Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Jayapal. She has been a sensational leader within the Democratic Caucus and within the Congressional Progressive Caucus, especially on the issues of immigration and the rights of refugees. It is such an honor to be able to serve with her. I appreciate being able to spend some moments just reflecting on what took place in our Chamber last night with the President's speech.

We should start by giving credit where credit is due. This speech was not ``American Carnage II.'' It was a vast improvement, I would say, over all of the violent and apocalyptic imagery and rhetoric that we saw in the inaugural address. So hats off to the President's new speech writer, whoever that may be.

However, having said that, I think it is simply old wine in a new bottle. The same basic extremist Steve Bannon infrastructure governed that address despite the fact that the manners had improved considerably.

When I thought about President Trump's speech in this Chamber last night, I thought about George Orwell. Not because of 1984, although I admit that my well-thumbed copy of this great dystopian novel is sitting on my desk right now and the words ``war is peace'' and ``ignorance is strength'' have been running through my mind over the last several weeks. No, I thought of Orwell not because of 1984, but because of a great essay he once wrote called ``Notes on Nationalism.''

In this essay, George Orwell contrasted patriotism and nationalism-- two concepts that often get conflated. But at least, in his view, they represented two very different things. Patriotism, he argued, was a positive emotion, a passionate belief in one's own community--its people, its institutions, its values, its history, its culture.

An American patriot today, I would argue, believes in our magnificent constitutional democracy--our Constitution; our Bill of Rights; our judiciary and our judges; our States and our communities; our poets like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes and Merrill Leffler; our philosophers like John Dewey and Ralph Waldo Emerson; our extraordinary dynamic culture which invites and absorbs new waves of people from all over the world, our artists, our musicians like Bruce Springsteen, the Neville Brothers, and Dar Williams. All of these people and things are what we love about America, and they evoke the positive emotion of patriotism.

Patriotism is all about uplifting people; drawing on what is best in our history; finding what is best in our culture; invoking our Founders, Madison,

Jefferson, Franklin, and Tom Paine; invoking the people who founded the country once again through the Civil War and the reconstruction amendments, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass; the people who transformed America in the women's suffrage movement, like Susan B. Anthony; the people who remade America once again in the civil rights movement, like Martin Luther King, Bob Moses, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; the people who blew the doors off of discrimination and oppression against other groups, like the LGBT community, like Harvey Milk.

All of these people stand for a progressive dynamic and inclusive concept of America, and patriots want to draw on this culture in history in order to continue to make great progress for our people today. A patriot wants to improve the health of our people, the education of our people, the critical thinking skills of our people, the well-being of America.

Now, nationalism is different. If you look at it historically as Orwell did, nationalism has been not about building people up and improving their lives, it has been about militarizing society and getting everyone to sync their individuality, their creative personality into a large corporatist and authoritarian state, one that is destined to exploit people's goodwill by mobilizing them for groupthink and endless hostility in war, the kind that Orwell dramatized so frightfully in 1984 and in ``Animal Farm.''

Well, I am sorry to say that I didn't see a lot of patriotism in Orwell's terms in the speech last night. Ninety percent of our kids go to public schools, but 90 percent of this President's energy and administration's energy seems to go into maligning and defunding public education and diverting public money away from public schools into private education. That is the Betsy DeVos agenda.

Or take health care. The Affordable Care Act represents a magnificent national investment in health care of our own people. More than 22 million of our fellow citizens, previously uninsured, got health care because of the ACA. Thirty million if you include the expansion of Medicaid that took place under the ACA.

If you decide to go to a town hall, yours or someone else's, you will meet people who will tell you that their lives were saved because of the Affordable Care Act--victims of breast cancer and colon cancer and heart attacks and strokes and on and on. These things are just in the nature of life. We are all subject to medical misfortune. If you learn you have cancer or if you have a heart attack, that is a misfortune. It happens to people every day. But if you have cancer or leukemia or you have a heart attack and you can't get health coverage because you lost your job or because you are too poor, that is not just a misfortune, that is an injustice because we can do something about that. Because that has to do with how we have organized our own affairs as a society.

But what did we hear from the President last night about the health care and well-being of our people? Repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. They voted more than 50 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act and never once to replace it. They have got no plan. The President did not offer a plan.

The President restated the values of the Affordable Care Act itself. And understand, the Affordable Care Act was the compromise because the logical thing to have done, as President Obama said, if we were starting from scratch, would be to adopt a single payor plan. But because we were along a certain path, he felt we couldn't do that.

So he took the plan that was adopted at The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, the one that was put in in Massachusetts by Governor Romney--RomneyCare. That is the Affordable Care Act. But they couldn't tolerate that because they cared more about scoring political points against the President than they did about actually making health care available to as many Americans as possible.

So the President showed up empty-handed again. No plan whatsoever. If there were a plan, we would be debating it. If they had something to offer, we would be talking about it. But they don't have it. They just want to repeal and consign everybody back to medical oblivion. Millions of people going back to not having it. Making everybody else's insurance premiums skyrocket and just turning our backs on the families that now depend on the Affordable Care Act.

Now, I will say the President mentioned in passing something that he made a big deal of during the campaign, and I was happy he did. He went back to saying that we needed to give the government the authority to negotiate with the large drug companies, the prescription drug companies, for lower prices.

And I was happy to hear my colleagues from the other side of the aisle in talking about the pharmacist just now, also talking about the extraordinary power of the pharmaceutical companies and their predatory practices.

Well, what the President has said makes perfect sense on this point, which is there was some special interest legislation that came out several years ago saying that the government could not negotiate for lower prices with the drug companies when it comes to Medicare. We do it with Medicaid, we do it with VA drug benefits, but we can't do it for Medicare drug benefits because some lobbyist was able to get somebody to stick that into the bill, and the GOP majority stands by it now.

And so I appeal to the President, if you are serious about it, I will work day and night to get every Democratic vote I can to side with you in giving the government the authority to negotiate for lower drug prices. That is a common ground agenda. Let's do that.

But as to the general picture of health care in the country, the President gave us nothing last night. We also got no jobs plan. We got no plan to confront the shameful inequality in our society.

When the President and his Cabinet entered the Chamber last night, the net worth of this room went up by $9.6 billion. This is the richest Cabinet in American history. These 17 people in the Cabinet have more wealth than 43 million American households combined. That is one-third of American households. When you look at the Trump Cabinet, you can see the net worth of one-third of American families together.

And the President, who campaigned like a crusading populist, like William Jennings Bryan, for working people, creates a Cabinet of billionaires and CEOs, people who profited like mad from NAFTA and all the trade deals that the President now denounces. He closed his campaign by railing against Goldman Sachs. But Goldman Sachs may as well be the nickname of this Cabinet. From Secretary Tillerson to Steve Bannon and many others, Goldman Sachs is all over this administration.

And last night, we also got more immigrant bashing. And I know my friend and colleague, Congresswoman Jayapal, will discuss this.

How patriotic is immigrant bashing? I would say not very. Tom Paine said America would be a haven of refuge for people fleeing political and religious repression all over the world. Madison said it would be a sanctuary for religious and political refugees. America would come to be symbolized by the Statue of Liberty. ``Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,'' that is the spirit of America.

We are a nation of immigrants. Other than Native Americans, we were here before everybody else got here. And the slaves were brought here against their will. But everybody else, we are immigrants or we are the descendants of immigrants. So if you attack immigrants, you are really attacking the dynamic and inclusive culture of America, a community of communities.

And then there is the big proposal we got to slash $56 billion in domestic spending and put it into a great big, new military buildup. And here we see the fingerprints, of course, of Steve Bannon. We could destroy the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the State Department, the Peace Corps, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Election Commission, the CFPB, and on

and on, and still not come close to the $56 billion that they want to rip out of the domestic priorities of the American people and simply give to the Pentagon. And for what? Why? No one has told us why. What is all of that money going to buy? Who is going to get rich off of all of that money?

Ladies and gentlemen, when you add it all up, this program seems like it partakes of the ultra-nationalist politics that Orwell perceived in authoritarian regimes, not the kind of patriotism that reflects the best in our own Democratic political culture.

The great thing is that Americans are deep patriots. We love our communities. We love our institutions. We love our values. We love our Constitution. We love our Bill of Rights. And we are not going to fall for a right-wing, ultra-nationalist agenda that takes us away from everything that we love.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor David Burwell who passed away on February 1, 2017. David will be remembered as a passionate activist for conservation and environmental advocacy. In a decades-long career, he made many important contributions to environmental progress through his early work with the National Wildlife Federation, by co-founding the visionary Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (RTC), and in serving as director of the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Mr. Burwell is remembered by his RTC co-founder Peter Harkin as ``a voracious learner and a fearless instigator,'' for whom ``no unexplored fact was too insignificant, and no challenge was too large.'' These qualities served him well in the 1980s, when all across the country, thousands of miles of railroad were falling out of use each year. Instead of simply watching this land be sold-off and re-developed, Mr. Burwell worked with Congress to preserve railroad corridors as hiking trails for current and future generations of outdoor enthusiasts and railroad history buffs.

He is survived by his wife Irini, his son and daughter-in-law, his two granddaughters, and his brother. May his life's work be an inspiration to all of us.

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

I rise in support of H.R. 1033, the Open Book on Equal Access to Justice Act.

Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by echoing the praise that the chairman offered to Mr. Collins and Mr. Cohen for their leadership on this important legislation which I support for several reasons.

To begin with, it strengthens the Equal Access to Justice Act, a crucial law that has helped senior citizens, veterans, the disabled, and not-for-profit groups vindicate their rights against unreasonable or arbitrary governmental action.

Now, as the chairman stated, under the so-called American rule, parties to adjudicative matters typically pay their own litigation costs, subject to certain statutory exceptions; and one of these exceptions is the Equal Access to Justice Act, which allows a party to be reimbursed for litigation costs when he or she is victorious against the Federal Government under specified conditions.

But if the U.S. can show that its position was substantially justified, or that special circumstances would make an award unjust, then the prevailing party is not entitled to be reimbursed for his or her litigation costs.

In addition, only certain parties are eligible to be reimbursed for their litigation costs under the act, based on their net worth or tax exempt status, among other factors that are built in to the statute.

Whether these restrictions still make sense is an open question, as Congress simply does not have the adequate information to assess the continuing effectiveness of the act. This is because there has been no comprehensive Federal report on the total amount of fees awarded under the act since 1995, and, as a result, all we have is conjecture and extrapolation.

Fortunately, H.R. 1033 addresses this problem by requiring annual reports on the amount of fees paid under the act to prevailing litigants against the government. As a result of this legislation, Congress will know now, on an annual basis, the agencies required to reimburse parties for their litigation costs; the claims that first gave rise to the litigation; and the amount of awards made under the act, as well as the basis for them.

With this information, Congress will be in a much better position to assess the ongoing implementation of the act and the performance of the agencies as litigants.

Another reason why I support this legislation is that it respects the privacy interests of the parties who are reimbursed for their litigation costs pursuant to the act. Unfortunately, prior versions of this legislation were unnecessarily intrusive.

Organizations, like the National Organization of Social Security Claimants' Representatives and the Paralyzed Veterans of America, expressed their serious concerns that prior versions of the bill might ``infringe the privacy of vulnerable people who have applied for Social Security and veterans' benefits.'' These are serious concerns, especially given the fact that the bill requires the information collected to be made available to the public and transparent through posting on the internet.

As currently drafted, however, H.R. 1033 strikes the proper balance between encouraging transparency and respecting the legitimate privacy interests of parties that have been raised as an issue in the past. The bill specifically provides that the annual reports required to be made publicly available may not reveal any information the disclosure of which is prohibited by law or court order.

Finally, I support H.R. 1033 because it recognizes the important role that the Administrative Conference of the United States has historically played in helping Congress identify inefficiencies among the Federal agencies and ways to save taxpayer dollars through the proper economies. I am particularly pleased that the current version of this legislation reflects various thoughtful suggestions shared by the Administrative Conference with our staffs.

Given the excellent work and scholarly analysis that have been the hallmarks of the Administrative Conference of the United States, I expect its report and its attendant findings will be an invaluable aid to Congress.

As the Judiciary Committee is the authorizing committee for the Conference, I encourage our friends on the Appropriations Committee to ensure that the Conference has adequate funding to implement this very important legislation.

Like the Administrative Conference, H.R. 1033 requires only a modest investment that will result in a very valuable return for all Americans. Accordingly, I urge my colleagues to support this measure, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Georgia has made a very powerful argument for a bipartisan push for transparency and accountability.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, in closing, I want to recognize my colleagues on both sides of the aisle.

As Mr. Cohen has pointed out, this legislation has been a model of bipartisan collaboration, and the work product shows the investment of both sides in it. So I want to salute everybody for their diligence in helping to craft this important legislation. The gentlemen from Georgia (Mr. Collins) and the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cohen), as well as our former colleague, the gentlewoman from Wyoming, Ms. Lummis, have cooperatively worked to effectuate a very effective, commonsense bill that will improve the accountability and the transparency of the Federal Government. This is a commendable accomplishment.

Accordingly, I would ask all of our colleagues to join us in supporting this legislation.

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

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be with you this afternoon. I have a series of other speakers who will be joining me later in the hour from the Progressive Caucus, as we discuss some of the key events of the week from our perspective.

General Leave

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

Mr. Speaker, I love magic, and I bet a lot of people out there watching today love magic, too. Ever since I was a kid, I loved the cup tricks, the card tricks, and the rabbit coming out of the hat. When I was in college, I even used to entertain at elementary school birthday parties, helping to pay my way through college.

The key move in magic, as you know, Mr. Speaker, is the sleight of hand. I looked up the definition of ``sleight of hand'' in the Merriam- Webster Dictionary, which defines it as a cleverly executed deception.

A sleight of hand is also sometimes called a prestidigitation, quick fingers, or legerete de la main, which is the French phrase for ``lightness of hand.'' It is defined as the set of closely related techniques used by a stage magician to manipulate the perceptions of the audience.

Sleight of hand depends on the use of psychology, careful stage misdirection, constant blabbering, and strategic confusion to distract the audience.

Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States has been masterfully deploying sleight of hand ever since his inauguration. With his nonstop tweeting and his incessant mad antics, the President distracts us from the real action, which is what is happening here in Congress. We are witnessing a magic trick on the world's largest stage, the auditorium of American democracy. And we, the people, are the captive, bedazzled, and totally distracted audience of the President. The tweets are a massive sleight of hand distracting us from the serious destruction of public policy and law that is taking place right here in Congress.

I want to say, at the outset, I prefer to think of this as a magic trick because the alternative that the President simply can't control himself is almost too horrific to contemplate.

The Constitution does have a way of dealing with that problem, too, and you can find it in the 25th Amendment.

Today, we are going to assume that all of this is a magic show. I used to coach kids' soccer. And when I coached soccer, I would always tell the kids: Don't bunch. Keep your eye on the ball. Stay in your lane and pass the ball.

Without fail, the youngest kids who are just starting out, they all chase the ball. They move around the field in a big clump, a big mob. And I would say: Don't follow the mob that is following the ball. Go to where the ball is going to be going.

When they are young, they don't know how to do it.

I think that advice applies here as well to America, to the body politic. Don't follow the mob that is following the ball. Let's not be distracted full time by all the tomfoolery and tweetfoolery.

There are important and dangerous things happening right here in Congress right now. While the President is tweeting insults and fake news and inflating his slender college victory and the size of his inaugural crowd and making fun of Meryl Streep and chatting about Nordstrom's department store and talking about how he is going to make Mexico pay for his wall and so on, what is taking place in Congress is the systematic dismantling of the regulatory apparatus that the American public depends on for clean air, clean water, safe food, a decent environment, and control of criminality in the country.

The fundamental political action that we must be paying attention to now is the dismantling of the regulatory apparatus of the Federal Government, which is happening every day right here in the Halls of Congress. This is the apparatus that protects our food, our air, our water, our health care, our financial system, the ability of people to invest safely on Wall Street, occupational safety and health for our workers. All of this is being attacked in terrifying and often invisible ways.

Behind the scenes, while the wizard of odd convenes a dinner in Mar- a-Lago where he entertains a national security crisis discussion in full view of other diners who begin to tweet out and Facebook out what they are seeing happen, while all of that is happening, Congress is rolling back environmental protections to protect streams, rivers, and drinking water from pollution. They are savaging the rules that restrict the volume of greenhouse gas emissions that are leaked into the atmosphere, destabilizing our climate system. Check out H.J. Res. 38 and 36.

While the distractor in chief whines about leaks, while his whole campaign was based on leaks of emails that were captured by Russian agents working to get him elected, in Congress, they are rolling back financial regulations which ensure that workers have retirement savings options, H.J. Res. 66, and which protect consumers from excessive financial risks, H.R. 78.

They have also targeted and rolled back labor regulations that promote safe and healthy workplaces and fair employment practices, H.J. Res. 37.

Amazingly, while President Trump's National Security Adviser, General Flynn, was forced to resign when it was revealed that he had been colluding with Russians to lift the sanctions that the Obama administration had imposed on Russia, here in Congress, we are passing joint resolutions to rescind anticorruption regulations that required oil and gas companies to report monetary payments that they made to foreign governments, H.J. Res. 41.

So Trump tweets about leaks, while his administration is one vast leak to the Russians. And here, Members of the GOP are working to throw an invisibility and secrecy cloak over corporate payments being made to foreign governments and corporations.

While the world is distracted by all of the sleight of hand, this Congress is passing bills to give government back to giant corporations and special interests that care not for the common good but simply for their own bottom line.

Mr. Speaker, as a freshman, I have been here for only 8 weeks. I have to tell you that I am disappointed that I have not voted on a single bill in the House Judiciary Committee that has had so much as a hearing. Yes, I want to repeat that. We have voted on five bills since I got here and not one of them has had a hearing.

Now, I come from the Maryland State Senate where I proudly served for 10 years as a State senator. When we had a bill coming up, no bill could be brought to the floor without a hearing first, and anybody who wanted to come testify on the bill could come testify on it. Now, that is not practicable here in the U.S. Congress. However, we could at least have experts relating to the bill and people who are affected by the bill come in and testify, but we haven't done that in the House Judiciary Committee. Instead, we voted on a series of bills which, to my mind, dramatically curtail the public interest.

Yesterday, we voted on a bill to dismantle, essentially to put into a stifling straightjacket, the class-action mechanism that has been used over the decades to vindicate the interest of people who are victims of sex discrimination, victims of race discrimination, victims of toxic torts, victims of asbestos poisoning. We voted basically to trash class action yesterday without even so much as a bill.

Now, on some of the other bills, it was said to me: Well, there were hearings in prior Congresses. One Member said: We had a hearing on that back in 2012.

This is 2017, 5 years later. But on this particular bill that I am talking about, nobody even heard the bill. There was no hearing on it. It was simply brought up for a vote. That is irresponsible legislation. That is not real democracy when you don't even have a hearing and people who are affected by the legislation don't have the opportunity to come and talk about it.

Now, they are not having hearings because they think--and they are probably right--we're not paying attention. What are we paying attention to? We are paying attention to the magician. We are paying attention to the wizard of odd. We are paying attention to the tweets instead.

The good news is that the audience is starting to wise up. The whole country is waking up to the profound dangers of the administration's financial and political entanglements with Russia, with the Russian corporate and governmental elite.

Just this week, the National Security Adviser, Mr. Flynn, resigned after reports came out about his communications with the Russian Ambassador while President Obama was still in office, communications dealing with the lifting of sanctions on Russia, communications that General Flynn lied about and was forced from office because of it. He misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his conversations with the diplomat, which was being monitored and recorded by the intelligence community.

Now, Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen, my fellow Americans, let's think about this for a moment. As a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Mr. Flynn was no innocent about the world of spy versus spy. He must have known that his telephone call with the Russian Ambassador was being monitored and recorded. If he really wanted to go rogue and operate on his own without the permission and the license of President Trump, he never would have allowed that telephone conversation to be recorded. But he did allow it to be recorded. He made the call with presumable full knowledge that other people in the intelligence community would be listening in on it, which leads me to the inescapable, logical conclusion that Flynn knew that, in making that call, he enjoyed the full support of the one person above him who could remove him from his job, the President of the United States.

Now, do I know that? No, I don't know it. I surmise it. How are we going to know whether or not this is true? How do we get to the bottom of the Russian connection in the campaign? How do we get to the bottom of the Russian connection in the Trump administration?

We need to have a full, complete, independent investigation by experts, like the 9/11 Commission, which gets to the bottom of this profound danger, this dagger pointed at the throat of American democracy.

Mr. Speaker, everybody loves magic, I think. Everybody loves the enchantment of being fooled, of being distracted, of being diverted. That is why people go to magic shows. It is diverting. It is amusing. It is fun.

Everybody loves a great magician, too. None was greater in our history than the great Houdini, who dazzled the world with his extraordinary optical illusions and effects, his amazing ability to simulate telepathy and telekinesis.

Houdini also had a very strong ethical and professional code about being a magician. He never revealed a trick. More importantly, he never tried to fool people in order to defraud them. He never tried to fool people in order to humiliate them. He never tried to fool people in order to take away their rights. He never tried to fool people in order to demoralize and crush them or to strip them of their freedom. He never tried to fool people in order to victimize them.

Indeed, in the 1920s, Mr. Houdini channeled all of his magnificent energy away from doing his magic shows and instead put it into the separate but related task of exposing psychics, mediums, con men, charlatans, and practitioners of the occult and the dark arts who did take advantage of people's good will, who did take advantage of people's impressionability to defraud them, to take their money, their belongings, and to distract them from the real world, and to undermine the moral and ethical principles that should govern human behavior and must govern social life.

Although Houdini is no longer with us, he has great heirs today in socially responsible magicians like the Amazing Randi and Penn & Teller.

Already millions of Americans themselves--millions of us in the audience--have woken up to the fact that we have been pulled into an irrational and dangerous fantasy world, an echo chamber of malignant narcissism, cruelty, and paranoia.

It is time for all of us to stop being distracted, to stop being bedazzled, and pay attention to the real game, which is, one, trying to get America to join with Vladimir Putin, a dictator and an autocrat who said that the single greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in order to create an international league of dictators, demagogues, and despots to violate human rights and crush liberal democracy; and, two, to dismantle at home the public regulatory infrastructure which protects our land, our air, our water, our climate, our liberties, our freedoms, our equal rights, and our capacity to function as the greatest democracy on Earth and to function as an efficient and effective government meeting the needs of the people.

The magicians out there--there aren't many--but you have a special obligation to help us blow the whistle, and you are doing it. But it is really the American people--it is all of us who must stand up.

The Constitution talks about three branches of government. Article I is Congress. Article II is the executive. Article III is the judiciary. Let's call Congress the first branch.

But when you think about it, what is even more important than the Congress is the trunk, the roots of democracy. Everything grows up from the people. The branches are out there, but Congress works for the people. The President works for Congress and the people. The Supreme Court and the judiciary work for the people.

It is time for the people to dissolve the spells that have been cast over the country, to say this is a democracy. We operate by the Constitution and the rule of law.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn), my good friend, the Assistant Democratic Leader.

Honoring Voorhees College and Denmark Technical College

Mr. Speaker, we should be joined momentarily by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee. I want to close out, though, my own thoughts by responding to something I have been hearing over the last week here in the Halls of Congress.

Now that it is clear from our intelligence agencies, 16 of them, including the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and so on, that Vladimir Putin had a deliberate campaign of espionage, cyber sabotage, propaganda, and fake news to undermine American democracy in the 2016 election, and now that it is clear that there were high-level contacts between Trump associates and officials of the Russian Government, it is no longer being denied by anybody on either side of the aisle. What I have started to hear is, well, sure, they tried to hack our election, and, sure, they leaked thousands of emails, and, sure, they changed the dynamics of the campaign and what people were talking about in the campaign, but there is no proof that they stuffed any ballot boxes or they hacked into the computers. And that is true; we don't know that they stuffed any ballot boxes or hacked into computers, and we will have to see if anything comes out about that when we finally get to do a real comprehensive investigation. But, Mr. Speaker, the reality is that we should be terrified and appalled and outraged that they were allowed to go as far as they did.

How many people in this body would accept a foreign entity coming into our congressional districts and spending millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars against us, hacking into our computers, releasing our emails, and completely changing the dynamics of the campaign?

So when I hear from colleagues that, well, yes, they distorted the campaign, they hacked into the campaign, but they didn't steal the election, I think that they are making a distinction with no difference at all. If you derail the campaign, you kidnap the campaign, you hijack the campaign, you have altered the outcome of the election, especially one in which your opponent gets 2.9 million votes more than you did, especially in an election where you were able to torture out only the slenderest of electoral college victories in three States by 70,000 votes.

So I simply reject the constant claim that I am hearing from colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that we don't need to worry about Russian subversion of the 2016 election because it only affected the campaign; it didn't necessarily affect the election outcome. To influence the campaign is to influence the election outcome.

Mr. Speaker, I am seeing Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee is not here, so I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a distinguished reporter and commentator, Bruce DePuyt, on the occasion of his retirement from News Channel 8. For over 25 years, Mr. DePuyt has been a steadfast and trusted source of news for millions of people in Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Virginia. As most recently the producer and host of NewsTalk on WJLA News Channel 8, he has covered with true zeal, old-fashioned erudition and relentless energy not only local news but national and international news, weaving them together to create the special news ethos of the Washington area. His journalistic excellence has been recognized by local institutions such as the Washington Blade, which listed him as Best TV Personality of 2013, and the Washington City Paper, which named him Best Newsmaker of 2010. Mr. DePuyt is widely respected among his fellow print and broadcast journalists, who compete to have him as a commentator. I have had the privilege to witness firsthand, both as a guest on his show and as a loyal member of the audience, Mr. DePuyt's exemplary skill as an interviewer and piercing insight as an analyst. Although a bulldog for a straight answer, he can always be trusted to facilitate fair, enlightening and compelling conversations on the essential topics of the day.

Please join me and many residents of Maryland, as well as our friends in Virginia and D.C., as we thank Mr. DePuyt for his many years of service in educating and informing the community. He has made great journalistic contributions already, and we congratulate him on his rich and impressive career and wish him well in all of his future endeavors as a journalist and a citizen.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Garamendi) for the exemplary act of civility in allowing me and another late-arriving colleague to be part of the freshman class presentation about our collective commitment to promoting and practicing civility both within our class and within the Congress of the United States as long as we are here.

It is a great honor to be part of the freshman class of the 115th Congress. I am thrilled to make this commitment to civility--and even friendship--across the aisle with whatever Republican colleagues are willing to hang out with a liberal constitutional law professor.

Despite my great passions as a liberal and a progressive, I dedicate myself to civility for three reasons, and I think they are all consistent with my political values and beliefs:

First, I am a middle child, and so it is in my nature to try to bring people together. If you study the theory of birth order advanced by Frank Sulloway in his great book ``Born to Rebel,'' you will find an exemplary middle child in Reverend Martin Luther King who believed in the power of love for reconciling different views in society, and you will find a theory of the effectiveness of nonviolent struggle for progress and change, a theory that doesn't try to wish away or blink away real conflict that people have but embraces conflict as the possibility for uplifting everyone in the process.

Second, I am from the great State of Maryland, one of the original middle States tucked between New England and the South. In Maryland, we have a habit of working across party lines for the common good. Many of the big bills that I introduced in the Maryland Senate I introduced with Republican friends, like my friend Senator David Brinkley. We did the medical marijuana program together. He is a fellow cancer survivor and felt very strongly about that.

I did a number of criminal justice reform measures, including abolishing mandatory minimum drug sentences, with a Republican colleague named Michael Hough in Frederick County, who lives within my congressional district.

I even introduced a bill which succeeded for fiscal transparency in government, putting up all government expenditures over $10,000 online within 48 hours, with Congressman Alex Mooney from West Virginia, although then he was a State senator in Maryland who served with me in Annapolis.

Third, as a law professor, I believe that all of our ideas, passions, and feelings about politics are refined, perfected, and improved through the process of political dialogue, testing, and questioning.

So I know that our Republican colleagues make us stronger on the Democratic side of the aisle, and I hope that we make them stronger, too, that we all grow together and that we are able to improve each other's ideas, change each other's minds sometimes, and work on issues of common concern like infrastructure, which I think is a pressing problem that we can gather consensus around in this body, like the environment and the perils of climate change.

Our greatest Presidents have always called us to civility. George Washington invited Americans to place our patriotic love of liberty first above partisan and sectional feeling. Thomas Jefferson said that we are all Republicans, we are all federalists at a time of great division in the country. In his first inaugural address, President Lincoln said: ``We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.''

So the bonds of affection might seem like a romantic dream given the divisions and polarization in the country today, but I do think that, if at least we start with civility and respect, maybe we will be able to attain the level of recovering the bonds of affection that should unify all of us as Americans.

The word ``party'' comes from the French word ``partie,'' a part, and we have got to remember--each of us, all of us--that our party is just one small part of the whole, and we are all here to try to advance the common good.

With that, again, I want to thank the Congressman for his very gracious offer of the time.

Thank you so much, Mr. Garamendi. Thank you for convening us to talk about the first month of the Trump administration. The attacks on our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and the rule of law are coming fast and furious, so it is hard to collect all of them, and I appreciate the effort to try to inventory them today.

I represent the wonderful people of Montgomery County, Frederick County, and Carroll County, Maryland, the Eighth Congressional District, and I am, by training, a professor of constitutional law which I have done for the last quarter century at American University.

So in reviewing the highlights--or the low lights--of the last several weeks, Mr. Garamendi, I thought I would start, actually, with my very first day on the job. I went to sign up for health insurance in the basement of the Longworth House Office Building, which I was delighted to do because my job entitles me to sign up for health insurance, and I recognized how fortunate I was. As I was down there, a number of other new Members began to form, and I looked at them.

Then, as I was going through, at the same time, some memoranda that my office had received, I noticed that some of the first bills we were going to be looking at were to set the stage for dismantling the Affordable Care Act, for voucherizing Medicare, for pulverizing Medicaid and downsizing it, for demonizing Planned Parenthood, and for making it impossible for hundreds of thousands of citizens across the country to get basic health care.

I said to myself: Tell me that it is not the case that I am entering Congress with other Members who are going to be signing up for health insurance that they get as part of their job, and then they are going to go upstairs to the floor of the House and vote to strip 22 million Americans of their health care in the Affordable Care Act.

But, believe it or not, this is precisely what has transpired, and there is a very clear move on to try to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. The majority has voted more than 60 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but America has woken up to the fact that it is for real this time, and we have hundreds of thousands--millions--of citizens mobilizing across the country to defend the Affordable Care Act and to demand accountability from their Member of Congress. I am thrilled to see that.

Also, during the last few weeks, we all read a report from 16 intelligence agencies of the United States, including the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a dozen more, all of them expressing their confidence and their very strong belief that Vladimir Putin, the KGB, and the Russian Government worked a campaign to undermine and sabotage American democracy in the 2016 Presidential election. It included acts of cyber sabotage, espionage, fake news, and propaganda that all entered into American political discourse and our institutions in order to change the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election.

What we have gotten from the President of the United States is a series of blithe dismissals of the whole thing saying repeatedly: Other people do the same.

I think it was yesterday that commentator Bill O'Reilly said that he needed to criticize Vladimir Putin, who was a killer, to which the President responded: Lots of people are killers. And, essentially: Have you looked at what America has done recently?

That kind of talk is absolutely outrageous and scandalous that the President would say that.

The point is not to join the killers of the world. The point is not to participate in the league of bandits, bullies, dictators, despots, and rightwing movements that are forming all over the world. The point is to take them on and to stand up for democracy, human rights, and the real ideals of the country.

So back in the home office, in Moscow, they must be chortling that the President of the United States would establish a moral equivalency between the first democracy--the first constitutional democracy ever created on Earth--and a thug who is presiding over essentially a kleptocratic, authoritarian regime in Russia, a man who has said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the single greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.

So we have that to deal with.

Meantime, instead of taking on the real authoritarians on Earth, the President summons up all of his courage with Steve Bannon, and they impose a ban on people coming to America from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen; and they invoke 9/11 several times in the course of establishing this unprecedented refugee ban. The only problem is that the terrorist hijackers who came to attack

the country on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. The vast majority of them came from Saudi Arabia, which is the stronghold and the organizing center of Wahhabism, fundamentalism, radical Islamic terrorism on Earth which has been promoting and disseminating militant Islamist ideology all over the world. Yet, the Trump administration did nothing about that, either because they were too powerful for them to take on or because Mr. Trump has had extensive business dealings with Saudi Arabia, as well as in other countries that were passed over in this ban.

Now, of course, because this is a religiously oriented Muslim ban that is meant to whip up propaganda, hysteria, and chaos in the country and has nothing to do with national security, it has been struck down in different parts or in whole by five or six Federal district courts, most recently by the United States District Court in Seattle. The case is now in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

There are so many problems with the executive order in terms of due process, equal protection, free exercise of religion, and so on, that there are multiple judicial decisions that are striking down different aspects of the executive order.

Well, what else do we have going on? Today, in one of the committees that I serve on, the House Administration Committee, there was a 6-3 vote to dismantle the only Federal election entity, the EAC, which is charged with trying to promote the cybersecurity of our elections. That vote was along party lines--6-3--to dismantle the Election Assistance Commission which had been created and established on a bipartisan vote many years ago. That was just taken down.

So I would say that there appears to be an effort to plunge America into a certain kind of chaos at this point. That, of course, has been the explicit wish of Steve Bannon, who has described himself as a Leninist who wants to tear down our system of government and demolish the politics of the country to replace with something else which has gone un-named.

So, my fellow Americans, Mr. Garamendi, these are very serious times. I am thrilled that the people of America are organizing in every State of the Union and in every community to build up the capacity to resist these attacks on our Constitution, on our Bill of Rights, and on the rule of law. The majority of the people who did not vote for this President are mobilized, they are galvanized, and they understand that eternal vigilance is, indeed, the price of liberty, and people are going to remain eternally vigilant--and passionately so--during the course of this administration when the attacks continue to come fast and furious on our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.

I thank the gentleman from California for his leadership.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be here with my colleague Pramila Jayapal from Seattle, Washington. We wanted to talk about what has been happening over the last week with the executive orders on immigration and asylum that have taken place, and we want to try to take a broad perspective on this; to put it in some historical, legal and constitutional context; and then also to talk very specifically about the executive orders and what has been taking place with them in different parts of the country; and about the multiple Federal judicial rulings imposing injunctions on enforcement of those orders.

But I wanted to begin, actually, by stepping back from the heat of the current crisis and looking, instead, at the idea of America.

Well, what is the idea of America? America was created, as the great Tom Paine said, as a haven of refuge for people fleeing political and religious repression from all around the world.

Remember the radicalism of the American Revolution and our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. We were the first Nation on Earth conceived in revolutionary insurgency against monarchy, dictatorship, autocracy, theocracy, and the merger of church and State.

The American colonists were rebelling against, not just the king and all of the whimsical depredations and abuses of the crown, but also against centuries of religious warfare in Europe between the Protestants and the Catholics, holy inquisition, holy crusades, witchcraft trials, endless wars between the Catholics and the Protestants.

Our forefathers and foremothers wanted to break from that history and put into our Constitution the separation of church and State--as Jefferson called it, the wall of separation between church and State, the establishment clause, the idea of free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, the right to petition for redress of grievances, the right of people to assemble, freedom of thought, freedom of conscience in the United States.

But it would be a land that would be open to people who were fleeing authoritarianism, who were trying to get away from repressive regimes, and kings, and monarchs, and princes, and tyrants, and dictators, and despots everywhere. That was the idea behind America.

Well, then in this Presidential campaign, then candidate Donald Trump said that he wanted to impose a Muslim ban, a ban on Muslims coming to America, which would cause our forefathers and foremothers to turn over in their graves to hear that somebody running for President of the United States wanted to impose a ban on the immigration of people based on their religious faith, in a country that was designed on the principle of free exercise of religion, designed on the principle of no establishment of religion, designed on the principle of no religious tests for public office or political participation that suddenly we would say we are not going to accept people--in the 21st century--based on their religious heritage.

And of course, anybody can make up their religion anyway. Anybody can say what they are. So it is as futile and as silly as it is anathema and apathetical to our basic constitutional ideals.

Well, that Muslim ban has, in its bizarre way, become law now in the United States of America. The President issued an executive order as one of his first actions on people coming to our country from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, those seven countries. And we have got to interrogate what exactly the logic of this is.

The President and his chief strategists of the alt-right, named Steve Bannon, have defended this order on the grounds of national security. The idea is that somehow we are defending the national security and the defense by banning people from those countries.

All right, we all support national security. If that would advance our national security, it is something we should look at.

Well, what is the evidence that that is going to benefit our national security? Our country now is no stranger to terror and to terrorism. All of us remember that shocking, fateful day, 9/11, back in 2001, when America changed forever.

Those 19 hijackers came from three countries. And which three countries on this list of seven did they come from? None of them. Those hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. The overwhelming majority of them came from Saudi Arabia, then Egypt then United Arab Emirates.

None of those three countries is on this list of seven. Why not? Well, a couple of different theories are out there. One is that President Trump has business interests in those countries. He is doing business with corporations in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt, and in the United Arab Emirates. So that is one leading theory that is out there. The other is that these are rich and powerful countries. So despite the fact that they were the lead exporters from this prism of terrorist hijackers to the United States, they get a pass.

And instead, we pick on Yemen, and Somalia, and Iraq--our presumed ally--that another Republican President sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into waging a war based on the mythology that there were weapons of mass destruction in that country, but now they are on our side. Yet, we have imposed a ban of people coming in as refugees from Iraq. But Saudi Arabia gets a pass; Egypt gets a pass; United Arab Emirates gets a pass because they are on the rich side.

So what exactly do these seven countries have in common if it doesn't have anything to do with our national security? Because if you look at the other terrorist events that have taken place in our country, for example, the Boston Marathon bombers, those young men who were implicated in that crime against the people of the city of Boston and the people of the United States came from Russia originally.

Is there a ban on Russia being imposed here? Quite the contrary. Earlier today, President Trump relaxed sanctions on Russia, made it easier for American businesses to export information technology to Russian companies, according to news reports.

I haven't seen the exact order yet, but there is an executive order that is lessening sanctions on Russia, despite the fact that two of the most infamous terrorists against the United States originally came from there. So what do those seven countries have in common?

Well, they are all Muslim countries. They are poor Muslim countries. They are poor Muslim countries that Donald Trump doesn't do business with. And so maybe that is it. Maybe the idea is, we are going to wage a worldwide war on the poorest, most vulnerable Muslim countries, even if they don't pose any special threat to us, because that will conform to Steve Bannon's ideological world view of a major contest between the Christian west and radical Islamic terror.

I think that would be it. But President Trump, of course, puts his business interests even above the racism and White nationalism of Steve Bannon, because the business interests have to come first in all cases.

So that is the best that we can make of what has been imposed on the country, an Orwellian policy imposed with Kafkaesque incompetence all over the United States of America. So the airports are in an uproar, families have been dislocated, children agonized over the situation, panic spreading across America. And part of me wants to think, well, this is just the misfortunes of a beginning President. Maybe this is part of a design by Steve Bannon who has proclaimed himself a Leninist who wants to tear the system down, tear the government down; to start over again.

Maybe that is what is going on. Who knows? But all of this brings us back to the emoluments clause. Now the emoluments clause, Article I, section 9, clause 8 of the Constitution was inserted by our great Founders because they feared foreign monetary dominance of the United States Government.

They knew that kings and princes, dictators and despots, traitors and saboteurs all over the place would try to use their money to compromise the integrity of Republican government, Republican democracy.

Remember, we were trying something new here, what our great Republican President Abraham Lincoln would later come to call the ``government of the people, by the people, and for the people.''

That was the experiment that we launched then, and they knew that there was a basic problem, which is, the room will not hold all. We can't have a New England town meeting every time we need to make a decision, so we have got to elect people to go be our Governors.

But when you elect them, now you have got an agent. And the problem all of you lawyers know out there--in principal agent law--is how do you make sure the agent actually serves the client rather than the interests of the agent himself or herself?

And the Founders understood that, and they were afraid that the people who we elected might go to Washington and be corrupted by foreign money, by all of the diplomats and spies running around offering gifts, and gold, and snuffboxes, and diamonds, and so on. And so what they said was that no official in our government, no official could accept any gifts, or emolument, any payment of any kind at all from a foreign government, a king, a prince, or a foreign government. No foreign payments.

And that is something that has been observed scrupulously for more than two centuries by our Presidents. Nobody has even come close to the line of violating that.

When Benjamin Franklin was Ambassador to France, he received a snuffbox from the people of France. He came back, and he brought it to Congress and asked Congress to approve, because it is up to this body to decide whether or not a foreign payment is acceptable or not.

And Congress said: Mr. Franklin, because of your extraordinary reputation for integrity, for decency, and for honesty, we understand you have not been compromised by that snuffbox, and it is just a snuffbox, and you can keep it.

But today, what we have got now is a President who has hundreds of millions of dollars of interest all over the world--in Russia, in the Philippines--millions of dollars of loans from the Government of China, the Trump Hotel, which is renting out banquet rooms, dining halls, floors, hotel rooms, to foreign governments and embassies from all over the world who come here to try to influence our government.

And what do we hear about the emoluments clause? Has the President come to ask us whether or not we approve of these arrangements? Nothing. Nothing has happened. Is it affecting policy? Every single day.

And I come back--before I turn it over to my colleague--to what we are talking about, which is these executive orders which have this very bizarre quality, my fellow Americans.

They apply to poor Muslim countries where Donald Trump has no business interests. These executive orders don't apply to Saudi Arabia, they don't apply to Egypt, they don't apply to the United Arab Emirates, they don't apply to any of the countries where Trump Industries has business. That is precisely why the Founders put in the emoluments clause. I know it is a bit of a mouthful, but every American has got to learn to say it. All it means is payments. This is the foreign bribery clause in our Constitution.

These terrible immigration orders, which have created chaos and pandemonium across the land, are a perfect demonstration of why we need to enforce the emoluments clause and why this President needs to divest himself immediately of all these foreign concerns, or this Congress must hear the appeals that are coming from our side of the aisle and must listen to the fact that these payments that are being received on a daily basis by the President are a threat to the American constitutional order.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal), my good friend and colleague from Seattle, Washington.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee).

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Barragan).

I thank the gentlewoman.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished Congresswoman from New York, Yvette Clarke.

I thank the Congresswoman for her comments.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Cicilline).

Mr. Speaker, I will be very brief here because a number of our colleagues from around the country are waiting to weigh in.

Let me just say that this executive order is like a bad issue spotter on a constitutional law final exam. It

is riddled with so many constitutional errors and violations, starting with the ban on religious free exercise, equal protection of the laws.

The way it has been implemented has been draconian and Kafkaesque

around the country, violating due process and the right to counsel,

which has been the source of a lot of the successful constitutional

litigation that has already taken place.

It hasn't even been out on the street for a week, and I think five or six Federal district courts have struck down different aspects of it. So it is a Pandora's box, and it is going to be the gift that keeps giving to constitutional lawyers across the country.

Again, we are urging the President just to withdraw it at this point.

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

Mr. Speaker, we have four more speakers. We have had an overwhelming response to the Progressive Caucus' Special Order on the executive orders here.

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Pocan).

Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman from Washington State (Ms. Jayapal) and I thank all of the Members who have come pouring out in response for this Progressive Caucus Special Order.

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

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

Could we allow the gentleman to complete his statement just with 1 minute?

I ask unanimous consent for just 1 minute to complete----

I thank the gentleman. That is very gracious of the Congressman.

If the gentleman has a few seconds left, I would just say I know the distinguished Congressman King is going to go, and then we have a couple more people who were left over from the Progressive Caucus Special Order who will stay for 1-minutes after.

Will the gentleman yield?

I thank you for your thoughtful comments tonight, and I think you made some good points. I think you effectively made the point that this is not, strictly speaking, a Muslim ban. It is not a ban on all Muslims entering the country. In the popular vernacular, the public has taken up basically what was the current President's language that he used during the campaign. So people are using it for kind of a shorthand.

But I want to ask you about the ban. It is not the case that there is no religious reference in the executive order because it does say that the religious minorities from those countries are given preference, and that would be the Christians in those countries.

One thing I think that does need to be corrected is thousands of Christians were admitted from the Muslim world under the Obama administration, and there was no discrimination. In fact, I think there were almost as many Christians admitted as Muslims.

But here is my real question for you. The 9/11 hijackers--which was the worst terrorist atrocity ever committed on our shores, thousands of Americans were killed, the country plunged into chaos--came from three countries: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. All three of those countries where Trump Industries does business were exempted from the ban on the seven countries. Why? What is the policy justification for not including that?

None of the countries that are included in the ban produced any of the terrorist attacks that we saw in Orlando, in San Bernardino County, or any of the other ones. So how were those chosen and the source countries for the 9/11 attack exempted?

Again, that is very gracious of you, and I appreciate the spirit with which you engage in this dialogue. I think it is something we really do need to get to the bottom of. To my knowledge, Trump Industries is not doing business in the poor Muslim countries that were targeted like Somalia, Libya, and so on, but perhaps I can be corrected.

In any event, the fact that he has done business in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt, and United Arab Emirates--in the wealthier Muslim countries--it may be logical as a matter of business practice, but I don't think that can become the basis for American foreign policy. I think that is the reason why this policy has created such outrage in America and around the world because it doesn't seem to have any national security logic to it. It is not about terrorism unless you can convince me that those seven countries actually generated terrorism.

Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to H.R. 7.

A few days ago, millions of Americans made history by marching for freedom and equality against an administration that keeps threatening to grab women by their privacy rights. H.R. 7 now tries to make it impossible for millions of women, like my constituents in Maryland, to have an abortion, even when their health is at stake and even to the point of manipulating the tax laws to force private insurers in the ACA not to offer complete coverage.

Here in Washington, D.C., the only capital of a democracy on Earth where residents are denied voting representation in their national legislature, this extreme legislation constitutes a special assault on liberty. The hundreds of thousands of taxpaying citizens living in D.C. have decided, like the people of Maryland, to offer Medicaid funding for poor women to have complete coverage. This legislation strips this modicum of democracy away in the District of Columbia, combining a cavalier attack on democracy with a vicious attack on health care.

If a foreign repressive power like Russia tried to deny women in our Capital City complete medical coverage, we would consider it an act of aggression against the United States. As a Representative from Maryland, the Free State, I reject this outrageous attempt to deprive women of their constitutionally protected choices, and as the next-door neighbor of the good people of Washington, D.C., I reject this brutal attack on democracy and health care.

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

Mr. Chairman, this amendment would require both the Chairman of the SEC and all of its Commissioners to undergo a comprehensive, professional ethics training in order to ensure that all SEC regulations and actions are free from conflicts of interest that may arise from their past or future employment or by legal representation of regulated entities.

This training into all of the ethical standards that were just invoked by my distinguished colleague from Michigan is critical to guard against regulatory capture and to protect the public interest. The whole challenge of a republic is how to get legislators and other public officers, who are agents of the people, to serve the common good rather than their own, private interests. In the cost-benefit terms of this legislation, you would call this the ``agency problem.'' Our Constitution, with everything from the separation of powers to the Emoluments Clause, to the Title of Nobility Clause is designed to safeguard the public interest and to reduce the prospects for mischief, corruption, and self-dealing by people in government. Providing mandatory ethics training is a simple way to remind all of us in public life whom we really work for--the American people.

Requiring employees to undergo basic ethics training is not unusual. In fact, every congressional staffer who works in this body is required to undergo ethics training in his or her first 60 days of employment here. The freshman class, of which I am a proud member, just had an excellent briefing on professional ethics standards a couple of weeks ago.

Under this amendment, Congress will be able to ensure that the SEC officials who are making the critical rules that govern the financial securities industry are looking out for the American people and not for any particular special interest.

Conflicts of interest have been rife in the financial sector. In 2008, while Wall Street and big banks preyed on the victims of the mortgage crisis, American families lost trillions of dollars in retirement values, home values, equity, and so on.

This amendment would implement a simple safeguard, ensuring that the people who regulate the financial sector are not crossing any ethical lines or are bending the rules in favor of past or future employers or of any other special interests. The people of the United States expect and deserve nothing less from Washington.

In closing, I urge all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this amendment.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, the gentleman from Michigan has invited us, through the various colloquies this afternoon, to believe that there is a comprehensive ethical regime in place. We agree that there is, but what there is not is a requirement that the Chair of the SEC and each of its Commissioners undergo ethics training, the kind of training that millions of Americans undergo all the time in order to understand precisely what their ethical obligations are. It is as if to say that nobody needs to have stop signs or stoplights out there because there is a traffic code someplace. There may be, but we need to give the actual direction to people who are participating in the activity of regulation.

Nothing that the good gentleman has said persuades me that the ethics training is actually taking place or that the SEC Commissioners and the Chair of the SEC do not need it.

If anything I said is read by anyone to insult the President of the United States or the current Chair of the SEC, then I would stand corrected. I don't think I said anything that would have

affronted any of them. This is basic ethics training that takes place for people across the government. For the life of me, I can't understand what the opposition to it is.

There seems to be a kind of fetishizing of cost-benefit analysis above everything else. The Constitution doesn't include the words ``cost-benefit.'' There are a whole series of rules that we have in there, including the Emoluments Clause, which established the principle of no conflicts of interest, no foreign bribery, no domestic bribery, no compromising of the integrity of government; and I do not understand why we are so afraid of building those principles into the legal architecture that governs the Securities and Exchange Commission.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I think we have arrived at what the difference is between me and the gentleman from Michigan.

The regulation, as he reads it, applies only to the Chair. This amendment would extend the ethics training, which he seems to support, to all of the members of the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is true that they all have to do a filing, as we all do, about our various finances, but that is not the comprehensive ethical training that all of us need to get in order to avoid conflicts of interest. So, if that is something that is good enough for the Chair, it is, presumably, good enough for all of the members of the SEC.

I would urge my colleague to rethink his opposition to this commonsense amendment, which, I think, would install precisely what the American people are asking of us, which is that all of us pay attention to public ethics in the conduct of our duties.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. President, I have an objection because 10 of the 29 electoral votes cast by Florida were cast by electors not lawfully certified because they violated Florida's prohibition against dual office holding.

It is in writing, Mr. President.

Not as of yet, Mr. President.

``. . . to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress; . . .''