| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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House Votes Scheduled
00:07:39
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|
unidentified
|
Pretty good, huh? | |
| Okay. | ||
| Now you're going to go out and win those events, right? | ||
| Nice to see you all. | ||
| Great going, everybody. | ||
| Nice to see you. | ||
| Thank you, kids. | ||
| Here, take a pen. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'll give some of these out, okay? | ||
| Take the pen. | ||
| Take the pen. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Where's Riley? | ||
| And President | ||
| Trump here with other lawmakers signing new executive orders. | ||
| We'll show this again in our program schedule later this evening if you missed any of the signing. | ||
| Going to leave it to take you live to the House for votes. | ||
| Members will be voting on whether to begin work on a bill to classify fentanyl and similar substances as Schedule I drugs that have the strongest controls and penalties. | ||
| Also this week, a measure to block bans of oil and natural gas fracking. | ||
| And Speaker Mike Johnson will be meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. | ||
| That'll take place on Capitol Hill tomorrow. | ||
| You can watch live coverage of the House right here on C-SPAN, expecting members to gavel in in just a moment. | ||
| And again, the House about to gavel back in for votes. | ||
| Members will be voting on whether to begin work on a bill to classify fentanyl and similar substances as Schedule I drugs. | ||
| Those have the strongest controls and penalties. | ||
| Also this week, a measure to block bans of oil and natural gas fracking. | ||
| And Speaker Mike Johnson will be meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who's visiting Washington, D.C. You can watch live coverage of the House right here on C-SPAN. | ||
| While we wait for members to gavel in for their votes, let you know that tomorrow, U.S. Trade Representative nominee Jamison Greer will be on Capitol Hill for his confirmation hearing. | ||
| Mr. Greer has worked in international trade law and previously served as chief of staff to the U.S. Trade Representative during the first Trump administration. | ||
| We'll have that live from the Senate Finance Committee tomorrow at 10 a.m. Eastern over on our companion network, C-SPAN3. | ||
| You can also join us online at C-SPAN Now, this is our free mobile video app and at c-span.org, waiting for members of the U.S. House to gavel in for votes. | ||
| Previously postponed votes will be taken the following order. | ||
| Ordering the previous question, the House Resolution 93 and adoption of House Resolution 93, if ordered. | ||
| The first electronic vote will be conducted as a 15-minute vote. | ||
| Pursuant to clause 9 of Rule 20, remaining electronic votes will be conducted as five-minute votes. | ||
| Pursuant to clause 8 of Rule 20, the unfinished business is the vote on the ordering of the previous question in House Resolution 93, on which the yays and nays are ordered. | ||
| The clerk will report the title of the resolution. | ||
| House calendar number two, House Resolution 93. | ||
| Resolution provided for consideration of the bill H.R. 27 to amend the Controlled Substances Act with respect to the scheduling of fentanyl-related substances and for other purposes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The question is, and ordering the previous question, members will record their votes by electronic device. | |
| This is a 15-minute vote. | ||
| And the House taking a pair of votes here. | ||
| First, a procedural vote on debate rules for the bill seeking to combat the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. If this vote fails, Democrats have promised to bring up a different bill for consideration. | ||
| But with Republicans in control of the chamber, it's not likely to happen. | ||
| If the vote passes, members will vote on the debate rules for the bill next, and then further work on the measure expected later this week. | ||
| The underlying bill H.R. 27 would classify fentanyl and all fentanyl-related substances as Schedule I drugs. | ||
| It's a most restricted level. | ||
| While we're in this vote on the debate rules, we'll show some of today's White House briefing with Press Secretary Caroline Levitt. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Good afternoon, everybody. | ||
| Good to see you all. | ||
| President Trump is in charge, and America is back. | ||
| This week further demonstrated that the Trump effect is real. | ||
|
President Trump's Hostage Rescue Success
00:05:19
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| Over the weekend, Americans celebrated the return of American Israeli citizen Keith Siegel and two Israelis who were held captive by Hamas terrorists since October 7th, 2023. | ||
| President Trump and his administration worked diligently to secure their release and are committed to freeing all remaining hostages. | ||
| Yesterday, as you all know, President Trump held his first foreign meeting at the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. | ||
| And as the President said, the bonds of friendship and affection between the American and Israeli people have endured for generations and are absolutely unbreakable. | ||
| The president is committed to eliminating Hamas and securing a lasting peace for the entire region. | ||
| The historic proposal for the United States to take over Gaza announced by President Trump last night underscores this commitment. | ||
| Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. | ||
| President Trump is an outside-of-the-box thinker and a visionary leader who solves problems that many others, especially in this city, claim are unsolvable. | ||
| We've already seen the results from President Trump's bold peace-through strength diplomacy on the world stage. | ||
| In response to President Trump's tariffs this week, both Mexico and Canada took immediate steps to alleviate the illegal alien migration and flow of deadly drugs, particularly fentanyl, into our country. | ||
| Mexico's President Claudia Scheinbaum agreed to permanently supply 10,000 Mexican soldiers on the U.S. border, who will be specifically designated to stopping fentanyl and criminal aliens from pouring into our country. | ||
| And Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, agreed to appoint a fentanyl czar, list cartels as terrorists, and increase resources to assist the 10,000 frontline personnel at our northern border with Canada. | ||
| In recognition of these steps, President Trump paused the implementation of tariffs for one month while negotiations continue and final deals can be structured. | ||
| Throughout the transition and during his inaugural address, President Trump made it known that the United States cannot and will not allow the Chinese Communist Party to continue with its effective and growing control over the Panama Canal. | ||
| Following Secretary Rubio's successful first trip and visit there over the weekend, Panama's president said he will allow its participation in the Chinese Communist Party's, it will no longer allow the participation in the Belt and Road initiative. | ||
| That participation will expire. | ||
| This is significant because Panama was the first Latin American nation to join Belt and Road and now becomes the first to back away from it because of President Trump. | ||
| And to assist with the ongoing mass deportation effort, El Salvador's president has agreed to the most unprecedented migratory agreement anywhere in the world. | ||
| Because President Trump is back in charge, El Salvador has offered for illegal aliens of any nationality facing deportation in the U.S. to be booked in his country's prison system. | ||
| And finally, President Trump's envoy for special missions, Rick Renal, traveled to Venezuela and not only secured the release of six American hostages, but Venezuela also agreed to accept the return of illegal alien Trende Aragua gang members. | ||
| All of these incredible victories prove how well President Trump's peace-through strength approach is working. | ||
| And the days of weak American leadership are over. | ||
| In another success story this week, efforts to seal the border, halt the invasion, and carry out the largest mass deportation campaign continue at lightning speed. | ||
| Customs and Border Protection has approximately 79 miles of new border wall projects already underway in various stages of construction and planning. | ||
| The first flights arrived to Guantanamo Bay yesterday afternoon out of El Paso. | ||
| And who are some of the passengers aboard, you may ask? | ||
| There were 10 members of the transnational gang Trende Aragua on this flight. | ||
| And overall, our heroic ICE agents continue to prioritize the removal of violent criminal illegal aliens in communities across the country. | ||
| On February 3rd, ICE Dallas arrested a citizen of Nicaragua who has been convicted of sexual assault, strong arm, and lewd acts with a minor and sentenced to 15 years in prison. | ||
| ICE Los Angeles arrested a Mexican citizen who has been convicted of lewd acts with a minor and sentenced to 364 days. | ||
| In ICE Atlanta arrested a citizen of Mexico who has been convicted of homicide by vehicle and hit and run and sentenced to six months confinement. | ||
| In ICE New York arrested a Venezuelan national and known TDA gang member who has a prior criminal conviction for assault in the third degree, causing physical injury. | ||
| Americans are safer every single time one of these criminals is arrested and deported from our country. | ||
|
Confirming Cabinet Nominees
00:04:42
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| On another important and ongoing topic, the Senate is working fast to confirm President Trump's exceptional cabinet nominees in the face of relentless media smear campaigns. | ||
| As of right now, 12 members of the president's cabinet have been confirmed, most recently Pam Bondi, who, as you all know, I was just in the Oval Office for that swearing-in ceremony surrounded by Pam's lovely family. | ||
| And we look forward to watching her serve as the Attorney General of the United States. | ||
| According to CNN, President Trump is getting more cabinet picks confirmed so far than the average president in the modern era. | ||
| Another success story. | ||
| And we believe it's critical that Republicans in the Senate majority stay tough and keep their foot on the gas to confirm all of the remaining nominees as quickly as possible so we can continue President Trump's important work here at the White House and across our entire federal government. | ||
| And lastly, throughout his historic campaign, President Trump pledged to restore common sense to our country. | ||
| And he is continuing to deliver on that with an executive order that he will sign later today. | ||
| The president will be signing an executive order keeping men out of women's sports to defend the safety of athletes, protect competitive integrity, and uphold the promise of Title IX. | ||
| This common sense action from President Trump ends the disgusting betrayal of women and girls by the previous administration, who for years catered to radical activists who wanted biological males to be treated as women in workplace showers, competitive sports, prisons, and even rape shelters. | ||
| Gender, ideology, and sanity is over. | ||
| Submissions from individuals across the country interested in participating in our new media seat at a future briefing continue to flood in. | ||
| We are at more than 12,000 in counting. | ||
| If you're watching right now and are interested, you can continue to apply on our new media website, whitehouse.gov/slash new media. | ||
| And in the seat today, we have a longtime national television broadcaster. | ||
| I'm sure many of you recognized her when she came in, Sage Steele, who is now the host of an incredibly successful podcast, The Sage Steele Show, on YouTube and all podcast platforms. | ||
| And previously, Sage was a fixture at ESPN from 2007 to 2023, primarily hosting Sports Center, which we all know well. | ||
| Before leaving the company to exercise her First Amendment rights more freely, we are honored to welcome her to the briefing room today. | ||
| She will be joining the President at the Big EO signing later this afternoon. | ||
| I know many of you will be there as well. | ||
| So Sage, why don't you kick us off on this very exciting day for women and girls across the country? | ||
| Thank you for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is exciting. | |
| And Caroline, thank you for welcoming people like me with a little bit of a different perspective, different background in this seat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It really does mean a lot. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| Obviously, the House already passed the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which is a really big step for women and girls. | ||
| So far, the Senate, as we know, has not brought it up to vote. | ||
| We all know executive orders can be overturned, so I'm wondering how important it is to the President to get Congress to bring this, to pass legislation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So there are no instances like the PASS administration that really tried to destroy Title IX. | |
| It's incredibly important that Congress immediately acts on this priority. | ||
| I think the president is really setting the tone, making this a very immediate priority for this administration, just as he promised to do on the campaign trail. | ||
| And I'd like to get into the executive order a little bit because it is the news of the day here at the White House and talk about what this executive action will actually do. | ||
| So the executive order that the president will be signing later this afternoon, as I said, upholds the promise of Title IX. | ||
| It also will require the DOJ to abide by the nationwide previous administration's illegal Title IX rewrite that would have dissolved single-sex spaces and opportunities. | ||
| It also requires immediate action, including enforcement actions against schools and athletic associations comprised of schools that deny women single-sex sports in single-sex locker rooms. | ||
| The executive order also calls for the convening of private sporting bodies in the White House. | ||
| We want them to come to this campus so the president can hear in person the stories of female athletes who have suffered lifelong injuries, who have been silenced and forced to shower with men and compete with men on athletic fields across the country. | ||
|
President's Peace Goal
00:03:53
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| Many of those women will be at the White House today. | ||
| I encourage all of you in the media to actually talk to them to hear their stories. | ||
| And I would also just add one more thing. | ||
| This is a wildly popular position with the American people. | ||
| In fact, there was a new poll recently that showed the overwhelming majority of Democrats also support keeping biological men out of women's sports. | ||
| And so I know the president is very excited about the bill signing that will take place at 3 o'clock this afternoon. | ||
| You will hear from him more on that later. | ||
| And we look forward to seeing you there stage. | ||
| So thank you very, very much. | ||
| Garrett, great to see you here today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| On Gaza, the President has spent basically his entire public career criticizing foreign entanglements, nation building, sending American troops to fight abroad, particularly this plan seems like it could ultimately involve all of those things. | ||
| Can you explain this reversal and how building and owning Gaza squares with America First foreign policy? | ||
| I would reject the premise of your question that this forces the United States to be entangled in conflicts abroad. | ||
| The president has not committed to putting boots on the ground in Gaza. | ||
| He has also said that the United States is not going to pay for the rebuilding of Gaza. | ||
| His administration is going to work with our partners in the region to reconstruct this region. | ||
| And let me just take a step back here because this is an out-of-the-box idea. | ||
| That's who President Trump is. | ||
| That's why the American people elected him. | ||
| And his goal is lasting peace in the Middle East for all people in the region. | ||
| And as I said in my opening remarks, we've had the same people pushing the same solutions to this problem for decades. | ||
| And it's been very made very clear to the president that the United States needs to be involved in this rebuilding effort to ensure stability in the region for all people. | ||
| But that does not mean boots on the ground in Gaza. | ||
| It does not mean American taxpayers will be funding this effort. | ||
| It means Donald Trump, who is the best dealmaker on the planet, is going to strike a deal with our partners in the region. | ||
| He did not rule out American troops in Gaza last night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are you doing that now? | |
| I am saying that the president has not committed to that just yet. | ||
| He has not made that commitment, and you know that. | ||
| And on the foreign partners, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, the Saudis have already panned this plan. | ||
| What foreign partners, if any, have expressed any interest in being part of it? | ||
| Well, the president has said he's been socialing this idea for quite some time. | ||
| He's been thinking about this. | ||
| He said in his remarks last night, this was not a decision or an announcement that he takes lightly. | ||
| And the president has already spoken to the president al-Sisi. | ||
| In fact, that was his first foreign leader call. | ||
| He is meeting with the King of Jordan, King Abdullah, next week. | ||
| He spoke with the King of Bahrain. | ||
| He spoke with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. | ||
| And he has made it very clear. | ||
| He's been very vocal that he expects our partners in the region, particularly Egypt and Jordan, to accept Palestinian refugees temporarily so that we can rebuild their home. | ||
| I'd like to show you some images of Gaza that were taken. | ||
| Fox News aired this. | ||
| I mean, that is, as they put it, in an apocalyptic scene in Gaza. | ||
| This is an unhabitable place for human beings. | ||
| Do you really think that families can live their dream in a region that looks like this with no running water, no electricity? | ||
| And the special envoy to the president, Steve Witkoff, recently traveled to Gaza, as you all know, and he came back with images that he showed the president of the dire situation here. | ||
| And the president made this decision with a humanitarian heart for all people in the region. | ||
| Thank you, Caroline. | ||
|
Why Not Deploy Troops?
00:15:47
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| Are any officials here preparing to fight Democratic lawmakers in the streets? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| So thanks for the question. | ||
| Some elected Democrats are so steamed about Doge. | ||
| Congresswoman LaMonica McIver says we are at war. | ||
| Ilhan Omar says we might actually see somebody get killed. | ||
| And Chris Van Holland says we have to fight this in the Congress. | ||
| We have to fight this in the streets. | ||
| So what now? | ||
| And may I just point out, if you heard that type of violent, enticing rhetoric from our side of the aisle, from Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, I think there would be a lot more outrage in this room today. | ||
| It's unacceptable, the comments that have been made by these Democrat leaders, and frankly, they don't even know what they're talking about. | ||
| Because President Trump wasn't elected with a mandate from the American people to make this government more efficient. | ||
| He campaigned across this country with Elon Musk, vowing that Elon was going to head up the Department of Government Efficiency, and the two of them, with a great team around them, were going to look at the receipts of this federal government and ensure it's accountable to American taxpayers. | ||
| That's all that is happening here. | ||
| And for Democrat officials to incite violence and encourage Americans to take to the streets is incredibly alarming and they should be held accountable for that rhetoric. | ||
| It sounds like something that they're most concerned about is Doge engineers with access to treasury systems. | ||
| Can you clarify? | ||
| Do the Doge engineers have read-only access in these systems? | ||
| So they are not allowed to write new code? | ||
| They are not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And then one more thing. | ||
| NBC is reporting that some of the illegal immigrants that we've seen rounded up and arrested are not being deported. | ||
| They're being released with ankle or wrist monitoring devices or they have to check in on the phone. | ||
| So is the administration arresting more people than you have room for? | ||
| I have seen the reports and I'm glad you brought it up because we want to address it. | ||
| There have been a total of 461 illegal aliens. | ||
| This is of this morning when I got this information from DHS that have been released from custody of the more than 8,000 that have been arrested since President Trump was inaugurated. | ||
| It's less than 6% and there are reasons for their release. | ||
| Some of the factors include a lack of significant likelihood of removal in the foreseeable future, lack of detention availability, which is something this president and this administration has been incredibly vocal about. | ||
| We are doing everything we can to deport and detain illegal immigrants, but we need Congress's help to increase funding for Border Patrol and for ICE to increase detention capability in our facilities. | ||
| And then other serious medical conditions have also been the reasons for some of the release of these individuals. | ||
| But none of them have final deportation orders. | ||
| Many of them are probably contesting their immigration status. | ||
| I'd refer you to DHS for more details, but I did get that information because I knew it would be a question. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Caroline? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| The president and you here again today have made clear, given the devastation, you think Palestinians have no choice but to leave Gaza and go elsewhere. | ||
| But Palestinians say this is their home. | ||
| They don't want to go. | ||
| The president last night said he's willing to use the military if necessary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is the U.S. prepared to remove Palestinians from Gaza by force? | |
| The president is prepared to rebuild Gaza for Palestinians and all people in the region, peace-loving people who want real economic development and opportunity in the region. | ||
| This is a region that has been controlled by Iranian-backed terrorists, Hamas, who have brutalized not just Israelis but Palestinians too. | ||
| It is because of Hamas that you see those images on that screen, that Gaza has become a demolition site because Hamas launched that brutal attack on Israel on October the 7th. | ||
| And so again, I would stress President Trump wants to ensure that this can be a place where all people can live in peace. | ||
| He is a peacemaker in chief. | ||
| He made that very clear in his first term. | ||
| And as for how that will be accomplished, the president and his team are talking with our allies in the region to consider next steps. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What should the American people be prepared to see U.S. military on the ground fighting a ground war against Hamas? | |
| Again, the President has not committed to U.S. troops in the region. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it is an option. | |
| I have said that the President has not committed to that yet. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If I could just follow up on that, though, why not rule out the idea of committing U.S. troops? | ||
| This has been a long-standing argument that the president has made really over the last decade or so, talking about endless wars and not something the U.S. wants. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why not rule out? | |
| Because I think the president is very good when he's making deals and negotiating not to rule out anything because he wants to preserve that leverage in negotiations. | ||
| And so I think that's what he's doing here. | ||
| Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Follow up on that, though. | |
| He also said that everyone loves this plan. | ||
| He said that in the Oval Office this morning. | ||
| In fact, the Deputy Prime Minister of Jordan called it the declaration of war on the Arab people. | ||
| So how does he square the fact that even some Republicans on the Hill are objecting to this or questioning this? | ||
| How does he square the fact saying everyone loves this plan? | ||
| Well, King Abdullah of Jordan will be here next week, so I can provide you more context on the conversations he will have directly with the President of the United States after that meeting. | ||
| And I would just point out that there's been a lot of leaders and officials all around the world who have doubted, I suppose, the deal-making ability of President Trump. | ||
| You heard the Panama leader saying that he would not agree to some of the concessions that he has now made because of Secretary Rubio's visit. | ||
| You had the Colombian president saying he wouldn't accept flights of Colombian illegal nationals who have entered into our country illegally. | ||
| And those flights are underway. | ||
| So actions speak louder than words. | ||
| Dasha. | ||
| Caroline, you said the president has been working on this idea for a while behind the scenes now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is there a written plan based on the president's proposal for Gaza? | |
| And if so, when was it drafted and who had a hand in that? | ||
| The plan was written in the president's remarks last night as he revealed it to the world and to the American people and his team are continuing to be engaged on this effort. | ||
| I saw the National Security Advisor this morning. | ||
| He has a very busy day of calls and they will again continue to engage with our partners. | ||
| That includes Steve Witkoff as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mary. | |
| Two questions for you on the news of the day. | ||
| So how is today's executive order going to impact the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles? | ||
| For example, would a man who thinks that he's a transgender woman be allowed to compete as a female on U.S. soil? | ||
| It's a very good question, and the president has actually mentioned this, that he does expect the Olympic Committee and the NCAA to no longer allow men to compete in women's sports. | ||
| And I think the president, with the signing of his pen, starts a very public pressure campaign on these organizations to do the right thing for women and for girls across the country. | ||
| Again, this is an incredibly popular position. | ||
| There have been many notable female athletes who have had the courage to speak out against some very powerful institutions in this country. | ||
| They deserve to have a voice and a say. | ||
| The president is bringing their voice to the highest level at the White House this afternoon, and he expects these organizations to comply with this federal executive order that he'll be signing today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| And one more on media coverage of this executive order and the topic in general. | ||
| What's the White House's view of framing that calls men transgender females or similar rhetoric coming from organizations like the ACLU and GLAAD? | ||
| Well, it's been very clear. | ||
| The policy of this administration is that there are only two sexes, male and female. | ||
| Pretty simple. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Brian Glenn. | |
| Yes. | ||
| USAID has gotten a lot of attention the last couple of days with some of these bizarre things that we've been, taxpayers have been funding. | ||
| Now it looks like there are a couple media outlets that have been dragged into this conversation as far as USAID funding as well. | ||
| Does the president have any comment on that? | ||
| So upon coming out here to the briefing room, I was made aware of the funding from USAID to media outlets, including Politico, who I know has a seat in this room. | ||
| And I can confirm that the more than $8 million taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American Taxpayers Dime will no longer be happening. | ||
| The Doge team is working on canceling those payments now. | ||
| Again, this is a whole of government effort to ensure that we are going line by line when it comes to the federal government's books. | ||
| And this president and his team are making decisions across the board on do these receipts serve the interests of the American people. | ||
| Is this a good use of the American taxpayers' money? | ||
| If it is not, that funding will no longer be sent abroad and American taxpayers will see significant savings because of that effort. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I'd like to give some love to the back row. | ||
| I've heard that unfortunately they haven't been called on in years past. | ||
| So Reagan, why don't you go ahead? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Caroline. | |
| The WHC announced that comedian Amber Ruffin, who has called the president a toddler with his pants pulled down, will be the entertainment for this year's correspondence dinner. | ||
| Does the White House have a reaction to this choice and will the president be attending the dinner this year? | ||
| Certainly an interesting choice. | ||
| I have the president's invitation on my desk. | ||
| I have the invitation for myself on my desk as well. | ||
| Haven't talked to the president about it. | ||
| When he makes his decision, I will let you all know. | ||
| But definitely an interesting choice of the comedian. | ||
| I'll talk to the boss about it and see what we decide. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, go ahead. | |
| Yes, yes. | ||
| On the executive order said to be signed today, you said that this will be enforcing spell up for schools and the public. | ||
| How exactly the administration plans to enforce this, even at a local level. | ||
| And on top of that, there are human rights groups who say that this could expose kids to discrimination. | ||
| What is your response here? | ||
| I think kids have already been exposed to discrimination, especially young women and girls who have been forced to shower in locker rooms with biological men, who have been forced to compete on playing fields with biological men, which is incredibly unfair and unsafe. | ||
| And again, an incredibly unpopular policy with the American people. | ||
| As for the actions that this executive order takes, I already laid those out at the beginning of the briefing. | ||
| I'm happy to give you a copy of this fact sheet so you can let your audiences across the country know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's your message to schools who don't comply with this? | |
| They should, because it's going to be federal law in about an hour and a half. | ||
| So your colleague to your right to myself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Caroline. | |
| Taylor with Spectrum News. | ||
| You talked a bit about Doge. | ||
| Elon Musk is currently a, quote, special government employee who also owns companies that have billions of dollars in federal contracts. | ||
| You said earlier this week that he has abided by all applicable federal laws, but what steps is the Trump administration taking to address that conflict of interest? | ||
| The president was already asked and answered this question this week, and he said if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that Doge is overseeing, then Elon will excuse himself from those contracts. | ||
| And he has, again, abided by all applicable laws. | ||
| In the back left, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Trade Advisor Peter Navarro, when asked about the External Revenue Service today, said, quote, we're going to collect a lot of tariff revenues and we're going to get tax cuts out of it. | |
| Is it the official position of the White House that tariffs will lower taxes for Americans? | ||
| The President has always been clear that he believes tariffs are a tax on foreign nations and he's committed to cutting taxes for the American people here at home. | ||
| He also believes tariffs are a great revenue raiser for this country and that's exactly why he has committed to the creation of the external revenue service, which I think is a phenomenal idea. | ||
| We'll just go down the whole row. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tell me about the PPC. | |
| Can you confirm that under the President's plans for Gaza, any and all Palestinians who want to stay in Gaza on their land will be allowed to do so? | ||
| I can confirm that the President is committed to rebuilding Gaza and to temporarily relocating those who are there because as I've showed you repeatedly, it is a demolition site. | ||
| There is no running water. | ||
| There is no electricity. | ||
| The president wants these individuals to live in peace. | ||
| He is committed to doing that with this very bold new plan and we will continue to keep you apprised of updates as we receive them. | ||
| Yes, go ahead. | ||
| So now that the President Trump's policies are starting to take shape, how long will it take to cycle through and get some of the actual prices that Americans are paying to come down? | ||
| Prices at the store and at the grocery pump across the board, sure. | ||
| Well, the president is doing everything he can, obviously, to reduce the cost of living crisis in this country as quickly as possible. | ||
| That's why he signed a litany of executive orders across the board in the first couple of weeks here. | ||
| He declared a national energy emergency. | ||
| He committed to cutting 10 regulations for every new one on the book. | ||
| As you know, working for a Fox business-related outlet, deregulation and energy independence are huge drivers of reducing inflation in this country. | ||
| And I think Americans can be assured by the results President Trump had in his first term, when, again, inflation was 1.4% when he left office. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is it a month or is it a year? | |
| And will Americans have the patience to wait for it? | ||
| I don't have a timeline, but the president is doing everything that he possibly can to reduce the cost of living for Americans at home. | ||
| Phil Wegman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Is it worth risking the life of a single U.S. Marine to turn the Gaza Strip into the Riviera of the Middle East? | ||
| Phil, I'm not sure why you're asking me that question because I've already said the President has not committed to sending Marines or any boots on the ground in Gaza. | ||
| We'll bring it to the front row. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good to see you again here in the front row. | |
| Caroline, two things. | ||
| On today's announcement, Title IX, if he scales back the Education Department or moves to shut it down entirely, what entity will enforce Title IX? | ||
| As of now, this will be enforced through education through Title IX. | ||
| If the abolishment of the Department of Education continues, which, as the President said yesterday, it's something his team is looking at and considering. | ||
| It's something he talked a lot about on the campaign trail. | ||
| Then, of course, we will look at additional maneuvers to ensure that these very important policies can be implemented. | ||
| Okay, so the education abolishment thing is still on the table, Title IX. | ||
| The President talked about it yesterday in the Oval Office, and he has good reason to talk about it. | ||
| I mean, look, our education system is failing students in this country. | ||
| The Nation's Report Card, I brought it up in my remarks last week, it shows that fourth graders are not reading at the level they should. | ||
| I believe it was 40% of them are proficient in reading. | ||
| As the mother of a child, I want an education system that helps my child read and write, teaches him math, nothing else in the classroom. | ||
| And the president is wholeheartedly committed to we can make academia great again in this country. | ||
| What other question is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Caroline. | |
| Does the president, is he looking at offering anything to these Arab countries that take in Palestinians? | ||
| Is he willing to give them anything in return? | ||
| And secondly, when the president announced his taking over Gaza policy yesterday, was Netanyahu aware of this? | ||
| And what was his reaction when Trump presented that idea to him? | ||
| I was not, I won't get ahead of the president's discussions or negotiations on your first question about what would be offered. | ||
| I think the president's made it clear that he expects these nations in the region to step up and to accept Palestinian refugees who will be temporarily relocated for the rebuilding of Gaza. | ||
| As for whether Prime Minister Netanyahu was aware before the President's remarks, he was indeed. | ||
| I wasn't present for that reaction. | ||
| But again, this is something the President has been socializing and thinking about for quite some time. | ||
|
Recruitment Crisis in Military Branches
00:04:17
|
||
| Nick, good to see you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jordan, thank you, Caroline. | |
| So Secretary Hexa announced yesterday that Army recruiting levels have reached 12-year highs in December, 15-year highs in January. | ||
| What is making young people want to serve the military under the Trump administration? | ||
| And how does that contrast to Biden's failure consistently to meet recruiting average? | ||
| Does DEI play President Trump's anti-DEI agenda play a role in this? | ||
| First of all, the recruitment level for all branches of our military are at crisis levels, and it serves as a national security risk that our military branches are not fully staffed to where they need to be. | ||
| And I do believe it's a culture problem within these institutions that the president is very much committed to fixing, as emphasized by the executive orders he has signed to root DEI out of the military. | ||
| And I think when young men and women who are honorably signing up to serve in our nation's military see somebody like Pete Hegseth, the new Secretary of Defense, who is a proven war fighter, who risked his life in battle for this country, who understands what it means to deploy and to defend the Constitution and your nation abroad and to put your life on the line, when they see a leader like that and a leader like President Trump who is committed to peace through strength, that's very inspiring. | ||
| And we look forward to seeing those recruitment numbers and retention numbers skyrocketing over the next four years. | ||
| And I know Pete Hegseth is committed to increasing recruitment at all branches of the military. | ||
| I would defer you to the Department of Defense on exactly what he plans to implement. | ||
| Jeff, thanks very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Two questions. | |
| One, the President yesterday used the word permanent for permanently resettle Palestinians. | ||
| I hear you said temporarily today. | ||
| Is that a shift or a specific change that you want to highlight? | ||
| And my second question is, yesterday he spoke about the U.S. owning Gaza. | ||
| Who owns Gaza now and how would the U.S. acquire ownership? | ||
| Well, Gaza is currently run by Iranian-backed terrorists in the Middle East, Hamas, who we all agree. | ||
| I think everybody in the region agrees that can no longer stand. | ||
| Just look at the events of October 7th and the events since. | ||
| And the President, again, is committed to rebuilding the region for all people who want to return to it once it is no longer a demolition site and it's a place where people can actually live and thrive in harmony as the nays are 208. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The previous question is ordered. | |
| The question is on the adoption of the resolution. | ||
| Those in favor say aye. | ||
| Those opposed say no. | ||
| In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, for what purpose does gentlemen seek recognition? | ||
| I asked for a recorded vote. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A recorded vote is requested. | |
| Those favoring a recorder vote will rise. | ||
| A sufficient number having risen, a recorded vote is ordered. | ||
| Members will record their votes by electronic device. | ||
| This is a five-minute vote. | ||
| And the last vote of the day here on debate rules for the consideration of H.R. 27. | ||
| That's a bill seeking to combat the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. If the rule vote passes, we expect the House would continue work on this later in the week. | ||
| The underlying bill would classify fentanyl and all fentanyl-related substances as Schedule I drugs. | ||
| That's a most restricted level. | ||
| It would also require mandatory minimum sentencing for any criminal violations related to the drug. | ||
| And it establishes expedited registration for the use of controlled substances like fentanyl for research. | ||
| While we're in this second and final vote of the day, we'll take a look at comments by Defense Secretary Pete Hegset. | ||
| He welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Detanyahu to the Pentagon and held a meeting with the Israeli leader. | ||
| They spoke to reporters afterwards. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| Well, Mr. Prime Minister, it's great to see you. | ||
|
Unbreakable Bond
00:06:21
|
||
| It was a pleasure to see you last night in the White House as well. | ||
| And it is the truth that we have no greater ally than the State of Israel. | ||
| We're honored to stand alongside you, stare down many of the same threats that you do. | ||
| And under President Trump's leadership, just like you, we are totally committed to achieving peace through strength, through standing with Israel on our side, putting America first, and never backing down from anything. | ||
| It has been and will continue to be an unbreakable bond between our countries. | ||
| As you know, I've had a chance to visit Israel eight or nine times, spent time with you at the Western Wall, watched the IDF in action, visited terror tunnels, understand the proximity, whether it's the Golan Heights or Hezbollah or the Gaza Strip, the threat that Israeli citizens have been under. | ||
| And it always struck me the sense of purpose that permeates the state of Israel, living under an existential threat. | ||
| And I've always had a great deal of respect for the response that country has had. | ||
| And now, destroying Hamas's capabilities in Gaza, Hezbollah's capabilities in the north, damaging the Houthi infrastructure in Yemen, and things that are of great importance to America. | ||
| Those are all of great importance to us. | ||
| But in September of 2024, killing the man responsible for the 1983 bombing of the Marine Corps compound in Beirut, killing 241 Americans. | ||
| You have a long memory. | ||
| We have a long memory. | ||
| And may our relationship continue to endure. | ||
| We're going to continue to grow our defense industrial base. | ||
| We've supplied munitions that were previously not supplied, that are useful in eradicating radical enemies, and we are committed to continuing to do so. | ||
| So I hope you've noticed here at the Defense Department under President Trump, we are laser-focused on reviving the warrior ethos, on rebuilding America's military, and reestablishing deterrence, which is something you, Prime Minister, have done in your neighborhood in impressive, aggressive, and important ways. | ||
| So it's an honor to welcome you to the Pentagon on behalf of the Department of Defense. | ||
| Thank you for spending the afternoon with us, sir. | ||
| Well, thank you, Mr. Secretary Pete. | ||
| You've been a great and stalwart friend of Israel. | ||
| And we see President Trump and the team that he's put together as extraordinary friends, extraordinary patriots of America, and therefore also champions of the American-Israel Alliance. | ||
| I truly believe Israel obviously has no greater friend than the United States, and I think the United States has no better friend than Israel. | ||
| It's an ally that perhaps is different from any of your allies because we have no compunction about fighting our enemies by ourselves. | ||
| We're willing to shoulder the burden of our defense, but by confronting the forces of radicalism and terror and the forces that are anti-American at the core, they call you the great Satan and they call us the small Satan. | ||
| We just stand in their way. | ||
| But you are their great enemy. | ||
| By confronting these various enemies, we're not only defeating those who wish to attack us, but those who wish to attack you as well. | ||
| And therefore, our victory is your victory. | ||
| And we are well ahead and well advanced in the pursuit of our war goals that will give security and peace. | ||
| And that's the only way you get it in our region and perhaps in many other regions. | ||
| The only way you get peace and an enduring peace is by being very, very strong. | ||
| And with our alliance, with your support, including the decision you just mentioned of supplying Israel the much-needed tools for our defense, we are a lot stronger than we've ever been. | ||
| I thank you for this warm reception. | ||
| It's good to see you again. | ||
| And I look forward to our discussions away from the camera. | ||
| Good to see you, sir. | ||
| Welcome to the Pentagon. | ||
| We look forward to the discussions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Considering your view and worldview. | |
| I would just say to the question of Gaza, the definition of insanity is attempting to do the same thing over and over and over again. | ||
| And as the President and Prime Minister pointed out last night, the President is willing to think outside the box, look for new and unique, dynamic ways to solve problems that felt like they're intractable. | ||
| So we look forward to more conversations about that, creative solutions to that. | ||
| And as the man tasked with leading the Defense Department here, we're prepared to look at all options as we've said. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Secretary, are you having a plan to send troops to Gaza? | |
| Are you working on options for the President right now that would involve U.S. troops in Gaza? | ||
| The President is involved in very complex and high-level negotiations of great consequence to both the United States and the State of Israel. | ||
| And we look forward to working with our allies, our counterparts, both diplomatically and militarily, to look at all options. | ||
| But we certainly would not get ahead of the president or provide any details about what we may or may not do. | ||
| Dude, that's just bad military. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's all we have. | |
| We're leaving now. | ||
| Thank you, President. | ||
| Thank you, Brest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, President. | |
| Thank you, President. | ||
| We're leaving now. | ||
|
Christopher Katz's Sacrifice
00:03:49
|
||
|
unidentified
|
On this vote, the yeas are 215, the nays are 208. | |
| The resolution is adopted. | ||
| Without objection, a motion to reconsider is laid on the table. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| The House will come to order. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Wisconsin seek recognition? | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to speak out of order. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Without objection. | |
| On this past Saturday, February 1st, 2025, United States Capitol Police recruit officer Christopher Katz was tragically killed in a car accident in Glen County, Georgia. | ||
| Five other Capitol Police recruits were seriously injured in the crash as well. | ||
| Chris was an ambitious young man who had dreams of serving his country and his community. | ||
| He had several career options in law enforcement, but chose the United States Capitol Police due to their rich history and dedicated service to the United States. | ||
| He had tremendous respect for the critical role in protecting the nation's elected officials and the institutions of democracy. | ||
| Chris's family and friends remember him for his unwavering dedication to service and his love of life. | ||
| He was a young man with a bright future taken far too soon, but he will be forever remembered for his passion, kindness, and commitment to making a difference. | ||
| We're thankful for his service. | ||
| Every single day, members of the Capitol Police put themselves in the line of danger to protect this great institution and those of us who work and visit here. | ||
| Our prayers and sympathies are with the United States Capitol Police community, these officers, and their families. | ||
| On behalf of myself, Ranking Member Joe Morelli, and the House of Representatives, I ask that the United States House of Representatives observe a moment of silence. | ||
|
Gentleman Recognized for One Minute
00:15:20
|
||
| Thank you, and I yield back. | ||
| Let me see if I need glasses for this or not. | ||
| Okay, the chair will now entertain requests for one-minute speeches. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Georgia seek recognition? | ||
| With that objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor Mr. Kevin Jones, who retired as the Brunswick Police Chief after an exceptional 30-year career in law enforcement. | ||
| His dedication to service has had a lasting impact on the community. | ||
| Chief Jones served as Brunswick's police chief since February of 2019, focusing on modernizing policing practices, enhancing officer training, and improving public safety efforts. | ||
| His leadership emphasized transparency, accountability, and community trust, earning respect from citizens and city officials alike. | ||
| Under his guidance, Brunswick experienced a significant reduction in crime, a revitalization of neighborhood watch programs, and improved police-community relations. | ||
| His dedication made Brunswick a safer place to live, strengthened ties between the community and law enforcement, and increased confidence in the department. | ||
| Chief Jones announced his retirement in October of 2024, ensuring a smooth leadership transition for the department. | ||
| He has mentored many officers, ensuring the next generation of leaders is ready to step up. | ||
| Chief Jones leaves behind a legacy of integrity, leadership, and service that will continue to inspire the community for many years to come. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back. | ||
| All right, next one. | ||
| All right. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentlewoman from Virginia seek recognition? | ||
| Speaker, I rise to request unanimous consent to address the floor for one minute. | ||
| Without objection, the gentlewoman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak out on behalf of our beleaguered federal workforce, which is currently under attack by the Musk-Trump Vance administration. | ||
| Trump's OMB nominee, Russell Vaught, said, quote, we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. | ||
| When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. | ||
| We want to put them in trauma. | ||
| Well, Mr. Speaker, they're in trauma. | ||
| Literally on my way to the floor to vote tonight, I received a text from a federal employee that said simply, help us. | ||
| Exclamation point. | ||
| Who exactly is the Musk-Trump Vance administration terrorizing? | ||
| The people who make sure your food is safe to eat, your water is clean to drink, and the air is clean to breathe. | ||
| The people who work tirelessly to keep pregnant women, asthmatic children, and people with cancer from dying. | ||
| The people who make sure you fly safely. | ||
| The people protecting American lives here and around the globe through diplomacy, intelligence gathering, and fighting crime. | ||
| To the federal workforce, I see you. | ||
| I'm doing everything I can to help you. | ||
| I won't quit. | ||
| Please don't quit either. | ||
| Thank you and I yield back. | ||
| Members are reminded to refrain from engaging in personalities toward the president. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Georgia seek recognition? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to address the House for one minute and to revise and extend my remarks. | |
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today to celebrate an extraordinary milestone, the 100th birthday of Alan Kinder, a man whose life embodies resilience, courage, and a passion for service. | ||
| Alan's story is one of bravery, from storming Omaha Beach during the second wave of D-Day to surviving the Battle of the Bulge. | ||
| After his heroic service in defense of our nation, he returned home to build a life filled with family, purpose, and more adventure. | ||
| Alan has been both a witness to history and a keeper of it, reminding us all of the sacrifices made for our precious freedom. | ||
| And yet it's his warmth and compassion that shines the brightest. | ||
| Both Alan's kindness and the stories of his remarkable service have left an indelible mark on every person lucky enough to know him. | ||
| Alan, on behalf of the 9th District, I wish you a wonderful and very happy 100th birthday and entire 100th birthday year. | ||
| And I thank you for your service, your stories, and your example. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, I yield back. | |
| For what purpose does the gentlewoman from New Mexico seek recognition? | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I asked for one minute to address the House and to revise my remarks. | ||
| Without objection, the gentlewoman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to speak directly to the American people and to our federal workers, not only across the country, but especially in New Mexico. | ||
| I know that many of you are feeling frightened, uncertain, and under attack, but I want you to know the Democrats have your back and are fighting back using every tool that we have, the courts, the Congress, fighting back in our communities, fighting back against an unqualified, unvetted billionaire who is stealing your data, taking your jobs, dismantling our federal agencies, and freezing the funds that make our communities run. | ||
| You have dedicated your careers to ensuring that this great nation can serve our people, and we say to you, hold the line, because we have your backs. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Wisconsin seek recognition? | ||
| I'd like to ask to speak for a minute. | ||
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| There's been such good news coming. | ||
| It seems like every day out of the White House that it's easy to lose track of some of the executive orders coming from President Trump. | ||
| But I'd like to bring attention to one today, and this is one that once it's in effect, there's nothing they're going to be able to do to stop it. | ||
| And that is his order reinstating service members discharged under the military's COVID-19 vaccination mandate. | ||
| It's hard to believe that only four years ago we had people who were demanding that or a president who was demanding that all our brave service members had taken experimental vaccine and if they didn't take it, they would be removed from the service. | ||
| President Trump has reinstated these folks, a great man of compassion, a man who respects independent thought, unlike a lot of people who feel, oh, you know, one guy who went to college told me this, I better do it. | ||
| I know a lot of other people who didn't get the vaccine. | ||
| They were very did a very good job of researching it and had solid reasons. | ||
| So I would like to thank President Trump for reinstating all of our brave servicemen who were unfairly forced from the military. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentlewoman from Michigan seek recognition? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Afternoon, Mr. Senator, address the House for one minute. | |
| Without objection, the gentlewoman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| I know that Black History Month is a time to celebrate and recommit to the fight for justice and black liberation in the Michigan's 12th congressional district and beyond. | ||
| I am proud that I was raised, born and raised in the most beautiful blackest city in the country, the city of Detroit, where movements are born, where history is made every single day. | ||
| Time and time again, we see efforts to erase our history. | ||
| Systemic racism continues to be codified into our laws and into our budgets. | ||
| I know the current administration is now attempting to dismantle foundational civil rights protections, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and roll back our hard-won progress here in our country. | ||
| And no matter how much they want to whitewash it, they cannot erase black history. | ||
| Black history is American history. | ||
| There would be no United States of America without the contributions of our black neighbors. | ||
| Black lives matter, and black history matters. | ||
| With that, I yield. | ||
| The gentleman from Texas, for what purposes does the gentleman from Texas seek recognition? | ||
| I would like to seek unanimous consent for my one-minute remarks and to it revise and extend. | ||
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today to stand in unwavering support of our nation's federal employees, many of whom live and work across the Texas 18th congressional district. | ||
| As a proud member of the Congressional Labor Caucus, I am here to say loud and clear, America needs this federal workforce, and we will not sit by while their jobs, their rights, and their livelihoods are under attack. | ||
| Federal employees ensure the safety and well-being of every American, and these efforts to reduce federal workers will only bring them home. | ||
| Thousands of federal workers in Texas' 18th congressional district serve vital roles, including health care, transportation and safety, social security, and much more. | ||
| To every dedicated federal employee, our message is clear. | ||
| We have your back. | ||
| We will fight in Congress to protect your rights, your jobs, and your ability to serve the American people. | ||
| Your work does not go unrecognized. | ||
| I urge my colleagues to stand against this calculated attack on federal workers and the values of public service. | ||
| Thank you, and I yield back the balance of my time. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia seek recognition? | ||
| Three minutes and a quarter. | ||
| My remarks. | ||
| Without objection, the gentlewoman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| I thank the gentleman for yielding to me. | ||
| These are unprecedented and extraordinarily difficult times for our federal employees. | ||
| The Trump administration seems intent on dismantling much of the federal government in violation of the Constitution, federal statutes, and federal regulations. | ||
| The administration has relentlessly attacked federal employees, subjecting them to chaos and fear. | ||
| The administration has imposed a hiring freeze, offered deferred resignation, fired employees, put employees on leaves, effectively established federal F, and ended telework and remote work. | ||
| The administration is not alone in attacking federal employees. | ||
| The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, on which I serve, has held two hearings in Congress, and both were designed to demoralize federal employees. | ||
| As I said at the first hearing, federal employees deserve praise for their expertise, dedication, and service, not derision. | ||
| Let's be clear what is motivating these actions. | ||
| They are designed to give experts, to get experts to quit the workforce. | ||
| I yield. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Michigan seek recognition? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, I would like to address for one minute. | |
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, Elon Musk invested $277 million into Donald Trump's election. | ||
| I guess that's the price to take over our federal government. | ||
| Elon Musk is worth over $400 billion, meaning his contribution to Trump is same as about $130 for an average American. | ||
| Mr. Musk, the government is not a private enterprise. | ||
| It serves the American people, not the wealthy shareholders. | ||
| Thousands will die around the world because U.S. aid won't deliver life-saving food and medicine. | ||
| Millions will lose control of their personal information, social security numbers, banking information, social security checks, Medicare benefits. | ||
| Elon Musk does not care about you because he does not have to and he does not want to. | ||
| Rest assured, Democrats care, I care, and we will be using every tool at our disposal to get rid of this unelected, power-hungry, egocentric billionaire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And with that, I yield back. | |
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Florida seek recognition? | ||
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| I rise for every American whose life has made better because of the work of federal civil servants. | ||
| President Donald Trump and his power craze posse of billionaire bosses are firing our federal workers. | ||
| Our quality of life is degraded and diminished because of that. | ||
| They're moving to install their unqualified followers to do the dirty work of a hostile takeover of every facet of our lives, like Medicaid, the Weather Service, and the Department of Education. | ||
|
Fighting for Federal Workers
00:15:51
|
||
| Their deferred resignation plan is a scam. | ||
| Firefighters, nurses, TSA agents, park rangers, foreign aid workers, they are refusing to go quietly in the face of an authoritarian, and I commend them. | ||
| America is indeed at a fork in the road. | ||
| Do we want qualified, respected workforce serving us, or do we want an army of clueless yes men working to serve the selfish rich? | ||
| I know what I want, what the American people want, and what the people deserve, a government that works for them. | ||
| Thank you to our federal workforce and our civil servants. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3rd, 2025, the gentleman from Maryland, Mr. Ivey, is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I ask that all members have five legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and insert extraneous material into the record. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Without objection. | |
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, the Congressional Labor Caucus comes today to oppose the Trump administration's unlawful and unconstitutional attacks on federal workers. | ||
| Our federal workforce has the experience and the expertise that America needs. | ||
| We must protect the public. | ||
| The air that we breathe, the water we drink, the medicine we take, the food that we eat hangs in the balance. | ||
| This fight is too important. | ||
| We cannot allow the Trump administration to replace a competitive merit system with a political spoils system. | ||
| That is why we will keep fighting in Congress and in the courts. | ||
| I have my colleagues with me today who've come to express their concerns, and I now yield two minutes to my friend Representative Norcross. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Mr. Speaker, as co-chair of the Labor Caucus, we're here to speak today on something I didn't think we ever had to do. | ||
| We had to talk about the hard work of our federal workforce, those federal workers who get up every day to go to work, the ones that keep our food safe to eat, the water safe to drink, and the air safe to breathe. | ||
| Federal workers are nurses, they're doctors, they're in the VA taking care of our vets each and every day. | ||
| They're civilian DOD workers. | ||
| That's right, working in the Pentagon and around the world to make sure that our military is ready to go. | ||
| They're the ones who are processing Social Security checks for our seniors. | ||
| Yes, the TSA agents every time we go to the airport. | ||
| And Trump is making it hard, almost impossible, for them to do their jobs. | ||
| He wants them to quit. | ||
| They dedicate their life for us, the federal workforce. | ||
| Who are they? | ||
| They're you and me. | ||
| They say they have to come back to the office when it's more efficient for a person agreed upon with management to work from an absolute different location. | ||
| I would suggest if you really want to know where federal workers are, they should go look at the offices where your member is supposed to be showing up. | ||
| Tell me how many times they go to the office. | ||
| But that's what we're dealing with. | ||
| Trump is revoking their union contracts, the contracts which they negotiated legally and trying to be enforceable. | ||
| So important. | ||
| Trump doesn't have the authority to change his agreement, but he's doing it, and it's going to take our courts to turn this around. | ||
| America's civil service is a merit system. | ||
| Trump signed another executive order to remove jobs from the nonpartisan civil service. | ||
| So here we are, folks, back again. | ||
| Your civil servants who wake up every day to help us. | ||
| I'm not seeing any of those civil servants fly in their private airplanes like Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump. | ||
| They're just regular people like you and me trying to get by. | ||
| And as we have this discussion with all the Labor caucus, I want to just take a minute to thank Glenn Ivey, who represents so many federal workers back in his district, Stephen Lynch, who's been leading our fight at the Postal Service. | ||
| But folks, at the end of the day, we have to stick together. | ||
| Right there, right there, carved into the wood, says union, and that's what we have to do. | ||
| God bless you, and to every federal worker, thank you for what you do. | ||
| And I yield back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I now yield one minute to Ms. Schaikowski of Illinois. | ||
| I want to thank Congressman Ivey for yielding to me. | ||
| This is so important. | ||
| And yet, we should be ashamed of the way the Trump administration has been absolutely attacking our federal workers. | ||
| The people who go to work every single day to do important functions. | ||
| They don't have any ulterior motive. | ||
| They are doing things like making sure that our senior citizens get their medications, that we take care of our veterans who need help. | ||
| These are the kinds of things that they are servants to all of our people. | ||
| They are doing their best job, and yet they are being criticized. | ||
| And I think that we want to say a big thank you. | ||
| And I pledge to all of our federal workers that I will be here to praise you, to protect you, to say that you have not only every right but every privilege of serving the American people as you have done day in and day out. | ||
| So I say hooray to the workers who do so much every single day, not asking for any special awards, but do the work that the people of the United States need. | ||
| And we have to thank them every single day for their work and not denigrate them as the Trump administration has done. | ||
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unidentified
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With that, I yield. | |
| I thank my colleague and now yield two minutes plus to Representative Sanchez. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I want to thank Glenn Avery for his wonderful work. | ||
| And Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of our nation's federal workers. | ||
| As a member of the Labor Caucus, I stand with the essential workers who provide critical services to the American public. | ||
| Make no mistake, we are seeing a direct attack on our democracy right now. | ||
| Efforts to shut down federal agencies are designed to erode our nation's foundation. | ||
| No one, not the president, not an unelected billionaire, has the right to single-handedly dismantle federal agencies created and funded by the Congress. | ||
| Yet that is exactly what is happening. | ||
| President Trump has surrendered control over to Elon Musk, allowing him to dismantle our institutions without any oversight. | ||
| This is a blatant abuse of power, and it's happening on this Congress's watch. | ||
| They've attacked federal workers, replacing skilled civil servants with political loyalists. | ||
| They've targeted and smeared public employees who have served this country honorably, many for decades. | ||
| They're even rejecting union contracts that were lawfully negotiated between the government and workers. | ||
| This is union-busting, plain and simple. | ||
| As a former union member, I won't stand for that. | ||
| These contracts are protected by law and cannot be changed on a whim or, more likely, on a tantrum. | ||
| It gets worse. | ||
| Elon Musk's Doge has even infiltrated the Treasury Department. | ||
| He and a bunch of 20-somethings now have access to the federal payment system and the confidential data of almost every American. | ||
| Why on earth do a bunch of kids who are not even legally old enough to rent a car need access to Americans' personal information and data? | ||
| Why should they have their hands on your social security or Medicare payments or see whether you or a loved one has a disability or whether or not you received a tax refund? | ||
| This isn't just a violation of privacy. | ||
| It's a breach of the trust of the American people that they put in government. | ||
| Doge needs to be held accountable for its unlawful actions, and Democrats are and will continue to fight back. | ||
| We are demanding hearings, investigations, and supporting lawsuits that seek to protect your very personal information. | ||
| But we need the few Republicans in this body who care about the rule of law to join us in this fight. | ||
| We need to defend Congress's constitutional authorities, the power of the purse, and oversight of the executive branch. | ||
| We need Republicans to stand up for all Americans. | ||
| To all federal workers, please know you are essential. | ||
| America values you. | ||
| We need you, and we have your back. | ||
| When you're attacked, every American who depends on you is also attacked. | ||
| I once again thank my colleague, Mr. Glenn Ivey, and I yield back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I now yield two minutes to my colleague, Representative Pocan from Wisconsin. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I want to thank Mr. Ivey for convening this special order hour and for his hard work on behalf of the federal employees and all workers in his district. | ||
| As a co-chair of the Congressional Labor Caucus, I'm proud to stand with our essential workers who keep the government running every day. | ||
| But since day one of this administration, President Trump has relentlessly attacked federal employees as he and Elon Musk seek to eliminate many nonpartisan career public servant jobs across the country. | ||
| These attacks on federal workers are straight out of the Project 2025 playbook. | ||
| Unelected billionaire Elon Musk has been bulldozing through the federal workforce, demanding the firing of hundreds of thousands of employees whose only fireable offense is trying to serve the American people. | ||
| Federal workers are nurses and doctors at veterans hospitals. | ||
| They process social security checks for seniors. | ||
| They are TSA agents and air traffic controllers who keep us safe when we fly. | ||
| More than 85% of the federal workforce operates outside of Washington, D.C. In my home state of Wisconsin, there are 18,000 federal civilian employees, including over 5,800 federal workers in my district alone. | ||
| In the last two days, my office has gotten over 1,000 constituent calls with people angry, hurt, and terrified that the services they use every day will vanish along with the workers who make these programs run. | ||
| An attack on federal workers is an attack on the services that Americans rely on every day. | ||
| And Elon Musk and Trump will continue to put lives at risk as they seek to cut $4 trillion over the next 10 years to pay for tax cuts for Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the wealthiest. | ||
| To all the selfless civil servants, our message is clear. | ||
| America needs you, and we have your back. | ||
| We are fighting in Congress to oppose Donald Trump and Elon Musk's baseless attacks on you and your important work, and we urge you to stand strong. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| I thank my colleague. | ||
| I now yield two minutes to Mr. Menendez of New Jersey. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, and I want to thank my incredible colleague, Glenn Ivey, for convening us here today and for the opportunity to speak. | |
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today in solidarity with our nation's federal workers, including the more than 22,000 who live and work in the great state of New Jersey. | ||
| Our federal workforce is a vital cornerstone of our work to protect the most vulnerable amongst us, grow our economy, protect our national security, and to keep us safe. | ||
|
unidentified
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In Newark, our air traffic controllers and TSA agents devote their careers to keeping our skies safe and getting us to where we need to go safely. | |
| Social Security employees in the Hoboken Field Office assist our seniors and those with disabilities in receiving the benefits they have earned and depend on. | ||
| And U.S. CIS officials in Newark assist immigrant families with processing their visas, green cards, and applications for naturalization. | ||
| Our nation runs because of federal workers, and an attack on them is an attack on the services that Americans rely on every day. | ||
| Along with my Democratic colleagues, I want to make our message to federal employees clear. | ||
| We have your back, and we will not back down. | ||
| We will continue to oppose this administration's baseless and lawless attempts to diminish the important work you do every day. | ||
| Our civil service is a merit system protected by the right to due process, and attempts to implement Schedule F, union bust, and undermine our collective bargaining process will be met with swift and unyielding resistance from me, the Congressional Labor Caucus, and my colleagues on this side of the aisle. | ||
| The decision to enter public service is an honorable one, and millions of federal workers and retirees have made that decision deserve our support. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, and I yield back. | |
| I thank the gentleman, and I now yield two minutes to Representative McLean Delaney of Maryland. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, as a proud member of the Labor Caucus, I rise today to stand up against the administration's actions against our 2.2 million federal workers, including 35,000 of them in the 6th District of Maryland. | ||
| America's greatest asset is its people, and our dedicated civil servants are no exception. | ||
| I am so deeply troubled by the administration and Elon Musk's efforts and actions to access every American's data and to, more importantly, access the U.S. Treasury Department's federal payment system, including U.S. taxpayers' confidential financial information, to slash critical federal programs and to threaten the termination of thousands of federal workers. | ||
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Federal Workers Under Threat
00:10:33
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| I'm even greater alarmed by the Trump administration's flagrant efforts to seek political retribution against federal agents for past investigations, including investigating the violence that occurred on January 6th. | ||
| Many members feared for their lives that day, and insurrectionists violently assaulted officers tasked with protecting the people here and this building. | ||
| Now these agents are at risk for losing their livelihoods, for following the law, and doing their jobs. | ||
| All of this follows the Trump administration's OMB directive to illegally freeze congressionally approved federal funding and its letter to more than 2 million federal employees offering a buyout from service. | ||
| I implore you, do not take that buyout. | ||
| It is not to be trusted. | ||
| As the buyout letter says, we are truly at a fork of the road. | ||
| Do we defend American workers and our institutions or gut the federal agencies of the knowledge that fuels America innovation and strengthens our national security? | ||
| These attacks strike at the bedrock of our American values and represent an unprecedented power grab that undermines our democracy's balances and checks. | ||
| Many of these actions have not been authorized by Congress and rightfully belong under its purview. | ||
| While I've long believed in seeking common sense, common ground when governing, I must now stand my ground for the 35,000 government employees in my district and countless more across the country, looking now for Congress to take action. | ||
| Yesterday, I joined a briefing with several colleagues from Virginia, Maryland, and other places, along with members of AFG, AFSME, Democracy Forward, NTEU, IFPTE, NARF, NFFE, and AFL-CIO in conjunction to develop an action plan to better defend our workers at USAID, at DOL, at the Department of Education, at NOAA, | ||
| and so many other agencies under eminent threat of mandated leave, termination, or closure. | ||
| In closing, from NIST to Fort Dietrich to our National Fire Academy in the 6th District, federal workers in Maryland are counting on us, the people in this changer and in our communities, to stand up and speak up for them. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I yield back my time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I now yield two minutes to Representative McGovern of Massachusetts. | ||
| I thank you. | ||
| I thank my colleague for organizing this special order. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of our public servants as they face an unprecedented illegal attack by the Trump administration. | ||
| Our federal employees are part of every single community in America. | ||
| They keep us safe, they sustain us, and they support us. | ||
| Now they are under attack. | ||
| Donald Trump and Elon Musk's attack on the federal workforce is an illegal purge. | ||
| Don't let anyone call it anything else. | ||
| This is a purge. | ||
| It is an unlawful attempt by a reality show Wannabe King to install cronies and bootlickers. | ||
| Our public servants represent the best of us. | ||
| They are selfless, determined, disciplined, and professional. | ||
| They are everything that Donald Trump and his MAGA flunkies are not. | ||
| To our public servants, I will say this. | ||
| Do not be afraid. | ||
| Do not be intimidated. | ||
| The law is on your side. | ||
| We are still with you. | ||
| A grateful nation is still with you. | ||
| You have dedicated your lives to the American people. | ||
| You have made our country strong. | ||
| Have faith that our country is strong enough to withstand the petty tantrums of a small, self-obsessed man who disgraces the very idea of public service with his every breath. | ||
| Now is the time for courage. | ||
| I am grateful for your service. | ||
| I believe in you, and I yield back. | ||
| I thank the gentleman, and now I yield two minutes to Representative Lansman of Ohio. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you, also, to support our federal workers. | |
| These are public servants who live and work all over the country. | ||
| The vast majority of our federal workers do not live in the Washington, D.C. area. | ||
| It's a big misconception. | ||
| People think, well, these are federal workers. | ||
| They're just here in D.C. They're in our districts. | ||
| Each one of us has probably tens of thousands of federal employees in our congressional districts, meaning that we serve them. | ||
| And it just so happens they serve us. | ||
| But Trump and Elon Musk have been setting these fires all over the federal government. | ||
| They've launched this reckless trade war with China. | ||
| They tried to stop federal funding from going into our communities. | ||
| These are our tax dollars. | ||
| They gave Trump gave an unelected tech billionaire access to our Social Security data, to all of our data, to our federal payment system, and empowered him to purge as many public servants from our federal agencies as he possibly could. | ||
| One of those public servants is a constituent of mine in southwest Ohio. | ||
| She lost her job. | ||
| For 20 years, she worked at USAID, leading the agency's famine early detection efforts. | ||
| Her work ensured food reached children, families, and communities in crisis. | ||
| She saved lives. | ||
| But it's not just about food. | ||
| Hunger fuels instability. | ||
| When people are desperate, terrorism thrives. | ||
| And when the U.S. pulls back, it creates a vacuum for China to step in. | ||
| This administration actions are just cruel, and they're making our country and our world less safe. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Are they purging our federal workforce? | ||
| They've got to find $4 trillion, $4 trillion that won't go to you or me or our communities. | ||
| They're planning to use these dollars to pay for tax giveaways for the Uber wealthy, for the Elon Musks of the world. | ||
| They're stealing from our workers, our country, and our allies, all so the Uber wealthy can get wealthier. | ||
| It has to be stopped. | ||
| This Congress can stop it, but the majority has to step up. | ||
| Thank you, and I yield back. | ||
| I thank the gentleman, and I now yield two minutes to Representative Caston of Illinois. | ||
| Thank you, Congressman Ivey. | ||
| So last week, I spent an afternoon at the National Air Traffic Control Center in Aurora, Illinois. | ||
| I'd been invited to discuss some work our office has been doing to make sure that these folks are not penalized for seeking mental health care. | ||
| None of us could have anticipated that our visit would be after the crash of American Flight 5342 in Washington, but it is safe to say that that office was shook. | ||
| And then we started talking about mental health. | ||
| One employee said that their staff still remember the arson attack on this facility back in 2014, and they were nervous that recent budget cuts have limited their ability to maintain security levels at that facility. | ||
| Another employee asked me, how should they interpret announcements from the Trump White House that federal employees were going to get laid off? | ||
| Would they have a job? | ||
| If they got laid off, who was going to do their work? | ||
| How are they going to continue to support their families? | ||
| I had a female air traffic controller who asked why Donald Trump immediately blamed the crash on DEI hiring practices. | ||
| Wasn't lost on any of us that our air traffic controllers, like our society, are not exclusively straight white men, but she was wondering if she was about to get fired solely on account of her gender. | ||
| Now, let that all sink in. | ||
| These are hardworking federal employees who have dedicated their lives to keeping our skies safe. | ||
| They are overworked. | ||
| They are underpaid. | ||
| And now they're wondering whether the President of the United States, his Republican enablers, and his IT goons are about to fire them, curtail their pay, blame them for airline tragedies because of the way they look, who they love, how they pray. | ||
| What possible good comes to the American people by having a bunch of stressed-out air traffic controllers? | ||
| The United States government can't function without these nonpartisan civil servants, our air traffic controllers, our TSA agents, our VA, our hospital workers, people who make sure your Social Security payments get through. | ||
| Why would we want to break that? | ||
| Maybe because you're carrying out Russia's foreign policy. | ||
| Maybe because you're just a grifter who's figured out that you're going to short the stock market after you tank it. | ||
| Maybe you're just a coward. | ||
| Maybe you're an idiot. | ||
| Maybe you think it's better to be proximate to power than to stand up for what's right. | ||
| But whatever it is, it ain't patriotism. | ||
| And it scares the dickens out of me that standing up for America in 2025 is a partisan endeavor. | ||
| I yield. | ||
| I thank the gentleman, and I now yield two minutes to Representative Hoyer of Maryland. | ||
| I thank my colleague for taking this special order. | ||
| I thank my colleague for his service. | ||
| A full disclosure, my colleague and I probably represent between us about 150,000 federal employees. | ||
| But I rise not for those federal employees who I care a lot about, as this Mr. Ivey, but I rise for the federal employees throughout America, but not just for them. | ||
| I rise because they serve America every day in critical places for veterans, for homeowners, for moms, for dads, for teachers, for doctors, for nurses, all of whom rely on the federal government so that they can give services needed by the American people. | ||
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Blitzkrieg on Federal Workers
00:15:44
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| Why are we doing this? | ||
| I just said upstairs that I've been here for 44 years. | ||
| This is an unprecedented move taken by the Trump administration and the Musk administration in the first 15 days. | ||
| No thought, no planning, no consultation. | ||
| It is a blitzkrieg on the American government. | ||
| Now let me give you the words of Russell Vaught, who's going to be heading up apparently the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget. | ||
| This is what he said not so long ago. | ||
| We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. | ||
| When they wake up in the morning, we want them not to want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. | ||
| We want their funding to be shut down. | ||
| Now, he's referring to EPA, but he's aimed his objective at all of the agencies of government. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise not only on behalf of federal workers, as I said, who every day perform the services we, the Congress, representing the American people, have asked them to do. | ||
| They didn't create any of these agencies. | ||
| We did. | ||
| They did not give them the objectives. | ||
| We did. | ||
| They are performing the services for the American people that the American people need and, yes, want. | ||
| The initial notice went out to 2 million people, approximately all of the civilian employees of the Federal Service. | ||
| I want everybody to think for just one second, what if every all two million of Americans, civil servants, said, okay, we're gone, and then promised to be paid for seven months for doing no work and the government shut down. | ||
| Business, commerce, education, health care, public safety would all be shut down. | ||
| That is not what the American people voted for. | ||
| Are the people who help feed our seniors, our children, who provide medical care to our veterans, who keep our communities clean and safe, who help Americans recover from disasters, who defend our national security and provide countless other services to American people, villains? | ||
| Hell no, they are heroes and absolutely essential for America to be great. | ||
| When you treat federal workers as villains, you turn the American people into victims. | ||
| That is what this administration is doing. | ||
| They've offered federal workers a buyout with their deadline just hours away without any consultation to determine the adverse or, frankly, positive impact of such an action. | ||
| That's not what the American people expect us to do. | ||
| I and the members who speak here and I hope all the members of this House will do what the founding fathers thought we should do, be an independent branch of government to set policy and not allow the federal workers or the federal government to be run over by somebody who likes firing people. | ||
| I yield back the balance of my time. | ||
| I thank the Congressman. | ||
| I now yield two minutes to Representative Brown of Ohio. | ||
| Thank you, Congressman Ivey, for organizing this special order hour. | ||
| I rise in support of more than 9,000 federal workers in my district and their dedicated colleagues across the country. | ||
| Make no mistake, President Trump and unelected billionaire Elon Musk are waging an all-out assault on federal workers. | ||
| In just two weeks, they've managed an unlawful union busting, budget freezing, and civil servant layoffs all designed to intimidate, weaken, and dismantle our federal workforce. | ||
| This isn't just an attack on federal employees. | ||
| It's an attack on all of us. | ||
| In Northeast Ohio, federal workers process Social Security checks for seniors. | ||
| They are doctors and nurses caring for veterans. | ||
| They are TSA agents and air traffic controllers who keep us safe when we fly. | ||
| And they are researchers developing new technologies at NASA Glen. | ||
| These are hardworking, honorable public servants who deserve our respect, not threats, and not pink slips. | ||
| Let's be clear. | ||
| This reckless effort to push federal workers out isn't about right-sizing government. | ||
| It's about gutting it. | ||
| It's about dismantling the very services that millions of Americans depend on. | ||
| This is part of a coordinated effort to erode trust in government because the president and his billionaire buddies want it to fail. | ||
| They don't want experienced workers loyal to the country. | ||
| They want political lackeys loyal to only one man. | ||
| So they push the lie that government is inherently wasteful and that federal employees are part of some so-called deep state. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| It's dangerous. | ||
| And here's why they are really doing it. | ||
| To strip away labor, consumer, and environmental protections. | ||
| And most notably, to hand billionaires and their corporations massive tax breaks while sticking it to working Americans. | ||
| So we have to ask: is this a government of the people, by the people, and for the people? | ||
| Or is it a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires? | ||
| Federal workers don't serve a president or his billionaire buddies. | ||
| Let me say that again. | ||
| Federal workers don't serve a president or his billionaire buddy. | ||
| They serve the American people, and we stand with them. | ||
| And with that, I yield back. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| How much time remains? | ||
| The gentleman has 27 minutes remaining. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I now yield two minutes to Representative Hoyle of Oregon. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of our nation's federal workers. | ||
| As a member of the Labor Caucus, I am proud to stand with these public servants who have dedicated their careers to delivering for the American people. | ||
| This administration has relentlessly attacked these nonpartisan, expert workers who make sure our food is safe to eat, our water is safe to drink, and our air is safe to breathe. | ||
| As a third-generation union member, I am particularly outraged by the obvious intimidation and union-busting tactics that this administration has used on these essential workers. | ||
| But these actions are not just an attack on federal workers. | ||
| They are an attack on the services that these hardworking people of my district and this country rely on every day. | ||
| Let's be clear. | ||
| Firing federal workers means delays in receiving Social Security checks and fewer law enforcement officers keeping our communities safe. | ||
| If the Department of Labor doesn't have sufficient personnel, it'll be easier for employers to commit wage theft, workplace safety, and rights violations. | ||
| And who does that benefit? | ||
| Not the American people, not working people. | ||
| In my district, we know federal workers are not lazy or ineffective. | ||
| They're our friends, our family, and our neighbors who support us every day. | ||
| They get up and they go to work to work for the people of this country and not for a political party. | ||
| Federal workers, you've had our backs, and I assure you, we have yours. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I now yield two minutes to Representative Kennedy of New York. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I want to first thank Congressman Ivey for putting this together here today and for his leadership. | ||
| I rise today to stand in unwavering solidarity with the hardworking men and women of our federal workforce. | ||
| As a member of the Labor Caucus, I'm proud to support the public servants who dedicate their lives to keeping our country running, including the 8,500 federal employees who call my district home. | ||
| These workers are not faceless bureaucrats. | ||
| They are the backbone of our communities. | ||
| They are our neighbors. | ||
| They are our friends. | ||
| They process veterans' benefits, ensure Social Security checks go out on time, make Medicare payments to our seniors' physicians, ensure our air and water is clean, and keep our nation safe and much, much more. | ||
| And yet right now, they are under attack. | ||
| From a president who's outsourced his own power, to a billionaire hell bent on dismantling our government to serve his own greed. | ||
| The administration and so-called Department of Government Efficiency are purging career professionals, politicizing civil service, and handing over even more power to the ultra-wealthy. | ||
| I've been hearing from constituents all week, and this is not what people in my community and across America want. | ||
| They do not want an unelected billionaire who, I might add, has made billions off taxpayer-funded contracts to actively weaken our government. | ||
| They do not want an unelected billionaire to create a system where the rules don't apply to him and democracy takes a back seat to his own profits. | ||
| And they do not want an unelected billionaire to attack our federal workers whose love for our country keeps our communities safe and our society functioning. | ||
| We will not stand by while they buck the rule of law to dismantle the very institutions that protect hardworking families, seniors, veterans, and our democracy. | ||
| Make no mistake, this is an attack on federal workers that will allow those at the highest levels of our government and their billionaire buddies to exploit the concerns of our constituents, take power away from the people, and enrich themselves at the expense of hardworking families in America. | ||
| America's civil service is a pillar of our society, and we will defend it. | ||
| I say to the federal workforce, thank you for your service. | ||
| We have your back. | ||
| We will fight for your jobs, your dignity, and the services that millions of Americans rely on. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I now yield two minutes to Representative Ballant of Vermont. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Ivey. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I'm here today to stand with our federal workers and civil servants and to tell them that we will fight these illegal actions. | ||
| The Trump administration is treating our federal workforce as if they are the enemy. | ||
| These are regular Americans who work important jobs all over the country, not just in D.C., but in all of our districts. | ||
| In fact, 85% of the nonpartisan civil servants are spread around the country. | ||
| Vermont is home to 8,000 of these federal workers. | ||
| They're part of the 2 million federal workers that operate our national parks. | ||
| They're scientists at the FDA. | ||
| They work at hospitals, at NASA. | ||
| They protect our national security. | ||
| In fact, 70% work on behalf of our national security and defense. | ||
| And I will tell you, Mr. Speaker, I am deeply concerned that the illegal purge of our civil servants at the Department of Justice and at the FBI will lead to another 9-11 terrorist attack. | ||
| And Americans, I ask you, do we really want to put our nation at risk so that billionaires can get a massive tax cut? | ||
| Follow the money. | ||
| That's what this is about, firing our federal workforce to fund tax cuts for billionaires. | ||
| Don't be fooled by what's happening here. | ||
| It is about the money. | ||
| Follow the money. | ||
| Our federal workers are civil servants because they're here to serve the people. | ||
| They are hired on a nonpartisan basis because they keep our country running. | ||
| They keep us safe. | ||
| This, what is happening, is an illegal takeover of our government. | ||
| Our government. | ||
| By locking them out of their jobs, firing them illegally, and bullying them out of a job. | ||
| Trump and Musk are trying to create chaos and confusion, and it will harm Americans. | ||
| Not just the people who are being fired illegally, but it will harm all of those Americans in our districts who seek services from these workers. | ||
| And none of this, none of this is about making our government work better for Americans. | ||
| It is a well-worn tactic used by authoritarians and dictators like Orbán in Hungary and Bolsonaro in Brazil. | ||
| And they do it to destroy government services so that they create chaos and they create confusion. | ||
| And then we turn against each other. | ||
| This administration is using chaos and cruelty to amass power and wealth. | ||
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Strong Support for Federal Workers
00:15:20
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| But not for us, not for Americans, only for them. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I now yield two minutes to Representative Johnson of Georgia. | ||
| I thank the gentleman from Maryland, and I'm here on behalf of the House Labor Caucus, and I thank the gentleman for convening us today. | ||
| And Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of our nation's federal workers who are under a brutal and heartless assault by Elon Musk and his co-president, Donald Trump. | ||
| A week ago, they sent the now infamous Fork in the Road email to 2 million federal employees trying to trick them into a quick decision to retire immediately and receive eight months of severance pay, which is false, while threatening that if you refuse to retire, your job might be eliminated. | ||
| My brothers and sisters, don't fall for the okie-doke. | ||
| Don't retire. | ||
| Stay on the job. | ||
| You have rights that protect your job. | ||
| So don't let them intimidate you into retirement. | ||
| Your country needs you to continue your work. | ||
| You are a professional and a highly skilled person. | ||
| And we know you work long hours, often under difficult circumstances. | ||
| And you do so because you believe in the importance of public service. | ||
| We will not allow Elon Musk and Donald Trump to replace you with people willing to kiss Trump's ring rather than serving our country. | ||
| Stay the course. | ||
| Keep your eye on the prize. | ||
| And House Democrats, we've got your back. | ||
| And thank you for your service. | ||
| And with that, I yield back, but not before pointing out that they're doing this with House Republicans and House and Senate Republicans letting it happen. | ||
| Don't fall for the Okie Doke. | ||
| Thank you, and I yield back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And I now yield two minutes to Representative Tacano of California. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for yielding. | ||
| The actions coming out of the White House are shocking. | ||
| They're alarming. | ||
| They're unconstitutional. | ||
| We have seen an unelected billionaire attempt to lay off, fire, and purge federal employees from across the executive branch. | ||
| No agency or department is safe, not even the department taking care of veterans. | ||
| And as the ranking member of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, I have been quick to warn employees at the VA not to fall for the recent attempt from Musk to buy out employees. | ||
| I've warned VA employees and providers: Elon Musk thinks you're stupid and won't see through his deceptive and fraudulent buyout offer. | ||
| VA employees should ignore his email and send it to the trash bin. | ||
| And that the Trump administration is playing a dangerous game with your livelihoods and veterans' lives. | ||
| The Department of Veterans Affairs has a mandate to ensure that veterans with visual, hearing, mobility, and cognitive impairments can still apply and receive care. | ||
| The Trump administration put an end to that mission, that mission to reach out to veterans with visual, hearing, mobility, and cognitive impairments. | ||
| He put an end to that mission in the fervor to get rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in federal agencies. | ||
| Yes, diversity, equity, and inclusion includes veterans with visual, hearing, mobility, and cognitive impairments. | ||
| So far, 60 employees with the mission of reaching out to these very veterans with unique challenges to encourage them to apply for VA have been put on leave. | ||
| Have been put on leave. | ||
| We're talking about veterans with visual, hearing, and mobility and cognitive impairments. | ||
| The federal hiring freeze has, the federal freeze, hiring freeze initiated on President Trump's first day in office has left approximately 700 open positions that cannot be filled. | ||
| These are 700 opportunities to increase veterans' access to care that will instead stay unfilled. | ||
| And what is even more shocking is that my Republican colleagues have stayed silent while veterans care is being impacted by Doge. | ||
| I challenge my Republican colleagues who said idly by to stand up to the richest man in the world. | ||
| Stand up to this would-be autocrat. | ||
| Stand up to this bloodless coup. | ||
| Stand up for federal workers and your constituents. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| I thank the gentleman. | ||
| I now yield two minutes to Representative Carter of Louisiana. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Ivey. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I rise today in strong support of our nation's federal workers. | ||
| As a proud member of the Labor Caucus, I stand with these professionals who keep our government running. | ||
| Their work is vital to our health, safety, and security of the American people. | ||
| Since taking office, President Trump has attacked federal employees, seeking to replace nonpartisan civil servants with unqualified political loyalists. | ||
| These workers ensure our food is safe, our air and water clean. | ||
| Our veterans are cared for. | ||
| They process Social Security benefits, safeguard our airports, and protect our communities. | ||
| More than 85% of federal workers serve outside of the national capital region, meaning these attacks impact every single congressional district in our nation, including mine in New Orleans and the river parishes. | ||
| Firing federal workers leads to delays in Social Security payments, longer VA wait times, fewer law enforcement officers on the street. | ||
| We cannot allow reckless policies to dismantle these vital services. | ||
| Trump's administration recently issued a deferred resignation offer claiming employees could resign by February 6th and still receive pay benefits until September 30th, 2025. | ||
| There's no evidence that this is legal or even real. | ||
| Federal employees who accept this offer may face retaliation, unemployment, and no recourse. | ||
| This is a calculated effort to weaken agencies and cut services. | ||
| Simply put, it's a sham. | ||
| We must also oppose Schedule F, which would strip civil service protections, making employees at will and vulnerable to political purges. | ||
| Our government should be staffed by professionals based on merit, not political loyalty. | ||
| The American people deserve a government that works for them, not for some partisan politician. | ||
| Finally, Trump's union-busting tactics, including rejecting legally bargained contracts, cannot stand. | ||
| The right to collective bargaining is a fundamental right, and these agreements must be honored. | ||
| To all federal workers, America needs you. | ||
| The labor caucus has your back, and we will fight for your rights, your jobs, your dignity, and your livelihood. | ||
| Stand strong. | ||
| We are with you. | ||
| Don't fall for the okey-doke. | ||
| And know this: that we stand with you, and we've got your back. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| I thank the gentleman. | ||
| I now yield two minutes to the representative from Maryland, Ms. Alfrith. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| 44,000 civil servants, hardworking, qualified, passionate public servants, call Maryland's third congressional district home. | ||
| And in the last week, thousands have reached out to my office, concerned, anxious, and wondering if their government actually values the work they do on behalf of the American people. | ||
| It's clear that through the Fork in the Road email that 2.2 million federal employees received in attempts to expand Schedule F, that President Trump and Elon Musk are trying to remove civil servants from the civil service. | ||
| Instead, they want to fill our federal workforce and put life-saving services for the American people in the hands of political, unqualified political cronies in a modern-day spoils system. | ||
| The irony, of course, is that the civil service was created to avoid this situation. | ||
| The Congress recognized that cronyism and corruption did not serve the American people and did something in 1883 to create a merit-based civil service system. | ||
| So, Mr. Speaker, on behalf of my constituents, as the proud daughter of two civil servants and as a proud member of the Labor Caucus, I stand here appalled by this administration's changing of the rules on these workers. | ||
| I'd like my district, everyone in my district, and every federal worker in this nation to know that House Democrats have your back. | ||
| And with that, I yield my time. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I now yield two minutes to Representative Magaziner of Rhode Island. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend Mr. Ivey for yielding, and I rise today as a proud vice chair of the Congressional Labor Caucus to stand with the hardworking men and women who keep our government running. | ||
| Federal workers show up every day to serve their neighbors and our country. | ||
| These are the workers who make sure social security checks go out to your parents and grandparents. | ||
| These are the men and women who deliver our mail no matter the weather. | ||
| The doctors and nurses at the VA who provide care to our nation's bravest. | ||
| And when Donald Trump and Elon Musk attack these public servants, it means fewer law enforcement officers working to keep us safe, slower disaster response for families hit by severe storms, longer wait times for Social Security and Medicare. | ||
| But attacking these workers is exactly what Donald Trump and his co-president Elon Musk have set out to do. | ||
| They are attacking air traffic controllers, postal workers, food inspectors, people who keep us safe. | ||
| And why? | ||
| To find money to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Their goal here is to line the pockets of the wealthy off the back of working people and the services that all Americans rely on. | ||
| These attacks on federal workers are an attack on all working people across this country. | ||
| And I want to tell the federal workers in Rhode Island and across the United States that House Democrats stand with you. | ||
| We see your dedication. | ||
| We know the positive impact that you deliver every day. | ||
| And the best resistance is to keep showing up, keep doing what you do best. | ||
| This country runs because of you. | ||
| And here in Congress, we are going to fight to oppose Donald Trump and Elon Musk's baseless and cruel attacks against those who have devoted their lives to service. | ||
| And I yield back to Mr. Ivey. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I now yield two minutes to Representative Takuda of Hawaii. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | |
| I rise today in solidarity and with much aloha for our nation's federal workers. | ||
| As a member of the Labor Caucus, I am proud to stand with these essential employees who keep our government running every single day. | ||
| Federal workers care for our veterans. | ||
| They keep us safe when we travel, and they make sure our seniors get the social security payments that they need to put food on the table and to survive. | ||
| Our federal workers were also the ones who were first on the scene when fires ravaged Maui. | ||
| They saved lives. | ||
| They provided food and shelter, replaced documents. | ||
| They gave our people hope. | ||
| Day in and day out, federal workers are the unseen hands and hearts that guide our nation through complex challenges and maintain the infrastructure and services that underpin daily life. | ||
| They give our people hope and help. | ||
| So when we attack federal workers, we not only discredit their work, Mr. Speaker, we cut off the very hands holding us up. | ||
| Since taking office, President Trump has made it his number one priority to undermine and dismantle our federal workforce. | ||
| Over the past two weeks, the Trump administration has been bullying federal workers to resign while making a hollow promise of pay and benefits through the end of the year. | ||
| Now, President Trump is threatening mass layoffs for those who refuse to accept this bogus and deceptive office. | ||
| We have 43,000 hardworking federal employees in Hawaii. | ||
| Many of these civil servants have called me, contacted me, expressing their anger, frustration, and their fear. | ||
| One constituent who spent his entire career with the Department of Health and Human Services said he's experienced several presidential transitions, but none as demeaning and demoralizing as this one's. | ||
| Once committed to a full career in public service, he now wakes up daily, dreading the new abuse and attacks he and his colleagues will face. | ||
| Let us be clear: federal workers are not the problem. | ||
| They are part of the solution. | ||
| They don't make decisions based on political whim. | ||
| They don't serve a single master and his billionaire friends. | ||
| They serve the people of this country. | ||
| The American people deserve a government that works for them, not against them. | ||
| To all the federal employees in Hawaii and across this country, we see you, we hear you, and we'll fight to protect you. | ||
| Thank you for your dedication and for your service. | ||
| You are the quiet force that keeps our nation strong. | ||
|
Protecting Federal Workers
00:06:57
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|
unidentified
|
You've always had our back. | |
| Now it's time we have yours. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I now yield two minutes to Representative Dexter of Oregon. | ||
| Thank you to the Congressman from Maryland for making this opportunity. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise as a proud member of the Congressional Labor Caucus in support of our federal workers today. | ||
| I introduced new legislation earlier today to protect federal workers who stand up against Elon Musk's grotesque seizure of critical government agencies. | ||
| My bill, the Stop Musk Act, would prevent retaliation against any federal employee who resists illegal or unconstitutional efforts led by Elon Musk. | ||
| In the last week alone, Musk has seized control of the U.S. Department of Treasury's payment system, exposing Oregonians' personal financial information, has shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, putting the lives of millions of people at risk, and threatened the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, otherwise known as NOAA, undermining our work to combat the climate crisis. | ||
| And this is just the beginning. | ||
| Under this legislation, federal employees who resist, circumvent, or prevent Musk's illegal and unconstitutional takeover would be protected against retaliation for their efforts to fight back. | ||
| The world's richest man should not have the power to unilaterally dismantle the federal government and the critical services it provides Oregonians. | ||
| Federal employees are at the forefront of fighting Elon Musk's power grab, and we must protect them. | ||
| All week, I, like all my colleagues, have been hearing from constituents who are demanding action. | ||
| Let me be clear: we will use every legislative, judicial, and public pressure tactic to stop Musk's takeover and protect our workers. | ||
| This multi-front battle will be fought in the courts, the halls of Congress, and in the public sphere. | ||
| We must stay loud, we must stand tight, and we must press on. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| How much time do I have remaining? | ||
| The gentleman has two and a half minutes remaining. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I just would like to say that a few hours ago, I stood with members of unions, employees at the Department of Labor, and people walking down the street who saw what we were doing and wanted to join in and support the cause. | ||
| And as I stood out there and spoke in favor of the efforts that they were making to be heard, to protect their jobs and protect their ability to work for the American people, it reminded me of my father, who had worked in that same building four decades ago until he was forced out during the Reagan administration. | ||
| To my colleagues who are there today, I want to thank them for joining. | ||
| To the employees who were out there, I want to say this. | ||
| I lived through what you are going through right now, and I understand. | ||
| And for that reason, I recommit myself to working hard to protect your rights, to make sure that you don't get forced out of government, even though you haven't done anything wrong. | ||
| You got the experience and the expertise to do the work that the American people need, and we want to make sure that you have a chance to continue to do that. | ||
| And I want to thank the Congressional Labor Caucus as well for standing up and making sure that we continue to fight here in Congress to protect their rights. | ||
| And lastly, I'd like to thank all of those people out there, whether they're union members or attorneys or employees who are fighting every day to get their point across and make sure that we're heard by the Trump administration. | ||
| Thank you for what you're doing. | ||
| And I want to urge you to continue to do the work that you're doing because it's making a difference. | ||
| The Trump administration has made many moves. | ||
| Many of them have been, in my view, unlawful and unconstitutional. | ||
| And these, especially the ones that are impacting the employee rights that these government employees have earned over the decades, like my father, who joined the Department of Labor after his service in the Air Force, they deserve to be treated fairly with respect and with recognition of the legal rights that they deserve to have. | ||
| So with that, I want to thank the members of the Congressional Labor Caucus and yield back the balance of my time. | ||
| Members are reminded to refrain from engaging in personalities towards the President and to direct the remarks to the Chair. | ||
| Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3rd, 2025, the gentleman from California, Mr. LaMafa, is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I appreciate the time and the opportunity to shed the light on several subjects that we could cover here tonight. | ||
| And indeed, much going on and much to be excited about as well. | ||
| In my home state of California, we have several issues I'd like to touch upon. | ||
| It will have to do with water, water supply, fire and forestry, and some rebuilding that will need to be done around our state. | ||
| But my colleague also here tonight has joined me, and I would like to yield him as much time as he'd like to consume. | ||
| My good friend Glenn Grothman from Wisconsin will he's been a strong leader on immigration and more specifically controlling our border and also sticking up for families in this country of the values it's going to take to have strong families and maintain the values that really were founding values and the one that are going to make our country strong. | ||
| So I appreciate his work and his articulation on that. | ||
| So I yield to my colleague. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| There has been so much in the news in the last two weeks it's hard to know where to start. | ||
| I'd like to cover a couple issues that the mainstream media has picked up on, though perhaps not done the best job on covering. | ||
| And one issue that made a huge difference in the lives of the most vulnerable of us, that Donald Trump weighed in not by doing something, but by allowing an administrative role to die. | ||
|
Government Program Blockers
00:14:08
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| The first great victory for Donald Trump, which hasn't been reported out there, concerns the effort by the Biden administration, which ran out of time, to get rid of what they call 14C certificates. | ||
| Everybody may be familiar with Light manufacturing or packaging done in their district by people who are handicapped. | ||
| Maybe they have spina bifida, maybe they have Down syndrome. | ||
| But in any event, for this reason, they are not able to be profitably employed for above minimum wage or minimum wage dollars. | ||
| And each state does it a little bit differently, but the states make an estimate of what that employee is worth, and maybe they're paid $5 an hour for, like I said, light manufacturing or packaging. | ||
| If you tour these facilities, and I think every congressman ought to tour them at least once, it is one of the most enjoyable things you can do because you will find the people who have been dealt a difficult lot on life, | ||
| so happy to see you, so happy to see what they're doing with you, so happy to make friends with the other employees there, both other employees who have different abilities and other employees who are usually in a supervisory capacity. | ||
| These are also a godsend to the parents or guardians of these folks, and that in normal circumstances they have to worry when the guardians or parents die off, what type of friends, what type of social life they will have. | ||
| But because they frequently stay in these facilities or work in these facilities for 20 or 30 or 40 years, they develop lifelong friendships, which are so important for these folks to have. | ||
| Now, had Donald Trump not won the election, they would have continued to work through the administrative rule process, and it's entirely possible that these sort of facilities would have been shut down by a Biden or a Harris administration. | ||
| They were working towards that. | ||
| You might say, why would anybody take away the right for these jobs for these people? | ||
| The reason is they'll say, well, if we're paying somebody $5 an hour, we're taking advantage of them. | ||
| We can't take advantage of them, so we'd rather have them shut down. | ||
| How horrible. | ||
| To the most vulnerable members of our society, Joe Biden was prepared to say, if you want to work here for $5 an hour, tough. | ||
| We're going to close that facility or we'll leave the facility open, but you'll no longer be able to work. | ||
| You'll no longer have the pride of being able to get a paycheck and spending it on clothes for yourself or gifts for your parents, what have you. | ||
| I would like to thank President Trump for not continuing with that administrative rule. | ||
| And at least we know probably for the next four years, the jobs of these folks, which means so much to them, more to them than I would say the average citizen in our society. | ||
| I'd like to say thank you, President Trump, for allowing the most vulnerable members of a society to have the choice to continue to work for, in some cases, sub-minimum wage, but have the enjoyment of that independence. | ||
| And I should point out that almost all the people I'm talking about have some SSI payment in addition to that, so it's not like they're expected to pay a mortgage with their $5 an hour job. | ||
| They get other governmental assistance as well. | ||
| So I know there are a lot of other things we've been grateful for President Trump for the last couple weeks for, but for keeping the 14C certificates, that is a tremendous victory for the most vulnerable of us. | ||
| And I don't think it would have happened if President Trump didn't get elected. | ||
| Now, the next thing to look at, we've heard people talk about Elon Musk and what he did at US, what he wants to do to USAID. | ||
| First of all, I'd like to point out that the reason people are mad at Elon Musk, who can't do anything on his own, who all he can do is advise the president. | ||
| But the reason they're mad at him is horror of horrors. | ||
| He thought there was a government program that wasn't necessary. | ||
| That's not the way things worked here. | ||
| Nobody believes that if Elon Musk had Donald Trump's ear and came out for more preschool, if he came out for more mental health funding, | ||
| if he came out for expanded government daycare, the folks on the other side of this aisle would be praising Elon Musk for being a forward-looking person and for doing what people on that side of the aisle want to do, which is either expand old programs or come up with new government programs. | ||
| And quite frankly, as long as I've been here, I'm sure there must be some government program that ended, but I can't think of any. | ||
| Okay, so Elon Musk is under attack for actually suggesting a government program is unnecessary. | ||
| I praise him for that. | ||
| There is nothing wrong with him advising President Trump. | ||
| I don't know whether you folks would feel better if they gave him a position and a $100,000 a year salary. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But it is refreshing that some of the most successful people in America can use their mind, their brains, to advise President Trump on how to be a good president. | ||
| And it's particularly good to have somebody outside this building who is not used to the swamp type mentality of we never under any circumstances get rid of a program. | ||
| The only question is whether we're going to expand it 2% or 8%. | ||
| It's great to have a friend who can look at some programs and say, hey, maybe this program sounded good when we first created it in 1963 or whatever, but it hasn't worked up to snuff. | ||
| And of course, I agree with Elon Musk that some of the money spent on these programs is even a moral stain on the United States of America, particularly a moral stain, because we are spending money in other countries. | ||
| When we talk about gender-affirming care, that's where they give puberty blockers to young children. | ||
| I think it's horrific that we would give puberty blockers to a 12- or 13-year-old in America. | ||
| But America is supposed to be the light onto the world. | ||
| Can you imagine the United States weighing in and giving gender-affirming care to the poor little children in Guatemala? | ||
| I mean, how bad can we be? | ||
| How embarrassing can we be? | ||
| That's what we do with the incredible amount of wealth that this country has been given. | ||
| We take our wealth and try to screw up, what I would say screw up, the poor little children of Guatemala. | ||
| I'm glad Elon Musk came across this program. | ||
| And I'm glad, upon people pointing out what's in the program, that Donald Trump, when he heard about it, full bore, put his foot on the brake and said, if the people running this program are spending the money that way, we got to stop spending money right away and look a little bit further into the program. | ||
| But in any event, what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask people on that side of the aisle is take an honest look at yourself. | ||
| If Elon Musk announced that we needed more preschool, if Elon Musk announced we were going to need more mental health with where the mental health professions are today in favor of these puberty blockers and that sort of thing, would you really be concerned that he's advising President Trump? | ||
| Or would you be praising him? | ||
| And would the Washington Post and New York Times be praising Elon Musk for being open-minded and ignoring the hide-bound conservative members of the Republican Party? | ||
| Of course they'd be praising him. | ||
| The only reason they question whether or not he can advise President Trump is because they don't like for almost the first time, first time I've been here, that we genuinely are seeing a government program begin to end, hopefully. | ||
| The third thing I'll point out, President Trump signed a bill today dealing with men and women's sports. | ||
| It was a good bill. | ||
| There are not a whole lot of men participating in women's sports around the country, but it's certainly a little weird that when one sets up a swimming tournament or a track meet or something where it's very clear we have the men's event and the women's event that under any circumstances we take a man and say, well, just because you feel like a woman today, we're going to pretend you're a woman. | ||
| I think that's unusual enough. | ||
| But I'm going to ask, and President Trump has had executive orders on this topic as well. | ||
| I'm going to hope that we're able to do something statutorily about getting rid of government funding for programs that do things like give surgeries on minors, | ||
| give puberty blockers on minors, things that there are no shortage of intelligent people who will say this is damaging. | ||
| Not to mention there are a huge number of people with just plain common sense who realize that you don't try to engage in irrevocable medical procedures with 14 or 15 years. | ||
| As a matter of fact, I would even say it's medically inexcusable to engage in these procedures in people who are 24 or 25 years old. | ||
| After all, in this country, you know, can't buy a beer until you're 21 years old, can't buy a cigarette until you're 21 years old. | ||
| And I would think any medical professional with any morality, I mean, I realize they're making money on this thing, but with any morality would harm these young people. | ||
| So it's my hope that my leadership team, now that we took care of the ridiculous idea that men should be able to pick whether they're men or women, depending upon, I guess, whether there's a track meet that day. | ||
| I hope our leadership team begins to go after these so-called medical professionals who are doing irrevocable. damage either with drugs or with surgeries on people under 18. | ||
| And quite frankly, it ought to be barred for people under age 21. | ||
| And quite frankly, the medical society ought to, on their own, make it clear that it's medical malpractice to do this sort of thing, even on a 25 or 26-year-old, because we all know very well that the way we feel about things when we're 20 or 24 or 25 is frequently very difficult or very different the way we feel about things when we're 30 years old. | ||
| So I'd like to thank the gentleman from California for allowing me to address these issues. | ||
| And remember, folks out there, if you've got a ward or a child who worked for a, what used to be called a sheltered workshop, President Trump kept your ward or child employed the way they want to. | ||
| But in any event, thank you again, Mr. Lamava. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I appreciate my colleague Mr. Grothman on that and sticking up for families and for in other conversations on sensible border policy that's going to keep our country safe and strong and our employees of this country more likely to be employed. | ||
|
Riley Gaines: Standing Up Against Unfairness
00:02:54
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| So it's appreciated. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all members may have five legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the topic of this special order. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Without objection, that is granted. | |
| All right. | ||
| And picking on a little bit on what Mr. Grossman was saying here a moment ago, I'd like to point out as well, I think just a real national hero, heroine, who's a young woman who's really stepped up out of necessity, but also out of a strong desire to do the right thing and have the right thing. | ||
| And I'm talking about Riley Gaines, a collegiate swimmer who had swam so successfully, did much, much winning at the University of Kentucky. | ||
| She's the one that also faced in competition, had to face off against basically a 6'4 male and was denied opportunities, denied recognition because of the unfairness and balance of girls and women in their sports having to face boys and men in their sports, | ||
| as well as all the discomfort from shared changing areas and the unfairness of losing out on the ability to win competitions where that might put them in a position to win medals that might ultimately win them a scholarship from high school into college or put them in a national competition or an international competition if you're at the collegiate level or at the Olympic level. | ||
| And we saw some horrific things on my view in this the last last Olympics where the young woman who was in female boxing there, I believe she was from Italy, how humiliated she was, she had to face basically a male boxer with a clear physical advantage And just get the heck beat out of her in the process. | ||
| And one of the saddest things I've seen in a long time was her collapsing on her knees just in tears at that Olympic event afterwards because of the unfairness of it all and how hard she trained for years and years and years to be in that position, only to have, in this case, the Olympic committee say, ah, we'll let anybody in against competing against the women in this case. | ||
| So, but Riley Gaines, I know her personally and just find her to be a dynamic young woman who stands up for the right things. | ||
| She didn't ask for this position. | ||
| She was a competitor and doing her thing. | ||
|
Choice to Work Efficiently
00:07:26
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| She was thrust into this position because she saw what needed to be done, what needed to be made right on this, and sticking up for other women and girls in their sports and in their other domains. | ||
| And so she's gotten a lot of good work done, including today the presidential declaration that this would no longer go on in things in this country, especially things that the federal government might have involvement or sanction in. | ||
| So congratulations to her and appreciation to President Trump for straightening things back out a little bit, putting some common sense back into that area. | ||
| So with that, also, I hear the debate here tonight on federal workers and the opportunity that has been put in place here for if they seek and so choose, and there's the word choose, choice, to take advantage of an opportunity if the job they're in is not meeting where they want to be, or you might see a reduction in some of these government programs and some of these government agencies. | ||
| It's a pretty generous exit of eight months of pay and such to retire from that job or move on that one and go seek other opportunities. | ||
| We hear a lot of caterwauling about that tonight, about I guess the essentialness of every single government agency and every single worker. | ||
| Now, there's plenty of really good workers willing to work hard and do a good job in so many of our federal agencies, but there's also quite a few that aren't as motivated. | ||
| And we see this battle over them returning to work as is being mandated. | ||
| We saw President Biden just before leaving office trying to give out super generous contracts and extend the term of not having to be at the workplace based still upon basically the COVID era and getting used to that concept and way of doing things. | ||
| It's proper for people to show up to work. | ||
| It's essential. | ||
| Around here, we had proxy voting and our committees were not meeting in person. | ||
| And Doug Ghana, it's essential in this place that we sit across from each other, we sit next to each other and have these real debates in front of the American public to allow true debate, true public debate on the things that are going to affect over 300 million Americans on the decisions made here. | ||
| So I'm certainly glad we got rid of proxy voting here and got back to work doing things after the COVID era finally ended and a lot of manipulation that happened in that era to make things, you know, still we haven't completely recovered in our workforce and the attitudes, I think, of certain people that feel like they're entitled to just having the government send them checks and the attitude of not having to show up to work. | ||
| We've found that certain people can do a certain amount of work for home, but the battle here in town where some really high percentage, I've heard his number as high as 92. | ||
| I don't know if it's accurate or not. | ||
| 92% aren't showing up here. | ||
| Some of these buildings are almost ghost towns from the workforce not coming in there. | ||
| So yeah, this needs to be looked at. | ||
| So what is being looked at by the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, Doge, they call it, and Elon Musk, is basically saying, hey, American taxpayers, we know you work hard for what you earn and what government takes from you. | ||
| These aren't contributions, as we hear talking, these contributions, they aren't contributions. | ||
| They're compelled payments of taxes here. | ||
| You don't have a choice, or they come start taking things away from you and oxygening off your home or your car or your farm or whatever if you don't pay your taxes. | ||
| It's not voluntary. | ||
| It's not contributions, as these guys talk about. | ||
| It's not investments. | ||
| They take it from you. | ||
| So I think any taxpayer, any working person has the right to demand that government is looking at things and is it being efficient with what it's using. | ||
| And the stones they're flipping over and what they're uncovering so far with USAID and many other aspects I can't list here tonight are showing that there's. | ||
| It confirms what I think normal people know, there's a lot of money being wasted in government by, by many entities. | ||
| You know, and look at the look at the situation to Ukraine now. | ||
| Zelensky is claiming, like well, of about 177 billion dollars that's been transferred over there, he thinks only 75 billion of it actually got to him or the causes they were working on over there in Ukraine. | ||
| So what? | ||
| Where's 102 billion dollars gone? | ||
| Are these real numbers? | ||
| Let's investigate, let's find out, and that's what we need to. | ||
| That's what we need to do respectfully with tax dollars that are taken from people not voluntarily, and so every aspect of government needs to have that accountability. | ||
| It's okay to audit, it's okay to ask these questions. | ||
| It's not against something or against a certain group of people. | ||
| So when we're talking about, in this case, the opportunity for employees to find other opportunities, then what would be wrong with that if they so choose and if agencies are going to be downsized? | ||
| And you know everybody's mad at Elon Musk now, at least on that side of the aisle. | ||
| Well, when he took over Twitter, now known as X, he cleared out about 85 percent of the employees there that a lot of them are just hanging on and going for the party there. | ||
| He seems to be able to run that entity a lot more efficiently, so that should be an example for government instead of this scourge that we're hence we're hearing about. | ||
| Is that oh, it's awful, it's terrible, but we appreciate those that do the things that we as Americans ask the government agencies to do, and they do them efficiently and with cheerfulness and and remembering that the customers are the taxpayers, are the people that come to the counter and say, you know hey, I need a permit to do this or I need this or that service. | ||
| These are the customers you know. | ||
| Getting a passport, we've had horrific stories come in out of my own office about during the, the height of COVID, and such that you could hardly get anybody to process a passport for you, at least very timely, you know, in my home state of California, just a simple thing like a personalized license plate at the state level From DMV. | ||
| It takes nine months now, nine months to get a personalized plate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You know, I mean, that's a revenue generator for the state, supposedly. | ||
| So, you know, we've got to really check and see what are the attitudes of people that work and serve in government at any level, whether you're elected, whether you're hired, you know, an agency head, what have you. | ||
| And these are good conversations to have, not the catarauling we're hearing about, oh my gosh, it might be displacing somebody. | ||
| Like, well, maybe we need to have a little downsizing. | ||
| I believe we do. | ||
| So, anyway, that's that piece on that debate. | ||
| But I'm going to return back to issues going on in the West. | ||
|
Dams and Diesel: Free Power vs. CO2 Taxes
00:15:30
|
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| I am privileged to chair the Western caucus in the House here and the important issues that it has addressed over the years. | ||
| And a lot of that revolves around energy. | ||
| And I'll tell you what, the issue with energy in this country, when we've seen skyrocketing prices of all types of fuel, that has been a major inflation driver. | ||
| Really, two aspects of why we're suffering from inflation is government overspending beyond anywhere close to what revenue it was. | ||
| The new trillions we have seen as a government being spent during the COVID era and beyond, and the end of the Biden administration. | ||
| Well, we're going to have to take some medicine on that and get back to how about a concept of pre-COVID level of spending, maybe even adjusted for inflation. | ||
| Old inflation, not just massive inflation. | ||
| We have the right and the obligation to be looking at it this way. | ||
| So, inflation driven by massive government spending, eating up the pool of available currency and credit, as well as the cost of doing business driven by issues such as energy, you know, in farming, for example. | ||
| On my own farm, a couple years ago, we saw that our price of fertilizer tripled and our price of fuel doubled in that season. | ||
| So, what does that mean for a farmer like me or any other farmer growing a crop? | ||
| Well, they still have to be in the black at the end of the year, they still have to make a profit, and so those costs are going to be passed on somewhere, aren't they? | ||
| And so, that's going to always come back to the consumer, it always comes back to the taxpayer having to pay for these things. | ||
| Because, on one hand, government massive overspending here at the federal level, and things that drive inflation, such as the cost of fuel, and all the things that are related. | ||
| There is so much that depends on energy in any type of production that is going to have an impact on price. | ||
| So, take diesel fuel. | ||
| Take a food product as a farmer. | ||
| When you start out in the spring, you need fuel to start tilling the land and getting it ready for preparing a seed bed to plant that crop. | ||
| So, someone has to bring you the diesel to run your equipment. | ||
| Then, soon after, someone delivers that fertilizer, likely with the diesel vehicle, someone delivers that seed, and at that point, you've planted, and then you have irrigation of one type or another, depending on your crop. | ||
| Well, in some cases, it's going to be fuel that's required to run the pumps or electricity to run wells, fuel for lift pumps. | ||
| In some cases, you're fortunate you have gravity-fed water, like much of we do in Northern California, due to storage of water. | ||
| So, what is our energy policy? | ||
| Well, I guarantee you, under President Trump, it's going to improve, and with that, we're going to see improved prices on energy. | ||
| And that will help us to tame inflation. | ||
| And on the other side of the coin here, with the work with Elon Musk and others on the Department of Government Efficiency, prices can go down if we're not doing so much massive spending and sucking up all the credit and all the currency out there by government action. | ||
| That's a pretty good recipe. | ||
| Why don't we allow success to happen on that? | ||
| Because American people are clamoring for it. | ||
| As they've had their eyes open on what's been going on, where their tax dollars are going, I'd say to my colleagues on the other side, you might just slow down a little bit and look and see what's really happening here and how people are feeling about that, how they're thinking about it, how they felt it for several years in their wallets with inflation and wondering why I no longer have any money left over to do some of the things I want. | ||
| At the same time where there's these mandates coming down the pike in my home state of California and affecting things even nationally here, like, well, you can't buy a gas-powered vehicle anymore or diesel-powered pickup in just a few years because we want to ban them because of CO2. | ||
| Well, that's taking away choices from people. | ||
| It's giving them unaffordable alternatives, especially the more they ban and the more they drive up the cost of fuel. | ||
| In my own home state, they keep adding on new taxes for climate taxes or CO2 taxes or they have auctions for the privilege of making CO2. | ||
| Where did that come from? | ||
| That's like they devised a new currency, CO2. | ||
| I mean, so I can remind you, you've probably seen me on TV doing this several times. | ||
| But let me remind you, the composition of our atmosphere is those main components. | ||
| Right there in yellow, that's nitrogen, 78%. | ||
| Now I ask people, how much CO2 do you think there is in the atmosphere? | ||
| Most folks, you know, going about their lives, not worried about all this stuff, they say some are gas somewhere between 20 and 50 percent. | ||
| Well, nitrogen is at 78. | ||
| Here in the blue is oxygen at 21. | ||
| That adds up to 99. | ||
| Third place, here in the green, argon, 0.93 percent. | ||
| So we're already at 99.93 percent that is not CO2. | ||
| So look over here. | ||
| Here's some other trace gases that has to do with water vapor. | ||
| And there's even krypton gas up in the atmosphere. | ||
| That's 0.03. | ||
| So you come down here, this little purple stripe right here. | ||
| CO2 is 0.04%. | ||
| 0.04%. | ||
| It's practically a rounding error when you look at it on this chart. | ||
| And you would think it's an existential crisis the way John Kerry and all the others are taking their private jets over to Davos and talking about how we need to change our life. | ||
| And that the people with the Paris Accord and the World Economic Fund or others all want to make sure the United States is paying a heavy price for this. | ||
| Meanwhile, China builds more and more coal-fired power plants and does what they wish. | ||
| They're not part of that Paris Accord. | ||
| So, you know, again, a little reminder on CO2 and what that is actually going to be costing us. | ||
| So let's get back to other forms of energy here. | ||
| I'm showing you a picture of Shasta Dam. | ||
| Now, it's actually starting to fill up right now. | ||
| We're getting massive rains in Northern California. | ||
| And on Shasta Dam, they're actually not dumping the water at a high rate. | ||
| And so that makes hydroelectric power, you see, coming out, it actually comes from the bottom of the dam is where the hydro plant is. | ||
| Here, this is a that's a different form of spilling there that comes out of the spillway when they feel like they have an excess. | ||
| So hydroelectric power, if you want to play the CO2 game for a moment, is CO2-free power. | ||
| So it's available for 24-7. | ||
| As long as you've got water behind the dam, you can generate that CO2-free power. | ||
| It's reliable. | ||
| You don't have to wait for the sun to come up to hit your solar panels or the clouds to go away, the rain to go away, or the wind to come up to blow your windmill. | ||
| So what's happening in Northern California? | ||
| Well, recently they decided, after many years, to tear down, this is kind of related to that subject, four dams on the Klamath River. | ||
| Now, you see some of the Klamath system here that helps transfer water to agriculture and other needs and wildlife as well. | ||
| They tore them down, took down four dams that produce hydroelectric power. | ||
| The CO2-free power everybody thinks they want. | ||
| Tore them down. | ||
| And guess what's happening now? | ||
| Because they're getting a lot of rain in the area. | ||
| We're actually getting flooding in certain areas. | ||
| And we will get more flooding with even greater amount of rain because we don't have the dams anymore as a tool. | ||
| All ostensibly to help a fish population go up and down the Klamath River. | ||
| Well, the flaw in that thinking is that the Klamath Lake is actually a system that is based on a very shallow, rather warm lake up here that feeds the rest of the system here that is not really the best for the salmon that they're talking about. | ||
| But we gloss over that because we just want to tear the dams out and score a win. | ||
| Well, they got their way, they scored them, and now the whole basin here is being affected. | ||
| The river system is being affected by where there used to be water, and now you're getting sloughing, you're getting the people that live along the area, their property is now worth a lot less, all because of, I think, fraudulent environmental claims that really have never been proven. | ||
| And so, what's some of the other effects of watching those dams be torn out? | ||
| The initial happening was dead fish, ostensibly four fish. | ||
| When they removed those dams, there was a great concentration of silt that had built up behind them over 50, 60, 100 years, depending on the age of which of the four dams. | ||
| And so, we had this massive kill of this and a whole bunch of other wildlife up and down the river as that silt is now being pushed the 170 or so miles it is out to the ocean. | ||
| So, these salmon live on a three-year cycle. | ||
| So, if this silt doesn't wash all the way out to the sea in that three-year period, what does that mean long-term for salmon populations? | ||
| Will they die off as all the different cycles of salmon will be gone? | ||
| So, here's the dead fish. | ||
| They had dead deer out there getting trapped in this silt. | ||
| All sorts of wildlife, turtles, you name it. | ||
| But, in the name of the environment, putting our heads back or pinning our ears back and just going, they tore the dams out anyway. | ||
| And they have their sites on more. | ||
| One called Lake Pillsbury in Mendocino County, which a lot of people rely on for drinking water as well as agricultural water. | ||
| And it used to be a power generator in that area as well. | ||
| But the utility decided it's not worth the fight anymore, so they've abandoned it. | ||
| And if they get their way, it will be torred out soon, too. | ||
| So, you know, it's just one losing combination after another on this, all in the name of the environment, and an utter loser for the people. | ||
| Those tear out of the Klamath dams cost the people $450 million to remove those. | ||
| $250 million of it came from a state water bond. | ||
| Now, the rest of the bond is supposed to be actually building water supply, including the sites reservoir I can talk to you about here in a little bit. | ||
| And another 200 million came from the ratepayers of Pacific Corps, where they were charged a surcharge to put money aside for the dam removal so the company could skate out of there without any real liability on the dams they owned. | ||
| So that was the honey deal that was put together for that. | ||
| So when I come back to this picture of Shasta Dam here, when the water is not being run through the turbines at the bottom of the dam or like the one at Lake Oroville, then you've missed out on opportunity in generating low-cost, highly reliable, CO2-free power. | ||
| So Shasta Dam isn't currently doing that right now, but Lake Oroville, nearby, also in my district in Northern California, is dumping water. | ||
| And I understand the Army Corps of Engineers has a goal of making sure there's enough storage to make up for mass amounts of rain. | ||
| And indeed, we've gotten a lot of rain lately. | ||
| Shasta Dam had a peak inflow of 120,000 cubic feet per second. | ||
| I think it was yesterday, and Oroville, I think, peaked at about 107,000 cubic feet per second. | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| Both of those dams have still a mass amount of space behind them. | ||
| Oroville, I think it's 400,000 more acre-feet of space, maybe 450,000. | ||
| And Shasta Dam is about still 500,000 acre-feet of space. | ||
| And so this storm is going to end mostly, I think, tomorrow. | ||
| And at that point, those numbers, they've already tailed off from those peaks, I said, in the 100,000s. | ||
| Each of them are down now about 50 to 60,000 CFS coming in. | ||
| And so those numbers will continue to tail off as the rain stops. | ||
| And so we'll have a situation where, yeah, we've got a good influx of water that's going to help fill the lakes. | ||
| As I said, they're each still far from their goal of being full. | ||
| And when you recall that we went nearly zero for January on rainfall in Northern California, we got some on the very last day. | ||
| And we're going to expect that we can count on filling these lakes in February or March. | ||
| April 1 is kind of the magic date where they relieve the flood control mandate on that and allow the lakes to fill up more than their action level, which is which those numbers are being caught up to now and maybe slightly exceeded. | ||
| The thing is, they're quick to want to dump water. | ||
| And yeah, they're scared of this big storm right now. | ||
| But it has just kind of brought it up to par, you know. | ||
| And it's going to put us in a good position to be able to get the lakes full by the time May and June rolls around. | ||
| And there's nothing to say that they can't let water out a little at a time, should it look like it'll get too full. | ||
| But the haste, in my view, and it's my opinion, to let the water out, I think they want to bump Oroville up to 50,000. | ||
| I think currently it's 33,000 of CFS going out. | ||
| They want to bump it up to 50, which just isn't the greatest for people downriver at that level. | ||
| They could just keep it at a steady 20 or 30 for a little while, and then when the storm ends and they see the inflow has stopped, maybe they can just take a time out and see forecasting with the weather. | ||
| We can watch the news and have a pretty good read on what the weather is going to be. | ||
| But the Army Corps of Engineers is still using 50-year-old manuals from the 70s on how they want to plan the flood control aspects of the storage of these lakes. | ||
| 50-year-old manuals. | ||
| And they say, well, we're updating them. | ||
| Like, well, when will they be updated? | ||
| And so we can use dynamic scoring, so to speak, on how weather is going to be predicted. | ||
| And, you know, can we manage the lake in a way that, well, we don't see much weather happening in the next two weeks, so we don't really need to let water out in February or March or what have you. | ||
| Let's let it build up. | ||
| No, they're not allowing themselves to use that. | ||
| They're still studying. | ||
| They're still in the back room studying and working on updating the manuals. | ||
| And they say, we'll have it in two or three more years. | ||
| Well, that's frustrating, man, because watch what happens when people don't get the water they need in the San Joaquin Valley to grow the amazing crops that we have in this state. | ||
|
Managing Forests for Water Recharge
00:15:42
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| I show you this poster quite a bit on these floor talks here of what California grows. | ||
| It's here somewhere. | ||
| Anyway, when we don't have the water to do this stuff, here we go. | ||
| You don't get this stuff from California. | ||
| And so when you see that over 90%, even 100% of some of these products are grown in California, are you going to import them somewhere else? | ||
| At what quality? | ||
| At what price? | ||
| At what continuity? | ||
| Or can we have them come from the state? | ||
| Because we actually do have the water supply in the north to supply the whole state. | ||
| You know, some people say, well, Doug, are you going to send all the, you know, my northern California neighbors sometimes, you're going to send all the water south? | ||
| What's wrong with you? | ||
| We have plenty of water if we would store it, if we would add to the Shasta Dam. | ||
| You know, we have the opportunity to raise Shasta Dam 18 feet, 600,000 more acre-feet of storage, and also the ability to not have to release water quite as quickly if they get to that point. | ||
| Now, you've got to see the water chugging down the Sacramento River without the releases. | ||
| There's a lot of water coming in. | ||
| Okay, we get that. | ||
| But that's what these structures are for, is to take that ebb and flow, so to speak, that be that rubber band. | ||
| That's what dams are good for. | ||
| That's why they're seeing flooding on the Klamath in areas because they took the dams out and they lost the hydroelectric power in the process. | ||
| So we're talking about how much water is getting away from us that could be generating power that could go for crops, growing crops in Northern California and Central California. | ||
| Indeed, the breadbasket that I just showed you on those. | ||
| Here's a more updated poster I have now of what's been happening. | ||
| The water year, they score it from October 1 until the following September 30. | ||
| So this is starting October of 23, the water year up to so far a little earlier in January when we had this information. | ||
| So it's about a year and a quarter of flow. | ||
| So what makes me crazy is that we're not taking advantage right now of the water that's flowing out of Lake Oroville or is coming out south of Lake Shasta and flooding the Delta. | ||
| Right here, during this year and a quarter period that's almost current right now, we have a number of 29 million acre feet came into the Delta. | ||
| 29 million acre feet. | ||
| Now combined, Lake Oroville, Lake Shasta hold 8 million acre feet. | ||
| San Luis Reservoir holds about 2 million acre feet. | ||
| Nearby you have New Milonas, which is around 2 million. | ||
| Trinity Lake I think is 2.2 million. | ||
| Lake Folsom is a number I think 800,000 if I remember correctly. | ||
| So you would fill all those lakes one time with this year and a quarter worth of flow that comes into the Delta. | ||
| So that's what comes in. | ||
| So okay, well certainly we're using some of that water and moving that other places because we're smart and we can design things. | ||
| We have the engineers for that. | ||
| We used to have a vision for that when we built the Central Valley Project in the 30s. | ||
| And the state water project in the 60s, well, their vision did put away a lot of water and they had a vision for even more, but they quit building it because the population didn't really demand it at the time back in the 30s or the 60s or whatever. | ||
| Should have built it because you can't build it now because of all the environmental nonsense. | ||
| But how much did we save? | ||
| 29 million in. | ||
| 22 million went out to the Pacific Ocean and turned into salt water. | ||
| Some people say like, well, we should build some desal plants along the coast. | ||
| Yeah, we could do that. | ||
| Certain areas that might be strategically smart. | ||
| Guess what happened? | ||
| A project called Poseidon, I think in Huntington Beach, one of the beach towns in Southern California. | ||
| They fought for 20 years trying to meet every mandate, every hoop to jump through on what it would take to get a permit for the California Coastal Commission and others on that. | ||
| They spent millions of dollars to build that decel plant down there. | ||
| As I said, they jumped through every hoop and answered every question. | ||
| And we're told after 20 years, no, we're not going to permit you. | ||
| So there you go on your decel. | ||
| So where do you want the water to come from anybody for anybody for any purpose? | ||
| Well, it could come from right here, this 22 million we're wasting. | ||
| So what's happening right now? | ||
| The mass inflows coming down Sacramento River and Fed River and all these other areas. | ||
| And I'd like to see what the delta inflows are today. | ||
| They're probably pretty amazing. | ||
| There's two sets of pumps at the south end of the delta, a federal set and a state set. | ||
| President Trump has seen to it through the Bureau of Reclamation that the federal pumps are running pretty strong, somewhere around 90-91% of capacity. | ||
| State pumps are running at a much lower level, somewhere around 20-25%. | ||
| It oscillates between that. | ||
| Why don't they run in at 100% and take advantage of the opportunity to fill San Luis Reservoir, which is only three-quarters full right now, or put water in the aqueduct or put even more into the areas that water can be pooling in the Central Valley and doing groundwater recharge. | ||
| I was just told today we've seen some groundwater recharge last year due to some of those positive efforts. | ||
| And that's a tough deal for those folks down there because they've had overdrafts due to agriculture doing to have their due to having their surface water taken away from these projects because it's going out to the ocean for a fish deal. | ||
| So they had to run their wells. | ||
| Maybe they ran them too much. | ||
| So we've had subsidence where the land goes down. | ||
| It depresses somewhat. | ||
| You even see that on the canals going through there. | ||
| So we can be doing recharge right now, and the governor has moved in the direction of allowing more recharge. | ||
| Some reason they have to get a permit for that every year. | ||
| You know, I talked to his team about that, said, why don't we just have the permits ready to go every year so we don't have to wait and lose time on that? | ||
| So maybe there'll be a precedent going forward. | ||
| So groundwater recharge, filling the aqueducts in the Southern California reservoirs that aren't full. | ||
| For example, this one, which was empty when the fire broke out in Pacific Palisades, is a San Inez Reservoir. | ||
| My understanding of it is that done correctly, the aqueducts could supply some of the higher lakes. | ||
| I think Lake Kachuma, and someone can straighten me out if I'm wrong on this, but through the domino effect, water, surface water, I believe, could make it here. | ||
| I know they do fill this with well waters also, but the lake was empty because they had to fix a cover over it. | ||
| They emptied it last February and haven't gotten around to doing the repair or finished the job. | ||
| So it sat empty, 117 million gallons of water, which is about 40 acre feet, which would have helped keep the hydrants full instead of just a few hours as they're relying on three 1 million gallon tanks instead of 117 million. | ||
| It lasted a few hours down there as they were valiantly trying to fight fire and palisades and other areas. | ||
| They could have had several days worth of water had that been full. | ||
| So was it bad planning? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Bureaucracy. | ||
| And the crazy thing was that the LA Fire Department didn't even know, they didn't have the knowledge that it was empty. | ||
| So instead, burned out community because they didn't have everything they needed to be able to fight that fire the way they could. | ||
| Could they have beat it all? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| They had a lot of wind to beat. | ||
| And you know, the firefighters fought valiantly and people did a lot they could, but certainly having that extra water supply could not have hurt. | ||
| I know I've seen plenty of that in my own Northern California area with communities just disappearing due to fire. | ||
| And this falls more to forest management, land management. | ||
| Down in Southern California, they had a brush removal program in the areas adjacent and above those communities that burned that they suspended. | ||
| The brush is the fuel that allowed the fire, driven by high wind, to come all the way to the edge of town and burn through the town. | ||
| The brush removal, maybe it wouldn't be the be-all end-all on that, but it sure would have helped. | ||
| It sure would have given more of a fighting chance. | ||
| And that's what it is. | ||
| We're doing forest management, especially focusing around our cities to thin the product, thin the trees and such to a point where that a fire coming high speed from a distance hit that because the trees are thin enough and spread out enough that it hits the ground and slows down and you have a chance to save whatever town it is. | ||
| We lost a town of Paradise. | ||
| Partly because of that, we've lost a town called Greenville in Plumas County, another one next door called Canyon Dam above my hometown of Oroville, California. | ||
| Lost town Berry Creek, other adjacent areas there due to fire after fire after fire because of lack of management. | ||
| The one above Oroville, Berry Creek, they had funding lined up to do some forest thinning around there, a grant the local folks were going to do. | ||
| And because there was an 18-month or longer process to get the permits to do something, this is not something new either. | ||
| This isn't new under the sun of thinning forests and managing them. | ||
| But they didn't get it done. | ||
| So those areas burn. | ||
| They burned out these towns. | ||
| Talk to the cattle rancher there, what that looked like for him. | ||
| A family had been farming or ranching and grazing up in those forested areas for many, many generations and decades. | ||
| Look it up on the internet. | ||
| Read his column. | ||
| A man named David Daly, D-A-L-E-Y. | ||
| Look at his column. | ||
| Look at the emotion. | ||
| Look at what it meant to him on that. | ||
| He wrote a really good column on that two, three years ago on what that means. | ||
| You want to talk about a real human story on that and a real thing that affects a community and all that. | ||
| I'd ask you to look that up. | ||
| David Daly, go search that and find his column and see what lack of forest management meant to him and the burned out, the carcasses of the cattle that he and his family are run there, as well as all the other wildlife, the cougars, the raccoons, you name it. | ||
| This happens to everybody. | ||
| And then the next effect of that after the fire is that when the rain does come, it's going to wash all this ash, wash all this mud down into the brooks and the creeks and the rivers and the streams and eventually into in this area Lake Oroville, which is being a key part of the state water project supplies water to 20 million Californians. | ||
| So it isn't just, hey, you guys way up there in the sticks, you don't matter, you know, whatever. | ||
| No, that has an effect on pretty much the whole state that draws that water supply because we aren't doing a simple thing like something that's not new under the sun of managing forests properly. | ||
| Well, they're going to clear-cut everything. | ||
| That's what they want to do. | ||
| Big timber, big lumber companies want to. | ||
| No, it isn't. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| Pay attention. | ||
| Dig in on this. | ||
| These folks that do it on their private land, they have an 80-100-year plan of how they harvest, manage, and plant it back. | ||
| And that's what we need to have similarly on federal lands or your other government-owned lands, which I'm reminded, they aren't government-owned. | ||
| They're people-owned. | ||
| The government's supposed to be the steward of them. | ||
| And it's not being a steward. | ||
| You know, Forest Service, they're way behind, way behind the eight ball. | ||
| They have 193 million acres under their purview. | ||
| And if they're managing 2 million of that per year, that's only 1%, which means it'll take 100 years to get over all of it. | ||
| So hopefully, they're accelerating the process. | ||
| That's what we're trying to cause them to do here. | ||
| But when they count burned-out land sometimes as treated acres, like, well, you can just burn everything, I guess, and have it call, check the box and say it's treated. | ||
| That's nonsense. | ||
| That's terrible for everybody. | ||
| The asset the timber is, which doesn't always get accounted for for its value, though they'll talk about what the cost of the firefighting was or the cost of the buildings and towns that are burned out. | ||
| Do we ever get to see what the value is of the actual timber itself? | ||
| So, what we have isn't working. | ||
| It's not all that successful with the management of these forested lands, the management of the water supply, and the ability we have to do so much better. | ||
| And it doesn't cause environmental harm. | ||
| We have excess water for much of the year going out the delta and other areas that could be captured and put to good people use. | ||
| People still need the food, they still need these products. | ||
| We can grow them in California, or we can try and import them from South America or somewhere else and become dependent on a foreign food supply. | ||
| That's a really great idea. | ||
| And then we don't have the employment of our people. | ||
| We don't have employment of the lumberjacks in small towns I represent in Northern California or others like it in other states. | ||
| So, you have that unemployment, you have bordered-up small communities, you have all the things that go with the social aspect of people that don't have the self-worth that comes from good, honest work. | ||
| What's that get into? | ||
| You know what that gets into? | ||
| It ends up being alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence, all those things that would be restored with a strong local economy, giving products that people need anyway. | ||
| They need wood and paper products, they need food products, they need electricity to be generated, whether it's by a hydroelectric power plant or any other manner of energy that can do it. | ||
| Uranium, why aren't we doing much more with nuclear power? | ||
| CO2-free for all your CO2 scorers out there. | ||
| Why aren't we doing that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Environmentalists sue and stop over everything. | ||
| We've got a reformed Endangered Species Act, NEPA, and the California state-level CEQA to work for us once again. | ||
| These are laws that the federal level passed 50 years ago or longer. | ||
| And they've been manipulated. | ||
| They've been weaponized by courts, by judges, by environmental groups to turn into something else. | ||
| Even something as nice as a national park. | ||
| I like to point out the folks in Marin County, these farmers and ranchers there on an area called the Point Reyes Seashore Park. | ||
| Those folks came in in the early 60s and demanded they were going to bully these people off their land by eminent domain. | ||
| So they struck a deal. | ||
| Said, well, we'll sell the land to the national parks as long as we have the ability to lease it back in perpetuity, was the deal that was struck. | ||
| As long as it's the same family that is in the operation there, it was supposed to be in perpetuity. | ||
| So they struck that deal, and they thought they could live with that. | ||
| Well, not too many years later, after the weaponization of environmental laws and what's known as NEPA, a permit process, That got weaponized by environmental groups to sue the heck out of these people every time they tried to get an extension of their grazing permit. | ||
|
Elk Grazing Dispute
00:05:03
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| You know, they were trying to get in for 20 years, and then they'd say, well, we'll have to settle for five or two. | ||
| And so, for doing some of the environmental mitigation that they would be demanded of with only a two-year lease, it's pretty tough to say, like, well, I can't put half a million dollars into my sheds or my equipment or the drainage to control whatever might be coming off the dairy or the ranch. | ||
| So, they can't make the investment because they can't be assured that they'll be long enough there to do that. | ||
| So, basically, they're screwed by government and by environmental organizations. | ||
| And these are good, honorable people. | ||
| They're very compatible with the land. | ||
| They say, well, it's the tool in the elk. | ||
| We're getting affected by these cattle. | ||
| The elk and the cattle get along beautifully together. | ||
| There's many acres for them. | ||
| They graze to a level that the land can sustain, and then they move them out. | ||
| They move them to a different grazing area. | ||
| Grazing is a good thing, whether we're talking forested areas or others as fire breaks, or in this case, the Point Reyes Seashore, where these families have been disrespected and basically a gun held to their head to sign an agreement only recently to say you're going to have to leave the land. | ||
| These are good, hard-working people, and there doesn't seem to be much reward in California and some aspects of the federal government for being good, hard-working people, honest people, the ones that will pull over on the edge of the road and help you with your flat tire, make sure you're okay, like that. | ||
| What do they get? | ||
| Litigated to death. | ||
| You know, people, some of them very elderly now, that say, I just can't fight the fight anymore. | ||
| I don't have enough money. | ||
| I don't have enough will. | ||
| So, what happens? | ||
| Government wins, extreme environmental organizations win, and somebody comes in and says, Save the day, hey, we're going to buy you out there. | ||
| You'll get 15 months to be eased out of this. | ||
| So, all the employees are gone, the cattle's gone, the dairies are going to go somewhere else. | ||
| It's hard enough to run a dairy in California anymore. | ||
| They regulate that out of business. | ||
| Well, there's people that don't like dairy products, they don't like that. | ||
| They don't like that it comes from animals. | ||
| You know, a lot of wrong people are in charge. | ||
| And it's been pretty refreshing to see what the Trump administration has done to put things back on a direction here that rewards hard work, honesty, and the right way of doing things. | ||
| So, it can be kind of discouraging, very discouraging. | ||
| And for the families, the farmers, the ranchers in this Point Rhea situation right now, my heart goes out to them. | ||
| I hope we can find a solution for them because they shouldn't be getting kicked off that land. | ||
| They, in good faith, when they were bullied off that land and had to sell to the parks, otherwise lose it to eminent domain, and now been bullied off by regulations, by NEPA, by endless, endless lawsuits. | ||
| That ain't right. | ||
| That ain't America. | ||
| They're still making a product that people want and people need. | ||
| They would like to continue doing that as good stewards of the land. | ||
| Instead, they have designs like, well, we're going to have more tourism on there. | ||
| Like, well, is that as good? | ||
| I would suggest it probably isn't as good for that land. | ||
| But, yeah, they power ahead. | ||
| So, I hope maybe something can be done to rectify that and rectify a whole lot of other things that have affected rural America so much. | ||
| So, Mr. Speaker, thank you. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| The gentleman's time has expired. | ||
| Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3rd, 2025, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Schneider, for 30 minutes. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I was listening to my colleague from the other side of the aisle. | ||
| He was talking about how families want to be able to go to the grocery store and afford food for their kids. | ||
| They want to be able to put not just food on the table, but put their kids in clothes and shoes, pay for their health care, for housing. | ||
| I rise today, Mr. Speaker, to share much of the frustration and anger of our constituents watching as the new administration has come in and done a whole host of things, announced a whole litany of actions, but failed to deliver on the key promise of working to lower costs for American families. | ||
| Costs are going up. | ||
|
Focusing on Lowering Costs
00:15:37
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| In fact, you may have seen the news today. | ||
| Waffle House just announced that they are putting a 50-cent per egg surcharge because the price of eggs have gone so up, gone up so much. | ||
| In fact, in my community in Highland Park, Illinois, a dozen eggs costs $5. | ||
| A generation ago, President Clinton ran on a campaign built on a very simple axiom. | ||
| It's the economy, stupid. | ||
| While what was true in 1992 is just as true in 2024 in the last election and is true today. | ||
| The American people want their representatives working and focused on the economy. | ||
| They want us to be trying to create quality, well-paying jobs, provide more opportunities for themselves and a better future for their children. | ||
| They want us to lower costs and raise the standard of living for all Americans. | ||
| Beyond economic growth and opportunity, they want us to make sure that we're helping to keep our communities healthy and safe and that we're focused on a strong national security and a strong national defense. | ||
| That's the charge voters gave us here in Congress and gave to the new president. | ||
| And it's hard to believe that we're only two weeks into the second Trump administration and already the early onslaught of chaos, confusion, and manufactured crisis has been stunning. | ||
| It's easy to feel overwhelmed. | ||
| In fact, folks at home are telling me how they feel just this onslaught is non-stop, which I guess is the point of what the administration is trying to do. | ||
| We're going to focus tonight on a couple of issues. | ||
| I'm joined by a couple of my colleagues. | ||
| We are a part of the New Democratic Coalition. | ||
| The New Democrats are the moderate Democrats, 110 strong, who are focused on serving our people an economy that is lifting up their lives. | ||
| We're focused on lowering costs. | ||
| We're focused on making life better for all Americans. | ||
| If we look at the last couple of weeks, just three things. | ||
| I can't touch on everything, but I'll touch on three specific things. | ||
| A little more than a week ago, the administration issued a memo threatening to freeze $3 trillion of spending across the board. | ||
| It was confusing. | ||
| It had no clarity of what specifically or how specifically anything would be frozen, who would be included, who would be excluded. | ||
| Our phones started ringing off the hooks. | ||
| Preschools providing early education to our children, giving them that head start to get ahead in life, were saying they might have to close. | ||
| Programs like Meals and Wheel for Wheels by seniors were struggling. | ||
| Infrastructure projects. | ||
| In my district, a project that was decades in the making and had received a $19 million grant from the Department of Transportation, was threatened. | ||
| Health care providers didn't know what they were going to continue to do. | ||
| First responders were concerned. | ||
| There was an extraordinary outcry from across the country. | ||
| And on Monday, the administration started backtracking. | ||
| By Tuesday, they had pulled it all back, the memo back altogether. | ||
| Chaos, confusion, manufactured crisis. | ||
| Just this past weekend, President Trump announced 25% tariffs on our two most important trading partners, Mexico and Canada, as well as 10% tariffs on China. | ||
| Across the board, the Wall Street Journal issued an op-ed, the dumbest trade war in history. | ||
| This is not a Democratic rag. | ||
| This is the Wall Street Journal calling it the dumbest trade war in history. | ||
| And evidently, the President got the message because within just a couple of days, he paused the threat against our trading partners in Canada and Mexico. | ||
| And today, for the past week, our phones have been ringing off the hooks again, this time talking about the fact that an individual who didn't receive a single vote, a billionaire who controls the largest or one of the largest social media platforms, who would benefit from having access to data, classified, confidential personal data of Americans, | ||
| was in fact given unfettered access to that confidential personal information of Americans. | ||
| Their pay information, their social security numbers, health care information. | ||
| All of this is now in the hands of Elon Musk, who no one in this country voted for. | ||
| No one empowered him to try to control our government. | ||
| A man who is positioned to reap billions of dollars off the personal information of the American people and gain his own personal power is now having access to that information. | ||
| We need to make sure that this stops. | ||
| Those are just three examples of the chaos, crisis, and confusion sowed by this administration in just two weeks. | ||
| And yet none of this has focused on bringing down the cost of eggs or the cost of living for the American people. | ||
| That's why we're here tonight, calling on the administration, calling on our colleagues in Congress to work with the Democrats to work together to focus on the economy, to make life easier for all American families, to help families get ahead and lift their children up for a better future. | ||
| So now I'd like to call on some of my other colleagues. | ||
| I'm first going to yield to my friend Salud Carbajal from the great state of California. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, Chairman Snyder. | |
| I am proud to stand here as Vice Chair of the New Democrat Coalition to make it clear that we are here five weeks into this new Congress fighting to end the chaos of this new administration and get us back to what the American people elected us to do. | ||
| Lowering costs, promoting safer communities, and actually governing. | ||
| The American people elected us to tackle the cost of living, not cut public education. | ||
| The American people elected us to lower the price of groceries, not declare trade wars with allies that will raise those prices for Americans even further. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, the American people elected us to ensure their communities are protected, not give billionaires back doors into their personal data. | ||
| I want the American people to see this. | ||
| This room is empty. | ||
| The majority has gone home for tonight. | ||
| We have not even tackled one bill this whole week to deal with the high costs. | ||
| This is a co-equal branch of government. | ||
| But my colleagues seem content to give up our congressional power of the purse. | ||
| Where is the so-called party of law and order? | ||
| That party is willing to look the other way on enforcing the law, like the laws that protect funding approved by Congress into law. | ||
| The South proclaimed party of law and order is willing to let chaos reign and thousands of Americans see the funding they rely on to get frozen, their benefits put on the chopping block, and even their jobs eliminated by what? | ||
| An unelected billionaire. | ||
| My constituents are crying out for us to do something, and I want to ensure them we are doing something. | ||
| We are here, even as they get ready to turn off the lights, working to craft legislation that will block right-wing activists and the use of our power in this chamber to halt all the efforts to deny the law and promote chaos over order. | ||
| New dams are the tip of the spear. | ||
| We will fight ill-conceived tariffs, plot to raise your taxes to pay for tax cuts for who? | ||
| The richest people in our country. | ||
| Fight invasions of your privacy. | ||
| And of course, we will fight to deliver what we hear every single day. | ||
| Lower the cost of living, make our communities safer, and stop the chaos and gridlock. | ||
| Mr. Chair, I yield back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Again, I want to thank Salud Carbajal from California, and he touched on a critical thing. | ||
| The Republicans are literally trying to take money from hardworking families to pay for tax cuts for those who need it the least, for billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, or for the President's family. | ||
| The President threatened to put tariffs on our trading partners, Canada and Mexico. | ||
| That is a tax on American families. | ||
| We are not going to let it stand. | ||
| That's why the outcry is important. | ||
| That's why it's important we are here tonight. | ||
| I'm proud to yield now to dear friend from Florida, Congressman Darren Soto. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, my dear friend from Illinois, Mr. Schneider. | |
| Mr. Speaker, you may have heard this, but inflation was one of the biggest issues in this last election. | ||
| Let's go a little, take you a little ways back here. | ||
| We saw during the height of the pandemic, it caused global inflation. | ||
| Supply chains broke down, production broke down, and every country felt it, even the U.S. Inflation at one point rose as high as 9%. | ||
| But over many months and many years, and through efforts to boost production, to improve supply chains, to improve our infrastructure, to get back to normal, we saw it go down to as low as 2.4% in September of 2024. | ||
| 2.4%. | ||
| Gross groceries and housing specifically have been a challenge. | ||
| When President Trump took office, inflation was still under 3%. | ||
| Still under 3%. | ||
| Hundreds of executive orders have been signed. | ||
| Some divisive, some illegal, but few, if any, address lowering costs for the American people. | ||
| Many may have even increased costs. | ||
| First, the tariffs, chaos against our own allies. | ||
| And President Trump admitted, well, this may cause some pain for Americans. | ||
| Don't we remember he ran on lowering costs, or maybe that was just a joke to get elected? | ||
| Because now suddenly we're going to have to accept some pain because of tariffs that he's trying to impose on the American people. | ||
| Tariffs equal inflation. | ||
| Tariffs equal taxes on American consumers. | ||
| And then immigration. | ||
| You know, we had a workforce shortage for many years. | ||
| And then over time, through legal programs like temporary protective status and parole in other areas, booming states like Florida and particularly Central Florida, South Florida, and Tampa Bay benefited by these legal programs. | ||
| So when you look at housing, which there's a huge shortage, 30, 40% of the industry relies on immigrant labor. | ||
| And that's after trying to get every American we can to work to help build housing. | ||
| Also with commercial real estate, the same thing. | ||
| And so what do we see? | ||
| Food prices already starting to creep back up and housing prices, same deal. | ||
| Eggs. | ||
| Gosh, remember I can't afford eggs, bro? | ||
| That was like a huge deal during the election. | ||
| We saw eggs down to about $2 only a couple months ago. | ||
| Now $7,000, almost $8. | ||
| Back in the day was, oh, it's President Biden. | ||
| Now we have MAGA supporters going into intimate detail on the bird flu. | ||
| Funny. | ||
| Last time that happened, that wasn't the explanation at all. | ||
| It was, oh, Biden, this and that. | ||
| And now science and thoughtful answers to explain inflation that's happening under President Trump now. | ||
| And then this was the craziest thing, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| Apparently, it's dishonoring folks for us to even talk about how these policies will raise costs right up again that went down to as low as 2.4% a few months ago, still under 3% when President Trump was sworn in. | ||
| But it could get worse if the Trump tax scam 2.0 gets passed. | ||
| The Inflation Reduction Act, it allowed for prescription drug savings for all seniors under Medicare, a cap of $2,000 a year. | ||
| Most seniors were paying up until this year, $3,500 was the cap last year. | ||
| There was no cap before that, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| And they're paying $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 or more in out-of-pocket expenses. | ||
| Now, seniors won't pay more than $2,000 a year for their prescription drugs. | ||
| But if we see the majority take a sledgehammer to the IRA, that savings goes away for seniors across the nation, just when they got it. | ||
| That savings, lowering costs for our seniors, it could go away. | ||
| And then the Obamacare subsidies. | ||
| Oh my gosh, have we not seen the majority learn? | ||
| Have Republicans not learned from now? | ||
| First of all, there's no plan. | ||
| There's no alternative. | ||
| It's been over 10 years. | ||
| And by the way, since then, we've seen states like Florida have the largest Obamacare exchange in the nation. | ||
| 4.6 million Floridians from President Trump's home state, more than any other state in the Union, get their health care through Obamacare, through the ACA exchange. | ||
| Do you know what happens if the Obamacare subsidies go away, Mr. Speaker? | ||
| A family of four will see their health care increase by $8,000 to $10,000 a year. | ||
| That's a lot of eggs. | ||
| That's a lot of costs that people are going to have to shoulder that will cripple families. | ||
| And you know what else is going to happen? | ||
| Then we're going to have more people without health insurance. | ||
| And then it's going to cost taxpayers through the emergency room. | ||
| And this is not how you make America healthy again, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| It's how you make America sicker. | ||
| So why would anybody want to eliminate these health care savings? | ||
| What could possibly be so important? | ||
| Can you believe it's to cut taxes for billionaires? | ||
| So my constituents, $8,000 to $10,000 in increases in their health insurance, seniors across the nation who have a $2,000 cap on prescription drugs, they're going to have to, little old ladies who are trying to pay out of their pockets for prescription drugs. | ||
|
President Trump Inherits a Strong Economy
00:02:01
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|
unidentified
|
Our seniors, our men and our women, they're going to have to forego those savings because the top 1%, the top 0.1%, well, they need more tax cuts. | |
| Are you serious? | ||
| Is this what people voted for? | ||
| Heck no. | ||
| And the last time we saw that happen, we saw this chamber flip quicker than you could possibly imagine. | ||
| It was sad. | ||
| It didn't have to be that way. | ||
| The record is clear. | ||
| President Trump inherited a strong economy from President Biden. | ||
| I'm going to repeat that. | ||
| President Trump inherited a strong economy from President Biden. | ||
| High growth, big job numbers, inflation below 3%, 2.9% to be exact, as of the end of January. | ||
| So here's a simple measure we'll see over the next couple months. | ||
| Will costs go up or will they go down? | ||
| Will grocery prices go up or will they go down? | ||
| Will housing prices go up or will they go down? | ||
| Democrats stand ready to work in a bipartisan manner to keep our economy running strong. | ||
| This is the second closest house in the history of the nation. | ||
| There are three votes separating Democrats from Republicans in this chamber. | ||
| Actually, one vote right now because of the folks who had to go on to the Trump administration. | ||
| So we can easily work together to resolve these things, or you go it alone in some big reconciliation package for billionaires, and then we see what happens in these very easily tracked measures. | ||
| But most of all, people will see it when they want to buy a home, when they want to go to the grocery store, when they want to go on vacation down to Orlando, which we welcome everybody to come to, or if they want to buy a new car, all these things. | ||
| Americans are going to be watching. | ||
| We need to work together. | ||
| And with that, I yield back. | ||
|
New Dems Fight Inflation
00:07:24
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| Thank you. | ||
| And let me now turn it over to a colleague from the great state of Virginia, also a member of the leadership team for the New Democrat Coalition, my dear friend Jennifer McClellan. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, thank you to the chair of the New Dems Coalition, Brad Schneider, for organizing this special order hour so that we can talk about the Trump, Vance, Musk administration's erratic and senseless attacks on the federal government, their federal hiring freeze, their ill-conceived and short-sighted actions in the first two weeks, | ||
| and how they are actually going to raise costs for the American people, not lower costs for the American people. | ||
| You've heard about the tariffs that were on and then off, paused, except against China. | ||
| Before the tariffs were announced, I was meeting with local leaders across my district, from the rural southern end to the urban northern end. | ||
| My farmers were worried about the trade war that the tariffs would unleash and how it would decimate the largest industry in Virginia, which is agriculture. | ||
| The seniors across the district were worried about the impact that rescinding efforts to reduce prescription drug costs would have on their health care bills. | ||
| Other seniors were worried about how a tax on energy efficiency programs that they used to weatherize their homes and reduce their electric bills would lead to higher utility bills. | ||
| We've seen whole flocks of poultry farms, the chickens on poultry farms, having to be put down, which will impact the cost of eggs that so many people supposedly voted this election because of their worry about. | ||
| We have seen hardworking federal employees whose jobs are at risk, who fear whether or not they will receive their pension if they take this illegal offer to buy them out. | ||
| And if they read the fine print of the documents that just now are starting to be given to them, they'll find that they just might. | ||
| I don't think any of that lowers costs. | ||
| What it does is throw the American government, which so many people rely on, into chaos, grinding it to a halt. | ||
| And that was the point. | ||
| But what we're going to find is that that does not lower costs. | ||
| It hurts the American people. | ||
| And the New Democrat Coalition will fight it every step of the way. | ||
| Thank you, and I yield back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, we heard in the last half hour or so people talking about the rising cost of eggs. | ||
| They talked about the fact that there is a bird flu epidemic that is devastating our flocks. | ||
| The Centers for Disease Control is being cut by the Trump administration at a time when we need their work more than ever to try to make sure that this horrible epidemic comes to an end and costs come down for American families. | ||
| Thing is, Trump and the House Republicans are plotting cuts to a whole host of programs across our government. | ||
| Programs providing services to seniors and veterans with health care, programs feeding hungry families and their children, and more. | ||
| And all of these cuts are simply to pay for taxes, for tax cuts for their billionaire friends like Elon Musk and others. | ||
| The new Dems will continue fighting on behalf of the American people to cut inflation, to improve the lives of hardworking families, and make our communities safer and our national security stronger. | ||
| If Trump's tax on American consumers with his tariffs goes through on Canada and Mexico, American consumers are going to see a 25% increase on many essentials, as well as things like cars and appliances, just taking the trip to the grocery. | ||
| While Trump is waging war on American savings and bank accounts, the new Dems will continue to fight to lower inflation and cut costs for hardworking families. | ||
| And by giving Elon Musk and his minions unfettered access to American citizens' personal information, he is putting at risk Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, Head Start, so much other information. | ||
| The new Dems will continue to work with our colleagues in the Democratic caucus on legislation to prevent unlawful access to this information. | ||
| We are prepared to stand strong on behalf of the American people. | ||
| We are prepared to stay focused on the economy and do everything we can to make people's lives easier, to make their future and their children's future better, and to preserve our dear country. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I yield back. | ||
| Does the gentlemen have a motion? | ||
| I do. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I move that the House now adjourn. | ||
| The question is on the motion to adjourn. | ||
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Those in favor shall say aye. | |
| Those opposed, no. | ||
| The ayes have it. | ||
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The motion is adopted. | |
| Accordingly, the House stands adjourned until 10 a.m. tomorrow for morning hour debate. | ||
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The House began work on a bill to permanently classify fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances as Schedule I drugs, which have the strongest controls and penalties. | |
| Also, this week, a measure to end bans on oil and natural gas fracking. | ||
| And Speaker Mike Johnson will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Capitol Hill tomorrow. | ||
| As always, watch a live coverage of the House on C-SPAN. | ||
| Earlier today, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds and the president of the group Citizens Against Government Waste, Thomas Schatz, testified on improving government efficiency and reducing unnecessary spending. | ||
| Watch the full House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing tonight at 9 o'clock Eastern on C-SPAN on our free video app, C-SPAN Now or online at c-span.org. | ||
| Saturdays, watch American History TV's new series, First 100 Days. | ||
| We'll explore the early months of presidential administrations with historians and authors and through the C-SPAN archives. | ||
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Andrew Jackson's Vision
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We'll look at accomplishments and setbacks and examine how events impacted presidential terms and the nation up to present day. | |
| This Saturday, we'll look at the first 100 days of Andrew Jackson's presidency. | ||
| Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828 in a rematch with John Quincy Adams from the 1824 election. | ||
| Mr. Jackson came to office with a vision for the country, but his agenda was stalled by controversy. | ||
| Early issues during his term included states' rights, payment of national debt, tariffs, and treatment of Native Americans. | ||