Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize the one-year anniversary of the passing of Representative Alcee Hastings, a civil rights advocate and active leader of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (U.S. Helsinki Commission) for more than twenty years. His work included promoting principled foreign policy, human rights, strengthened democracy across Europe, domestic and international election observations, and diversity and inclusion at all levels of government and foreign policy decision making. Alcee Hastings passed away on April 6, 2021.

Mr. Speaker, I was in a Helsinki Commission hearing. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea'' on rollcall No. 117.

Stated against:

Madam Speaker, 54 years ago tonight one of the great tragedies in our Nation's history occurred in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

In Memphis, there is great love for Dr. King and his dream. He had given the ``I've Been to the Mountaintop'' speech the night before in Memphis. And tonight, at this hour there is a memorial service at the National Civil Rights Museum, which was constructed at the Lorraine Motel where he was staying and where he was slain.

In Memphis, a phoenix has risen from the ashes. The National Civil Rights Museum celebrates Dr. King's life and all the pioneers that preceded him and were after him in fighting for civil rights and civil justice in this Nation.

I share with all in mourning the death of Dr. King 54 years ago but take great pride in Memphis having the National Civil Rights Museum and encourage people to visit.

Mr. Speaker, this past week, we celebrated the life of Don Young, the dean of the House with 49 years here representing the State of Alaska. He was a Republican. But before he was a Republican, he was an American. He wanted this House to work and this House to work together.

Don Young voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill because he knew infrastructure, roads, airports, river ports, and trains made this country move and made business happen.

I hope we will not forget Don Young, not just because of his oversized and loveable personality and the warmth that he exuded to all of us, but for the fact that he was bipartisan and wanted this House to work.

There is a motto up there, above the Speaker's lectern, that says: Get something done while you are here that is memorable and important.

Look at that and remember Don Young.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for my time.

I rise in support of the MORE Act which would finally reform how we deal with marijuana laws and how we should. Mr. Bentz said we should put more money into law enforcement. That is the opposite of what we should do.

Decriminalizing means cops spend less time busting people for marijuana possession and more time looking for people committing violent crime. That is a better use of law enforcement time.

Maurice Hinchey and Sam Farr on this side of the aisle knew it when they were here. They sponsored bills, as did Don Young and Dana Rohrabacher on the other side of the aisle, because it was a Libertarian freedom issue.

It is no secret the war on drugs failed. Harry Anslinger started it in the 1930s, and he vilified Hispanic Americans and said this was a way to get them.

Then Richard Nixon even had a commission that said we should decriminalize marijuana but then decided, because of Ehrlichman and Haldeman, that, no, the Nixon strategy was better designed at going after marijuana because Blacks and hippies who protested the war were his opponents, and we needed to go after them.

So they turned it around, they never legalized it as the commission said they should, and they made the war on drugs worse. It then went on and on.

Marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol. People do not smoke marijuana and beat up their wives or get angry and beat up others or drive their cars in wildly dangerous conditions at fast speeds and kill others.

Congress has been out of step on this issue. It is called cultural lag. We are finally coming around to rescheduling it from Schedule I where it is in a class with heroin and methamphetamines, which is absurd. We should have research.

We must deschedule marijuana. We must decriminalize it at the Federal level. Now is the time to do some remedies to our Federal marijuana laws. This is an historic time.

I thank Mr. Nadler, Ms. Lee, and the others who have championed this bill, Mr. Blumenauer, and let's move forward and do the right thing.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to congratulate Hedy Weinberg, who is retiring in June as the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee after 38 years advancing and protecting civil rights. Ms. Weinberg, a native of Chicago, has been at the forefront of legal battles to protect the rights of LGBT people, prison inmates, immigrants and those seeking access to legal abortions. She has stood up for voting rights and religious freedom, while challenging laws restricting the teaching of evolution. She has worked to end racial profiling by law enforcement. Ms. Weinberg's tenure at the ACLU has run concurrent with my service in the state Senate and in Congress. It has always been gratifying and comforting to know that the ACLU and Hedy were there supporting the issues that needed support to protect our Constitution and our fundamental rights. Ms. Weinberg has been recognized for her advocacy work and is the recipient of the Human Relations Award from the National Conference on Community and Justice-- Nashville Chapter; the Tennessee Library Association's Freedom of Information Award; and the Human Rights Campaign Equality Award. In 2012, she was inducted into the Academy for Women of Achievement by the YWCA of Nashville and Middle Tennessee and in 2016 received the Bridge Builders--LifeTime Achievement Award from the American Muslim Advisory Council. Ms. Weinberg was a founding and steering committee member of ``Nashville For All of

Us,'' which successfully organized the campaign to defeat an ``English- Only'' ballot initiative in Nashville, and of Healthy and Free Tennessee, a statewide coalition focusing on promoting reproductive and sexual health. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, the Steering Committee of the American Constitution Society--Nashville Chapter, and the Steering Committee of Our Muslim Neighbors. Ms. Weinberg is a graduate of Grinnell College and received her master's degree from the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Ms. Weinberg has done so much to advance civil liberties in Tennessee and her service has been invaluable. I am proud to call her my friend and wish her every happiness in retirement.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize March as Cerebral Palsy Awareness Month and to urge my colleagues to support federal funding for cerebral palsy research.

Cerebral palsy is the most common life-long physical disability, occurring in approximately 1 out of 345 children in the United States. It is also the most common disability that has no dedicated federal funding.

No dedicated federal funding for cerebral palsy means there are fewer treatment options, less prevention, less education, and a lack of standards of care across the lifespan. Additionally, there is not a reliable system to count how many people in the U.S. have cerebral palsy, so the estimates on cerebral palsy prevalence are just that-- estimates.

I am working to change that and urge my colleagues to join me. Today, I introduced a bipartisan bill with Congressmen Brian Fitzpatrick and Emanuel Cleaver to create a Cerebral Palsy Research Program within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to support research on the diagnosis, treatment, mitigation, health care costs, and societal costs of cerebral palsy. It also directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to update and publish their Strategic Plan on Cerebral Palsy.

I hope my colleagues will join me in this effort to support more research on cerebral palsy--a disability that affects approximately 1 million people in the United States, has few reliable treatments, and no cure.

Mr. Speaker, first, I want to take a point of personal privilege. This is the first day that I have walked into the House without Don Young being in it.

Don Young was an outstanding Congressman and a good human being. He was my friend. Every day I walked in those doors and he sat on the aisle, I would say hello, and we would talk. This is the first day he hasn't been there to say hello.

I will join with other Members to memorialize him in the services tomorrow here in the Capitol and also at his church in Virginia on Wednesday. Mr. Young was the dean of the House, just a good human being, and he had a wonderful wife.

On this bill, I want to thank Mr. Armstrong for working with me on it. He was a strong proponent of the bill, and it is truly bipartisan and bicameral. It has already passed the Senate in some form, I believe.

It has been mentioned that Justice Scalia was a great proponent of this, as was Justice Ginsburg and Justice Kavanaugh.

Mr. Bentz and Ms. Jackson Lee have made all the arguments. I have a few pages of speeches here, but there is no reason to read them. A long time ago, I was told if you make the sale, sit down. The sale has been made, I believe.

Mr. Speaker, I urge everybody to vote ``aye.''

I rise in strong support of H.R. 1621, the Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act. This bill is a bipartisan, bicameral effort to prevent judges from punishing defendants for conduct they have not been found to be guilty of. I'd like to begin by thanking my co-lead on this bill, Congressman Kelly Armstrong, for all his hard work on this issue.

The U.S. Constitution's Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee the right to due process and the right to a jury trial for those accused of a crime--these are two foundational principles meant to foster justice and fairness in the American criminal legal system. These rights ensure that we are presumed to be innocent unless and until the government proves a defendant's guilt to a Jury.

Our system requires the government to prove an individual's guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt; however, under current federal law, judges may impose sentencing enhancements for conduct that they find to have been committed based on a less demanding standard--preponderance of the evidence.

The result of this discrepancy in the law is that even if a defendant has been found by a jury of their peers to not be guilty of a crime, a judge may still use and consider that conduct for the purposes of sentencing them. This means that people are spending time in jail for conduct that the government failed to prove they had committed, and a jury has acquitted them of.

This is entirely antithetical to the foundational principles of our criminal justice system and Constitution--it not only undermines due process, but it undercuts the important role juries play in our criminal system by allowing judges to sentence individuals for conduct regardless of the decision of the jury.

The Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act would correct this inexplicable discrepancy by prohibiting the consideration of such acquitted conduct in sentencing by federal judges, unless being considered for the purpose of mitigating a sentence. This would ensure that no one spends time in jail for conduct prosecutors were not able to prove at trial.

It does so by amending Section 3661 of Title 18 to expressly state that, except for purposes of mitigating a sentence, a court of the United States shall not consider acquitted conduct when sentencing a defendant.

Ending the consideration of acquitted conduct is and should be a bipartisan effort--two of the fiercest champions of this policy position include the late Justices Ginsburg and Scalia.

Allowing judges to continue to sentence defendants based on conduct they have been acquitted of demeans and diminishes due process and is a blatant attack on the Constitutional rights of Americans. We must preserve and protect these rights by passing the Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act.

No one should be put behind bars for something the government was unable to prove they did to a jury of their peers beyond a reasonable doubt.

I urge all of my colleagues to join me in supporting this bicameral, bipartisan bill to end this un-American practice.

Will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Speaker, I want to say how much I enjoyed working with Mr. Armstrong on the Judiciary Committee.

When I came back for the new Congress and he wasn't on the committee, that was a loss. But it has been good to work with him on this bill, and he has worked on this in the past. I appreciate it.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to incorporate by reference everything that Mr. Armstrong said into my previous lack of remarks. It can be done.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to remember Marvis LaVerne Kneeland Jones, a renowned Memphis educator and one of the courageous Memphis State Eight who integrated then-Memphis State University in 1959 following the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling (1954) declaring segregation of public schools unconstitutional. Mrs. Jones was born in Chicago in 1941 and was raised in Memphis where she graduated from Hamilton High School. She obtained a master's degree from what is now the University of Memphis and taught in the Memphis City Schools for 25 years. As a civil rights trailblazer, her heroic integration of Memphis State opened the doors of opportunity to thousands. In 2006, the University honored the Memphis State Eight by recognizing their pioneering work desegregating the campus, and Mrs. Jones was among the remaining five who returned to the University in 2019 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of their achievement. Mrs. Jones was a marvelous singer and piano player and tickled the ivories to the delight of audiences. She was married

to the late state Representative Rufus Jones for 57 years, helping at the Rufus Jones Big Star grocery store at College and McLemore and on his political campaigns. She loved her children and saw them earn significant advanced degrees, and guided her talented grandchildren who called her ``Granna.'' I extend my condolences to Mrs. Jones' four children--Dr. Gladys A. Jones, Rufus E. Jones Jr., Dr. Ida L. Jones Pittman, and Dorothy D. Jones--and to her many friends, colleagues and admirers.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to pay a respectful tribute to Dr. Donald P. Pinkel, a pediatric oncologist whose aggressive treatment of childhood cancer at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, and elsewhere, has saved thousands of lives. Dr. Pinkel died last week in California at the age of 95. Already an established childhood cancer specialist in his native Buffalo, Dr. Pinkel was lured to St. Jude in 1961 by its founder, Danny Thomas, before the physical structure had been built. He was instrumental in its development and staffing as its first chief executive and medical director. In segregated Memphis, he insisted that all facets of St. Jude be integrated and that the malnutrition of his patients, many of them Black, be addressed by a nutritional assistance program that became the model for the federal government's Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as W.I.C. With other top researchers, he developed chemotherapy protocols for treating almost always fatal acute lymphocytic leukemia that were considered radical and dangerous, but which proved over time to transform the illness into a treatable disease which now has a 94 percent five-year survival rate. As Danny Thomas' daughter Marlo said in a statement last week, her father and Dr. Pinkel ``had the same unyielding hope and were equally audacious in their determination that childhood leukemia could be vanquished.'' Memphis and the nation can be grateful this man of science devoted his life to saving vulnerable children. I send my condolences to his wife, children, grandchildren and great- grandchildren. His was a life well-lived.

Madam Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 2116, the CROWN Act. No one should be deprived of equal rights under the law because of their hair texture or style. It should never be the case that a person is denied the opportunity to participate in school sports or is sent home from work just because of what their hair looks like.

The most egregious example of this was a wrestling coach who had an African-American wrestler that had to cut his hair to perform. He wasn't allowed on the wrestling team unless his hair was cut because the wrestling coach didn't like it. Well, the wrestling coach was ignorant of the fact that that should have been his choice. He couldn't rise to understand it.

Now, Mr. Bishop and I, we share something in common. We both don't have a wonderful crown with glorious locks. And sometimes when people, particularly people who aren't too smart, get mad at me--and I imagine this happens to Mr. Bishop, too--they will say: You bald-headed whatever. I have no choice in the fact that I am bald headed. I had a lot of hair when I was young. I had more hair than Mr. Jordan.

Madam Speaker, I will yield to the gentleman from North Carolina.

Well, they have said things they thought were nasty. But it was not nasty to me because I have no choice in the fact that I am bald.

Madam Speaker, reclaiming my time.

I am just as good a human being, just as smart, just as effective, and just as caring with or without hair; and the fact is it is discrimination, and it is ignorance.

African Americans have been discriminated against in many ways because of their hairstyles. It is a natural thing for African Americans, and they should not be penalized in the workplace, in sports, in school, or in any other ways.

I stand here for the CROWN Act. It was originally introduced, I think, by Cedric Richmond, and I joined with him on the Judiciary Committee to support it.

I had seen problems in Tennessee when I was a State senator, and supported bills there to protect people who wore braids and whatever. I hope people will rise up and vote ``yes'' in understanding of other people and think beyond themselves.

Madam Speaker, this morning I went to a breakfast where I heard the thoughts of Miss Sheila Bair. Miss Bair is a Republican. She describes herself as a Midwest Republican who worked on Senator Dole's staff for 8 years. She is a former assistant secretary of the Treasury and a former head of the FDIC under Republican Presidents.

She said specifically the problems with inflation in this country are worldwide. They are the supply chain, which is worldwide, caused by the pandemic in China and other problems. They are worldwide. So any more of this rhetoric about Biden and his problems with the supply chain, it is not Biden; it is a worldwide problem.

The same thing for the price of oil. Yesterday, in Judiciary Committee we heard someone say it is Biden's fault that the price of oil has gone up. The price of oil is a worldwide market. President Biden's actions do not affect the worldwide market. It is supply and demand. We need to not hear these canards.

And the same for this bill. This is, as Mr. Nadler said, forced arbitration. Mr. Johnson has been working on this for years, and I compliment him on his work and his success. This gives consumers a chance to get their cases heard and to get a rightful judgment, not be forced to take an arbitration that is almost always entirely pro- business.

This is the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats look out for people, people who have had injustice done to them and look for a way to correct it and give them equity. Republicans look to business, who caused the harm, and try to defend them and keep their pockets full.

I support the bill. All American consumers would support the bill. I urge its passage.

Madam Speaker, as a member, co-chairman of the Helsinki Commission, I want to compliment Mr. Cardin and Mr. Wicker and their work on this bill, bipartisan, from the Senate.

What Russia has done with Ukraine is immoral. It is illegal. It is against the word, the acts, the intentions of every godly character ever. God would not have approved. WWJD?

What Russia has done deserves the entire condemnation of the world; and everything we can do to condemn them and put them out of organized civilized society is appropriate because they are not acting as a civilized member of society.

I support this bill. I think there is not too much we can do to Russia. There is not too much that they have done to Ukraine and continue to do in killing children, and disabled, and orphans. They deserve all of the might of the United States that we can put on them and take away from them. We need to punish them with all we have. I support the bill entirely.

Glory to Ukraine.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to congratulate Lucian T. Pera, a Memphis lawyer and specialist in legal ethics and media law, who has just been named the winner of this year's American Bar Association Michael Franck Professional Responsibility Award. The award is named in honor of Michael Franck, the late director of the State Bar of Michigan and long-time champion of improvements in lawyer regulation in the public interest. Mr. Pera, a partner in the Memphis office of the law firm Adams and Reese and a former President of the Tennessee Bar Association, has written extensively on ethics issues, including in a column for the magazine of the ABA's Law Practice Division. He has recently served as Chairman of the ABA's Center for Professional Responsibility, and has served as the ABA's Treasurer, on its House of Delegates, and as a member of the Board of Governors. He is recognized nationally for his work on ethics in the legal profession as well as media law and transparency issues in government, particularly in Tennessee, where he also served as President of the Tennessee Open Government Coalition. A graduate of Princeton University and Vanderbilt University Law School, Pera will receive the Franck award at a ceremony in Baltimore on June 3. Mr. Pera is an outstanding lawyer and upstanding citizen, and I commend him for receiving this prestigious award.

Mr. Speaker, last week, I led a bipartisan group to visit Lithuania and the OSCE meeting in Vienna, Austria.

In Lithuania, we met with the leaders and assured them of America's Article 5 responsibilities and commitments in case Russia comes into Lithuania. They are very concerned.

We met with our troops, who are 6 kilometers away from Russian troops stationed in Belarus. We then went to the OSCE in Vienna, and we led a strong response to support Ukraine and oppose an unbelievable invasion by the cruel Vladimir Putin.

The European community is united, except for Russia and Belarus, in opposing the intrusion. Vladimir Putin is not operating in a rational manner. His KGB history and his extreme response to COVID have driven him to a delusional, paranoid, and dangerous state. It concerns all.

I appreciate the actions of our President in supporting our country. I support President Zelensky, who is the Maccabee of his era, but the candle has only lasted so long. We need to get him more oil.