Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I thank the chair, the ranking member, and all of my colleagues, as well, for the hard work and nonpartisan work, I must say, as well, that we put in, but especially the staff, who I thought did an outstanding job, yet again, in this investigation and in the report that they wrote.

I will speak to two different groups of people today. The first is my colleagues. The second is the young women--and I will come back to this in a minute--who I had a chance to speak to a few weeks ago, in the same week that Mr. Swalwell and Mr. Gonzales had resigned from the House. I will come back to that in a moment.

My colleagues, after they found out I was on the Ethics Committee, would frequently come up and ask me on different topics: What is over the line? What can I do to not get in trouble? How do I stay out of trouble, that sort of thing.

On these issues, this is a particular set that we have talked about on a couple of occasions, so I wanted to point out a couple of things here.

I commend Mr. Edwards for the comments that he made and the legal document that he filed, but one of the things it really failed to do was address the specific allegations about the gifts and how inappropriate, frankly, they obviously were on their face.

As the report details on page 4 of the report: ``Both women received numerous gifts from Representative Edwards, including jewelry totaling over $1,000, designer purses, guns, shoes, flowers, a laptop and cell phone, KitchenAid mixer, robotic vacuum, vacations, tickets to performances, and one-on-one dinners.''

The tickets to performances, that wasn't just any performance. That was ``Hamilton'' on Broadway.

Mr. Speaker, my anniversary is coming up. I have been married 38 years as of Thursday, and my wife really wanted to go to see ``Hamilton.'' When I took a look at what those prices were, I said: Babe, we are going to have to wait until it comes on the off-Broadway tour.

He put up the money to send them there anyway, and those are the types of things, those are the types of gifts, that kind of jump out at you. This isn't like a birthday card. This isn't congratulations on your wedding or that new baby that was born. These are gifts that people, Members, should not be giving to staffers.

I worked for a Congressman and three Senators as a staffer beginning back in 1987. We didn't pass around gifts like this. We just didn't.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is important for us to make sure we understand that, as Members, we want to mentor and help our young people move on and move up. I have to say that in that 40 years, I have seen people who fell into this situation, frequently women, where there were accusations or sexual harassment taking place or sexual relationships taking place. Some of my personal friends were forced out of their jobs in 1987 and 1988.

We didn't have the types of protections then that we do now. In fact, Congress explicitly exempted itself from these sorts of restrictions. We have to make sure that now that they are in place, we use them to the fullest extent because those people, primarily women, it was damaging to their careers, and it stays with them.

That was before the internet age. These women today, in this instance, that is not good mentoring. This is something that could follow them for the rest of their careers, and it won't be beneficial to them.

Let's make sure, as we work through this with our staff, that we don't do things that actually injure our staffers who are doing good work for us and trying to make a difference.

One other point I want to make, and this is directly to the staffers. I had a chance to speak to a group, just coincidentally, during that week of the Gonzales and Swalwell resignations. It was a group of young people, mainly interns but not solely. Some of them were young people here on the Hill in their late teens and early twenties.

I asked them: How many of you heard about the resignations of Mr. Swalwell and Mr. Gonzales? There were about 40 of them in the room. Every hand went up.

I asked them then: How many of you know that we have an entity here, the Office of Employee Advocacy, that you can turn to and get assistance if you find yourself in that situation? Only two hands went up.

I talked to them and encouraged them about reaching out to this sort of professional assistance. It is a confidential attorney-client relationship. It makes a difference. Instead of them trying to parse out at age 19 or 20 or 22 or 25 the best way to proceed, get the sort of legal guidance to help you make it through there.

We have to do a better job of making sure that when that question is posed, not just 2 hands go up, but all 40 hands go up, so that when young men and women, especially women, find themselves in these kinds of situations, they don't have to try and figure out how to go forward. They don't have to go to the staff director, as what happened here, and get whatever guidance they might get, recognizing that the staff directors were in a precarious situation, too, when you have a Member committing this kind of misconduct. Let's make sure that they have that type of assistance.

Mr. Speaker, the last point I will make on this, and this is in the wake of some of the other--not investigations before the committee right now, but some of the other things we have heard. There are going to come times when we need to go outside of the House of Representatives and refer these cases to law enforcement because some of the sexual misconduct isn't just sexual harassment. It is sexual assault.

To the colleagues listening out there right now, don't do anything to approach these lines. They know that

this is over the line. He knows this was over the line, and he knew it when he was doing it. Let's make sure that we stop it in its tracks and give these young people, young women in particular, the type of assistance that they need.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for yielding and giving me an opportunity to speak today in this august Chamber. I also thank the Congressional Black Caucus for the outstanding leadership that is shown on these issues, such as the March on Washington last Friday, and continues to do so as we move toward the elections in November.

I rise today because over the past month, really over the past 18 months, but in particular the last month, I have heard so much from my constituents about their struggles to keep their heads above water and the struggles with affordability across the board. We have heard a lot about that today. I have to mention some, but I will go back to some other topics, other aspects of that, as well.

The gas prices are hitting everybody. There is no question about it. In my district here in Maryland, gas is $1 a gallon higher than it was just 8 months ago.

That has meaning for people who drive for a living. I ran into a guy who is an Uber driver. In fact, he was driving me somewhere. I asked him about this, and he said: It is killing me, and it makes it almost so that it is not even worth doing this.

That is because he spends so much of what he makes putting gas in the car.

I can sympathize with that. At the gas station just a few days ago, it almost cost $80 to fill up my car, and I don't drive a really big SUV, but it still costs that much. Other people who have to drive for a living, people who drive trucks, the cost of diesel, for example--I don't have many farmers in my district, but for them, diesel is up $2 a gallon. You know that is hurting them, Mr. Speaker. That is passed on and leads to higher grocery prices that my constituents are seeing in the grocery store, too.

Schoolbuses are back for schools in most places across the country, and most of those run on diesel fuel. Guess who is going to end up paying for that, Mr. Speaker. It is the taxpayers. Their bills are going to go up.

We have hundreds of schoolbuses in my district. We have 136,000 kids who go to public school in Prince George's County. Many of them need the schoolbus to get there. That is true for the other counties surrounding the D.C. area and across the country. It is going to lead to millions of dollars in cost increases, which were not expected when they set their budgets last year in paying for these schoolbus costs that have gone up.

I also had a real tough stretch with government employees in my district. We know that. The Trump administration attacked the government employees from the beginning, forcing them out. I have many people in my district who answered the call to service and focused their careers on serving in the government, just like many of my colleagues here and just like the staff that does such outstanding work here in the House of Representatives, in the Capitol, and in the Federal Government across the board.

Most of them aren't doing this because it is paying the big dollars because it doesn't. Most of them are doing it because they really enjoy serving the country. Most of them were doing it because they knew it was important and needed.

I had a couple of constituents--this happened a little while ago--and one of them worked at NIH doing clinical trials for Alzheimer's. She had a Ph.D. and a specialty degree, and she had been working on this for years. They forced her out and shut down the clinical trial.

Now, clinical trials are not light switches. You can't bring somebody back in a little bit later and just start from where you left off. You have to start from scratch.

We heard last week about the amazing discovery with respect to pancreatic cancer and how there is a new drug that might really lead to cures for pancreatic cancer, one of the most deadly cancers out there. I am a cancer survivor, so I pay very close attention to these kinds of things. That would have been derailed if that clinical trial had been shut down like this one had been. Fortunately, that was a private sector clinical trial that was being run there. Anything on the public sector side was in trouble.

I ran into another individual, a mechanical engineer, and he worked for the Federal Government. His job was to make sure that pacemakers and other medical devices were working before they were given to patients in surgery, to help keep them alive. Wouldn't it be nice to be sure that we had people there making sure that these products actually work the way that they were supposed to? He got fired. He got pushed out of the government.

We have grocery costs. I mentioned that a minute ago, but I want to come back to that because the tariffs have been awful in the impact that they have had on grocery prices.

In my area, hamburger--I am not talking T-bone steak; I am talking hamburger--$7 a pound and up? That is where it is. We have other costs going up, too. Milk is about $4.30 a gallon on average across the country. I am old enough to recall when they cost just a fraction of that. We used to get hamburger because it was cheap. When I was back in school, you could afford to get it. It is $7 a pound now. That is because the tariffs have caused grocery prices and other prices across the board to go up for no reason.

One of my colleagues mentioned earlier that the Trump administration and many of my Republican colleagues are telling you it is not the consumers that are paying these tariffs; it is the foreign countries that the goods come from.

Here is how you know that is not true. Remember a couple of months ago when the Supreme Court said that the Trump tariffs were illegal and had to be refunded? The Trump administration set up a program to refund the money. Guess who is getting the money? Not China, not Russia, but major corporations across the country. The Walmarts, the Targets, and those kind of folks are getting the money. Small businesses, like the one in my district that sells its product internationally and buys products internationally to make their product, can't get a refund. They are not eligible. Under the program that the Trump administration set up, small businesses are not eligible to get refunds. For consumers, who also paid these tariffs, taxes, and higher prices, there is nothing out there for them to get the money back that they paid that the Supreme Court said was illegal.

I want to move on real quick and touch on a topic we haven't said much about, and that is the impact on small businesses that the Trump administration has had. We had a hearing a few months ago, and the SBA Administrator came in. She is the head of the SBA. I asked her a couple of questions. One of the things we have seen in the first year and a half is that more than 60 percent of Federal Government contracts for small businesses have been terminated across the country.

Small business is supposed to be the engine that drives the economy. Small businesses are where we get the new jobs that people need in their communities. Small businesses are the places that train young folks to help them become productive, economic citizens.

They are wiping those jobs out. They call it termination for convenience. What that means is they don't terminate it for cause. They don't terminate it because you did something wrong. They terminate it because they want to, and they can't give a good reason to explain it.

Now, the impact on, for example, disabled veteran-owned small businesses, 6,435 of their contracts were terminated for convenience. That is 41 percent. Black-owned businesses, 3,208 contracts were terminated for convenience. That is 107 percent more than were terminated under the Biden administration. The same kind of thing has happened for other types of small businesses. I asked the small business administrator: What is going on with this? She said, well, we terminate some of these for fraud. Well, as I mentioned a minute ago, if it had been fraud, they would have terminated it for cause because you are breaking the law, and they would have referred it to the Department of Justice for prosecution.

I asked her how many of these she sent to the Department of Justice for prosecution, and how many of those have led to indictments. She didn't have an answer for that. Guess what. I think the answer is zero.

We know for sure that it is not about that. It is just about helping the bigger businesses, the ones that are already the billionaires, the ones that are already making lots of money, the ones that make huge contributions to the Trump administration and the families--huge contributions, I mean billions of dollars in cryptocurrency and the like. That is where it is going.

I won't get into the accountability piece. We will have to save that for another day because the selling of pardons is something like what would have made Richard Nixon pale.

Real quick, let me end up with this: The cost to people in my district, just like people across the country, people who are struggling, people who have done the right things, people who have worked every day of their lives, it is killing them. It really is. They are having to choose--winter is coming. Many of them are going to have to choose between heating and eating because these electric bills are going through the roof. Many of them are going to have trouble paying the rent. Many of them, if they have kids like me, are having trouble finding the money they can pull together to pay these skyrocketing mortgage interest rates as they continue to climb.

Inflation is going up. Interest rates are going up. Everything is going up, and this administration is not helping to bring it down. In fact, this administration, the Trump administration, and my Republican colleagues, unfortunately, are one of the key reasons all of it is going up, and they won't do anything to help you all. You American folks out there who sent us here to help you, they are pushing your heads under water.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for putting this together. I also want to say this: The reckoning can come in November. When you look at those prices, remember to vote. When you look at that gas pump and what it costs, remember to vote. When you pay that rent, when you can't afford your healthcare, remember to vote in November.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for her powerful words and for hosting this Special Order, and I thank the Congressional Black Caucus. I certainly want to thank my colleague from Georgia (Mrs. McBath). I had the chance to serve with her on the Judiciary Committee, and I know she feels this very deeply and very passionately and rightly so.

I think it is important for all of us to try to make sure that even if we haven't suffered a great loss like that, that we try to understand and remember the importance of the impact of what that kind of an event can do to a family, to a community, and what it has done to the country.

I am blessed with six kids, and they all live in the D.C. area. We meet together frequently on weekends. I am a grandfather, too. A few months back, my granddaughter was in a heated argument with her cousin. They are not the arguing type, so I kind of paused and started listening. I was trying to figure out: What are you all arguing about?

She looked at me and said: Well, we are trying to figure out the best way you should respond when an active shooter comes into your school.

She had her version of it, and he had his version. I just remember being sort of stunned by the whole thing because I am 65. I grew up in a different era, obviously. I am originally from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and Dale City, Virginia. They are two quiet towns, especially back in the sixties and seventies, at least on this kind of front. I went to schools where we had fire drills, but we didn't have active shooter drills. We are now at the point where schools are being approached and they are selling bulletproof blackboards, and they are selling bulletproof backpacks and the like. That is where our schools have come.

There have been debates about whether teachers should be armed or not. Although we have seen that having armed personnel at a school during an active shooter drill doesn't necessarily fix that problem, but that is kind of where we went with that.

I came up and didn't really know much about gun violence until I became a prosecutor, first here in Washington, D.C., at the U.S. Attorney's Office. It just happened that I started that job in 1990, which was in the middle of the crack wars. D.C. was averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 to 500 homicides per year. The numbers have jumped from when I was a kid. Murder was a front-page story, but it got so prevalent during that timeframe that sometimes they didn't report on a homicide. They didn't even make the paper. There were just so many coming in day after day after day after day. It was young people killing young people, young males in particular, usually over drug disputes, but sometimes not even that.

When I later became elected prosecutor in Prince George's County, I had cases that were kind of the same ilk. A guy cut in front of another guy in line. He was looking at my girl. He disrespected me. All of that was sufficient to kill somebody on the spot.

Those were young boys. Well, young men in some instances, late teens, early twenties. That is where we were as a country. That is where we, in some ways, remain as a country.

Just before I was elected State's attorney and was sworn into office, we had a double murder that took place in our community. What was special about this one was that these were two deputy sheriffs who had been killed, gunned down. They had been called to a family's house. A mother and a father were having trouble with their son, and they called because it was a mental health call.

The two officers, Arnaud and Magruder, came into the house, and they said: Well, he is down the hallway. So they walked down the hallway towards the bedroom not knowing that he had hidden the gun in his bedroom inside the speaker of the stereo system. As they came down the hall, he grabbed the gun, confronted them and shot both of them to death. Then he ran out of the house.

I had not even become State's attorney yet. I hadn't been sworn in yet, but going to that funeral was my first official act as State's attorney. Sadly, there were hundreds of more murders to come. We still have them. Crimes are coming down in Prince George's County, and crimes are coming down in Washington, D.C. Crimes are coming down across the country, but any murder is too many. As we just heard from our colleague from Georgia, that mother and that father never stopped grieving over the loss of that child, and rightly so.

When I got to Congress 3 years ago, one of the things I started trying to figure out was: What are the things that we can do to try and address this problem?

I recognize that Democrats and Republicans are in different places. We had an assault weapons ban in the United States in the nineties. It expired. Evidence seemed to show that there was some success from that, but our Republican colleagues then and Republicans across the country opposed it.

It has never been re-enacted. Are there common ground approaches to try and address this problem? Are there ways in which we can find a common ground approach to deal with some of these issues?

I looked around and thought if we can't do assault weapon bans, what about ghost guns? Ghost guns came out maybe not even 10 years ago. For those of you that don't know, ghost guns are guns that do not have serial numbers on them. They can't be identified. The reason they are popular, especially among criminals, is because you can use the gun and drop it. If you don't leave any fingerprint or DNA on it, they sure can't trace back through the gun to figure out who had it and who committed the murder.

Guess what happened. The use of ghost guns surged. Between 2017 and 2023, there was a 1,600 percent jump in the use of ghost guns at crime scenes. It went from 1,629 to 27,490 in a 6-year period.

What can we try and do about that? We can try to do legislation. We do legislation here in Congress, right? Let's try and do the legislation piece.

Democrats offered two bills to ban ghost guns and do it in different ways. Hundreds of Democrats signed on, not one Republican signed on to either bill, either piece of legislation to ban ghost guns.

That didn't work, but the crime, as you heard, continued to go up. The use of ghost guns in crimes continued to go up. It skyrocketed, really. The Biden administration said to the ATF, issue a regulation, base it on the Gun Control Act, which is the longstanding law that covers gun usage and the regulation of guns in the United States, and maybe that will help.

They issued the regulation about 2, 3 years ago at this point. My Republican

colleagues--I was on the Judiciary Committee at the time--railed against it. It is a horrible overreach, they said, by the Biden administration. It is an infringement on our constitutional rights, our Second Amendment rights. Of course, there were challenges. It was taken to court and worked its way up to the Supreme Court. Guess what happened at the Supreme Court: 7-2 margin in Bondi v. Vanderstok.

The Supreme Court said: We are going to uphold this regulation. We don't think it violates the Constitution. We are going to let it stand. That opinion was written by Justice Gorsuch. In fact, all three Trump Supreme Court appointees joined in the majority of that opinion. I thought, well, maybe that is a big step in the right direction.

Now I am on the Appropriations Committee, and guess what. Just a few weeks ago, the Republicans put out a bill and the bill contains language to undercut the enforcement of that regulation.

Now, why would they do that? We know that only criminals want to use ghost guns. There is no other purpose. If you are a law-abiding citizen, it doesn't matter if you have an identification number on it. It is just like a car. Cars have VIN numbers. Why can't guns have identification numbers? It is certainly useful for law enforcement. It can't be on those grounds, and it can't be constitutional grounds because the Trump Supreme Court by 7-2 vote just told them this does not violate the Second Amendment. They put out this reg, quietly.

I hope it doesn't pass in the Senate, but that is where it is now. They are trying to undercut it, even though it is constitutional. It is not just the ghost guns piece. It is other issues, too. One that I thought we would be able to find common ground on was suicide.

In 2026, we have 27,600 suicides by gun, 4,600 were veterans. Whether Democrats or Republicans, we all love veterans, right? Why wouldn't we want to support efforts to try and bring down suicides among veterans?

As you just heard a few minutes ago, many of the programs that are aimed at reducing gun violence, including for suicides, have been cut by the Trump administration. Matter fact, one of the first things the Trump administration did when they came into office was to eliminate grants that helped reduce gun violence across the country that had been proven to work over the past few years. Not only that, the President issued an executive order that removed the Surgeon General's advisory report on firearm violence because it used the term ``public health crisis in America,'' I guess, which could it be any more obvious that this is a public health crisis. It is the number one cause of death in young people.

I remember having a debate with my Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee one time about whether it was number one or number two, and I paused and said: Does it really matter? Is it okay if it is only the number two cause of death in the United States for our children? Isn't that sufficient for us to want to try and do something on this front?

The Trump administration also cut funding to address gun violence prevention, $66 million for assistance for gun violence victims, $82 million for law enforcement support and training and safety. Why would we cut those? The training piece, if you didn't know how important it was, you should really know after watching ICE in action in Minneapolis. The killings of Good and Pretti, among other acts of violence that took place at the hands of ICE agents in Minnesota and across the country, I think clearly demonstrate that those agents were not prepared for the type of policing that they were put out there to do, not at all.

They certainly weren't trained in things like the force continuum. In fact, many of them didn't even have the tools that you would use other than guns along the force continuum, no tasers and the like.

It is the same thing when they put the National Guard on the street. President Trump put them out in D.C., and I remember being out at dinner with my wife one day when they first came out. They were walking around in groups of four and five with M4s.

We were eating outdoors at a restaurant, so there were crowds of people all along the walkways. I thought about it and I said: M4s are so powerful that even if they shot the right guy and hit him, the bullet would keep going.

Now, when you are in warfare and you guys are facing each other, the soldiers are facing each other, that is one thing because if it goes through that guy, it is going to hit another bad guy behind them. But when you are in a crowded street like I was on the waterfront here in Washington, D.C., the last thing you want to have to use is an M4 because the collateral damage is not just collateral damage. It is human beings whose lives could be taken, even though they weren't doing anything but just walking along the waterfront enjoying the evening.

Let me say this, as well. I think that the goal, at least that I came here with, was to try and find ways to address gun violence. I thought ghost gun restrictions would be one way to go. Clearly, that was wrong. Let me try another angle on this. We put out a bill called Raise the Age, and the thinking on that was, if we raise the age from 18 to 21 for people purchasing assault weapons, they will be okay with that because it moved from 18 to 21 when Reagan was President. He supported it for handguns.

If we are going to have 21 for handguns, shouldn't we also have it for assault weapons? Why allow them to buy an AR-15, but they can't buy a 9 millimeter? I got zero cosponsors from the Republican side on that bill, this Congress and last Congress. I can't get any of them to support it.

Mr. Speaker, I get it. I know there is a lot of political challenges here and, frankly, we will keep working at it, but I knew when Republican colleagues were shot and Democratic colleagues have been shot, when we have been victimized by gun violence and we still can't move on legislation to address gun violence, then I don't know that there is enough to make it happen. When it is people outside of this Chamber, other than us getting shot, is enough. I just don't know if that is ever going to be the case.

I think we have to continue to keep fighting and keep working to address this problem because the homicides keep happening, the bodies keep falling, the chalk lines around them keep being drawn, and the pools of blood oozing out of their bodies until the police get there to try to fix the problem that, in many instances, these guns are too powerful to allow them to be fixed.

Let's try to find a way to address this. Let's try to find a way to work together. Mr. Speaker, I know you are not going to agree to all the legislation that I would propose. I certainly don't agree with a lot that has been done by my Republican colleagues--surely, in the cuts and especially to the ghost gun regulation. I can't figure it out.

I can't figure out why we would want to restrict information from being gathered so that researchers and scientists can try to figure out other approaches to reduce gun violence, other than just enforcement.

We have seen intervention and prevention programs work. Why shouldn't we study them to see if we can expand them to see if we can find ways to combine enforcement with intervention and prevention efforts and reverse gun violence even more? Why can't we do that?

We will see how it goes. I can't say I am super-hopeful right now, but I truly believe that we can find a way to protect people's Second Amendment rights and also protect second graders. We have to find a way to make sure that they can be safe in school, on the streets, and in their homes. We have to find a way to bring down the suicides for veterans who serve this country and, in many instances, were broken because of their service to this country, because of what we had them do. We also have to find ways to protect law enforcement officers, who put their lives on the line out there on the street and are particularly at risk from gun violence, as well.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Virginia for putting this together. I thank my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus. I hope we can find a way to work together across the aisle, this Chamber and the other Chamber on the other side of the building, and even with the Trump administration, to get something done on this front.

I know the routine mantra that we just have to lock them up. We need more penalties, more enforcement, no bail, and all of that. The problem is that all of these first-time shooters, many of them mass shooters, we didn't have a chance to keep them in jail because they never went. We didn't have a chance to withhold bail because they didn't have to pay bail to be out on the street.

Let's not wait. Let's address this problem. Let's work together. Let's save lives here in the United States.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address a deeply troubling pattern of behavior that strikes at the very heart of the American justice system. It is a pattern where self-enrichment is rewarded, oversight is blindfolded, and rule of law is bent to serve the powerful.

I sit on the Appropriations Committee, and we had a chance last week to hear the testimony of the Acting Attorney General, Mr. Blanche. I asked him about what I thought was a blatant pay-for-pardon scheme, and this involves the Binance Corporation.

Let me walk through some of the facts of what happened there, as I did there with the Attorney General.

In late 2023, Binance agreed to pay a penalty of $4.36 billion. A U.S. judge approved the guilty plea and settlement for the anti-money laundering and sanctions in February 2024. In other words, the chairman of Binance and the company itself pled guilty to crimes that involved money laundering. This involved money laundering that was helping groups like ISIS and al-Qaida, enemies of the United States, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

In December 2024, Mr. Zhao and Mr. Witkoff met in Abu Dhabi at the Bitcoin MENA 2024 Conference. Mr. Witkoff is the special envoy for the Trump administration who negotiates agreements with respect to the Middle East and does this on behalf of the Trump administration. They discussed the violations of anti-money laundering laws while Mr. Zhao was serving at Binance.

In October 2025, Mr. Trump granted a full pardon to Mr. Zhao. That meant that they did not have to pay back the money that was part of the fine, and it wiped away the conviction and the related elements of that.

According to The Wall Street Journal, part of what happened between the pardon and the meeting was that there was a payment that was made. That was money that was paid, according to The Wall Street Journal, from Binance, which took steps that catapulted the Trump family venture's new stablecoin product. The Trump family venture was WLF, and it dealt with cryptocurrency. Members of Trump's family, two of his sons, and Mr. Witkoff all had vested interests in that company.

While they put the money into the WLF transaction, that enhanced the credibility and pushed up the market value of the WLF company from $127 million to over $2.1 billion.

I asked Mr. Blanche, given that he had this meeting, then the money, and then the pardon, did he think it would be important to appoint a special prosecutor to review the transaction just to make sure that there was no misconduct that took place, whether it was on behalf of the President or any of the other factors or players who were involved, and he said no.

A special prosecutor would be someone who the Attorney General could appoint in order to have a full and independent investigation done, but he refused to do that.

It is important to put this into context, too. Just in the first 3 months of this year, Mr. Trump has engaged in 3,700 stock transactions personally, and his net worth has grown from $2.3 billion to $6.5 billion since 2024. That is a $4.2 billion increase in his personal wealth since he returned to the White House.

There are other issues that we should raise. In fact, the sentences to my right were taken from a New York Times article that chronicles many of these types of issues. Nvidia stock is another one where there was a potential benefit of $5 million to WLF and the Trump family.

I am not saying that there was or was not misconduct by Mr. Trump. We don't know that yet, but it is important to make sure that somebody who is independent, objective, and knowledgeable would conduct that kind of investigation.

So far, the Trump administration has refused to do that, so I am going to be introducing legislation that I think will help to facilitate that. If you have a President who doesn't want to have his Attorney General conduct any investigations into what his administration is doing, we should have other avenues to move that forward. We have in the past, like the Independent Counsel Act. We also could beef up the inspector general law which was put in place after Watergate took place and was put in place specifically because of the Nixon administration misconduct and the failure to have anybody in the Nixon administration investigate that.

You might recall that John Mitchell was the Attorney General. He ended up going to jail because he participated in that misconduct. We need to make sure we don't find ourselves in this situation again where we have got the fox guarding the henhouse.

We will offer this legislation soon, but I think it is critical to make sure we understand a couple of things in the wake of this. We need to keep an eye on the Trump administration, and we need to remember, too, that after the testimony he gave, he was promoted to Attorney General by the President.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for hosting this Congressional Black Caucus special hour. I also thank my colleague from Georgia, who just finished speaking. I appreciated the powerful statement that she made and the insightful comments that she shared with us tonight.

Juneteenth is just around the corner. Juneteenth was a special day for me. It is one that we celebrated my mother's birthday on frequently, and certainly, as a child of North Carolina and Virginia, had special meaning, as well. I have had a chance to enjoy those days, but the meaning of them has evolved over time for me.

I was a child in North Carolina, Rocky Mount, North Carolina in the late 1960s. It was still segregated. Across the street was Booker T. Washington High School, and I lived on the side of the tracks that the African-American community lived in back then.

The schools were segregated. Stores, many of them, you couldn't try on clothes if you wanted to go get fit. There were a lot of restaurants you couldn't go into and if you did want to go in, they tried to make you go in through the backdoor. That is where we stood as a nation when I was a child.

Then, as you heard from my colleague from Virginia, the movement that came along that grew into the civil rights movement changed all of

that for the United States of America. We had gone from a real dark time after the North withdrew from the South, the return of Jim Crow, the growth of the Ku Klux Klan, the return of almost a version of enslavement return to the South in the late 1870s and it got worse over the next decades.

We had lynchings. It was a regular tool of terrorism in the South during those days. It was used to keep people in line if they did something radical or dramatic, like trying to vote or even register to vote. That is what we were in. That is what my grandfather was born into in North Carolina in 1895.

Things changed over time, thank God. We grew as a community, the African-American community. We started schools, historically Black colleges like Howard University and others that gave us a chance to gain an education, even in a segregated environment. We started groups, fraternities, sororities, especially for kids going to college.

The Divine Nine we call them now. I belonged to Kappa Alpha Psi. It was one of those sources of strength for our community. We had to develop our own newspapers since White newspapers wouldn't cover what was going on in the Black community.

We developed alternative structures that allowed us to train people to become doctors and the like. The NAACP grew and became a force for change, fighting against segregation in America and especially against lynching.

All of that grew over the years. We didn't have a lot to work with. Segregation was hard, and the further South you went, the harder it was. But ultimately in the late 1950s in Montgomery, Alabama, there was something called the Montgomery bus boycott that took off.

The Montgomery bus boycott was led by the faith community there, the African-American faith community, because the buses in Montgomery if you were African American, you were supposed to sit in the back. If the front of it filled up and new White people got on to the bus, if you were African American, you were expected to get up and give your seat. That was the nature of the way things were in those days. A woman named Rosa Parks decided she had had enough and she refused to get up and give her seat up.

Now, actually, that wasn't just a coincidence. This is something that people had been preparing for for years. The churches, the NAACP, and the like, and something called the SCLC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, all were working together to try and figure out how can we push back and fight back against this. How can we try and change this?

The boycott began and just coincidentally, a young pastor almost fresh out of divinity school came down from Boston. His father had been a pastor in Atlanta and he wanted to become a pastor like his father, but he didn't want to try and start in Atlanta, so they sent him to Montgomery. And just at the time that this young man got there, this man named Martin Luther King, Jr., they were looking for new leadership to lead the bus boycott and lead the faith community forward.

This is a man who was still writing his Ph.D. dissertation while he was leading the bus boycott. He was married and beginning a family while he was leading the bus boycott. If that wasn't enough, the hate, the anger, the opposition rolled up against him and his house, for example, was bombed while he was at church one day preparing for the Sunday service.

The house was blown up. He knew that his wife and his child were there and he didn't know if they were dead or not until he was able to run back home and see for himself.

When he got there, he saw a group of people who were angry and they wanted revenge. They wanted to go strike back and retaliate against the people who had bombed his house.

Dr. King said that is not how we do things. That is not the Christian way. That is not the way we are going to lead this movement. We are going to fight hate with love. We are going to fight violence with nonviolence, and we are going to win the hearts of these people and change the course of this Nation.

Now, it took a long time to get there. The bus boycott took a year. People were walking to work day in and day out in the snow and the rain and the cold, but they kept walking. They tried to create ways to ferry each other to and from where they had to go. Many of them were working as domestics, for example. They had tried giving each other rides and they put this whole structure in place to permit that.

The bus boycott was successful. The bus company thought they could hold out, that they could outlast them, but as it turned out, they were wrong. One woman said, ``My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.''

They came together and won that bus boycott, and it was the first giant step with respect to the civil rights movement. There were other forces that had gathered prior to that, there was the desegregation of the Army.

My father-in-law fought in World War II. There were colored units back then, and he rose up to the level of captain. He left the service, re-enlisted for ground combat during the Korean war and went to fight again. There were many others like him who put their lives on the line. Many of them gave their lives in the fight to protect our country.

One of the things my father-in-law told me was that when they had come back from Europe, he was stationed in Italy--they put a lot of what they called Negro troops then in Italy to fight there--and when they were bringing them back, many of the German soldiers had turned themselves into them because they didn't want to have to turn themselves into the Russians. One of the ironies was that when they got back to the United States, the Black troops who had fought to protect and defend the United States of America, had saved Europe from totalitarianism and in many instances had given their lives and lost their friends and colleagues in this fight still had to ride in the back of the train behind these German soldiers. That is where America was.

Mr. Speaker, when the civil rights movement moved forward and gained momentum and culminated, as you heard from my colleague from Virginia, in the crown jewel of the civil rights movement was the Voting Rights Act. Other pieces came along. The Civil Rights Act was there, too. The Fair Housing Act, all those things came together. But the Voting Rights Act was the key tool to the transformation of the South in this country.

John Lewis was one of the key players in that movement. I saw a play about him. It is called ``Young John Lewis.'' They ran it here in D.C. a couple weeks ago, and I went to see it. The culmination of the ``Young John Lewis'' play is the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

It was supposed to be a cause for celebration. It is supposed to be the climax, the high-water moment of this play, but a strange thing had happened just a few days before.

The United States Supreme Court, the Trump majority in the United States Supreme Court, had essentially eviscerated the Voting Rights Act that they were supposed to be celebrating.

Instead of there being a big cheer in the audience, there was this sad kind of pall that came over the crowd, including me. The voting rights piece, that first Supreme Court opinion that I mentioned just a few days ago, Callais, Justice Alito said he is not totally gutting it. He is just changing the standard of review, the legal ways to analyze those cases.

So we thought, let's hope and see how it plays out. It just turns out that there was another case in Alabama 3 years before where the Supreme Court had basically supported the Voting Rights Act and affirmed it. A three-judge panel had been appointed, because there were more challenges coming from the State. That three-judge panel consisted of one Clinton appointee, but two Trump appointees. That three-judge panel had said, after weeks of hearings--I think it was like 80 witnesses, 800 exhibits, extensive, detailed, thorough hearings--and that three- judge panel, which including two Trump appointees, concluded that the lines that had been drawn by the Republicans in Alabama constituted intentional racial discrimination. There was an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians' voting strength.

They said that the map that the Republicans were trying to put in place--and, remember, this was triggered by President Trump's call to Texas a few

months earlier saying: I need five seats. I will come back to that in a minute.

The three-judge panel said: Nope, you still can't put that map in place. There were two seats, one is held by our current colleagues Terri Sewell and Shomari Figures. It is the Shomari Figures' seat they were going after. They were trying to draw it out. The three-judge panel said that seat should stay. Then the United States Supreme Court, in an expedited manner, overturned the decision of that three-judge panel, even though they had just said a few weeks ago that intentional discrimination will not be talented in drawing these lines.

Even though there is something called the Purcell Rule, which the Supreme Court had honored for decades, the Purcell Rule is: You know what? We are not going to be doing these election decisions when we get too close to an election, because it can cause problems in how you implement the election. So we won't do that.

They violated that even though the three-judge panel said one of the reasons they didn't want to overturn the lines at that point was because it would cause chaos in the election. The Supreme Court did it anyway.

The Trump majority on the Supreme Court threw it out. Justice Sotomayor wrote a dissent. In that dissent she says: ``Now the Court is squarely faced with a record of the turmoil it has caused and the harm it has wrought. Yet just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos.''

So that is where we have come from Juneteenth: The gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

It is not just in Alabama, unfortunately. I was down in North Carolina, back in my home State. I have got a colleague named Don Davis who is running for reelection. North Carolina is playing the exact same game as Alabama is. In fact, they did it a few years ago. This will be the third election that Congressman Davis has to run where they have tried to change the lines to make it harder for him to win.

When they did it in 2024, they knocked off three other Democrats who had been my colleagues when I first served here. The Republican legislature drew out those three Democrats and put them in districts that were predominantly Republican so that they couldn't win. We lost those three seats, but that is not enough. They want to take more. They went after Don Davis' district and cut the African American voting bloc in half there.

Now, I went down because I want to try and help him win anyway. I know that area a little bit. I know that those voters were angry that there is an attempt to disenfranchise them in that way, but I think they see past the moment and understand the importance of what we need to do right now.

There are challenges coming up this November. One of the main challenges is to show that these, I think, illegal efforts to disenfranchise voters in this way, African American voters who were explicitly protected by the Voting Rights Act--which was explicitly based on the 14th Amendment, which was explicitly written to address all of the challenges and dangers and awful history that we created with slavery and segregation--all of that we have to fight back.

Now, the Trump administration is not going to make it easy. In addition to appointing a Supreme Court that would strike down the Voting Rights Act, they have gutted the part of the Department of Justice that is supposed to be protecting voting rights enforcement.

When Mr. Trump came into office, one of the first things he did was force out all but two of the attorneys in the voting rights section. Only two were left. In addition to that, they threw out all of the voting rights cases under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. He did that immediately. He did that before the Supreme Court had even ruled. He was telegraphing exactly what he wanted to have happen with this.

He is not done there. Let's keep in mind a couple of things. In addition to gutting the unit at the Department of Justice that is supposed to protect voting rights, he is making aggressive moves on it. Remember, he did that speech where he talked about nationalizing elections? Well, we all know that Federal elections are run by the States. The Constitution says that. He still announced that anyway.

He also sent the FBI to do a raid on the Fulton County Department of Elections to seize the ballots. Now, I have never seen anything like that.

At first he started out, he sent requests--demands, actually, to 47 States saying: Hey, we want all your voting files. The States resisted, and you can imagine why, especially States where Democrats are at risk of the type of gerrymandering that we have seen in Alabama and North Carolina.

He said he needed to do it based on the theft of the 2020 election. Now, he is still acting like he actually won the 2020 election. This would be kind of like if the team that lost the Super Bowl last year was still running around acting like they actually won it. That is what Donald Trump is doing. Six years later, even though all of the statements they have made about this have been discredited, they have lost in over 60 courts all across the country, including courts with Republican appointees, including courts that are managed by the Republicans with Trump appointees on them. Over and over and over again they say: Nope, you actually lost that election. He won't give it up.

I don't think it is really about the 2020 election anymore. I think in his mind it is really about 2026 and what they might do in November.

We need to keep in mind a couple of things, based on the history that you heard from my colleague from Virginia--and we know history can repeat itself--there is a saying that the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. The thing to remember is it does not bend on its own. It only bends in the right direction when we make it bend in the right direction.

On Juneteenth this year, the Obama library is going to open in Chicago, a long time coming, an exciting moment. I think it was in some ways a crowning achievement for the United States of America. At least it was viewed that way not just around the world but by many here in the United States. I am going to be excited to see what they have done and what they have built.

The legacy is the most important part of what that is about. The legacy of that Obama election, of what we can do and where we can go is something I think we need to focus on.

I watched a little bit of a special about it, and they played some of his speeches back from that era. The thing that is interesting is they are so different from the speeches we get from the White House now. They are not about division. They are not about anger. There is no hostile attacks on reporters, even when he disagreed with them. There is no threats to wipe out an entire civilization. There is no wars started, just because somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed. There is none of that stuff.

As he said, there is no red States. There is no blue States. There is the United States of America.

There is a call to a certain type of America that he made that reminded me of John Kennedy's in the 1960s. It reminds me of Dr. King's in the civil rights movement in the late 1960s.

Many of our greatest leaders made the statements that pulled us together, that brought us together, despite the divisions we had in our history, realizing that, as they say, we might have come over here on different ships, but we are all on the same boat now. We need to find a way to start working together again, but we can't keep undermining the rights of other people. We can't keep disrespecting the rule of law. We can't keep undermining democracy if we are going to move in that direction again.

For this Juneteenth, my hope is that the America that we aspire to will get back in the front window and that we will start moving in that direction again and that we can start raising ourselves and our Nation up to those high standards again.

To my colleague from Virginia, I thank her for doing this. I appreciate the work that she has done for the Congressional Black Caucus. I thank my colleagues in the caucus for the work that they do day in and day out. Here in the House, I thank my colleagues. Even when I disagree with them, we can find a way to disagree without being disagreeable. We can find a way

to remember that we are all supposed to be fighting for the same things, that we can turn to each other and not on each other at this critical moment.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in observance of National Police Week.

Over 300 names were added to the wall in memoriam this week. One of those names was my cousin, Earl Ivey, Jr.

He served as an officer for the Mount Rainier Police Department, the Office of the Sheriff, the Seat Pleasant Police Department, and he did double duty as chief and chaplain of the Fairmount Heights Police Department.

He was an excellent man, an excellent father and husband, and a great neighbor and friend.

I commend him and all of the others who were added to the wall this week.

I had one comment I wanted to make to my colleagues. During this week that should be celebratory, there was an amendment to a resolution that was offered that was political and partisan instead of being straightforward and honoring those who were added to the wall.

Their names don't have Ds or Rs listed after them. They didn't serve based on their party affiliation. We should set the party affiliations to the side for this week and this purpose and just celebrate them and the great work that they do.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from New York for putting this together today. I thank the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force and the Congressional Black Caucus for joining in as well in support of this effort.

The tragedy in Buffalo, unfortunately, is not a rare event. As you just heard from my colleague, 10 people were gunned down using an assault weapon that had been sold to an 18-year-old, an AR-15 that had been modified. He gunned them down in cold blood, and he drove 200 miles to get to them because he wanted to kill African Americans. I guess that was the closest he could get to find them, and that is what he did that day.

He had been inspired, sadly, by another similar type of shooting, a mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, just a few years before at the Mother Emanuel Church. In fact, my colleague from New York and I had a chance to go visit there just a few months ago, where nine people were gunned down. The person had come into the church, sat through Bible study with the African Americans that he later gunned down, and killed nine of them.

I know the question that we have now. We had a long list of these that happened on such a regular basis that sometimes people are numbed by it, forget to keep track of it. It is a sad day that we have reached from that standpoint.

A version of that too that I heard the other day in the hallways here is the shooting that took place at the hotel where President Trump was about to speak. One of the things that the person remarked to me was that the older people were scared by the gunfire, but the younger folks were not. I kind of wondered about that. Then I thought about it, and I said: Well, this is the generation that has grown up, and instead of doing fire drills, they have done active shooting drills. They have been trained tragically in what to do when you hear gunfire like that.

Schools now sell bulletproof backpacks to protect kids--``protect kids''--from this kind of gun violence and bulletproof chalkboards. Think about that. How did we get to this place?

Then the next question, of course, is: How do we get out of it? We have talked a little bit about some of the solutions to gun violence. I have got to say that my Republican colleagues, sadly, are not in support of nearly any of them that I am aware of. The ghost gun piece, in particular, was a shock for me. Ghost guns, as you may know, are untraceable guns. The only reason somebody would want a gun that is untraceable is if you want to commit a crime and you want to make sure that law enforcement cannot find you.

Why these guns would be legal is beyond me, but there was a period where they were. We couldn't pass legislation to ban them, so the Biden administration reached out to the ATF, which passed a regulation that did ban them. The Trump Supreme Court, to my surprise, upheld that regulation.

I thought, well, maybe it is a new day. Yesterday, in the Committee on Appropriations, I am sorry to say, my Republican colleagues passed language that would repeal the ban on ghost guns. The sad thing about it is I think they were trying to do it sort of in the cover of dark because they didn't offer an actual piece of legislation that would have hearings and the like to do the same, because they would have to stand up and defend it there, so they just tried to slip this in.

This is a tragic moment, I think, given all of the deaths, all of the killings, all of the murders that we have seen year after year and now decade after decade here in the United States.

I also would add this. We found some things that do work. You heard about the assault weapons ban. I know that is a bridge too far for many of my Republican colleagues--I guess all of them actually, because none of them will even cosponsor legislation like that. I put together a bill that is called Raise the Age, and it would raise the age from 18 to 21 to buy an assault-style weapon. It is already required that you be 21 to buy handguns, and that was a bill that was put in place by the Ronald Reagan administration.

I thought maybe we can get some support for this. There was not one Republican cosponsor for that bill. The shooter in Buffalo was 18 years old, and he bought the gun by himself without anybody to monitor it. The shooter in Charleston, he was 21, but he should have been caught by the background check. He slipped through, though, because it was underfunded and they didn't have enough people to make sure they caught and did all of the checks. Even though he should have been flagged and he was, they didn't have the bodies to do the follow through. He got the gun, and we know what he did after that.

Then, lastly, on this point, some of the things that we found that also work is not just enforcement. It is also intervention and prevention. We found grants that help with violence in the street, to reduce it. They help by reaching young people before they get too deep into trouble or help to get them out before they get too far along with it. But the Trump administration has cut 400 of those grants worth $815 million. The funds that would be used to help prevent street violence or, even worse, gun violence in our schools has been cut back.

I say this on this day of remembrance: I call upon all of my colleagues--I know we don't agree on everything. In fact, we don't agree on a lot, but let's see if we can find a solution to this. My Republican colleagues want to protect the Second Amendment. That is great, but we have got to be able to find a way to protect the Second Amendment and protect second-graders at the same time. Let's get this done. Let's get this done.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for leading this Special Order tonight and my colleagues who have spoken on the floor in shock and dismay with respect to what the Supreme Court did in the Voting Rights Act ruling just a few days ago, and also what the Virginia Supreme Court did in the ruling that it passed down.

I will say this: Many of my neighbors, friends, and the students I have had a chance to speak to recently were also surprised, shocked, disappointed, and dismayed by what happened.

They have also been surprised by President Trump sending the FBI in to seize ballots in Atlanta to try to prove that he won an election 4 years ago that he obviously lost.

They have been surprised, dismayed, and disheartened by what they saw with respect to ICE in Minneapolis and the recognition that there is a strong possibility that ICE and the National Guard may be showing up in polling places in November.

They have also been shocked and surprised that icons like Jim Clyburn and Emanuel Cleaver, who served this body and this Nation honorably for decades, are at the risk of being forced out of office based on these unfair rulings.

I will say this: I have been really heartened by what I saw from those young people when I was speaking to them over the past 2 weeks. They were concerned that they couldn't live up to the moment, that there was nothing that they could do, and that they were too young to have an impact.

Yet, I reminded them of people like John Lewis, who was 18 or 19 when he began his work in the civil rights movement that culminated in the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted just a few weeks ago. I reminded them that Dr. Martin Luther King was only 25 when he led the Montgomery bus boycott and was still working on his dissertation and raising a family, all at the same time.

I reminded them that there were many leaders who came before us-- young people, men and women--who saw the need for service and a call to have an impact, and they stepped into that void.

I reminded them that the Freedom Riders had people on at 18, 19, and 20 years old who they forced to write and sign wills before they got on those buses because they knew that they would be violently attacked, and they were.

We can meet this moment, just as those ancestors met those moments, just as our predecessors met those moments. All we need to do is go to the voting booth.

We have to make sure we get out there and do that work, push in the streets, campaign, stand up, make sure we fight, speak, have our voices heard, and bring everybody out who we can because it is critical for us to win in November in order to turn this around and show them that, despite all the efforts that they have made--the Trump Supreme Court, the seizure of the ballots, all the things that they have been doing with the executive orders and the like--we can defeat all of those in November. But we have to show up, and we will.

Mr. Speaker, I was in the Appropriation Committee voting on an amendment related to DACA. Had I been present, I would have voted NAY on Roll Call No. 130.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia, and I thank the Congressional Black Caucus for putting this together and coming forth with this information and giving me a chance to speak. As well.

I will be brief. I know we are running out of time. I did want to comment briefly about Minnesota. I just got back a little while ago from Minnesota. We went out to do a special hearing out there, in large part due to the killings that have gone on, to the ICE protests, to the arrests, the roving patrols, and the like. I wanted to see it firsthand. I have got to say, I was shocked by what I saw, but that is not the first time I have seen it.

African-American history had a lot of parallels to what is going on in Minnesota right now. I think it is deeply disturbing, deeply troubling. The deaths that have been caused, in my view, by police excessive force, ICE agents using excessive force, the roving patrols, and the like, the racial profiling that is taking place, all of those kinds of things we have seen before.

I think we also have to be sure we understand a couple of things moving forward. One is that the agents who work for ICE are not warriors; they are guardians. Whether they put on the camouflage, whether they are wearing masks, no matter, they work for the American people. They are guided by the Constitution, or should be guided by the Constitution. We have to make sure that they understand that fully, just as the protesters in Selma and Birmingham had to make sure that lesson got across to the law enforcement in Alabama and in those cities at that time.

I think it is critical for us, as Congressman Jackson pointed out, to make sure we recall that the advances that have been made during the African-American movements and efforts have been not just African Americans, they have been Americans across the spectrum working together, fighting for justice, striving together to make a difference.

I want to make sure we continue to do that. I will come back, and we can discuss this more at length in the future. It is critical for us to find a way to move forward together because we can't do it alone.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for hosting this event, and I also thank the Congressional Black Caucus for the focus on this issue tonight.

I was a child in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in the late 1960s. I lived across the street from the Booker T. Washington High School, so you know what side of town I lived on.

Rocky Mount was a city that was still segregated. In fact, it was literally divided by the railroad tracks that ran through the middle of the town. The Whites lived on one side; the Blacks lived on the other.

My parents were both graduates of that high school, and I had gone to work at that point. My mother worked in the school system. In the late 1960s, the schools were still segregated. I was able to see how that changed as my mother was working and then had the chance to work at other schools as the schools integrated.

I knew that the connection was the civil rights movement that was led by Dr. Martin Luther King, and Dr. Martin Luther King had preached at that gymnasium at the Booker T. Washington High School a few years earlier. I was probably too young to remember him even showing up, but we recognized the power of that movement and his leadership.

His leadership was a courage rooted in faith and total commitment to public service. He knew he was going to be killed, as you know from the ``I've Been to the Mountaintop'' speech he delivered the night before he was assassinated, but he still went on.

In 1956, after he had just graduated--or he was still working on his dissertation, actually working on graduating with his Ph.D.--he was called to Montgomery to preach at a church there and lead the church. When he got there, he was drafted to become the leader of the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was put in that position because they had conflicting groups. They couldn't decide who the leader should be, but they knew it was a critical time, and they knew that this young man, whose father had been a preacher, had talent. They put him in the middle of that position.

This is a young man--I think he was around 26--who moves to a new town, doesn't know anybody there, with his wife and child. He becomes the pastor of a church. He is still writing his dissertation at night, and then he becomes the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. Talk about gifted leadership.

Not too far into that--they were a few days in, actually--the White segregationists realized that this bus boycott was serious. They knew that it was real. They started with the threats. They tried to threaten people and threaten to take their jobs away, but they weren't able to get away with that. They weren't able to undermine the bus boycott with threats, so they actually started calling Dr. King's house. They threatened his wife, and they threatened him.

Eventually, the threats became real. In 1956, somebody put a bomb at his house and blew up the front part of it. His wife was there. His young baby was there. Thank God, neither of them was hurt. When Dr. King heard about it, he prayed and then ran to his house as quickly as he could.

When he got there, a crowd had gathered, hundreds of people, African Americans who lived in that community and knew about Dr. King and attended his church. They were angry. If they had guns, they brought those. If they had weapons, they brought those. If they didn't have that, they grabbed a shovel or whatever they could get their hands on and went to the house because they were ready to seek revenge, but Dr. King said: That is not our way.

The Christian leadership that he provided was deeply rooted in faith, deeply rooted in nonviolence, and was ultimately tested that night. He met the test that night and continued forward.

Part of that movement ended up resulting in the civil rights legislation that became the crown jewel of the American democracy, because America wasn't really a democracy in 1776 or when the Constitution was written in the 1787-1789 era. It certainly wasn't a democracy after the Civil War because right after that, when Reconstruction ended, the Ku Klux Klan rose up. They reasserted their right to white supremacy.

African Americans who had been freed from slavery were pushed back into an ugly version, an ugly, violent version that we called segregation. The Jim Crow laws were put in place. Many of them had achieved positions, including being elected to this body, and all of that was stripped away.

For the next 100 years or so, African Americans lived under the threat of violence. If you looked at a White woman the wrong way, you could end up dead. If she just thought you looked at her the wrong way, you could end up dead. That is what happened to Emmett Till.

Not only that, you had African Americans who came back from service after World War II, including my father-in-law, and what they found was an America that was still deeply violent, deeply racial.

In fact, one of the veterans who came back who had served in the military and fought in World War II had his eyes gouged out when he came back, an act of violence that shocked the country, but didn't shock it enough. We had other lynchings, and the like, that went through that era and continued until the 1960s. That is when Dr. King and the civil rights movement had their rendezvous with destiny.

I am here tonight to thank him for the work that he did. The Voting Rights Act, which is one of the key pieces of legislation that came out of that era, is now under attack. It is under threat. It is pending in front of the Supreme Court across the street. We won't know how it is going to turn out until the opinion is released, but I tell you what: We are not in the same place we were even then. When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, yes, there was division. There were people who opposed it. There were segregationists--they called themselves Dixiecrats then--who opposed it, as well.

When it was reauthorized in 2006, the vote in the House was 390-33, and it passed the Senate unanimously. President Reagan had signed a previous reauthorization. President Bush signed this one, and that was just 20 years ago. What has happened to the country since then?

I will say this: We all know that the vote is the most powerful tool in a democracy. We all know that there are challenges to votes, voting ability, and voting rights across the country. We have disagreements, I suppose, with our Republican colleagues about some of that, but we need to make sure we remain vigilant and keep working hard to protect those rights.

I had a chance over the weekend to do a couple of things. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, I had a chance to visit churches and groups that were celebrating Dr. King, remembering Dr. King. I went to First Baptist Church of Highland Park, Faith Temple No. 2, and the AKAs had a day of service that I was happy to attend and have a chance to speak to them, worship with them, and work with them.

They are all concerned about where the country is going and the challenges to American democracy and the civil rights movement that gave us the rights that we have today.

I think it is critical for us to remember a couple of things. One is the work continues, no doubt. I have strong disagreements, to say the least, with the current administration, and I commit myself to fighting against the excesses and the wrongs that are going on there.

On Friday, I went with a group of Democrats to Minnesota to deal with the protests there, to see them firsthand. They reminded me in some ways of the civil rights protests from back in that era, the protests in Selma that led to the Voting Rights Act passage, the protests in Birmingham. The violence is shocking. People are dying. The shooting of Renee Good is just one example of those that has reached the media attention, but there are more of these going on all across the country. I saw clips of people and heard their testimony, people who were dragged out of cars, people who were citizens but were still arrested anyway and taken to the ICE detention center and not released for hours, people who were denied the right to call for an attorney, people who were denied the basic constitutional rights that my colleague from Virginia was talking about.

We have got to make sure we turn that around. We have got to make sure that we protect the rights that the civil rights movement was about defending and even beyond that the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, all of those things were put in place 250 years ago, which is the anniversary we are about to celebrate later this year, and rightly so.

We are not a perfect country. We are not a perfect nation, but we have been called to a perfect mission. We need to fulfill that mission.

I think it is important to wrap up with this. Dr. King's dream, kids learn about it in school now, and they see the replays, but in some ways the dream has become a memory for many. I think it is important for us to recall that the dream is not a memory, it is a mandate. It is a mission. It is a movement that we need to continue to make sure we get that work done that Dr. King died for and so many others died for, as well.

I thank my colleague again for putting on this event tonight, giving us a chance to remember Dr. King and think about the civil rights movement and where we are going as a nation. I want to continue to fight alongside her and all my colleagues with the Congressional Black Caucus and my colleagues here in the House of Representatives on both sides of the aisle as we work to get this done.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my distinguished colleague from South Carolina and certainly my distinguished colleague from Maryland for giving us the opportunity to speak on this issue tonight, the fifth anniversary of that tragic day of the attack on this Capitol.

I want to focus on two men who were here that day. One was Nathan Tate. He was a police officer who had grown up in Prince George's County. He had mixed feelings about what the police do because he had had some bad experiences in his childhood and in his neighborhood, but he decided he could make a difference.

He felt called to public service as a police officer. When he went to work, he joined the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., and was sent to some of the toughest neighborhoods in Washington, where I had actually been a prosecutor many years before.

On that tragic day, he was one of the 140 officers who were attacked and injured. Fortunately, he was not one of the four who died that day. Another one died the next day. Four officers committed suicide in the wake of the trauma that they had experienced that day.

Mr. Tate was attacked and temporarily blinded by bear spray. He hit his head on the scaffold as he was knocked to the ground and lost consciousness temporarily. He was afraid he wouldn't make it home that night to see his six children. He didn't know if he was going to make it.

His attacker was a man named Andrew Taake. Mr. Taake later pled guilty to attacking officers, including Mr. Tate, with bear spray and a metal whip.

You heard a moment ago that our President and some of our Republican colleagues said that this was a tourist event, but I know not many tourists bring bear spray and whips to the Capitol. The man who attacked him was also a fugitive from justice at the time he came here. He had been released on bond from Texas. He was a 32-year-old man, and he was charged with online solicitation of a minor.

Fortunately, it was an undercover officer posing as a 15-year-old girl, but there was an arrest warrant out for his arrest at the time he came here and launched that attack.

He ended up pleading guilty and accepting responsibility in front of the judge, or so he said, because when you plead guilty, the prosecutor reads a statement of what you have done and you have to swear under oath that that statement is true.

He did that, but at the same time, he had been bragging about attacking these officers. Later, he came out and denied responsibility for what he had done. In fact, he said Officer Tate had attacked him.

The judge in that case was appointed by Donald J. Trump. He heard all the evidence, he heard the guilty plea and the evidence that both sides presented, and he sentenced Mr. Taake to 6 years in jail. Donald Trump's pardon wiped that away with the stroke of a pen.

Mr. Tate, formerly Officer Tate, felt so betrayed by what had happened--not just that day, not just by the way some Members of Congress have responded to what happened that day, and not just by the pardon--that he actually left the police department. He didn't feel he could be a police officer again. However, he was still committed to public service that now he is a middle school teacher in Charles County, Maryland, continuing to do outstanding work.

Actually, The Washington Post article that profiled him today showed that he talked about this issue today or this week with the children in his class. He is trying to continue to serve. He is trying to continue to make a difference. He is trying to make a difference for the next generation. He had life-altering scars that he suffered that day. Many of our colleagues had life-altering scars that they suffered that day. Our Nation suffered life-altering scars that day. We need to commit today that it will never happen again.

Mr. Speaker, I was absent from the first vote today due to my participation in the shadow hearing, ``Kidnapped and Disappeared: Trump's Detention Abuses,'' where I was discussing the impacts of this administration's immigration policies on constituents in my district. Had I been present, I would have voted NAY on Roll Call No. 313.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for yielding to me and for putting this together. I appreciate the fact that she took the leadership and initiative to bring this forward. I also thank my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, as well, for taking a stand on this issue and the House Democratic Caucus overall.

This is the issue that we fought about with respect to the government shutdown. This is the issue that has not gone away. I suppose the White House and my Republican colleagues were hoping that it would, but it is worse now than it was even then.

In fact, the Republicans knew this problem was coming all the way back on January 20 when Mr. Trump first took office. To much fanfare, they began moving forward with his legislative agenda, the big, beautiful bill and other pieces of legislation. I don't even know how many executive orders they put together and put out undermining the government from the standpoint of government employees and making damaging impacts across the board.

They failed to address this particular issue. In fact, I will come back to that in a moment. Not only did they not address extending the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act, but they made the problem even worse. The big, ugly bill that they passed included a $1 trillion cut to Medicaid.

The healthcare safety net in this country, to the extent it is a safety net, was damaged terribly by what they have done, and it is about to get infinitely worse when these tax credits expire at the end of the month.

I know my Republican colleagues have been fighting against ObamaCare for years now. I can remember back when it was first passed 15 years ago in this Chamber. There were over 60 votes to repeal and replace the ObamaCare piece of legislation. They kept going year after year after year. Somewhere along the way, about 5 years in, they found out that the American people actually like ObamaCare. They don't call it ObamaCare. They might call it the Affordable Care Act, but they kind of liked not having pregnancy treated as a preexisting condition, and they kind of liked having the ability to have their kids stay on their family insurance plans until they turned 26.

The efforts to repeal it not only failed, but it has gotten stronger over the years because people have come to realize that without it, they might not be able to afford healthcare at all.

I have decided to bring in a couple of comments from people in my district. There are too many to read all of them, but this one is from Beth, who lives in Greenbelt, Maryland, which is in my district. She is looking at her premiums going up $9,372 this year. She has major health conditions that require ongoing healthcare that she can't avoid. They were brought on by a major surgery that she underwent several years ago.

Her case isn't unique. In the State of Maryland, it is estimated that the impact will be on 14,000 or so members of my district. A 60-year- old couple with an $82,000 income is looking at a 168 percent increase if these affordable care tax credits are allowed to expire. A family of four, ages 45, 45, 15, and 10, is looking at a 200 percent increase in their monthly premiums. Obviously, most families can't sustain that.

I am going to pick one. I read an article in the Washington Post a little while ago. This is a gentleman in Altoona, Pennsylvania. That is not my district, obviously; that is the district of Congressman Joyce. Matt Hornberger is 61 years old and from Altoona, Pennsylvania. Monthly payments for him and his wife will rise from $670 to $2,054. He said this: ``Between the high deductible and $25,000 in premiums, this is 40 percent of our income. I am just trying to live a life here and be able to go to the doctor when you need to go to the doctor.''

He ought to be able to do that. In fact, every American ought to be able to do that.

What have we gotten from our Republican colleagues in the 9 months or so since they took over the White House, the House, and the Senate? Not much. I remember the President saying in the debate that he didn't have a plan, that he had a concept of a plan. I am not sure we have gotten much past the concept point 9 months later, but he did talk about HSAs.

I was looking at that, doing a little research, and an economist, Doug Holtz-Eakin, who works for the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank, said this: ``There is a place for health savings accounts to augment insurance and fill things out around the edges, but it can't be the core insurance product.''

The reason for that is because it is not designed to be the core insurance product. As a matter of fact, we have HSAs in place now, but 66 percent or so of these have only $1,000 or less in the account.

As you heard from my colleague from Virginia, $1,000 doesn't go a long way in our healthcare system. It is $70,000 a day for the NICU system. I am a kidney cancer survivor. A thousand dollars sure wouldn't have covered my insurance for the surgery that I underwent. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't have even covered the MRI that allowed us to find it, fortunately, very early on.

Now, what is the path forward?

Mr. Speaker, I have to complain a bit because we have been talking about this issue the whole time. I am a father. I have six kids, and this reminds me a little bit of one of them.

He came home from school one day and he looked at his mom, of course, and said: Mom, will you help me with this project I have? She said: Honey, I am a little tied up right now. Can I help you out later? He said: We can't really wait on this. She said: Why not? He said: It is because it is a big part of my grade. It is a huge part of my grade. She said: Okay. I will help you out with it, but when is it due? He said: Tomorrow. She said: When did you know about this project?

As it turned out, he knew he had this assignment months ago, but he hadn't done anything to get ready for it. He hadn't let us know that he needed the help to work on it, and he certainly hadn't done any work to prepare the project.

That is what our Republican colleagues are doing right now. They came into office on January 20th knowing that these ACA tax credits were going to expire. They didn't do anything to address it. Not only that, but we brought it to their attention when this bill was moving through, the big, ugly bill. We tried to address it then, but they refused to extend the tax credits then. We tried to offer amendments at the committee level. I am on the Appropriations Committee. We offered four of those to try and amend

this piece just to extend it. Let's try and fix it. If you have other things you want to do it with it, let's extend it now so it doesn't expire.

They refused to do it. They voted it down four times on a party-line vote over and over again just like they had done over the previous 15 years when they were trying to get rid of it. Maybe this is death by a thousand cuts in their minds, but something strange happened along the way.

The American people started getting these notices in the mail that their premiums were about to double or triple. The American people, millions of them across the country, started realizing that there is no way they can afford to pay that. They are going to be forced into the choice of either dropping the insurance or take some other drastic measure like selling their house. One lady said she might have to pull her kid out of college to pay for this healthcare coverage.

It is absolutely outrageous, but the failure to do something until the eleventh hour is a total abdication of their responsibility of leadership, not just in the House, not just in the Senate, not just in the White House but entirely across the board.

The Republican Party didn't wake up to this until the American people started screaming in their ears. Well, now, here we are. What is the path forward?

Senator Schumer back during the government shutdown at the end of it said: Tell you what. Why don't we just extend it for a year. Let's put a task force together to try and work out the differences because I understand the Republicans don't agree with everything. Let's take a year and extend it and try and work it out.

Not only did the Republicans and the Senate reject that, they actually said: This is stupid. I can't believe he would propose this. Those were the types of comments he got from his Senate colleagues for proposing a 1-year extension.

Right now, there is a 3-year discharge petition that would extend the tax credits for 3 years. I don't know if there are any Republicans who have signed on to that, but I think we have about 9 legislative days left. At least my kids were only in their early teens. However, if they want to do the big fixes they have been talking about with respect to healthcare, they are not going to be able to do it in 9 days.

Now, I know they are going to try and do something to save face, but at the end of the day, the extension is really the only realistic way we have to go here.

I have to say this: If they don't do the extension, it is going to be devastating for families across the country, millions of them.

We were talking a little bit about how much these things could cost. The HSA is a thousand-dollar average. Look at the average cost for heart surgery. Just the surgery, not even the stay, is between $30,000 and $200,000 just for the procedure. I don't even know how much my cancer surgery cost because I had health insurance. I didn't have to check it like that. We had to pay some deductible, but nothing dramatic. We wouldn't have been able to afford it. I wouldn't have gotten the surgery because I wouldn't even have known I had cancer because we wouldn't have gotten the MRI.

That is where we are putting the American people right now. Actually, not we, the Republicans are putting the American people right now.

It is time to end this. The clock is running out. The calendar says the time has come to do something and put some kind of proposal on the table.

I have to say this, too, on the proposal piece. When the Speaker passed the bill, I think it was, if I recall correctly, July 25th, we left town for the August recess, came back, passed the bill, and then left town again. There was a stretch there where I think we had been in session between July 25th and when the government finally reopened, I think it was 12 legislative days.

To my friends out there in the country, how many of you could only work 12 days in July, August, September, and October and still have a job and still get paid while you are out? That is what they did.

Mr. Speaker, the time has come to get this done finally, to make some kind of an effort to reach a bipartisan solution and resolve this crisis that was created entirely by my Republican colleagues, that was totally avoidable, that they decided to run into the fire anyway.

Let's fix this. Let's protect the American people. Let's allow them to go at least 1 year, maybe 3, so we can extend this so they can make sure that they continue to have healthcare coverage while we are working on this bill. Let's get it done.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this legislation. As a former prosecutor here in Washington, D.C., I had a chance to use these statutes frequently with respect to the bail determination that is made in all of these criminal cases at some point or another.

My colleague talked about this being commonsense legislation, but the D.C. bill is patterned on the Federal Bail Reform Act. I note that there is no effort to amend that here or change it in the way that has been proposed in this bill.

In addition to that, roughly 40 States in the Union are patterned after the Federal Bail Reform Act, just like the D.C. bill is, but there is no effort to change those. Many of those 40 States are represented by Members on the other side who support this bill.

The main point I want to raise right now is that it appears to me that this bill, as drafted, would create a scenario that is unconstitutional. As I read it, it strikes a 5-day provision. In other words, when somebody is initially arrested, they can be held for 5 days, and so, Mr. Speaker, you can have the full-scale hearing.

The way this is drafted is it eliminates the 5 days, and it says:

Notwithstanding any other provision, the judicial officer

shall order that the person who is charged with this crime be

detained for the period before trial.

I think that says that no matter what, whoever is arrested for any of these charges, there is a mandatory requirement that they be held for the entire pretrial period. That would certainly be unconstitutional.

Under Salerno, the Supreme Court case which ruled on the constitutionality of this language over 40 years ago, the Supreme Court said that there are a variety of safeguards that have been put in place: right to counsel, detention hearing, and the chance to offer opposing evidence and the like, that provides the safeguards that permit the statute to be found to be constitutional.

However, the way this bill is drafted, none of those safeguards could come into play because the initial provision as it is written makes all of those superfluous and says that no matter what, if these charges arise, then the person has to be detained for the entire pretrial period.

Mr. Speaker, I would say at this point, though, that because it is unconstitutional, I urge my Republican colleagues to oppose this bill. I urge all of my colleagues to oppose this bill.

I would note that Salerno was written by Chief Justice Rehnquist, no liberal advocate, and Justice Scalia supported it, as well.

This is a provision that has key safeguards that are excluded. By the way this is drafted, it has to be revised. I oppose it even if you do the revision piece, Mr. Speaker, because I think it violates the rights of the District of Columbia to make their own determinations.

At a minimum, Mr. Speaker, please send constitutional law forward.