Louise McIntosh Slaughter

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, too often, our laws passed with the best of intentions fail to keep pace with technology, and that is what we are seeing today with the Communications Decency Act.

The bill was passed in 1996 as Congress' first attempt to regulate inappropriate material online. This law prevented hosts and visitors of a website from being treated as a publisher for legal purposes. It is what allowed classified websites like eBay to flourish while being legally protected from third-party content posted on their sites.

But 20 years is an eternity in the digital age, and bad actor websites have created platforms designed to facilitate illegalities like child prostitution and sex trafficking, and they use provisions in this law to shield them from any liability.

One of the most notorious examples is online advertiser Backpage.com. Since 2011, more than 20 civil action lawsuits have been brought against this site for willingly facilitating sex trafficking and the prostitution of minors. However, each time a legal action was brought against Backpage, Federal law shielded them from liability.

Last year, The Washington Post reported that a contractor for this site was soliciting and creating sex-related ads, despite Backpage's repeated insistence that they had no role in the content of their ads. Backpage used longstanding Federal protections under the Communications Decency Act to shield itself from all liability.

In the Doe v. Backpage ruling by the first circuit, the judges held that, even if Backpage had facilitated the crime of sex trafficking, this law shielded the company from the claims that were filed by the child victims. The first circuit recently reiterated that when it threw out yet another lawsuit against Backpage. The courts weren't able to help these victims, instead, encouraging them to pursue legislative changes, and that brings us here today.

H.R. 1865 finally creates a legislative solution to hold these bad actors accountable and allow the victims to seek the damages that they deserve. It creates a new offense in the Federal code for websites that facilitate this criminal activity and gives, to prosecutors, the tools they need to hold the wrongdoers accountable.

The bill is a product of a lot of great work, and I want to thank Congresswoman Wagner for introducing it. The Rules Committee, last night, made in order an amendment from Congresswoman Walters that substantially strengthens the legislation and has Congresswoman Wagner's full support. Its inclusion attached the text of bipartisan Senate language to drastically improve its implementation. This is language that has the support of both the tech industry and the victims advocacy groups.

Mr. Speaker, it is so nice to see Members of both parties from both sides of the Capitol come together on this. Through collaboration, we have crafted a bill that does more than just update a 20-year-old law. It fulfills our moral responsibility to protect the children that we represent.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, President Trump tweeted over the weekend: ``Dems are no longer talking DACA.''

Mr. Speaker, I beg to differ. Democrats are still urging our colleagues yet again to act by helping us bring up the Dream Act for a vote on the House floor.

If we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up H.R. 3440, the Dream Act. This bipartisan, bicameral legislation would help hundreds of thousands of young people who are American in every way except on paper. President Trump set the official deadline for DACA to expire on March 5, so we can't afford to waste any more time, and Dreamers should not be forced to live in fear any longer.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment in the Record, along with extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Espaillat), to discuss our proposal.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire of my colleague if he has further speakers?

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

Mr. Speaker, in closing, many of my colleagues today, as well as I, discussed the need to protect America's children. This bill is a great piece of that, and I am very grateful to have it on the floor today. But there is more that we can do. It must include acting to curb the Nation's gun violence epidemic.

Every day in America, 91 people are killed by a gun. Since Sandy Hook, there have been close to 1,000 mass shootings. A mass shooting is one where three or more people have lost their lives. Imagine that, thousands of them. Our Nation is still mourning the loss of 17 lives just last week when a gunman using an AR-15-style rifle opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. That gun is a weapon of war and should only be in the hands of the military and never on the streets of the United States.

Assault weapons were the weapon of choice not just in the Florida shooting but also in the mass shootings at the concert in Las Vegas; the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado; and the elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

They were prohibited under the assault weapons ban that Congress let expire in 2004. I was here when we established that ban, and we saw a great decrease in gun deaths from that. So they should be prohibited today and not in the hands of people who simply want to kill the most people they can in the shortest time.

Why would we allow an insanity like that?

So I was pleased to cosponsor legislation this week to re-implement the assault weapons ban.

The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School are inspiring the entire Nation to push Congress to do our job and to act on gun violence.

I will tell you that I understand the pain that everybody feels from all of this, but we can't maintain it. We go from one to the other, as though nothing had ever happened before.

But we have to also do what the NRA has forbidden us from doing, which is to have gun research at the Communicable Disease Center. That certainly should be lifted, as well.

We certainly should expand and strengthen the background check system. Keeping people on the terrorist watch list and the no-fly list from being able to purchase firearms and explosives seems to me to be a no-brainer, but we won't even do that. And, yes, reinstating that weapons ban again, I think, is critically important.

Perhaps the voices of those injured and grieving children can break the gun lobby's stranglehold on Congress. I hope so. The majority should heed their call because we, as Members of Congress, are in a unique position. Unlike the clergy or grief counselors or elected officials, we can actually do something to combat this violence. It certainly is, Mr. Speaker, past time that we do.

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

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

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

We saw a shutdown just over 2 weeks ago, and here we are again; I believe this is the fifth one since September. And since the Republicans control every branch of the government, we have to wonder what is going on here.

I stood in this same spot after midnight in 2013 and announced that the great government of the United States was closed for business. At that point, they were closed for business for 16 days, which means all the Federal buildings and parks were closed. The vendors who had little mom-and-pop stores, newspaper kiosks, and things at Federal businesses lost all the money, a lot of it, people with lunchrooms. The estimate was $24 billion was lost to the Federal Government.

As I recall that particular one, that was because Senator Cruz, a Republican from Texas, didn't like the Affordable Care Act and apparently was not in favor of giving healthcare to the American people.

The first shutdown that occurred when I first came here was during the Clinton administration, when Speaker Gingrich shut down the government of the United States because he was unhappy with the plane seat in Air Force One that had been assigned to him.

And 2 weeks ago, it was blamed on the Democrats, which is very strange, since the Democrats do not have the vote to shut down the House. Only the majority has those votes. And this is the first shutdown in history, as far as we can find, that the group of persons who control the House, the Senate, and the White House have given themselves a shutdown. It is a pretty sad day for us.

So here we are, 3:30 a.m., 3\1/2\ hours after a government shutdown once again. We have really got to stop this. I tell you, our fellow Americans are in a state of nervous anxiety. The stock market dropped 1,000 points in a single day, twice this week. We have perplexed the entire United States of America as well as large parts of the world.

And I would think that a reasonable person, looking at all this, would be understood to believe that perhaps Republicans are incapable of running the government because it is purely, purely government by nothing but crisis.

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

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

If we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up H.R. 3440, the Dream Act. This bipartisan, bicameral legislation must pass before the time runs out on hundreds of thousands of young people who were promised, by a previous administration, that if they registered and paid $500, they could stay in the only country they know.

Without any warning, the new President invalidated the program and their lives. The things that they were promised were taken away, and those young people, a part of our lives, are living in fear. I really hope that we can do something about that. It is past time.

But I think what happened to them was most un-American.

So I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment in the Record, along with extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Ms. Michelle Lujan Grisham) to discuss our proposal.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Polis), a distinguished member of the Rules Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), a distinguished member of the Committee on Rules.

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from Massachusetts.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the Democratic leader.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire of my colleague if he has any further speakers?

Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, let's acknowledge that a deal like this could have come much sooner if the majority tried bipartisanship from the very beginning. Instead, our Nation has had to go through four short-term funding fights and two government shutdowns to arrive at where we are this morning. All of that was entirely preventible. It was brought on by the majority's inability to get its work done.

It was little more than a week ago that President Trump stood in this Chamber and gave his State of the Union Address. In it, he proclaimed: ``I call upon all of us to set aside our differences, to seek out common ground, and to summon the unity we need to deliver for the people.''

That was Tuesday. But the following Tuesday, the President said that he would love to see a shutdown. He keeps injecting incredible confusion and uncertainty as to what he actually would be willing to sign into law. I am aware that my colleague, Mr. Sessions, did assure us that he wants to sign this bill.

Mr. Speaker, it has been an awful long night, and it didn't need to be. We don't need to take up every crisis to the very brink. Since you control every lever of power in this government, you have failed the most basic responsibility: to run this government in a sensible and intelligent way. Everybody--all of us--know, whether we want to admit it or not, that this is no way to run a government and certainly not a government as important as the one we were sent here to represent.

I also urge a ``no'' vote on the previous question so the House can take up the Dream Act because time is so quickly running out on those young people. It would be a blot on our conscience for the rest of our lives if we did nothing to help.

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

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

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