Bob Goodlatte

Mr. GOODLATTE

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I oppose this amendment. The amendment would exempt settlement agreements pertaining to the protection of Americans' privacy, but nothing in the underlying bill prevents victims of a privacy invasion from obtaining relief. The Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act of 2016 explicitly permits remedial payments to third-party victims who are directly and proximately harmed by the defendant's wrongdoing, nor does the bill preclude wider conduct remedies used in privacy cases. Nothing in the bill bars DOJ from requiring a defendant to implement measures to strengthen privacy. The ban on third-party payments merely ensures that the defendant remains responsible for performing these privacy-strengthening tasks and is not forced to outsource set sums for the work to third parties who might be friendly with a given administration. Accordingly, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I claim time in opposition, even though I do not oppose the amendment.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume to respond to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee), who is a valued member of the Judiciary Committee, and we do work on bipartisan issues. I will say that this issue is bipartisan as well, and she should take note of the fact that it is also bicameral. The United States Senate is, indeed, interested in this issue. The bill that we are considering in the House has also been introduced in the Senate by Senator Lankford from Oklahoma. Also very, very importantly, it is important to understand that when the Congress appropriates funds, it is the duty of the executive branch to carry out the appropriations made by the Congress, not to go out and change those decisions. The gentlewoman talks about housing counseling. Well, the Congress appropriates funds for housing counseling, has and will continue to do so, I am sure. When we cut back on some of those funds--it is still a lot of funds. When we cut back on some, I guess there were some people, some bureaucrats in the Justice Department who felt that that was not the right thing to do. Or maybe it was the organizations that receive these funds that couldn't get them from the Congress, so instead they went over to the Justice Department and said: Well, when you get settlements from these big banks, make sure that you give some of those funds to us. Well, that actually subverts the direct intent of the Congress in terms of how much money to spend. The funds are owed to the Treasury of the United States and to the people who are directly the victims of wrongdoing. They should definitely be compensated. If they are compensated as a part of a settlement that any Justice Department prosecutor enters into, they should benefit from that. People who are not victims need to go through the appropriations process, come to the Congress for funding. If the Congress doesn't give them the funding they want, they shouldn't have other places to go in the Federal Government to get that money by simply going around the Congress and going to the Justice Department, having them take money that is supposed to go into the Treasury and then be appropriated by the Congress, and say: No, no, we will beef you back up in terms of the amount of money for housing counseling and put that money, instead, to you directly here without it going through the appropriations process in the people's House. That is what we are trying to fix here. It is a very, very important thing that we fix and a very important principle that we protect in our Constitution. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, this amendment would exempt settlements resolving workplace sexual harassment, violence, or discrimination; but nothing in the underlying bill prevents victims of workplace harassment, violence, or discrimination from obtaining relief. The Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act of 2016 explicitly permits remedial payments to third-party victims who were directly and proximately harmed by the defendant's wrongdoing. Nor does the bill preclude wider conduct remedies used in discrimination cases. Nothing in the bill debars the Department of Justice from requiring a defendant to implement workplace training and monitoring programs. The ban on third-party payments merely ensures that the defendant remains responsible for performing these tasks itself and is not forced to outsource set sums for the work of two third parties who might be friendly with a given administration. Accordingly, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Two years ago, the House Judiciary Committee commenced a pattern or practice investigation into the Justice Department's mortgage lending settlements. We found that the Department of Justice is systematically subverting Congress' spending power by requiring settling parties to donate money to activist groups. In just the last 2 years, the Department of Justice has directed nearly $1 billion to third parties entirely outside of Congress' spending and oversight authorities. Of that, over half a billion has already been disbursed or is committed to being disbursed. In some cases, these mandatory donation provisions reinstate funding Congress specifically cut. The spending power is one of Congress' most effective tools in reining in the executive branch. This is true no matter which party is in the White House. A Democrat-led Congress passed the Cooper-Church amendment to end the Vietnam War. More recently, bipartisan funding restrictions blocked lavish salary and conference spending by Federal agencies and grantees. This policy control is lost if the executive gains authority over spending. Serious people on both sides of the aisle understand this. A former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Clinton administration warned in 2009 that the Department of Justice has ``the ability to use settlements to circumvent the appropriations authority of Congress.'' In 2008, a top Republican Department of Justice official restricted mandatory donation provisions because they ``can create actual or perceived conflicts of interest and/or other ethical issues.'' Any objections to this bill would be unfounded. Whether the beneficiaries of these donations are worthy entities is entirely beside the point. The Constitution grants Congress the power to decide how money is spent, not the Department of Justice. This is not some esoteric point. It goes to the heart of the Constitution's separation of powers and Congress' ability to rein in executive overreach in practice. Nor does the bill restrict prosecutorial discretion. That discretion pertains to the decision to prosecute. Setting penalties and remedial policy is the proper purview of Congress. Opponents' central concern is that there may be cases of generalized harm to communities that cannot be addressed by restitution, but this misses the fundamental point. The Department of Justice has authority to obtain redress for victims. Federal law defines victims to be those ``directly and proximately harmed'' by a defendant's acts. Once those victims have been compensated, deciding what to do with additional funds extracted from defendants becomes a policy question properly decided by elected Representatives in Congress, not agency bureaucrats or prosecutors. It is not that DOJ officials will always be funding bad projects. It is that, outside of compensating actual victims, it is not their decision to make. Rather than suspend the practice of mandatory donations in response to these bipartisan concerns, the Department of Justice has doubled down. In April 2016, a major DOJ bank settlement required $240 million in financing and/or donations toward affordable housing. DOJ's June 2016 settlement with Volkswagen requires a $2 billion payment to fund the administration's green energy agenda. This payment cannot be justified as remedial because the settlement states explicitly that a separate $2.7 billion payment is intended to fully mitigate the harm caused. It is time for Congress to end this abuse. The Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act of 2016 bars mandatory donation terms in DOJ settlements. It is a bipartisan bill. It makes clear that payments to provide restitution for actual harm directly caused, including harm to the environment, are permitted. Do not be fooled by opponents' scare tactics. They claim that the legislation could prohibit conduct remedies used in settlements covering workplace discrimination, harassment, and consumer privacy. The bill does not preclude such remedies. Nothing bars DOJ from requiring a defendant to implement workplace training and monitoring programs. The ban on third-party payments merely ensures that the defendant remains responsible for performing these remedies itself, and is not required to outsource such set sums for the work to third parties who might be friendly with a given administration. This bill addresses an institutional issue. That is one reason similar language passed the House last year by voice vote. I thank all of the bill's cosponsors, and I urge the bill's passage. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds to respond to the gentleman from Georgia and say that no one gets off the hook; not Wall Street, not anybody in this legislation. All we are saying is that if money goes, as a fine, it should either be paid into the general Treasury, as required by the law, or to actual victims of the wrongdoing by the parties. And if it is paid into the general Treasury, the Constitution requires that it be paid, that it be appropriated by this Congress, not by bureaucrats and prosecutors at the Department of Justice. At this time, it is my pleasure to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Hensarling), the chairman of the Financial Services Committee and a great leader on this issue.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, the amendment would exempt certain discrimination settlements from the bill's ban on third-party payments, but nothing in the underlying bill prevents a victim of discrimination from obtaining relief. The Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act of 2016 explicitly permits remedial payments to third-party victims who were wrongly and proximately harmed by the defendant's wrongdoing; nor does the bill preclude wider conduct remedies used in discrimination cases. Nothing in the bill bars the Department of Justice, for example, from requiring a defendant to implement workplace training and monitoring programs. The ban on third-party payments merely ensures that the defendant remains responsible for performing these tasks itself and is not forced to outsource set sums for the work to third parties that might be friendly with a given administration. I also say to the gentleman from Michigan that former Congressman Dan Lungren of California, a distinguished former colleague of ours on the House Judiciary Committee, was instrumental in helping us move this legislation forward and is a supporter of the legislation, notwithstanding the comments of the gentleman's that might confuse people as to what his position was. He strongly supports this legislation. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute to respond to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson), who would not yield but who continues to claim that this legislation helps these major financial institutions while he defends the Justice Department, which enters into agreements with these financial institutions that owe hundreds of millions of dollars--in many instances, billions of dollars--to the Treasury in fines as a result of these settlements, but say if you give money to our preferred third-party group that wasn't even injured as a part of this process, if you give the money to them instead of to the government, instead of to the taxpayers, instead of to the general Treasury, we will give you $2 off for every $1 you give them, $2 off the fine for every $1 you give them, $2 million off the fine for every $1 million you give them. It adds up pretty quickly, but the taxpayers are the ones taking a bath here. Guess who benefits. Those big banks that he says we are protecting? No. The Justice Department is protecting them, and this is why we need this legislation. It is the Congress that appropriates funds, not the bureaucrats and prosecutors in the Department of Justice. Mr. Chairman, it is my pleasure to yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Marino), the chairman of the Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law Subcommittee.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. First, I say to my friend, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers), of course, the National Council of La Raza would not like this legislation because the National Council of La Raza is the largest beneficiary of what the Justice Department is doing. They are getting the money. They are one of the largest recipients. So I am not at all surprised to hear that they wouldn't like us to stop this cozy relationship in which they go to the Justice Department and say, ``Hey, we need more money,'' and the Justice Department says, ``Okay. In the next settlement we do, we will send some of that money over to you.'' This is an abuse. It is clearly a slush fund, and it needs to be stopped. I prefer to focus on institutional concerns with mandatory donations rather than on the nature of the recipients. However, there is no ignoring the troubling May 19, 2016, testimony to the Financial Services Committee that the donation beneficiaries were ``Democrat special interests.'' These include the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, whose director calls himself a ``bank terrorist.'' Documents show that the groups that benefited from mandatory donation provisions actively lobbied the DOJ to include them. The bill's opponents have proffered a series of specious arguments. The principal ones I refuted earlier. The others I will address now. We are told that required donations represent just a fraction of the overall settlement amounts. That is true, but irrelevant. In absolute terms, there is a tremendous amount of money--nearly $1 billion-- flowing to activist groups at the unilateral discretion of the executive just in these financial service industry settlements and another $2 billion more for the Volkswagon settlement. In any event, the $1 billion is over twice the annual Congressional appropriation for the Legal Services Corporation and is a huge windfall to the recipient organizations. An analysis of 80 beneficiaries of the Bank of America settlement revealed that, on average, the DOJ required donations accounted for more than 10 percent of their 2015 budgets. Such largesse should not be conferred unilaterally. Critics contend that there is insufficient evidence that the DOJ structured the settlements to direct funds to activist groups. This is disingenuous. The opposition knows that the DOJ refuses to let the committee make the most troubling documents it found public. Opponents also argued that mandatory donations are plainly lawful; but the House Financial Services Committee heard from three experts that mandatory donations are an unconstitutional subversion of Congress' spending power. That view is echoed by former President Clinton's own head of the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. Yet, even if these payments were not unlawful, they are definitely bad policy, which is precisely why legislation should prohibit them. Another unfounded objection is that it is unrealistic for Congress to legislate redress every time a violation occurs that causes generalized harm. In the banking settlements, the housing groups that received donations were in categories that were already specifically receiving grants from Congress. This shows that the infrastructure to direct funding to community projects is already in place. The Department of Justice could also recommend to Congress, for example, as part of the President's budget, projects to fund that address generalized harm. Finally, as the renowned liberal legal scholar and former D.C. circuit judge, Abner Mikva, has explained, on this point, efficiency is outweighed by the principles of representative government. The Founders knew the spending power was ``the most far-reaching and effectual,'' and they wanted to ``ensure Congress would act as the first branch of government.'' Accordingly, they understood Congress ``would less efficiently and less coherently devise fiscal policy than would a single `treasurer' or `fiscal czar.' Yet they chose, for good reason, to suffer this cost and bear its risks.'' This bipartisan legislation is a critical opportunity to marry oversight with action and to effectuate the Founders' vision of Congress' spending power as key to reining in the executive branch. This is a commonsense bill, the objections to which are unfounded; so I urge all of my colleagues to support this bill. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous materials on H.R. 5063.

Mr. GOODLATTE

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 2831) to make technical amendments to update statutory references to provisions classified to chapters 44, 45, 46, and 47 of title 50, United States Code, as amended.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman, and I urge my colleagues to support the bill. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to bring before the House H.R. 2831, a bill to make technical amendments to update statutory references to provisions classified to chapters 44 through 47 of title 50, United States Code. As I previously stated, the Office of Law Revision Counsel must occasionally undertake editorial reclassification projects to reorganize areas of law that have outgrown their original boundaries or to eliminate organizational units that are no longer efficient. H.R. 2831 reflects yet another of the office's editorial reclassification efforts, and I thank Ranking Member Conyers for cosponsoring this bill as well. H.R. 2831 will update statutory references to provisions classified to title 50. The Office of Law Revision Counsel has prepared this bill and submitted it to the committee as part of the office's ongoing responsibility to maintain the code and assist the committee in the revision and codification of Federal statutes. In May of 2013, title 50 was editorially reorganized to set forth more clearly the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, the National Security Agency Act of 1959, and certain other related statutes. No statutory text was altered in the reorganization; the provisions were merely transferred from one place to another in title 50. The change was necessary to improve the organizational structure of the material in the United States Code. The technical amendments made by H.R. 2831 update United States Code citations to reflect the new code citations for the provisions. Further, to eliminate any confusion, the Office of Law Revision Counsel provides a comprehensive guide to the old and new code citations for this title on its Web site: uscode.house.gov. H.R. 2831 is an important bill because it helps ensure that our laws are up to date and accurately reflect the location of statutory text in the United States Code. For these reasons, I urge my colleagues to support this important bill. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 2831, currently under consideration.

Mr. GOODLATTE

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 2830) to make technical amendments to update statutory references to certain provisions classified to title 2, United States Code.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to bring before the House H.R. 2830, a bill to make technical amendments to update statutory references to certain provisions classified to title 2 of the United States Code. The Office of the Law Revision Counsel has an ongoing responsibility under section 285b of title 2 of the United States Code to maintain the United States Code and assist the House Judiciary Committee in the revision and codification of Federal statutes. In order to maintain and improve the United States Code, the Office of the Law Revision Counsel must occasionally undertake editorial reclassification projects to reorganize areas of law that have outgrown their original boundaries, or to eliminate organizational units that are no longer efficient. The office assures us that the decision to transfer provisions in the United States Code is not undertaken lightly. After careful study, the Law Revision Counsel recently identified certain organizational deficiencies in the code that needed to be corrected, and accordingly, undertook the necessary changes. The purpose of this bill is to update statutory references to laws classified to title 2 of the United States Code. H.R. 2830 will amend these citations to accurately reflect the new location of the corresponding provisions in the U.S. Code in light of the recent editorial reclassification of title 2. I want to thank Ranking Member Conyers for sponsoring this bill along with me today. Title 2 of the U.S. Code includes all of the laws governing Congress and the legislative branch. The reorganization of title 2 for the purpose of the online version of the code took place on February 1, 2014. Because chapters 3 and 4 of title 2 far outgrew their original boundaries, the Office of Law Revision Counsel reorganized these two chapters into 11 new chapters in order to set forth more clearly the provisions related to the House of Representatives and the Senate. No statutory text was altered by the reorganization; the provisions were merely transferred from one place in title 2 to another. As a result of the reclassification, title 2 now better exhibits the laws governing congressional pay and benefits, ethics, leadership, and administration, just to name a few. The short-term inconvenience of adjusting to new code citations is greatly outweighed by the benefit of much-needed long-term improvements in the organizational structure in the United States Code. Further, to eliminate any confusion, the office provides a comprehensive guide to the old and new code citations on its Web site: uscode.house.gov. With enactment of this legislation, the citations that refer to code sections altered by the reorganization will be updated to reflect the changes made to title 2. For the foregoing reasons, I urge my colleagues to support this important bill. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous materials on H.R. 2832, currently under consideration.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I would first like to thank the gentlewoman for her support of this important legislation, but also to thank her for remembering Mr. Parker and his contribution not only to the Judiciary Committee, but to this entire Congress and our country. Her words are well taken, and I thank her for them. I urge my colleagues to support the bill. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODLATTE. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 2832) to make technical amendments to update statutory references to certain provisions classified to title 52, United States Code, as amended.