| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
Gerrymandering's Threat to Texas
00:15:23
|
||
| They're leaders, not us choosing our voters. | ||
| They deserve congressional lines that lift up communities, not carve them apart block by block to keep one party in power forever. | ||
| Redistricting happens every 10 years. | ||
| You count the people, you draw the lines. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| But this scheme throws that bedrock principle out of the window just to protect Republicans at the cost of breaking our democracy. | ||
| You know, I served three terms in the Texas state legislature, including when we redistricted the state based on the last. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Watch the rest of this on our free C-SPAN Now video app as we take you now to the U.S. Capitol where the House is gambling in. | |
| This is live coverage on C-SPAN. | ||
| And H.R. 4275, 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 and Rule 20, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion from the gentleman from Arkansas, Mr. Hill, to suspend the rules and pass H.R. 3357 on as amended, on which the yays and nays are ordered. | ||
| The clerk will report the title. | ||
| Union calendar number 90, H.R. 3357, a bill to amend the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to require issuers with a multi-class stock structure to make certain disclosures in any proxy or consent solicitation material and for other purposes. | ||
| The question is: Will the House suspend the rules and pass the bill as amended? | ||
| Members will record their votes by electronic device. | ||
| This is a 15-minute vote. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the beginning of the first and only vote series of the day here in the House, members voting now on a bill that directs the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue rules that require companies that issue multiple classes of stocks to publicly disclose information about the relative voting power of certain shareholders. | |
| One more vote expected after this. | ||
| And while members are voting, we'll take you back to the Voting Rights Caucus press conference. | ||
| Fool each other. | ||
| What they're really after is to get to that Supreme Court and challenge the Voting Rights Act. | ||
| And then it's not just about a few maps in Texas, it's about the entire country and taking the voice of the people and assuring there's not Latinos and African Americans and women and other minorities in this capital representing the American people, the people that fit their districts. | ||
| They're trying to rig the system and we need to fight. | ||
| And we're going to fight on the streets with a loud voice, in the courtrooms, in the legislative body, and more than all, at the ballot box next cycle. | ||
| And we're going to take back the majority and we're going to fight with everything we have. | ||
| And we need to alert people, call your governor, call your senators in Texas. | ||
| I never thought as a Texan I would have a governor who would bow to a New Yorker and sell out his own Texas delegation. | ||
| Never in the history of Texas have we seen this and now we're living it. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| The next person that you're going to hear from, also a Texan from Austin, Lloyd Doggett. | ||
| Thank you very much, Mark, for your leadership on this. | ||
| I think that so many people will remember last year during his campaign, President Trump told one group that if they voted for him that time, they wouldn't need to vote again. | ||
| Well, this is part of that effort to start the next election. | ||
| It starts in Texas, but he clearly plans to extend it across America and pick up as many seats as he can with crooked lines instead of honest votes. | ||
| The stakes here are much more important than me or any individual up here. | ||
| We have the opportunity to serve briefly on behalf of our state, but what is at stake here is the future of American democracy. | ||
| Because Trump knows if we have a Democratic House, it has subpoena power. | ||
| It has the opportunity to set the agenda. | ||
| It has the opportunity to have a big say in the appropriation process, the power of the purse, which these Republicans have increasingly turned over to the White House. | ||
| So much at stake for the future of our country. | ||
| Now, when the legislature is considering this, I believe there won't be a Senate map or an Abbott map or a House map. | ||
| There will only be one map that counts, and that's the one that President Trump drew for the Republican delegation over here at the White House. | ||
| And so I believe the outcry of every Texan should be: show us the Trump map. | ||
| Show us the Trump map that Trump says will replace five Democrats with five willing Republicans, because that Trump map is what ultimately they will impose. | ||
| They are hiding it today. | ||
| They are secreting it. | ||
| They hope after they go through the charade of these public hearings that they can pop it on the legislature at the last minute, spring it on them, and pass it in a matter of hours to deceive the public. | ||
| So show us the Trump map. | ||
| You are so proud of it. | ||
| You were so sure of it that you could replace five Democrats in an honest way. | ||
| Let's see your handiwork and the damage you propose to do to America to enrich and empower yourself and your family indefinitely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Lloyd, is Jasmine? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Lloyd, thank you very much. | ||
| And the next person that you're going to hear from is my next door neighbor to the south, representing Texas's 30th congressional district, Jasmine Crockett. | ||
| Thank you so much, and thank you for everyone that is here. | ||
| It's hot, so I'm going to do my best not to be repetitive, but make sure that I can bring out some additional points. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So I want to point out, because a lot of people don't fully understand what gerrymandering is, I want to give you some numbers because I want to make sure that we are clear on exactly what they're trying to do. | ||
| In this last presidential election, Donald Trump won the state of Texas by 56.2 percentage points. | ||
| But when we look at currently what the congressional maps look like, we have a total of 25 Republicans out of the 38 seats. | ||
| That represents 65% of the state. | ||
| Now, what are they proposing to do as it relates to our districts? | ||
| They want to take it up to 79% of the representation in a state in which a president only earned 56%. | ||
| Was it 56? | ||
| Yes, approximately 56%. | ||
| That is what gerrymandering is. | ||
| It's the same thing we saw in North Carolina that used to have a congressional delegation that was seven and seven. | ||
| Ultimately, Trump won that state almost by about 50%. | ||
| And we know that statewide, when we looked at those other seats, guess who won? | ||
| Democrats. | ||
| It's a 50-50 state. | ||
| But right now, the congressional delegation in North Carolina, it's 10 Republicans and four Democrats. | ||
| They're talking about they're starting to cheat. | ||
| They've been cheating. | ||
| Right now, we should be in power. | ||
| We should be the ones that are controlling the House. | ||
| We should be the ones that have the ability to subpoena Elon Musk. | ||
| We should be the ones that have the ability to subpoena these Epstein files. | ||
| Let me tell you something. | ||
| They don't want the truth to come out. | ||
| They are so far from being interested in transparency. | ||
| And frankly, we know that the Republicans have abdicated their duties as it relates to those in the House as well as the Senate. | ||
| And they know we won't back down. | ||
| So I got news for them. | ||
| As they sit up here and think that they're about to win, let me tell you, they are playing the game known as the biggest loser. | ||
| And the biggest one sits in the White House. | ||
| And baby, the baby loser right here is down there below them. | ||
| They will lose because the people are speaking out and they are showing up. | ||
| It is the same reason the Republicans don't want to go into their districts and talk to the people because they know that their policies are loser policies. | ||
| They are losers. | ||
| I'm going to tell you: if it's one group of people that's not going to lose, it is going to be us because we are going to fight this every step of the way. | ||
| And so, I want to thank those governors that have already made it clear that if you want to fight fire with fire, we got something for you. | ||
| So, thank you to Gavin Newsome, who said, play with Texas if you want to, because we can play with California. | ||
| I thank you to the governor in New Jersey who said it's not necessarily off the table. | ||
| I thank you to any Democratic governor who has tried to be fair with the lines that they have drawn. | ||
| But right now, fairness is not anything that this administration is familiar with. | ||
| The law isn't anything that this administration is familiar with. | ||
| The only thing that they know how to do is be crooked, draw crooked lines, and tell crooked lies. | ||
| So, I am here to tell you that if you think that you can just roll over the Democrats, it is a new day. | ||
| And I am looking forward to making sure that we can respond in kind if they want to play because we already know that our lines are already jacked up. | ||
| I already gave you the numbers. | ||
| You can play with them more if you want to, but just know I'm going to spend every waking day until now, between now and November, to make sure that not only these new seats that you try to draw, if that's what you try to do, that we win those seats, but maybe it's time for us to take some other seats that are sitting up here right now because they're not doing their jobs anyway. | ||
| So, just know I will not rest because this is not what democracy looks like, but we're going to show you what it looks like. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Dasmine, thank you very much, and thank you to each and every one of the members. | ||
| They did just call vote, so we'll take a couple of questions and then we have to leave. | ||
| Police, when you're called upon, let us know who you represent and please keep your questions brief. | ||
| We have with Craig Television. | ||
| Do you share support for that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you get a sense about democratic leadership that support that? | |
| I mean, I think just like Jasmine just said, I'm not a big fan of mid-decade redistricting, but what Trump is doing is unfairness discriminatory against black and brown and Asian voters in the state of Texas. | ||
| And so, if you have to match Trump's energy, you can't just roll over and be like, you know, you do whatever you want, and we're just going to follow the rule of law. | ||
| You have to match his energy. | ||
| And so, if that's what he's bringing to the table, then that's what we're going to bring to the table. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Can you feel a little bit about what you're hearing now when the Democrats do take the capitalists? | ||
| You referred to it. | ||
| And I know you don't know what everybody else is doing, but can you talk a little bit about how the Democratic Party might counter this for you in Texas? | ||
| Well, I mean, there's a lot of strategies that can be employed. | ||
| Obviously, I came from the state house. | ||
| Julie and I were both there. | ||
| We ultimately broke quorum over something that was even smaller than this. | ||
| I mean, obviously, it was a very big deal. | ||
| And one of the things that I did not iterate in my comments is that we've talked a lot about how, you know, we all know that everything's bigger in Texas, but I want to be clear that this is bigger than Texas, all right? | ||
| And one of the things that we did not talk about is the fact that whoever is the speaker, which it needs to be Hakeem Jeffries, that is who's going to have to certify the election. | ||
| Remember, they're talking about a third term. | ||
| So, this is bigger than Texas. | ||
| This is why I am asking if there are other governors that are willing to do this because this is about our democracy. | ||
| This isn't about any singular seat right here because we don't own these seats anyway. | ||
| These seats belong to the people. | ||
| But when we think about the fact that they are openly saying, Oh, yeah, there's ways to have a third term. | ||
| Well, let me tell you, they can nominate whoever they want to with the Republican rules, but we're going to follow the Constitution up in here if we are the ones that actually have the gavels. | ||
| So, this is one of the reasons that I am asking for everybody to use whatever tools they have in their toolbox. | ||
| It was the House that broke quorum when we were in the state house, but obviously the Senate, they could also break quorum. | ||
| We know that they did that back in 2003 in the state of Texas. | ||
| We also know that there are donors that I'm sure are going to be willing to make sure that they are investing. | ||
| investing and making sure that they can take down some of these candidates since they don't want to rule out dark money. | ||
| I'm sure some dark money is gonna pour in on the behalf of the American people. | ||
| So, what I am saying is every tactic, as well as making sure we're touching people. | ||
| I will spend a lot of time in the state of Texas. | ||
| I have traveled this country, but I am going to be boots on the ground informing Texans because listen to this. | ||
| When we had our Senate election against that one senator that I'm not a fan of, Cruz, Betso lost by three points. | ||
| But in that particular election, we only had a 17% voter turnout. | ||
| We only need to turn out people in Texas. | ||
| That is why they are so pressed to suppress their votes. | ||
| So, if we turn out, imagine what it looks like if 25% of registered voters turn out. | ||
| So, let me be clear: just like on his little birthday, he had his bootleg parade that cost the American people close to $50 million for free. | ||
| More people showed up around this country to protest him. | ||
| We are going to do the same things. | ||
| We're going to hit them polls and we're going to hit them hard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, absolutely. | |
| Amen. | ||
| We'll take one more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's some reporting that one of the reasons they're doing this is to actually carve out more Latino votes because the Latino vote shifted somewhat to the right. | |
| Is there any sense that from your perspective that that's accurate, that the Latino vote has shifted, and that's going to come out? | ||
| And I would have to think they both went to the state. | ||
| I was going to let Vicente because I know that that covers his district. | ||
| But no, I think that that's what they're what they're with that. | ||
| I think that's crazy. | ||
| I think what they are trying to do is actually suppress black and brown and Asian voices. | ||
| That's what they've done the last two to three redistrictings and that's what they're continuing to try to do now, plain and simple. | ||
| All that other stuff is just a bunch of nonsense. | ||
| We have to go because we have to go and vote. | ||
| But I'm asking everyone from around the state of Texas to go and I'm going to let Jasmine close us out here, to come to these hearings, show up to these hearings around the state. | ||
| Houston, there's one in Arlington, Texas, and there's another one, I believe, in Austin. | ||
| We need for people to show up. | ||
| We need for activists to be there, Democratic elected officials to be there, and let their displeasure be unknown that we are not going to stand for Donald Trump's discrimination in the redrawing of these maps. | ||
| Jasmine? | ||
| I was just going to add, I had not heard that that is the goal. | ||
| I will tell you, though, that the state of Texas has always been found to be intentionally racially discriminatory every single time they go through redistricting. | ||
| So, I don't anticipate that we will see anything different. | ||
| Ever since we've had a Voting Rights Act, federal courts have consistently ruled in that way about Texas. | ||
| As it relates to a shift, I do know that they believe that there was a shift in this last election, but the reality is that Democrats lost. | ||
| We say it at home. | ||
|
Branch Underway
00:13:33
|
||
| That's what truly happened. | ||
| In addition to that, it is my understanding that the tariffs are hitting our state really hard. | ||
| Texas is one of the largest trading states in the country. | ||
| So, his tariffs are hitting us a little bit deeper. | ||
| That's number one. | ||
| Number two, when it comes to the raids that have taken place, there were those that believe, yes, we need raids, we need to get rid of bad people because that's what he said, but that's not who he's going after. | ||
| So, the Latinos in our state are not very happy with the execution of his immigration policies. | ||
| So, ultimately, do I believe that there is some shift within the Latino community, specifically in Texas, is gonna help him out? | ||
| Maybe down in Florida, but that's not who we are as Texans. | ||
| So I think we are going to stand strong and we are going to push back, fight back, and we are going to deliver wins that they have never seen. | ||
| We are going to beat this administration. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
you all. | |
| And the first of two votes continues here on the House floor in the only series being held today. | ||
| The vote underway is on legislation that directs the Securities and Exchange Commission to put out rules that require companies issuing multiple classes of stocks to publicly disclose information about the relative voting power of certain shareholders. | ||
| One more vote is expected after this. | ||
| It deals with the funding for the Coast Guard. | ||
| As the SEC vote continues, we'll show remarks by Speaker Johnson, followed by a briefing with House Democratic leaders. | ||
| Hey, everybody, got a few thoughts for you as we work through today. | ||
| Yesterday, some of you may have seen a false headline in the New York Times, and the headline was terribly misleading. | ||
| It said House Republicans are, quote, adjourning until September to avoid a vote on releasing Epstein materials. | ||
| I just want you to know, and everybody here knows, that's an outright lie. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| And they were forced to modify their headline and update it today. | ||
| The reason is, we all know that's the initial lie travels much faster than the truth, and so we're making sure that people know what is actually going on here. | ||
| I think every single one of your publications have known that the published schedule of Congress was decided in December of 2024, and it's been published ever since. | ||
| We are fulfilling the calendar. | ||
| We're working. | ||
| We'll be working tomorrow. | ||
| There have been votes every day this week. | ||
| We have nine or ten committees working through markups this week, many tomorrow. | ||
| Congress is doing its work. | ||
| No one is adjourning early. | ||
| We have an August district work period that is very important to the function of Congress that has been recognized for all of memory of this institution. | ||
| And that is what everyone will be doing. | ||
| The Times was forced to change the headline because it was completely false. | ||
| No one in Congress is blocking Epstein documents. | ||
| No one in Congress is doing that. | ||
| What we are doing here, Republicans, are preventing Democrats from making a mockery of the Rules Committee process because we refuse to engage in their political charade. | ||
| That is what is happening and nothing more. | ||
| The way Democrats have tried to weaponize this issue is absolutely shameless. | ||
| And I just want to say this. | ||
| Democrats said nothing and did nothing, absolutely nothing, about bringing transparency for the entire four years of the Biden presidency. | ||
| But now, all of a sudden, they want the American people to believe that they actually care. | ||
| Their actions belie their words. | ||
| We will not be lectured on transparency by the same party that orchestrated one of the most shameless, dangerous political cover-ups in the history of the United States. | ||
| And that was President Biden's obvious mental decline. | ||
| House Republicans stand for maximum transparency and truth. | ||
| We always have and we always will. | ||
| We're in lockstep with President Trump and his administration on this issue. | ||
| We are pushing for the release of all credible information to be released with regard to the Epstein matter. | ||
| I would note also that there are real issues, legal issues, with the Kana resolution, with the Massey resolution. | ||
| Connas has no protection whatsoever for the victims of these horrible, unspeakable sex crimes, and Massey's doesn't go far enough. | ||
| Additionally, the President has directed the Department of Justice to pursue the release of grand jury information, and that is happening as we speak. | ||
| In fact, the court is processing the DOJ's request for grand jury materials as we are standing here right now. | ||
| That's a very important step. | ||
| We'll evaluate any necessary measures that Congress needs to undertake when that process is completed. | ||
| I'm convinced the administration is thoroughly reviewing all materials and working to release all credible information while also providing protection for victims. | ||
| And I've been very clear and on the record many times that we have an obligation to do that, a legal obligation and a moral obligation to protect the people who have been the victims of these unspeakable crimes so that their names are not drugged through the mud. | ||
| That's a fine needle to thread, and I'm convinced that the people who are in charge with this are doing it the right way, judiciously. | ||
| The Trump administration is working through the court to unseal those documents. | ||
| Most of the Epstein files are under court order and sealed, so you have to go through that route to do it. | ||
| All that credible information needs to come out, but they deserve the space to do that in the way that it is supposed to be done, and they are. | ||
| A thorough, judicious, meticulous review to truly protect innocent people who suffered. | ||
| In the meantime, on a much brighter note, the House Republicans are looking forward to going back to their districts. | ||
| They have a lot to be proud of and a lot of good news to share back home. | ||
| It's just six months, six months of this administration and this Congress. | ||
| We work closely with President Trump. | ||
| We've delivered on the mandate from the American people. | ||
| We have the safest border now in the history of the country. | ||
| Inflation is cooling. | ||
| We passed one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in the history of this institution, the One Big Beautiful Bill. | ||
| And what that did, as you know, was it secured the largest tax cut for American workers, the largest single investment in border security and national defense in generations, the largest reduction in spending in the history of any government on planet Earth, and much more. | ||
| President Trump is making historic trade deals to balance the playing field and bring trillions of dollars of investment into America. | ||
| As a side note, I will tell you I was in the Oval Office last night for the historic moment where he made the trade deal with Japan. | ||
| It was really something to see. | ||
| I'll write a book about it one day. | ||
| The Art of the Deal is a masterclass. | ||
| We passed over 250 bills. | ||
| We voted to codify 50 of President Trump's executive actions, and we're just getting started. | ||
| He has signed into law so far important legislation like the Lake and Riley Act, the Halt-Fentanyl Act, the Take It Down Act, the Genius Act, and of course the $9 billion rescissions package. | ||
| In just six months, President Trump and House Republicans have made safer, stronger, and more prosperous America. | ||
| We have worked to do that, fulfilling our campaign promises, and there's much more to come. | ||
| And during the district work period, we'll be crisscrossing our districts and sharing with constituents the impact of all that hard work here on Capitol Hill. | ||
| So I'll just conclude this and take a couple questions by saying as we break apart here now to go home for the district work period, there is a lot to share with our constituents, a lot to share, a lot of good news. | ||
| And we're looking forward to everyone feeling the positive effects of the work that's been done here so far. | ||
| Come to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you feel like your Republican conference is not in the benefit any longer? | |
| You saw yesterday Comer announcing that he is going to be a stocking number, Emily Maxwell. | ||
| Do you support the House Cooper Sight Committee's works? | ||
| And do you support the local career members who do want to talk to anti-Congress? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Look, there is no daylight between members of the House Republican Conference, or for that matter, between us and the White House. | ||
| I fully support my committee chairs. | ||
| Jamie Comer is a trusted friend. | ||
| He's an excellent chairman of the Oversight Committee, and he has a duty and responsibility to follow the truth where it leads. | ||
| And so every single one of us are for maximum transparency, and we'll use every power that we have to ensure that that's done. | ||
| If they see fit to bring in Jelaine Maxwell for testimony, that's fine. | ||
| I will note the obvious concern, the caveat that Chairman Comer and I and everyone has, that could she be counted on to tell the truth? | ||
| Is she a credible witness? | ||
| I mean, this is a person who's been sentenced to many, many years in prison for terrible, unspeakable conspiratorial acts and acts against innocent young people. | ||
| I mean, can we trust what she's going to say? | ||
| Even if she raises her hand and says that she'll testify under oath, is that something that can be trusted? | ||
| You know, that's a reasonable question. | ||
| Is that credible evidence? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But we'll have to see. | ||
| We have to uncover everything that we can and let the American people evaluate this. | ||
| There's concern. | ||
| I mean, obviously, we've seen the conservatives shut down the House for routinely. | ||
| You saw that you had to pull the rule because of fear of Epstein votes. | ||
| No, we don't have any fear. | ||
| No, no, hold on. | ||
| No, Greece, no. | ||
| There's no fear here. | ||
| No, there's no fear. | ||
| There's no fear. | ||
| We're not going to allow the Democrats to use this as a political cudgel. | ||
| Remember, they had four years. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| The Biden administration held the Epstein files for four years. | ||
| Not a single one of these Democrats or anyone in Congress made any peep about that at all. | ||
| They could have brought a discharge petition at any point in the last four years. | ||
| They chose not to. | ||
| They waited until President Trump was elected. | ||
| I think that's very suspect. | ||
| And I will not allow the House to be drug into political gamesmanship. | ||
| I'm not going to do that. | ||
| The President promises that Republicans made two voters over Jeffrey Epstein. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why not more of a sense of urgency? | |
| Why not just hold the vote today? | ||
| There's no point in having a vote today because the administration is already doing everything within their power to release them. | ||
| They've gone to the grand jury. | ||
| They've requested the courts to unseal the documents so that they can be released. | ||
| The president himself has said all credible evidence should be put out to the American people while protecting the innocent. | ||
| That's where we stand as well. | ||
| There's no point in passing a resolution to urge the administration to do something that they are already doing. | ||
| And so that's why we're going to let that process play out. | ||
| This is not out of fear in any way. | ||
| What we're trying to do is maximize transparency and stand for the truth. | ||
| Let me say this very important. | ||
| We want every single person who is involved in any way in the Epstein evils to be brought to swift justice. | ||
| We want the full weight of the law to fall upon their head. | ||
| And I will do everything within my power to make sure that it's possible. | ||
| That process is underway right now, and we'll see how it plays out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Speaker, I keep using the phrase that there's no daylight between you and the White House. | |
| Don't you have a responsibility to build some daylight between you and the White House? | ||
| You are a leader of a co-equal branch of government. | ||
| Isn't part of what your members are concerned about? | ||
| Is that there needs to be a second set of eyes? | ||
| I'm the leader of the most important branch of government, in my view. | ||
| It is Article 1. | ||
| And if I see that Article 1 and our authority is being breached in any way, I'll act upon it. | ||
| I'm a jealous guardian of our responsibility here, our constitutional authority, and that most important branch of government, and a government of, by, and for the people. | ||
| But I will tell you this right now. | ||
| When I say there's no daylight between me and the president, we talk about this privately. | ||
| He's spoken about it publicly. | ||
| I have as well. | ||
| He's trying to achieve the same exact objective that we are, that every member of the House Republican Conference wants to achieve, and that is to let the American people decide. | ||
| This information should have come out a long time ago. | ||
| I've been an advocate of that. | ||
| We all have. | ||
| But that process is underway right now. | ||
| Now, we've got to jealously guard that and protect it and make sure it's happening. | ||
| And if it doesn't, then we'll take appropriate action when everybody returns here. | ||
| But we have to allow the court process to play out. | ||
| That's how it works. | ||
| I used to be a litigator. | ||
| There is a standard here, a legal standard that everybody cannot forget. | ||
| The courts, law enforcement, and government agencies have to protect the innocent. | ||
| And the way you do that is you are very careful not to release names of victims or release it in a haphazard manner so that their names could be unmasked in some way because it would destroy their lives. | ||
| And anybody who's been brought swept up into that. | ||
| So that's what the Justice Department is doing. | ||
| I think they're doing a deliberate job right now. | ||
| And our job as the Article I branch is to allow the executive to do that. | ||
| If it doesn't come to fruition, then we will act. | ||
| but we have to allow that time to process it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| President Obama committed treason. | ||
| Heads up. | ||
| Good morning, everyone. | ||
| Honored to be joined today by Whip Catherine Clark and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar as we prepare to depart for the August district work period. | ||
| The Trump administration and House Republicans have been a complete and total failure. | ||
| These MAGA extremists promised that they were going to lower costs in the United States of America. | ||
| In fact, they promised the American people that costs would go down on day one. | ||
|
Congratulating Coach Roger Williams
00:04:58
|
||
| But costs having gone down, they are on the way up. | ||
| Inflation is a great place to be. | ||
| Two-thirds being in the affirmative. | ||
| The rules are suspended. | ||
| The bill is passed. | ||
| And without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The House will be in order. | |
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Texas wish to be recognized? | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to speak out of order. | ||
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, Satchel Page, great Hall of Fame baseball player in 1948, won two games of a doubleheader. | ||
| When he was in the locker room talking to the press, the press said, Satchel, you won both games today. | ||
| What was your best pitch? | ||
| Your fastball or your curveball? | ||
| He says, neither is my B-ball. | ||
| They said, your B-ball, what's that? | ||
| He said, my B-ball, when I throw it, it goes where I want it to be. | ||
| And I can't think of any place I'd rather be here than right now representing the congressional baseball game and our team. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Out in order. | |
| We ask that you take your conversations off the floor. | ||
| The gentleman is recognized. | ||
| The congressional baseball game was played on June 11th, and I'm proud to say that we raised $2.7 million for charity right here. | ||
| record. | ||
| We sold almost 40,000 tickets, had 34,000 in attendance with another record. | ||
| The Republican team, the USA team, Team USA, is on a five-year winning streak. | ||
| We won 13-2 this year. | ||
| And I'm proud to coach these guys. | ||
| They really do a great job, and I'm proud to be able to coach, coach this team. | ||
| The Democrats, they have a good team. | ||
| They have good coaching. | ||
| And we welcome playing them again next year in next year's game and setting records. | ||
| And with that, I yield to Manager Sanchez for her comments. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| I want to first and foremost congratulate Coach Roger Williams and the Republican team on their victory in this year's baseball game. | ||
| I have to say that I was very proud of the hard work and the dedication of the Democratic team. | ||
| We came out, we played hard, and more importantly, we raised a record amount of money for local charities here in the Washington, D.C. area. | ||
| The congressional baseball game is probably my favorite time of the year, not the least of which is because every morning I get to yell at 15 men and tell them what to do. | ||
| But it's also because we can put partisanship aside and play a good game for a good cause. | ||
| Together, we raised a whopping $2.8 million, which will go for sports scholarships, local boys and girls' clubs, and other youth charities. | ||
| And that's something that I think we all can be proud of. | ||
| Again, I want to congratulate Coach Williams and his team, and we're coming for that trophy next year, my friend. | ||
| You're going to find it. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| I thank the gentleman from Texas. | ||
| Pursuant to clause 8 of Rule 20, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion from the gentleman from Missouri, Mr. Graves, to suspend the rules and pass H.R. 4275 as amended, on which the yays and nays are ordered. | ||
| The clerk will report the title. | ||
| H.R. 4275, a bill to authorize appropriations for the Coast Guard to establish the Secretary of the Coast Guard and for other purposes. | ||
|
House Republicans' Dilemma
00:12:28
|
||
| The question is, will the House suspend the rules and pass the bill as amended? | ||
| The members will record their votes by electronic device. | ||
| This is a five-minute vote. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Elm Lawmaker is now voting on legislation that reauthorizes funding for the Coast Guard through fiscal year 2029 and creates a new Coast Guard secretary position like other military branches. | |
| The bill also bolsters Coast Guard recruitment and retention efforts and includes numerous provisions to address sexual assault and harassment issues that have been reported within the Guard, particularly at the Coast Guard Academy. | ||
| This is a five-minute vote and the last one before lawmakers adjourn for their August recess. | ||
| Members return for votes on Tuesday, September 2nd. | ||
| While they vote, we'll return to the briefing with House Democratic leaders. | ||
| More affordable. | ||
| We can build an economy that rewards the people who make it run, not the corporations who exploit them. | ||
| We can have a Congress that prioritizes kids and families. | ||
| This is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. | ||
| There is enough for everybody, not just to get by, but get ahead. | ||
| If we give the American people the fair shot at success that they deserve. | ||
| And there is no one who we'd rather be in this fight with, giving people the fair shot, making an affordable economy in this country than our chairman, Pete Aguilar. | ||
| Thank you, Whip Clark, Leader Jeffreys, for your friendship, but for your leadership of this Democratic caucus as well. | ||
| This Republican majority is nothing short of a disgrace. | ||
| They've spent the last six months lining the pockets of billionaires and wealthy corporations who are already raking in record profits. | ||
| They prevented Democrats from rolling back reckless tariffs that are driving the price increases that we see under Donald Trump's watch. | ||
| They're closing nursing homes, forcing grandma and grandpa to fend for themselves while making the purchase of a new private jet fully tax-deductible. | ||
| It's just cartoonish levels of corruption. | ||
| Rural hospitals are already closing down because Republicans pushed through the largest cut to Medicaid in the history of the country. | ||
| They've completely broken the bipartisan appropriations process and are leading us toward a government shutdown that will hurt hardworking Americans. | ||
| We were elected by our constituents to solve problems and to get things done. | ||
| But at every turn, the Republicans are choosing partisanship and division and chaos. | ||
| Now they're fighting amongst themselves about how they should hide President Trump's involvement in the Epstein files. | ||
| Over the next few weeks, House Democrats are going everywhere to talk about the devastating impacts of the Republican cuts to Medicaid and their inability to focus on the most pressing challenges that the American people face. | ||
| Republicans are too scared to face their own voters and will probably spend the August recess on the run. | ||
| Turn it over to Leader Jeffries. | ||
| Thank you, Pete. | ||
| Questions? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Leader Jeffries. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| The Senate Republicans seem to be torn about staying in session, about new nominees, and also going back to sell the big beautiful bill from their perspective. | ||
| Would it help Democrats if they were to stay in session so they couldn't sell and market that piece of legislation? | ||
| That's a decision for the Senate Republicans to make, as Chair Aguilar just indicated, as Catherine Clark has indicated. | ||
| Republicans are on the run. | ||
| They have nothing good to sell to the American people. | ||
| The one big, ugly bill hurts everyday Americans to reward billionaires and wealthy corporations with massive tax breaks. | ||
| It is deeply unpopular. | ||
| And that is why it's our expectation that during the August district work period, you're going to see House Republicans and Senate Republicans running away from the American people because they are running scared. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When you come back in September, you're going to have the shutdown by Dedal Crinky Delta Diaken. | |
| Peter, you said earlier in the week that if it's a partisan Republican bill, House Democrats will be united against it. | ||
| You didn't mention the Senate. | ||
| Do you have faith that Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats will hold the line, given that they did not do so in March? | ||
| We had a very productive meeting with Senate Democrats yesterday, and I'm confident that the only path forward is for Republicans to work with Democrats to pass an appropriations bill that meets the needs of the American people in terms of their health, their safety, and their economic well-being. | ||
| A partisan spending bill is dead on arrival. | ||
| Catherine? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pete? | |
| These are our two appropriators here. | ||
| Listen, the House Republicans and the Senate Republicans have a choice to make. | ||
| It doesn't matter whether they in the Senate stay in session or go home. | ||
| They cannot hide from the destruction that they have caused. | ||
| We are looking at with this largest cut to Medicaid in our country's history, not only will it have an impact on people who get their insurance through Medicaid, | ||
| which is 40% of the children in this country, but there are now estimates that it will cause a almost 70% rise in insurance premiums for a family of four that makes our 12. | ||
| Two-thirds being in the affirmative, the rules are suspended. | ||
| The bill is passed and without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table. | ||
| Have a great one. | ||
|
Censure Of McIver
00:05:05
|
||
| The House will be in order. | ||
| The House will be in order. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Louisiana seek recognition? | ||
| Mr. Speaker, pursuant to clause 2A1 of Rule 9, I rise to give notice of my intention to raise a question of the privileges of the House. | ||
| The form of the resolution is as follows: House Resolution Number 539, censuring Representative LaMonica McIver and removing her from the Committee on Homeland Security. | ||
| Whereas on May the 9th, 2025, Representative McIver took part in an incident at the Delaney Hall Federal Immigration Facility located in Newark, New Jersey. | ||
| Whereas Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, as a result of her actions on May 9th, 2025, has been charged in a three-count indictment. | ||
| The gentleman will suspend the public. | ||
| The gentleman will suspend. | ||
| The House is not in order. | ||
| Gentleman from Louisiana. | ||
| Indictment by a federal grand jury for assaulting, resisting, impeding, and interfering with federal officers. | ||
| Whereas Representative MacGyver is alleged to have challenged guidance from a federal officer regarding access to the secure immigration detention facility. | ||
| Whereas Representative MacGyver is alleged to have interfered with Homeland Security investigation officials for making an arrest of an unauthorized visitor. | ||
| Whereas Representative MacGyver is alleged to have, quote, slammed her forearm into the body, close quote, and restrained an HSI officer by, quote, forcibly grabbing him. | ||
| Whereas Representative McIver is alleged to have further interfered with an immigration and customs enforcement deportation officer engaged in the performance of his official duties. | ||
| Whereas body camera and other video evidence support the allegations made within the federal indictment. | ||
| Whereas such actions constitute a violation of Section 111A1 of Title 18 United States Code related to the assaulting, resisting, impeding, and interfering with a federal officer. | ||
| Whereas clause 1 of Rule XXIII of the rules the House of Representatives provides a member, delegate, resident commissioner, officer, or employee of the House shall behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect credibility on the House so stated in Rule 23 of the rules of the House of Representatives. | ||
| Whereas such actions of a member of the House of Representatives do not reflect credibly on the House, whereas Representative McIver's continued service on the Committee on Homeland Security, which is charged with oversight of federal immigration enforcement and other national security matters, would represent a significant conflict of interest. | ||
| Now, therefore, be it resolved. | ||
| Section 1, censure of Representative La Monica McIver. | ||
| Representative LaMonica McIver, 1, is censured. | ||
| 2. | ||
| Shall forthwith present herself in the well of the House of Representatives for the pronouncement of censure, and 3 is censured with the public reading of this resolution by the Speaker. | ||
| Section 2, removal from Committee on Homeland Security. | ||
| The following name member B and is hereby removed from the following standing committee of the House of Representatives, the Committee on Homeland Security. | ||
| Ms. McIver. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, that is all. | ||
| Under Rule 9, a resolution offered from the floor by a member other than the majority leader or the minority leader as a question of the privileges of the House has immediate precedence only at a time designated by the chair within two legislative days after the resolution is properly noticed. | ||
|
Mr. Speaker, One Minute
00:15:33
|
||
| Pending that designation, the form of the resolution noticed by the gentleman from Louisiana will appear in the record at this point. | ||
| The chair will not at this point determine whether the resolution constitutes a question of privilege. | ||
| That determination will be made at the time designated for consideration of the resolution. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Alabama seek recognition? | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman from Utah, Mr. Moore, be removed as a co-sponsor to H.R. 4401. | ||
| Without objection. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| The chair will now entertain requests for one-minute speeches. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Pennsylvania seek recognition? | ||
| Mr. Speaker, a questionnaire was consent to address the House for one minute. | ||
| I will revise and extend my remarks. | ||
| And the House is not in order. | ||
| The House is not in order. | ||
| The House will be in order. | ||
| The gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I rise today to recognize the Central Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce as it celebrates 120th anniversary. | ||
| In 1905, the chamber was founded as the Milton Board of Trade. | ||
| Over the last 120 years, the chamber has grown and expanded its reach and membership into Columbia, Montour, Northumberland, Snyder, and Union counties. | ||
| And 120 years later, the mission of the chamber remains the same as when it was founded. | ||
| Quote, to be the partner of choice to enable economic and business development by partnering with businesses, schools, communities, and individuals in Central Pennsylvania. | ||
| As a proud member of the chamber, I recognize its vital role in driving regional economic growth, fostering job creation, and supporting businesses of all sizes as they innovate and invest in America's future. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I thank the board members, staff, membership, and partners who have worked together to promote and improve our region. | ||
| They have fostered a commitment to free enterprise that enables our local communities to unlock their true economic potential. | ||
| Congratulations to the Chamber on this milestone occasion. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back the balance of my time. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from California seek recognition? | ||
| Without objection. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize General Atomics, a world-leading technology company headquartered in the district I represent, and their historic achievement of completing the Eders Central Solenoid. | ||
| This giant custom-designed magnet, 60 feet tall, 14 feet wide, and weighing over 1,000 tons, is the largest pulsed supercomputing electromagnet ever built. | ||
| And it's a major step in the long journey toward commercial fusion energy. | ||
| General Atomics was one of the early trailblazers of both nuclear fission and fusion. | ||
| Under the leadership of their chairman and CEO, Neil Blue, General Atomics has pioneered many new innovations, from groundbreaking advances in nuclear technology to remotely operated aircraft and electromagnetic systems. | ||
| Fusion energy will provide a source of virtually limitless baseload power and a clean and safe pathway for true energy security. | ||
| It's no wonder countries across the globe are racing to achieve fusion first. | ||
| And San Diego is leading the way with the leadership of companies like General Atomics and others. | ||
| I look forward to celebrating many more accomplishments with my friends at General Atomics. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Ohio seek recognition? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to address... | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize Kenley Jewelerette. | ||
| Kinley is a member of the Premier Showman 4-H Club in Hillsborough, Ohio. | ||
| For her 4-H project, Kinley gave back to veterans by thanking them for their service with stars, stripes, and smiles buckets. | ||
| With help from her community, she assembled goodie buckets to disperse the veterans in her area. | ||
| Included were cards that thanked them for their service. | ||
| Freedom has never been free, and our brave servicemen and women and their families sacrificed so much to keep us safe. | ||
| It's great to see these heroes being recognized, and it's my honor to advocate on their behalf in Congress. | ||
| Outstanding organizations like 4-H teach our young people the values of patriotism and hard work. | ||
| Programs just like this one represent the best America has to offer, and it's great to see them focusing their efforts on honoring our nation's heroes. | ||
| Kenley, all of Southern Ohio is proud of you. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from California seek recognition? | ||
| Mr. Speaker, to address the body for one minute without objection. | ||
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, today I rise to celebrate the 90th birthday of immigrant Herman Davis. | ||
| Immigrant grew up in Germany during World War II. | ||
| After the war, she came to visit her sister in Garden Grove, California, my district, where her life changed forever. | ||
| She met Wally Davis. | ||
| They got married and had seven beautiful children. | ||
| She never returned to Germany. | ||
| Wally Davis was one of Orange County's first Hispanic attorneys and a civil rights icon. | ||
| An immigrant, she was always there for him, and she was the story behind Wally's success. | ||
| Happy birthday, Immigrant. | ||
| We love you. | ||
| Look forward to the next few birthdays of yours. | ||
| Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| Gentleman yields back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Indiana seek recognition? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to address the House for one minute and also revise and extend my remarks. | |
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to highlight how the One Big Beautiful bill will strengthen and protect Medicaid for those who need it the most. | |
| This legislation focuses on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse that have historically plagued this system, ensuring that resources are used efficiently and effectively. | ||
| Contrary to the misinformation spreading, there are roughly 1.4 million illegal immigrants who are receiving Medicaid, crowding out benefits met for American citizens. | ||
| What's more, this bill invests billions of dollars in long-term care for seniors and people with disabilities by establishing a new pathway for states to offer home and community-based services. | ||
| This will help preserve Medicaid for the most vulnerable populations who rely on it, pregnant mothers, children, seniors, and individuals with disabilities, and low-income families. | ||
| Thank you, and I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania seek recognition? | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to address the House for one minute and to revise and extend my remarks. | ||
| Without objection, the gentlewoman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| In Pennsylvania, nearly 65% of nursing home residents rely upon Medicaid. | ||
| In my district, outside Philadelphia, it is a lifeline for more than 15,000 seniors who have worked and earned access to affordable, high-quality care, who deserve to age with grace and dignity. | ||
| President Trump and the Republicans' big ugly bill will cut Pennsylvania's Medicaid program, known as Penny, by about $53 million over the next decade. | ||
| What will happen to our parents, to our grandparents? | ||
| Some facilities may be forced to make impossible decisions, like reducing staff or raising prices for those who don't qualify for Medicaid. | ||
| Others simply will not survive. | ||
| I know how worrisome it is to watch aging parents need to leave the home they loved. | ||
| I know how critical it is to find them the best possible care. | ||
| I saw it with my own in-laws, Joan and Bill Cannan. | ||
| After all, through Medicaid, think about it. | ||
| I was disabled and you offered me aid. | ||
| I was infirmed and you offered me care. | ||
| I was aging and you offered me dignity. | ||
| That's what Republicans voted in lockstep to tear away. | ||
| Shame. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Pennsylvania seek recognition? | ||
| I seek unanimous consent to address the House for one minute and revise and extend my remarks. | ||
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a heavy heart and a deep sense of gratitude as I pay tribute to a true hometown hero, Carla Reynolds of Bristol Borough. | ||
| Carla was more than an advocate. | ||
| She was a force of nature, a woman of uncommon compassion, relentless purpose, and a rare gift for bringing people together. | ||
| Through her signature event, Unity Day, Carla united law enforcement and neighbors, children and elders, in a shared celebration of kindness, community, and respect. | ||
| She believed our greatest strength lies in our ability to stand together, and she proved that year after year, day after day. | ||
| Through her Boots on the Ground Foundation, Carla offered not just food and essentials to those in need, but her time, her energy, and her heart. | ||
| She gave selflessly, always showing up for those in crisis, always finding a way to help, and never asking for a thing in return for herself. | ||
| She also championed young people, creating initiatives to spotlight Bucks County youth who excelled in academics, service, and sports. | ||
| Because, as she would say, our kids need to know that we see them. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, over the many years I had the privilege to work alongside Carla, I came to not only know her mission, but her soul. | ||
| May God bless Carla Reynolds, and may we each do our part to honor her by continuing the work she believed in so deeply. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I'll yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Virginia seek recognition? | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise to address the House for up to one minute and extend and revise my remarks. | ||
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, Virginia federal employees are still being fired, riffed, harassed by this administration. | ||
| Last week, I heard from a constituent who received a termination letter from the Department of Health and Human Services just hours before it went into effect, and with no access to their equipment, no off-boarding information, and no details about their severance. | ||
| And this is one of many, many stories that I get to my office every week. | ||
| Civil servants who dedicate their career to serving this government deserve transparency, clarity, and respect. | ||
| But across agencies, this administration continues to blindly and abruptly fire federal workers. | ||
| And what do we have to show for it? | ||
| A complete and total brain drain. | ||
| We are losing talent and expertise in our federal government, all while the administration prioritizes tax cuts and handouts to the biggest corporations. | ||
| And to my constituents impacted by these cuts, I will continue to demand answers, and I will continue to fight to hold this administration accountable. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Wisconsin seek recognition? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to address the House and to revise and extend my remarks. | |
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the legacy and esteemed career of Green Bay Packers president and CEO Mark Murphy, who is set to retire at the end of this week after serving in the role for more than 17 years. | |
| Mark Murphy is a Green Bay Packers legend and a highly respected figure throughout Wisconsin and among NFL fans across the country. | ||
| During his tenure as president and CEO, the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl in 2011, made five NFC Championship game appearances, secured eight NFC North Division titles, earned 13 playoff appearances, and posted a 172 and 101 regular season record, second best in the league over that span. | ||
| Off the field and under his guidance, the Green Bay Packers invested more than $700 million in the Lambeau Field campus and Titletown development without the use of public money and increased charitable giving across Wisconsin. | ||
| Most recently, the Packers hosted the immensely successful 2025 NFL draft, which drew an official attendance of 605,000 and delivered a major economic boost in our region in northeast Wisconsin. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, as the representative from northeastern Wisconsin and as a lifelong Packers fan, I want to thank Mark Murphy for his many years of dedicated leadership with the Green Bay Packers and wish him the very best in his retirement. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, with that, I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentlewoman from Michigan seek recognition? | ||
| I ask unanimous consent to address the House for one minute. | ||
| Without objection, the gentlewoman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, disastrous floods, horrific floods, are devastating the lives of our residents in southeast Michigan and across the nation. | ||
| And the dangers don't stop when the flooding ends. | ||
| Too many of our families are denied FEMA assistance because current rules and policies don't cover repairs and reconstruction for most basements, where floods are the most destructive. | ||
| Without federal assistance, Mr. Speaker, they are forced to live in extremely unsafe conditions, being exposed to serious health risks like mold and mildew and moisture damage. | ||
| One of my residents, a 90-year-old, had no hot water and a broken furnace and toxic mold in her basement. | ||
| There are people recovering from disasters, many of them on a fixed income, seniors, who cannot afford the thousands of dollars in repairs of their basement. | ||
| That's why I'm proud to introduce the Fix Our Flooded Basements Act to make sure that federal disaster assistance finally covers those costs. | ||
| We must make this change so that our residents, our constituents, live in a safe, again, home after a flood. | ||
| They need to be able to rebuild their lives from the disastrous floods. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Indiana seek recognition? | ||
| I rise and 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. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| This week marks the six months of the America First leadership under President Donald Trump. | ||
| He has innumerable accomplishments over the first half of this year and has kicked off a new golden age for our country. | ||
| His strong leadership has single-handedly added over half a million jobs to the U.S. economy. | ||
| Many of these jobs came back to my home state of Indiana, like the announcement from General Motors about increasing its production in the Fort Wayne facility truck plant. | ||
| He has brought gas prices to their lowest point since 2021 by unleashing American energy independence. | ||
|
Honor And Service
00:15:26
|
||
| Outside of the economic impacts that have saved money for everyday Americans, President Trump has kept his commitment to protect American children and families by halting so-called gender-affirming care for children in this country. | ||
| As another testament to his impressive pace, President Trump has also signed 27 bills into law, the greatest of which, the One Big Beautiful bill, delivers tax cuts to American families, solidifies funding for America's Golden Dome, and defunded Planned Parenthood. | ||
| Over the past six months, President Trump has delivered on his promise to restore America's strength and dominance. | ||
| And I look forward to continuing the fight with President Trump leading the way to ensure America's golden age lasts for decades to come. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll yield back. | |
| What purpose does the gentleman from California seek recognition without objection the gentleman is recognized Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| In February of this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi went on national TV and told the American people that Jeffrey Epstein's client list was, quote, sitting on my desk right now. | ||
| Why won't she release that client list? | ||
| Why won't House Republicans vote to release that list? | ||
| In fact, House Republicans are shutting down Congress early. | ||
| Shortly after my speech, Congress is going to shut down until September because House Republicans want to avoid voting on releasing the Epstein files. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I'll tell you why. | ||
| The Wall Street Journal just confirmed that in May of this year, the Department of Justice told Donald Trump to his face that he is in unreleased Epstein files. | ||
| House Republicans are facilitating a cover-up of epic proportions. | ||
| Release the Epstein files. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentlewoman from South Dakota seek recognition? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am from North Dakota and I seek recognition to address the House for one minute and to revise and extend my remarks. | |
| Without objection, the gentlewoman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a notable North Dakotan, Linda Casager, who recently retired after 50 years of dedicated service at Valley Senior Living. | ||
| Linda began her career in elder care as a high school student at the age of just 15 and devoted five decades to helping seniors stay active, healthy, and connected. | ||
| Her work as a restorative aide supported not only the physical well-being of her residents, but their dignity and independence. | ||
| Colleagues describe her as a compassionate, reliable, and deeply committed person, a steady presence in a field where continuity makes all the difference. | ||
| 50 years in a role is rare. | ||
| 50 years of meaningful care is extraordinary. | ||
| Linda's legacy is a testament to the power of faithful service. | ||
| She has touched countless lives, and she's made her community proud. | ||
| Congratulations, Linda. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Tennessee seek recognition? | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I seek unanimous consent to address the House for one minute to revise and extend my remarks. | ||
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I rise in sadness to mourn the passing of Detective Andrew Woods of the Union County Sheriff's Office, who passed away following this heroic battle against stage four cancer. | ||
| Andrew spent his career with the Union County Sheriff's Office, starting in patrol and working his way up to a detective. | ||
| He was known as a man who always showed up with a smile and served as a mentor to the younger officers. | ||
| He was a friend to all in the department and to the community. | ||
| He spent his time as a volunteer firefighter while also mentoring kids in the community. | ||
| He wanted to be involved in public service and law enforcement. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, in his free time, he would spend time with his family fishing, golfing, or watching Tennessee balls whoop up on Alabama. | ||
| And too many times that didn't happen, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| Andrew was a person that all Americans should strive to be like. | ||
| He was dedicated to serving his community. | ||
| He was a good family man and committed his time to helping children achieve their dreams of becoming law enforcement. | ||
| He is truly a hero of Tennessee, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I'd personally like to extend my condolences to Andrew's family, his friends, my dear friend Sheriff Brading, and the entire Union County Sheriff's Department. | ||
| Our prayers go out to all of you, and may the Lord bless you, brother. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Georgia seek recognition? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, President. | |
| 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 honor one of our country's heroes, Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer Scott Ruskin. | ||
| Scott Ruskin hails from New Jersey and was an accountant at KPEMG before enlisting to serve in the Coast Guard in 2021. | ||
| After joining the Coast Guard, Scott participated and completed rescue swimmer training and was stationed in Corpus Christi, Texas. | ||
| In the early morning of July 4th, Scott, along with other local and federal first responders, were dispatched to aid and rescue efforts at Camp Mystic in Kerr County as flooding from the nearby Guadalupe River hit the camp. | ||
| Scott, while leading the Coast Guard triage at Camp Mystic, was able to save over 160 people through his efforts, including my twin granddaughters, whose birthday is today. | ||
| His selflessness and bravery in the face of danger is something we should all strive to embody. | ||
| Thank you, Scott. | ||
| Thank you for your courage and for changing the course of many families' lives, including my family. | ||
| God bless you. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from California seek recognition? | ||
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I rise in sadness to remember a friend, a personal friend from home in the district, Wallace Clark Roney. | ||
| Everybody knows him as Wally Roney passed recently here of health issues. | ||
| And he's a fifth-generation cattle rancher, lifelong steward of the land, and indeed a towering, imposing figure, big guy in California agriculture. | ||
| But that big guy, as imposing as he was, is also kind of like a big bear cub. | ||
| He loved what he did. | ||
| He loved helping his neighbors. | ||
| He loved helping the cattle industry and sticking up for agriculture. | ||
| And you won't find a better friend. | ||
| He and his wife, Billie Jean, are good friends of mine. | ||
| And as we remember today and feel that sadness, know that his spirit of fighting for agriculture as a fellow Cal Poly Mustang graduate will always be remembered and appreciated. | ||
| He was a respected leader, of course, in this field in all those areas, blending old school ranching, sharp business sense, and deep understanding of land management. | ||
| He grew up alongside seasoned hands, learning the value of grit, responsibility, and persistence. | ||
| He trained horses, rodeoed, raised cattle, never hesitated to speak up when it was important to help preserve his industry, preserve a lifestyle, not just for him, but his neighbors, for everybody that depends on this as a food supply, making America stronger. | ||
| God bless Wally. | ||
| His wife, Billie Jean, will miss you. | ||
| You're indeed a good friend, and you'll never be replaced, but you'll always be remembered. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Florida seek recognition? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, I ask Ann Sentu to speak to the House for one minute and to revise and extend my remarks. | |
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| It's a little bit high. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There we go. | |
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize a warrior of the United States Air Force, Chief Master Sergeant Jason Q. Schaefer. | ||
| Chief Schaefer embodies the mindset and diligence that is needed to defend our nation. | ||
| He entered the Air Force in March 2000 as a Security Forces member and has been serving for 25 years. | ||
| During his time in the Air Force, he developed an impressive background which includes experience at varying levels in the security forces and has participated in operations in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Pacific region. | ||
| He's now retiring after all of that time. | ||
| Being a service member is tough. | ||
| It's demanding, and the time spent away from your family is even harder, but we can never forget to thank those who make that sacrifice, which is why I want to thank him, his wife Tawney, his children Dallas, Ashland, and Keegan for making sacrifices so our nation can prosper. | ||
| Chief Jason, aim high and have a happy retirement. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentlewoman from Virginia seek recognition? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, I rise to address the House Board for one minute to revise and extend my remarks. | |
| Without objection, the gentlewoman is recognized for one minute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the brave members of the Virginia Beach Fire Department's Swiftwater Rescue Team who were recently deployed to Texas Hill Country to support the flood rescue efforts there. | |
| The specialized team is uniquely qualified to respond to natural disasters, having recently assisted in the rescue efforts from the October floods that occurred in western Virginia. | ||
| The team drove 1,700 miles through the night from Virginia Beach on July 4th to Texas to aid in the flood rescue efforts. | ||
| In the face of tragedies like the floods in Texas, we are incredibly fortunate to have brave first responders who choose to run towards danger instead of away from it. | ||
| I will continue to pray for the safety of our first responders as well as the victims and the families affected by this horrific disaster. | ||
| I'm grateful that this team was able to put their expertise to use and assist in saving lives. | ||
| And I'm happy to hear the news that they are coming home. | ||
| Thank you, and I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Indiana seek recognition? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, I seek 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to kick off my Hoosier Heartland tour. | |
| As this chamber adjourns, I eagerly look forward to beginning my first summer district work period. | ||
| As I move about Indiana's 6th District over the weeks to come, I'm eager to share this time with our hardworking Hoosiers. | ||
| For seven months, I've been working to deliver for our communities. | ||
| I look forward to sharing my work and to bringing details of our wins back home. | ||
| But most importantly, this time we'll focus on listening. | ||
| I look forward to touring our local businesses, to meeting with our 11 county sheriffs, to visiting the many district airports I represent, and to hearing from our family farmers. | ||
| This Hoosier Heartland tour promises to encompass many meaningful conversations that will inform my work as we return in September, and I eagerly undertake it. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I yield back. | ||
| For what purpose does the gentleman from Washington seek recognition? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Speaker, I'd like to address the body for one minute and, if necessary, advise and extend my remarks. | |
| Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for one minute. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, Eastern Washington and Spokane are home to many heroes and champions, but today I would like to speak of one particularly exceptional young man, Bryson Phillips of Mount Spokane High School. | ||
| Bryson was named a two-time U.S. Paralympics Track and Field High School All-American, and he's somebody who's overcome tremendous challenges. | ||
| After suffering a stroke at age three, Bryson was left with paralysis on his right side, a condition called hemoglia. | ||
| Despite relearning how to walk, talk, and perform daily tasks, he never gave up. | ||
| Bryson found his competitive spirit on the track. | ||
| In representing Mount Spokane, he's won multiple state titles and competed on the national stage, all while maintaining a 4.0 GPA. | ||
| Bryson Phillips, you are a total stud, and the entire Congress and the entire Republic deserves to hear your story, and now they have. | ||
| Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back. | ||
| The Chair lays before the House a communication. | ||
| The Honorable Speaker, House of Representatives, sir, pursuant to Section 1K of House Resolution 895, 110th Congress, and Section 4D of House Resolution 5, 119th Congress, | ||
| I transmit to you notification that the following individuals each have signed an agreement not to be a candidate for the office of senator or representative in or delegate or resident commissioner to the Congress for the purposes of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 until at least three years after they are no longer a member of the board or staff of the Office of Congressional Conduct. | ||
| Anna Michaela Alland, Hejong A. Chow, Jody B. Heiss, Cheryl L. Johnson. | ||
| Copies of the signed agreements will be retained by the Office of the Clerk as part of the records of the House. | ||
| Signed sincerely, Kevin F. McCumber, Clerk. | ||
| The Chair lays before the House a communication. | ||
| The Speaker's Rooms, Washington, D.C., July 23rd, 2025. | ||
| I hereby designate the period from Wednesday, July 23rd, 2025, through Monday, September 1, 2025, as a district work period under clause 13 of Rule 1. | ||
| Signed. | ||
| Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives. | ||
| Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3rd, 2025, the gentleman from Utah, Mr. Kennedy, is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
Tax Relief for Hardworking Americans
00:10:25
|
||
| Without objection. | ||
| With that, I yield as much time as they may consume to my distinguished colleagues from the state of Indiana, Representative Baird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, and I appreciate the gentleman yielding. | |
| So, Mr. Speaker, on July the 4th, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill into law. | ||
| This historic legislation delivered the largest tax cuts for the working and middle-class Americans in the U.S. history and will revitalize rural America. | ||
| One Big Beautiful bill made permanent the 199A small business tax credit, providing certainty to small businesses and ensuring Main Street can thrive. | ||
| This legislation also saves 2 million family farms, including over 6,800 family farms in my district, from facing a death tax increase. | ||
| This will protect the generational transfer of family farms. | ||
| This bill also cuts down on the waste, fraud, and abuse in our federal agencies that has made it harder and more expensive for our American people. | ||
| This bill is a win for our farmers, small businesses, and the Americans in every income bracket. | ||
| Thank you, and I yield back. | ||
| With that, I yield time to myself from Utah, Mike Kennedy, and I'm going to give my speech. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, today I rise to recognize some of the impacts of the One Big Beautiful bill and what it will have on my state. | ||
| By passing the One Big Beautiful bill, the House Republican majority kept its promise to preserve the 2017 tax cuts and provided further relief for American families. | ||
| The White House's Council of Economic Advisors estimates the bill will raise Utah wages between $4,300 and $7,700 over the next four years, putting more money in the pockets of our hardworking Americans. | ||
| Typical families with two children can also expect to see higher take-home pay in the range of $7,900 to $11,400. | ||
| Utah is one of the fastest-growing states in the nation and has the highest average household size. | ||
| The One Big Beautiful bill increases the child tax credit to $2,200, which will help our Utah families as they continue to grow. | ||
| Without the bill's passage, a tallowed tax credit would have dropped to just $1,000 per child. | ||
| I'm glad this bill invests in the future of our families, not just in Utah, but all over the country. | ||
| The One Big Beautiful bill also helps hardworking Americans by cutting taxes on overtime pay. | ||
| Around 22 percent of all employees in Utah regularly work overtime and could benefit from this tax break. | ||
| The bill also cuts taxes on tips. | ||
| Whether you are a waitress earning tips or a nurse working overtime, this legislation will make sure that your hard-earned money stays where it belongs, in your pocket. | ||
| The legislation also benefits those who give to charitable causes, including tithes or religious contributions, allowing individuals who do not itemize their deductions to claim a charitable deduction. | ||
| The One Big Beautiful bill delivers historic tax relief for seniors. | ||
| This legislation ensures that nearly 90 percent of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits. | ||
| In Utah alone, around 400,000 seniors could benefit from the no taxes on Social Security provision of this bill. | ||
| Our seniors have spent their lifetimes contributing to our nation's economy, and House Republicans are glad to provide them relief through this bill. | ||
| The One Big Beautiful bill will also help Utahn's in ways beyond tax credits. | ||
| It will help rural Utah by boosting Utah's energy sector due to provisions slashing the bureaucratic red tape associated with permitting days and by restarting oil, gas, and coal leases. | ||
| This will create thousands of jobs in Utah. | ||
| The One Big Beautiful bill also helps Utahns by reauthorizing the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, also known as RECA, for another two years following its expiration last year. | ||
| RICA authorization will compensate Utah's who are exposed to radiation after the above-ground atomic testing at the Nevada test site. | ||
| It will also extend compensation to uranium miners and expand eligibility for downwinders across the state of Utah. | ||
| This will help relieve burdens for Utahns who were harmed during active nuclear weapons testing. | ||
| The bill will provide funding for technological advancement for our military and enhance the quality of life for our military personnel by allocating up to $7.4 billion in benefits for service members across the country. | ||
| Under this bill, the budget will provide for the restoration and renovation of barracks, more funding for the Defense Health Program, aid to military families by aiding to the child care fee assistance, and provide for bonuses for members of the military. | ||
| This policy reflects our commitment to honoring the sacrifices of our military by investing directly in service members and the infrastructure that supports their well-being. | ||
| It demonstrates our commitment to putting America first by ensuring our servicemen and women in Utah and across the world receive the care and support they deserve. | ||
| This legislation is designed to put hardworking Americans, families, and small businesses first, including my constituents in Utah's 3rd District. | ||
| By passing this bill, Republicans have delivered on the promises we made to the American people. | ||
| Thank you, and I yield back. | ||
| State of North Dakota, Representative Fedorchak. | ||
| Thank you, Representative Kennedy. | ||
| Thank you for leading this important special order tonight to talk about all the wins in the One Big Beautiful bill. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today to highlight an important promise President Trump made to the American people that the One Big Beautiful Bill fulfills. | ||
| The One Big Beautiful Bill delivers a long list of wins for families, seniors, small businesses, farmers, energy producers, and our military. | ||
| It prevents the largest tax increase in U.S. history, $4.5 trillion in Americans' pockets instead of in the government's coffers. | ||
| And it delivers permanent tax relief. | ||
| It begins to rein in Washington's out-of-control spending, makes historic investments in border security and national defense, and restores the kind of common sense priorities people in my state of North Dakota live by every single day. | ||
| There are so many wins in this bill that we need to break them apart and highlight them separately. | ||
| Today, I want to focus on a provision that many think is too good to be true. | ||
| In fact, in talking to people, I think they do believe how can this actually happen, but it will, and that is no tax on tips and overtime. | ||
| During my time back home recently, I visited with folks across North Dakota, including those working in the construction, law enforcement, and service industries. | ||
| This bill is great news for them and the hundreds of professions who regularly put in overtime to get the job done. | ||
| In fact, around 30 percent of all employees in North Dakota regularly work overtime and could benefit from the no tax on overtime provision in this bill. | ||
| And according to the Council of Economic Advisors, an even larger 65 percent of workers in North Dakota are in occupations that are likely eligible for overtime and could also benefit. | ||
| We cut taxes on up to $12,500 of overtime pay for more than 80 million hourly workers. | ||
| This is estimated to increase yearly take-home pay by more than $1,400. | ||
| The bill also eliminates federal taxes on up to $25,000 of tips for Americans' 4 million tipped workers. | ||
| As a former waitress, I know how valuable this provision would be, and this applies to all tips. | ||
| Whether they are tips that are cash or on credit, all tips qualify for the no tax on tips. | ||
| This will estimate to boost incomes by an average of $1,300 per year. | ||
| With these policies, we are rewarding everyday Americans' hard work. | ||
| And we're not waiting. | ||
| These provisions are retroactive, meaning that people will see the benefits of no taxes on tips and overtime this year, even for hours worked prior to this bill passing. | ||
| I was very proud to join my colleagues in delivering on this commitment to the American people, and I can't wait to see how it benefits them all. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I yield back the remainder of my time to the chair. | ||
| Gentleman yields back. | ||
| Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3rd, 2025, the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. McGovern, is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address one of the most serious issues of our time, the risk of conflict with nuclear weapons. | ||
|
Moral Imperative for Nuclear Security
00:15:46
|
||
| It is a threat that challenges our conscience. | ||
| It is a threat not just for Americans, but for all humanity. | ||
| And it is a threat not just to humans, but to all species of life on our planet. | ||
| We raise this issue in the context and context of a series of important anniversaries. | ||
| One week ago, July 16th, marked the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon in New Mexico. | ||
| We still live with a legacy of above-ground nuclear tests. | ||
| Two years ago, the Defense Department awarded the Atomic Veterans Commemorative Service Medal to the still surviving veterans of that era and their family members. | ||
| We must also honor the downwinders, civilians whose health and lands suffered from the effects from radiation from these tests. | ||
| Many were in the state of Nevada. | ||
| In addition, we cannot forget the Pacific Islanders who have not been able to return to their home islands, or the Uyghurs and others whose homeland in Xinjiang was the location of China's nuclear tests. | ||
| They too have suffered a long-term health consequence. | ||
| In two weeks, we will commemorate the first use of a nuclear weapon in a conflict, and that was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the second, the bombing of Nagasaki, on August 9th. | ||
| Let us pray that Nagasaki will be the last. | ||
| Let us work to make sure that it is. | ||
| Sadly, the threat from nuclear weapons is only increasing. | ||
| There are estimated to be 13,400 nuclear weapons in the world today. | ||
| Some 90% of these are in the arsenals of the United States and Russia. | ||
| The rest belong to the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. | ||
| Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine and even against NATO nations. | ||
| North Korea uses its nuclear weapons program to intimidate the United States, Japan, and Korea. | ||
| China continues to build up its nuclear arsenal. | ||
| It has some 600 warheads today and is expected to pass 1,000 by 2030, according to the Pentagon. | ||
| The question of Iran's nuclear program has been at the top of our concerns. | ||
| The military strikes by Israel and the United States were, as stated, designed to degrade or eliminate Iran's nuclear development capabilities. | ||
| However, as the Washington Post reported last week, U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that only one of Iran's three principal nuclear facilities was destroyed by the U.S. attacks. | ||
| This tells us that military action is not a reliable way to counter nuclear threats. | ||
| In 80 years of the nuclear era, the only proven, demonstrated way to reduce the risk of nuclear conflict and to lessen the scale of its destruction is through diplomacy and negotiations. | ||
| If not for past arms control agreements, Mr. Speaker, today's arsenals would be larger and more dangerous. | ||
| If not for limitation on above-ground and atmospheric testing, many more people would suffer from radiation and contamination. | ||
| But our challenge is made harder by the fact that there is only one arms control agreement remaining in force between the United States and Russia. | ||
| The new START Treaty limits the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads for each party to 1,550. | ||
| The treaty expires in February 2026. | ||
| There are scant signs that either government is interested in extending it. | ||
| President Donald Trump can and should take forward steps on nuclear arms control. | ||
| He can follow in the footsteps of other Republican presidents. | ||
| President Eisenhower, in his Adams for Peace speech, expressed the moral imperative to warn Americans in the world of the destructiveness of atomic weapons. | ||
| President Reagan, in his second term, negotiated the INF Treaty with the Soviets. | ||
| He spoke privately with Gorbachev about the elimination of all nuclear weapons. | ||
| Earlier this year, President Trump said from the Oval Office, and I quote, there's no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. | ||
| We already have so many. | ||
| You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over, and here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they're building nuclear weapons, end quote. | ||
| He added, let me quote again, we're all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually hopefully more productive, end quote. | ||
| On this point, Mr. Speaker, President Trump is right. | ||
| President Trump has the opportunity to make nuclear threat reduction a part of his legacy. | ||
| As a smart first step, he and Putin can strike a deal to respect Newstart's central limits and set the stage for a more comprehensive nuclear arms control framework agreement. | ||
| Next, President Trump can put nuclear weapons on the agenda when he meets with Xi Jinping. | ||
| He expressed a willingness to do this in his Oval Office comments. | ||
| Even talking about negotiations in itself can help reduce tensions. | ||
| A deal requires a first step, and I encourage the President to take it and to take it soon. | ||
| And we in Congress can use our voice. | ||
| Along with our colleague, Representative Jill Takuda of Hawaii, I am the proud sponsor of HRES 317, a resolution that calls on the U.S. government to return to the negotiating table on nuclear disarmament and to lead a global effort to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons. | ||
| It reaffirms our country's moral and strategic obligation to prevent nuclear war and pursue a world free of nuclear weapons as a national security imperative. | ||
| This call is in the spirit of President Eisenhower and Reagan and Presidents Carter and Obama, and we hope President Trump. | ||
| I'm pleased to report that Senators Markey, Merkley, Sanders, Welsh, and Van Hollen have all introduced a version of our resolution. | ||
| And I urge the foreign policy committees of both bodies to consider these resolutions promptly. | ||
| Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, activity in House committees is taking us in the wrong direction. | ||
| Last week, the Appropriations Committee approved an energy and water bill that cuts the National Nuclear Security Administration's defense nuclear nonproliferation account by $412 million. | ||
| That's 17%. | ||
| These activities help the U.S. stop the spread of nuclear weapons, detect hidden nuclear activities, and support arms control efforts. | ||
| Why would anybody think it is a good idea to cut that account? | ||
| Also last week, the Armed Services Committee approved the National Defense Authorization Act. | ||
| It authorizes $62 billion for the nuclear enterprise, which represents a 26% increase over President Biden's request last year. | ||
| Unfortunately, the committee rejected an amendment by our colleague from California, John Garamendi, to restrict funding to create a new land-based nuclear delivery system, the Sentinel missile, a $180 billion boondoggle he has called an endless money pit. | ||
| The threat of nuclear war is an existential one. | ||
| We have a moral imperative, a moral imperative to address it and address it urgently. | ||
| Debates over the utility and morality of nuclear weapons are as old as the nuclear age. | ||
| Notably, many of the people who helped make atomic weapons turned out to be some of the most powerful voices against their use and for the reduction in their arsenals. | ||
| Two years ago this week, Mr. Speaker, the film Oppenheimer premiered. | ||
| It told the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who helped create the atomic bomb, but then pushed against development of more powerful weapons. | ||
| And for that position of moral courage, he paid a political price. | ||
| Two months ago, Dr. Richard Garwin passed away at the age of 97. | ||
| He's best known as the author of the first hydrogen bomb. | ||
| Less widely known is that he spent decades working tirelessly in arms control and disarmament on scientific panels, conferences, and government boards. | ||
| In a 2018 interview, Dr. Garwin said, and let me quote, there is the myth, and you saw it operate many times in the past, that if there is a perceived security problem, well, no difficulty, we'll just buy more nuclear weapons. | ||
| But that doesn't improve our security. | ||
| What we want is less nuclear weapons and less cause for using them on the other side, end quote. | ||
| You know, when I was a staffer for the late Congressman Joe Moakley in the 1980s, I recall going to hear Dr. Garwin and Dr. Carl Sagan give a talk on nuclear weapons and the Strategic Defense Initiative. | ||
| Dr. Sagan, of course, is the physicist who helped us understand the idea of a nuclear winter, the hemisphere-wide dark age caused by the radioactive ash sent into the atmosphere following multiple nuclear detonations, wiping out food supplies, causing untold deaths from starvation even beyond the millions killed by the blasts. | ||
| For us today, the dynamic Dr. Garwin identifies isn't in the past. | ||
| It's in the present. | ||
| Our inboxes are full of policy papers expressing fears about the growth of China's nuclear arsenal or Vladimir Putin's intentions or Iran's plans. | ||
| Too often, policymakers have a reflexive response. | ||
| They are building war, so we should build more. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, this is so short-sighted. | ||
| It is a dangerous reaction, very, very dangerous. | ||
| We know firsthand the harm that such devastating weapons can have. | ||
| On the 80th anniversary, people of many generations will gather in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and very few survivors of those atomic bombings remain with us. | ||
| But their stories endure. | ||
| The disturbing photos of the burns and the radiation sickness, they endure. | ||
| And those cities, those gathered, will recommit to preserving the memory of the destruction and to plead with current and future generations to work to ensure that such horrors never, ever, ever happen again. | ||
| I regret I cannot be with them in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that is why I have organized this special order on the House floor today so that members can share their message from the floor of the House. | ||
| And to our colleagues and to the President and to the American people, this is a crucial moment in world history. | ||
| We have a moral responsibility to speak out and to do more. | ||
| After the anniversaries, after the August break, when we return to Washington, let us commit to raise more awareness, more congressional hearings, more debate on the floor, more encouragement for scientists, civil societies, civil society, and regular citizens to raise their voices. | ||
| Let us commit to legislation to contain the growth of nuclear weapons. | ||
| Let us commit ourselves to the elimination of nuclear weapons. | ||
| And with that, Mr. Speaker, I am glad to yield to the gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Foster. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and thank you, Representative McGovern, for holding this special hour to discuss the dangers of nuclear weapons. | ||
| You know, when I first entered Congress, I was the third PhD physicist elected to this body. | ||
| We had at the time Vern Ehlers, a nuclear physicist and a conservative religious Republican representing Western Michigan. | ||
| We had Rush Hold, a plasma fusion physicist, a progressive Democrat representing Princeton. | ||
| And we had me, a sort of garden variety, garden variety Democrat who spent the last 25 years smashing protons and anti-protons together to make particles that have not been around since the Big Bang. | ||
| And although our politics were quite different, we were united by a special responsibility to join the discussion about nuclear weapons and ask what we can do to strengthen global nuclear security and maintain U.S. leadership in trying to prevent nuclear war. | ||
| One area where we were always in violent agreement was to stop wasting money on Star Wars, which was then rebranded, the SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiatives, and is now rebranded Golden Dome. | ||
| For more than 45 years, scientists have been patiently explaining to policymakers that this is never going to work. | ||
| It is easy to overwhelm with a trivial response to it. | ||
| We have spent over $200 billion on it. | ||
| We have never tested it once against the kind of countermeasures that you know any competent opponent would deploy. | ||
| And even if we succeed at stopping ballistic missiles, there are unfortunately many other ways to deliver nuclear weapons that we can never stop. | ||
| And so this thing is, it is deeply, I guess stupid is not too strong a word. | ||
| When you explain something to someone in a variety of terms again and again, and they just don't want to hear it because they think it messages so well, wouldn't it be great if we had this magic golden dome or whatever you want to call it that would stop nuclear weapons? | ||
| Yeah, it would be great, but if it is an impossibility to do the fundamental physics of it, then we should stop talking about it and we should certainly stop wasting money on it. | ||
| Another place where we were always in strong agreement was how we should be strengthening the non-proliferation efforts at our national laboratories. | ||
| Our national labs create an underlying foundation for all of our nuclear security efforts, including the non-proliferation and national security priorities that we're talking about here today. | ||
| In order to ensure that current and future arms control efforts are properly fulfilling their mission, we have to invest in our scientific workforce to maintain our leadership in verification efforts. | ||
| You know, it's not well known, certainly among members of Congress, but when the IEA sends inspectors into Iran, into countries of concern, those have been largely trained by the national labs in the United States. | ||
|
Nuclear Proliferation Risks
00:15:06
|
||
| And when we gut the nonproliferation capacities of our national labs or simply allow them to retire, as has been happening, we risk putting aside one of the most powerful tools we have to actually enforce any deal that we may get. | ||
| The President's very fond of talking about this deal he's going to get on Iran nuclear. | ||
| We had listened to him talk about how he was going to get North Korea. | ||
| You know, I support efforts to try doing that, but if we ever succeed at getting one of these deals, we are going to need for sure to have experts we trust that can go in there and make sure nobody's cheating. | ||
| But unfortunately, what we're seeing is the gutting of those budgets in that capacity because it doesn't satisfy the mega worldview, I guess. | ||
| And over the years, I've focused my attention on a few specific areas to strengthen our nuclear security architecture. | ||
| One of them is what's called a nuclear, well, it's the business, it has a number of names, but the question is: if for some reason a nuclear weapon is detonated somewhere in the United States or anywhere around the world, the President will come under huge pressure to say who did that, whose weapon was it. | ||
| There is a lot of very detailed knowledge that we have had in the past in our national labs to be able to go in there, do what's called nuclear forensics, and find out whether that was a bomb from X, Y, or Z. | ||
| And that capacity has been under duress for a long time, and it seems like it's every single time the appropriations budgets come up, we end up having to try to defend that. | ||
| And that's something that's completely irrelevant until it's the most important question in the world. | ||
| Who did that? | ||
| Who let off this nuclear weapon? | ||
| And how do we make sure we don't retaliate against the wrong person or entity that did that? | ||
| So, first, then there are a number of other things I've been working on. | ||
| First and foremost is HRES 100. | ||
| It's a resolution that I introduced in the House with 19 other members supporting arms control and condemning Russia's purported suspension of its participation in the New START treaty. | ||
| The current extension of the NUSTART is set to expire in under a year, and anyone who remembers previous arms control negotiations will know that there's almost no time left to negotiate a subsequent treaty. | ||
| Additionally, any negotiations, whether with Russia, China, or any other country, will require partners who are willing to have discussions on armed control, which is something that's far easier said than done. | ||
| This is not something where the two great men leading great nations can come together and strike a deal. | ||
| The details matter, and you have to have technical experts that you trust going deep down into the weeds to have an agreement that they will come back to you and say, Yeah, this is a solid agreement that we can trust. | ||
| You know, and it's a time when traditional channels of dialogue on arms control and strategic stability have been closed or quiet. | ||
| And we're going to rely more than ever on keeping alternative channels open and keeping the expertise in place so when the time comes for these agreements, we have people we trust that can carry them out. | ||
| Non-governmental organizations, scientists, and research institutions have kept this dialogue open even during the worst parts of the Cold War. | ||
| And we're going to need to rely on them to fulfill these roles again. | ||
| Another crucial institution that we must continue to support in these times is the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency. | ||
| We're already seeing the incredibly hard work that Director General Grossi and his staff are putting in to responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine with its many nuclear reactors and the myriad of other crises on their doorstep. | ||
| Which brings us to Iran. | ||
| You know, one of the proudest moments in my career was standing alongside Dr. Richard Garwin, who, as Representative McGovern mentioned, often pointed to as the father of the hydrogen bomb and a strong advocate for nuclear nonproliferation. | ||
| He stood by my side along with Energy Secretary Dr. Ernie Moniz as I announced my support for the Iran nuclear deal. | ||
| And one of the tragedies of the recent past has been this president's abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal, which has gotten us into a heck of a pickle. | ||
| As predicted by the people who actually understood what our true options were in that negotiation. | ||
| After the U.S. bombing of Iran, there's been an immense amount of debate about whether or not Iran's nuclear program was set back by a certain amount of time, whether it's years or whatever. | ||
| But the level of technical ignorance that has been displayed by this administration is frankly frightening. | ||
| They have access to the best weapons designers in the world, and either they're not listening to them or not asking their questions. | ||
| Because when you hear Secretary Rubio, for example, saying, oh, don't worry, don't worry about their 60% enriched uranium inventory, because they're going to have to convert it to metal, and that will take us years. | ||
| Anyone with a knowledge of the history of the Manhattan Project knows that is not a major activity. | ||
| Iran has done it for a long time. | ||
| They know how to do it. | ||
| And if you're only interested in converting from uranium hexafluoride to metal, you know, a few tens of kilograms, which is what you need for your first weapon and set of weapons, this happens in a laboratory. | ||
| It can happen in a congressional office. | ||
| You don't need a big space for this. | ||
| The conversion of the uranium hex to what's called green salt and the green salt to metal is something that happens in a small industrial building that can happen anywhere in any city in Iran and will be really hard to tell. | ||
| So we have not prevented them from doing what they have to do. | ||
| And the enrichment level is another thing where we're seeing, frankly, technically ignorant statements made. | ||
| You know, we have three levels of uranium. | ||
| There's the less than 20% is generally regarded as relatively safe, can be used in reactors without a lot of safeguards. | ||
| Then when you get above 90% enriched uranium, that's the good stuff for really high-performance weapons. | ||
| But what about in between? | ||
| They have 60% uranium. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| That is not weapons grade, but it is weapons usable. | ||
| For example, the Hiroshima bomb. | ||
| The Hiroshima bomb was made with a mixture of 50% enriched uranium and higher enriched uranium. | ||
| The 60% uranium that Iran has a significant inventory of is perfectly usable even for a simple Hiroshima-style gun-type device. | ||
| And when our leadership speaks in ignorance, apparent ignorance of that fact, you know, beating their chest and saying we set them back by decades, whereas in fact that's not the case. | ||
| And this uranium, this uranium hexafluoride, just to give you a sense of the scale, the 400 kilograms that the IEA watched them enrich to 60%, that is stored conventionally in the United States in about 25 scuba tank-sized pressurized containers. | ||
| Any five of those scuba tanks have enough uranium to make a Hiroshima-style nuclear weapon. | ||
| And these things are not hard to smuggle. | ||
| We will have a hard time convincing ourselves, in fact, that the Iranians already haven't done it. | ||
| And so just pretending like Iran does not have a credible threat here and has no leverage is a dangerous and ignorant position for our government to be taking. | ||
| And one of the scariest things about the many threats that we face right now. | ||
| For those of you who don't know, actually you should go look at the Wikipedia article on the Hiroshima Little Boy bomb. | ||
| And you will see a lot and the references in it. | ||
| It's unfortunately very well documented over the years because it's not the best weapon you can make by far. | ||
| You can make much more complex and inefficient weapons, but the Iranians don't have to do that. | ||
| If they simply want to replicate what was done, you get an old 155 millimeter howitzer, you replace the explosive shell with some enriched, 60% enriched will work just fine. | ||
| Uranium, you shoot it into the right shape target, and you've got something that's as effective as the Hiroshima weapon. | ||
| This is not a trivial risk, and the only answer to this is negotiations. | ||
| And we have to get very serious about that. | ||
| It's not something that the Iranians even have to test. | ||
| We did not test the Hiroshima weapon before we sent out. | ||
| It was just obviously going to work. | ||
| The physics hasn't changed in the 80 years since then. | ||
| And so we're at a very uncertain position on that, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. | ||
| Another, we've also recently been hearing a lot of calls about the resumption of nuclear testing. | ||
| You know, this is particularly worrying because the move away from nuclear testing has been really one of, you know, it's one of the cornerstone successes of non-proliferation and nuclear security. | ||
| But just think of all the attention Donald Trump could get by giving the order that he wants to blow off a nuclear weapon just to make sure it works or whatever it is. | ||
| You know, yeah, you get a lot of attention that way. | ||
| But our country has a tremendous amount to lose if everyone begins nuclear testing again. | ||
| The U.S. during the Cold War conducted over 1,000 nuclear tests, far more than any other country, and we had much better instrumentation knowing exactly what happened in those explosions. | ||
| And that knowledge that we gained has allowed our nation to maintain the safety, security, and effectiveness of our nuclear stockpile without any further testing. | ||
| And if we were to resume testing, the rest of the world would resume testing. | ||
| I'm sure they all have bomb designers that are just chomping at the bit to get more data on exactly what happens if they explode one of their untested weapons. | ||
| If we do this, we would be giving away the most significant strategic advantage that our country has, which is this huge database of exactly what works and what does not work, in detailed and very technologically aggressive designs for our nuclear weapons. | ||
| So if we open that Pandora box, every country which is nuclear capable will say this is our opportunity to become co-equal with the United States in knowledge of nuclear weapons, and that will be yet another disaster for the proliferation regime. | ||
| So, you know, the next few years are going to be crucial to making sure that the world we live in remains safe from the threat of nuclear weapons. | ||
| And again, I thank you, Representative McGovern, for bringing us together to discuss this. | ||
| I thank the gentleman from Illinois for his thoughtful remarks. | ||
| I now yield to the gentleman from Hawaii, Mr. Kuda. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I rise to join my colleagues and reinforce their warning and urgent call to action. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, today we stand at a crossroads. | ||
| The world is once again drifting toward a future where nuclear weapons are not just tools of deterrence, but urgent threats hanging over every human life. | ||
| We cannot afford to look away, not when the lessons of the past are still very visible amongst us. | ||
| Look to the people of the Marshall Islands, many of them living in my district, part of our Hawaii Ohana, whose lands became sacrifice zones in the name of power. | ||
| Entire communities displaced. | ||
| Generations scarred by radiation. | ||
| The Bikini Atoll, once a paradise, became a proving ground for devastation. | ||
| These were not just theoretical consequences, lines on paper, assumptions, equations. | ||
| They were real, and they are very real still. | ||
| The United States and its allies conducted 318 nuclear tests in the Pacific Islands. | ||
| The people who lived on the islands lost their ancestral homes, now uninhabitable. | ||
| And the people who were exposed to fallout were immediately sickened with ongoing long-term impacts for human health, including increased rates of birth defects, genetic disorders, and secondary cancers. | ||
| The nuclear age taught us that while bombs may drop in seconds, their impacts stretch across centuries and generations. | ||
| And now, instead of learning from history, learning from the mistakes of our past, we are poised to repeat it with greater risk, fewer safeguards, and far more at stake. | ||
| Today, the United States, Russia, and China inch closer to an unrestrained three-way arms race as we collectively spend well over a trillion dollars on updated and new nuclear warheads and means of delivery. | ||
| Just one of these programs, as was mentioned, the Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, will cost $141 billion, according to the Department of Defense. | ||
| But keep in mind, that's not even the bottom line. | ||
| Their cost estimates keep growing and growing. | ||
| A new arms race is a race with no finish line. | ||
| Let us be clear. | ||
| No winners, only losers in this race. | ||
| And it doesn't have to be this way. | ||
| We must urgently renew and expand nuclear arms control treaties with both Russia and with China. | ||
| The path to security lies not in new warheads or golden domes, but in dialogue, transparency, and mutual restraint. | ||
| We must invest as much into diplomacy and prevention as we do into silos and interceptors. | ||
| Because let us be clear, all it takes is one bomb, one miscalculation, one moment of madness, and everything, everything will end. | ||
| The clock is ticking, but the future is still ours to shape. | ||
| Let us choose wisdom over fear, peace over peril, life over annihilation. | ||
| Mahalo to my colleague, Congressman McGovern, for organizing this special hour. | ||
|
Call for Nuclear Abolition
00:11:54
|
||
| And I would ask that on August 6th and August 9th, let us take a moment to pause and remember we do have a choice. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield to that. | ||
| I thank the gentlewoman for her remarks. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Minnesota, Ms. Omar. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I rise today to once again call on the United States to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and for all of the world's nuclear-armed powers to adopt policies of mutual disarmament and abolition. | ||
| In a few short weeks, we will mark the 80th anniversary of the only time nuclear weapons have been used in combat by the United States in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. | ||
| The fact is, in 80 years since, we have only avoided nuclear war by sheer luck. | ||
| As long as countries possess massive arsenals of world-destroying weapons, the risk of miscalculation and the risk of escalation is eternal. | ||
| In the last few years, we have seen multiple situations that remind us of the extent of the fragility and of the danger. | ||
| Nuclear-armed India exchanged fire with nuclear-armed Pakistan just this year. | ||
| Cooler heads prevailed this time. | ||
| Nuclear-armed Israel conducted unilateral strikes on facilities in Iran. | ||
| That war didn't go nuclear this time. | ||
| Nuclear-armed Russia continues its brutal war of conquest in Ukraine. | ||
| We are avoiding escalations that increase the threats of nuclear threat war between Russia and the West so far. | ||
| The truth is, the era of nuclear weapons will only end in one of two ways. | ||
| Either we will abolish these horrific weapons from the face of the earth, or we will use them and abolish humanity instead. | ||
| The only sane position, the only legitimate position for anyone who values human life is abolition. | ||
| And more than half the countries in the world have now formally agreed, signing on to the TPNW. | ||
| We should join them. | ||
| Because just as we have gotten terrifyingly close to nuclear war in these past 80 years, we have gotten close to disarmament. | ||
| It is not a pipe dream. | ||
| Reagan, Gorbachev also did it. | ||
| South Africa unilaterally dismantled their arsenal. | ||
| Other countries have stopped developing nuclear weapons before they got the bomb. | ||
| It is possible to disarm. | ||
| It is possible to abolish nuclear weapons. | ||
| We only need the political will, and we need the urgency. | ||
| Finally, Mr. Speaker, you will note that I said the bomb dropped in Hiroshima and Niasaki were the only nuclear weapons used in combat. | ||
| But they were not. | ||
| We must be absolutely clear the only times nuclear weapons have been used. | ||
| In fact, nuclear weapons have been used thousands of times and their primary targets have been Americans. | ||
| We also mark this month the 80th anniversary of the Trinity tests in New Mexico. | ||
| And so we should remember that entire communities have been poisoned by these weapons right here in the United States. | ||
| Entire generations have seen their families, their friends, their classmates dying of rare cancers caused by the radiation exposure. | ||
| They have been forced to drink poisoned water and breathe poisoned air. | ||
| The effect of the communities known as the Downwinders have been catastrophic, and their suffering is still sadly mostly unknown in this country. | ||
| We have made some small steps towards providing overdue compensation to these Americans, the first and the most consistent victims of our nuclear weapons program. | ||
| But we still have a long way from justice. | ||
| So, Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Mr. McGovern for hosting this special hour tonight and for his years of principled leadership on this issue. | ||
| I yield back. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman for her remarks. | ||
| And, you know, we're living at a time when there's great polarization in our politics. | ||
| But the issue that we're talking about here today ought to bring Democrats and Republicans together, because whether you're Democrats and Republicans or Liberals and Conservatives, we do have a mutual interest in survival. | ||
| And if nuclear weapons are ever used in the current day, nobody wins. | ||
| Nobody wins. | ||
| And what we're talking about is the salvation or the destruction of our civilization from nuclear death. | ||
| The stakes could not be higher. | ||
| And yet what is shocking to many of us is the lack of urgency, the lack of attention to this subject. | ||
| And I now, Mr. Speaker, would like to yield to the gentleman from Michigan, Ms. Talib. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| There is a lack of urgency. | ||
| And we need to move with urgency because a nuclear war cannot be won and would have catastrophic human consequences. | ||
| Our one warhead, one, has the power to wipe out an entire city. | ||
| A full-scale nuclear war would devastate life as we know it. | ||
| 80 years ago, the horrific U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused unimaginable death and immense human suffering, and survivors to this day face long-term health issues and radiation poisoning. | ||
| So 80 years later, after these atrocities, we must, we must, as a chamber here, recommit our efforts to finally achieving the complete and total abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide. | ||
| We must ensure these war crimes are never repeated anywhere. | ||
| Nuclear weapons are tools of death and destruction. | ||
| They cannot be used without disastrous consequences that violate international law and our shared humanity. | ||
| The White House and Congress need to immediately work to negotiate new constraints to cap and reduce nuclear arsenals, especially with Russia and China. | ||
| We must do everything in our power to prevent an unrestrained nuclear arms race. | ||
| It's absolutely terrifying that in the United States, the president has the power to unilaterally decide to launch a nuclear weapon. | ||
| Think about that for one moment. | ||
| The use of just a fraction of nuclear weapons we possess, most of which are ready to launch within minutes of an order from any president, including the current one, would lead to mass destruction of unprecedented global scale. | ||
| Members of Congress on both sides of the aisles should back common sense efforts to prioritize nuclear disarmament and adopt measures to reduce the risk of nuclear war. | ||
| We must continue to work towards international agreements, Mr. Chair, with all nine countries that possess nuclear weapons. | ||
| Through a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty, as well as the treaty on Prohibiting nuclear weapons. | ||
| Again, we must come together. | ||
| I cannot say this enough. | ||
| The devastation, the consequences of any nuclear launch could be, again, life-changing around the world. | ||
| We must continue to strive for a world free from the threat of nuclear war. | ||
| With that, again, I cannot thank enough my colleague, Mr. McGovern, as he commits to banning nuclear weapons and again, try to save us from any kind of life-changing devastation to our lives to our world. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I want to thank Congresswoman Talev, all my colleagues who have been here today because this is the most important issue, quite frankly, facing our planet. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, we can never ignore the fact that behind the conference room discussions about the utility of nuclear weapons, behind the corporate lobbying for nuclear modernization spending, this is a story of human suffering. | ||
| The Nobel Committee awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to the organization Nihon Hidonko for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again. | ||
| Nihon Hidanko is a grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. | ||
| In two weeks, members of this organization, along with activists and citizens from Japan and around the world, will gather in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings. | ||
| They will amplify this clear and existential message that nuclear weapons must never ever be used again. | ||
| This organization keeps alive the testimony of Hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. | ||
| They are the witnesses to the indescribable, the unthinkable, the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons. | ||
| Nihon Hidonko highlights the nuclear taboo, the concept that nuclear weapons should never be used, an idea that is under threat from the growth in nuclear arsenals from around the world. | ||
| Among the organization's aims is an international treaty for nuclear disarmament. | ||
| Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, or TPNW, was adopted on July 7, 2017 and entered into force on January 22nd, 2021. | ||
| It is the first legally binding international agreement to comprehensively prohibit nuclear weapons with the utility, with the ultimate goal being their total elimination. | ||
| 73 nations are party to the treaty. | ||
| The United States is not. | ||
| Neither are the other eight nuclear powers. | ||
| We won't get there overnight, but we should not abandon the goal. | ||
| My resolution, along with the gentlewoman from Hawaii, Representative Takuta, H. Res 317, calls for good faith negotiations with the other eight nuclear armed states to halt any further buildup of nuclear arsenals and to aggressively pursue a verifiable and irreversible agreement or agreements to verifiably reduce and eliminate their nuclear arsenals according to negotiated a negotiated timetable. | ||
| I encourage my colleagues to support this resolution and join us in our efforts. | ||
| At this time, Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California, Mr. Takano. | ||
| Thank you very much for yielding. | ||
| My colleague Ranking Member McGovern of the Rules Committee, I thank him and the CPC for organizing this very important special order hour. | ||
| Next month marks 80 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. | ||
| These were the only times that nuclear weapons have ever been used in war. | ||
|
Bridge to Hiroshima
00:05:12
|
||
| I have to say that this memorial, this memory, this 80th anniversary milestone is not just historical, it is somewhat personal. | ||
| And unexpectedly so, say beginning in 2001, 2002, when at the age of 40, 41, I made my first visit to Japan. | ||
| I grew up as an American, a Japanese American. | ||
| One of my grandparents, the only grandparent, my grandfather Isao Takano, immigrated to the United States around 1916. | ||
| He was born in 1898 in Japan. | ||
| And he came from the environs of Hiroshima. | ||
| Growing up, we would go to his niece, my second cousin, or one of my, I don't know how to kind of appropriate the right sort of familial designations of who's a cousin, a second cousin, but Kikuwe Takagi was my grandfather's niece, who married an American and lived in Anaheim and worked at Disneyland. | ||
| We knew that, we knew some facts, but we never, in our times when we would get together for our family gatherings, would we ever discuss what happened in Hiroshima? | ||
| But it wasn't until I was well into my adulthood on my first trip to Japan visiting Hiroshima and visiting Kiku, who was there taking care of her mother, that I learned that she was Hibakusha, a survivor. | ||
| That's a Japanese word for a survivor of the atom bomb. | ||
| She lived in the outskirts of Hiroshima. | ||
| If you've been there, it's mountainous. | ||
| It's a place, a delta with five different rivers converging. | ||
| And she lived in the outskirts. | ||
| And she was a middle school student. | ||
| And on the day that the bomb dropped, she was still ill, so much so that her mother said, you don't need to go into the city center to do your public service work. | ||
| Because the middle school children were needed to clean up the debris of the area around the downtown of Hiroshima. | ||
| They were doing an urban renewal project to widen the streets. | ||
| They knew the people of Hiroshima, the political class knew that Hiroshima was a target because it was an industrial city. | ||
| But little did they know that the teachers, the middle school teachers, and the 13-year-olds who were there at the city center doing this public service work were all going to perish that day. | ||
| But my cousin survived because she stayed home at the behest of her mother. | ||
| And she had not visited any of the memorials until I had arrived in the early 2000s. | ||
| And I felt a tinge of guilt for asking her to do this because she had never really sort of delved into this history by visiting the memorial museum. | ||
| Riding over the bridge of one of the rivers to the museum, the day that Kikawea decided and I decided to go, she told me about how the river was not visible during the day that the bomb, the days afterward, because of the numbers of bodies that just covered the surface of that water. | ||
| And when you arrive at the memorial location, you can see bottles of water that many people who attend these memorials will leave for the thirsty souls of those who perished and those who were thirsty from the August heat. | ||
| I feel a deep obligation and responsibility to carry this memory forward. | ||
| And I remember as I crossed the bridge thinking to myself how I was personally connected by family to this historical event, that it was not something abstract. | ||
| And it was a moment that who I was, my identity, somewhat shifted and changed. | ||
| More than 200,000 people were killed. | ||
| Most of them civilians. | ||
| Some died instantly. | ||
| Others suffered for months or years from burns, radiation, and grief. | ||
| 80 years after the erasure of two cities, we have still not learned the lessons of these terrible bombings. | ||
| There are an estimated 13,400 nuclear warheads on Earth today. | ||
|
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
00:07:56
|
||
| The United States and Russia hold more than 90% of them. | ||
| Together, we control more than 12,000 warheads, and that's more than enough to end human civilization. | ||
| And while the United States and Russia maintain the largest stockpiles, China is rapidly building. | ||
| According to the Department of Defense, China's arsenal already has 500 operational warheads. | ||
| And if current trends continue, it could surpass 1,000 by the year 2030. | ||
| This growth adds to global instability and makes the case for more urgent diplomacy and arms control. | ||
| It makes the case even stronger for diplomacy and arms control. | ||
| And yet, the most important arms control treaty still in force between the United States and Russia is set to expire in less than 200 days. | ||
| If we let the new START treaty expire, we will be left with no legal limits on the size of the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world. | ||
| And at the same time, we are seeing headlines about strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. | ||
| These actions revive a dangerous question. | ||
| Can we stop the spread of nuclear weapons through military force? | ||
| I believe the answer is no. | ||
| We cannot destroy knowledge with a bomb. | ||
| We cannot erase a nuclear program by targeting one facility. | ||
| Strikes might delay a program, but they almost always provoke retaliation and hardened resolve. | ||
| And they do nothing to build the kind of long-term trust and transparency that actually reduces nuclear risk. | ||
| That is why we need a strategy based on diplomacy, prevention, and protection. | ||
| We know that this strategy can work because it did in the past. | ||
| Iran's nuclear weapons program development ground to a halt under the Iran nuclear deal. | ||
| It was only after President Trump ripped up the accord that Iran set itself on the pathway it is on today. | ||
| And the recent strikes reinforce the military theocracy's paranoia that the only pathway to secure the regime's long-term survival is through development of a nuclear program. | ||
| Because like I said before, if a nation has enough willpower and know-how-how, they will develop a nuclear weapon. | ||
| And that means U.S. national security cannot solely rest on deterrence. | ||
| We should lead by example. | ||
| That means modernizing verification tools, supporting international inspectors, and investing in the diplomatic capacity to negotiate real agreements. | ||
| It also means rethinking how we can make decisions about the use of nuclear weapons. | ||
| And Congress has a role to play. | ||
| We cannot stay silent while the risks grow and the guardrails fall away. | ||
| The American people deserve transparency about how nuclear launch decisions are made and who is involved in making them. | ||
| This is not just a matter of policy. | ||
| It is a matter of survival. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not mere tragedies. | ||
| They were warnings. | ||
| The people who died there cannot speak for themselves. | ||
| But we can speak for the future. | ||
| They were denied. | ||
| We can choose a path that avoids repeating the worst mistake in human history. | ||
| Let us honor the lives lost not only with remembrance but responsibility. | ||
| Let's choose diplomacy over destruction, prevention over provocation, and peace over peril. | ||
| And let me return back to that scene of riding over that bridge over the river with my cousin Kiku and the thought that I had that every world leader who has some control over a nuclear arsenal should make it a commitment to visit Hiroshima and walk the grounds and understand what happened there, | ||
| what happened in Nagasaki, because I think that's the only way that one has the moral stature and authority to be a leader of a country that has a nuclear arsenal. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| And Mr. Speaker, I now yield back to my good friend, Mr. McGovern. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman for his eloquent remarks. | ||
| And there's so much more that needs to be said, but our time is coming to a close. | ||
| So let me end by saying the following. | ||
| You know, when I was in college in the late 1970s, I interned for Senator George McGovern, no relation, but a leader on arms control issues. | ||
| And I was able to accompany him to a debate with William F. Buckley at Yale University entitled Resolve that the SALT Talks Are in the Interest of U.S. National Security. | ||
| And of course, by that, the SALT talks were the strategic arms limitation talks. | ||
| And George McGovern closed the debate, and I remember this like it was yesterday, but I thought very powerfully. | ||
| He said that he recalls that when he was a young senator in 1963, they were debating the limited nuclear test ban agreement. | ||
| And Senator Everett Dirksen, who was the Republican Senate minority leader at the time, took to the floor to close the debate. | ||
| And he had said that he had just reread John Hersey's Hiroshima, the description of what happened to that great city the morning after. | ||
| The scene of one family sitting charred around the breakfast table, out in the yard, bits and pieces of children's clothing, the broken arm of a doll, toys and debris scattered over the landscape. | ||
| And he said, you know, I thought about that scene, and I said, someday Everett Dirksen will be buried in Illinois. | ||
| And when that happens, I don't want them to put on my gravestone he knew about this and he didn't care. | ||
| Well, Mr. Speaker, we all know the realities of nuclear weapons and their devastation and the fact that if they were ever used, it will result in the total annihilation of our planet. | ||
| The question for all of us is are we going to do anything about it? | ||
| You know, I said earlier that one of the most troubling factors in this whole topic is the lack of urgency here in Congress. | ||
| I mean, we don't talk about this. | ||
| We're not pushing for arms control. | ||
| We're not setting goals of the total abolition of nuclear weapons. | ||
| Instead, we are just, out of habit, voting in favor of military budgets that contribute to the problem. | ||
| And I think At this moment, as we approach the 80th anniversary of these horrible events, this is a time for us to step up and to do something before it's too late. | ||
| And so I urge my colleagues to commemorate, to have moments of silence to remind their constituencies of the anniversaries of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. | ||
| And I urge them to join with us in a bipartisan way in doing something about it. | ||
| George McGovern ended his debate with William Buckley at Yale by saying this. | ||
| He said many years ago, in ancient wisdom, it was said, I have set before you two choices, life or death. | ||
|
Yield to Reform
00:04:49
|
||
| Therefore, choose life that thee and thy seed may live. | ||
| And that's the choice I want the United States to make at this moment. | ||
| And I hope that we are up to the task, and I hope that we just don't continue to ignore the perils of nuclear warfare. | ||
| And with that, I yield back my time. | ||
| Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3rd, 2025, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Schweikert, for 30 minutes. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker, Pro Ten. | ||
| I'm going to yield to my friend from California as much time as he may consume. | ||
| Thank you very much to my friend from Arizona. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, in 2010, California voters overwhelmingly voted to establish a Citizens Redistricting Commission. | ||
| The voters said, we want to take the process of drawing district lines out of the hands of politicians. | ||
| They said that voters should choose their politicians. | ||
| Politicians shouldn't choose their voters. | ||
| And that commission has drawn our district lines through the last two rounds of redistricting. | ||
| And yet now, the governor of California has announced a plan to abolish the Citizens Redistricting Commission and to seize its powers for himself. | ||
| He initially proposed simply ignoring the commission, ignoring the Constitution, and overriding his maps with those that he and the legislature drew. | ||
| But apparently someone told him that that would get immediately struck down in court. | ||
| So now what they are plotting is a special election where they will use confusing ballot language and other means of deception to try to convince voters to fool voters into dismantling the very independent commission that they recently established. | ||
| And the point of this is that the governor would like to reduce the representation of Republicans in Congress in our state to three members out of 52 so that Republicans will hold 6% of the seats, even though Republicans typically get over 40% of the vote in statewide elections. | ||
| It could be the single most egregious act of corruption in the history of our state. | ||
| And you don't need to take my word for that. | ||
| You can take the word of Common Cause, which is a group that typically almost always aligns with Democrats on elections and voting issues, whose executive director said, quote, point blank, it is a dangerous move. | ||
| Or you can take the words of Patricia Sine, who is a Democrat serving on the Citizens Redistricting Commission, who said the very purpose of the state's independent redistricting commission is to protect voters from partisan power grabs like this. | ||
| If this were to succeed, it would set a dangerous precedent for suppressing voters across the nation. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, this is a moment for every Californian and every American of decency, regardless of party affiliation, to speak out against the abject corruption that our governor is attempting. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize Heather and Jeremy Reynolds, the first and second place winners of the 69th annual Tevis Cup, a grueling 100-mile endurance trail ride from Roby Park to Auburn held on July 12th of this year. | ||
| This year's competition proved even more challenging than usual, with the heat and rocky road providing unforgiving conditions for all competitors. | ||
| Of the 105 entrants, only 43 were able to complete the ride to Auburn. | ||
| However, the couple persevered through, crossing the finish line in 17 hours and 45 minutes. | ||
| Over the span of more than 20 years of competitive riding, the two have accumulated countless awards, including eight Tevis Cups and five Hagen Cups. | ||
| Despite their many accolades, the one challenge they had never conquered was crossing the finish line together. | ||
| In this year's competition, they did. | ||
| Crossing the finish line with their hands joined together, marking an astounding new achievement that's been a goal of theirs for over two decades. | ||
|
Borrowing And Demographics
00:15:19
|
||
| Together, Heather and Jeremy Reynolds embody perseverance, teamwork, and competitive excellence. | ||
| Their achievement serves not just as personal fulfillment, but also as an inspiration to their peers, fellow competitors, and our community at large. | ||
| It is an honor to represent remarkable individuals such as Heather and Jeremy in Congress. | ||
| Therefore, on behalf of the United States House of Representatives, I proudly extend my heartfelt congratulations to Heather and Jeremy Reynolds for their exceptional athletic achievement at the 69th annual Tevis Cup and commend them for their unwavering dedication to the tradition and sport of equine endurance riding. | ||
| With that, I yield back to the representative, my friend from Arizona. | ||
| Thank you to my friend from California. | ||
| And as we always say to Californians, don't take Arizona's water. | ||
| Mr. Speaker pro tem, I know we're actually doing half an hour, so can I make a quick request of how many minutes are left? | ||
| Would you gentlemen repeat? | ||
| Mr. Speaker, Pro Tem, may I inquire into the remaining time? | ||
| The gentleman has 25 minutes remaining. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Perfect timing. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, Pro Tem, I'm going to try to do a run-through of a couple things here. | ||
| I'm going to try to walk through some economics. | ||
| Then I'm going to actually try to walk through some warnings that are in the documents that are around us that very few people seem to bother to read. | ||
| And then I'm going to actually do some things that are hopeful because I think sometimes I'm a bit dour and I don't do enough of this. | ||
| So first off, look, August, Republicans, we're going to go out and tell the morality of people's taxes not going up next year, what we did in the reconciliation budget, of incentives to invest in America, to build new plants of equipment for working people to have some things to actually draw them back into the labor force, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime on some of these things. | ||
| If you actually look at one of the reasons those things are in there, and we're actually starting to see some of the models of the economic side actually saying some very optimistic things of we think this is going to change labor force participation, small changes. | ||
| The left will actually sort of do a bit of schizophrenia of you cut spending over here, but too much of this money is borrowed. | ||
| I agree, it's too much is borrowed. | ||
| I want to cut more spending, but then you attack us when we try to actually point out misalignment, bad acts. | ||
| In fact, we have what was the report that just came out a couple days ago. | ||
| We found, what is it, 2.8 million of our brothers and sisters enrolled in subsidized ACA plans as well as Medicaid plans? | ||
| We're not allowed, they don't want to talk about that because it sort of screws up their pitch when you actually walk through what we see in the math. | ||
| We know the American people believe and understand the morality and the great economics of encouraging those that are able-bodied, able to work, to participate in society. | ||
| And if anyone's a geek out there, it's probably four or five years old. | ||
| University of Chicago, four of their PhD economists, wrote a brilliant paper talking about if you actually ask people to participate in society, in the economy, to take a job, even if you give them welfare, government subsidies, because they have attachment to the economy, to work, that at the end of 10 years, | ||
| those who actually had the work requirements actually end up much wealthier and off of government support because it's the morality of learning to get up, building attachment, learning skills, moving up in an organization. | ||
| So, but somehow that I don't, and there was a time that was actually left ethos, the argument of work is moral, and somehow that left the Democrat Party. | ||
| So, let's walk through a couple things. | ||
| I've used this board for months now. | ||
| It'll probably be the last time I use it. | ||
| Understand baseline over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, we're going to spend $86 trillion. | ||
| Think of the screaming and mashing of teeth and protests, so they're all ginned up. | ||
| You cut $800 billion from this and a little bit from a couple other things. | ||
| It was less than 2% of that spending. | ||
| Are you telling me that the left doesn't believe that if you're spending $86 trillion as your baseline spending and understand, I'm going to show you some of the charts, how much of this is basically demographics? | ||
| We got old. | ||
| Our health care costs. | ||
| I'm going to show you a couple charts here and a couple of loans that I really want folks to understand. | ||
| But for the American people, when you see someone from the Democratic Party behind a microphone going, they cut spending, it's this off of a base of this. | ||
| It's the lack of understanding. | ||
| And look, one of the points that you keep trying to make over and over and over and over and over again is: was the Democrats' plan that they wanted to raise taxes on everyone? | ||
| Because that was automatic. | ||
| That was coming at the end of this year. | ||
| Your taxes were going up back to the pre-2017 tax reform. | ||
| Everyone wants to get, well, you shouldn't have extended the tax policy for the highest income. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But that's a tiny, tiny portion of the total dollar amounts. | ||
| And look, when they had control of everything, I'm, oh, they didn't do it. | ||
| But just from a point, and this is more for everyone to understand, particularly even staff. | ||
| You see the blue here, non-defense defense. | ||
| Every dime of that is borrowed. | ||
| And I think this year we'll probably borrow, let's call it $400 billion of Medicare. | ||
| So my best estimate, and we're going to actually hold a contest shortly to see who can guess the final borrowing for this year. | ||
| And the economy has actually been pretty good. | ||
| We're tracking, we think actually, customs receipts. | ||
| If any of you think of it as tariffs, we may have another $70 billion on top of baseline. | ||
| It's probably going to come at $2.2 trillion of borrowing this year. | ||
| So this doesn't have the tax reform, many of those things much built into that base. | ||
| But understand, in this country, how do I help folks understand? | ||
| Here's where we're already at. | ||
| And this will make sense in a little while. | ||
| For every dollar we take in in tax receipts, we spend $1.39. | ||
| We spend $1.39 for every dollar we take in tax receipts. | ||
| But if you saw that previous chart, you've noticed that only about 24 to 26 percent is in discretionary, what we really get to vote on. | ||
| That's why you end up having to use what we call these reconciliation budgets. | ||
| 1974 Budget Control Act allows us to move a bill if it has certain fiscal properties to it through the Senate without having to get 60 votes. | ||
| It's all a dance to deal with the 60 votes. | ||
| If we were actually a little more honest about math, maybe we wouldn't have to do this dance. | ||
| And why this is important is I'm a little freaked out because this is the MedPAC report. | ||
| And I know every member of Congress has read every word of it because it's really important. | ||
| But there's a chart in here if you actually read the footnotes. | ||
| Now look, for anyone that's paying attention, you know I'm trying to bring Medicare Advantage back where the incentives actually are about helping populations be healthier and not about risk scoring them that it's a concentration of illness, but the incentives that if populations are healthier, the plans can make more money. | ||
| But inside here is also a great data point, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| This year we're going to spend, let's call it $1 trillion on Medicare. | ||
| How many of you would guess what we're going to spend in seven years? | ||
| The model in here says in seven years, we go from $1 trillion a year on Medicare to $2 trillion. | ||
| We double Medicare spending in seven years. | ||
| Now part of that is demographics. | ||
| You know, starting functionally 30 years ago, we started having a lot fewer children. | ||
| So today, if we took today and stepped back 20 years ago, we had about 35 million of our brothers and sisters who were 65 30 years ago. | ||
| Today, we're approaching about 70 million of our brothers and sisters who are 65 and up. | ||
| So more than double. | ||
| Go back 20 years ago, the number of 18-year-olds we have is pretty much the same as the number of 18-year-olds we have today. | ||
| And next year, the number of 18-year-olds goes down, and the year after that, it goes down. | ||
| And the year after that it goes down. | ||
| Is that Republican or Democrat, or is it just demographics? | ||
| It's a little hard to campaign on that. | ||
| It's a little hard to attack the other side. | ||
| But the fact of the matter is, if we all read our data, we don't have a choice. | ||
| This is the Social Security Medicare Actuary Report. | ||
| Another thing I know every member here has actually read seven years from now, Medicare Part A trust fund, which is about 38% of Medicare spending. | ||
| The rest comes out of the general fund and members' participation, I think, is about 15%, the fees they pay. | ||
| But that 38%, that trust fund, is gone in seven years, meaning hospitals, surgery centers, everyone else, 11% cut. | ||
| But I know we're all going to talk and work about how we're going to revolutionize the cost of health care, except one of the classic problems around here, Mr. Speaker, is for some reason the left, and many of us on the right, we talk about health care as a finance problem. | ||
| It's the ACA was a finance bill. | ||
| It's who had to pay, who got subsidized. | ||
| Medicare for all is a finance bill. | ||
| I would argue the Republican alternative from a few years ago was a finance bill. | ||
| It had a little better actuarial curve, but it was a finance bill. | ||
| Who got subsidized, who has to pay? | ||
| I beg of our brothers and sisters around here, open up your brain. | ||
| We live in a time of miracles. | ||
| We're going to have some conversation about how do you change the view of health care is it's what we pay. | ||
| Can we change the cost by doing it better, faster, cheaper with technology, our brothers and sisters being healthier? | ||
| Because if we don't, we have problems like it's on this chart. | ||
| Today, 16% of all tax receipts go just to interest. | ||
| In nine budget years, actually nine years straight up, in nine years, 30% of all U.S. tax receipts go just to interest. | ||
| And heaven forbid, if we had a one-point movement in interest rates, my math is 45% of all tax receipts would go to interest. | ||
| So when you see people come behind these microphones, how many people are saying, hey, how do we convince the bond markets? | ||
| The bond markets are basically on the edge of running this country now, because when you borrow $6 billion a day, next year I think we borrow $6.50, maybe $7 billion a day. | ||
| In nine years, we're over $10 billion a day. | ||
| Let's see, if we're six, that's what, $70,000, $72,000 a second. | ||
| And some of the crazy articles, because I have this aggregator on my news that basically a couple left-wing economists saying, borrowing doesn't matter. | ||
| People are always willing to buy U.S. debt. | ||
| Okay, let's pretend these left-wing economists are right. | ||
| We can continue to borrow and borrow and borrow. | ||
| They purposely sort of forget the punchline. | ||
| Okay, let's say we could borrow every all week forever. | ||
| At what point is there no more services, purchases, government helping our brothers and sisters because it's all covering the interest costs on the bonds? | ||
| So let's say you're, I think, a little insane, but you believe we can just borrow forever. | ||
| you're a monitorist, but even the fragility in the monitors you saw in the previous few years of inflation, that their model didn't work. | ||
| But additional to that, we're going to pay the interest. | ||
| So in nine years, baseline under a favorable interest rate model, 30% of all U.S. tax receipts go to interest. | ||
| And God, heaven forbid, if interest rates were to come up 1%, because we have to, this year or this coming year, I think we're going to refinance $11 trillion. | ||
| The year after that, I think it's $13 because we stay so short on the financing term. | ||
| We sell short-term debt instead of longer-term debt because it turns out there's not as big an appetite. | ||
| So we're in this world where nine budget years, $10 billion a day. | ||
| So let's actually, I'm just going to run through a number of these things fairly quickly just to sort of get a point. | ||
| National health expenditures as a percentage of GDP. | ||
|
Embracing AI Prescription
00:11:42
|
||
| This will make sense in a moment. | ||
| In 2033, functionally, what, eight years from now, over 20% of the economy will just be health care. | ||
| Why? | ||
| The Joint Economic Committee two years ago wrote a report that I thought I was going to get the crap kicked out of me, but we spent months and months and months grabbing every bit of literature and said, can someone tell me what obesity costs America, what it costs society, what it costs family formation, what it costs, we came up with a number, this is two years ago, of $9.1 trillion additional health care costs. | ||
| And we had some mortality statistics, the number of multi-chronic conditions, the misery out there. | ||
| Now, what is fascinating is we have some articles right now that talking about that we may have actually hit something crazy. | ||
| And it's an odd way to phrase it, but it is what the researchers, we may have already hit what we call peak obesity. | ||
| So when we published the report two years ago, we still had about four or five more years of growth of obesity in some states actually approaching 50% of their population being technically obese under the BMI calculations. | ||
| Looks like in the last 12 months, we may have started to bend the curve. | ||
| We're trying to recalculate, is this a sign of incredible hope that we know so much misery in our society because there's a brilliant paper from about seven years ago saying leading contributor to income inequality in America. | ||
| Turns out isn't education. | ||
| Turns out it's health. | ||
| And if you think about it, the cascade of the cost of someone with severe diabetes, when we already know diabetes is 33% of U.S. health care, what if things like this actually could help our brothers and sisters? | ||
| Is this Republican or Democrat? | ||
| It's just good policy. | ||
| It's just always been uncomfortable to talk about. | ||
| And maybe the society is starting to open up saying, hey, maybe a healthier society actually is a really good, really moral thing. | ||
| So look, as we walk through these, I want to come back and sort of hit a punchline here. | ||
| These charts have been available to us for years. | ||
| The curve keeps getting steeper. | ||
| So when you have someone say, I'm a protector of Medicare, great, I'm with you. | ||
| It's an earned benefit. | ||
| We made a societal promise. | ||
| Are you telling the truth about its financing? | ||
| Oh, David, we can't do that. | ||
| Someone will say something mean about us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So what also in seven years also is empty? | |
| The Social Security Trust Fund. | ||
| I'm sure you all dove into the Social Security Medicare actuary report and saw the point in there where it says in 2032, 2033, actually we think it's 2032, our brothers and sisters on Social Security take a 24% cut. | ||
| Our model says we double senior poverty in America. | ||
| Absolutely immoral. | ||
| But have you also read the papers of the scale of tax hikes, of policy? | ||
| Now, is the left offering to work with those of us on the right who are willing to step on the third rail and do the moral thing to actually take on these? | ||
| Hell no. | ||
| I've talked to so many people who are on Ways and Means and other things with me who basically look at me in terror and run out of the room because the political consultants care more about the power of the politics than the fact that in seven years Medicare is $2 trillion a year. | ||
| In seven years the Medicare Trust Fund is empty. | ||
| In seven years the Social Security Trust Fund is empty. | ||
| And one of the rough numbers we had is the first full year, just if you wanted to backfill that shortfall in Social Security, is $618 billion. | ||
| So basically, what is that? | ||
| Two-thirds of what the entire defense budget is. | ||
| There's a lack of understanding of the scale of almost the dystopianism that comes from what happens when these trust funds are empty. | ||
| Hey, Mr. Speaker, Pro Tem, may I make an inquiry in how many minutes I have left? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The gentleman has six minutes remaining. | |
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| I'll learn to talk faster, but the poor person trying to take my words down, I apologize too. | ||
| I can sometimes. | ||
| I'm going to skip over some of the other charts. | ||
| You don't all, you get the punchline. | ||
| In the next decade, the vast majority of debt is driven by interest, health care costs, and we're often very uncomfortable to talk about it. | ||
| So let's actually talk about things that are great, that if we would get policy right, can lower that health care cost, not just argument about who gets subsidized, who gets financed, be really good for society, really good for the budget. | ||
| So you all saw the Economist article last couple days talking about the miracle of how much cancer that the statistical benefits were having on the number of cures, particularly lung cancer, blood cancers, and their model that we are on the cusp of having continued major continued mortgage breakthroughs. | ||
| You all saw this article a couple of days ago about a Microsoft platform. | ||
| I didn't even know they were specializing in this. | ||
| And what was stunning about the data sets they had in here, AI system diagnosed patients four times more accurately than a human doctor. | ||
| Now, I just upset some of my brothers and sisters in the dock caucus, but the data is the data. | ||
| Should we, Mr. Speaker, legalize technology? | ||
| If I have something I can blow into called a breath biopsy, if it's statistically as accurate or more accurate than a human and knows what I have, should it be allowed to prescribe? | ||
| Uncomfortable, but it would help crash the cost of health care. | ||
| It would actually help us move some of the facts that we have shortage of medical professionals. | ||
| We're on the cusp of these things. | ||
| Matter of fact, many of these things, like that technology, has been around for five years, except it's functioning illegal. | ||
| We don't reimburse it and we don't allow it to prescribe. | ||
| We are on the cusp. | ||
| A few minutes ago, an hour ago, Altman, OpenAI, was down the hallway. | ||
| He and I had a few minutes of conversation about a new healthcare stack that's going to go public in about a month. | ||
| And he seemed incredibly optimistic that its accuracy will be off the charts. | ||
| Should we legalize the use of technology to help our society be healthier? | ||
| Should we allow it to prescribe? | ||
| It's uncomfortable because this place is a protection racket. | ||
| You've got to understand, Congress is mostly about one thing. | ||
| It's about money. | ||
| And the left pretends it isn't. | ||
| The right pretends it is. | ||
| It's about money. | ||
| And when you start to say, hey, maybe we could use technology as a competition to help our brothers and sisters be healthier and therefore change the cost of health care, someone's going to look at you and say, but I make money on that. | ||
| You're going to now have me compete against a data system that's more accurate than I am. | ||
| But over and over, new Apple Watch AI model can reveal hidden health conditions. | ||
| Here's a couple of the things I've been most interested in last couple years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great article. | |
| I have a huge one. | ||
| I did a whole speech on it a couple years ago. | ||
| AI discovered a whole new category of antibiotics. | ||
| So you remember we were all panic stricken that we had diseases, bacterial infections that we didn't have antibiotics for, the antibiotics weren't working, and AI designed a whole new category of antibiotics that in the literature said it would have taken humans 20 years to develop. | ||
| Instead of being afraid of the technology, maybe we get our heads straightened up saying in a society where we have a shortage of young people, our brother, our baby boomers like me with gray hair, we're getting older, we're going to consume a lot more health care. | ||
| Can we embrace the technology? | ||
| And that technology lets us free when you start to realize the things that are going on. | ||
| We just had a doctor, a radiologist in our office walking us through a statistical abstract on breast cancers and the scans and showing that his AI platform is remarkably more accurate, cheaper, faster, and more accurate. | ||
| Why wouldn't we embrace that except we don't reimburse it? | ||
| Because the barriers to entry here are protection rackets saying we're not fighting for what's the fastest, bestest, cheapest. | ||
| We're often here because we know our incumbency. | ||
| And look, we really are on the edge of miracles. | ||
| How do I get the left, the right, to understand the math is the math? | ||
| Demographics are the primary driver of U.S. sovereign debt. | ||
| Now, it's hard to campaign against the other side on that, but maybe we could take a couple months off and actually do good quality policy and legalize properly vetted, properly certified AI to prescribe. | ||
| The wearables, this August, I'm going to do an experiment with this Oral Ring and I'm buying some Dexcoms to manage my. | ||
| Have you all seen the app where you can take a picture of your food and it calculates its glucose and its calories? | ||
| How do we create the incentives? | ||
| Maybe we should look at the ACA and instead of just smoking in three age categories, we could add a fifth category that's an incentive for our brothers and sisters that if you manage your health, 16 percent of U.S. health care is people not taking their drugs for their hypertension, for their statin. | ||
| 16 percent is over $600 billion a year. | ||
| There are solutions. | ||
| We can make a difference. | ||
| Embrace the technology, change the cost, have a healthier society, and it's the most powerful thing we can do for U.S. sovereign debt. | ||
| With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The gentleman yields. | |
| Under the speaker's announced policy of January 3rd, 2025, the chair recognizes the gentlewoman from Ohio, Ms. Kaptur, for 30 minutes. | ||
|
Tariffs Worsening Trade Accounts
00:04:28
|
||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I'm deeply concerned about the devastating impact that President Trump's reckless tariff policies are having on our American automotive industry and its workers. | ||
| The latest financial figures from Jeep Stellantis, for example, the proud maker of Jeep and Ram vehicles that are so popular, paints a deeply disturbing picture. | ||
| Nearly $2.7 billion in losses that are tied directly to these tariffs. | ||
| That translates into plant shutdowns, canceled programs, and over 900 American workers already laid off. | ||
| The General Motors chief executive officer similarly said tariffs cost GM $1.1 billion this quarter and that the next quarter will be worse. | ||
| This is real money. | ||
| In an industry that America has been striving to bring back to full production in this country, we've lost so many jobs abroad to cheap labor in places that have no labor rights. | ||
| Now, this is what happens with tariffs when you lead with flashy headlines instead of well-thought-out trade strategy. | ||
| Tariffs without a plan don't punish China. | ||
| They don't balance our trade accounts. | ||
| Our trade accounts get worse. | ||
| They punish Toledo. | ||
| Bad tariff policy punishes manufacturing America. | ||
| These tariffs punish Ohio. | ||
| They punish Michigan. | ||
| They punish Indiana. | ||
| They punish Illinois, America's manufacturing heartland. | ||
| Tariffs punish Missouri. | ||
| They punish Wisconsin. | ||
| They punish every worker on the line who's just trying to build a better life for themselves. | ||
| And the families, the workers that work in these plants do hard work. | ||
| They deserve to earn a fair wage with good working conditions and benefits, health benefits, retirement benefits. | ||
| American workers need real trade reform, balanced trade accounts, and sensible tariff policies, not gimmicks. | ||
| I urge the Trump administration to stop the damage now before the bleeding gets worse. | ||
| Our chief trading partner in northern Ohio is Canada. | ||
| We like Canada. | ||
| Our industry is integrated. | ||
| Parts pass over the border sometimes six, seven times. | ||
| Tariffs make no sense in an integrated economy. | ||
| The American automotive industry needs investment here at home on our continent, not more outsourcing. | ||
| We don't need that. | ||
| We need job insourcing before more jobs disappear and more families pay the price. | ||
| Our communities need economic certainty, not higher prices, not pink slips, not utter chaos, and not tariff regimes that change every couple days. | ||
| America needs a trade and tariff regime that yields good jobs, well-paid workers, and prices for cars and trucks that Americans can afford and consumer goods that they can afford to buy. | ||
| I urge the members of this House and the Trump administration to take a look at what is happening in the real economy. | ||
| Let's fix it before it gets much worse. | ||
|
Geothermal Potential Unleashed
00:06:26
|
||
| America doesn't need that. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about the new horizons of advancing geothermal energy. | ||
| Geothermal energy is one of the most fascinating, promising, yet underused clean energy sources in our country. | ||
| The problem with this, you can't see it. | ||
| You can't see it. | ||
| So a lot of people, when they're walking, when they're in the woods, whether they're going to work, they never think about the power of the Earth. | ||
| But beneath our feet, due to the temperature differentials between the air we breathe and the temperatures in the soil, lies a constant supply of heat from the Earth's core. | ||
| In developed communities, we have vast subterranean water and wastewater lines that have been built over the last hundred years, not just in this country but all over the world, where we have more developed societies and there is waste energy that's renewable, reliable, and constantly available in those vast underground big pipes that run through all of our cities and towns. | ||
| Geothermal energy doesn't depend on the weather. | ||
| It doesn't depend on the season or geographical conditions. | ||
| It exists as a consistent and dependable source for a clean energy grid. | ||
| And when you go underground, generally you have a 45 to 75 degree constant temperature underground all year long. | ||
| The United States has enormous untapped geothermal potential, enough to power millions of homes, while slashing greenhouse gas emissions and lowering energy bills. | ||
| We estimate, just think about this, Cleveland, Ohio, a big city. | ||
| I had the privilege of representing part of it for a long time. | ||
| But there, their water and wastewater purification systems are the highest cost for that city. | ||
| The energy cost of water wastewater processing is the largest cost in any city. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| But every year, when the purified water is thrown back into the lake, it leaves the plant, just that city throws into Lake Erie the equivalent of a waste heat load of nearly 400,000 barrels of oil annually. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| That is waste heat that we as a country could be capturing. | ||
| But that's just one untapped location along just one great lake, Lake Erie. | ||
| Imagine if we could add in to Cleveland, Lorain, Ohio, Avon Lake, Ohio, Sandusky, Ohio, Oregon, Ohio, Toledo, Ohio, and that doesn't even count going north up into Detroit and then on the north side of Lake Erie, the cities in Canada. | ||
| There's a whole lot of energy wasted being dumped into the lake. | ||
| We have to capture it. | ||
| By investing in geothermal technology, communities across our country and world can strengthen energy security, reduce reliance on dirty fuels, create good-paying jobs in engineering, drilling, and maintenance, and lower energy costs for industry, for public facilities, for neighborhoods, and all kinds of companies. | ||
| Geothermal energy has a small land footprint. | ||
| It can even be co-located with other renewables or energy-hungry data centers, which so need it. | ||
| If we're serious about building a resilient, energy-independent future, we need an all-of-the-above energy strategy, including unpacking the power that's already beneath us in the earth and being wasted. | ||
| Check out Vancouver, Canada, and what it has accomplished with geothermal energy since the 2010 Olympics. | ||
| They have really had a plan and a strategy that is remarkable. | ||
| Check out a country in Europe called SEGED Hungry, S-Z-E-G-E-D, that is Toledo, Ohio's sister city for 40 years. | ||
| The good news is the Trump administration appears ready to posture across America to draw forth geothermal power, and we're interested in doing exactly that, particularly in manufacturing America. | ||
| And I'm privileged also to represent a vast, vast agricultural region, and grain drying is so expensive when we have to dry corn and dry soybeans and so forth. | ||
| So the agricultural community uses huge amounts of energy. | ||
| Let's create new jobs. | ||
| Let's lower the consumers' energy bills. | ||
| Let's strengthen America's energy security. | ||
| And geothermal energy holds the potential to achieve all of those goals. | ||
| Let's get it done and move America to an affordable and energy-independent future for the decades to come. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker. | ||
| Thank you for letting me put on the record the future for this country in energy, including geothermal energy. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the extraordinary life and legacy of Ohio State Senator Mayor Jean Valiquette, a towering figure in Ohio's politics and history and a trailblazer for women across Ohio and our nation. | ||
| Born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, Mayor Jean broke barriers as the longest-serving woman in the history of the Ohio legislature. | ||
|
Milwaukee's Cold Case Mystery
00:06:57
|
||
| With her intelligence, fierce conviction, and unmatched oratory, she was a tough lawyer. | ||
| She served our community for 24 consecutive years, often as the only woman in the Ohio Senate. | ||
| Can you imagine that? | ||
| She was a champion for working families, for labor rights, a defender of women's rights, and an early advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment. | ||
| Her work helped create the Ohio Lottery to support education. | ||
| She never wavered in her fight for fairness, for dignity, and opportunity for all. | ||
| And though she chose a quiet retirement, her impact will echo for years and generations to come. | ||
| She was always present. | ||
| She always cared. | ||
| She took her family's experience and she moved it into the highest levels of lawmaking in the state of Ohio. | ||
| May she rest in peace and may her courage, her grit, her fierce dedication inspire us all. | ||
| We miss her. | ||
| And we know that her works in Ohio have made a difference in the lives of our 12 million people. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and I yield back. | ||
| The gentle lady yields. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Under the speaker's announced policy of January 3rd, 2025, the chair recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr. Grothman, for 30 minutes. | |
| We're unwell today, so we're going to make this speech short. | ||
| I'm going to cover three short topics. | ||
| The first topic, five years ago yesterday, there was a horrific incident that happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. | ||
| Bernard Trannell, who was holding a Donald Trump sign, was assassinated. | ||
| Somebody came out on a bicycle with a mask over his head. | ||
| We don't even know if he was a black man or a white man, but with a mask over his head. | ||
| He saw a guy named Bernard Trannell holding a sign for Trump, and that person came up and killed Bernard Trannell. | ||
| Bernard Trannell was kind of an iconoclast. | ||
| Okay, Bernard Trannell was a Rastafarian. | ||
| I'm not sure I pronounced that right. | ||
| He was for Black Lives Matter. | ||
| He frequently endorsed Democrat politicians. | ||
| But for whatever reason, Bernard Trannell was in the very liberal east side of Milwaukee or the River West neighborhood of Milwaukee. | ||
| Very, very left-wing. | ||
| Bernard Trannell swam upstream and decided to carry a Donald Trump sign. | ||
| He was assassinated. | ||
| This is the type of thing as we see America decline, we ought to be talking more about. | ||
| It's the type of thing that happens in Mexico. | ||
| It's the type of thing that happens in Honduras, where during elections you can expect somebody is assassinated. | ||
| You wouldn't think it was happening in the United States. | ||
| One of the things we have to take into account when we look at this situation is not only is it something you would expect to happen in a third world country, but I felt at the time the liberal establishment in Milwaukee didn't treat it different than any other murder. | ||
| And when you begin to shoot people for carrying a yard sign that people don't like, we're in new territory. | ||
| But shot he was. | ||
| I went down and saw his neighborhood, and we cannot allow this to go on. | ||
| We cannot allow these people to do such a thing. | ||
| I don't like talking or describing people as black or white, but in my opinion, at that time in 2020, the Democrat Party was afraid of some black people voting for Trump. | ||
| And I wondered if that's one of the reasons why they decided to target Bernard Trannell. | ||
| But target him, they did. | ||
| They shot him dead. | ||
| The establishment in Milwaukee at that time implied that perhaps the reason he was shot had nothing to do with politics. | ||
| We don't know what his politics. | ||
| I mean, just because he was carrying a Trump sign doesn't mean that he was shot for carrying a Trump sign, but of course he was shot for carrying a Trump sign. | ||
| In this very liberal neighborhood, the guy came up, they have pictures of it, the guy came up on a bicycle. | ||
| How often do you have somebody, you know, you hear about people being shot when somebody shoots out of a car, but here he was shot by somebody on a bicycle, so it had to be somebody in the neighborhood. | ||
| I will say this: there was a time where Republicans stepped up and put a given amount of people available if somebody could turn in the person who shot Bernard Trannell. | ||
| I'll say right now, I intend to tomorrow and next Monday find some people to put together and put a $30,000 bonus to anybody who can do something that leads to the conviction of the person who shot Bernard Trannell. | ||
| I'm going to contact the Milwaukee Police Department there. | ||
| I'm told sometimes cold cases are a little bit people beginning to make more progress. | ||
| If $30,000 is thrown out there, I expect that hopefully will make some sort of difference. | ||
| And like I said, this is a guy on a bicycle. | ||
| It's not like somebody did a drive-by out of a car and was gone right after that. | ||
| Apparently, somebody, apparently, this guy lived within a few blocks of where Bernard Trannell was shot. | ||
| Bernard Trannell, by the way, owned a print shop, so he had a commercial property there that people were aware of. | ||
| Somebody has to know more. | ||
| Somebody has to see where this bicyclist went. | ||
| Presumably, somebody told the bicyclist, we got to kill this guy. | ||
| We can't have him elevating the number of people who are voting for Donald Trump in this radical liberal area to 15 or 20 percent. | ||
|
LGBTQ Books Controversy
00:11:27
|
||
| So, but in any event, let's not forget about it. | ||
| The Republican Party should never forget about Bernard Trannell. | ||
| The next thing I'm going to talk about here, it kind of bothers me when I think the conservative Republican movement, of which I consider myself one, aims so low below the target. | ||
| A couple weeks ago, we had a newspaper article dealing with the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court allowing children or parents to opt their children out of graphic LGBTQ books in Montgomery County, Alabama, Montgomery County, Maryland. | ||
| And this was supposed to be a great conservative victory that a second-grade child did not have to read books that were clearly designed to promote a lifestyle, a sexual lifestyle. | ||
| And the Republicans considered this a great victory. | ||
| It really bothers me that Republicans considered this a great victory. | ||
| Was this a great victory? | ||
| Because of the Supreme Court decision, we wind up having Maybe, I don't know, maybe one out of 20 parents were on the ball enough to say that we are not going to allow, | ||
| or not going to force parents to or parents are not going to create a situation in which their children have to read LGBTQ books. | ||
| That's preposterous. | ||
| It never should have happened in the first place. | ||
| But instead, they're pretending like this is a great victory. | ||
| Another thing about this so-called great victory, three of the ten judges on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this was no big deal. | ||
| That in fact, parents shouldn't be able to object to their children reading books of a sexual nature in first or second grade or up to fifth grade, apparently. | ||
| I mean, that's almost beyond belief how far down we've come as a society. | ||
| And the conservative news media, Fox News, that type of thing, they thought this was a victory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can you believe that? | |
| We're handing out LGBTQ books in first and second graders. | ||
| The Supreme Court, with three people dissenting, three judges, rules that we don't have to have children go here. | ||
| And if 5% or 4% of the parents opt out, that's a great victory. | ||
| Is that what America has come down to? | ||
| I would hope the comatose clergy in this country wake up, demand that schools not do any of this stuff, and begin to put elementary schools back where they were when I was a child, | ||
| talking about reading, writing, not talking about LGBT, and not as saying it's a great victory if like one out of 20 parents says you don't have to give this to your kids. | ||
| So let's dial it up, America. | ||
| Let's dial it up, conservative news media. | ||
| This was a horrific sign that three Supreme Court judges would have the nerve to say that parents shouldn't even be able to object to this, much less the idea that it's even in the schools in the first place to be objected to or otherwise. | ||
| So there's your second issue of the day. | ||
| The conservatives should wake up, you comatose people, wake up, you comatose clergy. | ||
| We do not have to have LGBTQ books in, couldn't exactly tell here, I think it's fifth grade, fourth grade, third grade, and second grade. | ||
| I know down to second grade. | ||
| I mean, just unbelievable. | ||
| Now, my third topic tonight, we passed the Great Big Beautiful Bill, and I voted for the Great Big Beautiful Bill. | ||
| There were a lot of good things in the Great Big Beautiful Bill, but there were things that were highly questioned. | ||
| And there's no question the number one defeat that I had in the Great Big Beautiful Bill was spending money on what they call low-income housing tax credits, in which a property developer with some conditions, but was given tax credits equal to 70% of the cost of a building. | ||
| In other words, he got to build the building, but the government would pay for 70% of the building. | ||
| That's preposterous. | ||
| Prior to us increasing the amount of credits, I felt I was in good shape. | ||
| We had the Heritage Foundation editorialize against it. | ||
| The Wall Street Journal editorialized against it. | ||
| The Cato Institute editorialized against it. | ||
| I thought all was just completely common sense. | ||
| Not to mention the average congressman should say it's not up to the government to pay for a private citizen's 70% of a private citizen's building. | ||
| But that's what we have. | ||
| And the Republicans, when the bill left the House, at that point, about $12 billion a year was spent on this. | ||
| The Republicans, and we were told and given pep talks about how we're going to cut spending. | ||
| Oh, man, we're going to cut spending. | ||
| Wow, this is historic. | ||
| Actually, increased spending on low-income housing tax credits in the House. | ||
| That's preposterous. | ||
| Then we sent it over to the Senate, and I was hoping, because I had a couple buddies over there were on my side, that at least we'd go back to where we started in the Senate. | ||
| But no, in the Senate, the free-spending Republicans went up again. | ||
| It's something we ought to spend a little bit more time looking at, how this was able to happen here. | ||
| Why, with all the conservative think tanks types explaining it's a train wreck, why anybody with an ounce of common sense realizes it's a train wreck, the Republicans went ahead and upped spending on this program first in the House and then in the Senate. | ||
| So I hope the Press Corps is not going to forget about this program and hope continues to follow it. | ||
| The Washington Post of all newspapers pointed out, looking at about four or five different projects in the Washington, D.C. area, they found that the cost of some of these was over $1.2 million a unit. | ||
| Is that possible at the time we had this supposedly tight budget? | ||
| We're going to spend over $1.2 million per unit? | ||
| Just unbelievable. | ||
| We're going to give you all, we're going to give the chair here a bonus on something I noticed when I was back home. | ||
| My good friend from Ohio decided to talk a little bit about all the wonderful things we could do with gambling proceeds. | ||
| When I was first involved in politics, gambling was considered a sin and it was against the law because we knew we were taking money from the poorest people. | ||
| Now, at least in Wisconsin, we've gone from, I believe, one small casino to have to be 15 casinos, including some huge casinos. | ||
| In Wisconsin, they have separate slot machines in many bars. | ||
| In the helpful Wisconsin, they sell scratch-offs in gas stations throughout the district. | ||
| The reason it was brought up to me, I noticed that in some of these convenience stores, they're now selling $50 scratch-offs. | ||
| Can you believe the horrible state of Wisconsin is selling $50 scratch-offs? | ||
| My goodness. | ||
| They're just shameful the way they take advantage of the poor and the dumb. | ||
| It's just horrible. | ||
| I don't think we would have put up with that when I first got involved in politics, but apparently Tony Edvers thinks it's a great way to get more state money in to take advantage of people who are buying $50 lottery tickets. | ||
| In any event, it's maybe not the biggest problem in America, but the number of people who are losing money at these slot machines and scratch-offs is not a small number. | ||
| It's not something we should be proud of. | ||
| I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the Democrat Party feels it's a great way to increase funding on schools, take advantage of people. | ||
| But I don't think it's a good thing. | ||
| And I wish my brothers and sisters in the state legislators, state legislatures, would get rid of some of these ridiculous machines and ridiculous scratch-offs and stop taking advantage of the most vulnerable people in our society. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| There's four different topics for you to remember. | ||
| We covered the increased gambling pushed by state governments as they want to have government play a bigger and bigger role in life. | ||
| We covered the ridiculous Republicans who think it's a victory that three Supreme Court judges ruled that you have to allow LGBTQ books in second or third grade. | ||
| We covered Bernard Trannell, the poor guy who was assassinated for carrying a Trump sign five years ago yesterday. | ||
| And we covered the low-income housing tax credits. | ||
|
C-SPAN's 2025 Congressional Directory
00:03:04
|
||
| I think the most questionable program in our internal revenue code and probably in federal law altogether. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The gentleman yields back. | |
| Can I make a motion? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No motion is necessary. | |
| No motion is necessary. | ||
| I'd like to move that we adjourn. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Person with the clause 13 of Rule 1, the House stands adjourned until 11 a.m. on Friday, July 25th, 2025. | |
| Today, lawmakers passed legislation to reauthorize funding for the Coast Guard through fiscal year 2029 and create a new secretary position like other military branches. | ||
| This marks the last legislative session before the August recess. | ||
| Members will return for votes on Tuesday, September 2nd. | ||
| Watch live coverage when the U.S. House gavels back in here on C-SPAN. | ||
| Get C-SPAN wherever you are with C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app that puts you at the center of democracy, live and on demand. | ||
| Keep up with the day's biggest events with live streams of floor proceedings and hearings from the U.S. Congress, White House events, the courts, campaigns, and more from the world of politics, all at your fingertips. | ||
| Catch the latest episodes of Washington Journal. | ||
| Find scheduling information for C-SPAN's TV and radio networks, plus a variety of compelling podcasts. | ||
| The C-SPAN Now app is available at the Apple Store and Google Play. | ||
| Download it for free today. | ||
| C-SPAN, democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Looking to contact your members of Congress? | ||
| Well, C-SPAN is making it easy for you with our 2025 Congressional Directory. | ||
| Get essential contact information for government officials all in one place. | ||
| This compact, spiral-bound guide contains bio and contact information for every House and Senate member of the 119th Congress. | ||
| Contact information on congressional committees, the President's Cabinet, federal agencies, and state governors. | ||
| The Congressional Directory costs $32.95 plus shipping and handling, and every purchase helps support C-SPAN's non-profit operations. | ||
| Scan the code on the right or go to c-spanshop.org to order your copy today. | ||
| House Speaker Mike Johnson spoke to reporters just off the floor where he refuted a New York Times story, saying the House was recessing for August because GOP leaders wanted to avoid a vote on forcing release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. | ||
| Speaker Johnson said the story was false and that there's no point for the House to pass such a resolution since Attorney General Pam Bondi and other Trump administration officials were working to release the files while remaining sensitive to the privacy needs of the victims. | ||
|
False Headlines Misleading
00:00:12
|
||
| Hey, everybody, got a few thoughts for you as we work through today. | ||
| Yesterday, some of you may have seen a false headline in the New York Times and the headline was terribly misleading. | ||