Floor Statements

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition.

I thank my colleague from South Carolina for his excellent presentation, but this bill is a case study in a legislative majority that is in search of not common ground and common sense but rather extreme measures that divide and polarize the Congress and the people.

Once upon a time this was a sensible, bipartisan bill led by our Democratic colleague, Val Demings from Orlando, Florida, who had been a police chief. Her bill allowed Federal agencies to sell handguns that they were no longer using to the active-duty officers, who previously carried those handguns, for fair market value as long as they completed a background check like everybody else in America.

Mr. Speaker, last Congress, Republicans weakened that bipartisan bill, which I think commanded unanimous support in Congress, by stripping the background check requirement while still restricting the bill to handgun sales to current law enforcement officers only. So we were willing to go along with that compromise. We accepted that in the last Congress.

When the bill came to the floor for a vote, however, Republicans filled the bill with a menagerie of more outlandish and extreme provisions, and

that is the version that they started with in this Congress which is before us today.

When we marked up this legislation, we offered an amendment that would allow them to go back to the compromise version of the bill, a version of the bill that they themselves had introduced and that we support, but they refused to do it.

So today, in place of a reasonable, commonsense, and common-ground bill, Republicans are dug in on another extreme proposal that riddles our gun laws with loopholes and politicizes what should have been a simple, bipartisan measure.

The bill before us today would allow surplus firearms to be sold not only to active Federal law enforcement officers in good standing, but also to retired law enforcement officers.

Because the bill now has no background check requirement, it could create a situation in which it would be possible for an officer to retire and commit a crime, such as domestic violence or assault, that would ordinarily render him or her ineligible to purchase and possess firearms but then still be able to buy a firearm from the Federal Government without any background check at all.

While the bill includes a good standing requirement, as they remind us, this is plainly meaningless as applied to retired officers who may have left the department in perfectly good standing but could not pass a background check today.

Agencies can certify that an officer is in good standing when they retire, but they have no way to track the behavior of their former officers after that if they cannot do a background check. So an agency could unknowingly sell a surplus firearm to someone who cannot lawfully buy a gun, and all of this would occur under the statute without any background check at all.

The bill also allows for the sale of any firearm except machine guns. That includes not just handguns, but also assault weapons, destructive devices like hand grenades, and even firearms that are subject to heightened restrictions under the National Firearms Act. Moreover, it allows them to be sold at salvage value, effectively making it so that the Federal Government and the taxpayers would actually be subsidizing gun sales. They replaced fair market value with salvage value.

My colleagues have claimed that the bill would not really allow for the sale of all of these types of firearms because it only applies, they say, to service weapons. However, they need to read their own bill. It allows for the sale of any firearm other than a machine gun that is issued to an officer. That means if an officer uses not just a handgun, but an assault rifle, a grenade launcher, or anything classified as a destructive device, any firearm or destructive device used by a SWAT team, any firearm or destructive device used by the Secret Service, so long it is not a machine gun, if issued to an officer, can be sold back to him or her without a background check under the bill at salvage value.

If that is not what they mean, and they have been scrambling to deny it, then they should change the language of the bill because that is plainly what the bill says. Forgive me for insisting on scrupulous attention to words, Mr. Speaker, but that is the business we are in when we enter the legislative process.

Taken together, the bill makes it so that an officer could retire, commit a crime, become a person who may not legally own firearms under Federal law, then buy from the Federal Government a handgun, a semiautomatic assault rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, or even a grenade launcher, at a discount, with no background check at all.

Now, Mr. Speaker, this is a famously do-nothing or do-very-little Congress. They don't have much on their agenda other than slashing $880 billion from Medicaid, SNAP, Meals on Wheels, Head Start, and the other programs that actually serve Americans who don't live like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. However, Mr. Speaker, you would think they would have the time at least to write a bill that would not permit these kinds of things to happen.

These are unacceptable risks of dangerous weapons being sold to a person who may not legally have one. So reluctantly, I must oppose this bill which began as a Democratic bill which commanded unanimous, bipartisan support before.

Nothing in this bill is going to help law enforcement officers actually do their jobs, which was how all of this was introduced when we first started out today. Indeed, it doesn't provide a single Federal dollar to help local law enforcement.

In fact, our colleagues have not advanced a single bill during this entire Police Week or even this entire session of Congress to increase funding to State and local police.

In fact, the party that now controls the White House and both Chambers of Congress is now letting DOGE, Elon Musk, and their midnight crew of computer hackers dismantle entire agencies, fire thousands of Federal workers without cause, and generally wreak havoc across the government.

Last month, DOGE decided unilaterally to cancel more than $500 million of Department of Justice grant funding for local law enforcement, public safety, and crime prevention programs all over the country in our communities.

What did we hear from our colleagues across the aisle?

Did they stand up to DOGE and object to this defunding of the police?

No, Mr. Speaker. Our colleagues said absolutely nothing, and I mean that literally.

During the Judiciary Committee markup of the reconciliation bill, Democrats offered a simple amendment to immediately restore hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the police and for hundreds of other essential public safety grant programs dismantled by, as far as we can tell, one employee at DOGE.

Every single one of our GOP colleagues voted against that amendment, but they refused to utter a word in favor of Elon Musk's chainsaw massacre of local law enforcement and public safety programs. They don't want to be quoted supporting DOGE, but even if their quotes don't support DOGE, their votes support DOGE, and they have voted not to restore hundreds of millions of dollars that DOGE cut from our State, local, and county law enforcement and public safety organizations.

In case some of our colleagues haven't heard yet from their outraged constituents about this, let me offer just one example of more than 365 grants that were abruptly terminated by DOGE. That is one grant program per day all across the country.

DOGE cut funding for a program called the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative, which provided funding to dozens and dozens of rural law enforcement agencies across America allowing them, with their strapped budgets, to hire more officers and purchase up-to-date equipment and technology. They also supported rural victim services and crime prevention programs. This program was created to assist small, rural agencies that need Federal funding but are so small, short- staffed, or underresourced, they wouldn't even have the ability to apply for the funding.

One such recipient of this grant from the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative was the Shawano, Wisconsin Police Department, which was using the funding to pay for a detective dedicated to investigating and solving unsolved violent crimes and to stop narcotics trafficking in their community.

The police department said that the additional detective would build trust with community members, increase patrols in hot spot areas, enhance crime prevention, and sustain a reduction in violent crime in narcotics-related crime. This is just one of the hundreds of rural police departments and other agencies using this funding from this one grant program from 365 that were suddenly terminated by one DOGE employee running amuck in the Department of Justice.

This is funding, Mr. Speaker, that we in the House of Representatives voted for on an overwhelming bipartisan basis and that the Senate overwhelmingly voted for on a bipartisan basis. We had bicameral passage and presentment to the President. The President signed it into law. The Department of Justice got the funding. The Department of Justice programmed the funding, and the Department of Justice awarded those grants all across America.

Mr. Speaker, guess who stopped it without my knowledge, without their

knowledge, and without anybody's knowledge?

It was one DOGE employee, one of Elon Musk's junior lieutenants who spent his career at Tesla, and then he decided he was going to wipe out hundreds of millions of dollars going to our people.

Mr. Speaker, are our colleagues going to allow DOGE to get away with this critical destruction of law enforcement in rural communities, urban communities, and suburban communities across the land?

Apparently so. They remain silent on it. They won't utter a word in favor of it, but they don't utter a peep against it. They just vote for it. They just sheepishly get in line and support this destruction of what we had already voted for to put into action.

Mr. Speaker, I oppose this legislation, which is a trivial distraction from what is really going on in America today. They are dismantling the priorities of the people as passed through the people's House and through the Senate and signed into law.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to join us in actually standing up for law enforcement, for the police, and for community safety. I would invite them to join us in actually standing up for the Article I powers of Congress. I hope they will join us in rejecting DOGE's deranged funding cuts that are undermining public safety and harming law enforcement across the land.

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

Mr. Speaker, perhaps my friend from South Carolina would indulge me a few questions because I am puzzled by some of the representations that were just made.

The gentleman answers a point I didn't make. He said that the officer must be in good standing in order to be sold the gun. That is true if they are an officer. What if they are a retired officer? What does it mean to be a retired officer who is in good standing when that person no longer has a record and the department is not keeping track of them? That is why the original legislation insisted that there be a background check.

I am wondering if the gentleman would answer that question.

Well, you get that one.

Let me ask another question.

The gentleman says that only handguns would be issued to officers, whether they are currently officers or whether they are retired, but SWAT teams are included by your legislation, I believe. Are not members of SWAT teams issued semiautomatic weapons and other kinds of guns? Are you saying that this applies only to handguns? If so, why didn't you write it to apply only to handguns?

I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina for the purpose of a colloquy.

Even in the case of a SWAT team, the gentleman is saying that a member of a SWAT team would not have a semiautomatic weapon?

Are they not issued to the officer?

That is while you are an officer. Now let's say you retire and you commit domestic violence or assault or battery or some other offense 2 years later. The department is not notified of that, is not keeping track of it. What does it mean to say a retired person is in good standing if they have committed a crime in the meantime?

There is nothing that would actually prevent the sale actually by GSA, right? Who would effectuate the provisions of the prohibited purchaser statute?

Then we are establishing legislative history that, according to the gentleman, this legislation is designed to apply only to handguns and not to all of these other things which the gentleman says are irrelevant. Is that right?

Then why is it in this bill?

Neither are machine guns. The gentleman excluded machine guns.

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

They went to the pains of excluding machine guns, saying that they didn't want a retired officer to be able to purchase a machine gun, but then they are allowing grenade launchers, semiautomatic weapons, and all these other weapons. I don't understand why, when the gentleman now is vigorously protesting that that is not the intention of the statute, that is not the intention of the legislation.

Please rewrite the bill to be in accord with what you are saying, which is that this applies only to handguns. Otherwise, you are just multiplying

the proliferation of regulations which I thought you were opposed to.

Now you are saying we want the GSA to issue a whole bunch of regulations to do the work that Congress refuses to do. I think you are moving a little bit closer to what Congresswoman Demings' original legislation was if you limit it to handguns. What she said is: Obviously, someone who retires from the force can go out and purchase whatever weapons they want. This was the sentimental value of allowing an officer to purchase a gun that he or she used when they were actually in service, at fair market value.

Now you have riddled it with all of these other exceptions and completely changed the meaning of the legislation in a way that moves us backwards in terms of public safety. In America, 80 or 90 percent of the American people want a universal violent criminal background check.

We think we have enough loopholes as it is, with the internet loophole, which the majority refuses to close; with the private gun show loophole, which the majority refuses to close; with the person-to- person private sale loophole, which the majority refuses to close.

We don't need more loopholes. America already stands out as an outlier in the world among advanced industrialized countries. We have rates of gun violence and gun homicide that are 10 or 20 times higher than Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Israel, and Japan. You name it, nothing comes close to us.

Instead of helping police officers by getting guns out of the hands of criminals, our colleagues are just looking for ways to create more loopholes in the laws for purchasing guns.

Mr. Speaker, again, I just wanted to nail down into the weeds here exactly what the legislation says. The term ``firearm'' is the meaning given that term in section 921(a) of Title 18, excluding any machine gun. They have properly decided that we should not put more machine guns into the stream of commerce.

What is still swept within it? Any explosive, incendiary, poison gas, bomb, grenade, rocket, missile having explosive or incendiary charge of more than \1/4\ ounce, mine, device, and so on.

Why would we open this up if that is not the intention of my colleague? I take him completely in good faith at his word. Let's write that out of the bill because what we have seen is that people who mean to do harm to other people will exploit any other opportunity to do it. I don't understand the logic of excluding machine guns but then sweeping in all of these other dangerous weapons.

I am happy to yield to my friend if he wants to elaborate on that, or I will reserve my time. Maybe he can use some of his time.

Mr. Speaker, there is another bit of business we need to clean up here, and I would invite my distinguished colleague from South Carolina to join me in this.

We voted back on March 15, 2022, to erect a plaque in the Congress of the United States to honor the police officers who fought tooth and nail, with valor, courage, and heroism, to defend us against mobs of thousands of marauding rioters and insurrectionists, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, who came to try to overthrow a Presidential election. They stormed the Capitol. They injured, wounded, hospitalized, brutalized more than 140 officers, many of whom are still suffering from the physical and mental wounds today.

We voted back on March 15, 2022, to put a plaque up in Congress to honor them, and it reads: ``On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on January 6, 2021. Their heroism will never be forgotten.''

Alas, Mr. Speaker, their heroism seems already to have been forgotten by some of our colleagues. The plaque exists. We have the plaque. It has been produced. Yet, the Speaker of the House refuses to put the plaque up 2 years later. Why? Why will we not honor the police officers, like Sergeant Gonell who was forced to leave the police force because of the severe injuries that he suffered then and is trying to support his family on around half the salary that he had before?

Why would we not honor the officers like Michael Fanone, who wasn't even on duty that day, but he heard about the riots at the Capitol, and he came down to join the fight with his brothers and sisters in blue and was nearly killed? He begged for his life to the mob, saying he had four daughters of his own. He had a heart attack. Will we not honor Michael Fanone?

Will we honor Officer Harry Dunn who fought for hours and hours, enduring not just other physical attacks but savage racial epithets and abuse?

Will we honor Officer Hodges who nearly died trying to stop the mob from entering the Capitol? He got caught in the doorway on the western front of the Capitol. He was tortured in front of the eyes of the world. You have probably seen the pictures of him being caught and beaten by the mob, which that day was wielding Confederate battle flags, American flags, baseball bats, steel pipes, broken furniture, you name it, to attack our officers.

These people gave blood, sweat, and tears. Several officers died in the aftermath, including Officer Brian Sicknick who died the very next day after receiving grievous wounds and injuries.

We could be doing a lot more for them. President Trump wants a fund for January 6. That is good, right? No. He wants a fund for the rioters' families. He wants a fund for the insurrectionists that he pardoned, not for the police officers. Will my colleagues say anything about that?

At the very least, let's put up the plaque to honor these officers. Not a single Member of the majority has given us one reason why this plaque, which is completed, has not been hung in the Capitol of the United States. Why not? If you don't respect the law enforcement officers and the police who fought tooth and nail for us that day, at least respect the rule of law. This was supposed to be up 2 years ago.

Mr. Speaker, forgive my passion, but I was there. I was here on January 6, 2021. I heard them chanting: ``Hang Mike Pence.'' ``Hang Mike Pence.'' The words are still echoing in my mind from that day. They were looking for Nancy Pelosi. They were quoted as saying they wanted to assassinate Nancy Pelosi. They stormed her office. They took over her office.

Do we honor police officers for real, or do we only honor them if it is politically convenient for us to honor them? Like the prosecutors, the new Attorney General got in. The new Acting U.S. Attorney, Ed Martin, got in. They were forced to withdraw that nomination after it turned out he had appeared 150 different times on Russian propaganda networks, like Russia Today and Sputnik, and after it turned out he had all kinds of Neo-Nazi affiliations and friendships. Anyway, he got in. You know what he did? They fired more than a dozen of the most experienced veteran prosecutors in the Department of Justice. Why? Because they did their jobs, because they prosecuted the people who committed that massive assault on American democracy. The greatest mass assault, violent assault on the Capitol in the history of the United States. We have never seen anything like it.

This administration not only pardoned more than 1,500 people who participated in that brutality, in that attempt to overthrow an election, which Joe Biden won by more than 7 million votes, 306-232 in the electoral college, not only did they pardon all of those offenders, whether they were nonviolent or violent--and a lot of them have already gone on to reoffend since they got their pardons from Donald Trump--not only did they do that but they wanted to sack the prosecutors for doing their jobs.

Is there anybody on that side of the aisle who will speak out against this obscenity? No, I don't think so.

Is there anybody on that side of the aisle who is uttering support for law enforcement during our law enforcement week who will say it is time to put up the plaque in honor of the officers who defended us?

Mr. Speaker, I hope my colleagues have some good reason for doing what they are doing. The Framers of the Constitution thought that people who participated in the government would come to identify with their branch of government. That is why I thought, well, when they stormed the Capitol

and Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection against us, we would, in bipartisan unison, denounce it and vote to impeach and convict.

Ten Republicans did join all the Democrats in doing that. That was historic. Seven Republican Senators voted to convict after seeing overwhelming evidence.

Mitch McConnell also found the evidence completely convincing, but he said that he didn't think the Senate has jurisdiction to try to convict a former President, despite the fact that that contradicted two centuries of precedent, and the Senate ruled on the very first day against that motion to dismiss the charges. He said there was nothing that could be done, even though Donald Trump was actually, factually, ethically, and morally responsible for everything that happened.

When will my colleagues finally break from the cultish obedience to Donald Trump, who is now over in the Middle East on what looks like a business trip for him and his family? They are all raking in not just hundreds of millions of dollars but billions of dollars with their business deals.

My colleagues are back home doing his bidding, trying to slash $888 billion from Medicaid and the programs that the American people have built. Our parents and grandparents built those programs so we can take care of ourselves.

The richest man in the world and Donald Trump have another agenda. They have left your agenda behind. They left you guys to do the dirty work.

Donald Trump is collecting a $400 million flying grift gift from Qatar. They are giving him bribery force one. Nobody has ever seen anything like this in the history of the United States. They are trying to give him a jet plane.

It is humiliating for the American President to be flying around in a plane created by the dictator, the theocratic monster of Qatar, while they are collecting billions of dollars. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has gotten $2 billion from Saudi Arabia.

This is totally in violation of the Constitution. Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 says that nobody holding an office of trust under the United States shall, without the consent of the Congress, collect a ``present, emolument, office, or title of any kind whatever from any king, prince, or foreign state.''

That is Donald Trump's new business, to go collect foreign government emoluments.

I hope my colleagues will join us in demanding that he come to Congress to ask for permission to keep that $400 million bug-riddled airplane that he wants to fly around on somebody else's tab. It is absurd, the lengths that they have gone to, to mangle and trample our Constitution.

Let's get back to law enforcement and the rule of law, starting with the Constitution of the United States of America. The President wants to keep all of these gifts from foreign dictators. Come to Congress.

That is what Abraham Lincoln did. The King of Siam gave Abraham Lincoln elephant tusks. This is in the middle of the Civil War. Check out the descent of honor and integrity in our country. In the middle of the Civil War, President Lincoln comes to Congress and says: Can I keep those elephant tusks? Congress comes back with a message: We love you, Honest Abe. You are doing a great job in the war, but no. Turn those over to the Department of the Interior.

My colleagues will not even demand that Donald Trump bring his corrupt gifts, his royal spoils, to the Congress of the United States to ask our consent. Every President has done it up until this one.

Let's get back to the rule of law. Let's enforce the Constitution. Let's honor the police officers who defended us. Let's stay away from bills that just put a lot more guns into traffic to make life more dangerous for police officers and for everybody in America.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank Ranking Member McBath for her extraordinary leadership.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to support the Improving Law Enforcement Officer Safety and Wellness Through Data Act, which seeks to improve law enforcement officer safety and wellness by requiring that the AG and other Federal officials issue regular reports on attacks on police officers, aggression against police officers, and on officer mental health.

I salute Mr. Fry, a freshman to this body, for his stewardship of this bill. The collection of this information is important and useful, but the mere passive gathering of data does little or nothing to actually improve officer effectiveness or public safety.

In fact, none of the bills we have considered from the majority during this law enforcement week would actually produce any measurable gains in public safety.

We spent the week voting for bills that will do nothing really but increase the number of weapons on our streets, our buses, our trains, our subways, parks, restaurants, and in our schools. That is a strange way to improve public safety or aid law enforcement in doing their jobs.

Now, there are things we can actually do to improve public safety.

Mr. Speaker, forgive me. I know Mr. Fry is in his second term, not in his first term. He is a valuable member of our committee.

Mr. Speaker, the last gentleman to speak said he never wanted to hear about defunding the police again, and I agree with him completely.

The problem is, he is about to hear about it because DOGE is defunding the police as we speak and, unfortunately, with your cooperation and your passivity, they are getting away with it.

Now, this self-anointed fourth branch of government, DOGE, which I think is getting run out of town right now because of its rank incompetence and lawless assaults on the privacy data of hundreds of millions of Americans and its unlawful summary mass firings of professional civil servants like air traffic controllers, food and drug inspectors, pediatric cancer researchers in my district, Forest Service, and firefighters. They are getting run out of town now. I don't hear a lot about Elon Musk. He has lost some elections for my friends across the aisle, so they are trying to let him sink into anonymity, but he has done his damage.

Over at the Department of Justice--and I have got to correct myself. I was saying that his employee, who I can identify now as Tarak Makecha, was responsible for slashing more than $500 million in public safety, local law enforcement, and victim assistance organizations across the country. Although that was technically correct, more than $500 million, it really understates the gravity of this offense against public safety. It was $811 million in grants that were terminated.

Now, understand what a grievous assault this is on our system of government. Congress passes budgets. They are initiated here in the House of Representatives. We voted to appropriate that money to the Department of Justice. The House voted for it. The Senate voted for it. It was signed into law by the President. The money went to the Department of Justice. It was programmed for those purposes. $811 million was awarded to each of those grantees and now we have got some reportage explaining what happened. It all came down to this one guy, Tarak Makecha, working for Elon Musk.

Did anybody elect him around here? Did anybody confirm him for any job? I don't think so.

He wrote some memos under the authority of dusk, which now I think is an invalidated, discredited authority if you read the opinion from the Federal District Court of Northern California on Friday night because they remember how the Constitution works.

We don't have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk or Tarak Makecha. This guy wrote memos to the deputy attorney general demanding that all of these grants to law enforcement and public safety and victim assistance groups across the country in our districts be deleted. He wouldn't rest until they were deleted. They were deleted so he said he could report it to his superiors and to the White House.

Now, why aren't we using this valuable time not just to pass a mere reporting bill, which is fine, but how about an action bill?

How about a bill that restores hundreds of millions of dollars to actually promoting criminal law enforcement, public safety, aid to victims of rape and sexual assaults, organizations fighting child sexual abuse across the country? Why don't we do that?

Why don't we just pierce the fog of rhetoric a little bit and get down to something that is actually happening?

Then we can follow that up with what I think would be a significant symbolic statement, as Mrs. McBath urges us to do, let's put up the plaque to honor the officers who defended us against the rampage of January 6.

The gentleman from North Carolina, I think, tried to change the subject as if one mob rampage justifies another. I am against all mob violence. I am against all mob rampages. I don't feel like I have to speak out against one of them. If I can't speak out against the one that comes to our House, who will trust me to speak out against mob violence anywhere else? I denounce it wherever it takes place, under whatever guise, under any ideological auspice at all. I denounce mob violence.

I challenge my friend from North Carolina to find me one Democratic official who incited violent insurrection or incited mob violence on that day because I will tell you, this Chamber voted to impeach that President who incited mob violence against us in a sweeping bipartisan vote, Democrats and Republicans, together. Then the Senate voted 57-43.

The President, in his inimitable way, was able to beat the constitutional odds, but nonetheless, commanding majorities of both Chambers found that he incited violence against us in order to overthrow a Presidential election he had lost by more than 7 million votes.

Find me a Democratic Governor who pardoned any of the mobsters or the violent insurrectionists or people burning down buildings. Can you find me one? Can you find me any Democratic politician who wants to honor those people? Can you?

I can show you a United States President today who seems to think that it was the rioters and insurrectionists who deserve honor and praise.

Don't give me any false analogy or false comparison. We denounce violence everywhere.

Will our colleagues have the courage to ask for the plaque honoring the police officers who opposed the violence that came right into this Chamber? I can hear them chanting: ``Hang Mike Pence. Hang Mike Pence.''

Remember him? He was the Republican Vice President of the United States, and they chased him out. Now, they would like his memory to go down that Orwellian black hole so nobody remembers him or so nobody remembers the things the Republicans said. They called it terrorism at the time, but now it is inconvenient.

Donald Trump doesn't want police officers being honored for the work they did defending our Constitution, our democracy, our Capitol, and the Members of Congress, including people who sit on that side of the aisle as well as the Members who sit on this side of the aisle.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman stirred me out of my stupor there by coming back with a couple of grants that apparently were eliminated. I will take his word for it. If I did the internal math correctly, that was less than $2 million out of $811 million cut in awards that were made by the Department of Justice to local law enforcement citizen community safety groups, and so on across the country.

Now, apparently there are certain grants that the gentleman doesn't want ever to go out. For example, I take it the gentleman doesn't think very highly of anything having to do with citizens who are transgender. We differ about that, apparently, because I think everybody has civil rights and everybody's voice needs to be heard.

In any event, that needs to be brought up in the Appropriations Committee where we can vote on it democratically. That should not be up to one of Elon Musk's midnight riders, a computer hacker who comes in and simply decides to wipe out all of the handiwork of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate signed into law by the President and then awarded by the Department of Justice.

We do not have a fourth branch of government here, which is what the Federal District Court, Northern California, was saying on Friday.

Are my colleagues aware that there have been more than 250 cases brought against the reign of lawlessness and authoritarianism brought down on America in the first 5 months of the Trump administration? There are 156 preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders right now.

A couple of hours ago, the Supreme Court heard the case about Donald Trump in an executive order trying to destroy birthright citizenship in America. Every sixth grader in America knows that if you are born in America, you are a citizen of the United States. They tried to reverse that. That got struck down by four courts.

They call them radical left rogue judges. Well, two of the ones who struck it down were Democratic appointees, one by President Obama and one by President Biden. The other two were Republican appointees, one appointed by President Bush and one appointed by President Reagan, who said that in his four decades on the bench he had never seen a more unconstitutional law than that one. He had never seen an easier case than that one.

You don't have to be a lawyer to understand what is wrong with that. You just have to know how to read. The first sentence of the 14th Amendment says: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States. . . . `'

These people are finger painting all over the Constitution. They are usurping the rule of law as adopted by the Congress of the United States. They are creating new branches of government. I am glad that they finally ran Elon Musk out of town because he was no longer politically useful to him, but in the meantime we have to deal with the wreckage.

If he, by accident, did something the gentleman agrees with, bully for him, great, but in the meantime, he has undone the will of Congress. He has nullified and canceled hundreds of millions of dollars going out to public safety and criminal law enforcement across America.

Let's get back to the rule of law. Let's get back to law enforcement.

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

Mr. Speaker, this is Police Week. In colloquial terms, it is Law Enforcement Week. Traditionally, we do two things in Law Enforcement Week. One, we recognize the valor, the sacrifices, and the commitment of the police officers who serve our communities, who serve us in Congress, and who serve across the country.

Two, we try to think of ways we actually can assist them in doing their jobs better so we can make their work more effective and safer, and we can make the police function generally more efficacious for the American people.

Unfortunately, with this bill, we are not doing either. In fact, the majority is really falling down on the job in terms of both of those major objectives.

In 2022, on March 15, we passed H.R. 2471, to post in the Capitol on the west side of the Capitol a plaque in honor of the hundreds of police officers who nobly served us on January 6, 2021 when our institution, when our democracy, came under attack by Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other violent extremists who stormed the Capitol, drove Members of the House of Representatives out of our Chamber, drove Members of the Senate out of their Chamber, and attempted to overthrow a Presidential election.

Now, the new administration has seen fit to pardon more than 1,500 rioters and violent insurrectionists who attempted to overthrow our constitutional form of government on that day, and they succeeded in bloodying, wounding, injuring, and hospitalizing more than 140 police officers on January 6. Several officers died in the subsequent weeks, and several people died on that day.

Now, we have passed a law, not a recommendation, not an idle promise, and not a suggestion in a suggestion box, we passed a law to post this plaque in the U.S. Capitol. Yet Speaker Johnson has done absolutely nothing to post this plaque.

I know that some of my colleagues think that they are being most effective when they are doing nothing. This is a Congress that is getting a reputation for being perhaps the greatest do-nothing Congress in the history of the United States. Here is one thing that this Congress can do, which is to post this plaque which reads: ``On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on January 6, 2021. Their heroism will never be forgotten.''

What extraordinary irony that is. Their heroism is already being forgotten, or at least there are some people who would like us to forget their heroism. That is on the symbolic front, because everybody wants to pay lip service to the police, and everybody wants to say that we honor them. Let's really honor them.

Let's put up a permanent plaque for future generations of Americans to see that these officers risked their lives for the people in this Chamber, for the Members of the House and the Senate, for the leadership of the House and the Senate, for the staff who work here, and for the reporters who work here.

We have many officers who have had to leave the police service because they have been wounded and disfigured permanently by the injuries they suffered at the hands of these people. This is the very least we can do at a time when the President of the United States says that he wants to create a fund for January 6, not a fund for Michael Fanone who had a heart attack and had to beg for his life; not a fund for Sergeant Gonell who was forced out of the force because of permanent injuries and now is living on a fraction of the salary he had before trying to support his family; not a fund for Officer Hodges who was tortured in the eyes of the world, who got caught in the doorway while the insurrectionists beat him with all of their weapons that they brought back that day.

No, it is not a fund for them that President Trump is suggesting. He wants a fund for the rioters. He wants a fund for the families of the insurrectionists.

As Sergeant Gonell said recently, it seems like he believes that the rioters and the insurrectionists were the ones defending the Capitol on that day.

Let's get this plaque up. We voted for it on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis.

I appeal to Speaker Johnson to enforce the law even if he doesn't like it anymore and even if he changed his mind about the plaque. This is the law. Let's get it up there.

Now, secondly, we should be talking about how we could actually aid, abet, and assist law enforcement officers in their work. Unfortunately, we have not had from the majority a single bill that

they are willing to bring to the floor to increase any funding for local law enforcement. On the contrary, the emissaries from DOGE--and here I don't necessarily hold my colleagues accountable for this because they didn't seem to know about it any more than we did--but the functionaries of DOGE slashed more than $500 million that the Department of Justice was giving to local police departments across the country, community safety groups, and organizations assisting victims of rape and sexual assault.

As far as we can tell, one person in DOGE, one unelected, midnight bureaucrat whose career was made with Elon Musk, who seems to have skipped town now, that guy cut out hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to local law enforcement and community safety groups across America.

I introduced an amendment in the budget reconciliation process in the Judiciary Committee to restore all of that money. Not a single Member, neither a Democrat nor a Republican, spoke against it, and my Republican colleagues did not say a word, but they all voted against it. They voted to uphold that nasty handiwork of DOGE slashing hundreds of millions of dollars, which we appropriated on a bipartisan basis in the House, in the Senate, and it was signed by the President, programmed by the Department of Justice and awarded to their communities, my community, your communities, communities across the country, and one young person, a midnight computer hacker from DOGE, Elon Musk's emissary, destroyed all of it, more than 300 grants.

Now they come forward with a budget for next year that would cut more than $1 billion out of law enforcement: FBI, Department of Justice, and ATF, you name it, Mr. Speaker, right down the line. I will have some more to say about that after.

So what do we have?

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this bill. In 2004, Congress passed LEOSA, a law that allows both off-duty and retired officers to carry concealed firearms irrespective of State law. It compelled all States to allow off-duty and retired officers to carry concealed firearms under the terms set by Congress overriding the rules of the State.

Now, when Congress debated it 20 years ago, members of the Judiciary Committee on both sides of the aisle expressed anxiety about the bill trespassing on the rights of the States to decide on gun laws for themselves. The Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee at the time, Congressman Sensenbrenner, opposed LEOSA for the reason of federalism and State rights. He voted against it. Several police groups opposed the legislation expressing concerns about how it would affect officer safety, how it would create confusion in the event of an active shooter, how it might expose their agencies to more liability, and the insufficiency of training requirements for retired officers.

Despite all of that, LEOSA became the law after Congress legislated some important limits on it and imposed commonsense training requirements on the former officers. Those have been in place for more than 20 years.

Now, H.R. 2243 would terminate the realm of discretion that States have to limit when and where individuals may carry their concealed firearms under LEOSA. It would force States to allow off-duty and retired officers to carry concealed firearms onto all private property open to the public, including restaurants, bars, parks, national parks, and playgrounds. It would also force States to allow off-duty and retired officers to carry concealed firearms on buses, trains, and subways. It would even force States to allow for the concealed carry of firearms in gun-free school zones. It also allows the off-duty and retired officers to completely disregard State laws prohibiting high- capacity magazines.

This legislation not only supersedes the considered policy judgments of the States, but it threatens the safety and security of Federal agencies by forcing them to allow concealed carry in many Federal buildings. Forcing Federal offices and buildings to allow concealed carry is a completely unnecessary and dangerous risk.

The legislation also weakens training standards. Under current law, a person carrying a firearm must meet State training requirements every year, but this bill would allow individuals to do concealed carry with training certifications obtained every 3 years. This is troubling given that the bill extends nationwide concealed carry to retired officers who are no longer receiving the training that accompanies their old employment.

Our colleagues have different reasons that they advance for this, which I think are pretty refutable. In the big picture, this bill does nothing for existing police officers right now. It does nothing to enhance public safety, and our friends have completely missed the mark I think in terms of what law enforcement week should be all about.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my distinguished colleague's suggestion that I may have the wisdom of somebody who has been here for 21 years, but actually I wasn't here either. I got it just from the books myself.

I was here, I should say, in 2021, when the Chamber was stormed, and that is a day I will never forget. Forgive my passion on the point of getting that plaque up. I wish our colleagues would just help us convince the Speaker of the House that this is something that is simple, and it should be done. It is not a partisan issue.

On that day, we were not Democrats or Republicans. We were Americans, and we were legislators together being hounded and chased out of this Chamber by people who did not accept the constitutional rules of the game.

To me, it is a matter of great regret and melancholy that somehow it has become politicized to the point where people can't even acknowledge what they were saying at the time. We had Republican leaders who were describing it as terrorism and saying it was absolutely inexcusable and indefensible. Now, all of a sudden, we have the majority which will not even follow the law by posting a plaque in honor of the officers who gave blood and sweat and tears on that day.

One of them, Officer Hodges got caught in the doorway. The whole world saw him screaming to high heaven for probably--I don't know if it was 45 seconds or maybe it was up to 90 seconds, as he was being beaten and pummeled, and he was being crushed in the doorway. When they finally dislodged him, they took him back where they were taking the officers. We were very short-handed. They wanted to tell him to just stay there and wash his eyes out. He took about 5 to 10 minutes while they were pouring water in his eyes, and he got up. Do you know what he did? He went back outside, and he rejoined the battle because he said he

knew that they needed him. We were outmanned, and we were outflanked by the forces of violence that came down on us on that day.

That is the kind of bravery that we should be at least acknowledging, if not praising. I know at the time we thanked them for saving our lives, and people did die that day. Again, there were more than 140 officers who were wounded and brutalized and injured, and many still have the physical injuries and scars that they are dealing with, as well as the mental scars, because there is a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Several of the officers who were there had been in the Iraq war, and they had been in the Afghan war. They testified before the January 6th Select Committee, and several of them testified they had never seen violence as brutal and as bloody as what took place on January 6, 2021, with the various extremist groups that came and led the attack on the Chamber and then gave bloody instructions to the rest of the mob about how to treat police officers in their effort to go and ``hang Mike Pence.'' That was the chant. I can still hear in my mind, ringing off the walls of the Capitol: ``Hang Mike Pence.'' ``Hang Mike Pence.'' ``Where's Nancy?'' ``Where's Nancy?''

We are not going to allow this to be buried into some kind of Orwellian memory hall. We have got a law requiring that that plaque go up, and we are going to see that that plaque goes up and that the law is enforced.

As for the LEOSA reform, again, it doesn't even purport to do anything for police and law enforcement. Today, it would, I suppose, increase some of the mobility of retired officers, off-duty officers to go to places like restaurants, bars, public parks, national parks, metros and buses, and so on, if they are police. I think that that should be decided by our communities, whether people are doing concealed carry there.

I thought that a belief in federalism was something that unifies us. That is something that the State governments can decide in cooperation with the local governments. The Congress of the United States does not need to be making decisions about restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina, or bars in El Paso, Texas, or what have you. Why don't we let the people of the States and the localities make those decisions.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his excellent presentation of the bill. I wish it were one that we could be together on, but I think it just goes way too far in terms of trespassing on States' rights and States' powers. We have a nice equilibrium and stasis in terms of where the law has been for the last two decades, and this seems unnecessary. It does seem to me like a diversion from the things we actually could be doing to be making the lives of police officers safer.

The reason why so many police organizations are with 90 percent of the American people in supporting a universal violent criminal background check is because nobody should be accessing guns, any kind of gun, if they are not able to pass the Brady background check. That background check has saved countless lives since it was instituted. The reason the vast majority of the people support it is because we need to close those loopholes. You should not be able to skip a background check by finding a gun online. You should not be able to skip a background check by going to a private gun show or engaging in a so- called private sale or transfer.

We need a universal violent criminal background check. That will do far more than anything we are looking at today to make the lives of police officers better, to make their jobs easier, because they are on the frontlines of these killing fields across the country.

America's rates of gun violence are completely out of control when compared to the nations in the European Union or Canada, our next-door neighbor. We are losing 5, 10, or 20 times the number of people that the residents of those countries are losing because our gun laws are like Swiss cheese. They are filled with holes. Let's close those loopholes. It doesn't diminish anybody's Second Amendment rights.

Justice Scalise said it himself in District of Columbia v. Heller. You can have criminal background checks to make sure that only the right people are getting guns and not the wrong people are getting guns. There are things we can do to improve public safety and to assist police officers, and we should be working on those.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz).

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

I thank the gentlewoman for her eloquence and lucidity in those remarks and for sponsoring this legislation.

I speak very strongly in favor of Ms. Wasserman Schultz's resolution, which recognizes Jewish American Heritage Month and the important contributions that Jewish Americans have made to our country, and I thank her for her continuing leadership within Congress and also within the American Jewish community.

The resolution calls on elected officials, faith leaders, and civil society leaders to condemn and counter all acts of anti-Semitism.

I also want to salute Mr. Schmidt, the distinguished Member from Kansas, for his powerful endorsement of this idea.

The resolution also goes on to urge the House to take ``all possible steps to ensure the safety, security, and dignity of American Jews in all aspects of their lives.'' We are called upon to condemn anti- Semitism and to ensure the safety of the Jewish community, along with everyone else. The appeal is appropriate and timely.

We have to do everything in our power to counter the poison of anti- Semitism, racism, and other forms of bigotry, which are really the gateway to destruction of liberal democracy in our country.

That obligation means fighting anti-Semitism, even when, perhaps especially when, it is expressed and endorsed by officials of the United States Government.

Last week, President Trump finally withdrew the nomination of Ed Martin to serve as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Mr. Martin's confirmation in the Senate faced many insuperable obstacles. It was doomed.

First of all, he had no prosecutorial experience and no administrative experience running a prosecutor's office.

Secondly, he had shown an extraordinary devotion to the extremists who participated in the violent insurrection against the Capitol and against Congress on January 6, 2021. He represented many of them as a defense lawyer, but he championed the cause of a great number more in not just legal but in political and civil contexts.

He also failed to disclose that he had appeared more than 150 times on Russian state propaganda networks, like Russia Today and Sputnik, when he was nominated to be the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. These are networks that were forced to register as foreign agents of Vladimir Putin's government.

The truth is that his nomination was doomed, regardless. I would say that all of these disqualifications by themselves pale in comparison to Mr. Martin's long and troubling relationship with a Hitler-loving neo- Nazi named Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who was sentenced to 4 years in prison for breaching the Capitol during the January 6 attack.

Hale-Cusanelli is an outspoken anti-Semite who proudly wears a Hitler mustache, advocates killing the disabled at birth, and told coworkers that Hitler should have finished the job. At his sentencing, a Trump- appointed Federal judge warned him that his actions and statements make everyone, including Jewish people, less safe in our country.

How did Ed Martin, President Trump's pick for one of the most important jobs in the American criminal justice system, react to all the extraordinary statements and the lawless actions of Mr. Hale- Cusanelli? He invited him to go on his podcast multiple times to spout his fascist propaganda. He presented him with an award before a big audience. He praised him as an extraordinary man and an extraordinary leader.

By attending President Trump's inauguration with his good friend, he continued to promote him in establishment political circles, and he headlined a fundraiser together with Mr. Hale-Cusanelli in Florida last year.

By pretending not to know that he was a vicious anti-Semite, even after he clearly had evidence that he was, Mr. Martin continued to legitimize and validate the views of this man.

Mr. Martin's weak protests that he didn't know anything about what his views really were were debunked not only by National Public Radio but by the record of Martin's involvement with other extremists.

For example, Mr. Martin has also praised Jack Posobiec, an anti- Semitic conspiracy theorist with links to the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and several other white nationalist organizations.

Mr. Martin frequently praises Mr. Posobiec online and calls his anti- Semitic insights valuable and incredible. Mr. Martin's own views are saturated with deranged analogies that dilute the meaning of Nazism and Fascism.

In one episode about the 2024 election, he compared President Joe Biden to Adolf Hitler, which either means that Biden committed genocide or that Hitler was just a regular old politician. In another episode about the election, he repeated the defamatory lie that Jewish people who vote for Democrats are somehow less Jewish than those who vote for Donald Trump.

How did President Trump treat this disturbed individual after his nomination just collapsed across the hallway in the U.S. Senate in the face of this mountain of evidence of his extremism? It was not by cutting him loose, as he should have, but by appointing him to serve in a senior role in the Department of Justice that does not require confirmation by the U.S. Senate.

President Trump named him to be the U.S. pardon attorney, and he named him to be director of a task force on the weaponization of government. This was a perfect assignment, perhaps, for a man who writes vituperative threat letters to Democrats when he hears them say things that he doesn't like.

Mr. Speaker, it makes me wonder why President Trump would put up with this and would insist upon placing him in a position of such critical importance in the Department of Justice. President Trump saw very fine people

on both sides of the anti-Semitic riot that took place in Charlottesville. We know that he had Nicholas Fuentes to his house, another neo-Nazi Holocaust revisionist.

Mr. Speaker, I believe that this is a matter of fundamental importance, that both Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate demand that Ed Martin not have a role in the U.S. Government, given his close association with all of these extremists and his very damning statements in the past, not to mention the fact that he had more than 150 appearances on Russian propaganda state networks.

We should be rejecting anti-Semitism wherever it appears: on the left, on the right, or in the center. It doesn't matter what you call yourself. If you align with hatred against any group, you are a danger to American constitutional democracy, and we should not allow it to gain a foothold in the Government of the United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, let us adhere to the spirit of President George Washington, who said in his famous letter in 1790 to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, that ``the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.''

If these words are to mean something in our day in the 21st century, we must insist that men like Ed Martin and his anti-Semitic associates and friends have no place representing the people of the United States in our government.

We must pay more than lipservice to the idea of fighting anti- Semitism. We must fight anti-Semitism when we see it in the Government of the United States itself and even amongst our friends.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this resolution. Let's put the words and the spirit of this resolution into practice.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I have not had the good fortune to meet our new colleague from Florida, and I will be sure to come over to introduce myself right after. I am glad the gentleman is in support of the resolution.

The very first sentence of it says: ``The House of Representatives calls on elected officials,'' which presumably includes us, ``faith leaders, and civil society leaders to condemn and counter all acts of anti-Semitism.''

If a discussion of anti-Semitism and the contributions of Jewish Americans is not an appropriate time to talk about anti-Semitism in the government, I wonder what is.

I would be very happy to pursue with my new colleague the subject of Ed Martin. I don't know exactly where he stands on Ed Martin, whether he opposed the President's withdrawal of his nomination after it came out about his close association with a neo-Nazi.

The story behind it, if the gentleman is really interested in it, is National Public Radio confronted him with all the evidence of Hale- Cusanelli's Nazi statements, including: ``Hitler should have finished the job.''

Hale-Cusanelli was also associated with statements like he was right about disabled people and when babies are born disabled, they should be put to death immediately, and so on.

They presented him with a complete litany of it, and Ed Martin's response to it was that National Public Radio is a propaganda network paid for by the government, and he had nothing of substance to say about his good friend's, this ``extraordinary leader,'' anti-Semitic remarks.

It seems that for some people, there is never an opportunity to actually repudiate and denounce anti-Semitism when it actually appears. When it came out that he did know about it, they were forced to withdraw the nomination.

Mr. Speaker, imagine everyone's surprise when Donald Trump decided to then make him the United States pardon attorney overseeing a large office of people considering pardon applications from across the country.

Is that someone that I think can be trusted to deal fairly in terms of minority groups, such as Jewish Americans, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans? I don't think so.

I am sorry the gentleman doesn't think it is appropriate to talk about anti-Semitism when we see it. We just have an honest difference of opinion about that, but if the gentleman is interested in pursuing it some other time, I would love to discuss it with him.

I think my colleague will come to find that we use the floor of the House of Representatives to talk about a lot of things going on. My Republican colleague might be able to stick narrowly to one particular topic. Good for him if that is what he would like to do, but we like to talk about all of our legislation in context here.

This is a matter that is actually called for directly in the very first sentence of the resolution that we are all about to approve.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I thank Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the distinguished Representative from Florida, for being such a great leader in opposing not just anti-Semitism but all forms of racism, bigotry, and anti- Semitism. One could say it was the original form of racism. It goes back millennia, and it mutates and appears in different guises and different forms and at different periods in history.

Mr. Speaker, anti-Semitism and racism are the gateway to destruction of liberal democracy, so we need to recognize the extraordinary accomplishments of Jewish Americans, along with

the extraordinary accomplishments of members of other groups, and to fight and resist bigotry of all forms, as George Washington talked about.

Mr. Speaker, let us continue to fight for an America that is going to be open to the contributions of everybody, and I appreciate Ms. Wasserman Schultz' ability to bring before us again the Jewish American Heritage Month resolution. I am delighted to support it, and I urge all Members of the body to vote for it.

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

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor my distinguished constituent and friend, Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block, as his fourteen years of remarkable leadership as the Washington Director of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action come to a close.

I have been proud to partner with Bend the Arc in the fight for strong democracy, solidarity and justice. For over a decade at Bend the Arc, Rabbi Jason has modeled these principles every day in his role as a core leader within the interfaith solidarity movement. When leaders in government face stark moral and political choices, Rabbi Jason hasn't hesitated to pray--not just with his hands and his mind but with his heart and his feet, in the tradition of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel--to influence public actions. He is quick to remind us of our collective imperative to advance social justice and fairness for all Americans. I have seen him communicate the intricacies of budget reconciliation through a parable from the Torah.

Throughout his career, Rabbi Jason has shared his profound knowledge about the complexities of antisemitism, immigration, mass incarceration and war and peace, both within the American Jewish community and with my colleagues in Congress. He's been at the forefront of movements to protect and expand voting rights; to institute a living wage through the Fight for $15 movement; to end the injustice of mass incarceration and to fight the appalling Muslim Ban and other unjust immigration policies. Rabbi Jason also carefully cultivated Bend the Arc's Selah Leadership Program to imbue the next generation of Jewish social change leaders with core skills and practical experience.

Rabbi Jason is a man of society and a man of nature, a man of public engagement and private life. I see him and his wife Devora on multiple occasions enjoying a long Shabbat afternoon hike through the forests of Maryland's beautiful Eighth District. I know he deserves the additional time he will be able to spend with his family now.

Bend the Arc derives its name from the assertion by 19th century abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker--and made famous by Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.--that ``the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.'' For more than a decade, Rabbi Jason has dedicated his waking hours to carrying this prophetic voice forward and bringing Bend the Arc's promise into reality. He is a gentleman and a scholar who brings soulfulness and warmth to his interactions with everyone, no matter their background, their age or their political affiliation.

Rabbi Jason has shown us what it means to devote one's life's work to solidarity and what Dr. King called the beloved community. Through the relationships he has built and his unwavering commitment to creating a better future for all people, Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block has made a profound difference in Washington. It is an honor to represent him and support his righteous causes in Congress. On behalf of the good people of Maryland's Eighth District, I proudly salute his 14 years of service at Bend the Arc.

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

Mr. Speaker, this week, we welcome thousands of law enforcement personnel to Washington for National Police Week. We remember officers who lost their lives in service to our communities and our country, and we thank all officers who work to keep us safe while reflecting on how we can invest in law enforcement to better serve our communities.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to strongly support this resolution because we strongly support our local law enforcement officers. Yet, we also strongly support our State, Federal, and Tribal law enforcement officers, as well. Why are these brave officers not part of this resolution? This is a strange development.

In the last Congress, the 118th Congress, we passed H. Con. Res. 40 to honor local law enforcement. We also passed H. Res. 363 in 2023 to recognize the police lives lost that year and the importance of funding and supporting all law enforcement, Federal, State, county, and local. These were followed by H. Con. Res. 106 and H. Res. 1213 in 2024, which did the same.

This year the majority has chosen to have us solely recognizing local law enforcement. Why is that? What explains this strange omission of the Federal police officers who serve us?

With President Trump back in office, the majority apparently now sees fit to honor only local officers and not the Federal law enforcement officers who fought so valiantly to protect every Member of this body and the Senate, our staffs, and our democracy on January 6, 2021. Apparently, their commitment to backing the blue is so weak that they now won't even mention Federal officers because they have to maintain the pretense that Capitol officers did something wrong by defending us against the violent rampage of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and other extremist marauders who stormed the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

Is that right or will the majority please prepare a resolution honoring Federal law enforcement, as well that we can bring to the floor?

This is one troubling sign among many of an ideological abandonment of our Federal law enforcement officers and there are more than 137,000 of them, not just the Capitol Police.

Speaker Johnson still refuses to hang a simple plaque honoring those officers as is required by Federal law. The bill mandating the creation and placement of the plaque, H.R. 2471, was signed into law on March 15, 2022, and the plaque was supposed to have been erected within 1 year of that, March 15, 2023.

The plaque is finished, it is ready to be placed, and it looks like this. It reads: ``On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on January 6th, 2021. Their heroism will never be forgotten.''

Well, it seems it is already being forgotten by the GOP majority or at least they want us to forget it. Are my friends so captive to conspiracy theories and revisionist fantasies about January 6 that they will not do the bare minimum to honor the police officers who fought tooth and nail to protect every person in this room who was there, including Members on my side of the aisle and Members on the other side of the aisle?

The people we are failing to honor by not hanging this plaque include at least 140 police officers who were beaten with poles, bats, American flags, Trump flags, Confederate battle flags, and their own shields. These are people who lost fingertips. They suffered concussions, broken jaws, and broken ribs. They had heart attacks and strokes. They sustained multiple other violent injuries and suffer from them, many of them, to this day, in one of the worst days of injuries for law enforcement officers in the United States in this century.

This affront is now adding further symbolic insult to the grievous injury that began at the beginning of this administration. President Trump granted full pardons to more than 1,500 insurrectionists and rioters and commuted the sentence of the rightwing extremists who spearheaded the attack on this Chamber and on the police officers who defended us.

More than 600 of those defendants whose pardons are full, complete, and unconditional were charged with assaulting or obstructing law enforcement officers. Now President Trump, backed by his own Justice Department, thinks that the violent insurrectionists should be compensated, not the police officers, but rather the people who perpetrated this assault on America.

President Trump said: A lot of the people in the government really like that group of people. He is creating a compensation fund not for the officers

and their families who fought and suffered and several died to save our country but for the domestic terrorists, as leaders of the Republican Party described them at the time, who tried to destroy it.

That is the decision, to cast his lot with the Proud Boys and other extremists that he incited on that day.

Many of the officers who served on January 6 feel betrayed by the officials whose lives they saved that day. Take former U.S. Capitol Police Sergeant Aquilino Gonell who was nearly crushed to death on January 6.

Sergeant Gonell is an Army veteran from the Iraq war and was upholding his oath to defend and protect the seat of our Nation's government. He said he saw violence on that day here at the Capitol far worse than anything he experienced fighting for America abroad.

Despite the fact that he and many other officers nearly lost their lives and now face lifelong injuries that have forced him out of the line of police work, they still cannot get approved for Public Safety Officers' Benefits, which provide disability benefits to officers catastrophically injured in the line of duty.

As Sergeant Gonell recently told my staff, Trump is treating the rioters like they were the ones defending the Capitol. He noted that at every turn when Republicans could honor the bravery of law enforcement officers that day, they have instead chosen to do nothing.

Of course, if my colleagues across the aisle want to focus on local law enforcement, then I might ask why we are simply honoring them with this concurrent resolution and not taking more meaningful action, like restoring millions of dollars in Federal grants that help support them that were recently terminated by the Department of Justice at the direction of DOGE and Elon Musk.

Those grants supported programs like the rural violent crime reduction initiative, which delivered financial assistance directly to dozens of rural law enforcement agencies across America and allowed agencies to upgrade technology and equipment, hire and deploy personnel, support victim services and crime prevention programming, and fill in other gaps in policing for small, rural, underfunded police agencies.

We should be grateful for all of our officers, Federal, State, county, and local, who help keep us safe while people are in their communities and while Members of Congress come to Washington, D.C. We should be grateful for all of them.

Let's join together to uplift all law enforcement officers whether they are local or State, Tribal, or Federal, and let's support them symbolically with our words but more importantly with our actions. Let's restore all of the funding, the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been cut or that face cuts by this new administration.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to hear the distinguished chairman of the Judiciary Committee denounce the assault, the violent assault, on Congress, the Capitol, our police officers on January 6, 2021. I wonder if he would work with me to help enforce the law that was signed on March 15, 2022 by President Biden for a plaque to be placed in honor of the police officers who served us so valiantly and so bravely and saved our lives on that day.

It was supposed to have been up by March 15, 2023, and the Speaker simply has remained noncommittal and indifferent. The plaque is actually completed. It is ready to be put up. We can show it again. It is not as big as this poster, but it is the smallest token of recognition and honor that we should be able to extend to the Capitol officers, many of whom are still with us on the force, for their sacrifice and the sacrifice that their families made based on their work that day defending us.

I wonder if the chairman of the Judiciary Committee would follow through on his very impressive statement that we all denounce the violence of any kind against officers, including the more than 140 Capitol officers who were wounded, injured, hospitalized, some of them permanently disfigured and maimed on that day as well as officers around the country.

Now, on the point about defunding the police. Look who is defunding the police: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and their silent partners in Congress are defunding the police. They just terminated $500 million worth of grants, lost funding from the Department of Justice providing Federal support for local violence reduction by community police, community policing and prosecution, victim services, juvenile justice, child protection, substance abuse and mental health treatment, corrections and reentry, justice systems enhancements, research and evaluation, and

other State, county, and local level public police and safety functions.

I brought this to the attention of the Judiciary Committee because, again, this was an operation by DOGE. We have got a Federal District Court opinion from northern California saying that DOGE basically has no legal status because it wasn't created by Congress. It might be a completely renegade operation in an attempt to create a fourth branch of government.

In any event, those of us who voted for the money, and that is people on both sides of the aisle, voted for the money to be distributed by the Department of Justice to local grantees didn't even know about this. I shared with the chairman and with all the members of the committee, the one name of the DOGE employee, an unelected bureaucrat, a juvenile bureaucrat from Silicon Valley who worked his way up through Tesla and so on, and they ended up in DOGE, cut hundreds of millions of dollars to local police. They defunded the police.

DOGE defunded the police. Donald Trump defunded the police. I introduced an amendment to try to restore every single grant that they cut off in severing that Federal investment in local police.

My colleagues uttered not a word, not a word in opposition to my amendment, but they all voted against it simply because they are walking the line with Elon Musk right off the edge of the Constitution because there is no constitutional grounding for anything that guy is doing.

They walked the line behind Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and they just defunded hundreds of millions of dollars from community law enforcement and public safety, so don't give me that lecture about defunding the police, which our side has never supported, but their side has just colluded in right now in terms of what the Department of Justice did.

That doesn't even get into their attempt to dismantle completely the ATF, shut down critical functions in the Department of Justice that protect us from foreign involvement in our elections, to take down the kleptocracy task force and so on. I don't want any lectures coming in our direction, either.

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

Mr. Speaker, I will start just by asking my friend from Ohio whether he is referring to me when he uses the word ``you'' or if he is referring more generally to some other people because I would categorically deny having done any of those things.

I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

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

Well, the gentleman refers exclusively--and I think he is aware of this because he is an extremely clever debater--to things that different local governments did or did not do. I don't know what Denver, Colorado, or Burlington, Vermont, did. I know what the United States Congress does, and we never defunded the police, and we never tried to defund the police.

On the other hand, my good friend, I believe, participated in--and if he didn't, I am happy to stand corrected, but I know a bunch of his colleagues said they wanted to defund the FBI, just like those who want to defund the ATF and shut it down right now, so that is a reality.

In any event, why don't we talk about what Congress can actually do? The President's new budget proposes to cut--so this is something that my colleague and I could agree on--$1 billion across 40 Department of Justice grant programs which support local police departments to reduce violent crime, hate crime, and crime against women.

Would my colleague work with me to oppose that suggestion in the President's budget? They want to cut $646 million from FEMA for violence and terrorism prevention. Why do they want to do that? I have no idea.

They want to cut $545 million from the FBI, cutting its workforce by more than 2,000 personnel. That sounds like defunding law enforcement to me.

I know they don't seem to be as fond of Federal law enforcement as they are of local law enforcement, but do they really want to cut more than half a billion dollars from the FBI to be fighting criminals and terrorists? For the life of me, I don't understand how they can do that while they swear fealty to law enforcement. It just makes no sense.

They want to cut $491 million from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, making our cyber and physical infrastructure far more vulnerable to attack by foreign bad actors like Vladimir Putin and President Xi and Kim Jong-un. I know there are some people in high levels of office who are fond of those people, who write valentines to Kim Jong-Un, but the rest of us would like to be protected from them. We shouldn't be dismantling the cybersecurity infrastructure of America.

They want to cut $212 million from the DEA. Can you imagine? If a Democratic President had proposed any of this, they would be screaming, their hair would be on fire, but Donald Trump proposed it, and they just mumble along like it is no big deal.

What about all of these efforts to defund Federal law enforcement, like the DOJ, FEMA, FBI? Will our colleagues work with us to restore that money?

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

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

Yes, the record is becoming increasingly clear here. My colleagues don't want to do anything about the dismantling of hundreds of millions of dollars of funds that we appropriated at the Department of Justice that have been mysteriously deleted by a DOGE employee from local law enforcement. These are grants that go to local police departments and victim assistance agencies all over the country. They got rid of that.

Then the President comes forward with a budget that will cut more than $1.5 billion, maybe $2 billion from local law enforcement to go after violent crime, hate crime, to defend the victims of rape and sexual assault, and my colleague changes the subject once again to talk about weaponization.

We have never seen weaponization of the government like what we have seen under Donald Trump and his Department of Justice. The first thing they did was they got rid of a dozen experienced veteran criminal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's office and the Department of Justice simply because they had worked to prosecute January 6 insurrectionists and rioters.

Yes, let me repeat that. They fired prosecutors for doing nothing more than their jobs to prosecute the criminals who beat the daylights out of our police officers, and they sacked all of those prosecutors. They were some of the most experienced veteran prosecutors that we have in the U.S. Attorney's office. Then he named to be the acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin. He was just forced to withdraw that nomination because he was standing by a Neo-Nazi Holocaust revisionist who said that Hitler's problem was that he didn't finish the job. He also said that those who are born with disabilities should be killed at birth. Ed Martin called him a great man and a great leader.

He withdrew the nomination, but still he put Ed Martin in the Department of Justice in a position that is not subject to Senate confirmation. They have weaponized the Department of Justice. They have weaponized the Department of State. They are going after anybody they describe as a political enemy. Ed Martin was writing letters to Members of Congress when he didn't like what they had to say.

We have never seen weaponization of the government like what is taking place right now. They took the U.S. Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer, and they sacked her because she refused to take the position that Mel Gibson should get his guns back. That wasn't part of her job, but they tried to conscript her to it. The pardon attorney refused to do it because she said that was not her job and there were too many questions about domestic violence episodes.

If you want to have a separate hearing on weaponization of the government under Donald Trump, let's do it. In the meantime, let's support local law enforcement and let's support Federal law enforcement. Let's have another resolution praising all law enforcement for what they do, and let's get that plaque up.

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

Mr. Speaker, we rarely take time to recognize the hundreds of public servants who, with great diligence, work behind the scenes to support this body's work for the American people. It is a surpassing honor today to praise my constituent William (Bill) Cox's decades of excellent service to the U.S. House of Representatives.

For more than 43 years, Bill has been one of this chamber's most dedicated public servants. He's served with distinction in many capacities throughout this institution and for the past 23 years has brought his excellent leadership and fastidious attention to detail to the Office of the Clerk. On June 5, 2025, Bill will retire from the Clerk's Office.

Bill was born in Fowlerville, Michigan. After graduating from high school in 1978, Bill moved to Washington, D.C. He made ends meet by working shifts at the Grand Central Station delicatessen in downtown Washington until he got his first Capitol Hill job. It was in the House's ``folding room,'' where government publications were prepared for distribution.

His hard work quickly led to his next position as a Publications Assistant, Data Base Manager, and Systems Administrator for Representative Lee Hamilton. During his 12 years serving Representative Hamilton and the people of Indiana's Ninth District, Bill was instrumental in computerizing the office's operational systems. Under his leadership and guidance, the office graduated from a single shared printer, monitor and keyboard unit to a 25-user Unix mini-computer system. Having found his calling, Bill burned the midnight oil to attend night school at the University of Maryland University College. In 1990, he earned a bachelor's degree in information systems management.

Three years later, Bill transitioned to serve as an Administrative Assistant and then Administrative Director for the House Committee on International Relations (now the House Committee on Foreign Affairs). In 1998, Bill briefly left the Hill to become the Director of Operations for the Computer and Communications Industry Association.

In 2002, Bill returned to the House to accept the Administrative and Technical Support position in the Office of Official Reporters, a division within the Office of the Clerk. In this role, Bill has proven to be an expert in both the digital and physical systems that enable the House of Representatives to function every day. He's been the chief IT Specialist processing committee transcripts and the chief facilitator for office renovations. He has worked for five Clerks of the House: the Honorables Jeff Trandahl, Karen L. Haas, Lorraine C. Miller, Cheryl L. Johnson, and now, Kevin F. McCumber.

Always a family man, Bill is looking forward to his next chapter in life with his wife, Toby Long; his son, Charlie and Charlie's wife, Carolyn; and his two grandchildren, Simon and Henry. His family is counting down the

Mr. Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to Francine Kerner, who retired on February 28, as Chief Counsel of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) after dedicating over 50 years of her career to public service.

On September 11, 2001, Ms. Kerner woke up and went to work, just like any other day. For her, that was as Deputy Assistant General

Counsel at the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Enforcement Division. She was in her office at Main Treasury when the terrorist attacks began. That fateful day changed the worId and changed Ms. Kerner's life.

A few weeks later, Congress enacted the Aviation and Transportation Security Act and established TSA. Ms. Kerner was one of a small group of federal workers chosen to stand up the fledgling agency with a monumental task ahead of them.

To secure U.S. passengers and the American people from the grave threat posed by airline hijackers, Congress mandated that TSA begin screening passengers and checked baggage at 450 commercial airports within just a few months. Meeting these deadlines at the time required the largest mobilization of the federal government since WWII and the largest civilian undertaking in the history of the U.S. government.

As TSA Chief Counsel, Ms. Kerner was responsible for providing the legal and policy advice for this record level of mobilization. For the next 23 years, she served as a principal architect of TSA's mission- critical programs and operations, supported by the outstanding team of attorneys she recruited, guided, and whose careers in Federal Service she unstintingty advanced.

Prior to being named TSA's Chief Counsel, Ms. Kerner's Federal career spanned two decades, beginning as Counsel to the Inspector General (IG) at the Commerce Department in 1979 before serving in several managerial positions at the Treasury. She later helped the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms overhaul its fair hiring, promotion and professional development programs.

Ms. Kerner found her way into public service after earning her law degree at the New York University School of Law in 1974. While at NYU Law, she interned for the New York City Law Department and served with such distinction that her supervisor, Mary P. Bass, later asked her to work in the Carter Administration where Ms. Bass was serving as the first IG at the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Ms. Kerner is the recipient of numerous awards earned throughout her career of service, including the Presidential Meritorious Rank Awards in 2001 and 2022; the American University Roger W. Jones Award in 2023; the D.C. Bar Association's Beatrice Rosenberg Award for Excellence in Government Service; the Burton Award for Public Service in the Government; and the TSA Federal Woman's Program Trailblazer Award in 2011, in recognition of her efforts to advance the career of women at

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to reflect on the profound responsibility that accompanies public service.

As public officials across the country are sworn into office, each affirms a commitment to faithfully execute the duties of public office and defend the Constitution of the United States. But more and more Americans are losing faith that the actions of our public officials are principally guided by our Constitution and our laws. And some of my colleagues even doubt whether truth exists and whether government can operate on the basis of mutually agreed facts, such as who won an election.

Gregory Mize--a Georgetown University law professor and retired trial judge--offers a compelling perspective: we can use jury trials as models for attaining higher levels of truthfulness and reliable outcomes in government. After all, our whole justice system is based on the idea that we must all tell the truth and the fact-finder can decide ``beyond a reasonable doubt'' or ``by preponderance of the evidence'' what actually happened.

Thomas Jefferson said, ``I consider trial by jury as the only anchor, yet ever imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.'' Indeed, the way a courtroom pursues truth provides a blueprint for encouraging trustworthiness in our public servants.

At the beginning of jury selection, potential jurors take a solemn oath to truthfully answer questions posed by the judge and lawyers. The selected jurors take a second oath to ``faithfully discharge the duties of a juror and a true verdict render according to the law and the evidence.'' When testimony begins, jurors observe each witness take an oath under penalty of perjury to ``tell the truth and nothing but the truth.'' Judges, also sworn to follow the law, enforce rules of evidence--including by striking irrelevant or unreliable testimony from consideration by the jury. In some cases, judges must also pre-qualify proposed experts before they can state an opinion on a key issue. A lawyer's questioning then further tests the reliability of those opinions. Thanks to these established procedures, jurors learn the court's high valuation of honesty and come to expect it from their government

Rather than relying on a single robed jurist to render a final verdict, our Founders wanted a panel of common citizens to administer justice in honest dialogue with one another. They believed jury deliberations to be a gold standard for reaching truth and achieving just ends.

After hearing evidence and receiving legal instructions from the judge, jurors enter a deliberation room. They test one another's recollections and assumptions and assess witness credibility. Studies show that, during deliberations, a jury polices itself. Individual jurors remind others of the obligations of their oaths and the requirements of the law as stated by the judge.

As a new year--with a new Congress and President--is underway, it is high time to bring courtroom reverence for truth-telling into the government generally and the public square. As citizens, we must demand a commitment to the pursuit of truth from all of our public officials. While enforcing oaths of office is a big challenge, citizens must demand truth from public officials in all that we do. And as public officials, we must earn that trust by honoring our oaths.

The work of Judge Gregory Mize is exemplary in calling America back to the bedrock quest for truth. We owe him a debt of gratitude.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to remember my beloved friend and Montgomery County legend, Jack Fitzgerald, who passed away this week at the age of 89. He will be sharply missed by friends, family, and customers of the Fitzgerald Auto Malls up and down the East Coast.

Jack's life embodied the restless, adventuresome spirit of America and entrepreneurial business at their very best. Over the course of his extraordinary life, he built Bethesda Auto from a single storefront in the early 1950s into a massive success, with dealerships across Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

An old-fashioned businessman devoted to the community, he was an eloquent champion of customer safety, consumer protection, and employee well-being. He pioneered the installation of child safety seats before it became an industry standard.

Jack was friends not just with CEOs of auto companies but with Ralph Nader.

Remarkably, Jack transferred his company to employee stock ownership over the last year before his death. His legacy now lives on in his employees and in everybody in Montgomery County, Maryland, who loved him.

Mr. Speaker, please join me in saluting the life of Jack Fitzgerald, who was a pillar of our community and a local hero. May his memory be a blessing.

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

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

Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to H.R. 1526.

I heard the majority was bringing legislation forward to clean up a major policy crisis taking place within the first 100 days of the Trump administration, and that sounded pretty good to me because we are drowning in crises. The problem is that this bill does not address any of the real major policy crises of the first 100 days that Trump has caused for America. They are wasting our time with this bill by misdiagnosing and mislabeling the judicial response to these crises as a crisis itself.

The whole country is reeling right now from the economic disaster Trump has plunged us into. He destroyed more than $10 trillion in American wealth in 1 single week, and then he went golfing and bragged to America about winning the tournament at his own golf course. Madam Speaker, that is like bragging about being endorsed by your own campaign manager.

With so much winning, the country can hardly stand how much winning Trump is doing for himself, Elon Musk, and his billionaire Cabinet. Perhaps he could have yelled fore on the fareway so tens of millions of Americans could have taken our retirement savings out of the stock market before he hit us in the head with a golf ball.

Trump's ruinous tariffs have crushed our relationships with democratic allies and loyal trade partners like Canada, Mexico, the U.K., Germany, and France while delicately carving out an exception for Trump's friends in the home office back in Russia.

When asked why Putin uniquely escapes the wrath of Trump's global trade war, we are told it is because Trump doesn't want to interfere with the negotiations taking place between Russia and Ukraine for a cease-fire, an explanation that might have somewhat more force if Trump had not made sure that the tariffs do apply to Ukraine as they do.

The basis for this most imbecilic and destructive trade war in the history of the world is the profound economic research and policy writings of one Ron Vara, a completely fictional economist conjured up by Trump adviser Peter Navarro, a real person whom Elon Musk just called a moron and dumb as a sack of bricks.

Navarro's last name, delightfully, is an anagram for Ron Vara. Madam Speaker, you can try this yourself at home. Navarro turns into Ron Vara. Navarro figured that out himself. That is perhaps the greatest achievement of the Trump administration so far. What an enchanting and clever basis upon which to crash the economy of the United States of America.

Despite the fact that Congress, not the President, has the power to regulate international commerce and legislate tariffs, our GOP colleagues don't even want to have one hearing on the breathtaking economic folly and wreckage of this fling into the abyss of trade war with the world, much less do they want to do anything to reverse this policy nightmare for tens of millions of businesspeople, farmers, workers, retirees, and consumers being throttled by this historic, self-inflicted wound.

No, today they want to talk about the real emergency, which is the power of the United States district courts to issue universal injunctions rather than just injunctions that apply to the specific parties in the case.

It seems like a rather boutique and esoteric issue to raise in the middle of an economic catastrophe that they just foisted upon America, but there is a method to the madness. You see, Madam Speaker, Federal judges have issued at least 68 court orders that block or pause the administration's lawlessness to prevent irreparable harm in the country from his unconstitutional actions. The judges deciding here were appointed by five different Presidents, both Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents, in 11 different district courts across seven circuits. The judges have explained in painstaking detail what is unlawful about Trump's executive orders and actions.

Trump has offered no substantive critique of their legal reasoning, but he and Musk still want the judges impeached. They say they should be removed from office simply for striking down the President's illegal policies, which is odd given that Trump and his party demanded for 4 years that Federal judges strike down President Biden's policies like student loan forgiveness or immigration policies or EPA action on climate change.

They seem to embrace Marbury v. Madison and judicial review of Democratic Presidential actions but not of Republican actions. They say that is because Trump just won an election. He beat Kamala Harris by 2 million votes.

Guess what, Madam Speaker. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by over 7 million votes, and that didn't stop them from suing to stop numerous Biden policies they thought were unlawful. Sometimes they won, and sometimes they lost. It is the same now. Nearly 160 cases have been brought against Trump and Musk's actions. Trump has won some, and he has lost some.

However, our colleagues protest that Trump is different because the courts have issued relief in at least 57 different cases, a record number of cases in American history, at record speed. That is true, but if it seems like an incredible number of cases to lose in less than 100 days, recall that Trump is engaged in a record number of illegal actions at a breathtaking velocity never seen before in U.S. history.

As of today, he has already issued 111 executive orders in less than 100 days. Biden issued 162 in all 4 years. Trump can issue as many as he wants, but he has got to make them constitutional because if they are not, they are going to get struck down.

When Trump denounces the judges as radical left judges and lunatics who have gone rogue like Judge Boasberg, he is just advertising his complete ignorance of the Federal bench.

Judge Boasberg is the chief judge of the U.S. District Court, first nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, who was Justice Kavanaugh's roommate at Yale and a pillar of the conservative bar.

We have impeached only 15 judges in U.S. history, always for serious misconduct like taking bribes, embezzlement, corruption, and habitual drunkenness on the bench. It was never because of a doctrinal disagreement and never because of a judge's legal ruling. As Chief Justice Roberts said a few weeks ago, the proper response in our democracy to a judicial decision that you disagree with is to appeal the ruling, not impeach the judge.

Donald Trump has gotten some relief in some of his cases already. The system is working. We don't need to turn the whole world upside down to distract from the economic calamities they have brought upon us.

All this would be fun and games except the rhetorical assault by Trump and Musk and our colleagues against the judiciary has turned into something far more sinister in some quarters: death threats, bomb threats, and online intimidation and harassment of judges. These judges are currently targets of an onslaught of social media taunts and attacks that call for their exile to GTMO or label them a national security threat or traitors. Even worse, this campaign of vilification has spread to their families, including attacks on a Federal judge's daughter who had her photo and place of work posted on a social media site by Elon Musk to his 290 million followers. These threats followed an actual bomb threat targeting the sister of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It is a dangerous situation.

Now our colleagues want to pass the No Rogue Rulings Act which would effectively ban Federal district courts from providing nationwide relief against unlawful actions by the administration. Litigants could request injunctive relief only with respect themselves.

So, for example, if the President establishes a church or bans newspapers or imposes martial law, then each citizen in America would have to bring his or her own case because the courts would not be able to rule to strike down unconstitutional actions generally. That is patently absurd, and we are going to be able to explain how this legislation is a massive distraction

from the issues that are really facing America.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal).

Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record ``The Lost History of the `Universal' Injunction,'' a law review article by Mila Sohoni refuting what was just stated by the gentleman. The universal injunction, the nationwide injunction, goes back at least to 1913 and has been used repeatedly over the last century.

[From the Harvard Law Review]

The Lost History of the ``Universal'' Injunction

(Mila Sohoni)

The issuance of injunctions that reach beyond just the

plaintiffs has recently become the subject of a mounting wave

of censorious commentary, including by members of Congress, a

Supreme Court Justice, the Solicitor General, the Attorney

General, and the President. Critics of these ``universal''

injunctions have claimed that such injunctions are a recent

invention and that they exceed the power conferred by Article

III to decide ``Cases[ ] in . . . Equity.'' This Article

rebuts the proposition that the universal injunction is a

recent invention and that it violates Article III or the

traditional limits of equity as practiced in the federal

courts. As far back as 1913, the Supreme Court itself

enjoined federal officers from enforcing a federal statute

not just against the plaintiff, but against anyone, until the

Court had decided the case. If the Supreme Court can issue a

universal injunction against enforcement of a federal law,

then--as an Article III matter--so can a lower federal court.

Moreover, lower federal courts have been issuing injunctions

that reach beyond the plaintiffs as to state laws in cases

that date back more than a century, and the Supreme Court has

repeatedly approved of these injunctions. If Article III

allows such injunctions as to state laws, it a fortiori

allows such injunctions as to federal laws. Mapping these and

other pieces of the lost history of the universal injunction,

this Article demonstrates that the Article III objection to

the universal injunction should be retired and that the

unfolding efforts to outright strip the federal courts of the

tool of the universal injunction--whether by statutory fiat

or by a judicial redefinition of Article III--should halt.

But I would speak to the consciences of honorable men, and

ask, how they can venture . . . to recommend changes, which

may cut deep into the quick of remedial justice . . . .

Surely, they need not be told, how slow every good system of

laws must be in consolidating; and how easily the rashness of

an hour may destroy, what ages have scarcely cemented in a

solid form.

--Joseph Story, Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1812-

1845)

introduction

The Trump Administration and the Obama Administration do

not seem to have much in common. But they have had one shared

foe: the ``universal'' injunction. Across both

administrations, federal district courts have issued a slew

of injunctions blocking the executive branch from enforcing

federal laws, regulations, or policies ``not only against the

plaintiff, but also against anyone,'' even in cases not

certified as class actions.

The federal courts' power to issue such injunctions--which

are variously called ``national,'' ``nationwide,''

``universal,'' and even ``cosmic''--is now under fire. In

Trump v. Hawaii, Justice Thomas concurred separately to urge

the Court to take up the question of the legality of such

injunctions, suggesting that they are a modern innovation and

that they might fall outside the judicial power of Article

III courts. In 2018, the House Judiciary Committee of the

115th Congress released a markup of the Injunctive Authority

Clarification Act, which would curtail the authority of

federal courts to issue such injunctions.

In December 2018, the Solicitor General's Office called for

the Court to ``arrest'' this ``disturbing but accelerating

trend,'' which it cast as a ``rapidly expanding threat to the

respect that each coordinate Branch of our Nation's

government owes the others.'' In guidelines to Department of

Justice civil litigators, former Attorney General Jeff

Sessions referred to such injunctions as ``abuses of judicial

power,'' a ``threat[ ]'' to ``the rule of law,'' a ``danger

to our constitutional order,'' and a ``kind of judicial

activism [that] did not happen a single time in our first 175

years as a nation.'' Several states--including states that

earlier sought and won such injunctions--now contend that

``universal injunctions contradict the rest of Anglo-American

jurisprudence.'' The Trump White House, in its

characteristically measured tones, has hinted that the

practice is perhaps not beyond criticism. A growing vein of

scholarship concerning such injunctions has also developed.

This Article demonstrates that the universal injunction is

a tool with a more venerable lineage than heretofore

recognized. Surveying cases involving both state and federal

law and drawing on decisions by courts at all three levels of

the federal judicial hierarchy, this Article shows that

Article III courts have issued injunctions that extend beyond

just the plaintiff for well over a century. Building on this

lost history, this Article argues that the Article III

objection to the universal injunction should be retired and

that legislative efforts to outright strip the federal courts

of the substantive power to grant such injunctions should

halt.

Let us begin with the history. The universal injunction

against federal law did not ``emerg[e] for the first time in

the 1960s,'' as many critics of the universal injunction have

claimed. The Court itself issued a universal injunction in

1913, in the months preceding its opinion in Lewis Publishing

Co. v. Morgan, when it temporarily enjoined a federal statute

from being enforced not just against the plaintiffs but also

against ``other newspaper publishers.'' In the following

decade, the Court issued two other preliminary injunctions

that barred a federal law's enforcement beyond the plaintiffs

within a single judicial district, and in one of those cases

it specified that similarly broad final relief should issue.

Moreover, at least as far back as 1916, three-judge federal

courts issued injunctions against the enforcement of laws

that reached beyond the plaintiffs in those suits. The laws

thereby enjoined were state laws, not federal laws, but the

injunctions possessed the characteristic that matters most to

the Article III debate over the injunctive power: those

injunctions gave sweeping protection to nonplaintiffs who

would otherwise have been vulnerable to the law's

enforcement. When the state defendants in those suits

appealed directly to the Supreme Court--as procedural law at

the time allowed them to do--the Court on several occasions

affirmed the lower courts' injunctions, and sometimes did so

in single-sentence, unanimous, per curiam decisions. In one

important (though not unique) instance--Pierce v. Society of

Sisters--the Court affirmed a universal injunction barring

the enforcement of Oregon's compulsory public-schooling law

in a landmark precedent that remains good law to this day.

Not long thereafter, the universal injunction was brought

to bear upon federal agency action. In 1939, the D.C. Circuit

issued a universal injunction against federal agency action

in Lukens Steel Co. v. Perkins. That highly consequential

decree altered the federal government's purchasing activities

with respect to the iron and steel industries for a whole

year in the run-up to America's entry into World War II. When

the Supreme Court took up the case in Perkins v. Lukens Steel

Co., the Court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing and

were thus not entitled to seek any kind of relief, the steel

companies' suit, the Court held, ``contains no semblance of

these elements which go to make up a litigable controversy as

our law knows the concept.'' Crucially, Perkins left intact

the propriety of injunctions reaching beyond the plaintiffs

as remedies in cases brought by plaintiffs with standing,

indeed, Perkins is bookended by decisions in which the Court

continued to approve that practice. In Hague v. CIO, less

than a year before Perkins, the Court affirmed an injunction

that protected those who acted in sympathy with the

plaintiffs from enforcement of a city law; in West Virginia

State Board of Education v. Barnette, shortly after Perkins,

the Court affirmed an injunction that reached beyond both the

plaintiffs' children and the alleged plaintiff class to

shield ``any other children having religious scruples'' from

a state law requiring students to salute the American flag.

This history has important implications for how we should

understand Article III. Today, critics of the universal

injunction contend that Article III courts should adhere--or,

as they sometimes frame it, revert--to the rule that

injunctions must be solely ``plaintiff-protective.'' They

have urged the Advisory Committee on Federal Rules to

create such a rule by amending the Federal Rules of Civil

Procedures. They have pressed Congress to institute such a

rule by statute--and indeed, the 115th Congress lately

considered doing just that, holding hearings on whether it

should forbid what the bill at issue styled as ``orders

purporting to restrain enforcement against non-parties''

in cases not certified as Rule 23 class actions. Justice

Thomas, as noted, has suggested that Article III may

forbid injunctions that reach beyond the plaintiffs.

We must be clear about one thing: it would be a sharp

departure from precedent and practice to treat Article III as

requiring the equitable remedial powers of federal courts to

be cabined in that manner. Article III confers a singular

power upon all federal courts to decide ``Cases[ ] in . . .

Equity.'' It does not allocate different types of equitable

remedial power to courts at different levels of the federal

judicial hierarchy, and it draws no line between state and

federal government defendants. That singular judicial power

must be uniformly interpreted, and its scope cannot sensibly

be regarded as hinging on the surmounting of hurdles to class

certification that were not created until 1966. If the

Supreme Court can issue a universal injunction against

enforcement of a federal law in a suit by a single plaintiff,

then so can a federal district court as an Article III

matter. If a federal district court issue a universal

injunction against enforcement of a state law in a suit by a

single plaintiff, a federal district court must also have the

power to issue such an injunction against enforcement of a

federal law as an Article III matter. There is only one

``judicial Power,'' and that power includes the power to

issue injunctions that protect those who are not plaintiffs.

Finally, some critics of the universal injunction have

invoked a strict form of originalism in support of their case

against that remedy. But the logic of that argument would

extend well beyond the universal injunction. At the time of

the Founding,

English officers were kept to heel not with injunctions

issued by the Chancellor in equity, but instead with common

law damages suits or ``prerogative'' writs (mandamus, quo

warranto, and so on) issued by the King's Bench--a common law

court. And American federal courts did not issue ``Young-

type'' injunctions against enforcement suits brought by state

and federal officers until well after the Founding. A

strictly originalist approach to the judicial power in equity

would therefore jettison not just the universal injunction--

it would equally undercut the propriety of an injunction that

protected just a single plaintiff from enforcement of even an

egregiously unconstitutional law by a government officer.

Such a straitened conception of the equitable power of

Article III courts cannot be squared with either a century-

plus of practice or with ``the implicit policies embodied in

Article III'' itself. Nor, fortunately, is that result

demanded by Grupo Mexicana de Desarrollo v. Alliance Bond

Fund, Inc., for that decision rested not only on the meaning

of equity in England in 1789, but also on how American

federal courts treated that concept in decisions extending

through the twentieth century. Measured by that yardstick,

the universal injunction against federal law is

constitutionally legitimate.

At bottom, the current debate over the universal injunction

is as much a debate over the proper role of the federal

courts as it is a debate over the arcana of equitable

remedies. May courts decide disputes only for the parties

before them, or may they declare the law for nonparties, too?

This Article's contribution to that evergreen debate is to

show how, in the period from 1890 to 1943, the law-

declaration model animated and guided the actions of federal

courts as they issued decrees on myriad questions of public

law. Expanding the frame of our inquiry even by this much

reveals that the injunction reaching beyond the plaintiffs--

and the law-declaration model of the judicial power that this

remedy implies--is not some late-blooming efflorescence of

post-Warren Court judicial hubris. Rather, it is a tool that

developed in tandem with, and in support of, the regime of

routinized judicial review of state and federal official

action that we continue to live under today. Our government

is not a monarchy, and our federal judges are not Westminster

chancellors; in no small part, the one has followed from the

other.

The Article proceeds in six Parts. Part I maps how the

current discourse concerning universal injunctions has

gerrymandered the analysis of judicial power and has thereby

cast undue doubt on the propriety of this remedy. Part II

explores how the Supreme Court in the 1890s endorsed an

expansive view of the powers of federal courts to control the

rights of nonparties through injunctive decrees. Part III

describes injunctions against enforcement of federal statutes

issued by the Court itself in the 1910s and 1920s and

examines their implications for the Article III analysis.

Part IV describes injunctions against enforcement of state

law issued by lower federal courts from the 1910s through the

1930s and then similarly outlines their implications for the

Article III analysis. Part V turns to federal agency action,

focusing specifically on Perkins and two cases involving

state and local laws that are important for understanding

Perkins; this Part spans the 1939-1943 period.

Mr. Speaker, the link to the entire document can be found here: https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/920- 1009__Online.pdf.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet.

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

Both Democrats and some Republicans have assailed the clearly unlawful nature of this trade war instituted by President Trump based on tariffs against the entire world except for Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Congress has the power under Article I of the Constitution to regulate commerce internationally. We have the power over tariffs.

The President purportedly is asserting powers under a statute which applies to emergencies in extraordinary and unusual situations. Then he said this has been going on for decade after decade.

Well, then how could that be an emergency? How could that be extraordinary and unusual?

There will be a lawsuit on this, and what our colleagues are saying is that if there is a bipartisan lawsuit that goes to court which stops these tariffs that are crippling businesses and farmers and wiping out people's retirements across the country, and if they succeed in one district, say, in Minnesota or Wisconsin or New York, you have to go to every one of 94 different districts in the country to get the benefit of that. That is what they want to do.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler).

Mr. Speaker, nationwide injunctions are something that my friends across the aisle not only endorsed but took liberal advantage of in the last administration.

Remember Judge Matt Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas? They were lining up around the block to go forum shopping in his little district because he was the only judge to get cases against Biden there. Then Republicans praised the nationwide injunctions he issued.

The gentleman who just spoke signed a letter in praise of a nationwide injunction that was offered by Judge

Kacsmaryk. If the gentleman wants to change his position, fine, but please explain to us why the position has changed since the gentleman was praising nationwide injunctions in the last administration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Neguse).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his astute observations there and say that Judge Kacsmaryk was reversed several times by higher courts.

We never came out and said, therefore, let's ban nationwide injunctions. We did say we should reform judge shopping and forum shopping. That is the real problem. Yet, it is not a problem if there is a nationwide crisis created by illegal action by an executive that a judge has the authority to counter that with an injunction and then it gets appealed up to the Supreme Court.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, just to answer a couple of things raised by the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Jordan), my friend.

First of all, that is not what the Supreme Court said. The Supreme Court simply said that this was not a case that should be going through the Administrative Procedure Act under the Immigration and Nationality Act. It should be done through a habeas corpus in the district of confinement, in Texas.

Mr. Speaker, in fact, the Supreme Court affirmed that there must be due process for people who were illegally taken out of this country and sent to El Salvador.

Secondly, the gentleman gives us a false choice when he says: Who gets to decide? Is it the person who puts his name on the ballot and goes out and campaigns, or is it an unelected Federal district judge?

Decide what? If we are talking about deciding the constitutionality of a law, obviously it is the judge under Marbury v. Madison. I know that the distinguished gentleman from the Committee on the Judiciary knows that the fact that Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by 2 million votes is neither here, nor there.

Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 7 million votes, and they still went to court pretty much on a weekly basis to try to get Joe Biden's legislation and his programs struck down. The majority believed in judicial review then. We should understand that it is very convenient for Republicans to say, all of a sudden, that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't believe in judicial review just because they have the Presidency.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Ross).

Mr. Speaker, the Supreme Court has already rejected at least two of the actions that Donald Trump has taken since he got in. One was firing the executive director of the Office of Special Counsel. He was reinstated.

The other was reinstating a $2.1 billion aid grant that was essentially impounded and diverted by the administration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the very distinguished gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Subramanyam).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Bell).

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

Mr. Speaker, I will answer my good friend, the chairman of the subcommittee, about the remarks he just made.

He is correct that the President, of course, like Members of Congress, must also interpret and enforce the Constitution. In fact, that is the core part of the President's job, to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, says Article II, not distorted or rewritten, but to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. That doesn't negate the fact that under Marbury v. Madison, it is emphatically the province and the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is in the event of an actual case or controversy.

The gentleman invoked George Washington. There is a beautiful portrait of Washington, the Trumbull portrait, that we have in the rotunda and it is a picture of George Washington surrendering his commission as the general of the Continental Forces, which Napoleon said made him the greatest man ever, that he could have stayed on as a dictator forever, and he gave up his power. He could have been President forever, but he gave up his power.

When we compare that to Donald Trump who is saying he is going to run for an unconstitutional and, yes, an illegal third term, that would be an illegal third term for him to run again to try to take office, so that is why we have courts in order to cabin the potentially limitless ambitions of Presidents. That is why we don't have kings; we have Presidents here.

Secondly, there seems to be a myth on the other side that if a President campaigns on something, then it is constitutional and the courts can't strike it down. So if the President campaigns on running again for a third term, then it is okay. Where does it say that in the Constitution? That can't be right. We are all bound by the Constitution no matter what we say during the campaign. A person could run around saying, ``I am going to be king,'' or if President Trump said, ``I will be dictator on day one.'' No, you will not be dictator on day one under the Constitution of the United States.

Why did the judge tell the administration to turn the planes around? Because of the two most beautiful words in the English language, ``due process.'' Because what they can do to noncitizens, they can do to citizens. If they can sweep anybody off the street and say we are going to send you to a torturous prison in El Salvador without any kind of hearing at all, it can happen to citizens as well as noncitizens.

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

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\3/4\ minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Goldman).

Mr. Speaker, listening to the debate, it occurs to me that Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid should have just denounced traditional activism and moved to change the Federal rules of civil procedure: Always better to blame the judge than to take responsibility for your own unlawful actions.

Mr. Speaker, I will close by quoting Thomas Jefferson who said during the time of the Alien and Sedition Acts: ``A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.''

In the meantime, we are suffering the horrors and malignities of this period, but if the game runs against us sometimes as it will, we must have patience because it is a game where principles are at stake.

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

Mr. Speaker, thousands of my constituents have been illegally fired by Elon Musk and by Donald Trump. One of them was with me last night, Dr. Lauren McGee, who was an NIH pediatric cancer specialist heading up a team looking into osteosarcoma, bone cancer for children. She got fired on February 14 because she was a probationary employee. Probationary, not because she had done anything wrong, but because she had been promoted into the new job. She was with me last night, and she had to sit here and listen, along with me--and I had spent the day with her--to Donald Trump saying one of their top priorities is to fight childhood cancer, and she got sacked on that Valentine's Day massacre.

Now they want to censure the gentleman from Texas. Why? Because he challenged the President about his claim that he has a mandate to cut Medicaid, and that is what the gentleman was trying to raise.

We have Republicans in the Chamber who have never voted to impeach Donald Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against this Congress, this Constitution, and his own Vice President, who have never voted to even censure the President for doing that, and yet they want to censure the gentleman from Texas.

Last night, President Trump called a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts ``Pocahontas,'' using an ethnic slur to go after her. If you really want to proceed to censure the gentleman from Texas for talking about no mandate to cut Medicaid, then certainly we are going to have to move to censure the President for using a racial and ethnic slur against a sitting United States Senator.

I would prefer to stand by the tradition of free speech and even the tradition of heckling. There is a fine American art of heckling. If you read the Lincoln-Douglas debates, I recommend the Harold Holzer version of it because the newspapers carried all of the hecklers' comments, too. People would get up and heckle, and Lincoln would interact with them and Douglas would interact with them.

Let's stop clutching our pearls. There has been lots of heckling over on that side of the aisle. I saw the gentlewoman from Georgia heckle the last President and have a whole heckling section there. We didn't try to censure them or kick them out of Congress or anything. We actually not only say we believe in free speech but we believe in free speech. We will stand up for people's right to speak.

Now, I don't believe in the kind of heckling where you drown somebody out and you make it impossible for them to speak, but the gentleman was trying to start a conversation as opposed to just being spoken to all night.

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

Mr. Speaker, I begin with an urgent constitutional public service announcement based on millions of calls and messages that have been flooding Congress.

There is a serial constitutional violator at large right now in the District of Columbia whose overall project to dismantle our Constitution and rule of law is now the target or subject of at least a dozen different Federal court temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions across the land and also faces emergency civil actions in dozens of other courts and jurisdictions.

The suspect has been described as a very evil individual by Steve Bannon and has been operating in a clandestine fashion with a night crew of computer-hacking juvenile associates, one of whom goes by the alias of ``Big Balls'' and another one they call ``the kid,'' who has been known to post racist and anti-Semitic provocations online.

The accelerating spree of constitutional offenses alarming the Nation involves dozens of episodes of computer fraud and data theft affecting potentially 300 million Americans and escalating threats against congressionally created Federal agencies serving the people from the NIH to the National Weather Service to NOAA to the Department of Justice; public workers; teachers and students; prosecutors of cop- assaulting criminals and seditious conspirators against our government; FBI agents; and anyone who depends on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or any other computerized public payment system.

The apparent ringleader of all the constitutional mayhem is a reported father of 12, a formerly deportable undocumented immigrant who worked illegally in the country and is apparently part of a loose network of Silicon Valley billionaires who oppose American constitutional democracy and openly favor creation of a monarchical techno-state under their control.

The suspect was seen yesterday in the vicinity of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW and is known to have been consorting as recently as a few days ago with a convicted felon from New York.

Described as the richest person in the world, the suspect is both a government contractor with billions of dollars in defense contracts-- and we learned yesterday $400 million slated from the State Department for some of his armored Tesla vehicles--and also he is a part-time government worker whose many taxpayer-supported businesses are being investigated, fined, or sued by numerous Federal agencies, including the Department of Transportation, the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Justice, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The suspect has allegedly been working to seize control over several of these same agencies to shut them down, which would presumably terminate all of the relevant threatening investigations.

The public has never received from the suspect any ethics disclosure forms required of all Federal workers nor any conflict of interest waiver to resolve his glaring conflicts of interest.

The suspect spent his formative years in apartheid South Africa and has been known to post racist and anti-Semitic material and to engage in a Nazi salute in public.

Steve Bannon calls him a truly evil individual. The ringleader and his associates, sometimes called the Muskovites, have been seen by numerous Federal workers violating the separation of powers and the Spending Clause, usurping the powers of this body, trampling the civil service laws, and violating the rights of both his Federal and corporate workers.

The suspect, his sponsors, and accomplices should be considered dangerous to the constitutional rights, freedoms, and institutions of the people as well as their property, their jobs, and their livelihoods.

If you know anything about the situation and you are a Republican Member, please get in touch immediately with the Democrats so we can form a majority to stop this unprecedented attack on the Constitution and American law and order before we end up like apartheid South Africa or Orban's Hungary or Putin's Russia.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program where we avoid the constitutional crisis overtaking the first and greatest multiracial, multiethnic constitutional democracy on Earth and instead pass completely redundant, unnecessary, and sloppily drafted laws that allow us to vote against immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, as Elon Musk was, without either engaging in comprehensive immigration reform or fixing the border.

Now, with this bill, House Republicans are once again seeking to take political advantage of a horrific crime by seizing on the death of Agent Gonzalez in the performance of his duties, while doing nothing to make our border more secure or to repair our broken immigration system.

Everyone knows, of course, that they blew up the bipartisan border security deal that we had at the end of the last Congress.

H.R. 35 seeks to establish new criminal and immigration penalties on anyone--citizens, permanent residents, documented immigrants, or undocumented immigrants--for this offense: fleeing a Border Patrol agent or a law enforcement officer who is working with the Border Patrol.

Fleeing Border Patrol at the border already carries substantial criminal and legal penalties under current law. That is already a crime. Under 18 U.S. Code 758, whoever flees or evades a checkpoint operated by the Customs and Border Protection, or any other law enforcement agency, in a motor vehicle and flees from Federal, State, or local law enforcement in excess of the legal speed limit can be charged with and convicted of high-speed flight from an immigration checkpoint.

Furthermore, many decades of prosecution and case law make it perfectly clear that fleeing law enforcement is a crime involving moral turpitude for which a conviction will render a noncitizen, whether documented or undocumented, immediately deportable and inadmissible to the country.

In other words, what they are dragging us through again is already against the law. If all of it is already a crime, why do we need another version of it, except for plainly opportunistic political purposes.

I know those are the only bills they have been bringing forward. They have got no other agenda for the country. They have handed over the legislative authority of the Congress of the United

States to Elon Musk, the fourth branch of government.

In any event, they want us to pass again something that is already against the law. We don't need it. In fact, this characteristically poorly drafted, pile-on bill is so poorly drafted this time that it could subject not just undocumented people, not just permanent residents, but American citizens to prison sentences for conduct that the vast majority of Americans would not even recognize as a crime at all and would not see as a crime.

Now, unlike existing Federal law or similar State statutes, the bill does not define what it means to ``flee.'' In their haste to get this to the floor, they just rushed over that element of the crime, which is of extraordinary interest to every other jurisdiction and even Congress before when dealing with it. Leave that aside, it does not even require evidence of criminal intent, a guilty mind, what lawyers call mens rea, the intention to do the evil thing.

In other words, this bill does not require a person to know that they are fleeing Border Patrol in order to be charged with that crime.

Think about it, Mr. Speaker. It applies to citizens, not just noncitizens, and you can be prosecuted and jailed for fleeing from a Border Patrol that you didn't know was Border Patrol.

This is a radical departure from the prevailing rule in American jurisdictions.

For example, in Maryland--I looked up my State--the offense of fleeing or eluding law enforcement requires that a uniformed officer gives a person a visual or audible signal to stop and prominently displays their official badge or other insignia. If an officer is not in uniform, Maryland requires that an officer give a visual or audible signal to stop while in an officially marked police vehicle to establish the necessary mens rea before we put somebody in prison. Under either circumstance, a visual or audible signal can be by hand, voice, emergency light, or siren.

It is not only blue States like mine that require evidence that the accused knew what they were doing was wrong before convicting them of purposefully fleeing from law enforcement. That is the rule almost everywhere.

I am sure the Crime and Federal Government Surveillance Subcommittee chairman, Mr. Biggs, and the sponsor of this bill, Mr. Ciscomani, are aware that, in Arizona, the offense of unlawful flight from pursuing law enforcement requires proof that the officer's vehicle had markings indicative of an official police vehicle, evidence that the driver knew that the vehicle was an official law enforcement vehicle, or the defendant must admit knowing that the vehicle was an official police vehicle.

In other words, their own State takes the exact painstaking precautions that they just run roughshod over in order to get this bill, which has not had a hearing, to the floor of the United States House of Representatives.

Should a defendant choose to exercise their right to trial by jury, the trial judge in Arizona would instruct the jury that they may consider whether the officer operated their emergency lights or siren to determine whether the defendant is guilty of unlawful flight from an actual pursuing vehicle.

As was stated in the collaborative reports ``Without Intent'' and ``Without Intent Revisited,'' published by The Heritage Foundation, which is adamant about mens rea, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, ``Ensuring that an adequate mens rea provision is included in statutes and regulations that create criminal offenses is critical.''

The Heritage Foundation says that it is critical to specify that there must be a culpable or guilty state of mind before we put people behind bars. It appears that nearly every State recognized this fact when drafting their statutes carefully to address the fears and consequences associated with people fleeing law enforcement.

We don't want people going to jail because they were simply moving away from a person they thought was a criminal who turns out to be, for example, an undercover police officer.

As a matter of fact, of the States represented by the 32 cosponsors of this legislation, all but two of them specifically require, at minimum, an audible or visual signal to stop the vehicle to prove that there was intentional flight from a pursuing officer.

Looking at statutes that address similar conduct in all 50 States, there are only 6 that do not explicitly require an order, direction, request, or signal to stop the vehicle.

Despite this widely accepted approach to legislative construction, H.R. 35 would allow Donald Trump's Department of Justice to not only convict noncitizens but citizens of a violation of this so-called offense and to deport noncitizens without allowing them their day in court and without requiring any evidence of any knowledge that they were actually fleeing a government agent.

Without any limiting characteristics, under this bill, a citizen could be sent to prison because they did not immediately pull over when hailed by someone--for example, a local undercover officer assisting Border Patrol.

Similarly, in the immigration context, admitting to acts that constitute this nebulous and vague conduct would render a green card holder deportable.

The bill applies its criminal immigration penalties even if the law enforcement officer is in plain clothes and is driving an unmarked undercover vehicle.

There are a lot of good reasons why a law-abiding citizen or permanent resident might be wary of pulling over for an unmarked vehicle. Just last week, reports emerged of an alarming trend across the country of rapists, criminals, or vigilantes pretending to be immigration enforcement personnel targeting people whom they thought might be undocumented in order to rape them, assault them, harass them, or what have you.

I saw on TV a case last night of a sexual assailant who accosted a woman and forcibly assaulted her while pretending to be an ICE agent. I saw that last night.

Another man, Sean-Michael Johnson, was arrested for impersonating a law enforcement officer, along with felony kidnapping, larceny, and assault and battery, after he impersonated an ICE agent and stopped a group of men in their car because he told them they were not lawfully present in the country.

In this environment, Mr. Speaker, it would be neither unreasonable nor surprising for law-abiding citizens to be wary of pulling over for an unmarked car that claims to be working with Border Patrol. Further, given that the Trump administration is deputizing anyone they can to get to aid immigration enforcement efforts, the number of officers, both in police clothing and in unmarked clothing, to whom this law would apply is staggering.

In backing this bill, our colleagues want to impose extraordinary criminal and immigration consequences for not immediately pulling over when an unmarked car driven by a total stranger hails you at a time when criminals, including a pardoned January 6 felon, by the way, are going around impersonating immigration enforcement officers.

That is a real trend happening now, and I would love to be convinced it is not if the gentleman has reason to think that all of these reports and arrests of people impersonating officers are wrong.

This is a trend in the country. All of this is simply to give more power to target immigrants, which already exists, just for the purposes of a legislative show. This is outrageous.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose the legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. Speaker, yes, we have hundreds of thousands of Federal employees who live in Maryland, and we are very proud of them. I assume the distinguished gentleman from Virginia is proud of the hundreds of thousands of Federal employees who live and work in Virginia, including in Roanoke. They have constitutional rights just like other American citizens have.

None of our rights, whether they are constitutional or in the civil service, should be trashed by an unelected billionaire bureaucrat who doesn't understand our system of government.

As to the merits, the distinguished gentleman talks about high-speed chases, which is what most statutes talk about in the country. This bill--I don't know if the gentleman read the language--doesn't mention high-speed chases or any speed at all. It just says ``fleeing.'' It is the only statute I could find in the country that doesn't define what ``fleeing'' means.

It is a very sloppy bill that has not had a hearing and that was brought to the floor for political entertainment purposes.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 6 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal), who is the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, just in answer to a couple of the recent comments that the good gentleman, the floor manager, says: How could it be possible that this bill is both duplicative and wildly expansive?

Mr. Speaker, it is duplicative of the actual criminal offense. That already exists. It is already a crime for somebody at the border to flee in a high-speed chase away from an officer. That is already a crime.

What is expansive is this applies to citizens. It goes way beyond the border. It goes all over the country. It doesn't define what it means to flee. It doesn't require a high-speed chase.

As the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal) was saying, it can apply to a woman who hears on the news, the way I heard last night, that there is a maniac out there claiming to be an ICE agent who is attacking women. She hears about it, and then a plainclothes officer in an unmarked car begins to chase her. If she moves away and stops three or four blocks later, she is guilty of violating their sloppily drafted bill.

If Republicans are serious about it, we should go back and have a real hearing, and the majority should look at what States across the country are doing.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Bynum).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Tlaib).

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, the distinguished chairman of the Judiciary Committee (Mr. Jordan) invites us to believe that we should just suspend our own interests in legislative power. We should no longer defend the laws we have passed, the programs we have adopted, the money we have appropriated but that we should turn it over to the new fourth branch of government, Elon Musk, who can do whatever he wants.

Then he wants to also delegate to Mr. Musk our oversight power. We have an entire committee chaired by Mr. Comer. We have our own subcommittee on Oversight in the Judiciary Committee, but do they want to have hearings on Big Bird and Ernie and all of the alleged waste, fraud, and abuse that Mr. Musk is finding with his untutored, unvetted, juvenile computer hacker crew?

Come on. Let's show some institutional self-respect. This is the Congress of the United States. We are not delegating our power to Elon Musk or anybody else.

Mr. Speaker, many of our great heroes have understood that sloppy legislation undertaken as part of an attempt to whip up anti- immigration hysteria comes to haunt not just the immigrant community, of course, but citizens, too.

This bill is a great example of that because I don't know if they meant to write it this way, but it applies to citizens. It doesn't require mens rea, so call the Heritage Foundation about that. They are opposed to bills like this that don't require you prove that people have a specific intent to violate the law and commit a criminal offense. It doesn't define what fleeing even means. It doesn't require a high-speed chase, which is what they keep talking about. That is already against the law in lots of places.

It is a sloppy bill that is going to come back and haunt us if it were ever to become law, which it won't.

Thomas Jefferson said during the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts where people were trying to whip up hysteria--

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, the purpose of the gentleman's bill is not to give Congress the power to undo midnight rules because Congress already has that power.

Under the Congressional Review Act, House Republicans can go to the floor this week, and they can try to undo every single regulation that was issued by the Biden administration from August of last year to Inauguration Day.

What does their bill do? It would allow the majority to roll up lots of midnight regulations and lots of others, too, including what you might call twilight, midday, and early morning regulations--indeed, all of the regulations adopted in the final 365 days of the prior administration, an entire year that takes place at midnight. All the regulations adopted in the last year could be tied together into a bundle, wrapped up together in a giant bunch, and then voted down as a single jumbo resolution.

This tactic could be used to try to get Congress to eliminate no fewer, by my count, than 355 major regulations from the last year of Joe Biden in one fell swoop, forcing every Member to vote either to sustain all of the regulations or to overturn and destroy all of them. By destroying them, that means the agencies could not try to promulgate similar regulations in the future without an act of Congress.

This would allow Trump's enablers and the sheeplike new Elon Muskovites in Congress to obliterate hundreds of completely diverse and unrelated regulations in one fell swoop. These are regulations that were adopted over the last year: Everything from removing lead from drinking water to making cell phones compatible with hearing aids to creating safety standards for infant bath seats to implementing the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Mr. Speaker, the reason that 43 States have constitutional or statutory single-subject rules for policy legislation initiatives and referenda is because voting on completely different subjects at the same time is a moronic way to govern and an invitation to political manipulation of the will of the people.

What is a Member to do if he or she strongly approves of, say, overturning 20 percent of these rules but strongly opposes overturning 80 percent of them? This weird dilemma makes us ask why we would even want to force such a choice. After all, the vast majority of America rejects this whole concept.

Well, the obvious purpose of this bizarre legislation is to get Republicans to vote to repeal extremely popular, commonsense regulations but then try to enable them to escape the political consequences of doing so.

Consider some of the Biden administration regulations which they would tuck into this monstrosity, omnibus midnight relief resolution and decide if you are willing to vote to overturn them, even if they are tucked in with some infamous washing machine regulation they love talking about.

Consider this one from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It cuts credit card late fees from an average of $32 to $8, meaning your credit card company cannot charge you more than $8 for late fees because the CFPB brought a suit and determined that is the whole administrative cost of a late fee. It didn't say the credit card companies couldn't charge anything, but it said when they are charging you $32, that is just a rip-off.

Now, our friends on that side of the aisle want to repeal this regulation because they insist it violates their precious laissez-faire principle. That is, let the credit card companies do whatever they want, but when it comes to leaving middle-class and working-class consumers to the mercy of gigantic credit card companies, my friends, laissez isn't fair. At least that is what the Democrats think, and we will stand up for this regulation.

If you think the credit card companies should be restored their power to charge whatever they want for late fees, way beyond their actual administrative expenses, then by all means support the Republicans' bill. Elon Musk and the billionaires will love you for it. Musk did, after all, just sign an agreement with Visa for his X wallet.

Another rule Republicans could add to their giant bundle is from the Department of Transportation, which requires airlines to provide automatic refunds when your flight is canceled and to disclose upfront baggage and flight change fees.

It used to be they could cancel your flight and just say they will give you another flight in the future at some point. The Department of Transportation determined that is not fair. If they cancel your flight, you get a refund. If you want to fly later or go take a train or find another mode of transportation, you can do it.

Now, they could throw that into the big bonfire of regulation destruction they are so excited about, and then you could consign your rights back to the microscopic fine print on the back of your airplane ticket rather than having the consumer champions at the Department of Transportation try to stand up for the people.

If you want the airlines to have that power over you, go ahead and vote for the GOP bill, support more laissez-faire for the billionaires. Strike a blow against the reviled Bidenomics. Give yourself all the airline inconvenience you want.

Another rule that they would throw in is the FTC's wildly popular click-to-cancel rule mandating that it should be just as easy to cancel a service advertised online as it is to sign up for it. The American people love that, right? Do you want to go back to the days when it was as easy as A-B-C-1-2-3 to sign up for an online service but then like the 12 labors of Hercules to try to get out of it when you no longer need it, then by all means support this great laissez-faire Republican bill. Strike a blow against the big, bad, evil, mean, wicked, terrible regulations.

If you fall for all that propaganda, and you are more afraid of the big, bad, evil regulations than the big, bad, evil corporations, go ahead and vote for it. The unelected billionaire bureaucrat and his nameless, faceless, racist, junior bureaucrats in the Muskovite nighttime wrecking ball crew will be thrilled if you vote for it.

Another rule that is up for reversal is the CFPB regulation capping bank overdraft fees at $5. My constituents in Maryland, who might not be as rich as some of the constituents over on the other side, were getting overdraft charges of $35. They didn't like that, so they support the CFPB regulation capping overdraft fees from banks at $5, which is at most what it costs the banks to process it.

That practice was costing American consumers, mostly young people, mostly older people and working-class people, $5 billion a year. Biden's new $5 rule, that is the max for overdraft fees. Excuse me. It is not a rule. It is a dreadful regulation to cut overdraft fees by more than 80 percent.

Guess what? The banks didn't go bankrupt. They have never been wealthier or healthier, with record profits in the last quarter, even with consumer safety regulations, which we are supposed to be so terrified about.

Go ahead and vote for the big banks, Elon Musk, and the Republicans. Vote against your own interests. You can lift the $5 overdraft fee. I would be interested in what the gentleman thinks it should be, $30, $40? I don't know.

Finally, consider an HHS rule that you could be forced to vote for in advancing the big omnibus package they want: a ban on junk health insurance plans that rip our people off when they need healthcare the most and are most desperate. That is an HHS rule, and the Republicans say that that rule should be repealed because I guess the low-quality health insurance companies don't want to rip you off, right? If you believe that, then by all means, vote for the bill.

Instead of considering these regulations one at a time on their own merits and then voting on them transparently and publicly, as current law requires and as the vast majority of State constitutions and State legislatures require, this Republican bill would give Congress the power to wipe out all of these rules and hundreds of others in one single, massive party-line vote, which completely pulls the wool over the eyes of the American people.

Why do it? They haven't said. They just want it to slide through. They want to throw all these excellent regulations, supported by the vast majority of American people, in with a couple of regulations that I have heard them talk about, when I asked them why they want to do it, about washing machines. All right, say you don't like

those washing machine regulations. Make your argument to Congress. Let's debate it and discuss it, and maybe you will convince me. We will give it an up-or-down vote.

Each regulation gets its own vote. What is wrong with that?

No. They want to flood the zone with confusion and treat the people like sheep, not citizens. They don't want their constituents to notice the damage they are inflicting on the public good.

When I first heard about this legislative rip-off, I actually wanted to get in touch with the distinguished gentleman from Arizona, Representative Andy Biggs, because I remembered that he was the proud and impassioned sponsor of H.R. 91, which he introduced just a few weeks ago, on January 16, 2025. It was a very impressive bill. Guess what it is called? It is called the One Bill, One Subject Transparency Act. Let me repeat that: the One Bill, One Subject Transparency Act. That is his bill. I love the fact that he has been fighting for that. His bill ``requires each bill or joint resolution to include no more than one subject and the subject to be clearly and descriptively expressed in the measure's title.''

The midnight regulation kitchen sink bill would violate everything that I thought Congressman Biggs believes about the legislative process: Members should be voting on one subject or one regulation at a time, not a dozen different subjects, not 100 different regulations in a single resolution, and the title of the bill should indeed clearly and descriptively communicate exactly what we are voting on, which means one thing.

Amazingly, before I could get to find Representative Biggs to tell him that we had to get together across party lines to stop this new monstrosity I heard about, I was told by my staff that he was actually the author of the Midnight Rules Relief Act.

I couldn't believe it. I was dumbfounded and gobstopped. The lead sponsor of the One Bill, One Subject Transparency Act was now advocating this massive conglomeration of subjects and regulations, a huge legislative stew, a gumbo where poison pills and healthy vegetables are mixed up freely into one toxic, indigestible, and incomprehensible meal.

It is amazing to me. This is the cynical tactic that I thought my friends in the Freedom Caucus have for years been complaining about: the passage of bewilderingly complex and inscrutable legislation covering way too many subjects at once.

As Mr. Biggs' press release on his bill stated: ``Too often, congressional leaders use `must-pass bills' . . . as methods for passing laws that may have failed if considered on their own.'' I will have some more to say about things that he has said about it in the past.

He had a solution to all of these tactics of political dishonesty. The One Bill, One Subject Transparency Act would require that every bill considered by the House encompasses no more than one subject at a time. Let me repeat that: no more than one subject at a time. If a bill addresses two or more, then guess what? The bill becomes void.

I will stand up for that principle today that I thought once unified us. Borrowing from his own statements, I have also proposed an amendment to the Midnight Rules Relief Act. Using language taken directly from his legislation verbatim, I propose that any resolution we consider overturning agency regulations should be limited to a single subject, and if the resolution attempts to nullify regulations in two or more diverse areas, the resolution becomes, of course, null and void.

The whole point of the one bill, one subject House Republican movement led by the distinguished gentleman from Arizona is that Congress should not be destroying legislative transparency or accountability by shoving unrelated packages into a single moving legislative vehicle.

By the way, please spare me any lame rebuttal that we don't have time to actually do our jobs and hear each bill on its own, an argument that my Freedom Caucus friends have rightfully shown contempt for when raised in the past. If you want to repeal the $5 bank overdraft fee, the clean water rule, or the click-to-cancel rule, be my guest. We have all the time in the world to debate why you want to overthrow the $5 bank overdraft bill.

This week, the Republicans have brought a grand total of three bills to the floor, I think it is. We had some procedural minutia and three bills. We have nothing but time here. They have got no agenda.

Their whole agenda has been sidelined and supplanted by Elon Musk, who I thought was the fourth branch of government. Now, he seems to be the first branch of government, too, as my colleagues across the aisle simply want Elon Musk to do their jobs. We have members in committee thanking him for doing such great oversight.

Gee, I thought that Chairman Comer on the Oversight Committee was supposed to be doing oversight. I didn't think we needed a new fourth branch of government called Elon Musk to do that completely lawless and reckless and replete with conflicts of interest, but I digress.

Twenty-four resolutions of disapproval of specific regulations have actually been introduced in this Congress. Do you know how many of those resolutions of disapproval have been taken up in committees of jurisdiction? Zero. Do you know how many have been brought to the floor of the House by my colleagues, who are so exercised about big, bad, terrible, evil, and mean regulation? None of them.

They have not brought a single regulation forward. They have done nothing on regulations with all the time in the world. Now, they want to destroy every principle they claim to adhere to in terms of legislation on the floor of the House of Representatives.

The truth is that these Republican politicians are terrified to overturn these regulations in broad daylight. They know America supports them.

They should show some courage. Stand up for your anti-working class, anti-middle class, and plutocratic principles. Go ahead and vote to destroy the $5 bank overdraft rule, but do it openly, do it clearly, and do it one by one.

Take each one on. We will stay here with you all day. We will even work a 9-to-5 day, something we haven't seen around here in a long time. We will work 8 hours or 12 hours if you want to get into the details of it.

Let's do our jobs for real. I dare you, all you single-subject zealots out there, to oppose this embarrassing and humiliating Midnight Rules Relief Act.

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

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

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

Mr. Speaker, there is a lot of what the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs) just said that I agree with because he wasn't talking at all about his bill.

Let's start with what I really agree with the gentleman about.

Article I makes Congress the preeminent and predominant branch of government, as Madison said in the Federalist Papers. We are the predominant branch. Don't accept anything from anybody on either side of the aisle if they get up and talk about how we are three coequal branches, which is what they teach people in fifth grade.

First of all, ``coequal'' is not even a word. That is like the term ``very unique'' or something like that. Republicans are saying we are three equal branches.

I think not because the preamble of the Constitution leads right into Article I. All of the legislative power is vested in us, and it is laid out in Article I, Section 8. There are 18 different powers to regulate commerce domestically, internationally, the budget, taxes, et cetera.

Then Article, I, Section 8, Clause 18 says: and all other powers necessary and proper to the execution of the foregoing powers.

Going to Article II, there are four short sections about the President. There wasn't even a President included in the Articles of Confederation. They decided to add it. Why? What is the core job of the President? It is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not distorted, not mangled, not overturned, not defeated, not thwarted.

The President doesn't have the power to impound money that has been appropriated by Congress. An appropriations act is just another law, like the law that you can't assault Federal officers. An appropriations act is just like that. Congress is, indeed, preeminent and predominant, but I am afraid that, at that point, my agreement with the gentleman falls off.

Let me start by addressing the comments of the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. Kiley). I don't know if the gentleman is there.

Mr. Kiley was actually a student of mine at Yale Law School. He was an A student all the way, but I would say he just gave us a B-minus argument because he at least addressed the idea of Congress reviewing regulations, and he said he thought that was important for legislative power.

We have that power. He didn't address what this bill is about, which is bundling together a whole bunch of dissimilar and unrelated regulations and voting on them once. The distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. Kiley) never talked about that. I hope the gentleman comes back to the floor.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs) says that the Democrats are giving away legislative authority to the administrative agencies. Not at all. No. No. On the contrary. We think the administrative agencies must faithfully execute the laws that we, Congress, have passed.

This month, Republicans are the ones who have completely abdicated their legislative power. The majority is allowing Elon Musk's actions. God knows what role he is playing. He is a special government employee who hasn't turned in any conflict of interest forms, at least that I have seen.

I don't even know who he thinks he is representing or advocating for other than his own business interests, and he hasn't shown us that he has a conflict of interest waiver for the billions of dollars of taxpayer money he gets from government contracts. Yet, my Republican colleagues are perfectly happy to sit on their hands for several weeks and not do anything to get in the way.

Some of them shamefully have even gotten up and thanked Elon Musk for the great job of oversight he is doing when we have an Oversight Committee that the Republicans chair. The Judiciary Committee could be looking at it also.

Instead, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are applauding a guy and his nighttime crew of a bunch of junior Muskovites who are hacking into computers and taking over the private data of millions of Americans in blatant violation of the Privacy Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which was pushed by Ronald Reagan, who would be turning over to learn what has become of his party.

Mr. Speaker, why do Republicans want to be able to bundle all of these bills? Republican Members haven't said.

Why don't my Republican colleagues tell us which bills the majority wants to bundle together?

The gentleman from California (Mr. Kiley) said: We are not going to put all those popular ones that I just talked about from the CFPB and the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Education. We are not going to put all those in it. It is just the unpopular ones.

Tell us which are the unpopular ones that Republicans are going to bundle together as the majority barrels this through.

The distinguished gentleman hasn't explained why he thinks this is befitting the legislative branch of government, which he rightfully commends as the preeminent branch of government.

I thought my colleagues on the other side of the aisle were opposed to multiple subject rules. I thought that the gentleman was advocating for single-subject bills. This is the exact opposite of that when everything is thrown into one big gumbo.

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

Mr. Speaker, I know they talk about the deranged Trump syndrome. Now they are talking about the deranged Musk syndrome. I do know that Steve Bannon has described him as a truly evil individual, so I understand that there are major conflicts emerging over there.

In any event, back to the merits of the bill. I have to adjudicate the merits of this bill by the lack of coherence and energy and passion with which my normally passionate and eloquent colleague is operating today. One can barely torture out an argument from everything he is saying for the bill, and I noticed there is no one left on his side who wants to be associated with it in any way.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Jacobs), my colleague.

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from California.

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

Mr. Speaker, why don't we put them in legislation? I would love to. If your leadership would allow us to bring it to the floor, to cap bank overdraft fees at $5, let's do it. I will take all these consumer public safety regulations, turn them into bills, and bring them to the floor as soon as you get an agreement from your leadership to do that. They don't even want to vote on the horrid bills that you bring forward much less the excellent bills that we have got.

Mr. Speaker, the bottom line is this: If you want to defend the $5 overdraft rule, if you want to defend the ban on junk health insurance, then vote against their bill. If you want to get rid of all this public safety regulation, then go ahead and support their bill.

The gentleman amazingly says in answer to my colleague from California that there will be time to debate the regulations. Their bill would allow for 355 major regulations to be bundled together so they can get away with just one vote. They would twist their arms to vote for that one vote for all the special interests out there who want to get rid of it.

Do you know how much time there would be to debate on each regulation if we had the normal 1 hour rule? As you know, right now each side gets 30 minutes. That is 60 minutes. We would be able to spend 10 seconds on each of those regulations. Just 10 seconds, and the gentleman assures us there will be ample time to do it.

Come on. Get real. Be serious.

This is an attempt to destroy the public interest in a way that the gentleman knows is an absolute travesty in terms of the integrity of the legislative process. He is the author of the one subject, one bill legislation. He is the author of it, and this bill is the absolute antithesis of it.

Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record two letters of opposition, one from the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards and one from Earthjustice.

Coalition for

Sensible Safeguards,

February 12, 2025.

Hon. Mike Johnson,

Speaker, House of Representatives,

Washington, DC.

Hon. Hakeem Jeffries,

Democratic Leader, House of Representatives,

Washington, DC.

Dear Speaker Johnson and Democratic Leader Jeffries: The

Coalition for Sensible Safeguards (CSS), an alliance of over

200 labor, scientific, research, good government, faith,

community, health, environmental, and public interest

organizations that represent millions of Americans and

advocate for effective regulations to protect the public, and

the undersigned organizations strongly urge you to oppose

H.R. 77, the Midnight Rules Relief Act.

H.R. 77 would amend the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to

allow simultaneous disapproval of dozens of regulations

finalized near the end of presidential terms using a single

joint resolution. The effect of this bill would be to greatly

expand the CRA's anti-regulatory force by amplifying the

harmful impact of the CRA's ``salt the earth'' provision,

which bars agencies from issuing new rules that are

substantially the same as the rules that are repealed. It

would also make it easier for narrow majorities of lawmakers

to repeal recently completed safeguards without the due

consideration and deliberation that Congress should employ

before taking such drastic steps. As such, the operation of

the bill would significantly constrain agencies' authority to

carry out their statutory missions to protect the public.

The proposed legislation is based on a fatally flawed

premise--namely, that regulations which are proposed or

finalized during the so-called ``midnight'' rulemaking period

are rushed and inadequately vetted. In fact, the very

opposite is true. In recent months, the Biden Administration

has finalized regulations that increase overtime pay to put

more money in the pockets of working families, limit carbon

emissions from polluters to fight climate change, increase

fuel efficiency standards to make cars cleaner, protect

workers from harmful ``non-compete'' clauses in employment

contracts, block companies from taking advantage of consumers

with ``junk fees,'' put new limits on toxic ``forever

chemicals'' that poison communities across the country, and

many more. Unlike CRA resolutions, which can sprint through

Congress in just a few weeks, many of these regulations that

will benefit the American public had been in the regulatory

process for years.

In July 2016, Public Citizen released a report that

compared rulemaking lengths for rules finalized at the end of

the term or during the presidential transition period to

those that were finalized outside of this period. The results

were noteworthy. The report found that rules issued during

the presidential transition period spent even more time in

the rulemaking process and received even more extensive

vetting than other rules.

Prominent administrative law experts have also concluded

that the concerns regarding these regulations are not borne

out by the evidence. For example, in 2012 the Administrative

Conference of the United States (ACUS) conducted an extensive

study of regulations finalized near the end of previous

presidential terms and found that many end-of-term

regulations were ``relatively routine matters not implicating

new policy initiatives by incumbent administrations.''

ACUS also found that the ``majority of the rules appear to

be the result of finishing tasks that were initiated before

the Presidential transition period or the result of deadlines

outside the agency's control (such as year-end statutory or

court-ordered deadlines).'' ACUS concluded that ``the

perception of midnight rulemaking as an unseemly practice is

worse than the reality.''

Supporters of H.R. 77 have presented no persuasive

empirical evidence supporting their claims that regulations

were rushed near the end of presidential terms. Likewise,

they have supplied no evidence that such regulations did not

involve diligent compliance with mandated rulemaking

procedures. In reality, compliance with the current lengthy

regulatory process prevents agencies from finalizing new

regulations efficiently, and thus earlier in presidential

terms.

In the end, it is difficult to overlook the tragic irony at

the heart of H.R. 77. It would empower Congress to use the

Congressional Review Act (CRA)--a process that is rushed,

nontransparent and discourages informed decision-making--to

block rules that have completed the long journey through the

rulemaking process.

Unlike the CRA's expedited procedures, agency rules are

subjected to myriad accountability mechanisms, and, for each

rule, the agency must articulate a policy rationale that is

supported by the rulemaking record and consistent with the

requirements of the authorizing statute. In contrast, members

of Congress do not have to articulate a valid policy

rationale--or any rationale at all--in support of CRA

resolutions of disapproval. Quite simply, they can be, and

often are, an act of pure politics. H.R. 77 would make the

situation even worse. It would, in effect, demand that all

members of Congress have adequate expertise on all of the

rules that would be targeted by a single disapproval

resolution. Such a scenario would be highly unlikely.

It would also risk encouraging members to engage in ``horse

trading'' to add still more rules to the disapproval

resolution until enough votes have been gathered to ensure

the resolution's passage. Surely, this approach to

policymaking cannot be defended as superior to that

undertaken by regulatory agencies.

Public Citizen, which co-chairs CSS, is actively tracking

the CRA resolutions introduced in the 119th Congress. Over 60

rules are vulnerable to repeal through the CRA. Last

Congress, 22 out of at least 109 CRA resolutions faced votes

on the House or Senate floor. The targeted rules protect

small businesses, workers, consumers, students, veterans,

investors, people of color, clean air, clean water, renewable

energy, wildlife, gun safety, among others.

CSS agrees that the CRA is in dire need of reform, but

instead of expanding its harmful effects, as the Midnight

Rules Relief Act would do, we encourage the House to evaluate

proposals that would limit those effects. One such measure is

the ``Stop Corporate Capture Act.'' Among its many real and

meaningful reforms to strengthen the regulatory process, the

Stop Corporate Capture Act would address one of the most

problematic aspects of the CRA by eliminating the ``salt the

earth'' provision discussed above. Critically, the Stop

Corporate Capture Act would also create a fast-track

reinstatement process for rules that were the subject of

resolutions of disapproval.

We look forward to working with Congress to ensure that our

regulatory process is working effectively and efficiently to

protect the American public.

We strongly urge opposition to H.R. 77, the Midnight Rules

Relief Act.

Sincerely,

Accountable.US, AFL-CIO, American Bird Conservancy,

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees

(AFSCME), Americans for Financial Reform,

Animal Welfare Institute, CalWild, Center for Biological

Diversity, Center for Economic Integrity, Center for Food

Safety, Center for Justice & Democracy, Center for

Progressive Reform, Center for Responsible Lending, Center

for Science in the Public Interest, Christian Council of

Delmarva, Citizen Action/Illinois, Climate Action Campaign,

Coalition for Sensible Safeguards, Consumer Action.

Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Federation of

California, Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety,

Cultivating Lives Educational Services, Inc., Earthjustice,

Economic Action Maryland Fund, Economic Policy Institute,

Endangered Habitats League, Endangered Species Coalition,

Food & Water Watch, FOUR PAWS USA, Friends of the Earth,

Government Information WatchGreenpeace USA, Impact Fund,

International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and

Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), Institute

for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, Kettle Range

Conservation Group, Large Carnivore Fund, League of

Conservation Voters, National Association for Latino

Community Asset Builders, National Association of Consumer

Advocates, National Consumer Law Center (on behalf of its

low-income clients), National Consumers League, National

Employment Law Project, National Health Law Program, National

Wolfwatcher Coalition, National Women's Law Center, Natural

Resources Defense Council, Oceana, P Street, People Power

United, Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Public Citizen, Public Justice, Public Justice Center,

Resource Renewal Institute, RESTORE: The North Woods, Rise

Economy, Sierra Club, Southern Environmental Law Center, Team

Wolf, Texas Appleseed, Tzedek DC, Union of Concerned

Scientists, United Steelworkers (USW), Vermont Public

Interest Research Group, Virginia Citizens Consumer Council,

Womxn From The Mountain, Wyoming Wildlife Advocates.

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

Will the gentleman yield?