Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize Gun Violence Awareness Month and call upon the Senate to protect the lives of innocent Americans by passing commonsense gun reform measures that have already passed the House.

This past February, in my district in Aurora, Illinois, five innocent people were killed and six police officers injured when a person who shouldn't legally have had a gun opened fire in a workplace, trying to kill as many people as he could. And earlier this month, we witnessed another horrific shooting in Virginia Beach where 12 more innocent lives were taken.

These tragedies have become too common in America. The victims are our family members, our friends, and our neighbors.

The House has already passed legislation that would, in fact, cure a fraction of this epidemic of gun violence, but the Senate refuses to act.

Commonsense gun reform is supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans, and Congress has a responsibility to protect innocent lives. Every American deserves the right to live their lives free from the fear of violence and without worry that their next trip to work, to school, or their place of worship may be their last.

Thoughts and prayers are not enough. We cannot wait for the next tragedy. The Senate must act now.

Madam Chair, first, I am a proud cosponsor of Representative Lipinski's amendment, which would direct an increase of $15 million to Argonne National Laboratory's Leadership Computing Facility.

The ALCF is a national scientific user facility that provides supercomputing resources and expertise to the scientific and engineering community to accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation in a broad range of disciplines. This money will be well spent.

A second amendment, offered by myself, instructs the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to include accelerator-driven systems in its evaluation of future nuclear technology and fuel.

There is a bipartisan and bicameral interest in accelerating investment in advanced nuclear reactors, which are walkaway safe and proliferation-resistant and have the potential to burn or minimize nuclear waste.

One proposed system uses a proton accelerator, a neutron spallation target, and molten salt fuel, but it remains subcritical, thereby greatly reducing the safety and security risks.

It can, without redesign, burn spent nuclear fuel, natural uranium, thorium, or surplus weapons material, such as surplus plutonium. It operates without the need for enrichment or reprocessing and may be used to produce the tritium needed to maintain our stockpile.

Madam Chair, I thank my colleagues for their support.

Mr. Chair, I thank the chairwoman for yielding.

My amendment will direct the State Department to use $10 million from the NADR account to take advantage of the opportunity to advance U.S. diplomatic goals in the Middle East through scientific engagement with a contribution to the SESAME Project.

SESAME, the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Application in the Middle East, is a major science facility in Jordan.

About an hour drive from Amman and an hour drive from Jerusalem, it is a cooperative venture by scientists and governments throughout the region, including Israel, Iran, and everyone in between.

Science is a universal language that can cross barriers and build bridges, if we let it. As a high-energy particle physicist who spent my career working with international teams of scientists, I saw firsthand that even when a country's politicians cannot get along, often its scientists can.

This U.S. support will strengthen the SESAME Project and encourage scientific collaboration among all of the countries in the Mideast.

I urge my colleagues to join me and vote ``yes'' on this en bloc package.

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, this bipartisan amendment, offered by myself and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Kelly), would strike section 510, which bans HHS from adopting standards for a unique patient identifier that would allow patients to be uniquely identified across electronic health record systems.

In the last 21 years that this misguided policy has been in place, thousands of Americans have died due to giving the wrong drug to the wrong patient or due to incorrect or incomplete electronic medical records, all arising from the inability to simply and correctly merge health records from different systems.

Countless man-hours have been lost trying to figure out whether one patient's information is the same as another whose name might be spelled differently, or who has recently moved to a new city or State, or who might be under a maiden name, for example.

Matching records properly requires a unique identifier for each patient. A Federal ban on doing this properly makes our healthcare system more expensive and less safe for patients.

According to a 2016 study of healthcare executives, 86 percent of respondents have witnessed or knew of a medical error that was the result of patient misidentification.

A Johns Hopkins study recently calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to preventable medical errors. While our data collection on medical errors is not as detailed as it should be, it is reasonable to assume that a unique patient identifier would help save a nontrivial fraction of these lives.

Amidst the wave of digitization of the healthcare industry, most providers have adopted electronic health records, spurred on by the 2009 HITECH Act. But if we cannot ensure that we have the right patient with their full information at the point of care, then we cannot properly utilize the enormous promise of the portability and interoperability of health records.

This ban is also handcuffing us in the fight against opioids. A 2018 roundtable on the opioid crisis cohosted by HHS and the nonprofit Center for Open Data Enterprise recommended the generation of a unique identifier for each patient. This would not only guard against doctor shopping by those struggling with substance abuse disorder, but it could also prevent those in recovery from accidentally being given prescription opioids after an injury, surgery, or childbirth, triggering a relapse.

Repealing this ban tackles a known problem in our healthcare system, and I urge support for this bipartisan amendment.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro), the chairwoman of the Appropriations Labor, HHS, Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee.

Madam Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time.

I would like to again thank my colleague from Pennsylvania (Mr. Kelly), for cosponsoring this bipartisan amendment so that we can move our healthcare system into the 21st century to save money and, most importantly, to save lives.

Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, I would like to thank Congressman Andy Kim for cosponsoring this amendment.

This simple amendment would add and remove $1 from the substance abuse treatment fund, which we intend as a signal that HHS should prioritize opioid treatment money where the science shows that it actually works, on medication-assisted treatment.

Unfortunately, addiction is an issue that we have become all too familiar with in our communities and across the country. It has claimed too many loved ones, shattered too many lives, and broken too many families.

It is a devastating reality that drug overdoses have surpassed motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of injury-related deaths in the United States. In fact, more people die in a single year from overdoses than were killed during the entire Vietnam war.

This is a public crisis that affects people of every race, every income group, and every education level. These are mothers and fathers. They are friends and neighbors.

Honestly, when I was first elected to Congress, I was not prepared for the numbers and the types of stories that I heard from family members who have lost loved ones to substance abuse.

The urgency of this deadly epidemic requires us to work together and work smart as a community and a Nation to fight back. It requires that we use the best available science and spend our money where we know it does the most good.

We should implement evidence-based treatment options, and research has backed medication-assisted treatment. Studies have shown that medication-assisted treatment decreases opioid use, opioid overdose deaths, criminal activity, and infectious disease transmission.

These studies also show that medication-assisted treatment increases social functioning and retention in treatment. Patients treated with medication are more likely to remain in therapy compared to patients receiving treatment that did not include medication.

It is also important in the tragic case of pregnant women who are addicted to opioids. A 2012 study by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists found that the treatment of opioid- dependent pregnant women with buprenorphine improved outcomes for their babies and that medication-assisted treatment reduced withdrawal systems in newborns and decreased the length of hospital stays.

Medication-assisted treatment works, and it is what we should be funding.

Madam Chair, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

Madam Chair, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Madam Chair, the opioid epidemic has claimed too many lives and torn apart too many families for us to be using anything but the most effective treatments.

It is past time that we stop treating opioid addiction as a moral failing and start treating it like the treatable medical condition that it is.

Madam Chair, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment to make sure that HHS prioritizes funding for medically assisted treatment.

Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, my amendment highlights the need to think about our future workforce and how it will change because of technology, and to encourage the Bureau of Labor Statistics to accept a wider and more forward-looking range of inputs into its range of projections for the workforce of the future and that BLS should conduct the Contingent Worker and Alternative Work Arrangement Supplement to the Current Population Survey more frequently.

I co-chair the New Democrat Coalition's Future of Work Task Force with my colleagues Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester, Congressman Chris Pappas, and Congresswoman Haley Stevens, all of whom have cosponsored this amendment.

The Future of Work Task Force has held a series of forums to hear from experts on various areas that will require this body's attention in the coming years and decades.

Last Congress, we heard from historians, economists, and policy experts about how technological revolutions of the past have impacted social and political institutions, and the lessons from those experiences and from our current conditions that can help us prepare for the future.

We have also heard from labor and business leaders who are pioneering new ways to attract talent, to retain the services of skilled employees, and to develop skills for the increasingly rapidly changing economy.

It is nearly unanimous among our experts that the economy will change significantly and change faster, but it is less clear just how quickly the workforce will need to adapt.

For decades, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been doing excellent and invaluable work to track our labor trends, and its projections have proven very reliable and useful to businesses and to our educators in times of slower and relatively predictable technological development.

However, they are based on backward-looking historical data and historical trends, and some of the anticipated changes in technology, such as robotics, self-driving vehicles, and artificial intelligence could fundamentally change our economies in ways that we haven't seen before and are not preparing for.

So in its current form, the way that the Bureau calculates and estimates future development of the workforce may not be able to capture the dramatic changes that our future holds.

One panel convened by the task force suggested that it would be difficult or impossible to do projections in any single way to predict the future of the workforce, but with additional resources, the Bureau of Labor Statistics could model for a variety of scenarios of different rates of technological change in different sectors.

My amendment increases the BLS amount by a dollar and decreases it by a dollar, which we intend to signal that the BLS should submit to Congress an estimate of the resources it would need to make a range of forward-looking estimates, including consultation with those industries that are driving the rapid technological change and those industries that will be affected by that change to account for the increasing rate of technological job displacement.

Technological changes to the workforce are not new. The industrial revolution and the automation of agriculture transformed the way work was performed in our country, and significantly improved, on the whole, our standard of living over time, but the benefits have not been uniform and all communities and all job sectors have not benefited equally.

Past transformations have typically played out over generations so that our social and political institutions had ample time to respond, but today, the development and deployment of our technology is far more rapid, and Congress, business, and our educational system need the best possible data to evaluate policy proposals and to produce the workforce training needed for future employees, to develop educational curricula, and ensure that our economy works for everyone.

Like the industrial revolution, technological development presents the opportunity for greatly improved standards of living, but it will also bring challenges to our workforce.

Businesses, communities, and government must work together.

Madam Chair, I urge my colleagues to join me in voting ``yes'' on my amendment, to begin to establish a range of planning scenarios from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the future world that we will all inhabit.

Madam Chair, I thank my Future Work Task Force co-chairs, Congresswoman Haley Stevens, Congressman Chris Pappas and Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester, for cosponsoring this amendment, and I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on the amendment.

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

Madam Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Madam Chair, my amendment would increase the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority account by $1 million to support increased R&D for biosecurity.

As the only Ph.D. physicist in Congress, I feel a special responsibility to speak out on issues of national security, especially when they concern emerging technological threats that Congress may not be sufficiently aware of.

For more than 70 years, nuclear weapons have held center stage among the threats to our national security and global safety because of their capabilities to threaten the existence of all mankind.

However, the dangers posed by advanced biological threats are catching up fast.

For example, the ability of genome editing tools, such as CRISPR/ Cas9, to delete, suppress, and amplify specific genes has been a long sought-after capability for treating monogenic disorders and other disorders.

However, this ability could also be abused for nefarious purposes, such as disrupting the normal function of particular biological systems or weaponizing synthetic versions of a virus.

This is a global issue that will require global solutions.

Unfortunately, the advances in this field are outpacing our ability to develop policies that will set international ethical and regulatory frameworks.

Diagnostic platforms that can rapidly detect and characterize bioagents will become increasingly critical to safeguarding human health.

If we are going to stay ahead of these technological threats, we need to be strategic about our investments.

As a leader in technology and innovation, the United States must act now to mitigate any dangers that these technologies might pose.

Madam Chair, the $1 million allocated by this amendment represents truly only a fraction of what will ultimately be needed, but I urge my colleagues to join me and vote ``yes'' on my amendment.

Madam Chair, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Madam Chair, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize Julie Rothenfluh for 23 years of service at the Naperville Public Library.

Julie's contributions to the Naperville Public Library are truly noteworthy. As Executive Director, Julie has guided the library through a period of profound change. While technology has substantially changed the way we receive information, the Naperville Public Library has adapted to meet the needs of an evolving community. Julie's strategic plan for the library has placed a special emphasis on accessibility and innovation. Her hard work and determination have helped the library achieve a five-star rating from the Library Journal for ten consecutive years. This puts the Naperville Public Library among the top libraries in the country.

Madam Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in recognizing Julie Rothenfluh and her outstanding contributions to the City of Naperville, the Naperville Public Library, and the many lives she has touched.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize the Spanish Community Center's 50th anniversary.

The Spanish Community Center in Joliet, Illinois has long been a valued part of our community. Over 50 years ago, amid the Civil Rights movement, the Hernandez, Adler, and Maher families began providing valuable services to the growing local migrant communities. This local organization became the Spanish Community Center in 1969. Since then, this cherished institution has offered valuable social services to residents of Joliet and the surrounding area. While the Spanish Community Center began as a response to the needs of Joliet's Latino communities, it now proudly offers assistance to all who need it.

I would like to thank the Spanish Community Center for its commitment to the citizens of Illinois and for its contribution to the Joliet community.

Madam Speaker, today I rise to recognize 50 years of outstanding work by Comerstone Services in Will County, Illinois.

On March 20, 1969 a group of community members, parents and civic leaders launched the Will County Sheltered Workshop to create employment opportunities for adults with disabilities. Later renamed Comerstone Services, the organization greatly expanded their services as the demand for assistance grew.

Since the 1990s, Comerstone has extended its reach across Will and Kankakee Counties as they focus on moving individuals in need of special assistance out of larger facilities and into smaller neighborhood group homes. In 2018, the program provided a record 187 new jobs for individuals with disabilities, delivering over $1.5 million in wages. Today, Comerstone provides services to over 1,200 people per day.

I would like to thank Comerstone Services for its commitment to the citizens of Illinois

and for its contribution to the communities of Will and Kankakee Counties.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize the National Science Bowl team of Naperville North High School and to commend them on reaching the national finals of the high school academic competition.

Since 1991, the Office of Science's National Science Bowl has hosted some of the nation's

most intelligent students for one of the largest and most prestigious academic competitions. Every year, teams from 64 schools around the country compete to demonstrate their understanding of the great issues in mathematics and science.

I want to congratulate the Naperville North High School team on reaching the national finals and on placing first in SLAC Division Team Challenge. The talent and knowledge present in these students are truly impressive, and as Congress' resident PhD-trained physicist, I wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize the Union of Concerned Scientists' 50th anniversary.

For five decades, the Union of Concerned Scientists has been using the latest technological and scientific expertise to address the world's most pressing issues. Its team of nearly 250 experts in science, policy, and communications continues to introduce new and innovative solutions to the greatest questions of our time.

Among their many projects and initiatives, I have been particularly impressed with their work to address the looming threats posed by climate change and to contain the existential threat of nuclear war. I would like to thank the Union of Concerned Scientists for its commitment to our collective future and for its numerous projects that will help ensure a better world for our children.

Madam Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the resolution (H. Res. 327) encouraging greater public-private sector collaboration to promote financial literacy for students and young adults, as amended.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks on this legislation and to insert extraneous material thereon.

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

Madam Speaker, I rise in support of H. Res. 327, a bipartisan resolution we introduced in April in honor of Financial Literacy Month.

I would like to start by thanking my friend Congressman French Hill from Arkansas, who should truly be considered as an original cosponsor of this resolution for working on this legislation with me.

The aim of this resolution is simple but important. It encourages collaboration between the public and private sector to promote financial literacy for students. It emphasizes the importance of financial literacy for consumers of all ages, and it supports efforts of Federal agencies to expand financial education resources.

This year alone, approximately 15.1 million students will be in grades 9 through 12 and almost 20 million students will be enrolled in colleges and universities.

That is a lot of young people who will soon be entering a complex financial marketplace where they will have to quickly make important financial decisions. These include decisions about paying for college, credit cards, financing a car or a home purchase, preparing for unexpected emergencies, and saving for retirement.

However, without an understanding of basic financial concepts, these young people will not be well equipped to make these decisions.

At a time when student loan balances stand at $1.5 trillion and a majority of private workers have access to defined contribution plans and not traditional pension benefits, it is even more important for young people and workers to be financially literate.

Part of the problem is that too few schools incorporate financial education into their curriculum. According to the Council for Economic Education, only a third of States require high school students to take a course in personal finance. In those States, most schools teach the subject as one portion of another course of study--such as math, economics, or social studies--while only five States require a semester-long, standalone personal finance course.

Studies show that financial illiteracy carries significant cost. Consumers who fail to understand the concept of

compound interest spend more on transaction fees, run up bigger debts, and incur higher interest rates on loans.

We also need to work on making financial literacy tools available for everyone. Unfortunately, levels of financial literacy are lower among the less educated minorities and women.

Just 19 percent of high school graduates possess basic financial knowledge and skills. Perhaps even more troubling, according to a survey by the Consumer Federation of America and the Financial Planning Association, 21 percent of respondents, including 38 percent of those with income below $25,000, reported that winning the lottery was ``the most practical strategy for accumulating several hundred thousand dollars for their own retirement.''

This is a tragedy in the making, and we can do better.

While Americans are not expected to manage their own legal cases or medical conditions, they are expected to manage their own finances.

We teach our children to wear seat belts. We teach them to say no to drugs. We should also be teaching them the financial literacy skills that they will need to successfully navigate the financial marketplace.

We want to give young people and all consumers the tools they need to survive. One of the ways in which we can do that is by having Federal agencies partner with schools, local and State governments, workplaces, community organizations, nonprofits, and financial service providers.

Whether it is giving students immersive opportunities to see how money and banking work in the real world or helping train and equip teachers with the curriculum and materials they need to succeed in the classroom, Federal agencies should be bold and innovative in their approaches and leverage the ways in which technology can be used to further these laudable goals.

We cannot afford to have future generations of Americans grow up without learning these fundamental skills. For that reason, I urge all my colleagues to support this resolution.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. David Scott).

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

I would like to again thank my colleague, Congressman Hill, for his assistance in support of this resolution, and I urge my colleagues to join us in supporting this important resolution to show Congress' commitment to ensuring our Nation's students have the essential financial literacy skills they need to thrive and excel in today's economy.

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

Madam Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 1876) to create an interdivisional taskforce at the Securities and Exchange Commission for senior investors.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on this legislation and to insert extraneous material thereon.

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

Madam Speaker, I am proud to support H.R. 1876, the Senior Security Act of 2019, a bipartisan bill introduced by Congressman Gottheimer and Congressman Hollingsworth.

The financial exploitations of senior citizens is a major problem today, and with the aging of the baby boomer generation, it will only get worse in the coming years.

By 2030, one in five persons in the U.S. is projected to be 65 or older. That would equal approximately 75 million people who are senior citizens.

It is also estimated that nearly one in five Americans over the age of 65 have been a victim of financial exploitation. This can take many forms, including being steered towards inappropriate investment, paying unreasonably high fees for financial services, or outright fraud.

Senior citizens are often targeted because they are more likely to suffer from problems of memory and judgment, making them vulnerable to fraud. Exacerbating the issue is that the overwhelming majority of incidents of elder financial exploitation go unreported to authorities.

The Senior Security Act would help combat elder financial abuse by creating a task force in the SEC to identify the challenges that senior investors encounter and areas in which senior investors would benefit from changes to SEC regulations.

The bill also requires that the GAO conduct a study on the financial exploitation of senior citizens. The GAO study would give us an important comprehensive look at this issue, including a breakdown of the economic costs of financial exploitation of senior citizens, answers to how often this happens, why such abuses often go unreported, and factors that contribute to an increased risk of exploitation.

Americans work hard over their lifetime in order to save for retirement and be financially safe and secure when they get older. Unscrupulous people and companies would take advantage of these senior citizens and rob them of their hard-earned money. Those people and companies should not be able to get away with such egregious behavior.

This bill would allow us to more effectively combat this growing problem. For that reason, I want to thank the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Gottheimer) and the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Hollingsworth) for bringing this bipartisan initiative forward. I urge all Members to vote ``yes.''

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Gottheimer), the coauthor of this legislation.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of the time.

Madam Speaker, I want to congratulate, again, Mr. Gottheimer and Mr. Hollingsworth for having brought this bill to the floor. I urge my colleagues to join us in supporting this important piece of legislation to comprehensively examine and strengthen the protections against financial exploitation of our senior citizens.

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

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

Madam Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 328) supporting the protection of elders through financial literacy.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on this legislation and to insert extraneous material thereon.

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

Madam Speaker, I am proud to support H. Res. 328, a resolution introduced by Congressman Casten of Illinois and Congressman Rose of Tennessee.

This bipartisan resolution acknowledges an important component of financial literacy, and it is raising awareness of threats to personal finances, especially for vulnerable targeted populations such as older adults. It also encourages continued public-private partnerships and information sharing to effectively prevent, detect, report, and investigate elder financial exploitation.

As we have heard, the baby boomer generation is getting older; 10,000 of them are turning 65 each day. According to the National Center on Aging, up to 5 million older Americans are abused every year, and the annual loss by victims of financial abuse is estimated to be at least $36.5 billion. That is why we need to be proactive about combating this serious problem on multiple fronts.

We should work to arm our senior citizens with the knowledge they need to effectively detect and prevent financial exploitation by would- be criminals. Understanding the red flags and warning signs to look for is important first step.

In addition, we should continue to support efforts by FinCEN and other regulatory and law enforcement agencies to ensure that information at the disposal of these agencies is used to better deter and respond to incidents of elder financial exploitation.

Efforts like H. Res. 328, together with the Senior Security Act of 2019 and the Senior Safe Act of 2018, show Congress' commitment to supporting our Nation's senior citizens on a bipartisan basis. It also shows our commitment to encouraging collaboration, public-private partnerships, and information sharing in order to effectively combat financial exploitation of senior citizens.

Madam Speaker, for these reasons, I want to thank the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Casten) and the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. John W. Rose) for bringing this bipartisan initiative forward, and I urge all Members to vote ``yes.''

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Casten), the co-author of this legislation.

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

Madam Speaker, I want to again congratulate Mr. Casten and Mr. Rose for having brought this resolution to the floor. I urge my colleagues to join us in supporting this important resolution to empower senior citizens and promote public-private partnerships in order to strengthen our enforcement against crimes of financial exploitation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank Chairwoman Waters for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by thanking the chairwoman for bringing up this bipartisan bill today and for maintaining bipartisan momentum in the areas where bipartisan agreement is achievable. Chairwoman Waters and her staff were instrumental in passing this bill in the last Congress and including it in JOBS 3.0.

I would also like to thank my friend, Congressman Hill, for working on the Cooperate with Law Enforcement Agencies and Watch Act, the CLAW Act, with me.

I am proud to support this bill, which passed with very strong bipartisan support in the last Congress, a 55-0 vote in the Financial Services Committee, a 379-4 vote on the House floor.

This bill creates a commonsense safe harbor from Bank Secrecy Act liability for a bank that keeps an account open at the request of law enforcement. For background, law enforcement agencies sometimes send what are called keep open letters to financial institutions so that they can obtain critical evidence in investigations by following the money.

While following these law enforcement requests is optional, agreeing to them does, in fact, create a technical violation of the Bank Secrecy Act. This complicates the decision for a financial institution that should be simple. This could, in fact, undermine our efforts to prevent illicit finance or money laundering.

This bill will enhance the ability of the law enforcement community to track funds in a criminal investigation, leading to better evidence and, hopefully, conviction of criminals higher up in the hierarchy. To be clear, nothing in this bill takes away from financial regulators' safety and soundness powers, and financial institutions still have to file SARs when they have a keep open letter.

In addition, this bill requires that the keep open letters have a definite duration but does not preclude law enforcement from sending subsequent letters to extend the period, should the investigation continue.

This bill is a great example of how Democrats and Republicans can come together on a number of issues of common interest.

In a world in which criminals and criminal organizations have access to increasingly sophisticated tools and technologies to carry out their criminal activities, we should help financial institutions in leveling the playing field to bring these criminals to justice.

This bill follows other commonsense, bipartisan efforts that I have supported to modernize our Nation's ability to confront dangerous criminals and criminal organizations. I recently introduced with Congressman Kustoff the CONFRONT Act, which would require the Treasury Department to develop a national strategy to combat the financial crimes of transnational criminal organizations and individuals. I am hopeful that this bill can also be passed in the near future with similarly strong bipartisan support.

This bill today is an important measure that allows financial institutions to effectively assist with combating crimes such as money laundering and illicit financing, and I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize Officer Skyy Calice as the recipient of the City of Aurora's African American Heritage Advisory Board's 2019 African-American Leader of the Year award.

Officer Calice with the Aurora Police Department has been a true star in our community. As a Community Oriented Policing Officer, she has used her perspective and experience to launch numerous initiatives to make a difference. She established the Girls Run the World mentoring program to help guide young ladies in our local high schools to reach their full potential. Programs like this have been crucial to so many of our community members and future leaders.

I would like to thank Officer Calice for her honorable commitment to her community. I would also like to express my support for the City of Aurora's African American Advisory Board Annual Heritage Dinner. The commitment of dedicated public servants like Officer Calice is an inspiration to all of us.

Mr. Speaker, we rise today to honor the lives that we lost to gun violence in Aurora, Illinois, earlier this month.

This is, unfortunately, not the first time that we have mourned the unnecessary loss of life from gun violence. Eleven years ago, when I first took office, I inherited a community in mourning: 17 students were injured and 5 were killed in the Cole Hall mass shooting at Northern Illinois University. So I spent my first weeks and months in office doing what I could to help my community recover.

Now, 11 years later, on February 15, the call went out from Aurora, Illinois: Workplace shooting at Henry Pratt. Active gunman. Officers down.

More than 200 police units from across the western suburbs of Chicago responded to contain the situation. They were running toward the sound of gunfire, as they do countless times each day in our country.

Six officers were injured during that response, and, in the aftermath, we learned that we lost five members of our community:

Josh Pinkard, the plant manager at Henry Pratt, who, when fatally shot, sent a final text message to his wife, Terra, to say ``I love you'';

Trevor Wehner, on his first day at work at Pratt as an intern from Northern Illinois University;

Clayton Parks, Trevor's supervisor and also a graduate of NIU;

Vicente Juarez, a hardworking family man who lived with his wife, daughter, and grandchildren on a quiet street in Oswego;

Russell Beyer, a mold operator and union committee chairman from Machinists Local 1202 and the father of two children.

Now, as we have done so many times before in Congress, I will soon ask that we pause for a moment of silence; but this time, I would ask each of you to also think of the voting card that each of us carries on the House floor and the responsibility that you carry with that card, because this week we will finally be voting on legislation for effective and universal background checks for all gun sales. This is legislation supported by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress and supported by 97 percent of the American people.

So, our hearts go out to the family and friends of the victims left behind, and now I ask that we pause for a moment of silence.