Floor Statements

Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I also want to thank my colleagues, Mr. Sensenbrenner, Mr. Conyers, and Mr. Mooney, for cosponsoring and supporting this amendment.

It is a bipartisan amendment and, I think, a natural complement to the excellent amendments just added from Mr. Walberg and also from Mr. Amash. It would prohibit funding made available by this act from being used to implement the recent DOJ policy change, which dramatically expands the Federal Government's civil Asset Forfeiture Program.

The new policy revives a controversial and, I think, unconstitutional practice that has been decried by Americans and Members of Congress across the political spectrum who hold dear the idea of due process and the presumption of innocence as it applies not just to us as people but also to our private property as well.

The new policy allows State and local law enforcement to circumvent State laws limiting civil asset forfeiture by having Federal agencies adopt State and local cases. Under this dubious practice, law enforcement may seize a citizen's cash and property simply because someone suspects it of being connected to criminal activity without convicting, indicting, arresting, or even charging the property owner with having committed a crime and without proving or even alleging in court that the property is somehow connected to criminal activity.

Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property have been seized in this way by law enforcement on an officer's mere suspicion. In order to get your property back, you have to go out and hire a lawyer, you have to go to court, and you have to prove that your property was obtained through innocent means, completely reversing the constitutional presumption of innocence that is at the heart of due process.

This practice is an outrageous violation of property rights, of civil liberties, and of the due process principle that we are all presumed to be innocent as American citizens, and it raises profound questions also under the Takings Clause, which forbids the taking of private property without just compensation by the government.

Although the resurrected policy contains a few new safeguards, they will not remotely prevent abusive seizures or eliminate the profit incentives that encourage rampant civil asset forfeiture. The policy will lead to the same abuses uncovered in 2014.

A Washington Post investigation found that, since 2001, State and local law enforcement had made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth nearly $2.5 billion under the civil Asset Forfeiture Program.

One striking case discussed by The New York Times was of Carole Hinders, owner of a restaurant in Arnolds Park, Iowa, who deposited her cash earnings in the bank on a weekly basis, and it was always under $10,000. She was suspected of illegally structuring her deposits, although they were perfectly innocent, and the IRS simply seized $33,000 from her, causing huge problems for her business.

Another case that caught my eye was of a Chinese-American restaurateur who was traveling with a large sum of

money because he was about to buy a building for his new restaurant. He had been saving for decades to buy his own restaurant. He was stopped by the police and became understandably very anxious during the encounter. The police said that they found the large sum of cash money he had with him suspicious, and his nervous demeanor also telling, and they simply seized his money. They detained him for 2 hours. They let him go. They didn't charge him with anything, but they seized his money, his life savings that he had planned to use to purchase the building for his restaurant. He was a lucky one in that he was able, eventually years later, to get his money back, but he lost the business deal and his deposit in the process.

In 2014, the value of money and property seized under civil asset forfeitures by Federal law enforcement exceeded the total of losses in money and property from burglaries in our country. That means our people lost more money at the hands of the government through civil asset forfeiture than from being burglarized.

Because of the abuses revealed in 2015, the DOJ imposed restrictions to limit when the Federal Government could adopt forfeiture cases, and banned State and local police from using Federal law to seize cash and property without criminal charges or warrants, but the new policy lifts these restrictions and places the Federal Government back on the side of the trampling of people's constitutional rights.

With civil asset forfeiture, people cannot only lose their property without being charged with a crime, they can also lose their property when someone else allegedly uses their property in commission of a crime.

A Michigan woman lost a car she co-owned with her husband because he was caught soliciting prostitution while driving her car.

This policy runs roughshod over the property rights of the innocent and burdens our citizens with onerous costs to get their property back that they never should have lost in the first place.

Mr. Chair, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all agree that civil asset forfeiture is a serious threat to constitutional values.

Mr. Chair, I urge all of us to vote for this important amendment.

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

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to bring up H.R. 3440, the DREAM Act, to protect Fatima, whose young brothers-- exceptional soccer talents in Montgomery County, Maryland--were deported over a great public protest just last month.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of the Fulbright Program, which more than 370,000 people from the United States and over 180 countries have participated in since its founding in 1946.

For 70 years, the Fulbright Program has promoted strong relationships between Americans and other people and stimulated international education and progress. Some 57 Fulbright Fellows have received Nobel Prizes; 82 have received the Pulitzer Prize; 33 have gone on to serve as head of state; and 10 have been elected to the U.S. Congress.

All over the world, more than 370,000 Fulbright alumni are making waves in science, medicine, public service, art, business, philanthropy, and education.

Mr. Speaker, President Trump now proposes a staggering 55 percent cut to the Fulbright Scholar Program. This would devastate a successful and flourishing project.

Our country benefits enormously from Fulbright Fellows past, present, and future, and I urge all of my colleagues to continue supporting this excellent program on a full basis.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to take this time from the minority leader on behalf of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. We are doing a Special Order hour this evening on police and civilian relations.

We are joined by the very distinguished Congressman Keith Ellison. Before we start, though, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman).

Honoring the Life of Nadadur Vardhan

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Sherman for his comments. And again, the Progressive Caucus Special-Order hour tonight is on the subject of the police power in America, and its uses, its abuses, what has been taking place in different parts of the country, and we are going to kick off with Keith Ellison, who has been the chair of the Progressive Caucus. And in addition to being a distinguished member of the Congress from Minnesota, he is the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison).

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Ellison very much for those very thoughtful and insightful comments.

I want to pick up the discussion about the police power and expand the discussion to include not just power over persons, but power over property in America.

Our Constitution's Framers were deeply informed by the social contract theorists of the 17th and 18th centuries, and those theorists believed that we enter into a social contract out of a state of nature, because we are all

made better off by virtue of being part of a society.

So the first incarnation of it came from Thomas Hobbes in his work on the ``Leviathan.'' Hobbes argued that the state of nature was, in his famous words, ``nasty, brutish, and short,'' because anybody could kill anybody. And so we enter into society together, and we give our power to the leviathan, the government.

Now, the problem with his view, of course, was that the leviathan, the government, had whatever powers it wanted, unlimited, infinite powers. And at that point, as the Framers of our Constitution would see, you have got a real problem, because you might be saved from criminals and bandits and thieves, but now you have got to deal with an all-powerful government and police who can trample your rights just as much as the thieves and the bandits could. So the Hobbesian theory was inadequate.

John Locke, in his famous work on the social contract, improved upon the proposition. The state of nature for him was not quite so frightful a place. There were certain virtues to a state of nature, so people were actually giving something up by going into it.

So in his view, entering the social contract meant that we would surrender some of our powers to government, and certainly our powers to commit violence and theft against other people, but in return, we would be guaranteed rights by the government and we would also have rights against the government, and that was the view that deeply informed the U.S. Constitution.

The whole point of the rule of law is that the people have rights against the government, against those who are just the agents of the sovereign. The sovereign is the people. The people are the sleeping sovereign who can come awake in times of constitution-making and also in order to make law.

Now, the whole social contract becomes unraveled Hobbesian style if we are attacked by the police. So my friend, Congressman Poe from Texas, earlier spoke about the horrific spectacle of violence waged against U.S. citizens and others in the streets of Washington, D.C., by the thugs of Prime Minister Erdogan from Turkey, who were unleashed on protesters, and we saw, as Congressman Poe said, a scene of really savage violence take place right here in Washington.

I am glad that we have a bipartisan consensus that that kind of police attack on freedom of expression, freedom of assembly is unacceptable in the United States of America, whether it is on citizens or whether it is on permanent residents or whether it is on noncitizens.

But there is something else that is going on in the country having to do with the police power. The police power in common law terms, in the American vernacular, is not just the power that police officers have to regulate public safety and public order; the police power also has to do generally with the governmental power to regulate.

There are some very troubling things that are taking place in America today. One of them has to do with the eminent domain power. We are seeing rampant abuse of the eminent domain power across the country today, where private developers use their political power and influence in campaign contributions in order to get local governments or State governments to condemn private property of homeowners in order to oust them from their homes in order to build a private project.

Now, one of the chief perpetrators of this business model in the United States of America happens to be the President of the United States, Donald Trump, who has bragged about his use of the eminent domain power and has been involved in a lot of litigation relating to eminent domain power.

I will take you to Atlantic City and introduce you to a woman named Vera Coking, who lived in a three-story house off of the Boardwalk in Atlantic City right next door to the 22-story Trump Plaza that then- businessman Donald Trump had built. Trump had built the hotel; he built the casino; he built a parking garage. But it wasn't enough for him. He wanted a VIP parking garage.

He wanted a parking garage for limos and made an offer, which Ms. Coking refused, on her house so he could demolish her house and build his expanded garage. She said: No, thank you.

He came back with another offer. She said: No, thank you. It is not a question of money. My family has lived in this house for generations, and my kids went to school here, and we belong to the church here. It is not for sale.

Well, then at that point, President Trump, in order to build his gold-plated parking garage for the limos, went to a government agency that he knew well called the Atlantic City Casino Redevelopment Authority to help him take away Ms. Coking's property, and they entered into litigation. Fortunately, she found pro bono counsel in the Libertarian public interest group, the Institute for Justice, a Libertarian think tank and legal action center, and they were able to stop Donald Trump in court in a case called Atlantic City Community Redevelopment Authority v. Banin. Unfortunately, that took place before the famous Kelo v. New London decision in 2005.

Now, there was a very similar scenario in Kelo, in a hard-hit working-class town in Connecticut called New London, where the Pfizer Corporation and a local private land redevelopment authority, one of these shadowy, mixed public-private entities, decided that they wanted to displace a whole neighborhood in New London so they could destroy the blight, as they called it, and put in their brand-new development.

Ms. Kelo, a very soft-spoken single woman, working-class woman, decided to fight, and she also found the Institute for Justice, and they organized the community to say, no, they were not blight, that they had ties to this community and they were not going to be forced out by these big corporations.

They won all the way up to the Supreme Court, and then a five-Justice majority in the Supreme Court, in the Kelo decision in 2005, determined that it is perfectly constitutional and consistent with the Takings Clause in the Fifth Amendment of our Constitution for a public municipal corporation to condemn a person's private home or a private small business in order to turn it over to another private business if it is consistent with someone's economic redevelopment plan. And this was a decision that President Trump said he ``agrees with 100 percent.''

Because, remember, that was his business model, that everything is for sale, and if you refuse to sell to Donald Trump and his companies, they are just going to get public authority to come in to get you out of the way so they can condemn your land and take it over.

Now, it turns out that in the Kelo decision, after the Supreme Court's erroneous judgment in it, the land was condemned, Susette Kelo was forced out of her house, and--guess what--they never even built it. Today it is an urban wilderness taken over by wild cats.

Well, let's look at another example of abuse of police power in America today.

I understand that earlier this morning, the Justice Department announced a new Federal policy to help State and local police officers take cash and property from anybody suspected of a crime even without arresting them, even without charging them with a crime, and even without an arrest warrant, reversing an Obama administration rule that was put in place because of rampant abuse of people's rights across the country.

This is the United States of America. The police should not be able to stop people on the street, in their cars, or at their homes and say: I think that the money you have doesn't really belong to you. I think the condo you have doesn't belong to you. I think the car you have doesn't belong to you. I think your property looks suspect. We are going to seize it. And then we are going to hold it, and you have the burden of coming to sue us to prove that your property is innocent-- without charging them with a crime, without arresting them, or without using a search warrant. This is what Attorney General Sessions wants to do with the Orwellian new order that he handed down today. He wants to get the Federal Government back into the business of working with State and local governments to simply declare people's property and their money presumptively guilty. And then they have to go out,

hire a lawyer, and go to court to prove that their property or money is clean within the eyes of the government.

But whatever happened to due process? Under our Constitution, we are presumed to be innocent of crimes, and our property should be presumed to be innocent of crimes if there is no legal process at all to condemn our property or to cast a shadow of criminal suspicion over it.

If you look at the history of this, Attorney General Holder barred State and local police from using the Federal legal regime to seize cash and other property without criminal charges or without criminal warrants, which is the right way to do it. That is the constitutional way to think about it.

In a democratic society, the people are presumed to be innocent until they are proven guilty. It is not as if we are walking around with the stigma of being presumed guilty of doing something in the eyes of the State.

Since 2008, thousands of police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program, which allowed the police to make seizures and then share the proceeds with Federal agencies. It allowed the Federal agencies to cooperate with State and local law enforcement.

Then the Department of Justice said they were disengaging from that because there was a series in The Washington Post about all of the extraordinary abuses taking place.

There was one gentleman, a small business man, a Chinese-American citizen of the United States who was traveling with a lot of money because he was going to purchase a building for his new Chinese restaurant that he was going to open up, and so he had, I think it was around $25,000 or $30,000 with him. He got stopped by the police and he was exceedingly nervous about the whole thing. They said he was acting nervous and they took his money from him, his life savings that he was hanging on to in order to go and purchase a building for a Chinese restaurant. Luckily, he found some lawyers, but it took several years for him to get the money back. He lost the deal.

He is in the minority because most people this happens to never go to court to try to get their money back, they are so terrified and demoralized by the experience of having their property taken by government agents without any due process at all.

I urge everyone to go and find that Washington Post series on the abuses that led up to the change in policy that was put into place by Attorney General Eric Holder.

Now, Attorney General Sessions does a U-turn. The administration, which President Trump started by saying he wanted to give power back to the States and back to the people of the United States, instead says the Federal Government is going to be incentivizing more violation of people's due process rights by allowing seizure of people's property and money.

It goes back to what Congressman Ellison was talking about: What is this going to do for police-civilian relations in the United States, when people are terrified that their property can be taken away by agents of the State without an arrest, without a criminal warrant, or without any charges at all? That is not right in our country. That is not right in a country that does not allow for a taking of private property without a public purpose. It is not right in a country that is based on due process of law, that is based on probable cause and search warrants for people being searched.

That is where this administration is taking us with the policy that was announced earlier today. It is going to make our communities only more suspicious and only more dangerous.

We have to step back from this Orwellian leviathan vision of government, an all-powerful State that can seize your home or your small business because a big business man like Donald Trump wants your property to build his casino garage for his VIP guests; or because some fancy company decides it wants to redevelop your land; or because the police decide you don't look the right way and we are just going to take your money out of your pocket, we are going to seize what is in your wallet, we are going to take your car, we are going to take your boat, or we are going to take your condo or apartment without any criminal charges at all, and you go and deal with the problem.

Mr. Speaker, in the United States of America, we are a land of laws. The great Tom Paine said that, in the monarchies, the king is law, but in the democracies, the law is king.

We have to abide by the rule of law here. And I am not talking about Democrat, Republican, left, or right. We all have to be constitutional patriots in America, to stand up for our Constitution.

I would invite the President of the United States to come join us here to talk about the problem of eminent domain abuse and to talk about the problem of law enforcement taking people's property and their money without due process of law, because it is a serious threat to everything that we believe in and why we created our social contract. All of us have got to be constitutional patriots and stand up for the basic principles of the country.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.J. Res. 92. I thank my colleague from Virginia (Mrs. Comstock), the chairman of the committee, for leading this measure, and I am very happy to lend my support to the resolution.

This resolution would grant congressional consent to amendments to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Regulation Compact Authority pursuant to legislation already enacted by the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, respectively.

Established in 1967, the WMATA is an interstate compact agency responsible for operating the mass transit system for the Washington Metropolitan area.

As part of a broader effort to promote safety and efficiency in the WMATA Metrorail system, Congress transferred appointment authority for the WMATA board of directors to the Secretary of Transportation through enactment of the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act in 2015, the so-called FAST Act. Under the FAST Act, Congress also directed the WMATA jurisdictions to adopt conforming compact amendments.

H.J. Res. 92 is a bipartisan measure that would grant Congress' consent to these amendments to the WMATA compact.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton)

Mr. Speaker, I simply want to, again, commend Mrs. Comstock for her leadership on this legislation. I thank all of our fellow members in the regional delegation in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia for their collaborative work on this issue, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Goodlatte for facilitating the resolution's consideration by both the committee and the House.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.J. Res. 76. This very important legislation grants congressional consent and approval to Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia to enter into a compact under Article I, section 10 of the Constitution, establishing the Metrorail Safety Commission. Importantly, Federal transit funds have been suspended by the Federal Transit Authority until Congress grants its assent to these amendments to the WMATA compact, as H.J. Res. 76 would do.

I want to thank my friend, the distinguished minority whip, Steny Hoyer, for taking the lead on this measure, and all of our colleagues in the Virginia and Maryland delegations and District of Columbia delegation for supporting it in such a strong, bipartisan, and cross- Potomac River fashion. I am proud to join them.

Mr. Speaker, I did want to take a moment to say a word about the Metro system.

WMATA is not just the Metro that serves the Washington area. It is truly America's Metro system. It is the second largest system in the Nation, behind only New York City. It is 117 miles long. It has 91 stations, and it includes more than 12,000 employees.

It is critical to the functioning of the Federal Government because it moves more than 40 percent of the Federal workforce every day to and from work and also during the day for various missions that people go on during the normal workday. It is essential to national security. If we didn't have the Metro system, what is already one of the most traffic-plagued and congested regions in the country would be absolutely paralyzed.

It is also the mechanism that moves millions of Americans who come from all over the United States, all of our constituents here in Congress, to visit us. That is how people get to the White House and the Capitol and go to the Pentagon and go to see NIH and visit the museums and the battlefields and so on.

So the Metro is critical not just to the people who live and work here every day and make the Federal Government go, but also to all American citizens who rely on the efficiency of the Federal Government and come to Washington to petition for redress of grievances and to partake in the processes of government.

I am thrilled that this legislation, responding to the safety needs of the system, is moving forward with speed now. It is essential that we continue to invest in the Metro, to upgrade its safety, to upgrade its efficiency and its reliability.

The Federal Government was instrumental in the creation of Metro at the beginning, along with Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. We all send representatives to the board of Metro. The Federal Government has representatives on the board of Metro. We are equal partners in it, and I want to make sure that everyone here in Congress feels deeply invested in the success of Metro, which, after all, gets a lot of our staffers to work every day.

With passage of H.J. Res. 76, Congress reaffirms its fundamental commitment to America's Metro system. Accordingly, I urge my colleagues to support the swift passage of this resolution.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), our distinguished minority whip, who has been a longtime champion of the Metro system.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Connolly).

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentleman.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, when I was a kid in high school, they built the Metro system here. It was a great feat of bipartisan leadership when they built the Metro, and it changed my life. It was the jewel of our region, and it opened up, to at least one kid, the Capitol, the White House, the museums, the National Gallery, the Hirshhorn, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, and it was really a spectacular and resplendent addition and feature to the Virginia, D.C., Maryland region.

In the intervening years, there has been inadequate investment in safety, efficiency, and reliability in the Metro system, and we need to bring the Metro back to its original glory and we must make sure that, above all, it is safe for the people who ride it. The safety and security of the passengers is essential.

So passage of this resolution will ensure the establishment of the safety commission to assume effective oversight of this system and to allow for the disbursal of Federal transit funds to Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. for essential transit services.

I urge all of our colleagues to support this bipartisan measure. Again, I want to salute all of the Members who have been involved in this legislation, and I thank House Judiciary Chairman Goodlatte for facilitating consideration of the resolution by both the Judiciary Committee and by the House.

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

Mr. Chairman, I rise to oppose the amendment, which selectively requires the military to identify Islamic religious doctrines, concepts, or schools of thought used by various extremist groups and how they have been incorporated into terrorist messaging.

The problem, of course, is that terrorist killers have used religious doctrines and concepts from every major religion on earth, including not just Islam, but Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism, Hinduism, Buddhism, for homicidal purposes. Because religion is based on faith and not reason, and because religious texts are not self-explanatory, good people will invoke scripture for good causes and evil people will invoke scripture for evil causes.

We don't need a big government study to teach us something so commonsensical, which the Founders taught us a long time ago. If we want to study the exploitation of religion for terrorism, let's study it universally.

Focusing on one religion not only vastly understates the problem, but exacerbates the problem by fomenting the myth that religious fanaticism and terrorism are unique to the charlatans and predators of Islam when they are common to the charlatans and predators of nearly every religious faith and identification.

Constitutionally, we do not single out particular religions for governmental inspection and suspicion under the First Amendment.

Mr. Chairman, the floor leader has invited us to stick to the facts, so I want to stick to the facts in order to clear up some of the propaganda I have heard today for this terrible bill.

First of all, it has nothing to do with ``groundless cases or frivolous claims,'' because the draconian new limits proposed in their legislation applied only to valid claims in serious cases. It has nothing to do with groundless cases and frivolous claims. That is an irrelevant distraction from their own legislation, which is an attempt to reduce what you can recover with a perfectly valid claim when a jury has awarded you damages.

Number two, the floor leader says that it would not apply in the case of someone being raped in a nursing home. Perhaps he thinks it wouldn't apply to my constituent, a 15-year-old girl who got raped by her dentist.

But as I read the bill, it says, ``healthcare lawsuit means any action against a healthcare provider,'' and that includes anyone who is providing healthcare. So if a nursing home is providing healthcare or a dentist is providing healthcare, they would be covered by the law.

But I would invite the floor leader to clear this up, because if he is representing now that rapes of patients in a nursing home or in a dentist's office don't count, that should be definitive legislative history that we establish today because we tried to amend the bill to that effect in committee and the majority voted it down. But he has just represented that a rape would not count, and I want him to definitively commit whether or not a rape by a healthcare provider would count.

Finally, the gentleman from Iowa says it won't preempt the States, it will not impose Federal laws because it is still in the State courts. It is still in the State courts, but Federal law now applies.

There are 28 States which have said that you cannot limit people's access to noneconomic damages when a jury wants to award them those damages for pain and suffering. They have either said in their Constitution there can be no limits at all, or the legislatures have said it, or the State supreme courts have struck it down. And their legislation is a bulldozer that will run over the laws of 28 States.

And they claim, Mr. Chairman, that somehow they are acting in the guise of federalism. They are destroying federalism. That is why I was so happy that Mr. Duncan, a former State Judge from Tennessee, and a member of the GOP majority, got up to say this is antithetical to everything they stand for.

Mr. Chairman, first of all, there are only three States in the Union that set the limit where they want Congress to set it for every State, which is $250,000. They are overriding the laws of 28 States which allow for unlimited damages.

Number two, the gentleman from Iowa says: Well, a rape is criminal, so it is not related.

But you can bring civil actions against the same conduct that constitutes a crime. So if you look at your own bill, it says any theory of liability, so that would include intentional acts.

Now, again, Mr. Chairman, is the majority representing that this will not apply to intentional torts?

Because they were very definitive in committee that it would apply to intentional torts, including rapes and assaults. So I would like to know: Does it apply or does it not?

Because this is a critical matter, because people have been--we are not talking about the good doctors. Everybody loves the good doctors. We are talking about doctors or nursing home providers or dentists who rape their patients and assault their patients.

They would be limited--juries could try to give millions of dollars, but their legislation would limit you to $250,000 in noneconomic damages. We have got to clear this up, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, I thank Mr. Conyers very much for yielding.

The good gentleman from Iowa invites us to believe that the laws of the States are not being overridden because some of these States don't have laws. That's right, because their State supreme courts have said that their constitutions forbid the imposition of a cap on what juries would award people who are injured in medical cases.

So, in Arizona, Arkansas, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming, there are State constitutional prohibitions explicitly on damage caps. In New York and Oklahoma, there are explicit caps on damages in wrongful death cases. And in 11 States, State supreme courts have struck down statutorily enacted medical malpractice damage caps: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Now, what is interesting in my State, the 15-year-old girl who was raped by her dentist could recover up to $785,000 because we had a whole special session of our general assembly to arrive at that figure. But there are other States where they said you can't have any limits at all, and those are the States that are being attacked by this legislation because now they are reducing them from potentially $20 million or $10 million to $200,000, an outrageous invasion in states' rights and the rights of juries to decide how people need to be compensated.

Mr. Speaker, it is with great respect that I take the time to draw your attention to the important work of the Rachel Carson Council (RCC). Founded in 1965 and based in Bethesda, Maryland, the RCC honors the legacy and environmental ethic of Rachel Carson by linking environmental, health, and social policy solutions ``with the goal of building a more just, sustainable, and peaceful future.''

The RCC recently released a comprehensive report, ``Fowl Matters,'' examining poultry production and its impact on public health and clean air and water. The report details the dramatic changes in the chicken industry over the past half-century, whereby the traditional practice of families raising chickens on small farms in open spaces for personal use has given way to modern-day Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). As the RCC documents in its report, this new model has sweeping negative implications for the health and safety of people, animals, and the environment.

The report raises serious concerns regarding the enforcement of existing regulations under the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act related to CAFOs. For instance, it notes that industrial agriculture is one of the largest contributors of nutrient and sediment pollution to the Chesapeake Bay watershed, resulting in algal blooms that block sunlight from underwater grasses and suck up oxygen that fish populations need to survive. On Maryland's Eastern shore alone, CAFOs produce as much sewage as do 9.8 million humans, most of which goes untreated, threatening human health, fishing, and the public's ability to enjoy this indispensable natural resource. Additionally, the large fans used by CAFOs to aerate confined waste can cause nearby residents to be exposed to air polluted by ammonia and other dangerous particles. Breathing in this polluted air can cause respiratory diseases, asthma, and lung cancer. The RCC report underlines these pollution concerns by highlighting that CAFOs are often located near vulnerable communities of lower socioeconomic status which tend to have fewer resources to engage in litigation asserting their environmental rights.

The report also argues that conditions in CAFO facilities can endanger the health of

workers. Over the course of 12-hour shifts standing in production lines with temperatures up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, workers breathe air contaminated by dust, ammonia, and feathers. These workers are vulnerable to all manner of health problems, including coughs, asthma, bronchitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, chemical burns, staph infections, and loss of limbs in dulled machinery.

Mr. Speaker, I urge you and my colleagues to review the well- researched and documented Fowl Matters report by visiting the RCC website, at www.rachelcarsoncouncil.org. We must keep these profound concerns in mind as we craft policies affecting the poultry industry and work to ensure strong enforcement of our environmental laws to protect the health and safety of communities nationwide.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members participating in this Special Order hour with the Progressive Caucus have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include any extraneous material on the subject of this Special Order, which is healthcare.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be here tonight on behalf of the Progressive Caucus to manage this Special Order hour along with my colleagues, who I will be introducing. Several of them will be joining me tonight to discuss what is going on in the Senate today with the GOP finally unveiling their closely guarded secret plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a plan they are unveiling that has had the legislative benefit of no hearings, no witnesses, no expert testimony, no testimony by the public, and, again, no Congressional Budget Office score so far, which is the same way that the legislation passed out of the House side.

So does all of this sound familiar? It should, because this is the same clandestine, in-the-dark process that led to the plan which emerged here in the House of Representatives on the barest of margins with every manner of power play and power ploy engaged by leadership to produce the final result.

That bill, by the way, now stands at a whopping 9 percent in the polls, which means it is even more unpopular than Congress itself. And even though my friends across the aisle rented buses and vans to take them over to the White House to go and celebrate and exult in their dubious victory and uncork the champagne and drink beer with the President and his staff after they pushed the bill through the House, today, President Trump now calls the bill that he celebrated and he campaigned for mean. He says it is a mean bill today.

And there is no question he is right about that. We said that at the time, mean as a rattlesnake, that bill, which would have thrown 24 million people off their health insurance plans and destroyed preexisting health insurance coverage for people with preexisting health conditions.

The Senate version, though, is just as mean. It is downright mean. It may even be meaner than the House version. It not only strips health insurance coverage from tens of millions of our fellow American citizens; it not only forces American families to pay higher premiums and deductibles, increasing out-of-pocket costs, all to pay for a tax cut for the wealthiest of our citizens; it forces Americans, ages 50 to 64, to pay premiums five times higher than everyone else, no matter how healthy you are.

That is right. If you are in the age bracket of 50 to 64, your premiums, under their bill, will be five times higher than everybody else in the population, no matter how healthy you are. It reduces the life of the Medicare trust fund and robs funds that seniors depend on to get the long-term care that they need. It blocked grants, Medicaid to the States, and then, astonishingly, for the first time ever, places a per capita cap on Medicaid payments for all recipients, including disabled Americans and senior citizens.

That is just unconscionable. Think about it. For the first time ever, under Medicaid, the Federal Government would not commit to pay for all of enrollees' health bills. So if your illness or your injuries are too severe or too complicated, your treatment too long, tough luck for you, buddy; you are on your own, Jack. That is the new proposal that is coming out from the Senate today.

The people that railed about death panels before passage of the Affordable Care Act, panels that never materialized and were proven to be an absolute

fiction and fantasy, now seek to throw millions of people off of their health insurance, roll back the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act, which benefitted millions of our countrymen and -women, and then cut the heart out of the Medicaid guarantee by placing a per capita cap on payments to beneficiaries.

And this particular assault on the health and well-being of the American people doesn't even claim to be a response to any alleged problems with the Affordable Care Act, or with ObamaCare as they call it. It is, instead, a sweeping change to Medicaid that so-called free market conservatives have been trying to make for years.

This Senate legislation, cooked up in secret and seasoned with slashing cuts to Medicaid, is one fine mess. It does nothing but make our healthcare system more expensive, dangerously throws tens of millions of people off of their insurance, and eviscerates the core protections of Medicaid.

And why? What is the public policy being advanced here? All for a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans. It takes a special kind of single- minded focus to turn a healthcare bill into a massive tax cut for the people who need it the least in America.

Now, I heard some of my friends, my distinguished colleagues on the other side, say that other colleagues should not have been talking about how the bill was ``mean,'' or ``mean spirited,'' or ``mean'' because we have a renewed spirit of civility in this Chamber, which we do; and I praise it, and I celebrate it. Ever since the terrible attack on our colleague Steve Scalise and other colleagues and the Capitol Police officers who rose valiantly to defend them, we have really tried to put aside a lot of the partisan rancor. But my friends, we have got to talk honestly about legislation which is threatening the well-being of our own citizens.

The word ``mean'' comes not from my colleagues who were speaking before. The word ``mean'' comes from the President of the United States himself, who said that the legislation that passed out of the House, looking back on it, was ``mean.'' Now, all of that was in order to say he likes the Senate version instead, but we think that the Senate version is even meaner than the bill that the President has already described as ``mean'' that came of the House.

So to describe more of the specific terms of this legislation and why it is a threat to our public health, why it is a threat to the basic values of solidarity and justice and community that defines us as Americans, we have invited a number of our colleagues to come up and participate, beginning with the Congresswoman from Seattle, Washington, Pramila Jayapal, who used to co-chair the Progressive Caucus hour with me.

She has now been replaced by someone because she is moving on to an even bigger assignment right now, but please welcome a great Congresswoman, Pramila Jayapal, from Washington.

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

I thank the gentlewoman, Ms. Jayapal.

We have next with us Congressman Ro Khanna who is from California. He is an economist, and he is a lawyer. He has taught economics at Stanford, and he has taught law at Santa Clara. He was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Commerce Department under President Obama. He is a well-known author who has written a very good book about manufacturing and economic competitiveness in the United States.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Khanna) who is going to be taking over for Congresswoman Jayapal as my co- convenor of this Special Order hour from here on in.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Khanna for his very wise and insightful words.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky).

Mr. Speaker, I want to pause from our analysis of the specific terms of the bill that was unveiled today to ask the question: What is the value that is really at stake in healthcare policy in the United States?

When we were debating on the House side, I heard a colleague get up on the floor and say something to the effect of: Under ObamaCare, under the Affordable Care Act, healthy people are having to pay insurance to take care of sick people.

It took a second for that to register with me. Then I turned to the person I was sitting next to and said: Yes, that is what insurance is. The whole point of insurance is that all of us pay money in, knowing that people get sick in the course of life.

We hope that we are not going to be one of them. We hope we won't get injured. We hope we won't get sick or ill or come down with a terrible disease, God forbid, but we know it can happen, so we all pay in. When it does happen to some people, that is what insurance is for. So the value there is one of solidarity among everybody together.

In the richest country on Earth, at its richest moment in our history, there is another value at stake here, which is the value of justice.

Forgive me, but I want to speak personally for a moment here, because I have what we call a preexisting condition. So this issue of preexisting condition coverage is important to me and my family. I understand it is important for tens of millions of families across the country.

If you are having a great day, and you have got not one, but two jobs you love--I have been a professor of constitutional law at American University for 27 years now, and I was serving in the Maryland Senate. But if you wake up and it is a beautiful day and you have got two jobs you love, a family you love, great kids, and constituents you are committed to, and a doctor tells you that you have got stage III colon cancer, that is what I immediately took to be a misfortune.

It is a terrible misfortune, but we have to remember that it happens to people across the country, all over the world, every single day, where people get a diagnosis of colon cancer, lung cancer, Alzheimer's disease, autism, bipolar disorder, depression, multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, you name it. It is a misfortune because it can happen to anybody.

But if you are told that you have colon cancer, for example, and if you can't get health insurance because, for example, before marriage equality, if you loved the wrong person and you couldn't get health insurance through your spouse, or if you can't get health insurance because you lost your job and you are without health insurance, or if you are too poor to afford it, that is not just a misfortune. That is an injustice.

We can do something about that. Life is hard enough with all of the illness, sickness, accidents, and injuries that people receive without government compounding all of the misfortune with injustice. Life is hard enough without government doing the wrong thing. So the Affordable Care Act added more than 20 million Americans to the rolls of people who have health insurance.

The bill that came out of the Senate today wants to strip health insurance from tens of millions of Americans and jack up everybody's premiums and make healthcare more inaccessible for people. They want to compound the normal difficulties and misfortunes of life with the injustice of distributing healthcare in a radically unequal and unjust way.

We can't go back. It is too late for that. The great Tom Payne once said that it is impossible to make people un-think their thoughts or un-know their knowledge. We have come too far as a country to turn the clock back.

I know there are people on the Senate side, like Rand Paul, who I saw on TV speaking about this, who think we should get rid of all forms of public attempts to get people health insurance. Rand Paul takes a perfectly principled position. He says the government shouldn't be involved at all. I don't know how he feels about Medicare or Medicaid. He certainly hates the Affordable Care Act. He just wants to outright repeal it, which is what the GOP said they would do.

So he is going to vote against that bill because it keeps the remnants of the system that we voted in with the Affordable Care Act. I understand that. I understand his position. I disagree with it completely because I think, as Americans, we have got to have solidarity with each other and we have got to take care of each other through insurance because the misfortunes of life can happen to anybody. So we have got to stand together.

He says that is not part of the social contract. Okay. That is fine. I get it. But what I don't understand is people are saying: Well, we said we would just get rid of it, but we will get rid of some parts of it. We will throw millions of people off their health insurance. We will make insurance more expensive for everybody. We will cut the heart out of Medicaid.

Why? What is the public policy that is being advanced here?

It doesn't make any sense. Countries all over the world have arrived at the point of universal single-payer plans, like in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada. The countries that can afford it overwhelmingly have said: healthcare for everyone.

That is why I am a proud cosponsor of a bill, which is proudly cosponsored by a majority of the people in the Democratic Caucus. It is Congressman Conyers' Medicare for All bill.

I think that is where we need to go. I am convinced we are going to get there sooner rather than later. Winston Churchill once said: You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, once they have tried everything else first.

We have tried some other stuff in between, but we are on the way to taking public responsibility for the healthcare of our people. My healthcare is connected to your healthcare because my health is connected to your health. We want the families whose kids go to school with our kids to be in a relationship with a primary care doctor. We want them to get their shots. We don't want them coming to school sick.

Public health dictates that everybody be in the system. A lot of young men, for example, think that they are too tough to go see doctors. That becomes a danger for everybody else. We need everybody to be in a relationship with a doctor. We owe that not just to ourselves and our families, but we owe it to everybody.

Everybody in the system, everybody covered. That is where America needs to go. But understand that what is coming out of the Senate has nothing to do with that. The Senate plan is all about rolling back the progress that we made under the Affordable Care Act, like the ban on throwing people off of healthcare because they have a preexisting condition or denying people insurance in the first place because they have a preexisting condition.

The fact that someone has got a preexisting health condition is the reason that they need health insurance. It is not a reason to deny them health insurance. What they are doing is perfectly backwards.

The Affordable Care Act also said that young people could stay on their family's plan until age 26. Thank God we have had that provision. Even the GOP doesn't want to mess with that, at this point. We got millions of people into relationships with doctors. We could show you dozens of emails and letters and calls that we are getting from people who say: The Affordable Care Act saved my life. I would have had no access to healthcare without it.

The whole idea of turning the clock back and moving in the opposite direction is completely antithetical to the direction of American history. We are moving forward. We want universal coverage for everybody.

By the way, we spend more on healthcare than most of those countries that have single-payer healthcare. I think we may spend more than anybody else on Earth on healthcare, but

we don't get the best results because we leave so many people out and we are spending lots of money on insurance. The last I looked, it was around 30 or 31 cents on the dollar we are spending on the insurance companies, on bureaucracy and red tape, instead of getting people healthcare.

That is the direction we need to be moving in, not dismantling and savaging the healthcare protections that we have in place right now.

I want to close with some thoughts just about the process that is going on. Back when the Affordable Care Act was being debated, my dear friends across the aisle complained about how fast things were going and how they thought the legislation was being rushed.

I don't want to embarrass anybody by calling out specific statements made, but we have got voluminous statements made by people on the other side of the aisle saying: This is too fast. You're trying to sneak it through. You're trying to ram it down the throats of the American people. All of this is happening too fast.

Well, Mr. Speaker, the debate over the Affordable Care Act spanned more than 12 months. It took more than a year. The Senate bill was unveiled today with no hearings, no witnesses, no professional testimony, no opportunity for the public to testify for nurses or doctors or patient advocates or any of the groups that are interested; none of them.

In the Affordable Care Act, there were 79 hearings that I was able to find in Congress. That is 79 hearings. Not zero hearings, which is what they are proposing to do now. There were 79 hearings. There were 181 witnesses, both expert witnesses and ordinary citizens, who came to testify before Congress, in public. So far, there has been zero testimony on what the ramifications and consequences are of the bill that was unveiled in the Senate today.

We had multiple Congressional Budget Office scores that analyzed the costs and the impact of different proposals that were part of the ACA. By contrast, the House was forced to vote on the GOP healthcare repeal plan in this body with no CBO score at all, no estimate on how much the bill would cost the taxpayers, no estimate on how many Americans precisely would lose their health insurance. We have learned later the CBO estimate of $23 million, but that was after we voted on it.

So the people who were saying that the debate moved too fast back then--a year of debate, with dozens of hearings and witnesses, and so on--now seem perfectly content with a process where a bill comes out on Thursday, and then they are going to vote on it next Thursday with no hearings, very little public debate, no opportunity for people to come and testify, and no real opportunity for the public to process what is going on.

What is the urgency?

If it is such a great bill, then we should be out trumpeting it and advertising it. And everybody should have at least one townhall meeting back in their congressional districts to explain how they feel about it so that everybody's constituents can ask us about the bill.

Is it going to improve America's healthcare? Is it going to improve the health and well-being of the people, or reduce the health and well- being of the American people? Is it going to drive our premiums, copays, and deductibles even more?

Those are questions we should have to face with our constituents.

Regardless of what your political party or ideology is, everybody should tell their Member of Congress: At the very least, let's have some public discussion about it. Let's have the opportunity for townhall meetings across the country before we completely rewrite the healthcare plan for the American people.

I urge my colleagues to slow down, take a step back, and work across the aisle for the best possible results. There are things we can do together to help.

For example, I heard the President of the United States come to our body and make a speech in which he said that prescription drug prices were out of control and we needed to give government the authority to negotiate lower drug prices. I agree 100 percent with the President of the United States about that.

There has been no action on that by my friends across the aisle in the House or in the Senate, and I beseech the President of the United States, before you advance 1 centimeter further on this extremely controversial bill, which I understand four Republican Senators have already announced their opposition to today, before you go any further on this, let's get to something we can agree on for once. Let's find the common ground. And the common ground has got to be prescription drug prices are out of control for Americans.

Let us give the government the authority to negotiate for lower drug prices in Medicare the way that we have got it for VA benefits or for Medicaid prescription drugs. We have got that authority, but there was a special interest provision slipped into Medicare part D, and the government doesn't have that authority. That is authority we should have.

Mr. President, we agree with you about that. Why don't you put a pause on trying to demolish the ACA and Medicaid, and let's see if we can get some prescription drug legislation that will bring prices down for all Americans. We are ready to work with you on that.

There are reports that there is some effort to come up with a phony plan on prescription drug prices that wouldn't actually give the government the authority to negotiate lower prices. I hope that is not true, but let's have a real plan to bring people's prescription drug prices down.

There are things we can do together across the aisle. In fact, the President of the United States said repeatedly during the campaign that his plan would be a magnificent plan that would cover everybody. He said everybody would be part of it. And a lot of people, including me, took him to be invoking the single-payer universal health plans that work all over the world, that work in Canada and that work throughout Europe and so on.

Mr. Speaker, let me ask, would it be possible for us to get together with the President in order to come up with a single-payer plan, the kind that he invoked over the course of the campaign? Let's seize upon the new spirit of civility and community in this body and in Congress to come up with plans that bring us together, that don't drive us apart.

The plan that passed out of the House of Representatives is standing at 9 percent in the public opinion polls. I can't imagine that the Senate plan is going to be any more popular. If this was a mean plan, as the President said, the Senate plan looks meaner, or at least as mean as the House plan is.

But even if you doubled it and said 18 percent of the people would support it, that is still a tiny fraction of the American people. The overwhelming majority of Americans are not sold on this idea of turning the clock back and throwing millions of people off their health insurance plans.

Let us work together, and we can do it. In the societies that have universal health coverage, it is accepted now by people across the political spectrum. If you go to France or the United Kingdom or Canada, the conservatives are not agitating to throw people off of healthcare. The conservatives support a universal payer plan. And there are lots of conservative arguments for it.

For example, let's liberate our businesses, especially our small businesses, from the burden of having to figure out people's healthcare. Let's take that completely off of the business sector, and let's make that a public responsibility the way they have done in so many countries around the world. Wouldn't that be good for business? And doesn't it enhance feelings of community, solidarity, and patriotism for everybody to be covered by the healthcare system of the country that they live in?

We can do this as Americans. We are the wealthiest country that has ever existed. This is the wealthiest moment in our history. Let's come up with a real plan for health coverage that eliminates as much insurance bureaucracy and waste as possible and gets people the healthcare coverage that they need.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank you for the opportunity to have this Special

Order hour on behalf of the Progressive Caucus, which has advanced the Medicare for All plan, and I encourage everybody to check it out.

But in any event, we are not retreating 1 inch from defending the Affordable Care Act and the progress that has been made under it, and I hope that we will have maximum transparency and scrutiny of what came out of the Senate today, because we think that the only possible outcome is that bill will go down; then we can come together, find the commonsense solutions, find the common ground, and make progress for the American people.

Mr. Speaker, thank you very much. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 21 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, June 23, 2017, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, since its founding in June 1992, FairVote has fought creatively all over America to advance significant voting and electoral reforms that make American democracy more responsive, more accountable, and more representative. I rise to celebrate this visionary non-partisan and non-profit organization which, I am proud to say, is headquartered in the 8th District of Maryland.

Under the exemplary leadership of its Executive Director Rob Richie and board chairs, former Congressman John B. Anderson and musician Krist Novoselic and with the energy of its youthful, talented staff, FairVote has worked with purpose and imagination to implement ranked- choice voting, proportional representation, redistricting reform, the National Popular Vote agreement and voter preregistration for teenagers nationwide. FairVote's sophisticated educational campaigns have been teaching Americans across the country that these changes are all effective tools of democracy and can help us make certain that all Americans have their voices heard and views represented.

Mr. Richie's distinguished career in public life has been devoted to democratic ideals, voting rights, and the realization of responsive and representative government. He has played a key role in implementing ranked-choice voting in over a dozen cities; in advocating the National Popular Vote plan across the country as states equal to 165 electoral votes have joined the agreement; and in promoting voter registration, voter access and voter participation.

On behalf of FairVote, Mr. Richie has appeared regularly in the media, written for leading national publications, published nine books, and addressed important groups such as the American Political Science Association and National Conference of State Legislatures. Through FairVote, Richie's luminous work has changed America's conception of how we vote, what democracy means and how we can make strong progress this century. Standing with him throughout as a colleague and inspirational reform leader in her own right has been his wife Cynthia Terrell.

As FairVote celebrates 25 years of thoughtful advocacy, I want to commend the group, its leaders and all affiliated with it for their hard work and passionate commitment not only to the principles of democratic inclusion and governance but to the difficult and urgently necessary process of electoral reform across the country. As a champion of electoral reform and the proud Representative from Maryland's 8th Congressional District, I look forward to watching the many important accomplishments still yet to come from Rob Richie and FairVote, American idealists and democratic patriots all.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the time.

I rise only to express my real disappointment in the way that this bill has been brought to the floor. Had the majority not insisted on a closed rule, preventing the House from voting on any and all amendments to repair and improve S. 1094, I would have offered an amendment to ensure that it applies in a way that respects the due process rights of Federal workers, and that it would apply only to collective bargaining agreements ratified on or after enactment.

I support the goal of improving accountability at the VA, but I want to make sure it is not done in a way that prejudices and undermines the collective bargaining rights and the due process rights of the workforce.

There are real problems at the VA now, we know. There are 45- to 49,000 vacancies there. There is bureaucratic dysfunction in a lot of places, and all that this bill would do is to change the evidentiary standard of proof from the preponderance of the evidence to substantial evidence in leveling sanctions and discipline against employees.

That is a tiny detail. It is an irrelevant distraction from the massive problems that actually are facing the VA today. So we should be filling these vacancies. We should be improving the function of the VA, but we should not use this or that problem as an excuse to undermine the due process rights of the workforce. That sets a terrible example for the Federal workforce, generally, and it does nothing to repair the underlying problems and inadequacies that are taking place at the VA.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to share an excellent Letter to the Editor, urging the Trump administration to respect the political autonomy of American citizens living in Washington, D.C., written by David Jonas Bardin to the Washington Post.

In ``Hey, White House: Leave D.C. Alone,'' David writes:

``The May 28 editorial `More meddling' said that the White House has joined Congress ``in trying to block the District's Death with Dignity law.'' President Trump's proposed budget would unconstitutionally forbid implementation of that law in the 2018 fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1. The Constitution established federal legislative power over a future federal district as well as future federal installations outside the District of Columbia, such as Fort Bragg, N.C., to safeguard legitimate federal government interests there. The Bill of Rights immediately limited those powers in order to block tyranny.

``Even before statehood and even without D.C. voting rights in Congress, it is high time to recognize that Americans living in the District count as `the people' under the 10th Amendment, which says: `The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.' Power to allow, forbid or regulate physician-assisted suicide was never delegated to the federal government.

``Mr. Trump should heed President William Henry Harrison's wise words: `The people of the District of Columbia are not the subjects of the people of the States, but free American citizens.' ''

Mr. Speaker, I rise because the majority is expected to vote today to repeal Dodd-Frank, the legislation that we passed after Wall Street predators in the mortgage meltdown crisis cost the American people 8.7 million jobs and $19 trillion, including $2.7 trillion in retirement savings. Ten million Americans lost their homes and entire communities were devastated.

But, amazingly, the majority wants to destroy the most important piece of financial safety legislation passed for the American people in 75 years. They call it the Financial CHOICE Act, but what kind of choice does it give you?

It destroys the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has saved 26 million people nearly $12 billion from scams and rip-offs. It destroys the Volcker rule, which keeps banks from making speculative bets with your money.

The Financial CHOICE Act is the wrong choice for America and a very bad choice for Congress.