John Conyers

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee), the distinguished ranking member of the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims of the Committee on the Judiciary. Madam Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield to me?

Mr. CONYERS. Madam Speaker, when the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Gekas), subcommittee chairman, hits a nerve, he said how long. That is what we have been saying in the civil rights movement for a long time, Madam Speaker. How long? How long will it take? Well, it is taking not enough time, it is not long enough this time. So I am glad the gentleman from Pennsylvania brought that refrain of the civil rights movement back into this debate.

Mr. CONYERS. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that each side be granted 15 additional minutes.

Mr. CONYERS. Madam Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel), the ranking member of the Committee on Ways and Means and former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. (Mr. RANGEL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. CONYERS. Madam Speaker, I am proud now to yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez), chairman of the Hispanic Task Force on Immigration.

Mr. CONYERS. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Menendez), a distinguished member of the Hispanic Caucus, a leader on our side of the aisle. (Mr. MENENDEZ asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. CONYERS. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Becerra), a former member of the Committee on the Judiciary, a distinguished lawyer.

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

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lofgren).

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to join my colleagues in this discussion. I have listened to the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary begin by describing, I lost count, about seven or eight horrible, offensive, violent incidents in which a pregnant mother and her unborn child were hurt or killed. There is not anyone in the Congress that does not feel very strongly about the violence against unborn victims. But if that is going to be the way we get to undermining Roe v. Wade, I do not think it is going to happen here today, because I think our job is to make it clear what is really going on. Just for the record, I would like everybody to know that there is punishment for the killing of a fetus. It was stated that there is no punishment that exists today. It is in the Federal law. It is in the current Federal sentencing guidelines that permit the enhancement of a sentence under the vulnerable victims guideline. So that is number one. Number two, there is a substitute. There is a remedy to the flawed bill that has been brought on the floor. That is the Lofgren-Conyers substitute, which does everything, and in some instances it has more penalty for the person that attacks a pregnant mother and kills an unborn victim than the current bill, but it gets us around the subversion of Roe v. Wade, and it comports with Roe v. Wade. I am amazed that we would begin this discussion trying to skip around the whole heart of this debate. This is not a matter of how many anecdotes you can dig up. I have 40. The gentleman has 10. I have twice that amount. The question is, how are we going to deal with the subject, Mr. Speaker. The right way to do it is through the substitute, which is going to be dealing with a way to punish the people that violate mothers, and by the way, it is hard to deal with an unborn victim of violence without hurting the mother as well. So this is what we are here to discuss today. Let us be friendly about this. This act was designed to erode the foundation of a woman's right to choose under Roe v. Wade by simply elevating the legal statuses of prenatal development under Federal law, and creates a separate offense during the commission of a crime ``. . . which causes death to a member of the species homo sapiens at any stage of development.'' That is a quote from the bill. Well, that sounds okay, but what does it mean? It means that if enacted, this would be the first time in the Federal legal system that we would begin to recognize a fertilized egg, a zygote, a preimplantation embryo, a blastocyst and an embryo through 8 weeks of pregnancy or a fetus after 8 weeks which can be a person, which can be an independent violent crime. That is what the bill is trying to do. I did not know I would have to be the first to bring it to discussion, since I am against it, but no sneaking around today, we are going to have to put it all on the table, so we might as well start off now defending the proposition that is embedded fatally in H.R. 503. These acts against women are tragic and especially for pregnant women. But the true aim of this legislation is not to stop violence against women. In fact, the protections for women are notably absent from this legislation. So what we are here today to do is to determine whether or not we are going to undermine a woman's right to choose by recognizing that all of these things that have not had separate rights are now equal to and in some cases superior to women who are worthy of the legal protection. The Supreme Court has held, I remind all the lawyers on the Committee on the Judiciary, the Supreme Court has held that fetuses are not persons within the meaning of the 14th amendment. I am not going to repeat that. If enacted, the bill would improperly inject debates about abortion into criminal prosecutions across the country. That is unfortunate and tragic. I think that may be one of the purposes of why the proponents have written the bill up in this way. They have crafted a bill that is certain to inflame the national debate about when life begins. We do not want to do that. We just merely want to protect unborn victims of violence. The way to do it is by simply moving away from the notion that we have just created another category of persons that have not ever been recognized in the Federal legal system before now. That is why we are going to have a fair amount of opposition to this proposal. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to hear from the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Chabot), the subcommittee chairman. I would like him to know that all of us on our side and those that support the substitute believe strongly that victims of violence should be punished; the victims, both the mother and the unborn infant, the unborn victim. Okay. We all believe that. We do not have a different view on that. Okay. The second thing that you need to know is that, if this bill does not deal with abortion, which I will go into later, why is it coming out of the Subcommittee on the Constitution instead of the Subcommittee on Crime? Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Chabot).

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, this is a civil rights bill?

Mr. CONYERS. The gentleman from Ohio said this is a civil rights bill?

Mr. CONYERS. All right. Is it a crime bill?

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, is it a crime bill? Yes or no?

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Ohio is saying yes, I take it. It is sort of a crime bill.

Mr. CONYERS. I yield to the gentleman from Ohio. It is a crime bill.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Ohio. It took a half a minute of my time to get to that. But it is a crime bill that comes out of the Subcommittee on the Constitution in the Committee on the Judiciary. Now, you think we do not know why, do you not? You think we thought that it was tossed there by accident. But it is tossed there because it is changing the fundamental constitutional law in the most controlling case on abortion in current Federal judicial practice, Roe v. Wade. That is why it went there. So I think that we ought to put all these cards on the table and not try to demonize the other side because we have a bill that does the same thing as the primary bill. But the only thing that we do not do is that we do not redefine what an embryo is. We do not change the status of a fetus or a fertilized egg. We do not make them all persons, and you do. There it is, I say to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Chabot). That is the difference. If my colleagues corrected that difference, we would all be supporting their bill. It turned out that the Lofgren substitute is even more harsh on those who violate women who are pregnant. So I just wanted my colleagues to take that under consideration as we continue to debate. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Millender-McDonald) who is the chairperson of the Women's Caucus.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 7 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler), and ask him to yield to me.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to say to the gentleman from Texas, the very distinguished majority whip, before he leaves the floor that we do recognize and make prosecutable killers of women that are pregnant. Mr. Speaker, we create two separate crimes, so I do not want that misstated again unless you read the Lofgren-Conyers substitute. Two separate crimes, both prosecutable and will be prosecutable because they are constitutional.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Mrs. Maloney).

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Solis). Mr. Speaker, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Solis) for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I think the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Graham) was the one that said that H.R. 503 is a two-victim bill. The bill on the floor is not a two-victim bill. The bill only recognizes one victim, the embryo or the fetus. Harm to the woman does not factor into the bill at all. The bill does not require prosecution of the crime against the woman, and so to call it a two-victim bill is a fallacy.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler).

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I just want to let the author of this bill, the gentleman from South Carolina who just spoke, know that what he claimed as a red herring really is not a red herring at all. The threat to Roe v. Wade made in this bill cannot be made more clear because this bill contradicts the definition of who a person is by writing it the way they did. The Court, in Roe, recognized the woman's right to have an abortion as a right protected by the 14th amendment. In considering the issue of whether a fetus is a person, the Court noted, ``Except in narrowly defined situations, the unborn have never been recognized in law as persons in the whole sense,'' and concluded ``person'' as used in the 14th amendment does not include the unborn. The Court declined to grant fetuses the status of person because it recognized the difficulty in finding an end point to rights that the fetus might claim. The current bill raises those same issues. In the 28 years since Roe, the Supreme Court has never afforded legal personhood to a fetus; and that, I would say to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Graham), is what the problem is about the bill; that, I would say to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Chabot), is what the problem is about the bill; that, I would say to my dear chairman, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Sensenbrenner), is what the problem is about the bill. The gentlemen are contradicting the definition of ``person'' by writing it in the way that they have. That is why the gentlewoman from California had to write a substitute, because we had to get that corrected. As a matter of fact, we go further to prosecute an assailant of a pregnant woman than you do. So, let us not talk about that being a red herring. That is what the debate is all about. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.