Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the urgent need for research funding for epithelioid hemangioendothelioma (EHE). EHE is a rare and devastating cancer that can affect anyone of any age and that grows in the cells that make up our blood vessels, often appearing in the liver, lungs, and bones. This disease is very rare, affecting one in one million people, and is also exceedingly difficult to diagnose.

According to the National Cancer Institute, patients suffering from EHE often live with severe pain, broken bones, disability, and respiratory infections. Studies show that EHE is more common in women, but more fatal for men. Because of its status as an exceedingly rare form of cancer, there is no standard treatment available and meager funding for lifesaving research.

This rare cancer is extraordinarily difficult to treat and often does not respond to chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Because there is no standard, effective treatment for EHE, many patients must resort to organ transplants and undergo a vascular embolization, where doctors block the artery supplying blood to the tumor.

One of my constituents recently lost his beloved cousin, Brianna Rae Carney, to this terrible disease. To honor her courageous, selfless spirit, he wrote me to encourage this body to raise awareness of EHE and invest in robust medical research

Mr. Speaker, as a cancer survivor who owes my life to the excellent and effective medical treatment that I was fortunate enough to receive, I encourage my colleagues to join me in supporting increased federal support for finding more effective treatments and ultimately a cure for this terrible disease.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in solidarity with Mr. Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, a member of the Parliament of Sri Lanka. Mr. Ponnambalam has recently been subjected to harassment and wrongful detention by Sri Lankan law enforcement. Despite video evidence contradicting the official account and lack of an official arrest warrant, Mr. Ponnambalam was arrested for behaving in an unruly manner towards state intelligence officers during a public meeting. Fortunately, he was released on bail shortly after his arrest.

While I am glad to hear of Mr. Ponnambalam's release, his harassment by Sri Lankan authorities remains highly troubling, and is part of a stream of attacks on minority members of the Sri Lankan parliament. Mr. Ponnambalam is a member of the minority Tamil ethnic group who has advocated for the marginalized and spoken at the United Nations Human Rights Council about the killing of Tamil journalists. Other members of the Sri Lankan parliament have faced harassment because of their activism over the past few months on the destruction of Tamil places of worship, militarization in the Northeast, and other crimes against members of the Tamil ethnic group.

Mr. Speaker, we must stand with the victims of human rights violations in their advocacy for their rights. I hope my colleagues will join me in expressing support for Mr. Ponnambalam and in calling for the Sri Lankan government to commit to democratic values and practices.

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

Today, we meet not to lower the costs of prescription drugs, nor to expand President Biden's infrastructure plan, nor to protect the voting rights of the people, nor to protect the healthcare choices of women across America because we know they are definitely not interested in that. No, we meet, rather, for another stop on the GOP's endless revenge tour against Democrats who dared to tell the truth about Donald Trump and his repeated sellouts and betrayals of the American people over the last 6 years.

It is all about Donald Trump tightening his stranglehold over Republicans for the 2024 campaign and driving out anyone who dares to think for himself or herself.

Don't take my word for it. Just read Friday's statement by the twice- impeached inciter of insurrection, sexual abuser, defamer of women, and indicted pilferer of national security secrets, war plans, and top- secret classified documents himself. On Friday, Trump posted this order to his followers in this unveiled threat to anyone who would dare to defy his control over the GOP: ``Any Republican voting against [Adam Schiff's] censure, or worse, should immediately be primaried.''

The Luna resolution is a weapon of mass distraction from Trump's indictment by a Florida grand jury on 37 Federal charges relating to obstruction and unlawful retention of defense information for storing dozens of classified, secret, and top-secret documents at his Florida resort in his bathroom, his bedroom, and beyond, and then refusing repeatedly for more than a year to return any of these official documents to the National Archives and the FBI.

It is amazing to me that they have to change the subject from one of Donald Trump's current offenses against America to one of his older offenses, welcoming Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential campaign.

Russia repeatedly intervened in the 2016 campaign to help Donald Trump, and that is not a matter of opinion. That is a question of direct, positive fact.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the former FBI Director whose report is cited authoritatively by Mrs. Luna, found right at the beginning of his report that ``the Russian Government interfered in the 2016 Presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.''

Here is what the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the Office of the Director of

the National Intelligence found in 2017: ``Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. Presidential election.''

The Mueller investigation and the Moscow Project documented more than 250 episodes of collaboration and meetings between Russia and the Trump campaign, including Paul Manafort's repeated passing of campaign secrets, such as polling data, to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian agent, and the infamous meeting on June 9, 2016, at Trump Tower led by Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican, stated that the U.S. Senate bipartisan Select Committee on Intelligence ``found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling'' in the American campaign.

The Mueller report, if you read it, makes no pronouncement on collusion, the punitive crux of the distinguished gentlewoman's complaint, because, as Mueller writes, ``collusion'' is not a legal offense or a legal concept.

The whole question of Trump's collusion with Russia is in the realm of opinion, and most Americans would see a lot of collusive activity, all the way up to the present day when Donald Trump refuses even to take the side of the Ukrainian people against Vladimir Putin's filthy, bloody, imperialist invasion of their country, which has been filled with lies, atrocities, and war crimes.

In any event, we don't censure Members over a difference of opinion.

Mr. Speaker, we are seeing the complete ethical collapse of a once- great political party. The Republican Party began as a pro-freedom, antiracist, pro-immigrant, anti-Know-Nothing party. It has become an authoritarian cult of personality taking orders from an inciter of insurrection, bully, and braggart whose rage toward Mike Pence and whose spectacular disrespect for the rule of law endangered not only our entire constitutional order but everyone in this room. The party of Lincoln and his Lincolnites has become the party of Luna and her Luna followers.

Today's madcap antics are an obvious deflection from Trump's deepening legal troubles. His allegedly criminal conduct in pilfering, hoarding, and refusing to return national security documents has caused his own Attorney General, William Barr, to say that: ``Trump's conduct is indefensible. . . . He is not a victim here. He was totally wrong.'' And, ``There is no excuse for what he did here.''

Yesterday, Representative Boebert offered a resolution of impeachment against President Biden. The GOP simply has no ideas for our economy, no ideas for our country, and no ideas for our people but is on an embarrassing revenge tour on behalf of Donald Trump, who treats them like a ventriloquist dummy.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Aguilar), the chairman of the Democratic Caucus and a former member of the January 6th Select Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Jeffries), the minority leader and a member of the first House impeachment team.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Quigley).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from New York (Mr. Goldman).

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 20 seconds to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lofgren).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Himes).

Mr. HIMES: Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Maryland for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I just heard the gentleman from Virginia say that this is not a censure of Donald Trump, and he is right about that, and, boy, is he right about that because there is no behavior--not a discussion of how he would handle women, not an attack on this Capitol, and not the misuse of classified information--that will ever result in a peep from the Republican majority much less a censure of that behavior. This is a question of standing, Mr. Speaker, amongst other things, if that is what you stand upon.

As my colleagues pointed out, we don't hear anything about a colleague whose entire campaign and entire resume was built on falsehood. Instead, we hear that Russia was a hoax.

Mr. Speaker, I was there. The investigation began by a Republican chairman. All these investigations were predicated on the fact that a Donald Trump foreign policy aide told the Australian ambassador that they were expecting dirt from the Russians.

The most important thing I can say is that I sat next to Adam Schiff for years. He is a man of integrity and dignity. This vote, quite frankly, Mr. Speaker, is a testament to your dignity or lack thereof.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Swalwell).

Mr. Speaker, I just want to observe that there are dozens of Members on our side who have come to stand with Mr. Schiff, and it appears to have been evacuated on the other side. There is nobody standing with the Luna resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Garcia).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms. Dean), a member of the second House impeachment team.

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 10 seconds to the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. Mullin).

Mr. Speaker, they defend the big lie, they defend the insurrection, they defend George Santos, but they attack Adam Schiff.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Carson).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), the ranking member of the Rules Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member of the Rules Committee for those astute remarks. I note that dozens of Members of our caucus have come to stand with Mr. Schiff today, while the sponsor of this resolution, Mrs. Luna, appears to be completely isolated over on her side of the aisle.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Krishnamoorthi).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Crow), a member of the first impeachment team.

Mr. Speaker, we are here precisely because of Donald Trump, because he wants this retribution exacted against Adam Schiff for standing up against Donald Trump's lies and assaults on American democracy.

I congratulate the gentlewoman on her forthcoming baby. That is awesome news. I am wondering if she would share some of her time with me because I have started to run out of time, and she has no speakers over on her side, so consider that.

In the meantime, I recognize for 1 minute the gentlewoman from Colorado (Ms. DeGette). I recognize for 1 minute the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Neguse).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson), the chairman of the January 6th Select Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 10 seconds to the gentleman from Mississippi.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms. Scanlon).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. Robert Garcia).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the distinguished gentleman from Texas (Mr. Castro).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the former Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 10 seconds to the gentlewoman from California.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman kindly for his courtesy in granting me this time.

Today is June 13. We have had 164 days in the year 2023, and we have had 291 mass shootings. We are having, on average, 1\1/2\ mass shootings every single day in America.

Of course, our colleagues would prefer not to talk about it because they say it is impolite to talk about a mass shooting on the day it happens. With that theory, we would never talk about it, and we would continue ad infinitum into the carnage and the bloodshed that this unlimited, open-arms policy is giving America today.

A number of my colleagues have invoked the Second Amendment. They only quote half of it. They say: `` . . . the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.''

What about the first half of it? ``A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.''

They say we want to repeal the Second Amendment. Mr. Speaker, we don't want them to repeal the Second Amendment. We want them to read the Second Amendment because the Second Amendment would ask us why we

are allowing people to go into elementary schools, Walmarts, supermarkets, churches, and synagogues all over America with AR-15s enabled sometimes with a stabilizing brace--as in Dayton, Ohio; Boulder, Colorado; Colorado Springs; Nashville, Tennessee--and assassinate our people.

If a foreign government were doing it, we would declare war on them, but since we are just allowing the gun industry to spread these weapons of mass destruction around the country, they want to allow it.

They say that the Second Amendment must be respected in this strange and distorted way because they believe the Second Amendment gives people the right to overthrow the government. This insurrectionist theory of the Second Amendment means that the people must have an arsenal equal to that of the government.

Well, it is very hard to explain the rest of the Constitution, then. The Second Amendment doesn't mention anything about rebellion or insurrection.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 says Congress has the power to call forth the militias from the States in order to ``suppress insurrections.''

Does that sound like a pro-insurrection document to you?

How about the Republican Guarantee Clause?

Congress shall guarantee to the people of the States a republican form of government and assist them in putting down domestic violence.

How about the treason clause, which says that treason shall consist of levying arms against the Union?

I could give you six more examples like that, but why don't we pause on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which says that anybody who has sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States and violates that oath by engaging in insurrection or rebellion shall never be allowed to hold Federal or State office again.

That is not the meaning of our Constitution.

The regulation the administration has adopted is perfectly constitutional, so if you want more bloodshed, just stand for that. It has got nothing to do with the Second Amendment. It is perfectly constitutional for us to engage in reasonable gun safety regulation. Check out Heller v. The District of Columbia. Justice Scalia wrote that opinion.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as she may consume to the distinguished gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton).

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

Mr. Speaker, I speak in opposition to this effort to overturn President Biden's veto of H.J. Res. 42, legislation that was introduced by Georgia Representative Clyde to strike down the people of Washington, D.C.'s local police reform law.

If it rings a bell, it is no wonder. The House and Senate have already voted on H.J. Res. 42. The overwhelming majority of Democrats voted to oppose it when Republicans brought it to the floor in April. When it reached President Biden's desk in May, he vetoed Mr. Clyde's resolution, as he promised that he would.

Although the resolution narrowly passed the House and Senate, in neither Chamber did it assemble anywhere close to the two-thirds majority required in both Chambers in order to override a veto.

Mr. Speaker, today's vote is an exercise in time-wasting and vainglorious futility. The Republican majority doesn't have the votes to override the veto, and it doesn't deserve to.

H.J. Res. 42 would nullify a law passed unanimously by the Council of the District of Columbia representing more than 700,000 residents to promote accountability for police officers who use excessive force or abuse their power, a goal that the vast majority of Americans share.

The D.C. law bans the use of chokeholds and other dangerous neck restraints and sets reasonable standards for the use of deadly force.

It requires public release of body-worn camera footage and creates a police officer misconduct database, but only for officers who have been either convicted of a crime or for whom allegations of abuse have been civilly or administratively sustained.

The law prohibits D.C. from hiring police officers who have engaged in prior criminal or official misconduct.

Most importantly, the new law empowers the chief of police to fire or discipline officers who break the law by removing police disciplinary matters from the collective bargaining table.

Now, Mr. Speaker, you may recall that this is the position that galvanized the opposition to D.C.'s law. This provision is why Republicans want the Congress of the United States to behave like a 535-Member nationally elected super-city council with the power to overturn the work of the 13-member Council of the District of Columbia elected locally by the actual residents of Washington, D.C.

So what is so important about this provision? Well, the local police union doesn't like it, and they have been the chief lobbyists against it. They sued when this reform legislation was first passed in D.C., asserting that the provision removing police discipline from the collective bargaining table violated the U.S. Constitution, but they lost their case in the U.S. District Court for D.C. and the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C., and the Supreme Court failed to grant cert.

Now, in their haste to kick around the people of Washington and not to support D.C. police officers who, after all, came to our defense on January 6, many of whom were wounded by the insurrectionists and ended up with broken fingers and arms and legs, and so on, our GOP colleagues are suddenly embracing the extreme position on police disciplinary matters which has already been rejected by the courts in which jurisdictions across America are debating and doing away with.

Now, why is the ending of discipline of police officers a subject for collective bargaining such a big deal? Well, Washington itself is a good example.

The D.C. Metropolitan Police Department has been forced by labor arbitrators to rehire a significant number of officers who had been fired for engaging in serious criminal misconduct, including criminal assault, including sexual assault.

Every D.C. police chief for at least the last 25 years have expressed outrage about having to hire bad cops after they have been fired for engaging in serious misconduct. Forcing police chiefs to reinstate bad cops fired for breaking the law is bad for public safety, bad for community trust, and bad for morale among the vast majority of good police officers who are doing their jobs, like the ones who came to defend us on January 6, 2021, against the violent mob insurrection incited by the former President.

This should not be a partisan point. This is a matter for local decisionmaking in Washington, D.C., as it is in every other jurisdiction in the country.

Mr. Speaker, 700,000 tax-paying American citizens have decided through their locally elected representatives that the chief of police who is appointed by the Mayor should be able to discipline bad actors within the police department. Reversing the D.C. government on this local matter is outrageous interference by Congress to impose a bad public policy on the Capital City.

The D.C. police accountability law makes reasonable, commonsense reforms that will make the D.C. police more accountable to the community of people they serve, increase public trust, and strengthen public safety.

In fact, multiple provisions constituting the D.C. police reform law are mainstream reforms that enjoy strong public support and are congruent with the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the House in the 117th Congress, and with police accountability laws enacted by dozens of States and localities in recent years in the wake of notorious episodes of brutality, like the unconscionable murder of George Floyd.

For example, since May of 2020, at least 24 States have enacted legislation to limit the use of dangerous neck restraints against citizens; 39 States have passed reforms related to officer education and training.

Twenty-six States have enacted laws to improve data collection and increase transparency. At least seven States, including Arizona, Colorado, and Wisconsin, have passed legislation requiring the publication of police databases or use-of-force information. Twenty States since 2020 have enacted laws that address State-level use-of- force standards.

This is a matter for States and localities to decide themselves. Reversing D.C. on this local matter is an outrageous effort to impose bad public policy on the people of D.C.

Voting to override the veto of this GOP resolution is yet another attack on local decisionmaking, federalism, and the policies of meaningful oversight and accountability that the majority of Americans want. A vote to override the veto today is a vote against political democracy and local self-government in America. A ``yes'' vote today is a vote against commonsense oversight and accountability over policing in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to stand up for democracy, stand up for political self-determination, and vote ``no'' on this attempt to override the President's veto.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a true man of faith, Bishop William J. Barber II, who is stepping down from his ministry at North Carolina's Greenleaf Christian Church after serving his congregation and community for 30 years with love and devotion.

Under Rev. Dr. Barber's remarkable leadership, Greenleaf Church blossomed into a vibrant parish proclaiming the gospel in all aspects of community life. He secured investments to provide the community with a childcare center, computer literacy job training, affordable housing for families, a low-income senior living facility, a celebrated after- school program, a restaurant, a free community garden, a gang- prevention program, and an HIV/AIDS ministry. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he kept services going and grew a massive online ministry. During Rev. Dr. Barber's tenure, seven individuals have received a call to ministry from Greenleaf and have gone on to complete Master of Divinity and doctoral degrees, and three of them now pastor other congregations.

As an active community leader, Rev. Dr. Barber famously built a powerful grassroots coalition to advocate for moral public policy in the North Carolina General Assembly, leading the way to expand ballot access, increase the state minimum wage and pass the Racial Justice Acts challenging the racist application of the death penalty. This coalition, which grew into the Forward Together movement, also helped secure the freedom of several innocent Black men who had been awaiting execution on death row. In 2013, the coalition's ``Moral Monday'' demonstrations mobilized tens of thousands of people to protest voter suppression and other acts of what Rev. Dr. Barber calls ``policy violence.''

In 2015, Rev. Dr. Barber founded Repairers of the Breach, a nonpartisan, interfaith movement that advances moral and constitutional values to combat policies affecting the most vulnerable communities. After a 26-state ``moral revival'' tour in partnership with the Kairos Center for Religion, Rights & Social Justice, Rev. Dr. Barber and Repairers of the Breach re-launched the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival in 2018. This powerful movement is continuing the work of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders who first launched the Poor People's Campaign in 1968 to build a broad, interracial movement for economic justice. Under Rev. Dr. Barber's leadership, the revived Poor People's Campaign has built a national community of hundreds of organizations committed to addressing the interlocking injustices of poverty, racism, ecological devastation, militarism and religious nationalism.

Rev. Dr. Barber's extraordinary eloquence and moral passion have uplifted the fortunes of countless Americans. He previously served as president of the North Carolina NAACP and on the National NAACP Board of Directors. He has published four books and hundreds of articles, and inspired the introduction of a Third Reconstruction Resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 117th Congress. Rev. Dr. Barber earned a bachelor's degree from North Carolina Central University, a Master of Divinity from Duke University, and a doctorate from Drew University with a concentration in Public Policy and Pastoral Care. He has had ten honorary degrees conferred upon him.

Yale Divinity School recently honored Rev. Dr. Barber by naming him as Founding Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy.

I hope that the House will join me in celebrating Bishop William J. Barber II for his three decades of selfless service at the Greenleaf Christian Church and for his contributions to our Nation as a moral movement leader. I look forward to continuing to work together for many years to come.

Madam Speaker, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says that the validity of the public debt shall not be questioned.

We made a commitment to every Social Security recipient in America, to Medicare and Medicaid recipients, to the veterans, to the bondholders of the United States, that we would pay our debts, as we are fiscally, morally, politically, and constitutionally required to do.

Yet, Donald Trump has issued the order. He said it is inevitable, default on the debt of the United States for the first time in American history, crash the economy, lose 9 or 10 million jobs.

Now, in the words of Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who appears not to be here right now: The GOP will not negotiate with their hostage.

Who is the hostage?

The American people are the hostage. Our government is hostage. The Constitution is hostage.

I introduce to the MAGA Republicans who have split today, but who increased the debt ceiling three times under Donald Trump, who gave us a quarter of all the debt of the United States between George Washington and Joe Biden, I introduce them to the Constitution of the United States: The validity of the public debt shall not be questioned.

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

The good chairman of the committee invoked the name of Mayor Muriel Bowser, the Mayor of the District of Columbia, who sent us a letter with the chairman of the D.C. City Council, Phil Mendelson, which closes this way: ``Not only should our policy decisions not be overturned by officials not elected to represent our residents, but piecemeal interference hurts our ability to confront crime and improve public safety in the District of Columbia.''

What is this about, Mr. Speaker? H.J. Res. 42 seeks to nullify a law passed

unanimously by the Council of the District of Columbia to promote accountability for police officers who use excessive force or abuse their power, a goal that the vast majority of Americans share.

The D.C. law banned the use of choke holds and other dangerous neck restraints and set reasonable standards on the use of deadly force. It required the public release of body-worn camera footage and created a police officer misconduct database for officers who have been convicted of a crime or had allegations against them civilly or administratively sustained. It prohibited D.C. from hiring officers who have engaged in criminal or official misconduct.

Most importantly for these purposes, Mr. Speaker, the new law empowered the chief of police to fire or discipline officers who break the law by removing police disciplinary matters from the control of arbitrators under collective bargaining. This is the provision that galvanized opposition to the bill from the police union, the key provision that has now led our colleagues to want to convert the Congress of the United States into the largest city council in the world, a 535-member city council with the job of micromanaging and superintending the work of the 13-member Council of the District of Columbia.

The local police union hates this provision, which is their right, of course. Their chief has been the chief lobbyist against Washington, D.C., on this law. He was the key GOP witness in the Oversight Committee hearing on the law.

His union sued when the legislation was first passed, asserting that it violated the U.S. Constitution not to subject the discipline of police officers to an outside arbitrator. They lost in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, they lost in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and the Supreme Court did not grant cert. Still, the union is running TV ads against this law and has obviously found friends on that side of the aisle.

Now, in their eagerness to kick around the more than 700,000 taxpaying American citizens who live in Washington, D.C., but have no voting representation in the House of Representatives or in the U.S. Senate, our colleagues are embracing a claim that puts them in favor of an extreme police union position on discipline that jurisdictions across America are debating and many of them are rejecting.

Why? Well, D.C. is a good example. Before passage of this law that they propose to repeal, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department had been forced by labor arbitrators to rehire a significant number of policemen and -women who had been fired for engaging in serious criminal misconduct. Here are some examples of the officers who were fired but the department was forced to reinstate by an arbitrator.

One officer illegally struck a suspect multiple times in the head. The officer was criminally tried and convicted of criminal assault, sentenced to 30 days in jail, 3 years of probation, and 500 hours of community service. Despite strong opposition from the police department, he was reinstated by an arbitrator.

Another officer, off duty at the time, sexually assaulted a woman and was convicted of misdemeanor sex abuse and sentenced to a 100-day suspended sentence and a year of probation. Despite strong opposition from the department, he was reinstated to the force by an arbitrator.

Another off-duty police officer confessed to abusing a child. The officer was convicted of child abuse and sentenced to 5 years of probation. Despite strong opposition from the department, he was reinstated, as well.

Every D.C. police chief for at least the last 25 years has expressed outrage about the old system of having to rehire bad cops after they had been fired for perpetrating serious misconduct against the people of Washington, D.C.

Former D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham openly lamented that he had to allow ``very bad police officers back onto our department.''

Former Police Chief Charles Ramsey said this: ``It is demoralizing to the rank and file who really do not want to have those kinds of people in their ranks. It causes a tremendous amount of anxiety in the public. Our credibility is shot whenever these things happen.''

The current D.C. Police Chief, Robert Contee, says that giving the police the power over discipline reduces the risk of returning poor performers to the force.

Forcing police chiefs to reinstate bad cops fired for breaking the law is bad for public safety, it is bad for community morale, and it is bad for the morale of the vast majority of good cops who are doing their job.

It is also bad for taxpayers. Between 2010 and 2020, The Washington Post found that D.C. paid out $91 million to resolve claims of police brutality and misconduct. The taxpayers are also on the hook for backpay that was paid out to bad cops who were fired for this misconduct when they were rehired following the ruling of an arbitrator.

In a recent 5-year period, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department was forced to rehire 36 officers. According to an Office of the D.C. Auditor report, D.C. had to pay $14.3 million in backpay to these convicted and disciplined officers.

The question of whether police chiefs or arbitrators should be the ones to decide to put disciplined cops back on the force is a matter for local decisionmaking in Washington as it is in every other jurisdiction in the country.

Mr. Speaker, 700,000 taxpaying American citizens have decided through their elected representatives that the chief of police, who is appointed by the Mayor of the District of Columbia, should be the one to be able to discipline bad actors within the police department.

Reversing the D.C. government on this local matter is outrageous interference by Congress to impose a bad public policy on the Capital City.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, just a few points about the last contribution from the gentleman from Georgia.

Georgia reported 892 murders in the last year, the fourth highest in the country. He said that Washington, D.C., is overrun by violent criminals. The only time I have seen an institution overrun by violent criminals was here in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, an event that that gentleman described as a tourist visit and has consistently likened to a tourist visit. I don't know that he is going to be the best and most reliable witness for determining when an institution is being overrun by violent criminals.

The rhetoric I hear from the Freedom Caucus is about defunding the FBI and defunding the ATF. No one on our side of the aisle is talking about defunding any of them or defunding the police. On the contrary, we have advanced initiatives to increase local government funding for police and other services.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia for her eloquent remarks and also for making the specific point that the D.C. reform legislation is perfectly congruent with the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which we passed in the 117th Congress.

In fact, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act goes further than D.C. went. D.C. did not touch qualified immunity, which was something that was dealt with in the Federal legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I also wanted to correct one other piece of misinformation that was left by the gentleman from Georgia. He said that it is against the law under the D.C. law for a police officer to touch someone's neck. That is not the definition of the law against choke holds and neck restraints.

It requires the use of any body part or object by law enforcement against a person with the purpose, intent, or effect of controlling or restricting the person's airway or severely restricting the person's breathing. That does not involve just touching a person's neck.

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

Mr. Speaker, how much time do we have remaining?

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms. Lee).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentlewoman from Pennsylvania for her remarks, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from D.C. (Ms. Norton).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for her point, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, control over local police is an essential facet of political self-government and home rule. The people of Washington, D.C., through their representatives, need to be able to control their own local police. They also need to control their judges.

The problem, of course, is that right now the District of Columbia is caught betwixt and between. The people have made clear that they want to become a State. They organized a State and constitutional convention. They have petitioned for admission to the Union and are asking the Congress of the United States under Article IV of the Constitution to exercise our powers to admit them as a State and to redraw the boundaries of the Federal District given our exclusive power and our comprehensive power under the District clause to do that.

In fact, in 1846, Congress redrew the boundaries of the District of Columbia in order to retrocede to Virginia lands there, and that was perfectly constitutional. Today Congress can exercise its powers under Article I, section 8, clause 17 to modify the boundaries of the Federal District to cede the residential lands to the new State that is petitioning for admission to the Union.

The House of Representatives in the last two Congresses voted to admit the District of Columbia, or Washington, D.C., as the new State. The Senate did not act, yet their statehood drive continues.

Alas, our colleagues, rather than trying to help propel another State into the Union and to allow them to gain equal footing with all of the other States instead decides to try to micromanage their local affairs and to drive them back into some kind of semi-colonial status that they thought they had left behind many decades ago.

So the real question for the Congress of the United States is: Will we do for the people of Washington, D.C.--taxpaying, draftable citizens who have served in every war that the Republic has ever fought going back to the American Revolution--will we treat them the same way that we treated the people of 37 other States who were admitted by the original 13?

That is the dynamic of enlargement of democracy that was contemplated by the Framers of the Constitution and the Founders of the country. They did not want there to be large, colonized, and subjected populations subject to the will of other people for precisely the kind of reason that is on display today.

There is no reason why the local government of Washington should be lorded over and superintended by other people's Representatives no matter how well-intended they may be or how politically intended they may be or how malevolently intended they may be. The Framers of the Constitution and the people who fought the American Revolution rejected the idea of virtual representation.

That was the claim of the crown and the Parliament. They said: You don't need your own representatives because you are represented by people in Parliament who will be able to take into account your interests.

The revolutionaries rejected that saying that in real democracy people get to choose their own representatives, and those representatives elect their own council and their own mayor, and they get to choose their own police chief. They get to make their own decisions.

So really what we see today is a drama that reenacts the basic struggle for democratic self-government in our country. This is a chapter in that drama, but it will lead eventually--it must lead--to the admission of Washington, D.C., as a new State the way that 37 other States were admitted by the original 13, including my own Maryland, because those original States understood the logic of democratic equality and freedom in our country.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, the multiple provisions constituting the D.C. police reform law are mainstream, commonsense reforms unanimously passed by the Council of the District of Columbia which enjoyed strong public support and are perfectly congruent not only with the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the House in the 117th Congress, but also with police accountability laws enacted by dozens of States and localities in recent years in the wake of notorious episodes of police brutality like the murder of George Floyd.

For example, since May of 2020, at least 24 States have enacted legislation to limit the use of dangerous neck restraints against citizens. Thirty-nine States have passed reforms related to officer education and training. Since May of 2020, 26 States have enacted laws to improve data collection and police transparency. At least seven States, including Arizona, Colorado, and Wisconsin, have enacted laws requiring the creation of public databases on use-of-force information.

States like Colorado, South Carolina, and Maryland have mandated adoption of body-worn cameras statewide. At least 20 States have enacted laws that address State-level use-of-force standards.

This joint resolution of disapproval is an attack on local decisionmaking, federalism, and the policies of oversight and accountability that Americans clearly want and that our committee as the oversight committee should be championing.

This resolution would result not only in less political democracy in America but less official oversight and accountability over policing in the Capital City. It is amazing to me that our colleagues will not even have a hearing on the desire of Washington with 700,000 taxpaying but unrepresented Americans to join the Union as a State, but they will mobilize all their energy to strip from the local D.C. police chief the power to discipline cops who commit crimes.

There seems to be no end to our colleagues' willingness to undermine good police work in Washington. Last month the most memorable thing they have done so far in the new Congress, Committee Republicans visited more than 20 January 6 insurrectionists living in D.C. jail-- the vast majority of whom are there because they were convicted of or charged with violently assaulting our police officers. Our colleagues liken the extremists who attacked our police officers to political prisoners--people like Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Alexei Navalny. Those are people charged with ideological offenses against authoritarian regimes.

These prisoners they visited were charged with, and in many cases convicted of, violently assaulting American police officers.

This month now Republicans want to overturn a local law that allows the chief of police in D.C. to keep cops who commit crimes like drug dealing or sexual assault off the force. I don't blame the people of Washington or Ms. Norton for telling them to keep their hands off D.C.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Massachusetts (Ms. Pressley).

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for her remarks.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

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

May I inquire how much time is remaining, Mr. Speaker?

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

Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman from Texas I think makes the essential point which is the people of Washington and their representatives are governing in their best interests. That is the essential gamble of democracy.

This is why American federalism is such a beautiful thing. The laws in Kentucky passed by the colleagues of my friend, the chairman of our committee, the laws in California, the laws in Alaska, the laws in South Carolina, and the laws in Washington, D.C., differ in certain ways. That is how federalism works.

It is a massive insult, indignity, and affront to the people of Washington, D.C., to pull the rug out from beneath their comprehensive effort to develop good policing in Washington, D.C.

There are lots of States and jurisdictions with higher crime rates. There are lots with lower crime rates. That is neither here nor there. Democracy is not something you earn by virtue of the crime rate or the inflation rate or the employment rate. Democracy is something you earn by virtue of natural rights that we have recognized under our Constitution, which is why our Constitution begins with the words ``We the People.''

The people of Washington, D.C. don't have complete rights yet, which is why they are fighting for statehood. The last thing we should be doing is driving them back to the worst days, which as former Speaker Pelosi evoked, when Congress micromanaged every little thing that took place in Washington.

It is not fair to the people of Washington, and it is a waste of our time.

If they think they have a good proposal that will end crime in America, let's do it nationally and make it apply to everybody. Otherwise, let's agree with the people from D.C.: Hands off Washington.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to highlight national ``Autism After 21 Day''--April 21st--as an important milestone during Autism Acceptance Month. As we use this month to recognize the many wonderful contributions of people with autism, it is also fitting for us to take a few moments to acknowledge the challenges that many people with autism face as they transition into adulthood.

Each year in the United States, more than 70,000 children with autism become adults with autism. The transition to adulthood is difficult for many individuals, but it can be especially challenging for autistic young people, who too often face a formidable ``services cliff'' as they age out of the school system. Support services may drop off, and young adults with autism sometimes struggle to continue their education or find meaningful employment. Some young people in this situation experience a crushing loss of their community and can feel very isolated.

In light of these major challenges, I want to recognize the extraordinary work of my constituents, JaLynn Prince and Dr. Gregory A. Prince, who founded the Madison House Autism Foundation. This remarkable organization is improving the health and wellbeing of autistic adults throughout their lifespans through employment partnerships, housing initiatives, and many other exceptional offerings. The Madison House Autism Foundation is also driving forward the Autism After 21 movement--a growing social movement that champions the expansion of attention, care and support to maximize the wellbeing of people with autism throughout their lifespan.

Mr. Speaker, we must continue working to build a more inclusive and enlightened society that provides opportunities to autistic individuals of every age. I urge my colleagues to join me in recognizing April 21st as national ``Autism After 21 Day''.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to congratulate my constituent Louis Hoelman III on everything he has accomplished to date in a dazzling teaching and coaching career in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Mr. Hoelman is himself a proud graduate of Montgomery County Public Schools. He attended Parkside Elementary School, Highland View Elementary School, Eastern Junior High School (as it was known at the time), and the great Montgomery Blair High School. He went on to Montgomery College and graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in Kinesiology.

Mr. Hoelman launched his career as an Athletic Director at the Silver Spring Boys and Girls Club. In 1993, he returned to Montgomery County Public Schools as a physical education teacher at Piney Branch Elementary School. In 1999, he joined the staff of Montgomery Blair High School as a physical education teacher and, in 2001, he became the head coach of Blair's varsity girls' softball team. Over the years he has also coached basketball, team handball, field hockey, and cross country. In 2022, he became the head coach of Blair's varsity co-ed golf team and led them to the final round of the State Golf Championship. In addition to his very busy teaching and coaching career, he is the founder of the renowned Takoma Sports Camp for boys and girls.

By the end of Blair's 2022 softball season, Mr. Hoelman had amassed a total of 294 wins over his softball coaching career. I understand that as of today, he stands on the cusp of racking up 300 career wins. He has received numerous Coach of the Year awards, including citations from the Montgomery Gazette, the Washington Examiner, Montgomery Blair High School, and, most recently, the National Federation of State High School Associations.

Beyond his remarkable record of successful coaching, Mr. Hoelman is known for his warm,

inclusive and exuberantly friendly attitude towards all students. He displays great enthusiasm for ensuring that every student experiences the physical and mental health benefits of exercise. He is dedicated to helping young people develop a positive relationship with physical activity to benefit them for the rest of their lives.

During remote learning at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr. Hoelman taught physical education from his living room. Under the most arduous conditions, he went all out to keep his students active and engaged--from leading them in 20-minute workouts every class to coaching them on how to improvise sports equipment using whatever materials they had at home. His dedication and creativity gave students a much-needed energetic break from the isolating and stressful circumstances of the pandemic period.

Like people in thousands of families in Montgomery County, I am profoundly grateful to Mr. Hoelman for his three decades of passionate service to our community and our children, and I look forward to seeing everything he will accomplish in the years to come.

Mr. Chairman, we oppose H.R. 5 because we stand with the school boards and the PTAs, the parents and the teachers, the students, and 13,000 school superintendents whose letter opposing this legislation I would ask to be included in the Record.

Mr. Chair, I include in the Record a letter from The School Superintendents Association.

March 22, 2023.

Hon. Kevin McCarthy,

Speaker, House of Representatives,

Washington, DC.

Hon. Hakeem Jeffries,

Minority Leader, House of Representatives,

Washington, DC.

Dear Speaker McCarthy and Minority Leader Jeffries: AASA,

The School Superintendents Association, representing 13,000

school district leaders across the United States, writes to

share our view of H.R. 5, the Parents Bill of Rights.

Superintendents know that parents are their children's

first and most important educators, which is why effective

family engagement at the state and local level is one of the

key determinants of student and school success. As

superintendents who serve at the pleasure of school boards

selected by parents, families and community members, it is

critical that every child and family who walks through our

doors on a daily basis feels welcome and supported in our

buildings and classrooms. We know an educational environment

that connects and engages families will ensure greater

success for all students. We believe that every family should

have the opportunity to be an active participant in their

child's educational experience and connect directly with

their child's professional educators, while working in

concert with school staff and administrators to maximize

their child's success.

As a national organization representing the CEOs of school

systems, our view has always been that local control in K-12

education is not only what is best, but what is most

appropriate. It is for this reason that we must oppose H.R.

5. As champions of local control, AASA has long opposed

topdown, prescriptive federal education policies that dictate

how districts utilize limited federal funding, pressure

districts to adopt specific standards or curriculum or create

national teacher or educator standards and requirements.

Parents are the locus of local control in education as they

provide input on local policies and practices created at

school board meetings, connect directly with superintendents,

principals and teachers in class and school-wide events, and

have access to any and all educational materials, platforms

and curriculum their children are utilizing inside and

outside of school.

The Parents Bill of Rights is full of district mandates

without any funding for these new and burdensome requirements

that will be a place a disproportionate hardship on small and

rural schools. Provisions that would require a district to

print out the curriculum for parental review and comment,

send notices about every guest speaker that may address a

class, require mental health personnel to contact parents if

a student discloses any mental health concern and share a

list of every professional development opportunity the

district provides to educators and staff are just a few

examples of extreme federal overreach in local education

policy.

Aside from AASA's federalism concerns and the many new

unfunded mandates that H.R. 5 creates, there are also

practical implementation concerns with how the legislation

would disrupt learning in classrooms and make it incredibly

challenging for educators to meet the significant educational

needs of students. For example, giving parents the ability to

opt out of the collection, disclosure, or use of personal

information collected from students and commonly used

education technology in the classroom would make it nearly

impossible for schools to meet the educational needs of

students and use a host of online diagnostic, differentiated

and adaptive assessments and tools to measure a student's

understanding, proficiency and growth academically. This

change would leave teachers not only ill- equipped to address

learning loss in a post-pandemic educational environment

thereby exacerbating educational inequities, but forced to

find and make use of resources, curriculum, and assessments

from several decades ago.

H.R. 5 would make it more challenging to ensure our schools

are safe and welcoming environments for every student. The

legislation would make it more challenging to direct students

to appropriate mental health supports in schools thereby

risking the safety of all students and educators. As an

example, a counselor who suspects a child may be abused would

be required to notify parents and get a signed parental opt-

in before the counselor can assess the child's health, safety

and well-being at home. The bill would also undermine

districts' ability to collect anonymized survey data to gauge

student safety and well-being in school and it would make our

transgender and nonbinary students more likely to disengage

or drop out of school.

While we appreciate the robust discussion about student

privacy and support a reauthorization of Family Educational

Rights and Privacy Act and Protection of Pupil Rights

Amendment that will clarify critical issues and update the

law to appropriately respond to the twenty-first century

learning environments in our schools, the changes to FERPA

and PPRA proposed by H.R. 5 are not those AASA can support.

Similarly, we welcome a conversation on how to reauthorize

the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, but we do not

support piecemeal changes to critical provisions in Title I

of the law and urge Republicans and Democrats to come

together--as they always have--to craft comprehensive ESEA

policies to better our nations' schools, increase student

achievement and ensure our schools are welcoming places for

every child and family.

Thank you for considering our views and it is our hope that

we can work with both sides of the dais to find common ground

this Congress on the policy and funding issues of greatest

importance to school district leaders.

Sincerely,

Sasha Pudelski,

Director of Advocacy, AASA, The School Superintendents

Association.

Mr. Chair, we stand with local governments against this outrageous power grab by MAGA Republicans in Washington who are supporting book banning, suppression of historical facts about slavery, Jim Crow segregation, racial violence, and favoring top-down micromanagement of our local schools across America.

Is there really a problem for parents like us with finding out what is in our public school libraries?

Well, before you pass a massive new Federal law and a massive new unfunded mandate for our local governments, why don't you take the time to make a phone call?

That is what I did. I called up the person who runs the school libraries for Montgomery County, Maryland, which has more than a million people there. I learned from Andrea Christman, who oversees all the media centers for our county, that the entire catalogue of 2.2 million books is online, freely available, and current as of today. Anybody can go online and find it right now.

If all the info is out there, as local governments want it to be, then what is this about?

Well, it is about book banning, of course.

Mr. Chair, 2 years ago, more than 1,600 books were banned in the United States of America.

Here are three of the key books that the rightwingers have been going after.

Khaled Hosseini's ``The Kite Runner,'' about the dangerous fanaticism, authoritarianism, and abuse of the Taliban, a rightwing religious fundamentalist movement all about censorship and repressing women's control over their own bodies and their own fertility.

``The Handmaid's Tale,'' Margaret Atwood's extraordinary dystopian novel about a rightwing misogynist movement which uses high technology and depraved religious ideology to control not only the minds of their followers, but their private and public lives and the fertility of women.

Of course, George Orwell's, ``1984,'' because they have no sense of irony. They are always trying to censor this one.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman.

Mr. Chair, we need more politicians reading books and fewer politicians trying to censor books in America.

It is amazing to me to see politicians who oppose a universal violent criminal background check and who defend assault weapons after the massacres at Columbine; after Parkland, Florida; at Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut; after Uvalde; after Santa Fe, Texas, that they are now going to keep America's children safe by banning ``The Handmaid's Tale'' and ``1984.''

Mr. Chair, we can do better for the children of America.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to congratulate Pat Lawson Muse on the occasion of her retirement after 40 remarkable years with NBC4-TV in Washington, D.C. Pat is an Emmy award-winning anchor who, together with Barbara Harrison, made broadcast history in the mid-1980s when they formed the first all-female local TV news anchor team in the Nation. The people of Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. are now celebrating Pat's 40 years of excellence in broadcast journalism and service to the entire Washington region. As an anchor and general assignment reporter Pat has been a fixture on local television news, covering and reporting many of the most significant local and national stories of our time.

For decades Pat has also been a familiar face on Sunday mornings hosting NBC4's community affairs programs, including Reporter's Notebook, Viewpoint and News4 Your Sunday, exploring many of the most important issues affecting people in our region, such as finances, health, education, public safety, faith and the environment. In addition, since 1984 Pat has been the leading force in NBC4's Food 4 Families campaign which has fed tens of thousands of families, veterans, senior citizens, and others in need during the Thanksgiving period.

Muse, whose broadcast career began in radio, has been inducted into the National Association of Television Arts and Sciences Silver Circle.

We salute Pat not only for representing the local TV broadcasting profession with such excellence but for serving the many diverse communities in and around the state of Maryland with such great integrity, dignity, and uncompromising commitment to the common good of our people.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the distinguished gentleman from New York for his excellent leadership on this bill today on the floor.

The distinguished gentlewoman from Colorado posed a question that I have been hearing my Republican colleagues utter over the last several days: Who decides what is true or false? How can we know what is true or false? The gentlewoman confided her fear that the Federal Government would end up defining what is true or false.

Well, my, my, my. That is an absolute assault on the Constitution of the United States because we have an entire Federal judiciary, which is based on people getting up in court and swearing an oath under God or the Constitution to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The whole point of what Federal courts do is to determine what is true and what is false.

Yet, now, we have an entire political party, which is organizing itself around this radical, moral agnosticism, claiming that there is no way we can know the difference between whether an election is on Tuesday or whether an election is on Thursday, as Vladimir Putin wants to tell us through his sinister propaganda put out by the Internet Research Agency.

The whole judicial system is based on the difference between truth and lies.

In fact, the administrative system, do you want to get Social Security? Either you are 65, or you are not. That is a matter of positive fact.

You qualify for Medicare, or you don't. Truth or fact.

Yes, our system operates on the basis of truth or fact. Don't throw up your hands and say: ``Oh, well, we can't know what the truth is. We can't know what lies are. We don't want bureaucrats telling us what that is.''

That is what democratic government is. That is how we operate, by our commitment to the truth. That is why we all swear an oath here to uphold the Constitution. That is why people go to court and swear an oath to tell the truth.

Now, they take their shocking nihilism about what is true and what is false, and they convert it to this entire Congress. It all starts, of course, with January 6 and, before that, the Presidential election. It all starts with the big lie, Donald Trump's big lie.

They say: ``Well, who knows? Maybe he won. Maybe he didn't. You say Joe Biden is President. We say Donald Trump is President.'' Nonsense.

Mr. Chairman, 60 Federal and State courts rejected every claim of electoral fraud and corruption that they put forward. They don't have a single court that ever ruled in their favor.

Donald Trump lost that election by more than 7 million votes, 306-232 in the electoral college, so then their big lie now has to stretch all the way over January 6. We have to disbelieve the evidence of our own eyes, of our own ears. We saw them come and descend upon this Chamber, this Congress, wounding and injuring 150 of our police officers, breaking people's noses, breaking people's fingers, putting people in the hospital.

Already, they are back on the news with big lies, saying, ``No, no, no. It was a tourist visit,'' like these real tourists up here who have come to watch Representatives in the United States Congress say there is no difference between truth and lies, real tourists who are not beating the daylights out of our police officers.

So the lie now extends to January 6. Who knows what really happened? Yes, we all saw it. We saw the Vice President of the United States getting chased out of the Chamber with people yelling, ``Hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence.''

We had a bipartisan committee for a year and a half with more than a thousand witnesses, a hundred subpoenaed witnesses under oath, most of them from the Trump White House and the Trump family and Republicans testifying about Trump's plan to overturn the Presidential election and get Pence just to install him in office.

Yet, they are agnostic about: ``Well, the truth and lies, who knows what really happened? Who knows?'' Yes. Who knows.

They have a perfect bill for you, then. We call it the Putin protection act. That is what it is, the Putin protection act.

The distinguished gentleman from New York explained Putin spent millions of dollars in 2016 to pump propaganda, electoral sabotage, into our political system. He did. Every security agency in the country told us that. We got a bipartisan report from the Senate saying it.

They are agnostic about it. When it comes to Putin, they see no evil, hear no evil, none of it. But we know that it happened.

That is Putin's plan. Why? Putin cannot beat America politically. He can't beat us economically. He can't beat us militarily. Putin can't beat us philosophically. There is one thing he has--the internet. Why? Because we are a wide open country. He says: Let's take advantage of it. Let's go on their social media platform. We will put people who oppose Putin on the internet in jail--which they do. If you send a tweet against Putin, you are going to jail.

If you put out a tweet against his filthy imperialist war, which some of them support in Ukraine, if you put out a tweet against that in Russia, you are going to jail.

He says: Let's take advantage of America's openness. We will take advantage of them, and we are going to put out propaganda. We will lie about when the election is. We will say it is on Thursday when it is on Tuesday. We will tell people to go vote next week, whatever.

That is the genesis of this whole thing. We have our security agencies who alert social media. They say they are putting up fraudulent information on your platform.

Now they come forward and say that the Democrats are trying to-- what?--tell the truth. Not Democrats, the government, our paid Federal Government agencies, are trying to tell the social media when foreign malign actors like Russia, China, and Iran are trying to interfere in our elections.

That is what this is about--Putin protection act. They want Putin and Xi to run free over our platforms, and then they want to fine Federal Government employees thousands of dollars if they alert our government to what foreign malign actors are doing.

The whole justification for it is their silly obsession with Hunter Biden's laptop and this New York Post story, which was taken down by Twitter for 1 day 3 weeks before the election as an exercise of their private decisionmaking.

Then Elon Musk buys Twitter, and he fires six journalists because they disagree with him. They have no problem with that because, of course, it is a private entity. They can do whatever they want. They want to fire journalists, they fire them. They want to take the story down for an hour or a day, they can do that.

Then they want to turn that into the basis for handcuffing the entire Government of the United States so we can't protect ourselves against Vladimir Putin and President Xi? Give me a break.

Mr. Chair, I just want to echo the very important point you just made. We have a sequence of trivial amendments that have been added by the majority, and they refuse to consider what I think is the central amendment that this legislation would need in order for it not to be an utter disaster for America if this legislation were to pass.

Now, they concede implicitly by their legislation that there is a problem with saying we are not going to allow any government officials to get in touch with the social media, because they create an exception for certain things: for child pornography, for human trafficking, and for drug dealing. And I agree with all of those. But are those more important and more grave than the national security interests of the United States itself?

What about assaults on our elections, which go right to the heart of national security? What about assaults on our energy security structure? What about assaults on our power structure? Not only do they not build that into their bill; they will not even allow us to put it on the floor for an open vote among all of our colleagues in Congress.

Why won't they do that? Well, because if there is a national security exception to their Putin protection act, at that point, the exception swallows the rule, because the rule is let's let Putin and Xi and every autocrat, theocrat, and dictator on Earth run amuck on our social media and not allow our government officials to say anything about it. That is the effect of this legislation.

I thank Mr. Goldman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the distinguished gentlewoman from Minnesota for yielding.

Just to recap where we are from yesterday, the whole Congress eagerly awaited to hear what the big anti-inflation initiative would be coming from the GOP side of the aisle. In the past, Richard Nixon had offered wage and price controls. Herbert Hoover, of course, had dismantled all social spending. What was going to be the big plan coming from the Republican side? The big plan is to ask for the President of the United States, when he issues executive orders, to add inflation estimates.

Of course, there is no study showing that executive orders have had any impact on inflation or deflation in the country, so it seems now we are on a real wild goose chase where people are pasting all different kinds of things on it.

The gentlewoman from Minnesota actually comes forward with a very interesting idea, which would be a wonderful thing to talk about if we had a real hearing in the Oversight Committee about the subject. What she is saying is that a number of States, including my State, Maryland, have adopted the genuine progress indicator as a real index of social and economic well-being in their communities.

What this does is it doesn't count negative things like the costs of car accidents and asbestos poisoning as part of GDP. Right now, there are so many negative things that are included as part of GDP. The genuine progress indicator has, I believe, 26 different factors that measure actual progress in social and economic well-being.

If we are going to go down this road without a hearing, without any real analysis, and this is going to be the majority's approach to dealing with inflation, then, by all means, let's include the genuine progress indicator.

Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition.

Mr. Chairman, now we move from the ludicrous to the absurd to the sublime.

Yesterday, they wanted a report from the President upon issuance of an executive order for executive orders having an inflationary impact or having an economic impact of $1 billion. Today, they have gone to one one-thousandth of that. They want a report for every $1 million.

The gentleman points out that I observed yesterday that it would apply to only a handful of executive orders, which is absolutely right. I wasn't arguing or wasn't concerned, as he said, that it applies to too few cases. I was just reflecting about how silly the whole exercise was.

They didn't even seem to understand how few executive orders it would apply to, just like they forgot to put into the legislation a requirement that it actually be published, something that was remedied yesterday in the Boebert amendment.

In any event, Mr. Chairman, now they want an inflationary estimate statement when there is an executive order that has $1 million economic impact, which, by my quick calculation here, is three one-hundred- thousandths of 1 percent of the $26 trillion U.S. economy. It is a fraction of the budget of the Oversight Committee itself. We may as well be saying we should register what the inflationary impact is of the majority and minority budgets in the Oversight Committee.

Obviously, this is an exercise in futility, in silliness. They are finger painting on their own legislation, which itself is not based on any legislative process, based on any hearing, and it obviously does nothing to reduce inflation.

That, however, is what this administration has been working on. Of course, they don't talk about unemployment anymore, which they used to talk about, because President Biden's administration created 12 million new jobs, whereas the last President destroyed millions of jobs. The economy has come roaring back under the Biden administration, just like the Biden administration is actually bringing inflation down.

Example: Check out the Inflation Reduction Act. Everybody who is on insulin in America under the Medicare program is now paying only $35 a month. Now, we know that they opposed that. We know they wanted to repeal that provision. I think they still do want to repeal that provision, but that was a very concrete action, to lower prescription drug prices for diabetics within the Medicare program. They have been lowered across the board within the Medicare program.

That is the kind of specific programmatic action that the Biden administration has undertaken, not a silly reporting bill, which some days is applying to a billion dollars, some days it is applying to a million dollars. There is no rhyme or reason to what they are doing.

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

Mr. Chairman, I don't know that there is much left to say on the substance of this amendment.

I did hear my colleague from Pennsylvania make some sort of disparaging remark about Maryland and about how he didn't live in Maryland, where, apparently, we don't understand the value of money.

Well, the land where we actually are standing today used to be part of Maryland. It was ceded by Maryland to Congress for the purpose of creating the District of Columbia.

When our Capitol came under attack by violent insurrectionists and those who were chanting ``hang Mike Pence'' and who were determined to overthrow the 2020 Presidential election, there were hundreds of police officers who came from Maryland to join the Metropolitan Police Department and the Capitol Police officers in defense of the Capitol of the United States.

I take umbrage at any insinuation that the people of Maryland need to take a back seat to anybody in terms of the defense of the principles of this country. I would thank Mr. Perry for a correction about that.

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

Mr. Chairman, yes, the prices of housing are too high, and the prices of groceries are too high. That is why the administration is working concretely to lower prices and why inflation is coming down now across the board.

What do we get from the majority today? They want a reporting bill about the inflationary impact in executive orders, nothing even about what Congress is doing and how Congress is behaving and contributing to inflation. They want to somehow add a technical reporting requirement for executive orders and think that is accomplishing something.

The administration is lowering the cost of student debt despite the fact that they are doing everything they can to stop it. The administration is acting to lower housing prices across the country. We have moved to lower prescription drug prices and healthcare across the country. They have been fighting us every step along the way. Instead, they come back with this reporting bill, which, again, will do nothing to help the fight against inflation.

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

Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition.

Mr. Chair, I am afraid I remain unilluminated as to what that amendment will do. Apparently, the purpose is to require a more detailed or technical description of the projected impact, or when an assessment required by the bill finds that there will be some inflationary effect.

Again, this sounds like it is simply adding more bureaucracy, more paperwork with no return on investment for the taxpayer dollars that it would obviously take to conduct such an analysis. I mean, here we have gone for more than two centuries with apparently no economist arguing that what we really need to stop inflation is more reporting in the process of issuance of executive orders by Presidents of the United States.

Suddenly, somebody had a great epiphany over there, without even a legislative hearing, that what was really needed was just for the President of the United States to append an inflationary statement to executive orders at the rate of a billion dollars, perhaps to be amended to a million dollars.

Who knows if it is 50 million or 100 million, but it doesn't make any difference because there is no data behind any of it. There is no analysis. You may as well spin a wheel and pick a number at which a report is going to be compelled by the majority here for the so-called REIN IN Act, which stands for the Reduce Exacerbated Inflation Negatively Impacting the Nation Act.

You could go by other titles, including the running on empty index, no new ideas, none act, since basically they are scraping the bottom to try to figure out something to say about inflation, because the administration is actually bringing inflation down.

Now, we notice they don't talk about unemployment, which used to be their mantra: jobs, jobs, jobs. But when Joe Biden came back and created 12 million new jobs after the last administration destroyed millions of jobs with their lethal recklessness in the mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic and Joe Biden turned it around in this administration, they stopped talking about it.

However, they did notice that there was global inflation going on because of the disruption of the global supply chain and because of Vladimir Putin's filthy, imperialist invasion of Ukraine, which some of their Members actually are cheerleaders for, then there was a real problem with inflation.

The administration has steadily been bringing it down, which is why it doesn't have quite the political salience it used to, but the world was waiting with bated breath to determine what their actual plan would be and, alas, their whole plan is a reporting requirement. Nothing to do with Congress and Congress being able to do anything, but a reporting requirement for the President when he issues executive orders.

I think the public is gravely disappointed by this complete collapse of any real commitment to the one issue they thought they had organized their conference around.

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

Mr. Chairman, one can only regard with amazement the gentleman's insinuation that I want to hand power to the executive branch when we have been acting here in Congress to pass the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and to pass the Inflation Reduction Act in the last Congress.

All of the measures they oppose, we moved in order to make real economic progress in the country. Congress was doing that.

They have a big opportunity today to come forward with what their anti-inflation agenda is. Their whole anti-inflation agenda is: we are going to beg the President of the United States to append some inflation numbers to an executive order, to a handful of executive orders over the course of the year.

The gentleman also, I think, slipped in his opposition to our legislation, which reduces to $35 a month what diabetics have to pay for their insulin shots. He calls this price-fixing.

My friend from Pennsylvania is invited to contradict me if I misunderstood him. I think he was describing all of the lowering of prescription drug prices we have done.

We are saving millions of Americans across the country thousands of dollars in their Medicare prescription drug prices, and the gentleman just called that price-fixing. I assume he is opposed to it.

Mr. Chair, I am happy to yield, if he would like to correct me, but otherwise I am going to go back with the conclusion that you are opposed to all of the lowering of the prescription drug prices that the Congress actually engaged in in the 117th Congress.

Finally, the gentleman would like to somehow put in our court the burden of bureaucracy.

Well, let's talk about the major bureaucracy that is being put in place in America today to violate the rights and the freedom of women to make their own medical decisions as they try to criminalize that.

I don't know exactly where the gentleman is--perhaps he can clarify it--most of them support a national ban on abortion, taking what was a constitutional right for more than a half century and turning it into a felony criminal offense or a misdemeanor criminal offense.

You want to talk about bureaucracy? You want to talk about police state? That is on you.

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

Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition.

The Acting CHAIR: The gentleman from Maryland is recognized for 5 minutes.

I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Jeffries), the distinguished minority leader.

Mr. Chair, I thank the gentleman for his extraordinarily insightful and significant remarks.

The only exception I would take is when he referred to extreme MAGA. We actually had a colloquy about this yesterday with the good gentlewoman from Colorado.

I had gently suggested that perhaps our colleagues on the other side of the aisle could stop referring to ``Democrat Congresswomen'' with ``Democrat plans'' and ``Democrat bills.''

``Democrat'' is a noun. The adjective is ``Democratic.'' So it would be the ``Democratic Congresswoman,'' the ``Democratic bill,'' and so on.

I said it grates on our ears the same ways it would grate on your ears if every time we invoke the name of your party, we said the ``banana Republican Congresswoman'' or the ``banana Republican Member'' or the ``banana Republican Conference.'' That, we would consider a breach of civility and decorum, so would we prefer to go back to something else.

Yet, the gentlewoman from Colorado said, if I understood her correctly, that she would continue with her deliberate mispronunciation of the name of our party in its adjectival form.

By the way, she took the opportunity to raise the whole question of MAGA, which I had not mentioned. She said, and when you call me MAGA, don't call me MAGA--call me ultra-MAGA.

So when the minority leader referred to the extreme MAGA element, which appears to be driving the train over there, he should have called it the ultra-MAGA element out of deference to the gentlewoman from Colorado.

I certainly will be able to honor her wishes in the future as she chooses to be described as ultra-MAGA.

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

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

Mr. Chair, so I believe our colleagues are coming clean. They opposed the American Rescue Act, which was absolutely essential legislation to get the country out of the Trump economic wreckage during the last administration.

We had 14.8 percent unemployment; the highest unemployment rate since the Department of Labor started keeping statistics.

Today it is down to 4 percent with the creation of 12 million new jobs under the Biden administration. So they shift the subject from unemployment, which they used to talk about, to inflation.

Well, they raised the debt limit themselves three times under Donald Trump who contributed 25 percent of the entire debt of the Nation between George Washington and Joe Biden.

Mr. Chair, 25 percent all came from the Trump administration, but they are looking for something to try to pin on Biden.

So rather than acknowledging that Putin's war in Russia and the disruption of the global supply chains caused by the coronavirus pandemic created a global inflation, and America is doing much better bringing it down than anybody else, they decide just to try to demonize and vilify Joe Biden.

Why? Because the cabinet is empty. The cupboard is bare. There are no ideas over there, as the distinguished minority leader said.

They are not offering any ideas--some reporting requirements, and they are doodling on that; should it be a billion or a million or hundred million.

Who knows? There has been no hearing on it, so they are making it up as they go along on the floor of the House. We can do much better as we did in the 117th Congress to get America moving again.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, it is always a pleasure to hear my friend from Texas, Mr. Roy, who mentions something which sounded like a substantive suggestion about ending corporate subsidies, or perhaps I intuited or interpreted that.

If he wants to work on legislation with me on ending corporate welfare and corporate subsidies in America, I would love to do that.

That would be a serious step in the right direction, and I would love to work with him on that.

I take it by his suggestion that we rein in spending, something that I referred to when we talked about the Republicans raising the debt limit three times under Donald Trump, they had no problem with doing it back then and creating all of this debt, and we know that the former President was spending like a drunken sailor.

I take it that by not mentioning the legislation anymore, he is basically conceding that this bill will do nothing to bring down the inflation rate. It certainly will not. I don't know if they have been able to mobilize a single economist in the country who would argue that passing this legislation will bring the inflation rate down.

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

Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chair, I thank the gentleman for introducing his amendment, which would add yet another reporting dimension to this already wasteful, bureaucratic paperwork exercise when what the American people need, deserve, and are getting from the Biden administration is real, tangible action to bring down prices in America.

What are we doing? Well, here is one of the things we are doing for older people who disproportionately depend on prescription drugs and people battling illness right now: We have dramatically lowered the cost of prescription drugs in the Medicare program for millions and millions of Americans.

We just heard someone on the other side of the aisle, the gentleman from Pennsylvania, call this price fixing. Well, here is an example of the price fixing that President Biden and the Democratic majority are engaged in. We fixed the price for people who were paying thousands of dollars for insulin shots. We fixed it by putting it down to $35 a month, and they oppose it.

Talk about inflation? What about inflation for diabetics? They don't count? We are not interested in inflation for diabetics, just for large corporations, the people who got more than $1 trillion in a tax cut from the last President? That is who we care about?

We don't care about millions of people who have diabetes in the country, who are spending thousands of dollars a year to pay for their insulin shots? Well, we cut that inflation down to $35 a month, and we get a lecture from them about how that doesn't count.

The Biden administration is trying to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from people who have to pay under a staggering student loan debt today, and they are fighting us on that. They don't care about that kind of inflation. They don't care about the pocketbooks of people who are staggering under student loan debt, 43 million people. We are talking about billions of dollars. Forty-three million people will be assisted by the student loan debt executive order and initiatives taken by the Biden administration, but that doesn't count for them.

We started this series of amendments by talking about the fact that they have this self-imposed political speech impediment. They can't correctly pronounce the name of our party in its adjectival form, but I thought of a solution to this because I was reading a great book by H.W. Brands about Franklin D. Roosevelt called ``Traitor to His Class.'' In the book, he has a bunch of Roosevelt's speeches. Do you know what President Roosevelt called our party? Not the Democratic Party, much less the Democrat Party. If you can't pronounce it, do what Roosevelt did. He called us the democracy. He said the ``economic royalists,'' the corporate plutocrats, say if you invest in the wealthiest people in society, some of the wealth will trickle down on everybody else, but the democracy says you invest in the great working middle class of America, and we will all rise and prosper together. That is the doctrine of the democracy.

If you can't pronounce the name of our party, just call us the democracy. That is what we are today because we defend the right to vote, and we defend free and fair elections, and we stand by the results of elections.

We defend not only the country and our democratic allies all over the world, as in Ukraine, but we defend this body; we defend this Chamber; we defend the Capitol of the United States; and we defend the interests of the working majority of Americans.

The American people are not asking for more reports and more bureaucracy. They are asking for action, and that is what the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress are giving them.

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

Mr. Chair, the Biden administration brought Trump's unemployment rate, which was skyrocketing, down. We went from 14.8 percent to less than 4 percent, creating 12 million new jobs.

Now, President Biden is bringing down the soaring inflation rate he inherited because of the massive disruption in global supply chains caused by the lethal recklessness of the Trump administration in mismanaging the pandemic response.

We are saying, let's finish the job. Just as we brought unemployment down, we are bringing inflation down. We are making the American economy work for the American people through strategic investments like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2 trillion investment in the roads, the highways, the bridges, the ports, the airports, and broadband across the country, in rural areas.

President Biden is fighting for investment in the American people, and that is what the Democrats are fighting for, not a bunch of reports. We don't need this legislation.

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

Madam Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Madam Chair, I thank the distinguished ranking member of the subcommittee for her leadership on refuting this legislation.

After 2 years of rooting for economic failure and blaming President Biden for everything; for post-COVID global inflation, for the instability caused by supply chain breakdowns, and the phenomenal failure of Donald Trump's mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic, after all that, after all the whining and crying about inflation, Republicans finally have the chance to take center stage, right now, with their proposed solution to the problem of inflation.

The world has been waiting with bated breath. Would it be what Richard Nixon did, wage and price controls? Would it be what Herbert Hoover, that Republican did, total laissez-faire, whatever happens, happens?

Well, the long wait is over. The GOP has now debuted their big plan for dealing with inflation in America with H.R. 347, something called the REIN IN Act, which stands for the Reduce Exacerbated Inflation Negatively Impacting the Nation Act.

It is a bill for a mandatory reporting requirement related to executive orders that might apply to two or three executive orders a year.

You got that right: A reporting requirement related to a handful of executive orders every year is the GOP's response to inflation after barnstorming the entire country, claiming that they had some kind of solution.

Now, you might think it is the most brilliant thing since the invention of Social Security, which they opposed, or Medicare, which they opposed, or you might think it is the dumbest thing since Donald Trump's last trillion-dollar corporate tax giveaway.

But either away, it will have zero effect on inflation or deflation in the United States of America. Nothing. It is not going to have any effect at all.

Now, our friends in the GOP are interested in this session of Congress in tortured, inscrutable, incomprehensible acronyms.

So they can have the REIN IN Act, which they seem very connected to, but I want to suggest a better title that will still conform to their acronym. Let's call it the running on empty initiative based on no ideas none act. How about that?

The legislation was hatched without any hearing, and it shows. It has no legislative meaning and no potential economic consequences.

Even as reporting bills go, it is pathetically weak, as it doesn't even require publication of the report. They came up with a reporting requirement that didn't even require the report to be published.

Look, executive orders are not the cause of inflation, and there is no economic research suggesting they are.

The most conservative economists in the world will tell you that inflation is a complex, global phenomenon connected to prices, supply chains, supply and demand curves, and unemployment rate.

Since 2020, inflation has risen worldwide, exacerbated by supply chain delays caused by the pandemic and then Vladimir Putin's filthy war of aggression in Ukraine, which some of our friends over there support.

President Biden has created something like an economic miracle out of the chaos handed to him by Donald Trump.

After signing his massive tax giveaway, Trump's failed State dysfunctional response to COVID plunged America into its most severe economic contraction since 1946. Someone dispute that.

The unemployment rate rose to 14.8 percent under Donald Trump, the highest on record since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting data in 1948.

In 2021, Biden and the Democrats got to work. We passed the American Rescue Plan, which fueled a strong, equitable, economic recovery with historic reductions in unemployment, in poverty, in economic hardship.

Real GDP increased by 5.7 percent. The unemployment rate decreased to 4 percent, surpassing all forecasts. Wages increased by 5 percent with the highest increases going to lower economic income earners.

So Democratic policies have allowed the U.S. to absorb the shock of rising inflation engulfing the globe since 2020.

That is serious economic policy, what President Biden and the Democrats are engaged in, and they have a silly little symbolic messaging bill for a couple of notations they didn't even want to publish originally within the process of offering executive orders.

Madam Chair, we have created 12 million new jobs in America. How many million jobs do they want to erase over there in their desperate, sudden pursuit of inflation?

They raised the debt limit three times under Donald Trump. Now they talk about the debt limit all the time. They raised it three times, and they contributed under Donald Trump 25 percent of all the debt in the United States from George Washington to Joe Biden--25 percent of the debt under one President, Donald Trump.

They did that, and now they dare come talk to us about inflation, and the bill that they advance is one to have some people pass some more paperwork around.

Come on. Give me a break. Give us something better than the running on empty initiative with no new ideas at all.

We recommend a ``no'' vote. What real economic action requires is precisely what President Biden is already doing.

Madam Chair, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Madam Chair, actually, I have a question because it strikes me

as a very sincerely and decently motivated amendment to a flawed bill.

But is there a reason to think that any of the current economic analyses of inflation and the current indicators that we use don't take into account the various factors that the gentleman specifies?

I yield to the gentleman for the purposes of a colloquy.

Madam Chair, reclaiming my time.

That makes great sense to me, and I am tempted to support the amendment. If the gentleman is correct, that points to a larger problem.

Is the gentleman telling us that the inflation rate today that is published by our government does not incorporate spending patterns in rural areas, for example?

Madam Chair, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois for the purpose of a colloquy.

I am sorry. By which definition?

Reclaiming my time, I don't know what the reason for that is, and thank you for educating me. I wasn't aware of it.

I assume they are saying the inflation rate is higher in urban areas than it is in rural areas, which is, presumably, why they peg it to that. That might bring the inflation rate down.

Would the gentleman just give me a sense of how taking it into account might affect what is today the general inflation rate? Let's assume it is inflated because it is focused on the urban areas where the cost of living is higher. Would it reduce the overall inflation rate?

Madam Chair, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois for the purpose of a colloquy.

Reclaiming my time, this very constructive colloquy, I think, underscores the importance of actually having hearings in Congress. This is legislation that sprung out of someone's head somewhere and then appeared on the House floor without actually having a hearing where we could examine it.

The gentleman raises a profound point that might lead us to question inflation statistics generally. I just don't know. At this point, we are all guessing because we haven't had a hearing, and we don't know the facts of it.

Unfortunately, we are going to be sending people, including me, to the floor to vote on this amendment without really having any information about the background.

Obviously, we want to make sure that military personnel, farm households, and residents of rural areas are included, forcefully, if they are excluded now, even if that means bringing the inflation rate down, something I imagine President Biden would quite enjoy.

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

Madam Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Madam Chair, I claim the time in opposition to the amendment.

Madam Chair, the first thing I want to note about this amendment is that it now expands the definition of a major executive order to include those projected to cause an annual gross budgetary or economic effect of at least $1 billion, which includes those orders that would have a positive economic effect of $1 billion or more, thereby just adding a lot more paperwork, a lot more unnecessary bureaucratic entanglement.

The distinguished chair of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, I think, mentioned in passing the Biden administration's attempt to roll back some of the radical deregulatory program of the Trump administration, which undermined regulations favoring automobile safety, train safety, water safety, land safety.

Again, we have what appears to be another clever talking point by the GOP, and the whole country is now up in arms over what took place in East Palestine, Ohio. We see precisely what the human effects and consequences are of their radical, pro-corporate deregulatory agenda, dismantling the rules and regulations that protect public safety and public welfare.

That is really what is going on over there. It is not about having a couple of little analyses stuck onto an executive order every 4, 5, or 6 months. We know exactly what the real economic program is.

This bill is a camouflage, just like this amendment is, and I urge the body to oppose it.

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

Madam Chair, I claim the time in opposition to the amendment.

Madam Chair, I want to just clear up a couple of things.

First, I heard the very distinguished gentlewoman from Colorado mention job creators. I assume she was responding to President Biden since 12 million new jobs have been created under President Biden, whereas millions of jobs were lost under the prior President, who may be a favorite of the gentlewoman's.

I also wanted to make just a brief semantic point because the gentlewoman was making a grammatical error that I heard some of her colleagues make before. I believe she referred to a ``Democrat solution.'' I heard another Member talk about a ``Democrat Member'' and a ``Democrat plan.''

I just wanted to educate our distinguished colleagues that ``Democrat'' is the noun. When you use it as an adjective, you say the ``Democratic Member,'' or the ``Democratic solution,'' or the ``Democratic plan.''

I assume it is a good faith grammatical error the first few times, but after people are corrected several times and they continue to say it, it seems like it is an act of incivility, as if every time we mentioned the other party it just came out with a kind of political speech impediment like, ``Oh, the banana Republican Party,'' as if we were to say that every time we mentioned the ``banana Republican Member,'' or the ``banana Republican plan,'' or the ``banana Republican Conference,'' but we wouldn't do that.

So out of pure political courtesy, when it is an adjective, refer to the ``Democratic Congresswoman'' or the ``Democratic Member.''

Having said that, I would like to say that I favor the Boebert amendment. I think it is really the Raskin amendment because none of them apparently caught the fact that their reporting requirement wasn't to be published until I told them. I actually read the bill, and I said there is no publication of it. So this amendment follows through on the fact that I pointed out to them that their bill didn't even call for publication of the inflation information which they thought was so essential.

Madam Chair, I am afraid I am going to have to support the Boebert amendment, because I think I am the genesis of it.

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

Madam Chair, I claim the time in opposition.

Madam Chair, I would ask if the gentleman would be willing to yield for a couple of questions?

Again, there was no hearing in committee, so I don't understand this. This might be a great idea, but I would like to figure it out.

It requires that any inflationary estimates prepared incorporate the inflationary impact of debt servicing costs, which seems perfectly logical to me.

But is there a reason to think that the current inflation rate, as defined by the U.S. Government, does not incorporate the inflationary impact of debt servicing costs?

Madam Chair, I yield to the gentleman for the purposes of a colloquy.

So that is true across the board in terms of all of the economic indicators that we read about, whether it is the OMB or the-- --

Madam Chair, I reclaim my time and thank the gentleman for his kind answers.

This really is why we have hearings in Congress, because it feels like we are just posting a lot of graffiti on a wall here.

I don't know how the inflation rate is calculated. I don't know whether the import of this amendment would be to double count debt servicing costs because I don't know which government agencies actually incorporate debt servicing costs and which don't.

One thing I do know is that if the gentleman has the greatest amendment of the year, it is still basically irrelevant because it does nothing. In other words, it is not going to do anything to bring down anybody's debt servicing costs, which I agree are huge, unlike, for example, what the Biden administration has done in terms of student debt by acting dramatically to bring it down--even though there are people from across the aisle who are in court today, I believe, trying to get that thrown out and trying to bring everybody's student loan debt back up--that is real economic action.

In any event, what this is about is pure symbolism. In other words, they are asking for a reporting bill that will only apply if there is a $1 billion plus impact, and the good gentleman comes forward to say: Make sure, Mr. President, when you are doing your calculations, that you include debt servicing costs.

I don't know. You could take it or leave it. It doesn't do anything for people who are staggering under debt. The way that the Biden administration is trying to act, for example, is to deal with the problem of student debt or the way that we have acted to try to help people who are suffering under mortgage debt, that is real economic action.

I am just going to have to consider it carefully, given the information we have. But I will end with a plea for the good chairman of the Oversight Committee, the distinguished gentleman from Kentucky: We have to have hearings on these bills, so we know what we are talking about, because I feel like we are dancing in the dark here.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I just repeat my puzzlement from before.

Perhaps if Mr. Cloud would yield for another question.

What is the inflationary impact of debt servicing costs? Have there been any economic studies on that?

Madam Chair, I yield to the gentleman for a colloquy.

Madam Chair, I reclaim my time.

I think the gentleman raises a very interesting point. I would love to know the answer as to whether or not it is actually incorporated today in what the inflationary or deflationary effects are of debt servicing costs. Obviously, this bill and this amendment would not have any impact on what those debt servicing costs are, but I don't see much of a problem of adding this language to the hortatory nature of the legislation.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I will just end on this one with this thought.

The majority comes forward with a plan to say we want to know an estimated inflationary impact of an executive order, and then we have a series of Christmas tree amendments saying, make sure you include the cost to rural areas; make sure you include the cost of debt servicing. I would like to know the overall costs.

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

Madam Chair, I want to speak in strong support of the gentlewoman's amendment. I thank Ms. Jackson Lee for her leadership in terms of real economic policy, which is about making the government an instrument of well-being and public good.

We know we have serious philosophical differences with our friends across the aisle. Many of them wanted to dismantle Social Security and Medicare. When President Biden arrived the other day, a lot of them retreated very quickly from it.

I would be delighted if someone wants to challenge me on that because we have all the quotations from all the Republican Senators and Representatives that said it was time to get rid of Social Security and phase it out, adopt means testing, increase the age, so on and so forth.

That is a real policy difference. What they have done here really falls under the category of symbolic politics. The good gentlewoman from Texas has done her best to make this meaningful, and I thank her for giving me the opportunity to say that.

Madam Chair, I rise in favor of Mrs. Lee's excellent amendment here which makes both powerful economic points and powerful constitutional points.

The economic point is that Congress must act in order to bring down inflation, Congress must act in order to promote employment, and we have acted in partnership with President Biden to do just that in the Inflation Reduction Act, in the infrastructure act, and in a whole series of bills that we have used to bring inflation down and to dramatically lower unemployment in the country.

But she is making also, I believe, a very powerful constitutional point because part of what gets lost in the symbolism of this legislation--a mere messaging bill about having executive orders over $1 billion, which describes a handful in a year attached in an inflation description--what gets lost is that the Constitution in Article I sets it up so that Congress is the major definer of economic policy in the country.

It is Congress that is supposed to be laying and collecting taxes and impost and dealing with the debt of the country. It is Congress that regulates commerce among the States and with foreign countries.

So the failure to come forward with real productive legislation on inflation is also a surrender to the executive branch, and we don't need to do that.

So we should be working with the executive branch as we have done in the Inflation Reduction Act, with the infrastructure bill, in lowering prescription drug costs, and in lowering the costs for diabetics to get their insulin shots to $35 a month. That is the real pathway, not just a bunch of reporting bills.

Madam Chair, I claim the time in opposition.

As far as I understand, the amendment just adds one more unnecessary detail to the report, creating greater administrative burden and taxpayer costs that are still undefined. It is unclear why it is necessary. If it is necessary, it should be adopted across the board. But, of course, we had no hearing so we can't really understand what the merits of the proposal are, but right now, it just seems like a lot more bureaucratic paperwork.

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