The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Paul] is recognized for 5 minutes.

• Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, yesterday's Supreme Court decision in City of Boerne versus Flores is being touted as a blow to religious liberty and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. It is, however, a blow to neither. The case of City of Boerne versus Flores came to the Supreme Court as a result of the zoning laws in Boerne, Texas which restricted the uses to which Reverend Cummings could put the property belonging to the Roman Catholic Church for which he worked. These particular zoning restrictions were not directed at Reverend Cummings or the Roman Catholic Church. The zoning laws were not even directed at religious organizations or churches generally. Rather, these zoning restrictions were directed at property owners in general in the name of historic preservation. These facts, however, beg the question as to why this case was argued instead as a violation of religious liberties protected by the first amendment.

• What made this an issue of religious freedom in the court and `court of public opinion' is perhaps a symptom of the U.S. Supreme Court's holding in Village of Euclid, Ohio versus Ambler Realty Co. (1926) in which the Court sanctioned the abandonment of individual rights to property in the name of zoning for the `collective good.' For those whose property rights are regulated away, devalued, or `taken' regulatorily, it is a natural symptom to expect these aggrieved parties to cling to whatever Constitutional liberties might still gain them a sympathetic ear in the courts. Those destroying flag-like property scramble for protection under the banner of free expression and Reverend Cummins sought property rights protection elsewhere within the first amendment, namely, religious freedom. Absent local, state, or federal governments' realization that such dilemmas are hopelessly irreconcilable outside a framework of individual property rights, similar cases will continue to find their way to various levels of the judicial system as those suffering infringements upon their rights in property, grope for justice against the collective expropriation which has become not only the rule, but the rule of law, in this country.

• It is no accident that a case such as this did not originate in Houston, Pasadena, or Alvin, Texas. Each of these cities have allowed the marketplace, through a series of voluntary contractual exchanges, (rather than a central-planning-style zoning board), to determine how private property is most effectively developed.

• The first amendment is meaningless absent a respect for property rights. Freedom of the press is a mere sham without the right to own paper and ink. Freedom of religion is vacuous absent the right to own a pulpit from which to preach or at least a place in which to practice or worship. Until this country's lawmakers and courts restore a system of Constitutional jurisprudence respective of the inextricable nature of so-called economic and fundamental liberties, all liberties will be subject to eradication at the whim of the legislatures, the courts, or both.