PPSA Act of 2021

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 1339 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Reschenthaler), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. Speaker, on Tuesday, the Rules Committee met and reported a rule, House Resolution 1339, providing for consideration of three measures: H.R. 302, H.R. 2988, and H.R. 8326, all under structured rules.

For H.R. 302, the rule provides 1 hour of general debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, makes in order one amendment, and provides a motion to recommit.

For H.R. 2988 and H.R. 8326, the rule provides 1 hour of general debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Oversight and Reform for each bill, makes in order four amendments for H.R. 2988 and three amendments for H.R. 8326, and provides en bloc authority for both bills and motions to recommit for both bills.

The rule further provides the majority leader or his designee the ability this week to en bloc requested roll call votes on suspension bills considered from September 13 to September 16.

Lastly, the rule provides same-day authority through September 30 for a measure dealing with continuing appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2023.

Mr. Speaker, I rise proudly today in support of House Resolution 1339, the rule for three crucial bills, each of which will protect an essential institution in American Government and public life that came under serious attack in the previous administration: our Federal civil service, whistleblowers acting against public corruption, and the Census Bureau. All three bills were marked up and passed by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

H.R. 302, the Preventing a Patronage System Act, is a bipartisan bill led by Congressman Connolly of Virginia and Congressman Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania. This legislation will insulate our civil service against partisan political interference and ensure that no future President can fire government experts and civil servants simply to replace them with their own political loyalists and sycophants.

The civil service system was created in the 19th century with the explicit purpose of ending the so-called spoils system and ensuring that Federal employees are hired, promoted, and fired based on their qualifications and performance, not their political party connections or the political favors and services they are willing to render to elected officials.

The merit-based Federal workforce exists to effectively implement Federal laws and programs passed by Congress and signed into law by the President and translate those laws and programs into concrete results and benefits for the American people. Professional civil servants, like scientists, engineers, meteorologists, statisticians, economic researchers, and policy analysts must be able to do their jobs and advise government officials and the public based on empirical methods, facts and data, not ideological filters and bars of political correctness, and without fear of retaliation and discharge for political reasons.

But the previous administration attempted to turn our civil service, Mr. Speaker, into a top-down political and ideological party machine, the kind that the original architects of civil service tried to dismantle in the 19th century. In October of 2020, the former President issued Executive Order 13957 to create Schedule F, a sweeping new employment category for career civil servants who work on public policy issues. Schedule F specifically targeted about 50,000 presently nonpartisan policy experts, many of them holding advanced degrees and having served for decades as policy experts across different administrations with Presidents from different political parties.

For these civil servants, Schedule F would have stripped away their rights, their merit-based legal protections, and their professional independence. Civil servants transferred into the new Schedule F could have been fired and replaced at any time for any political or ideological reason or for no reason at all given by a hostile administration. The 50,000 civil servants deemed to be involved in formulating policy could have been swept up in a Schedule F political purge and replaced with unqualified loyalists and flunkies, with potentially catastrophic consequences for national security, the continuity of

governance, and the evenhanded and effective enforcement of Federal laws and programs.

The President already has the opportunity to appoint more than 4,000 political appointees. But Schedule F sought to go much further in radically transforming the civil service into an instrument of the chosen political ends and designs of the President.

Thankfully, President Joe Biden rescinded the order in January 2021. However, several top Republicans have already expressed support for picking up right where the previous administration left off with a new Schedule F.

Our civil servants must be hired based on their merits and then evaluated based on their actual job performance in office, not their political party membership, not their ideological viewpoints, and not their political campaign activism. Indeed, there are already processes in place for evaluating Federal employees' actual job performance, which is why in 2021, more than 10,000 Federal employees were removed from their jobs for not living up to job expectations. That is how you deal with people who are not actually doing their jobs. This bill is precisely about ensuring that civil servants will be evaluated based on their job performance and not the partisan political goals or extracurricular demands of a particular administration.

As a member of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, which considered this legislation carefully and reported it favorably and the proud Representative of tens of thousands of Federal workers in Maryland's beautiful Eighth District, I am proud to advance this bill and urge all of my colleagues to support its passage on a bipartisan basis. We have an urgent mandate to protect the historic merit-based civil service and the integrity of the Federal Government against anyone who would turn the clock back more than a century to allow Presidents to convert our Federal workforce in service of agreed-upon Federal laws and programs into an instrument of personal ambition, campaign reelection, or party patronage.

Now, turning to H.R. 2988, the bipartisan Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act of 2021, led by Chairwoman Maloney. This is another piece of critical legislation in defense of another critical democratic safeguard.

Whistleblowers are a great American institution and an important mechanism for guaranteeing the integrity of government. Our protection of whistleblowers reflects the fact that in our system of government, we have checks and balances all the way down. An individual Federal employee can hold even the most powerful government officials accountable to the rule of law, which binds all of us. Whistleblowers in American history have exposed self-dealing, bribery, kickbacks, sweetheart contracts, lost and stolen Federal property, national security failures, criminal coverups, other political corruption, war crimes, rape and sexual harassment in the military, major public health violations, episodes of environmental and toxic contamination, and the systematic waste or pilfering of taxpayer dollars.

This bill will improve current protections for whistleblowers by clearly prohibiting retaliatory investigations and other actions against Federal employees who share information with Congress, the House of Representatives, or the Senate, or with their supervisor. The bill limits the public disclosure of the identity of whistleblowers and extends whistleblower protections to new categories of Federal officers and employees, including Public Health Service workers and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's commissioned officers.

The bill also contains provisions to ensure a timely and fair procedure for whistleblowers facing discrimination and retaliation. Currently, the backlog at the Merit Systems Protection Board means that some whistleblowers may wait years for a hearing to be scheduled on their claims. This bill grants whistleblowers access to a jury trial in Federal district court if the Merit Systems Protection Board does not render a timely decision in their case.

Whistleblowers are integral to government transparency and accountability in our country. I strongly support this bill to ensure whistleblowers can come forward without fear of reprisal or punishment.

The last bill before us, Mr. Speaker, H.R. 8326, the Ensuring a Fair and Accurate Census Act, also led by Chairwoman Maloney, will protect the Census Bureau against future efforts at political interference, and it will ensure the Bureau's independence in the performance of its essential duties.

The Census is a constitutional mandate and imperative. The U.S. Constitution requires an actual enumeration of the whole number of persons in the country for apportioning Representatives among the States and Congress. The Census is an expression of the original principle that democracy must rest on the Jeffersonian idea of the consent of the governed. And, therefore, we need to know everyone who is here and part of the sovereign people of the Nation. The Census determines congressional apportionment of House seats and the allocation of trillions of dollars of Federal spending. Even many businesses in the private sector rely on Census Bureau statistics to guide their decisions.

The previous administration's spectacular contempt for our constitutional system was on full display during its many efforts to interfere with the 2020 Census for purposes of political gain. The effort to complete a comprehensive and effective Census was undermined at every turn by efforts such as the unlawful plot to add the citizenship question to the short form, which was struck down by the Supreme Court, or the installation of a record-breaking number of highly partisan political appointees to the ranks of the Bureau's leadership. The reforms contained in the Ensuring a Fair and Accurate Census Act will safeguard the integrity of the Census count against this type of sinister political interference in the many years to come.

Mr. Speaker, I will reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to hear my good friend from Pennsylvania make his presentation. I was surprised that he described these three bills as completely irrelevant, given that one is about protecting the integrity of the Federal civil service, a force of more than 2 million people who are doing the work of the American people in the National Park Service, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, and so on.

I don't know what is completely irrelevant about that. Nor do I understand what is completely irrelevant about protecting the rights and our encouragement of Federal workers to be whistleblowers when there is massive waste, fraud, abuse, or exploitation taking place with the taxpayers' money. That is an essential purpose of government.

We have a government that is an instrument of the will of the people, and we have a lot of public policies that are being enforced, but we want to make sure that they are being enforced correctly and that the people's taxpayer moneys are being respected.

The whistleblowers are helping us do that in blowing the whistle on hundreds of millions of dollars of waste, corruption, and abuse that have taken place. Why we would turn a blind eye to that and describe it as completely irrelevant is beyond me.

Of course, the Census is foundational to the workings of American democracy, and we want to prevent precisely the kind of political finger-pointing all over the Census Bureau and our laws that we saw in the last administration.

I am just curious whether the gentleman really believes that if the current President suggested that we take 40,000 or 50,000 Federal workers who presently have civil service protection and put them directly under his control for political appointment, he would think that is a good idea because our legislation will prevent any President in the future from doing that, including this Democratic President, any future Democratic Presidents, any future Republican Presidents or Independents or anyone else.

We don't think that is a good idea, and I can't believe that my good friend from Pennsylvania would just be agnostic as to that proposition.

Let me just say, finally, about the whole question of what is relevant and what is irrelevant, it seems like all we are hearing from the other side is embodied in the big statement coming out of the Senate from Senator Lindsey Graham, saying it is time for a national Federal ban on abortion that could even be exceeded by the States.

Now, originally, they said: Well, Roe v. Wade is settled precedent, and we accept that.

Then, they packed the Court with their Justices, who were determined, hellbent, on overturning Roe v. Wade, and they did it.

Then, we heard from our friends across the aisle: Well, this is a matter for the States. Let the States decide.

Now, we hear from our colleagues in Congress that, no, they want a national criminal ban on the right of women to make their own decisions about their health, their families, their careers, and their futures.

Then, they will even allow States to go beyond that to completely ban abortion, which is, of course, the essential pro-life position which we have heard from our colleagues across the aisle. That is what they are focused on.

Meantime, the President signed, this week, the Inflation Reduction Act, which will dramatically lower healthcare costs for tens of millions of Americans and, finally, overturn the Republican ban on the government negotiating in the Medicare program with Big Pharma for lower prescription drug prices.

We are actually making progress. They want to drag everyone into their insatiable efforts to ban the right to abortion in America.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, my colleagues tempt me to wander afield from what we have come here to talk about since they want to talk about seemingly everything else. So let me try to respond to a few of the points that have just been lobbed in our direction.

First, they seem to want to assign responsibility to the President of the United States for the inflation rate. But then, surely, they will assign responsibility to the President of the

United States for the unemployment rate, which now stands at around 3.5 percent, the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years. You have got to go back a half century to find the kind of job situation that President Biden has brought to the United States of America.

Last week, we learned that payroll employment is up by 315,000 in the month of August alone. Since President Biden came into office, we have added 668,000 manufacturing jobs.

Now, it is true the President has been fighting inflation ever since he got into office. Why?

Well, the economy started to come roaring back--not just in America, but all over the world in the wake of the pandemic. So we saw a tremendous demand with broken supply chains. So what happens under the law of supply and demand? The prices go up. But, unlike our colleagues who seem to want to chortle about it and use it as a campaign talking point, President Biden and the Democrats have been acting to bring inflation down. Every single day.

Yesterday's Consumer Price Index data showed continued progress in bringing global inflation down here in the U.S. economy. Gas prices are down an average of $1.30 a gallon since the beginning of the summer. Price increases slowed at the grocery store this month. Still too high. But real wages went up again for a second month in a row, giving hardworking families more breathing room.

It is amazing to me that some of the time has been delegated to one of our distinguished colleagues who seem to want to blame these global economic conditions arising from COVID-19 and the pandemic and broken supply chains, as well as Vladimir Putin's filthy imperialist war in Ukraine, which fortunately, the people of Ukraine, with the support of a lot of people in this body--but not everybody--is starting to win. And we have seen dramatic reversal of fortune in that war as the democratic forces are beating Vladimir Putin and the autocrats in Russia.

But in any event, we just heard someone who wanted to blame all of these global economic conditions on an SEC regulation, which we are not here to discuss and, therefore, unfortunately, I can't address. I might agree with the gentleman, for all I know. It has nothing to do with the legislation before us, and it is hard for me to believe that that is the source of inflation around the world or the unemployment, which now is practically at the bottom level that we have ever seen in over a century.

But in any event, Mr. Speaker, back to the point at hand, I thought we were going to be distracted with Republican calls to ban abortion across the country. Well, the polls must be teaching them something because I am not hearing about abortion today.

For many years, all I heard from them was abortion is murder, and the millions of persons who are being murdered by abortion. They demanded the overthrow of Roe v. Wade, and they got their way.

Yesterday, Senator Lindsey Graham introduced legislation for a national criminal ban on abortion. But, of course, the so-called pro- life forces want to go further in the States and ban it completely. A lot of them don't even want to allow exceptions for rape or incest.

I thought our colleagues were going to explain what their position really is. I would invite them to do so as long as they don't want to talk about the legislation before us today.

Why don't they tell us what their position on abortion is, because America wants to know.

I think their position has changed somewhat. They are singing a somewhat different tune since the people of Kansas, by 20 points, destroyed their anti-choice agenda, and explained to them in numerical terms that the people of America are on the side of freedom and the rights of women and men and families to make their own decisions and not to have those decisions be made by Lindsey Graham, one Senator, who yesterday pronounced that he chose 15 weeks as the right point to criminalize abortion. He chose that himself.

What is their position now? America wants to know. What is their position?

Do they support a national criminal ban on abortion? Are they going to allow any exceptions for rape or incest? What is their position on it, if they don't want to talk about the legislation at hand?

Meantime, the Democrats continue to fight for lower drug prices, for a record, unprecedented, historic investment in renewable energy.

We are addressing the problems of the future. At the same time, we are defending the integrity of the Federal civil service and our workforce, which was compromised and abused in so many ways by the last administration.

We are defending the rights of whistleblowers to tell the truth about what is taking place in terms of political and public corruption and not to have to face retaliation from their supervisors. We are defending the institutions of democracy, including the Census, against all of the kinds of machinations and corruption and political abuse that we saw in the last administration.

We are glad that the Supreme Court struck down their last interference with the Census by trying to paste questions outside of the rule of law on the short form. This legislation is designed to protect the integrity of the Census along with the civil service, along with the whistleblowers.

But as long as my dear colleagues and friends don't want to talk about the legislation at hand, please clarify for America what their plan is to take away the health rights of American women and their families. Are they supporting the plan we heard yesterday announced by Lindsey Graham for a nationwide Federal criminal ban?

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, the very distinguished gentleman from Kentucky purported to speak for what Americans are worried about. Undoubtedly, many Americans are worried about inflation, which is why this administration has been taking strong action not just to get jobs for everybody who wants a job and good jobs and union jobs for people, but also to bring inflation down.

Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record a New York Times article titled ``U.S. Gas Prices Have Fallen for 91 Straight Days, a Relief for Consumers.''

[From the New York Times, Sept. 13, 2022]

U.S. Gas Prices Have Fallen for 91 Straight Days, a Relief for

Consumers

(By Isabella Simonetti)

The price of gasoline continues to fall steadily, easing

pressure on American consumers as the cost of filling a tank

continued to tumble from record levels reached earlier in the

summer.

Gas prices fell 10.6 percent in August, which helped

moderate still-sky-high inflation, Tuesday's Consumer Price

Index report showed.

The energy index, which tracks gasoline and electricity

among other energy sources, dropped 5 percent last month, as

electricity and natural gas prices rose.

After peaking at $5.02 in June, gasoline prices have

dropped for 91 straight days, and the national average stood

at just over $3.70 a gallon on Tuesday, data from AAA show.

But analysts point to a few reasons this streak of declines

is unlikely to continue.

Because they're determined by oil prices, gasoline prices

are also susceptible to a wide range of challenges, like

hurricanes that knock out drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and

efforts to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine by

curbing its ability to sell crude on the global market.

While gas prices are down, the overall energy index still

remains up 23.8 percent over the 12 months that ended in

August. Electricity prices alone jumped 15.8 percent,

representing the largest 12-month increase since August 1981,

the inflation report said. The jump in electricity prices is

largely attributable to the high cost of natural gas, said

Laura Rosner-Warburton, an economist at MacroPolicy

Perspectives.

As winter approaches, other fuel prices could influence

inflation data. The cost of heating a home with natural gas,

the most common source of home-heating fuel in the United

States, is expected to jump more than 25 percent from last

year, to $952 for the six months from October through March,

according to the National Energy Assistance Directors

Association.

``You would expect that a hard winter could create a

significant increase in demand in price of natural gas,''

said Bryan Benoit, U.S. national managing partner of energy

at Grant Thornton. ``And then of course all of this is

further exacerbated by what's going on with the war in the

Ukraine.''

I want to talk about some of the other things that Americans are worried about since my colleague purported to speak for Americans because I saw a poll recently saying that Americans are worried about the attack on democracy and voting rights.

Part of that may be the fact that some of our colleagues seem to be ambivalent about whether or not to denounce the rampant violence that was unleashed against this institution, this body, on January 6, 2021, when thousands of rioters came and attacked our officers, wounding and injuring more than 150 of them, breaking their jaws, their necks, lost fingers, strokes, heart attacks, concussions, and contusions. And, of course, the former President says that his mob actually greeted the police with hugs and kisses.

Some of our colleagues shamefully have followed the former President in trying to whitewash the worst episode of domestic mass insurrectionary violence ever unleashed on the Capitol of the United States with an attack on the Vice President, Mike Pence. We heard those words, ``Hang Mike Pence. Hang Mike Pence,'' bouncing off of the walls of the Capitol and against the Congress of the United States.

So, yes, people are worried about the state of our democracy with so many members of the GOP following Donald Trump in not only his terrible big lie, the first time we have ever seen that in American history, but also the big lie encompassing this mob violence and this insurrection against the Government of the United States.

Do you know what else Americans are worried about, Mr. Speaker? Americans are now worried about State politicians and Federal politicians trampling the rights of women. For more than a half century, women have had a right to make their most intimate procreative and reproductive decisions with their families, with their husbands, with their partners, with their ministers, and with their church leaders.

Then, they gerrymandered the Supreme Court. They kept Merrick Garland off the Supreme Court by not even giving him a hearing over on the Senate side.

Then, what do you know, Mr. Speaker? They followed what the RNC was asking for in all of their platforms for all of these years: Overturn Roe v. Wade. They overturned Roe v. Wade.

Then, we heard from our colleagues: Well, we just want the States to decide.

But, yesterday, Senator Lindsey Graham unveiled what the real plan is: a nationwide criminal ban on abortion, and if they can go further in the States, they will go further in the States.

We have Republican proposals all over America to completely ban abortion from the moment of conception, which is the pro-life orthodoxy, which is life begins at conception.

We heard it in the Judiciary Committee. We have heard it in the Oversight and Reform Committee. We have been hearing it for years. But now they have fallen strangely and demurely silent. Why is that? Part of it is because of the good people of Kansas, who showed them just where America is on this.

America is a country committed to individual freedom and the rights of the people to make their own decisions and not having busybody, theocrat politicians in State capitals telling them how to make their own decisions about their careers, about their lives, about their families, and about their healthcare--and certainly not allowing Lindsey Graham to dictate to the women of America what their destiny will be.

They won't say a word about it. They will talk about an SEC regulation nobody heard of that we are not here to talk about today. They will blame Joe Biden for global inflation. They will blame Joe Biden for Vladimir Putin's filthy, imperialist invasion of Ukraine.

I hear them denouncing Joe Biden. They won't denounce Vladimir Putin for 1 second.

I would happily yield 1 minute if they would denounce Vladimir Putin, but they won't do it. We have heard people over on their side cheerleading for Vladimir Putin. I heard the gentlewoman from Georgia say: Russia wins.

Guess what? Russia doesn't win. The people of Ukraine are winning today, and the people of America are with the people of Ukraine. We are on the side of democrats, small d democrats, all over the world against the autocrats like Putin, against the theocrats like people who would dictate to the women of America their own health decisions.

We are against the tyrants, the bullies, and the despots. We are against Presidents who get into office and try to dictate the political decisionmaking of individual members of the workforce and try to push their ideological program into the government. We are for defending whistleblowers; we are for defending the Census; and we are for defending democratic institutions in America.

I am just shocked that I hear from my good friend from Pennsylvania, someone I like and someone I trust, that he actually is defending Putin against Biden and blaming Joe Biden for Putin's long-running plan to invade Ukraine. That is a remarkable thing to me, and I hope we can have that clarified.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Kentucky spoke about what his constituents are interested in. Apparently, they are interested only in the question of inflation.

My constituents are interested in that and are satisfied about the fact that we have had more than 90 days of decline in gas prices and that this administration is fighting to reduce inflation, including with the Inflation Reduction Act, which dramatically reduces healthcare costs, saying that nobody will have to spend more than $35 a month on insulin--no diabetic in America--and no one in the Medicare program will have to spend more than $2,000 a year on prescription drugs, generally.

How is that for getting inflation down?

But that is not all they care about. They care about women's right to choose and the GOP assault on the freedoms of the people, something which our colleagues maintain their demure and uncharacteristic circumspect silence about today. They didn't want to talk about this new GOP plan to ban abortion all across America. That is what we heard yesterday from Senator Graham about his plan for America.

My constituents want freedom in America. They want democracy in voting rights. They don't want to see violence unleashed against the Capitol of the United States, against school boards, against State capitols, or any of the political violence we have seen from whatever source. I am happy to denounce all of it.

I wish my colleagues would denounce political violence when it comes to our very doors, when it enters this Chamber, rather than playing follow the leader with the former President who has disgraced himself as the first President in U.S. history to be impeached twice and continues to be embroiled in all the political corruption investigations all over the country, as it has been shown that he egged on armed protesters to come to try to attack this body, to drive Vice President Pence out of the body, and to drive us out of the body, as well, interfering with a Federal proceeding.

Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``yes'' vote on this rule and the previous question.

The material previously referred to by Mr. Reschenthaler is as follows:

Amendment to House Resolution 1339

At the end of the resolution, add the following:

Sec. 13. Immediately upon adoption of this resolution, the

House shall proceed to the consideration in the House of the

bill (H.R. 8589) to prohibit the Securities and Exchange

Commission from finalizing the proposed rule titled ``The

Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related

Disclosures for Investors''. All points of order against

consideration of the bill are waived. The bill shall be

considered as read. All points of order against provisions in

the bill are waived. The previous question shall be

considered as ordered on the bill and on any amendment

thereto to final passage without intervening motion except:

(1) one hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the

chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on

Financial Services; and (2) one motion to recommit.

Sec. 14. Clause 1(c) of rule XIX shall not apply to the

consideration of H.R. 8589.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Reschenthaler) for yielding.

I rise to oppose the previous question so that we can immediately consider Representative French Hill's H.R. 8589 to prohibit the Securities and Exchange Commission from trading its independence and statutory authority away in the name of alarmist climate advocacy.

The proposed climate change rule from the Securities and Exchange Commission will further crush our fragile economy, and struggling families will ultimately pay the price.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Consumer Price Index numbers for the month of August. As has been mentioned already today, CPI surged to 8.3 percent, above projections, still a 40-year high, showing that this inflation crisis is not going away anytime soon.

Americans are paying more for everything, and rising prices continue to wreak havoc on farmers, middle-class families, and small businesses struggling to stay afloat all across America.

Of course, Democrats' overspending for the last year and a half has produced excess demand, pushing up prices, but no amount of Fed tightening can fix the inflationary supply-demand mismatch without also addressing the supply side.

At the heart of this inflation crisis is the Biden administration's war on American energy production. This policy of deliberately constraining the supply of energy is taking its toll on the American people. According to a Penn Wharton study, inflation reduced the purchasing power of American households by approximately $6,000 last year. That is like taking an entire paycheck away for an entire month for every American household.

Real earnings, hourly earnings, dropped 2.8 percent over the year in August. Wages are down because of this inflation crisis. Credit card debt is up. It hit an all-time high last month.

One in six American households are now behind paying their electricity bills and in danger of losing their utility services altogether, with natural gas prices up 30 percent since last July. Effectively, electricity prices are now up 15 percent, a 14-year high.

When Joe Biden took office, the average price of gasoline was $2.36 per gallon. Today, the average gas price in America is $3.72 per gallon, and stubbornly, diesel prices are much, much higher. That goes into everything: transportation, manufacturing, farmers having to fill up the tank on their tractors. All of that is passed on at the retail point of sale. In less than 2 years, America has gone from energy dominant to energy desperate.

Mr. Speaker, ground zero for the Biden administration's war on American energy is the weaponization of financial regulation and the politicization of access to capital.

What do I mean by this? We all know that the Biden administration killed the Keystone XL pipeline and other critical energy infrastructure projects. We know that they are frustrating the construction of new refineries. We know that they have held up 4,400 drilling permits. But ground zero is the weaponization of financial regulation to deny American energy the access to the capital that they need to invest in a very capital-intensive business.

Throughout the executive branch, at the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the OCC, and other financial regulators, Biden has installed or nominated unelected climate alarmists and given them free rein to attack American energy businesses, all in the name of climate change.

The sad irony, Mr. Speaker, is that if we want to innovate and actually solve climate change, we wouldn't be denying American energy companies and the scientists there access to financing. We would be giving them more financing to innovate and to solve the problem the American way, through free enterprise and innovation. One of these radical nominees even called for bankrupting American fossil fuel companies.

Perhaps the most dangerous regulation issued by the Biden administration to destroy American energy is the SEC's climate risk disclosure rule proposed in March. This 534-page monstrosity marks the transformation of the SEC from an independent agency dedicated to investor protection to an unaccountable and politicized bureaucracy intent on advancing radical environmental and social policy over which it has neither expertise nor jurisdiction.

This proposed rule is totally disconnected from the longstanding investor-driven materiality standard and will politicize the agency and reduce its credibility by hurting investors, elevating nonpecuniary factors above financial returns, and steering retail investors into lower performing, higher fee, and less-diversified ESG investments.

As a reminder, Mr. Speaker, the statutory mission of the SEC is to protect investors; maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets; and facilitate capital formation. This is not about protecting investors. It is about hurting investors. It is not about capital formation. It is about capital destruction. It is definitively not to reduce carbon emissions or solve climate change, but the SEC is wading into environmental policy debates like climate change with its top-down, government-directed, one-size-fits-all mandatory environmental, social, and governance disclosure regulation, or ESG.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler claims that the requirements in the proposal are material because institutional investors are demanding this information. But according to a study conducted by the University of Chicago and FINRA, only 21 percent of surveyed retail investors in this country even knew what ESG stands for.

The fact of the matter is, retail investors are not demanding this information. They want returns, not politics, guiding their retirement and college savings.

What do retail investors really care about? Yesterday's bloodbath in the stock market when the Dow plummeted by over 1,000 points in a single day, the worst drop since June 2020.

That tells me what investors actually want, Mr. Speaker, and it is returns. They need returns. They don't need an inflationary environment that is eating away their purchasing power and rising interest rates because of it that result in turmoil in the financial markets, destroying retirement savings.

ESG funds are hurting American investors. They are tech-heavy, and in a market where tech stocks are in a massive sell-off and are vastly underperforming non-ESG funds that contain investments in energy, who are the losers? Retail investors who are unwittingly invested in and overexposed to ESG. On top of that, ESG funds charge 43 percent higher fees than non-ESG funds.

In short, the government is redirecting capital away from energy, and it is costing retail investors, which include teachers, police officers, and other ordinary Americans saving for retirement, extraordinary amounts of money.

But, today, Congress can actually do something to protect investors. I am leading this previous question that would amend the rule to immediately consider H.R. 8589, legislation offered by the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Hill), my friend, to stop this SEC rule in its tracks before it causes more damage to retail investors and to Americans struggling to keep up with unsustainable energy prices.

Mr. Speaker, House Republicans will keep pushing for America to get back to basics. We need to deliver economic relief to the American people to alleviate the pain of inflation. To do that, we need to unleash the supply side. That means more, not less, financing of American energy to lower the price at the pump, to reduce the cost of heating your home.

Yes, Mr. Speaker, we need financial advisers to get back to the basics of investing. That means diversified portfolios that include American energy, not just tech, because the point of investing your hard-earned money isn't to further a political agenda or some far-left view of America that some woke asset manager on Wall Street thinks. Instead, it is to generate a financial return that will enable you to send your kid to college, ensure you can live a comfortable life in retirement, or pursue some other aspect of your American Dream.

Yes, Mr. Speaker, it is about capital formation. It is about giving heroic American energy companies access to the capital and the financing that they need, not only to make energy affordable and reliable for the American people but to make America competitive in the global economy.

It is for all of these reasons, Mr. Speaker, that I urge my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to join me in supporting this previous question.

Mr. Speaker, let me respond to my friend from Maryland on some of the specific points that he made in rebuttal to my opposition to the previous question.

The gentleman says that we don't want to talk about the underlying bills.

What Republicans want to talk about is what the American people are worried about, which is rising prices. What we are focused on is opposing a previous question so that we could actually go and consider legislation that would actually help improve the record inflation, 40- year-high inflation that Americans are suffering with.

What we are talking about is how we are going to lower the pain at the pump and lower the cost of heating your home, which is at a 15-year high in America right now. That is what Republicans want to talk about; what the American people actually care about right now.

The gentleman says that, Oh, unemployment is down.

Let me tell you the statistic that matters.

It is the fact that we have 12 million unfilled jobs in America because the Democrats' spending spree has paid Americans to not go to work, because employers in my district and every district around the country can't find labor.

The supply-demand mismatch that has produced this inflation crisis is the result of fiscal policy errors. It is the result of a war on American energy constraining the supply of energy. It is because of excessive spending that has discouraged people to return to the labor force.

So we have excess demand from overspending, and we have constrained labor supply and constrained energy supply, which is impounded into everything and results in higher retail prices.

The gentleman says that, Oh, don't look here; don't look at us; don't look at the Biden administration's war on energy and labor supply. No, it is not that. It is not the Fed that continued to keep interest rates too low for too long and flooded our money supply at a time when all of these fiscal policy errors were going on. No, it is not that. It is global inflation.

Well, why is it, then, in March of 2021, at the precise time that this Congress passed the American recovery plan, $2 trillion of unpaid- for spending, why is it then that U.S. inflation rates became untethered from global price increases? That is what happened, in synchronicity with their legislation.

Mr. Speaker, finally, he blames Vladimir Putin.

Gas prices on the day Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine were the highest in 40 years. Inflation was over 8 percent on the CPI, the highest in 40 years, the highest since 1981 on the day Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

This is not about Vladimir Putin. It is about Americans not producing energy anymore.

And why do we want this particular legislation, the legislation to block the SEC's climate disclosure rule? Because we need more financing of American energy.

Mr. Speaker, I would argue to my friend from Maryland, also, if the obsession on the other side with the climate, if that is the concern, if that is why we have this SEC rule, if that is why we have weaponized financial regulators to go after the American energy sector and redirect capital and financing away from the American energy sector, if that is the solution to climate change, I want the gentleman to explain that to me. Because the best scientists in the world working on the issue of carbon capturing, carbon sequestration, and harnessing the carbon cycle, they work at American energy companies.

The answer to climate change is not to centralize power in Washington and add a thousand pages to the Federal Register. That will not change the weather. What will solve climate change is to solve that problem the American way. The American way is through innovation, technology, and science, and that means robust, free enterprise. That means more, not less capital formation. That means more financing of American energy, more financing of innovation. That is the Republican solution to climate.

It is also the Republican solution to our energy crisis and our inflation crisis. That is what we are focused on, not these bills that the American people don't care about.

We are focused on lowering prices at the grocery store and at the pump and financing American competitiveness, American innovation, and American know-how.

That is what we want to do.

We may have found a point of bipartisan agreement that we all dislike Vladimir Putin. But one of the main reasons why Vladimir Putin was able to invade Ukraine was the removal of deterrence: unilaterally waiving sanctions on Nord Stream 2, refusing to respond for a full year of a buildup, inviting aggression by retreating from Afghanistan, and signaling to our allies that we are not coming to help you. That might be one of the reasons why we have a problem with Vladimir Putin right now.

To the gentleman from Maryland's argument that we are just purporting to speak for all Americans, we are the Representatives of the American people, and we are their only voice in this Chamber. I am not purporting to speak for Americans. I am telling you what my constituents in Kentucky are telling me.

Charlie from Fleming County says that he can't afford to fill up his tractor as a farmer because diesel prices are where they are. He says: I don't know where they get their numbers in Washington, Congressman, but it feels three times 8 percent on the CPI.

Lorna from Mount Sterling, Kentucky, owns a floral business, a Main Street small business, and everything costs more. She said: This is not the America I know.

Then, Jamie, who is a mom of two kids, she goes to get baby formula. She goes to the grocery, and she can't afford groceries. She tries to fill up her car to take her kids on errands, and she can't afford it.

This is not purporting to speak for the American people. These are the American people, and they are suffering because this administration will not fix the supply side.

They raise taxes on businesses, which discourages business investment and capital expenditures that we need to fix the supply bottlenecks. They raise prices at the pump by declaring war on American energy production by weaponizing financial regulation. They refuse to take actions that actually will solve the supply problem by encouraging people to go back to work.

We don't need to be discouraging people from going back to work. We need to fill those 12 million unfilled jobs right now by encouraging productivity and American people going back to work.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to defeat the previous question so that we can go to some legislation that would actually help lower prices, what the American people do care about, not what they purport to care about, what they tell us they care about, and that is lowering prices.

This bill would help us do that because it would unlock the financing we need to make America energy dominant once again and lower prices across the board.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentleman and my good friend from Maryland for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, the rule before us today provides for consideration for three pieces of legislation that are laser-focused on a President who has not been in office for almost 2 years now.

Meanwhile, yesterday's CPI reading came in higher than expected, registering an 8.3 percent year-over-year increase. That is another 40- year high, literally the highest in my lifetime.

It is abundantly clear that Democrats are focused on their efforts of political gamesmanship, hoping to distract the American people from the absolute failures of the Biden administration.

Let's just go through these bills. The first bill, H.R. 302, makes it even harder for the President to remove insubordinate Federal employees in policy-making roles. All this legislation accomplishes is further shielding unelected career bureaucrats from accountability to the American voter, who are footing the bill for their salary. The Federal Government should be responsive to the voters and their elected Representatives, not the whims and the ideological leanings of unelected bureaucrats.

Additionally, this rule provides for consideration of H.R. 2988, the Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act. Let me start by just saying that the need to protect whistleblowers is one of the most bipartisan points of agreement in Congress. However, this legislation does nothing to protect actual whistleblowers. There is a significant difference lost in this bill between retaliation against legitimate whistleblowers and the consequences in response to unacceptable actions taken by a government employee.

Finally, the rule provides for consideration of H.R. 8326, Ensuring a Fair and Accurate Census Act. Yet, this bill does everything but ensure a fair and accurate Census. Specifically, H.R. 8326 provides the director of the Census Bureau with unprecedented power and authority to make all operational, statistical, and technical decisions for the Census.

Further, this bill constrains the ability of future Censuses to include critical questions, including a citizenship question, ensuring that future Censuses will be unfair and inaccurate.

Instead of focusing on real-life issues facing everyday Americans, House

Democrats this week are focusing on three bills that are completely irrelevant to the multiple crises created by Joe Biden's policies.

In fact, two of these bills have already passed in the House this Congress in larger packages. The failed policies of the far left and the Biden administration have plunged our economy into a recession. And, yes, it is a recession. They have stolen wages from the American workforce, they have destroyed seniors' retirement savings, and they have left families with the highest food prices since 1979. Let me repeat that. Grocery prices surged 13 percent in August, the largest increase in over 40 years.

Mr. Speaker, 80 percent of Americans say that inflation is the most important issue facing the country, but you wouldn't know it by the bills the Democrats are prioritizing and running on the floor this week.

I think it is time my Democratic colleagues listened to the people and work with Republicans on real economic solutions, rather than doubling down on these dangerous, reckless, out-of-control spending and far-left policy bills, the same policies that have created the crises that we are now facing.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose this rule, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I will double down on the comment that these bills are irrelevant. They are absolutely irrelevant in that two of them are superfluous. One has already passed. One passed in an amendment to the NDAA, and the other one is an unprecedented grant of authority to the Census, which is completely inappropriate. So, yes, these bills, I would argue, are irrelevant.

Do you know who would think they are irrelevant? Any person you talk to on the street. If you go up to somebody filling up their gas tank, and you ask them about these three bills, these are irrelevant to their lives. They are worried about the price of gas.

If you ask somebody at a grocery store who is trying to feed a family about these bills, these bills are irrelevant to their grocery bill.

If you are talking about real wages and fighting the loss of wages and inflation, these bills are irrelevant to that. A lot of blue-collar workers want wages to increase like they did under the last administration, not decrease like they are today.

So, yes, these bills are absolutely irrelevant to everyday Americans.

But let's just talk about the high cost of inflation. Inflation is the top concern reported by businesses and voters alike. However, instead of working to lower costs for businesses and workers, the SEC proposed burdensome new rules requiring businesses to disclose extensive climate-related data and additional climate risks.

That is why if we defeat the previous question, I will personally offer an amendment to the rule to immediately consider H.R. 8589, which would prohibit the SEC's woke climate rule from ever moving forward.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment into the Record, along with any extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from the Commonwealth of Kentucky (Mr. Barr), my good friend, to explain the amendment.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume for just a few points in rebuttal.

Mr. Speaker, we keep hearing that inflation is a global issue, like somehow it is not Biden's fault and the fault of far-left Democrats-- which it is.

The reason why this is a global issue--and remind my friends on the other side of the aisle--is because we are the world's largest GDP. We also just happen to be the world's reserve currency.

So, of course, when we have inflation, the world will have it. That is just economics. So it is amazing how the principles of economics are just cherry-picked to make points. But I would remind my colleagues of those two facts. In short, we are exporting the inflation.

Now, as far as what we are doing to cause the inflation, well, it is pretty simple. We have injected trillions of dollars into the economy. That causes inflation. And then to double down on the failed policy, Joe Biden unilaterally, and I would argue unconstitutionally, canceled the debt of a swath of college students so you now have even more liquidity in the market because of them.

And the sick irony here is that the guy that is driving the pickup truck, the guy that went to school to be a plumber, an HVAC repairman, that guy is now subsidizing the lawyer who is driving to his downtown job in a BMW. That is what is so perverse about what is happening.

Now let's just talk about gas prices.

My colleague and my friend from Maryland said gas prices are down. Yeah, they are down from like a week ago; they are not down from January 2021 when they were less than $2.50 a gallon. So let's continue to move that goalpost.

You can't argue that gas prices are up. Americans know gas prices are up. They are feeling the pain at the pump. They are also feeling it in the higher cost of all energy and food.

Finally, blaming Putin on gas prices and issues. Yeah, Putin is partially to blame, but who encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine? That would be Joe Biden by his surrender of Afghanistan.

Let me be clear that any weakness on the foreign stage is an indication of aggression. When Joe Biden showed weakness by abandoning the Bagram Air Base, by leaving our allies on the ground to predations of the Taliban, that was weakness, and Putin seized on that to invade Ukraine.

Instead of giving the Ukrainians the MiGs they needed, the proper military supplies they needed, we decided to go halfway. Joe Biden didn't fully commit. Now we have a protracted war in Ukraine, which is going to lead to a humanitarian crisis not only in Central

Europe but all across Africa, for example, and higher energy prices here.

Mr. Speaker, but that is all traced back to Biden being weak on foreign policy.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Barr).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I let my good friend from Maryland know that I like him, too, and I would certainly clarify the remarks on Putin.

I will denounce Putin right now. Remember, I was the one calling in the beginning of this conflict for a no-fly zone to be established led by the United States. I don't think there is anybody more hawkish on Russia and the Ukraine issue than myself on this side of the aisle. So, to say that I was up here defending Putin is ludicrous.

We, of course, needed to beat Putin. We should have been much more engaged from the beginning of this conflict, not just to send a message to the Russians but to send a message to the Iranians and a message to the Chinese vis-a-vis Taiwan. But I could go on.

I would say it is a total mischaracterization of my position to say that I am up here saying good things about dictator Putin.

I remind my friend from Maryland about the history of this building. In 1814, it was literally burned to the ground. In the seventies, Puerto Rican separatists stormed in and detonated a bomb. So, let's just get the historical context in place.

As far as denouncing violence, everyone on this side of the aisle has denounced political violence consistently. The inconsistency is from my friends from across the other side of the aisle who cherry-pick when they denounce political violence.

I remember that during the entire summer of 2020, my friends across the aisle treated the destructive BLM and antifa protests that caused $2 billion worth of damage, they treated those protesters with kid gloves. You had the current Vice President paying the bail for the protesters. You had the gentlewoman from New York, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, saying: ``The whole point of protesting is to make people uncomfortable. . . . To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable, that is the point.'' Those are the words of the Democrats, not of us. We could go on.

Chris Cuomo, CNN host: ``Please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful.'' The last time I checked, that was a Democrat.

New York BLM cofounder Hawk Newsome said in response to Eric Adams trying to put plainclothes police officers on the street: ``There will be riots; there will be fire; and there will be bloodshed.''

It sounds to me that the political violence and the support for the rhetoric that is coming to support political violence and upheaval are coming from one side of the aisle, the Democrat side of the aisle.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Barr) for more rebuttal.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers. I am prepared to close, and I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, as I mentioned earlier, the CPI just released yesterday shows that prices have increased 8.3 percent from August of last year. Real wages are down 2.8 percent. The cost of electricity has skyrocketed 15.8 percent. That is the most since 1981, the most since I was alive.

As of August, nearly one quarter of all Americans reported forgoing basic needs like food and medicine just to be able to afford their energy bill. This number will only get worse because we are going to face even higher costs to heat our homes this winter, with natural gas prices nearing a 14-year high.

Yet, Democrats want to focus their efforts on, again, I would call it, irrelevant legislation that has already passed the House. It will not provide any relief to American workers and American families.

For these reasons, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the previous question and to vote ``no'' on the rule.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Madam Speaker, there are a lot of issues with this amendment, not the least of which is that my colleague is the subcommittee chairman on the committee of jurisdiction for this amendment, yet we are not taking it up in that committee because I suppose we don't want the debate.

While we are talking about national security in the National Defense Authorization Act, this amendment adds to the already excessive bureaucracy at the State Department, not at the Pentagon.

It has nothing to do with national security. This is about political ideology and using the National Defense Authorization Act for more bureaucracy, a climate change officer at embassies, consulates, diplomatic missions, et cetera.

It is alleged to provide expertise on climate change in the State Department, and it stipulates that this must be done in an equitable, inclusive, and just manner.

Do you know what is not equitable or just? Sending State Department officials around the globe to tell other countries trying to emerge in their world, in their economies, by adopting ineffective, destabilizing green energy just so that John Kerry can fly around in his private jet and rub elbows with billionaires in Davos.

It is certainly not equitable or just to tell other countries they must transition to electrical systems built on the horrific, forced slave labor and child labor facilitated by the Communist Party of China. That doesn't seem equitable, doesn't seem just, doesn't seem fair.

This amendment also contains the sense of Congress that would affirm climate change as one of the core tenets of foreign policy priorities.

Madam Speaker, we are talking about the National Defense Authorization Act. This is not the State and Foreign Ops reauthorization. This doesn't belong here. This has nothing to do with this.

Everybody here knows, or should know, that we face enormous challenges around the globe for a national security policy. But if we want to talk about State and Foreign Ops, we can talk about Sri Lanka.

They have an ESG score of like 99 or something like that. They just overthrew their government because they

can't eat because of these policies, these policies imposed on them by the United States of America in the accolades of this Green New Deal garbage.

Ghana is the same thing, moving up in the world, electrifying their country so everybody could afford electricity in a Third World country. Now it is dark at night in their homes because there is no electricity because of this kind of stuff.

This doesn't belong here, Madam Speaker. Actually, it doesn't belong anywhere, but it certainly doesn't belong as an amendment to this bill. I urge all of my colleagues to vote ``no.''

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I would just offer this to my colleague, my friend. I have served in uniform, and I know what the existential threats are.

Madam Speaker, I know, having served long in both the enlisted ranks and the officer ranks, the troubles that national security pose to this Nation.

While you might find woke officers and enlisted members infiltrate the Pentagon to destroy the military with this tripe, I am not one of them. I am not going to fall for it. Neither should anybody here.

We need to focus. Our military, our national defense, needs to focus on real enemies, enemies like China, Iran, terrorism, and potentially Russia, but not in a proxy war in Ukraine. These are real enemies.

Climate change can be handled by other agencies and should be handled by other agencies. DOD and men and women in uniform need to focus on defending our country from our enemies, not this, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Speaker, this amendment, as has been stated, establishes an office of climate resilience in the White House and a climate resilience equity advisory board, including outside stakeholders, to develop a national climate resilience action plan.

What does ``outside stakeholders'' mean? I mean, to me, what I hear is people who do what a lot of people do in Washington. They grift. They are making money. They are making policy that makes their friends money. That is what that means. The stakeholders should be the American people, outside stakeholders developing a national climate resilience action plan.

Now, quite honestly, this is, again, the National Defense Authorization Act. How this amendment made it to the floor under this bill is, quite honestly, beyond comprehension. It is just another level of Federal bureaucracy in the name of climate that does nothing to improve the readiness of our military or support the warfighter.

That is what we should be discussing this evening. That is what the underlying bill is about, the National Defense Authorization Act. This has nothing to do, again, with supporting the warfighter, nothing to do with increasing readiness.

I remember filling out officer evaluation reports with all kinds of requirements. I had a paragraph I had to fill out on every officer, all kinds of requirements that I had to put a statement in about this or that. It left me about one sentence to talk about their warfighting capability, each officer, about one sentence left in all the space of the requirements that I had to complete that had absolutely nothing to do with the servicemember's ability to do their job in combat. So, here we are going to add some more because we don't have enough of that.

The folks responsible for developing a nationwide resiliency plan would be those with emergency management experience if they were going to do it, but that is not required. Again, we have outside stakeholders.

I mean, it doesn't even belong in this bill, but even if it did, it doesn't get anything right here because we are not going to protect anybody. This is just another bureaucracy for activists on the left to impose these things on United States citizens.

I mean, we have real problems. It would be great if we had a task force in the White House, since apparently the President can't handle it, to deal with the record inflation that we have.

It would be great if we had somebody in the White House, maybe a task force, to deal with fuel prices. I mean, we have our national leaders traveling all around the globe, thousands of miles away, to try to get other countries to pump more oil, refine more oil. We won't do it in the United States of America.

It would be great to have that task force. Maybe that would help national security so we wouldn't have to go fight these foreign wars. But I guess we are going to do this social justice climate fearmongering.

It just creates another activist entity within the Federal Government and fails to protect folks from disasters or actually protect the taxpayers. It will actually undermine resiliency efforts by focusing on socialist ideas that are failing. They are failing in this country right now.

What we are seeing happening in our economy is the result of these types of things. We don't let the market work. We don't want the market. We are going to impose our will on the American people and say, ``You are not going to drive that kind of car, you are not going to use that kind of fuel, you are not going to buy that kind of electricity. We know better than you do. We are Washington, D.C.''

Most of us have no experience in these industries that we are forcing on the American people. It undermines America's prosperity and promotes technologies that enrich our enemies, like China, rather than supporting the military, which is what this bill is supposed to be about.

I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Graves).

Mr. Speaker, this amendment reauthorizes the Delaware River Basin Conservation Program for 10 years and increases the Federal cost-share for the projects.

Now, it is the same kind of theme here at the end of the evening. I guess it is late. Looks like it is about quarter after 2. Nobody is supposed to notice that we are talking about the National Defense Authorization Act, but this is about the Delaware River Basin Conservation Program.

I am sure it is important to my good friend and colleague. We served together in the statehouse. But he knows and I know the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee shares jurisdiction over this legislation with our colleagues on the Natural Resources Committee, not on the House Armed Services Committee. This doesn't belong here.

As a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, I can tell you that this bill has not been considered. This amendment hasn't been considered in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Neither side has taken a look at it, so we don't know the pros and cons.

But we know this: This has nothing to do with protecting the residents of Pennsylvania or the Delaware Bay or the Delaware River from invasion from the Chinese or from the Russians or some kind of amphibious force.

My good friend even talked about the trails, the environment, and the conservation around the area, which is all a great discussion. But we are here to talk about the National Defense Authorization Act. This is not to pass nondefense-related amendments, and it is completely inappropriate, completely unrelated to national defense. It actually undermines our national security by providing resources to the Delaware River Basin Commission that should go to the Pentagon.

As long as we are talking about it, let's be clear here. Unelected bureaucrats at the DRBC have usurped the authority of the Pennsylvania legislature, which my colleague on the other side of the aisle and I served in, and have deprived Pennsylvanians of their property rights by instituting a ban on hydraulic fracturing.

Maybe there is a national security nexus because preventing the responsible development of Pennsylvania's wealth of natural gas has enriched the Putin regime. It has funded its aggression in Ukraine and continued European dependence on Russian gas. That is what it has done.

This bill absolutely has no place in the National Defense Authorization Act. While most of America might be sleeping at 2:15 in the morning, I am not. I am here in opposition to this because it doesn't belong here. It belongs in another committee, in another discussion where we can get into the details of what this would do, what this reauthorization would do.

We are not going to be duped by adding this to the National Defense Authorization Act and continuing the egregious overreach of the unelected activists at the DRBC.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I sure appreciate my good friend and colleague. It is always about people, to my good colleague.

But on this particular evening, and on this bill, it is about national defense. It is about national security. It is not about this. This does not belong here.

We could have a conversation, and we should have a conversation about this, but not here, not now, not tonight, and not on this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``no'' vote, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

This bipartisan amendment is the Preventing a Patronage System Act, H.R. 302, which was reported from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, and which also passed the House as Title 12 of the Protecting Our Democracy Act.

The Preventing a Patronage System Act is prompted by attempts to eliminate expertise and acumen from our civilian civil service.

Since the inception of the civil service system in 1883 with the Pendleton Act, administrations have acted to create formal exceptions to the competitive service only five times.

These excepted service categories are created for limited positions that require unique hiring or operating rules, like for positions of a short-term political nature or positions in remote areas, or where there is a critical, technical hiring need so great that competitive civil service rules cannot meet the need.

In these limited cases, individuals hired into positions classified in excepted service are not vested with certain civil service appeal rights because they have not undergone the required competitive hiring process.

On October 21, 2020, the then President signed executive order 13957 to create a sixth and broad excepted service schedule, a new schedule, Schedule F.

This order undermined the merit system principles of our Federal workforce by requiring agency heads to reclassify broadly policy- determining,

policymaking, or policy-advocating positions to a newly created Schedule F category, removing the appeal rights of affected Federal employees.

One agency alone, the Office of Management and Budget, planned to reclassify 400 positions to Schedule F. That is 80 percent of its workforce.

On January 22, 2021, as one of the President's first executive orders, Executive Order 14003 revoked the creation of Schedule F.

The danger remains, however, that a future President could attempt to erode the foundation of our merit system principles, over 140 years old, by resurrecting something similar to a Schedule F.

The Preventing a Patronage Act stems from a bipartisan provision that would freeze Federal employee reclassifications to the five existing excepted service schedules in use prior to fiscal year 2021.

This amendment preserves congressional roles and prerogatives in determining which Federal employees are vested with civil service protections and which are not. Future administrations would simply be required to come to Congress for statutory authority before making sweeping changes to the Federal workforce.

This amendment seeks to preserve core principles of our civil service, the expertise and not political loyalty of our workforce.

The provision is endorsed by the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Treasury Employees Union, the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, the Senior Executives Association, the National Federation of Federal Employees, and many other unions and good government groups.

I am proud this bipartisan amendment is cosponsored by my Republican friend from Pennsylvania, Brian Fitzpatrick.

Mr. Speaker, I urge adoption, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, my friend from Georgia has it all wrong. He is right about the will of the people, but the will of the people does not elect a tyrant, a dictator, or a king. They elect a President to preside who is subject to the careful checks and balances of the Constitution of the United States.

For 140 years, this Congress, after passing the Pendleton Act, has insisted that our civil service should not be partisan. In fact, we passed the Hatch Act to regulate their political activities, unlike any other American, to ensure that the American people get fair, unbiased, and nonpartisan service from their public servants.

Schedule F that was proposed by the previous President upturned that and if it had been implemented fully, it would have politicized the civil service in an unprecedented way that would have returned us to the spoils system of the 19th century. That is what we are doing here.

The second thing we are doing, which my friend may or may not care about but many of us do, is to reassert the role of Congress, irrespective of who is in the White House.

Any President must come to this body before he or she proposes to create a new Cabinet office, dissolve an existing one, or change it fundamentally. That is what this simple amendment does. It is a bipartisan amendment. I urge its adoption.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to urge my colleagues to support amendment 495, an amendment that cuts red tape and removes burdensome requirements placed on art in embassies abroad; an amendment, by the way, that was offered by my Republican friends at last year's NDAA. That is why we are here tonight.

The Art in Embassies Program is a public-private partnership that exhibits American art in our diplomatic outposts throughout the world. The program engages over 20,000 participants globally, including artists, museums, galleries, universities, and private collectors and encompasses over 200 venues in 189 countries.

The program has promoted cultural diplomacy through art by way of artist exchanges and programs exhibiting a diverse group of American artists and international artists and artists from the host countries.

For example, in 2019, the African-American experience was the central focus of the AIE exhibit in Kigali, an exhibit that featured works by a number of African-American artists.

The Art in Embassies Program has a long track record of advancing U.S. public diplomacy through temporary and permanent art exhibits, publications, and cultural exchanges.

The Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, first envisioned this global visual arts program in 1953. President John F. Kennedy, who understood the value of art in diplomacy, formalized it as an important tool for our State Department back in 1963.

Unfortunately, the 2021 legislation placed unnecessary and repetitive reporting requirements on the program that threaten its viability. It limits the purchase to $25,000, and anything above that has to come to Congress for review.

These requirements require Congress to review all art that is purchased for the Art in Embassies Program beyond that limit. That places a tedious and gratuitous strain on our ability to run the program at all.

These attacks on cultural exchange programs are not new. Sadly, in the 1940s, in sort of a red scare moment in the United States, Members of Congress attempted to defund and delegitimize the works of modern American artists across the board.

The Art in Embassies Program not only showcases our fundamental respect for the basic right to free expression, pluralistic beliefs, and American creativity, it is also an important tool for the United States to advance our public diplomacy priorities and support influential cultural exchanges.

This simple amendment would sunset the requirement 1 year early from the 2-year sunset that is provided in the current law.

Maya Freelon Asante, an artist who has participated in the Arts in Embassies cultural exchanges, recently said it best: ``Art used as a form of cultural diplomacy is more important now than ever because art can transcend language and cultural barriers and helps us focus on positive and peaceful alliances.''

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to adopt this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, the intolerance we just heard, referring to this amendment as ridiculous, coupled with the admission by the gentleman from Tennessee that he wants congressional review so that it is zero.

Art is a powerful tool fighting war. Look at Picasso's Guernica; maybe the most evocative anti-war painting ever.

I was in Madrid for the NATO Summit where I spoke about war and peace to the heads of state at NATO just 2 weeks ago. I visited the Prado, and I looked at one of the most powerful pictures I've ever seen by Goya about Napoleonic occupation of his homeland, Spain. He witnessed that horror, and he depicted it, and it drove him almost into madness, what he witnessed.

Maybe my friend thinks that art ought to be zero, but I believe millions of Americans would disagree, and so do I.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to adopt this amendment and not to go the route of zero art in America, and I yield back the balance of my time.