Ruben Gallego

Mr. GALLEGO

Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, today I rise to speak in favor of the Global War on Terrorism War Memorial Act. This act will initiate the process for constructing a memorial to the brave men and women of the Armed Forces who have fought and, too often, died for this country in the wake of the September 11 attacks. As a veteran of the Iraq war, I am extremely proud to be on the floor today as we memorialize the bravest and best of Americans: the ones who volunteered to put themselves in harm's way and did not come back. I want to commend my fellow Marines, Mr. Moulton and Mr. Gallagher, for sponsoring this act. As you know, Mr. Speaker, it takes a lot for an enlisted marine like me to speak very highly of any officer, let alone Marine Corps officers, but there are always exceptions. Mr. Speaker, as we consider this legislation, I hope every Member of this body will take a quiet moment today to think about the courageous men and women we have lost over the past 16 years. When I cast my vote today, I know I will be thinking about my close friends, including Corporal Andre Williams and Lance Corporal Christopher Lyons, who died 12 years ago today in Cykla, Iraq. This memorial will honor thousands of our countrymen who have been killed and wounded in Iraq and around the world. It will memorialize the service of those who have survived the battle only to fall victim to the mental and emotional demons of post-traumatic stress. And it will represent a token of thanks to the family and friends who have served by supporting their loved ones in uniform. For as long as this memorial stands, it will continue the proud tradition of America honoring its sons and daughters who have given their last full measure of devotion. I look forward to commencing design and to the day when the memorial passes from an idea on a piece of paper to a landmark on the National Mall. I thank Congressman Moulton and Congressman Gallagher for their remarks. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Moulton).

Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Panetta). To show our bipartisan nature, we are going to allow somebody from the Army to speak also on this bill.

Mr. GALLEGO. That is worse.

Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Again, I thank Congressman Gallagher, Congressman Moulton, and all of the veterans who have sponsored this bill in remembrance of our brothers and sisters from the global war on terrorism. I would like to speak a couple more minutes just because I rarely have the opportunity to speak about the guys that I served with. It was a group called Lima 325 out of Ohio. It was one of the best groups of men who I probably have ever met. We were nice young men from New Mexico that were suddenly added to these country boys and city boys from Ohio and sent to the middle of nowhere, Iraq. And from there, we saw a lot of combat. We lost a lot of friends. In section 60, many of us veterans have this tradition where we go and we put our quarters on the headstones of the men we served with. And I, unfortunately, have to put down a lot of quarters. But one of the things that I will always remember is that this unit, Lima 325, really brought people from all walks of life in America. You had African Americans, you had country boys from Ohio, you had Navajo from the Navajo Nation and other parts of our Tribal Nations, you had Latinos. We even taught some of the Ohio boys how to cook since they don't really have good taste. We introduced them to the idea of green chili, which I have heard has now taken off in Oliver, Ohio. And we lived together for 7 months, going from house to house, from hole to hole. And even today, though many of us cannot see each other, we still live with each other in our spirits and in our souls. These types of memorials matter. For many of us, this generation is not the generation that served together on a base. Many of us actually served from different parts of the world. We dropped our jobs and what we were doing, our school sometimes, to join in, leave our families, leave the comfort and safety of the United States to go and defend what we believed was important to this country and to honor our commitment. Sometimes it is these types of memorials that are the only thing that actually bring us together. I recently was lucky enough to have my 10- year reunion with the guys from Lima Company, and that is the first time I had seen many men that I had lived with for so long. It was a very inspiring as well as moving, and really consoling thing for me. I believe that having a memorial of this nature would be extremely important for many men and women to be able to see, to be able to come and maybe not necessarily physically meet with their partners, with their comrades, but to at least be able to spiritually have a place to meet with their comrades, with the people that they served with in arms. Mr. Speaker, I urge everyone to vote ``yes,'' and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. GALLEGO

Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Speaker, first of all, my experience with the Affordable Care Act actually comes from the State legislature, where, in a bipartisan manner, the Republican governor joined with the minority Democrats and a handful of Republicans in the Senate State House to pass Medicaid expansion. Why did we do that? If you looked at what was happening in Arizona, it was some of the Trump areas, as I like to call them, these rural districts where the rural hospitals, which are not only the medically necessary infrastructure of the area but also the economic drivers, the only high-wage employers in the area, they were about to shut down. There was so much uncompensated cost, because people were using the emergency room as their primary care doctor, that these hospitals were starting to have to charge more and insurance companies were starting to refuse to pay more for their premiums, that they needed to respond to that. In the end, what we started hearing from these hospitals is that we are going to have to shut down the emergency room, and if you have an emergency, we are going to have to helicopter you either to Tucson or Phoenix. Now, for many of you guys who are not Southwesterners like us in the Southwest, we have a lot of territory and a lot of land. For you to just drive to Phoenix for emergency care would be pretty insane, let alone the expense of helicoptering into Phoenix was even more so than that. Because we had the goal of actually increasing and improving our healthcare outcomes, we worked again in a bipartisan manner with Governor Brewer, with Republicans and Democrats to pass one of the most comprehensive Medicaid expansion bills in the country that has actually turned around, lowered costs, created better healthcare outcomes, and has now insured more than 400,000 poor Arizonans that did not have it before, including people in the disability community, as well as children. To counteract what we saw today, if it wasn't really for the bravery of Senator Murkowski, Senator Collins, and Senator McCain, as well as all of the Senate Democrats, what we would have seen would have been a bill that would not only have just rolled back the millions of people who are now covered with health insurance, but it would also have been detrimental to the people who currently have even private health insurance. Premiums were going to go up for everybody. The estimated amount of people just on the so-called skinny bill that were going to lose health insurance would be 16 million people, and on the House bill it was going to be 23 million people, in addition to the essential gutting of Medicaid, all for giving a tax cut to the top 1 percent. Now, this is bad policy, but it is worse policy when you don't have an open process to it, when you seek it through the middle of the night, hoping that the American public is just going to accept what comes out. There is a reason why TrumpCare was polling less than Congress, and trust me, it is very difficult to poll less than Congress. At this point, it is just our families that like us.

Mr. GALLEGO. I like you, too, Ted. You are a good man. But the fact that we the American public knew so little, just knew enough, and said this bill is bad and were able to come out and put pressure on our Senators and our Members of Congress with public hearings and townhalls was key to stopping this. Lastly, before I move back to Ted, if you are so proud of this bill, if you are the Senate Republicans and you are so proud of this bill, if you are Donald Trump and you are so proud of this bill, even our House colleagues, why didn't you have consistent townhalls? Why didn't you go out there and explain to people what you were planning to do and why this is better for America? Instead, they tried to hide it. They tried to move it as fast as possible, and then tried to schedule a vote in the middle of the night. If you have to vote for something in the middle of the night, it means you are not very confident and you are not very proud of that bill. So what is the solution now? Nobody in the Democratic Caucus thinks the Affordable Care Act--or ObamaCare, as some people call it--is the be-all and end-all. We don't think it is perfect. We certainly think that there is a great bipartisan approach we can take to make it better. And what I mean by ``better'' is more coverage, lower premiums, and better healthcare outcomes. When I use those words, those were almost exactly, word for word, what Donald Trump said he wanted to see happen when he was going to replace the Affordable Care Act. But, point by point, whether it was the bill that came through the House or the bill that came through the Senate, none of those would have even fit Donald Trump's mandate. Which is why, at the end of the day, that bill was radioactive. Nobody liked it, and they had to hide it. So what we should do is follow the advice of Senator McCain in Arizona, follow the example of Senators Murkowski and Collins and all of the Senate Democrats: get back to regular order and work out an actual fix to the Affordable Care Act and get Americans more coverage, lower premiums, and better healthcare outcomes. I say that also as someone who is on an ObamaCare plan. I am not exempt from it, and neither is Mr. Lieu. We are in it just as much as everyone else is, and we want to see it fixed.

Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Speaker, if you want to hear some ideas--and I think it is important that instead of just us knocking what was introduced, we could also give some ideas--certainly, for me, and I think I am also speaking for Ted Lieu, we would prefer to have Medicare for all, so people have a stable insurance, a system that we know works, a system that actually brings down costs. But if we can't do that, there are many things we can do in the meantime. Why not drop the age of Medicare eligibility to 55? If you do that, you are going to also decrease premiums for people who are not on Medicare, people who are just buying private health insurance. You could be on Medicare at 55 and still be working. What about for those counties that don't have private insurers on the subsidized market? They should be able to buy into the Federal health insurance plans of all of the workers who live in those districts, or buy into the plans that Ted and I have. Why can't we let them do that? Why not cover every U.S. citizen up until the age of 18 under Medicaid to relieve the parents of that burden? We can also start looking at community health centers, reinforcing those to make sure that we are taking the poorest of the poor who actually cost the most when it comes to healthcare costs and, instead of forcing them into a hospital or into a primary care situation, they could get consistent care without putting a burden on the overall medical system. There are tons of ideas that we could be working on with our colleagues that will, again, fulfill President Trump's goal of lower costs, lower premiums, and better healthcare outcomes. So this doesn't have to be a static situation. This doesn't have to be an either/or. President Trump is making it sound like, because we did not pass his idea of reform, we must collapse the whole system. That is unnecessary, that is irresponsible, and that is not how adult people that legislate act. You can fix this. We can fix this so more people can have healthcare coverage, more people can have that security that they are going to always have health insurance so they can go and start a business and know they are going to have health insurance, know that they can send their kid to college and they are still going to have health insurance, know that they can retire knowing that they have been healthy the whole time and they are going to have a good, dignified retirement because we had made sure that we established a good healthcare system from the time they were born until the time they retire. This is possible. This is possible.

Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Speaker, lastly, I will close with this. If you were one of those Members of Congress, if you are a Republican Senator or a Republican Member of Congress who voted to gut the Affordable Care Act, there is time. There is a way to come back from that really bad decision. You can turn around and start working for the betterment of this country by trying to fix the Affordable Care Act. The American public will look kindly upon those legislators who are here to work in a bipartisan manner to, again, lower costs, lower premiums, and provide more coverage and better healthcare outcomes. There is time to do this. But there is not time for more opportunities to gut this, for more time to kick people off Medicaid, or for more time to create some kind of situation that is only go to raise premiums. If we allow Trump to actually, in his words, make the whole thing fail, it is not ObamaCare that fails, it is not the Affordable Care Act that fails--it is the American people that fail. He is playing a game with the lives of the American people. What he is going to do is he is going to cause millions of people to either lose their insurance because insurance companies are going to have to start shedding people, or premiums are going to end up going up because, if he creates instability in the market, these insurance companies are going to try to recoup their costs somehow, and it is going to discourage younger individuals from actually coming on and buying into the ObamaCare insurance pool, which, again, will raise premiums. This is unnecessary. Mr. Speaker, for those Members of Congress and those Senators who want to work with us, the first step is to encourage and stop the President from sabotaging the Affordable Care Act and to work diligently in a bipartisan manner to fix the Affordable Care Act and cover more people.

Mr. GALLEGO

Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Speaker, there is a really disturbing story in Politico today. Speaker Ryan was apparently afraid that he wouldn't be able to pass the defense spending bill, including $1.6 billion for Trump's dumb wall because conservatives wanted to block Medicare for transgender servicemembers, so he called the President asking for help. What did Donald Trump do to get Speaker Ryan out of this jam? Trump decided to ban brave transgender Americans from serving. That is right, Mr. Speaker, Trump is kicking transgender men and women out of our Armed Services to make sure he can get money to build his stupid, irresponsible, unnecessary wall. He is implementing one bigoted policy in order to achieve another one. This is hatred in the service of injustice. This is transphobia in the service of racism. This is stupidity in the service of foolishness. Mr. Speaker, we need to stop doing Trump's dirty work. Not only is President Trump's border wall expensive and unnecessary, Members of this body who care deeply about our national defense shouldn't be forced to decide between voting for this ridiculous proposal and voting to fund our military. More importantly, on such a momentous issue, the American people deserve to know where their elected representatives stand. Mr. Speaker, let us defeat this rule. Let us stop this wall. Let us enable every American patriot, regardless of their gender identity, to do what I did: to fight for this country with pride, courage, and selflessness.

Mr. GALLEGO

Mr. GALLEGO. On June 7, 2016, at 6:14 p.m., Donald Trump, Jr., writes: ``Great. It will likely be Paul Manafort, campaign boss, my brother- in-law''--Jared Kushner--``and me, 725 Fifth Avenue, 25th floor'' which is Trump Tower?

Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Speaker, on July 11, Donald Trump, Jr., released a series of emails regarding his meeting with a Russian Government lawyer and an individual associated with Russian intelligence. Don Trump, Jr.'s, emails are a smoking gun. They prove that the Trump campaign was not only aware of the Russian Government's efforts to meddle in our elections, they were enthusiastic about accepting Russia's support. What follows are the contents of those emails. They painted a disturbing picture of a campaign, and now an administration willing to break the law and sell out to an adversary of the United States in order to advance their own petty interests. Our hope is that the American people will carefully consider the content of these messages and what they say about the fitness of Donald Trump and his senior advisers to hold high office. We will begin. There was a comment posted by Donald Trump, Jr., on Twitter on July 11, 2017. ``To everyone, in order to be totally transparent''--which we now know he wasn't even in this email--``I am releasing the entire email chain of my emails with Rob Goldstone about the meeting on June 9, 2016. The first email on June 3, 2016 was from Rob, who was relating a request from Emin, a person I knew from the 2013 Ms. Universe Pageant near Moscow. Emin and his father have a very highly respected company in Moscow. The information they suggested they had about Hillary Clinton I thought was Political Opposition Research. I first wanted to just have a phone call but when that didn't work out, they said the woman would be in New York and asked if I would meet. I decided to take the meeting. The woman, as she has said publicly, was not a government official. And, as we have said, she had no information to provide and wanted to talk about adoption policy and the Magnitsky Act. To put this in context, this occurred before the current Russian fever was in vogue. As Rob Goldstone said just today in the press, the entire meeting was `the most inane nonsense I ever heard. And I was actually agitated by it.' '' End of email.

Mr. GALLEGO. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. GALLEGO. On June 3, 2016, at 10:53 a.m., less than 20 minutes after that email, Donald Trump, Jr., wrote back: ``Thanks, Rob, I appreciate that. I am on the road at the moment but perhaps I just speak to Emin first. Seems we have some time, and if it's what you say, I love it especially later in the summer. Could we do a call first thing next week when I am back? ``Best, Don.'' Mr. Speaker, ``I love it.'' His response was: ``I love it.'' I worked in politics for a long time. I have never been approached with information from a foreign government. But if I were, my response would not be: ``I love it.'' My response would be: ``This is completely inappropriate.'' My response would be: ``Don't ever contact me again.'' My response would be: ``I am calling the FBI.'' In this email, Donald Trump, Jr., showed his true colors. This email proves that he lacks basic integrity. The willingness of Jared Kushner to attend that meeting proves that he, too, is no patriot.

Mr. GALLEGO. On June 6, 2016, at 3:38 p.m., Donald Trump, Jr., wrote back: ``My cell''--we have omitted that cell number. Unlike Donald Trump, we do not give out individual cell numbers. ``Thanks. ``D.''

Mr. GALLEGO. On June 6, 2016, just a few minutes after receiving this email, Donald Trump, Jr., wrote back: ``Rob, thanks for the help.'' From Moscow thanks for the help, he should have said.

Mr. GALLEGO. On June 7, 2016, at 5:16 p.m., Donald Trump, Jr., writes: ``How about 3 at our offices? Thanks, Rob, appreciate you helping set it up?''

Mr. GALLEGO. On June 8, 2016, at 11:15, Donald Trump, Jr., writes: ``Yes, Rob, I could do that unless they wanted to do 3 today instead. Just let me know and I will lock it in either way.'' That is some eagerness that this man has for this information.

Mr. GALLEGO. This email is from Donald Trump, Jr., sent Wednesday, June 8, 2016, at 12:03 p.m., to Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort. Subject, forward, Russia--Clinton--private and confidential. ``Meeting got moved to 4 tomorrow at my offices. ``Best. ``Don.''

Mr. GALLEGO. The other thing that we have to consider is this: right now, there is a person who is in the White House who has lied on their security clearance--a security clearance that we use to determine whether we shall trust somebody with this top secret information for this country. Jared Kushner was in a meeting with a foreign agent. Now we know that he was in a meeting not just with a foreign agent but a former-- ``former'' Soviet counterintelligence officer. Let me tell you something. There is no such thing as former counterintelligence officers if you ever work with the Soviets. Once you are in the KGB, you are always in the KGB. Why was that person in that room? It was not to talk about adoption. He certainly wasn't there to talk about anything else. But, if anything, he was there to pass information. The fact that Jared Kushner lied in his clearance, lied and omitted it until finally revealed today, really calls into question whether that man should be in the White House right now and trusted with this type of sensitive information. Ted, you and I were in the military. We both had security clearances. If we had this type of omission in our security clearance, what would have been our punishments?

Mr. GALLEGO. What is the motivation for omitting this meeting? There are clearly emails, there are clearly pointed emails, saying: Why are you going to be attending this meeting? There is a subject line that says, Clinton emails. There is a subject line that has to do with a Russian agent, a crown prosecutor. Now we know there is a former Soviet counterintelligence agent who just happens to be there, and Jared Kushner omits it from his security clearance. That is not an accident. That is a criminal act, a criminal act that any other citizen in this country, any other soldier, sailor, marine, airman, if we ever did that, we would be quickly prosecuted under the UCMJ.

Mr. GALLEGO. No.

Mr. GALLEGO. I am controlling time.

Mr. GALLEGO. If you start seeing and putting it all together, we now know that there is a clear narrative of Jared Kushner's involvements with the Russians. First, he tries to set up a back channel. Then he omits his conversations and meetings in a security clearance. He continues to lie even though he is continuously brought forth as being untruthful. Now we find ourselves in the situation where there is basically zero trust that this man in the White House with top secret clearance is not compromised. In conclusion, let me close with this. You just heard emails after emails. Imagine this conversation happening the opposite way. Imagine a conversation happening with a Democrat or the Clintons saying, I have information, and the word Moscow is said probably four or five times altogether. Imagine the idea that you are meeting in private, and then imagine all the follow-up lies that happened. What would be occurring right now? What would be occurring is what we saw last year: consistent oversight. But there is none. There is no oversight right now. Paul Ryan has not taken the helm and has not done any type of oversight. The House Republicans have abdicated their responsibility and have allowed Donald Trump and all those other members of his family and the administration who have been compromised to continue being a threat to our national security in the White House. This should not be the way. Partisanship should never be above patriotism. But what we are seeing right now is naked partisanship being exposed and pushed as far as possible in the hopes of protecting a faulty President, his administration, and his family. That is not American. That is not what any of us ever signed up for. We swore--whether it was in the Armed Services Committee, whether it was when we were in the armed services, or whether it is when we came here to Congress--to uphold the Constitution of the United States and protect it. Right now we can honestly say that that is not occurring. There is an absolute abdication happening right now of leadership from House Republicans. Ted, please close.

Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.