Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, in Maryland's beautiful Eighth Congressional District, Montgomery County, Maryland, something shocking is about to happen.

In 1 week, tens of thousands of people in our community will lose their Salvadoran temporary protected status. They will lose their work authorizations, and many will lose the careers that they have worked hard to build here, packing up whatever belongings they can fit into a couple of suitcases. They may be separated from the rest of their families and forced to return to a country where they will face violence and human rights violations. Their departure will create great dislocation and heartbreak in many neighborhoods.

For the past 25 years, Salvadoran TPS holders have raised their families here and sent their kids to our schools, started small businesses, and added to the vibrant culture of Maryland's Eighth District.

They have believed in America, and they form an essential part now of our communities. The Free State is the third-largest population of Salvadoran TPS holders in America. Every year, the 23,000 of them who call our State home contribute an estimated $732 million to our community. They have been a powerful driver of our prosperity.

One of my Salvadoran constituents who obtained TPS and arrived in Maryland when she was just a baby has built an outstanding career here as an educator at an elementary school where she herself went to school in the only State and in the only country she has ever known.

As a product of Montgomery County Public Schools, she is proud to give back to the community that helped her family establish a life in the United States. She hopes to keep educating the next generation of leaders. Yet the looming end of TPS next week threatens to strip her away from her students. The abrupt revocation of her status also threatens to separate her from her U.S. citizen spouse.

Another constituent also arrived in Maryland as a child. After escaping brutal poverty in El Salvador, she went on to achieve success by providing professional cleaning services to households throughout our community. She has been an active member of her local church and congregation. With her TPS designation now in question, she worries about having to abandon her livelihood, her family, and the community she loves. She does not know what the future holds.

Other hardworking Salvadorans have played an important role in the growth of one of Montgomery County's finest paint manufacturing companies. In their many years working for the company, these constituents have made impressive use of their work authorizations.

They manage business affairs for the company, test its new paint formulas, and efficiently facilitate the delivery of products to doorsteps across our community.

These neighbors have enriched the social, economic, and cultural life of our State. Their loss will be felt in classrooms left without teachers, unbuilt houses, renovations unfinished, landscaping projects abandoned, friendships severed, and families deprived of breadwinners and loved ones.

The Trump administration, if you are listening, please extend this vital program. Do not turn a blind eye to what is taking place. America has always served as an asylum for humanity. As Tom Paine said, it is a place of refuge for hardworking people fleeing economic, intellectual, political, religious repression and poverty from all over the world.

The administration should extend TPS and assure Salvadorans of their place in our community.

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

In this 119th Congress we have watched the President's followers in Congress surrender to the President one constitutional power after another.

Amazingly, the Speaker and the MAGA party have abdicated nearly every single essential power that the Framers exclusively vested in us, Congress, the Representatives of the people. First is the power to declare war, which has been usurped by the President with catastrophic results for the country and without a peep from his sycophants in Congress.

Next is the spending power, the power of the purse, the power to appropriate Federal dollars to spending and grant programs and to specify their purposes, powers that have been continually violated in acts of impoundment, nullification, and redirection by the President who has not only effectively shut down the Department of Education, USAID, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but has even helped himself, without any appropriation from Congress, to $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to give away to Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other convicted insurrectionists who attacked this body in order to try to overthrow a Presidential election in January of 2021;

Next is the power to impose tariffs and taxes and the power to regulate

commerce with foreign nations, powers that have been ripped away from us without any protests from the majority so the President could launch preposterous trade wars against the world and aggressively insult and alienate our beloved neighbor and democratic ally Canada.

They have abandoned even the power to decide whether or not the President should receive Presidential emoluments, gifts, payments from foreign governments as he piles up a pirate's treasure of hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts from foreign autocracies and monarchies.

They have abandoned the unquestioned exclusive congressional power of Congress to build and exercise control over needful buildings and structures for the national government like the White House; the Reflecting Pool, which they are now calling the strait of warm ooze; and The Kennedy Center. All of these structures are being bulldozed, demolished, desecrated with Presidential graffiti, and renovated according to unilateral and independent executive decisions without even congressional consultation--all for the first time in American history.

They are dangerously ceding our power to regulate the times, places, and manner of Federal elections conducted in the States to the post office and to our monarchically minded President who has no constitutional role in elections and was impeached by this Chamber for inciting a violent insurrection to try to overthrow an election, which he lost by more than 7 million votes, 306-232 in the electoral college.

So what constitutional power do our colleagues propose to surrender today? Well, it is just a power that Congress has had since the beginning of the Republic under Article III, Section 1: the power to define the composition of the Supreme Court and the number of Justices who serve there.

Over the course of our history, Congress has exercised this authority seven different times by changing the number of Justices on the Court.

With the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress established the first Court with six Justices. In 1801, President Adams and Congress shrank it to five Justices.

When President Jefferson won in 1800 and came back to power, then it was back to six Justices.

In 1807, Congress expanded it to seven Justices when it created the Seventh Circuit, keeping to the congressional tradition of one Justice per Federal Circuit.

In 1837, Congress expanded the number of Federal Circuits to nine and then added the corresponding two seats to the Court, bringing the Court to nine Justices.

In 1863, Congress briefly added a 10th Federal Circuit during the Civil War and added a 10th Justice, giving Lincoln one more to appoint.

In 1866, Congress went back to seven Justices.

In 1869, President Grant and Congress increased the Court to nine again with another Judiciary Act, again, matching the number of Justices to Federal Circuits. That is the tradition of circuit riding.

Today, we still have nine Justices, although we have 13 Federal judicial circuits, the vast majority of which are not represented by even a single Justice among the nine currently serving on the Supreme Court.

In fact, the floor leader from Arizona has not only no Justices from his State on the Supreme Court, there are no Justices from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has 67 million Americans living there.

Five of the Justices today come from the New York City metropolitan area, basically one for each borough. Is it really possible that there are not people from other parts of the country who could effectively and honorably serve on the Supreme Court?

Well, if we decided this on an originalist basis, we might move to place 13 Justices on the Court to match our 13 Federal circuits or we might go to 6 Justices, which was the original number there.

However, MAGA's proposal is to strip Congress of all authority in the matter, to freeze it and cement it permanently in the constitutional architecture for all time, with the suddenly magic number nine.

This is odd. Nine is neither the number of Federal circuits we have-- that is 13--nor is it the original number of Justices Congress placed on the Court. That was 6. Therefore, what is going on here?

Well, surprise, surprise, America, it is another partisan power grab by MAGA, our colleagues who fear for the results of the November election, as their policies have brought us nothing but war, inflation, corruption, lawlessness, and a $40 trillion debt, one-quarter of it supplied by this Presidential administration.

The MAGA party wants to cement into place a profoundly partisan and lopsided 6-3 Roberts Court that was gerrymandered and engineered by Mitch McConnell after the untimely deaths of Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg, each in the final year of a Presidential term.

After Justice Scalia died on February 13, 2016, President Obama nominated my constituent, Merrick Garland, to fill the seat. Senator McConnell did not even allow hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee, much less a vote in the committee, much less a vote on the floor. He said he wanted to let the people decide, and 11 months was too close to the next election; forgetting, I suppose, that President Obama had won one of those genuine constitutional 4-year terms in office.

That seat sat open for a record-setting 422 days before they filled it with Justice Gorsuch. In other words, they were for an eight-Justice Court during that year, but when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, less than 2 months before the election, when early voting had already started in some States, Senator McConnell rushed through confirmation hearings and then a final vote for Amy Coney Barrett just 8 days before the 2020 Presidential election took place, laughing about this glaring disparity in treatment, acknowledging what everyone knew: Well, that 1-year rule was just for the Democrats. They were very happy to barrel through that nomination at the last moment.

Now, by essentially stealing these two seats from the American people, MAGA has put four of the five seats in the ruling majority rightwing faction in the hands of Justices appointed by two Presidents who lost the Presidential popular vote--George W. Bush in 2010 and Donald Trump in 2016.

The rightwing capture of the Court, fueled by corporate dark money and the Citizens United decision, has plunged this Court into a legitimacy crisis, an ethics crisis, and a jurisprudential crisis like has never been seen before in American history.

Trump's followers in Congress now seek to freeze into place the political Court that MAGA built for decades to come. Thus, they urge us to give away another critical power that the Framers vested in us.

As gas and diesel prices soar out of control and Trumpflation spirals up for groceries, healthcare, housing, as Trump's reckless and forever war of choice in Iran spirals downward, and America increasingly stands isolated in the world, MAGA wants to impose a straitjacket clamp-down on our democracy, our freedom, and our constitutional rights.

The Roberts Court overthrew Roe v. Wade and destroyed the constitutional right of women to comprehensive healthcare in every State in the country. It demolished the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, and the Callais decision just this term. Also, these fraudulent textualists invented out of thin air Presidential immunity from prosecution for felony crimes committed in office.

In Federalist 51, Madison said that the major safeguard against tyranny and despotism in America would be the natural identification and loyalty that Members of Congress would show to our own branch of government. We would stand up for ourselves, Madison thought.

``Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,'' he wrote, but today's Republicans show no loyalty to the constitutional architecture of Congress, to our rights, our prerogatives, our powers. They are content just to keep their heads down, to close up shop, to go home as early as possible just to keep their jobs so the President will not mobilize social media and Elon Musk's money against them in a primary. They want to preserve their survivability, their marketability. What a

humiliating and spectacular collapse of the tradition of congressional self-respect and constitutional patriotism.

I urge every colleague in this body to oppose this ridiculous constitutional amendment and giveaway of congressional powers, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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

The floor leader offers a charming and completely self-defeating argument when he goes to the Roosevelt plan. FDR was a President, and Congress rejected his plan.

The gentleman acknowledges that Congress has changed the size of the Supreme Court seven different times, and we have also declined to change it several times.

Now, he describes what Roosevelt wanted to do as Court packing. This is Court packing on steroids. The gentleman wants to say that this President happens to like the people on the Court right now, through all of the packing and stacking and gerrymandering that has taken place in the last few years, and therefore we should freeze it, not just only for his own term but for all time. That is extraordinary.

In the meantime, they have not offered a single argument to explain why nine Justices should be the number that we constitutionalize and place in cement forever.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson), who is the ranking member of the Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet Subcommittee.

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

Mr. Speaker, I will try to answer the interesting questions raised by my distinguished colleague, Mr. Jordan, in seriatim.

First of all, anything that we do to try to improve the fortunes and the well-being of the American people, our colleagues call socialist. They call Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid socialist. That is just water off our back.

The President talks about communists. The only communists on Earth today are his best friends and his role models, like Kim Jong-un, who he writes love letters to, and President Xi, who he has praised more than two dozen times in public.

How about Vladimir Putin, who he follows around like a puppy dog? Vladimir Putin was head of the KGB. If there is a problem with communism, it is over on that side of the aisle.

The gentleman legitimately asked the question: Why did the former chair of the Judiciary Committee, Mr. Nadler, advocate for an increase of four seats on the Supreme Court--which we are not debating today? What we are debating is whether Congress should have the power to do anything, to increase or reduce the size. He asked about that. It is a legitimate question. I will tell you exactly why.

The gentleman may be unfamiliar with the history here, but Congress has traditionally linked the number of Justices on the Court to the number of Federal circuits. We have 13 Federal

circuits. His proposal was to go from 9 to 13.

Even the gentleman's beloved Ninth Circuit--which I think he is supposed to be representing in some sense--would be represented on the Supreme Court. We could have one Justice from each Federal circuit. That is what circuit riding was all about. You don't need some conspiracy theory to explain it. He was very overt about why he wanted to go from 9 to 13, which we could discuss another day.

Here the question is whether we should nullify, obviate, and destroy our own power to decide who should be on the Court. Still, the gentleman has not offered one single argument explaining why the number nine should be magic other than it cements into place all the decisions of this rightwing Roberts Court.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms. Scanlon), the distinguished ranking member of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government.

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

By ``leftwing socialist group,'' I assume the gentleman is referring to the Framers of the Constitution. It is the Framers who set up the system. They are trying to overthrow the system that the Framers created. The Framers gave Congress the power to control the number of Justices on the Court.

Where does the number nine come from? I still await a single positive argument for why we should inscribe into law forever the number nine as the number of Justices we should have and nullify the power that the Framers of the Constitution and the Founders of the country gave to us.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Ms. Stansbury).

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

Mr. Speaker, I will add to the remarks of the distinguished gentlewoman, this point: It is interesting that our colleagues suddenly want to dabble in constitutional amendment politics. Nobody is crying out for this, as my colleagues have argued, but you know what people want by 85 percent? People want the equal rights amendment. Where is the Republican Party on that? They used to support it.

Three-quarters of Americans, more than 75 percent, want to overturn Citizens United by a constitutional amendment, which transformed every corporate treasury in America into a dark money political slush fund. We want to get rid of that. How come they are not here today on that?

How about a constitutional amendment on the right to vote or abolishing the electoral college and giving us a

national vote for President? We have commanding popular majorities that want all those things.

Yet, they come forward with a constitutional amendment no one is talking about where you need two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-quarters of the States. You can measure the sincerity of this whole proposal by virtue of the fact that there is no national movement for it in any way.

This is, again, another little bone that is chucked over toward the White House to show them that they want to freeze into place the vanishing power of Donald Trump.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman quotes me as having said that I said there was no possible reason that someone would want nine. No, I didn't say that at all.

I think there might be a number of reasons. One very clear one is they want to freeze into place the majority they have in the Court right now, a majority that was created by the most suspect political maneuvers on the Senate side. The gentleman would like to lionize the number nine and place it in cement.

Why wasn't it nine when Senator McConnell blocked any confirmation or vote on a replacement for Justice Scalia after he died? He kept it at eight for an entire year in order to get to the next administration so they could put Justice Gorsuch in instead of my constituent, Merrick Garland, who is one of the most talented people ever nominated to the Supreme Court. He was the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, and they kept him off. Eight was fine with them then. Now, they want to go to nine because President Trump likes it just fine.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Menefee).

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

Mr. Speaker, quickly, just as Congress has exercised its authority seven different times to reduce the size of the Court or increase the size of the Court according to appropriate historical circumstances, it has rejected numerous proposals to do that, including in the famed Court-Packing Plan.

I don't know why our colleagues insist on thinking that FDR's field proposal is somehow an argument for giving our power away. We exercised our power properly in that moment.

The gentlewoman from Wyoming refers to the Democratic political program. I am not sure what she is referring to, but it is certainly the opposite of the GOP political program of endless war, inflation, corruption, illegal tariffs, and billion-dollar ballrooms.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I am moved by the remarks of the distinguished gentlewoman from Colorado. It seems to me if it doesn't make money for the Trump family, they call it socialist. That is interesting, especially when it is President Trump who is taking large pieces out of American corporations, like Intel. No other American President has done anything like that. He is, obviously, the state socialist and hanging around and palling around with every communist dictator on Earth.

Again, we have not heard a single positive argument for why we should cement for all time nine as the number of Justices on the Supreme Court. I am beginning to conclude that there simply is no argument.

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

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

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

Mr. Speaker, finally, a serious argument. I thank the distinguished gentleman, the former attorney general of Kansas, for responding.

First of all, he describes this as the Keep Nine Amendment. If you want to keep at nine, you don't need a constitutional amendment. You just make that argument in Congress, just like people argued in prior centuries to keep it at ten or keep it at six or let's move to seven, so we don't need to freeze it into the Constitution.

Secondly, he says that this should be a bipartisan issue. It should not be partisan. Agreed. We should have a bipartisan commitment to the handiwork of the Framers. It is in the Constitution that it is up to Congress. Yet, the gentleman leaves us by saying: Well, we are actually going to turn it over to the people to decide whether to revoke this power that the Framers invested in Congress.

Of course, that is what it would mean to amend the Constitution. Why would we want to do that? We have dealt with this in a responsible way throughout American history. We are suspicious that our colleagues first gave away the war power to the President.

Then they give away the spending power by letting him just abolish entire agencies and entities, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, USAID, and the Department of Education.

Then they give the President the power over tariffs, which we have because we have the power to regulate commerce domestically and internationally, and he imposed the largest tax in American history unilaterally. That is what a tariff is. It is not a tax on China or any other country. It is a tax on our businesses and our people.

Now we are in a trade war with Canada. If you travel to the north of Michigan in the Upper Peninsula, you go to the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, you go to the Adirondacks in New York, the small businesses are crying out for help because Canadians are boycotting us because of the whimsical, irrational, and deranged trade policies of this administration.

We have real problems to deal with. We don't really need to be giving away the powers of Congress and upsetting the proper balance of powers that was set by the Framers originally.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, one still searches in vain for a single justification for why we would surrender and abdicate yet another power that Congress has in the Constitution, this time freezing it into the cement of constitutional architecture for all time, that there will be nine Justices.

Mr. Speaker, they haven't even explained what that means. For example, let's say another Senate decides to do what Mitch McConnell did and hold a seat open for a year. Now that we have written a number into the Constitution for the first time, does that mean that the Supreme Court can't meet or can't vote? It is a serious question.

In other words, can the Supreme Court not operate if it doesn't meet the magic number of nine? They haven't told us, which shows this is just frivolous political confetti that is being thrown into the air. It is not an attempt to really think through the powers of Congress, the powers of the Court, and so on.

My friend from Kansas said that the Court shouldn't be a political football, and I agree with him about that because there are important things entrusted to the Court, like the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, and due process, all things under attack by this administration.

Their gerrymandered Supreme Court, well, they have done all right sometimes, not as good as the district courts and the appeals courts have done. We have won more than 80 percent of the cases against President Trump in those courts, which is why they have been calling for the impeachment of judges, including Republican-appointed judges like Judge Boasberg, who was appointed by President Bush. They have called for his impeachment. That is making a political football out of it.

We have had colleagues who have put up posters to impeach this judge and impeach that judge. They wanted to have a hearing about it in the Judiciary Committee, where they are talking about it. That is making a political football about it.

I think we can all be intellectually honest. We know after Brown v. Board, the right-wingers, the anti-integrationists said to impeach Earl Warren, and the Republican platform for decades had language attacking the Supreme Court for Roe v. Wade.

People have a right on all sides of the political spectrum to express what they feel about the Supreme Court, but why suddenly should we amend the Constitution of the United States to revoke our own powers simply because President Trump happens to like this Supreme Court and they voted for his immunity from felony crimes committed while in office, the so-called textualists and the so-called originalists.

Where do you see in the Constitution anything about the President having immunity? When the Framers wanted to write immunity into the Constitution, they did it, like through the Speech and Debate Clause for Members of Congress. Maybe that is what they are going to want to give up next, the Speech and Debate Clause protecting us from prosecution by the executive branch for saying things that he doesn't like.

That is not in the original Constitution. The President has it, but they made it up. Where did that come from? The stork brought it. They invented it.

They call themselves originalists. It wasn't in the Federalist Papers. It wasn't in the original Constitutional Convention records. It is not in any of the ratified convention records. Where did that doctrine come from? They made it up.

Mr. Speaker, we all can argue about what the Supreme Court does, but nobody yet has made a single satisfactory argument about why we should freeze, for the first time in American history, the number of Justices at nine when it has always been up to the Representatives of the people in the House and the Senate.

Let me just close on that thought. The Senate already gets some say over the Supreme Court by rendering the power of advice and consent. The only power we have is the power they want to give up.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank our floor leader here on our Special Order hour, Congressman Jackson, for being such an extraordinary leader for all of us in keeping the movement for civil rights, for civil liberties, and for democracy going in the country.

I want to start by just saluting Congressman Jackson for bringing national focus to the assault on DEI, which, of course, has been primarily just a system for opening up the doors to institutions that have discriminated in the past.

I am seeing two kinds of people or, I should say, two kinds of categories of people working in the government under the Trump administration.

One is what they call DEI hires. Who are some of the DEI hires? Well, when Secretary Hegseth became the Secretary of Defense, which he would later rename Secretary of War, he launched a campaign against so-called wokeness in the military, and one of the first people who he fired was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General CQ Brown, only the second African American to serve in that capacity.

Now, what were his qualifications? Well, he was a U.S. Air Force general and a command pilot with more than 3,100 flying hours, primarily in the F-16 Fighting Falcon. He logged more than 130 combat hours in wartime. He was a commander of global operations and was given nothing but superior reviews, but he was profiled as the reviled DEI hire, and they sacked him.

Then, Secretary Hegseth also got rid of a four-star admiral, Lisa Franchetti, who was one of the first women in the U.S. Navy to serve in a combat role and rose steadily through the ranks of the military to become the first woman ever to lead the United States Navy.

Throughout her extraordinary 40-year career, Franchetti commanded at every level of the Navy, including the guided-missile U.S. destroyer USS Ross, Carrier Strike Group 9, and the U.S. 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean.

So here we have two people who are at the very top of their profession, and of course, there were many more periods in American history where they would not have been able to do that because women and African Americans were excluded. They were able to do it in our time, precisely because the armed services opened up their vision and opened up their vista to include women, African Americans, and others who had been traditionally excluded. Yet, they are essentially labeled DEI hires, and that becomes the justification for getting rid of them.

Well, there is another group of people. Take, for example, Secretary Hegseth himself, who was a weekend talk-show cohost who was forced out of the leadership of two different veterans nonprofit organizations before he was named as Secretary of Defense.

Why was he forced out? Well, it turns out that he was reportedly engaged, repeatedly, in financial mismanagement, improper disorderly and drunken misconduct, and he faced repeated accusations of sexual harassment and assault from multiple women, to the point

where even his own mother took him to task for these multiple episodes.

Well, here is another one. The Director of the FBI, Kash Patel, who made news this spring because his security team reportedly requested breaching equipment when he was completely unresponsive one morning. He has been spotted chugging beers with the U.S. men's hockey team in their locker room and giving out free personalized bourbon bottles that say ``Kash Patel FBI Director'' on them.

These are the people who were brought in who end up firing all of the so-called DEI hires. I remember when the new administration came back into power and there was a joint session of Congress in this room. The President came and made his big speech about everything they were going to do.

Then, when it all broke up, afterward, somebody went outside and plowed his car into the back and side of a parked police cruiser. It turns out that was the chief of staff to Speaker Mike Johnson, but he was forgiven immediately for what he had done. I am not saying he shouldn't have been, but let's just say generally, and I am not speaking necessarily in terms of legal prosecutions here, but in terms of culture, we have the DEI hires who are being fired by the DUI hires.

There is a frat-boy culture, which is what I am referring to, which dominates within the Trump administration, and those people are sacking, firing, kicking out of their careers people who have done nothing other than to thrive and succeed because the doors of discrimination have been taken down in the past. They, the Trump administration, want to put them back up. They want to reinstate all of the blockades to people's progress.

Let's see fewer DUI hires and more DEI hires and let people succeed on their actual merit.

Mr. Speaker, we have made progress in America when we dismantle the professional chokehold of good old boy networks and race and gender- exclusionary policies adopted by the groups that have dominated forever. There are established networks that thrive on keeping other people out. Let's open the market and government up to merit and hard work.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to wish my constituent, Dr. Irwin Arias--Win, as he is known to his friends--a very happy 100th birthday. And what a century it has been. Dr. Arias is one of the world's leading experts on the human liver. He has had a dazzling career as one of the world's most accomplished medical researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Arias is also a beloved mentor, teacher, friend, husband, father and grandfather. I am proud to recognize his extraordinary life during this centennial milestone and express my gratitude for the lifesaving contributions that he has made to medicine.

Dr. Arias was born in Rockville, New York in 1926. His first scientific research experience was a high school fellowship tied to the 1939 World's Fair, when he designed experiments to study light transmission in plastics. This fellowship ignited Dr. Arias's passion for science and exposed him to brilliant peers who would go on to their own impressive scientific careers. In college, Dr. Arias enlisted in the Navy as part of the Nation's mobilization to defeat fascism during World War II. He managed to complete his service while taking classes at Harvard College. He graduated from Harvard in 1946 and, urged on by his academic advisors and mentors, applied to medical school. After graduating medical school at the State University of New York, Dr. Arias spent six years as an intern and resident at Boston City Hospital.

In Boston, Dr. Arias began treating patients suffering from a variety of liver conditions and spent two years researching liver pathology. His work attracted the notice of Dr. Irving London, the founding Professor of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who invited Dr. Arias to become one of the first assistant professors for the new medical school. At Albert Einstein, Dr. Arias went on to lead interdisciplinary treatment teams of doctors and scientists who worked together to provide innovative care to their patients. He formalized this approach within the Marion Bessin Liver Research Center, which he founded in 1974, and which became the first liver research institution to be supported by NIH. To this day, the Center supports interdisciplinary teams and mentors new generations of brilliant researchers dedicated to liver treatment.

Dr. Arias built on this experience as he helped establish the Department of Physiology within the Tufts University School of Medicine. At Tufts, Dr. Arias continued to mentor generations of medical students and researchers and urged them to see the overall human and social context of their studies. He set up courses that taught physiology students to think of their patients first before their medical problems. Wherever he could, Dr. Arias emphasized experiential learning with multidisciplinary teams and set up new courses for medical students and researchers to collaborate on real problems. Dr. Arias's pedagogy attracted national attention, and he brought this novel approach to NIH by setting up the Demystifying Medicine program with his colleague, Dr. Ruth Kirschstein. To this day, the Demystifying Medicine series pushes the boundaries of translational research--bridging important gaps between scientific research and medical practice--and has become a global model for the international scientific community.

In addition to his great talent and passion for translational research and collaboration, Dr. Arias is a formidable researcher in his own right. During his research career, he and his collaborators have discovered mechanisms of inheritable jaundice, learned how ABC transporters mediate bile transport, and identified the proteins that regulate hepatocyte polarization, mitochondrial fusion, ATP production and bile transporters. Dr. Arias has also mentored generations of young researchers and medical students at NIH, including Dr. Anthony Fauci. A lifelong teacher and scientist, Dr. Arias continues to coordinate the Demystifying Medicine program and operate a lab at NIH.

Dr. Arias is the loving husband of Dr. Lyuba Varticovski, beloved brother of Joan Gordon, loving father of Jonathan, Linda, Wendy, Nancy and Diana and the devoted grandfather of Daniel, Rick, Alex, Beau, Madeline, Sarah, Noah, Henry and Sofia. He is an avid traveler and fitness enthusiast. I am proud to salute my constituent Dr. Arias for his outstanding contributions to science and society and wish him a happy 100th birthday.

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

Mr. Speaker, welcome back to you and to Mr. Fitzgerald. I am pleased we are working together to address a real flaw in government surveillance authorities and to safeguard Americans' privacy and civil liberties by moving the NDO Fairness Act today.

Under the Stored Communications Act, prosecutors can go to a judge to

get a search warrant for the content of private communications and documents that Americans send over the internet and store in the cloud.

Third-party providers store our emails, our private chat messages, our work documents, and our phone records on their servers. Most of these can be searched if the government gets a warrant based on probable cause that the search will reveal evidence of criminal activity, but unlike the searches most Americans are familiar with from TV dramas where an officer shows up at a suspect's house with a warrant, the Stored Communications Act allows Federal investigators to request a nondisclosure order, also known as an NDO, from a Federal judge, preventing your service provider from ever telling you that your email account or phone records had been seized.

There is no statutory time limit. NDOs can exist in perpetuity, allowing the government to forever hide their searches from the searched.

There are good reasons why prosecutors might need or want a nondisclosure order, an NDO, for a brief period of time. In some cases, immediate notice might put an undercover agent in direct danger or risk the destruction of key evidence or compromise an ongoing investigation, but 40 years after passage of the Stored Communications Act, the government's use of nondisclosure orders has expanded well beyond these high exigency cases.

Under current law, the request has become little more than a simple box-checking exercise. The statute allows the government to maintain these nondisclosure orders indefinitely. DOJ's current policy limits the duration of the NDOs to 3 years, and that policy is itself totally voluntary and flexible. DOJ can rescind, suspend, or even just ignore it at will.

We need laws, not voluntary, dismissible DOJ policies, to protect our privacy under the Constitution. By limiting nondisclosure orders to 90 days with the possibility of renewal if there is an actual emergency still ongoing, the NDO Fairness Act ends the so-called forever NDOs where nondisclosure orders have no end date and no end in sight.

By requiring prosecutors to explain the rationale for their requests, we end the so-called rubberstamp NDOs in which applications for an NDO are submitted with boilerplate language and no evidence demonstrating any true or compelling need for nondisclosure.

By ensuring that judges apply the proper strict scrutiny standard to the requests, we limit nondisclosure orders to those where secrecy is actually necessary to the pursuit of the investigation.

In this way, the NDO Fairness Act will protect all Americans who keep an increasingly large percentage of their information online and should expect notice if the government is rifling through their records.

Most recently, we have heard about NDOs in the case of Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation into President Trump's effort to interfere with the results of the 2020 election, an effort that culminated in an attack on this building, the U.S. Capitol, on January 6, 2021.

It has been well-known for years that in the days leading up to the attack and while the mob was still rampaging in the Capitol, President Trump and his enablers, like Rudy Giuliani, made a series of phone calls to Members of Congress trying to convince them not to certify the election, even as the insurrectionists were tearing through the building.

As part of his investigation into that attack, Special Counsel Smith asked a Federal grand jury to subpoena the phone companies for the records associated with individual Members of Congress known to have been in contact with the White House over a 4-day period running from around January 6, 2021. The subpoena sought call records, the kind of information that is on your phone bill, not the content of any calls or text messages, but a record of who called who when. He also asked a Federal judge to issue an NDO for those subpoenas. He did so after receiving permission to do so from the Public Integrity Section and in full compliance with both existing law and DOJ policy.

It is no secret that the President had made it a habit to pressure witnesses not to testify against him. In August 2023, while he was being prosecuted for these efforts to overturn the 2020 elections, he posted the message: ``If you go after me, I am coming after you.''

Senators were upset by these completely lawful subpoenas and well- justified nondisclosure orders under the law as it was understood. Their response was to pass a law giving them, and them alone, the right to collect $1 million apiece each time the government sought their communications records, in the past and in the future.

Instead of acting to protect all Americans, all of us, they sought a multimillion-dollar payday for themselves as U.S. Senators. They did not even include mere lowly Members of the U.S. House of Representatives in their legislation.

Fortunately, that selective, self-serving authority was short-lived, and we succeeded in overturning, I think unanimously in this body, that stunningly corrupt law. The proposal before us today addresses the problem at its root for all Americans and protects all of us, not just the 100 Americans who we get to serve with in the Chamber down the hall.

Prosecutors under Presidents of both parties have routinely sought NDOs in all kinds of probes. The number of orders accompanied by NDOs that electronic communication companies receive has only increased since this legislation was first introduced over 4 years ago.

This body has proudly already passed this bill twice. I am hopeful that our colleagues in the Senate may now realize and act on the fundamental importance of this legislation for everyone in America.

Our laws should protect the civil liberties of all 340 million Americans just as the Equal Protection Clause demands.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Nadler for leading the NDO Fairness Act since this legislation was first developed, and I thank Mr. Fitzgerald for ably leading the charge in this Congress. I look forward to voting ``yes'' on this important legislation.

Mr. Speaker, for the aforementioned reasons, I enthusiastically endorse this legislation and encourage all of my colleagues to support it.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the Prison Staff Safety Enhancement Act, which would require DOJ to improve the safety of Bureau of Prisons facilities across America. More specifically, S. 307 would make improvements to how BOP assesses and responds to sexual harassment and assault by inmates of staff members.

Federal prison staff go to work every day to protect the public safety, to prepare people for successful reentry into

our communities, and to keep our communities safe. Yet, they often face threats of sexual harassment and sexual assault by inmates.

A 2023 report from DOJ's inspector general found that 40 percent of more than 7,000 surveyed BOP staff reported that they themselves had been sexually harassed by an inmate. The report found that reports of sexual harassment were even more prevalent among female staff members. Mr. Speaker, 69 percent of female BOP staff said they had been sexually harassed by an inmate on the job. This harassment included whistling, catcalling, genitalia exposure, sexual remarks, and sexual gestures.

The inspector general also found the true scope of the problem is not really known because BOP has not adequately or consistently collected data on the problem. This has prevented BOP from taking effective action.

That is why the act would require BOP to fully implement recommendations made in the 2023 IG report or explain why it cannot do so. It would also require BOP to provide updated data to the inspector general on the number and prevalence of inmate-on-staff sexual harassment and sexual assault episodes, require the IG to analyze the sufficiency of the data, and make any necessary recommendations to Congress and the Attorney General on how the Bureau of Prisons can reduce the pervasiveness of these incidents.

Lastly, it would require the Attorney General to adopt nationwide standards for prevention, reduction, and punishment of sexual harassment and assault committed by incarcerated individuals against BOP employees.

By requiring BOP to fully implement the recommendations of the IG report, this act would improve BOP's data collection, training, and policies on both sexual harassment and assault. It would also require BOP to conduct regular risk assessments within individual facilities and across BOP, with an emphasis on the risks for female staff.

I applaud Senator Ossoff for his work on this legislation. He has worked to improve the conditions and safety of our Federal prisons for both the staff and inmates. I was proud to support passage of the Federal Prison Oversight Act, a bipartisan, bicameral bill that he led with my colleague, the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Crime, Congresswoman McBath. That bill was signed into law in 2024 and established new independent oversight of BOP. It received broad support from civil rights groups, prison employees, and criminal justice groups, but its full potential is yet to be realized. Congress should fully fund the Federal Prison Oversight Act so it can be fully implemented and add to the safety improvements in the bill before us today.

We know from past failures in oversight that we must do more to make our prisons safer for inmates and staff alike. Such failures include years of systemic sexual assault of incarcerated women and whistleblower retaliation at one of the Federal woman's prisons in Dublin, California, that led to closure of the facility and criminal convictions of nine BOP officers, including the warden himself. This never should have happened. I hope we can continue to work together to make sure our prisons are safe for everybody who enters them, whether involuntarily as an inmate or voluntarily as a staff person.

Our prisons are some of the most challenging and difficult work environments in America. BOP has faced longstanding staffing challenges, from poor morale to ever-declining recruitment and retention rates. By working to reduce the intolerable sexual harassment and assault of staff members, this legislation would take an important step toward improving safety across BOP facilities and the ability of staff to carry out their crucial public safety mission.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support S. 307, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I should note that the bill does not address staff-on- inmate sexual harassment or assaults, but the Prison Rape Elimination Act does. Yet, this administration has been actively dismantling the protections of this legislation. I hope we can work together on that as well.

This bill would require the AG to adopt nationwide standards to prevent the sexual harassment and assaults of BOP staff members by inmates. It would also improve BOP's efforts to address this conduct if it takes place, and it will strengthen oversight of the Bureau of Prisons so we can improve the safety of staff working in every corner of the country. Nobody should fear harm of this kind while on the job, regardless of where they are employed in America.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for their hard work on this bipartisan legislation. I encourage all of our colleagues to join us in supporting this legislation that has been broadly endorsed by organizations, including the American Correctional Association and the Fraternal Order of Police.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this bill to strengthen protection for victims and survivors of domestic and sexual violence.

Kayleigh's Law Act of 2026 would require Federal courts to issue lifetime no-contact orders against defendants who are convicted of certain offenses, including child sexual exploitation, sex trafficking, stalking, and sexual abuse, upon request or consent of a victim but independent of the criminal case.

Hundreds of thousands of people live under conditions of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and other kinds of sexual abuse, and this legislation will help many of them escape that trap and turn their lives around.

According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, an average of 24 people every single minute become victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner. That is more than 12 million American women and men every single year.

Nationwide, more than one in five women have been raped or subjected to attempted rape, and 60 percent of the rapes are committed by someone they know, a number that increases dramatically for minor victims, going up to 93 percent who actually knew their abuser.

The lives of survivors of sexual and domestic violence can be radically altered even long after the abuse has ended, and many suffer from a wide range of chronic physical, mental, and professional problems. They pay a heavy price financially for medical and therapeutic treatment, lost work, and legal expenses. The weight of these burdens is even greater for survivors who have fewer resources and smaller networks to draw upon.

In recent years, some States have passed laws to strengthen protections, often thanks to the advocacy of survivors themselves, like Kayleigh Kozak, who was abused by her soccer coach beginning when she was only 12 years old.

Because of her undaunted advocacy in her home State of Arizona, survivors of sex crimes and other violent crimes may now petition the court in their State for a permanent order of protection against their abusers, totally separate and apart from the criminal case.

Other States have enacted similar laws. I am proud to say that my State, Maryland, is one of them. These laws empower victims and survivors to feel a lot safer and to move forward with their lives. It is wonderful that we are advancing a version of the Kayleigh's Law Act that will allow Federal courts to issue no-contact orders to victims and survivors of the worst offenses. I am pleased we were able to work together in committee on a bipartisan basis to ensure that this legislation would advance and prioritize the protection and the needs of victims and survivors.

Mr. Speaker, I strongly support H.R. 8481. I urge all of my colleagues to do the same, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Some States have already moved to institute permanent, lifelong no- contact orders, but right now there is nothing at the Federal level that would allow a victim to receive a lifelong, permanent no-contact order, and that is what we are doing.

There is no way of undoing a violent act like a rape that has taken place in the life of a victim, but at least we can seal off the victim's future from further harassment, taunting, leering, insulting, intimidation, and so on from someone who committed the crime.

I am proud that we are moving this on a bipartisan basis, and I hope that all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will vote ``yes'' to ensure the protection, the security, and the peace of mind that will result from this legislation.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of S. 32, which would amend title 28 to provide an additional place for holding court in the Southern District of Texas and in the Southern District of California.

Under due process and equal protection, our basic access to justice rights don't change or shouldn't change depending on where we live. But in practice, that is exactly what is happening,

as my distinguished colleague Mr. Schmidt just explained. When residents of the Southern District of Texas or the Southern District of California need to drive for hours to attend court or to go serve on a jury, which is a civic obligation, they have less access to justice than other citizens with easy and direct physical access to the court system.

It makes no sense that just because someone lives in a more rural district they should incur dramatically increased travel time and administrative expenses just to seek justice. With the price of gasoline and diesel soaring today with inflation, that is no joke.

Adding courthouses is a small step in the right direction toward making the courthouse doors accessible to all Americans, no matter where they live.

The Southern District of Texas spans 43 counties, and the Southern District of California includes San Diego County, the second most populated county in California. Residents there have the same problem many people are experiencing across the country. To access both the physical and the metaphorical courthouse doors, they need to travel long distances and wait in the backlog before having their day in court.

The easiest way to alleviate the burdens on the residents of these two growing districts is to add a courthouse. This change is cost free because there is an existing judicial facility available for the court to use in both of these places. Making use of this existing building would ensure that litigants, attorneys, witnesses, and other court users would have greater access to the justice that our Federal courts and our Constitution provide.

The administrative body for the Federal court system, the Administrative Office of the Courts, supports this bill. They know, like we do, that our country cannot have a flourishing justice system when its buildings are falling apart, its staff are underpaid, and there is a perpetual shortage of judges to administer the laws.

We have a lot to do to ensure Americans have equal access to our laws and a judiciary that they can trust to fairly hear them out and adjudicate their disputes.

This bill won't fix all the problems, but it will help more than 13 million Americans who deserve equal access to justice and greater access where they live.

I appreciate Representatives McCaul, Ruiz, and Issa for their bipartisan work on this issue. I want to recognize Mr. Schmidt for his distinguished stewardship of this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all my colleagues to support this commonsense legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

I rise in support of H.R. 1869, which would create a new trade crimes task force within DOJ to strengthen capacity to investigate and prosecute trade-related crimes.

Trade crimes are a big problem in the U.S. Foreign hackers equip computer chips with spyware and then slip them into the bloodstream of American commerce, market opportunists use unstable materials to create counterfeit batteries that end up exploding and maiming unsuspecting e- cigarette users in our country, and handbags made with forced Uyghur labor passed off as fair trade materials deepen and perpetuate our complicity with human rights crimes.

Other trade crimes may not have a clear victim or defined perpetrator, but they are equally pernicious. Cyber intrusions can risk a company's trade secrets without their knowledge. They may never become aware of the data leak, but a foreign competitor can use the intellectual property to unfairly compete with targeted U.S. companies.

The deluge of counterfeits and the unique way trade crimes are perpetrated make it difficult for prosecutors at DOJ to enforce our laws. This legislation would help the government prevent trade loss by creating a task force to identify, investigate, and prosecute trade crimes that hurt Americans across the economy.

We are proud the legislation has been bipartisan. I thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle on the select committee on China, especially our distinguished colleague from Illinois, Raja Krishnamoorthi, the House Appropriations Committee, and the Judiciary Committee for working to carefully negotiate this legislation that, if properly funded, will help the U.S. crack down on foreign entities that circumvent U.S. trade laws.

Although DOJ already has dedicated personnel to enforce laws protecting Americans against illegal products, limited funding and resources prevent prosecutors from doing enough.

If we don't provide funding for this work, the bill we are voting for today has an uncertain future. The myriad investigators, prosecutors, and support staff envisioned for the task force will never be hired.

You cannot increase trade crime enforcement without increasing the number of prosecutors working on the problem, and you cannot increase the number of staff handling trade crimes without more funding.

Stopping and preventing counterfeits that hurt Americans, endanger national security, and lose billions in profits for U.S. companies is serious work. I am glad we can all agree that DOJ prosecutors should focus on keeping America safe rather than pursuing political rivals of the President and targeting perceived political enemies with bogus prosecutions.

Mr. Speaker, I support this legislation strongly. I encourage my colleagues to do the same, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Krishnamoorthi), who is an original cosponsor and eloquent champion of this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers here. I urge everybody to support this important legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Today, we are considering a series of bipartisan and, one hopes, noncontroversial bills to help ensure that the U.S. Code is up-to-date and accessible to all American citizens. We do this at least once every Congress. This is the first time we are doing it in the 119th Congress, I believe, and I am very pleased to support this package.

Currently consisting of 54 different titles, the U.S. Code is a compilation of the vast array of Federal laws organized by coherent subject matter areas. As new laws are passed, they get assimilated into the code, which is a painstaking process undertaken by the dedicated professionals who work in the Office of the Law Revision Counsel.

As part of the office's efforts to maintain the code, they work to make it more efficient and easier to navigate and understand. This includes correcting technical errors, removing ambiguities, updating statutory cross-references, and repealing provisions that have become obsolete.

The bills we are considering today are a result of this exhaustive process. It is important to note that these bills make no change to the substantive meaning or effect of any existing laws. They are purely technical in nature and will help ensure that the code is authoritative, accurate, and accessible.

I thank Chairman Jordan for continuing our Judiciary Committee's long tradition of considering these bills in a bipartisan way. I thank the sponsors of each bill for bringing them forward today.

The first of them is H.R. 4499, which updates cross-references and corrects related technical errors throughout the code to accommodate previous reclassification efforts in title 34.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all my colleagues to support the legislation, and I thank my distinguished colleague for his leadership. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers, so I will not belabor the point. I like this legislation, and I am voting for it. I hope everybody does. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The legislation makes a variety of technical corrections to title 49, following enactment of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, but it makes no substantive changes.

Mr. Speaker, I urge everyone to support the bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

The legislation incorporates certain amendments to the Inspector General Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and the Ethics in Government Act. It makes no substantive changes to any of these laws.

Mr. Speaker, I urge everyone to support the bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, these are all similar recodification and editorial reclassification bills, but this one is a sparkling diamond in the rough, which is why I introduced it. It updates cross-references and corrects related technical errors throughout the entire code to accommodate previous reclassification efforts. It just makes the lawbooks a lot clearer and life a little bit better for everybody.

Mr. Speaker, I urge everyone to support it, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I urge unanimous passage of this fine, seaworthy legislative vehicle, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, the bill makes good technical changes, nothing substantive. I urge everyone to support it, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume, which will not be a lot.

Mr. Speaker, the bill incorporates new provisions that have been enacted since title 51 was enacted, but it makes no substantive changes. I thank our friends in the Office of Law Revision Counsel for doing such a good job on this.

Mr. Speaker, I urge everyone to support and approve the bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.