Floor Statements

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 6810. Thomas McGuire was born and raised in Sebring, Florida, and joined the U.S. Army Air Corps at 20. Major McGuire was known for his daring missions and record-breaking efforts as an aerial combat pilot in the Air Force.

Mr. Speaker, I encourage all of our colleagues to join me in honoring the life of Major McGuire by naming the post office in Sebring, Florida after him.

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 very strong support of H.R. 5985.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Levin), my good friend, for any remarks he may choose to make.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentleman from California for his thoughtful remarks, I urge passage of H.R. 5985, and 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 H.R. 7893, and I yield 4 minutes to the very distinguished gentlewoman from Alabama (Ms. Sewell).

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

Mr. Speaker, I urge passage of H.R. 7893, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in very strong support of H.R. 7192, and I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Correa) for any remarks he may have.

Mr. Speaker, I urge passage of H.R. 7192.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in very strong support of H.R. 1098, and I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New Hampshire (Mr. Pappas), for any remarks he may choose to have on this significant occasion.

Mr. Speaker, I urge the passage of H.R. 1098, and 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 H.R. 6651. Sergeant Murphy is a lifelong resident of Necedah, Wisconsin, and this legislation would rename a post office in Necedah after him.

He served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam war. As squad leader, Sergeant Murphy assisted multiple wounded soldiers and led his fellow servicemembers to overwhelm his adversaries on a search and destroy mission in November 1966. He is the recipient of a Purple Heart and a Distinguished Service Cross for his valiant service.

Mr. Speaker, I encourage all of my colleagues to join me in honoring the efforts of Sergeant Murphy by naming the post office in Necedah, Wisconsin, after him.

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

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

I rise today to oppose H.R. 192, yet another attack on home rule in the District of Columbia. I wish we were here today talking about climate change, which is a dagger at the throat of humanity.

We have seen record drought in the Midwest, record forest fires in the West, record flooding in the East, hurricanes of record velocity in the distinguished gentleman from Louisiana's beloved Gulf Coast. There were mosquitoes in the north pole last summer. The sea levels are rising everywhere.

However, we are not here to talk about that emergency.

I do have a book for my friend, Mr. Higgins, called ``Bayou Farewell'' written by one of my constituents about what has been taking place on the Louisiana coast that I am going to offer to him today.

We are not talking about climate change, and we are not talking about gun violence, despite the fact that America now has rates of gun violence and gun-related mortality 20 times higher than the nations of the European Union. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death among children and young people under 18 in America. It is out of control.

However, we are not talking about that.

We are exercising our constitutional authority, as my distinguished colleague from Louisiana says, to oversee the District of Columbia. Here today what has caught our eye is that they have legislation which passed and has become law in the District of Columbia which allows permanent residents and other noncitizens to register to vote.

As a result, they have nearly a half million registered voters in the District of Columbia. Madam Speaker, 512 of them are noncitizens. A little bit more than one-tenth of 1 percent of registered voters are noncitizens.

Their primary election in 2024 has already begun. The D.C. voters received their ballots or began receiving ballots in the mail on April 29, and the District has already begun accepting ballots.

The D.C. Council had transmitted the Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2022 to Congress for the required review period on January 10, 2023.

The House passed a disapproval resolution, as my friend mentioned, on February 9, 2023. The Senate did not pass the disapproval resolution.

The act became law in March of 2023.

What we are talking about now is passing legislation to overturn a practice that is literally taking place as we speak within the District of Columbia.

Now the critical point everybody needs to understand is that the District of Columbia has no voting representation in the House of Representatives, nor does the District of Columbia have any voting representation in the United States Senate. Their legislation doesn't apply even to their nonvoting delegate in the House, nor does it apply, of course, to Presidential elections.

What we are talking about is should these 500 or so people in the District of Columbia be allowed to vote for advisory neighborhood commission, school board, and members of the D.C. Council and mayoral elections.

The practice of noncitizen voting, my friend may be interested to learn, is one that actually was adopted in the vast majority of American States at different points in American history, including, I checked, in Louisiana, where it existed for around a decade.

It started, as far as I could tell, with this basic premise, that when the country began, there was a race qualification, a gender qualification, and property, wealth, and religion qualifications in different places, but the basic logic of it was that if you are a White male property owner, it doesn't make any difference what your citizenship status is. That lasted really up until the Civil War.

The practice of alien suffrage at the local level was one that became hotly contested before the Civil War. The Southern States opposed it because they said that the immigrants who were coming in who were being given the right to vote were antislavery, abolitionists. The Northern States, specifically the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln, defended the practice of noncitizen voting. This was a major bone of contention geographically, sectionally, in the country with legislation like the Kansas-Nebraska Act and other statehood admission struggles.

When the South seceded from the Union and wrote their own constitution, the very first article of the Confederate Constitution banned the practice, which we are discussing in a very modified form today. They banned anybody from voting in the Confederacy

who was not a citizen of the Confederacy. When the Union won the war, and secession was put down, alien suffrage spread across the country.

Again, the Republican Party championed it, and they championed it in the form of something called declarant alien suffrage, which is, for people who were permanent residents of the country who were on the pathway to citizenship, they were given the right to vote, especially in a lot of the Western States, as those States tried to attract population westward.

The practice appears to have been diminished and eliminated in a lot of places around the turn of 20th century and before World War I. It survives today in the form that the District of Columbia has fastened onto it for local voting on the theory that you want people at the local level to be involved in their kids' schools and you want people to be engaged in local government.

We ban noncitizen voting at the Federal level, which means we also ban it at the State level because they are linked constitutionally in Article I. So, what we are talking about is noncitizen voting chosen by a local government at the local level simply for municipal elections.

The basic logic of it there, as I understand it from just trying to read up on what the people in D.C. did, was that they saw that while noncitizens from Canada or Mexico, for example, shouldn't be able to vote in national elections because the interests of the United States and Canada and Mexico may diverge, at the local level, everybody presumably has the same basic interests in efficient garbage collection, excellent public schools, and so on.

That is why they have done it. It affects a relative handful of people. I am not quite certain why we would be engaging in legislative action to overturn it, except for the purposes of sending some kind of message about it.

The gentleman also mentioned diplomatic personnel and undocumented people. As for the diplomatic personnel, a foreign passport may not be used to register to vote in the District of Columbia. The person has to have a residential address in the District of Columbia, and it cannot be an embassy or another diplomatic site because you can't register at your place of work. I don't know whether the gentleman has actually any evidence of this happening. I think, if there were, that would be something we would be interested in.

The same thing with undocumented people. It would, of course, be crazy for an undocumented person to attach their name to a public and transparent document like a voter registration document. I don't know if they have any evidence that this has happened, but we were not able to find any evidence that there were any undocumented people doing so.

In other words, the District's use of this practice for local elections and local government functions appears to be in accord with the way it has always been used, which is for permanent residents who are part of the community who are on the pathway to citizenship.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, just a couple of quick points about the distinguished gentleman's remarks.

First after all, what we are talking about is making a Federal decision or a congressional decision for a locality.

The gentleman's native Texas had noncitizen voting from 1869 to 1921. For a half-century, Texas had it. That policy is one that was completely up to them. It was never overruled by the Federal Government.

The gentleman says that foreign agents could vote under this legislation. Of course, foreign agents can vote all across the country today. People who register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act or fail to register under FARA and are convicted for that still have the right to vote. I believe Michael Flynn is still voting despite the fact that he failed to register under FARA. Paul Manafort is still voting. Other people who have been foreign agents don't automatically lose their right to vote because of that.

In the District of Columbia, if somebody wants to register from a foreign country, they effectively have to renounce their right to vote in a foreign country because the District of Columbia says you can't be voting in another country.

Incidentally, that is not the rule all over the world. Under the Maastricht Treaty, Americans who are living in European countries and are effectively domiciled there, which is defined as having physical residence plus the indefinite intention to remain, are given the right to vote in European localities--again, in just European local elections, not in EU elections or national elections. If you are an American living in Barcelona or Spain indefinitely, you get to vote in local elections there. They have adopted basically the same logic that the people in D.C. adopted, which is that they want people who are living there indefinitely to be engaged in local government.

Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton).

Madam Speaker, I yield an additional 20 seconds to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia.

Madam Speaker, I quote Justice Scalia on what the very distinguished gentleman from California just described as a radical practice: In general, noncitizen voting ``has been open, widespread, and unchallenged since the early days of the Republic.''

What my Republican colleagues would like to portray as some kind of outlandish practice is one that has been used at various points in our history by a majority of the States, certainly at the local level. It was the Republican Party, again, I reemphasize, which was the great champion of noncitizen voting and stood up for it against the States that ended up seceding from the Union in the Civil War.

We were debating the very point that the gentleman fastened upon when we talked about the Census. The Supreme Court has been emphatic repeatedly that the Census counts everyone in America, citizens and noncitizens alike.

Now, we know Republicans don't like that. My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have been trying to get around it in a dozen different ways, but the Supreme Court has been perfectly clear that everyone is counted in the Census, even if they don't have the right to vote and even if they are not a citizen.

Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Illinois (Mrs. Ramirez).

Madam Speaker, I am sorry that the gentleman from New Jersey has left the Chamber because I could reassure and console him very quickly. It is against the law for noncitizens to vote in Federal elections. That is embodied in Federal statute, and it is a crime for someone to attempt to do that. That is not what is on the table here today.

What is on the table is whether a locality, in this case, the District of Columbia, should be permitted to allow noncitizens to participate in local elections for things like school board and city council and advisory neighborhood commissions.

The gentleman from New Jersey should be apprised at some point that the great State of New Jersey allowed noncitizen voting between 1776 when the country began and 1820. For a half century, it was allowed in his State and obviously did not lead to the downfall of the Republic.

Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Stevens).

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for her trenchant remarks. She makes an excellent point. Washington, D.C., is the only National Capital on the planet Earth disenfranchised in its own legislature, which is the vulnerability that is being exploited today by our colleagues.

Can you imagine if they told the people of Paris that they could not be represented in L'Assemblee nationale simply because they breathed the same air as representatives coming from other parts of France? You would have another French Revolution on your hands.

I will thank the people of Washington that Ms. Norton represents, who have a valid bona fide political grievance and yet did not come down here and beat the daylights out of our police officers, wounding and brutalizing and hospitalizing nearly 150 of them.

They have gone about it the right way. They have petitioned for statehood, and they are trying to defend their rights to govern themselves.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Robert Garcia).

Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time I have remaining.

Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Louisiana for a very substantive and dignified debate on this subject, which I know attracts strong views across the aisle.

I want to restate some essential points for people to keep in mind. One is that what we are talking about is local elections in the District of Columbia, so the question is who will get to vote for the school board members and the councilmembers and who will

get to vote for the neighborhood advisory commissioners. That is an institution that I think is unique to the District of Columbia, where neighborhoods have elected representatives who get to weigh in on things like the times that bars close, restaurant licenses, and stuff like that. That is really what we are talking about here.

The people in D.C. have only one nonvoting Delegate for the District of Columbia, no voting representation here, no voting representation in the Senate, so the noncitizens, the 500 or so who are registered today, can't even vote for Eleanor Holmes Norton. It goes to the question of local elections.

I am certain that most Members of Congress and most Americans certainly didn't expect that the House of Representatives would be spending so much time debating this relatively minute matter and, I daresay, trivial matter in the context of all the national emergencies and crises we are facing today, but it does seem to be part of an election year assault on the District of Columbia.

It is a lot easier to kick D.C. around a little bit than to solve the gun crisis, which has gotten to the point where gun violence is now the leading cause of death in America for young people under the age of 18. It is a lot easier to kick D.C. around a little bit than to confront the climate crisis, which is bearing down on all of us across the country.

The gentleman has made one very powerful point, which is, constitutionally, we have the authority to do this because the people in D.C. are still under the authority of Congress under Article I, Section 8, Clause 17. That is why they want out. They want us to use our power over the District in all cases whatsoever to modify the boundaries of the District of Columbia and to yield the residential areas to the creation of a new State.

The power of Congress to do that was established in 1846 when Alexandria, Arlington, and Fairfax County were retroceded to Virginia. We have the power to redraw it. We can redraw it, and D.C. would actually be larger populationwise than two other States in the Union.

They want to exist on a plane of political equality. They want to be able to have the right to go through the same political experience the gentleman talked about in Texas. At one point, they wanted to grant noncitizens the right to vote in local elections. At another point, they didn't. That is all they are asking for, the right to make their own decisions for themselves.

I daresay, no matter how benevolently motivated the gentleman from Louisiana is, or I am as a Representative from Maryland, no one is more interested in the welfare of the people in the District of Columbia than the people who actually live there.

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

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

I thank the distinguished gentlewoman from South Carolina for her great leadership on this as well as Mr. Connolly from Virginia for his very hard work on it, too.

In this century, public confidence in the Federal Government depends on ensuring that our Federal information technology systems and websites are secure, safe, and effective. We invest more than $100 billion every year in Federal IT needs. Outdated legacy IT systems and infrastructure are costly to maintain and very challenging to secure against the onslaught of cyberattacks by adversaries and criminal organizations. The constantly changing landscape of information technology requires resources if Federal agencies are going to be able to protect data privacy, complete their missions, and effectively serve our people.

The Modernizing Government Technology Reform Act would ensure this important work continues smoothly by extending the Technology Modernization Fund's sunset from December 2025 to December 2031. It would also clarify the use of funds and maintain the repayment flexibility adopted by the Technology Modernization Fund, known as the TMF, in recent years while ensuring its solvency by setting minimum reimbursement requirements.

Additionally, the bill sets requirements for regularly updated inventories and lists of legacy Federal IT systems and high-risk Federal IT systems, as well as of the legacy systems that present the greatest security, privacy, and operational risks.

This timely and comprehensive picture of the Federal Government's most serious IT modernization needs will inform the ability of the TMF, the administration, and Congress to make the best investments.

The TMF provides a self-sustaining funding model that has become an essential tool for Federal agencies to address these challenges. It supplies upfront funding for IT projects in exchange for future reimbursement once a project's cost savings are realized, allowing agencies the flexibility they need to address modernization needs outside of the traditional budget cycle.

The TMF also instills accountability safeguards to ensure that taxpayers are getting strong returns on our investments. Projects are selected for funding after rigorous review by the TMF board of technology experts, and written funding agreements outline specific requirements and milestones that have to be met. Funds are distributed incrementally based on performance as assessed by quarterly reviews by the board, and technical experts provide hands-on support toward successful execution of the projects.

Committee Democrats have supported robust oversight and funding for the TMF, including a historic $1 billion investment through the American Rescue Plan. With this infusion, high-priority projects were also allowed reduced repayment requirements, if warranted. Since the infusion of these moneys, the TMF has received more than 220 agency proposals requesting more than $3.5 billion, far outpacing our funding availability.

To date, the TMF has provided over $900 million to 57 IT modernization projects across 32 agencies, and the Biden-Harris administration has embraced it as an indispensable tool to better serve the American people.

For example, TMF funding is helping to digitize veterans' records, ensuring that more than 1 million people and their family members who reach out to the National Archives and Records Administration every year get timely access to the documents they need to verify their qualification for important lifesaving benefits.

TMF funding is also expediting the speed and safety of food inspection at the USDA, leading to better meals for school kids and servicemembers alike. TMF funding also better secures all of our personal data at the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education.

I thank Representatives Mace and Connolly for their great work on this important project. I urge my colleagues to support the bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I have no further speakers. I yield myself such time as I may consume for the purpose of closing.

Madam Speaker, I urge everybody to support this fine legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Madam Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentlewoman, again, from South Carolina, and I thank my wonderful colleague from California, Mr. Ro Khanna, for his leadership on H.R. 5887, the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act. I am really proud to declare our support for this bipartisan legislation.

Federal Government services should be accessible and responsive to the American people. This means ensuring agencies have the resources and staffing they need to fulfill their missions, as well as the infrastructure and technology they need to have effective interactions with the public. Committee Democrats have fought for adequate funding so that the government makes the necessary Federal IT modernization investments that our agencies need to deliver for the people. It also means strengthening and standardizing Federal agencies' efforts to improve the delivery of government services.

Mr. Khanna's bill would create a Federal Government service delivery lead position in the Office of Management and Budget to coordinate government-wide efforts to improve the delivery of services. Working with lead service delivery officials designated at each Federal agency, the service delivery lead at OMB would develop and oversee the implementation of government-wide standards, policies, and guidelines to improve government service delivery, and would evaluate agency progress, including by collecting and reporting information, data, and metrics.

This bipartisan bill will help ensure the Federal government is providing the best service possible to the people and that it is acting in transparent, methodical, and accountable ways to improve our delivery of government services.

I urge all my colleagues to support H.R. 5887.

Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. Khanna).

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

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

Madam Speaker, I rise in favor of the Federal Prison Oversight Act, which would strengthen oversight of our prisons and improve conditions for the people who work and live inside them.

I thank the bill's House leaders, my friends and colleagues Representatives Lucy McBath and Kelly Armstrong, as well as Senators Jon Ossoff and Mike Braun and Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, for their strong bipartisan work on this legislation.

The bill has the support of a wide array of groups across the spectrum, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Prosperity, the Conservative Political Action Committee, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, Justice Action Network, Right on Crime, the Due Process Institute, and the Council of Prison Locals, which represents 30,000 correctional officers.

Federal prisons have long experienced systemic problems that threaten the health, safety, and civil rights of incarcerated people and also the staff who work there. For example, last year, NPR reported that more than 4,950 incarcerated people had died in facilities operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in the last 10 years. Many of the incarcerated either experienced delayed care or postponed care for serious medical problems.

This February, the DOJ inspector general issued a scathing report on

BOP prisons, which found that systemic policy violations and operational failures contributed significantly to the problem of inmate suicide.

Bureau of Prisons facilities are responsible for more than 158,000 incarcerated people and more than 34,000 correctional officers and staff. As documented by GAO in our hearings, BOP has consistently struggled with the problem of staffing shortages. According to the Council of Prison Locals, BOP has lost 20 percent of its employees since 2016 and only employs around 13,000 correctional staff officers today, despite receiving appropriations to fund more than 20,000.

As of 2023, staffing levels for healthcare workers at BOP facilities were only 69 percent, and nearly 20 percent of the facilities do not have a healthcare program onsite to provide even routine and preventative healthcare. Staffing shortages have contributed to often disturbing and, at times, fatal delays in rendering healthcare services for the incarcerated.

GAO has also reported on BOP challenges in upholding its responsibilities to help inmates prepare for a successful release and reintegration, including implementation of important requirements of the First Step Act of 2018 to lower the risk of recidivism.

Additionally, BOP has systemically struggled to make prudent use of resources due to a failure to effectively monitor and evaluate its programs. Taken together, these challenges led GAO to add the management of the prison system to its 2023 high-risk list, indicating the severity and magnitude of these problems.

H.R. 3019 would take important steps to address these concerns by requiring the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General to periodically inspect, evaluate, and report on policies, procedures, and activities at BOP prisons, with higher risk facilities required to undergo even more frequent inspection.

Such inspections may include reviews of inmate confinement conditions; working conditions and staffing capabilities; policies and procedures related to housing, confinement, and other restrictive housing; healthcare programs and services; and complaints of violence and abuse made against incarcerated people and staff.

The bill would also establish an ombudsman within DOJ that would be charged with receiving such complaints that go to problems threatening the health, safety, welfare, and rights of incarcerated people and staff.

Institutionalized misconduct, mismanagement, abuse, and negligence have no place in the Federal Government, especially in operations dealing with vulnerable people who are most in need of a pathway back to personal health and responsibility and to society.

To make our communities safer, uphold our values, and reduce recidivism, it is imperative that we bring increased transparency, accountability, and humanity to our prisons. The Federal Prison Oversight Act is an important step forward on these goals, and I urge my colleagues to support the bill today.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from Georgia (Mrs. McBath), the author of the legislation and a real leader on criminal justice reform.

Madam Speaker, I thank Mrs. McBath for her magnificent leadership on this and her commitment to creating decent conditions in our prisons. I thank her for the beautiful example of her commitment based on her love of Jordan and her whole family and community.

Madam Speaker, I urge all colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this very fine legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I start by humbly suggesting that the majority needs someone new working on legislative acronyms for these messaging bills. This is the DC CRIMES Act, which stands for the D.C. Criminal Reforms to Immediately Make Everyone Safe Act of 2024.

``Immediately make everyone safe.'' That doesn't sound like legislation. It sounds like a Penn & Teller magic trick to me.

If the gentleman from Florida can actually immediately make everyone safe, the gentleman should not only be Donald Trump's running mate, as I keep hearing about, but the gentleman should be the Mayor of the District of Columbia.

The D.C. Criminal Reforms to Immediately Make Everyone Safe Act is the fourth bill that the majority has brought to the floor to vilify, heckle, and micromanage the elected Mayor and Council of the District of Columbia on the appalling conceit that the distinguished Members of the Republican Conference from Florida or Kentucky or Arizona care more about public safety and public welfare in Washington, D.C., than do the 700,000 people who

live there and their elected officials on the D.C. Council and the Mayor.

This one is even more sweeping and radical than their prior bills. It doesn't simply overturn one specific current D.C. law. It permanently strips D.C. of authority over any of its criminal laws, making this legislation, perhaps inadvertently, I concede, the largest proposed rollback of D.C.'s authority to govern itself in nearly 30 years.

Our colleagues may be shocked to learn during this debate what exactly it is they are being asked to vote for today. At the Rules Committee meeting yesterday, I asked the Republican Members whether they understood what this bill actually does if you take the time to read the language. None of them seemed to know.

Let me explain. The bill amends the D.C. Home Rule Act to say that the D.C. Council may not ``enact any act, resolution, or rule to change any criminal . . . sentence in effect on the date of the enactment of the DC CRIMES Act of 2024.''

In other words, if this bill becomes law, the D.C. Council could never increase criminal penalties again without Congress acting first, nor could it create any new criminal offenses at all.

This is their big tough-on-crime package the majority offers the Congress: No increases in criminal sentences indefinitely in the District of Columbia, and no new offenses can be passed at all.

Say the D.C. Council wanted to create a new criminal offense for directing an organized retail theft ring. Mr. Donalds' bill would prevent them from doing it.

Say D.C. wanted to make it a crime to possess a firearm with a removed or altered or mutilated serial number. Under Mr. Donalds' bill, they would be barred from doing so.

In fact, that is precisely what D.C. just did a few months ago. My Republican colleagues seem blissfully oblivious to the fact that, earlier this year, responding to the spike in crime occurring across America--not just in Washington, D.C., of course--the D.C. Council passed a 63-page law called the Secure DC Omnibus Emergency Amendment Act of 2024, which dramatically increased criminal penalties for nine different crimes and created six new criminal offenses.

The D.C. bill, which was passed unanimously by the council and signed into law by the Mayor, does what Republicans have so eloquently been orating about on the floor. It increased criminal penalties, including for gun crimes, violence in parks, violence committed against vulnerable people, and violence committed against rideshare drivers, Metro drivers, and transit workers.

The Secure DC Omnibus Emergency Amendment Act also created a host of new offenses, including directing a retail theft ring, strangulation, firing bullets in public, possessing a firearm with a removed or altered serial number, and unlawful discarding of firearms or ammunition.

They addressed the actual problems that they are experiencing in their city, something our colleagues seriously know nothing about and don't care about. If Mr. Donalds' bill had actually been law at the time, the D.C. Council would have been barred from enacting all of these tough-on-crime penalties altogether, and they will be barred in the future from responding to the kinds of spikes in crime that they experience.

Amazingly, the gentleman proposes this naked power grab against Washington, denying them the crime-fighting tools they need, despite the fact that they have done a good job and total crime in D.C. is down 16 percent in 2024 compared to the same period last year, which was conceded by the Republicans in the Rules Committee yesterday.

There has been a 26-percent reduction in violent crime in 2024, which they conceded in the Rules Committee yesterday, and a 22-percent reduction in homicides.

In other words, local democracy works. Let the local governments respond to the problems they are having, but our colleagues insist that crime is still spiking in D.C., despite the evidence to the contrary.

What is their big tough-on-crime solution? The bold solution Republicans offer us to combat crime in the Nation's Capital is to prohibit the D.C. Council from ever increasing any criminal penalties and blocking the D.C. Council from ever creating any new crimes.

If that is not what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle intend to do, then I think my colleagues need to go back and try again with some new legislation.

In any event, for my Republican colleagues who love to castigate the people of D.C., who I concede voted more than 90 percent against Donald Trump in the last election, I would respectfully suggest that the majority considers the following fact: D.C. has higher maximum criminal penalties than many Republican States do. Let's compare.

The maximum penalty for armed robbery in D.C. is 30 years. In Kentucky, represented by the chairman of the Oversight Committee, the maximum is 20 years, 50 percent less. In North Dakota, it is 10 years, or 66 percent less.

In D.C., criminals can receive a 40-year sentence for armed carjacking. In Kentucky, represented by the chairman of the Oversight Committee, carjacking is not a separate independent offense. You have to charge somebody with armed robbery, but even then, you can only get half the sentence you can get in D.C. for carjacking.

Despite all of the fine election-year rhetoric we have heard, there is something profoundly antithetical to our system of government in what the gentleman is proposing. If you read the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson set forth a bill of particulars against King George and the Parliament, and one of the central allegations of it was that they were denying the colonists the right to define criminal offenses for themselves. People over in England were dictating to people in our country what the criminal offenses should be, and that is like, with all due respect, the gentleman from Florida dictating to the people in Washington, D.C., how they should order their affairs when it comes to the criminal law.

Jefferson would have understood very well the situation that we are in, and our friends in Washington, 713,000 taxpaying, draftable U.S. citizens, have petitioned for statehood because they no longer want to be kicked around by other people's Representatives. They want to have an equal say in this body and an equal say in the U.S. Senate. They don't want other people's Representatives telling them that they can't pass the criminal offenses or the increased criminal sentences that they want for their crimes.

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

Mr. Speaker, the distinguished gentleman from Arizona invites us to believe that the people of Washington, D.C., don't want to respond to spikes in crime in their own city. It is only in response to hearings called by Republican Members of Congress. I think that is an affront to our fellow citizens who obviously care deeply about what is going on in their own city, and I daresay a lot more than those of us who represent other jurisdictions, because we care principally about the places that we represent.

Mr. Speaker, I will say before yielding to my friend from the District of Columbia that you don't have to look like a monarch or a tyrant to act like a monarch or a tyrant.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton), the distinguished, nonvoting delegate.

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia.

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

Let's see, no one on the other side has contradicted the plain, commonsense interpretation of this bill, which is that the District of Columbia Council will now be disabled from ever increasing a criminal penalty again, a criminal sentence again, and the District of Columbia Council will never be able to create a new criminal offense like the one they just created for running a retail theft ring, which has become a problem across the country in a lot of places. A lot of States have legislated on that. I know Maryland has legislated on that.

I am just wondering whether anyone on that side would yield for a question whether this is the deliberate intention of this legislation or it is just a mistake or whether they don't accept that plain, commonsense reading of the language of the bill because we are voting on something far more drastic and sweeping than what was represented by the sponsor's original statement.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Bishop), momentarily, so that he can answer my question.

Are we interpreting it properly?

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

Before the gentleman leaves the Chamber, I thought I might note, I am going to give him some examples, some anecdotes and data since he appears to be legislating by vignette: In Summerville, South Carolina, last week there was a severe armed carjacking by three teenage suspects. In April, a man wanted for murder in Rock Hill was captured following another carjacking at a Huntersville QuikTrip.

I could give you a dozen of those. I don't think that the answer to any of that would be to disenfranchise the people of South Carolina or to have Congress usurp the State legislative authority or the local authority there.

My friend from Florida describes the District of Columbia as a Federal enclave, which of course it is not. A Federal enclave is a Federal property or land, like in Rockville, Maryland, which is my district, where we have the NIH. That is a Federal enclave.

This is the District constituting the seat of government set forth in Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the Constitution.

Now, both of my friends over there say, well, we are going to take just a small step in the right direction.

How is it the right direction to deprive the people of the District of Columbia the power to have control over their own criminal sentencing, including the power to increase criminal sentences? If they had passed this legislation at the beginning of the year, they would have foreclosed the ability of the District of Columbia to increase criminal penalties across the board on a whole range of offenses and perhaps even to create new criminal offenses in the District.

The gentleman from South Carolina lectured the people of Washington, D.C., about criminal incidents taking place here, and of course there are criminal incidents taking place also in South Carolina in the exact same way.

However, how about something that took place even closer to home? How about the violent mob insurrection where a mob incited by the ex- President violently assaulted Capitol Police officers and Metropolitan Police Department officers who were forced to deploy to the Capitol, and nearly 150 of them ended up brutalized, wounded, and hospitalized after being hit over the head or in the chest or stabbed or speared by steel pipes, Confederate battle flags, Trump flags, and American flags, shamefully?

Yet, we have the ex-President and a number of people who are his sycophants over on that side of the aisle describing people who are in jail for that, a majority of them having pled guilty

for those offenses, the others convicted after due process of law, calling those people hostages.

A hostage is someone who has been illegally abducted by a terrorist or criminal entity, like Hamas, and held for a financial or political ransom. Yet, shamefully, there are people on that side of the aisle who call the prisoners who have been convicted after having been given every aspect of American due process and right to counsel, they are calling them hostages or political prisoners, like Alexei Navalny or Nelson Mandela. That is what they have come to.

They want to denounce a criminal event that happened six blocks away. What about the massive criminal event, the most massive criminal event in the history of the Nation's Capital that came right into this Chamber, forcing the Senators and Representatives to flee, and they won't say a word about it. Yet, they get up and they denounce lawlessness, and they won't even denounce lawlessness that comes right into the Congress and the Capitol of the United States.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I thank the gentleman for pointing out that I accurately cited the statistics for all of the declines in crime and violent crime and homicides in the District of Columbia in 2024.

Alas, I do have to correct my friend in his history because there might be some students watching this. Thomas Jefferson never signed the Constitution. He was, of course, on a diplomatic mission when the Constitution was being signed in Philadelphia, but he did write the Declaration of Independence.

The other side says, bizarrely, that the District of Columbia Council and the Mayor should be denied the authority to increase criminal sentences forthwith because they have shown no inclination to increase criminal sentences.

Leaving aside the absolute illogic of the argument, it is also false because the District of Columbia in the secure D.C. act, passed just 2 months ago, increased criminal sentences across the board, which I am afraid my friends were completely oblivious to when they started this legislation. They weren't aware of it.

The people who claim to be speaking for the populous of Washington, D.C., didn't know that the Council had just acted to dramatically increase criminal penalties in the city. They denied them the right to further increase criminal penalties in the city because they say they haven't shown any inclination to do so which, of course, makes no sense and is also completely false.

All of this is pure political theater. It is bad political theater. Somebody decided a long time ago that it works for people who would never try to kick around their own State legislatures, their own county councils, or their own city councils to kick around the people of Washington, D.C.

My friends think that they have scored some kind of huge rhetorical coup, pointing out Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the Constitution, which indeed says that Congress shall exercise exclusive legislation over the District, constituting the seat of government from land that is ceded by various States.

Nobody on this side of the aisle, including the distinguished gentlewoman from the District of Columbia, has denied that for a second.

What we have said is this is a massive assault on home rule, and it is also an embarrassing one because it cuts completely against all of the rhetoric that we are hearing from our colleagues across the aisle.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I think we have made some progress in this conversation because a plain reading of the distinguished gentleman from Florida's legislation indicates that what he is telling the District of Columbia is you may never increase criminal penalties again. The only time there can be an increase in criminal penalties in the District of Columbia is if Congress does it.

Unfortunately, this Congress has a hard time even keeping a Speaker in place without them trying to vacate the chair and topple the Speaker.

This Congress, as the whole country knows, has been absolute chaos and dysfunction and disorganization from the beginning.

I don't blame the people from Washington, D.C., who sent us these letters; the Mayor, the Council, and the Attorney General of D.C. saying thanks, but no thanks. We will take it from here.

The people in D.C. are perfectly able to decide what criminal offenses they need in the District of Columbia and how the sentences should be set and fixed.

They have courts in the District of Columbia, they have a legislature, the Council for the District of Columbia, which is elected from their eight wards and four at-large members and the chairman of the Council, and they have a Mayor. They have advisory neighborhood commissions.

I wonder if any of my colleagues over there are active in any of the wards or advisory neighborhood commissions where they live. I tend to doubt it.

The people of D.C., I understand from Congresswoman Norton, are actually involved in the governance of their city and the management of their local affairs.

Yet, in this totally ham-handed and almost comically dysfunctional attempt to score points against D.C., they come up with legislation which says D.C. can never increase criminal penalties, again, when they are accusing D.C. of being too soft on crime, despite the fact that we are able to show that D.C. has tougher criminal sentences than many of the States represented by the Members who have been speaking about this over the last several days.

All of it feels a lot, to me, like a silly election-year stunt. I don't think anyone thinks that this is serious legislation, but I am glad at least that the other side has conceded that the bill means what it says.

They want to strip the District of Columbia of any power to increase criminal sentences in their city. I simply think that that is a terrible form of public policy and is a major inroad against home rule over the last several decades when, in fact, what we should be doing is giving the people of D.C. greater political self-government and giving them the rights to equal representation which, of course, was the aforementioned Jefferson's ideal for the country.

If you go back and read the Northwest Ordinance, he thought that every part of the country would eventually attain a level of political equality by admission to Statehood through Article IV of the Constitution.

That is the spirit of the Constitution, not kicking around people, our fellow citizens, because we think we have more power than them, and we can score some political points off them.

Why don't we have a hearing about Statehood for the District of Columbia, and let's keep the engines of democracy, freedom, and political equality in the country moving.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise to celebrate the life and achievements of Zach Polett, one of our Nation's greatest recent community organizers. A humble and unassuming figure, Zach was a brilliant political strategist and dedicated activist who--among other accomplishments--helped organize the first health care workers' union in the South, pass statewide minimum wage and campaign finance ballot initiatives, design nationwide voter registration programs and cultivate a new generation of community activists. The loss of Zach in September 2023 has been deeply felt by those fighting for social justice across the country.

The soul of our democracy is sustained by people like Zach, who believe in the fundamental dignity of every human being and the power of collective action to address our most pressing challenges. Though active in many social movements in college to oppose the Vietnam War and support the Civil Rights Movement, Zach originally set out to study medicine at Harvard University and Stanford Medical School. It turns out that his career as an organizer wouldn't stray too far from his original intent. Instead of treating people, Zach treated the structural ills that afflict our communities. He set out to heal the world.

After medical school, Zach moved to Little Rock for an internship with a small nonprofit called Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). That internship would change his life and the lives of so many others. Through ACORN, Zach quickly found his calling to help Americans from all walks of life channel their desire for change into community power. Zach was uniquely talented in the

nuts and bolts of organizing, like forging strong connections with people from all walks of life, formulating the hard-nosed political strategy required to win change and managing the administrative tedium essential to the functioning of any organization. His talents were recognized when he was asked to establish ACORN's activities in Louisiana, California and Florida. He helped organize the South's first union of health care workers. He oversaw Project Vote's campaign to register millions of voters. And he created a strategy to pass a ballot initiative raising the minimum wage for hardworking Arkansans in 2014. When he eventually served as Senior Vice President of the Public Interest Network, Zach refused to leave his adopted home state because of his commitment to the people of Arkansas.

Zach met the love of his life, Mary Mayeaux, while searching for ACORN volunteers in Louisiana. He and Mary raised their two sons Mark and David in Little Rock, and became the loving grandparents of Kian, Luka, Luna, and Vera. Zach's family and his chosen family of progressive organizers across America continue to feel the pain of his loss as a husband, father, grandfather, and leader. In his honor, we must continue his life's work to defend our democracy, build power from the ground up and steer our course towards a freer and more just future for all.

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

The last President tried to include a citizenship question on the decennial Census in 2020 and tried to count only U.S. citizens for the purpose of Census and reapportionment, and the effort failed miserably in court, for obvious reasons.

Section 2 of the 14th Amendment states that apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives is based on ``the whole number of persons in each State,'' persons being the all-encompassing category, much larger than that of citizens.

When the Framers wanted to impose a citizenship requirement in the text of the Constitution, they knew how to do it. Take the President of the United States, for example. It says that you have got to be a born U.S. citizen in order to run for President. Some of the historians tell us that was because Thomas Jefferson was trying to block Alexander Hamilton from running for President. He was foreign born. In any event, however, it was very clear that you needed to be a born U.S. citizen to run for President. For those of us in the House, it says we must have been a citizen for at least 7 years.

There are lots of citizenship requirements in the Constitution. There is no citizenship requirement for being counted in the Census and for purposes of reapportionment. On the contrary, the Census and reapportionment have included all persons, including noncitizens, like permanent resident green card holders, since 1790. That has been the unbroken practice since the beginning of the Republic.

This point was made even more clearly and emphatically by the Supreme Court in its unanimous 2016 decision in Evenwel v. Abbott, rejecting precisely the argument my distinguished friend is trying to make. Like this legislation itself, Evenwel involved a challenge to congressional apportionment based on a total count of the entire population

instead of a limited count of the total citizen or voter population. Justice Ginsburg held for a unanimous court that section 3 of the 14th Amendment ``retained total population as the congressional apportionment base.'' She cited the speech made on the floor of the Senate by Senator Jacob Howard upon introduction of section 2 of the 14th Amendment:

``The basis of representation is numbers . . . . The committee adopted numbers as the most just and satisfactory basis, and this is the principle upon which the Constitution itself was originally framed, that the basis of representation should depend upon numbers; and such, I think, after all, is the safest and most secure principle upon which the government can rest. Numbers, not voters; numbers, not property; this is the theory of the Constitution.''

My colleague needs to remember that when the Republic was founded, the vast majority of people were not citizens who could vote. Women could not vote, children could not vote, enslaved Americans, obviously, could not vote. So the Census and apportionment was for everybody who was here. That was the whole basis of the three-fifths compromise. Because enslaved Americans were being counted, too, what percentage should they count for purposes of reapportionment? Well, Congress arrived at 60 percent, three-fifths. It was the Southern States who were saying they should count completely for these purposes because they wanted the enslaved Americans to be enlarging and inflating the congressional delegations from the slave states. For these purposes, the Northern States said: No, they shouldn't count at all; they should count zero percent in the apportionment. They arrived at three-fifths. In any event, everybody agreed that everybody would be counted.

Justice Ginsburg included lots of decisive legislative authority like this, including the floor statement here in the House of Representative James Blaine, who stated: ``No one will deny that population is the true basis of representation; for women, children, and other nonvoting classes may have as vital an interest in the legislation of the country as those who actually deposit the ballot.''

For all of you constitutional textualists out there, the plain reading of the text is clear as day.

For all of you constitutional originalists out there, the original purposes of the passage of the 14th Amendment have been carefully articulated by the Supreme Court on a unanimous basis and never rebutted.

For all of you Members who like to follow precedent, every apportionment since 1790 has included every single person residing in the United States, not just those lucky enough to have been given the right to vote. As the Evenwel Court noted, the 14th Amendment contemplates that ``Representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible or registered to vote.''

The constitutional meaning is indisputable, a point which settles this for those who actually want to follow the Constitution in all cases, not just when it favors our own preferred policy outcome.

The House should be getting real work done instead of wasting more time on another MAGA bill that will never pass the Senate, let alone get signed by the President, much less approved by the courts. The bill is an insult, and it is an affront to the great radical Republicans who wrote the 14th Amendment. Their party was a profreedom, pro-union, proimmigrant, anticonspiracy theory, anti-Know Nothing Party that wanted to make sure everybody in the country was counted and made visible.

The Census is essential to democracy. Just as the Framers endorsed Thomas Paine's ``Common Sense,'' they endorsed a common Census, but this bill would destroy the accuracy of the Census, which may have something to do with its actual legislative motivation.

In the 2010 Census, the undercount of Hispanic citizens was 1.4 percent. In 2020, that number grew to 5 percent, with many observers crediting that jump to the Trump administration's simple attempt to add a citizenship question to the Census and all of the intense publicity and rumor surrounding it.

The addition of a question about citizenship will indeed deter many immigrants, including people who are permanent residents, including citizens, from completing the Census. Many noncitizen immigrants who are seeking asylum or are refugees will avoid responding because of uncertainty over their status and fear of arbitrary law enforcement action.

Extensive research over the last decade shows that many residents wrongly believe the Census Bureau will share their responses with other agencies. To be clear on this point, it does not. Federal law prohibits it. However, that pervasive worry has prevented some people from answering questions about immigration status or responding to the Census at all.

Mr. Speaker, we strongly oppose this legislation as unconstitutional and unwise. It dishonors our own history and the values of the Nation.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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

The gentleman from North Carolina observes that we don't have anybody wearing a black robe in the House of Representatives today, but you don't have to wear a black robe in order to read the Constitution, interpret the Constitution, and follow it.

If you need people with black robes, then I would urge the gentleman to read the Supreme Court's decision in Evenwel v. Abbott, where the Supreme Court unanimously found that the Census and reapportionment must include the entire population, all persons; not all citizens, not all voters, the alternative suggestions that are being made today.

Mr. Speaker, what do we have here? Since 1790, all persons have been included in the Census, in every Census on a decennial basis since the beginning of the Republic.

The Supreme Court rejected the theory that is being advanced by my friends in the majority today in Evenwel v. Abbott that the Constitution requires citizens rather than persons, and the gentleman from North Carolina invites us to think it has something to do with immigration.

We actually had an immigration deal coming out of the Senate for hundreds of new Border Patrol officers and asylum officers and asylum judges and fentanyl detection machinery, and it was vetoed by the fourth branch of government, Donald Trump, who said he didn't want a border solution, he wanted a border crisis to run on.

Despite the fact that Senator Lankford, perhaps one of the most conservative Senators that we have in the Republican Party, said that this was a great deal and the best that he had ever seen coming out of the Senate, and despite the fact that Senator McConnell was for it, they blew it all up.

You judge for yourself the seriousness of the claims that they want to do something about immigration. This is another useless and needless distraction.

I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Barragan).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Illinois (Mrs. Ramirez).

Mr. Speaker, I am about to yield to my friend from New York (Ms. Meng), but I am inspired by the remarks of the gentleman from Wisconsin, especially about the word ``Republic'' which, of course, comes from res publica, the public thing.

He happened upon a subject that is of a lot of interest to me because I wrote a paper about it when I was in sixth grade.

The Pledge of Allegiance was written by a radical Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy--I am not sure if the gentleman is aware of that--on the 400th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the new world.

Reverend Bellamy, who was an abolitionist in Vermont, was concerned about the continuing salute of the Confederate battle flag in the southern States.

He wanted to write a flag salute that would be unifying for the union, and he wrote: I pledge allegiance to my flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, with liberty and justice for all.

You notice what is not in there. He did not have ``under God.'' That was added in 1954 by Congress several weeks after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

In any event, I am not quite sure what the relevance is of the gentleman's invocation of the Republic or of Ben Franklin and the famous vignette about him saying: If you can keep it.

Ben Franklin was, of course, a big supporter of immigration to the country, although he did display an anti-German bias in some of his writings.

I will tell you a little story about Ben Franklin that might be of relevance to what the gentleman is talking about because I just did a tour in Philadelphia with the Ben Franklin people up there, and we learned this wonderful story.

He made a loan to a friend of his for $100, and then he recorded in his diary that this gentleman he made the loan to for $100, Josiah, was always disappearing behind a tree or a building whenever Ben came along.

He finally caught up with him, and he said: Josiah, I loaned you a hundred bucks, and I am wondering, am I going to be able to get my principal back or at least the interest?

Josiah said: Well, Ben, look. The $100 is well invested somewhere else, so you don't have to worry about that.

Franklin said: Well, what about the interest?

Josiah said: Well, I forgot to tell you that it is against my religion to pay interest, so I can't pay you the interest.

Franklin said: You mean to tell me it is against your principle to pay me the interest, and it is against your interest to pay me the principal?

Josiah said: That's right.

Franklin said: Well, I can see I am not going to get either.

Well, here our principles and our interests converge very much. The principles are set forth in the Constitution, which is we count everybody, and everybody is part of the Census, and everybody is part of the reapportionment process.

It has been like that since 1790. We don't need to start finger painting on the Constitution with this silly election year proposal.

It is also in our interest because, as my colleagues have said, this is a land that is built on immigration. Except for the Native Americans who are already here and the people who were brought over as slaves, all of us are the descendants of immigrants to this country.

Tom Paine, when he got to America in 1774, 2 years before the Revolution, he said: This land, if it lives up to its principles, will become an asylum to humanity--not an insane asylum, mind you--an asylum to humanity, a place of refuge for people seeking freedom from religious, political, and economic oppression. That is who we are.

Every day I have in my office people from the hotel industry, people from the construction industry, and people from the restaurant industry saying: We have huge labor shortages. We need people in America.

I am for a whole lot more lawful immigration to America, less unlawful immigration to America like the deal that was worked out in the Senate that was rejected by the Republicans, and a lot less demagoguery about who we are as a country because the Census and reapportionment provisions in the 14th Amendment tell it all.

This is a country that is for everybody seeking opportunity and hope,

willing to follow the law and follow our Constitution.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Meng).

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from New York.

Mr. Speaker, I know Mr. Burchett's prayers go right to the top.

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

It is always great to be with my friend from Tennessee. Just two quick points on his always trenchant remarks.

One is that one should be clear that under this legislation, they are not roping out of the reapportionment just undocumented people. They are also roping out of the reapportionment permanent residents, people who are green card holders who are on the pathway to citizenship already. They are talking about disenfranchising from the Census reapportionment process millions of people who are lawfully within it. They should be aware of that.

Also, if we were being cynical politically, we would embrace this legislation because it is the red States like Texas and Florida whose congressional delegations are inflated by virtue of counting people who are not citizens. We are simply trying to follow what the Constitution says, which I know is kind of a radical proposition around here these days.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Manning).

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

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

If you strip away all the bombast and all the rhetoric, the gentleman just basically delivered a tirade about immigration but never addressed the fact that their legislation is totally unconstitutional.

If you want to deal with immigration, we had a bill, and the bill would have added hundreds of Border Patrol officers, asylum officers, and judges. The Republican leadership in the Senate said it was a great deal. They got most of what they wanted. It was a great compromise. Yet, who didn't want it? Donald Trump, still the putative leader of those who are left in the GOP, Lincoln's party. Donald Trump didn't want it because he didn't want a border solution. He wants a border crisis.

They are left with a bunch of completely superficial, empty bills like this one, which I doubt will even pass the House. If it does pass the House, it certainly won't pass the Senate. It will never be signed by the President, and it would be struck down immediately by the Supreme Court.

Why are we wasting our time on that instead of getting to the legislation that actually a majority of the Senate was behind? I wish one of my colleagues would address that.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, it is always delightful to hear my friend from Colorado speak. One thing that I do want to point out, however, because there might be some students in the gallery today, is that there can be no illegal aliens and there can be no green card holders in Congress because the Constitution very clearly specifies that you must have been a citizen for 7 years before you run for the House, you must have been a citizen for 9 years before you run for the Senate, and you must be a born U.S. citizen in order to run for President of the United States, which some historians, as I think I mentioned before, attribute to Thomas Jefferson trying to write Alexander Hamilton out of the Presidential sweepstakes.

In any event, I think that my colleagues should probably relax with some of the hyperbole and exaggeration here. After all, all we are saying is: Let's keep doing what we have done since 1790 in the country.

This is the way that the Census and the reapportionment have always been run in the United States of America, and what they are proposing is obviously a radical departure from what the Constitution ordains.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to hear someone on that side of the aisle denounce Vladimir Putin, and I thank him for his remarks. We should definitely avoid putting in a President of the United States who looks up to Vladimir Putin and calls him a genius.

In any event, I could be persuaded by the gentleman's policy arguments, but then we have got to amend the Constitution. This is the way it has been done since the beginning of the Republic. The language in the 14th Amendment is perfectly clear, that it is all of the persons of the State who have to be counted.

Mr. Speaker, I thought you guys were constitutional textualists. I thought you followed the language of the Constitution, the original intent of the Constitution, and the precedent that has been set. I could be persuaded by it. I don't like the fact that Texas and Florida, or any State for that matter, gets an inflated congressional delegation because of this reason or that. Let's have that discussion, but you have got to amend the Constitution. You can't just say: Well, I don't like what is in the Constitution, and therefore I am going to ignore it.

The point about the territories I am not sure I understood. That undercut the gentleman's argument because, of course, the people in the territories are not represented in the House of Representatives except by nonvoting delegates whose votes ultimately don't count and can't count according to a D.C. circuit court decision called Michel v. Anderson.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, why do you need to amend the Constitution if you can just go ahead and do it by statute here?

That is rather curious. I think the gentleman doth protest just a little bit too much. I admire the intellectual honesty in putting forth a constitutional amendment, because that is precisely what needs to be done. I am happy to look at that. I appreciate his candor in admitting that the Constitution needs to be amended in order to overturn more than 2 centuries of practice and everything the Supreme Court has ever said about the issue.

It also should be clear to everybody that only U.S. citizens of majority may vote in Federal elections, that is Federal law, but everybody, including children, who are U.S. citizens are counted even though they can't vote in Federal elections.

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I don't want to be in the position of lecturing my colleagues about something that they often like to say, but the Constitution is the Constitution, and nobody yet has laid a glove on the Constitution or explained how the Supreme Court erred in the unanimous Evenwel decision.

None of them has been able to explain away the very plain language of the 14th Amendment, that it is all the persons of the States who are counted, not the citizens, and that has been the basis for both the Census and the reapportionment since the country began.

So the rest of it just strikes me like election year political rhetoric. To the extent that we want to deal with immigration, we had a great bargain that came out of the Senate, which everybody in this body and that body seemed to be behind, until they heard from Donald Trump that no, he didn't want to see any legislative progress, he wanted to be able to demagogue the immigration issue out on the campaign trail, although he has been severely undermined by all of the exposure that went into that decision.

Again, I haven't heard anyone either explain why their legislation is constitutional, nor have I heard anybody explain what is wrong with the immigration package that we have for hundreds of new Border Patrol officers, hundreds of new Border Patrol and asylum judges and a crackdown of drugs at the border.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. LaTurner for his excellent introduction. I rise also in support of H.R. 6927, which would amend the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 to require any agency head who is a member of the National Security Council to notify the executive office of the President, GAO, and congressional leadership within 24 hours in the event of medical incapacity.

This bill was brought forth after the hospitalization several months ago of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to treat complications from cancer surgery.

Secretary Austin has taken responsibility for the lack of notification to the President during his hospitalization and has assured the American people that ``there were no gaps in authorities and no risks to the Department's command and control'' during his absence.

A congressional hearing on the topic in February confirmed as much, and a classified review found no ``ill intent'' by the Secretary's staff.

I commend the Biden administration for the swift action it took to conduct a thorough review of current protocols and to ensure that the Office of the President receives all proper notifications. This bill aligns with the Biden administration's efforts in the field.

Consistent with the spirit of transparency embodied in the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which requires congressional leadership to be notified if the President is unable to discharge the duties of his or her office, I agree that Congress should be notified if an agency head who is a member of the NSC is similarly incapacitated.

I support this legislation, I congratulate Secretary Austin on his recovery, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Davis).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from North Carolina for his eloquent remarks, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time, and I am prepared to close.

Mr. Speaker, we had such a nice bipartisan spirit going. I almost want to bite my tongue, but I do have to respond to the last speaker who took a gratuitous shot at President Biden and the Biden administration, which has moved very quickly to get behind this legislation and to address this gap in the law.

We do need to always establish the chain of command, and we need to know, as the gentleman from Wisconsin was saying, where is the Commander in Chief? Where is the leader?

That was the question everybody was asking on January 6 when this institution, this body, came under brutal, merciless attack by a mob incited by the former President.

Nearly 150 of our police officers were wounded, brutalized, and hospitalized in that attack, and everybody was asking this very question the gentleman from Wisconsin was asking, which is: Where is the Commander in Chief? Where is the leader? Where is the National Guard?

I am sorry to have to make that refutation of the last interjection by the gentleman from Wisconsin. Again, I thank Mr. LaTurner for the bipartisan spirit with which he brings this legislation forward, and I strongly 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 Comment Integrity and Management Act.

Technological advances have expanded access to Federal agencies' online rulemaking dockets and have made it easier for the public to comment on proposed rules. That is a very

good thing from the standpoint of transparency, accountability, and deliberation.

At the same time, in some recent high-profile rulemakings, agencies have received an extraordinarily high volume of completely duplicative comments, which has created some challenges for agencies in processing them and managing their online rulemaking dockets.

I am sure Members are familiar with receiving a standardized message hundreds or even thousands of times from constituents or people across the country.

This bill is designed to help agencies manage such mass comments and computer-generated comments submitted in response to proposed rules. It is not intended in any way to discourage mass comments, which are indeed a vital part of the regulatory process. The bill would simply allow agencies to post a representative sample of mass comments. If they choose to do that, they would also be required to post the number--hold that thought, if you would, Mr. Speaker. I was describing the next bill. Forgive me. We got our papers confused here. Keep that in mind. I like that one, too.

The Information Quality Assurance Act is bipartisan legislation introduced by Representatives Porter and McClain. I commend them for their work on it.

It would require the Director of OMB to update guidance issued under the Information Quality Act. That guidance is more than 20 years old, and much work has been done by Congress and the executive branch on these issues in the interim. The Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, the DATA Act, and the OPEN Government Act are just a few new laws requiring updated guidance.

Updated guidance would enable agencies to better ensure the quality of information and evidence used in promulgating regulations. The new guidance would ensure that the best reasonably available scientific, demographic, economic, financial, and statistical information is relied on during the regulatory process.

The bill also continues the practices of the Information Quality Act that allow for public input on the information submitted and mechanisms for OMB to report any complaints to Congress.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the majority for working closely with us and the administration in crafting this bill. The result is strong, and I fully support it.

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

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

Despite the fact that I didn't know we were on this bill originally, we are in very strong and unanimous support on our side of the aisle for this, and I yield back the balance of my time.