Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I am delighted to be here on behalf of the Progressive Caucus. This is our Special Order hour. We have decided to devote our remarks this evening to the testimony of former FBI Director Comey, who testified in the U.S. Senate today.

General Leave

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

Madam Speaker, today, America watched former FBI Director Comey offer his testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It was a dramatic and serious moment in the history of our country and in the unfolding of the crisis related to the investigation of Russia's involvement in the U.S. election and then the firing of General Flynn by President Trump.

This was the first time that Director Comey spoke publicly about his firing by President Trump and the investigation since he left the FBI, and his testimony confirmed much of what has been reported about the matter.

Now, what any reasonable-minded observer would have to conclude after watching the testimony today, after reading Mr. Comey's testimony, is that President Trump was trying mightily to use his office and his influence to get Director Comey to drop the investigation of General Flynn, his former National Security Advisor. Indeed, President Trump as much as said so when he said that he had fired Director Comey because he was unhappy about the Russian investigation and, presumably, the Russian investigation into General Flynn.

Now, Madam Speaker, distinguished colleagues, look how far we have come over the last several months. The President of the United States hired a National Security Advisor after being warned not to by the former President of the United States, by then-President Obama. That National Security Advisor lasted a total of 24 days in office, when it was determined that he had lied to Vice President Pence about his dealings with Russia. And then later we learned that he was a registered foreign agent, or he registered retroactively as a foreign agent, an agent for a foreign government. Now, think how dramatic this sequence of events is.

Imagine, if you will, if President Barack Obama had met with Attorney General Eric Holder and Vice President Joe Biden and FBI Director Comey in his office and then asked Vice President Biden and Attorney General Holder to leave his office, saying that he wanted to speak alone to the FBI Director, and then proceeded, essentially, to tell FBI Director Comey that he wanted him to drop the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, saying, you know, ``Hillary Clinton's a good woman. She's a good person, and I hope you can just let the investigation into her emails go. Just let it go,'' and to demand repeatedly for absolute personal loyalty.

Now, as it happened, Director Comey refused to take a vow of absolute loyalty to the President. After all, he takes an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States and the people of the country, so he couldn't say that he would give absolute loyalty to the President of the United States. That is not consistent with our constitutional form of government.

But imagine that this had happened under the Obama administration. Obama had made a similar demand of FBI Director Comey who was investigating, after all, Hillary Clinton's emails, had dismissed the Vice President and the Attorney General to have a one-on-one conversation, and then said, ``I really hope that you let this go,'' using the full trappings of his office and his influence to try to get the FBI Director to drop the investigation.

If that happened, I dare say that every Member of this body, every Member would have recognized that as an attempt to obstruct justice by the President of the United States, and lots of Members certainly would have been calling for impeachment of President Obama for interfering with an ongoing investigation by the FBI.

Well, what is happening now in Congress?

Well, lots of our colleagues are murmuring a defense of President Trump saying: Well, it doesn't look good and maybe he shouldn't have done it, but he is new to government. Trump is new to Washington. He is not schooled in the ways of Washington, it is being said. He is actually a breath of fresh air that he doesn't know how Washington operates.

I think that that completely confuses the question. Dear colleagues, Madam Speaker, the law against obstruction of justice in the United States, which is a felony criminal offense, 18 U.S.C. 1503, applies against experienced government officials and inexperienced government officials. It applies to all citizens of the United States. It applies to people who have worked in Washington their whole life and people who have worked in Washington for several months. In fact, it applies to people across the country.

It is not a law that applies just in the District of Columbia. It applies in New York. It applies in Mar-a-Lago. It applies in California. It applies everywhere.

No American citizen can interfere with the due administration of justice, whether it is trying to persuade a juror to do a certain thing, whether it is trying to influence a judge in a particular case, or whether it is trying to get a prosecutor to drop an investigation into a particular person or into an entire subject matter.

No one has the right to interfere with the due administration of justice in America. That is both a criminal statutory principle in 18 U.S. Code. It is also a constitutional principle, which is well recognized because democracy, our constitutional democracy, depends upon the rule of law; and there is no rule of law if there is no evenhandedness and no impartiality in the administration of justice. No one has the right to interfere with justice.

Now what should be done about this?

Nobody quite knows what to do at this point. We do have a special counsel, Mr. Mueller, who has been appointed, and that is good, but what he is looking for is counterintelligence information, and he is looking for possible criminal activity.

But if we take a step back, what is all of this really about?

I was very pleased that former Director Comey talked about this in his testimony today. What this is about was a concerted, deliberate, comprehensive effort, orchestrated from the very top of the Russian Government, to interfere with the U.S. election. That is something now that former FBI Director Comey has spoken about publicly, and it is something that 18 of our intelligence agencies have reported to Congress and the American people in a public report with a high degree of certainty that there was an orchestrated campaign to undermine and subvert our campaign, starting at the highest levels of the Russian Government. That took place, okay?

So the criminal or counterintelligence investigation doesn't go to the question that has got to concern us in Congress, which is the threat to our democratic form of government. As FBI Director Comey restated today, 2016 could just be a dress rehearsal for what is coming at us in 2018 and 2020. The intelligence agencies said that they would try to do it again.

Russia is no match for the military might of the United States of America. Russia is no match for the economic might of the United States of America. Russia's autocratic, kleptocratic, dictatorial-style government is no match for the constitutional democracy that we have built up in the United States of America. But the Russians have figured out a way to use the internet to try to penetrate the democracies of the world on the cheap. It is not that expensive to have paid trolls to orchestrate fake news and propaganda and to try to distort the electoral process in the United States of America--or in the Netherlands, or in France, or in other countries around the world.

Now, we don't have all of the facts. That is why what we need is an independent, outside investigation by a commission that we set up outside of Congress--no Democratic Members of Congress, no Republican Members of Congress, no elected officials. What we will put on there are statesmen and stateswomen who are experienced in questions of democracy and foreign policy, who are trusted, and we will ask them to give us the kind of report that the 9/11 Commission gave to us but about what happened in the 2016 election and how do we prepare to stop it from happening again to us in the future.

Now, notice that you can support this, and I think you should support this, whether or not there was any collusion by anybody within the Trump administration. You can be completely convinced that there was collusion between particular members of the Trump administration or Trump campaign and Russia or you could be completely convinced that there was no collusion at all, that they knew nothing about those efforts. It doesn't make any difference. There was still a massive assault on American democracy, and we have got to respond to it.

That is why I think the pathway forward for us now is for both sides in Congress, both parties, to come together and to act in a patriotic way, not in a partisan way, to say let's create an objective, disinterested, outside commission to get to the bottom of what happened to us in this election. And we will let, for the time being, the Department of Justice and Special Counselor Mueller deal with the question of criminal culpability and criminal deeds, but that is of less importance, in truth, than the integrity of our political institution and the future of American democracy.

There is the question which remains unresolved and, at this point, still relatively untouched, about what is so special about Michael Flynn.

We have a President who is unafraid to offend anybody. He told our best allies in the world in NATO that NATO is obsolete. I think he has changed course on that, but he was very willing to basically wave off the importance of NATO.

He was willing to tell one of our biggest trade partners in the world, Mexico, that he was going to force them to build a wall on the border, force them to pay for it. And again, I think he seems to have backtracked from that. I don't know where he stands on that now.

He was willing to insult and affront the Government of Australia, which has been a great ally of America.

He had a TV show called ``You're Fired,'' so he is not afraid of offending people, and we see him offend people all of the time and pick fights with people all of the time. He picked a fight with Meryl Streep. He is willing to tweet at anybody.

But suddenly, with Michael Flynn, this disgraced National Security Advisor whom he fired, President Trump goes to great lengths to try to interfere in an ongoing investigation which I think everybody can recognize is obstruction or attempted an obstruction of justice. He interferes with the FBI Director in a really astonishing and unprecedented way to try to get Flynn carved out of the investigation.

Why? What does Flynn know? What is the nature of their relationship such that the President goes to such extraordinary lengths to carve him out from the investigation?

That is something that we are going to need to get to the bottom of because democracies operate on the truth. Truth is built into our system. That is why we have judges and we have juries. That is why we have due process. That is why we have congressional oversight over the President of the United States. That is why all of us in public service swear an oath to the Constitution. The truth means something in a democracy, so we are going to have to get to the bottom of that.

But, in the meantime, Congress can act effectively and in a unified way. And I was encouraged by what both Republican and Democratic Senators on the Senate committee today were saying, which is that everybody agreed, or at least a lot of them agreed, that there had been this unacceptable assault on the electoral institution of our political democracy in 2016, and we have got to prevent it from happening again.

We need to have a bipartisan, or nonpartisan, independent commission outside of Congress to study exactly what happened and to report back to us about what we need to do to build up our defenses so our democracy is as strong as our economy and as our military. So our democratic institutions need to be fortified against subversion, against hacking, against cyber propaganda and fake news and so on.

Madam Speaker, I am going to call up and invite the very distinguished Congresswoman from Seattle, Washington, Pramila Jayapal, who has been a terrific leader for human rights and for democracy in the U.S. House of Representatives since her arrival in January.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be here this evening, and I am delighted to be hosting the Progressive Caucus Special Order hour. We have a number of Members who are going to join us to discuss the President's budget proposal, which appears to have been written at Trump Tower, primarily for the benefit of people spending the weekend at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Pocan), to kick off our analysis of the Trump budget.

Thank you so much, Congressman Pocan from Wisconsin, a distinguished leader in the House of Representatives, and the new co- chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Mr. Speaker, a budget, as we like to say, is not just a bunch of numbers, but it is an ethical document. It is a reflection of our values, and it is a plan of action for investment of our energy and our resources into the future.

The Progressive Caucus has drafted The People's Budget based on the actual needs of American society. So we have looked out, and we have seen that the great American infrastructure is ailing; it is crumbling. The bridges are falling down. The roads and the highways need repair. The transit systems are under tremendous stress, including the Metro system here in the Maryland, Washington, Virginia area.

The cybersecurity system is compromised. Our airports, our port structure, our water systems, like in Flint, Michigan, need desperate intervention and rescue and help. We propose a $1 trillion plan of investment in the American infrastructure to create millions of jobs, putting people to work on restoring the strength and the vitality of America's basic institutions, the infrastructure that supports a strong and flourishing economy.

So that is the heart of it. But we are also working to defend the gains we have made in healthcare, to extend healthcare so that all Americans are included in our health insurance system so we can squeeze out the bureaucratic bloat and the money that is wasted on insurance bureaucracy and red tape.

We are also working for investment in quality child care so working families are not spending 30 or 40 or 50 percent of their family budgets on trying to just pay for babysitters and piece together a system.

America is the wealthiest society on Earth, and this is the wealthiest moment in our history. We can provide healthcare for everyone. We can create a childcare system that works for working families in America. We can reinvest in American infrastructure.

But right now, there is no leadership, and there is no vision. We are so disappointed that the White House did not come forward with a plan, a bipartisan plan, to try to reinvest in American infrastructure, which everybody says he or she supports so we could get behind that, but we don't see anything.

Proverbs says that where there is no vision the people will perish, and so we have offered a vision. And instead, they have come with a plan that lacks all vision, lacks any plan for reinvesting in American infrastructure, lacks any investment in the vital services that people need and, on the contrary, works to dismantle healthcare services, Medicaid, education, community development grants, senior workforce, jobs training, you name it, the Peace Corps, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities; slashed $6 billion from NIH in order to undermine scientific research and medical progress on colon cancer and breast cancer and Alzheimer's disease and asthma and bipolar disorder.

We have been making progress on all of these things, and, for some reason,

the Trump administration says they want to pull the plug on it and slash $6 billion from NIH and all of the institutions around the country that NIH supports.

Well, we have invited Congressman Ro Khanna to be with us tonight. He is a leading expert on the economy and on the manufacturing sector, and we have asked him to talk about investment in infrastructure and manufacturing, what we need and what, instead, we have gotten from the Trump budget.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Khanna).

Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Khanna for that excellent discussion.

You would think, with all of the domestic budget of the country being dismantled and slashed and reduced by the Trump administration that we would end up saving money, but they don't in any way at all because the money is just being shifted over to the Pentagon.

So the proposal is to slash $56 billion from things like Meals on Wheels, NIH research into eating disorders and asthma and Alzheimer's disease and heart and lung disorders and breast cancer and colon cancer, and environmental cleanup like the Chesapeake Bay cleanup, which they want to zero out, and then to shift the money over to the Pentagon at a time when the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform received a report and had a hearing on a McKinsey report which showed that there was $125 billion in immediate savings available at the Pentagon in waste, fraud, abuse, and contractor overruns.

So, at a moment when the Pentagon is drowning in money that they don't know what to do with and all of the beltway bandits are buzzing around in order to get their slice of the pie, President Trump decides it is a good moment to try to dismantle services for the elderly and to stop job training for young people, to stop job training in location for retired citizens, wipe out funding for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup, and roll back or abolish preschool development grants to the States.

The litany of attacks on the American people is really quite astounding, and I invite everybody just to go and read the specifics of this budget, which can be read as nothing more than an assault on the health and the well-being and the security of the American people.

For example, the Department of Education budget proposes to cut $578 billion in title I, part A to support services for disadvantaged students. It reduces IDEA funding by $113 million, seriously jeopardizing special education services for students with disabilities all across the country.

It eliminates title II, part A, which provides Federal funding for teacher support and class size reduction. It eliminates or reduces more than 20 additional programs promoting literacy in our communities. It cuts Perkins Career and Technical Education funding by 15 percent. That is just on the education side.

Department of Health and Human Services, it eliminates the Community Services Block Grant. It eliminates the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. It cuts the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health by 40 percent. It reduces funding for Child Care and Development Block Grant programs by tens of millions of dollars. It reduces support for Federal job training for adults by 40 percent, job training for dislocated workers and youth.

It ends the Senior Community Service Employment Program, an excellent program that has located work, meaningful work, for tens of thousands of older Americans. It closes Job Corps centers. It eliminates funding to counter the worst forms of child labor through the Bureau of International Labor Affairs. It eliminates $11 million in OSHA safety training grants for high hazard industries.

You have got to read it to believe it, but the amazing thing is, despite pulling the plug on all of these essential domestic programs that have been proven to work, it doesn't save us any money because the money is just thrown at the Pentagon and is being saved to throw up the wealth ladder in the country, send it up the wealth ladder through tax cuts to the largest corporations and the wealthiest Americans.

That is the name of the game. Everybody understands it, which is why this is the good news. At least we are hearing from both sides of the aisle that the President's budget written in gold

at Trump tower for the people at Mar-a-Lago is DOA, dead on arrival. Everybody is saying it, that there is no way that America could absorb the shock of letting this budget come anywhere near to reality.

But the message that we get from President Trump and his administration is very simple: Let them eat emoluments. Let them eat emoluments. Now, of course, we don't get them; he gets them. But the American people are left empty-handed at the end of this.

We don't get any meaningful investment in the infrastructure of the country. There is no jobs program that is in here. There is no attempt to guarantee the solvency and the strength and the resilience of the Social Security program. We have got that as part of our plan in The People's Budget for the Progressive Caucus.

It is far from trying to stabilize and strengthen Medicare and Medicaid, those two great victories of the Great Society. There is an attempt to undermine and ravage Medicaid and Medicare, again, to send all of the wealth up the income ladder, all of the wealth to the people who need it the least in the country, pulling the plug on everybody else.

Well, our hope is that we are going to be able to organize people to stop it, but the tragedy here is that there are so many needs in America that need to be addressed. Working people have seen a major erosion in their living standards over the last several decades. Working people have lost pension security.

Working people need to have retirement sources stabilized. We have got to use Social Security as a way to make sure that everybody can experience a decent and dignified retirement. Social Security is a great accomplishment, maybe the greatest antipoverty program ever created in the history of the Earth. It lifted millions of senior Americans out of poverty; and despite the opposition of the GOP at the time, now everybody concedes that Social Security was a brilliant idea with administrative bureaucratic overhead less than 1 percent, and it lifts millions of seniors to a state of at least a modicum of dignity in retirement. And there are millions of children who are on Social Security because of survivors benefits and disability benefits.

So we need to strengthen the Social Security system. We need to reinvest in it, and we need to expand it, because it used to be that there were supposed to be three pillars for people's old age: one was Social Security, another was a defined pension, and another was personal savings.

But the pensions from private employment are increasingly gone. They have been scattered to the winds. And people's personal savings have been eroded by the dramatic increase of economic inequality in the country and the erosion of the living standards of working people.

Tens of millions of Americans are relying exclusively on Social Security now, so we have got to reinvest in Social Security and make sure it works, and we have got plans for doing that, too.

But the point is that the real problems of the country have been ignored. There is no vision. There is no program. There is no policy for reinvesting in America coming from the Mar-a-Lago set, from this Cabinet of billionaires.

We are not getting any of it. Instead, we get an almost laughable, comical, cartoon version of rightwing GOP economics, which proposes to slash everything and to uproot the basic programs that the American people rely on for a civilized society. We can do better than this.

I see I have been joined by my very distinguished colleague who will pursue the discussion. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison).

I thank Congressman Ellison for his eloquent remarks and extraordinary service as co-chair of the Progressive Caucus. He has been replaced this week by Congressman Pocan, who we heard from earlier this evening, but it was in deference only to the busyness of his schedule, since he has also become, in addition to the distinguished Congressman from Minnesota, the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Let's begin to wrap this up. Let's review some of the extraordinary assaults on the health and the well-being of the American people that are embodied in this atrocious budget.

First, the President says: let's cut children's health insurance by more than $600 billion.

This would strip countless children of dental care, asthma treatment, and other medical visits.

It eliminates over $190 billion to the SNAP program, a supplemental assistance program that is the food assistance program which helps prevent 42 million working families from going hungry in America.

It calls for billions in cuts to Medicaid. It, unbelievably, in the middle of an opioid crisis across the country, would reduce access to drug addiction treatment and drug prevention services with a $1.2 billion cut to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At a time when we need to be doubling down on investment in drug prevention and drug treatment and dealing with the opioid crisis, the Trump administration simply hides under the bed.

The budget would cut the Department of Labor's job training programs by an astonishing two-thirds--that is job training for our people at a time when we are going through dramatic structural shifts in the nature of the economy with robots and mechanization, and they want to cut by 65 percent the Department of Labor's job training programs.

They want to sell off our national parks and public lands for oil drilling, gas exploration, and fracking. They want to sell the land of the American people--the trust that we have had for centuries--that a great Republican President, Teddy Roosevelt, once insisted on. They want to sell it off to their friends at Exxon Mobil and the frackers across the country.

They have spent $10 billion building their stupid wall--a 14th century answer to a 21st century problem. Maybe they will have a moat and some alligators to go with it. But didn't I hear somebody say on the campaign trail that Mexico was going to pay for that wall? I heard millions of people chanting that at rallies, and the President was saying: Mexico--you can believe me--Mexico is going to pay for it.

Already they are putting $2 billion in our budget while they are stripping schoolchildren of their lunches. While they are slashing scientific and medical research in the country, they want to put $2 billion into a wall that nobody needs at a time when illegal immigration from the southern border is at a decade's record low. They want to take $2 billion and put it into that.

They want to cut billions of dollars from afterschool programs, from teacher training, and from student loans. They want to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, which millions of women and men depend on not just for family planning but also for basic medical attention, purely out of animosity toward Planned Parenthood which has not received one penny for abortion services in many decades. They just want to dismantle it. They would destroy it if they could, despite the fact that millions of Americans depend on Planned Parenthood.

They want to cut Social Security--which they promised not to touch-- by $72 billion by restricting enrollment in the disability insurance program--and on and on. You name your favorite, most important Federal program, and I guarantee you, unless you are a Big Business beltway contractor defense bandit, it is going to be cut in this budget. You can go and check it out.

Now, if a foreign power--a foreign repressive power--like Putin's Russia or Duterte's Philippines or Orban's Hungary set out to injure and demoralize the American people, they could not have done better than the budget which President Trump sent to Capitol Hill this week. This is a budget that is drafted seemingly by an enemy of the American people.

It is not the media that is the American people's enemy, as the President insisted, it is whoever drafted this budget. That is the enemy of the American people.

Let them eat emoluments, they are telling us with this. Let them eat emoluments. They have got all the emoluments. They are the ones taking the money from the foreign governments. But they are saying, Let them eat emoluments, because the American people have been robbed by this budget if it were ever to see the light of day.

Mr. Speaker, a great Republican President once spoke of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Abraham Lincoln was a Member of this body. He sat where we have the honor of sitting in this body, and he talked about government of the people, by the people, and for the people. This is a budget of the super rich, by the super rich, for the super rich. It was drafted by a Cabinet of billionaires for the people who are lounging at Mar-a-Lago today, and they give the finger to the rest of the country. That is what this budget says.

If my friends on the other side of the aisle are smart--and I know they are--and they know what is good for them--and I know they do, Mr. Speaker--they will say immediately this document is DOA and they have got nothing to do with it and very quickly distance themselves from it. We need to return to that great vision of a government that is of the people, by the people, and for the people. That is who we are as a country.

The government right now is experiencing a hostile takeover by a tiny elite, and that is what is taking place around the world today. If you look at Putin's Russia, if you look at Orban's Hungary, if you look at Duterte in the Philippines, if you look at what they tried to do with Le Pen in France, there is a new model, my friends, all over the world. Government is a moneymaking operation for a tiny elite in each society. They want to go back to something like kings and queens where the government serves the tiniest portion of the people.

They might get elected spouting populist rhetoric and slogans, but the minute they get in, Wall Street takes over. We have got a President who campaigned against Goldman Sachs, and his Cabinet is dominated by Goldman Sachs. How long are people going to fall for that magic trick? Not very long if anybody still believes in it out there. I don't think anybody's faith or confidence in this President as a populist will survive this budget--what a joke, and what an insult to the great populists of American history like the populist movement in William Jennings Bryan, that they would dare to associate themselves with populism.

This is a budget that is based on elitism and class warfare, top-down class warfare: the richest people in this country against everybody else. That is what this budget represents. That is what it embodies.

So check out the Progressive Caucus' People's Budget. It is a real reinvestment in the infrastructure of the country: our bridges, our roads, our highways, our transit systems, our port systems, our airports, and cybersecurity--where America really needs investment, not stealing from poor people, not stealing from the working class, and not ripping off NIH and the Centers for Disease Control in order to put money in the Pentagon for a bunch of beltway bandits and defense contractors who have so much money they don't know what to do with it anymore. That is not what we need. We need a real investment in America.

This budget is an affront, and it is an insult to the American people. We should reject it immediately. I call on all of our colleagues, Mr. Speaker, to repudiate this document in a bipartisan fashion, and let's get down to work for the American people.

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

Mr. Speaker, President Trump is headed to Saudi Arabia today, which is an authoritarian, theocratic state which bans any criticism of the government and executes people or imprisons them for allegedly insulting Islam.

Just a few weeks ago, a Saudi man, Ahmad Al Shamri, who is in his early twenties, was sentenced to death for atheism and apostasy. Another Saudi man, Raif Badawi, a few years ago was sentenced to serve 10 years in prison, to suffer 1,000 lashes, and to pay 1,000,000 Saudi rials for insulting Islam simply for advocating secular thought and the separation of church and state.

There are dozens of Saudis languishing in prison for blasphemy, apostasy, heresy, sorcery, witchcraft, and other imaginary offenses. Mr. Trump, please use at least 2 minutes of your time while you are in Saudi Arabia to plead with the rulers there to release all religious prisoners and stop executing and incarcerating people for these imaginary religious crimes in the 21st century.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be here with my partner, Congresswoman Jayapal from the State of Washington, and we are running the Progressive Caucus Special Order hour.

We are delighted to kick off this session, which is about the extraordinary revelations this week and some breathtaking developments in Washington, with a statement by our distinguished colleague from Texas, Sheila Jackson Lee.

I yield to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the Congresswoman for those extremely thoughtful and lucid remarks. I also wish to associate myself with the idea that, here on this issue, we cannot act purely as partisans. I suppose I can make a partisan speech with the best of them, but we are called upon during these very trying days to speak not as partisans but as patriots and as constitutional patriots.

I have been a professor of constitutional law for 27 years at American

University's Washington College of Law, and I am aware that the Founders of this country were determined to see that while we acted as partisans in the normal push and pull of legislative politics, when it comes to the basic character of our democracy, all of us try to need to act in a way that is consistent with the constitutional values that unify us.

Thomas Jefferson said: ``If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.''

And George Washington said that we should never forget that the word ``party'' comes from the French word ``partie.'' One part, each party is one part of the whole, and we have to try to keep our mind focused on the whole thing.

Well, the whole country is in danger right now. The events of the last week have been breathtaking and extraordinary. So let's take a moment to try to catch our breath to remember what is really at stake with the Russian connection, with the firing of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn after 24 days, with the firing of FBI Director James Comey this week after he refused to drop the investigation into Michael Flynn, and the Russian connection.

All of this is about, in the big picture, an organized and systematic assault on the American form of government and our Democratic political institutions.

During the 2016 Presidential election, 17 of our U.S. intelligence agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and more than a dozen of others, got together and produced a report where they said, with a very high degree of certainty, that Vladimir Putin and Russian agents had an organized campaign orchestrated to engage in cyber espionage of the United States of America and our political institutions, and cyber sabotage of our political institutions with paid operatives working to disseminate fake news and propaganda, and to engineer leaks of mixtures of real emails mixed in with fake news, and so on.

All of it meant to throw the Presidential election, to destroy the chances of Hillary Clinton, and to destabilize American political democracy. We know that this modus operandi was used before the 2016 election in America, and it was used again after, as recently as the election in the Netherlands with Mr. Wilders, who was the favorite of Vladimir Putin, and then again in France with Marine Le Pen and the National Front where Mr. Putin and his operatives did a data dump the weekend before the French Presidential election.

Right before the blackout on campaigning, they again orchestrated hacks of the Macron campaign, and then tried to put out, again, a complete disinformation package on behalf of Le Pen.

Well, the intelligence agencies warned us that this was just a dress rehearsal for 2020. This is what Vladimir Putin is doing. He is trying to organize every dictator, despot, and kleptocrat on Earth together to destroy the liberal democracies, from the outside and from the inside.

Now, militarily, he is no match for the United States of America. Economically, he is no match for the United States of America. Intellectually, in terms of our political institutions and the democracy we have built, our Constitution, he is no match for America.

But he perceives a weakness, and the weakness is all about the internet because the internet links the whole world together. And if he can use the internet in order to hack into our institutions, both our party institutions and our election systems, and the media, and political campaigns, and then use that to sew confusion and propaganda, then he may, indeed, be able to gain control over the direction of our country, the sovereign people of America.

We were warned in that intelligence agency report, which is public, which everybody can find online, that this is their plan. It wasn't as if 2016 was a one-shot deal. This is exactly what Putin will continue to do.

So that is the background. Now, why is the firing of FBI Director James Comey so disturbing? He, of course, had a 10-year term, which was abruptly and suddenly cut off by President Trump after Comey told him-- according Comey's account, at least--that he would refuse to drop the investigation into Michael Flynn.

There are lots of people involved in this Russian connection story, including Page, and Stone, and Manafort, and Jared Kushner that go way beyond what we can talk about here tonight. But I just want to focus for the moment on Flynn.

Why is this sequence of events so disturbing? Well, it came out this week also that the Trump transition team, headed by none other than Vice President Pence, knew that Flynn was under criminal investigation at the time that they decided to hire him as America's National Security Advisor. At a point when they decided to make him America's number one national security operative, they knew he was under criminal investigation for being a paid operative of the Turkish Government, a paid agent of the Turkish Government. And nonetheless, they brought him on.

And then when it was learned from the Acting Attorney General Sally Yates that Mr. Flynn was vulnerable to blackmail by Russians for having misled Vice President Pence about his entanglement with the Russian Ambassador and his conversations with the Russian Ambassador, still they kept him on. So they brought him on, knowing he was under investigation, then they knew he lied about his connections to the Russians, and still they kept him on.

When the media finally broke the story of Flynn's collusive actions with foreign governments while he was the National Security Agency Director, Trump finally fired him, grudgingly, let him go, but said that Flynn was the victim somehow, and even tried to disassociate himself from the firing of Flynn.

Then we learn that the President tried to get the FBI Director James Comey to drop the investigation. Now, that is according to the FBI Director James Comey, who has never been accused of lying or perjury. So it is going to be his word against that of the President of the United States, who has said things like: Well, Ted Cruz' father participated in the assassination of JFK; and 5 million people voted illegally in the United States, with no evidence at all; and Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or Indonesia; and he had his phones tapped, and so on.

And so that issue might come down to a swearing contest between the former Director of the FBI, Mr. Comey, and President Trump. But in any event, according to Comey, Trump said to him: Will you let it go? Will you let the investigation of Flynn go? And Comey said he would not. And then Comey was let go instead.

So the question is: What does Michael Flynn know that everybody bends over backwards in the Trump administration to try to please him and placate him?

This is an administration that doesn't mind insulting our longest and most cherished allies in the world: NATO, which he has said is obsolete; Mexico, which he has had no problem insulting and affronting; Australia; and so on. Yet with Michael Flynn, everybody is tiptoeing. Everybody is doing a tap dance. What does Michael Flynn know about President Trump? It would seem as if he has got some kind of information about the President that the President doesn't want to get out there.

That is why a special counsel had to be appointed, and I am glad a special counsel was appointed. And I believe that Mr. Mueller is up to the task. And he has been known as a straight shooter, and a nonpartisan, someone who will follow the facts where they will go.

Well, in the meantime, we have got to look at the much broader issue. Because, of course, that is about the criminal deeds or actions of particular people. And some people may end up facing prosecution for what they did. But there is a much larger issue here. Because as a country, we have got to stand up for strong democracy all over the world.

But what is happening with all of these shenanigans, and sinister contacts and connections with the Turkish Government, and the Russian Government, and Orban in Hungary, and the killer dictator Duterte in the Philippines who orders that people he thinks are drug users should be shot on

sight in his country, who has been invited to the White House by President Trump?

Well, our country has got to stand up for what is great about our country: our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. President Trump said this is a witch hunt. But I want to close by telling you about a real witch hunt that is going on right now on the planet Earth.

And if we were not so distracted by the spreading staph infection in the White House, we would be able to help in terms of this situation. And I refer to you an article that was in the newspaper a couple of days ago in The New York Times about the governor of Jakarta, one of the largest cities in Indonesia.

He is Christian. He is the Governor of Jakarta. Someone was running against him and said that all the Muslims should vote against him because he is Christian. They should have to vote for a Muslim because the Koran tells them to. The governor objected.

Mr. Basuki said: That is not right. The Koran doesn't say that Muslims must vote for Muslims. Muslims can vote for me, even though I am a Christian.

He was prosecuted, arrested for blasphemy against the Koran, against Islam, and sentenced to 2 years hard time in a maximum security prison in Indonesia.

In America, where we have a First Amendment and freedom of conscience, free exercise of religion, separation of church and State, we got rid of blasphemy a long time ago. But now we have got a human being--a governor, no less--who is in prison for hard time in Indonesia, one of our allies. We should not let that stand.

There are hundreds of people all over the Earth who are in prison for blasphemy or apostasy or heresy--religious offenses--and we are saying nothing about it. In Russia itself, there were just marches a month ago against political corruption and authoritarianism. Tens of thousands of people. Our government did nothing. Why? Some of them are on the payroll of Russian autocrats, and others just don't care.

We should be on the side of the people of Russia who are fighting for democracy, fighting for religious freedom, fighting for human rights. That is what America should be about. That is what is really at stake here.

Our government should not be consumed with self-interest and promoting people's corporate agendas. It should not be consumed with the personal vanity of the President. It should not be about private agendas. It should be about the public good of the American people and standing with democracies all over the Earth.

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

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

I rise in strong support of H.R. 510, the Rapid DNA Act of 2017. I also want to salute Mr. Sensenbrenner for his hard work on it.

This bipartisan legislation would integrate Rapid DNA technology into the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, popularly known as CODIS, to enable law enforcement to perform valuable investigative functions faster and more efficiently.

DNA technology is a valuable, dynamic, and rapidly unfolding element of our criminal justice system. DNA technology helps us to identify suspects, eliminate false suspects, exonerate the innocent, and ultimately to convict responsible perpetrators of crime. My State of Maryland is home to the first capital prisoner in the United States who was exonerated while in prison for a homicide with DNA technology.

CODIS and the National DNA Index System play a critical role across the country in criminal investigations by Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies. Rapid DNA involves a fully automated, hands-free process designed to produce a DNA profile within minutes at the booking stage outside of a crime lab.

Existing law does not provide for the inclusion of Rapid DNA analyses into CODIS. H.R. 510 would bridge the gap between Rapid DNA technology and CODIS by authorizing law enforcement to conduct Rapid DNA analyses and upload the results to the national index, as long as the Rapid DNA machines that are used are accredited. This adds a real-time layer to CODIS and saves us all significant time and resources, improving efficiency in the criminal justice process.

H.R. 510 has significant practical and positive consequences for law enforcement and for public safety. For example, Detroit, as of this April, has tested approximately 10,000 backlogged sexual assault kits. As a result, there have been more than 2,600 DNA matches, including CODIS hits; the identification of nearly 800 potential serial rapists; 92 convictions obtained by the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office; and DNA crimes linked to 40 other States and the District of Columbia.

The addition of Rapid DNA information to the CODIS database will help identify serial rapists if matches are made to the lab analyses of the sexual assault kit samples.

I hope that the use of Rapid DNA will allow other DNA labs to focus more of their resources on reducing the backlog

of untested sexual assault kits across the country. My home State of Maryland has 3,700 untested rape kits right now, according to a report done last year.

Accordingly, I urge my colleagues to join the chairman and those of us in the minority in supporting this important legislation.

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

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

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

The Rapid DNA Act is strongly supported by several organizations which know that the expanded use and availability of Rapid DNA will enhance public safety by reducing the DNA backlog, reducing violent crime, and allowing law enforcement to investigate crimes and identify suspects with greater efficiency and accuracy. The organizations include the National Center for Victims of Crime; the Police Foundation, which works to improve policing through innovation and science; and the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association.

Mr. Speaker, in the case that I referred to before, the Bloodsworth case from Maryland, this was a gentleman who was convicted of a grisly rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl. He swore he hadn't done it. He was convicted. In court he swore every day that he was the wrong guy.

When DNA technology was first unveiled, he read about it. He begged his lawyer who is now the chief judge on the D.C. Superior Court, Judge Morin, to get the DNA test done. That lawyer took $5,000 out of his own pocket to do the DNA test, and it came back with greater than 99 percent certainty it could not have been Bloodsworth.

Then the DNA evidence provided an exact match to a prisoner who was a floor below Bloodsworth at the time. So they found the right guy, and he was about to get out of prison a few months later.

The DNA evidence establishes an extraordinary new era that we are in in terms of criminal justice, and I am proud to be supporting this legislation that Mr. Sensenbrenner has brought forward, which I think will improve accuracy and efficiency all around. I applaud his efforts and the efforts of our chairman to ensure the integrity and the quality of the analysis that will be used in the criminal justice system.

I urge all of our colleagues to join me in voting for H.R. 510 today.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I, too, rise in support of H.R. 1616, the Strengthening State and Local Cyber Crime Fighting Act. This bill establishes the National Computer Forensics Institute as an official Federal program to be managed by the Department of Homeland Security and operated by the U.S. Secret Service. I strongly support it because it addresses a serious problem and advances a solution that is critically important to the safety of our people.

Cybercrime poses an enormous threat to national security, economic prosperity, and public safety. The range of threats and the challenges that they present for law enforcement multiply just as rapidly as technology evolves, causing serious insecurity in the personal lives, the work lives, and the finances of our people.

Over the past decade, our law enforcement community has recorded a significant increase in the quantity, quality, complexity, and danger of sophisticated cybercrimes targeting private industry, including our financial services sector and private individuals. These crimes include intrusions; hacking attacks; the surreptitious installation of malicious software; identity theft; and massive data breaches that have compromised and exposed the personal, financial, business, medical, and professional information of millions of U.S. citizens.

How many of our people have suffered the disruption, indignity, and anxiety of identity theft, for example?

For Americans who have been victimized by cybercrime, especially our seniors, it is a terrifying and demoralizing experience. For small businesses affected, it is costly and enormously draining.

Just as cyber warfare has transformed the nature of war in this century, cybercrime has transformed the nature of crime, adversely affecting the members of our law enforcement and intelligence services.

To date, the National Computer Forensics Institute has risen to the occasion, training more than 4,000 State and local law enforcement officers and 1,600 prosecutors. With this legislation, the institute will continue to educate State and local law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and judges on current trends in cyber and electronic crime investigations and best practices taken across the country. The institute will train officers on proper procedures to conduct these important investigations that are affecting more and more Americans every year.

In addition, the National Computer Forensics Institute will continue to work to protect our citizens' personal information from unwarranted governmental intrusion by establishing national standards for conducting these investigations. The institute will protect these important privacy interests along with the security of our businesses, our homes, our finances, and our personal effects.

For these reasons, I proudly support H.R. 1616.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for yielding me time. Just to close, I want to echo Congressman Ratcliffe in observing it is National Police Week, so we have the opportunity to highlight the successful efforts that have already taken place to combat cybercrime.

As the operator of the National Computer Forensics Institute, the Secret Service has demonstrated its excellence and diligence in pursuing cybercrime both domestically and internationally. Its investigations have produced more than 4,000 arrests, involving more than a billion dollars in fraud, and saving the public billions of dollars more in potential fraud that would have taken place absent their intervention.

H.R. 1616 will strengthen these efforts in continuing to combat cyber and electronic crime.

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

I rise also in support of H.R. 1892, the Honoring Hometown Heroes Act. I want to begin by saluting the distinguished author of this legislation, the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Larson), who has navigated the twists and turns of the legislative process to bring this legislation to the floor with the Committee on the Judiciary.

H.R. 1892 would bestow one of the highest honors that can be given in America to our first responders who have died in the line of duty by allowing the U.S. flag to be lowered in their respective jurisdictions. The bill amends the U.S. Flag Code to allow the Governor of a State, Territory or possession, and the Mayor of the District of Columbia to order the flag be lowered to halfstaff if a first responder in the jurisdiction dies while serving in the line of duty.

Our first responders put their lives on the line every day for the greater good of the people that they have taken an oath to serve and protect. Every year, some first responders make the ultimate sacrifice and lose their lives while serving and protecting their communities in the line of duty.

Currently, under the U.S. Flag Code, a Governor or the Mayor of the District of Columbia can order that the flag be lowered to halfstaff after the death of a President or former government official or after the death of a member of the Armed Forces from the jurisdiction. It is only fitting that, given the hard work and sacrifices and crucial role of first responders, we honor these brave men and women in the same way that we honor government officials and members of the Armed Forces when they make the ultimate sacrifice. Accordingly, I urge all of my colleagues to support H.R. 1892.

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

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

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

I encourage all of my colleagues to support this wonderful legislation, and I take the occasion of National Police Week to restate everyone in this body's appreciation for the hard work that our responders and our officers do.

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

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

I rise today in support of H.R. 1428, the American Law Enforcement Heroes Act of 2017. I want to thank the author of the bill, Mr. Hurd, for bringing it forward.

This measure has the laudable goal of recognizing our brave men and women who have served in the armed services, but it also helps to protect our communities through community-oriented policing.

I support H.R. 1428 for several reasons. To begin with, the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, also known as the COPS Office, is responsible for advancing community policing by law enforcement agencies through information and grant resources.

The COPS Office promotes community policing with a commitment to building trust and mutual respect between police and the people in the communities they serve by awarding grants to law enforcement agencies for the hiring of law enforcement officers for community policing.

Through the COPS Hiring Program, funds are provided directly to law enforcement agencies to hire or rehire career law enforcement officers to increase their community policing capacity and crime prevention activities. To date, more than 129,000 officers for over 13,000 agencies have been funded via the COPS Hiring Program, which was first established 23 years ago under President Bill Clinton in 1994.

The COPS Office began supporting military veterans through the COPS Hiring Program and currently gives additional consideration to law enforcement agencies that commit to hiring our veterans. Although we have not had hearings to discuss the import of providing incentives through this program for the hiring of veterans as new law enforcement officers by State and local law enforcement, we believe the bill is well designed and well intentioned.

The bill prioritizes grant applications of law enforcement agencies that will use grant funds from the COPS Office to hire veterans, thereby giving preference to those agencies when applying for grant funds. The intent is to assist law enforcement agencies in attracting well-qualified, service-oriented people who have already served America through their military service.

Another positive purpose of this legislation is to provide our brave veterans the opportunity to continue to serve their country and respective communities upon completion of their military service. Military service provides vital leadership traits that can be valuable in assisting military veterans in their effort to succeed in law enforcement careers, and we need to take advantage of that.

Veterans with combat experience have obtained skill sets that relate to law enforcement work, such as discipline, loyalty, ethical standards, and integrity; physical fitness; firearms and tactical skills; the ability to respond appropriately under stress; and experience working with diverse populations.

Those who have served in the military often have a desire to continue to serve others, and a career as a law enforcement officer allows veterans to continue serving others through community policing, where we need them so much. A career in law enforcement also provides veterans with long-term stability, gives a sense of accomplishment and pride, and offers a career where their dedication to protecting and serving the public can be applied.

Finally, measures such as H.R. 1428 will help ensure our communities are protected through community-oriented policing.

Accordingly, we support passage of H.R. 1428, the American Law Enforcement Heroes Act.

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

Mr. Speaker, I close by restating my support for this legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I also rise in opposition to this suddenly undead GOP plan to strip millions of Americans of their health insurance and Medicaid coverage and dramatically increase our monthly premiums. Just when you thought we had actually slain the zombie, the repeal-and-replace plan comes back again with no hearings, no witnesses, no budget score, and no policy coherence. It is like the bloody hand emerging from the grave in ``Carrie,'' even as the credits are rolling and the people in the audience have already left for their cars.

Mr. Speaker, let's return this so-called American Health Care Act to its own preexisting legislative condition: dead on arrival.

What makes anyone think it improves the appeal of this plan to strip preexisting coverage from the American people?

The fact that you have a preexisting condition is why you need medical attention. It is not the reason to deny it to someone.

In the last round, I heard colleagues complain that, under the current system, healthy citizens have to pay for other citizens when they get sick. Yes, my friends, that is what insurance is. Any Member who believes that the currently healthy should not help insure the currently sick must believe no one in his or her family will ever get sick. That is magical thinking. But in America, as Bruce Springsteen says: We take care of our own.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Jayapal for leading us in this Special Order to discuss President Trump's tax proposal, which we received this morning--or last night. The public discussion on taxes has been going on for several weeks now in anticipation of the release of the President's proposal.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets, from the East to the West, the North to the South, all over America. Hundreds of thousands of people marched with a very simple demand to President Trump, which is that he follow the precedent and the policy that was pursued by the last nine Presidents, going back to Richard Nixon, for a half century of releasing his tax returns, something that President Trump promised to do as a President, saying he would do it after his audit was completed, and then he got into office and then just changed his mind and said this would be, I guess, another one of the broken promises that he would deliver to the American people.

So why is this a big deal? Why is it important that we get to see the President's taxes?

Well, America was conceived in popular democratic revolution against royalty, against monarchy, against aristocracy. We, as a people, overthrew a king who imposed tea taxes on small businesses, on the little people, but exempted his tycoon buddies in the East India Corporation, a king who constantly sweated the commoners with high taxes to pay for his lavish expenses and traveling jaunts and vacations around the world with the royal family and the royal court, a king who never paid any taxes and never disclosed his own entanglements with foreign governments. We rebelled against that kind of government.

We demand accountability. We demand transparency here.

Mr. President, please read the Constitution. We have no kings here. We have no slaves here. We have no czars here. We have no serfs here. We have equal citizens, free citizens with equal rights.

We allow no titles of nobility here, which is a point you might mention to your Secretary of State, who still carries that disgraceful title conferred upon him by Vladimir Putin, the Russian Order of Friendship.

In America, no one is above the law and all of us are subject to it. As Tom

Paine put it, in the monarchies, the king is law; but in the democracies, the law is king.

The President of the United States owes an undivided loyalty to the people, the laws, and the Constitution of the United States, not the oligarchs of Russia, not the businessmen of Azerbaijan, not the hotel owners of the world, not the Bank of China, not the dictators and kleptocrats and tyrants of the Earth. The President owes undivided loyalty to the people of the United States.

So we ask the question: Where are your taxes?

How can we determine whether the President has conflicts of interest or is collecting illegal emoluments from foreign governments if he won't show us the names of the people and the corporations that he is in active partnership with all over the world? We simply can't do it.

How can we dream of undertaking to completely reform and revise the tax policy of America unless we see the President's tax returns in order to determine whether or not he is going to benefit from the policies that he is now advancing? We can't do it.

Forgive me, but is there anyone left in America who thinks that this President would propose a tax reform that would hurt his own individual, personal, or business interests? If you believe that, you are too innocent to be let out of the house by yourself at this point in the Trump administration.

So then we arrive at work and we receive this. This single piece of paper is the Donald Trump tax plan. It is not a bill. It is not a study. It is not a plan. There are not even complete sentences in it. There are sentence fragments in it. It is not even a press release.

But it has got a few key ideas, apparently, that he is asking the Republicans in Congress to lead us to pass by tomorrow in order to make the 100-day deadline which the President has disdained and castigated. But he wants to make the 100-day deadline because he understands now that there is some kind of milestone that he wants to suddenly be able to achieve.

Well, what is in here?

Well, first, the Treasury Secretary, Mr. Mnuchin, set out a test for tax reform in which he said there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class. Well, this plan totally defies that promise. It betrays that promise. It provides a huge tax cut for the wealthy, while middle class families receive very little benefit, at the same time that social programs are being sliced and diced all over the Federal Government.

We also know that the tax plan will provide a huge benefit to Donald Trump himself. Now, we know this only because one of his tax returns leaked out, suspiciously, and some think, from the White House, the 2005 plan, which appeared on TV--nothing before that, nothing after.

But even taking this 1 year which, presumably, is most in the President's favor, President Trump would save over $28 million in taxes under the 1-page plan that got passed around Congress today. Most of that money comes through the reduction of the pass-through business income tax rate, reducing it from the 30 percent range to 15 percent.

But then it also proposes abolishing, and I know it because it says right here, bullet No. 3 under bullet No. 5, repeal the alternative minimum tax. He wants to repeal the alternative minimum tax.

Now, what is this AMT? AMT does not stand for ``all money to Trump.'' AMT stands for the alternative minimum tax. And what it means is, if you are superwealthy and you have got an army of lawyers on your side and you can structure your corporate bankruptcies and your personal business losses--of which President Trump has many--in such a way as to make it possible for you not to pay any taxes for a long time, the alternative minimum tax says, well, there is something that everybody has got to pay. There is an alternative minimum tax. We are not going to let anybody's clever lawyering bring them below a certain rate.

On that rule, we know that Mr. Trump, in that 1 year we know about, 2005--you probably saw it on Rachel Maddow. In that 1 year, he paid millions of dollars only because of the existence of the alternative minimum tax. In other words, all of his deductions and corporate bankruptcies and clever lawyers' tricks that got him down to zero, presumably, in all these other years that he won't show us, none of them could stop him from having to pay something, because the alternative minimum tax says let's not press a good joke too far. We understand you are very wealthy. We understand that there are loopholes that have been injected to the law, but we are not going to let anybody fall below a certain minimum threshold.

You could think of it kind of like equivalent to the minimum wage for working people. The alternative minimum tax is kind of the minimum wage that the wealthiest people in the country pay us, as opposed to escaping all of their taxes.

Well, Donald Trump now wants to abolish the alternative minimum tax. He just wants to get rid of it. That doesn't sound like a very good idea. It is going to dig a superbig hole for us and dig the deficit much further.

Let's talk about the deficit. Well, I thought--look, I love the fact that we have got two parties. We should have more parties. It is great that we have got a left and a right. A bird can only fly if it has got a left wing and a right wing, all right?

But I thought that the heart of Republican Party orthodoxy is you don't blow up the deficit with outrageous tax proposals or spending proposals. They call us tax-and-spend liberals. They are cut-the-taxes- and-spend conservatives. I don't even know what makes them conservative anymore. I call myself a liberal because the heart of the word ``liberal'' is liberty. I call myself a progressive because the heart of the word ``progressive'' is progress. And if we are not making progress, then what are we doing in government?

But after seeing this plan, I realize those of us on our side of the aisle can call ourselves conservatives, too, because we want to conserve the land, the air, the water, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, political democracy, our alliances with foreign governments and foreign democracies, Social Security, health care for the people, and we want to preserve as much of a balanced budget as we can get to. On the other side of the aisle, they are calling themselves conservatives, and I don't know why because if they back this proposal, then they are blowing a multitrillion-dollar hole in the deficit.

This plan is not remotely revenue neutral. The earliest estimates are that it will blow a 6 or $7 trillion hole in the deficit. That, of course, is a way to put unsustainable pressure on the other commitments we have made as a Congress, as a people, Social Security commitments to the people, and Medicare commitments to the people for health care. We cannot afford this irresponsible and reckless tax plan that has been sent to Congress by the President. It is a return to discredited, failed, supply-side economics. All they can say is they will blow a $7 trillion hole in the deficit, but they are going to make so much money back through all the economic activity that we will be able to make money on that. If you believe that, then you will believe Mr. Trump's promise that he is going to release his tax returns next year or the year after that.

Look, we do need tax reform in America because this system is regressive, and this system is opaquely complex. We need some real reform. But this is not remotely the answer, this one-page mimeographed sheet of some really bad ideas.

Let me just say one other thing that seems to have snuck in there: repeal the estate tax. They want to repeal the estate tax. This might be the greatest betrayal of all--not because President Trump has ever supported it, but because the Founders of America were determined to have an estate tax. I am talking about Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, and Ben Franklin. The original Americans wanted this to be a country of economic opportunity and freedom for people. But they thought the idea of inherited wealth passed down from generation to generation was a major threat to the idea of political equality and democracy for all. They saw that it would be unsustainable if you had huge fortunes-- nowhere near as huge as they are today--but huge fortunes being

passed down from generation to generation. That would lead us to an aristocracy; that would lead us to a monarchy; and that would lead us to Presidents of the United States who would think that they don't have to show you their income taxes, Presidents of the United States who think it is okay to spend public money on fancy vacations for their family and Secret Service all over the country and the world and having a winter or a summer escape at Mar-a-Lago, Florida, and so on. Go back, please, I beseech the citizens of America, read Thomas Jefferson about inherited wealth.

Now, our laws today don't even have the estate tax or the inheritance tax starting until millions of dollars. The vast majority of Americans are not even affected by it. It applies right now only to the smallest sliver of the wealthiest Americans. I think--and forgive me for not having the facts in front of me--again, we are just getting this all right now, but I think we are now somewhere around $4.5 million. So if you die with $4.5 million, your estate is not going to be taxed. That is enough to send the kids and the grandkids to college. It is enough for people to inherit a house or two houses. That is not bad. But the fact that we would tax beyond that means that we are not going to get a society that is based on inherited wealth and deep, profound political and economic inequality which were totally anathema to the Founders of the country, and also, by the way, totally antithetical to the vision of Adam Smith who is the big hero to my conservative friends on the other side of the aisle.

Adam Smith was someone who said: You don't want to have inherited wealth in a society like that. That is dangerous. It will promote idleness and irresponsibility among the people who inherit hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. It will increase political inequalities and class tension in the society, and it will lead to irresponsible behavior by the people who have that kind of wealth.

People will get the idea that they can buy a public office. In America, public office is something that you earn. It is not something that you buy; but, right now, there is a model for elective politics around the country which is you don't have to be involved in politics, you don't have to be involved in social movements, you don't have to be involved in public service, and you don't have to do anything for anybody. As long as you have got enough money, you can go in, you can buy the consultants and the pollsters, and you can go right to the head of the class, and then you can get into office.

What is so dangerous about that? Well, look around the world. What is happening? There is a whole new model of government that is popping up from Putin's Russia to Duterte's Philippines to Orban's Hungary to Le Pen's France. And the model is this: that people get into office, and government becomes a moneymaking operation for them and their friends, for a tiny elite. That totally contradicts the promise of America. Our Founders were concerned with making sure that there would be public virtue, that we would put people in office who were committed to the common good, to the public interest of everybody, not to the goal of enriching themselves or their hotel partners or people they are in business with in Russia or in Saudi Arabia or all over the world. That is not the model. In America, the government has got to be devoted to the people.

So, America, read the fine print here. This tax plan contradicts everything that we were founded on as a country. It upsets the very idea of democracy--abolishing the estate tax, abolishing the alternative minimum tax, driving all the wealth up the income and wealth ladder. That is not America. We have got to stand up for what American values really are. We are not Russia. We are not a kleptocracy. We are not Azerbaijan. We are not Saudi Arabia. This is the United States of America. We need a government that is committed to the economic success of every family and of every person.

So I am urging the public to do exactly what you did with that terrible health proposal they came forward with that would have thrown 24 million Americans off health insurance in order to create hundreds of billions of dollars of tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. Reject it. Don't accept it.

America needs to know that all of the protests and the popular participation is working. The Women's March set the whole context for discussion about what is going to happen here because we know that President Trump campaigned like William Jennings Bryan, like he was a big populist. He was going to be on the side of the working people. But he got in, and the very people he denounced, like Goldman Sachs, have come to run his government. It is a Wall Street Cabinet. It is the wealthiest Cabinet in the history of the United States. That is who this government represents today. That is what this tax plan represents today.

So they are going to try to jam it down Congress over the next 24 hours. We are going to do everything to stop it. We need the help of the American people to stand up and say: No; what is the rush? Let's take time, and let's analyze what is in there. Let's see if it is consistent with our values. Let's see if it is going to blow a multitrillion-dollar hole in the U.S. deficit. Let's see if it is sustainable, and let's see if this is the best way to do this.

This is not a way to run Congress of the greatest democracy on Earth--springing things at us in the last minute, just like they did with the healthcare plan. The Affordable Care Act that they are so eager to slice and dice at this point came about after 70 hearings in this body, after a year and a half of debate, and after town meetings all over America. Their plan to destroy it they brought in on Monday night, and they voted it in on Wednesday with no hearings, with no witnesses, with no deliberation and discussion. Now they want to try the same magic trick with their tax plan.

They have got a royal straight flush. Let's be clear, they control the House, the Senate, the White House, and now, with the confirmation of Mr. Gorsuch, the Supreme Court. All that we have on our side are those three beautiful words that kick off our Constitution: we the people. We the people have to stand up and say that this is not what anybody voted for. It clearly was not what the majority of the country voted for because a majority of the people did not vote for Donald Trump. But it is not even what the States and the electoral college who were on his side wanted. Nobody was talking about a tax plan that would bring havoc and ruin to our economy and drive working class and middle class people even further into a position of submission to the wealthiest people who now appear to want to govern us in all things.

We don't begrudge anybody their wealth. It is great. This is a country where people can get rich. That is great. But your wealth does not give you the right to control everybody else. Your wealth does not give you the right to govern the rest of America. That is the principle at stake here.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Clay for convening us this evening to discuss this very important matter.

Why is it so important?

Well, we live in a time of rampant official lawlessness and disrespect for the Constitution of the United States.

But I am not here to talk about the Emoluments Clause or the power of Congress to declare war, or about equal protection. I am here to join my colleagues in talking about an incident of artistic discrimination committed by this institution, an assault on the First Amendment.

Why is it so important?

I was thinking about a professor I had who wrote a book about broken windows. The thesis of the book basically was that if windows are broken in the neighborhood and nothing is done about it, it sends the message that you can go on to bigger and better things. In other words, petty crimes and misdemeanors unaddressed go on to become high crimes and misdemeanors.

When we started the 115th Congress, unfortunately, within the first week or two, we started with a broken Constitutional window, Mr. Clay, because we allowed, we tolerated, and we countenanced an act of vigilante discrimination and censorship by certain Members against speech by the constituents of other Members.

So I want to tell the story to the people of America, especially the young people of America, who have open minds and open hearts, and I am delighted that so many young people are in the chamber tonight to hear about what happened here because this is a very important moment in the history of this institution.

Now, I am a professor of constitutional law by training. I did that for 25 years before I came to Congress, and I teach, also, the First Amendment.

There are six rights contained in the First Amendment, and I hope all of you learn the six rights. They are: the right to petition for a redress of grievances; the free exercise of religion; the right of assembly; the right of free press; the right of no establishment of religion; and then, last but certainly not least, the right of freedom of speech.

Here in Congress, since 1982, we have had a Congressional Arts Competition. It is a magnificent statement of American values. We invite Members from every district in America--there are 435 districts here, plus five Delegates who come from territories or the District of Columbia--so there are a total of 440 that are eligible.

Each one impanels a group of artists. They have a whole process, and the best artwork is adjudicated and then brought to Washington. You can find them in the tunnel connecting the Cannon House Office Building to the Capitol Building, to the Chamber where we are right now. There are hundreds of beautiful, extraordinary, interesting, vivacious, controversial paintings done by the young people of America.

So what is the issue? Well, we are living in a time of political correctness. Let's say it plain. Sometimes the political correctness comes from the left. It happened recently at Berkeley in California, where the college canceled a planned appearance by Ann Coulter, a rightwing commentator whose views are totally anathema to me, but they canceled her speech.

Now, in fairness to Berkeley, they said there had been violence there and they thought there might be violence again. But there was such a storm of outrage about this example of a kind of leftwing political correctness, they reversed the decision and they said she could come. They understood it was their responsibility to make sure that her speech could proceed without being disrupted and broken up, so they did the right thing.

What are we experiencing here right where you sit in the Congress of the United States, in the House of Representatives? We are experiencing an example of a rightwing political correctness run amok. It is rightwing political censorship because some people didn't like somebody else's expression. Instead of walking on to the next painting, they decided to take it down, remove it, and return it to the office of Congressman Clay. Not once, not twice, not three times, not four times, but five times they took this painting down.

Congressman Clay and I wrote a letter to Speaker Ryan protesting this act of vigilante censorship right here in the Congress of the United States. Speaker Ryan, instead of standing up for the First Amendment, instead of standing up for the Speech and Debate Clause, instead of standing up for artistic expression, instead of standing up for freedom and teaching a lesson to the young people of America, he called the painting disgusting and then initiated an official process whereby they censored it. For the first time in the history of this competition going back to 1982, 35 years, they censored a painting.

Now, luckily they have made this young artist one of the most famous artists in America now, and we can all wish him nothing but magnificent fortune as he goes ahead to develop his skills and his artistic voice. They were not able, I hope, to crush the spirit of this young man, but they did something really deeply injurious to the Republic of the United States. They engaged in an act of naked viewpoint discrimination against a work of art.

Now, what are the constitutional values here that need to be vindicated for artists like David Pulphus or the winner from my district last year, Alannah Van Horn, who did a self-portrait?

Let's just be clear about one thing: these paintings hung for 6 months before the vigilante censors in the House of Representatives decided to come and take them down. For 6 months, they didn't harm anybody, they didn't hurt anybody, they didn't cause a riot, they didn't cause a ruckus, nothing--until they decided somehow that this painting ran afoul of their political correctness litmus test for what is acceptable in Congress.

So what is really at stake here? Well, first of all, it is the rights of the Member who sponsored this painting.

I want to say I am so impressed by the courage and the strength and the determination of Representative Clay to stand with his constituent and his constituency as well as with the Constitution here.

He brought a First Amendment lawsuit with Mr. Pulphus not for money, not for damages, but for a preliminary and permanent injunction against congressional censorship of this painting. So they went to court.

They had a very simple argument. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. That is it. That is one of the six rights that I referenced when I opened my speech. Congress can't sensor speech.

Congress just censored speech.

The judge in the case, Judge Bates of the United States District Court, rendered a fascinating opinion. He found that this was indeed a clear case of viewpoint discrimination. It was censorship based on the views or the perspective of the artist. There was little doubt, he said, the government was engaged in a blatant act of viewpoint discrimination.

There are lots of cases that make clear that viewpoint discrimination is unacceptable in the United States, like Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, which said that UVA could not set up a program for young journalists and newspapers and magazines at UVA and exclude those from a religious point of view. The Court said, if you are going to set up a forum for speech like that, you can't single out one point of view and then suppress it.

It was the same idea in Texas v. Johnson in 1995, when the Supreme Court said that the right to burn a flag as a political protest is constitutionally protected. You don't have to agree with it, but other people have the right to burn the flag if it is their flag. That is their property.

The Court pointed out also that, in America, flag burning is the proper mode of flag disposal. If you look at the flag treatment protocol, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts burn flags all the time. So, if you punish someone for burning a flag, you are punishing them for a thought crime; you are not punishing them for an action which is done all the time in the United States.

In any event, the Court says viewpoint discrimination is unacceptable. Nonetheless, Judge Bates said that Congressman Clay doesn't win. Why? It is because of where it took place. He said that the hallway in the Cannon House Office Building leading to the Capitol is not a public forum of any kind. It is not a traditional public forum like a street or park. It is not a limited public forum, something that is set up for the expression of speech, which is precisely what you would think it is. It is not even a nonpublic forum, Judge Bates says. Judge Bates says that the 440 paintings down there are government speech.

Now, that doesn't make any sense. We have lots of people who are in the gallery tonight, and I assume you passed by these paintings on the way over. If you didn't, check them out.

I challenge anybody in America to go down to the tunnel and look at the paintings and regard the magnificent diversity of views and perspectives embodied in this one painting, for example, and say that it is government speech. In fact, the reason it was censored is because it wasn't government speech.

Yet, the court got it wrong. Now, I am not going to say really nasty things about him. I am not President of the United States. I am not going to say that he is a nonjudge or a so-called judger. I think that he made a serious mistake. I think the D.C. Circuit will reverse it. I think the U.S. Supreme Court would reverse it.

You know what? It doesn't make any difference, because everyone who has the honor of serving in this Chamber takes an oath to the Constitution of the United States. We have got to uphold the First Amendment. That is a responsibility that we have got. And we can't just say, ``Oh, we will let a court deal with it.'' We have got to deal with the First Amendment.

And it is very clear--the court said it itself--this was viewpoint discrimination. That is unacceptable. And we

should say that, yes, the Constitution applies in the Congress of the United States. We don't hold ourselves exempt from it. We don't say, if we set up a forum for young artists to bring their paintings in, that we are speaking. That doesn't make any sense. They are the ones speaking.

So where do we go from here?

Well, we are appealing to Speaker Ryan and to our friends in the majority to back off of the regime of rightwing political correctness. Just like it was wrong for Berkeley to try to sensor Ann Coulter, as much as many of us abhor everything she says and stands for, it is equally wrong for the Republican majority here to sensor Mr. Pulphus for your subjective interpretation of what his painting means.

One of the reasons why the Supreme Court has always said you can't sensor art is because art is polysemous. What does that mean? It means it is open to multiple possible significances. Who is to say what this painting means or what Guernica means?

Guernica, by the way, would certainly be censored under the principles that are being advanced here because it is sensationalistic or it deals with contemporary controversy. I mean, what art doesn't deal with contemporary controversy? I mean, it just doesn't make any sense what they are saying.

So I think that the majority should really rethink whether it wants to be in the business of censorship. This is not Russia. This is not Azerbaijan. This is not Saudi Arabia. This is not Iran. This is the United States of America.

People have a right to paint the painting that they want. If you don't like the painting, you go to the next painting. You don't take it down, especially in the Congress of the United States where we should be setting an example. Justice Brandeis said government is the omnipresent teacher to the people of the constitutional values of the whole society.

Now, we have got one other serious problem I want to mention before I go because, you see, before they engaged in this act of censorship against this young artist who was from St. Louis who was obviously upset about what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, and painted this painting which I think is actually a very interesting, captivating painting that reminds me of Picasso's Guernica and clearly evokes themes from George Orwell's ``Animal Farm,'' before they did that, you didn't have to agree with any particular painting or sculpture or artwork in the Capitol complex, right?

We have great champions of freedom and justice in the Republic who are portrayed all over the Capitol complex, like Abraham Lincoln, for example, like Rosa Parks, like Martin Luther King, like Lyndon Johnson, like Sojourner Truth.

You know what? We also have people who are traitors to the country, people who were Confederate conspirators against the United States, like John Breckinridge, a guy who served as a U.S. Senator and as Vice President of the United States and then defected from the Union, took up arms against the United States of America, and was declared a traitor and stripped of his titles as a former Vice President and a former Senator.

There is Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy. There is a statue of him up. Robert E. Lee, obviously the general for the Confederacy during the Civil War. There is John C. Calhoun, who defected from the Union and took up arms against us.

So we have these portraits, statues, and busts of great Americans who stood for freedom, justice, and equality in America and the Constitution. And we have people who got themselves into trouble and, I think, brought disgrace to themselves with what they did. But they were all up together.

Now that we are entering into a new area of authoritarian thought control and censorship and political correctness in Congress, how can we have a statue of John Breckinridge up in the Capitol complex? How can we have Jefferson Davis up in the Capitol complex?

If this is government speech, now we are going to have to litigate each one of these artistic displays to see whether or not they are actually consistent with the values of the United States Congress and consistent with the values of the U.S. Constitution. Is that where we want to go?

I invite my colleagues--I beseech my colleagues--don't take us there. Reverse this act of censorship against this young man. Don't set out to crush his spirit. Don't step on the First Amendment. Show America that we believe in the Constitution. Otherwise, we are going to be engaged in some very interesting discussions about the kinds of artwork that are found all over the Capitol campus.

I just want to salute, again, Congressman Clay for bringing us together and all of my colleagues who have come forward to stand up for the First Amendment tonight.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a fine constituent and public servant, James Lieberman. After thirty years, Mr. Lieberman will be retiring from a prolific and significant career at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency.

Between 1985 and 2005, Mr. Lieberman's career blossomed as a U.S. Customs Service Contract Specialist. During this period, he served as a Procuring and Administrative Contracting Officer on many of the highest-visibility, highest-priority and highest-impact acquisitions within the agency. From 2005 to 2007, Mr. Lieberman was asked to serve as Chief of the Business Management Branch of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency supervising contracting professionals who provided acquisition services to support the Offices of the Commissioner, Chief Counsel, International Trade, Internal Affairs, Congressional Affairs, Public Affairs, Finance, Training and Development, and Human Resources. Between 2007 and 2012 James served as the Director of the Border Patrol Contracting Division. His division was responsible for acquiring all supplies, equipment and services for Office of Border Patrol. After an exemplary demonstration of skill, Mr. Lieberman was asked to serve as the Director of the Border Enforcement Contracting Division from 2012 to 2017. His career crescendoed during his time as the Acting Executive Director, Procurement Directorate, from 2016 to 2017. His department is comprised of seven divisions authorized for 166 full-time employees.

We appreciate Mr. Lieberman's profound commitment to public service and honor his long and successful career.

Mr. Speaker, the gassing of civilians is an atrocity, a human rights violation, and a war crime. Assad's chemical gassing of his own people took place just a few days after the White House said that it would be silly to try to dislodge President Assad from power in Syria.

Somehow, we have to disentangle and disenthrall ourselves from Putin's friend, Assad, and all of the bullies and dictators and authoritarians on Earth who are a threat to their own people.

Last week 75,000 people marched in Russia against corruption and human rights violations. We should be on the side of the Russian people who are trying to liberate themselves from human rights violations and murder and political corruption in their country.

We need an independent investigation of the political, financial, military, and diplomatic invasion of America with this Russian connection. We need to restore our moral leadership in the world as the champion of human rights.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman so much for convening this superb discussion of Jeannette Rankin and a century of women in Congress. She, of course, was part of the great generation of suffragettes who transformed America by winning the right for women to vote, first in a lot of the State legislatures and by way of State constitutional amendment, and then by way of the 19th Amendment. So it is a fitting tribute that the gentlewoman brought everybody together to do this.

I was reflecting today, when I heard that this was going to happen, about the fact that we have, in Congress, I think it is 85 women now, which is about one-fifth of the Chamber, and I think there are 20 U.S. Senators, which is also one-fifth on the Senate side. Obviously, those numbers are not proportionate to women's place in the population.

I hope that we could use the anniversary of Jeannette Rankin's election to reflect on things that could be done to improve these numbers today. One of the things that I would love to be able to pursue with the gentlewoman and other interested Members is the use of multi- Member districts, which were much more common at the time that she first served than they are today.

A lot of our States have multi-Member districts for election to State house or State senate. When you use multi-Member districts, the proportion of women rises considerably because what happens is people form tickets, they form slates, and it would be very unusual today to form a slate that is not balanced according to gender and some kind of racial, ethnic diversity. When we have single-Member districts, it is

much tougher to accomplish that. So that is one of the things that we could discuss, in addition to making this Chamber and other chambers much more work-family friendly, especially for people who are in the young parenting years.

I thank the gentlewoman for what she has done and salute her on this project.

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

Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and my partner in this Special Order hour, Congresswoman Jayapal from the State of Washington, I rise to discuss the imminent Senate filibuster against President Trump's nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ordinarily, a Supreme Court nomination like this would be an all- consuming public matter. It has gotten a little bit less attention because there is so much going on all over the globe. The world is on fire today. We see outrageous atrocities taking place in Syria under the so-called leadership of President Assad. We see here in America a government in turmoil, as every day the curtain is drawn back just a little bit further on the Russian connection with the Trump White House.

But we do need to take some time to focus on the U.S. Supreme Court if for no other reason than what we have in America today is one-party control of the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, the White House, and, if the Supreme Court goes, too, we essentially have no meaningful multiparty democracy in terms of the essential governance of the country.

Now, as the Senate takes up the President's nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Court, I have heard a number of officials and commentators criticize the effort taking place in the Senate over the last few days and into the next few days to stop Gorsuch. I have heard them criticize it by invoking the aphorism ``two wrongs don't make a right.'' Of course, they are referring to the fact that President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland, the Chief Judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, was stonewalled for 9 months in the last year of President Obama's Presidency.

Judge Garland didn't even receive a hearing. It never got to the point that there was a vote. He would have loved the opportunity to have someone filibuster his nomination on the floor of the Senate. His nomination never got to the floor of the Senate. He never had a hearing in committee--completely unprecedented in our history simply to stonewall, obstruct, and sandbag a judicial nominee like this. I will have something to say about the qualifications of Judge Garland.

But, in any event, the Democrats now are saying: We are not going to proceed with the nomination of Judge Gorsuch; we are going to block it. In answer, I hear repeatedly from U.S. Senators and commentators this phrase: Two wrongs don't make a right. Of course, that truism is true. But what does this excellent piece of folk wisdom have to do with the current situation of the nomination of Gorsuch to the Supreme Court?

If you saw someone punching out a security guard and running into a bank to rob the bank, it would be legally and morally wrong for you to go punch out another security guard at a bank across the street and go rob that bank. Two wrongs, indeed, do not make a right. You don't solve one bank robbery by committing another. But if you saw someone punching out a security guard and running into a bank to go rob it and you decided to run after the robber, pounce on him, and punch him out, that would be completely legally and morally justified.

In other words, stopping the original wrong is not in itself a wrong. Stopping the original wrong is right. That is the right thing to do, and that is what the Democrats are doing. They are trying to block a crime in progress because, understand, we have never, in American history, seen something like a President send a nomination to the Supreme Court to the U.S. Senate to fill a seat probably for 20 or 30 years and the Senate just says simply: We are not going to have any hearings about it. That is exactly what they did to Judge Merrick Garland.

Let me just say a few words about him before I turn it over to my colleague, Congresswoman Jayapal.

Judge Garland is, arguably, one of the two or three most experienced and qualified judges ever to be nominated to the Supreme Court. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.

After serving as a law clerk to Judge Henry Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then Justice William Brennan on the U.S. Supreme Court, he practiced law at Arnold & Porter here in Washington; and he worked as a Federal prosecutor in the Department of Justice, where he played a leading role in the investigation and prosecution of the Oklahoma City bombers and the investigation and prosecution of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

He has had nearly 20 years of judicial experience on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Senate originally confirmed him in an overwhelming 76-23 vote, where he not only swept the Democratic Caucus in the Senate, but won the majority of Republicans when he first went on the court.

His nomination to the Supreme Court fell victim to the GOP Senate leadership's rule-or-ruin mentality that is ravaging the most basic norms of American political democracy in this century. If Garland could not be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court, then no moderate liberal judge can be.

Some people have suggested that Gorsuch should be filibustered for exactly 9 months, which is the length of time that the GOP used to run out the clock on the Merrick Garland nomination. In other words, he was blockaded for 9 months. Therefore, blockade Gorsuch for 9 months, then have a vote on him.

This apparently symmetrical answer would certainly make President Trump's nominee twist in the wind and suffer the way that President Obama's nominee twisted in the wind and suffered, but that is not the point. It is not to inflict pain on the nominee. The real problem is not 9 months of legislative obstructionism, much less retribution for what was inflicted on one judge.

The real question is: Who gets to have the seat on the Supreme Court?

It is about the next 25 years of Supreme Court decisionmaking. That seat, by all rights, belongs not to Judge Gorsuch, but, rather, to Judge Merrick Garland.

Judge Gorsuch, however qualified he might be in terms of his own career, would present a jurisprudence dramatically to the right of the jurisprudence that would clearly be advanced by the addition of Judge Garland to the court. That is what we are going to talk about tonight.

I am going to begin by turning it over to a great champion of justice, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights for all the people, my distinguished colleague and the vice chair of the Progressive Caucus.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Jayapal for that excellent discussion of the pro-choice question and other jurisprudence.

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Illinois for those excellent comments. As we have been discussing this evening, there is an egregious process problem with the nomination of Judge Gorsuch, and there is an egregious substantive problem with it.

The process problem, of course, is that the seat properly belongs to Judge Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, who was denied, extraordinarily, even a hearing for a 9-month period. The justification for that offered by Senator McConnell was that he felt that the people should speak in the 2016 election. Of course, President Obama was President. The Senate was the Senate. The people had spoken in the 2012 and 2014 elections. But they said they wanted the people to speak.

Well, the interesting thing, of course, is that the people spoke, and 2.9 million more people voted for the candidate who said she would appoint someone to the Court who was pro-choice, pro-Bill of Rights, pro-civil liberties, and not the Justice promised by Donald Trump, someone who would reverse Roe v. Wade and stand by Citizens United and the corporatization of the Supreme Court. So the people spoke.

The other problem, the substantive problem, is that Judge Gorsuch adds to what has come to be called the corporate majority on the corporate Court. Corporations win; workers lose.

Corporations win; investors lose. Corporations win; consumers lose. Repeatedly. Time after time in the Roberts Court, the jurisprudence of the Court is defined by the identity of the parties, which is completely antithetical to our whole concept of rule of law and constitutional justice.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the very thoughtful gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Texas for those extraordinary comments. Congresswoman Lee makes me think about the partisan identification of Supreme Court nominees because it is a relatively recent phenomena that we identify them as Democrats or Republicans.

Many of my favorite Supreme Court Justices were appointed to the Supreme Court by Republican Presidents. Justice Suitor, of course, was appointed by the first President Bush. He was an exceptional Justice, who earned the ire, unfortunately, of the Republicans because he voted with the majority in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, affirming a woman's right to choose an abortion in consultation with her physician and her family and because he voted in Lee v. Weisman to prevent religious prayers from taking place at public school graduation ceremonies.

The rhetoric then in the Republican Party was, ``No more Suitors,'' despite the fact that he had been nominated by a Republican President. ``No more Suitors'' is what they said.

Or Justice Kennedy, who has been an exceptional Justice when it comes to vindicating the constitutional rights and equality of the LGBT Americans. He was the one who authored the decision in Lawrence v. Texas, overruling Bowers v. Hardwick, saying that the State of Texas and other States could not arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate gay people simply for their relationships. He wrote that.

He also was the author of the Supreme Court's magnificent decision in the Obergefell case, determining that equal protection means that States cannot discriminate against gay and lesbian citizens in the institution of marriage--and there is no going back on that.

But, of course, the rhetoric on the other side now, because it has got to be turned into a partisan football, is, ``No more Kennedys.'' ``No more Kennedys.'' ``No more Suitors.'' Why? Because they did their jobs as Justices. ``We want people like Neil Gorsuch who are going to tow the line every step along the way.''

Neil Gorsuch is someone that they are convinced will be part of both the attempt to dramatically reduce or abolish the privacy rights of the people, turn the clock back on the equal rights of the LGBT community but, also, more importantly, participate in what has been called the development of the corporate court Neil Gorsuch.

Now, that is a long-running development. But the critical moment came in 2010 with the Citizens United decision. Understand, the traditional doctrine for two centuries was that a corporation is, in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall from the 1819 decision in the Dartmouth College v. Woodward case, he said, ``an artificial being, invisible, intangible, existing only in contemplation of law,'' not possessing the constitutional political rights of the people. But in Citizens United, a deeply divided 5-4 Supreme Court found for the first time in our history that for-profit business corporations enjoy the political free speech rights of the people.

So what did that mean as a practical matter? Because, after all, before, the CEOs could spend whatever they wanted of their own money independently in a political campaign--see Buckley v. Valeo; the members of the board, the corporate executives, could spend whatever they wanted independently in a political campaign--see Buckley v. Valeo; they could contribute up to the limits--see Buckley v. Valeo; now they can contribute to every Member of Congress and every Member of Congress' opponent because of a recent decision handed down by the Supreme Court.

But there is one thing they couldn't do: The CEOs could not take money directly out of the corporate treasury to spend in politics. But the Citizens United majority gave them that power.

This breached an understanding that had been in place for centuries that the most conservative Justices on the Court adhered to. Chief Justice Rehnquist, a very conservative judge, said that corporations are magnificent vehicles for the accumulation and investment of wealth, and they have worked great for the economy, but they are very dangerous if you allow them to cross the line from economics to politics.

Justice White, a very conservative Justice, appointed by a Democrat, President Kennedy, said that corporations are endowed with all kinds of special attributes, like perpetual life of the corporation, the limited liability of the shareholders, and all kinds of legal trappings and subsidies. He said: The corporation is the creature of the State, and the State need not permit its own creature to consume it, to devour it.

So we had a doctrine, which is that corporations could be confined to the economic realm. They could not convert all of the wealth and power they accumulate in economics into political power. But that is what the Supreme Court did in Citizens United.

But it didn't stop there. Because now the question became, as the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals put it: If a corporation has political rights, if a for-profit business corporation has political rights, why doesn't a for-profit business corporation have the religious rights of the people? And that became the Hobby Lobby decision in 2014.

Hobby Lobby was a for-profit business corporation, not a religious entity, not a church, not a mosque. It was a business corporation. And it was not organized for religious purposes. It was organized for profitmaking purposes. Yet the corporate leadership said: We don't want to participate in the provision of contraceptive care for our employees under the Affordable Care Act. We don't want to do that. We assert the religious rights of the corporation.

Now, stop and think about that for a second. From the standpoint of most religions, it is pure blasphemy to say that a corporation should have religious rights. As James Madison put it back when he wrote his famous remonstrance against religious taxation: The religious rights of the people are sacred in our system because they are between the person and God, they are between the believer and God. The government doesn't get involved; corporations aren't involved; and all of these other artificial entities aren't involved. It is between the person and his or her religious faith or worship.

But beyond the blasphemy of it, think about what this means. What it means is that a business corporation can say that it does not want to participate in the provision of contraceptives to their employees, thereby violating the rights of their employees.

If a corporation can exercise its newly found religious conscience to say that it doesn't want to provide contraceptives to employees, why can't the corporations say: Well, it also violates our rights to compel us to serve people on an interfaith or interracial basis; that offends our religious beliefs, too, as a corporation? Where does this doctrine end?

Now, why do we raise this? Because Judge Gorsuch was part of the majority which determined that corporations have a religious conscience, have a religious soul. He has been part of the spiritual ennoblement of business corporations to the detriment of workers and consumers and other people who have to deal with this newfound corporate power.

Judge Gorsuch seems like a good guy. He is right out of central casting, but he is being put on the Court to participate in the greatest concentration of corporate power, jurisprudence, and thinking on the Supreme Court in its entire history, with the possible exception of the Lochner period. Of course, in the Lochner period, in the early 20th century, the Supreme Court began to slash away at child labor laws, at laws protecting the rights of people to belong to unions, at any kind of social regulation, saying that violated due process.

Well, today, the First Amendment, where religious freedom played the same role that due process played during the Lochner period, they become a catchall rubric for the Court to strike down the laws of the people and to benefit big corporate power against the rights of actual human beings, like the people who lost their contraceptive care in the Hobby Lobby case because some of the corporate lawyers representing Hobby Lobby had the bright idea to assert that the corporation was protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. And, of course, Judge Gorsuch went along for the ride, with all of the other corporate judges and the justices on the corporate court.

Mr. Speaker, there is one category of judges in our Federal judiciary that merit the Appalachian Justice, who are called ``Justice.'' Everybody else is called ``Your Honor'' or ``Judge.'' But the people who go on the Supreme Court get to be called ``Justice.'' It means something.

There is a massive injustice taking place here because of the outrageous sandbagging, stonewalling, and obstruction of the D.C. Circuit Court Chief Judge Merrick Garland, who was denied even a hearing in the U.S. Senate. Now there is an attempt to tilt the Court for the next 15, 20, or 30 years with the appointment of Judge Gorsuch to the corporate bloc.

So here in the House of Representatives, of course, we do not enjoy the power of advice and consent; but a number of us simply wanted to say this evening that we stand very strongly in solidarity with those Members of the Senate who are exercising their constitutional duties by trying to filibuster this nomination, which is conceived in a wrong, in an attempt to steal a Supreme Court seat and, if it were to be accomplished, would be destined simply to add to a rightwing pro- corporate majority on the Roberts Court.

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