Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members

have five legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous materials on the subject of my Special Order.

Madam Speaker, with my colleague Pramila Jayapal, from the State of Washington, on behalf of the Progressive Caucus, we are taking this Special Order hour to focus on the question of the Russian connection.

This is a matter of utmost seriousness and urgency to the American people because it goes to the question of our national security and the political sovereignty of the American people to engage in democracy on our own without foreign interference, subversion, and sabotage.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Maxine Waters), the distinguished Congresswoman.

Madam Speaker, I want to thank Ms. Waters for her zealous work on behalf of her constituents and all Americans.

Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler), our distinguished colleague, who is a leading member of the House Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to my colleague from Washington State (Ms. Jayapal), who is the co-convener of the Progressive Caucus Special Order along with me.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Jayapal for her fantastic leadership for the people of Washington in the city of Washington and her zealous advocacy for all of the American people.

Mr. Speaker, let me try to recap some of the themes that we have brought up this evening and talk about what is really at stake here. But I want to start with some good news, because there was really some great news out of Russia on Sunday, where more than 75,000 people across the country braved the tyranny and despotism of their government to go out into the streets to express their commitment to democracy, human rights, and against corruption.

They were focused very specifically on some of the oligarchs who surround Vladimir Putin. One of them, Prime Minister Medvedev, it has just been learned, has amassed more than $1 billion, as a public servant, in mansions, in vineyards in Italy, in fancy cars, in jewelry--$1 billion. And the people of Russia are up in arms about the corruption, the kleptocracy, the stealing from the Russian people, which is increasingly impoverished by the imperial designs and the corrupt practices of Putin and his team.

So tens of thousands of people went into the streets to protest. These are brave people, because you are talking about an authoritarian government there, a dictator, a despot, someone who orders out for the assassination of his political enemies. Many of them were arrested. Hundreds of them were arrested in Moscow, and some of them are still in jail right now.

Mr. Speaker, we should be on the side of the protesters in Russia. That is who we are as America. We are a nation conceived in revolutionary insurgency against corruption, against monarchy, against dictators and autocrats and theocrats and kleptocrats who steal from the people. That is who we are.

We should be meeting with them. We should be meeting with the human rights activists. We should be meeting with the anticorruption marchers who are putting themselves on the front lines of history. We should be meeting with the dissenters and the critics of Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs and big business kleptocrats who surround him. But, instead, our government has aligned with Putin himself, with the insiders in Russia. That is totally antithetical to the design of America, when you think about it.

Mr. Speaker, we have the great good fortune to go to work every day surrounded by portraits of people who built this country, like George Washington, who is right over there. We have got portraits of Thomas Jefferson. We have got portraits of Frederick Douglass. We have got portraits of Abraham Lincoln, who actually served in this body and, when he was here, spent a lot of his time railing about a war that was concocted with lies by President James Polk, the Mexican War.

But Lincoln knew how delicate and precious and precarious an enterprise democracy is. In the Gettysburg Address, he posed the question of how long government of the people, by the people, and for the people can last. Will it perish from the Earth? And he put the question to the people because, he said, it is up to us.

Democracy is a rarity in human history. Democracy is not the norm. That is why America is a miraculous experiment on Earth. If you don't do anything, you are going to end up with dictators and despots and kleptocrats who steal from their own people, like Vladimir Putin.

But America started a different way. The first three words of our Constitution are ``We, the people.'' We, the people; we flipped the whole design. Before that, the whole theory was that the king had the power, and the king got power directly from God; and everybody was a subject of the king, and everybody served the king.

Our Founders had the vision, in that outburst of enlightenment and enthusiasm, to say, no, we are going to try something different:

We are going to start a government based on we, the people, and we are going to separate church and state; and we are not going to dictate to people their religious worship, and we are not

going to dictate to people their political beliefs. There is going to be freedom of thought and freedom of speech.

We don't trust the collapse of all powers into one, which Madison said was the very definition of tyranny. We are going to separate powers. The legislature, Congress, will come first, Article I. It will represent the people. But then we are going to have someone else execute the laws of the people, faithfully execute the laws of the people. That will be the President. And when there are disputes, they will be adjudicated in a third branch of government, by the Supreme Court, to figure it out.

But we are going to separate the powers, because when one guy has got all the power, it endangers the freedoms and the liberties of everybody else. We even said, even though our President is limited by the separation of powers, we are going to make sure that the President and also the Members of Congress will have an undivided, zealous loyalty only to the American people.

Article I, section 9 says we cannot accept presents, emoluments, which are any kind of payments, offices, or titles from foreign princes, foreign kings, or foreign states, period. We can't accept them without the approval of Congress. It doesn't go.

There were all kinds of powers that were sending spies and saboteurs to Washington, when the country first began, to try to pay off elected officials, but our Founders had the vision to say: No, we are not going to accept that. We are not going to allow payments and bribes and fancy presents being given to our elected officials.

So one government, separated powers, based on public integrity, honesty, and devotion to the people. That is the model here.

Now, we should be on the side of democratic movements all over the Earth, like the people who assembled in Moscow on Sunday, who assembled in Siberia on Sunday. There were marchers even there. It was like our Women's March. It took place all over the country. Those are our people. We should be on the side of the people who are trying to overthrow the despotism in Russia.

But look what is happening. Tyranny and authoritarianism are on the march all over the world. Russia is the headquarters of it, but you can find it everywhere you look:

Philippines, a madman dictator who thinks he has the power to send his agents out to go and shoot people on the street because they look like they are a drug dealer and brags about it, Duterte;

Hungary, another favorite of Vladimir Putin, Mr. Orban, who is cracking down on press freedom, on human rights in his country;

Iran, authoritarian, theocratic state; people being thrown in jail for blasphemy, for heresy, for apostasy, for religious offenses;

Saudi Arabia, fomenting racist, anti-Semitic propaganda and sending it out, oppressing people based on religion, not even allowing women to drive in their society.

Everywhere you turn, tyranny, despotism on the march.

And Mr. Putin has a plan. How do we know it? Do we know it from the Democratic Caucus or the Republican Conference? No. We know it from our intelligence agencies, from the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Seventeen of America's intelligence agencies came back with a report, and they said Vladimir Putin has a plan to continue to destabilize and undermine liberal democracy all over the world.

Brexit was part of it. The intervention in our election was part of it. They are going after France, where they want the rightwing, ultra nationalist, anti-immigrant campaign of Marine Le Pen to triumph in France. They are trying to do it in Germany, which is now the strongest outpost of liberal democracy left on Earth, as of yet, uncontaminated by the penetration of Russian intelligence and Putin's agents.

But what did they do to us? What is this all about?

Well, we had an election in 2016. The sovereign people of America had an election. Now, unfortunately, we are still using the electoral college, which is antiquated and obsolescent. There is a movement to change it afoot to the national popular vote. But be that as it may, that is our system. We haven't reformed it yet. It is our system. It is our elections here in America. But the electoral college makes it more vulnerable because you just have to intervene in a handful of States in order to sway the vote.

What did Putin do? Again, we know this. I am not making this up. We know this from our intelligence agencies. If you don't believe me, you go to your computer and you just look up the intelligence agency report on Russian interference and espionage and sabotage in our 2016 election.

And what did they do?

They spied on different Democratic institutions, like the Democratic National Committee, and they spied on particular people.

They engaged in not just cyber espionage, but cyber sabotage.

They orchestrated a series of leaks which dominated election coverage in the United States for several weeks.

They orchestrated a campaign of fake news and propaganda in order to undermine Hillary Clinton, who was reviled--and is reviled, presumably--by Vladimir Putin because she challenged him, and she challenged the human rights situation in Russia and the involvement of Russia with various dictators in other parts of the world. So they interfered in our election.

When I first got to Congress, that was still being disputed. When we tried to talk about this, it was being said, well, there is no evidence that Russia did this. Well, guess what? The evidence is replete. It is decisive. It is determinative.

Now we are not hearing from our friends on the other side: Well, Russia didn't do this.

Now they are saying something different: Well, Russia may have done that. It may have been this massive, orchestrated campaign to undermine and subvert our elections, but there is no proof that that was actual collusion by the Trump campaign.

About that, I want to say two things. Number one, it shouldn't make any difference. Let's say nobody in the Trump campaign knew anybody in Russia and never heard of Vladimir Putin. It would make no difference because we should still view this as a radical threat to the political sovereignty of the American people.

But the second answer is even more important. As all of my colleagues were pointing out before, every day we get more evidence not just of contacts and connections, but actual collaboration and cooperation between people in the Trump campaign, the Trump family, and the Trump universe with Vladimir Putin and his closest agents and assets throughout Russia and around the world.

Let's just recap a few of those: former national security adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign, or I guess he was fired by President Trump after he failed to disclose the scope of his contacts with Russians, including Ambassador Kislyak. He was paid more than $33,000 in 2015 by Russian-funded propaganda media, and the full extent of his relationship to the Russians is still being investigated.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse himself from this whole matter because he met several times with Ambassador Kislyak, who has been described as Russia's top spy in America during the 2016 election. Then--I will speak charitably here--he misled his own colleagues in the Senate about it at his Senate confirmation hearing raising the issue and then denying that he had had any contact with the Russians at all.

Senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner met with the Russian Ambassador at Trump Tower a few months ago in December of 2016. We have got former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page, who has admitted that he met with the Russian Ambassador and other Russians in Cleveland at the Republican National Convention and met with managers from Rosneft, the Russian-owned oil company. He himself owns shares of a Russian energy company called Gazprom.

Roger Stone, Trump's longtime buddy and political adviser, was working with WikiLeaks, which published documents during the election based on information divulged because of Russian interference and espionage that

tilted the scales again in favor of Trump in the campaign, and he hosted a series on the Russian propaganda network.

Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager for 6 months, was an adviser to Ukrainian oligarchs who got sweetheart business deals from Putin's associates. He was also a business partner of Russian oligarchs close to Putin. He resigned in August of last year after reports surfaced that suggested that he had received $12.7 million from Ukraine's pro- Russia former president Viktor Yanukovych. He was on the payroll for $10 million, it has just come out, in order to promote the Russian perspective and Putin's propaganda in Washington, D.C., and throughout the United States in order to change the course of U.S. politics.

Now, I am sorry to put these out there as a bunch of clues. I wish we had a coherent story to tell. We don't, because what we need is a comprehensive 9/11-style independent investigation to figure out what precisely happened. In America you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Nobody is putting any of these people in jail, but it has come out, despite their best efforts in some cases, that they are up to their necks in the Russian connection.

What does that mean for American democracy?

What we know is there was a massive independent expenditure in 2006. That is what we call it under our FEC law when you go out and spend money to try to destroy one candidate and help another. There was a massive foreign independent expenditure orchestrated by Vladimir Putin.

The question is: Was it, in FEC terms, a coordinated expenditure? That is, did the Trump team actively work with them?

As we are saying, there are lots of clues that suggest it is so. I am not willing to say that they were definitely in cahoots with them. I am not willing to say that they were necessarily collaborating the election. But the evidence accumulates every single day that points in that direction.

Now every day in Washington, D.C., what we are doing is running around because there is a coverup that has been unfolding. Today, of course, we are dealing with a resolution in the House Judiciary Committee to try to get to the bottom of what Chairman Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee actually did when he ran over to the White House with some information that he had about Trump apparently being picked up incidentally in conversations that were being tapped by the American intelligence community with foreign operatives. Again, it is shadowy because we don't know the whole thing. But what we do know is that Chairman Nunes went to the White House to tell President Trump or his deputies before he told anybody here in Congress.

Now, we have been saying from the beginning we want an independent, objective 9/11-style commission--no Democratic politicians, no Republican politicians, and no elected officials. Let's agree on gifted statesmen and stateswomen who can really get to the bottom of this if we care about the truth. Their answer has been: No, we have got the Intelligence Committee to do it instead.

But now what we have got is the Intelligence Committee chair traveling back and forth to the White House, spilling the beans, which undermines everybody's confidence in the integrity of the investigation that is taking place into the Russian connection and what actually happened in the 2016 election.

Mr. Speaker, in the American system of government, elected officials have to have undivided loyalty to the American people. That is why we have got the Emoluments Clause: no presents, no emoluments, no offices, and no titles from foreign governments. That is why we swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States of America. Each one of us who has the great honor and privilege of coming to Washington, D.C., to represent the people swear an oath to our Constitution and to our people.

We are not a country, like so many, that are defined by one religion. We are not defined by one race. We are not defined by one ethnicity. We are not defined by one political party. We are not defined by one political ideology. We are defined by one Constitution. That is what unifies us as Americans. We must be constitutional patriots here and insist upon our constitutional values and the rule of law for democracy to be meaningful in the 21st century.

There is a new model of tyrannical government traveling all over the world, and all the bullies and despots have found each other. They are in league together. They want government as a moneymaking operation. They want government as a moneymaking operation for private elites in their country, whether it is in Russia or the Philippines or Saudi Arabia. Sad to say, we are starting to see the development of that right here in the United States of America.

So we have the opportunity and we have the responsibility to exercise our rights as citizens under the First Amendment and to exercise our privileges as Members of Congress under the speech or debate clause to speak up against the march of tyranny all over the Earth. We have got an obligation to resist the corruption--the same corruption that the people in Russia were marching against on Sunday. We must demand real answers about what took place in our Presidential election in 2016. The intelligence agencies warned us that what happened in 2016 was a dress rehearsal for what is going to happen the next time and the time after that.

I want to say something about the geopolitics of this. Think about it for a second:

Who has got the strongest economy on Earth?

We do, the freest, the original democracy. We have got the strongest economy.

Who has got the strongest military?

We do.

Russia can't come close. But the way I understand what happened in 2016 was that Vladimir Putin--who is not an honest man, but he is a clever man--decided that this was a moment of opportunity for Russia. He is the former chief of the KGB. Let's not forget that. He is the guy who said that the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union. He is an irredentist imperialist who wants to go back and reconstruct the Russian empire.

But what he saw was an opportunity, which is that today the whole world is linked, and it is linked by the internet. He created something that I think of as a Manhattan Project for military conquest and defeat of the liberal democracies in the 21st century.

He set about to figure out this question: How can we undermine and subvert the liberal democracies?

These are open societies. America is an open society. We pride ourselves on the First Amendment, on freedom of speech, and on free dialogue and discussion.

So he said to himself: How can I subvert and undermine that?

The answer became very clear: to create--really on the cheap, because compared to military might, this is pennies on the dollar--he was going to create an internet army, in effect, to try to undermine and subvert our democracy with fake news, with propaganda, and with paid trolls to get information out to try to destroy the reputations of opposition politicians and to try to promote the parties that he viewed as ``within his camp.''

Guess what?

It still is going on today. It is still happening. We are not talking about ancient history. We are talking about an ongoing project. That is why I am proud to be a member of the minority caucus here, the Democratic Party caucus, which is insisting that we create an independent, objective, neutral, 9/11-style commission to investigate the Russian connection and what happened with the attack on American democracy in 2016.

We have got to get to the bottom of it. Two-thirds of the American people in public opinion polls say that they support such a commission. There is nobody who would oppose it except for somebody who has got something to hide. But for the rest of us, we have every reason to get to the bottom of this plot to destroy our election in 2016, and we have every reason to defend this great constitutional democracy with everything we have got.

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

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

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 6 o'clock and 15 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Thursday, March 30, 2017, at 9 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, every American who loves freedom, democracy, and public integrity this week is expressing solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of anticorruption protesters in Russia who took to the streets on Sunday. That huge throng of brave Russians, including hundreds arrested and jailed by agents of Vladimir Putin, were protesting the autocrats and kleptocrats running their country, a key target being Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who has amassed vineyards, luxury yachts, and mansions worth more than $1 billion.

We should be standing with the protesters, but the corrupt autocrats of Russia have found good friends in the billionaire Cabinet of international businessman Donald Trump, whose administration is administering a spreading staph infection: disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was paid by Russian companies to appear at Russian events; Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil and a close friend of Vladimir Putin who was awarded in 2013 a title of nobility called the Russian Order of Friendship; Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager who collected $10 million a year to advance the agenda of Russia and Russian oligarchs.

We should be standing with the protesters. Two-thirds of Americans want to see a complete, independent 9/11-style investigation into the Russian connection, and we owe them no less.

Mr. Speaker, nobody takes the speech and debate clause more seriously in this body than Mr. Garamendi. He speaks in debate pretty much every day, and that is what the Founders wanted us to do, not to just come here in a kind of naked exercise of power politics and see who can get more votes, but really try to learn from each other and engage in a dialogue so we are advancing public policy.

It was a pleasure to receive the gentleman's invitation to join this Special Order on Alzheimer's disease. I am delighted to join him. I am also delighted to see at the dais this evening the Speaker pro tempore, my friend Congressman Smucker from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He is just a freshman, but he is already wielding the gavel. I would say that seat suits Congressman Smucker just fine. It is good to see him up there tonight.

Congressman Garamendi, I am the Congressperson from Montgomery County, Frederick County, and Carroll County, Maryland, the 8th Congressional District, which includes the NIH, the National Institutes of Health; so I have the great fortune and honor and responsibility of representing thousands of people who work at NIH and who live in Rockville and in the neighborhood. So I see this as not just a national treasure and resource, but also a vibrant and vital part of my community that I represent.

I speak tonight not just as a politician, but I speak also as someone who has--I guess what we call around here--a preexisting condition because when I was in the Maryland State senate and as a professor of constitutional law at American University, I was given a diagnosis in the year 2010 of colon cancer.

I learned something very interesting going through the experience about the difference between misfortune and injustice. Because if you have a job that

you love and a family that you love and constituents that you love and it is a beautiful day and you are told that you have got stage III colon cancer, that is a misfortune. It can happen to anybody--liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, Independent, old, young, every race, every ethnicity. It can happen to anybody. It is a misfortune.

At the time, I was the floor leader in Maryland on marriage equality legislation, and it struck me that the misfortune can happen to anybody. But if you can't get health insurance because you love the wrong person or because you are unemployed or because you are too poor, that is not just a misfortune. That is an injustice because we, as a society, can do something about that.

So when we think about Alzheimer's disease or cystic fibrosis or lung cancer or diabetes 1 or 2, in a democratic society, our obligation is not to compound the misfortunes of life with governmental injustice; our job is to try to reduce misfortune because we are all citizens together.

So that is why I am so proud to represent NIH because, as has been said very eloquently by a number of speakers tonight, the NIH is in the forefront of defending our population against disease and serious illness.

So let's talk about Alzheimer's for a little bit.

More than 5 million Americans are living today with Alzheimer's disease. That is about the population of my State--everybody in Maryland, from Baltimore to Rockville, to Silver Spring, to Bethesda, to Chevy Chase, to Middletown and Frederick County, to Sykesville, all over Carroll County, from the eastern shore to western Maryland, millions of people. That is how many people across the land are suffering from Alzheimer's disease. And it is a number that is rapidly increasing. It could be as high as 16 million people by 2050 is what the experts at NIH are telling us.

Since 2000, deaths from Alzheimer's have increased a startling 89 percent. You have shown us what the graphs are, Mr. Garamendi. One in three senior citizens today dies from Alzheimer's or another form of dementia. For victims of this disease, it is demoralizing, devastating, debilitating, and draining for the whole family.

In Maryland, Alzheimer's affects 100,000 people, and it costs us around $1 billion in Medicaid dollars every year.

In 2017, it is estimated that, across the country, we will spend $259 billion caring for people with Alzheimer's and other kinds of dementia, with $175 billion being borne by Medicare and Medicaid, alone. This means nearly one out of every five Medicare dollars is spent on Alzheimer's.

So we have got to move quickly and effectively to address the crisis and to solve the puzzle of Alzheimer's disease; otherwise, these costs are going to continue to grow even more sharply, and Alzheimer's could overwhelm our healthcare system.

We need a cure, which is why the good people at the Alzheimer's Association are asking Congress to support a $414 million increase in the research budget at NIH for Alzheimer's in FY 2018. But President Trump has proposed a $5.8 billion cut to the NIH, which is a 19 percent reduction in the NIH budget.

Why?

Well, it is very hard to know. It is part of a proposal to slash $60 billion in science research, environmental protection, housing, the human needs budget, and to shift it into the Pentagon. Now, that is at a time, Mr. Garamendi, when a committee I serve on, Oversight and Government Reform, just had hearings where Democrats and Republicans, alike, were outraged to learn that $125 billion in waste, fraud, abuse, and contractor overruns is happening right now in the Pentagon.

We could save $125 billion just by taking seriously the problems in contracting and fraud and abuse that is taking place with the beltway bandits. But instead of going after that corruption and waste, they want to take $60 billion out of the human needs budget and shift it over to the Pentagon.

Well, that is going to have a disastrous effect on our ability to make progress. That is the point I think you are making tonight, Congressman Garamendi. You are saying that, when we invest in basic research on the diseases, we make progress.

Look what we have done with AIDS. It is amazing. Look what is happening with cystic fibrosis. We are making real progress because we are investing. We have got to not cut back on any of the research that is taking place. We have got to double down and invest, and we really need to do that with Alzheimer's.

So this move to slash the human needs budget, the medical research budget, and put it in the Pentagon is an assault on science, on medicine, and on the health care of our people. These are our people whose lives are at stake that we are talking about. These are our families that are suffering the savage repercussions of Alzheimer's disease. It is a terrible infliction on the land.

So I think that the idea of slashing $6 billion from research for serious diseases like Alzheimer's, like the doomed repeal-and-replace legislation that crashed and burned on Friday of last week, is totally counterproductive and destructive of the true needs and priorities of our people.

We spend more money on the military than the next five or six countries combined, and the Pentagon is swimming in a deep pool of waste, fraud, abuse, and contractor overruns today.

Let's focus on helping our own people right now, the way mature democracies do, not enriching beltway bandits and plutocrats and insiders the way that authoritarian governments do. The question of Alzheimer's is an urgent question for our time, just like the research into all of the other killer diseases that are afflicting our people.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Garamendi for making me part of this Special Order hour.

Mr. Speaker, we are here to discuss the rule for voting on TrumpCare, or RyanCare, or whatever they are calling it today, based on whoever is willing to put their name to it. But we learned upon arrival at work that the rules are that there are no rules.

It is ``Lord of the Flies Day'' here in the House of Representatives. They want to make us vote on a bill that no one has even read. No one can find it. Anything goes. The whole process has been a disaster, a debacle, a mockery of democracy--no hearings, no witnesses, no experts, no process, no deliberation, and now no bill even.

But the American people are saying ``no way.'' The polls show people are turning dramatically against that wreck of legislation that is missing in Washington today.

Yesterday, we heard about the Buffalo Bribe, the Hudson Hustle, the Kinderhook Kickback, every manner to try to round up votes from Members who know their political careers are in danger for going anywhere near this bill.

What do they propose to do?

What we know is they want to kick 24 million Americans off their health care, destroy Planned Parenthood, and transfer $600 billion up the wealth ladder in the United States.

This legislation, however it turns out today, will crash the system, which is what their chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has said he wants to do. If a foreign power like the Russians proposed to do this to America, we would consider it an act of aggression and war against the American people.

This bill is not a rescue mission, as they say. It is a wrecking ball, and we should put it to bed once and for all today.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Jayapal for her leadership on this Special Order.

I think the message is getting through to the American people: 24 million of us are about to lose health care if this legislation goes through.

In my home State of Maryland, 375,000 people are estimated to be on the chopping block in terms of their health insurance. In my district, the Eighth Congressional District--Montgomery, Frederick, and Carroll Counties--we could have 75,000 or 80,000 people lose their health care.

We were able to cut the uninsured rate in half with passage of the Affordable Care Act 7 years ago, and now they want to turn the clock back and take us in exactly the wrong direction.

If a foreign power like Russia, for example, tried to throw 24 million Americans off of their health care, we would consider it an act of sabotage, aggression, and war, but this is something that is happening inside the country. Nobody knows why they want to do that to older people with this age tax, why they want to do it to children, to people who have special health needs, to the sick.

It is also getting through that there is going to be $600 billion that travels upwards in America through a tax break to the wealthiest Americans. That is $600 billion that is moving upwards. This is not a healthcare plan, primarily. It is a wealth transfer plan, while we toss millions of our co-citizens to the curbside.

Seven years ago, we passed the Affordable Care Act. Millions of Americans have gotten health care for the first time, dramatically improving public health in lots of different ways, making sure that people could not be denied insurance coverage because of a preexisting condition, making sure that people in their twenties could stay on their parents' plan, ending lifetime insurance limits, ending annual limits, requiring insurance plans to pay for preventive services like flu shots and cancer screenings and mammograms, dramatically improving the public health. This has been a great success.

Tom Paine once said you cannot ``make a man unknow his knowledge, or unthink his thoughts.'' The American people know that we have made dramatic progress under the Affordable Care Act. We need to be moving more in the direction of covering more people and improving quality and reducing people's premiums and copays and deductibles.

This legislation, the repeal nightmare, goes in exactly the wrong direction. It jacks up everybody's premiums, increases the copays and

deductibles, while throwing millions of people to the sidelines.

I want to make one final point, which is the message has gotten through. The public opinion polls are showing that the American people are turning sharply against this terrible repeal plan, which means here in Congress the organizers of the plan are getting increasingly desperate, and they are making deals.

One of the deals that they have made with some upstate Republicans apparently is colloquially known around here as the Buffalo bribe or the Kinderhook kickback or the Hudson hustle. Someone called it today the Empire State enticement or simply Niagara calls.

There are some Republicans in upstate New York who are very nervous about voting for this bill, so what they have extracted is a promise, a very special provision that doesn't apply to the other 49 States. It applies only in New York, and it would say that New York State alone cannot assess its counties to participate financially in the Medicaid system. There are lots of other States that do it, but only New York could not do it. It could not assess the counties, except it could assess any jurisdiction with more than 5 million people.

Gee, what do you think that is? Maybe New York City.

Now, the problem with this other than it being sordid and unseemly-- this Buffalo bribery, this Hudson hustle--is that it is unconstitutional because the Federal Government can try to persuade States to do something by offering money, but it cannot extract a concession through coercion, and it cannot treat one State differently from every other State. It violates the principle of equal sovereignty.

I would just say, Congresswoman Jayapal, this legislation is not only reactionary, taking us back to a past nobody wants to go back to, and not only dangerous, but it is also unconstitutional because of the Buffalo bribe that is built into it.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor and commemorate the remarkable life of Carmen Delgado Votaw, one of my constituents who passed away on February 18, 2017 at the age of 82. Ms. Votaw was a civil and human rights giant and passionate participant in the global women's rights activist community.

Ms. Votaw, who was born in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, spent her career acting upon a vision of empowerment and inclusion for all women, especially in Latin America. She was a born community organizer, using immense tact, intellect, and grace to educate and enlighten others in order to open up cultural and political avenues for the advancement of women. Due to her years of work and advocacy in Latin America, she is credited with an increase in the number of countries that have signed the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women; a greater number of women in political and appointed offices; improved access to technology for rural women; and a higher literacy rate among women and girls.

Ms. Votaw received on multiple occasions presidential appointments in recognition of her outstanding abilities, including being appointed as Deputy Chair to the National Advisory Committee for Women. She served as Chief of Staff to Jaime Fuster of Puerto Rico in the House of Representatives, marking the first time a Hispanic woman had held that title. She was a founding member and President of the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women and a board member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. Ms. Votaw traveled around the globe to promote her agenda of civil and human rights. She visited 70 countries to participate in and speak at women's rights forums, including five United Nations World Conferences on Women. She is a published author, most notably having written the biographies of other distinguished Puerto Rican woman.

Among the organizations that have honored Ms. Votaw for her contributions to women's rights are the U.S. Marshals Service, the Instituto de Puerto Rico of New York, the National Institute for Women of Color, Hispanic USA Magazine, Federally Employed Women (FEW), and the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women. She has received the Hispanic Heritage Award for Education, a Civil Rights Award from NASA, MANA's Las Primeras Award, the National Cuban American Women's Association Award, and the National Council of Hispanic Women's Outstanding Achievement Award. She was inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame.

Even with her chock-full schedule of global engagement and leadership, Ms. Votaw was deeply devoted to her family and to her role as a grandmother. Please join me in extending condolences to her family and expressing gratitude for her life of dedication to helping all people find their voices. She made tangible contributions to the civil and human rights movements, the effects of which will be felt for generations to come.

Mr. Speaker, we are so proud of the leadership Congresswoman Jayapal is showing in both Washington State and Washington, D.C., in resisting these terrible cuts to the domestic budget of the people of the United States, in showing leadership, also especially in defending American values when it comes to immigration and affording a refuge to people fleeing political and religious repression all over the world.

She is a true leader and we are very proud of her. I am grateful that she is sharing a couple of minutes with me tonight to talk about the astonishing news of the day, which is the most dramatic and draconian budget cuts offered perhaps in our lifetime to the domestic budget of the United States.

It is going to take us many days--many weeks, indeed--to fully analyze what exactly will be axed with these budget proposals, but I wanted to start with a little exchange that took place today with Mick Mulvaney, who is leading the budget effort for the President.

He had a press conference and he was asked about the implications of these billions of dollars of cuts to Meals on Wheels. He was asked about one specific program, and he had no problem basically casting Meals on Wheels to the curbside, saying: ``It's just not showing any results.'' Which is why the Trump administration apparently feels good about slashing the domestic budget, including the community development block grants which help support Meals on Wheels across the country.

Well, let's just take this one tiny little example, then. Meals on Wheels actually serves 2.4 million Americans between the ages of 60 and 100. These are people who, for reasons of illness or physical infirmity or simply poverty, cannot go grocery shopping for themselves or prepare meals for themselves.

Why don't we take a moment to praise the people at Meals on Wheels who actually do something constructive and patriotic for their country. They bring food to older people who might otherwise go without.

You might say: Well, that is just kind of mushy-headed and soft- hearted. We are in the age of the budget ax. We need to destroy these domestic programs that are a terrible burden on the taxpayers.

Check out a 2013 review of studies on the issue of home-delivered meal programs like Meals on Wheels. The study says that these programs ``significantly improve diet quality, increase nutrient intake, and reduce food insecurity and nutritional risk among participants. Other beneficial outcomes include increased socialization opportunities, improvement in dietary adherence, and higher quality of life.''

Well, maybe you don't care about any of those things. Maybe you just consider about the bottom line.

Consider this finding. These programs are aligned with the Federal cost-containment policy to rebalance long-term care away from nursing homes to home and community-based services by helping older adults maintain independence and remain in their homes and communities as their health and functioning decline.

You see, for Mr. Mulvaney and President Trump and the Cabinet of billionaires and CEOs and ethically challenged Russian-influenced corporate titans, they don't care about how the program is actually working right here in American communities.

They don't care about facts. We know they have contempt for facts, which is why they give us their alternative facts. They don't care about studies and books because we know the President is their leader and he doesn't read books.

They definitely don't care about the elderly people who can't make it to the grocery store or who can't afford nutritious meals on their own. These are the same people, after all, that they propose to throw to the curb on Medicaid, with their proposal released last week in the cloak of darkness to repeal the Affordable Care Act and gut Medicaid and replace it with a monstrosity of a program which even their own Members can't support. Under their plan, 14 million would lose their healthcare insurance. Millions of elderly people would lose their insurance.

Now, with this mean-spirited little proposal to take a relative crumb away from the community development block grant and from Meals on Wheels, they would deprive a lot of people even of a wholesome dinner delivered to their home.

Why do they want to slash all of these programs across the board: the EPA, the State Department, the Agriculture Department, the Labor Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Commerce Department, the Education Department, HUD, Transportation, Interior, and so on? Why?

Well, the President has announced he wants to take $54 billion out of that slice of the pie for nondefense discretionary spending, which accounts for only 16 percent of the overall budget, and put that $54 billion directly into the Pentagon.

Just to repeat, they want to take $54 billion out of the domestic budget, nondefense discretionary spending, and put it into the Pentagon for a military buildup.

But for what?

The world's second largest military power is Russia. We outspend them 10 to 1. We are a giant and they are a dwarf.

Vladimir Putin, in any event, is Donald Trump's best friend, his BFF, his bosom buddy. The Trump-Putin relationship may be the President's most successful long-term relationship, at least politically speaking.

All that money that goes to the Pentagon, why? What is it for? Is it possible that Mr. Bannon and Mr. Trump are thinking about a war drive?

The President has tweeted about World War III in a very cavalier and flippant way.

It is disturbing. Nobody really knows. But one thing we do know is that all of that money that goes over to the Pentagon, if history is any record, will be available for the beltway bandits, the inside players with political influence and the mega corporations to go and make a buck off of the American taxpayer.

We will strip it from the EPA, and we will strip it from the Department of State, and we will strip it from education and we will put it in the Pentagon, and that is where we know a lot of people are going to get rich.

They are going from Meals on Wheels to deals on wheels. That is the name of the game. No more Meals on Wheels. It is all about deals on wheels. You have got to know the President, you have got to know the inside players in the

billionaire Cabinet, and then you can make some money.

Who are they going to sacrifice for this operation announced this week?

Well, it would take us all night to go through all of the domestic programs and projects that the American people depend on that are going to be sliced and diced because of this budget proposal, at least if it goes through.

But let's start with the National Institutes of Health, the NIH. The administration proposes to cut nearly $6 billion from the NIH--$5.8 billion they want to get rid of.

Now, what is the NIH, which happens to be in my congressional district in Rockville--and I am so proud of that--where we have got doctors and nurses and researchers and scientists who are working every day as part of the institutional world leader in biomedical research?

This is an entity that supports hundreds of thousands of jobs. These cuts would devastate the NIH and their ability to research lifesaving cures and treatments for diseases.

What kinds of diseases are being treated there?

I am not going to be able to go through all of them because there are hundreds of them that are being researched, where treatments are being developed, where patients are being seen, where progress is being made. Acute respiratory distress syndrome, Agent Orange and dioxin, aging, alcoholism, Alzheimer's disease, ALS, anorexia, anthrax, antimicrobial resistance, anxiety disorders, aphasia, arthritis, assistive technology, asthma, attention deficit disorder, autism, autoimmune disease. That is just the A's.

Let's keep going a little bit. Batten disease, biodefense, bioengineering, biotechnology, bipolar disorder, brain cancer, brain disorders, breast cancer, cancer, cannabinoid research, cardiovascular, cerebral palsy, cervical cancer, child abuse and neglect research, Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, childhood leukemia, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, climate change, climate-related exposures and conditions, colorectal cancer, and on and on. That is just the A's, the B's, and the C's.

They want to cut $6 billion from the NIH, which is working to cure, address, study, and manage the diseases and the sicknesses that our people are dealing with; and just cavalierly they say they want to slash it so they can pour all of this money over to the military side for a reason unknown.

When they came down with their executive orders, which have now been struck down by multiple Federal District Courts as unconstitutional, as a violation of the Establishment Clause, as a violation likely of due process and equal protection and so on, what they cited was 9/11 multiple times. They cited 9/11. The odd thing, though, was that the three source countries for the 9/11 hijackers--Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates--were left off their executive orders, even right up until today.

Why?

Some people say it is because Donald Trump has extensive business dealings with corporations and governments in those three countries. Nobody really knows. But they developed those orders, which the GOP proudly once called the Muslim ban, in response allegedly to 9/11. Even if you could blame an entire people for the acts of individual terrorists, they didn't do it. They turned to some other countries because that didn't interfere with the President's business interests.

So we have got this huge military buildup and we have got the siphoning away of tens of billions of dollars of the American people's hard-earned money away from medical research and diseases and environmental protection all into the Pentagon. For what reason, nobody knows, and they haven't told us.

What a dangerous moment this is in the life of the American Republic. What a perilous time this is for a nation built on the principle that that great Republican President Abraham Lincoln called government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Their budget proposal is a job killer. It is going to kill hundreds of thousands of jobs. It devastates and ruins the search for cures, the progress we are making in diseases like cystic fibrosis and diabetes. Diseases that afflict hundreds of thousands, millions of our people, they are just going to pull the plug on that. They are ransacking our children's education. They are hollowing out the rural communities. They are making urban life far more dangerous. They are weakening our leadership overseas. And, of course, because they don't believe in climate change, they are undermining our ability to respond to the great peril that faces us as a people.

Just like the proposal to trash the Affordable Care Act cannot go through this body because there must be a majority of responsible Members of this body who will not accept that terrible proposal that will throw 24 million of our people off their insurance, this body also cannot accept this terrible budget. It must have arrived here DOA.

If a foreign government, a rival to America, an enemy of America, had come up with this budget, we would regard it as an act of aggression against the American people. You could view it as a declaration of war against the prosperity, the health, and the welfare of our own people. But, alas, it didn't come from abroad. At least it was addressed that it came from the White House. It appears to have come from the administration, yet it threatens our way of life.

I would urge all of my colleagues to very carefully study this budget proposal over the next week or two and make clear that these are not the priorities of the American people, make clear that these are not the values of the American people, and this is not the future of the American people. We must continue to make progress. That means we must reject the Trump budget.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself as much time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, we have seen a number of bills this session which are designed to shut the door on victims of corporate misfeasance and negligence and to nail the door shut. H.R. 725 is part of this wave of legislation.

Like most other bills we have seen this session with brazenly Orwellian titles, the so-called Innocent Party Protection Act of 2017 has nothing to do with protecting innocent parties. Rather, it is just the latest attempt to tilt the civil justice system dramatically in favor of big corporate defendants by making it much more difficult for plaintiffs to pursue State law claims in State courts under the system of federalism designed by our Founders.

Again, this is a familiar experience because the bill addresses a completely nonexistent problem. If there had been a real problem, the Judiciary Committee might have held a hearing in which we could have invited groups to come forward who support tort victims. They could have come and testified about why it was so important for the interests of civil justice for us to pass this legislation.

But there was no hearing at all. We didn't hear any witnesses, much less the testimony of those groups that represent victims of mass toxic torts, asbestos poisoning, lead poisoning, sex discrimination lawsuits--none of it.

In fact, the groups that we would have called, if we were interested in the testimony of victims and people seeking civil justice, oppose this legislation overwhelmingly: the Alliance for Justice opposes it; the Center for Justice and Democracy opposes it; the Consumer Federation of America opposes it; the National Association of Consumer Advocates opposes it; the National Consumer Law Center opposes it; the Natural Resources Defense Council opposes it; Public Citizen opposes it; the Sierra Club opposes it.

Under current law, a defendant may remove a case, alleging State law claims, to a Federal court only if there is complete diversity of citizenship between all plaintiffs and all defendants. If the plaintiff adds an instate defendant to the case solely for the purpose of defeating jurisdiction, this constitutes fraudulent joinder today; and in such circumstances, the case may be removed directly to Federal court.

In determining whether a joinder was fraudulent, the court considers only whether there was any basis for a claim against the nondiverse defendant. The defendant must show that there was no possibility of recovery or no reasonable basis for adding the nondiverse defendant to the suit.

This very high standard has guided our Federal courts for more than a century and it has functioned well, and the bill's proponents offer no objective evidence to the contrary. And again, we have had no hearing. For a new Member of Congress like me, who comes from the Maryland State Senate, I am absolutely astonished and amazed that we would think of overturning a standard fixture in our civil justice system without so much as a hearing as to what the problem is.

H.R. 725 would replace a time-honored standard with an ambiguous one that would dramatically increase the costs and burdens of litigation on plaintiffs in Federal courts. It would try to strip our State courts of their basic powers to hear cases relating to their citizens. This is an assault on federalism.

The measure would require a court to deny a motion remanding to the State

courts unless the court finds, one, that it is ``plausible to conclude that applicable State law would impose liability'' on an instate defendant; two, that the plaintiff had a ``good faith intention to prosecute the action against each'' instate defendant or to seek a joint judgment; and three, that there was no ``actual fraud in the pleading of jurisdictional facts.''

This gauntlet of hurdles suddenly shifts the burden and creates a presumption that a Federal court should hear the case, making it far more expensive and difficult for plaintiffs to have their cases heard in State court.

H.R. 725 would effectively overturn the local defendant exception, which prohibits removal to Federal court even if complete diversity of citizenship exists when the defendant is a citizen of the State where the suit was filed.

The bill's radical changes to longstanding jurisdictional practice reveal the authentic purpose behind the measure. It is simply intended to stifle the ability of plaintiffs to have their choice of forum and, possibly, even their day in court.

In addition, H.R. 725 would sharply increase the cost of litigation for plaintiffs and further burden the Federal court system. For example, the meanings of terms like ``plausible'' and ``good faith intention'' are ambiguous and will spawn substantial litigation over their proper interpretation and application, further postponing decisions and justice.

Additionally, these standards would require a court to engage in a mini-trial during the early procedural stages of the case without any opportunity for the full development of evidence. Again, this would sharply increase the burdens and costs of litigation for ordinary citizens, for plaintiffs, which appears to be, to my mind, the only possible contemplated result of this legislation.

Finally, we need to focus on the fact that this bill offered by the majority raises profound federalism concerns, which I would have hoped they would be attentive to. Matters of State law should be decided by State courts, subject to certain exceptions as set forth in the Constitution.

It was our constitutional design that matters of civil dispute and conflict go to State courts, State judges, and State juries, all of them closer to the people themselves, unless you have a Federal question, a matter of Federal statutory law, a matter of Federal constitutional law, or you have got diversity jurisdiction.

H.R. 725 bulldozes this key federalism constraint and casts a shadow, unnecessarily and improperly, over State courts, the courts of the people. By applying sweeping and vaguely worded new standards to the determination of when a State case must be remanded to State court, the bill denies State courts the ability to decide and, ultimately, to shape the unfolding of State law. This is completely contrary to the design of the Founders, many of them Virginians, like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and George Mason, who wanted the State courts to be the central arena for the resolution of civil conflicts and tort disputes.

Simply put, H.R. 725 tramples State sovereignty and our basic constitutional structure. For these reasons and for the fact that nobody has demonstrated there is a real problem, I urge the House to resist this unnecessary and flawed legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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

I very much appreciate my colleague's remarks there. I want to make one point before I yield to my distinguished colleague from New York.

Mr. Chairman, my colleague asked us to reckon with the fact that it is emotionally devastating for people to be sued, and, undoubtedly, it is in certain cases. But compare whatever it might feel like to be sued in whatever case he might have in mind with the outrageous emotional devastation caused by asbestos poisoning, by lead poisoning, by mass sexual harassment, sex discrimination, race discrimination, all of the torts that come to dominate what takes place in our courts. So if we are going to have a new emotional devastation standard, I would put the plaintiffs up against the large corporate defendants any day.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to my distinguished colleague from New York (Mr. Nadler).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson).

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

Mr. Chairman, I think that we are actually progressing in our discussion of the issue because we presently have a law against fraudulent joinder. They simply want to make it far more difficult for plaintiffs to get justice in State courts. The law already makes it impossible to fraudulently join someone.

So in the case offered by the distinguished gentleman from Georgia, I could very much see an out-of-State corporate behemoth that owns nursing homes across the country saying that all of this should be in Federal court because the person who actually committed the sexual assault instate is judgment-proof because they don't have any money and that is not really a plausible opportunity to recover, and, therefore, it should stay in Federal court.

The grand irony here, Mr. Chairman, is that the party which sings lullabies about federalism and states' rights is in the business of stripping our State courts and our people of the opportunity to get into State court. All of this is about forcing everybody into Federal court. I remember a President who recently said in his inaugural address that the whole sum and substance of his administration is to give power back to the States and back to the people, but this legislation is designed to wreck federalism and to force everybody into Federal court where the big corporate defendants and the fancy lawyers have every conceivable advantage over people who are just trying to get justice when they have been injured in their State.

Mr. Chairman, the substantive issues at stake here are obviously complex, and I would invite all Americans to try to research what is going on. But if you don't have the time to actually study the more than a century in which we have had current fraudulent joinder rules and you don't have time to go and examine the bill as submitted by the majority, then just consider the procedure that has gotten us to this point.

There has been no hearing on this bill, there has been no call for this bill by anybody who has been injured in a civil tort case, and all of the groups that try to stand up for citizens against the largest corporations who are bankrolled by billions of dollars and are trying to force everybody these days into arbitration and to shut the courthouse door, all of those groups are opposed to the legislation because they understand what it is going to do.

It is going to make it far more difficult for people to prosecute civil

claims when they have been injured in something like a sexual harassment case, a sexual violence case, a discrimination case, an asbestos poisoning case, or a mass toxic tort. It is going to be far more difficult for people to get justice in their State courts.

Apparently, the interests of the large corporate polluters and inflictors of injuries--tortfeasors--are so important that we are willing to trample the basic principles of our constitutional design which is that these kinds of cases go into State court for State resolution, we reserve the Federal courts for complicated questions of Federal law and real cases of diversity jurisdiction, not phony cases of diversity jurisdiction where they try to eliminate the instate defendant, but real cases of diversity jurisdiction where nobody else is involved.

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

Mr. Chairman, the Soto amendment is an excellent amendment and I can't see why anybody would oppose it. I can't see, in the first instance, why anyone would want to keep the people's cases out of the people's courts in their own States.

It seems as if there is a move somewhere in this Congress that is so intent on protecting polluters and the manufacturers of auto defects that they are willing to trample our basic principles of federalism and invade the proper province of the courts.

The Soto amendment would exempt from this bill all cases in which the plaintiff seeks compensation for public health risks like fracking or any other kind of water contamination. Water contamination is devastating to our communities regardless of the source, as demonstrated by the ongoing Flint water crisis in Michigan.

This bill makes it easier for large corporations to remove State law claims to Federal court, where they think they have got a better chance of beating the claims of the small guy. The Soto amendment at least would carve out cases where there are public health risks at stake, such as those caused by fracking, which has been proven to generate earthquakes, well contamination, and the poisoning of local water supplies.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to H.R. 985, the so-called Fairness in Class Action Litigation and Furthering Asbestos Claims Transparency Act of 2017.

I want to thank my distinguished colleague from Texas for his presentation and for also making clear that the overriding purpose here is really to give the class action mechanism the guillotine. Now, this doesn't formally abolish the class action mechanism. It is not the guillotine, but it is a straitjacket. Let's be very clear, the whole purpose of this legislation is to make it virtually impossible for class action lawsuits to be brought by groups of citizens who share a common injury from things such as consumer rip-offs, pharmaceutical drug mistakes, faulty product design, sex discrimination, sexual harassment, poisonous breast implants, asbestos poisoning, lead poisoning, and so on--all of the billions of dollars worth of tort actions, nothing fraudulent about them, all of them already determined by courts and by juries to have taken place against our citizens, and they want to make it virtually impossible for people to proceed in court under the class action mechanism.

I began with a very important process observation which I noted before, Mr. Chairman. There has been no hearing on this legislation. There have been

no calls for this legislation from people allegedly suffering the horrors of the reviled class action lawyers. I notice that while my thoughtful colleague from Texas uses much of his time to deplore the work of plaintiffs' lawyers, he says nothing about defendants' lawyers, who have defended guilty parties in all of the cases we have mentioned before--all of the mass toxic torts, all of the drug injury cases, all of the environmental crimes and torts, all the asbestos poisoning and so on--and they have got a right to do that. They are simply doing their job. But the plaintiffs' lawyers have a right to do their job, too. That is how our system works.

I find it fundamentally disturbing that anybody would be out denouncing lawyers for representing people who have been injured in a tort case. But I oppose this misguided legislation because it sends another huge Valentine and wet kiss to large corporate polluters and tortfeasors but gives the finger to millions of American citizens who suffer injuries from these defendants.

This legislation would shield corporate wrongdoers by making it far more difficult for them to get together to obtain justice in a class action lawsuit. So whether it is by making it almost impossible for Americans to pursue their day in court through the class action vehicle or threatening the privacy of asbestos victims, it is clear that H.R. 985 wants to give corporate polluters and tortfeasors the power to play hide-and-go-seek with their victims in Federal court whenever they want to.

And it raises the broader question of who rightfully should hold power in a representative democracy like ours. Should it be large, private corporations, who are seeking rightfully their own profits? Or should it be the people, who are supposed to be sovereign?

I say it is the people.

This bill only favors the interests of the already powerful, to the detriment of the vast majority of the American people.

In cases seeking monetary relief, the bill requires a party seeking class certification to show that every potential class member suffered the same type and scope of injury at the certification stage, something that is virtually impossible to do. This requirement alone would sound the death knell for class actions, which are the principal means we have in court for consumers to hold wrongdoers accountable, without having to engage in multiple duplicative actions all over a State or all over the country, piling up the expenses for courts.

Most importantly, class actions make it feasible for those who have smaller but not inconsequential injuries to get justice. These injuries include diverse matters like products liability, employment discrimination, sexual harassment, and so on.

It is already very difficult to pursue class actions. Under current law, the courts strictly limit the grounds by which a large group of plaintiffs may be certified as a class, including the existing requirement that their claims raise common and factual legal questions, and that the class representative's claims must be typical of those of the other class members.

Finally, title II of H.R. 985 gives asbestos defendants--the very entities whose products have injured millions of Americans--new weapons with which to go out and harm their victims. This part of the bill would require a bankruptcy asbestos trust to report on the court's public case docket--which is then made immediately available on the internet--the name and exposure history of each asbestos victim who gets payment from a trust, as well as the basis of any payment made to that victim.

As a result, the confidential personal information of asbestos claimants, including their names and entire exposure histories, would be irretrievably released into the public domain. Imagine what identity thieves, reporters, insurers, potential employers, lenders, and data collectors could do with this sensitive information.

The proper title of this section of H.R. 985 should be the alternative fact act, not the FACT Act, because it penalizes the victims while favoring the perpetrators.

The bill requires the trusts to make intrusive disclosures of victims' personal information, but it makes no comparable demands on asbestos manufacturers, some of which intentionally concealed the life- threatening dangers of their products not just for months or years, but for decades, the result of which millions of unsuspecting workers and consumers were exposed to this toxic substance.

Essentially, this bill re-victimizes asbestos victims by exposing their private information to all of the world--information that has absolutely nothing to do with compensation for asbestos exposure.

Accordingly, I must oppose also this highly flawed provision of the legislation.

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

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

Mr. Chairman, I am afraid that the eloquence of my opponent might cloud the issue for some of the people in America. So rather than having us go back and forth disputing the character of the legislation before you, I urge everybody to go to it. But let's go to some of the people who care most about protecting innocent Americans from corporate wrongdoing and injury in the marketplace and in the workplace, and let's see what they have got to say about it.

Mr. Chairman, I have a letter to the House from groups who oppose this legislation as an assault on the rights of consumers and workers, including the Alliance for Justice, the American Association for Justice, Americans for Financial Reform, the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, the California Kids IAQ, the Center for Justice and Democracy, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Central Florida Jobs with Justice, Coal River Mountain Watch, the Committee to Support the Antitrust Laws, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Watchdog, Consumers for Auto

Reliability and Safety, Consumers Union.

I have just gone through the Cs. I am not going to take us all the way through the Zs, Mr. Chairman. But America's consumer groups are opposed to this legislation, and America's workers' groups are opposed to this legislation. It is a wolf in sheep's clothing, Mr. Chairman.

I have also gotten, specifically on the asbestos point, a letter from groups concerned with occupational health and safety who strongly oppose the Furthering Asbestos Claim Transparency Act, saying that this bill will drain critical resources that have been set aside to secure justice for victims of asbestos diseases, while simultaneously publishing those victims' personal information on the internet. Included in this very long list of opponents are the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, the Communications Workers of America, the Maine Labor Group on Health, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, the New Jersey State Industrial Union Council, and on and on.

So, again, they pushed this legislation through the House of Representatives at the speed of light, but under the cloak of darkness with no hearing at all. And then they come out and say: It is really for you, trust us. We are the Federal Government. We are here to help you. We are going to move all of the cases into Federal Court, and we are going to make it a lot easier to nullify class actions.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler).

Mr. Chairman, I thank Mr. Nadler for his excellent comments.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson).

I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman.

Mr. Chair, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Cicilline).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Minnesota (Ms. McCollum).

Mr. Chair, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott.)

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

We obviously have a different vantage point on what is taking place in the civil courtrooms of America today. On our side, we look out over America and in the courts and we see millions of our neighbors, our fellow citizens who are suffering the effects of asbestos poisoning, which is real, not imaginary; lead poisoning, which is real, not imaginary; and manufacturing defects by large automobile manufacturers and others.

They look at it and all they see is fraud, and they want to put the class action mechanism in a straightjacket to make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for people to pursue class actions. They want to put the names of asbestos victims up online for the whole world to see.

Obviously, we have got a division of opinion within the legislative branch. What about the judiciary itself?

Well, the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policymaking arm of the Federal judiciary, and the American Bar Association both strongly oppose H.R. 985. The conference report that has been studying class actions for 5 years has considered many of the issues addressed in H.R. 985. It strongly urges Congress not to amend the class action procedures found in rule 23 outside the Rules Enabling Act process.

Likewise, the ABA observes the many problems of advancing comprehensive class action reform without a hearing to examine all the complicated issues involved with so many rule changes.

Mr. Chairman, the other side invoked some hearings. I was astonished to hear it because I have been here for several months. I just joined Congress. I didn't have any hearings. It turns out I understand they were referring to

hearings that took place last year, perhaps the year before, where I understand--but all of it is hearsay to me because I wasn't here--that actual victims of asbestos poisoning were not permitted themselves to testify. It was a completely one-sided, lopsided process, and I will try to get to the bottom of that in order to determine it.

This is what happens when they are moving legislation through this body at lightening speed, but really in the thick of darkness because we don't have any meaningful, transparent communication about what the underlying issues are.

Well, I restate my opposition to this. The class action mechanism has been a central vehicle for justice for Americans for many decades. And now without so much as a hearing, without the mobilization of any proof that this should be done over the objections of the Judicial Conference of the United States, over the objections of the American Bar Association, and over the objections of every consumer group and worker group that has written in that I have seen, they are purporting to be acting in the name of the American people. In fact, what they are doing is they are pulling the rug out from underneath the class action vehicle.

Class actions have been so central to vindicating the rights of people who have been victimized by corporate polluters and toxic contaminators and automobile manufacturers who knowingly put defective instruments into cars, leading to people's deaths and injuries, and they want to make it more difficult for people to pursue justice in the courts.

I urge all of my colleagues to study this legislation the best they can and to reject it.

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

Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the manager's amendment to H.R. 985 with all due deference to the chair of our committee.

Although the amendment makes a number of mostly technical amendments to the bill, it still fails to address the numerous fundamental flaws that we have identified in the underlying legislation, which is a dagger pointing at the heart of class action lawsuits in America.

The major substantive change that I noted under the manager's amendment was that class certification would still be prohibited when a named plaintiff or class representative is a relative or employee of the class counsel, but made some other changes narrowing the scope of the conflict of interest provision slightly. The amendment still fails to address the fundamental problem with that provision, which is that there is no justification for concluding that the specified relationships are, per se, problematic or that class certification should be denied just because such a relationship exists.

The general problem pervading the legislation remains. The first is a procedural problem, which we have identified.

I was delighted that the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Farenthold) responded to our complaint that we had had no hearings on the bill. In response to that, he directed my attention to a hearing that took place in 2011, 6 years ago.

There are nine members of the Judiciary Committee who just joined this year and many dozens of Members who have joined the House since 2011. It is true that we could go back and read it within the 24 hours we had to do that before the markup took place. We could also go back and just read at that point the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees to everybody a jury trial which attempts to establish civil justice in America.

What we are getting instead is an attempt to put class action lawsuits and civil liability into a straitjacket. It is an attempt to make it far harder for people to see their rights vindicated when they have been violated by an auto manufacturer, someone who is putting asbestos into materials that are being used near servicemembers, those who are selling poisonous breast implants, and so on.

I am rising in opposition to the amendment simply because it does nothing to answer the many massive objections leveled against this legislation by consumer groups like the Consumer Federation of America, by groups defending civil justice, like the Alliance for Justice, and indeed by the Judicial Conference of the United States and the American Bar Association, both of which strongly oppose this legislation because they do not think it is warranted. They don't think that it responds to any problems that are really out there.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to have this time on behalf of the minority and the Progressive Caucus. We have a number of very distinguished Representatives who want to talk about what is going on with people's health care in America and the attacks leveled against it this week in Congress.

Before we begin, I yield to my distinguished colleague from New York (Mr. Jeffries).

honoring christopher ``notorious b.i.g.'' wallace

Thank you very much to the distinguished gentleman from New York. We are going to go from the Notorious B.I.G.'s music to the notorious GOP healthcare proposal being considered in Congress this week.

General Leave

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

Mr. Speaker, I am going to yield to my colleague from Minnesota, Mr. Ellison. It was 7 years ago in March 2010 that President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law extending access to affordable health insurance coverage to more than 20 million previously uninsured Americans.

Insurance companies under the new law could no longer deny you insurance because you had a preexisting condition, and, surely, that makes sense. The fact that you have a preexisting medical condition should be the reason that you get health insurance, not the reason you get denied health insurance.

Also, under the new ACA, young people up to age 26 could stay on their family plans, which helps families like mine because I have got a 22-year-old, a 20-year-old, and a 25-year-old. And believe me, they would not have health insurance if not for the Affordable Care Act, and I think my situation is that of millions of people across the country.

But today, the ACA is in mortal danger. The House GOP finally unveiled their plan for repealing and replacing the ACA with something else, which I call the unaffordable care act, that will cost millions of people their health insurance, increase everybody's premiums, reduce everybody's coverage, and bring incoherence and chaos into the system.

Mr. Speaker, I am going to yield to Mr. Ellison in just a moment to talk about what is going on with this legislation. But I do want to say something about the process by which we arrived here, because back when the Affordable Care Act was being debated--and I

wasn't in Congress then, so I approach this just as a historian--there were multiple complaints from the GOP Members about how fast things were going, how the legislation was being rammed through.

For example, our now-Speaker Paul Ryan said about the ACA: ``Congress is moving fast to rush through a healthcare overhaul that lacks a key ingredient,'' he said, ``the full participation of you, the American people.''

Greg Walden, the Energy and Commerce chairman from Oregon, said: On a bill of this significance, you would think we would at least allow people to come in who are affected by the extraordinary changes in this bill, and have a chance to let us know how it affects them.

And the Ways and Means Committee chairman today, Kevin Brady, said: The Democratic Congress and White House simply aren't listening. The Democrats are ramming it through over the public's objections.

Well, let's go back and look at how long it took the Democrats to get the Affordable Care Act passed and how much public participation and debate there really was.

Here in Congress, there were 79 hearings--I repeat, 79 hearings--on the Affordable Care Act.

There were 181 witnesses, both expert witnesses and members of the public, citizens coming to testify about the need for expanded health insurance coverage for the American people because of the high expenses of health insurance and the rip-offs of various insurance companies.

There were multiple scores that were received from the Congressional Budget Office during that time, as there was constant attention to the budgetary and fiscal implications of the Affordable Care Act.

Now, fast-forward to today. We took a year-and-a-half to get to the Affordable Care Act. How about them? Well, let's see.

The Republicans introduced their bill on Monday. They passed their bill in the dead of night, at 4:30 in the morning, 3 days later. There have been no hearings on the bill. There have been no witnesses to testify on the bill. There have been no expert witnesses. There have been no witnesses from the public.

There is no analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office on how much the bill will cost American taxpayers, American citizens, on their plans or how many Americans will lose their health care at all.

In other words, the party that complained about how fast the Affordable Care Act came into being, which was over the course of a year and a half with dozens of hearings, and dozens and dozens--more than 100 witnesses and lots of public debate where we went back to our districts and had townhall meetings, where there was orchestrated opposition against the plan, but we still stood there and we engaged in the dialogue, and we stood up for the Affordable Care Act. The people who said that that was too fast are now ramming through, at unprecedented, breakneck, lightning speed, a bill that will wreak devastation on the healthcare rights of the American people.

That is what is taking place. If you have got a contaminated, clandestine, secret, closed process, it will produce a terrible, undemocratic, and unhealthy result. That is what we are going to describe to you tonight.

I am delighted to yield to my colleague from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison.)

Mr. Speaker, I hope the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison) will stick around. I want to salute him and congratulate him on his new position, not only as a leading Member of the United States House of Representatives, but now as vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

All of your colleagues are beaming with pride about your accomplishments and about your national political leadership, and we are delighted that the rest of the country is going to get to share in your leadership now in your new aggressive role out organizing opposition to what is taking place in Washington today.

I want to take a little break from railing about this unaffordable care act that is going to drive everybody's rates up and throw millions of people off their health insurance.

I want to say a couple of good things that President Trump said as a candidate because he attacked ObamaCare, but he said he wanted a system that covered everybody. He's been quoted many times speaking in favor of a single-payer plan that would cover every citizen. Now, that talk has completely dried up. It has vanished and disappeared.

I urge President Trump to go back to his original instinct, which is that, if you are going to repeal and replace ObamaCare--the Affordable Care Act, as he keeps saying--let's replace it with the kind of system they have in Canada, they have in Europe, and just cover everybody. That would be the direction to go in. But to go backwards to throw millions of people off their health care is precisely what the American people don't want.

Now, here is another proposal that President Trump mentioned in passing when he stood in this Chamber the other night. He said: Let's repeal the special interest lobbyist provision that was snuck into Medicare part D, saying that the government could not negotiate for lower drug prices with the pharmaceutical companies.

Again, that was a very popular talking point for Donald Trump when he was running for President. He campaigned like Williams Jennings Bryan, but he is governing like William McKinley; that is, a cabinet filed with CEOs and billionaires. He did mention that. That was one tiny crumb, a remnant of the populist campaign he ran.

I urge my Republican colleagues to throw this terrible bill that they are going to waste everybody's time on, that cannot pass, which their Freedom Caucus is totally opposed to; and, instead, focus, at least, on something we can agree on, which is that the 25 or $30 billion that that special interest provision is costing us should be saved. We should allow the government to negotiate for lower drug prices in the Medicare program the way we are allowed to negotiate for lower drug prices in the Medicaid program and in the VA program.

So we can work together in a bipartisan basis. However, we are not going to allow anybody to throw millions of Americans off of their health insurance plan while driving up everybody else's rates and bringing the whole healthcare system to the brink of ruin.

When I got elected to Congress, I went down to the basement of the Longworth House Office Building after I was sworn in to sign up for my health care because we get health care as part of our jobs as Members of Congress. We pay for it through the local ACA healthcare exchange in the District of Columbia, but we are guaranteed the right to get that because of the Affordable Care Act.

When I went down that morning, I was signing up and I was looking

through the memo about what we would be doing during my first week in Congress here. Sure enough, I saw that the GOP leadership had put on there a procedural proposal to set the stage for the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act.

I looked up to see a line of my new colleagues waiting to come and sign up for their health care. Some of them I recognized as my Democratic colleagues, and some of them I recognized as my new distinguished Republican colleagues. And I said to myself: Wait a second. Please tell me that we are not going to have new Members of Congress come in here and sign up for their own health care that they get as part of their job as Representatives in the United States House of Representatives and then go upstairs to this floor to vote to strip millions of people of their health care.

Surely that is not what democratic representation means in the 21st century; that we get to have health care through our jobs, but we are going to take away the health care that other people have. But, my friends, I am sorry to say that is the reality that we are in this week.

Congressman Ellison is right, we are not taking the position that the Affordable Care Act is perfect. Far from it. I wasn't in Congress then. I don't know if the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Ellison) was. I wasn't in Congress then. But had I been in Congress, I would have been fighting for a single-payer plan.

I am on legislation this session to support a single-payer plan. In other words, the Affordable Care Act, for me, doesn't go far enough in guaranteeing that everybody has health care and in dramatically reducing the role of the insurance companies so we can spend more money on health care and less money on red tape and bureaucracy.

So the Affordable Care Act, which I support with all of my heart right now against all the attacks to dismantle it, was a compromise. It was a very carefully crafted compromise. Remember, we had more than 100 witnesses come and testify about it. They had zero on their crash-and- burn legislation this week. We had dozens and dozens of hearings where we had witnesses come and testify about it. They have had zero on their crash-and-cash legislation--crash the system and give cash to the insurance companies and the wealthiest people in the country. So we had an open process, and it was a compromise.

I remember very clearly as a State senator in Maryland watching President Obama on TV saying, if we are starting from scratch, he would be in favor of a single-payer plan. He said that would be the logical way to go. It is what they have in Europe. It is what they have in Canada and Mexico.

He said we are path dependent. We are on a particular path. We understand the role that the big insurance companies play, and they have got a lot of political power, and we have got everybody on the GOP side screaming and shouting for the insurance companies. So he said let's figure out a plan where we keep the insurance companies involved.

Guess what? That plan was hatched at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, much beloved and revered by the GOP Members of this body. It was the exact same plan that Governor Mitt Romney, their standard bearer running for President a couple of elections ago, put into place in Massachusetts.

The Affordable Care Act was the compromise. Now everybody is on their case because they are hiding under their desks, they are running away from their constituents, and they are canceling their townhalls. Nobody could get a plan out of them.

Suddenly they pull a plan out of their sleeve in the middle of the night. They rush it through this body. They voted on it at, I think, 4:30 in the morning after a 27-hour hearing. Everything is meant to be under the cloak of darkness, and people are making fun of them about how silly it is.

I sympathize with them because there is nothing they can do because the Affordable Care Act was the compromise. Now, they wanted to name it ObamaCare, of course, because they couldn't stand the idea that President Obama would get the political credit for bringing tens of millions of Americans health insurance. So they had to name it on him and then make up all of these stories about how terrible it was.

Guess what? They wake up today. Nobody is calling it ObamaCare anymore. President Obama is doing his own thing. They are calling it the Affordable Care Act, and people are defending it all over the country in 50 States in every congressional district.

You have got indivisible groups that have grown up all over the place, and my dear colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle are afraid to face their own constituents. They are canceling their townhalls, they are hiding under their beds and behind their office sofas, which, in many cases, are the exact same pieces of furniture because they sleep in their offices here. They don't want to face the people and the fact that we do not want to turn the clock back and go backwards and wreck this system. It is a lot easier to destroy things than to build things.

So we urge the GOP: If you want to meet to make real substantial improvements, expansion of the Affordable Care Act to include more people, to reduce the cost of the bureaucracy, let's do it. But your plan is a terrible plan. Your plan is one that is going to throw millions of people off of their health insurance. Your plan is one that is built around a huge tax break and transfer of wealth upwards in the country--one of the biggest transfers of wealth in the country ever to go in the northward direction.

It is an amazing thing that that is how they have designed their plan.

So it is a huge tax break to the insurance companies and to the wealthiest people, and millions of others are thrown off of their insurance plans. Everybody else's premiums are going to be soaring, and the whole system is likely to come crashing down.

If a foreign government like Russia, for example, were trying to do this to us, we would consider it an act of aggression, an act of war against the American people in our health care. But this is, instead, coming from what used to be one of our great political parties, the party of that President who talked about government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

We have, instead, a wrecking ball targeted right at you, the American people, coming after your health insurance, your health care, your ability to participate as a citizen in our healthcare system. That is a remarkable thing to be taking place in 2017.

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

I thank the gentleman so much and, again, I salute him for his incredible work for the people of Minnesota and the people of America.

Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have left?

Mr. Speaker, I just want to tie up some loose ends by exploring a few of the points that Mr. Ellison raised. But one of the very messy features of this legislation that is barreling through Congress this week is that the GOP leadership understood how popular the ban on denial of coverage for preexisting conditions is. That is going to be a mainstay of American life.

People should not be denied health care because they have a preexisting condition. That is the reason they should get health care, because they have a preexisting condition and they need it.

So they don't want to get rid of that. They understand that that is politically toxic. But they don't want to have the mandate for individuals to have to purchase insurance under the Affordable Care Act. That has been the major problem they have with the ACA. That is their major anathema. They can't stand that.

But guess what? You can't have one without the other. And if they believe in economics and they are being honest, they will have to concede that. Why?

Well, if I am a healthy young person, as I used to be, I will say to myself: Wow, an insurance company has got to cover me, even if I have got a preexisting condition, and I am perfectly healthy now, and I don't have to buy the insurance. So I am just going to go on my merry way, la-di-da, until maybe 1 day I have got a problem, I am in an accident, or I get some kind of diagnosis. At that point, I go to an insurance company, and they are going to cover me.

So they have kept the preexisting condition provision of ObamaCare, which is wildly popular in the country now. They are terrified to touch it now, although they were opposed to it before. But their proposal gets rid of the individual mandate, and it doesn't work. It will bankrupt the entire system. It is not going to work.

Now, another thing is that they are ignoring the extraordinary success of the Affordable Care Act. With whatever flaws it has got, it has been extraordinarily successful. It has dramatically reduced the number of uninsured people. It has insured more than 20 million people who did not have insurance before, and, therefore, it has dramatically reduced the number of people

showing up at the hospital in the emergency room with no insurance, and the hospitals have been obligated to see them.

And who pays for that? Guess who pays for it? You do, I do, the American public does when people show up without insurance. But the Affordable Care Act reduced, in a very significant way, the number of people showing up like that.

Now, in my home State of Maryland, we have seen extraordinary reductions in the numbers of people showing up in the emergency room without insurance because of the ACA. We have cut the uninsured rate by more than one-third in Maryland. We had a rate of 10.6 percent. Now it is down to 7 percent since the ACA was implemented.

All of the people who run the hospitals and our healthcare system are terrified that, if the GOP bull in the china shop wrecks the Affordable Care Act, what is going to happen is we are going to have hundreds of thousands of more visits every year in emergency rooms by people who are not covered by insurance, which means that the taxpayers get stuck with the bill again.

Now, let me tell you about my congressional district, the beautiful Eighth Congressional District, of which I am very proud. Everybody loves their district, but I do have the most beautiful, the most extraordinary district in the country. In Montgomery County, Maryland, in Frederick County, Maryland, and in Carroll County, it is gorgeous. Please come out and visit us in Bethesda, in Rockville, throughout Carroll County, throughout Frederick County. Come to Middletown, go to Thurmont, check it all out. It is beautiful. Come and visit us.

Look what has happened in the Eighth Congressional District. Well, as I said, we have reduced the uninsured rate by a third. We have 444,600 people in the district who have health insurance that covers preventive services today, like cancer screenings and flu shots, without any copays, without any coinsurance or deductibles, and they now stand to lose this access if the majority succeeds in eliminating the ACA provisions requiring health insurers to cover preventive services without cost-sharing.

We have got more than a half a million people in my district with employer-sponsored health insurance who are at risk of losing important consumer protections like the prohibition on annual and lifetime limits, protection against unfair policy rescissions, and coverage of preexisting health conditions if the ACA is entirely or partially repealed.

We have 21,400 people in the district who have purchased high-quality marketplace coverage, who now stand to lose their coverage if the marketplaces are dismantled.

We have 16,000 people in the district who got financial assistance to purchase marketplace coverage in 2016, who are now at risk of coverage becoming unaffordable, if they have their way and they eliminate the premium tax credits, and so and so forth.

Everything is dismantling the protections you have, making your premiums go up, throwing millions of people out of health insurance, and transferring lots of wealth upwards through the tax breaks that they want to give to wealthy people and insurance companies.

By the way, as I understand it, there is a provision that they want to repeal which capped the tax deductibility of insurance company executive salaries beyond a half a million dollars. They want to repeal that, so that would continue to be tax deductible. You could pay them millions of dollars, and they get the tax break because, of course, that is going to be their first priority, making the wealthiest executives in the health insurance companies whole.

Who cares what happens to everybody else, whether they lose their insurance, their premiums go sky-high? They know exactly where their bread is buttered. And that is just the icing on the cake.

Mr. Speaker, I don't think that their legislation can pass because the American people are too smart for it and will not stand for it. I don't think it will pass.

The President is already distancing himself from it. We all started calling it TrumpCare. The word went out that he didn't want it called TrumpCare. We think he knows that it is not going to pass, or, if it does pass, it is going to be a debacle of historic significance and moment.

None of them want it to be named after them. We have offered RyanCare, we have offered TrumpCare. None of them want to be associated with it.

I don't think it is going through. I understand that the Freedom Caucus, which thinks that there should just be a total free market, is going to vote against their plan, which they say is worse than ObamaCare, which they hated from the beginning. Although they are ideologically opposed to it, they know that ObamaCare is working, and they know that lots of people are being covered on it. And now they are going to be throwing millions of people off of ObamaCare, but they don't get what they want, which is a total free market.

Of course, a free market in health care doesn't work because health care is not a social domain where the market operates.

If you get sick or if you get injured, then you are just taken to the hospital. You don't have a lot of time to shop around for the best hospital or the best doctor. You just need to go in, which is why the civilized countries of the world that can afford it have gotten to the point of a single-payer plan. But they want to take us from the Affordable Care Act backwards. They want it to be a dog-eat-dog medical care system.

The American people are not going to accept that. They don't have a majority in Congress to do it, and it is the job of the minority in Congress which represents a majority of the people. Remember that the Democratic candidate for President received 1.9 million votes more than the Republican candidate for President. So it is the job of the minority which represents the majority of the American people, and it is the job of the people of the United States to say that we reject this sloppy, terrible plan that they are trying to rush through Congress. If they want to have discussions about actually improving things, we are very happy to do it. Otherwise, this cannot be accepted, and the American people need to pay very close attention to what is taking place in Congress this week.

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

Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. Speaker, is it consistent with the rules of the House of Representatives for the Committee on Ways and Means and the Energy and Commerce Committee to be considering the American Health Care Act without a CBO score that would permit us to know how much this legislation will cost?

Well, I didn't think it was hypothetical. I move that the House do now adjourn.

Yes, I will.

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

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

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

Mr. Chairman, I am delighted to be with my distinguished colleague from Michigan on this legislation, which is part of a package of bills brought forward by the majority, which we believe undermine the ability of Federal agencies to effectively promote the public interest.

To begin with, it is quite clear that this legislation is unnecessary. Current law already bans the use of agency funds for ``publicity or propaganda purposes.'' Current law also currently bars agency employees from grassroots lobbying campaign designed to pressure Members of Congress to support or to oppose agency proposals.

So, at the very least, all of this is duplicative, which wouldn't be so bad just to add another level of red tape and legislation, except for this: If you look at the legislation, under Restriction, part 2, it says:

``Any public communication issued by an Executive agency that refers to a pending agency regulatory action, other than an impartial communication that requests comment on or provides information regarding the pending agency regulatory action, may not--

``(A) directly advocate, in support of or against the pending agency regulatory action, for the submission of information to form part of the record of review for the pending agency regulatory action. . . .''

So let's parse that for a moment. What they are saying is that the agency may not directly advocate to the public: Please tell us whether you are for or against this regulation and why.

They are not trying to prevent a viewpoint-specific propaganda intervention by the agency. This would actually stifle the ability of the agency to solicit anybody's point of view to go out on Facebook and ask, ``What is your position about this,'' and to use social media to solicit the public's input.

So although the legislation masquerades as an attempt to promote government transparency, it actually radically undercuts government transparency and the ability of the agencies to solicit the widest possible input.

It also says that the agency may not appeal to the public or solicit a third party to undertake advocacy in support of or against the pending agency regulatory action.

Now, I would have no problem if what they were trying to do is simply restate the current ban on one-sided propaganda inquiries by an agency to get one side to come out and support or oppose an agency rulemaking, but that is already against the law.

What they are trying to do is to cut off the ability of the agency to solicit any public input on all sides of the issue.

Why would we place that kind of duct tape over the Administrative Procedure Act?

Well, one thought, if you look at this proposal in the context of everything else they have brought forward this week, they want to try to reduce everything to a cost-benefit analysis. That is, what would the cost to polluters be? What would the cost to the violators of the public interest be?

They never look at what the benefit to the public is of the regulations, and they want to do it behind closed doors and then prevent the agencies from going out and aggressively soliciting the input of the public on all sides of the issue.

So we don't see what the need for this proposal is. We believe that it will have a severely chilling effect on the ability of agencies to do their job. They continually talk about one case, the WOTUS case, the waters of the United States case, where I cheerfully and readily admit that the agency went too far in terms of campaigning for its proposal. But they were called on that. The GAO already determined that they ran afoul of the prohibitions.

So they have one case which was dealt with completely legitimately within the law, and they have not cited another case.

I would gladly yield my time to my distinguished colleague from Michigan if he can invoke one other case where there was a problem or explain why the resolution of this problem was not sufficient in this case, because I think everybody understood that the agency had gone too far. It was dealt with. The problem is over.

So now we have a so-called cure, which is far worse than the underlying disease because the so-called cure is going to stifle and chill the ability of every Federal agency in the United States Government to go out and aggressively solicit public input. That is what we want in the agency process.

Now, yesterday, they just voted to create a new roving supercommission that would pore through the rules of all the different Federal agencies and bring back a package and then ask us to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down so they can just more readily dismantle public regulation.

Let's be very clear about it. We're talking about regulation that protects clean air. They rejected an amendment that would carve out the Clean Air Act from that bill. We're talking about regulation that protects clean water. We're talking about regulation that protects the purity of our food and our drugs. We're talking about regulations that advance our interests in a clean environment and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

So it seems like they want to put the whole Federal regulatory process into a straitjacket, prevent the public from being involved, and prevent the agencies from going out and soliciting public input. That doesn't sound like giving government back to the people. That sounds like giving government over to billionaires, special interests, and big corporate powers that have all the lobbyists in Washington and know how to get things done behind closed doors.

Mr. Chair, I invite my distinguished colleague from Michigan to address any of the questions I have if there are any examples that he can provide of problems that would yield the need for such a dramatic shutdown on the ability of agencies to solicit public input.

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

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

Again, the advocates for the legislation returned to this one single case, which we all agree about. The GAO ruled that the EPA ran afoul of the prohibition on propaganda and on campaigning.

So the law worked there. The GAO blew the whistle on that. They shouldn't be coming out on one side of an issue and running a propaganda campaign. The government should not be engaged in propaganda. We all agree to that.

This legislation does something completely different. This legislation, rather than just saying a good day's work to the GAO for blowing the whistle, it says: Now we are going to tell all the Federal agencies and departments that have been out soliciting public input on all sides of issues, saying there is a regulation that has come up about clean air, about clean water, about food, about drugs, about the disposal of nuclear waste, about radioactive materials, and it tells them you can't do that anymore. You can't go out and solicit public input.

It places a complete chill on the ability of the government to go out and invite public participation in our government. Why? They keep returning to one case where the GAO blew the whistle where everybody agrees they were out of bounds.

A flag was thrown on the play, but now they want to use that in order to essentially impose a gag rule on Federal agencies across the land who are doing our work. The much reviled regulation that the agencies are engaged in is an attempt to flesh out the laws that we pass in this body because we don't want to be setting all of the particular rules about exactly how many pollutants can be in this water, in this

stream, in this river, in this creek, and so on, because we are not scientific experts on how many pollutants can be put into the air here and there. So it is delegated to government agencies.

But when they go through the Administrative Procedure Act and they have a rule and comment process, they should be able to go out and invite the public to participate.

Again, I invite my distinguished and thoughtful colleagues on the other side to cite one other case. Can they cite one case where the GAO did not blow the whistle? Can they cite some other litany of examples where there has been a real problem with government agencies being overzealous where it has not been corrected by the GAO?

The silence is deafening.

They have used the example of one problem that was caught, that was corrected, in order to try to demolish the ability of Federal agencies to go out and solicit the public's input.

To me, that is a familiar experience now, because I have been in the House of Representatives for just 2 months, and, in the committees I serve on, we continue to vote on bills where we have not had a single public hearing. We are not hearing from any of the groups.

I have a letter here objecting to this legislation that has been signed by the AFL-CIO, AFSCME, American Association for Justice, American Association of University Women, Americans for Financial Reform, Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, Autistic Self Advocacy Network, BlueGreen Alliance, Center for Biological Diversity, Clean Water Action, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety, Demand Progress, Earthjustice, Economic Policy Institute, Environment America, Environmental Working Group, Food & Water Watch, Greenpeace, Homeowners Against Deficient Dwellings, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, International Union of United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers, League of Conservation Voters, National Association of Consumer Advocates, and on and on and on.

I would like to have heard from these people in this process, but it seems like all we are getting from the other side is an attempt to have a curtain of darkness fall over all public process. We would like to have hearings. We want groups to be involved. But these people were not invited to testify. They didn't have a chance to opine on this.

Mr. Chair, in general, the problem here is that, rather than making government more transparent, we are making government more opaque. Rather than making government more open, we are making government more closed. Rather than reaching out to the public and inviting it into the rulemaking process, we are shutting the door and closing the blinds on it.

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

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

Mr. Chairman, I think we are finally having some light here on the subject.

My distinguished colleague and fellow freshman from Michigan is most concerned about what did take place in the Waters of the United States case. He praises the GAO for responding to Senator Inhofe's inquiry.

We all agree that the GAO determined that the EPA ran afoul of existing prohibitions in law on propaganda, on taking a side in an issue. A flag was called on the play and the problem was dealt with.

If you find a kid shoplifting a candy bar, and you catch him, you remove him from the store, you tell him not to do it again. You don't then go pass a law saying that anybody under 18 cannot enter any commercial establishment in the country. The law worked in that specific case.

But, you see, they have taken a sledgehammer to a mosquito, and the mosquito was already killed. So now what they are busting up is the ability of agencies across the country simply to use the social media to go out and to solicit and invite public input into the rulemaking process. What are we afraid of?

Justice Brandeis said that sunshine is the great disinfectant. We want the public involved. We want the public's engagement.

So, again, I invite my thoughtful colleagues on the other side to cite one case of an agency doing this that was not dealt with by the GAO. I can cite you countless examples of cases where Federal agencies have gone online to invite public input in a completely objective and neutral way. Now we are creating a chill over that process because of this ban on soliciting advocacy from the public on either side of the issue.

So I simply don't get it, and I am puzzled why they continually talk about one case which was happily resolved under existing law.

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

Mr. Chairman, I include in the Record several letters opposing the bill.

Coaltion for

Sensible Safeguards,

February 28, 2017.

Re House floor vote of H.R. 1004, the Regulatory Integrity

Act.

Dear Representative: The Coalition for Sensible Safeguards

(CSS), an alliance of over 150 labor, scientific, research,

good government, faith, community, health, environmental, and

public interest groups, strongly oppose H.R. 1004, the

Regulatory Integrity Act.

The bill is a brazen attack on the public's right to know

by micro-managing the type of information that agencies are

allowed to communicate to all of us when taking actions to

protect the public, our economy, and the environment. An open

government that prioritizes democratic public participation

requires agencies to be able to effectively convey

information to the public and make agency policy positions

clear to the public. This bill will make our government less

open and less democratic and should therefore be rejected.

H.R. 1004 will significantly inhibit federal agencies'

ability to engage and inform the public in a meaningful and

transparent way regarding its work on important science-based

rulemakings that will greatly benefit the public. As a

result, the bill will lead to

decreased public awareness and participation in the

rulemaking process in direct contradiction of the

Administrative Procedure Act and agencies' authorizing

statutes, which specifically provide for broad stakeholder

engagement.

Substantial ambiguities in the bill threaten to create

uncertainty and confusion among agencies about what public

communications are permissible, and thus risks discouraging

them from keeping the public apprised of the important work

that they do on its behalf. In an era when agencies should be

increasingly embracing innovative 21st century communications

technologies needed to reach the public, including social

media, H.R. 1004 sends exactly the wrong message.

The legislation strictly prohibits agencies from issuing

``public communications'' that ``emphasize the importance''

of a particular agency action unless the communication has

the ``clear purpose of informing the public of the substance

or status'' of the particular action. The legislation applies

to a wide swath of regulatory actions including rulemakings,

guidance, policy statements, directives and adjudications.

While H.R. 1004 assumes that the distinction between

informing the public of an agency action and emphasizing the

importance of that action is self-evident, in practice the

distinction is anything but clear. As a result, agencies are

likely to avoid any public communications that risk running

afoul of this ambiguous prohibition, no matter how

informative the communication might be for the public.

For example, various executive orders and statutes compel

agencies to conduct cost-benefit analysis on their pending

rulemakings, and thus to determine whether the rule's

benefits outweigh its costs. As currently written, the

Regulatory Integrity Act could potentially prohibit an agency

from communicating the results of such an analysis when it

concludes that a particular rule generates net benefits.

After all, that conclusion is tantamount to declaring that

the rule makes society better off on balance. Instead, the

agency would likely be forced to simply share the basic

information that they had conducted a cost-benefit analysis

of the regulation without being able to share the further

crucial information that the regulation's benefits exceeded

the costs. Given that many of the bill's sponsors

enthusiastically endorse the expanded use of cost-benefit

analysis in the rulemaking process, these kinds of arbitrary

prohibitions on communications concerning cost-benefit

analysis seem especially peculiar.

Agencies would encounter this problematic scenario when

deciding to share vital information, such as:

How many lives would be saved by a regulation;

How much property damage would be averted;

How much money consumers would save; and

Any of the other myriad public benefits that regulations

are designed to provide.

The stark absence of any clear bright-lines in the

legislation delineating what is and what is not prohibited

public communications is sure to have a chilling effect on

agencies, with the predictable result that agencies will be

less willing to share crucial information with the public and

that the public will be less informed about government

activities.

H.R. 1004 also will severely impede, rather than enable,

agency use of new communication technologies, most notably

social media platforms, to reach the public. Regulatory

experts and scholars agree that agencies should be using

social media forums and platforms.

Agencies will find it difficult, if not impossible, to

communicate with the public through social media under H.R.

1004 since the bill prevents any usage of social media that

both conveys information about a regulatory action but also

promotes the importance of that action.

For example, the U.S. Department of Interior operates a

Twitter and Instagram account that is very popular with the

public because it regularly features photos of beautiful

landscapes and wildlife from national parks across the United

States. Under the Regulatory Integrity Act, the Department

might be prohibited from posting such photos on Twitter and

Instagram because they are not solely informational in nature

and could be interpreted as promoting the importance of the

department's work in environmental and wildlife preservation.

Enactment of H.R. 1004 will lead to less transparency in

the government, make it more difficult for agencies to use

new communication technologies popular with the public, and

generally chill agency communications with the public on

important matters due to the lack of any bright-line

standards for agencies to follow.

We strongly urge you to oppose H.R. 1004, the Regulatory

Integrity Act.

Sincerely,

Robert Weissman,

President,

Public Citizen Chair.

Mr. Chairman, I thank my colleague for his thoughtful presentation and thank the Chair for his indulgence.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I do want to express my opposition to this amendment because it is perfectly duplicative, and it does nothing to cure

the very serious deficiencies in the underlying bill. Executive Order 13563, which was issued by President Obama, requires each agency to ``periodically review existing significant regulations to determine whether any such regulations should be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed, so as to make the agency's regulatory program more effective or less burdensome in achieving the regulatory objectives.''

Because there is little doubt that this executive order covers the review and elimination of duplicative and overlapping regulatory actions, there is no need for the additional reporting requirements that this amendment would redundantly impose. More importantly, this amendment simply fails to address the profound flaws in the underlying bill. It fails to provide the bright lines for what an agency can communicate to the public safely within the stringent new guidelines. It fails to eliminate the unnecessarily burdensome and onerous requirements in the bill that seem to have no purpose but to reduce the amount of information agencies would be able to release to the public and invite from the public.

The amendment fails to eliminate the prohibition against agencies making public communications that directly advocate for or oppose the submission of public comments or expert analysis of a pending rule. The amendment fails to remove the serious impediments this bill places in the way of agency use of social media platforms. Most importantly, the amendment does nothing to cure the serious chilling effect that the bill would have on agency communications and the negative effects that this imposition would have on the ability of agencies to educate millions of Americans about the costs and benefits of a particular regulation and to invite their input into the rulemaking process.

Because the amendment does nothing to improve the flaws of this bill and is duplicative of work that agencies are already required to do, I urge all Members to oppose this amendment.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I rise only to note the remarkable irony of the gentleman making an argument for the reduction of duplicative regulations by adding another duplicative regulation.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, this redundant and duplicative and, again, chilling amendment will only add more red tape, divert the time of agency officials to produce more paperwork that is unnecessary, and point us right back to the central flaw of the legislation.

My distinguished opponents have mobilized all of one case to demonstrate the necessity of this legislation, and it was a case which was properly resolved by the GAO, and everybody agrees to it. So I understand the urge to get up and say we need more legislation to do what we have already been able to accomplish under existing law, I understand that everybody wants to make a point about the righteousness of legislative change, but sometimes we just don't need another law. The law works as it was. We don't need another law.

And again, I am just impressed by the irony of saying we need another law to eliminate excessive and redundant regulation when the current law already does it. It is almost like a caricature of what we do here in Congress.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chair, a regime of fear has descended on the Federal workforce, and I have got 88,000 Federal employees in my district.

If they insist on this legislation--unnecessary, redundant, confusing, and chilling--at the very least, we must pass the gentlewoman's amendment to say that it does not trench on the First Amendment rights of our citizens who are simply exercising in a viewpoint-neutral, in a content-neutral way the determination of the agencies to solicit public input.

You say you support on your side the input of the public. You say you support the intent of the amendment. Let's accept the amendment, and let's all embrace the First Amendment together.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

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

Mr. Chairman, my amendment would protect all rules relating to the enforcement of the Clean Air Act, which are in danger now under H.R. 998, the SCRUB Act, which seeks to authorize a brand new $30 million Presidential commission of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats to wipe out agency rules across the whole field of government.

Mr. Chairman, last night in this Chamber, the President of the United States came and articulated policy areas where he said his administration ``wants to work with Members of both parties.'' One of these was to promote clean air and clean water. I was happy to hear it because earlier in the day he signed an executive order to clear the way for weakening safe drinking water standards through redefinition of which small bodies of water are covered under the Clean Water Act.

Now, the amendment I propose provides a chance for all of us to start fresh in demonstrating our seriousness about this new bipartisan commitment to protect the water we drink and the air that we breathe.

The SCRUB Act proposes to create a commission to do what Federal agencies and commissions already do, which is to review and update their rules. That is why a lot of us are deeply skeptical about spending $30 million to create a new roving commission to hack away at rules protecting the public interest.

This commission would be made up of five members appointed directly by the President at his discretion and four members by the President from congressional nomination, too, from each party.

The advocates for this legislation say it is not about dismantling the rules that protect the water that our children drink or the air that our children and our grandparents breathe or the food that all of us eat. It is just about getting rid of unnecessary and obsolete and profligate regulations. And I take them at their word that that is what it is about.

So let's all agree that the new supercommission that you seek to establish under the SCRUB Act will not touch, in any way, the rules adopted under the Clean Air Act. If that is not the purpose of this legislation, to undermine the Clean Air Act regime, as its advocates repeatedly insist, then there should be no problem having us formalize this commitment on a bipartisan basis.

Right now, the SCRUB Act does not explicitly protect clean air--or clean water, for that matter--from the prospects of a roving bureaucratic attack. Thus, it exposes all of us to unnecessary harm, threatening to scrub away the rules that protect the air we breathe.

What will that mean for 17 million Americans with asthma, for the millions of people with lung cancer and other respiratory diseases, for more than 30,000 people struggling with cystic fibrosis? All of these people are potentially in danger simply because of an overblown ideological attack on regulations, which are just the rules that we adopt as a constitutional democracy to protect ourselves from harm.

In answer to objections about the bill, the majority says that Congress will still have its say; but if you read it carefully, you see that congressional authority has actually been placed in a straitjacket. The bill requires an up-or-down vote on the commission's recommendations as a complete omnibus package rather than voting on each proposal individually.

So if you agreed with loosening some regulations, for example, in the Title X Family Planning program, which has a lot of rules, but you don't want to eviscerate the regulatory infrastructure under the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act, you would have to vote on the entire package at once. This makes Congress into an embarrassing rubber stamp for a nine-person body effectively controlled by the executive branch.

Dear colleagues, let's not play games with the health and safety of our constituents. If this bill passes as is, rules that govern the very air we breathe would be subject to the SCRUB Act's unelected, unaccountable, and unbounded practitioners. My amendment closes a gaping and dangerous hole in the legislation. I ask my colleagues to think about public health and safety first, and not the magical thinking and scientifically ungrounded cost-benefit analysis promised by the SCRUB Act.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as he may consume to my colleague from Maryland (Mr. Cummings).

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

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

I am, indeed.

Mr. Speaker, this is the final amendment to the bill, which will not kill the bill or send it back to the committee. If adopted, the bill will immediately proceed to final passage, as amended.

The purpose of this amendment is simply to carve out from the provisions of the legislation any rules that we have adopted in order to prevent conflicts of interest and in order to promote financial transparency and disclosure by executive branch employees.

Mr. Speaker, since I became a Member of the House in January and joined the Judiciary Committee, we have been subjected to an onslaught of bills seeking to free corporate polluters, lead paint and asbestos manufacturers, and other abusers of the rights of consumers and citizens from having to face the people they injure in court and having to comply with the rules that have been worked out over the decades to protect our air, our water, our land, our people, our health, and our workplaces.

In most cases, we don't even get hearings on these bills. In the Judiciary Committee, I have not seen a victim of toxic torts or lead poisoning or medical malpractice testify, but their rights are being flattened every single day by the legislative bulldozer that is running amuck.

These bills are flying at us with lightning speed--no hearings, no real debate, no time to study the measures, no time to do the proper information gathering for our constituents.

Now the SCRUB Act would establish an unelected roving commission with unlimited subpoena power. It would be controlled by the President who gets to appoint a clean majority--five members at his own discretion; and four more, two Republicans and two Democrats. So when they say it is bipartisan, remember what that means: Seven spots for majority appointees and two spots for minority appointees. More importantly, this roving commission can be lobbied behind closed doors by the special interests that want to splice and dice the regulations that we have worked out over the decades to protect the public against harm.

In all of the rules that our democracy has put in place--not just old rules, not just obsolete rules, not just silly rules--all of them are going to be in the crosshairs of this roving commission--no exceptions, no firewalls, no protections for rules governing public health and safety--like the Clean Water Act or like the Clean Air Act. They just rejected the amendment to carve that out. There are no protections, significantly, and this is what the amendment is about, for rules guaranteeing transparency in government and integrity in government.

My motion to recommit, Mr. Speaker, would incorporate into the underlying legislation an amendment that I advanced in committee that goes to the heart of the crisis of confidence in Washington, in America today. I think every Member of this body can support it without betraying any of their principles or their party. On the contrary, I think it strengthens all of our principles and it strengthens our parties by building public confidence in the political system as a whole. It makes sure we can keep draining the swamp, as the President of the United States said in this Chamber last night.

My amendment states very simply that the Commission may not target for destruction any rules relating to any law governing a potential conflict of interest of an employee or officer of the executive branch, or any law governing the financial disclosures of executive branch employees, and bribery.

Right now, we know there is a dangerous crisis in popular confidence in the national government. This administration has brought to Washington a web of complicated conflicts of interest, real or potential, attendant to a global business empire that engages in business with foreign governments, foreign and domestic corporations, and a huge host of regulated entities.

Just a mile from where we sit today, for example, the Trump Hotel is renting out guest rooms, ballrooms, meeting rooms, and whole floors to foreign governments, embassies, and large corporations in flagrant violation of the Emoluments Clause, article 1, section 9, which requires the President to come ask us--Congress--for permission to receive payments from foreign governments.

They even have a director of diplomatic sales now. Furthermore, the standard lease that the Trump Hotel has with the General Services Administration forbids any elected official of the United States Government or the District of Columbia from deriving any profit or value from the lease. Clearly, there is a breach in this lease right now. The problem is that the President is not only the tenant, he is, for all intents and purposes, the landlord too because he controls the GSA and appoints its director. So President-landlord Donald Trump would have to go to court to sue tenant businessman Donald Trump for breaching the lease by collecting money under it as a public official. This just scratches the surface of a welter of ethical conflicts.

Mr. Speaker, this is the final amendment to the bill which will not kill the bill or send it back to committee. If adopted, the bill will immediately proceed to final passage as amended.

Since I became a member of this House in January, my Freshman colleagues and I have been engaged in two activities. First, we've been sitting in hearings and trying to make sense of bills that fundamentally change the legal and regulatory structure of America--and we've done so without hearing from witnesses, without time to study measures, and without time to do the proper information gathering that I believe is necessary to serve our various constituencies. Second, we've come to the floor at the end of each day to cast votes on deregulation. This house has been in the business of loosening rules on everything. We've

made it easier to pollute, easier to harm consumers--all in the name of cutting regulatory costs. And so it's no surprise that a bill like this sailed through the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to the floor.

This bill would establish an unelected commission with unlimited subpoena power and partisan majority to chop through the Federal Register with a chain saw. There are no exceptions, no firewalls, no protections for rules and regulations governing health and safety and there are no protections for rules guaranteeing transparency in government.

My motion to recommit would incorporate into the underlying legislation, an amendment I offered in committee. It's straightforward and unburdensome. In fact, when I offered it in committee one of my colleagues on the other side indicated that the priority of this bill is ``major rules with massive costs.''

If passed, this MTR would make certain that no provision of the SCRUB Act could be used to eliminate rules relating to laws that govern conflicts of interest of executive branch officers or employees. That's it--it reinforces existing law and clarifies provisions of this bill.

Surely, we can agree that rules designed to help maintain the public trust in those representing them in the Executive Branch are sacred enough to be explicitly protected. And if anyone should ask why it's so important, we don't have to look too far. This administration is a walking, talking billboard for the need to protect laws that protect the public trust.

I urge my colleagues to support this common sense measure.

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

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.