Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry relating to the powers of the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Do the House rules in rule X, clause 11(g), which define----

Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry related to the powers of the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Mr. Speaker, do the House rules in rule X, clause 11(g), which define the conditions for public disclosure of classified documents, authorize the chairman of the Intelligence Committee to unilaterally make substantially and material changes to the document after the committee has already voted to approve and release it in its original form?

Further parliamentary inquiry then, Mr. Speaker.

What exactly is an advisory opinion? Because this relates, not to a hypothetical situation, but to an actual situation before the House of Representatives.

Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. Speaker, does the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee have the authority to transmit a classified document under House rule X, clause 11(g) that was never approved for release by a vote of the committee?

Even if it relates to current events?

Mr. Speaker, I represent 88,000 Federal workers in the Eighth Congressional District of Maryland who want to do their jobs for the American people.

They are DREAMers, too, and they are doers. They work at NIH, NOAA, the National Cancer Institute, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Defense, and the State Department.

My constituents and the people across the country who depend on them are in limbo because of the irresponsibility, the indolence, and the incompetence of President Trump, who called on his tweet machine for a ``good shutdown'' of the American Government that he barely opened up in the first place.

They worked overtime to get all of the Republicans behind their obscene tax break for the richest 1 percent of the country and foreign investors in Saudi Arabia, China, and the Cayman Islands, but they could not be bothered to pass a budget for the American people, which is our central constitutional function.

They don't mind shutting down the government for the fifth time in 30 years, as long as their big campaign donors get the huge legislative payoff they are waiting for.

Let's do our job, and let's pass a real budget for the American people.

Mr. Speaker, a century ago, William Butler Yeats wrote a poem called ``The Second Coming,'' in which he said: ``Things fall apart; the centre will not hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.'' But in America, that is not our destiny. We can make sure things don't fall apart. We can make sure that the center will hold.

Let's move beyond the blame game, and let's identify the moral center and common ground for reopening the government and moving America forward.

Commanding majorities in Congress and in the public want to reauthorize and fund the CHIP program and guarantee healthcare for our kids. We should do this for a 10-year period and save $6 billion over a mere short-term extension.

Commanding majorities in Congress and the public favor reauthorization and funding of the community health centers which are indispensable for both children's and adult health.

Commanding majorities in the public and in Congress favor passing a clean Dream Act for 800,000 DREAMers who are contributing to our communities and in school and serving our country.

And all of us must favor a return to regular order and a fair and transparent budget process that allows all of our agencies, from NIH and NOAA to the DOD, to plan for the effective delivery of public services.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent now to bring up H.R. 4872, the End the Shutdown Act of 2018, a continuing resolution that would immediately reopen the government through Tuesday while negotiations continue on a budget agreement that adheres to parity and addresses the other critical issues facing the country.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize my constituent and friend, Judge Chung Pak, for his extraordinary career in public service and his exemplary commitment to serving his community and the great State of Maryland.

Judge Pak is retiring after 31 years of splendid government service. For more than 23 years, Judge Pak served as an Administrative Patent Judge with the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), where he adjudicated more than 6,000 patent cases and personally issued over 2,000 opinions. Judge Pak has also served on the PTAB New Judge Training Committee, the PTAB Publication Committee, the Board of Patent Appeals, the Patent Academy Course Review Committee, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Diversity Council.

Judge Pak embodies the spirit of the American Dream and the immigrant success story. In 1971, he immigrated with his family from South Korea to Alabama, where he worked at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. In high school, he played nose guard on the football team, but it was his extraordinary skill on the tennis court that ultimately earned him a scholarship to Auburn University. After earning a degree in chemical engineering, Chung attended the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America, where he became a moot court champion.

Prior to his appointment to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, Pak was an intellectual property counsel at Praxair, Inc. and Union Carbide Corporation, where he worked on a wide range of issues including domestic and foreign patent procurement, litigation, trade secrets, antitrust, and licensing. He also served as a Primary Patent Examiner and an Assistant Patent Examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for more than eight years.

Judge Pak is a widely-respected community leader who has volunteered his time and invested his energy in a number of state and local causes. He has served as Co-Chair of the NAACP Montgomery County's Multicultural Partnership Committee, Board Member of the Senior Executive Association, member of Germantown Police Advisory Committee, member of the Maryland Attorney General's Advisory Council, and as a Maryland Higher Education Commissioner.

In recognition of his passionate commitment to public service, Judge Pak has received the President's Volunteer Service Award, the Maryland Governor's Volunteer Service Award, Progressive Maryland's Progressive Leader Award, and the Montgomery County Police Department's Award of Appreciation. He was also inducted into the Montgomery County Human Rights Hall of Fame.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in thanking Judge Chung Pak for a long and distinguished career in public service and in celebrating his dedication to his community and our country.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to the proposal put forward by my Republican colleagues that is misleadingly titled the ``Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.'' I voted against the GOP Tax Scam when it was brought up in the House of Representatives a few weeks ago, and I did again this week when Republicans bypassed ``regular order'' to pass a partisan, highway robbery and power grab bill that will give massive tax cuts to corporations experiencing record profits and explode our national debt, while pulling the rug out from beneath the American Working Class and Middle Class.

As the elected representatives of the American people, Congress should be passing legislation that helps every American, not serving as a rubber-stamp for tax cuts advanced by a President who bankrupted four companies, his high-flying billionaire cabinet, and his wealthy corporate donors demanding a big Christmas bonus for the one-percent. Yet that is precisely what the Republicans in Congress have done.

Let's be clear: this bill will not ``stimulate the economy'' or ``create more jobs''--in fact, more than 30 distinguished economists have invalidated these claims. This bill will not help middle-class Americans today and it will not help future generations of Americans tomorrow--in fact, these claims have also been proved false by the analysis of nonpartisan tax experts and government entities. Maryland's middle class, seniors, students, working families, and everyone else who is not a gigantic corporation, one of the richest of the rich in this country, or anyone without their own lobbyist will be made worse- off under this proposal. Our children and grandchildren will be footing the bill for this irresponsible and reckless corporate giveaway for decades to come.

Both the House and Senate tax bills are bad deals for my constituents, Marylanders, and ninety-nine-percent of Americans. There were virtually no hearings and no Democratic input in the process, while special interest lobbyists inserted absurd provisions (such as eliminating the deductions for state and local taxes and medical expenses, and opening-up oil drilling in Alaska).

A recent analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation found that many Americans, including many of my constituents, will receive a substantial tax hike under the Republican plan. Also, according to both the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office, by 2027, those earning $40,000 to $50,000 would pay a combined $5.3 billion more in taxes, while the group earning $1 million or more would get a $5.8 billion tax cut. Apparently the Republican version of the new American Dream is to raise taxes on the Middle Class while showering millionaires with tax breaks.

Congressional Republicans are also dismissing concerns over the debt, reversing years of deficit-hawk rhetoric so fast they are walking around with neck braces from the ideological whiplash. Suddenly the GOP is calling trillions of dollars of debt ``a drop in the bucket''--which will of course, be true, only until Republicans decide that we need deep painful cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security to pay for the magnificent tax cuts they have already bestowed upon the nation's wealthiest one-percent.

If this legislation is such a boon for America's small businesses, why are the small businesses in my state so upset about the plan? Maryland's small businesses may be in favor of long-overdue tax reform, but this is not it. They wanted public hearings, where provisions like pass-through businesses could have been openly discussed and debated. Instead, we're looking at a bill which pretends to provide for small business but most pass-through income goes to the top one-percent of American earners. This is hardly helping America's Middle Class as the Republican leadership claims, but it certainly helps the GOP's gilded Donor Class.

My constituents are not fools and they are not suckers. They are not holding buckets waiting for the Koch Brothers' private jet maintenance exemptions to magically ``trickle down'' and benefit them. No credible research has demonstrated that corporate tax breaks will create millions of new American jobs. In fact, documented history shows that just the opposite occurs. Foreign corporations are probably cheering along the GOP Tax Scam, knowing that America is only days away from creating millions of new jobs overseas. Trickle-down economics is a fraud. The only kind of economics that works for Americans is bubble-up economics where we invest in infrastructure, health care and education--we invest in the Middle Class and prosperity bubbles up everywhere.

Furthermore, I often hear from my overseas constituents, who have their own profound concerns about our tax system. As someone who has lived abroad, I appreciate their concerns. Americans abroad are being treated unfairly--taxed first by their local tax authority, and again by the United States. No other countries tax their citizens abroad, with the exceptions of North Korea and Eritrea. Yet Congressional Republicans have chosen to ignore the nine million voices of red, white and blue American citizens seeking help and relief. The GOP is callously ignoring our citizens overseas, refusing to help millions of constituents abroad who desperately want and deserve expat tax reform.

Congress should act immediately, so that U.S. citizens living abroad are not forced to choose between two terrible outcomes: draining their life savings to pay their taxes or renouncing their citizenship to escape this outrageous double taxation. There has been some important progress in this regard though. I'm pleased that my colleague from North Carolina, Representative George Holding, readily acknowledged the problem of expat taxation during the House Floor debate on H.R. 1, but frankly, it is shocking that the House Ways and Means Committee failed entirely to provide any tax reform relief whatsoever to millions of Americans living abroad.

My constituents did not send me to Congress to vote for a bill which adds more than $1 trillion to our national debt; sends American jobs overseas; eliminates tax assistance provisions for the sick, seniors, college students, teachers, families with special needs children, working families, and middle-class families; and puts more into the pockets of people like President Trump.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a hoax. Republicans boast that this bill provides ``tax cuts for everybody,'' but millions of Americans will see their taxes increased under this proposal. Don't just take my word for it, check out the latest analysis from the official revenue referee of Congress, the Joint Committee on Taxation.

In closing, Mr. Speaker, this tax bill is a bad deal for Maryland, and indeed, nearly every American whose last name isn't Trump or Koch or Mercer or Adelson. I am proud to have taken a stand for Marylanders and America's Middle Class by voting against the GOP Tax Scam.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be organizing this special hour on behalf of the minority.

We are going to be talking tonight about the growing smear campaign against Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating contacts between Russians interfering in our Presidential election in 2016 and Americans. What we have seen over the last several weeks is a rising tide of criticism of Mr. Mueller in attempts to undermine and sabotage the special counsel investigation.

We are going to be talking about all the different components of this attack, and we are going to be asking the question: Why?

Why suddenly is Mr. Mueller, who was once a hero to our friends across the aisle, a decorated Vietnam war veteran, former Director of the FBI, former U.S. Attorney for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the State of California, a celebrated law enforcement figure, and a registered Republican--why suddenly has he come under withering attack by everyone from our colleagues across the aisle in the House, to Republicans in the Senate, to people in the White House, to FOX News? Why has the whole rightwing propaganda machine turned on Mr. Mueller in the special counsel investigation suddenly? And what is it that we can do to try to prevent an assault on the special counsel in an effort to dismantle the special counsel investigation?

To begin tonight, I am going to call on a colleague from Florida (Mrs. Demings), who is an extraordinary freshman class Member in the House of Representatives representing the people of Florida. She was the chief of police in Orlando, Florida, before she came to Congress; so she has exceptional law enforcement experience and a whole career in law enforcement.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Demings.)

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mrs. Demings for her passion and her leadership. I am delighted to learn today that she will be joining the House Judiciary Committee as a new colleague next week, and I am thrilled about that.

Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Demings focused our attention on the rule of law and the startling disdain for the rule of law that is being shown in Washington right now, and the President's basic confusion about the proper role for the Department of Justice.

One of my revered colleagues on the House Committee on the Judiciary from California (Mr. Ted Lieu), who also serves on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, has had a front row seat to everything that has happened over the course of this year. He saw the Speaker of the House praise Mr. Mueller's appointment; he saw Senator McConnell praise Mr. Mueller's appointment as special counsel; he saw Mr. Mueller's nonpartisanship and professionalism being widely heralded by our colleagues on the Republican side; and now he is watching every day as they do everything in their power to destroy the reputation and the credibility of Mr. Mueller and his excellent team at the special counsel's office.

I have invited Mr. Ted Lieu to come up and speak and tell us what he thinks is going on and what is behind this smear campaign.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Ted Lieu for his excellent presentation. I would ask one question, and I hope that the law professor in me isn't showing too much, but I wanted to ask

Mr. Ted Lieu about one thing he said at the beginning.

Mr. Ted Lieu made the point very well that Mr. Mueller is a distinguished law enforcement officer, who is also Republican, and he was appointed by a Republican. Mr. Rosenstein is another distinguished and well-respected law enforcement official, who himself had been appointed by Attorney General Sessions, who is a Republican.

All of that is true. But then Mr. Lieu said this is not a Democratic investigation, which certainly it is not. It is a Republican investigation.

But wouldn't it be more appropriate to say it is a law enforcement investigation?

And if you want to be searching for some kind of partisan tilt, you are going to find that these are Republicans, not Democrats.

It is a critical point because, up until all of this started, basically the President respected the independence of the Department of Justice and we didn't go around searching in people's garbage cans trying to find out whether their wife was a registered Democrat or whether they voted Republican. Rather, we assumed that prosecutors and FBI agents and police officers can have a partisan registration and they can vote and participate as long as they do their jobs.

Mr. Lieu's point here is they are doing their job. Nobody is making any complaint about any of the guilty pleas or any of the prosecutions. They are complaining about a bunch of irrelevant stuff.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Lieu for all of his excellent work and leadership both in the Judiciary Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Schneider), another distinguished colleague on the House Judiciary Committee, who is also a member of my class, of sorts. He has been in Congress several different times and he makes a great contribution for his people whenever he is here.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for that excellent and indispensable discussion about what is really at stake here, which is democracy itself. If we can't rely on the integrity of our elections and the authenticity of the results, then democracy is in danger, in deep peril. I thank the gentleman for his leadership and for his outspokenness.

Mr. Speaker, to recap, we are here in this Special Order hour to defend Robert Mueller, because, in America, we live and die by the rule of law under democracy. The rule of law is the revolutionary idea, the one that our forebears fought for in the 18th century, that the most powerful officials in the land will be governed just like everybody else: by constitutional and statutory boundaries fixed in writing in the law in order to protect democracy and the rights of the people.

Ever since he whipped up chants of ``Lock her up'' in the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump has displayed complete ignorance of the difference between a constitutional democracy and a banana republic, a complete ignorance of the role of judges and the Justice Department.

The men and women who work at the Department of Justice for us, they inhabit a world of law, facts, and evidence. They cannot be forced to execute the President's personal vendettas

or prosecute his enemies, real or imagined, or provide support for his propaganda and delusional alternative facts.

President Trump has been on a collision course with the rule of law for a long time. Remember during the campaign, Mr. Speaker, when he attacked Judge Curiel for being Mexican American, implying that his ethnic identity somehow disqualified him from being a competent judge with integrity.

In February, he trashed Federal judges hearing arguments about his Muslim ban order. He has questioned the separation of powers, which he says is somehow obsolete. He has railed continuously against the free press and the media, which he describes as the enemy of the people.

He has continued, in direct violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause in Article I, section 9, clause 8, to collect money from foreign governments at the Trump Hotel, at the Trump Tower, at the Trump golf courses without obtaining congressional consent first, which is what the Constitution requires.

The critical flash point for President Trump's hostility to the rule of law recently has been his stubborn and baffling refusal to accept the reality of the Russian campaign to interfere in our election last year, and then his seemingly determination to undermine the investigation into what actually happened.

Most Americans have regarded this campaign of cyber espionage and cyber sabotage of our election as a frightful danger to democratic sovereignty in our country and a reason to dramatically improve election security across the land, as Congressman Schneider just argued; but Donald Trump keeps denying that the autocrat Vladimir Putin, the former director of the KGB, did anything wrong in our election.

He tried to convince then-FBI Director James Comey to drop his investigation into Trump's National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and to swear a personal loyalty oath to the President. When Comey refused these orders, when he refused this entreaty to change the course of the criminal investigation, when he refused to override his oath to the Constitution of the United States by swearing a personal oath to the President, something that we had never heard of before, Trump fired him. This was about as naked a case of obstruction of justice as you can imagine.

Now we hear from President Trump's personal lawyer that the President cannot be guilty of obstruction of justice. They say, by definition, the President cannot be guilty of obstruction of justice because the President is the chief law enforcement officer in the land.

This is analogous to the old monarchical dogma that the king can do no wrong, the king cannot commit a crime, the king is above the law; if the king does it, it can't be illegal.

Well, our friends seem to have forgotten this is the United States of America. We have got a Constitution here. We have got a Bill of Rights here. We have no kings here. We have no queens here. We have no royalty. We have just we the people, a government of laws, not of men. We have got a Bill of Rights and popular government.

Our friends across the aisle once understood that nobody was above the law. They brought impeachment charges against President Bill Clinton--two charges. One of the charges was obstruction of justice. They moved to impeach President Clinton for obstructing justice, which is now an offense that our friends say a President can't even be guilty of. They brought a case against President Clinton, Clinton v. Jones, which established that a President can even be sued while he is in office and can be deposed and so on.

They understood that at one point. They understand, when a Democrat is President, that nobody's above the law. But now, suddenly, Mr. Speaker, this President is above the law and he gets to determine the course of criminal investigations in the United States of America.

That is not constitutional democracy. That is a banana republic, when the President dictates to law enforcement, dictates to prosecutors what they are going to do, who they are going to investigate, and who will be prosecuted.

So now the race is on, Mr. Speaker, to smear the FBI. The race is on to smear Mr. Mueller, the very man who was praised by Senator McConnell, who was praised by Speaker Ryan, who was described by all of our colleagues as beyond reproach, unimpeachable, the former Director of the FBI, former U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts and California, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam war.

Now, suddenly, they cry havoc. They set loose the dogs of war on Mr. Mueller.

Why?

Because he is doing his job. Because we have two guilty pleas: one by the President's former National Security Advisor, Mr. Flynn; and one by Mr. Papadopoulos for lying to government agents.

We have got 12-count indictments that have been handed down against Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates, and they are afraid that investigation might be closing in on the very highest levels of government.

So what do they do?

They attack the prosecution.

That is what we have been seeing in Washington over the last couple of weeks, a truly extraordinary display of contempt for the rule of law, for the Justice Department, and honest prosecution and law enforcement in the United States of America.

Now, the first effort revolved around an FBI agent who Robert Mueller removed from the investigation in the summertime. He removed him because there were text messages revealed in which he was trashing a lot of political figures, not just President Trump. He was trashing Bernie Sanders, who he called an idiot. He also called President Trump an idiot.

He had unkind words for Eric Holder, and he had very harsh words for my friend and the former Governor of Maryland, Martin O'Malley. He was an equal opportunity insulter.

But our friends, seeing the progress of the Trump-Russia investigation of this special counsel's work, now suddenly decided: We found a villain. We have got our villain. His name is Peter Strzok, and he wrote all these texts, so let's go back to a guy who was removed from the investigation in the summertime. Let's leak all these texts out in the most mysterious and suspicious way, because this was the middle of an inspector general investigation, and they leaked out thousands of texts.

When I asked Mr. Rosenstein about it, he said it had been approved by the inspector general. But the inspector general released a statement the next day which professed that they had not been contacted about it, so there is a whole mystery there.

But, clearly, somebody wanted to get these texts out there. They wanted to create a thick fog of propaganda and confusion. And all that we heard from our colleagues was: Did you see what he said in this text to his friend? Did you see what he said in this text to his friend?

Nobody claimed that the guilty pleas by Flynn or Papadopoulos were legally flawed in any way. They didn't say there were any legal problems with anything that the special counsel had done--no illegal searches, no illegal seizures. They didn't say anything was wrong with the indictment.

But they find some text messages by a guy who was removed from the investigation, and then this becomes the big propaganda smoke screen, this guy who insulted, to my count, a lot more Democrats than he insulted Republicans. Regardless, he showed unprofessionalism.

He was removed quickly by Mr. Mueller--unlike, for example, what President Trump did when he learned that General Flynn, his National Security Advisor, was a serial liar, was lying to Federal agents, was lying to Federal officers, was lying to the Cabinet about his dealings with Russia and foreign governments.

It took President Trump 18 days before he removed him from office in the most begrudging way, and then, even then, after learning that he had been lying about his contacts with foreign agents, he tried to get Mr. Comey, the then-FBI Director, to cancel out the investigation of Michael Flynn, asserting that he is a good guy. Let it go. Let the whole thing go, he said.

But, no, that is not what Mr. Mueller did, the special counsel. When he learned that there were these text messages going out attacking various public figures, he said: We don't need that

kind of stuff on this investigative team. And he got rid of them, end of story.

Except this: It is an opportunity to create an irrelevant distraction from what is going on, to put up a big propaganda smoke screen.

And that wouldn't even be such a big deal in itself. Their arguments are transparently silly. We have colleagues who are saying this is a fruit of the poisonous tree, they intoned. It is all fruit of the poisonous tree.

Except it has nothing to do with fruit of the poisonous tree. That is a Fourth Amendment document which says that, if there is an illegal search or seizure by the government, the government may not use that unlawfully obtained evidence against someone in court. At that point, the exclusionary rule operates; the exclusionary rule is activated.

We asked our colleagues, and I asked Mr. Rosenstein: Was there an illegal search?

No.

Was there an illegal seizure?

No.

There was no illegality. You had an agent who sent some text messages trashing a bunch of politicians in the middle of a Presidential campaign, which is what millions of people were doing. It was irresponsible. He got removed, end of story.

That didn't work so well. That was the first time that they were throwing spaghetti with tomato sauce on it all over the walls. They threw it up and it slipped off. Nobody bought it.

So the next day, or a day later, they came back with another claim about asserting that the GSA had improperly released emails of the Trump Presidential transition team.

Well, there are a few problems with that. One is everybody was told from the beginning that all of those are government property. They were turned over by Trump's GSA, voluntarily. And Mr. Mueller released a one-sentence statement saying that all of the information that we have received was either voluntarily given or was lawfully obtained, end of story.

That didn't work so well either. Threw some more spaghetti against the wall in this smear campaign, and it slides off. It leaves a tomato sauce stain all over the wall, but it doesn't really stick.

Now they are going after Mr. McCabe, the number two person at the FBI. And I haven't been told exactly what their complaint is, but we are going to have a closed-door hearing about it tomorrow in the House Judiciary Committee. From published reports, all I understand is that he has committed the great sin and crime of being married to a woman who is active in Democratic Party politics.

Look, let's get something straight here. This is the United States of America, and law enforcement officers have a right to be registered as a Democrat, as an Independent, as a Republican, as a Green Party member, as a Libertarian. They can register however they want. And consistent with the Hatch Act, they can be involved in politics and members of their family can be involved in politics. There is nothing wrong that.

There is nothing wrong with the fact that Mr. Mueller, who is now the target of all of their venom, is a registered Republican or that he got appointed by another Republican, Mr. Rosenstein, or that he got appointed by a Republican, Attorney General Sessions, or that he got appointed by a Republican, President Trump; right? All those people are Republicans. They have a right to be Republicans, but they have got to do their public duty.

The irony, of course, is that the Republicans are attacking Republicans in office for being partisan against Republicans. It is completely incoherent; it is fantastical; and it shows the desperation of this smear campaign. It just doesn't make sense to anyone.

So we will see if they are able to smear another good, qualified, competent law enforcement official, which is what they want to do with the number two person at the FBI.

And what is interesting is that the people who are attacking their fellow Republicans for somehow being partisan just for doing their jobs never have anything to say about what we know was the real political corruption and contamination of the FBI back in the days of J. Edgar Hoover, when he used the resources of the FBI to go after Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, or the days of COINTELPRO, where the FBI actively tried to disrupt the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement and so on. They don't say anything about that.

It would strengthen their argument, of course, that their fellow Republican partisans somehow might be capable of political bias, but they don't even have the historical context to do that, and they don't believe in it.

The fact is that the FBI used to have a real problem with being a tool of political prosecution, and it has gotten over that. It has gotten beyond it today, in 2017.

Now, suddenly, all of their fire is trained on Mr. Mueller. It is trained on the special counsel: discredit and undermine him. And it wouldn't be such a big deal if they were just exercising their First Amendment rights, which they have every right to do. If they were just exercising their rights under the Speech and Debate Clause, which they have every right to do, to use their place in this body in order to denounce the FBI, to attack Mr. Mueller, to try to discredit law enforcement, they have got the right to do it. But what everyone is afraid of now is that they are trying to set the stage for the removal of Robert Mueller.

Now, that is no simple thing. The President can't simply fire Mr. Mueller. He would have to get Mr. Rosenstein to do it. And he can't be fired for any reason at all. He can only be fired for misconduct, for conflict of interest, or for some other good cause or incapacity. So there has got to be a reason why.

And when we asked Mr. Rosenstein whether he saw any reason to remove Mr. Mueller now, he said, no, that he is totally satisfied with the conduct of the investigation.

So what trumped-up alibi could they produce? What trumped-up justification could they find for the removal of Mr. Mueller?

It would create a serious constitutional emergency and crisis in America. And, of course, when we say a constitutional crisis, it is not the Constitution that is in crisis; it is us. They would be creating a political crisis that would require a resort to extraordinary constitutional mechanisms.

This would be a clearly impeachable offense for the President to use his power in order to thwart a criminal investigation that implicates the President. That is the very definition of obstruction of justice. It would just be an expansion and a refinement of what the President was doing when he fired Mr. Comey way back in the beginning of the administration for refusing to lay off Michael Flynn and for refusing to swear a personal loyalty oath to the President of the United States instead of to the Constitution and the people of the country.

So that is where we are. The people need to know. The people need to know what is going on, that there is an organized campaign being orchestrated at the highest levels of government to discredit Mr. Mueller and the special counsel investigation--not for not doing their job, but for doing their job. That is why they are being attacked today.

Mr. Speaker, I close with a thought just about the rule of law.

The rule of law is the idea that even the people who occupy the highest office in the land are subject to the Constitution, are subject to the laws of the people, because here the people govern. We have no kings here. That is what we rebelled against.

Our Founders believed, with Madison, that the very definition of tyranny is the collapse of all powers into one, where someone says: I have got all the power; I am the boss. Our Founders said: No, we are going to divide powers up:

Article I, we will vest the lawmaking power in the representatives of the people in the House and the Senate;

Article II, we will create a President who will take care that the laws be faithfully executed;

And then Article III, we will vest the judicial power in the Supreme Court and the Federal judiciary to sort out actual cases or controversies about what the law means.

But notice what comes first there, Article I. The people's representatives come first. The President works for us. The President works for a Congress,

which works for the people. The President implements the laws that we pass here.

The President is not above the law. The President is subject to the law, and the President has the honor of enforcing the laws that we adopt.

So let's get that straight. No one is above the law. Anybody can be found guilty of obstructing justice if one thing can be shown: if they obstruct justice.

And it looks like they are setting the stage for a further obstruction of justice with this outrageous smear campaign being leveled this week against Robert Mueller, against Mr. Rosenstein, against Mr. McCabe, and against the men and women of the FBI. That is what is taking place in Washington today.

Mr. Speaker, the people need to know, and we in Congress have got to do our constitutional duty, too.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to join this evening. I thank the gentleman for putting together a discussion, a Special Order on this critical piece of legislation, which is now hurdling through Congress today.

I was reflecting, Mr. Speaker, that I had never seen a riot before, and I wonder how many people have been to a riot. And then as I was watching this bill being rammed through Congress, I realized that we were observing up close a riot, a ruling class riot, a trickle-down riot, special interest riot, a 1 percent riot against the rest of the country, the 1 percent that will get 83 percent of the tax cuts, the 1 percent that is overseeing an explosion in our deficit, adding somewhere between $1\1/2\ trillion to $2.3 trillion to our deficit that we are passing on to our children and our grandchildren.

My constituents in Maryland are saying to me: Hey, if we are going to go into an extra $1\1/2\ trillion into deficits and debt, why don't we put that into an infrastructure plan for America? Why not rebuild our transportation system, the roads, the highways, the bridges, the Metro systems, the port authorities, the water systems, and cybersecurity? They are collapsing in front of our very eyes. So if we have got $1\1/ 2\ trillion that we are going to put on the Federal tab, let's direct it into infrastructure.

But what do they bring us instead?

Old-fashioned, shopworn, and historically discredited trickle-down economics. It never works. It never works to cut taxes on the wealthy and big corporations and hope that the profits will just magically, mysteriously rain down on the middle class and working people.

It has just never worked like that. The only thing that does work is bubble-up middle class economics that gives opportunity to everybody-- the poor working people, the middle class--and the money will flow up. The rich will get richer. We have proven it. That when you actually invest in education and you invest in infrastructure and you invest in healthcare, everybody does better. And then, because everybody is doing better, everybody does better, including the wealthy. We don't need to have top-down class warfare, trickle-down economics in America. But, hey, it is hard to stop a riot once it gets going, and we are in the middle of a riot here.

They said Malcolm X could stop a riot if he wanted to. Well, Paul Ryan could stop this riot if he wanted to. The GOP could stop this riot. Maybe even President Trump could stop this riot. But the American oligarchs, the ones who are friends with the Russian oligarchs, the American oligarchs can taste victory already. They are carting off their TVs. They are checking out their gorgeous new yachts. They are measuring the drapes at Mar-a-Lago. They are polling for the Senate seats that they plan to buy with all of the new campaign contributions that come rolling in from the Mercers and the Koch brothers and the other plutocrats who are going to make out like bandits with this highway robbery.

In a riot, there is no time for hearings, no time for facts, no time for economic analysis, no time for experts, no time for discussion or democracy. There is no time for us even to read the lousy bills that their lobbyists write for them. They are too busy looting the Treasury in the middle of the night, ransacking Medicare and Medicaid, and trashing the neighborhoods of the beleaguered American middle class by raising taxes on 86 million families over the next decade.

They are too busy trashing the State and local tax deduction, imposing double taxes on our people, something that has not occurred since we developed the tax system back in 1862, when they imposed the first revenue act. In the middle of the Civil War, they exempted State and local taxes.

Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans said then, ``That is double taxation; we won't do it in the middle of the Civil War,'' when they needed to raise money.

And here we are, in a time of record corporate profits, amazing prosperity that comes out of the Obama administration, amazing economic expansion and growth, and what do they want to do?

They want to impose double taxation on what they say is the blue States because now America has got to be divided.

It is their States and our States, so the blue States are going to just pay more. That is the way that they are pursuing their tax policy in the United States Congress. You could almost understand and appreciate this trickle-down mob mentality if it were just our own rich people who were wilding against American democracy. After all, the top 1 percent in America today owns only as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent combined. There is still the remnants of the middle class to destroy, and it is hard to keep up with the lifestyle of the rich and famous in Trump's billionaire Cabinet.

So they need to drive 13 million Americans off of their health insurance. They need to make tens of millions of Americans pay more in taxes. But here is the thing: one-third of the corporate windfall in their gigantic corporate tax break, which is the heart of their bill, hundreds of billions of dollars, one-third of the money will go to foreign investors in Saudi Arabia, in China, in Russia. The one-third of the American stock that is owned by foreign investors is going to just sail outside of the country immediately when we do this.

And that huge sucking sound of hundreds of billions of dollars flowing to other people's oligarchs will be followed by billions more in investments and millions more in jobs because of another little trick that got tucked into this bag of tricks on the American people and treats for our plutocrats. Their bill changes our tax policy to a territorial system.

Well, what does that mean?

It means, if you are an American businessman and you are setting up your new business, the American businessman or businesswoman, you are setting up your business on Main Street, you are going to pay 100 percent of your taxes due. Your rate is going to go way down under this bill, but you will pay 100 percent. If you ship your business and your jobs overseas to Mexico or Indonesia or Switzerland or Vietnam, you are going to pay zero percent of what you would owe.

Now, I think they put in some tiny, little fix about that saying: Well, if it gets too extreme, if you press the joke too far, you will pay something, maybe 10 percent.

Again, that was written in the middle of the night, so I haven't seen that. That is just a talking point.

But let me just close with this: like a riot, this tax scam has little to recommend it. Its only redeeming feature is that it will wake a horrified country up to the depravity and greed that have overtaken our politics and, I am sad to say, a once great political party in the United States of America. And when we wake up to the fiscal damage and the political hangover, then they will be coming with their meat cleavers towards Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.

And when the American people bounce out the people who rioted today, when they bounce them out of office, well, it is going to be okay for them because they can go and work for the lobbyists and the big companies that made out like bandits today. So the joke is on us if this actually goes through. But don't forget that what we saw today was a riot from above.

Mr. Speaker, yes, I did say that.

Mr. Speaker, the whole point is to cement into place an oligarchy, a plutocracy.

One of the reasons that the Founders of America were so opposed to the intergenerational transmission of wealth is because they said that is going to increase idleness, laziness, presumptuousness, and entitlement in new generations.

At a certain point, if you buy enough houses, if you buy enough horses, if you buy enough yachts, if you buy enough jewels, what do you want?

Well, you want a governorship. You want a Senate seat.

That is not democracy. That is plutocracy. So we can't let this system of wealth discrimination and separation devour our basic democratic values.

Mr. Speaker, I was shocked to read so many prominent elected officials and political operatives on the GOP side saying that the whole reason for doing this is that their donors were effectively going on a strike and the donors were saying: If you don't get the tax bill through, don't expect contributions from us.

We couldn't have a more vivid demonstration of plutocracy in the country.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, once again, for this opportunity and for his leadership.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman makes a superb point. We are at a point of record corporate profits. The corporations are swimming in profits and in cash, and if they wanted to be employing more people, they could be employing more people now.

Mr. Speaker, or raising wages. They could do it right now.

All that we are doing is bestowing more of a bonus on them so they can give more money away to the CEOs. In the stock dividends and in the stock buybacks, it is cash gains within the corporations, so they are going to get wealthier. There is no reason to begrudge that. It is a large part of a lot of people's dreams to make a lot of money, but let's not press a good joke too far.

They are making tons of money right now, and we have got serious needs in the country. We have got an infrastructure crisis. Our roads and our highways and our metro systems and our water systems are suffering--our schools, our universities, our community colleges.

Why not invest in some common things that bring us together as a society, rather than having highway robbery from above against the rest of the country? It is just incomprehensible to me.

I have got to believe this is something to do with the corruption of our campaign finance regime. People are talking about: Well, we are waiting for the contributions to come in, and that they are telling us on the phone they don't want to give us contributions until we pass the tax bill.

So give them hundreds of billions, drive us into trillions of dollars in debt, and then they will give us back hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. It is a bad deal. That is why a lot of parts of the country are moving to public financing now, because it is remarkable how much damage you could do to the country on the cheap with a relatively small investment. After the Supreme Court's decision in 2010, in the Citizens United case, redefining corporations as political citizens, now the CEOs can take money directly out of the corporate treasury and put it into politics.

Mr. Speaker, I am here to discuss a very serious issue, which are the mounting threats and criticism of Robert Mueller's investigation into criminality taking place in the course of the Presidential election with interference by the Russians and possible collusion with various Americans working with him.

But I want to start by putting this in a general context, Mr. Speaker. Tom Paine said: ``In the monarchies, the king is law; but in the democracies, the law is king.''

We place everything on the rule of law here in the United States of America. It is how we control the people who occupy the highest offices of government and control vast amounts of resources that belong to the people of the United States.

In the monarchies and in the dictatorships, the people have no control over those who occupy government; but in the democracies, in the constitutional societies, we exercise control over the people who lead the government to make sure that they don't abuse their power for improper purposes: for private gain, for the enrichment of particular classes, or for the perpetuation of their own political power.

Now, when we took office at the beginning of this year, Mr. Speaker, we received an Intelligence Committee report, signed by 18 intelligence agencies: the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and on and on.

They all told us the same thing, which is that Vladimir Putin had attempted to interfere and had interfered in the American election through cyber espionage and cyber sabotage in an effort to determine the outcome of our election. That took place. We knew that way back when we first took office.

Now, in the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which I serve on, and in the House Judiciary Committee, which I serve on, we were told--and we have been told for months going all the way back to the beginning of the year--that we don't need to investigate this assault on the sovereignty of the American people in our own election because there is an excellent lawyer and law enforcement official in charge of the special counsel investigation: Robert Mueller.

Indeed, Robert Mueller is a man of extraordinary and, perhaps, singular qualification. He is a decorated war hero from the Vietnam war; a U.S. attorney, who had been the U.S. attorney for both the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the State of California; a former Director of the FBI.

And do you know what?

Robert Mueller is a registered Republican. He was named as special counsel by another registered Republican and another widely heralded and highly-qualified law enforcement official: Rod Rosenstein, who had been a career attorney in the Department of Justice, and then the U.S. attorney appointed by President Bush in the great State of Maryland, my home State; and who is presently the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, appointed by another Republican: Attorney General Sessions.

So Attorney General Sessions appointed Rod Rosenstein, who is the Deputy Attorney General, a Republican; and Rod Rosenstein appointed another Republican and a widely admired and highly-qualified law enforcement official, Robert Mueller, to take over as the special counsel.

Now, with all these Republicans in charge of the investigation and with the Republicans here in Congress saying, ``no, we won't do any investigations of our own,'' despite past practice, we have to ask why Special Counsel Robert Mueller this week has suddenly come under withering fire by our GOP colleagues in the most ferocious organized attack on a Federal prosecution and prosecutor I have ever seen.

Well, the answer, alas, is obvious. They are attacking Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his fine team of lawyers and investigators because Mueller and his team are doing their jobs and justice is being done. There have already been two guilty pleas arising from this investigation: one from President Trump's former National Security Advisor, General Flynn, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI about Trump-Russia; and another criminal confession and guilty plea from the former foreign policy assistant, George Papadopoulos, who also took full responsibility for his criminal conduct in lying about Trump- Russia to the FBI.

And there have been sweeping criminal indictments handed down by the Mueller team, the special counsel, against Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, and his associate, Rick Gates.

Now, for all we know, this might be the end of it. The special counsel isn't talking. He is not leaking. He is doing his job. But it is also possible that the investigation is just getting started and that they are closing in on even higher targets: perhaps Jared Kushner, the all-purpose Trump aide and the

President's son-in-law, perhaps he is within the scopes of this investigation; perhaps Donald Trump, Jr.; and perhaps the President of the United States himself, Donald Trump.

And so the White House has issued its apparently desperate and cornered animal orders. The President cries chaos and let's slip the dogs of war against Special Counsel Mueller and the rule of law. This week, Trump has called the Mueller investigation--an investigation led by a Republican, who is named by a Republican, who is named by a Republican--he calls this investigation ``the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.''

And I don't want to hear from any of my colleagues, either, GOP on the other side, Well, you can't take seriously what the President says because he is disconnecting from reality or he is paranoid or he is delusional, unless you are willing to try to activate the provisions of the 25th Amendment. We must take the President's word seriously.

And, in the meantime, of course, our friends across the aisle, Mr. Speaker, are going along with everything the President says and everything that he does, and they are enabling his attempt to defame the special counsel, Mr. Mueller, and to attack the work of the FBI.

The President calls the FBI an agency in tatters, and an onslaught has followed in the media. On FOX News, a full-scale campaign against the FBI has arisen with lots of people comparing the FBI to the KGB, which is amusing because, if that were true, they would like the FBI-- because Donald Trump's best buddy in foreign relations and FOX News' beloved kleptocrat authoritarian dictator abroad is Vladimir Putin, the former chief of the KGB. But they compare our FBI, the tens of thousands of men and women who have given their lives to law enforcement in our country, they compare the FBI to the KGB under a totalitarian government.

Newt Gingrich calls Mueller corrupt, Newt Gingrich who was officially reprimanded right here, Mr. Speaker, right where we stand today, by this body. In a vote of 395-28, he was reprimanded and disciplined for violating the rules of this body, and he calls the former FBI Director, Special Counsel Mueller corrupt in an effort to undermine and discredit the special counsel investigation.

And now this propaganda campaign comes to the official channels of the House of Representatives. Yesterday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appeared before the House Judiciary Committee for an oversight hearing, and I was appalled and I was amazed at the way our GOP colleagues attacked him with a series of completely phony, overblown, and misleading accusations.

They are in full-scale assault mode now. They are in a frenzied wild goose chase to find anything possible to discredit Special Counsel Mueller and his investigators in his team.

And guess what, they finally found their villain. This week they found their villain, and they pounced on him. It is an FBI agent named Peter Strzok, who was working on the Mueller investigation but was removed from it this summer when it was discovered that he had sent a bunch of text messages to his apparent girlfriend criticizing a number of politicians, including Donald Trump, whom he called an idiot, Mr. Speaker. I think he was watching one of the Presidential debates where he sent a text message to his girlfriend, writing: ``OMG, he is an idiot.'' That is the way I am reading the texts that were revealed to us yesterday.

Now, he was probably one of millions of people to send that exact same text across the country. It wasn't a very nice thing to say, but he said it. He also called Bernie Sanders, the Democratic candidate for President, the Vermont U.S. Senator, an idiot. He called Trump an idiot; he called Sanders an idiot; and he had even more choice, unspeakable words for my friend, the former Governor of Maryland, Martin O'Malley, which I don't think I can repeat on the floor, Mr. Speaker.

All right. Mr. Strzok was speaking his mind in these private texts, but it raised the potentiality of bias in one of the agents working on the team. And so what did Mr. Mueller do when he learned of it? He fired him immediately. He got him off of the investigation, removed him from the investigation, and put him into a different part of the FBI. He removed him immediately from the investigation.

Unlike President Trump, for example, who took 18 days to fire General Flynn after learning that Flynn was a serial liar about his connections with Russia.

So it took President Trump 18 days. Mr. Mueller fired the guy immediately because people make mistakes, they do the wrong thing, and Mueller said: I don't want him on my team. He removed him, and they put him somewhere else.

Now, that should have been the end of the matter; right? It sounds like the end of the story is not a big deal. But, on the eve of our hearing yesterday, we received a dump of hundreds of these private text messages between Mr. Strzok and his friend, Ms. Page, and they make, no doubt, for titillating, fascinating, engrossing reading as these two people make their observations about the Presidential campaign. It's like ``Anna Karenina'' or ``House of Cards.'' It is fascinating. It is the kind of trivial gossip that people get into sometimes in this town.

I was amazed to learn that the Department of Justice itself--not Mueller, not his team, but the Department of Justice--the formal public affairs channel had actually orchestrated this dump of text messages that were revealed in the course of an ongoing Department of Justice investigation, inspector general investigation. They took this material from the middle of an investigation, called up a whole bunch of reporters and brought them in to show them these texts.

Why?

Well, nobody could really explain it. I asked Mr. Rosenstein yesterday, and he couldn't explain what really--he said: Well, it had been approved.

I said: ``Was there any precedent for it? Was there any precedent for the Department of Justice revealing material that turned up in the middle of an ongoing investigation to reporters?

He couldn't name any. It wasn't even in the press conference.

So that took place. That strikes me as very odd that there are people in the Department of Justice who apparently are cooperating with this effort to undermine the integrity and the strength of the special counsel investigation.

Well, the key thing to understand is that all of those text messages are totally irrelevant. The great text message love story saga, which was dumped on us, is an irrelevant distraction. Mr. Mueller got rid of Mr. Strzok, removed him from the team, end of story.

Of course, FBI agents, prosecutors are allowed to have a political party. Mueller's got one; it is Republican. Rosenstein's got one; he is a Republican. That is fine. You can be Republican. You can be Democrat. You are not allowed to have your political ideas affect your work to the point that you are biased.

So I take it Mr. Mueller figured that those text messages suggested the possibility of bias, not just against Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley, but also against Donald Trump, and they said: Okay. We will remove him from the team. He is gone.

But yesterday, that is all the Republicans wanted to talk about, this great trumped up, fake text message scandal--totally irrelevant.

The only one who, to his credit, tried to make it relevant was a Republican colleague who said this is fruit of the poisonous tree, and he repeated it numerous times. He intoned the words, ``fruit of the poisonous tree.''

Well, I am a law professor, so I know what ``fruit of the poisonous tree'' means. It is a Fourth Amendment doctrine which says that, if you have got an illegal search or seizure by the government, you cannot use evidence that is obtained by virtue of an illegal search or an illegal seizure against someone in court. If the government tries to use it, then the so-called exclusionary rule is activated, and you exclude evidence that is derived from an illegal search or seizure.

But there is no illegal search or seizure, and there is not even an allegation of an illegal search or seizure. All they have got is text messages between two lovebirds, and that is it.

I asked Mr. Rosenstein yesterday, I said: Was there an illegal search or seizure? Is there an allegation of an illegal search or seizure?

No, none at all.

So what is the relevance of all that stuff? Nothing. They found one FBI agent who is removed during the summertime for trashing a bunch of politicians on both sides of the aisle. They find that guy. They talk only about the fact that he called the President of the United States an idiot, which we must concede hardly makes him an original critic of the President. Okay. They find that one guy, and then suddenly they want to use that to claim that bias infects the whole operation, the whole investigation.

And why are they doing that? Well, look, if they just want to put up a propaganda smoke screen, that is within their First Amendment rights to do so and within their rights under the Speech or Debate Clause. The problem is that there is mounting fear and anxiety that this is trying to set the stage for President Trump to fire Robert Mueller, perhaps the most admired law enforcement official and prosecutor in the country, that they are setting the stage to fire him with all this trumped-up stuff about a bunch of texts between some lovebirds. That is it. That is all they have got.

After all this time, that is what they are using to try to discredit Robert Mueller and his team, who, at the time of his appointment, they described as unimpeachable, beyond reproach, and so on. But now that he is doing his job and it looks like the momentum of the investigation is leading to the very top of the U.S. Government, they may be looking for a reason to fire him.

Well, this is an emergency, a constitutional emergency if this is going to happen. This is why we are blowing the whistle on it.

I am delighted to be joined by a great legislator, someone whose career is woven into the fabric of the U.S. House of Representatives. He is the minority whip of this body, and I am just delighted to yield now to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) very much for his kind words and for his patriotism. I thank him for also pointing out the critical importance of civic equality to this discussion because civic equality implies that none of us is above the law.

Of the many dangerous things I have heard uttered over the last couple of weeks with respect to this investigation, perhaps none is more sinister or disturbing than the suggestion that the President cannot be guilty of obstruction of justice because the President himself oversees the whole government.

Well, at that point, we may as well hang it all up and go back to monarchy because the governing principle of our Constitution is we have no kings here. We have no kings here. So I thank Mr. Hoyer for that.

James Madison wrote that the very definition of ``tyranny'' is the collapse of all powers into one. We are trying to defend the separation of powers and we are trying to defend the rule of law against all of it being drowned in a political agenda.

Mr. Speaker, I am joined now by my very distinguished colleague on the House Judiciary Committee. I yield to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cohen).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his leadership. I thank him for invoking the critical Watergate analogy, the Saturday Night Massacre with the firing of Archibald Cox and other Department of Justice officials who refused to cover up for the President's crimes and misdeeds. I thank him for his legislation that would try to empower the special counsel not to be fired without a court's say-so at least, to build another check and balance.

I thank him, also, for invoking what is also taking place in Washington right now, which is this massive assault on the American middle class through this so-called tax cut bill, this tax scam, which would actually raise taxes for tens of millions of Americans while transmitting billions of dollars up the income and wealth ladder.

Ever since we have arrived here, the whole government has felt like a money-making operation for a person, a family, a small group of billionaires in the Cabinet, a handful of people in the country like the Koch brothers and the Mercers. We cannot allow either this assault on the basic middle class economics of the country to go through or this assault on the Constitution and the rule of law, which we witnessed so vividly yesterday in the House Judiciary Committee.

I want to thank the gentleman for his service and for being one of the first to blow the whistle about what is taking place here.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and to include any extraneous material on the subject of this Special Order.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to share with my colleagues a beautiful letter I received from my constituent Linda Sobel Katz, a former legislative aide to one of my predecessors in the House of Representatives from Maryland's 8th Congressional District, Representative Michael Barnes. To summarize Linda's thoughts would be a disservice to her passionate and eloquent message about America's priorities today, so I will simply include in the Record her letter:

``In the late 70s and early 80s, I was honored to be an

aide to Maryland Congressman Mike Barnes on international

human rights issues. It was my job to help Rep. Barnes speak

out for those suffering discrimination and worse in their

homelands. The climate in Congress was different then.

Democrats and Republicans willingly forged coalitions to

protect and rescue individuals from hostile leadership far

from our shores. As a communications consultant, this is the

path I have chosen for my life's work--to champion causes to

help better humanity and our environment.

``Never did I ever think I would need to speak out for

myself, especially to the esteemed U.S. Congress--once a

beacon of democracy, fairness, and justice to the free world

and those silenced by totalitarianism.

``As an American citizen who deeply cherishes our land, I

am horrified by the indifference of the majority in Congress

who would strike out against innocent Americans. First,

against children who are losing their CHIP coverage. To what

gain? And now, against Americans suffering from one of

humankind's worst diseases--cancer. To what benefit?

``What you are doing is causing a sense of powerlessness

and despair among those you have a sworn duty to protect. I

am such a constituent. As of this writing, you still have not

restored the Children's Health Insurance Program, CHIP, which

expired September 30. And you show the worst side of your

natures by denying coverage for cancer treatment to those

over 65 and paying for Medicare.

``I have been raising my granddaughter Sabrina, as her

legal guardian, for the past 10 years since the death of her

mother when Sabrina was four. During this time, I also spent

seven years caring for a husband with Alzheimer's. Formerly

co-owner of an insurance agency, my husband Hershel was

denied long-term care coverage because of two prior heart

attacks in his 40s and 50s. CHIP has been a godsend.

``We paid for Hershel's huge health needs out of pocket,

and it was nerve-wracking to consider whether our family

could survive financially.

``I am grateful that we are able to live in my home of

nearly 40 years in a comforting neighborhood of Silver

Spring, just outside the Nation's Capital.

``Less than a year after my husband's passing in November

2015--with no symptoms, other than a yellow tinge to my

eyeballs, and feeling in good health--I was diagnosed with

pancreatic cancer, one of the most deadly forms of this

insidious disease. I have been in chemotherapy at Georgetown

University Hospital for a year and remain stable after an

initial setback that prevented me from undergoing a

previously planned Whipple surgery to remove the tumor.

``But chemotherapy is not a permanent fix and has its own

limiting side effects. With my oncologist, we must explore

clinical trials and other emerging treatments to find a way

for me to stay alive so I can continue to raise my

granddaughter, now 13 and in 8th grade. Robust federal

funding for cancer research is so critical to the survival of

cancer patients. And so is the reassurance of coverage for

treatment through Medicare.

``Dear Members of Congress, do not wash your hands of

cancer patients on Medicare. So many of us continue to

contribute to family life and society in myriad, constructive

ways. Surely, you must have family members, friends, and

constituents suffering from cancer through no fault of their

own. Why strip away our hope and ability to live fully and be

useful members of our communities? Why choose to be cruel,

heartless, and mindless leaders lacking compassion for your

fellow citizens? You are fostering an unjust world, not the

America that sets the example for civilized behavior and wins

universal respect.

``I have a personal wish to live five more years so that I

can continue to raise my beautiful, bright, and wise

granddaughter and see her graduate from high school and be

launched into a future of service and commitment in a

gracious and caring world.

``Yes, she does wonder what will happen to her if I die

because cancer treatment is no longer accessible to me,

especially knowing that her U.S. government precipitated this

hostile action. What a tremendous burden for a young teen!

``So, I ask: What will you do to ensure that children have

a healthy future and that cancer patients get the care they

deserve? Our health care system should be a model in a world

still craving for leadership from America. Do not let us

down.''

In closing, Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to heed this thoughtful message and ensure that children in our country have meaningful access to health care; to have the courage to stand up for the cancer patients, the sick and suffering, the chronically-ill and their families who rely on Medicare to keep them alive; and to demonstrate, as Linda says, true American leadership. America is counting on Congress. Let us act with wisdom and decency comporting with our highest values.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the great contributions that have been rendered to our country and to my home state of Maryland by my constituent and wonderful friend, Stanton Gildenhorn. I offer these remarks just a few days ahead of Stan's 75th birthday next week.

Stan is a well-known public servant, politico, and television personality in our community. He got his start as the youngest staffer in President John F. Kennedy's White House and later worked for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Stan earned a J.D. from the George Washington University School of Law and worked as an attorney in private practice for many years, including in Rockville. He also put his superior legal skills to good use to benefit our community by working at non-profit organizations like the Montgomery County Humane Society and serving as both the Chairman and Counsel for the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee.

A passionate political thinker and strategist, Stan has managed or worked on dozens of campaigns in the last 40 years, at nearly every level of government, and chaired the Montgomery County Charter Review Commission. He was a fixture on national and local television shows for decades, and continues to offer valuable and incisive political commentary today.

I am honored to recognize the important contributions of my constituent, Mr. Stanton Gildenhorn today and hope this chamber will join me in wishing him a happy 75th birthday.

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

I rise in favor of the legislation. I want to thank the honorable gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goodlatte) for his leadership on this and also salute Representatives Kustoff and Kilmer for their introduction of this legislation.

It is important legislation, Mr. Speaker, because it extends protections under current Federal law for religious real property. We know there is no religious free exercise for our people if they are too afraid to go to church or to synagogue or to the mosque.

Currently, section 247 of the Federal criminal code prohibits both the damaging of religious property because of the property's religious character and the intentional obstruction--by force or threats of force--of anyone's exercise of their religious beliefs.

H.R. 1730 clarifies that not just force but threats of force against religious property are included in this prohibition.

In addition, the bill provides that the damaging or obstructing of such property that results in damages exceeding $5,000 constitutes a felony punishable by up to 3 years in prison.

Finally, H.R. 1730 clarifies that real property covered by the statute includes property leased by a nonprofit, religiously affiliated organization.

The importance of the bill, of course, is underscored by the recent upsurge, as Mr. Goodlatte said, in bomb threats, hate crimes, and vandalism committed against churches, synagogues, mosques, and other communities of faith, a wave of hate that is now etched in the public's mind by the shocking events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, which began at a local synagogue.

The Hate Crimes Statistics for 2016 released by the FBI indicate that anti-Semitic hate crimes increased 20 percent from the prior year. There has been an alarming surge committed not just against synagogues, but against churches and mosques in 2017.

We know that violent attacks against religious facilities have always accompanied waves of racial terror in our history. In the 1960s, African-American churches in many parts of the country were vandalized, fire bombed, and burned during the struggle for civil rights in the South. In the 1990s, there was a resurgence of arsons committed against African-American churches. In response, Congress passed the Church Arson Prevention Act in 1996 to make it clear that such behavior was also on the wrong side of the law.

Yet, in 2017, here we are again, facing another rise in hate crimes. We must do more to prevent and fight these threats to our most basic First Amendment freedoms that our people have, including the right of our citizens to practice their religion of choice.

While some may disagree with the religious practice of others, what they may not do is use physical obstruction, force, or threats of force to deny other people the right to worship as they choose. No American should ever have to choose between their faith and their personal security and the safety of their family. Therefore, I strongly support H.R. 1730, and I urge all of my colleagues to do the same.

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

Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record a letter from the American Jewish Committee and a letter from the Anti-Defamation League.

AJC, Global Jewish Advocacy,

Washington, DC, November 1, 2017.

Hon. Robert Goodlatte,

Chairman.

Hon. John Conyers,

Ranking Member, House Committee on the Judiciary, House of

Representatives, Washington, DC.

Dear Chairman Goodlatte and Ranking Member Conyers: I write

on behalf of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the global

Jewish advocacy organization, in strong support of H.R. 1730,

the Combating Anti-Semitism Act of 2017 (which we understand

will be renamed the Protecting Religiously Affiliated

Institutions Act of 2017).

This critically needed bipartisan legislation, introduced

by Rep. David Kustoff with Rep. Derek Kilmer as chief

cosponsor, addresses long-standing gaps in Federal hate

crimes law. H.R. 1730 amends the Church Arson Prevention Act

of 1996 (18 U.S.C. Sec. 241) (CAPA), which covers attacks on

religious real property, to bring all religiously affiliated

institutions--such as community centers--under the scope of

its protections. The bill also amends CAPA so as to encompass

threats against, as well as acts that result in damage or

destruction to, religious real property. Further, H.R. 1730

enhances the penalty for intentional damage to religious real

property, which is at the moment only at a misdemeanor level

unless there is bodily injury to a person.

In addition to closing these gaps in the law, enactment of

H.R. 1730 will send a signal of zero tolerance for hate

crimes against people of faith. Hate crimes against religious

institutions are on the rise in our country. Since January

2017, at least five mosques have suffered arson attacks,

while dozens of Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and other

religious institutions have been vandalized. These attacks

are intolerable. They infringe on the Constitution's

protection of the free exercise of religion. Moreover, crimes

against religious institutions are intended to create an

atmosphere of fear that deters community members from

attending worship services and social involvement. They pose

a danger to the religious freedom and security of all

Americans. In light of the violent anti-Semitic and racist

white nationalist rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia,

this legislation is more important than ever. We as a nation

must take action in response.

For these reasons, AJC strongly urges your support for, and

speedy action on, the Combating Anti-Semitism Act.

Respectfully,

Richard Foltin.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Kilmer), the distinguished coauthor of this legislation.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Schneider), my colleague on the House Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz), my distinguished colleague.

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 20 seconds to the gentlewoman from Florida.

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

Mr. Speaker, the First Amendment protects every citizen's right to free exercise of religion, and we, in Congress, must be zealous and vigilant partners with the Constitution in that enterprise.

From Charleston, South Carolina, to Charlottesville, Virginia; from suburban Maryland, where racial bias incidents are up 80 percent in my congressional district in 2017, to California, Oregon, and all over the country, America has seen a surge in threats and violence against individuals and religious real property in our country, all in an effort to deter our citizens from practicing their faith, or simply to assault or kill them for doing so.

There has also been a rise in threats made by telephone, in person, by email, or by phone all over the country, including to churches, synagogues, and mosques. In the first 7 months of this year, there were 63 reported incidents against mosques across 26 States, spanning from Florida to Hawaii. Clearly, Congress must act. We have excellent legislation in H.R. 1730 to expand our law to include threats of force, as well as to toughen up the penalties for this kind of conduct.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be here on behalf of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

We are going to have some discussion about recent developments in Congress over this week, and we are going to focus on the proposed tax legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal), vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She is going to talk about what that plan means for working people in America.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Jayapal for her wonderful remarks and her terrific leadership here on behalf of the people of Washington and on behalf of middle class and working class Americans all across the country.

Mr. Speaker, may I trouble you to ask how much time I have remaining.

Mr. Speaker, the Progressive Caucus greatly appreciates this time to talk with the American people. For me, it is always one of my favorite moments in the tremendously busy weeks that we have got here on Capitol Hill and in Congress.

I represent 800,000 people in Maryland's Eighth Congressional District, which includes Montgomery County, Frederick County, and Carroll County. I have the honor of going to work for them, essentially, 7 days a week. I live just about 25 minutes from Capitol Hill, and I take the Metro or drive to work, come back home, and I get to spend pretty much every day both with my district and with my colleagues here in Congress.

This is a special time of the week for me because so many of my colleagues are on airplanes or on trains going back to where they come from, and they spend a lot of their time on Mondays and Fridays traveling. I get to be here, and I get to work. I have a little more time to think, Mr. Speaker.

Because we are so buffeted by events, tweets, conflicts, and controversies, we don't always have time to think. I get to use the time on Mondays, Thursday nights, and Fridays to be a little bit more reflective and deliberative about what it is we are doing here in Washington.

I want to start by just bringing everybody up to date about an alarming new legislative development before I get back to the tax bill, which will be next week's problem.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed something that they call the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017. The entire bill is fraudulent, beginning with its name, because it asserts that it has something to do with reciprocity, but it doesn't.

Right now, any State that has a law governing the issuance of concealed carry permits to its citizens can decide to work with its neighbor to allow a reciprocal arrangement. About half of the States have done that; they have deals with their neighbors.

But this act would wipe all of the reciprocity agreements out. It would impose one national standard on everybody in America, reducing everybody to the lowest, most permissive States in the Union in terms of concealed carry.

Now, in my State, in Maryland, we have a number of very serious hurdles to get over before you get the right to carry a loaded concealed weapon. You can't be mentally unstable or dangerous. You can't be a domestic offender. You can't be a violent criminal convict, a felon, or a misdemeanant. You have got to show that you know how to use weaponry, and so on. We take it very seriously.

Several dozen States have similar laws; others have much laxer and much looser laws. That is federalism. Everybody decides for themselves.

But this legislation that they passed yesterday would wipe out the State laws of every State in the country and drag us down to the bottom. It is not a race to the bottom; it is a plunge to the bottom.

They say that if you can get a concealed carry permit in any State-- and in some States like Florida, there are 1.7 million people with concealed carry permits--you can go anywhere in the country. It is a passport to override the laws of every other State in the Union.

There are more than 14 million concealed carry permits in the United States, and now, suddenly, that is 14 million more people with guns who can come to your State, over your State laws, when you don't want it.

Oh, and guess what else they have snuck in here. The people who claim not to like litigation have created a whole new cause of action. They can sue the police officers if they feel the police officers have detained them too long. But, of course, the police officers are going to detain them too long because they have to figure out whether or not they have a right to the gun.

In the nationalization of concealed carry, have they created a bureaucracy, a computer where we are able to figure out whether someone is carrying a real concealed carry permit or a fake ID concealed carry permit? No, not at all. That is put upon you, your State, to try to figure it out. If you hold the person too long, they can sue you, and guess what: attorneys' fees for the police officers, attorneys' fees awarded against the sheriffs, attorneys' fees against our law enforcement officers for trying to keep us safe by trying to enforce our State laws.

Now, we have two opportunities to stop this. One is in the U.S. Senate.

I already spoke to one Senator who was absolutely dumbfounded and amazed that such legislation would even be introduced, after more than two centuries of the history of the United States, somebody would put in a bill to try to extinguish the State concealed carry laws all across the country and give other people who wouldn't have the right to get a gun in your State the right to come there; and this after some of the worst firearms massacres and disasters in our history: the Las Vegas attack, which led to the deaths of 59 of our countrymen and countrywomen, and the attack in Sutherland Springs, Texas, which killed dozens of people.

The gun violence has even come here to Washington and to the Capitol and to the Members of Congress, ourselves, and still we haven't done anything.

We don't take up a universal criminal background check to close the internet loophole, to close the private sale loophole of people selling guns in the parking lot at 7-Eleven, so we close the loopholes that make us an absolute outlier in terms of the civilized world. We don't take that up.

We don't take up legislation to ban military-style assault weapons, like the ones that were used in Newtown, Connecticut, to assassinate 20 schoolchildren at pointblank range. We don't take up that legislation.

We don't even take up the legislation that they promised, which we thought that they wanted to do, which was to get rid of the bump stocks. No, that faded away, too.

Instead, they bring us this proposal to drive us deeper into the cycles of gun violence and misery that the NRA and the GOP have taken us to in America.

So, there are two opportunities to stop this madness. One is in the United States Senate, but the other is this: the pretended champions of the U.S. Constitution are violating the Constitution; they are trampling the Constitution.

Why?

Well, the Congress of the United States is an institution with limited enumerated powers. We don't have the right to do whatever we want as Congress. We have to exercise a real power.

Well, what power is being exercised here?

Well, there are only a couple of possible candidates. One, they say we are regulating commerce, but that is patently absurd. There is no commerce

that is being regulated in any way at all. It doesn't say anything about business and it doesn't say anything about money. There is no commerce.

The Supreme Court authority is very clear about that. That is why the Supreme Court struck down the Gun-Free School Zones Act, which my friends across the aisle were totally opposed to. They said: Well, that has nothing to do with commerce. The possession of a gun within a school zone has nothing to do with commerce. You have to strike it down.

Well, equally, the possession of your concealed carry weapon has nothing to do with commerce either. So that doesn't help them.

Then they would say: Well, really what we are doing is we are vindicating the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment gives you the right to do it.

There are a couple of odd things about that. One is that, if the Second Amendment gave you the right to take a concealed carry gun anywhere you want in the country, why has no court ever said that, and why aren't they just bringing a lawsuit?

The Federal courts across the land have been overwhelmingly clear that the Second Amendment does not give you a right to carry a loaded concealed gun. You don't get that right under the Second Amendment. If you have that right, you get it from your State government.

I thought that was something that my friends across the aisle believed in: federalism and State powers and State rights. But, no, they would say: Well, this is an enforcement of the Second Amendment.

I suppose the Supreme Court also struck down that bit of trickery in a case called City of Boerne v. Flores, which dealt with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. There, Congress said, overwhelmingly--I think it was unanimous--we are going to overrule, essentially, the laws of the States and say that any burden on people's religious free exercise is presumptively unconstitutional, unless you can show that there is a compelling interest in your State against it.

The Supreme Court said: Wait, where does Congress get the power to do that?

Congress said: Well, we are just enforcing people's free exercise rights.

The Supreme Court said: You don't enforce people's rights by changing the meaning of the right.

Similarly, you don't enforce the Second Amendment right, which, undoubtedly, exists under the 2008 Heller decision, which said you have a right to a handgun for self-defense, you have a rifle for purposes of hunting and recreation, but you don't extend those rights, change the meaning of those rights in the name of the Second Amendment and then say that is where Congress gets its power. On that theory, the Supreme Court said in the RFRA case--striking down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as it applies to States--there would be no limit at all to Federal power, and that can't be right.

My friends celebrated yesterday having passed an unconstitutional bill--unconstitutional. We have no power to trample the handiwork of the States all over the country. The State legislatures have the power under the 10th Amendment, and Congress lacks the power in Article I to define what concealed carry policy is going to be in the States. That is up to the States.

So, if they want to become the absolute enemies of the State legislatures and State power and State rights, be my guest. But what they have is an unconstitutional piece of legislation as well as a deeply dangerous and ill-thought-out piece of legislation.

The last thing I want to say about it is, like almost everything else they bring to us now, there were no hearings on it.

Now, think about that. Here we are, one of the greatest legislative bodies on the planet Earth--Abraham Lincoln sat in this body; John F. Kennedy sat in this body; some of the greatest legislators who ever existed were here--and they are passing bills without so much as a single hearing. They just bring it up for a vote.

So we whip out our phones, and we are trying to google to find out about the issue. That is how I found out, for example, that more than 1,100 people carrying concealed carry weapons had committed homicides or mass shootings or killing of police or suicides--with their guns. And now they want open season.

If you want to allow anybody in your State to get a concealed carry weapon, be our guest. Don't impose that rule on the people of Maryland. We don't want it, thank you very much. We have already decided what we have got, and that is true of State legislatures all across the land.

Their so-called reciprocity legislation is actually a demolition of reciprocity, because lots of States have entered into reciprocal agreements that will be extinguished by their law.

So without so much as a hearing, without any real debate or discussion, without them even realizing that they are violating the Constitution, they go ahead and pass this law.

All right. But that, of course, is just a distraction from the main order of business this month, which is demolition of America's middle class. I am sorry to put it in such cogent and compressed terms, but there is no other way to describe what The New York Times calls the worst piece of tax legislation ever introduced in the history of our country.

Now, America has gotten the point about the GOP tax plan. People know it is highway robbery. People know it is a mugging of the working class and the middle class by the largest corporations and the richest people in the country. They know it is an outrageous decision to drive the country into $1.5 trillion more deficit, more debt, all to enrich the robber barons and the cyber barons of our time.

They want to cut corporate taxes from 35 percent to 20 percent at a time of record corporate profits.

Why? Why would you do that?

They say that if we bestow this extraordinary windfall, bonus present on corporate America, that somehow we are going to get more jobs out of it. But wait a second. We are at a time of record corporate profits right now. If all they needed was more profits, more dividends to create jobs, then we would be seeing them right now.

We are in a time of economic growth, and any economist you ask, who is not in the pay of the proponents, will tell you it is a deranged thing to cut corporate taxes at a time of record corporate profits.

Why would we do that?

They say it will lead to economic development. Nonsense. Show me one example where trickle-down economics has ever worked. It doesn't work, for a very simple reason. You give more money to the people at the top of society, they pocket it, they send it overseas to their Swiss bank accounts or to the Cayman Islands or more yachts. That is what they do with it.

If you want economic growth, you do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did. You invest in the middle class, you invest in working people.

Business growth comes from demand, and demand comes from a strong middle class that is able to buy stuff. If you starve the middle class, there is no demand. The rich take their money and they park it overseas. That is what our oligarchs do. That is what the Russian oligarchs do.

That is how Donald Trump has stayed in business. The Russian oligarchs have been renting out his condos and offices in the Trump Tower in New York and coming to the Trump Hotel. They have got their surplus profits they are exporting from Russia going right into the Trump enterprises. Our oligarchs do the exact same thing.

You want real growth, you want strong growth, you want fairness, you want a democratic society, you invest in the middle class, not the largest corporations, not the wealthiest people in the country.

Now, there is a strong link here to our campaign finance regime. Again, every public opinion poll shows Americans know it. You think you can fool the American people. You cannot fool the American people.

Americans know this tax bill is a great deal if you have your own lobbyist; it is a great deal if you have your own Political Action Committee; it is a great deal if you are in the Trump Cabinet, it is going to be perfect for you; and if your last name is Trump, this is absolute utopia. But if you don't have your own PAC, if you don't have your own lobbyist, watch out, watch out in this bill.

The Boston Globe's Annie Linskey had a great article with the title: ``The Koch brothers (and their friends) want President Trump's tax cut. Very badly.''

Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, a Koch group, said: ``It's the most significant Federal effort we've ever taken on.''

Congratulations to the Koch brothers. They are about to get their own signature tax bill. All the GOP politicians are saying the same thing in the newspapers. You can just check it out.

They say the same thing: We are calling up the millionaires and billionaires for campaign contributions, and they say, ``You deliver us that tax bill first. You get nothing from us until you deliver us that tax plan. You guys haven't done anything in Washington. You haven't thrown 30 or 40 million off their healthcare yet. We haven't gotten what we wanted. You deliver us that tax bill. That is what we want.''

Of course, Trump's Cabinet needs no outside push even from the campaign donors. It is the wealthiest Cabinet in U.S. history.

Guess what it is worth. $20 million? $50 million? $100 million? $1 billion?

No. The Trump Cabinet is worth $4.3 billion. $4.3 billion is what their Cabinet is worth.

They all love the tax plan, and they should.

You know why?

They wrote it.

You know who they wrote it for?

Them.

Just like for the Trump family, they are going to abolish the estate tax, which applies to only 2 out of every 1,000 richest people in the country. It is only the wealthiest people who pay the estate tax now, and they want to wipe it out, costing the rest of us $65 billion or $70 billion.

They want to collide, they want to contradict, they want to trample an essential principle of America that our Founders started off with, which is opposition to hereditary government, like kings, and opposition to hereditary wealth, hereditary aristocracy. The Founders, like Ben Franklin and Tom Paine and Alexander Hamilton, they knew that the intergenerational transmission of huge fortunes was a threat to democracy.

At a certain point, people don't want to just buy a bigger house or another house or a third house or a fourth house or a yacht. At a certain point, they want to buy a governorship, they want to buy a U.S. Senate seat, they want to buy the Presidency of the United States.

So what is at stake here is not just whether we are going to have some semblance of fairness in the economy. It is bad enough that we have got one of the most unequal economies on Earth today. That is bad enough. They want a government that is plutocratic, a government that responds only to the wealthiest class in society.

So they want to abolish the estate tax. They want to abolish the alternative minimum tax. That is the only reason that Donald Trump paid any taxes at all in the one year that we know he paid any taxes in the last 2 decades, the alternative minimum tax. So of course they want to get rid of that.

For the middle class, well, no breaks there. They want to get rid of the college student loan interest deduction. If you are struggling to get into the middle class, to go to college, if you had a deduction on the college student loan interest: Gone. They don't want it.

Healthcare expenses. You spend more than 10 percent of your income on healthcare expenses, long-term care for someone in your family who has Alzheimer's disease; you have a kid in your family who has autism going into a private school for kids with special needs, right now you can deduct that. They want to get rid of that.

They want to get rid of the State and local tax deduction, which half of my communities use, targeted right at those States, like Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, California, and Illinois, that invest heavily in education and infrastructure. So they just want to get rid of that.

Here's something else, another snake writhing in the grass of this terrible bill. They want to repeal the Johnson amendment. This is named after Lyndon Johnson when he was a Senator. So we are taking you back to the 1950s and 1960s. It was a very simple amendment that is essentially a logical corollary to the First Amendment, to the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. It says that 501(c)(3) organizations, churches, universities, not-for-profit entities cannot engage in political campaigning, in electioneering.

Guess what the Koch brothers and the Mercers have tucked into this one. They are going to get rid of the Johnson amendment. So the Koch brothers, if they want to spend $1 billion trying to define American politics in the name of plutocracy, now it will be tax deductible. Right now, they can spend it under Citizens United, they can spend whatever they want, but they have got to pay for it.

Now they put it into a church or to churches, the ``Church of the Golden Plutocracy,'' and then they can deduct it on their taxes and the church can now be involved in politics, it can spend money in politics, it can electioneer, it can endorse candidates for office, and it remains a tax-exempt entity.

Now, the smart churches, which is most churches, have opposed it. They said: Don't give us that power, because the next step is people are going to turn around and say, ``Wait a second. Why are we getting tax deductible contributions in churches? Why are we tax exempt if we are getting involved in politics like everybody else?''

That will be the logical question. Indeed, it threatens the very existence of the 501(c)(3) organization by tearing down that wall over tax-exempt contributions, which Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers and the Mercers want so badly. Very clever, their divine dark money loophole, very clever.

They are going to find a way that they can control our politics, deduct it from their taxes, and corrupt the entire not-for-profit sector, the churches and the synagogues and the mosques and so on.

I wish I could leave you with cheerier news tonight, but the U.S. Congress is on the verge of passing the worst tax proposal in American history that offends every value that we cherish in this country.

Why are the people who are pushing it, who are doing quadruple backflips in the middle of the night, hiding it from us?

It took us 2 years and 10 months to pass the 1986 bipartisan tax legislation. Here, this is behind the scenes in the dark, speed of light, dark of night, the whole thing.

Why are they willing to do it even though it is rejected now by 2-1 or 3-1 in every public opinion poll?

People understand it is highway robbery.

Why are they willing to do it?

Well, what is the worst that could happen to them?

Think about it. The worst that could happen to somebody who votes for this is they lose and they go to work for the Koch brothers, they go to work for the Mercers, they go to work for Sheldon Adelson, and the highway robbery is complete.

Now, popular protests stopped the plan to throw tens of millions of people off their healthcare. Despite the fact that the GOP controls the House, the Senate, the White House, and even the Supreme Court--they control all of it--yet popular protests around the country stopped it.

Mr. Speaker, that is the only thing that can stop us now, because so many of my colleagues across the aisle have decided to walk the plank for the Koch brothers and for the billionaire cabinet. They have decided to throw in with the oligarchs, the American oligarchs, and the plutocrats.

So popular protests, people speaking out and contacting their Members, will be our only hope of showing that this is an absolute insult and affront to American democracy; not just middle class economics, economics for everybody, but democratic politics; politics for everybody, not just the elite.

I thank the Speaker for granting us this opportunity to allow us to express our intense anxiety about what might happen next week. I wish the Speaker a good weekend. I hope that everyone will have the opportunity to consider the implications of what is taking place.

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

Mr. Speaker, there have been 914 cases of non-self- defense killings by private citizens holding permits to carry concealed loaded handguns in the last 10 years, which translates into 1,119 Americans dead by homicide, mass shooting, suicide, and murder of police officers under concealed carry permit laws in the States.

In Florida, for example--I saw my friend, Mr. Rutherford, up there-- in August, concealed handgun permit holder, Everett Miller, shot and killed two Kissimmee, Florida, police officers.

Now, if you want to give everybody the right to a concealed carry permit in your States, fine. But don't impose that on the people of Maryland. We have got our own laws, thank you. Since January, we have had 397 gun massacres in America defined as a slaying of four people or more. Two of them--Las Vegas, which left 58 people dead, and Sutherland Springs, which left 26 people dead--are among the 10 worst massacres in American history by gun.

The American people want to end this reign of terror. But what do our friends do on the other side? Do they bring us the universal criminal background check legislation favored by more than 90 percent of the American people of every political party to plug the gun show loophole, the internet loophole, and the 7-Eleven parking lot loophole? No.

Do they bring to the floor the bill to criminalize bump stocks which they promised to us? No. No such luck. Instead, they bring forward a bill that would wipe out the vast majority of concealed carry laws in the United States of America, trampling States' rights and wrecking all of the painstaking work of legislatures all over the land dragging this down to the most lax and permissive State laws in the country. It is not a race to the bottom, it is a plunge to the bottom they have engineered here.

This fraudulently named bill has nothing to do with reciprocity because States already have the power to negotiate reciprocity agreements, and 22 of them have it.

Your bill destroys reciprocity. Your bill brings us down to the level of the lowest, most permissive laws in the country. My State doesn't give concealed carry permits to domestic abusers, to violent offenders, and to dangerously unstable people. Don't drag us down to the lowest level. Protect States' rights.