Floor Statements

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise today also in strong support of this resolution, which recognizes the sacrifices made by law enforcement officers across America every day and honors the bravery of those who have fallen in the line of duty and given the rest of us the last full measure of their devotion. These too often unsung heroes have our eternal gratitude, and we must offer our unwavering support to their families and loved ones.

Mr. Speaker, 111 officers died in the line of duty last year, and 30 more have fallen already in 2026. They leave behind wives and husbands, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and partners and colleagues to remember them, and we must remember them too.

This year 363 names will be added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial here in D.C., including two officers from Maryland. I would like to mention Sergeant Brenda J. Lowery of the Cecil County Sheriff's Office died suddenly on June 4, 2024, after working the night shift at the Cecil County Detention Center. Those who knew her recalled how, throughout her nearly two decades of service, she managed to make a positive impact in the lives of not only her fellow deputies, but all those whom she interacted with each day. A dedicated servant to her community and country, Sergeant Lowery, like many officers, was also a military veteran, a veteran of the United States Air Force. She never stopped serving her country and her community.

Former Chief Edward E. Ivey, Jr., of the Fairmount Heights Police Department in Prince George's County has been described by colleagues as a natural leader and a pillar of his community that he served for 28 years. Chief Ivey passed away after an occupational illness on June 14, 2022. He was posthumously honored by the Chiefs of Police Association of Prince George's County with their Hall of Fame Award.

America's law enforcement officers set out every single day to protect our people. They protect our neighborhoods, our loved ones, our businesses, our schools, our property, and even this building and the people who work within it when called upon to do so.

We recognize that our sworn officers do not make these sacrifices alone. Every day, their families live with the knowledge that their loved one may not return home after the shift. These families, too, bear the heavy burdens of their profession, and we honor them today, as well.

Today, I ask all of our colleagues to join us in honoring all the men and women who took the oath, dedicating their lives to our communities with honor, duty, and courage and who have fallen in the line of duty. We remain committed to remembering them and honoring them. They will not be forgotten.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers, and I will close with this.

The observance of National Police Week and Peace Officers Memorial Day marks a time of solemn remembrance when our Nation comes together to honor the courage, the sacrifice, and the dedication of the noble law enforcement officers and personnel all across the country and right here in Washington, D.C., and on the Capitol itself who promote our safety and our security.

Let us rededicate ourselves to awareness of their service to our communities and our country.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the sponsors of this resolution for upholding and honoring the spirit of this moment. I thank my friend from North Carolina for his remarks. I ask all colleagues to support H. Res. 1252, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 2853, the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act. This bipartisan legislation will address the crisis of organized interstate criminal theft schemes that are costing the retail sector and consumers tens of billions of dollars a year but are often too complex for State law enforcement and prosecutors to address on their own.

In recent years, retailers have sounded the alarm about this crisis, expressing urgent concern that organized retail crime has become a significant threat both to public safety and to the viability of a retail sector already hard-hit by online commerce--threatening the viability of businesses of all sizes, from cargo brokers, shippers, big box stores, and online marketplaces to small, family-owned ma-and-pa retailers.

This is a problem that Members of Congress are hearing about all the time from our constituents. When we talk about the problem, we are talking

about serious criminal enterprises that operate in a coordinated manner to commit large-scale theft of merchandise for resale or to defraud retailers and convert the proceeds directly into cash or cryptocurrency.

This legislation is not aimed at petty shoplifters or small, one-off episodes of theft. We are talking about a multibillion-dollar criminal industry that grows, evolves, and adapts rapidly to the latest technology, security improvements, and modified business practices. These kinds of operations are centrally coordinated, enabled by technology, and very difficult to stop by local police forces.

While organized retail theft endangers the physical safety of retail workers in every sector, this kind of crime hits small businesses especially hard. Family-owned businesses simply cannot afford to replace lost inventory, increase security, make unplanned repairs, and pay the higher insurance premiums that are associated with this criminal epidemic. Small businesses do not have the funds set aside to recruit new employees to replace those who quit because they fear for their safety.

Organized retail crime is centralized and sophisticated. Combating it requires a coordinated Federal law enforcement response. This legislation is a targeted, bipartisan effort to address organized, multi-State criminal networks. It is designed to improve coordination among existing partners, not to expand Federal authority beyond its current legislative scope.

To be clear, let's go through exactly what CORCA does. It creates an organized retail and supply chain coordination center to help local, State, and Federal law enforcement agencies across America better analyze the problem and formulate more targeted and effective solutions. The information-sharing provisions are intended to help police forces work together, along with private-sector entities, to prosecute and disrupt the large criminal enterprises that are perpetrating networks of organized retail crime.

The law also authorizes prosecutors to aggregate thefts over a 12- month period to meet the $5,000 minimum threshold for Federal jurisdiction over certain crimes. It fixes some loopholes in money laundering statutes so that those using gift cards to launder the proceeds of their organized retail crime can no longer dodge money laundering charges.

Finally, the bill directs DHS and DOJ to review and make recommendations to Congress for strengthening grant programs for training and technical assistance.

Importantly, this legislation, which sunsets after 7 years unless it is extended, gives the Federal Government no new authorities. These new activities will take place entirely within existing legal frameworks. It leverages the strengths of local, State, and Federal law enforcement to foster a coordinated response across State lines and, indeed, international borders.

In an era in which the Department of Homeland Security often seems to have lost its way completely, this bill is intended to focus its agents on a staggeringly serious problem that demands their focused attention and expertise.

Some of my colleagues have raised concerns that the $5,000 threshold in this bill would trigger the involvement of the DOJ in what could be a local shoplifting case. In practice, however, longstanding DOJ policy advises Federal prosecutors to prioritize cases with much higher dollar amounts, leaving most retail theft cases to be charged by State authorities, which cannot effectively pursue cases across State lines. This policy disparity creates an enforcement gap that organized retail theft rings have learned to exploit. It is precisely this reason that gives rise to this legislation.

H.R. 2853 is focused on organized criminal enterprises engaged in cargo theft, gift card fraud, and other large-scale retail theft. These are not isolated incidents or opportunistic low-level offenses. They involve structured networks that move goods and money across jurisdictions, operating with a level of coordination that makes them difficult to detect and prosecute.

H.R. 2853 is a bipartisan effort to address a nationwide problem that indeed requires coordination across agencies, different levels of government, and private industry sectors. By strengthening information- sharing and aligning existing resources, this bill will help law enforcement agencies at every level of government more effectively identify, disrupt, and prosecute coordinated criminal enterprises.

Mr. Speaker, I support this legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Nevada (Ms. Lee), who represents the Third District of Nevada and has been such a great champion for this legislation and has educated a lot of the Congress about it, along with her colleague (Ms. Titus), who represents the First District.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Nevada (Ms. Titus), representing the First District of Nevada.

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

Mr. Speaker, in closing, let the word go out to all of the organized retail criminal conspiracies, outfits, operations, and racketeering enterprises across America and the world that we are going to have an Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center. We are going to be working between the Federal Government and the State and local governments in order to crack down on this very serious threat to our small businesses, some bigger businesses, and to all of the consumers and the people of the country.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished former prosecutor and Congressman from North Carolina (Mr. Knott) for his leadership on this.

We are not powerless. There is definitely something that we can do to stop this. This is a clear and effective bipartisan solution before us.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all of our colleagues to support H.R. 2853, and I am happy to yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I do not oppose the motion.

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

The Senate just unanimously passed this 43-day extension. Yesterday I was struck by a point my colleagues from the House Intelligence Committee made here on the House floor that the FISA 702 authorities were too important to turn off. We agree. But I also know that we cannot turn off our constitutional values and principles.

Nothing about protecting our safety should prevent us from protecting our rights. We can have both. When we talk about protecting civil liberties, we are not speaking of theoretical threats. We are talking of real violations perpetrated by the FBI, not just in 2022, but over the past year and still going on today.

The March 2026 FISC opinion describing the FISC judge's concerns about the FBI's violations of FISA is still classified by an administration that seems intent on keeping the public in the dark as we debate this fundamental problem.

We can say with some confidence that the FBI has no idea how many U.S. person queries they ran last year, how many times they spied on American citizens. We should not have to take this vote without being able to explain these serious deficiencies. We have a right to know how many times the communications of American citizens were accessed.

Every day that goes by where the Trump administration and Kash Patel's FBI can circumvent our constitutional values to spy on American citizens is one day too many. I won't oppose this short extension but only because it is my fervent hope and determination that it will give us the time to work together across the aisle to implement meaningful reform.

It is long past time for Speaker Johnson to stop blocking Members of this body from coming together across party lines to work in good faith to strike a bipartisan deal on section 702 that is the support of a robust, bipartisan majority which believes that the program is important for foreign intelligence but must be made consistent with the essential constitutional values of our privacy rights under the Constitution.

A significant majority of Members in this Chamber, Democrats and Republicans alike, want real reforms to protect Americans' privacy and civil liberties, not the paltry restatements of current law that have been offered to us so far.

The vast majority of Members of this body and the American people want a Federal judge, not an FBI agent or an FBI lawyer, to stand between them and their private communications. That is the constitutional design. You go to a judge. You don't leave it to the executive branch itself to check its own behavior.

The Speaker must allow the House to work its will. The Speaker must allow the House to serve the American people, to bring to the floor legislation that lives up to the spirit of the Fourth Amendment and ensures Americans are protected from their government as the Founders intended.

So as a gesture of good faith, we will give a few-week extension here, but we would love the Speaker of the House to get serious and allow us to have meaningful, bipartisan negotiation and compromise.

I have heard from so many distinguished Republican Members over there, including a number of former Federal prosecutors, who say: We can work this thing out. Let us do the people's business, and let's work it out.

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

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

I thank my friend from Kentucky for his always unswerving leadership on behalf of constitutional values, privacy, and the civil rights and civil liberties of the people.

The question here is how are we actually going to move the Speaker, who seems to be immersed in some combination of inertia, bureaucracy, and chaos, and the Senate, which doesn't seem to be living up to its traditional role in trying to reconcile our foreign policy and national security agenda with the constitutional values of the people?

We are saying, let's give it a few weeks now. I hope that Chairman Jordan will echo my endorsement of us really getting together to have bipartisan negotiations and compromise on this. This is not a partisan problem. We have people on all sides of this on both sides of the aisle. The vast majority of the Democrats want to make sure that we have a program that protects the privacy rights and the civil liberties of the people.

No, we do not trust Kash Patel to have conversations with Tulsi Gabbard as a successful substitute for the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. I am sure you don't trust whoever you would liken to Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard on our side.

That is fine. That is partisan politics. That is why we want this to rest on

some level of constitutional principles that will cut across party lines.

Let's take a few weeks to have serious, meaningful discussion. As a gesture of good faith, we say we will work with the Speaker if the Speaker will work with us.

We see him conducting negotiations in the middle of votes on the House floor. How about we all get together the way that Congress is supposed to and have meaningful discussion and dialogue? Let's do the same thing with people in the Senate.

I challenge the Members of the Senate to stand up for a system that the American people can believe in. We simply cannot leave it up to Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump to enforce our civil rights and civil liberties for us. That is not going to work. They are partisan actors. They have proven themselves to be partisan actors, and they don't make any bones about that. They are unashamed of it. That is fine. Then we need to put principles in place that are going to protect the American people.

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

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

The critical point is that we need to have a judge standing between the FBI and the private communications of the American people. This has got to be the essential constitutional value that is vindicated here. We need to interpose the authority and the independence of a judge between the FBI and the communications of the people.

The reform that my friend from Texas just mentioned is to have Kash Patel report his abuses to Tulsi Gabbard. If you think that is a good substitute for the Fourth Amendment, well, then you can go with what the gentleman was talking about, which was this 3-year extension. We are not willing go with the 3-year extension. 191 of us voted against it, including a dozen Republicans.

We are willing to give you 40 more days or 45 more days for us to negotiate this thing, if the Speaker will actually sit down with us. We want the Speaker to sit down with us, and we want the Senate to take its constitutional responsibilities seriously here.

The privacy rights of the people are too essential, and the privacy rights of the people should not be pitted against the national security interests of the country.

We can make this happen if we are willing to get rid of all of the chaos and the pandemonium that we have seen over the last several days and simply sit down and have a meaningful conversation and write the legislation.

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, we can reconcile the essential constitutional values of the country with the national security of the country. This 45-day continuation is a mandate. It is a mandate to the Speaker to allow the House to finally come together to develop compromise legislation that guarantees that judges--not Kash Patel, not Tulsi Gabbard, and not Donald Trump--will be the ones to ensure our privacy and our civil liberties.

Let's use this period to engage in real legislative compromise and negotiation in the interests of the American people.

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

Mr. Speaker, last year, devil-may-care, footloose, free- spending, Trump-enabling MAGA Republicans cut ICE and CBP a check from the American people for $170 billion with no oversight, no accountability, and no programmatic details.

And in the months since they passed their staggeringly irresponsible budget-busting, debt-enlarging big, beautiful bill, the American people have seen the consequences of handing billions of dollars to a rogue agency headed up by terrible leaders like Kristi Noem.

ICE now routinely tramples the constitutional rights of the people. It thumbs its nose at Federal court orders, and it brings fear and terror to communities across the country.

Look at what Federal courts have said about ICE, which didn't just lie about the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. In dozens of cases, Federal judges have found that ICE officials are lying in court. A Reagan-appointed judge rejected the testimony of the acting ICE director as ``disingenuous, squalid, and dishonorable.'' Another judge called the affidavit of a top ICE official: The sorriest statement I have ever seen in court and said that if you were asking to get a warrant issued on this I would throw you out of my chambers.

Mr. Speaker, now our colleagues, rather than deal with the reality of what they have created, a monster year with American citizens being shot down in cold blood at point blank range, in Minneapolis Alex Pretti and Renee Good--rather than deal with that reality, they just want to double down on their world historical error by giving up another $140 billion with basically no strings attached to the people at ICE that have unleashed this chaos against us.

Mr. Speaker, I am voting ``no.''

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

Mr. Speaker, I urge all of our colleagues, with constitutional patriotism still beating in their hearts after this tortured and demeaning and visibly transactional process we have seen today, to oppose the legislation.

This bill is a 3-year permission slip and blessing for the Trump administration and the next administration to keep abusing the sweeping FISA section 702 surveillance authority to spy on American citizens' private communications and to violate the privacy rights of the people.

I want every Member of this body to be clear on exactly what is in this bill. It has no warrant requirement for queries of U.S. citizens. It has no probable cause requirement. It provides for no judicial oversight of these government queries.

It subjects U.S. citizens to completely subconstitutional standards, avoiding the Fourth Amendment entirely. It is in a parallel universe from the Constitution--or perhaps I should say a perpendicular universe to the Constitution.

The Constitution interposes a judge--a neutral, independent magistrate--between the government and a search of persons and their things. This 3-year blank check to Trump, Patel, and company leaves the executive branch free to conduct these searches with self-reporting and self-policing as the sole protection against their abuse of the section 702 program.

Without any meaningful guardrails, this U.S. person information collected under foreign intelligence standards that have nothing to do with the Fourth Amendment is ripe for abuse. It has been systematically abused to spy on American citizens in the past, and it will be used in exactly the same way by Kash Patel and Todd Blanche in the future if we pass this bill.

Last week, it came to light that FBI Director Kash Patel was unhappy about a New York Times article, which focused on the fact that he had used FBI SWAT teams and jets to chauffeur his girlfriend around the country at taxpayer expense.

What did he do? He didn't decide to change his policy on how he uses the people's resources. Instead, he had his agents query FBI databases for dirt on the reporter.

Was the FISA section 702 program one of the databases he searched? The FBI says no. He just searched every other database at the FBI. We have no idea because they don't have to go to a judge before searching an American citizen's information.

We depend now, in this system, on Kash Patel to be the check and balance against Kash Patel. We only know about the fact that it even happened because a reporter got the information. Otherwise, we wouldn't even have known anything about it.

Let it be a warning to people vigilant about our civil rights and privacy, about what actually goes on.

Even Republicans on the Rules Committee last night were registering their displeasure with these reports.

Look, the FISA section 702 program has been misused and abused under every section. Section 702 authorizes the government to collect information from electronic communication companies in the U.S. about non-U.S. persons who are physically outside the U.S. When the government gets communications to and from these foreign targets, it also incidentally collects large amounts of information about American citizens.

In 2022, the FISC, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, detailed a historical pattern of noncompliant queries at the FBI. Improper searches swept in elected officials, political campaign donors, Black Lives Matter protesters, and many others.

At other agencies, analysts used section 702 to query their own names, the names of their relatives, and even the names of former romantic partners.

Just last month, Federal judges on the FISC issued an opinion to sound the alarm about how the FBI is currently abusing FISA, violating the law and flouting the safeguards Congress imposed 2 years ago to snoop on Americans' private communications. The administration is deliberately keeping this opinion totally classified in a basement SCIF here at the House.

Reforms that we made during the last FISA section 702 reauthorization, which I strongly supported and voted for--unlike my friend Chairman Jordan--those reforms relied on internal watchdogs and required agencies to track and report the use of section 702 data to spy on Americans.

I strongly supported that reform, but, 1 year and change into the Trump administration, the watchdogs are all but gone. After returning to the White House, President Trump quickly removed the internal watchdogs charged with verifying FBI's representations that the reforms are working; he illegally fired a majority of the members of the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board; and his Department of Justice reassigned other key compliance personnel. The watchdogs have been removed from the scene of the crimes.

The administration repeatedly claims that FBI compliance exceeded 99 percent in 2024 and 2025. Even if those claims are true--and I seriously doubt it--that is an admission that the FBI has illegally accessed the data of thousands of American citizens.

More importantly, these numbers are based on the violations and abuses that Kash Patel and Todd Blanche are willing to identify themselves and self-report. How can we believe these numbers when the administration has returned all the watchdogs to the pound? They are no longer there.

The FISC judges warned us just last month that the FBI is abusing its authorities to spy on Americans, so what makes us think that a 3-year blank check renewal will lead to self-correction?

Proponents of the bill claim that it protects privacy, but asking Kash Patel's FBI to self-report abuses of our civil liberties to Tulsi Gabbard's DNI is like asking Donald Trump to self-report his collection of millions of dollars from foreign governments directly to the U.S. Congress. That is actually the law under Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, the Foreign Emoluments Clause. Yet, he has never once come to ask for our permission for him to keep a foreign government emolument, whether pocketed through the Trump Hotels, the Trump golf courses, or the other Trump enterprises in crypto coins and scams, and so on.

If you think self-reporting is working well under the foreign government Emoluments Clause, go ahead and vote for self-reporting under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. For me, I am sticking with the Fourth Amendment and the Constitution. Under our Constitution, it is judges, not FBI agents or government lawyers, who must protect our privacy and our civil liberties.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lofgren).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal).

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

Mr. Speaker, the key point is this: Under this bill, FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans' communications without any review from a judge. It is the heart of the Fourth Amendment, Mr. Speaker, that search warrants have to be based upon probable cause, and you have to go to a judge to get a search warrant before you can invade the private expectations of the people in their places and in their things.

This bill leaves intelligence agencies in charge of policing their own compliance with the law. Asking Kash Patel to self-report his abuses to Tulsi Gabbard does nothing to protect the civil liberties of Americans.

That is not how our Constitution was designed. The whole reason we have the courts involved is to make sure that the executive branch doesn't get to be its own check and balance against itself.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time

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

Mr. Speaker, Kash Patel has been using government resources to chauffeur his girlfriend all over the country. Then when it was learned by the press that he was doing that, there was an article about it.

When he got mad about it, rather than say: Well, yeah, maybe there is a problem using an FBI SWAT team to shepherd my girlfriend around the country. Instead of changing the policy, he decided to go after the reporter and search the databases on the FBI.

This is while we are debating FISA.

If you need any more vivid demonstration, Mr. Speaker, of the danger of allowing law enforcement officials to govern themselves and to regulate whether or not they are violating the Constitution, check that out. We may disagree a lot about this FBI director's record. That is not directly relevant to this point.

Say you trust him, we don't, but we know you haven't trusted other people in the office before, Mr. Speaker. Let's legislate in a way that is consistent with the Constitution of the United States.

In closing, Mr. Speaker, the reason why we have to hold fast to the Constitution is precisely because we are all imperfect beings. I stood strongly for FISA 702 last time without the necessity of a search warrant because of all the reforms that I believed that the Biden administration would engage in, and they basically engaged in them.

Now the Trump administration is in, and President Trump came in and dismantled all of the safeguards we put in and just chased the watchdogs out of the FBI. That is why we must stick very closely to the Constitution, as my good friend, the chairman of the committee, argued the last time we debated this. He has convinced a lot of people that we need to stick to the Constitution. I am sorry we are not on the same side today.

The key point is that we do not trust government officials to regulate themselves. That is why law enforcement officers across the country, FBI, have to go to a judge to get a Fourth Amendment search warrant before they invade somebody's privacy unless there is exigency, unless there is an emergency, and we have accounted for that. We can deal with that problem.

Let's stick with the Constitution.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, yes, it is foreign intelligence, which is why when it comes to U.S. persons--U.S. citizens--the Fourth Amendment has to apply. The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), my distinguished colleague, said that the legislation is bipartisan.

I tell you what else was bipartisan--in fact, unanimous: the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Everybody got behind that. We are assured that there is reporting, but it is self-reporting. The distinguished ranking member says that it is by nonpolitical staff.

Yes, the nonpolitical staff left over after Kash Patel fired everybody at the FBI who they considered insufficiently loyal to MAGA and to Donald Trump and for those who worked on the January 6 case.

Then, we are told that the courts still can get involved at some point. Well, the courts are telling us right now that the FBI has been secretly breaking the law. Last month, the FISC court found that many of the government's 702 searches violated Federal law. We should be paying close attention to that as we move forward.

Mr. Speaker, please forgive me because I didn't even have 15 minutes to read it. I had to drive down from Maryland's beautiful Eighth District, so I have had about 90 seconds to review this product that we were supposed to have been working on for the last several months.

Let me do my best to try to analyze for people what is happening because already the machinery of propaganda and disinformation has set in, and people are talking about a magic warrant requirement which has appeared in here, which is complete and utter nonsense.

Let me start by echoing the distinguished ranking member of the Rules Committee that this is an appalling Kafkaesque process leading to an absurd Orwellian result. This is much worse than what was being offered before of the clean 2-year reauthorization. The substance of this proposal is utterly appalling.

They say you shouldn't look to see how the sausage gets made. This isn't even sausage. This is scrapple. It is scrapple with dogfood mixed inside of it.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to have to try to read through it to understand what they are doing.

Let's start with this: Originally, they proposed an 18-month clean reauthorization, and the Democrats and some members of the Freedom Caucus were very skeptical of the enterprise. They said: 18 months? That is not like any short-term extension we know around here. Usually, we talk about 72 hours or 1 week or 2 weeks. Eighteen months? That is a huge, massive expansion.

Then they went into some kind of compromise session with the White House. None of us were invited, so we don't know who was there or what was spoken, but they went from 18 months to 5 years. They went from a clean 2-year reauthorization to a 5-year dirty deal. The saving grace of it is supposed to be a so-called warrant requirement--which I will investigate in a second--which doesn't kick in for another 2 years.

We have 2 years without their illusory Band-Aid that they are putting on this process, this fake warrant requirement, so the Trump administration can do whatever they want even without this mythical, inscrutable warrant requirement, and then we get 5 more years of this.

This is the compromise that they worked out behind our backs, and all we could rely on was the goodwill of the handful of members of the Freedom Caucus who were standing up for the Constitution and the civil liberties and civil rights of the people.

I don't think that our friends in the Freedom Caucus have done the American people any favors if they are signing off on this.

The first thing that they do is they change the terms of the length of the legislation, a 5-year authorization with the fraudulent warrant requirement not kicking in for 2 years.

Let's look at the much-vaunted warrant requirement, which appears on page 3. Let's start with this in trying to understand the gobbledygook here. ``The Federal Bureau of Investigation may not ingest unminimized information acquired under this section into its analytic repositories unless the targeted person is relevant to an existing, open, predicated full national security investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If the subject of such predicated, full national security investigation is a United States person, for purposes of this paragraph, the investigation must be supported by probable cause.''

This is supposed to be the big concession to the people who were saying that the Constitution governs and the Fourth Amendment is still alive, right?

Well, what is the first thing that I notice as someone who spent 25 years as a constitutional law professor? Well, the operative part of it is the last eight words there: ``the investigation must be supported by probable cause.''

It doesn't say it has to be supported by a search warrant, much less does it say it has to be supported by a search warrant or probable cause determined by a judge, by a court. That is not in there.

Who is going to figure out whether it is supported by probable cause? We are not talking about evidence of a crime. We are talking about a predicated, national security investigation. If you flip the page, you find out that the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence shall jointly establish procedures and standards for officers and employees of the United States Government to determine the existence of probable cause. Well, there goes the requirement, the constitutional requirement of an independent magistrate issuing a warrant. The FBI will be the judge of its own warrant. In other words, we are right back to the problem that got us here in the first place. Mr. Speaker, look above there. We are told, ``Pursuant to subsection (b), no officer or employee of the United States Government may intentionally target for acquisition the communications of a United States person pursuant to an authorization issued under subsection (a). Pursuant to other provisions of this Act and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the Government may seek a warrant or other appropriate order supported by a probable cause showing to target for collection the communications of a United States person if there exists probable cause that the United States person . . . is a foreign power,'' et cetera, et cetera. May.

Suddenly, we go from the Constitution's imposition of a mandatory requirement for a warrant, right, that no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause and there must be a warrant for a search unless there is a specific exception to it. But this simply says they may seek a warrant. They don't have to. They may seek a warrant.

In other words, this provision, too, is meaningless. It just returns us to exactly where we were.

It takes us right back to the status quo.

It says that the Attorney General, that would be Todd Blanche, or the Acting Attorney General, and the Director of DNI, shall establish the procedures for determining if there is probable cause. I thought that James Madison and George Mason had taken care of that. I thought the Constitution established the meaning of probable cause.

Now, it is being delegated to the Acting Attorney General. It doesn't even say the acting but whoever the Attorney General might be. Perhaps acting is imported through this language. Who knows?

Do we really want Pam Bondi or Kash Patel or Todd Blanche figuring out what our Fourth Amendment rights are and then they get to decide for themselves without going to a court? At the very least, even if we are not going to have an actual warrant, there must be an independent judge, a magistrate, involved in defining whether or not there is probable cause to search American citizens. That is the bottom line here.

Everybody knows and understands our Constitution and, yes, our Constitution applies in peacetime. It applies in wartime. It applies to American citizens in America. It applies to American citizens abroad.

Mr. Speaker, we are very willing to sit down to try to figure out some way we can deal with this thorny area of the law, but sneaky meetings at the White House behind everybody's back and then votes at 2:30 in the morning are not going to do it for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the American people.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentleman from

Georgia for his points, but I hope that their entire case doesn't rest on the argument that he just advanced from page 5. He quoted the section saying that any information concerning a United States person acquired under 702 may not be used in evidence against that person in any criminal proceeding if such information was acquired in violation of subsection (o).

If you go to subsection (o), it says: ``Pursuant to subsection (b), no officer or employee of the United States Government may intentionally target for acquisition the communications of a United States person. . . . ''

That is precisely the law today. This is a restatement of what is already the law.

FISA is called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It is all about the surveillance of people abroad. It is not about surveilling the people here.

If somebody were deliberately targeted, every judge in the land, even those most faithfully reporting to Donald Trump, would say: I am sorry. You can't target U.S. citizens on that under FISA.

This is all about the collection of incidental data. I thought that everybody understood that that was the premise of our whole legislative discussion here, that this is about the collection of incidental data affecting hundreds of thousands of American citizens. That is what we are talking about.

The passage that the gentleman just read is a restatement of what the law is today, which is that if they set out to go after American citizens here, of course, the exclusionary rule operates at that point. It would be prohibited. The question is, what happens if they incidentally collected. Under this new language, nothing happens unless somebody permissively decides that they want to adopt a rule over at the Department of Justice making it a problem.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding and the gentleman from Texas for his remarks.

I rise today in strong support of H.R. 6310. This is a bipartisan bill to rename the Olney Post Office after Sergeant Edward Lawrence Ramsey.

Mr. Ramsey was a true American patriot. After serving honorably for more than two decades in the U.S. Army, he brought his passionate commitment to public service to Montgomery County, Maryland, where he served as a postal clerk for 27 years, first in Glen Echo and then in the beautiful town of Olney.

Mr. Ramsey's dedication to our community and his magnificent spirit brought joy and connection to generations of families, friends, community members, and colleagues throughout his career in the Postal Service.

Many have shared with me inspiring stories of Mr. Ramsey's work in the community. He often worked on the holidays to guarantee continued stellar postal service. He would cover for colleagues who couldn't make it to work because of a storm. He regularly dropped by the post office to ensure that things were going well for his colleagues and for customers even when he, himself, wasn't on duty. When a customer could not afford postage, it was always Mr. Ramsey who always quickly covered the cost out of his own pocket. He even helped resolve special after- hours requests for many customers whom he considered his friends.

It is no surprise for me to learn that visitors to the Olney Post Office would often wait in his line, a longer line, just to visit with him and to enjoy his vibrant and warm presence.

Mr. Ramsey's kindness and his enthusiasm for his work extended to his postal colleagues who became like an extended family to him.

Mr. Ramsey was a dedicated and devoted husband to his wife of 31 years, Sharon Mosley Ramsey, and a proud father of four sons, Edward Spencer, Lance Stanton, Hunter Shane, and Marcus.

Mr. Ramsey passed away in January of 2022 following a medical emergency he experienced while on duty at the Olney Post Office. We will hold his memory in our hearts, and we hope it will be a blessing to his loved ones and family.

We are forever thankful to Mr. Ramsey for his 47 years of dedicated service to our Nation and to our community in Maryland. Renaming this post office the Edward L. Ramsey Olney Post Office Building will honor Mr. Ramsey's outstanding life and legacy, and it will be a beacon to people in our community forever.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all of our colleagues to join me in supporting

Mr. Speaker, I rise to celebrate the B'nai Israel Congregation's Centennial. B'nai Israel is an essential part of Maryland's 8th District's vibrant and diverse Jewish community, and it is a privilege to represent a congregation with one hundred years of storied history and activism.

The B'nai Israel Congregation began as a small gathering of committed friends who met at a congregant's home on Georgia Avenue in Northwest D.C. It grew so quickly that the congregation had to occupy two buildings in the District before finally finding its permanent home in Rockville in 1976. In 2026, the B'nai Israel Congregation is one of the largest synagogues in the movement of Conservative Judaism. Today, over 1,100 families attend temple services, participate in b'nai mitzvahs and celebrate life milestones together.

The people who call the B'nai Israel Congregation their spiritual community share core values of connection and service that have defined the Congregation throughout these one hundred years. The Congregation supports lifelong Jewish learning opportunities, from the Schilit Early Childhood Center to a busy adult education program. The synagogue maintains a close relationship with several communities in Israel. And every month, congregants enact their commitment to community by delivering nutritious meals to local women experiencing homelessness. The entire congregation gathers for Mitzvah Day in December to bring mitzvot to people across Montgomery County.

This tradition of service flows from the B'nai Israel Congregation's deep well of moral solidarity and civic engagement. During their own migration from D.C. to Rockville, members of B'nai Israel helped lead the urgent project to free Jewish people trapped and persecuted by the Soviet Union. Today, congregants and clergy at the B'nai Israel Congregation are active participants in Montgomery County's interfaith coalition. They invest deeply in educating each generation about our own struggles in America for social justice and lead educational trips to historic sites of the Civil Rights Movement.

Montgomery County and the wider DMV have been fortunate to be the home of the B'nai Israel Congregation over the past one hundred years. Liberal democracies are sustained by vibrant and engaged communities like the B'nai Israel Congregation. May the congregants and clergy of B'nai Israel continue to go from strength to strength for the next century to come--yasher koach.

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

Mr. Speaker, here is what America is talking about: Donald Trump's unauthorized, undeclared war of choice, a forever war in the making, which is costing us between $1 billion and $2 billion every single day and has killed already 13 Americans in uniform, wounding more than 200 Americans in uniform, and killing more than 1,000 Iranians, including 170 school children who were bombed at an all-girls school in Iran.

Americans are talking about the fact that gasoline now costs $3.84 a gallon. It has gone up more than 25 percent in 1 week because of Donald Trump's unauthorized, undeclared, illegal war of choice in Iran. Crude oil is now soaring to more than $109 a barrel because Donald Trump's war planners could not have predicted that Iran would try to strangle commerce in the Strait of Hormuz.

That is what America is talking about this week. America is talking about when there will be justice for Renee Good and Alex Pretti, American citizens exercising their First Amendment and Second Amendment rights who were shot down in cold blood by government agents in Minneapolis, and the most recent Secretary of Homeland Security libeled them as domestic terrorists and refused to recant from that defamatory lie.

That is what America is talking about. When are they going to reform ICE, and when are they going to start paying members of the Coast Guard, TSA, FEMA, and CISA?

We have a discharge petition to say: Pay those people, and don't let all of the illegality of ICE bring down the faithful public servants at the Coast Guard, TSA, FEMA, and other Federal agencies.

That is what America is talking about this week.

Well, what are MAGA Republicans in Congress talking about this week? They are talking about the BOWOW Act. The BOWOW Act?

Now, how did they come up with this bill and this title?

Well, the President's poll numbers are sinking like a stone, so they needed to find something to do in Washington to put on the floor. They can't talk about Trump's ruinous tariffs that have plunged so many small businesses into oblivion and cost American consumers hundreds of billions of dollars. They can't talk about that because the Supreme Court, which they gerrymandered, sliced and diced, and packed and stacked, struck it down.

Even the extremely right-leaning Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump's tariffs. We told them that it was unconstitutional. We told them that only Congress has the power to impose taxes and to regulate commerce with foreign nations, but no. Like lemmings, they followed Donald Trump off of the side of the ship, and now those tariffs are not only economically ruinous for the country, but they are discredited and struck down.

They can't talk about that, which was their big policy hit of the administration so far. No, they can't talk about that.

Well, they are not talking about the war in Iran. That is splitting even the MAGA base right down the middle because they had talked before Donald Trump about the importance of Congress actually making decisions about going to war. After all, that is what the Constitution says in Article I, Section 8, Clause 11. It is Congress that has the power to declare war.

Mr. Speaker, they are not talking about that. They are not talking about the lives that have been lost in Iran with this bizarre, impetuous war of choice that has been thrust onto the country when the President promised us that there would be no more forever wars and regime-change wars.

They can't even settle on whether this is a regime-change war or not. Some of them say that it is. Some of them say that it isn't, so we don't know. They can't talk about that.

Maybe they can talk about the healthcare public policy, which Donald Trump has been promising for more than a decade. It is a decade of, in 2 weeks, we will get you our plan. They don't like the plans that we have under Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which have delivered healthcare to millions of Americans.

They have done whatever they can to dismantle those healthcare plans. Maybe they could come up with a healthcare plan. No, they are not uttering a peep about that.

You can't teach an old dog new tricks, and Donald Trump fundamentally is not interested in delivering a healthcare plan to America.

Then someone says, ``Well, let's go back to immigration,'' but they have already been told not to talk about mass deportation. We pulled out of Minneapolis because we disgraced ourselves there. We know that America reviles the policy of shooting down American citizens in cold blood for exercising their First Amendment and Second Amendment rights, so we can't talk about that.

Then somebody discovered Freddie and said: There is a case at Dulles Airport with a dog, and we can at least go to the dog people with the BOWOW Act.

I am co-chair of the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus, and I have one of my dog's dog hair all over this suit, even though I tried to get it off before I came out this morning. If anybody is going to be a sucker for something called the BOWOW Act, it is me. I don't vote for a lot of MAGA legislation, but every dog has his day, and I was willing to look at this one. I was moved by something called the BOWOW Act.

I looked up the incident that the gentleman from California has referenced, and it was outrageous. I was outraged to learn about what happened to Freddie. It all started when Freddie the Beagle, the canine detective at Dulles Airport who works with CBP, Customs and Border Protection, to detect smuggled agricultural products, alerted his superior officers at Dulles to the presence of over 100 pounds of prohibited food items that appeared in the baggage unloading area.

It turns out Freddie did his job. He barked and alerted his superior officers to what was happening. They determined that there was a guy coming over from Egypt, a foreign national, named Aly Marie. Mr. Marie, age 70 years old, who was traveling to the airport and had all of this illegal food, contraband, was foiled by Freddie's excellent detective work. This frustrated Mr. Marie guy kicked Freddie. He kicked him so hard that the poor dog became airborne and had bruised ribs.

Now, if you are a major dog person and believe in animal protection, like me, you say to yourself: You have to be kidding me. That should be illegal. Kick that guy out of the country immediately. Don't let him in.

Guess what. That is exactly what happened. He was arrested immediately. He was charged immediately. He was held by the authorities. He was charged with one count of harming animals used in law enforcement under 18 U.S.C. 1368. He was convicted in a trial on his second day in America. He was held overnight, arrested, charged, convicted the next day, and then removed. He was sentenced to time served. He was ordered to pay for the veterinarian bill for Freddie's bruised ribs, which the court records show is $840, and he was promptly deported right back to Egypt after the court hearing on day three.

I am happy to report that, according to the CBP, Freddie is doing fine today. The law worked.

Imagine if Alex Pretti and imagine if Renee Good had that kind of criminal law enforcement and justice. What if their killers had been apprehended, arrested, charged, and convicted in 3 days? That would be a great thing, but no. What do we hear from Pam Bondi? What do we hear from Kristi Noem, the now-deposed former Secretary of Homeland Security? It is under investigation. The whole world saw it right on video. It is under investigation. Nothing is happening there.

Freddie got justice. We have a system that actually works there. Mr.

Marie served 3 days in jail. His food was confiscated, taken away, and he was deported from the country. Why? Because assaulting a dog like that is a crime of moral turpitude. Under the Federal laws, a crime of moral turpitude like that gets you kicked out of the country. It all worked.

They have nothing else to talk about, so they want to double down and pass redundant legislation to say that somebody who does this should be deported, which is already what happened in this case. The opportunity to propose a redundant, unnecessary, superfluous bill to score meaningless political points, when the rest of the world is talking about war and inflation caused by this President, proved impossible to resist for our colleagues.

H.R. 4638 would render inadmissible and deportable any noncitizen who willfully or maliciously harms a police dog or a police horse, as current law already requires.

There is one change. It removes the requirement that immigrants to the country, whether travelers like the doggone Mr. Marie or a green card holder, it removes the requirement that a noncitizen actually be convicted of a crime. It is enough that you be charged with it or they say you admitted it, or whatever, but the conviction requirement is removed.

Now, that has been a trend for our colleagues in this session. They have been taking things that are already crimes and saying: Let's make that a matter of deporting and removing someone. Well, they already can be deported and removed, yes, but now they want to excise the conviction requirement to do it without complete due process. Why would they do this?

Thomas Jefferson said at the time of the Alien and Sedition Acts that there will be a temptation to go after the immigrants. He said that when you water down constitutional requirements as they apply to noncitizens, that is going to come to affect the citizens, too--a bitter lesson learned by the families of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

In other words, if you train the ICE agents that they can do whatever they want, that they are beyond the law, that they can put on masks, bust down people's doors, and enter without a Fourth Amendment search warrant issued by a neutral magistrate, if they can do that kind of thing, if they can abuse people as we have seen all over the internet, if they can rough up people, what difference does it make really if they are immigrants or if they are citizens if they are beyond the law? Now, we have dead Americans at the hands of our own Federal agents, with nobody charged, nobody arrested, and nobody being prosecuted.

They want to just get rid of the conviction requirement before people are deported. They can already be deported once they are convicted, but they want to get rid of the conviction requirement.

This case illustrates how completely unnecessary the bill is. Harming animals in law enforcement, or any form of animal cruelty, is already a crime involving moral turpitude and has been for a long time. It is a deportable offense, and everybody knows it. If it wasn't, Mr. Marie would not have been deported 3 days after he kicked Freddie.

Bizarrely, because their bill doesn't require a conviction, if this legislation had been in place and Mr. Marie had been deported on day two instead of day three, and there had been no trial, he never would have had to pay restitution. Think about that. Due process helps a lot of people. It is not just for the benefit of that defendant who might be innocent, as Mr. Marie was not, but it also benefits the victims because the victims can win restitution and fines in this way.

They want to deport first and not have a trial. They just want to eliminate due process. I don't understand it.

President Trump has had his experiences in the criminal justice process, and he had every right guaranteed to people under due process: the right to a lawyer, the right to be heard, the right to introduce evidence, the right to cross-examine, the right to trial by a jury of his peers. Even after going through all of that, there are still people who say: That wasn't enough. It didn't really work for him. He didn't really get due process. He wasn't really guilty of committing fraud.

If that is the case for someone who had every conceivable benefit of due process, what about somebody now who gets no due process at all and no trial? That is what they are suggesting. I don't understand why, really, other than the possibility of just introducing an unnecessary, redundant bill and giving them something to talk about when they don't want to talk about what is really going on in the world, what is really going on in America, with gas prices soaring out of control, people unable to pay for their healthcare, and people unable to afford groceries. They don't want to talk about any of that. They want to talk about Freddie.

Well, there is a lot of meaningful animal protection work we can do together, and those of us in the Animal Protection Caucus would be very happy to meet with the gentleman from California about all of the things we can do to really help animals in America. But right now, Freddie is doing fine. That case worked out fine. This bill is unnecessary.

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

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

We want the immigration laws enforced. We also want the Constitution of the United States to be enforced. They think somehow it has been suspended, and the President of the United States can do whatever he wants.

We are trying to stand up for the rule of law in America and for our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal).

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Washington.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I am baffled and amazed that the gentleman would bring up the economy under President Biden. A month before the Presidential election in 2024, The Economist magazine had a cover story titled: ``The envy of the world. The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust. Expect that to continue, argue Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr.''

That was what President Biden left to Donald Trump when he took over, an economy that was the envy of the world, inflation down, unemployment down, small business sector roaring, the economy roaring, opportunity for young people. Donald Trump has taken an economy that left other rich countries in the dust, and he has covered us in mud and dirt. He has put us in the dust.

Now gas prices are up 25 percent in 2 weeks. I don't need to refute all this propaganda and disinformation. People go to the gas station and it refutes all the propaganda and disinformation that we are hearing from them.

They are better off sticking to the BOWOW Act.

Under President Biden, we passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a $1.2 trillion investment in America, in our bridges, our roads, our highways, our ports and our airports, not blowing up stuff in other peoples' countries, precisely what Donald Trump had promised he wouldn't do.

That is where our money is going now, draining the U.S. economy by $1 to $2 billion every day. They are spending that on an undeclared, unauthorized war, and our colleagues would not even want to have one honest debate and one honest vote in Congress on whether or not to declare war on Iran. They won't utter a peep about it today or yesterday or tomorrow. They won't say anything about it, nothing, but they let President Trump have their way with them.

Now the gentleman somehow accuses us of not being interested in animal rights and animal welfare. I am sorry, I usually don't go running to rightwing MAGA forces for the protection of animals against animal cruelty and the industrial slaughterhouses and so on. They don't show so much interest in that, but now in Freddie's case because there was an immigrant traveler involved, they want to pass a law which is an exact echo of what the law is. The gentleman has not explained to us why we need to pass a law when Freddie's kicker was arrested, jailed, charged, prosecuted, convicted, and sent back to Egypt all within 3 days. He never saw anything outside of a jail cell in the United States of America, and yet they tell us we need, essentially, to go back and pass the law that mimics what the law is today, except now they want to sneak in a provision saying that we are going to remove the necessity of a conviction.

Why wouldn't it have been better to deport Mr. Marie on day two before he was fined $800 or $900 for Freddie's veterinarian bill?

Why would that have been better?

The gentleman hasn't explained. That is the only substantive change I can imagine coming from the BOWOW bill because the bowwows are already protected as we saw in this case. I wish he could summon up for the GOP caucus the same kind of fervor, passion, and commitment they are now demonstrating for animal rights and welfare, summon that up for human rights and human welfare, for people like Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who were shot down by out-of-control ICE agents in Minneapolis, and then ICE and Homeland Security say that they will not cooperate with local police authorities in Minneapolis and State police in Minnesota.

Why not?

All of a sudden they care just about dogs. They want to rewrite a law that already exists that already protects dogs, as we saw in this case, and not explain why they want to do it. It is an absolute diversion. It is an absolute distraction for the country.

They can't talk about gas prices. They can't talk about inflation. Remember, President Trump said he was going to bring down prices on day one. He hasn't done one thing to bring down prices. Now, they are soaring out of control throughout the entire economy because of his illegal, unauthorized war that is splitting even their own base.

It is the most unpopular war at the beginning that we have seen, maybe in American history, certainly in this century, because nobody explained why they were doing it. That is why the Founders said it has to be Congress that decides whether we go to war.

James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Payne, the whole founding generation knew that the Kings were always plunging their countries into impetuous wars of conceit, vanity, imperial ambition, foreign intrigue, and corruption. They didn't trust one guy with that decision; they put that decision in us. They reposed it in us, whether or not we wanted it.

They are running away from it. They don't want to make a decision about this war, which Donald Trump now calls the ``little excursion,'' the little excursion in Iran, the little excursion that has already taken the lives of 13 U.S. citizens in uniform, wounded more than 200 Americans, and killed more than a thousand Iranians, including 170 schoolchildren who got bombed in this reckless, impetuous war.

They don't want to talk about that. It is the BOWOW Act, but they have not made one good argument about why we need to add a redundant, superfluous law in this way.

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

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

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

I rise to oppose H.J. Res. 139, a feeble attempt by the President's budget-busting, blank-check enablers in Congress to distract America from their own staggering and historic fiscal irresponsibility.

Everyone knows they control the House. They control the Senate. They control the White House, and they have used their total power over our Federal Government to drive our country into a deep ditch of deficits, debt, illegal tariffs, undeclared wars, and economic destruction.

After adding $4 trillion to our national debt with their tax breaks for the super rich, every Republican in the Chamber but Representatives Massie and Davidson voted to allow President Trump to keep spending between 1 and $2 billion every day, not of his own money but of our money, on his unauthorized and unconstitutional war in Iran, without so much as a single vote or a single honest debate on the floor of the House.

This war of choice and aggression, which is spiraling out of control now in the Middle East, and which President Trump now calls this ``little excursion,'' has already cost 13 American servicemembers their lives and wounded over 200 Americans in uniform, while killing more than a thousand Iranian civilians, including 170 children at a girls' school that was bombed in the first week of Donald Trump's war.

But still our colleagues sit there passive, invertebrate, and complicit in the face of this brazen usurpation of congressional war powers, rising from their constitutional stupor only to vote ``no'' on our War Powers Resolution, which every self-respecting Member of the Article I branch should have voted for.

The administration reports that the first 6 days of this war cost the taxpayers $11.3 billion, or $1.9 billion a day.

Have Republicans come to the floor to explain why this war was necessary or to offer evidence of an imminent threat posed to the American people?

Have they asked for a special Iran war tax to demonstrate their fiscal responsibility?

No. They just put Trump's little excursion, as he calls it, on the national credit card like an impulse trip to Disney World.

But our constituents are paying through the nose for this historic folly right now, not just as taxpayers but as consumers. We have already been buffeted by Donald Trump's illegal tariffs and imbecilic trade wars against the rest of the world and the soaring cost of living under his corrupt economic policies. Now, we also have to contend with skyrocketing gasoline prices thanks to their foolish disruption of the global oil supply. Gas prices have shot up more than 25 percent since the lawless mullah theocrats of Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz after the lawless MAGA theocrats of America bombed Iran.

Now, our Republican colleagues present a doomed proposal to deface our Constitution with the same kind of witless, self-incriminating graffiti someone recently scrawled on the exterior front wall of the Kennedy Center, which they call the Trump-Kennedy Center.

This proposed constitutional amendment pretends to address a problem that the Republicans created and that Republicans have refused to address legislatively, even though they have all the political control and all the legislative tools they need at their disposal to address it.

We don't need a balanced budget constitutional amendment. We just need a balanced budget. If you believe in a balanced budget, bring us one. Show it to us. You control the Congress. But don't start a fiscal wildfire with your out-of-control spending and then throw the Constitution into the flames, too.

If this proposed amendment were in effect today, the GOP-controlled Congress would be forced to pay for Trump's war by further cutting critical programs for America's working families.

If we gain the majority and try to repeal the trillion-dollar tax cut that they handed to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, we would have to get a two-thirds vote in the House and a two-thirds vote in the Senate in order to engage in an act of fiscal responsibility. But if they wanted to pass another trillion-dollar tax cut for Elon Musk and the richest Americans, they would only need to get a majority vote in the House and the Senate.

Mr. Speaker, even Republicans are denouncing the gigantic, runaway deficits that result from out-of-control Republican spending and stupendously reckless Republican tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations.

One of our GOP colleagues, Representative Chip Roy, described their One Big Beautiful Bill Act as garbage prior to the House vote, saying: ``If we're going to do the tax policy, at least do the spending policy. Have the courage and the fortitude to do what you campaign on when you're talking about balancing the dang budget.''

Representative Roy's outrage makes sense. Republicans control the House. They control the Senate, and they control the White House. Yet they have not once balanced the Federal budget or even tried to present a balanced budget to Congress.

Their obscene, ugly, profligate law added a jaw-dropping $4 trillion to the national debt because of their massive giveaways to billionaires and corporations, which is the true political mission on their side of the aisle.

They paid for a fraction of their profligacy by stripping health insurance and food assistance from tens of millions of working-class Americans who are now living with these Marie Antoinette policies concocted by billionaires and cyber barons throwing Great Gatsby parties at Mar-a-Lago and bulldozing the White House to build themselves one more gilded ballroom.

Now, rather than showing some discipline and hard work and reversing some of their terrible fiscal blunders from the past to propose an actual balanced budget, no, they waste their time to keep the party going by inviting us to spend the day finger painting on the Constitution of the United States.

To observe the semiquincentennial of the country, they want us to use our Constitution to make them do what they claim they want to do but refuse to do at a time when they possess all the power they need to do it.

With the same foresight and expert planning, the White House has used in their chaotic, forever war in Iran, they will put our government into a fiscal straitjacket forever to cover up for their gilded incompetence and misplaced priorities.

It would mean, for example, that a responsible leader, like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Bill Clinton, would no longer have the flexibility to deal with economic crises created by Republicans like Herbert Hoover or Calvin Coolidge or George W. Bush.

The simple truth is that we don't need a constitutional amendment to balance the budget or have responsible fiscal policies.

They have got one-party control of every branch of government. They have never stopped talking about balanced budgets.

Why don't they just bring us one? That is all we need to do.

However, billionaire rip-off artists like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel don't get rich off balanced budgets. They get rich when the GOP opens the spigots of taxpayer money in Federal Government contracts and giveaways for billionaires and the high-flying, rent-seeking corporate class.

Republicans have run up historic corrupt deficits in this Congress and have never once submitted a single balanced budget. We don't need a constitutional amendment to force the majority to do the right thing. We need a new majority. Republicans may as well introduce a constitutional amendment saying that Federal agents shouldn't shoot American citizens in the face for exercising their First or Second Amendment rights, or a constitutional amendment saying Federal agents shouldn't shoot someone 10 times for lawfully carrying a firearm in Minneapolis.

Mr. Speaker, you don't need a constitutional amendment to respect the law, and you don't need a constitutional amendment to do the right thing for the American people. You just need a new majority, and, Mr. Speaker, it is coming.

Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to oppose this foolish diversionary legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am glad that the gentleman from Arizona has conceded that the last time we had a balanced budget was under President Bill Clinton, the elected Democratic President for two terms who turned over a surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars to his successor in office. Compare that to President Trump who has been President for a total of around 5\1/2\ years and has added one-quarter of the national debt from George Washington all the way to today. One-quarter of that has come from Donald Trump himself. Mr. Speaker, look not at what they say but at what they do. That is because it is the Democrats who have always been the party of fiscal responsibility. Like they are doing in their Iran war right now, they are spending us into oblivion without even coming to Congress to get the war declared. It is unauthorized-- much less telling us how they are going to pay for it other than putting it on a credit card for our children and our children's children to pay for many generations into the future.

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

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

Yes, it is unchecked Federal spending by President Trump, who is spending up to $2 billion a day on an undeclared, unauthorized, and unconstitutional war in Iran.

Our colleagues won't utter a peep about it, and they won't bring us a balanced budget, but they will bring us a balanced budget constitutional amendment.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett).

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for that refreshing intervention in the debate, but I think, as the President Clinton example demonstrates, we can have and we have had the political will at different points to balance the budget.

It is not politically impossible, but it does start with some people taking some courageous votes.

For example, let's vote on whether or not we should be at war in Iran, costing the American people $1 billion to $2 billion a day. If you can't even have the courage to decide that we will exercise our warmaking powers and our power to declare war under Article I, Section 8, and our spending power to do it, then nothing will save you, I am sorry.

You can pass a constitutional amendment saying don't shoot people in the face, but still, you have to tell ICE not to shoot people in the face. You have to demonstrate your commitment to actually making that policy real.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott), a very distinguished legislator.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished former majority leader of the House.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am charmed by the story that the gentleman from Pennsylvania just told us about having gone to the White House to talk to the President and telling the President he is spending too much. I am just recording the story as it was presented to us.

He said to the President: You are spending too much.

That is the understatement of the 21st century. He is spending $1 billion to $2 billion a day on an undeclared, unauthorized, unconstitutional war in Iran. He has given us one-quarter of all the debt that has been created in the United States from George Washington until today. That is under the Trump administration.

The gentleman represents that he spoke to the President and said: You are spending too much.

The President's response was: I know we are, but I can't get them to stop spending more.

Who is ``them''? Was that an implied critique of the Democrats? They control the House. They control the Senate. They control the White House. Who is President Trump in that vignette referring to? Is he referring to the Republicans? He must be because they are the ones who are controlling the Chamber, as they are proud to tell us. At least until the end of this year, they are the ones doing it.

If Republicans think they support a balanced budget amendment, why don't they start with a balanced budget? Just bring us one balanced budget. That is all that we need from them.

Mr. Speaker, they have taken what is a math problem and tried to turn it into a constitutional problem. Every family in America knows they have got to make their expenses come within their means and within their resources. Every family does that. Republicans don't want to do that. They want to turn what is a simple math problem or an economic problem into a constitutional problem.

To celebrate America's semiquincentennial, 250th anniversary, for the first time they want to say that what we need to do is to amend our Constitution to make us do what we want to do but we can't do. We don't have the will and political courage to do it.

It was offered by the majority itself. We have got the will on our side to do it. President Clinton did it, and we will fight to try to make our resources match up with our expenses.

We have already heard that their side of the aisle is looking for a military budget of $1.5 trillion for next year. They are looking for $1.5 trillion for the war budget, for Secretary of War Hegseth. They want $1.5 trillion. That is where they are headed: endless wars in the Middle East, undeclared wars of choice, wars of aggression, not authorized by Congress.

None of them will even utter a peep about it today. That is where we are hemorrhaging money in America. Instead, they want to talk about a hypothetical pie-in-the-sky constitutional amendment that no other generation of Americans has ever needed before in order to do the right thing.

What is their loyalty and fidelity to the Constitution? Let's say they got their amendment. Right now, Article I, Section 8 says that Congress must declare war. It is not the President, not Donald Trump, not JD Vance, not Tulsi Gabbard, or somebody in their chat group. Congress must declare war.

What do they do? They do nothing. They just let the President go ahead and enter into his wars of whim and caprice, vanity, conceit, imperial ambition, whatever. They do nothing. They won't even have a vote to support it or oppose it. They won't have an honest debate about it.

That is the war power, which Madison said was one of the essential powers Congress must have, because the kings were always plunging their countries into wars of conceit and vanity, imperial plunder and corruption. So it had to be vested in the Representatives of the people, but they won't follow that.

Mr. Speaker, how about the spending power? Exclusively Congress has the power to spend money. It has to arise here in the House of Representatives. We have the power to spend, and we have the power to tax. The administration has been struck down dozens of times for abusing our spending power, and they won't say a word about it.

What about the taxing power? Donald Trump became the first President in American history to unilaterally impose tariffs, which is a huge tax on our people. It is not on other countries and not on China. It is on us. We told him it was unconstitutional. They wouldn't do anything, with the exception of Representative Massie from Kentucky, who is the conscience of the Republican Conference--although I don't mean to damn him with faint praise--maybe a handful of others opposed the tariffs. They all went along for the ride, even though we have the power to impose tariffs. It has always been Congress that has established the framework for tariffs, not the President. We can't make it up as we go along, but that is what he did.

Of course, he was struck down even by the Supreme Court that has been sliced and diced and gerrymandered to his advantage. Even that Supreme Court struck it down on a 6-3 vote, but we hear nothing from our colleagues about it.

What about the First Amendment? There shall be no law abridging the freedom of speech. Yet, this is the most anti-free speech administration the United States has ever seen. Donald Trump's chairman of the FCC the other day said that broadcast licensees, television stations, better watch out what they say about the war.

I can't think of a more naked violation of the First Amendment than the government threatening to revoke broadcast licenses of media entities who disagree with the President's policy, especially about something as important to the American people as war.

They don't utter a single word about it. That is their demonstrated fidelity to the Constitution. They are now saying: Yes, we are not balancing the budget. We haven't presented a single balanced budget. If we are made to do it through the Constitution, we will follow the Constitution.

Fool me once, well, blame on you. Fool me twice, blame on me. We are not falling for that.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my distinguished colleague from Arizona for a spirited discussion of this important issue.

Mr. Speaker, I will take the example offered by the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs) of President Clinton. We could take many historical episodes, but we have time only for one.

President Clinton was determined to balance the budget, and he returned hundreds of billions of dollars in a surplus to his successor in office. He worked with the Republican-controlled Congress and led them along to eliminate the deficit.

The government ran a huge surplus without the aid of a contrived balanced budget constitutional amendment. Clinton bequeathed to his successor, George W. Bush, famously a budget surplus of $236 billion, which Bush and the GOP Congress quickly squandered on tax cuts for the richest people in the country and then the staggeringly costly forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Mr. Speaker, what do you know? History repeats itself. If it doesn't repeat itself exactly, it certainly rhymes. What do we have now? They have added $4 trillion to our debt with their massive giveaways to the richest people in the country and the richest corporations.

What are we in now despite all of Donald Trump's campaign promises? We are in another undeclared, unauthorized, forever war of regime change, although it is not really a regime change war because the President obviously doesn't care about democracy or human rights in Iran any more than he cares about democracy or human rights in America. In any event, we are there. We are in that war, spending $1 billion to $2 billion a day.

What do our colleagues do to try to deal with this fiscal catastrophe? They offer a balanced budget constitutional amendment, saying this is a bipartisan problem we are in. It is a pox on everybody's house. Let's just amend the Constitution to make us do what we really want to do but we can't do because we don't have the political resolve and the courage to do it.

At the same time, they don't have the political resolve and courage to exercise Congress' powers over war. They don't have the resolve and courage to exercise Congress' power over spending or over taxes or over our ability to regulate commerce domestically or nationally. They have given it all away to the President of the United States, when we are the Article I branch. We have the power. We can do it if we are willing to exercise it.

What is the President's power? It is very simple: to take care that the laws are faithfully executed.

If we pass a balanced budget, the President will have to remain within it. If we are going to say that we are going to have a debate about that war, that he can't just run off to war and start plundering the public fisc and spending billions of dollars of the people's money, he can't do it. Yet, our colleagues in the majority will not exercise any kind of discipline or institutional self-respect.

Mr. Speaker, the Framers of the Constitution thought that people in Congress would stand up for congressional power, just like the President would stand up for Presidential power and would always try to aggrandize the power of the executive branch, and the Supreme Court would stand up for the power of judicial review and what the courts do.

Yet, they thought that, as Madison put it in Federalist 10, ambition would counteract ambition. We would stand up for ourselves.

Our colleagues in the majority will not stand up for congressional powers under the Constitution of the United States, so they want to finger paint some more on the Constitution by adding their balanced budget constitutional amendment.

We don't need a balanced budget constitutional amendment, which will be a fiscal straitjacket in times like COVID-19 or times of war, where Congress needs the flexibility. All we need is for the majority to bring us a balanced budget, show some fiscal discipline, and show some fiscal resolve. Then, we can take it seriously.

Otherwise, it just seems like a massive, fantastical distraction from what is actually taking place in America today and on Earth, which is we have a President who is bulldozing everything from the White House itself to the Bill of Rights to the separation of powers.

What do we have on the other side of the aisle? It is nothing but legislative

accomplices in all of this fiscal and constitutional irresponsibility. They want to take a simple math problem and displace everybody's attention by trying to turn it into a constitutional issue.

Mr. Speaker, that wasn't the handiwork of James Madison. That wasn't the handiwork of Alexander Hamilton, who took balanced budgets very seriously. They didn't think that America needed it.

If the political leadership is not rising to the task, then we need new political leadership. If this congressional majority can't do it, let's elect a new congressional majority, but let's not throw the Constitution into the fire with all of the other constitutional principles that have been set ablaze by this administration.

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

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

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

Madam Speaker, another week, another redundant and completely unnecessary immigration crime bill. This one purports to make the commission of certain fraud offenses into deportable offenses, but conviction of a fraud offense is already a deportable offense, as the gentleman's recitation of all the cases involving people who were convicted of a crime and then deported and removed from the country demonstrates.

Fraud is considered a crime involving moral turpitude and a specifically enumerated aggravated felony, the conviction of either of which subjects any immigrant to deportation and removal from the country.

In the past, we have heard our colleagues claim these bills are necessary to resolve an undefined ambiguity in the law, but there is no ambiguity.

Section 101(a)(43) of the Immigration and Nationality Act specifies fraud as an aggravated felony, which is by definition a deportable offense. Supreme Court precedent for more than 70 years has treated fraud as a crime involving moral turpitude and therefore a deportable and removable offense.

I know that President Trump, who knows a lot about the criminal justice system, wants to strike a new pose of being tough on fraud. We still have a First Amendment, so that is his right. But at every turn, the Trump administration has dismantled the government programs and offices that actually combat fraud.

At the DOJ, they disbanded key anti-kleptocracy efforts. They eliminated the Consumer Protection Branch that prosecuted corporate fraud. They gutted core anticorruption units like the Public Integrity Section and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Unit. As all of America knows, they have completely ravaged and shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the first and only agency devoted solely at the Federal level to protect American consumers against being cheated by scammers and fraudsters and big corporations.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau delivered $21 billion back to more than 200 million Americans who were victims of fraud, scams, and other predatory business practices, and the administration has been gutting it because they are soft on corporate fraud and white-collar crime. That is the reality of what is going on here.

Hell-bent on meeting Stephen Miller's arbitrary mass deportation monthly quotas, this administration has directed FBI agents to deprioritize white-collar crime and instead devote their time to the big immigration roundup, whose beautiful results we can see in the nightmare of Minneapolis, where American citizens were shot down for exercising their constitutional rights.

As a result, prosecutions of white-collar crimes, which include a variety of fraud offenses, were down more than 10 percent in the Trump administration in 2025.

If that weren't enough, ICE is interfering with States' abilities to successfully prosecute crimes, like fraud and theft, and to ensure that perpetrators pay their fines and make restitution to their victims. Why is that? Well, they are deporting people before they can actually be tried and fined and before the fines are paid.

Take the case of Jeson Nelon Flores. He was accused of stealing $100 million worth of diamonds. Before his trial was set to take place, ICE swooped in and simply deported him before trial. That meant he served no jail time and was never ordered to pay any restitution to his victims, leaving them with lots of questions about where the $100 million of diamonds are but no justice.

By bypassing the conviction requirement, this legislation would hand a literal get-out-of-jail-free card to immigrants who commit fraud by deporting them without going through the criminal justice system and giving their victims a day in court.

This is part of a broader trend of this administration siding with the perpetrators against the victims, a trend America has seen in the administration's shameful decision to cover up for Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's co-conspirators, accomplices, and enablers, while outing the identities and even the photographs of survivors. It is a trend that includes the President's outrageous abuse of the pardon power to let fraudsters, who also happen to be MAGA donors, to purchase a pardon and skip out on their obligation to pay any fine or restitution to their victims.

That includes Trevor Milton, who defrauded investors in his company to the tune of $676 million. Milton and his wife donated $1.8 million to the President's reelection campaign. In March of last year, Milton got his pardon, and erased all of the restitution, the hundreds of millions of dollars he owed to his victims.

Take Lawrence Duran, who was sentenced to the longest prison sentence in American history for Medicare fraud in September of 2016. He filed hundreds of thousands of false claims with Medicare, bilking the taxpayers out of more than $87 million. Then he got his Trump pardon and skipped away without having to pay any of the fines or the restitution.

If you can remember one statistic from today, in just 1 year, Donald Trump's pardons wiped out more than $1.3 billion in restitution and fines to victims and survivors of fraud and other scams and white- collar offenses.

This bill is simply another effort to push a fake narrative while ignoring all of the fraud that engulfs us, which the administration has tolerated or even approved through these outrageous pardons.

The administration used fraud as an excuse to send thousands of masked Federal agents to terrorize the people of Minneapolis and surrounding areas, a blunder so egregious our colleagues are told not even to use the phrase ``mass deportation'' anymore because the vast majority of Americans reject what they saw on the streets of Minneapolis, agents beating up peaceful protesters and killing them. American citizens are dying because they dare to exercise their First Amendment rights and their Second Amendment rights in public.

We saw the price of this authoritarianism. Every day this administration is pushing lies to try to get the American people to ignore the reality that is discernible by our own senses. That is the real fraud on the American people.

Now, they want us to believe that they are combating fraud when they pardon it, and they wipe out all of the government units that are designed to ferret out fraud. They started by firing 17 inspectors general, whose job it is to fight fraud, waste, corruption, and abuse in the Federal Government. They sacked all of them to make it possible for the kind of rampant corruption we have seen to take place. The American people can see what is going on.

Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to oppose this redundant, unnecessary, and distractionary bill.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, they are entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts. I am afraid that the gentleman owes former President Biden a major apology for what he just said.

He said that hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution owed by people whom Joe Biden pardoned was forgiven. According to a study by the Cato Institute, which the gentleman can look up, all of the fines and restitution forgiven by Joe Biden was $680,000, not even $1 million; whereas, Donald Trump has forgiven $1.3 billion in fines and restitution owed by the fraudsters and conmen and white-collar criminals whom he has pardoned since

he got back into office under their pay-to-play pardon operation they have got going over there right now. That is the reality and the fact. That is the truth of the matter.

No, Joe Biden did not forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. What Donald Trump has done is utterly aberrational in American history.

I see the gentleman is fleeing the Chamber right now rather than dealing with the facts and the reality of it.

The gentleman was completely wrong.

The gentleman was fleeing the Chamber rather than deal with the reality that he was absolutely wrong when he accused President Biden of forgiving hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and restitution to people he pardoned. It never happened.

It was less than $1 million. It was $680,000.

Mr. Speaker, I will submit the Cato Institute report for the Record.

Mr. Speaker, I would love to be contradicted if there are any facts over on that side of the aisle. If anybody wants to traffic in facts-- but, no, maybe it is more imaginary and delusional sophistry from the gentleman.

Does he have any facts?

It is no problem just saying: I made a mistake.

It is like Secretary Noem calling Alex Pretti a domestic terrorist, calling Renee Good a domestic terrorist. That was a terrible mistake and a blunder, but she couldn't admit it.

Will the gentleman admit that he was wrong about that or does he have facts?

I don't know. I ask you, Mr. Speaker, whether there might be some way of determining whether there are any facts available to contradict me on this, but the study that I have shows that all of Joe Biden's pardons result in less than $1 million in fines and restitution to be forgiven.

Mr. Speaker, do you know why that is?

It is because up until President Trump, every other President had demanded ordinarily as a matter of course that fines be paid and restitution be paid.

I hope that there are some people on the other side of the aisle-- they have got a huge staff of hundreds of people, can somebody find a fact that would contradict what I have just said.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal), who is the ranking member of the Subcommittee of Immigration Integrity.

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

That was an amazing evasion of what we are really talking about.

Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record the Cato Institute study, ``President Trump's Pardons: An Embarrassment of Riches.''

[From the Cato Institute Blog, Feb. 11, 2026]

President Trump's Pardons: An Embarrassment of Riches

(By Dan Greenberg)

Yesterday, I described the final scandal of the Clinton

administration: Bill Clinton's midnight pardon of Marc Rich.

If the Rich pardon was a snowflake, then the pardons of

President Trump's second term are a blizzard.

The scope and magnitude of Trump's second-term pardons are

unprecedented. Joe Biden granted 80 pardons in his four-year

term, but Trump's pardons make his predecessor's look like a

drop in the bucket. In the first year of the second Trump

administration, the president issued 166 individual pardons,

as well as a mass pardon that erased the verdicts of more

than 1,500 January 6 Capitol rioters. In other words, even

putting aside the rioters' collective pardon, Trump is now

issuing pardons at eight times the rate Biden did.

Nonetheless, the fact that a president issues more pardons

than his predecessors is not necessarily problematic. The

real problem lies in the great number of particular second-

term pardons that appear indefensible. Such pardons fall into

five categories.

First: Biden's pardons eliminated roughly $680,000 in

financial penalties (fines, restitution, and forfeitures)

owed to victims or the government. In contrast, Liz Oyer, the

former lead pardon attorney of the United States, has

calculated that Trump's second-term pardons have forgiven

criminal debts of more than $1.5 billion. This staggering

sum--composed of money owed to crime victims and to

government treasuries--has been zeroed out by presidential

edict.

Trump's pardon pen was a boon to ex-criminals like Trevor

Milton (who no longer must repay the investors he defrauded

$660 million) and Lawrence Duran (who no longer must repay

the government he defrauded $87 million). It was also a boon

to HDR Global Trading Ltd., which owed the nation a $100

million fine; in this case, Trump also made history by

granting the nation's very first pardon to a corporation.

Second: Trump has normalized the pardoning of disgraced

politicians, such as former Honduran president Juan Orlando

Hernandez (who orchestrated a spree of state-sponsored drug

trafficking leading to a 45-year prison term), Nevada

legislator Michele Fiore (who embezzled $70,000 out of a

police memorial fund for personal expenses like rent and

plastic surgery), Virginia sheriff Scott Jenkins (who handed

out badges to untrained businessmen in exchange for $75,000

in bribes), and Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada (who

defrauded state government with a fake-payee kickback

scheme). Perhaps I should disclose my proximity to one such

pardon recipient, Arkansas legislator Jeremy Hutchinson (who

traded official acts for bribes, embezzled from campaign

funds, and filed false tax returns); Hutchinson's tenure in

the state Senate, which ended with simultaneous indictments

in three federal districts, began when he defeated me in a

Republican primary.

Third: Trump's pardons are beginning to undermine the

contemporaneous work of his own Department of Justice. Alina

Habba, Trump's own US attorney in New Jersey, announced

Joseph Schwartz's three-year sentence for $38 million in tax

fraud in April; Trump pardoned him seven months later. Real

estate developer Timothy Leiweke was charged earlier this

year with conspiring to rig the bidding process for a Texas

sports arena; Trump pardoned him in December. Federal

investigators and prosecutors must find such pardons

demoralizing and self-negating.

Fourth: [REDACTED] For instance, the ordinary vetting

procedures of the Office of the Pardon Attorney have often

been sidestepped. Formality in pardon deliberation is

desirable because it immunizes the president from the

appearance of pay-to-play; the absence of such formality

makes it plausible that a multitude of recent pardons are

transactional. Trump pardoned Paul Walczak (who evaded

millions of dollars in taxes) after Walczak's mother raised

millions of dollars for MAGA candidates and paid a million

dollars to dine with the president at Mar-a-Lago. Trevor

Milton--the securities fraudster mentioned above--donated

$1.8 million to Trump's campaign before a presidential pardon

wiped out all $660 million of his restitution obligations.

(That is, if nothing else, an impressive ROI.)

Before Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao--who headed the

cryptocurrency exchange Binance while it fostered more than

1.5 million illegal virtual trades as well as prohibited

transactions to Al Qaeda, Isis, and Hamas--Zhao had brokered

a $2 billion investment in Eric and Donald Trump Jr.'s

cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial. (When asked

about Zhao in a subsequent 60 Minutes interview, Trump

explained, ``I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was

a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of

a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden

administration.''

[REDACTED] Trump evidently hoped Cuellar would return the

favor by switching parties to the GOP; when that didn't

happen, the president released an angry statement on Truth

Social, criticizing Cuellar for ``Such a lack of LOYALTY,

something that Texas Voters, and Henry's daughters, will not

like. Oh well, next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!'' Previous

presidents would surely take offense at the suggestion that a

pardon could be traded for something of value; [REDACTED]

Fifth: Here is another occasion for alarm bells: Donald

Trump has increasingly focused on providing pardons to his

campaign supporters who stretched or broke the law, such as

John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Jenna Ellis. (As the

president's pardon attorney, Ed Martin, famously explained on

X, ``No MAGA left behind.'') Indeed, Trump apparently views

the exercise of his pardon authority to forgive federal

crimes as insufficient; Trump's inability to eliminate state-

level convictions has apparently led him to pressure state

government officials to pardon state-level offenses related

to the 2020 elections.

I am not the only Cato analyst who has explained the risks

of political and constitutional crisis created by

presidential attempts to get state-level election criminals

pardoned; normalizing such actions will inevitably create

ripple effects in future elections. Historically, the central

principle of the Justice Department's role in elections has

been ``prosecution, not intervention.'' The latest edition of

the DOJ's governing manual in this sphere, Federal

Prosecution of Election Offenses, explains that the states

have primary responsibility for overseeing elections--and

that any federal investigation of elections must minimize the

likelihood of affecting that election or otherwise ``chill

legitimate voting activities.''

That edition of the manual has disappeared from Justice's

website. Bob Bauer, Obama's former White House counsel, has

speculated that the manual is being revised to match Trump's

goal of ``nationalization'' of election administration.

The Supreme Court has explained that pardons are justified

if ``the public welfare will be better served.'' It is

impossible to see how the public welfare is served by many of

Trump's pardons today. The president's power to pardon

federal crimes is practically absolute. It cannot be modified

by Congress. Furthermore, just as an uninvolved citizen lacks

standing to challenge a prosecutor's actions, a third party

likewise may not challenge the grant of a presidential

pardon. [REDACTED] It looks like the floodgates will remain

open for the foreseeable future. Perhaps future presidents

will behave better; perhaps a future constitutional amendment

will encourage them to do so.

At least the specter of corruption in previous presidential

administrations (Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, or Biden's

pardon of his son) appeared to be an exception to the rule.

[REDACTED]

In it, it answers the question between the gentleman and me. I thought that I was submitting a very simple, humble request, that he withdraw the false statement that Joe Biden, as President, had forgiven hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and restitution. That is an absolute falsehood. It is inaccurate.

Now, look, let's start with this: I am going to educate the gentleman to the extent that he wants to be educated any further on the matter about the difference between pardons in the Biden administration and the Trump administration.

Joe Biden granted a total of 80 pardons in his 4-year term. President Trump issued 166 individual pardons in his first year and then, of course, famously, the mass pardon of 1,500 January 6 rioters and insurrectionists who stormed this Chamber and the Capitol.

I am quoting directly from the Cato study, for the benefit of the gentleman from Arizona: ``Biden's pardons eliminated roughly $680,000 in financial penalties (fines, restitution, and forfeitures) owed to victims or the government.''

This is money that a court has determined is owed and must be paid. Biden forgave $680,000. Now, I am sure that if you are one of the victims, you are not happy to hear about that, that that was forgiven, but that is within the power of the President.

``In contrast, Liz Oyer, the former lead pardon attorney of the United States, has calculated that Trump's second-term pardons''--that is just 1 year of pardons--``have forgiven criminal debts''--fines, restitution, and forfeitures--``of more than $1.5 billion.''

In other words, Biden didn't even forgive $1 million. President Trump has forgiven more than $1.5 billion to the fraudsters, white-collar criminals, and scammers who have found their way to Mar-a-Lago and the White House and have been able to finagle the pardon that they always wanted.

``This staggering sum,'' as the Cato Institute puts it, ``has been zeroed out by Presidential edict.''

That is in a completely different galaxy than what President Biden or any other President, Democrat or Republican, has done in American history. It is stratospheric.

I am glad that the gentleman's blatant misstatement and his refusal to retract it have given us the opportunity to focus on this extraordinary corruption that is taking place because it tells the true story of fraud and how fraud is being treated by the current administration.

Cato says to consider the case of Trevor Milton, ``who no longer must repay the investors he defrauded $660 million'' that he owed them. Take the case of Lawrence Duran, ``who no longer must repay the government he defrauded $87 million.''

You can add up all the people who were pardoned by President Biden, and you don't even get to $1 million. Then, you have individual criminals whom Donald Trump pardoned after they made various kinds of overtures to the White House or showed up at Mar-a-Lago, and those people were getting hundreds of millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars forgiven in fines.

The gentleman got back up to say these people were either convicted for or accused of tens of millions of dollars in fraud under President Biden. I am talking about what a court ordered them to pay. That is the apples-to-apples comparison that the gentleman doesn't want to deal with.

It is interesting that he happened upon that particular issue because it is not one that benefits their side of the argument at all, as they claim to be interested in saving the victims of fraud.

Victims of fraud, thousands of them, have lost more than a billion dollars because of the pardons of Donald Trump. That is the direct policy of the administration.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, some of our colleagues jump up like a jack-in-the-box whenever the President tells them to do that. Others in the Chamber want to stand up for American citizens exercising their First and Second Amendment rights, like Alex Pretti and Renee Good. They were shot down by ICE agents, who somehow believed that, with this Trump administration, they are above the law and beyond the law.

We are going to stand up with the American people. We are not going to take orders from the executive branch, which is utterly humiliating and self-defeating for a Member of the Article I

branch of the Congress of the United States.

The gentleman, I think, accuses us of something he called the deranged Trump syndrome, which I can only imagine means following a President who plunges the country into an illegal, unauthorized, undeclared war, spending $1 billion or $2 billion a day, and then not asking any questions about it because somehow you think your political destiny is intertwined with the President, who has shown no loyalty to the people who show loyalty to him. That is a personal problem on their part. We don't have deranged Trump syndrome. I think that falls on that side of the aisle.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, there is such a thick fog of propaganda and disinformation in the Chamber that I think we have lost sight of what the bill is about and what the law is.

The law is very clear today, which is: Conviction of a criminal fraud offense is already a deportable offense. It already gets you deported. That is why the majority began with a whole litany of cases where people were being deported after committing crimes.

They didn't like the fact that they had the right to appeal it. They don't like the fact that there is due process, but they appealed it. Then, they were deported. That is what the law is.

Their bill is simply an effort to say you don't need a conviction anymore. You could just deport them based on hearsay evidence. An ICE agent says that this person admitted to me that they had committed fraud, and that substitutes for a prosecution, trial, and conviction by a jury.

In the meantime, we have hundreds of judges in America who are condemning ICE for lying in court. We have Department of Justice lawyers who are saying literally in court that their job sucks because they can't defend what is taking place with ICE. We have judge after judge denouncing the fantastical, misleading, deceptive, mendacious testimony of people from ICE, and now you want to just trust an ICE agent to say this person admitted to me that they committed criminal fraud. We are just going to kick them out of the country without a trial.

Thomas Jefferson said during the Alien and Sedition Acts that there are people who want to strip away the rights of aliens and who will inevitably come to attack the rights of citizens, too. We already saw that in Minneapolis.

There were a lot of people in this Chamber willing to look the other way when they were knocking down the doors of immigrants without a search warrant, without probable cause, when they were roughing up immigrants, or when immigrants were dying in custody. Then, suddenly, these ICE agents thought they could get away with it when it comes to U.S. citizens, and that is when America woke up to this threat and said no.

ICE agents are not superior to the rule of law. They are not above and beyond the law. Even President Trump understood that, which is why he has pulled a lot of people out of Minneapolis. They wanted to change the subject. They said stop using the words ``mass deportation.''

A majority of the American people reject these authoritarian tactics that have been unleashed against both citizens and immigrants.

This is a nation of laws. It is a nation under the rule of law and under the Constitution. Their bill is, at best, if not completely redundant, unnecessary, and silly, a gloss on what the law already is, which is that if you are convicted of fraud and you are an immigrant, you get kicked out of the country. You are removed. They want to pick a fight on a nonsensical problem.

We don't need to degrade our own rule of law by taking action against people without a criminal conviction. The criminal justice system works just fine, so we should be encouraging government agents not to lie to judges, not to render false testimony, as judges across the country have been saying. Both Republican and Democratic appointees have been rejecting what is coming out of this administration.

This bill, as far as I know, is not about naturalized citizens. I think our distinguished chairman said something about that. He may have gotten it confused with another bill, but this bill is unnecessary and redundant.

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

Mr. Speaker, before the distinguished gentleman leaves, I would be happy to yield to him for an answer to a question.

The bill, as he originally introduced it, required a criminal conviction. I wonder why it was changed and whether that was changed with his approval or not. What was the logic for changing it?

I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Taylor) for the purpose of a colloquy.

Representative Taylor, this is your bill, H.R. 1958. It begins like this:

``Any alien who has been convicted of an offense that involves defrauding the United States Government or unlawfully receiving a Federal public benefit . . . or a State or local public benefit . . . is deportable.''

You have got the language of ``convicted'' in there. It was changed by the Committee. I am just wondering: Why did you originally have it in such a way as to require a conviction?

That is the way it has been changed. It has been altered to that. When you introduced it, it required a conviction. I am just wondering: What was your original logic, and why did you change your mind about that, if you did? Maybe you didn't.

Mr. Speaker, I will reclaim my time.

I supported the original vision. It was basically unnecessary because it was a restatement of what the law is, to put it all in one place, so I could certainly support that.

Then your language was completely diluted in committee to open up this huge, gaping hole to say that you don't need a criminal conviction before deporting someone. We have enumerated the problems with that.

For one thing, it deprives victims of a crime the opportunity to be heard and perhaps to get their restitution and to get their proper justice in court.

Also, it sets a terrible precedent. This is the Thomas Jefferson point. When we say we are going to have lesser standards relating to immigrants, that then carries over to citizens. We have seen already in this huge immigration roundup what that means in terms of the trampling of the rights of our people under the Bill of Rights.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for this lively debate. This bill is redundant. It is unnecessary. It is dangerous in terms of eroding a basic principle that we have, which is that there should be full due process and people should not be deported without a criminal conviction. The prosecution is

not always right, but also everybody should have their day in court, including the victims.

At a time when we have seen Big Brother bloated beyond belief in terms of budget and in terms of power, the last thing we should do is to look for further ways to aggrandize the power of the executive branch at this point.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Nadler for his extraordinary leadership on this legislation and on this issue.

I rise in strong support of S. 1884, the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2025. This bill, which has already passed the Senate by unanimous consent, amends the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 in a number of key ways to ensure that Holocaust survivors and their heirs have a fair opportunity in court to recover all of the artwork that was stolen by the Nazi regime or what is left of it. In doing so, this bill will provide these victims the chance to obtain some small measure of justice for the horrors and the injustices and indignities their families have endured.

During its reign of hatred and terror, the Nazis committed theft and murder on a mass industrial scale through the relentless killings of the Einsatzgruppen in the Bloodlands of Europe and through the death camps they established at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and many others.

For the victims' families, these pieces of art are both stolen objects and stolen connections to their own family members whose memories the Nazis have tried to permanently erase from history.

In many cases, the artwork serves as the final tangible connection of the victims' families to their lost family members, providing proof of their existence and a testament to their suffering and their loss.

Congress passed the 2016 HEAR Act, which established a 6-year Federal statute of limitations for claims arising from Nazi-stolen artwork out of concern that the State statutes of limitations would prevent most litigation. In its findings, Congress observed that the unique and horrific circumstances of World War II and the Holocaust make statutes of limitations especially burdensome to the victims and their heirs. It further noted the difficulty of piecing together their cases from a fragmentary historical record ravaged by persecution, war, and genocide. This costly process often cannot be done within the time constraints imposed by what was then the existing law.

Alas, several court decisions since the 2016 HEAR Act's passage have undermined the statute's purpose of trying to give victims a fair hearing on the merits of their cases regardless of the passage of time. These decisions have dismissed numerous cases precisely based on passage of time defenses like laches or adverse possession or other non-merits defenses like forum non conveniens, the act of state doctrine, or foreign sovereign immunity.

This bill addresses these court decisions and related concerns. It eliminates the HEAR Act's sunset provision so that defendants no longer have an incentive to simply run out the clock on victims' families. It also prohibits courts from dismissing lawsuits on grounds related to the passage of time or other non-merit defenses. Finally, it clarifies that claims for recovery of the artwork fall within an existing expropriation exception to foreign sovereign immunity regardless of the victim's citizenship or nationality.

This bill will help give victims and their heirs the chance to obtain a small measure of justice for the grave and dehumanizing wrongs they suffered as a result of the Holocaust. It will also give victims' families a chance to recover at least a partial connection to their loved ones, a connection that was stolen in every single way possible by the Nazis.

I applaud Representative Lee, and I applaud our Senate colleagues who have worked to advance this bill. I especially recognize my colleague Representative Nadler for his longtime aggressive and unswerving leadership on seeing justice done in this case and to see passage of both the 2016 Act and this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I strongly advocate for this legislation, and I urge all of our colleagues to support it.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member for yielding time.

Mr. Speaker, yes, use all lawful and constitutional means. I heard one of our colleagues across the aisle just say: Well, yes, Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 does give Congress the exclusive, plenary, comprehensive power to declare

war and not the President, and we could be debating it, but the President has already taken us to war, so it is too late. It would undermine the cause for us to debate it.

What a humiliating, self-defeating argument for a Member of the Article I branch of Congress to make. Don't my colleagues understand that destroys our power to declare war if any President can plunge us into a war and thereby defeat our exclusive, plenary power over it?

The Framers weren't fooling around when they did that. They knew that the kings were constantly plunging their people into wars of deception, conceit, plunder, imperial avarice, and fantasy. The kings were constantly doing that. They didn't want to leave it up to one person to decide whether to send a whole country to war and to put our sons and daughters at risk.

That is an awesome and solemn responsibility that must be vested in the Representatives of the people, all the people, which is why both the House and the Senate are involved in it.

Whether my colleagues think this war is the most brilliant and strategic breakthrough and moral cause since World War II, or they think it is an absolute strategic blunder built on lies like the last wars in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan, which cost thousands of lives and more than $1 trillion, wherever my colleagues are on that policy question, can we not agree as Members of the Article I branch that it is up to us? We have to vote on it. We have to debate on it.

I am hearing very interesting and good arguments all over this spectrum on this. That is why it is reposed in the Representatives of the people to decide it. It is not Donald Trump, not JD Vance, not Tulsi Gabbard, or anybody else in the executive branch. It is our decision. Everybody should vote ``yes'' on this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentlewoman from Georgia for her extraordinary leadership for gun safety and public safety in America.

Mr. Speaker, this bill would rip a dangerous new loophole in the Gun Control Act by changing the definition of firearm throughout the entire criminal code to exclude from coverage certain less-than-lethal but still highly dangerous weapons, such as tasers, which have been identified as a contributing factor in more than 500 deaths throughout the United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, this bill would exempt these weapons, which are currently classified as firearms, from all regulations under all Federal firearm laws. These weapons would be exempted from the laws, regardless of who uses, purchases, possesses, or manufactures them.

Mr. Speaker, 20 million people who are presently not allowed to possess or buy firearms in this country--convicted domestic abuses, convicted felons in every State, fugitives, and other prohibited purchasers--would legally be able to buy these dangerous weapons, like tasers, that are designed to incapacitate their targets.

A convicted domestic felon, who has been deprived of his right to have firearms because he has been proven to be

a danger to people in his family, in his home, his wife, his girlfriend, would be able to go out and get a taser. They would be able to go and get that taser without going through a single background check. They would just be able to go get it.

The bill exempts these weapons from the requirement that they have a serial number and that they be traceable so that law enforcement can identify their owners if they are used in violent crimes.

It would also exempt them from the Undetectable Firearms Act, which requires that firearms be detectable by metal detectors and X-ray machines used at airports. This detection element is key to preventing weapons from getting where they shouldn't be and preventing serious crimes.

If the bill becomes law, nothing would stop a convicted felon or a convicted domestic violence abuser from purchasing an undetectable taser and smuggling that weapon past security, onto an airplane, into a school area, indeed, into the Capitol, unbeknownst to anyone before it is too late. The bill would make everybody less safe.

Supporters say it is needed so law enforcement can use these less- than-lethal weapons. Mr. Speaker, 18,000 law enforcement agencies are already exempt from many of the provisions in this act and are already using taser technologies. Everybody knows that police have access to tasers. Police departments in all 50 States are using tasers today.

Likewise, the tax exemption in this bill does nothing for law enforcement agencies either because they already purchase these weapons completely free of the excise tax.

The combination of these exemptions is no accident. They do nothing for law enforcement. They both provide unfettered, even tax-free, access to dangerous weapons to civilians, including at least 20 million who shouldn't have them and wouldn't have them under current law.

Supporters argue the change is needed because the classification of these weapons as firearms may result in the use of the weapon being considered deadly force, even though the device is designed to be less than lethal.

We have been asking for years, and they cannot provide us a single case where this problem exists. In fact, courts have readily distinguished between deadly force and intermediate force in cases involving law enforcement.

They don't have a single case. They just say that some State attorney somewhere heard from another lawyer they were nervous about it. Mr. Speaker, come on. That is not how we should be legislating in the Congress of the United States.

Congressman Mike Thompson and 18 of our colleagues submitted an amendment to ensure that less-than-lethal weapons are not considered firearms only when they are used by law enforcement in their official capacity, which is purportedly what this is about. They rejected it.

The Republicans didn't want to hear it because we know that, in fact, there is a commercial purpose that pervades this entire legislation. It is all about opening up a huge, new market to sell tasers, including to millions of people who nobody should want to have them.

I have repeatedly supported and will continue to support legislation to give law enforcement every tool and training they need to keep us safe. I have got to oppose this legislation that could put law enforcement officers and the rest of us in danger.

I stand with the huge number of gun safety groups working to combat gun violence and domestic violence and who strongly oppose and condemn this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to join us in opposing H.R. 2189.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this bipartisan legislation, and I extend my praise to the distinguished gentlewoman from Missouri who has demonstrated a remarkable initiative and high octane energy in organizing the House of Representatives behind it. We are grateful to her for her efforts and also to Mrs. McBath, who is the ranking member on our Crime and Federal Government Surveillance Subcommittee for her efforts in always making sure that we put crime victims first. When we have a crime and there is a prosecution, it is State v. defendant or people v. defendant, but what is left out of that is the victim, and she always makes sure that we keep the victims very much in our sights, in our minds, and in our hearts.

The Crime Victims Fund has been significantly depleted, resulting in a $630 million cut to victim services in fiscal year 2024. Deposits into the fund have dropped dramatically since 2018. From 2008 to 2017, deposits were, on average, $2.56 billion annually. From 2008 through 2023, annual deposits averaged only $737 million.

So that is much greater than a 50 percent drop. There are different reasons for this that we need to analyze and address, but in the meantime, the consequences for VOCA grants are devastating.

These grants are the primary source of Federal funding for thousands of victim service providers across America, including programs serving victims of human trafficking, drunk driving, domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse. These are our people, our family members, and our community members who are suffering who need the help.

VOCA grants are funded by the statutorily created Crime Victims Fund, which is supported by criminal fines, assessments, and penalties paid for by convicted Federal offenders. However, these are being progressively wiped away. Without congressional action, victim service providers will be forced to make more dramatic cuts to critical services while many others will simply have to close their doors.

In order to stabilize the balance of the fund and prevent further cuts, H.R. 909 would add unobligated funds from actions brought under the False Claims Act to the sources of revenue that are deposited into the Fund. Deposits would be made into the Crime Victims Fund only after whistleblowers and defrauded Federal agencies are paid first and other preexisting obligations are satisfied.

This is a temporary change that will give Congress time to assess its overall efficacy and conduct robust review before deciding whether to renew, adopt an alternative remedy, or create a permanent, long-term fix.

Mr. Speaker, I suppose you could say this is a Band-Aid solution, but having cut my finger recently, I like Band-Aid solutions. Band-Aids are necessary sometimes to stop the bleeding, and I think that is where we are right now. We have an obligation to the millions of victims of crime across the country who rely on the services made possible by the Crime Victims Fund.

Mr. Speaker, I strongly support H.R. 909, and I hope all my colleagues will do the same.