Louie Gohmert

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member. This bill that is supposed to be for the people, one of the things it is really supposed to do, we have been told, you know, this is going to eliminate foreign interference with our bill. They have been preaching on it for years. There was the whole Russia hoax, all these other things. It turns out there hasn't been foreign interference, but the friends across the aisle were not serious, and are not serious with this bill about eliminating all foreign interference. In fact, that is why I filed an amendment that would have addressed that. They got loopholes big enough to drive several trucks through. So we took care of it in my amendment. My amendment says, ``Each State shall ensure that no foreign entity carries out any role in the administration of elections for Federal office in the State, including providing, maintaining, programming, operating, storing, or compiling any of the equipment, software, supplies, or information used in the administration of the election. ``A nonprofit organization may not carry out any activities related to voting or elections for public office in a State if the organization accepts any funds from a foreign entity.'' And then it defines foreign entity, where it covers everybody and everything that is not American. So we have got this amendment that would completely plug the loopholes that the Democrats have so that foreigners can't continue to influence the election. And what do they do? They say: Your amendment, we don't want it. It is not in order. We are not even going to give you a vote on it. They are not serious about eliminating foreign interference, and that is a shame.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, for years we have been hearing what we are hearing today: Look, we just want the same rights everybody else has. But we also heard for years: We just want to live and let live. I have got news for all of my friends across the aisle that don't know. There is a right to the marriage you are claiming you need this bill for that the Supreme Court has already said you have. It is there. So what this bill, the so-called Equality Act, is really about, it is not about giving rights. This is about taking away rights. You have the rights. But this is saying that part of the First Amendment, ``Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,'' that has to go. And just like my friend read from page 25, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, that has got to go. You can no longer--after this bill, you can no longer use that as a defense when we sue your church, we sue your preacher. Male or female, it doesn't matter. We are coming after you. If we sue a Rabbi, you can't hide behind the First Amendment or this Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It won't help you because we are saying you don't have those rights the Constitution gave you. That is all RFRA was to begin with. It was just codifying what was in the Constitution. I thought so much about my dear friend, the late Bishop Harry Jackson. He and I had stood inside this Capitol together for years trying to protect Christian rights. I miss Harry and I think about him a lot. And let me say, not as articulately, but for heaven's sake, you have got these rights. Allow people who believe what Moses said when he said: A man shall leave his father and mother, a woman leave her home, the two will become one flesh. Let them be able to practice the teaching of Moses. When Jesus was asked about marriage, he said--he quoted Moses verbatim. Please allow Christians who believe what Jesus said to practice that. Allow preachers who took oaths to practice it. Allow them to do that. Don't take away the rights the Constitution gave, and don't take away decades of rights that women have worked for and earned and just give it away to men.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, this package is a massive land-removal bill. It basically takes 2.7 million acres away from meaningful production. The one good thing I can say is, it is consistent with this majority and this administration's actions that make us more reliant on China and will enrich China. That is the one good thing; it is at least consistent. Now, the majority feels that people in this town know better than the people who are losing this land for the different uses for which they could have it. I know we are hearing today on the floor: Oh, we have all these people who want this bill passed. It should have gone through committee so we could do the motions, we could have witnesses, and we could find out for ourselves. After 3 years of the Russia hoax, we really need to hear from the sources.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, interesting days in the Capitol. I keep being asked about the metal detector. I was not happy about metal detectors. But for some weeks now, I have been complying, taking my stuff out, putting it on the table, going through the metal detector. I did that yesterday and came in here, and I was going to be recognized to speak. Since the restroom is just right there through that door, you see it as you are standing there at the door, I did what I have done for a number of weeks now. I went to the restroom and came back. Since the officers see you, and there was nobody else in the area, as there usually isn't these days, I went in, came out. So people know, it isn't like ``The Godfather.'' There are no tanks on the toilets, no place to hide a gun, that I see. Anyway, the officers see you, and no one has ever said a word about needing to be reexamined when you are just right there. Anyway, apparently, rules have changed over the last few weeks, and all of a sudden yesterday I was told, well, you need to be wanded. I said, no, I have been through the metal detector, and this has never been required before. So, I came in today. I get a notice that I am supposed to be fined $5,000. So, we will be appealing. One of the things that is not supposed to happen is arbitrary and capriciousness--and to go for a number of weeks and nobody ever say a word because you are just going right there and back, never having to be reexamined, and then all of a sudden yesterday, and today, be hit with a $5,000 fine. Mr. Speaker, I just want to make sure our colleagues know that the metal detectors are not the issue entirely. You may want to use facilities at your office or around your office because now, despite the admonition in the Constitution itself about not stopping or detaining a Member of Congress on his way into a session--it is in the Constitution--this Speaker has seen fit to defy that, to create metal detectors. And now that is not enough. You can't even go to the restroom in full view of the officers without being hit upon and unconstitutionally treated again. I have been going along with the unconstitutional action anyway. But it seems that it is one of those things, Mr. Speaker, no matter how much you finally are desensitized to the Constitution enough to comply with unconstitutional actions, there just keeps being another requirement, another requirement, and another requirement. So we will see how it all comes out, but hopefully other Members will learn from the arbitrariness of my treatment to avoid that for themselves. On FOX News my friend, Tucker Carlson, touched on this yesterday. And this article is by Tucker: There has been an enormous amount of talk--not just this week, but over the last month--about violent extremism and the people who embrace it. Those people, we are told, are domestic terrorists who must be put down by force. The war on terror has moved Stateside. Extremists are inside our country, and we must hunt them down. We are hearing those words nonstop, not just on cable news, but from elected officials, including some Republicans. We are hearing it from the leaders of Federal law enforcement agencies and the intelligence agencies. We are hearing it from the Pentagon. Just this week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered the entire U.S. military to ``stand down'' while investigators cleanse the ranks of political extremists. And, of course, we are hearing it from the business establishment, from Wall Street and tech monopolies, from the massive multinational corporations that increasingly control the contours of American life. All of them are now on the hunt for political extremists. By the way, with regard to the effort to purge the military of anybody with a political position that does not support socialism, my 4 years at Fort Benning, Georgia--about half of that under Commander in Chief Carter and the other, about half, under Commander in Chief Reagan--there were a lot of people at Fort Benning who didn't care for what was happening to the military under President Carter. But we knew you could not say anything derogatory about the Commander in Chief without being either punished with an article 15 nonjudicial punishment or being prosecuted because he was the Commander in Chief. But everybody, Democrat, Republican--and now lots of Socialists--as long as you did your job in the military and you followed orders, you didn't have any problem. But we were not heard to talk about the terrible morale under President Carter, the way we were no longer respected, the way internationally--especially after the failed hostage rescue attempt that I believe had more to do with civilian oversight restrictions than it was anything else. I was told by people at Fort Benning that the President, the White House was warned, If you make us go in with so few helicopters, there is a good chance we won't have the six needed in order to go rescue the hostages--we knew where they were--and that they were made to scale to eight. So when they lost three on the way to the staging area, then it was an automatic abort, according to one of my friends who was part of it. Anyway, we ended up losing a chopper with military on board, a C-130, with military onboard. But, still, we didn't go out. You didn't hear us trashing the Carter White House because we were in the military. Our political opinions didn't matter. Even if people had contempt for the poor leadership in the White House, you didn't say it because it was not allowed. People, despite their political positions, were ready to lay down their lives for their country if that was necessary, and some did. Even though that was a time of peace those 4 years I was in, we were never in a declared police action or war. Still, we did our jobs no matter what it was, and nobody was run out of the military for their political positions. But now under this administration, things have changed. As Tucker Carlson goes on, he says: You have to be more precise than that. In order to root out a problem, you have to know what the problem is. You need a sense of what you are looking for, a clear picture. You have to define the terms. The remarkable thing about this conversation we are having is that no one is doing that. Have you noticed that none of these newly energized and highly empowered extremist hunters have told us exactly what an ``extremist'' is? We are left to guess, to look around nervously to see if we can spot one. They are not talking about us, are they? And if they are, what exactly are they doing? How are they hunting these ``extremists'' they keep telling us about, but will not describe? We now know part of the answer to that question. He points out: Tucker Carson Tonight has exclusive obtained evidence that Bank of America, the second-largest bank in the country with more than 60 million customers, is actively but secretly engaged in the hunt for extremists in cooperation with the government. Bank of America is, without the knowledge or the consent of it customers, sharing private information with Federal law enforcement agencies. Bank of America effectively is acting as an intelligence agency, but they are not telling you about it. In the days after the January 6 riot at the Capitol, Bank of America went through its own customers' financial and transaction records. These were the private records of Americans who had committed no crime; people who, as far as we know, had absolutely nothing to do with what happened at the Capitol. But at the request of Federal investigators, Bank of America searched its databases looking for people who fit a specific profile. Here is what that profile was: Number one, customers confirmed as transacting, either through bank account debit card or credit card purchases in Washington, D.C., between January 5 and January 6. Number two, purchases made for a hotel or Airbnb in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland after January 6; any purchase of weapons or at a weapons-related merchant between January 7 and their upcoming suspected stay in the D.C. area around Inauguration Day. And also airline-related purchases since January 6. The first thing you should notice about that profile is that it is remarkably broad. Any purchases of anything in Washington, D.C.; any overnight stay anywhere in an area spanning three jurisdictions and hundreds of miles; any purchase not just of legal firearms, but anything bought from a ``weapons-related merchant,'' T-shirts included; and any airline-related purchases--not just flights to Washington, D.C., but flights to anywhere, from Omaha to Thailand. That is an absurdly wide net. Bank of America identified a total of 211 customers who met these ``thresholds of interest.'' At that point, ``Tucker Carlson Tonight'' has learned, Bank of America has turned over the results of its internal scan to Federal authorities, apparently without notifying the customers who were being spied upon. Federal investigators then interviewed at least one of these unsuspecting people. That person, we have learned, hadn't done anything wrong and was cleared. Imagine if you were that person. The FBI hauls you in for questioning in a terror investigation, not because you have done anything wrong or suspicious, but because you bought plane tickets and visited your country's capital. Now they are sweating you because your bank, which you trust with your most private information, has ratted you out without your knowledge. Because Bank of America did that, you are being treated like a member of al-Qaida. It doesn't matter how much you despise Donald Trump or how much you believe that hatred of Trump justifies suspending this country's ancient civil liberties, going through that experience would scare the hell out of you. Does anyone else know about this? Is there a record of this interview? Will I lose my job because of it? That actually happened to someone. Anyway, he goes on and points out this issue of banks toting over information, and it took me back in time to the George W. Bush Presidency, when I first got to Congress and I first learned about something called National Security Letters. That was a shock to me to find out about what were called NSLs, National Security Letters, because I have been a litigant, I have been a felony judge and a chief justice, and I was quite familiar with reviewing affidavits in support of requests for warrants. And I have reviewed them at all hours of the day and night most of the time because law enforcement in my jurisdiction was told by the DA they needed to go through the DA's office to make sure that the warrants met the constitutional requirements. So it was rare, but sometimes I did say: You don't have facts that create probable cause to believe a crime has been committed or probable cause to believe this person committed it. We need some facts here that you can swear to under oath that will allow me to sign a warrant so that places may be searched and specific things described with particularity can be seized. So having had that history, I was quite surprised to find that under the PATRIOT Act--and, actually, this note is from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I am not familiar with them, but they have a good synopsis on National Security Letters: NSLs are currently authorized by four Federal statutes: the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the National Security Act, the Right to Financial Privacy Act--which is kind of ironic; they don't need probable cause to get your records under the Right to Financial Privacy Act, that is amazing-- the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and also the USA PATRIOT Act. This article described the way they work pretty well: Although there are procedures for review after they are issued, National Security Letters can be issued by the FBI without any judicial oversight. The FBI must certify that the records sought are ``relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.'' We were assured during the reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act that this was only used to go against or to investigate foreigners who were either part of a known terrorist organization or known terrorists themselves or had relations with a known foreign terrorist organization. I had asked in one of our meetings with Justice Department people: Well, what about the other reason you can send out a National Security Letter and just siphon up all of somebody's records from a third party? That is called clandestine intelligence activities. And I was told: Oh, no, we don't really use that. I said: Well, I would like to know what that means, clandestine intelligence activities. Does that mean if my next-door neighbor is kind of hiding behind the curtain and watching what is going on at my house--that is clandestine, they are seeking intelligence what was happening next door--does that mean you can scoop up all their records? The answer basically was: No, we don't really use that part. That was so vague, it bothered me. Our chairman at the time was a great man, Jim Sensenbrenner, but he was not about to allow any changes to that, so it is still there 15, 16 years later. We kept being assured by everybody that there are never any abuses to the National Security Letters. But it concerned me because if all it took was an FBI agent just signing something saying, ``I need this for an investigation,'' who is to be sure it really was? I kind of like the warrant system, where you have to go to a judge and establish with particularity the person to be seized or the things to be seized or the place to be searched. I remember when I was an assistant DA. We had kind of an interesting deputy who people would kind of roll their eyes about. He was constantly coming in, asking for a warrant. As assistant DA, I got to know him. He was a nice guy, but he came in once and said: I know I have been harassing you, trying to get a warrant. I know there are people smoking dope out in this little bitty community. They have a little bitty store there, and I found out the people I think are smoking dope are going to have a party Friday night. I have good authority they are going to have potato chips there. That little store was just recently burglarized late at night, and one of the things they took was potato chips. So, I want to get a warrant to go into these people's home looking for potato chips, and then I will look for the dope while I am there. I said: Well, is there any way to identify the potato chips that were in this store that were stolen? No, no. But, see, that is the beauty. While I am looking for potato chips, I will just kind of look around for dope. I said: That is not adequate to establish probable cause to go busting into somebody's house looking for potato chips if you can't identify they were the ones that were stolen. Anyway, he was very upset that I wouldn't draft up the application for a warrant, his affidavit, because he thought he had a great way to do it. Well, what I didn't know back then was that there would be Federal statutes established after 9/11 that you don't need to go get a judge to say, yes, there is probable cause to believe a crime was committed and this person did it or probable cause to believe that you could find the fruits of a crime at a particular described location. No, no, you just have an FBI agent send a National Security Letter saying: I am investigating a matter, and I need you to give me all the records you have on a certain individual or a certain business. And by the way, under this NSL law, if you tell anybody that you got this demand for records, then you will have committed a felony, and we will prosecute you. Now, back then, it didn't say you could even tell your lawyer. But the President George W. Bush administration Justice Department said: But we are interpreting it to mean that somebody who receives a National Security Letter demand for production can talk to their lawyer. We won't prosecute anybody for talking to their own lawyer. Well, wasn't that generous. But we were assured, both privately in meetings and under testimony, that there were no known violations of the law on National Security Letters. It was always to go after foreign terrorists or people that associated with foreign terrorist groups; that is what we are doing. It still was a concern. That just seems like so much power. Eventually, it was included that, gee, you had to get higher up approval before you sent out the National Security Letter. But the Attorney General at the time--really good, decent guy, Alberto Gonzales--he had indicated that he was not aware of any known violations of the law under the National Security Letter laws. Unfortunately for him, he testified before--and I don't have any of the information; I am just going off my institutional memory from those days. He had testified before a Senate committee that, yeah, there were no known violations of the law on National Security Letters. Well, unfortunately for him, there was a DOJ inspector general report, as I recall, that had been on his desk for 3 days. The IG said there may be as many as 3,000 violations of the law in gathering information under National Security Letters, where FBI agents just wanted to find out about somebody, some business, so they sent a letter demanding records about the person or the business, saying give me all you have on this person or business, when there was not a case, not probable cause of anything, not a known terrorist involved or known terrorist organization. They just wanted information about somebody, something, and so sent them out. I had seen that Senator Schumer was really upset. He felt like they had been lied to when he found out there had been an IG report 3 days before, that the Attorney General had, when he said there were no known violations. I ran into Senator Schumer here on the Hill--I think it was the next day, within a couple of days--and I said: Say, I saw you had our Attorney General, giving him a hard time about the violations of the National Security Letter. That is something I have been upset about, then to find out there may have been more than 3,000 violations, just fishing expeditions. He said some things that were not complimentary about the head of the Justice Department. And he said: I don't know why the President doesn't just let him go and hire somebody else. I said: Well, I can tell you why he doesn't, and that is because we figure you would not allow a new appointee to get through committee, and we don't need to go--I think it was a year-and-a-half left--without a real Attorney General. And he said: No, look, there are people I know we could agree on if they would just try. But he felt like we needed a new Attorney General. Well, the thing is, the FBI Director at that time was a guy named Mueller, and it was really a problem that should have fallen directly at the feet of Director Mueller. It was his FBI. He could have supervised them more thoroughly, especially when we are talking about thousands of abuses of people's rights and abuses of the National Security Letter use, seizing people's information, personal as it is. But I thought about all of that when seeing Bank of America had turned over all of this information to the Federal authorities, the FBI, I guess. It made me wonder if maybe they were back to their old ways of abusing the NSLs, no probable cause that a particular person committed a crime at all, just on fishing expeditions. I wondered if maybe they used the NSLs to go on those fishing expeditions and caught lots of honest, innocent Americans in their net. Now, going back to that, when I first got here, we had a lot of friends on the Democrat side of the aisle who were extremely concerned about civil rights, just like Senator Schumer was extremely upset to find out the FBI had violated potentially thousands of people's basic civil rights, seizing information about them, without having any probable cause, violating the Fourth Amendment and possibly Fifth. But that was a different time. In fact, I was concerned, and I called the White House, asking for the Chief of Staff, Josh Bolten at the time. I felt like he was a really good, decent guy. He was in a meeting with President Bush at the time, but he called me back. I told him about the concerns, that a lot of people on both sides of the aisle are upset that our Republican administration was abusing people's rights like that, just using National Security Letters willy- nilly, and that we needed some change. They couldn't do it unless they knew they had an agreement to get through somebody else. What I should have done--I made a mistake--I should have been demanding that Mueller go, and we get a different FBI Director. But anyway, I suggested somebody that could talk friendly with Senator Schumer, give him a call and see if they could agree on some replacements. Anyway, we ended up with Attorney General Mukasey. I felt like he was a very honorable man. I had nothing to do with who was picked, but apparently, there was an agreement between the White House and Senator Schumer and others, potentially. But all of that came back to mind as I saw that a bank--I think the second biggest in the country--was turning over information without apparently getting any warrant. But really, it is a problem of the National Security Letter. We got into a discussion back at reauthorization. I heard from the Department of Justice, saying: Look, this is such an important tool. I am going: But it is so easily abused. There have to be more checks and balances here. Back at the time, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee here in the House were concerned, but there were not enough of us concerned to completely, radically change the National Security Letter laws or to do away with it, so they are still around all these years later. I am hoping that we can get some people on both sides of the aisle. Democrats are in the majority. I would love to see a hearing where we could get down to it. If it needs to be under classified conditions, closed, whatever, but we really need to take another look at this, because it could just completely depend on the administration. I would hope that maybe with as much hatred as some people have for former President Trump, maybe they thought, gee, what if he got reelected, then he could put people in place that used those National Security Letters to go after all the people he didn't like. Maybe that would be enough to encourage people who hate former President Trump to actually take some action to really try to secure people's civil rights that have been violated for years, and all under the guise that we are protecting ourselves from either international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, whatever that is. So, anyway, that came back to mind. It is still something that should be done. There is a story here my staff was able to find from The New York Times back in 2007, when they were a little more trustworthy, but it is titled ``FBI Head Admits Mistakes in Use of Security Act.'' And that was Mr. Mueller. He embraced the responsibility for the lapses, but he was punished by giving him 2 extra years as Director of the FBI. That allowed him to continue the poor supervision that allowed these kind of what he called lapses. In this article, it says, `` `How could this happen?' Mr. Mueller asked rhetorically in a briefing at the headquarters of the FBI. `Who is to be held accountable? And the answer to that is, I am to be held accountable.' '' But the truth is, he was never held accountable. In fact, he was actually rewarded. And Attorney General Gonzales paid the price for his huge failure. So that is rather tragic. That is something I am hoping that we could work together on, Democrats and Republicans, because civil rights, it appears, are being trampled once again. I don't know if there was a pause in the trampling, but, regardless, we need to be doing some serious oversight. Now, I have an article here from Yael Halon. It says, ``DeSantis bracing for `big fight' over Big Tech crackdown: `We're buckled up.' '' And that is another area where it is not the government that is abusing people's rights, but it is the high tech. I recently reread George Orwell's ``1984,'' and as I understand, I believe it was 1947 that he wrote it. He was dying, as I understand, of cancer. He had gone, I believe it was, to Scotland. He had been through some treatment that was pretty rough. So some think that may have helped him with imagination on how people could be tortured. But incredible. I mean, in the late 1940s there were very, very few televisions around. And I know where I grew up in east Texas, there were hardly any at all. Even up until 1953, there were very few. But here it is, right after World War II, and George Orwell is talking about this big brother. Of course, under the rules of the House, we are not supposed to talk about brothers, but this big sibling I believe is the word we are supposed to use. So big sibling watched and listened to everything everybody did, and they would use a telescreen. Which back then, you know, there were no flat screen TVs, but that is what is conjured up when you think about a telescreen. Televisions were rare, and this guy already is imagining that someday the government will be watching you through this big screen. And nowadays that is your phone, that is your computer. And I know I had heard from an intelligence friend, you know, that they could watch people through their camera on their computer; and so I started putting a little sticky note on my computer. One day, at the Judiciary Committee, the head of the FBI came in, and I noticed he had a little sticky note over the camera on his computer, and I thought, well, he knows what they can do, and if he is putting a sticky note over his camera, maybe he doesn't want to be watched by big sibling either. But, anyway, now the big tech industry can watch everything you do, everything you look up. They can listen to you. We had an IT helper come in. And I just don't like the idea that somebody, whether in high tech or government, could be watching or listening when there is no crime that is being committed. I asked the IT guy: ``Can you take Siri off of my stuff?'' I just hate Siri. And Siri's voice came up and said: ``That is not nice.'' Whoa. I would just as soon not have Siri, Alexa, anybody watching and listening to everything that is going on. No crime is being committed. It is not a crime to go to the bathroom here, even though I am being fined $5,000 for it. Hopefully that will be corrected. But that is just a little unnerving. Yet George Orwell foresaw that this big sibling would be out there someday watching and listening. So I really appreciate my old friend, Congressman Ron DeSantis as Governor of Florida. This article says he ``took aim Tuesday at the country's largest technology companies, which he characterized as a group of `monopoly communications platforms' based on how they have grown to regulate public discourse . . . DeSantis announced a crackdown on tech companies over content moderation, which he equated to political manipulation, reiterating a belief held by many conservatives that Silicon Valley is biased against right-leaning viewpoints.'' Parenthetically, here is an article in Time magazine by Molly Ball, ``The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.'' And, of course, she characterizes--well, I say she. I don't know. Molly may be a guy--but characterizes what went on as being justified, but try to save the election for then-Senator Biden. And it is quite interesting, but there is no question there was tremendous manipulation of information by the high-tech industry, even though that person, Molly, has a different perspective. The article by Yael Halon goes on to say: `` `We think this is something that Floridians want protection from, and I think it will end up being a really good first step,' DeSantis told `Tucker Carlson Tonight' on Tuesday. ``There has always been the question, `What do you do about this?' A lot of us have thought there was something wrong for a long time, but to sit back and hope it gets better, that clearly wasn't going to work. So we're leading and I think it will be good. ``In an effort to keep big tech out of Florida's political sphere, DeSantis proposed a number of measures, including a $100,000 daily fine''--not for going to the restroom right off the floor--``for companies that deplatform political candidates. Additionally, actions taken by companies to effectively promote a candidate will be considered campaign contributions. ``The Governor proposed measures to enhance user rights as well, including allowing individuals and the Florida attorney general to sue companies over violations of individual protections, as well as requiring companies to provide full disclosures of actions taken against individuals for violating policies. `` `It's not just being banned from Twitter. As we've seen, these companies can collude,' DeSantis told host Tucker Carlson. `They can deny you, if you're a small business . . . payment processing, the ability to use e-mail and text. So you go to a rally that they don't like or you engage in wrongthink, and all of a sudden, your flower business is decapitated for a month because they take action. ``The Republican acknowledged that the initiative will likely cause a `big fight in the legislative session.' `` `Hopefully, we can get a lot of support,' he said. `Most folks do want protections for their privacy and data. Most folks want protections from being de-platformed. I think it will be very positively received, but we're buckled up. We know there are always fights over these things, so stay tuned.' '' So we will see what happens. But in the meantime, I am sure some would want to blame it on conservatives or Republicans. There is a report out from Mar Chastain: ``2020 Homicide Rate So High There is `No Modern Precedent.'' But if you look at what brought about the 2020 homicide rate so high there is no modern precedent, we are talking about the group that had been protesting, looting--even though the lamestream media calls it mostly peaceful--the killing, the brutalizing, the fires, the trying to burn and kill police in their own station, those things have gone on. And until the Capitol was invaded--which was totally wrong. It doesn't matter, Republican, Democrat, Socialist, whatever, it doesn't matter, it is wrong. And despite my quoting the Speaker, her comment about surprised there are not riots in the street across the country, I do not advocate for violence. Never have. Don't advocate for violence. As a historian--and I never quit studying history, reading, finding out more--it is very clear that some things do help trigger violence. Just as if you seal a heating pressure cooker, it is going to create a terrible reaction. And as I pointed out before, you know, we in this country created courts. And in some cases it is the legislative job to resolve disputes civilly, and that normally avoids violence. Now, sometimes we have violence erupt in courtrooms. That happens. But as I have told people in my courtroom, you know, the courts often are the last civil bastion where we work things out. No violence. We punish people for violence. But this is where we come to civilly resolve disputes. And when you have courts repeatedly refuse to even have a hearing, take evidence, and resolve disputes, it does create problems. And I don't want those problems. I don't want violence from anybody. The odds are you increase chances of not having violence when our institutions constitutionally created to resolve disputes civilly do that. And I hope that is what we will do here and do a better job of it than has been done. But it used to be during the Revolution, one of the most common expressions often attributed to Voltaire--I have read some places that maybe somebody said it before Voltaire--but the line that Founders often said was: ``I disagree with what you said, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'' And now we come to a place in America where people feel like, well, I disagree with what you say, so I hate you. I hate your family. I am going to try to get you fired, and I hope we can get you put in jail. And I hope your children die and never get a job and can't take care of themselves. I mean, it has gotten really viscous in some places in this country. And I was raised in a family where meals were pretty lively because everybody was fairly intelligent and we had some very heated discussions. But we still loved each other. And, I mean, there are people in this body that I really love, you know. I think they are wrong about really critical issues, but we could come in here and argue and debate and fuss. Since I have been here, maybe one time it was different. But when people in here say, we are going to fight this, they are not talking about violence. They are talking about debate. That is what I am talking about. But we need to get back to the institutions designed under Federal and State constitutions to resolve disputes civilly. One of the problems with this whole Russia hoax, the guy that was slam-dunk guilty of fraud upon the FISA court of lying under oath was just allowed to plead and get probation. And I said when the article came out--I think it was December of 2019 that Kleinsmith had changed the information to help them in what amounted to be illegally getting a warrant against somebody in the Trump campaign--I said, I hope they are not going to use him as a scapegoat when there are so many in the DOJ or FBI that lied under oath. They committed what certainly appeared to be crimes. I will say, Durham entirely dropped the ball. The information should have been out long ago so people would know what was true and not have to rely on big tech to lie to them or manipulate them. But he dropped the ball. And so it appears to many people that there is a double standard when it comes to justice. If you are a part of the DOJ, FBI, or intelligence and you favor Democrats, it appears you get a better deal, but we will see. This is Friday and, Mr. Speaker, I know it is Friday and I am told I am the last speaker of the day. You have been immensely gracious, and I hope you have a good weekend. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, this is personal to me. I have dedicated so much of my adult life to the Constitution of the United States. If you go back to 1884--it has been cited for about 80 or 100 years even--the Select Committee back in 1884 was taking up the issue of a Member of Congress being expelled. The committee said that because the conduct was committed during an earlier Congress: It must be said that with practical uniformity the precedents in such cases are to the effect that the House will not expel a Member for reprehensible action prior to the election of a Member, not even for conviction of an offense. That has been so frequently decided in the House that it is no longer a matter of dispute. And, yes, that was expelling from the House, but you are wanting to expel a Member from being a full Member, as she was elected to do. Now, James Madison--hopefully, that name rings a bell--said if the legislature could regulate those--talking about qualifications--which in this case would mean you have to meet our qualifications for what you say before you are a Member of Congress or you don't come in. He said if you could regulate those qualifications, ``it can by degrees subvert the Constitution. A Republic may be converted into an aristocracy or oligarchy as well by limiting the number capable of being elected.'' Qualifications founded on artificial distinctions may be devised by the stronger party in order to keep out partisans of a weaker party. This is so dangerous. Never in the history of the Congress has a majority party taken such fanatical action to remove somebody from the other party from committees. This is unprecedented. We had a Senator named Biden who looked at a Ku Klux Klan recruiter as a mentor and friend, and you punished him by inaugurating him as President. Look, please, I know there are so many good, decent Democrats. We disagree on a lot of things, but as a matter of conscience--you talk about conscience. You have to know if you do this, just like Democrats objecting to electors and then coming around later and saying, oh, you are disenfranchising voters. Look, if you do this, you know the day will come when Republicans will not like something you said and start removing you from committees. This is not a road to go down. I beg you, please, don't start this precedent. It won't end well for either party. But we will follow your lead if you lead. I am imploring you, do the right thing. Vote ``no'' on this resolution.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, here is a quote: ``I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country. And maybe there will be.'' Or, ``Sadly, the domestic enemies of our voting system and honoring our Constitution are right at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with their allies in Congress of the United States.'' We were called enemies of the state. Those are all quotes from our Speaker. Now, on our side, we didn't take those to be impeachable because we didn't believe she surely meant that. By the Democrats taking this action, you are telling me, no, when we say those words, we actually mean to incite violence. That is what this action is saying. Look, I just looked on the History Channel. It says these words: ``If the Judiciary Committee,'' talking about impeachment, ``finds sufficient grounds, its members write and pass Articles of Impeachment, which then go to the full House for a vote.'' Half of all of the impeachments ever conducted, ever voted for, occurred under this Speaker. You are setting a precedent that says very clearly--because this impeachment isn't going to work, but it is setting the precedent. Unlike a year ago, when we said, look, it shouldn't go through the Intelligence Committee, it should go through the Judiciary Committee, forget that. Now the message is: If you have a whim and you want to just go after a President, just go straight to the floor--no investigation, no Judiciary Committee. Go straight to the floor. Use it as a political weapon as you wish. This is so dangerous, what you are doing, forgetting all the precedents. Yes, we can argue back and forth, but you are using this as a weapon, and you are destroying this little experiment in self- government in a year's time. It needs to stop.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. President, I object to the electoral votes of the State of Wisconsin because 71 House Members, all of who condemn violence as we witnessed today, are firmly committed to the resolution of disagreements in civil, lawful, peaceful institutions with full and fair debate, free of violence. And though not a single court has allowed an evidentiary hearing to listen to the significant body of evidence of fraud, and though some seize on the court's failure to misrepresent that no court would listen to the evidence as saying evidence did not exist; while Democrat leaders in Milwaukee illegally and unconstitutionally created more than 200 illegal polling places; tens of thousands of votes were changed by workers, despite election workers' objections, plus so many other illegalities to fraudulently create a 20,000-vote lead, we object, along with a Senator who now has withdrawn his objection.

Mr. GOHMERT. It is in writing. It is signed by a Member, but it is not signed and objected to by a Senator, Mr. President.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to agree with the comments that have just been made. We do need to come together and provide assistance to the American public, to those who have been so extremely adversely affected, not merely by COVID, but by the, in some cases, very offensive uses of government power and actually unauthorized power in numerous circumstances taking away people's freedom for the first time in American history when they were not sick, quarantining people who were not ill, shutting down businesses, picking and choosing winners and losers among businesses. Yet we, as Republicans, have been begging our friends across the aisle, come on, there are things ready to be used--readymade. The money that was appropriated several months ago--there is over $100 billion, maybe a whole lot more than $100 billion--is waiting to be used, but the deadlines in that initial bill have been exceeded. So all we need to do is say that money is available again. It is still just sitting there. As businesses are going bankrupt, my friends across the aisle are allowing them to go bankrupt and basically holding them for hostage and saying: We are going to keep letting businesses go broke; we are not going to let you use the money that is sitting there waiting to be used to help these businesses to save them from bankruptcy and to keep them in business; and we are going to let them keep going out of business because we want a big comprehensive bill. As I have said previously here, comprehensive bills is a term that means we want to make it so big that we can stuff all kinds of pork in there that you won't be able to find before we pass it. That is what is meant in Congress by comprehensive bill. We ought to avoid comprehensive bills and we ought to have rival shots addressing just what needs to be addressed and not putting everybody's favorite gift in the legislation. So we could have agreed on that months ago. I understand the position of the majority Democrats is that there have just been so many other important things that we haven't been able to get around to agreeing with our Republican friends on the need for just providing the billions and billions of dollars that have already been appropriated and is just sitting there. We don't want to make that available because we have got all these important things. Like last week and this week, all these important things: Let's see, we took care of saving the lives of ceiling fans this week. So that apparently was very critical. And, last week, we knew that people were suffering immeasurably from COVID, and rather than, again, helping with funding, we took up a marijuana bill that will provide tax incentives and actually some money and some assistance in getting marijuana going stronger nationally. It wasn't a bill that said that we are going to let the States decide for themselves. It was a Federal bill to really push not medical marijuana, but just marijuana. So the answer, according to the majority, to COVID and businesses going bankrupt is just smoke some dope and you won't be nearly as anxious about the loss of your business, the suffering of your family, and the isolation of our senior citizens. I have had senior citizen places of residence directors just weep every day as they see the seniors not able to spend time with their families, in isolation. We didn't address any of that, but we did take care of making dope available through the bill--at least the House has so far. It is doubtful the Senate will take those things up. And we also voted to take care of--as I understand, it just pertains to one place--where tigers are kept. But as my friend Dr. DesJarlais pointed out--he was looking at the numbers--and in the time that it took in this Chamber to vote on that bill, there were more people that died of COVID than have died from tigers in the last 25 years. Mr. Speaker, I know there are disagreements on priorities. Apparently, there was a need felt to do this bill to address the need of tigers, but we still left the needs of those dying from COVID, and businesses that are dying because of the restrictions, we left all of that undone to take care of ceiling fans, tigers, marijuana. Mr. Speaker, we could get a bill done rather quickly. And I understand we should have had a bill done 2 years ago--it would have been easy to make it bipartisan--on funding infrastructure. We desperately need to upgrade our infrastructure. According to most engineers and studies, we have like a D-minus grade on American infrastructure. But my understanding for why we have not done a bill in the last 2 years that the Democrats have been in the majority here in the House, has been a fervent desire to avoid President Trump getting any credit for anything that really helps America. Despite that desire of some, he has gotten an amazing amount accomplished. So I am hoping that we can come together rather quickly--hopefully, by Monday--and we can pass a bill that at least makes available the tens of billions of dollars that is just sitting there waiting for authorization to be provided to businesses that are in trouble. And we could do that quite easily. In fact, we have got a bill that my friend, Mr. Chabot from Ohio, had filed as the ranking member of the Committee on Small Business, and it would make the money available. We have had our colleague, Jaime Beutler--I am missing the last name--but it is a discharge petition. Everybody needs to come down and sign it--I think, nearly all the Republicans have--saying, let's bring this to the floor. Let's make this money available. Hopefully, that will happen, but it hasn't happened yet. Mr. Speaker, but all of that, as desperately serious, critically serious as it is, is still, when we look at the future of this country, the issue that stands behind the importance of having a free and fair election, because if you can't have that, the Republic ceases. We become a totalitarian government, socialist government--of course, that is a bit redundant. You can't have socialism without having a totalitarian government. And actually, what has often been referred to as a Communist Government, like in China, the Chinese Communist Party, the Soviet Union, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, they really weren't communists. We always refer to them as the communists, but communism doesn't exist if there is a government. True communism is where the government fades away, everybody shares and shares alike. But we have seen, historically, when a rather sad life of a person named Marx, following up on Engels, came up with this idea. He was completely wrong. He didn't foresee the rising of a middle class such as we have had here in the United States. Anybody that didn't foresee that and try to concoct a form of government without foreseeing that is not somebody that should be followed. And just as Dostoevsky said--and Solzhenitsyn quoted him in ``The Gulag Archipelago''--in Dostoevsky's case, he was speaking theoretically. In Solzhenitsyn's case, having spent many years in a Gulag, in a Russian prison, he was speaking not theoretically or hypothetically, but pragmatically from having been the victim of the government. But Dostoevsky said the problem with socialism is not economic. The problem is socialism is atheism. You cannot have a true socialist government unless the government becomes God. And there is no place for the one living God that our--nearly all of the Founders acknowledged. Even Ben Franklin--who is sometimes said to be a deist, which he clearly wasn't--said in his autobiography that he was moved to the contrary over a discussion about deism. But he made very clear he believed in God, he believed that divine providence, God's providence controlled things. And that is not a deist, for those that haven't studied deism. Mr. Speaker, nonetheless, we are in grave danger. And if the Supreme Court does not take up and resolve this dispute over whether or not we will continue to have a Democratic-Republican form of government, then it will cease, and there will not be another Republican elected because of the circumstances that have arisen. And I will address that further. Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend from Texas (Mr. Flores). Honoring the Life and Legacy of Edythe Kengla Swann

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank my Aggie friend and appreciate that shout-out to what sounds like an incredible lady. Mr. Speaker, my friend will be missed here in Congress. We have had some disagreements, but I know his heart and I know he has always wanted what is best for the country. And I greatly appreciate that heart. Mr. Speaker, perhaps I should have gotten more than two hours sleep last night. I was thinking ``Jaime Beutler Herrera'' but it didn't sound right. It is Jaime Herrera Beutler. Mr. Speaker, she has a discharge petition, and I hope that if there is any Republican that has not signed onto Jaime's discharge petition that they will come do that as soon as possible. We need to get that money. It has already been appropriated. It is just sitting there. Why could we not agree on that? I know that Ms. Herrera Beutler, I know Mr. Chabot, they would be fine if the Democrats put somebody else's name on what they have done. That is fine. Put Democrat names on it, but let's get it done. We are more concerned about helping people that need the money after having their businesses shut down, curtailed, cut back. Let's get that money to them, and I hope that we will. With regard to this election, on the one hand, you have got COVID that is killing people. On the other hand, you have fraud that is killing a nation. And we know it is serious because YouTube did everything they could--as did Google and Twitter--to censor the public dialogue about different types of fraud, investigations into the Biden family. They did everything they could to hurt President Trump and to help candidate Biden. Now we see today, YouTube is going to start preventing any discussion about fraud. So we know it is serious when YouTube has to take the position as the totalitarian censor--basically, fascist censor, that the high-tech industry has chosen to be--that they are going to eliminate anybody's ability using their public forum to discuss the facts of fraud. And for those networks that say that they are unfounded, they need to pull their heads out of the orifice, hole in the ground, whatever, in which their heads are stuck because there have been hundreds and hundreds of affidavits. There are thousands of examples of fraud in the elections. And as John Fund said, the biggest fraud about elections is the statement ``there is no fraud in elections.'' It is not new. It has just never, ever, anywhere in the history of the world, been utilized in so many ways and with so many ballots as it has been in this election. We have seen the gutless actions of some courts, some places that have refused to take up critically important issues that will mean this country has a future as a republic or will end that future and move us into the socialism that brings totalitarianism. But they refuse to take it up. You can understand, if you have no courage, then you would rather not take up an issue that might make some people mad, even though, as I figured out early in my career as a judge, if I was going to run from the job I ran for, I shouldn't even be there. Most judges haven't figured that out. Some are appointed, but they were appointed after they sought those positions. Well, if you are going to run from the job you sought, you shouldn't have that job. Just be honest and caring enough for the country that if you don't have the guts to do the job, resign and go. You can mediate. You can arbitrate. There is great money in arbitration. I had gone through the 3 days of study and testing by the only institute at the time that prepared people for international arbitration. There was great money in it. But at the same time, I was told by a Member of Congress, now is the time you need to start raising money. Do I start raising money to run for Congress, or do I pursue the extremely lucrative and rewarding career in international arbitration? Well, I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. Not a fun difference, but this is an important job. The judiciary is an important job. So, after the court refused to take up Mike Kelly's suit--totally legitimate, should have been taken up--we have a lawsuit that was filed a couple of nights ago by the Texas attorney general. It is styled State of Texas v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, State of Georgia, State of Michigan, and State of Wisconsin, so four defendants. As Article III of our Constitution says: ``In all cases affecting Ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and those in which a State shall be party, the Supreme Court shall have original jurisdiction. In all the other cases before mentioned,'' which is up in the first part of Section 2, ``the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.'' But this is a case, as the Constitution says, where the Constitution provides for original jurisdiction in the Supreme Court. That means you don't go to a lower court--not a magistrate, not a district judge, not a court of appeals--but you go straight to the Supreme Court. Now, I had filed things before in the Supreme Court, but I had never filed an original action. I didn't realize until this week that on something the Supreme Court is said by the Constitution to have original jurisdiction, you can't just file. You have to come in and beg: Oh, please, please, Mount Zion judges, please allow me leave so I can file this petition because you have original jurisdiction over this controversy, according to Article III of our Constitution. Apparently, the Supreme Court has previously decreed that if you want to file an original action, according to the Constitution, in our Court, you have to come in and beg us for leave to file such an original action. We may or may not let you file that lawsuit, even though the Constitution makes clear it should be, it has to be, originally in our Court and no other. So, the State of Texas, by and through its attorney general, filed this action. But they start by filing a motion for leave to file bill of complaint. So, that is what they filed. They go through the motions of doing what is required. Then, we get to the page that says ``Motion for Leave to File Bill of Complaint,'' and it sets out--I am not going to read the whole thing, but I think it is important that people understand exactly what is involved here. ``As set forth in the accompanying brief and complaint, the 2020 election suffered from significant and unconstitutional irregularities in the defendant States: ``Nonlegislative actors' purported amendments to States' duly enacted election laws, in violation of the Electors Clause's vesting State legislatures with plenary authority regarding the appointment of Presidential electors.'' In other words, the Constitution makes clear the State legislatures shall determine the appointment of the electors for that State as part of the electoral college and nobody else. Not a judge, not a State or Federal judge, not a commissioner, not a secretary of state, not a Governor, but the legislature has to make that call of the State. ``Intrastate differences in the treatment of voters, with more favorable allotted to voters--whether lawful or unlawful--in areas administered by local government under Democrat control and with populations with higher ratios of Democrat voters than other areas of defendant States. ``The appearance of voting irregularities in the defendant States that would be consistent with the unconstitutional relaxation of ballot-integrity protections in those States' election laws.'' Those are three points made as to why this election suffered from unconstitutional irregularities in those States that have been sued. All of these flaws, even the violations of State election law, violate one or more of the Federal requirements for elections. That includes equal protection, due process, the Electors Clause, and thus arise under Federal law. So, it is not just that the Supreme Court, under our Constitution, clearly has the original jurisdiction over this suit where a State sues another State or States, but this involves a Federal question. In case some on the Supreme Court are asleep or do not understand their obligation, it is a Federal question as well as being a State versus State. In Bush v. Gore in 2000, the Court said: ``Significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a Federal constitutional question.'' The plaintiff, the State of Texas, ``respectfully submits that the foregoing types of electoral irregularities exceed the hanging-chad saga of the 2000 election in their degree of departure from both State and Federal law. Moreover, these flaws cumulatively preclude knowing who legitimately won the 2020 election and threaten to cloud all future elections.'' I hope the Supreme Court--well, I know some of the Justices will take particular interest and give attention to that. This is for the future of the Republic. As Eric Metaxas points out in his book, quoting from Franklin, when he was asked, what have you given us? after the Constitutional Convention in 1787 in Philadelphia. He replied: A republic, Madam, if you can keep it. I think the title of Eric's book is ``If You Can Keep It.'' Well, the answer will be determined in this case. If the Supreme Court refuses to take it up and do their job, then the answer is, we kept it from 1789 until 2020. Then, because we had people in States that didn't do their job, or overzealously became partisan and allowed circumstances, even participating in circumstances, to permit fraud and to destroy the election process. Any Republican that thinks, ``Oh, well, if I sound good, and I don't stand up for the Constitution here, then I will be in good stead to be the Republican nominee. Then, I can win the Presidency in 2024,'' the news for those people is, if this fraud in this election is not addressed and these unconstitutional schemes are not struck down by the highest court in the country, there is not going to be a Republican elected again. It is not going to happen. So, it is rather important. History will judge us accordingly. From the looks of what the Supreme Court did to Congressman Kelly's case, in refusing to take it up, there is grave concern, appropriately, that the Supreme Court is not going to do their jobs, that they will choose to go down in history as the Supreme Court that allowed this Nation to lapse as a republic. There were rumors that the Chief Justice flipped his vote in the ObamaCare case because he became very sensitive to the allegation that if ObamaCare was overturned, he would become the most political Chief Justice since Taney in the Dred Scott case. The rumor was that he flipped and chose to uphold that decision, making him the most political Chief Justice in American history, probably more so than Taney. In Taney's case--regardless of how you pronounce it--in that case, that decision helped pave the way for the Civil War because the Supreme Court did not do their job in protecting the rights listed in the Constitution in the Bill of Rights. Likewise, this country is headed for some very dire times if the Supreme Court doesn't resolve this controversy and the fraud that underlies it. Again, for those that say there was no fraud, wake up, look at the evidence. There is sworn testimony. There is video footage. Another thing that people need to understand about the judicial system, it is not a new idea that one party to a suit would have possession of evidence that would show that party should lose the lawsuit. That has happened throughout jurisprudence. Over the years, in the common law, a doctrine, a legal doctrine, developed called spoliation. The doctrine is basically this: If one party is in possession of evidence, or possesses the capacity to preserve evidence, and they mix that evidence in with other evidence that prevents a party from being able to show that it should win the day, then that doctrine of spoliation can be utilized. If there is a jury which is the fact-finder, the judge can tell the jury that it may consider the fact that the defendant in this case had possession of documents that would either prove or disprove the plaintiff's case, and since the defendant refuses to produce them or put them in a manner that they could not be identified or destroyed them, then you may consider that that evidence supported the plaintiff's case. And you can even take judicial notice, a court can, of a situation like that. The Supreme Court could take judicial notice of that, that one party has the evidence that will prove the plaintiff's case, and they refuse to allow it to be found; or, as we saw in Pennsylvania, we had a Supreme Court order to preserve evidence, and the eight actors in Pennsylvania basically ignored the order so they could continue to hide evidence. That should be evidence and should have judicial notice taken that that evidence is the fact that they continue to hide what would have proved the plaintiff's case. So, as the brief says, taken together, these flaws affect outcome determinative numbers of popular votes in a group of States that cast outcome determinative numbers of electoral votes. This Court--and I am talking about the Supreme Court since they have original jurisdiction-- should grant leave to file the complaint and ultimately enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the defendant States' legislatures and remand the defendant States' respective legislatures to appoint Presidential electors in a manner consistent with Electors Clause, and pursuant to 3 U.S.C. section 2. So that is the motion for leave to file. And then we get to the bill of complaint that Texas is seeking to have permission to file. Oh, please, oh, most holy Supreme Court, please, lower yourselves to allow us to be heard before your Court of original jurisdiction. Please, oh, please. How many times do we need to say it to affect the high and mighty Supreme Court? Well, the bill of complaint actually has an appropriate quote from John Adams: ``That form of government, which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the laws, is the best of republics.'' And that is exactly what we will be losing if we do not preserve the integrity of this election. The bill of complaint goes on to say: ``Our country stands at an important crossroads. Either the Constitution matters and must be followed, even when some officials consider it inconvenient or out of date, or it is simply a piece of parchment on display at the National Archives. We ask the Court to choose the former. ``Lawful elections are at the heart of our constitutional democracy. The public, and indeed the candidates themselves, have a compelling interest in ensuring that the selection of a President--any President-- is legitimate. If that trust is lost, the American Experiment will founder. A dark cloud hangs over the 2020 Presidential election. ``Here is what we know. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a justification, government officials in the defendant States of Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania . . . usurped their legislatures' authority and unconstitutionally revised their State's election statutes. They accomplished these statutory revisions through executive fiat or friendly lawsuits, thereby weakening ballot integrity. Finally, these same government officials flooded the defendant States with millions of ballots to be sent through the mails, or placed in drop boxes, with little or no chain of custody and, at the same time, weakened the strongest security measures protecting the integrity of the vote--signature verification and witness requirements.'' And I might inject here, in the State of Georgia, on Saturday night, being there with the President, David Perdue, Kelly Loeffler, and so many other wonderful Georgia officials--and I do love the State of Georgia. It seemed like I spent 20 years there because I was in the Army, but my 4 years at Fort Benning, I grew to love the people of Georgia. We still have many great friends in the State, so it is always a pleasure to have an excuse to go back to Georgia. That was a rough time in our history. People did not appreciate those of us that wore the uniform. We didn't have it as bad as those who had recently come back from Vietnam, but it was a very unpleasant time to be in uniform. There were times when we were ordered not to wear it; yet, generally, the people of Georgia were just superb. I was there and Vernon Jones showed me an envelope he had gotten from America Votes, sometimes referred to as Stacey Abrams' group, but it had a return address on the envelope here in Washington, D.C., and apparently they sent out millions of these requests for absentee ballots. It seemed like something like that ought to be reserved to a governmental entity so that those are not sent to people who shouldn't be getting them, that government ought to update their records and make sure they are not sending them to dead people or to people who have been moved to other States, other jurisdictions for 40 years, as we have already heard in some cases. There was all this information about absentee ballots and pushing the recipient to fill it out, send it in, and even a postage-paid envelope was provided, which provides something of value to somebody for them to send in that absentee request. But I just thought: Wow. So Washington, D.C., has gotten involved in the State of Georgia's election in trying to skew the vote there. It is really interesting. But getting back to this complaint by the State of Texas, it says: ``The only date that is mandated under the Constitution is . . . January 20, 2021, U.S. Constitution Amendment 20. ``Against that background, the State of Texas . . . brings this action against defendant States based on the following allegations: ``1. Plaintiff State challenges defendant States' administration of the 2020 election under the Electors Clause of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, and the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. ``2. This case presents a question of law: Did defendant States violate the Electors Clause, or, in the alternative, the 14th Amendment, by taking--or allowing--nonlegislative actions to change the election rules that would govern the appointment of Presidential electors? ``3. Those unconstitutional changes opened the door to election irregularities in various forms. Plaintiff State alleges that each of the defendant States flagrantly violated constitutional rules governing the appointment of Presidential electors. In doing so, seeds of deep distrust have been sown across the country. In the spirit of Marbury v. Madison, this Court's attention is profoundly needed to declare what the law is and to restore public trust in this election. ``4. As Justice Gorsuch observed recently: ``Government is not free to disregard the Constitution in times of crisis. . . . Yet, recently, during the COVID pandemic, certain States seem to have ignored these long-settled principles.'' That is in the case of Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, New York v. Cuomo, a case from 2020. The petition or the complaint says that this case is no different now. ``5. Each of the defendant States acted in a common pattern. State officials, sometimes through pending litigation, for example, settling `friendly' suits, and sometimes unilaterally by executive fiat, announced new rules for the conduct of the 2020 election that were inconsistent with existing State statutes defining what constitutes a lawful vote. ``6. Defendant States also failed to segregate ballots in a manner that would permit accurate analysis to determine which ballots were cast in conformity with the legislative set rules and which were not. This is especially true of the mail-in ballots in these States by waiving, lowering, and otherwise failing to following the State statutory requirements for signature validation and other processes for ballot security, the entire body of such ballots is now constitutionally suspect and may not be legitimately used to determine allocation of the defendant States' Presidential electors.'' I interject here. A good example, and this also brings in the doctrine of spoliation, where, in Georgia, you had people lie to get people out of the area in which ballots were being counted, and then once they were all out and there was no big water leak, there may have been a slight leak in a commode, but they were moved out. You can see the video. But then out from under tables comes suitcases full of ballots that these people who are unwatched to ensure that these were legitimate ballots, they started running them through and counting them. Well, my understanding is they have refused to make those ballots available for examination. And that is where spoliation comes in. They have got the evidence; they refuse to produce it; so the presumption should be made by the Supreme Court, if those ballots were produced by the people who have sole control over them, they would prove the plaintiff's case; therefore, plaintiff's case is proven and the results are no longer viable and valid. The complaint goes on: ``Each of the defendant States acted in a common pattern.'' I touched on that. ``7. The rampant lawlessness arising out of defendant States' unconstitutional acts is described in a number of currently pending lawsuits in defendant States or in public view including: ``Dozens of witnesses testifying under oath about the physical blocking and kicking out of Republican poll challengers; thousands of the same ballots run multiple times through tabulators; mysterious late night dumps of thousands of ballots at tabulation centers; illegally backdating thousands of ballots; signature verification procedures ignored''--and I would interject, and those put in batches where it could not be determined what signatures came with that ballot. That ought to lead to spoliation evidence--``signature verification procedures ignored; more than 173,000 ballots in the Wayne County, Michigan, center that cannot be tied to a registered voter; ``Videos of: poll workers erupting in cheers as poll challengers are removed from vote-counting centers; poll watchers being blocked from entering vote-counting centers--despite even having a court order to enter; suitcases full of ballots being pulled out from underneath tables after poll watchers were told to leave. ``Facts for which no independently verified reasonable explanation exists: On October 1, 2020, in Pennsylvania, a laptop and several USB drives used to program Pennsylvania's Dominion voting machines were mysteriously stolen from a warehouse in Philadelphia. The laptop and the USB drives were the only items taken, and potentially could be taken to alter vote tallies; in Michigan, which also employed the same Dominion voting system, on November 4, 2020, Michigan election officials have admitted that a purported `glitch' caused 6,000 votes for President Trump to be wrongly switched to Democratic candidate Biden. A flash drive containing tens of thousands of votes was left unattended in the Milwaukee tabulations center in the early morning hours of November 4, 2020, without anyone aware it was not in a proper chain of custody. ``8. Nor was this court''--talking about the Supreme Court--``immune from the blatant disregard for the rule of law. Pennsylvania itself played fast and loose with its promise to this court. In a classic bait and switch, Pennsylvania used guidance from its Secretary of State to argue that this Court should not expedite review because the State would segregate potentially unlawful ballots. A court of law would reasonably rely on such a representation. Remarkably, before the ink was dry on the court's 4-4 decision, Pennsylvania changed that guidance, breaking the State's promise to the Supreme Court.'' In the October 28, 2020, decision, it said: ``We have been informed by the Pennsylvania Attorney General that the Secretary of the Commonwealth issued guidance today directing county boards of elections to segregate late-arriving ballots.'' Well, it turns out they lied to the Supreme Court. And if the Supreme Court will not have at least enough self-respect to call down a State that lies to the Court to get a ruling they want, then that is one worthless court. It is the same problem we have had with the FISA courts and why I want to eliminate them. They didn't even have enough self-respect that when they found out they were lied to in a number of manners in order to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, they didn't get upset. They didn't put anybody in jail. They didn't hold anybody in contempt. A court that worthless needs to be eliminated. As my law school professor, David Gwynne, used to say, you know, every Federal court in America, except for one, owes its existence and jurisdiction to the U.S. Congress. That, of course, the Supreme Court. We brought them into the world, we should be able to take them out. And that should happen when they don't even have enough self-respect to enforce the truthfulness required to make that court operate. In Republican Party versus Boockvar, November 6, 2020, a quote from that decision: ``This court was not informed that the guidance issued on October 28th, which had an important bearing on the question whether to order special treatment of the ballots in question, had been modified.'' That was from Justice Alito. ``10. The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four defendant states--Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin--independently given President Trump's early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, is less than one in a quadrillion, or one in''--well, I am not even sure what that number is. Maybe quadrillion. I guess that is 15 zeros. ``For former Vice President Biden to win these four states collectively, the odds of that event happening decreased to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power. ``13. By purporting to waive or otherwise modify the existing State law in a manner that was wholly ultra vires and not adopted by each State's legislature, defendant States violated not only the electors clause, but also the elections clause, to the extent that the Article I elections clause textually applies to the Article II process of selecting Presidential electors. ``14. Plaintiff States and their voters are entitled to a Presidential election in which the votes from each of the States are counted only if the ballots are cast and counted in a manner that complies with the preexisting laws of each State. The President and vice president of the United States are the only elected officials who represent all the voters in the Nation. Voters who cast lawful ballots cannot have their votes diminished''--or the term we have heard over the last 4 years, disenfranchised--``by States that administered their 2020 Presidential elections in a manner where it is impossible to distinguish a lawful ballot from an unlawful ballot. ``15. The number of absentee and mail-in ballots that have been handled unconstitutionally in defendant States greatly exceeds the difference between the vote totals of the two candidates for President of the United States in each defendant State. ``16. In addition to injunctive relief for this election, plaintiff State seeks declaratory relief for all Presidential elections in the future. This problem is clearly capable of repetition, yet evading review. The integrity of our constitutional democracy requires that States conduct Presidential elections in accordance with the rule of law and Federal constitutional guarantees. So that is critical. ``18. In a Presidential election, `the impact of the votes cast in each State is affected by the votes cast for the various candidates in other States.''' That is in the Anderson case, 460 U.S. at 795. ``The constitutional failures of defendant States injure plaintiff States because `the right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen's vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.''' And that is from Bush versus Gore. In any event, Mr. Speaker, it is critical that the Supreme Court step up and take the jurisdiction that the Constitution requires it to take. It won't be fun and it won't be pleasurable, but it is absolutely essential that the U.S. Supreme Court do what the Constitution created them to do, take up this matter with which it has original jurisdiction and determine there were unconstitutional actions taken that affected the outcome of this election. It was not a free and fair election, and if the Supreme Court does not act accordingly, then, really, the Supreme Court is irrelevant, Congress is irrelevant; and those who would seek to hide ballots in the future, create improper ballots, count ballots multiple times, they will control the future of this country, not the Supreme Court, not Congress, but a newfangled electronic--not just electronic. They used every method known to man. It will make Tammany Hall, and has made Tammany Hall, look like Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. It is time to act. It is time preserve the Republic. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend, my colleague, and my brother in Christ for yielding and for hosting this Special Order. To follow up on what Congressman Lamborn said, the very first book that the United States Congress authorized to be published at taxpayer expense was a book called the Bible. Not only that, I would also point to a quote, as there is a lot of talk about socialism and how it would work in this country. Dostoevsky hypothesized about it at the end of the 1800s, and Solzhenitsyn didn't hypothesize it, he lived what Dostoevsky said, and that is, the problem with socialism is not economic, the problem with socialism is atheism. And that is diametrically opposed to how this country was started. In fact, I had asked for the Congressional Research Service to give me information about the role of the church and the Bible in our founding, and this is derived from that. The first Christian church services in this United States Capitol were held when the government moved to Washington in the fall of 1800. They were conducted in the Hall of the House. During church services the Speaker's podium was used as a preacher's pulpit. Within a year of his inauguration, President Jefferson began attending church services in the Chamber of the House of Representatives. Throughout his administration, Thomas Jefferson permitted and encouraged church services in executive branch buildings. Sermons regarding the Old and New Testaments of the Bible were conducted in the Supreme Court Chambers while the judicial branch was located in the old north wing of the Capitol. And by the way, that was until the Supreme Court began to think of themselves as God, and at that time they said you can't talk about God or you can't be doing this kind of stuff in schools and other places. But the term ``separation of church and state'' was not found in the Constitution, it was in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists, in essence, saying, we are not going to pick a specific official denomination. President James Madison, who was often recognized as the author of much of our Constitution, followed Jefferson's example as President of coming to church in the Capitol and worshipping God here and using the Bible as the foundational support for that. If you look at President Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, it is inscribed on the inside of the north wall of his memorial, he said of North and South, ``Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.'' But he goes on to ultimately say: ``Yet if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago,'' in the Bible, ``so still it must be said `the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.'''

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend. He has been a real asset here in the House, and I look forward to more accomplishments in the days to come. Speaking of people I have served with, now she is a Senator, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, very proud of her home State. She is doing a great job as a Senator, just as she did a great job in the House. She has become the object of ridicule by a Chinese state-owned media editor. This article was written by Christina Wong, December 3. It says: The European Union Bureau Chief and columnist for Chinese state- run media outlet China Daily lodged a profane insult at U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican from Tennessee, on Thursday in a tweet. Blackburn, a respected conservative Senator who is a hawk on China, tweeted Thursday: China has a 5,000 year history of cheating and stealing. Some things never change. Chen Weihua, EU bureau chief and columnist for China Daily, then responded to her tweet with: Witch, spelled with a B, Senator Blackburn. Chen then followed up with another tweet that said: This is the most racist and ignorant U.S. Senator I have seen. A lifetime witch, spelled with a B at the start of the word. The gentlewoman retweeted his one-word reply to Blackburn. Blackburn responded a couple of hours later in a statement. She said: ``From Tiananmen Square to Uighur genocide, Communist China is an expert at slaughtering populations. America will not bow down to sexist Communist thugs.'' Breitbart News' James Pinkerton profiled Chen in May. He wrote: ``Chen Weihua works for the government-owned China Daily, reliably cranking out articles with headlines such as `White House must concentrate on fighting outbreak, not China-bashing,' and, `Washington must stop making decisions which undermine WHO.' ``In other words, his journalistic output nicely coincides with the People's Republic of China's propaganda plans, from deflecting blame for the coronavirus away from Beijing to defending Beijing's minions at the World Health Organization.'' Chen has previously tweeted: ``Trump and Pompeo are not even good liars.'' Pinkerton noted that Chen bashes the President and his administration reliably, but also eagerly, echoing top Democrats and leading never Trumpers. Chen has also called Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, another leading China hawk in the Senate, ``ignorant.'' Hawley responded: ``#China not happy about my call to confront their economic imperialism by ending the WTO and replacing it with a system that is good for American workers. I love being insulted by #China state-run press.'' Pinkerton noted that Chen has been the beneficiary of many liberal programs in the U.S. Chen lists on his blue-checkmark verified Twitter bio he was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford and a World Press Institute Fellow at Macalester College in Minnesota. He also listed the Freedom Forum in Washington, D.C. So isn't that special. Perhaps one of these institutions is where he learned to call women witches, spelled what a B wherever it was. He is not a very polite person and is very defensive of being part of a misogynistic, sexist, racist, and religion-hating administration. He is apparently proud of that. It is very unfortunate. But I am proud of Senator Blackburn. We are known by our friends, but we are known even more by our enemies, and Senator Blackburn has a real enemy there. I was reminded back early on in my time in China when we went to China. She and I, the two of us, personally confronted, in Beijing, the Chinese bureaucrat in charge of enforcing copyright and patent fraud, which was just overwhelming in China. The amount that the state appeared to not only allow but actually be involved in was pretty staggering. At one point, either Marsha or I asked: Why do you allow all of this patent fraud and copyright theft to go on? The Chinese bureaucrat indicated that, actually, they don't. They step in, and, in fact, he said the year before, they had seized the assets from 500 different vendors who were selling copyright- or patent-infringed goods. Whether DVDs, CDs, things that violated Americans' patents, they seized them. I said: So what did you do with what you seized? I don't know Chinese law, but his indication was that, well, under Chinese law, we can't just destroy goods that have value, so we had to do something with them. It appeared very clear that they seized these assets that were violating international trade, copyright, and patent laws. If they are not allowed to destroy such goods, then, obviously, they had to get rid of them since they felt they had value. So, the Chinese Government must have gotten into the business of selling copyright- and patent- infringed goods. So, there is not a lot of comfort there. Marsha and I did talk back then, and once you get away from the center of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing and you get around to different cities in China, Mr. Speaker, we were both reminded they were so hospitable, so gracious, and so wanting you to have a good experience in their towns. It reminded us both of Southern hospitality here in the U.S. The people were absolutely wonderful, Mr. Speaker. You just had to get away from the central government before you saw just how wonderful and fantastic the Chinese people are. But in Beijing, you have the hotbed of Communist Party activity. Although there are some in the United States who are wanting to get to being a Communist nation as quickly as possible, we see, anytime there is a Communist government, it is not good for the people at all. Another story from Simon Kent, December 1: ``No Twitter `Fact-Check' Warning on Chinese Official's Fake Photo of Australian Soldier Beheading Child.'' A lot of people have seen the photo, yes, but the Chinese produced a photo that was falsified. The Australian soldier was not about to behead a child. It is just more fake information out of the Chinese Communist Party. I guess if you are Twitter, Mr. Speaker, that is not something you would fact-check. You only want to fact-check honorable and honest people with whom you have disagreements. You wouldn't want to fact- check someone who is providing you a lot of money despite their retraining camps, their lies, and their official misrepresentations. You wouldn't want to do that because they might be tempted to cut back the revenue to your form of business. So, as Chris Plante says, if it weren't for double standards, they would have no standards at all there at Twitter. Twitter expands hate speech rules. Well, of course, you are not going to go after people who truly are full of hate, Mr. Speaker. They think conservatives are hateful. As a Christian, we are admonished by Jesus to love one another. We were admonished by Jesus Himself to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. So, Christianity is truly a religion based completely on love. It is such an incredible thing to base a religion on, but that is what it is. God so loved the world He gave His Son; His Son so loved the world He gave His life. Then, you have people saying: Well, these Christians and these churches are full of nothing but hate, when actually that is doing what the Chinese Communist Party does. You are taking something out of context and actually perverting the actual beliefs of Christianity. Twitter is expanding hate speech rules that will allow them to continue to produce things and get revenue from the Chinese Communist Party and not call into question their true hate of groups that might disagree with them. You run over them with a tank if they disagree with you even though they are unarmed. That is the kind of thing that Twitter is embracing here. But this story from Lucas Nolan, 3 December, says: ``Twitter has once again expanded its hate speech policies to `prohibit language that dehumanizes people on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin.' '' That is really rich coming from Twitter since they embrace the Chinese Communist Party and their hatred and their dehumanization of Uighurs, Christians, and people who want to have more than one child, and based on race, ethnicity, and national origin. ``Engadget reports that social media platform Twitter has expanded its hate speech policies again, this time to `prohibit language that dehumanizes people.' '' And on it goes: ``The change in policy comes more than 2 years after Twitter said that it intended to ban dehumanizing language and over 6 months from that last change to the site's policies that banned hate speech relating to age, disability, and disease.'' So, anyway, again, if it weren't for double standards, Twitter would have no standards at all. This article from Rich Noyes, November 24, ``The Stealing of the 2020 Presidency: The Media Kept the Truth From Americans'': ``A new study shows that if the media didn't apply a leftist bias to its Presidential news coverage, Donald Trump would have comfortably won a second term as President. ``To measure the true effect of the media's censorship on the election, the Media Research Center asked The Polling Company to survey 1,750 Biden voters in seven swing States--Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin--six of which, all but North Carolina, were called for Biden. We tested these voters' knowledge of eight news stories, all important topics that our ongoing analysis had shown the liberal news media had failed to cover properly. We found that a huge majority, 82 percent, of Biden voters were unaware of at least one of these key items, with 5 percent saying they were unaware of all eight of the issues we tested. ``This lack of information proved crucial: One of every six Biden voters we surveyed, 17 percent, said they would have abandoned the Democratic candidate had they known the facts about one or more of these news stories. A shift of this magnitude would have changed the outcome in all six of the swing States won by Joe Biden, and Donald Trump would have comfortably won a second term as President.'' Now, that is from Newsbusters. I really like those folks, but they are wrong about that. As we saw from the results and what occurred, and we are seeing more evidence every day, this concludes Donald Trump would have won comfortably. But as many of us know, there would have been more trucks with more fake ballots that would have been brought in, so the claim would have been made anyway that Donald Trump did not win because they just needed to know how many ballots they needed to overcome and they would bring them in to do so. Consistent with that, from Just the News, David Payne--it is a story about what has been going on. Sworn testimony of several whistleblowers on Tuesday--and this isn't like the fake whistleblower against President Trump that didn't actually hear the conversation. He was basing it on double hearsay. These are actually whistleblowers who had firsthand knowledge of what went on. And when they testified under oath from those who say there is no evidence, it is unfounded to say there was fraud, it is not their fault they are saying that, it is just they are very uneducated. So to help with that, when a witness has firsthand knowledge, personally observe, personally saw something occur, and they put that in a sworn affidavit, then we have evidence. It is not unfounded. I know people that have said that. It is not their fault. They are just ignorant, uneducated on what is evidence and what isn't. But sworn testimony is evidence when it is first person. And there are some exceptions to the hearsay rule that lots of articles have been written about and discussed in legal treatises. But in this case, it is not hearsay for most of these things that have been produced. But sworn testimony of several whistleblowers alleged what one election integrity activist is calling ``potential ballot fraud on a massive scale,'' with multiple eyewitnesses testifying to alleged suspicious behavior in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In a press conference in Arlington, Virginia, the Amistad Project--a civil liberties initiative of the Thomas More Society--presented the testimony of three individuals who claim to have witnessed apparent voting malfeasance--that means wrongdoing for those that don't know about evidence-- during the 2020 election. One, Jesse Morgan, a truck driver for a subcontractor with the United States Postal Service, claimed that a trailer he was driving, one full of potentially upwards of 288,000 ballots, disappeared from its parked location at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, U.S. Postal Service depot after Morgan dropped it off there. Morgan had transported these ballots from Bethpage, New York. Well, that is interesting. You could have 288,000 voting ballots that were produced in Bethpage, New York, and supplied to Pennsylvania-- apparently, having already been voted in. And it is possible that people would want to give them the benefit of the doubt. It is possible they had 288,000 people from Pennsylvania just temporarily residing in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and wanted to vote absentee in the Pennsylvania election. So, yeah, maybe it is possible that 288,000 Pennsylvanians were not in Pennsylvania pursuing homemade pumpkins pies--Perry Como used to sing--that they were actually in Bethpage, New York. The subcontractor also reportedly experienced ``odd behaviors'' from U.S. Postal Service personnel, behaviors which postal experts have said in sworn statements, ``grossly deviated from normal procedure and behavior,'' according to a press release from the Amistad Project. Mr. Speaker, by the way, for anybody that might be uneducated on the ways of court evidence, in a civil matter such as this, the normal standard of proof is a preponderance of the evidence, just the slightest evidence more showing that conduct probably was in appropriate. That is enough. It does not have to be beyond a reasonable doubt unless you are getting ready to prosecute people under criminal laws. Once you move into the criminal realm to prosecute people guilty of election fraud, then it does need to be beyond a reasonable doubt but not to establish a standard for an injunction to prevent decertification or to force decertification after certification, or to actually declare an election invalid, even. That is a burden of more probable than not, or probable cause rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. Another whistleblower, Nathan Pease of Madison, Wisconsin-- himself also a subcontractor for the U.S. Postal Service-- alleged that he was told that the postal service was planning to backdate tens of thousands of ballots in the days after the November 3 election in order to circumvent the ballot submission deadline. A third witness, Gregory Stenstrom--who testified at a Pennsylvania legislature hearing in Gettysburg last week-- claimed to have witnessed a Dominion Voting Systems vendor inserting jump drives into voting aggregation machines in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. And for those that don't know, that is not appropriate under the situation, as was here. And it really shouldn't be appropriate in any situation. We need to do away with the ability to have some foreign- owned counting service, like we have had in Texas, in the big cities-- no county that wasn't a big city controlled by Democratic officials would ever allow that to happen in east Texas, west Texas, south Texas, north Texas. But in our big cities, yes, they will hire foreign firms, as they have, or firms funded by foreign money. They will hire them. But they should not be, number one, connected to internet, should not ever be susceptible of foreign ability to access information, which means also to manipulate information if they are good hackers. And just as I said in 2001, back when I was a felony judge in Texas and Congress overstepped what was appropriate and ordered that every county in America had to give up what system of voting, no matter how effective and appropriate and protected it was, and all by electronic voting machines, it costs, seemed like $2 billion or so dollars. It was an unfunded mandate. But worse to me is someone who worked in our county courthouse--I said back in 2001, this means because of Congress' inappropriate bill they passed, that eventually elections will go to the best--the person with the best hacker. And now, 19 years later, that is what we have. Mr. Speaker, but it wasn't just hacking. It was also manipulation that wasn't hacking. There were doors to which electronic experts could go to manipulate things. It was creating fraudulent ballots. It was-- also, as I recall, the Texas constitution itself requires that ballots are to be numbered sequentially, and I don't believe that has been done in quite some time. So Texas, even though President Trump won and we picked up Republican seats there, I would submit it would be potentially even better results if we had ballots that comported with the Texas constitution. And I would submit that everybody ought to be having sequentially numbered ballots just to protect the election and voting process. ``In its press release, Amistad Project director, Phil Kline, said the testimonies are `compelling.' '' You see, testimony means things that were said under oath, which means it is evidence. It is a foundation for the claims of election fraud. `` This evidence joins with unlawful conduct by State and local election officials, including accepting millions of dollars of private funds, to undermine the integrity of this election, Kline said.' In this press release, the Amistad Project says it has collected sworn expert testimony alleging that `over 300,000 ballots are at issue in Arizona, 548,000 in Michigan, 204,000 in Georgia, and over 121,000 in Pennsylvania.' '' And in case there is wondering about whether or not that would affect the election, that would absolutely affect the election in each of those states. The story from PJ Media, Tyler O'Neal, December 1, again, talks about the truck driver that testified--which means it was under oath and it is evidence--``He had driven thousands of ballots from Bethpage, New York, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 2 weeks before Election Day. Phil Kline, a former attorney general of Kansas and director of the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, said that the Amistad Project corroborated the truck driver's story.'' So that is evidence. This story by Jim Hoft: ``Colonel Phil Waldron''--that I believe he has some former NSA folks that work with him--``tells Michigan lawmakers truckloads of ballots for Joe Biden were inserted into the Michigan 2020 election.'' Colonel Phil Waldron spoke tonight--this is dated December 2--at a Michigan hearing following his explosive testimony in Arizona on Monday on the voting machines used in U.S. elections. The Dominion systems were connected to the internet as well, despite Dominion's claims to the contrary. And that also--let me insert here--that also helps explains the U.S. Government's director that was suppose to have been protecting our election, cybersecurity, making sure it was secured. There was a puff piece done on the director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Association--or agency. Krebs was his name, Christopher Krebs. He had indicated in an article on Election Day that he wanted to thank his partners in Silicon Valley. And he was also grateful--I am sure he had someone in Dominion advising him, but Krebs said everything is good because he talked to people that might have been involved in the fraud and they assured him everything was good. So he said everything was good. Also, with our Attorney General Barr, he said he had seen no evidence of fraud. And there are others that have said the same thing. And I would humbly submit that all you have to do is close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ear, and sing ``la la la'' for a long period of time. Keep it up and you will neither see nor hear any evidence of fraud. So if our Attorney General can keep that up, then he will continue not to see or hear any evidence of fraud. So, hopefully, he has not been listening to what I have had to say here in the House because, here, again, it would cause him to demand to see and hear the actual evidence, and he may not want to do that so he can stay consistent. But the evidence is there. It is evidence. It is sworn. And as this article points out: According to Waldron, the United States has a copy of the traffic and the packets of information that were sent to Germany on election night. Yesterday, the first expert at the Arizona State Legislature hearing with Rudy Giuliani was U.S. cybersecurity expert, Colonel Phil Waldron. And Phil is an impressive man, an impressive person when it comes to cybersecurity. ``Colonel Phil Waldron spoke first at the Arizona hearing about the voting machines used in the U.S. election. The Dominion systems were connected to the internet as well, despite Dominion's claims to the contrary. The records within the system can be manipulated by outside parties and insiders as well. ``On Wednesday night, Colonel Waldron told the committee that they have witnesses now who delivered truckloads of ballots for Joe Biden from New York to Pennsylvania. Waldron said they likely did the same thing in Wisconsin. ``Waldron explained that Democrats inserted truckloads of fraudulent ballots into the fraudulent 2020 election.'' Many people saw the video from Georgia that was played yesterday, last evening. This article from The Gateway Pundit, December 3, says: ``Earlier today Cristina Laila reported on the explosive video that was revealed during the Georgia ballot counting at the State Farm Arena where crooked Democrats pulled out suitcases full of ballots and began counting these ballots without election monitors in the room. ``Trump's legal team showed a video from the State Farm Arena tabulation center when poll workers were told to leave at 10:25 p.m. ``A few `workers' stayed behind and were seen pulling suitcases of full of ballots out from under tables to be tabulated.'' So that seems strange, if you believe that the mainstream media never reports anything but facts, because you can, as I did yesterday, go online and put into Google anything about vote counting being suspended during election night. All of the first entries you get tell you that it was fact-checked; it is not true; it is fraudulent representation. It is not true; there was never any suspension of vote counting for anytime in the swing States. In other words, even though you heard it and you saw it happening on TV, don't believe your lying eyes and ears; believe what we tell you, because we are coming to you through the internet, so you can trust us, but don't trust your lying eyes or ears. Anyway, in that video, it is very clear, they did pull out suitcases full of ballots that were--whether intentional or not, they were hidden under tables, and they weren't pulled out until after the monitors and the other vote counters were ordered to leave, that they were stopping the vote counting, and they did leave. That is when the ballots come out from under the table and the counting of those ballots begins. It is absolutely extraordinary. But some of us have known that this kind of activity has been going on. We know that there were electronic manipulations in Dallas County in 2018. It is really unfortunate. Our Texas Attorney General had a chance to be a national hero, had they stepped in, utilized evidence from there. And I have heard people say, Well, I heard about that. There was really nothing to that. Well, I have been following that for two years and trying to get people in law enforcement to do something about it. But they avoided the chance to be a national hero and refused to go after the fraud that existed in the 2018 primary and general election in Dallas County, again, by a firm that had foreign money supporting it, and they did the counting for Dallas County. But since nothing was done there, then the people were free to continue that type of operation in the national election. Here is an article from Joel Pollak. ``Attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood told a rally in Atlanta, Georgia . . . Republicans should not vote in the January 5 runoff election for U.S. Senate unless State authorities rectify problems in the State's voting system.'' And I haven't talked to Lin Wood or Sidney Powell about that, but I would imagine, knowing them, that they were trying to make the point that this system needs to be cleaned up before the election on January 5, because we do need people to vote in that election--not multiple times, but legally; not people come in and illegally vote, but people vote legally as to who they want to represent them in the U.S. Senate. So here is a story from the Epoch Times, Christina Kim, November 28: ``The complaint against Michigan's Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Governor Gretchen Whitmer, marks the beginning of Powell's lawsuit against the State. ``Some of the allegations are repeated claims from Michigan and other States. Republican challengers were unable to `meaningfully observe,' and workers were instructed to backdate ballots. ``Other claims are newer. ``Expert witness, Russell James Ramsland, Jr., works with the Allied Security Operations Group. In the past, he has worked with NASA and MIT. ``Ramsland said there were four `physically impossible' `spikes totaling almost 385,000 ballots allegedly processed in a combined interval of 2 hours and 38 minutes.' He concluded that `Dominion alone is responsible for the injection, or fabrication, of 290,000 illegal votes in Michigan that must be disregarded.' This is nearly twice the number of ballots by which Biden is leading Trump, which is approximately 150,000 ballots. ``Dr. David Keshavarz-Nia has a Ph.D. in engineering and technology and received advanced training from the CIA, NSA and DHS. In his sworn statement . . . ''--and again, since it is a sworn statement, it means the allegations are not unfounded and there is evidence of what is alleged--`` `that USB memory cards were used to facilitate administrative' backdoor access `to disrupt polling operations and impact ballot counting across Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin.' ``He also said, after a detailed analysis of the New York Times data, in his expert judgment, `the vote count distribution in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, are not based on normal system operation. Instead, they are caused by fraudulent electronic manipulation of the targeted voting machines.' ``Another affidavit was submitted by someone whose name and personal information was redacted. This person was an electronic intelligence analyst with extensive experience as a white hat hacker used by some of the top election specialists in the world. ``The expert alleged that a search of Edison Research showed they had an Iranian server and there are records showing China accessing Dominion Voting's servers.'' Wow. ``Edison Research reports the vote count tabulation to Decision Desk HQ for election results. ``According to the affidavit, the digital forensics analysis shows there is `unambiguous evidence that Dominion Voter Systems and Edison Research have been accessible and were certainly compromised by rogue actors, such as Iran and China.' '' Now, this is an area that does require expertise, and that is why you need experts to come in and testify about it. It is true that simply making a statement under oath in an area that requires expertise may not be considered evidence until a judge--going back to the Merrell Dow decision of the U.S. Supreme Court--the judge became the gatekeeper, had to make inquiries of the expert outside the hearing of the jury, and determine whether or not this person was expert in an area in which he was proffered as a witness, and if the judge so finds, then that is, indeed, sworn evidence before the court. ``The complaint asks the Court to provide emergency relief to de- certify Wayne County's results, stop Benson and Whitmer from transmitting the State's certifications to the Electoral College, and `to transmit certified election results that President Donald Trump is the winner of the election' in Michigan, among other requests. ``Michigan's Senate Committee is set to meet next Tuesday, December 1, to hear testimony about absentee ballot counting at Detroit's TCF center.'' You know, this is a matter that should be thoroughly investigated by all areas of the Government, the three branches of Government, including--for those who we are told are recent college graduates that know the Three Stooges' names better than the three branches of Government--it is the executive branch, from the President all the way down; the legislative branch, including Congress and the Senate; and also the judiciary branch, where you would ultimately come to have judicial decisions made over these things. Those are all important. We all ought to be investigating this. It is part of our job as Members of Congress. That is what we need to be doing. Yet, it is worth noting--and I think important to note--that as we heard the majority leader talking about concerns about COVID and businesses going bankrupt and not being able to operate and, of course, the unconstitutional shutdown of churches, where the Government does prohibit the free exercise of religion, those matters should concern everybody and especially about who you place as your servant in the Government. But we hear the words from some people in this body about how critical it is that we do something about COVID. One of the first things we should have done--we had over $120 billion that was unused that was authorized and appropriated in the original Payroll Protection Program. It is just sitting there. All we have got to do is say yes, go back and allow that to be used by businesses in trouble under the same conditions, or we can modify them, and we have a bill. And Republicans have been, We don't care. Put a Democrat name on there. That is fine. Let's just do it to help businesses avoid going out of business. Instead, what we took up was the tiger bill. We took that up pretty quick this week. And as my friend, Dr. DesJarlais, pointed out, if you look at the time that we spent in here voting on the tiger bill, that, as I understand, only pertains to one place that keeps tigers, that during that period we voted on the tiger bill, there have been more people die of COVID than have died from tigers over the last 25 years. Yet, we rush in here to do the tiger bill. I know there is a lot of use, metaphorically, of the red pill/blue pill from The Third Eye or The Matrix. And it is intriguing. You know, the red pill is supposed to show you truth, what is really going on, and the blue pill, you will just be in blissful ignorance. I couldn't help but be reminded of that. When we are in here, we are not passing anything to help with COVID, not to help businesses going out of business. We are passing what ought to be called the blue pill law. We are not going to fix your problems, but we are hoping you will smoke dope so that you can--marijuana. So we are--I didn't vote for it--but appropriating a bunch of money to make marijuana more accessible, not for medicinal purposes--a lot of us are okay with that--but for widespread recreational use. So that if you are bothered--whether it is seeing an election stolen or seeing your business go bankrupt, because the Government won't you let you open, or seeing your church being closed and the preacher being taken down for someone who failed to wear a mask--smoke some dope. That is the message of the week. And that is what we did this week. So that is the message from the majority. Go smoke some dope, take the blue pill, and you will enjoy life so much more. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, at this time it is an honor to yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Walker), my friend that is apparently in his last term in this body. Hopefully, he will be serving in another body. Reflections on the Privilege of Service in the United States Congress

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, we have had an interesting week. Not a lot of critical votes have taken place. It was more of an organizational week we have had here. At the same time, the country's election hangs in the balance. I think it is important to take a step back in history, though. It is very interesting when you look back and see what things have happened in the past that maybe affected our future. Here is an article from Republican _ Michigander published by RedState: Don't let Soros and the ``Secretary of State Project'' take over your State. In 2010, the Secretary of State Project is so far targeting Michigan, California, Iowa, South Dakota, Ohio, and Minnesota. This post is Michigan specific, but look at the list of donors to a State level Michigan downticket race. Chances are this is happening in your state, too. The article says: You know comrades, says Stalin, that I think in regard to this: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this--who will count the votes, and how. That is from Boris Bazhanov's, ``Memoirs of Stalin's Former Secretary.'' Boss Tweed says, As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it? Some of the most overlooked and ultra-important positions in this state, talking about Michigan, are those who run the elections. Those are the county clerk, township/city clerk, and the secretary of state's office. It takes the work of these offices and their staffs to run the elections and make sure the process is above board--and, again, this is 10 years ago, 2010--competent, and with integrity. Livingston County does a great job with its Bureau of Elections. While these positions shouldn't be politicized, at least when it comes to elections, they are in a big way, and this politicization is coming to Michigan. Some people don't like it when their boys don't make the rules of the game. First and foremost is the benefactor of the Democrats, convicted insider trader George Soros, the man who broke the Bank of England. Much like his counterparts at Goldman Sachs, he makes a killing off of speculating, and what better way of doing that than by controlling elections. Other rich leftist democrats also wanted to get their people elected in their attempt to control our lives. Their project is called the Secretary of State Project. Its goal is to get their type of democrats in charge, and then look the other way when ACORN and PIRG to commit voter fraud, rigging the election for the democrats. They had some success in 2006. . . . And people can go online and find back in 2006 a report that George Soros and Democrats were going to be funding elections and selections of people, who would be involved in counting the votes in important places. Most of us didn't pay much attention to that. I know in Texas I thought, well, we are Texas. We elect Republican Governors, and they appoint our Secretary of State, so we are safe from this effort by the Soros Democrats. What I didn't think about back in 2006 and 2010 was the fact that county clerks are really responsible for the vote counting in their county. In most of east Texas, west Texas, south, and the Panhandle, if a county clerk and her or his staff did not do the counting of the ballots, we might get upset and vote them out. But in our biggest cities, biggest counties, like Dallas, Harris County where Houston is, Austin area, San Antonio area, they hire firms that come in, some of which we find out had Soros-type money that helped start these things. Maybe it is his, maybe it wasn't, maybe it was through Open Source or Tidewater, different groups that launder the money through different organizations, so it is hard to tell where it really came from, but we know it is people that wanted to control elections that got involved in deciding who would be in charge of counting the votes. Just like brother Stalin and brother Boss Tweed, they had figured out it doesn't matter who votes. What matters is who counts the votes. So this article goes on. This is 2010. FOX News reported: ``Since 2006 the Democracy Alliance, a left leaning influence group funded by George Soros among others, has had remarkable success in targeting and claiming Secretary of State's offices in 11 of 13 critical States they targeted, including Ohio, Minnesota and Iowa. ``Called the Secretary of State Project (SOSP) its aim is to target and capture the obscure, often overlooked office and implement election rules changes that give democrats a better chance of winning a plurality. Among those changes that the Secretary of State Project calls `election protection,' are a loosening of voter registration requirements and a lessening of efforts to prevent fraudulent voting, according to Matthew Vadum, a political analyst with the Capital Research Center. `` `The thing that is amazing is that they can get the office for as little as $100,000 in campaign funding because no one pays attention to it, and they get to control election opportunities in a State. It is cheap,' Vadum said. He said SOSP is currently targeting three States in the 2010 election: California, Michigan, and Minnesota. In total they count for 82 electoral votes. ``Vadum says that because of chaos and demoralization the Republican Party has not formulated a response to the Secretary of State Project or tried to match their efforts.'' That was 2010. We did not learn. And those campaigns, the project, had a profound effect. ``Brunner has been a disaster in Ohio, unless you are trying to rig the game for the dems. There was tons of shadiness in Ohio for the 2008 election. The good news about Brunner is that she is running for U.S. Senate where she can do less damage, even if she wins. ``Brunner made news in October 2008 when she declined to hand over to county election boards 200,000 names on voter registration forms where the drivers license or Social Security number on the forms did not match the name. The Secretary of State Project praised her actions.'' This is another report: ``Blackwell's office was one of the first and most critical offices claimed by the Secretary of State Project. He was succeeded in 2006 by Jennifer Brunner, who received $167,000 in campaign contributions from the Secretary of State Project, and immediately began a complete overhaul of Ohio's voting system. Among the changes she made were allowing election day registration and the failure to purge election rolls of ineligible and dead voters.'' As Lyndon Johnson famously told his campaign manager: No, sir. This man has every bit as much right to vote as anybody else in this cemetery. Back to the article. ``Her most memorable moment was when a Federal court judge ruled that she had violated Federal law for `not taking adequate steps to validate the identity of newly registered voters.' At the time she admitted that there were `discrepancies' in about 200,000 new registrations but refused to allow polling workers to take action on the questionable ballots.'' Mr. Speaker, if someone begins to see a pattern--gee, this was 2010. I didn't wake up until late in 2018. But this went on around the country, getting people in positions that they would be responsible for counting the votes and making rules, though that is supposed to be left to the legislature of each State, according to the Constitution, making rules as to what votes count and what votes don't. Going back to the article. ``When Jennifer Brunner defeated incumbent Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio in 2006, 12 of the 18 individuals who contributed the maximum $10,000 to Brunner's campaign resided in States other than Ohio. (One of these donors, incidentally, was Teresa Heinz Kerry.) Said Brunner, `I received significant support from the Secretary of State Project, which helped me toward the election.' ``Brunner went on to make her influence felt in the 2008 election cycle, when she ruled that Ohio residents should be permitted, during the designated early-voting period extending from late September to early October, to register and vote on the very same day. Citing the potential for voting fraud under such an arrangement, Republicans objected. But on September 29 of that year--the day before early voting was scheduled to commence--the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed Brunner's decision.'' I thank the Ohio Supreme Court for their contribution to voter fraud; and not to leave out our wonderful Chief Justice John Roberts, who similarly ruled, in effect: So what. There is fraud maybe, maybe not. I am not going to do anything about it. Thank you very much. ``In a separate matter, Brunner sought to effectively invalidate a million absentee-ballot applications that Republican Presidential candidate John McCain's campaign had issued. Each of those applications had been inadvertently printed with an extra, unnecessary checkbox, and Brunner maintained that if a registrant failed to check the box--even if he or she signed the form--the application could be rejected. On October 2, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned Brunner's directive on grounds that it served `no vital purpose or public interest.' '' I mean, after all, it was John McCain; he was going to be beat, so we will let that one go. ``Brunner's most noteworthy claim to fame took place in October 2008, when she refused to provide county election boards approximately 200,000 voter-registration forms in which the name did not match the driver's license or Social Security number. ``Count the dems, and reject the GOP votes. Boss Tweed would be proud. That is what the Secretary of State Project wanted, and what they got. ``Mark Ritchie was the Secretary of State who certified Al Franken's win on a recount. He was a Secretary of State Project candidate and here is the result. ``(Mary) Kiffmeyer is `absolutely sure' that Ritchie's efforts to eliminate voting regulations ensured Franken's victory. `` `The first thing he did when he got into office was to dismantle the ballot reconciliation program we started. Under that program districts are required to check that the number of ballots issued by matching them with the number of ballots cast,' she said, `that way we know immediately that the vote count is accurate.' `` `But that isn't what happened,' she said. `We now have 17,000 more ballots cast than there are voters who voted and no way to determine what went wrong. Why anyone would eliminate that basic check, I don't know,' she said.'' Well, she doesn't know, but some of us know exactly why you eliminate that check to make sure the vote counting is accurate, because that way you can have 17,000 people who didn't vote cast votes. And, obviously, there are people that have lost with a whole lot less than 17,000 votes on the other side. ``The Vadum guy quoted earlier was Matthew Vadum. He is one of the main guys at Capital Research, a good organization that has tracked the shadiness of these foundations and similar groups for years. He wrote a good piece in The American Spectator about the Franken-Coleman race and its Secretary of State. ``Both Franken and Obama, by the way, were endorsed by ACORN Votes, ACORN's federal political action committee. ``Minnesota's secretary of state isn't a Democrat by happenstance. ``Ritchie, who defeated two-term incumbent Republican Mary Kiffmeyer in 2006, received an endorsement and financial assistance for his run from a below-the-radar nonFederal `527' group called the Secretary of State Project. The entity can accept unlimited financial contributions and doesn't have to disclose them publicly until well after the election. ``The founders of the Secretary of State Project, which claims to advance `election protection' but only backs Democrats, religiously believe that right-leaning secretaries of state helped the GOP steal the presidential elections in Florida in 2000 (Katherine Harris) and in Ohio in 2004 (Ken Blackwell). ``The secretary of state candidates the group endorses sing the same familiar song about electoral integrity issues: Voter fraud is largely a myth, vote suppression is used widely by Republicans, cleansing the dead and fictional characters from the voter rolls should be avoided until embarrassing media reports emerge, and anyone who demands that a voter produce photo identification before pulling the lever is a racist, democracy-hating Fascist. ``Most media reports also leave out the fact that Ritchie has extensive ties to the controversial in-your-face direct action group, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), whose employees have been implicated in electoral fraud time and time again.'' Which is another reason ACORN doesn't exist. They were driven out of existence because of illegality and fraud, and it sounds like they just melded into other groups that were trying to do the same things ACORN did before being disbanded. Going back to the article. ``In 2006, the Minnesota ACORN Political Action Committee endorsed Ritchie and donated to his campaign. According to the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board, contributors to Ritchie's campaign included liberal philanthropists George Soros, Drummond Pike, Deborah Rappaport, along with veteran community organizer Heather Booth, a Saul Alinsky disciple who cofounded the Midwest Academy, a radical ACORN clone. One article on Ritchie's 2006 campaign website brags about the fine work ACORN did in Florida to pass a constitutional amendment to raise that State's minimum wage. ``ACORN got their man in. Their man made sure Stuart Smalley became a senator. The good news is that Mark Ritchie is running for reelection in Minnesota. Hopefully, the good people there throw his sorry rear out. ``But closer to home, the Secretary of State Project wants their own Mark Ritchie or Jennifer Brunner right here in Michigan. Her name is Jocelyn Benson. What are Benson's credentials? ``Benson is a native of Philly, well known for vote fraud.'' In 2010, this article is being written. Philly, well known for vote fraud. Don't we know. ``She went to Harvard Law. I have seen enough damage done by Harvard Law politicians like Obama and Granholm to refuse to back anyone who went there for political office. In 2004, for the democrats, she ran the poll challenging/poll watching programs for the DNC. They want the fox guarding the henhouse. She is also a protege of Jennifer Brunner. Yes, that Brunner. She was recently endorsed (before dems convention) by the SEIU, the most far left of the union leadership. ``The Blog Prof has been on the case researching Benson with posts here and here. ``In order to ensure that elections are fair, conducted with integrity, and legitimate, Jocelyn Benson and her friends at Secretary of State Project MUST be defeated by any legal means necessary. We must keep ACORN, PIRG-IM, Soros, MoveOn.org, and the rest of those groups out of the Secretary of State office here. ``We will be keeping a close eye on this race. . . .'' But nonetheless, that again, that was 2010, and then they go on to list lots of liberal Democrats supporting the Secretary of State Project, at least 250 of the 1,600. But then here is another article from February of 2010, FOX News, Ed Barnes: ``States' Secretaries of State Are Tipping the Balance of Power.'' ``In 2000, it was Katherine Harris, the secretary of state of Florida, who made critical decisions that helped swing the State Republican. ``In 2004, it was Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's secretary of state, who earned democratic wrath for ensuring a close Republican win. ``In 2008, it was the secretary of state of Minnesota, Mark Richie, who handed that State's Senate seat to Al Franken and control of Congress to the Democrats. ``In every major election since 2000, secretaries of state have emerged as key, often decisive, and partisan figures in the outcomes of those ballot battles. ``And just last week in Massachusetts, there was cause of concern that the upset victory by Scott Brown could be compromised by that State's secretary of state, who has to certify the results. ``According to Professor Robert Pastor of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University, the situation has gotten so bad that the partisan roles of the secretaries of states in the election process are undermining the faith of Americans in the election process. `` `After the 2000 election, partisanship in the office accelerated. It has skewed enough elections since then that a sufficient number of Americans should be concerned,' he said. `We are worse than many Third World countries' in holding fair and nonpartisan elections.'' And, again, that is February 2010 that this was written. ``And now there is a quiet, below-the-radar but major effort to target secretary of state offices in order to influence the outcome of upcoming elections. ``Since 2006, the Democracy Alliance, a left-leaning influence group funded by George Soros among others, has had remarkable success in targeting and claiming secretary of state's offices in 11 of 13 critical States they targeted, including Ohio, Minnesota and Iowa. ``Called the Secretary of State Project, SOSP, its aim is to target and capture the obscure, often overlooked office and implement election rules changes that give Democrats a better chance of winning a plurality.'' So, on that goes, and it covers some of the same ground as the last article. But it is amazing, though, the brilliant strategy--you know, if you don't mind fraud--the brilliant strategy of targeting secretaries of state, and in States like Texas where the secretary of state is appointed by a Republican Governor--has been for years--you go after the county clerks and make sure you have got good, stout Democrats who will hire firms funded, started by Democrat-leaning organizations so that they can work the system. Now, I mentioned earlier, I didn't wake up on how serious this effort, this brilliant effort by people on the far left was until I saw evidence of manipulating the results in Dallas County by the firm--and if I recall correctly, that may have been one of the Canadian-started firms. It has been a while, but they were hired to come in. And think about it. If you wanted to manipulate the outcome of an election, you get your person in to hire a firm where people could be trained to manipulate the vote. And say you had early voting, like Dallas, like every place in Texas had, and each precinct turns in a flash drive with the votes on the flash drive to the person heading up the Democrat firm--Democrat-funded firm that then has from Friday night until Tuesday night to play with those returns. And there were clear indications that in 2018, in the primary, that the early voting counts were manipulated. They made some mistakes. But, you know, they were just getting this thing down, trying to figure out how to do it without being caught, so they made some silly blunders that made very evident the fact that they had manipulated numbers in the primary. By the general election of 2018 in Dallas County, they got better about hiding it, but when you have got brilliant people who are looking into it, it is easier. I mean, those manipulations can be found and were found, and the information was offered to the Texas attorney general, whom I personally urged multiple times over the past 2 years: You have got to get on top of this, because the manipulations that we saw in Dallas County need to be exposed. People need to be indicted, and people need to go to jail for stealing elections or, at least, manipulating elections, and that way we can ensure a fair vote nationally in 2020. Apparently, our attorney general was preoccupied by other things, so he never got around to getting a warrant, which I believe it sure looked like probable cause evidence sufficient to get a warrant to seize the vote counting equipment used in 2018. As I understand, that has all been destroyed by now. The opportunity was missed by the Texas attorney general's office to seize those with a warrant and show for the world exactly how manipulations were done. It is a lost opportunity. And, of course, since we have a Director of the FBI who has shown more of an interest--he was put there to clean up the FBI of the massive abuse at the top, not necessarily demonstrated around the country. We have got a lot of great FBI agents around the country, but right here in Washington, I have seen the corruption firsthand. I have seen manipulation of the truth. I have seen FBI agents who lied about what they found and what they did in order to prevent people from being prosecuted that should have been. I have seen deals made like with Cheryl Mills: Gee, you let us--we have got plenty of evidence to get a warrant and seize your computer, but if you will just let us look, we promise not to make copies of anything. We promise that we will give it back, and we promise, under this agreement, you can't be prosecuted for anything that we find--and then giving the evidence back that could have been seized with a warrant, allowing that individual to sit in on the questioning of a potential target, though Mills could have been a target herself. These are the kinds of things that have given people across America the wrenching questions: Why has nobody gone to jail on that side of the political aisle? And that is a good question, and the answer is heartbreaking. If we don't enforce the rule of law, especially in something as critical as elections, then we have known for some time we were going to be headed in the direction of a Third World government. And that is apparently what we have got in this election. It could still be saved. The good thing for those involved in fraud in this last election is that you have a lot of Republicans who say: Look, we just want people to get along. You know, it is unpleasant when you talk about fraud in an election. Well, yeah, it is because it will mean the end of this little experiment in self-government. So, yeah, that is unpleasant to talk about. But if we don't clean up the process in this election, then there will be no free and fair future elections. As a judge handling felonies, it was made clear in the short school we went to upon becoming judges, and then it was made abundantly clear--anybody who just kept researching the law, trying to follow the law--that there are two critical types of deterrents that can ensure a brighter future for a self-governing country. One is general deterrence. There needs to be treatment of lawbreakers, in this case, people who have been involved in the fraud, to such an extent that the general public would not be tempted to engage in the fraudulent conduct. But that would be a deterrent. It would scare them out of participating. That is what I had hoped if our Texas attorney general's office had pursued the fraud that we knew of in Dallas County from the 2018 elections. There could have been general deterrents. And then, also, there are specific deterrents for the person engaged in the fraud, and that is you have a sentence strong enough that would deter the individual criminal from engaging in such conduct in the future that they would want to conform their conduct to the requirements of the law so they did not end up with another sentence like they got in that case. The problem for both general and specific deterrents, when it comes to voter fraud over recent years, is there has been no deterrence. There were a number of indictments issued in specific places, including the Gregg County commissioner, Democrats involved and others, but none involving the big frauds that would change a national election. So that has been really tragic to see the missed opportunities. But those of us who never stop studying history know that this is one of those lessons that gets--that is failed to be learned over and over, that brings about the end to republics. Of course, in the first great republic, the Roman Republic, they had tried to learn lessons from the democracy of Athens, and they did. But soon things degenerated. The leadership was absent. Caesar, as head of the military, did something that was illegal, crossed the Rubicon, and that was the end of the republic. Though senators still continued to be elected, by that point, it was a lost cause. So I am looking here at an affidavit by Mellissa Carone, and something that many in the news media have not understood, and that is that when you say an allegation is unfounded, it means there is no evidence, a no evidence point, as appellate courts would call it. And when there is somebody who has risked going to jail for perjury and sworn to being a witness to fraud, then whether you like the evidence or not, that is evidence. It is not unfounded. It is evidence. There are hundreds of affidavits that have been produced--maybe thousands. Some witnesses really don't have anything helpful, speculative suggestions, and those are not real evidence because they have no direct knowledge. It is kind of like the whistleblower--so- called whistleblower--who had no direct knowledge and no direct evidence. Well, that is not evidence if it would not be admissible in court. But if somebody has taken an oath and stated they witnessed fraudulent conduct, that is evidence. In some cases, the testimony is the creating of an environment in which fraud could occur and then seeing indications that fraud had occurred. As someone once said about circumstantial evidence--I know some people say that you can't convict somebody on circumstantial evidence. Oh, yes. It is done all the time. This particular law student gave an example: If I am driving by Baylor Stadium, I can't see what is going on inside the stadium. But I know it is the time that a game was supposed to happen between Baylor and another team, and I can see the scoreboard and both of those teams are listed on the scoreboard. There is time that is clicking down, and there are scores, and there is the roar of the crowd, and I see the score change. I don't have direct evidence there is a football game going on, but when you look at all the circumstances, then clearly that is circumstantial evidence that a football game is going on. So, Mr. Speaker, when you have evidence of all the circumstances and then outcomes that show this could not have happened without some misconduct or some gross negligence, then you have got significant evidence. This affidavit by this witness talks about the Dominion training, and this witness was hired, contracted, by Dominion Voting Services to perform IT work at the TCF Center in Detroit for the November 3, 2020, election. This person is a resident of Michigan. It says: During both shifts that were worked, I witnessed extreme irregularities in ballot counting, ballot fabrication/ completion and data security. Now, that is a summary, and again, not necessarily direct evidence, since we don't have any specifics. But the affidavit goes on: Improper counting protocol was prevalent during both shifts. It appeared the majority of people who manned the scanners or the counters were either untrained, poorly trained. They kept jamming machines and rescanning certain stacks of ballots. The proper procedure was to run a batch, a stack of 50 ballots through the tabulator and each ballot counted only once. When a jam happened, the computer would issue an error message indicating what number of the ballot stack had jammed the tabulator. At that point, the counter had two options: manually discard the batch on the tabulator and rescan it, or to continue scanning from the jammed ballot through the end of the batch. Countless times, as I floated on the floor to assist with the jammed tabulators, I saw workers rescan entire batches of ballots without first discarding that very same partially scanned batch. I witnessed entire ballot batches rescanned multiple times. Many Dominion employees were hired like me to un-jam the tabulator machines throughout the counting process. The jams and rescans of batches of ballots without the deletion of the scanned partial batches of ballots prior to each rescan was quite disturbing. At about midnight I was assisting one of the counters with a paper jam. I noticed his machine had a count of more than 400 ballots scanned in that particular batch. This was unusual, to say the least, because only one lot of a batch is processed at a time. This means that either the jammed batch had been counted at least 8 times or the counting machine was defective. I was so disturbed at this problem I brought it to the attention of my Dominion manager, Nick-- Whatever his last name is, however you say that. Nick stated we were there to assist with IT, but not to run their election. Besides extreme counting irregularities, the adjudication process volunteers watching the counting is supposed to be witnessed by one Republican and one Democrat. The conversations I overheard between those watching were usually derogatory comments about Republicans, thus I concluded that often there were two Democrat election volunteer poll watchers at many of the machines and no Republican poll watcher at all. I want to describe what occurred during shift change, which commenced about 7 p.m. It was chaotic and stunningly disorganized. It took about 2 hours for people to be assigned an area. At one point perhaps 30 people came downstairs to tabulation machines to be counters. At least four of them, one of whom I have known for over 20 years, told me they received absolutely no training for the counting area whatsoever. Upon information and belief, none of these workers transferred to the mail-in ballot counting section knew how to fix a tabulation problem. I showed many of these new counters how to cancel a partially scanned batch of ballots before resubmitting that jammed batch of ballots to be rescanned. Many of these new counters whom I helped with jams admitted they had received no training. Prior to my first shift, I received an email from Dominion that I would be issued a badge when I arrived at the TCF Center. When I appeared for my first shift, it was difficult to enter the TCF Center because I did not receive a badge and could not prove my Dominion credentials. A Dominion employee nicknamed Danielle came over and explained who I was. Only then was I permitted to enter the building. When I asked my manager, Nick, for a badge, he replied that I didn't need a badge. He stated we did not want our names to be showing because the challengers would attempt to question us while working. As a related aside, I recall a co-worker taking off her Dominion badge when a challenger asked whether or not the adjudication hardware was connected to the internet. Finally, Samuel Challendes removed his Dominion badge after a challenger took my picture and was escorted from the TCF Center. Samuel Challendes, a top Dominion employee from Denver, left the TCF Center midafternoon on November 3, 2020, to assist at the warehouse. When Samuel returned about 3 hours later, I asked him where the warehouse was and who owned it. I asked: Is it like an Amazon warehouse? He said, no, then explained that we call it the Chicago warehouse. It is where I had my pre-election training, the city of Detroit elections building. During the nightshift everyone was free to come and go as they pleased in and out of the counting room. Some people left reportedly to smoke and returned later to the counting room. I believe it is illegal to do this because boxes and stacks of ballots were left unattended. Nobody was present to verify that no ballots were removed or brought in, no one was paying attention, no one logged people as they came and went. When I returned to the TCF Center at 10 a.m. November 4, I walked right into the building, nobody stopped me, security was absent and nonexistent. Sometimes city workers asked me for the location of the blank ballots. There was a white table of blank ballots left unattended. When a worker had a ballot or ballots that they deemed defective in some way, they would go to the white table of blank ballots and complete one or some. I believe they were supposed to complete the ballot to match exactly what the voter intended. I saw city workers actually sign names as this if they were the person who completed the original ballot reportedly being replicated. Nobody was present to verify if these newly completed replacement ballots were identical. Dominion employee Samuel Challendes and a city worker who looked to be in his mid-twenties were responsible for submitting the final ballot numbers into the main computer. They had absolutely no supervision or accuracy verification. Dominion manager, Nick, was on the main floor assisting with IT jams most of the time. There was no city of Detroit staff present to witness the process. During the evening, I overheard Samuel talking to Nick about losing tons of data. Then Samuel, Nick, and the city worker all moved to the side of the stage and made calls on their cellphones. I asked Nick what was going on. He replied it was all taken care of and not to worry. I did not see anyone approach the computer Samuel and the city worker utilized. Nick went back to helping un-jam the tabulator machines. It is my understanding this critical error remains undocumented and unaddressed. Two vans pulled up to the garage of the counting room, one on day shift and one on night shift. I do not know what these vans contained, but I doubt it was food, because there was a shockingly short supply of food for the workers and I never saw food leave either of the vans. Coincidentally, the news announced Michigan discovered 100,000 additional ballots less than 2 hours after the last van left the building. She goes on to talk about she was the only Republican working for Dominion Voting Systems that she was aware of. There are more allegations and more statements, under oath. On November 5 I called the FBI to report the activity I witnessed which I believed to be criminal activity. After my initial report I was disconnected. When I called back and explained the nature of my call, I was placed on hold for a long time. Eventually I was able to explain my concerns, provide my contact information. As of today, I have not been contacted by the FBI over my concerns of massive voter fraud. But anyway, that is an affidavit, and affidavits are indeed evidence. Here is an affidavit from another witness. It is sworn to. He personally observed the absent voter counting boards in Detroit at the TCF Center. He has attended the Wayne County campus on an almost daily basis. On November 17, there was a meeting of the board of canvassers to determine whether to certify the results of Wayne County. The meeting did not start until 5, supposed to start at 3. We were told it was delayed so that representatives of the Democrat board members could obtain additional affidavits. At 5 p.m., an open meeting and discussion began to discuss the issue of whether to certify the vote. In my review of the results, I determined that approximately 71 percent of Detroit's 134 absent voter counting boards were left unbalanced and many unexplained. I informed the board members of the discrepancies, but soon thereafter, a motion to certify was made by Vice Chairman Jonathan Kinloch. After further discussion, I renewed my concerns that the reason that the numbers did not balance for the majority of the AVCBs in Detroit and, importantly, could not be explained. If the vote totals did not match, there should have been a documented reason explaining why. The board considered the ultimate question of whether to certify the vote, and the motion to certify failed 2-2. This vote was followed by public derision from our two Democrat colleagues. I, and Monica Palmer, who also voted against certification, were berated and ridiculed by members of the public and other board members. This conduct included specious claims that I was racially motivated in my decision. This public ostracism continued for hours, during which time, we were not provided an opportunity to break for dinner and were not advised that we could depart and resume the hearing on another date. I discussed a potential resolution with Vice Chair Kinloch in confidence. Ms. Anderson-Davis told us that we must vote to certify on that night. We were told that we could not consider matters such as the unexplained reasons that most of Detroit's AVCBs did not balance, and no one knew why. They were told they couldn't consider that. During the evening, Wayne County counsel, Ms. Janet Anderson-Davis, and my colleagues on the board continued to discuss irregularities. Ms. Anderson-Davis advised the board that the discrepancies were not a reason to reject the certification, and based on her explicit legal guidance, I was under the belief that I could not exercise my independent judgment in opposition to the certification. Therefore, I voted to certify the results. Late in the evening, I was enticed to agree to certify based on the promise that a full and independent audit would take place. I would not have agreed to the certification but for the promise of an audit. Then he goes on to explain the different promises he was made. But as pointed out: There are questions that need to be answered and can only be answered if Wayne County's canvass is transparent and provides information within its control. That information includes: The logs indicating when drop box ballots were collected and delivered, the log of persons who made these deliveries and who had access to drop-box keys and when that access was obtained. Similar concerns exist regarding the delivery of ballots to the TCF Center during the night of November 3 and the morning hours of November 4. I am also concerned about the use of private moneys directing local officials regarding the management of the elections, how these funds were used. He goes on: Why do the poll books, qualified voter files, and final tallies not match or balance? Seventy-one percent of Detroit's did not balance. Why not? Anyway, great questions that need to be answered if we are going to ever get to a proper finding regarding the results in Wayne County. I have an affidavit from Monica Palmer that was just mentioned. So like I said, there are hundreds of affidavits and sworn testimony as to improprieties. It should be noted, a lot of people have heard about, this is the title, ``Dominion Part of Council That Disputed Election Integrity Concerns in DHS Statement.'' This is by Jeff Carlson with Epoch Times. But we now know--it has been blasted all over the news--that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency headed by Christopher Krebs--he was fired. But before he was fired, his Agency issued a statement on November 12 disputing the allegation, saying: ``The November 3 election was the most secure in American history.'' What that Agency failed to disclose, however, is that Dominion Voting Systems is a member of the cybersecurity agency CISA. They are a member of CISA's Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council, one of the two entities that authored the statement put out by CISA saying there is no fraud. The Agency didn't respond to requests for comment immediately, but this article goes on to point out both Dominion and Smartmatic are listed as members of CISA's Sector Coordinating Council and appear to be actively involved, as they are named as organizing members. Among the key objectives is to ``serve as primary liaison between the election subsector and Federal, State, and local agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.'' Let's face it, Mr. Krebs worked for Microsoft at one time. They are not big fans of President Trump, nor is Bill Gates. But this article says: ``As CISA notes, they do not have direct oversight or responsibility for the administration of our Nation's elections as that responsibility lies with State and local governments.'' Yet, they had no problem issuing a statement promising everybody that these elections were totally free of fraud. Dominion used CISA to deny the allegations against Dominion. There is more in that article, but time is short. It is amazing. There was a judge, though. The judge didn't issue any order that cleaned up the problem. The judge noted that the case presented ``serious system security vulnerability and operational issues that may place plaintiffs and other voters at risk of deprivation of their fundamental right to cast an effective vote that is accurately counted.'' That is kind of like John Roberts: Yep, the case is presented. Could be a lot of fraud here, but I am going to let the fraud go forward. I am not going to deal with it. This could be the last election where there is any hope of having a true two-party system for President. We saw what happened with the abuse by the FBI, Department of Justice, State Department, a certain individual or possibly individuals. Even the Department of Defense got involved, trying to frame President Trump's campaign, justified, according to some, originally, spying on the campaign. But we know a lot more now. But let me make clear to people that are a bit slow-witted, like somebody at the Dallas Morning News: I have never advocated for revolution. I have mentioned the American Revolution, but I have quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., including in the speech where I was said to have advocated for revolution. I said: We must follow his example, and that is a peaceful demonstration, that we can rise up, but it must be peaceful. How much clearer does it need to be? Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I rise to bring forth the privileged resolution, H. Res. 1148.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I agree with my colleagues across the aisle. This should not be a partisan matter. We shouldn't have to be here today. But unfortunately, the Democrats decided to make this partisan. I begged to be allowed to make an amendment because this is one slap at a man who has already made clear, yes, he wants to stop fraudulent voting and make sure that hadn't occurred, but he is going to abide by the will of the people. Yet, they refused to allow any amendments. It says, it is resolved that the House of Representatives ``intends that there should be no disruptions by the President or any person in power to overturn. . . .'' They would not accept a friendly amendment, so it could be completely bipartisan, to say, ``or any candidate or anyone acting on a candidate's behalf,'' which would have included the President. Oh, no, we have to have a slap at the President. As my friend Mr. Steube pointed out, it is not Republicans who have divided this country in refusing to accept results of the elections. No, you go back to 1860. November 6, 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln is elected President by a big margin, and then States start seceding. They are not going to accept the results. Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated. Back then, it was March 4, 1861. States were already seceding. We are not accepting the results. And they were, every one a Democrat, saying that we are not going to accept that Republican's election to President. Then, what do we hear from Hillary Clinton? She has been quoted as saying that ``Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances, because I think this is going to drag out.'' Go back 100 years, after the Democrats refused to accept the results of the election of 1860. In 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected, and I have confirmed again today with someone who worked closely with Nixon that he had information submitted to him that established that there was much wrongdoing in Chicago, Illinois, fraudulent voting schemes. Despite what any others may think about Richard Nixon, he made the decision that the country could not stand that kind of divisiveness, so he refused to pursue the fraud of which he was told there was plenty of evidence in Chicago, Illinois. That is the way the Republicans have been. Then, we hear more sanctimonious talk about George W. Bush, and then who contested the election? Well, Al Gore. He calls and concedes, and then he later calls and backs it up. Thank goodness he wasn't President when we needed a decisive leader. But if you go through the chronology of Gore's defeat by President Bush--and a recount ultimately showed that he did lose. Gore did lose; Bush did win. But he was still contesting. He divided this Nation, refused to accept the results of the election, brought up some of the most ridiculous things from the butterfly ballot that kids in the fifth grade had no problem with. Oh, but it is unfair because they can't really understand it in that part of Florida. What an insult to those people in Florida. If you look now at what the Democratic Party is saying about this election in response to President Trump saying, I just want to make sure that it is not fraudulent voting; it is fair voting. And as long as everything is legal and fair, you betcha, he will have a smooth transition of power. He would agree to that. But if you look, as reported on August 2 of this year, buried near the end of Ben Smith's column is a report that ``Democrats have participated in a `war game' in which they considered several possible outcomes of the election. In one scenario, John Podesta, the former chair of Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign and a leading figure in party circles, played former Vice President Joe Biden and refused to concede the election.'' Then later it was posted--much more recently, I guess, that is September 6: ``Democrats promise more violence if Joe Biden doesn't defeat Trump by a landslide in the 2020 election. Rosa Brooks, a leftist who writes for The Washington Post, penned a piece that stated her research showed that the only scenario in November that would stop the violence is if Biden wins in a landslide. That kind of attempt to manipulate the voters by intimidation will just make Americans vote for Trump.'' It was posted September 6 in the American Thinker. ``Democrats openly say that if Trump is reelected, they are going to redouble their 4 years of madness, with special emphasis on the last 3 months of open violence. Indeed, they are already planning to destabilize the election and to contest if Trump wins, in hopes of a violent coup.'' And as if there is not a God in Heaven, today of all days, when this that should have been bipartisan is brought to the floor to slam Donald Trump, we have newly released information out today that has been declassified. This report, on September 7, 2016: ``U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding `U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.' '' Then further, it came out today: ``A former senior intelligence official told saraacarter.com that it would make sense that Clinton's plans would be usurped by the Russia's GRU, its military intelligence, as well as Russia's FSB, its equivalent of the CIA, when former British spy Christopher Steele began peddling the Russians for information.'' ``The real people colluding and conspiring with Russia were the Democrats, Hillary Clinton, and Fusion GPS,'' stated the source. ``It is the weaponization of the agencies and those like Clinton who built their private Idaho in the U.S. bureaucracy. They gave the keys to the kingdom to Russia to wreak chaos in our Nation for the past 4 years.'' Moreover, the information that came out today reveals that former CIA Director John Brennan allegedly knew of Clinton's plans and briefed President Obama on those plans in July 2016. It was the same month the FBI opened up the Crossfire Hurricane investigation against President Trump and his campaign--or candidate Trump and his campaign officials. So, what a day, the day that more evidence comes out that it was Hillary Clinton's campaign, the DNC, and they were refusing to go along with the legal and fair election. Then, afterward, that whole conspiracy, the dossier was used to try to prevent a President from staying in office after sworn in, and we are supposed to vote now to come after President Trump and demand he be legal and lawful in leaving office. He just wants fairness in the vote, and he will follow the will of the people. It is a real shame that my friends across the aisle wouldn't allow an amendment, so we could say to both sides: Follow the will of the people; have a proper transition of power. But, no, they wouldn't go there.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, I seek to provide a privileged resolution here in the House.

Mr. GOHMERT. H. Res. 1148, raising a question of the privileges of the House. Whereas, on July 22, 2020, H.R. 7573 was brought to the House floor for a vote, with the purpose of eliminating four specific statues or busts from the United States Capitol along with all others that include individuals who ``served as an officer or voluntarily with the Confederate States of America or of the military forces or government of a State while the State was in rebellion against the United States'' yet failed to address the most ever-present historical stigma in the United States Capitol; that is the source that so fervently supported, condoned and fought for slavery was left untouched, without whom, the evil of slavery could never have continued as it did, to such extreme that it is necessary to address here in order for the U.S. House of Representatives to avoid degradation of historical fact and blatant hypocrisy for generations to come. Whereas, The Democratic Party Platform of 1840, 1844, 1848, 1852, and 1856 states ``That Congress has no power under the Constitution, to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several States, and that such States are the sole and proper judges of everything appertaining to their own affairs, not prohibited by the Constitution; that all efforts of the abolitionists, or others, made to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery . . . are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences; and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people and endanger the stability and permanency of the Union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend of our political institutions.''

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Shimkus), my good friend, great patriot, and veteran.

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, I thank Mr. Shimkus for the wonderful tribute being paid. We will have to stand up here at some point and pay a wonderful tribute to Mr. Shimkus. Obviously, there is a great deal of trouble going on, a lot of troubled people in this country. It is interesting, recently, my wife had flown up to be here in Washington for the President's speech on the White House grounds and, flying back, she noticed there were people with the BLM, Black Lives Matter, paraphernalia, things on there saying ``BLM,'' ``Black Lives Matter.'' It was interesting to hear, apparently, some of the comments, and the comments had to do with the free plane tickets they got to fly up to protest here. One person said, yeah, they got a free minivan the whole time they were here. Somebody is paying for those items to come up and threaten and assault. Thankfully, there weren't near as many batteries with the actual physical part of the assault, just threatened assaults. My wife and I, when we left the White House grounds up from the closed Pennsylvania part, trying to get down to our car in front of the Willard, we ended up being chased by a mob. The mob was on its way, and they were very loud and aggressive as they ran toward us, so I thought we will cut through the Willard, because I knew we would never make it all the way around the next block. There was a door there, a glass door, and I kept knocking on the door, and there were people at the other end of the hall. They could see us. Nobody would come open the door. Finally, the mob was getting closer as they were running toward us, and I said: Look, if they get here before this door gets open, you go ahead around the corner. I am sure they will be all enthralled with beating me. I don't think they will come after you. Just get around the block. There are police at the other end of the next block. Just get there while they are after me. Don't try to stay and defend me. But out of nowhere, this guy just comes up behind me--he worked for the Willard--scanned his card, opened the door right before the crowd got there. But it is just amazing, you know, who wants to inflict violence like that, and, more particularly, who is it that is funding people to come up and create havoc like that? In an article by Katharine Gorka a couple of days ago in The Federalist, entitled, ``How the 1960s Riots Foreshadow Today's Communist Weaponization of Black Pain''--clearly, there has been pain this country. George Floyd's death was so unnecessary. It was outrageous. But who is paying? Who is stirring up all this violence to create more pain, more suffering, and more damage? It is a question worth finding an answer for. I have thought numerous times about David Horowitz. I introduced him to someone some years back and said that he used to be a Socialist; and David, now 80, said, Louie, I wasn't a Socialist, I was a Communist. I was a complete Communist, man. David has written before about his turn from being a Communist in the sixties. One of the things that he had said hit him very hard was they were preparing for protests, and someone else was trying to encourage efforts to make the police overreact so that they would hurt one of them. David didn't want anybody to get hurt or killed. He was told, We want the police to kill somebody because then we can ramp it up, and they won't be able to stop us. He never signed on to get somebody killed. But if you study the Marxist revolution going back to 1917, the October Revolution--of course, there was one earlier that year--but the Bolsheviks weren't the strongest party, the group of people at that time. There were so many things that could have gone wrong, but one thing they wanted to do--it is right out of the Marxist playbook--was to create such chaos that your little group may have a chance to weasel into power and take over. We are seeing a lot of that play out in this country. Fortunately, we have people in authority in the Federal Government--at least most places in the Federal Government in this administration, not all. We could improve some of the President's appointments who didn't turn out quite as strong as we had hoped. But we have to get to the bottom of who is paying, who is trying to get this thing all stirred up. This article from yesterday's, Washington Times, Jeff Mordock: ``Attorney General William P. Barr told federal prosecutors last week to charge violent demonstrators with a range of offenses, including sedition, a charge usually reserved for someone plotting to overthrow the government.'' But that bears looking back at the Federal sedition charge, 18 U.S. Code 2384 is seditious conspiracy. Some people I hear talk about it as this is treason. If you look at treason, both in the Constitution Article III, section 3, it is more about levying war against the United States Government. 18 U.S.C. 2381 is treason, and it is giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States. So it is a tough go. But if you look at the seditious conspiracy: ``If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.'' So that could very well come into play. Madam Speaker, I bring it up hoping that those who think it is just fun to create havoc, maybe throw Molotov cocktails or even pay for them or help supply them, help fund people who are going to come throw them or create havoc, then you are looking at 20 years just under that statute alone. I know under the doctrine of Posse Comitatus, from my days in the Army and since then, that some people are confused about the doctrine. They say that the President can never commit troops against American people. But we saw the Clinton administration utilize vehicles and equipment--it had to have people helping from Fort Bliss, as I understand it, from back in those days--that ended up leading to the death of 70 or 80 people there outside of Waco. The President can, but he has to do it himself. That was one of the confusing things back then. President Clinton, as I recall, was asked about it and he said something like, Oh, that is Reno's deal. Well, you couldn't utilize what was utilized against David Koresh with his confused personality, problematic as it was. Even that, you couldn't use military resources without the President's approval. So we never found out how in the world the orders were given, if the President himself didn't give it. That was a violation of the law. But here in 10 U.S. Code 253, it says, ``The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy . . .'' But you note the words ``domestic violence.'' It goes on. ``If it so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law . . .'' So it is wide open to being used in some of these riots where people's life, liberty, and certainly their property is not being protected, it is being overwhelmed. I think the President is right to give Governors and mayors the chance to protect their people, but at some point if it is not done, this ought to make clear to those Governors and mayors who aren't protecting their people, the President has authority to send in people to put down what appears to be sedition. This violence really is Marxist violence. It says in their title, Black Lives Matter. But if you look at what they are in favor of, it is not about Black lives mattering; it is things like destroying the family. Of course, BLM calls it the Western- style family, and that alone is just completely fiction. The families we have traditionally known in the United States since our very inception weren't Western style. These were Middle Eastern. These came from Moses and from Christians or Jews who believed what Moses said was inspired or provided by God. He said that a man shall leave his father and mother, a woman will leave her home, and the two will become one. Years later Jesus is asked about marriage and divorce. He quotes Moses verbatim and then adds the line: What God has joined together let nobody separate. So we didn't come up with that type of marriage. It is not Western style. We have to give credit where credit is due. It is Middle-Eastern style. It is from Moses. It is from Jesus. So you can't really take credit for that. But, then, again, when you are a Marxist group dedicated to the overthrow of the government and replacing it with a Socialist, Communist, Progressive, whatever you want to call it, that is the way they go. That is the direction. You destroy the history so you can't learn from prior mistakes and you can't learn from prior successes, you just rewrite the history. Orwell had a lot to say about that. There is a study--as this article from The Federalist points out by Joy Pullmann--up to 95 percent of 2020 U.S. riots are linked to Black Lives Matter. That is quite a good article and quite informative. But then this article by Edwin Mora says that a pro-Communist China group is funding a Black Lives Matter-linked organization. It points out that a pro-Communist China group, the Chinese Progressive Association in San Francisco, is actively funding a venture by Black Lives Matter cofounder and unabashedly anti-capitalist, Alicia Garza. Another article by Peter Hasson from 2 days ago points out that Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza in 2015 said that capitalism must be abolished for Black lives to matter. So, basically, they are pushing for the destruction of our Constitution-based government, and they are creating all kinds of chaos. So it shouldn't surprise anybody who saw the article yesterday by Douglas Ernst that that Jesus statue that is 90 years old was destroyed at St. Patrick's Cathedral in El Paso, the quote here is: I am in shock. But that is what Socialist, Communist, Progressives push. If you look at what Communists, Socialists have done, it is clear: you have to get rid of any belief in anything except the government. As I have mentioned before, when I was an exchange student in the Soviet Union, there were eight Americans that summer from the U.S. We went to the former city--it was the only recognized Christian seminary in the Soviet Union at the time--of Zagorsk. There was a building--as you would turn into the walled area of Zagorsk, there was a building there with a painting of Lenin's face and above it Lenin. Below it was ``Lenin s nami,'' Lenin is with us. So you may be turning in here to learn about Jesus, but just remember it is Lenin who is with us, nobody else. That is the message. It actually made me nauseous to go into an old church in Moscow that had a stained glass window with big gorgeous colors; instead of Jesus with all the children suffering to come under Him, it was Lenin sitting as Jesus is often depicted surrounded by the children. It was a bit sickening to go into the massive cathedral there in what was then St. Petersburg originally, then it became Leningrad. But that gorgeous, massive cathedral had been converted to a museum of atheism and evolution--just incredible. But that is where this all has to go if you are going to have a successful destruction of the freedoms we have and go to government control and government ownership and no private property. That is where it all ends up, if we don't get it stopped. It will mean the end of the country that afforded the greatest opportunities individually, the greatest assets individually, and the highest standard of living. It is tragic that we have poverty in the United States, tragic that we still have any homelessness at all that hasn't apparently improved a whole lot since the War on Poverty started trillions of dollars ago, but even so, we still had the highest standard of living and opportunities, I would submit, in history. It is what freedom and private property has brought--innovation, the greatest innovation in the history of the world. But that is all in jeopardy right now, and Americans better wake up. It is all at risk. These Marxist revolutionaries need to be stopped. It is sedition. It is a violation of Federal and most State law, and it is time to put it to an end. If the Governors and mayors who have been allowing this to go on--depriving Americans of their life, liberty, pursuit of happiness on their own property--then it will be time for the President to use these Federal statutes to step in and bring peace to the country once again, so we can go through our lives without worrying about being chased by a mob that is upset with you just because you went and heard a speech. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, an article from the Federalist by Joy Pullman today points out: ``Contrary to corporate media narratives, up to 95 percent of this summer's riots are linked to Black Lives Matter activism, according to data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. . . . Of the 633 coded as riots, 88 percent are recorded as involving Black Lives Matter activists.'' So all of these corporations that are donating money, it is very clear: They are helping a Marxist organization whose ultimate goal will be to relieve these corporations of all of their private property. Way to go. Early estimates from insurance agencies apparently say they have set a record in destruction for what the media--the alt-left media or mainstream, whichever you prefer--say is just mainly peaceful uprisings. It is astounding what has been occurring. This article from The Daily Signal points out, from yesterday, that if you go to the website for Black Futures Lab, a venture of Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, and click on donate, ``it will ask you to send your money to an obscure organization, the Chinese Progressive Association, explaining that `Black Futures Lab is a fiscally sponsored project of the Chinese Progressive Association.' '' So there you go. You are not only helping destroy America and eliminate private property that you own, you are also helping the Chinese Communist Party. Congratulations for all of those. You are not making Black lives matter; you are helping the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Kentucky for yielding. Madam Speaker, look, I am pleased that Democrats here are upset about what has happened to the post office. My regret is, you didn't get upset during the Obama administration when they were shutting down our post offices, not just getting rid of 12,000 mailboxes, shutting down processing centers. In my district, when they shut down the Overton processing center, it meant mail going from Tyler to Longview, or vice versa, went to Dallas then to Shreveport and back. The Deputy Attorney General came to my office--I had been demanding a meeting with the Postmaster General-- but, oh, no. No time for that. They had no decency. They tried to say 390 miles would be cheaper and quicker than going 30 miles. It is an outrage what the Obama administration did, including their Postmaster General, who was in office until June 15 of this year. Wake up. Let's complain about the post office during the Obama years.

Mr. GOHMERT

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. LaMalfa). Local Governments Need Coronavirus Relief Money

Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Banks). All Americans Should Root for COVID-19 Fight Success