeting winds of Washington.
Ronald Regan was such a man, Ed Meese is such a man, and Dick Armey is such another. In fact, it was to join up with the Regan revolution that Dick Armey ran for Congress in 1984. His record since then is studied with Conservative results to go along with his Conservative principles. His breakthrough legislation on base closing has allowed obsolete military bases—once the sacred cows of patronage politics—to be closed, saving billions for genuine defense priorities. And as Chairman of the Republican conference in 1992 he turned that quiet organization into a nerve center for communications and coalition building.
Known as the principle author of the Contract with America he helped set the stage for the Republican takeover of the House in 1994 and the remarkable achievements of the Republican Congress in passing the contract—particularly, welfare reform.
Because he is the man his is, Dick Armey has opposed presidents of his own party when principle demanded. He parried with the Regan defense department over base closing. He led the opposition to the first president’s-Bush’s-abandonment of the “No New Taxes” pledge and, in spite of his day in and day out support of virtually all of the current President Bush’s program, he called him on his plan to expand Clinton’s America Corps program.
Dick Armey retired from politics at the peak of his career--Majority leader of the House. Now how many, having attained that position of influence would decide, Well, I’m just going to leave. I have a feeling that it was because of an insight he gave us earlier in his career. He once said of our nation’s elected officials, “The American people didn’t give us power, they gave us responsibility.” 
It is not surprising that Dick walked away from political power while still in his prime. He may have retired from political power, but I have a feeling he’ll never retire from the responsibility he’s exemplified in his long and distinguished career.
Please join me in welcoming back Dick Armey. (clapping)

Thank you, Ken. Thank you, all. Thank you. You reduce me to my favorite Texas colloquialism: Aw, shucks.
Well, let me say, last night I was particularly touched at our proceedings last night and we did—I think your organization did an honorable thing in honoring an honorable man and I was glad to get to be part of it, to be here.
I should mention to you, by the way, I don’t use these terms loosely. Honor and fidelity have become increasingly more critically important terms in my life since having spent eighteen years in Washington—and Phil, you’ll know what I mean. And one of the things that, frankly, dismays me, is the degree to which people do not take these two concepts seriously. Honor and fidelity are very very important things, and for you young people here—study on it, choose it, commit yourself to it, and I think you will be not only a better person but a happier person.
I’m going to do a little of something indulgent here. Last night I noticed that not only was Chuck Colson here, but more importantly to me, Chuck, your wife and I believe your grandson was here. Are you here tonight, Chuck (and his wife and grandson)?
 Well pass this on. I wanted to do this in front of Chuck’s wife and grandson. 1998 I had the long knives after me. I was feeling lower than a snake’s belly, operating under the understanding that 99 percent of the all people in the world that loved me were either in my family or on my paid staff. I decided to fight back with a closed shop of my own people.
Under a further understanding that it was not wise to tell people your problems because, while 50 percent of them didn’t care, the other 50 percent was likely to be glad you had them, I set up no alarms, I sent out no S.O.S.s. and I committed to fight for my survival on my own terms with my own people. And Chuck--more importantly, your grandson in order to understand your grandson, and Mrs. Colson--out of the blue, Chuck Colson called me and rode to my rescue, and I will never forget the day he called--to first validate me (for such a person as Chuck to call and say, “I want to be on your side.”) and secondly to offer his assistance and then finally and most importantly, to support and sustain me with prayer. So somebody—I guess they’re not here--pass it on; I wanted to seize that moment last night, I’ve never had a chance to do this, I try to damn my foes in private and praise my friends in public.
When my wife and I sat down a couple of years ago (the elections were over) we had had a fairly difficult several years, starting in ’94—I mean in terms of the hard work and the wear-and-tear that we had sustained—and we were frankly both of us quite exhausted in a moment where we thought we needed to do a Fagan thing (for those of you that enjoyed “Oliver!”) and start reviewing the situation. And we began to grasp (probably for the first time in real terms) with a “maybe it’s time for me to leave this place.”
It was not an easy thing, and I’m not going to tell you all the considerations that resulted in my NCs in agreeing that it was time for me to go. But one of the things that troubled us in this whole discussion, through this whole time was both of us knowing I just could not walk away with what I believed to have been my life’s work and just leave it behind; that while I may leave Congress, I wasn’t prepared to leave the battle.
And so we turned our attention to the question, How can you leave a position such as I had and still be effective in fighting for the ideas that you think matter so much? Because, you see I was always guided by one of my axioms: The idea is always bigger than the man; the idea is bigger than the moment; the idea is the bigger than the party; if you don’t give your service to good ideas (with by the way, I think, honor, integrity, and fidelity) then you really don’t have much reason to be on that field.
So we had started addressing the question and the more we got to talking about it, the more we came out of our concern and, frankly, our sadness about my leaving with the realization that it is altogether possible for me to leave the United States House of Representatives, and in fact be a better servant to those ideas than I had been as majority leader in the House. And that was an exciting proposition in our mind. And you’re going to ask me, How’s it turned out? I don’t know the answer to that. But the potential was there and we began to talk about it; we got realizing it; we got enthusiastic so we said, You know, as in most things, you couldn’t do it alone. You had to find an affiliation--you had to find people—in other words,  I remember when I was a youngster we were taught this song: Give me some men who are stout-hearted men who will fight for the rights they adore.
And, I said, “I got to find that group of stout-hearted men.” I get this affiliation.
So we searched our memories of the eighteen years and the fights we’d been in, the struggles we’d had. And the one thing that consistently came up as we sort of reminisced over all those fights and all those wars was what was then known as Citizens for a Sound Economy. And, they’d always showed up at every fight I was ever in. They were always there—starting with my first fight against Comparable Worth in 1985, in July of ’85 when we gave Mary Rose Oakar a technical knock-out. I can’t tell you how much I still cherish that. (clapping)
Freedom Works--our Citizens was in that fight and they were in every fight I was in so I said, “You know, that’s what I need to do. I need to find an affiliation like that.”
Well to my good fortune, the folks at Citizens also apparently were thinking of me and we had a discussion and I found somebody that was willing to take me in. And, so I started this affiliation.
Now as some of you may have noticed over the course of the first couple of years out of my retirement out of Congress we’ve had some changes; we no longer have Citizens for a Sound Economy. I was that effective. But after some adjustment, changes, and so forth we had the further good fortune of having Jack Kemp begin to discuss with us the possibility that maybe we ought to merge our two organizations, and we went through a good deal of negotiation, discussion and so forth looking at potentials, possibilities--and so we now merged.
So, now if you say, Now where are you today? I’m with an organization that has a name that comes right back to my heart: Freedom Works. And it is the merged organization.
People want to know who we are. We are more than we more than we are an office full of very capable and able people in Washington, DC—like Matt Kibbe, our Executive Director (Matt, and I’m so proud of you). Some of you know that I always had the good fortune in all my years in Washington to have been surrounded by people in my employee (in those days, I think I’m technically Matt’s employee now). I’ve never been able to really swallow the term “staff” because they weren’t staff, they were partners and associates, but I’ve always had the good fortune of having young people—Bill Archer (Bill, you’ll love this), Bill Archer says to me, “Armey, how do you always have such an outstanding staff.
I said, “Well, Bill, I always try to hire people that are younger than me and smarter than me.”
And he said, “Well that’s not hard to do.”
I love that man, don’t you? You remember him, Phil. Great fondness.
But Matt is exactly the kind of able, quality, person of commitment that I’ve had the privilege to be an associate with—and Matt, I cherish our association and I’m so glad that you were willing to take me in.
Also, for those of you from Florida if you want to start a fight, and you want to say, If I start a fight will somebody show up? You can check with John Hallman, our Florida state director and John, you’re here aren’t you? Where is John?
So, yeah, if you want to start a fight, there we go.
What I discovered as we got together then, in Freedom Works and we began our sort of post-congressional sojourn, was that Freedom works was not these extraordinary people that I knew in these executive positions and mostly in our Washington office, but Freedom Works is three hundred and sixty-five thousand real people who live in their own real communities all over this country who show up. And when I got involved with it--‘course I’d always been in federal office; I’d seen citizens showing up at our federal fights--but the first good fight we got into was in Alabama. We had a new Republican governor from Alabama—some of you may remember him with some fondness; Bob Riley, he used to be one of us.  I had been invited to Alabama three congressional election cycles in a row by Bob Riley to campaign for him, been happy to do so. I think, Phil, you would agree with me, he was a very good colleague of ours when he was in the House of Representatives. We were all proud of him when he got elected governor. We were all optimistic, enthusiastic. We had a—we believed we had a small government, conservative Republican governor of Alabama.
Well, Bob hadn’t read the book. He hadn’t read Armey’s Axioms. If you love peace more than freedom you lose. So he decided he would rather have a peaceful term as Governor, and immediately got together with the head of the Alabama State Teacher’s Association who also happened to be the chairman of the Alabama Democrat Party.
Chapter 2—didn’t read that either: You make a deal with the devil, you’re the junior partner. (laughter, clapping)
So there’s poor old Bob, having made this deal with the Democrat Party in Alabama and pushing through an eight hundred million dollar tax increase to fix a deficit problem that was alleged to be four hundred million dollars that was in fact, by any honest measurement, more like two hundred million dollars. And furthermore Bob, being the good Christian that he was, arguing across the state of Alabama that you couldn’t be a good Christian if you didn’t vote for this tax increase, which I thought was a fascinating argument and what happened was the Alabama Citizens for a Sound Economy—that  fifteen or thousand or so  that lived in Alabama. They, who had worked— many of whom, most of whom had worked for Bob’s election—they started a fight. And this was a great revelation to me because I said, “Hey, I get it now, with Citizens we can have a fight at the federal level and we can have a fight at the state level.”
So all of a sudden Alabama CSE, without an executive director, without anybody running the place, but among themselves, started this war with the governor. And basically we found out about it when we started an S.O.S. over our fax machines and our email and over the phone. We began hearing voices from Alabama saying, Hey, our governor’s gone nuts, we’ve got a fight going on down there, you ought a throw in with us. And by the time we got to Alabama and saw the fight that was going on, we had Alabama supported by North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee CSE. Where the word had gone around and said, hey, there’s a fight going on in Alabama, we ought a run to the sound of them guns. And there was a devil of a fracas going on by the time I got there. And there we were: Alabama CSE taking on the biggest, baddest, meanest, Leftist lobby in the state—the Alabama Teacher’s Association. Hand-to-hand combat in the streets, and they won; they got a referendum on that tax increase and they turned it down by a vote of sixty-five to nothing.
This was—I’ll just throw a kind of I think a humorous little anecdote in on top of this. This was real people who showed up from their real homes and said, This isn’t right and we’re going to do something about it. And that’s who we are; taking on the biggest, most well-funded organized lobby in the state and whippin’ ‘em because real people met. It was really interesting because, yes, I did go down there at the invitation of the Alabama CSE to sort of talk to the troops, encourage the troops--I think we added a little technical advice here and there and a little guidance. I mean, that’s what you do when you call in the experts—expect them to help to just maintain the stability of your effort and I don’t want to say we did nothing but the fact is it was mostly done by real people, not people from Washington and there is a difference, (laughter) even if I are one.
But, Bob Reilly—I got a lot of attention from the press when I was down there. That’s what I do mostly is get attention from the press, and Bob Reilly said even, “Dick Armey has no business being in Alabama.”
My response was, ‘The last three times I was here, Bob, it was at your invitation to help you get elected to the House of Representatives.”
But, you know sometimes the Lord just kind of gives you a little moment--I’m sure he does not expect you to gloat but, maybe a little punctuation moment in your life when you can—it turns out that the members of the House of Representatives had named a room after me in the Capital and they had been kind enough--the members that voted that this (by the way there were eight that voted no). Ron Paul, bless this heart (Phil you’ll love this) Ron Paul abstained--Phil you probably did too. But Ron apologized; he said, “Dick, I just can’t tell you how bad I feel.”
“Ron,” I said, “Ron, if you had hadn’t at least abstained from that vote it wouldn’t have been authentic.”
Is that not right? Do I have Ron right?
But anyway, so there was this nice room with my name over the door and my portrait hanging on it and the governor of Alabama came from Alabama to eat with the Alabama delegation after the fight was over, and you’ll never believe what room they booked to have that luncheon.
Would you further believe that I happened to be on the hill in cloakroom that day when one of the Alabama guys said, “Hey, Dick, you ought a stop by and say hi to our delegation; we’ve go the governor in for lunch.”
And of course the devil does get on my shoulder and he does—I did do that I just stuck my head in long enough to say, “Hi, Bob” and to let him know that his coffee would be a lot sweeter in this room.
Now, that was probably not a kind thing for me to do but you know.
Anyway all of a sudden we turn around and we’ve got the same thing going on in Oregon.--Same thing. And all of sudden in the Oregon seat I see he starts a fight with their governor. And the alarm goes up. Alam alarm, you know. Of course this time they knew their governor was crazy; he was a Democrat. And again they had to fight the Oregon Teacher’s Association and we actually saw the film footage here because in Oregon in order to get the referendum up you had to file the petitions on the street so you had to fight the union in the courts over the petitions and on the street over getting the signatures with genuine harassment not only of the petition gatherer who again were real people out of their homes, not paid professionals but real people said, Yeah I’ll carry a petition around, stand in front of the Safeway.
So you had this harassment that was really quite militant of not only the people gathering the names but the people who might have considered signing their names were directly harassed. And so I guess can say to you without any doubt, our guys again beat the bad guys in hand-to-hand combat, got the petitions filed-not once, but twice, because the first time they were completed and filed they had a legal gimmick that some judge gave them and they had to do it over again.
And we rolled that back. You see, again by about 65 percent of votes. You see if you can get the good option in front of the people, the people usually will make the choice –the right choice at about 65 percent.
Then subsequently, in Washington State we did the same thing. And what I see validating here in these few years of experience that I’ve had is my wife and I were correct. If you get the right affiliation you can really get on the street with real people that really matter. You can make a big difference. 
A big part of our problem is how do you manage the people in public office? You have to get their attention. And the fact of the matter is, no matter how you boil it down, in the final analysis that person that has the greatest influence over the behavior of somebody in public office is somebody that lives, breathes, walks, talks, and votes in their district. And if those people will show up they can have an enormous influence over how people will do.
And that’s what we do. We show up and we influence people and on a few occasions (more than probably should have ever been necessary) we’ve had to encourage some Republicans to retire through the primary process in some of our states.  (clapping)
And I think--Grover weren’t you talking about that last night? There was rhino scent out there?
At any rate--and it always hurts us to do that but sometimes you have to have help people. You see the idea is very simple; you want to reward your friends, encourage your friends, applaud your friends, show up so they so feel sustained and then you also want to (which I say, I don’t want to be too harsh here) but you want to correct those who need correction or encourage them maybe to go on with some other occupation at the time.
And I’ve studied on this for a long long time. The—starting in the thirties, then again with the great second trunch in the sixties, Liberal s got a big jump on us. And we have really built up a lot of big, clumsy, ineffective big government in America. And if you really study on it hard, to a large extent since the thirties and then the sixties the role of the Conservative and by and large the Conservatives congregate in the Republican Party and by and large the Liberals and Leftists congregate in the Democratic party. So to a large extent it does matter which party prevails, but the job of the Conservatives is really frankly to clean up after the Liberal; to fix the problems they’ve created. And so to a large extent we just take a look at the policy land out there that we want to walk on and try to make better--get roses to grow where we now find weeds. We’re really cleaning up after the Liberals and correcting them.
And I just wanted to talk about two things. One: In 19--this is a little known historical fact for you and it is very interesting to me and Phil Crane and Bob because it’s such an extraordinary event—a legislative event in the history of the world. In 1936, when social security was created (hold on to your seats guys) the Senate was actually more right than the House. That hardly, I mean I don’t know if it happened very often, but in 1936 when the Senate first reported a social security bill they reported a bill that had what? Personal retirement accounts. And then when they went to conference between the House and the Senate and the White House weighed in we got this grand pyramid scheme that we’ve struggled with.
Now I have to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, social security as you’ve known it over your life has been, from its inception, a bad idea (clapping).
Dick Gephardt always said, “It’s been a great successful program.” Yes, if I were a liberal Democrat who wanted a program that first gave us big government and, second, could be used for the purpose of electing democrats and defeating Republicans for sixty years, I would say that’s been a great successful program. But that’s all it’s done. And the worm has turned on this. We have a moment now finally in the history of the existence of this program, when we can fix the dang thing.
See, my grandfather loved social security. I believe my grandfather was the first generation of social security recipients and I believe he may very well have been the last generation to love social security. I believe my dad started to have his doubts. I can tell you from my generation (and I’m sixty-three, I know you won’t believe that)--my generation does not love social security. If you’re in my generation and you think social security’s a good thing in your life, and if you don’t know enough about opportunity costs to realize what more better you could have done for yourself over your life you are either in a union, the Democratic Party, or a college professor. (clapping) And you have ideological reasons to remain ignorant. And then take a look at our kids. Our kids not only don’t love social security, but they resent it. My daughter, bless her heart, she wears a lapel pin that says, Who the devil is FICA and why’s he taking my money?
And so we have a moment where we can fix this, and wonder of wonders since Barry Goldwater in 1964, we actually have a president who dares to say, “Let’s go take this thing on.”
And we need to seize this moment. Now this is not going to be an easy fight. This fight will be won if America beats Washington. And it’s a fight where we will have to get people, not only our three hundred sixty-five thousand, but more people from more households all over America out of their homes and into the fight and on the street, in the congressman’s office, into the senator’s office, at the town hall meeting, in the editorial pages, in the op-ed pages, in the letters to the editor, on the phone to their neighbors and working hard on this. Because I’ll guarantee you; if in fact I were Sammy Sosa in politics I’d be saying,  “Social security’s been very very good to me.”
And they’re not going to give it up without a fight. This is a big fight. We need to be in it. And we need to understand, we’re not going to get a second chance; if we don’t do it now, it won’t get done. So we’ve got the stars aligned on us.
We’ve got another one that I want to talk to you about because I think a lot of people are missing it.
You know, partial-birth abortion was a horrible issue. It’s a painful thing for us, but because we took it on we did more than anything else we ever did to reframe the understanding of abortion in America. It has not been a comfortable debate; it’s been a difficult debate. But if there’s anything that’s turned that worm in our direction more than that I don’t know what it is.
Same thing with tort reform, we’re all talking about tort reform. We have a golden moment in tort reform that’s staring us in the face--and if we seize it, understand it, recognize it, and jump on it, a chance to turn the public’s understanding of the tort law in our direction.  And it is the asbestos case--We have a Judge Weiner who’s more than just another judicial hot dog (couldn’t resist that, couldn’t resist that – Kent appreciates me) a Judge Weiner that has – can you get this: an actual judge at the bench that’s taken the cases before him and divided those cases between the legitimate cases where injury has actually been sustained and the not legitimate cases.
 We have a federal judge that has made our case: That there’s a difference between legitimate lawsuits and frivolous lawsuits. And he’s made division of his calendar, of his docket, and it’s there for you to look at and examine. This is a big deal; it’s a big moment in our lives. We have an association of real victims who are now presenting themselves before the world prepared to show up and have done so already who are saying, You’ve got to fix these tort laws because these phony claims are what’s keeping us off the docket so we can’t get the just compensation we deserve.
Can you imagine us being able to be on the side of the real victims? Not going out and saying they’re there but showing when they are there to say, Yeah, and we’re on your side. Do you know what a change that is for us? And, a little known but very important fact, one of the leaders of that group of real victims and victims with family is the widow of a former Democrat member of the House of Representatives who died from the disease. So the Liberals can fight with her; let them go fight with the widow. We have a chance here.
Now why is this important? Because the Liberals have understood--just when they understood they couldn’t make their way in the world through gerrymandering, therefore they needed to turn their attention to rigging up the census; and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the most important thing that happened when Al Gore was not elected—that they stopped the rigging the census. They have now understood the best way for us to handle our prosperity and the tort law is to institute this model where we set up these trust funds and let the trustees dole out the money because then the charlatans will get their share just as well as everybody else. You will not have medical criteria; you will not have a differentiation. And of course as you might guess, we have Republicans (bless their little ol’ hearts) in the Senate, from Pennsylvania, who have blocked this lock, stock, and barrel. One: Go back to where we started with poor old Bob Reilly-- they like peace more than freedom. And unhappily for me (it breaks my heart) Senator Hatch, from Utah , is still seeking Senator Kennedy’s approval.
I’m here by the way to tell you I spent eighteen years in Washington as a member of Congress in many meetings with Senator Kennedy and he is not my friend. (clapping)
But they want peace more than freedom so they will buy into the phony model created by two of Tom Dashell’s staffers.
Now, we can sit here and we can say, Well, we’ll just let the Senate go first and let Arnold Specter go first, and we can allow the Republicans in the Senate to legislate the Democrat model for tort laws. And once they have it for asbestos you think they’re not going to say, Well that model’s working great there, we ought to try it here?
Sometimes we have to correct for the excesses of the Left. Social security’s the greatest opportunity in our lifetime to do that. Sometimes, if we’re smart and we’re quick on our feet and if we get the jump on them, we can preemptively stop them from putting their model in place; and we’re given that opportunity today with asbestos reform. Why don’t we, for a change, seize the moment. Why don’t we, for a change leave a bunch of big government Liberals sitting in our wake saying, like Marlon Brando in the back of that car, “I could’ve been a contender.”
Why does it always have to be us?
Now let me just tell you: we can do these things. We will have to be wiling and able to take on some of our friends and it’ll break our heart on occasion. Bob Reilly was a good friend of mine. I went to—Phil, you will remember the heartbreak of him losing his daughter. It was not an easy thing to get me off and Matt will tell you I tried to stay out of that fight because of my personal feelings for Bob. I had to get in that fight because he was wrong. I love Oren Hatch--I’ve always thought the world of him--but he’s wrong.
It’s easier for me to fight with a Pennsylvania senator--there’s no doubt about it--But the Lord didn’t give me just the fight that I would enjoy, he gave me also the fight that I regret--with Senator Hatch, as he did with Bob Reilly,.
We’ve go to take on all the fights that come our way. We’ve got to do it with a sense of demeanor (yet, resolve), honor, integrity, and, above all, fidelity. But we must show up. That’s who we are. That’s what we do. And I am so proud and so pleased to say again, not only did those three hundred and sixty-five thousand people--real people from all over America—not only were they wiling to take me in, but they were willing to share and embrace and endorse my conviction: that freedom works. Thank you for letting me be here. (clapping, yelling)