Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to oppose President Trump's budget. A budget is a statement of values, and this one shows what President Trump cares about: his senseless war first and American families last.

Across the country and in my home in Houston, Americans are fed up with a government that seems more focused on endless wars than on whether people can afford groceries or gas.

President Trump's proposed budget cuts many of the programs that would offer even a little bit of relief to the economic pain he has caused. It would even cut childcare, ignoring the realities families face. As a father of two, I know how costly childcare is, and I am troubled by leaders who would make it harder, not easier, for parents to work and raise their children.

We are feeling these cuts uniquely in my city of Houston. Despite having some of the most food-insecure neighborhoods in the entire country, we have seen massive cuts to food banks, including tens of millions of dollars from the Houston Food Bank.

Despite having the largest medical research hub in the entire country in the Texas Medical Center, which relies on a routine basis on NIH grants, we have seen $5 billion cut from the NIH.

Despite having some of the most environmental injustice-ridden communities in the entire United States of America, we have seen more than 50 percent in funding cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency. We know that those cuts are coming mostly from the environmental justice divisions.

This budget is immoral. It is an attack on Americans. It is going to severely harm people in Houston.

The President's policies have raised costs, worsened the affordability crisis, undermined access to healthcare, and delivered tax breaks for billionaires while working families fall further behind. Millions of people risk losing vital care and financial security while a small number of billionaires see their wealth grow. Think about that: Families are going without care so that the rich can get richer.

We are the wealthiest nation on Earth. Our budget can and must afford investments in childcare and healthcare and support for our seniors while managing our finances responsibly. What we cannot afford are priorities that put the richest first and leave working families behind.

Mr. Speaker, President Trump's budget represents not America First, but America last.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from the Commonwealth of Virginia for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I speak today because Congress must do all it can to end the disparities in Black maternal health outcomes in this country.

Moriah Ballard was 22 years old, a Houston woman, who was 7 months pregnant. She was ready. She and her husband had just bought a four- bedroom house. The nursery was set. The baby shower was planned. They had clothes, the onesies, and the books, until she went to the hospital with a headache one day and had some dizziness.

Doctors found her blood pressure was dangerously high. She had preeclampsia. They transferred her to a larger hospital, one of the most celebrated medical institutions in the entire country.

Over the next 3 days, her pain became unbearable. Her vision started to fail. Her blood pressure climbed to an untenable level. She kept pressing the call light in her room and kept pressing it, but nobody came. She lost her son in that experience--delivered stillborn. She woke up from surgery blind in one eye. Doctors later told her they wished that they had acted sooner.

That Houston woman's story is not a tragedy. It is a pattern.

Across this country, Black women die from pregnancy-related causes at three times the rate of White women. The CDC tells us that more than 80 percent of those deaths are preventable--not inevitable, but preventable.

In Texas it is even worse. In my district, it is the worst in the Nation. Harris County leads this Nation right now in Black maternal deaths.

From 2016 to 2020, the maternal mortality rate for Black women in Harris County was 83.4 per 100,000 live births, the highest in the Nation.

And it is only getting worse.

Harris County's maternal morbidity rate climbed nearly 35 percent between 2019 and 2024, outpacing the Texas statewide increase every single year.

This is happening in the shadow of the largest medical complex in the entire world.

So what do we do about this?

We as a body must act. We pass legislation like the Momnibus Act, which invests in the full spectrum of solutions that this crisis demands.

We address the social determinants of health: stable housing, nutritious food, mental health care. You cannot have a healthy pregnancy in an unstable life.

We grow the perinatal workforce, so every woman giving birth has access to a midwife, a doula, a community health worker who looks like them, who understands their culture, and we extend postpartum coverage through Medicaid and WIC because a mother's health does not stop mattering the moment she leaves the delivery room.

Too many Black women walk into a hospital wondering if they will walk out with an ailment or if they will walk out at all. My wife wondered that when she was giving birth to our youngest son and her blood pressure dropped to a dangerous level. I looked her in the eye and saw not just tears flowing but fear and the question of whether she would leave that hospital alive at all.

Moriah Ballard wondered that when she pressed the call light, and she prayed and she prepared herself to die.

No woman should ever have to do that--not in Houston, not in America, not ever.

This body has the power to change that.

There have been Black women who have been leading this Special Order hour today, and I wanted to be here to make sure that they knew that the Black men in this body have their back.

We are going to do every single thing we can to pass the momnibus act to end these disparities in maternal health outcomes, and I intend to make sure that we do so.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Pallone for yielding me time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition of the FENCES Act.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle talk about protecting public health and the environment and without sacrificing environmental protection in this country, but I want to point out that it is this administration currently in office that has eviscerated the EPA. Time after time, we have seen these bills filed that are intended to weaken our environmental protection.

Let me be clear about what the FENCES Act actually does. It weakens the Clean Air Act. It removes the EPA's ability to hold States accountable when they fail to reduce air pollution, and it gives polluters a free pass in communities that can least afford it.

I represent Houston, Texas. In my district, environmental justice is not a talking point; it is a reality that people wake up to each and every day.

We have communities that have some of the highest concentrations of industrial pollution in the entire country: communities with more than five polluting facilities in a 2-mile radius, cancer clusters, high rates of lung disease and heart disease, lower life expectancies, children and seniors breathing in some of the most contaminated air in America.

These communities don't need us here in Washington making it worse. I know firsthand what happens when you take the pressure off of State environmental regulators.

Before I came to Congress, I served as the chief legal officer for Harris County, the largest county in Texas. I watched the State's environmental regulators look the other way when pollution ran rampant in underserved communities.

They sat on cancer clusters. They let polluting facilities concentrate in neighborhoods that had no political power to fight back, and they handed passes to industry while residents got sick. I had to sue them to get them to act, but that is not how our government should work.

The Federal Government has to hold these folks accountable when they put industry over people and put our communities' health at risk, but this bill would add yet another obstacle to holding those in power accountable.

Here is what the FENCES Act actually does. Under current law, States already get credit when pollution blows in from other countries or from out of State. They are not penalized for pollution that they cannot control. That protection exists today.

This bill doesn't fix a gap. It tears open a new one. It expands that exemption so broadly that States can point to foreign pollution as a reason to stop making progress on air quality altogether.

It removes the EPA's ability to hold them accountable. It is a built- in excuse to look the other way. State regulators and polluters both know exactly how to exploit it, and they will.

That is why I tried to change this bill by submitting an amendment. It said one simple thing: that before this law takes effect, the Secretary of Health and Human Services must certify that the impacts will not harm children and the elderly. That is it. Prove that this is safe for our kids and our seniors before it takes effect.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle blocked it. They would not allow that vote. They couldn't say yes to that because this bill was never about clean air. It is about giving corporate polluters cover while the people in our districts pay with their health.

Over 100 million Americans already live in counties with unhealthy air quality. Air pollution contributes to more than 100,000 premature deaths in this country each and every year. The people in our communities are not abstractions. They are already on the wrong side of these numbers.

This body lets pollution run rampant as our communities see poison in the wind that blows and wonder ``Where did all the blue skies go?''

We should be standing up to make sure that every single person in our communities has clean land, clean air, and clean water, regardless of their ZIP Code or socioeconomic status.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the FENCES Act.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to the so- called RED Tape Act.

This bill clearly harms our communities. Right now, when the Federal Government approves a major construction project, like a highway or a Federal facility, the EPA has the legal authority to review it and to flag public health concerns. It can say that this project will harm air quality in this community. It can put that on the record, and regulators can act on it.

This bill eliminates that EPA review entirely. The one agency whose job it is to protect human health and air quality gets cut out of the process--no EPA air quality check, no independent public health voice at the table, major Federal projects approved with zero input from the people whose mission it is to protect the air we breathe.

That is not cutting red tape. That is cutting public health protection.

This bill hits different for my district back in Houston. I remember walking through a neighborhood in my district that for years had been fighting a cancer cluster as a result of environmental contamination. The woman who lived there told me: ``In that house, two grandparents passed away. In that house, it was a child. In that house, it was a mother.'' She said it matter-of-factly, the way people do when grief becomes routine.

I later walked that same neighborhood with the EPA Administrator under President Biden. I showed him what I had seen. EPA under that leadership showed up. They did the work, and they provided a line of protection for the community that they never had before.

The Trump administration and my Republican colleagues are now rolling all of that back. They have already fired thousands of EPA employees, roughly one in four people in the agency. They shut down the Office of Environmental Justice. They took down the EPA's environmental justice mapping tool that communities and local governments were beginning to rely on. One in three EPA staffers who were there on Inauguration Day will be gone by the time this is all over. That is not reform. That is demolition.

Today, the air quality in Houston is unhealthy for sensitive groups. The experts routinely tell us to reduce our time spent outside. It just happened this morning. Houston already ranks among the worst cities in the entire country for toxic air pollutants: ethylene oxide, benzene, and fine particulate matter from petrochemical plants and heavy traffic.

Black and Brown communities in Houston are more than twice as likely as White residents to live in neighborhoods that fail on multiple pollution metrics.

Those are the communities that this bill will hurt. Those are the communities that need EPA review of major Federal projects, not less of that, but more.

People across this country are dying and having horrible health outcomes because of hyperconcentration of pollution in their communities. This body's response is to present a bill that removes the one Federal agency charged with protecting public health and the environment from the room entirely.

Before I came to Congress, I stood up to the Trump administration in court when they tried to roll back environmental protections, and I plan to do the exact same thing in the Halls of Congress, as well. We owe it to our communities to make sure they have access to clean air, clean land, and clean water, regardless of where in this country they live.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to vote ``no'' on this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Fields for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a freedom fighter, a legend in this country, my Omega brother, the late Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr.

He was an icon who marched with Dr. King, who helped lead the Poor People's Campaign for economic justice, and to end an unjust war. He was an icon who ran for President and changed what this country believed was possible. He registered millions of voters who had never seen themselves in this democracy that we also hold dear.

He built the Rainbow PUSH Coalition to prove that our differences are our strength. Black, Brown, White, indigenous, immigrant, he believed we rise together or we do not rise at all.

Reverend Jackson was a truth teller, and the ills that he spoke to still demand an answer today.

Courts still to this day strike down voting laws that target Black Americans with what one Federal court called ``almost surgical precision.'' Black women still to this day die in childbirth at rates that shame this Nation. The racial wealth gap still to this day robs entire communities of the opportunity that the late Reverend Jackson fought his entire life to deliver.

Those battles are not behind us. They are right here. They are in this Chamber. They are in our districts. They are in the choices that we make every single day that we serve. We carry Reverend Jackson's legacy forward by engaging in those battles, by being a voice for those who have been made to feel like they are voiceless.

We are going to be all right, but not by accident and not without work. Reverend Jackson did that work for six decades. Now it is on us.

Rest in peace, Brother Jackson. It is the honor of my life to follow in your footsteps of fighting every single day alongside your son, my colleague, Jonathan Jackson. Rest in peace, brother.

Mr. Speaker, I am here today representing the people of Houston, Texas, asking House Republicans to take up, to put for a vote, the deal that was agreed to in the Senate that would fully fund FEMA, the Coast Guard, as well as TSA.

Houston has a unique impact in all of this. We are home to Bush Intercontinental Airport, right in my district, which has seen some of the longest wait times in the entire Nation and has had some of the highest TSA callout rates in the entire Nation.

We are also home to a U.S. Coast Guard base. Sector Houston-Galveston has more than 1,500 personnel, folks who are not going to be receiving paychecks if we don't agree to this deal.

We are also one of the most disaster-prone places in the entire country. We have had 500-year storm after storm, flood after flood, where people have lost their property, their dignity, and, in many instances, their lives.

We rely on FEMA. We rely on FEMA workers. We need this deal to happen, and the deal is already right here for the taking.

We have already seen that Senate Republicans and Senate Democrats have agreed on a clean funding bill that would fully fund these agencies and would benefit all the American people, particularly the folks in Houston, Texas.

I am calling on my colleagues in the House of Representatives, my Republican colleagues, and Speaker Johnson: Put this deal forward for a vote. Give the American people what they want, and that is a fully funded TSA, Coast Guard, and FEMA.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to ask my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to vote to fully fund TSA.

Across our country right now, we are seeing long lines at airports because they are understaffed because TSA workers are not being paid. Look at Houston, which is home to Bush Intercontinental Airport right here in my district. I was just up there yesterday talking to folks who were in line waiting to be screened for 3 hours, 4 hours, sometimes 5 hours before they saw a single machine and were able to make it onto their flight.

We know exactly why we are here, because the President is working to tether ICE funding to TSA funding.

I was proud to join my colleagues to provide for a clean funding bill that would fully fund the Coast Guard, fully fund FEMA, and fully fund TSA. Right now what we need in this country is commonsense governance. That means ensuring that our TSA workers are paid for the work that they are doing so that nobody is having to stand in line 4 hours just to get on a flight.

Mr. Speaker, I was 5 years old in 1993 when Tupac Shakur said:

You know, it's funny when it rains it pours

They got money for wars, but can't feed the poor.

Today, those words feel as real as ever.

President Trump, no one wants this war, and the American people literally cannot afford it.

Mr. Speaker, I am not an economist, but I understand that the U.S. war with Iran has shaken global markets, driven oil prices up more than 40 percent, and is even raising fears of a worldwide recession, impacting flights and the cost of goods. We feel it at home, where the price of gas is far more expensive than it has ever been.

This is not just about economics. It is about accountability. As a lawyer, I understand all too well that every President, including Donald Trump, takes an oath to defend the Constitution. That Constitution gives Congress, not the President, the power to declare war. Yet, Congress was sidelined. The American people were given no clear cause, no clear strategy, and no clear endgame.

We cannot afford this--not economically and not morally. America's conscience cannot afford it.

When leaders promise peace but deliver war, that is not just a policy failure. It is a betrayal of trust.

Mr. Speaker, when I was 5 years old, Tupac Shakur said: ``You know, it's funny when it rains it pours. They got money for wars, but can't feed the poor.''

Those words hit differently today.

Mr. President, nobody wants this war, and the American people cannot afford it.

I am not an economist, but I do know this: The U.S. war with Iran has rattled global markets, driven up oil prices more than 40 percent, and sparked real fears of a worldwide recession. We feel it at home. Gas is more expensive than it has been in a very long time. Flights cost more, and groceries cost more.

However, this is bigger than just economics. It is about accountability. I am a lawyer, and I know that every President swears an oath to defend the Constitution, and that Constitution empowers Congress to declare war, not the President. In this instance, Congress was sidelined. The American people got no clear cause, no strategy, and no endgame.

I say this as a proud son of two veterans. Their sacrifice meant something. Mr. Speaker, you do not send our sons and our daughters into harm's way without purpose, without justification, and without an imminent threat.

We cannot afford this war, not economically, and not morally. When a leader promises peace but delivers war, that is not just a policy failure; that is a betrayal.

Americans do not support this war, and the President should end it immediately.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today for my first time addressing the House to honor my predecessor, the late, great Sylvester Turner.

Our Congressman was a Houstonian through and through. He was a public servant who served with honor and integrity. He was a father and a grandfather.

He was the mayor of our phenomenal city. During his time as mayor, he led us through multiple natural disasters. He ensured that we had diversity and access to our government, and he fought for voting rights.

The late Congressman left big shoes to fill, but I intend to fill them, and I know my colleagues on the Democratic side will do so as well by fighting for voting rights legislation that ensures that every single person has fair access to the ballot box.

Today, I am here to honor our late Congressman Sylvester Turner. May we fight for voting rights.