Glenn Ivey

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank the chair, the ranking member, and all of my colleagues, as well, for the hard work and nonpartisan work, I must say, as well, that we put in, but especially the staff, who I thought did an outstanding job, yet again, in this investigation and in the report that they wrote. I will speak to two different groups of people today. The first is my colleagues. The second is the young women--and I will come back to this in a minute--who I had a chance to speak to a few weeks ago, in the same week that Mr. Swalwell and Mr. Gonzales had resigned from the House. I will come back to that in a moment. My colleagues, after they found out I was on the Ethics Committee, would frequently come up and ask me on different topics: What is over the line? What can I do to not get in trouble? How do I stay out of trouble, that sort of thing. On these issues, this is a particular set that we have talked about on a couple of occasions, so I wanted to point out a couple of things here. I commend Mr. Edwards for the comments that he made and the legal document that he filed, but one of the things it really failed to do was address the specific allegations about the gifts and how inappropriate, frankly, they obviously were on their face. As the report details on page 4 of the report: ``Both women received numerous gifts from Representative Edwards, including jewelry totaling over $1,000, designer purses, guns, shoes, flowers, a laptop and cell phone, KitchenAid mixer, robotic vacuum, vacations, tickets to performances, and one-on-one dinners.'' The tickets to performances, that wasn't just any performance. That was ``Hamilton'' on Broadway. Mr. Speaker, my anniversary is coming up. I have been married 38 years as of Thursday, and my wife really wanted to go to see ``Hamilton.'' When I took a look at what those prices were, I said: Babe, we are going to have to wait until it comes on the off-Broadway tour. He put up the money to send them there anyway, and those are the types of things, those are the types of gifts, that kind of jump out at you. This isn't like a birthday card. This isn't congratulations on your wedding or that new baby that was born. These are gifts that people, Members, should not be giving to staffers. I worked for a Congressman and three Senators as a staffer beginning back in 1987. We didn't pass around gifts like this. We just didn't. Mr. Speaker, I think it is important for us to make sure we understand that, as Members, we want to mentor and help our young people move on and move up. I have to say that in that 40 years, I have seen people who fell into this situation, frequently women, where there were accusations or sexual harassment taking place or sexual relationships taking place. Some of my personal friends were forced out of their jobs in 1987 and 1988. We didn't have the types of protections then that we do now. In fact, Congress explicitly exempted itself from these sorts of restrictions. We have to make sure that now that they are in place, we use them to the fullest extent because those people, primarily women, it was damaging to their careers, and it stays with them. That was before the internet age. These women today, in this instance, that is not good mentoring. This is something that could follow them for the rest of their careers, and it won't be beneficial to them. Let's make sure, as we work through this with our staff, that we don't do things that actually injure our staffers who are doing good work for us and trying to make a difference. One other point I want to make, and this is directly to the staffers. I had a chance to speak to a group, just coincidentally, during that week of the Gonzales and Swalwell resignations. It was a group of young people, mainly interns but not solely. Some of them were young people here on the Hill in their late teens and early twenties. I asked them: How many of you heard about the resignations of Mr. Swalwell and Mr. Gonzales? There were about 40 of them in the room. Every hand went up. I asked them then: How many of you know that we have an entity here, the Office of Employee Advocacy, that you can turn to and get assistance if you find yourself in that situation? Only two hands went up. I talked to them and encouraged them about reaching out to this sort of professional assistance. It is a confidential attorney-client relationship. It makes a difference. Instead of them trying to parse out at age 19 or 20 or 22 or 25 the best way to proceed, get the sort of legal guidance to help you make it through there. We have to do a better job of making sure that when that question is posed, not just 2 hands go up, but all 40 hands go up, so that when young men and women, especially women, find themselves in these kinds of situations, they don't have to try and figure out how to go forward. They don't have to go to the staff director, as what happened here, and get whatever guidance they might get, recognizing that the staff directors were in a precarious situation, too, when you have a Member committing this kind of misconduct. Let's make sure that they have that type of assistance. Mr. Speaker, the last point I will make on this, and this is in the wake of some of the other--not investigations before the committee right now, but some of the other things we have heard. There are going to come times when we need to go outside of the House of Representatives and refer these cases to law enforcement because some of the sexual misconduct isn't just sexual harassment. It is sexual assault. To the colleagues listening out there right now, don't do anything to approach these lines. They know that this is over the line. He knows this was over the line, and he knew it when he was doing it. Let's make sure that we stop it in its tracks and give these young people, young women in particular, the type of assistance that they need.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for yielding and giving me an opportunity to speak today in this august Chamber. I also thank the Congressional Black Caucus for the outstanding leadership that is shown on these issues, such as the March on Washington last Friday, and continues to do so as we move toward the elections in November. I rise today because over the past month, really over the past 18 months, but in particular the last month, I have heard so much from my constituents about their struggles to keep their heads above water and the struggles with affordability across the board. We have heard a lot about that today. I have to mention some, but I will go back to some other topics, other aspects of that, as well. The gas prices are hitting everybody. There is no question about it. In my district here in Maryland, gas is $1 a gallon higher than it was just 8 months ago. That has meaning for people who drive for a living. I ran into a guy who is an Uber driver. In fact, he was driving me somewhere. I asked him about this, and he said: It is killing me, and it makes it almost so that it is not even worth doing this. That is because he spends so much of what he makes putting gas in the car. I can sympathize with that. At the gas station just a few days ago, it almost cost $80 to fill up my car, and I don't drive a really big SUV, but it still costs that much. Other people who have to drive for a living, people who drive trucks, the cost of diesel, for example--I don't have many farmers in my district, but for them, diesel is up $2 a gallon. You know that is hurting them, Mr. Speaker. That is passed on and leads to higher grocery prices that my constituents are seeing in the grocery store, too. Schoolbuses are back for schools in most places across the country, and most of those run on diesel fuel. Guess who is going to end up paying for that, Mr. Speaker. It is the taxpayers. Their bills are going to go up. We have hundreds of schoolbuses in my district. We have 136,000 kids who go to public school in Prince George's County. Many of them need the schoolbus to get there. That is true for the other counties surrounding the D.C. area and across the country. It is going to lead to millions of dollars in cost increases, which were not expected when they set their budgets last year in paying for these schoolbus costs that have gone up. I also had a real tough stretch with government employees in my district. We know that. The Trump administration attacked the government employees from the beginning, forcing them out. I have many people in my district who answered the call to service and focused their careers on serving in the government, just like many of my colleagues here and just like the staff that does such outstanding work here in the House of Representatives, in the Capitol, and in the Federal Government across the board. Most of them aren't doing this because it is paying the big dollars because it doesn't. Most of them are doing it because they really enjoy serving the country. Most of them were doing it because they knew it was important and needed. I had a couple of constituents--this happened a little while ago--and one of them worked at NIH doing clinical trials for Alzheimer's. She had a Ph.D. and a specialty degree, and she had been working on this for years. They forced her out and shut down the clinical trial. Now, clinical trials are not light switches. You can't bring somebody back in a little bit later and just start from where you left off. You have to start from scratch. We heard last week about the amazing discovery with respect to pancreatic cancer and how there is a new drug that might really lead to cures for pancreatic cancer, one of the most deadly cancers out there. I am a cancer survivor, so I pay very close attention to these kinds of things. That would have been derailed if that clinical trial had been shut down like this one had been. Fortunately, that was a private sector clinical trial that was being run there. Anything on the public sector side was in trouble. I ran into another individual, a mechanical engineer, and he worked for the Federal Government. His job was to make sure that pacemakers and other medical devices were working before they were given to patients in surgery, to help keep them alive. Wouldn't it be nice to be sure that we had people there making sure that these products actually work the way that they were supposed to? He got fired. He got pushed out of the government. We have grocery costs. I mentioned that a minute ago, but I want to come back to that because the tariffs have been awful in the impact that they have had on grocery prices. In my area, hamburger--I am not talking T-bone steak; I am talking hamburger--$7 a pound and up? That is where it is. We have other costs going up, too. Milk is about $4.30 a gallon on average across the country. I am old enough to recall when they cost just a fraction of that. We used to get hamburger because it was cheap. When I was back in school, you could afford to get it. It is $7 a pound now. That is because the tariffs have caused grocery prices and other prices across the board to go up for no reason. One of my colleagues mentioned earlier that the Trump administration and many of my Republican colleagues are telling you it is not the consumers that are paying these tariffs; it is the foreign countries that the goods come from. Here is how you know that is not true. Remember a couple of months ago when the Supreme Court said that the Trump tariffs were illegal and had to be refunded? The Trump administration set up a program to refund the money. Guess who is getting the money? Not China, not Russia, but major corporations across the country. The Walmarts, the Targets, and those kind of folks are getting the money. Small businesses, like the one in my district that sells its product internationally and buys products internationally to make their product, can't get a refund. They are not eligible. Under the program that the Trump administration set up, small businesses are not eligible to get refunds. For consumers, who also paid these tariffs, taxes, and higher prices, there is nothing out there for them to get the money back that they paid that the Supreme Court said was illegal. I want to move on real quick and touch on a topic we haven't said much about, and that is the impact on small businesses that the Trump administration has had. We had a hearing a few months ago, and the SBA Administrator came in. She is the head of the SBA. I asked her a couple of questions. One of the things we have seen in the first year and a half is that more than 60 percent of Federal Government contracts for small businesses have been terminated across the country. Small business is supposed to be the engine that drives the economy. Small businesses are where we get the new jobs that people need in their communities. Small businesses are the places that train young folks to help them become productive, economic citizens. They are wiping those jobs out. They call it termination for convenience. What that means is they don't terminate it for cause. They don't terminate it because you did something wrong. They terminate it because they want to, and they can't give a good reason to explain it. Now, the impact on, for example, disabled veteran-owned small businesses, 6,435 of their contracts were terminated for convenience. That is 41 percent. Black-owned businesses, 3,208 contracts were terminated for convenience. That is 107 percent more than were terminated under the Biden administration. The same kind of thing has happened for other types of small businesses. I asked the small business administrator: What is going on with this? She said, well, we terminate some of these for fraud. Well, as I mentioned a minute ago, if it had been fraud, they would have terminated it for cause because you are breaking the law, and they would have referred it to the Department of Justice for prosecution. I asked her how many of these she sent to the Department of Justice for prosecution, and how many of those have led to indictments. She didn't have an answer for that. Guess what. I think the answer is zero. We know for sure that it is not about that. It is just about helping the bigger businesses, the ones that are already the billionaires, the ones that are already making lots of money, the ones that make huge contributions to the Trump administration and the families--huge contributions, I mean billions of dollars in cryptocurrency and the like. That is where it is going. I won't get into the accountability piece. We will have to save that for another day because the selling of pardons is something like what would have made Richard Nixon pale. Real quick, let me end up with this: The cost to people in my district, just like people across the country, people who are struggling, people who have done the right things, people who have worked every day of their lives, it is killing them. It really is. They are having to choose--winter is coming. Many of them are going to have to choose between heating and eating because these electric bills are going through the roof. Many of them are going to have trouble paying the rent. Many of them, if they have kids like me, are having trouble finding the money they can pull together to pay these skyrocketing mortgage interest rates as they continue to climb. Inflation is going up. Interest rates are going up. Everything is going up, and this administration is not helping to bring it down. In fact, this administration, the Trump administration, and my Republican colleagues, unfortunately, are one of the key reasons all of it is going up, and they won't do anything to help you all. You American folks out there who sent us here to help you, they are pushing your heads under water. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for putting this together. I also want to say this: The reckoning can come in November. When you look at those prices, remember to vote. When you look at that gas pump and what it costs, remember to vote. When you pay that rent, when you can't afford your healthcare, remember to vote in November.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for her powerful words and for hosting this Special Order, and I thank the Congressional Black Caucus. I certainly want to thank my colleague from Georgia (Mrs. McBath). I had the chance to serve with her on the Judiciary Committee, and I know she feels this very deeply and very passionately and rightly so. I think it is important for all of us to try to make sure that even if we haven't suffered a great loss like that, that we try to understand and remember the importance of the impact of what that kind of an event can do to a family, to a community, and what it has done to the country. I am blessed with six kids, and they all live in the D.C. area. We meet together frequently on weekends. I am a grandfather, too. A few months back, my granddaughter was in a heated argument with her cousin. They are not the arguing type, so I kind of paused and started listening. I was trying to figure out: What are you all arguing about? She looked at me and said: Well, we are trying to figure out the best way you should respond when an active shooter comes into your school. She had her version of it, and he had his version. I just remember being sort of stunned by the whole thing because I am 65. I grew up in a different era, obviously. I am originally from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and Dale City, Virginia. They are two quiet towns, especially back in the sixties and seventies, at least on this kind of front. I went to schools where we had fire drills, but we didn't have active shooter drills. We are now at the point where schools are being approached and they are selling bulletproof blackboards, and they are selling bulletproof backpacks and the like. That is where our schools have come. There have been debates about whether teachers should be armed or not. Although we have seen that having armed personnel at a school during an active shooter drill doesn't necessarily fix that problem, but that is kind of where we went with that. I came up and didn't really know much about gun violence until I became a prosecutor, first here in Washington, D.C., at the U.S. Attorney's Office. It just happened that I started that job in 1990, which was in the middle of the crack wars. D.C. was averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 to 500 homicides per year. The numbers have jumped from when I was a kid. Murder was a front-page story, but it got so prevalent during that timeframe that sometimes they didn't report on a homicide. They didn't even make the paper. There were just so many coming in day after day after day after day. It was young people killing young people, young males in particular, usually over drug disputes, but sometimes not even that. When I later became elected prosecutor in Prince George's County, I had cases that were kind of the same ilk. A guy cut in front of another guy in line. He was looking at my girl. He disrespected me. All of that was sufficient to kill somebody on the spot. Those were young boys. Well, young men in some instances, late teens, early twenties. That is where we were as a country. That is where we, in some ways, remain as a country. Just before I was elected State's attorney and was sworn into office, we had a double murder that took place in our community. What was special about this one was that these were two deputy sheriffs who had been killed, gunned down. They had been called to a family's house. A mother and a father were having trouble with their son, and they called because it was a mental health call. The two officers, Arnaud and Magruder, came into the house, and they said: Well, he is down the hallway. So they walked down the hallway towards the bedroom not knowing that he had hidden the gun in his bedroom inside the speaker of the stereo system. As they came down the hall, he grabbed the gun, confronted them and shot both of them to death. Then he ran out of the house. I had not even become State's attorney yet. I hadn't been sworn in yet, but going to that funeral was my first official act as State's attorney. Sadly, there were hundreds of more murders to come. We still have them. Crimes are coming down in Prince George's County, and crimes are coming down in Washington, D.C. Crimes are coming down across the country, but any murder is too many. As we just heard from our colleague from Georgia, that mother and that father never stopped grieving over the loss of that child, and rightly so. When I got to Congress 3 years ago, one of the things I started trying to figure out was: What are the things that we can do to try and address this problem? I recognize that Democrats and Republicans are in different places. We had an assault weapons ban in the United States in the nineties. It expired. Evidence seemed to show that there was some success from that, but our Republican colleagues then and Republicans across the country opposed it. It has never been re-enacted. Are there common ground approaches to try and address this problem? Are there ways in which we can find a common ground approach to deal with some of these issues? I looked around and thought if we can't do assault weapon bans, what about ghost guns? Ghost guns came out maybe not even 10 years ago. For those of you that don't know, ghost guns are guns that do not have serial numbers on them. They can't be identified. The reason they are popular, especially among criminals, is because you can use the gun and drop it. If you don't leave any fingerprint or DNA on it, they sure can't trace back through the gun to figure out who had it and who committed the murder. Guess what happened. The use of ghost guns surged. Between 2017 and 2023, there was a 1,600 percent jump in the use of ghost guns at crime scenes. It went from 1,629 to 27,490 in a 6-year period. What can we try and do about that? We can try to do legislation. We do legislation here in Congress, right? Let's try and do the legislation piece. Democrats offered two bills to ban ghost guns and do it in different ways. Hundreds of Democrats signed on, not one Republican signed on to either bill, either piece of legislation to ban ghost guns. That didn't work, but the crime, as you heard, continued to go up. The use of ghost guns in crimes continued to go up. It skyrocketed, really. The Biden administration said to the ATF, issue a regulation, base it on the Gun Control Act, which is the longstanding law that covers gun usage and the regulation of guns in the United States, and maybe that will help. They issued the regulation about 2, 3 years ago at this point. My Republican colleagues--I was on the Judiciary Committee at the time--railed against it. It is a horrible overreach, they said, by the Biden administration. It is an infringement on our constitutional rights, our Second Amendment rights. Of course, there were challenges. It was taken to court and worked its way up to the Supreme Court. Guess what happened at the Supreme Court: 7-2 margin in Bondi v. Vanderstok. The Supreme Court said: We are going to uphold this regulation. We don't think it violates the Constitution. We are going to let it stand. That opinion was written by Justice Gorsuch. In fact, all three Trump Supreme Court appointees joined in the majority of that opinion. I thought, well, maybe that is a big step in the right direction. Now I am on the Appropriations Committee, and guess what. Just a few weeks ago, the Republicans put out a bill and the bill contains language to undercut the enforcement of that regulation. Now, why would they do that? We know that only criminals want to use ghost guns. There is no other purpose. If you are a law-abiding citizen, it doesn't matter if you have an identification number on it. It is just like a car. Cars have VIN numbers. Why can't guns have identification numbers? It is certainly useful for law enforcement. It can't be on those grounds, and it can't be constitutional grounds because the Trump Supreme Court by 7-2 vote just told them this does not violate the Second Amendment. They put out this reg, quietly. I hope it doesn't pass in the Senate, but that is where it is now. They are trying to undercut it, even though it is constitutional. It is not just the ghost guns piece. It is other issues, too. One that I thought we would be able to find common ground on was suicide. In 2026, we have 27,600 suicides by gun, 4,600 were veterans. Whether Democrats or Republicans, we all love veterans, right? Why wouldn't we want to support efforts to try and bring down suicides among veterans? As you just heard a few minutes ago, many of the programs that are aimed at reducing gun violence, including for suicides, have been cut by the Trump administration. Matter fact, one of the first things the Trump administration did when they came into office was to eliminate grants that helped reduce gun violence across the country that had been proven to work over the past few years. Not only that, the President issued an executive order that removed the Surgeon General's advisory report on firearm violence because it used the term ``public health crisis in America,'' I guess, which could it be any more obvious that this is a public health crisis. It is the number one cause of death in young people. I remember having a debate with my Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee one time about whether it was number one or number two, and I paused and said: Does it really matter? Is it okay if it is only the number two cause of death in the United States for our children? Isn't that sufficient for us to want to try and do something on this front? The Trump administration also cut funding to address gun violence prevention, $66 million for assistance for gun violence victims, $82 million for law enforcement support and training and safety. Why would we cut those? The training piece, if you didn't know how important it was, you should really know after watching ICE in action in Minneapolis. The killings of Good and Pretti, among other acts of violence that took place at the hands of ICE agents in Minnesota and across the country, I think clearly demonstrate that those agents were not prepared for the type of policing that they were put out there to do, not at all. They certainly weren't trained in things like the force continuum. In fact, many of them didn't even have the tools that you would use other than guns along the force continuum, no tasers and the like. It is the same thing when they put the National Guard on the street. President Trump put them out in D.C., and I remember being out at dinner with my wife one day when they first came out. They were walking around in groups of four and five with M4s. We were eating outdoors at a restaurant, so there were crowds of people all along the walkways. I thought about it and I said: M4s are so powerful that even if they shot the right guy and hit him, the bullet would keep going. Now, when you are in warfare and you guys are facing each other, the soldiers are facing each other, that is one thing because if it goes through that guy, it is going to hit another bad guy behind them. But when you are in a crowded street like I was on the waterfront here in Washington, D.C., the last thing you want to have to use is an M4 because the collateral damage is not just collateral damage. It is human beings whose lives could be taken, even though they weren't doing anything but just walking along the waterfront enjoying the evening. Let me say this, as well. I think that the goal, at least that I came here with, was to try and find ways to address gun violence. I thought ghost gun restrictions would be one way to go. Clearly, that was wrong. Let me try another angle on this. We put out a bill called Raise the Age, and the thinking on that was, if we raise the age from 18 to 21 for people purchasing assault weapons, they will be okay with that because it moved from 18 to 21 when Reagan was President. He supported it for handguns. If we are going to have 21 for handguns, shouldn't we also have it for assault weapons? Why allow them to buy an AR-15, but they can't buy a 9 millimeter? I got zero cosponsors from the Republican side on that bill, this Congress and last Congress. I can't get any of them to support it. Mr. Speaker, I get it. I know there is a lot of political challenges here and, frankly, we will keep working at it, but I knew when Republican colleagues were shot and Democratic colleagues have been shot, when we have been victimized by gun violence and we still can't move on legislation to address gun violence, then I don't know that there is enough to make it happen. When it is people outside of this Chamber, other than us getting shot, is enough. I just don't know if that is ever going to be the case. I think we have to continue to keep fighting and keep working to address this problem because the homicides keep happening, the bodies keep falling, the chalk lines around them keep being drawn, and the pools of blood oozing out of their bodies until the police get there to try to fix the problem that, in many instances, these guns are too powerful to allow them to be fixed. Let's try to find a way to address this. Let's try to find a way to work together. Mr. Speaker, I know you are not going to agree to all the legislation that I would propose. I certainly don't agree with a lot that has been done by my Republican colleagues--surely, in the cuts and especially to the ghost gun regulation. I can't figure it out. I can't figure out why we would want to restrict information from being gathered so that researchers and scientists can try to figure out other approaches to reduce gun violence, other than just enforcement. We have seen intervention and prevention programs work. Why shouldn't we study them to see if we can expand them to see if we can find ways to combine enforcement with intervention and prevention efforts and reverse gun violence even more? Why can't we do that? We will see how it goes. I can't say I am super-hopeful right now, but I truly believe that we can find a way to protect people's Second Amendment rights and also protect second graders. We have to find a way to make sure that they can be safe in school, on the streets, and in their homes. We have to find a way to bring down the suicides for veterans who serve this country and, in many instances, were broken because of their service to this country, because of what we had them do. We also have to find ways to protect law enforcement officers, who put their lives on the line out there on the street and are particularly at risk from gun violence, as well. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Virginia for putting this together. I thank my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus. I hope we can find a way to work together across the aisle, this Chamber and the other Chamber on the other side of the building, and even with the Trump administration, to get something done on this front. I know the routine mantra that we just have to lock them up. We need more penalties, more enforcement, no bail, and all of that. The problem is that all of these first-time shooters, many of them mass shooters, we didn't have a chance to keep them in jail because they never went. We didn't have a chance to withhold bail because they didn't have to pay bail to be out on the street. Let's not wait. Let's address this problem. Let's work together. Let's save lives here in the United States.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for hosting this Congressional Black Caucus special hour. I also thank my colleague from Georgia, who just finished speaking. I appreciated the powerful statement that she made and the insightful comments that she shared with us tonight. Juneteenth is just around the corner. Juneteenth was a special day for me. It is one that we celebrated my mother's birthday on frequently, and certainly, as a child of North Carolina and Virginia, had special meaning, as well. I have had a chance to enjoy those days, but the meaning of them has evolved over time for me. I was a child in North Carolina, Rocky Mount, North Carolina in the late 1960s. It was still segregated. Across the street was Booker T. Washington High School, and I lived on the side of the tracks that the African-American community lived in back then. The schools were segregated. Stores, many of them, you couldn't try on clothes if you wanted to go get fit. There were a lot of restaurants you couldn't go into and if you did want to go in, they tried to make you go in through the backdoor. That is where we stood as a nation when I was a child. Then, as you heard from my colleague from Virginia, the movement that came along that grew into the civil rights movement changed all of that for the United States of America. We had gone from a real dark time after the North withdrew from the South, the return of Jim Crow, the growth of the Ku Klux Klan, the return of almost a version of enslavement return to the South in the late 1870s and it got worse over the next decades. We had lynchings. It was a regular tool of terrorism in the South during those days. It was used to keep people in line if they did something radical or dramatic, like trying to vote or even register to vote. That is what we were in. That is what my grandfather was born into in North Carolina in 1895. Things changed over time, thank God. We grew as a community, the African-American community. We started schools, historically Black colleges like Howard University and others that gave us a chance to gain an education, even in a segregated environment. We started groups, fraternities, sororities, especially for kids going to college. The Divine Nine we call them now. I belonged to Kappa Alpha Psi. It was one of those sources of strength for our community. We had to develop our own newspapers since White newspapers wouldn't cover what was going on in the Black community. We developed alternative structures that allowed us to train people to become doctors and the like. The NAACP grew and became a force for change, fighting against segregation in America and especially against lynching. All of that grew over the years. We didn't have a lot to work with. Segregation was hard, and the further South you went, the harder it was. But ultimately in the late 1950s in Montgomery, Alabama, there was something called the Montgomery bus boycott that took off. The Montgomery bus boycott was led by the faith community there, the African-American faith community, because the buses in Montgomery if you were African American, you were supposed to sit in the back. If the front of it filled up and new White people got on to the bus, if you were African American, you were expected to get up and give your seat. That was the nature of the way things were in those days. A woman named Rosa Parks decided she had had enough and she refused to get up and give her seat up. Now, actually, that wasn't just a coincidence. This is something that people had been preparing for for years. The churches, the NAACP, and the like, and something called the SCLC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, all were working together to try and figure out how can we push back and fight back against this. How can we try and change this? The boycott began and just coincidentally, a young pastor almost fresh out of divinity school came down from Boston. His father had been a pastor in Atlanta and he wanted to become a pastor like his father, but he didn't want to try and start in Atlanta, so they sent him to Montgomery. And just at the time that this young man got there, this man named Martin Luther King, Jr., they were looking for new leadership to lead the bus boycott and lead the faith community forward. This is a man who was still writing his Ph.D. dissertation while he was leading the bus boycott. He was married and beginning a family while he was leading the bus boycott. If that wasn't enough, the hate, the anger, the opposition rolled up against him and his house, for example, was bombed while he was at church one day preparing for the Sunday service. The house was blown up. He knew that his wife and his child were there and he didn't know if they were dead or not until he was able to run back home and see for himself. When he got there, he saw a group of people who were angry and they wanted revenge. They wanted to go strike back and retaliate against the people who had bombed his house. Dr. King said that is not how we do things. That is not the Christian way. That is not the way we are going to lead this movement. We are going to fight hate with love. We are going to fight violence with nonviolence, and we are going to win the hearts of these people and change the course of this Nation. Now, it took a long time to get there. The bus boycott took a year. People were walking to work day in and day out in the snow and the rain and the cold, but they kept walking. They tried to create ways to ferry each other to and from where they had to go. Many of them were working as domestics, for example. They had tried giving each other rides and they put this whole structure in place to permit that. The bus boycott was successful. The bus company thought they could hold out, that they could outlast them, but as it turned out, they were wrong. One woman said, ``My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.'' They came together and won that bus boycott, and it was the first giant step with respect to the civil rights movement. There were other forces that had gathered prior to that, there was the desegregation of the Army. My father-in-law fought in World War II. There were colored units back then, and he rose up to the level of captain. He left the service, re-enlisted for ground combat during the Korean war and went to fight again. There were many others like him who put their lives on the line. Many of them gave their lives in the fight to protect our country. One of the things my father-in-law told me was that when they had come back from Europe, he was stationed in Italy--they put a lot of what they called Negro troops then in Italy to fight there--and when they were bringing them back, many of the German soldiers had turned themselves into them because they didn't want to have to turn themselves into the Russians. One of the ironies was that when they got back to the United States, the Black troops who had fought to protect and defend the United States of America, had saved Europe from totalitarianism and in many instances had given their lives and lost their friends and colleagues in this fight still had to ride in the back of the train behind these German soldiers. That is where America was. Mr. Speaker, when the civil rights movement moved forward and gained momentum and culminated, as you heard from my colleague from Virginia, in the crown jewel of the civil rights movement was the Voting Rights Act. Other pieces came along. The Civil Rights Act was there, too. The Fair Housing Act, all those things came together. But the Voting Rights Act was the key tool to the transformation of the South in this country. John Lewis was one of the key players in that movement. I saw a play about him. It is called ``Young John Lewis.'' They ran it here in D.C. a couple weeks ago, and I went to see it. The culmination of the ``Young John Lewis'' play is the passage of the Voting Rights Act. It was supposed to be a cause for celebration. It is supposed to be the climax, the high-water moment of this play, but a strange thing had happened just a few days before. The United States Supreme Court, the Trump majority in the United States Supreme Court, had essentially eviscerated the Voting Rights Act that they were supposed to be celebrating. Instead of there being a big cheer in the audience, there was this sad kind of pall that came over the crowd, including me. The voting rights piece, that first Supreme Court opinion that I mentioned just a few days ago, Callais, Justice Alito said he is not totally gutting it. He is just changing the standard of review, the legal ways to analyze those cases. So we thought, let's hope and see how it plays out. It just turns out that there was another case in Alabama 3 years before where the Supreme Court had basically supported the Voting Rights Act and affirmed it. A three-judge panel had been appointed, because there were more challenges coming from the State. That three-judge panel consisted of one Clinton appointee, but two Trump appointees. That three-judge panel had said, after weeks of hearings--I think it was like 80 witnesses, 800 exhibits, extensive, detailed, thorough hearings--and that three- judge panel, which including two Trump appointees, concluded that the lines that had been drawn by the Republicans in Alabama constituted intentional racial discrimination. There was an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians' voting strength. They said that the map that the Republicans were trying to put in place--and, remember, this was triggered by President Trump's call to Texas a few months earlier saying: I need five seats. I will come back to that in a minute. The three-judge panel said: Nope, you still can't put that map in place. There were two seats, one is held by our current colleagues Terri Sewell and Shomari Figures. It is the Shomari Figures' seat they were going after. They were trying to draw it out. The three-judge panel said that seat should stay. Then the United States Supreme Court, in an expedited manner, overturned the decision of that three-judge panel, even though they had just said a few weeks ago that intentional discrimination will not be talented in drawing these lines. Even though there is something called the Purcell Rule, which the Supreme Court had honored for decades, the Purcell Rule is: You know what? We are not going to be doing these election decisions when we get too close to an election, because it can cause problems in how you implement the election. So we won't do that. They violated that even though the three-judge panel said one of the reasons they didn't want to overturn the lines at that point was because it would cause chaos in the election. The Supreme Court did it anyway. The Trump majority on the Supreme Court threw it out. Justice Sotomayor wrote a dissent. In that dissent she says: ``Now the Court is squarely faced with a record of the turmoil it has caused and the harm it has wrought. Yet just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos.'' So that is where we have come from Juneteenth: The gutting of the Voting Rights Act. It is not just in Alabama, unfortunately. I was down in North Carolina, back in my home State. I have got a colleague named Don Davis who is running for reelection. North Carolina is playing the exact same game as Alabama is. In fact, they did it a few years ago. This will be the third election that Congressman Davis has to run where they have tried to change the lines to make it harder for him to win. When they did it in 2024, they knocked off three other Democrats who had been my colleagues when I first served here. The Republican legislature drew out those three Democrats and put them in districts that were predominantly Republican so that they couldn't win. We lost those three seats, but that is not enough. They want to take more. They went after Don Davis' district and cut the African American voting bloc in half there. Now, I went down because I want to try and help him win anyway. I know that area a little bit. I know that those voters were angry that there is an attempt to disenfranchise them in that way, but I think they see past the moment and understand the importance of what we need to do right now. There are challenges coming up this November. One of the main challenges is to show that these, I think, illegal efforts to disenfranchise voters in this way, African American voters who were explicitly protected by the Voting Rights Act--which was explicitly based on the 14th Amendment, which was explicitly written to address all of the challenges and dangers and awful history that we created with slavery and segregation--all of that we have to fight back. Now, the Trump administration is not going to make it easy. In addition to appointing a Supreme Court that would strike down the Voting Rights Act, they have gutted the part of the Department of Justice that is supposed to be protecting voting rights enforcement. When Mr. Trump came into office, one of the first things he did was force out all but two of the attorneys in the voting rights section. Only two were left. In addition to that, they threw out all of the voting rights cases under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. He did that immediately. He did that before the Supreme Court had even ruled. He was telegraphing exactly what he wanted to have happen with this. He is not done there. Let's keep in mind a couple of things. In addition to gutting the unit at the Department of Justice that is supposed to protect voting rights, he is making aggressive moves on it. Remember, he did that speech where he talked about nationalizing elections? Well, we all know that Federal elections are run by the States. The Constitution says that. He still announced that anyway. He also sent the FBI to do a raid on the Fulton County Department of Elections to seize the ballots. Now, I have never seen anything like that. At first he started out, he sent requests--demands, actually, to 47 States saying: Hey, we want all your voting files. The States resisted, and you can imagine why, especially States where Democrats are at risk of the type of gerrymandering that we have seen in Alabama and North Carolina. He said he needed to do it based on the theft of the 2020 election. Now, he is still acting like he actually won the 2020 election. This would be kind of like if the team that lost the Super Bowl last year was still running around acting like they actually won it. That is what Donald Trump is doing. Six years later, even though all of the statements they have made about this have been discredited, they have lost in over 60 courts all across the country, including courts with Republican appointees, including courts that are managed by the Republicans with Trump appointees on them. Over and over and over again they say: Nope, you actually lost that election. He won't give it up. I don't think it is really about the 2020 election anymore. I think in his mind it is really about 2026 and what they might do in November. We need to keep in mind a couple of things, based on the history that you heard from my colleague from Virginia--and we know history can repeat itself--there is a saying that the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. The thing to remember is it does not bend on its own. It only bends in the right direction when we make it bend in the right direction. On Juneteenth this year, the Obama library is going to open in Chicago, a long time coming, an exciting moment. I think it was in some ways a crowning achievement for the United States of America. At least it was viewed that way not just around the world but by many here in the United States. I am going to be excited to see what they have done and what they have built. The legacy is the most important part of what that is about. The legacy of that Obama election, of what we can do and where we can go is something I think we need to focus on. I watched a little bit of a special about it, and they played some of his speeches back from that era. The thing that is interesting is they are so different from the speeches we get from the White House now. They are not about division. They are not about anger. There is no hostile attacks on reporters, even when he disagreed with them. There is no threats to wipe out an entire civilization. There is no wars started, just because somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed. There is none of that stuff. As he said, there is no red States. There is no blue States. There is the United States of America. There is a call to a certain type of America that he made that reminded me of John Kennedy's in the 1960s. It reminds me of Dr. King's in the civil rights movement in the late 1960s. Many of our greatest leaders made the statements that pulled us together, that brought us together, despite the divisions we had in our history, realizing that, as they say, we might have come over here on different ships, but we are all on the same boat now. We need to find a way to start working together again, but we can't keep undermining the rights of other people. We can't keep disrespecting the rule of law. We can't keep undermining democracy if we are going to move in that direction again. For this Juneteenth, my hope is that the America that we aspire to will get back in the front window and that we will start moving in that direction again and that we can start raising ourselves and our Nation up to those high standards again. To my colleague from Virginia, I thank her for doing this. I appreciate the work that she has done for the Congressional Black Caucus. I thank my colleagues in the caucus for the work that they do day in and day out. Here in the House, I thank my colleagues. Even when I disagree with them, we can find a way to disagree without being disagreeable. We can find a way to remember that we are all supposed to be fighting for the same things, that we can turn to each other and not on each other at this critical moment.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address a deeply troubling pattern of behavior that strikes at the very heart of the American justice system. It is a pattern where self-enrichment is rewarded, oversight is blindfolded, and rule of law is bent to serve the powerful. I sit on the Appropriations Committee, and we had a chance last week to hear the testimony of the Acting Attorney General, Mr. Blanche. I asked him about what I thought was a blatant pay-for-pardon scheme, and this involves the Binance Corporation. Let me walk through some of the facts of what happened there, as I did there with the Attorney General. In late 2023, Binance agreed to pay a penalty of $4.36 billion. A U.S. judge approved the guilty plea and settlement for the anti-money laundering and sanctions in February 2024. In other words, the chairman of Binance and the company itself pled guilty to crimes that involved money laundering. This involved money laundering that was helping groups like ISIS and al-Qaida, enemies of the United States, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. In December 2024, Mr. Zhao and Mr. Witkoff met in Abu Dhabi at the Bitcoin MENA 2024 Conference. Mr. Witkoff is the special envoy for the Trump administration who negotiates agreements with respect to the Middle East and does this on behalf of the Trump administration. They discussed the violations of anti-money laundering laws while Mr. Zhao was serving at Binance. In October 2025, Mr. Trump granted a full pardon to Mr. Zhao. That meant that they did not have to pay back the money that was part of the fine, and it wiped away the conviction and the related elements of that. According to The Wall Street Journal, part of what happened between the pardon and the meeting was that there was a payment that was made. That was money that was paid, according to The Wall Street Journal, from Binance, which took steps that catapulted the Trump family venture's new stablecoin product. The Trump family venture was WLF, and it dealt with cryptocurrency. Members of Trump's family, two of his sons, and Mr. Witkoff all had vested interests in that company. While they put the money into the WLF transaction, that enhanced the credibility and pushed up the market value of the WLF company from $127 million to over $2.1 billion. I asked Mr. Blanche, given that he had this meeting, then the money, and then the pardon, did he think it would be important to appoint a special prosecutor to review the transaction just to make sure that there was no misconduct that took place, whether it was on behalf of the President or any of the other factors or players who were involved, and he said no. A special prosecutor would be someone who the Attorney General could appoint in order to have a full and independent investigation done, but he refused to do that. It is important to put this into context, too. Just in the first 3 months of this year, Mr. Trump has engaged in 3,700 stock transactions personally, and his net worth has grown from $2.3 billion to $6.5 billion since 2024. That is a $4.2 billion increase in his personal wealth since he returned to the White House. There are other issues that we should raise. In fact, the sentences to my right were taken from a New York Times article that chronicles many of these types of issues. Nvidia stock is another one where there was a potential benefit of $5 million to WLF and the Trump family. I am not saying that there was or was not misconduct by Mr. Trump. We don't know that yet, but it is important to make sure that somebody who is independent, objective, and knowledgeable would conduct that kind of investigation. So far, the Trump administration has refused to do that, so I am going to be introducing legislation that I think will help to facilitate that. If you have a President who doesn't want to have his Attorney General conduct any investigations into what his administration is doing, we should have other avenues to move that forward. We have in the past, like the Independent Counsel Act. We also could beef up the inspector general law which was put in place after Watergate took place and was put in place specifically because of the Nixon administration misconduct and the failure to have anybody in the Nixon administration investigate that. You might recall that John Mitchell was the Attorney General. He ended up going to jail because he participated in that misconduct. We need to make sure we don't find ourselves in this situation again where we have got the fox guarding the henhouse. We will offer this legislation soon, but I think it is critical to make sure we understand a couple of things in the wake of this. We need to keep an eye on the Trump administration, and we need to remember, too, that after the testimony he gave, he was promoted to Attorney General by the President.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in observance of National Police Week. Over 300 names were added to the wall in memoriam this week. One of those names was my cousin, Earl Ivey, Jr. He served as an officer for the Mount Rainier Police Department, the Office of the Sheriff, the Seat Pleasant Police Department, and he did double duty as chief and chaplain of the Fairmount Heights Police Department. He was an excellent man, an excellent father and husband, and a great neighbor and friend. I commend him and all of the others who were added to the wall this week. I had one comment I wanted to make to my colleagues. During this week that should be celebratory, there was an amendment to a resolution that was offered that was political and partisan instead of being straightforward and honoring those who were added to the wall. Their names don't have Ds or Rs listed after them. They didn't serve based on their party affiliation. We should set the party affiliations to the side for this week and this purpose and just celebrate them and the great work that they do.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from New York for putting this together today. I thank the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force and the Congressional Black Caucus for joining in as well in support of this effort. The tragedy in Buffalo, unfortunately, is not a rare event. As you just heard from my colleague, 10 people were gunned down using an assault weapon that had been sold to an 18-year-old, an AR-15 that had been modified. He gunned them down in cold blood, and he drove 200 miles to get to them because he wanted to kill African Americans. I guess that was the closest he could get to find them, and that is what he did that day. He had been inspired, sadly, by another similar type of shooting, a mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, just a few years before at the Mother Emanuel Church. In fact, my colleague from New York and I had a chance to go visit there just a few months ago, where nine people were gunned down. The person had come into the church, sat through Bible study with the African Americans that he later gunned down, and killed nine of them. I know the question that we have now. We had a long list of these that happened on such a regular basis that sometimes people are numbed by it, forget to keep track of it. It is a sad day that we have reached from that standpoint. A version of that too that I heard the other day in the hallways here is the shooting that took place at the hotel where President Trump was about to speak. One of the things that the person remarked to me was that the older people were scared by the gunfire, but the younger folks were not. I kind of wondered about that. Then I thought about it, and I said: Well, this is the generation that has grown up, and instead of doing fire drills, they have done active shooting drills. They have been trained tragically in what to do when you hear gunfire like that. Schools now sell bulletproof backpacks to protect kids--``protect kids''--from this kind of gun violence and bulletproof chalkboards. Think about that. How did we get to this place? Then the next question, of course, is: How do we get out of it? We have talked a little bit about some of the solutions to gun violence. I have got to say that my Republican colleagues, sadly, are not in support of nearly any of them that I am aware of. The ghost gun piece, in particular, was a shock for me. Ghost guns, as you may know, are untraceable guns. The only reason somebody would want a gun that is untraceable is if you want to commit a crime and you want to make sure that law enforcement cannot find you. Why these guns would be legal is beyond me, but there was a period where they were. We couldn't pass legislation to ban them, so the Biden administration reached out to the ATF, which passed a regulation that did ban them. The Trump Supreme Court, to my surprise, upheld that regulation. I thought, well, maybe it is a new day. Yesterday, in the Committee on Appropriations, I am sorry to say, my Republican colleagues passed language that would repeal the ban on ghost guns. The sad thing about it is I think they were trying to do it sort of in the cover of dark because they didn't offer an actual piece of legislation that would have hearings and the like to do the same, because they would have to stand up and defend it there, so they just tried to slip this in. This is a tragic moment, I think, given all of the deaths, all of the killings, all of the murders that we have seen year after year and now decade after decade here in the United States. I also would add this. We found some things that do work. You heard about the assault weapons ban. I know that is a bridge too far for many of my Republican colleagues--I guess all of them actually, because none of them will even cosponsor legislation like that. I put together a bill that is called Raise the Age, and it would raise the age from 18 to 21 to buy an assault-style weapon. It is already required that you be 21 to buy handguns, and that was a bill that was put in place by the Ronald Reagan administration. I thought maybe we can get some support for this. There was not one Republican cosponsor for that bill. The shooter in Buffalo was 18 years old, and he bought the gun by himself without anybody to monitor it. The shooter in Charleston, he was 21, but he should have been caught by the background check. He slipped through, though, because it was underfunded and they didn't have enough people to make sure they caught and did all of the checks. Even though he should have been flagged and he was, they didn't have the bodies to do the follow through. He got the gun, and we know what he did after that. Then, lastly, on this point, some of the things that we found that also work is not just enforcement. It is also intervention and prevention. We found grants that help with violence in the street, to reduce it. They help by reaching young people before they get too deep into trouble or help to get them out before they get too far along with it. But the Trump administration has cut 400 of those grants worth $815 million. The funds that would be used to help prevent street violence or, even worse, gun violence in our schools has been cut back. I say this on this day of remembrance: I call upon all of my colleagues--I know we don't agree on everything. In fact, we don't agree on a lot, but let's see if we can find a solution to this. My Republican colleagues want to protect the Second Amendment. That is great, but we have got to be able to find a way to protect the Second Amendment and protect second-graders at the same time. Let's get this done. Let's get this done.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for leading this Special Order tonight and my colleagues who have spoken on the floor in shock and dismay with respect to what the Supreme Court did in the Voting Rights Act ruling just a few days ago, and also what the Virginia Supreme Court did in the ruling that it passed down. I will say this: Many of my neighbors, friends, and the students I have had a chance to speak to recently were also surprised, shocked, disappointed, and dismayed by what happened. They have also been surprised by President Trump sending the FBI in to seize ballots in Atlanta to try to prove that he won an election 4 years ago that he obviously lost. They have been surprised, dismayed, and disheartened by what they saw with respect to ICE in Minneapolis and the recognition that there is a strong possibility that ICE and the National Guard may be showing up in polling places in November. They have also been shocked and surprised that icons like Jim Clyburn and Emanuel Cleaver, who served this body and this Nation honorably for decades, are at the risk of being forced out of office based on these unfair rulings. I will say this: I have been really heartened by what I saw from those young people when I was speaking to them over the past 2 weeks. They were concerned that they couldn't live up to the moment, that there was nothing that they could do, and that they were too young to have an impact. Yet, I reminded them of people like John Lewis, who was 18 or 19 when he began his work in the civil rights movement that culminated in the Voting Rights Act, which was gutted just a few weeks ago. I reminded them that Dr. Martin Luther King was only 25 when he led the Montgomery bus boycott and was still working on his dissertation and raising a family, all at the same time. I reminded them that there were many leaders who came before us-- young people, men and women--who saw the need for service and a call to have an impact, and they stepped into that void. I reminded them that the Freedom Riders had people on at 18, 19, and 20 years old who they forced to write and sign wills before they got on those buses because they knew that they would be violently attacked, and they were. We can meet this moment, just as those ancestors met those moments, just as our predecessors met those moments. All we need to do is go to the voting booth. We have to make sure we get out there and do that work, push in the streets, campaign, stand up, make sure we fight, speak, have our voices heard, and bring everybody out who we can because it is critical for us to win in November in order to turn this around and show them that, despite all the efforts that they have made--the Trump Supreme Court, the seizure of the ballots, all the things that they have been doing with the executive orders and the like--we can defeat all of those in November. But we have to show up, and we will.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I was in the Appropriation Committee voting on an amendment related to DACA. Had I been present, I would have voted NAY on Roll Call No. 130.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia, and I thank the Congressional Black Caucus for putting this together and coming forth with this information and giving me a chance to speak. As well. I will be brief. I know we are running out of time. I did want to comment briefly about Minnesota. I just got back a little while ago from Minnesota. We went out to do a special hearing out there, in large part due to the killings that have gone on, to the ICE protests, to the arrests, the roving patrols, and the like. I wanted to see it firsthand. I have got to say, I was shocked by what I saw, but that is not the first time I have seen it. African-American history had a lot of parallels to what is going on in Minnesota right now. I think it is deeply disturbing, deeply troubling. The deaths that have been caused, in my view, by police excessive force, ICE agents using excessive force, the roving patrols, and the like, the racial profiling that is taking place, all of those kinds of things we have seen before. I think we also have to be sure we understand a couple of things moving forward. One is that the agents who work for ICE are not warriors; they are guardians. Whether they put on the camouflage, whether they are wearing masks, no matter, they work for the American people. They are guided by the Constitution, or should be guided by the Constitution. We have to make sure that they understand that fully, just as the protesters in Selma and Birmingham had to make sure that lesson got across to the law enforcement in Alabama and in those cities at that time. I think it is critical for us, as Congressman Jackson pointed out, to make sure we recall that the advances that have been made during the African-American movements and efforts have been not just African Americans, they have been Americans across the spectrum working together, fighting for justice, striving together to make a difference. I want to make sure we continue to do that. I will come back, and we can discuss this more at length in the future. It is critical for us to find a way to move forward together because we can't do it alone.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for hosting this event, and I also thank the Congressional Black Caucus for the focus on this issue tonight. I was a child in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in the late 1960s. I lived across the street from the Booker T. Washington High School, so you know what side of town I lived on. Rocky Mount was a city that was still segregated. In fact, it was literally divided by the railroad tracks that ran through the middle of the town. The Whites lived on one side; the Blacks lived on the other. My parents were both graduates of that high school, and I had gone to work at that point. My mother worked in the school system. In the late 1960s, the schools were still segregated. I was able to see how that changed as my mother was working and then had the chance to work at other schools as the schools integrated. I knew that the connection was the civil rights movement that was led by Dr. Martin Luther King, and Dr. Martin Luther King had preached at that gymnasium at the Booker T. Washington High School a few years earlier. I was probably too young to remember him even showing up, but we recognized the power of that movement and his leadership. His leadership was a courage rooted in faith and total commitment to public service. He knew he was going to be killed, as you know from the ``I've Been to the Mountaintop'' speech he delivered the night before he was assassinated, but he still went on. In 1956, after he had just graduated--or he was still working on his dissertation, actually working on graduating with his Ph.D.--he was called to Montgomery to preach at a church there and lead the church. When he got there, he was drafted to become the leader of the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was put in that position because they had conflicting groups. They couldn't decide who the leader should be, but they knew it was a critical time, and they knew that this young man, whose father had been a preacher, had talent. They put him in the middle of that position. This is a young man--I think he was around 26--who moves to a new town, doesn't know anybody there, with his wife and child. He becomes the pastor of a church. He is still writing his dissertation at night, and then he becomes the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott. Talk about gifted leadership. Not too far into that--they were a few days in, actually--the White segregationists realized that this bus boycott was serious. They knew that it was real. They started with the threats. They tried to threaten people and threaten to take their jobs away, but they weren't able to get away with that. They weren't able to undermine the bus boycott with threats, so they actually started calling Dr. King's house. They threatened his wife, and they threatened him. Eventually, the threats became real. In 1956, somebody put a bomb at his house and blew up the front part of it. His wife was there. His young baby was there. Thank God, neither of them was hurt. When Dr. King heard about it, he prayed and then ran to his house as quickly as he could. When he got there, a crowd had gathered, hundreds of people, African Americans who lived in that community and knew about Dr. King and attended his church. They were angry. If they had guns, they brought those. If they had weapons, they brought those. If they didn't have that, they grabbed a shovel or whatever they could get their hands on and went to the house because they were ready to seek revenge, but Dr. King said: That is not our way. The Christian leadership that he provided was deeply rooted in faith, deeply rooted in nonviolence, and was ultimately tested that night. He met the test that night and continued forward. Part of that movement ended up resulting in the civil rights legislation that became the crown jewel of the American democracy, because America wasn't really a democracy in 1776 or when the Constitution was written in the 1787-1789 era. It certainly wasn't a democracy after the Civil War because right after that, when Reconstruction ended, the Ku Klux Klan rose up. They reasserted their right to white supremacy. African Americans who had been freed from slavery were pushed back into an ugly version, an ugly, violent version that we called segregation. The Jim Crow laws were put in place. Many of them had achieved positions, including being elected to this body, and all of that was stripped away. For the next 100 years or so, African Americans lived under the threat of violence. If you looked at a White woman the wrong way, you could end up dead. If she just thought you looked at her the wrong way, you could end up dead. That is what happened to Emmett Till. Not only that, you had African Americans who came back from service after World War II, including my father-in-law, and what they found was an America that was still deeply violent, deeply racial. In fact, one of the veterans who came back who had served in the military and fought in World War II had his eyes gouged out when he came back, an act of violence that shocked the country, but didn't shock it enough. We had other lynchings, and the like, that went through that era and continued until the 1960s. That is when Dr. King and the civil rights movement had their rendezvous with destiny. I am here tonight to thank him for the work that he did. The Voting Rights Act, which is one of the key pieces of legislation that came out of that era, is now under attack. It is under threat. It is pending in front of the Supreme Court across the street. We won't know how it is going to turn out until the opinion is released, but I tell you what: We are not in the same place we were even then. When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, yes, there was division. There were people who opposed it. There were segregationists--they called themselves Dixiecrats then--who opposed it, as well. When it was reauthorized in 2006, the vote in the House was 390-33, and it passed the Senate unanimously. President Reagan had signed a previous reauthorization. President Bush signed this one, and that was just 20 years ago. What has happened to the country since then? I will say this: We all know that the vote is the most powerful tool in a democracy. We all know that there are challenges to votes, voting ability, and voting rights across the country. We have disagreements, I suppose, with our Republican colleagues about some of that, but we need to make sure we remain vigilant and keep working hard to protect those rights. I had a chance over the weekend to do a couple of things. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, I had a chance to visit churches and groups that were celebrating Dr. King, remembering Dr. King. I went to First Baptist Church of Highland Park, Faith Temple No. 2, and the AKAs had a day of service that I was happy to attend and have a chance to speak to them, worship with them, and work with them. They are all concerned about where the country is going and the challenges to American democracy and the civil rights movement that gave us the rights that we have today. I think it is critical for us to remember a couple of things. One is the work continues, no doubt. I have strong disagreements, to say the least, with the current administration, and I commit myself to fighting against the excesses and the wrongs that are going on there. On Friday, I went with a group of Democrats to Minnesota to deal with the protests there, to see them firsthand. They reminded me in some ways of the civil rights protests from back in that era, the protests in Selma that led to the Voting Rights Act passage, the protests in Birmingham. The violence is shocking. People are dying. The shooting of Renee Good is just one example of those that has reached the media attention, but there are more of these going on all across the country. I saw clips of people and heard their testimony, people who were dragged out of cars, people who were citizens but were still arrested anyway and taken to the ICE detention center and not released for hours, people who were denied the right to call for an attorney, people who were denied the basic constitutional rights that my colleague from Virginia was talking about. We have got to make sure we turn that around. We have got to make sure that we protect the rights that the civil rights movement was about defending and even beyond that the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, all of those things were put in place 250 years ago, which is the anniversary we are about to celebrate later this year, and rightly so. We are not a perfect country. We are not a perfect nation, but we have been called to a perfect mission. We need to fulfill that mission. I think it is important to wrap up with this. Dr. King's dream, kids learn about it in school now, and they see the replays, but in some ways the dream has become a memory for many. I think it is important for us to recall that the dream is not a memory, it is a mandate. It is a mission. It is a movement that we need to continue to make sure we get that work done that Dr. King died for and so many others died for, as well. I thank my colleague again for putting on this event tonight, giving us a chance to remember Dr. King and think about the civil rights movement and where we are going as a nation. I want to continue to fight alongside her and all my colleagues with the Congressional Black Caucus and my colleagues here in the House of Representatives on both sides of the aisle as we work to get this done.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my distinguished colleague from South Carolina and certainly my distinguished colleague from Maryland for giving us the opportunity to speak on this issue tonight, the fifth anniversary of that tragic day of the attack on this Capitol. I want to focus on two men who were here that day. One was Nathan Tate. He was a police officer who had grown up in Prince George's County. He had mixed feelings about what the police do because he had had some bad experiences in his childhood and in his neighborhood, but he decided he could make a difference. He felt called to public service as a police officer. When he went to work, he joined the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., and was sent to some of the toughest neighborhoods in Washington, where I had actually been a prosecutor many years before. On that tragic day, he was one of the 140 officers who were attacked and injured. Fortunately, he was not one of the four who died that day. Another one died the next day. Four officers committed suicide in the wake of the trauma that they had experienced that day. Mr. Tate was attacked and temporarily blinded by bear spray. He hit his head on the scaffold as he was knocked to the ground and lost consciousness temporarily. He was afraid he wouldn't make it home that night to see his six children. He didn't know if he was going to make it. His attacker was a man named Andrew Taake. Mr. Taake later pled guilty to attacking officers, including Mr. Tate, with bear spray and a metal whip. You heard a moment ago that our President and some of our Republican colleagues said that this was a tourist event, but I know not many tourists bring bear spray and whips to the Capitol. The man who attacked him was also a fugitive from justice at the time he came here. He had been released on bond from Texas. He was a 32-year-old man, and he was charged with online solicitation of a minor. Fortunately, it was an undercover officer posing as a 15-year-old girl, but there was an arrest warrant out for his arrest at the time he came here and launched that attack. He ended up pleading guilty and accepting responsibility in front of the judge, or so he said, because when you plead guilty, the prosecutor reads a statement of what you have done and you have to swear under oath that that statement is true. He did that, but at the same time, he had been bragging about attacking these officers. Later, he came out and denied responsibility for what he had done. In fact, he said Officer Tate had attacked him. The judge in that case was appointed by Donald J. Trump. He heard all the evidence, he heard the guilty plea and the evidence that both sides presented, and he sentenced Mr. Taake to 6 years in jail. Donald Trump's pardon wiped that away with the stroke of a pen. Mr. Tate, formerly Officer Tate, felt so betrayed by what had happened--not just that day, not just by the way some Members of Congress have responded to what happened that day, and not just by the pardon--that he actually left the police department. He didn't feel he could be a police officer again. However, he was still committed to public service that now he is a middle school teacher in Charles County, Maryland, continuing to do outstanding work. Actually, The Washington Post article that profiled him today showed that he talked about this issue today or this week with the children in his class. He is trying to continue to serve. He is trying to continue to make a difference. He is trying to make a difference for the next generation. He had life-altering scars that he suffered that day. Many of our colleagues had life-altering scars that they suffered that day. Our Nation suffered life-altering scars that day. We need to commit today that it will never happen again.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I was absent from the first vote today due to my participation in the shadow hearing, ``Kidnapped and Disappeared: Trump's Detention Abuses,'' where I was discussing the impacts of this administration's immigration policies on constituents in my district. Had I been present, I would have voted NAY on Roll Call No. 313.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for yielding to me and for putting this together. I appreciate the fact that she took the leadership and initiative to bring this forward. I also thank my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, as well, for taking a stand on this issue and the House Democratic Caucus overall. This is the issue that we fought about with respect to the government shutdown. This is the issue that has not gone away. I suppose the White House and my Republican colleagues were hoping that it would, but it is worse now than it was even then. In fact, the Republicans knew this problem was coming all the way back on January 20 when Mr. Trump first took office. To much fanfare, they began moving forward with his legislative agenda, the big, beautiful bill and other pieces of legislation. I don't even know how many executive orders they put together and put out undermining the government from the standpoint of government employees and making damaging impacts across the board. They failed to address this particular issue. In fact, I will come back to that in a moment. Not only did they not address extending the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act, but they made the problem even worse. The big, ugly bill that they passed included a $1 trillion cut to Medicaid. The healthcare safety net in this country, to the extent it is a safety net, was damaged terribly by what they have done, and it is about to get infinitely worse when these tax credits expire at the end of the month. I know my Republican colleagues have been fighting against ObamaCare for years now. I can remember back when it was first passed 15 years ago in this Chamber. There were over 60 votes to repeal and replace the ObamaCare piece of legislation. They kept going year after year after year. Somewhere along the way, about 5 years in, they found out that the American people actually like ObamaCare. They don't call it ObamaCare. They might call it the Affordable Care Act, but they kind of liked not having pregnancy treated as a preexisting condition, and they kind of liked having the ability to have their kids stay on their family insurance plans until they turned 26. The efforts to repeal it not only failed, but it has gotten stronger over the years because people have come to realize that without it, they might not be able to afford healthcare at all. I have decided to bring in a couple of comments from people in my district. There are too many to read all of them, but this one is from Beth, who lives in Greenbelt, Maryland, which is in my district. She is looking at her premiums going up $9,372 this year. She has major health conditions that require ongoing healthcare that she can't avoid. They were brought on by a major surgery that she underwent several years ago. Her case isn't unique. In the State of Maryland, it is estimated that the impact will be on 14,000 or so members of my district. A 60-year- old couple with an $82,000 income is looking at a 168 percent increase if these affordable care tax credits are allowed to expire. A family of four, ages 45, 45, 15, and 10, is looking at a 200 percent increase in their monthly premiums. Obviously, most families can't sustain that. I am going to pick one. I read an article in the Washington Post a little while ago. This is a gentleman in Altoona, Pennsylvania. That is not my district, obviously; that is the district of Congressman Joyce. Matt Hornberger is 61 years old and from Altoona, Pennsylvania. Monthly payments for him and his wife will rise from $670 to $2,054. He said this: ``Between the high deductible and $25,000 in premiums, this is 40 percent of our income. I am just trying to live a life here and be able to go to the doctor when you need to go to the doctor.'' He ought to be able to do that. In fact, every American ought to be able to do that. What have we gotten from our Republican colleagues in the 9 months or so since they took over the White House, the House, and the Senate? Not much. I remember the President saying in the debate that he didn't have a plan, that he had a concept of a plan. I am not sure we have gotten much past the concept point 9 months later, but he did talk about HSAs. I was looking at that, doing a little research, and an economist, Doug Holtz-Eakin, who works for the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank, said this: ``There is a place for health savings accounts to augment insurance and fill things out around the edges, but it can't be the core insurance product.'' The reason for that is because it is not designed to be the core insurance product. As a matter of fact, we have HSAs in place now, but 66 percent or so of these have only $1,000 or less in the account. As you heard from my colleague from Virginia, $1,000 doesn't go a long way in our healthcare system. It is $70,000 a day for the NICU system. I am a kidney cancer survivor. A thousand dollars sure wouldn't have covered my insurance for the surgery that I underwent. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't have even covered the MRI that allowed us to find it, fortunately, very early on. Now, what is the path forward? Mr. Speaker, I have to complain a bit because we have been talking about this issue the whole time. I am a father. I have six kids, and this reminds me a little bit of one of them. He came home from school one day and he looked at his mom, of course, and said: Mom, will you help me with this project I have? She said: Honey, I am a little tied up right now. Can I help you out later? He said: We can't really wait on this. She said: Why not? He said: It is because it is a big part of my grade. It is a huge part of my grade. She said: Okay. I will help you out with it, but when is it due? He said: Tomorrow. She said: When did you know about this project? As it turned out, he knew he had this assignment months ago, but he hadn't done anything to get ready for it. He hadn't let us know that he needed the help to work on it, and he certainly hadn't done any work to prepare the project. That is what our Republican colleagues are doing right now. They came into office on January 20th knowing that these ACA tax credits were going to expire. They didn't do anything to address it. Not only that, but we brought it to their attention when this bill was moving through, the big, ugly bill. We tried to address it then, but they refused to extend the tax credits then. We tried to offer amendments at the committee level. I am on the Appropriations Committee. We offered four of those to try and amend this piece just to extend it. Let's try and fix it. If you have other things you want to do it with it, let's extend it now so it doesn't expire. They refused to do it. They voted it down four times on a party-line vote over and over again just like they had done over the previous 15 years when they were trying to get rid of it. Maybe this is death by a thousand cuts in their minds, but something strange happened along the way. The American people started getting these notices in the mail that their premiums were about to double or triple. The American people, millions of them across the country, started realizing that there is no way they can afford to pay that. They are going to be forced into the choice of either dropping the insurance or take some other drastic measure like selling their house. One lady said she might have to pull her kid out of college to pay for this healthcare coverage. It is absolutely outrageous, but the failure to do something until the eleventh hour is a total abdication of their responsibility of leadership, not just in the House, not just in the Senate, not just in the White House but entirely across the board. The Republican Party didn't wake up to this until the American people started screaming in their ears. Well, now, here we are. What is the path forward? Senator Schumer back during the government shutdown at the end of it said: Tell you what. Why don't we just extend it for a year. Let's put a task force together to try and work out the differences because I understand the Republicans don't agree with everything. Let's take a year and extend it and try and work it out. Not only did the Republicans and the Senate reject that, they actually said: This is stupid. I can't believe he would propose this. Those were the types of comments he got from his Senate colleagues for proposing a 1-year extension. Right now, there is a 3-year discharge petition that would extend the tax credits for 3 years. I don't know if there are any Republicans who have signed on to that, but I think we have about 9 legislative days left. At least my kids were only in their early teens. However, if they want to do the big fixes they have been talking about with respect to healthcare, they are not going to be able to do it in 9 days. Now, I know they are going to try and do something to save face, but at the end of the day, the extension is really the only realistic way we have to go here. I have to say this: If they don't do the extension, it is going to be devastating for families across the country, millions of them. We were talking a little bit about how much these things could cost. The HSA is a thousand-dollar average. Look at the average cost for heart surgery. Just the surgery, not even the stay, is between $30,000 and $200,000 just for the procedure. I don't even know how much my cancer surgery cost because I had health insurance. I didn't have to check it like that. We had to pay some deductible, but nothing dramatic. We wouldn't have been able to afford it. I wouldn't have gotten the surgery because I wouldn't even have known I had cancer because we wouldn't have gotten the MRI. That is where we are putting the American people right now. Actually, not we, the Republicans are putting the American people right now. It is time to end this. The clock is running out. The calendar says the time has come to do something and put some kind of proposal on the table. I have to say this, too, on the proposal piece. When the Speaker passed the bill, I think it was, if I recall correctly, July 25th, we left town for the August recess, came back, passed the bill, and then left town again. There was a stretch there where I think we had been in session between July 25th and when the government finally reopened, I think it was 12 legislative days. To my friends out there in the country, how many of you could only work 12 days in July, August, September, and October and still have a job and still get paid while you are out? That is what they did. Mr. Speaker, the time has come to get this done finally, to make some kind of an effort to reach a bipartisan solution and resolve this crisis that was created entirely by my Republican colleagues, that was totally avoidable, that they decided to run into the fire anyway. Let's fix this. Let's protect the American people. Let's allow them to go at least 1 year, maybe 3, so we can extend this so they can make sure that they continue to have healthcare coverage while we are working on this bill. Let's get it done.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this legislation. As a former prosecutor here in Washington, D.C., I had a chance to use these statutes frequently with respect to the bail determination that is made in all of these criminal cases at some point or another. My colleague talked about this being commonsense legislation, but the D.C. bill is patterned on the Federal Bail Reform Act. I note that there is no effort to amend that here or change it in the way that has been proposed in this bill. In addition to that, roughly 40 States in the Union are patterned after the Federal Bail Reform Act, just like the D.C. bill is, but there is no effort to change those. Many of those 40 States are represented by Members on the other side who support this bill. The main point I want to raise right now is that it appears to me that this bill, as drafted, would create a scenario that is unconstitutional. As I read it, it strikes a 5-day provision. In other words, when somebody is initially arrested, they can be held for 5 days, and so, Mr. Speaker, you can have the full-scale hearing. The way this is drafted is it eliminates the 5 days, and it says: Notwithstanding any other provision, the judicial officer shall order that the person who is charged with this crime be detained for the period before trial. I think that says that no matter what, whoever is arrested for any of these charges, there is a mandatory requirement that they be held for the entire pretrial period. That would certainly be unconstitutional. Under Salerno, the Supreme Court case which ruled on the constitutionality of this language over 40 years ago, the Supreme Court said that there are a variety of safeguards that have been put in place: right to counsel, detention hearing, and the chance to offer opposing evidence and the like, that provides the safeguards that permit the statute to be found to be constitutional. However, the way this bill is drafted, none of those safeguards could come into play because the initial provision as it is written makes all of those superfluous and says that no matter what, if these charges arise, then the person has to be detained for the entire pretrial period.

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I would say at this point, though, that because it is unconstitutional, I urge my Republican colleagues to oppose this bill. I urge all of my colleagues to oppose this bill. I would note that Salerno was written by Chief Justice Rehnquist, no liberal advocate, and Justice Scalia supported it, as well. This is a provision that has key safeguards that are excluded. By the way this is drafted, it has to be revised. I oppose it even if you do the revision piece, Mr. Speaker, because I think it violates the rights of the District of Columbia to make their own determinations. At a minimum, Mr. Speaker, please send constitutional law forward.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding, and I rise in strong opposition to the gentleman's bill. I appreciate my colleague from Louisiana. We have had a chance to serve together on committees. I know he has a strong respect for law enforcement, so I am not saying his heart is in the wrong place, but I am saying this bill is wrong. I say that from personal experience. He is right, I was never in an active car pursuit, but I was a prosecutor here in Washington, D.C., and for 8 years in Prince George's County, which is the eastern border of Washington, D.C., so I have seen the results of some of these high-speed chases. The bill that is drafted, that he has proposed, actually takes away a reasonable balance that was drawn by the people here of the District of Columbia, as is their right for a democracy. Also, one of the things we need to keep in mind, and my colleague addressed this kind of briefly but, frankly, skipped over it, what happens when that chase leads to the death of innocent civilians? When the gentleman said he had been in 100 car chases, a chill went through my body, I have to say, because I have seen the results, the deadly consequences of some of these car chases. When you have to go talk to that family and tell them why their loved ones died, you don't want to have to say that it was over something minor like a stolen car. The balance that the city struck was that it should be for an imminent violent offense, high-level felony, something like that that you really understand why they would have engaged in the pursuit. This bill would take that away and expand it open so that you could have high-speed chases taking place with respect to misdemeanors. This isn't a hypothetical for me. When I was the State's attorney in Prince George's County, we actually had one of these. We had several, but I will just pick one for purposes of time. A police officer saw a stolen motorcycle zip down the beltway and decided to pursue it. Stealing a motorcycle is a misdemeanor and speeding is a misdemeanor, but he decided to pursue it anyway. Mind you, this is during rush hour, so he had to pursue on the border of the road, and speeds got up to over 100 miles an hour on the beltway in rush hour. Of course, it is hard for a car to catch a motorcycle, especially when it can weave in and out of traffic. He didn't make the apprehension, but what he did do as he was speeding along on the side of the road at 100-plus miles an hour was come across debris on the road, and he tried to swerve to avoid it. When he did that, the car jumped over the Jersey barrier between the two lanes and took him into the opposite lane of oncoming traffic. The car jumped over, hit the top of a car coming the opposite direction, and killed two men on their way to a concert. They had nothing to do with any kind of high-speed chase. They didn't have anything to do with any kind of criminal activity. These were people who were good folks, actually just visiting in the area--one was from Buffalo--who died because of a high-speed chase over a minor misdemeanor. That doesn't make any sense. It is not like that only happens in Prince George's County. Here in Washington, D.C., we had a similar kind of case. It was back in 2016. It led up to a deadly chase on East Capitol and Benning Road. The chases the gentleman was talking about, maybe those were rural areas, but those are high-traffic areas even in the nighttime. Sometimes these pursuits take place during the day. This led to the death of an innocent man. This was over a stolen car. Think about what you would say to that family when you are explaining to them that their father, brother, or son lost his life over a stolen car. Then the other part that influences me--again, I represent Prince George's County now--but sometimes when they start high-speed chases in D.C., they go into Prince George's County, Montgomery County, or Northern Virginia, and we lost someone during a high-speed chase on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway; another stolen car case. When we make these decisions about when a chase is permitted or should be permitted or not, we need to keep in mind that there can be deadly consequences from when this happens, and it frequently occurs. It is not like this is unusual. The Washington Post just did a piece about the Park Police. There have been 10 of these instances in recent weeks. I have a couple last points. One is liability. The Federal Government is going to put this burden on the city.

Mr. IVEY. When that liability arises from a car chase ending in death that didn't make any sense to a jury, the city could be on the hook for millions of dollars. I guarantee they are not going to step in and have the Federal Government cover that for them. When we think about these things, we need to keep all of those things in mind. The last point I will make, a variation on the home rule argument. D.C. is not a rural jurisdiction. In fact, its roads aren't even as straightforward as Manhattan. We have got diagonal roads that cut across, we have circles, and we have very dangerous intersections. I wish my colleagues knew how tricky it can be out there. A high-speed chase in the middle of the District of Columbia, even during the middle of the day is almost, by definition, dangerous almost under any circumstances, so you better have a really good reason to engage in a pursuit like that. That is not the balance that is drawn by this bill. That is not the balance that was drawn by the people of the District of Columbia. It should be the balance, and they should make the call because when the deaths happen, my colleagues won't be anywhere to be found.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentlewoman for hosting this Special Order today and for the great work that she has done on behalf of the State of Ohio and for the Nation. We serve on the Appropriations Committee together, and I have had a chance to see her do outstanding work on a firsthand basis, so I want to thank her for her service. Mr. Speaker, I rise today on behalf of hardworking public servants who were using their expertise and training for scientific advancement that could save lives and preserve American leadership in technology and innovation. Unfortunately, the Trump administration forced them out of their jobs and out of their laboratories. I had a chance to meet with many of these individuals over the last few months. We had a job fair in my district not that long ago, and a couple of people came through had a chance to chat with me. Unfortunately, we didn't have anything that met the caliber of the background and expertise that they possessed. One was a Ph.D. researcher at NIH who had been doing clinical trials on Alzheimer's research. She told me that what had happened was she had been laid off. Everybody in her lab had been laid off. So what that meant was the trial that they had been running for years got shut down. As we all know with clinical trials, Alzheimer's, cancer, and others--and I will come back to those--these aren't light switches, Mr. Speaker. We can't just flip the switch and start it back. In some of those instances, we have to start from scratch. Alzheimer's is a disease that I have a special interest in. It killed my father. I watched him waste away from Alzheimer's, and I now pay closer attention to the impact that that disease can have and the way it ravages thousands of people every year across the country. Instead of doing the research to find a cure for Alzheimer's, their laboratory got shut down. Medical devices was another one. I met a gentleman who was a mechanical engineer. He had been trained and earned his Ph.D. in research. He worked for the Federal Government. I believe he was at the FDA, if I recall correctly. He did tests to make sure that the medical devices that were up for approval had been tested and actually worked the way that they did. He gave me an example. He said that pacemakers were one of those. There are people who are trying to make innovations with respect to these kinds of medical devices. The job at his office was to make sure that these worked the right way and were safe and efficacious. His lab got shut down. I met another individual. She had a master's in public health. She got fired. You won't imagine how ironic it was, Mr. Speaker. She got fired, and she was doing work on measles. Just at the time they had the major outbreak in Texas, she was laid off, and her group was canceled out as well. The New York Times, just last weekend I believe it was, published a cover story on their magazine about losing the war on cancer. As you know, Mr. Speaker, the United States has been one of the leading innovators with respect to research, and cancer has been a huge focus on that research. We have been doing outstanding work there and making huge strides forward. As I mentioned a moment ago, I am a cancer survivor, and I was a beneficiary of the fact that we had innovations that changed the way that treatment was provided just in time for when I came along. That was 20 years ago. However, now we are shutting those clinical trials down, and that article lays it out clearly and sadly. It was a little ironic. Mr. Speaker. You may recall that here in this Chamber, President Trump gave a speech. It looked kind of like a state of the Union, but it wasn't actually that address, but there was a young boy up in the seats over there who was a cancer survivor. He had him stand up. He gave him a badge from, I think it was, Secret Service and celebrated his survival. Just a few days later, the Trump administration terminated research for pediatric cancer. We have to find a way to make sure we don't lose the competition with China. I just mentioned medical issues there, but the Trump administration is doing so many things with respect to research and development and high tech. China, on the other hand, as we heard from one of my colleagues a moment ago, is pushing employees. They are developing them. They can't develop them fast enough, and they are pushing them into research and work with respect to artificial intelligence and quantum computing, while here in the United States, especially in the last 9 months, we are doing everything we can--well, the Trump administration is doing everything it can, it would seem, to limit the number of people who can go into this kind of work. They are cutting back on the grants that would allow people to do the research, and they are cutting the funding for people who are going to school to earn their Ph.D.s to pay for their education. China is doing the exact opposite. To the extent the United States has been behind on creating its own researchers and developers here in the United States, we have had a lot of people come from overseas, people who are doing outstanding work, but they come from other countries. Then the Trump administration decided it wanted to cancel their visas. Some of the attacks on Harvard, in particular, the big threat was: We are not going to let you have international students come to study. The result of that was, international students from all around the world who are the top of the line, doing outstanding work, this is the next generation we want to help and have them come. Many of them come to the United States from other places, and they like it here so much they stay. They build their careers. In fact, many of the research and innovation entities that we have in the United States are run by people who have come from overseas, immigrants who have come to the United States. But we are forcing them away, scaring them away, and pushing them to other countries. You have got to believe the other countries are welcoming them with open arms. I was just talking to a group who trains doctors, medical doctors. They said the people that we train here, they are being pulled away to other countries now because they can complete their medical training, go work overseas, the medical training gets covered, and so they can get their medical education done and then go to work and have a chance to be successful and provide the type of medical care and treatment that we want to have here in the United States, but we are losing that, as well. We have got to make sure that we do everything we can to preserve the institutions and the departments and agencies that are doing great work here in the United States. NASA, NOAA, FDA, and NIST are all doing great work. The universities we have got here are doing great work on the R&D front. That is the only way we are going to be able to win the competition with China. That includes AI, quantum computing, and high-tech. Those are the places that gave us the lead that we have in software and in the computer industry. GPS and LASIK were spinoffs of R&D that was worked on at NASA. Instead of building that up, the Trump administration is laying people off. Mr. Speaker, 445,000 Federal employees lost their collective bargaining rights. As the Senate report pointed out, in forcing out tens of thousands of people who worked for the government--many of them doing the science and tech work that I just talked about--the Democratic staff report calls it: The $21 billion blunder, analyzing the waste generated by DOGE. DOGE didn't focus only on science and tech, but its impact has been resonating there for sure in a very damaging way for the United States. We need to work together to force the Trump administration to see the error of its ways. We need to make sure that we get back on track so that we can win the competition with China, preserve our leadership role in the world, and build on the great advances that we have had here in the United States. Let's get to work.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise today with deep concern over the weaponization of ICE by the Trump administration. Just this weekend, I had a chance to see Trump Border Czar Tom Homan talking about how the administration is conducting the sweeps on the streets and that they are doing it to prioritize public safety and national security. Yet, the facts tell a different story. According to CBS, only 8 percent of those detained have been convicted of violent crimes. The conservative Cato Institute found that only 7 percent of detainees were violent criminals. In fact, most detainees aren't even criminals at all. Of the people in detention, about half of them have criminal records. That is 300,000 people who are detained and who do not have criminal records at all. This administration is not actually prioritizing the most dangerous people, even though President Trump promised on the campaign trail that that is exactly what he would do. Mr. Homan also said that this administration always follows the law. However, last week, a Federal judge ordered ICE to stop conducting roving patrols, stop the sweeping arrests without reasonable suspicion, and stop denying access to lawyers. Mr. Speaker, the findings in this case are shocking. This is some of the worst examples of racial profiling I have seen even during my 12 years as a prosecutor. For example, some people were waiting at bus stops and having coffee when they were then surrounded by ICE agents in unmarked vehicles that sped up in their direction. They leapt out with masks on and their guns drawn and ran immediately toward these individuals. They then handcuffed these individuals and forced them into vehicles and drove them away. All of this was done before they had even asked them for identification. The men thought they were being kidnapped. Some of them had their feet, hands, and wrists shackled, and another man even had a gun pointed at him. The court who was reviewing these cases questioned what it was about the bus stop that caused these ICE agents to believe they had reasonable suspicion to detain these men. Reasonable suspicion means that there is evidence at the time that each of these men had committed a crime or were in the process of committing a crime. What was the basis of the ICE agents' reasonable suspicion? The court reviewed it and found that the government said: It was based on their past experiences that have demonstrated that illegal aliens utilize and seek to work at certain places, like getting their car washed or waiting for the bus. Nothing about these men suggested that they were in the country illegally or about to commit a crime at the time that they were stopped. They didn't even ask for ID before they were gun-faced and then handcuffed and taken away. The bottom line is that these men were taken into custody simply because they were Latino. Clearly, these tactics are unconstitutional. The use of race as the basis for grabbing people on the street the courts have long ago ruled are across the line and illegal. These tactics threaten some of the most basic and important principles that serve as the backbone for our Nation: the rule of law. Like the unlawful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the willful defiance of a unanimous Supreme Court decision to bring him back, the Trump administration is unapologetic in its efforts to target immigrants, the Constitution, and the law be damned. Now, in addition to being unconstitutional, this wastes a great deal of tax dollars because they are detaining masses of people in these large sweeps, only to have to release them when proof of their legal status is shown. It also horrifies the citizens who have to go through this experience. We now have Latino citizens who are afraid to leave their house to go to work or even to go to court. Remember the so-called Venezuelan violent gang members deported to the gulag in El Salvador. As it turns out, according to the Cato Institute, 50 of those men were not criminals. Their paperwork was in order. They were in the United States legally, and they hadn't committed any kind of crimes in El Salvador or Venezuela. Instead of focusing on criminals, they are grabbing people like the 64-year-old mother who was gardening in New Orleans, the father of three marines who had been working in the United States for decades, or yesterday when ICE raided a baseball summer camp. This is not the best use of our Federal law enforcement agents. I am a former Federal and State prosecutor. I deeply respect the rule of law and understand the responsibility elected officials have to protect it. We have got to do better than this. Let's focus on getting violent criminals off the street. There are more than 100,000 open warrants in the United States on any given day. Let's focus on those, and let's move forward in a way that respects the Constitution.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding and for organizing this Special Order hour honoring the life of the late colleague of ours, Congressman John Lewis. Congressman Lewis once said: ``Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble.'' We need to get into good trouble now more than ever. It certainly feels like today we are in the struggle for the soul of America, a soul that desperately needs healing. In the fight to heal the soul of America in 1965, Congressman Lewis got into good trouble. The good trouble he found himself in in Selma nearly cost him his life, but from that good trouble came great progress: the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicaid, Medicare, and the Fair Housing Act. These were monumental achievements made possible through many years of nonviolent struggle by ordinary people with an extraordinary vision. Sadly, 60 years later, it feels like we are going backward. Last time we were on this floor, House Republicans passed a bill to rip away healthcare from millions of Americans and to take food assistance away from families in need. For House Republicans and President Trump, making it harder for kids to eat so that some billionaires can pay less in taxes, may count as progress, but America is better than that. To move in the right direction again, we must fight back for what we believe in: to protect the vulnerable, to assist those in need, and to fight against discrimination. John Lewis serves as an inspiration for all of us during these unprecedented and difficult times for so many of our constituents. We must stay engaged, stay focused, and stay committed to the American ideals we cherish, the ideals Congressman John Lewis fought for both in this House and in Selma. To heal the soul of America, again, we need to remain inspired by John Lewis and to get into good trouble again.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to amend the rule to make in order the amendment at the desk that protects against any cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues from Ohio and California for hosting this event today. My colleague from Virginia who just spoke, which I hadn't actually planned on talking much about that, but after my family moved from North Carolina, we moved to Virginia and one of the things I recall was Virginia history. We had our history book. Interestingly enough, it started with Jamestown and Williamsburg obviously, then it kind of skipped ahead to the Civil War and the focus of the Civil War. There is no mention of slavery in between the two, by the way, or barely any. The focus of the Civil War was what they called the great Confederate generals: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the others. It talked about how great they were as generals, and the fact that if they only had an equal amount of supplies as the Union generals, they would have been able to win the war. They called it the war between the States. In some instances, the war of northern aggression, which is a little hard to imagine these days, but that was the schoolbook I learned from in my public school in Prince William County. The interesting thing about that, we have seen what the effort was with respect to the attempt to change history, we became the United States after the Civil War, after the African-American community was liberated from slavery and there was a chance to have the opportunity to vote, to participate fully in the community, in the Nation. That was overturned essentially by a deal that was cut between the North and the South after President Lincoln was assassinated and it led to the segregation of African Americans across the country. What went side by side with that was the obliteration of the actual history of what had led up to that point and the twisting of history to argue that, essentially, African Americans couldn't be trusted to be voting people in the democracy; that, in some instances, they even claimed that African Americans belonged in chains, belonged in slavery. As you heard earlier, the suggestion--I think that was from the Florida State government, not 150 years ago but recently--that African Americans actually benefited from being enslaved. Now, we all know how silly that is or, I guess, our colleagues, maybe not necessarily in Florida, but it is a ridiculous statement. It is the kind of erasure and twisting of history that I think is critical to make sure that we fight against. My mother was a librarian. My mother-in-law ended up being a librarian, so we had a heavy concentration of focus on books in my family during that stretch and the importance of history. I thought I would give a couple of examples of some of the issues that had popped up with respect to what the Trump administration has done. This is the executive order by President Trump that was issued in March. It was titled: ``Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.'' The reality is it wasn't about restoring truth and sanity to American history, it was really about hiding and deleting and whitewashing American history. One of the things they did in their first steps was to go to the Naval Academy. I guess an executive order was issued and the Department of Defense focused on this, in part. The Naval Academy, in response to that executive order and those directions from the White House and the Pentagon, pulled the book called ``I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'' from the bookshelves at the Naval Academy. That was by Maya Angelou, who was one of the most respected writers in American history. If I recall correctly, she was one of the poet laureates and spoke at one of the inaugurations, as well. What I thought was interesting about that was that even though they pulled Maya Angelou's book from the shelves--the book, by the way, was an autobiography. It talked about her rise, her growth as she was raised in the South, and the terrible things that she went through, including sexual assault and racial discrimination issues, and how she rose above it. In fact, a later book that she wrote based on one of her poems is called ``And Still I Rise,'' and it is the type of inspiring literature that I think not only should we not be hiding from Americans, but we should be encouraging all Americans to see. The Naval Academy pulled that book, but they left two copies of another book, ``Mein Kampf'' by Adolf Hitler, still on the shelves. In addition to that, there was another book that they left called ``The Bell Curve.'' You might not recall ``The Bell Curve,'' but I distinctly remember when it was published. ``The Bell Curve'' argued that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than White people. That is still on the shelves at the Naval Academy, but the book that critiqued ``The Bell Curve'' was pulled. This is what we are getting from the Trump administration. Of the books that they called for them to review, I think it was approximately 900 books. They reviewed those books, based on the request from the Trump administration, based on the executive order. Ultimately, it resulted in nearly 400 books being selected for removal from the Naval Academy's library. What I thought was interesting about that was the person the library is named after, Admiral Nimitz, actually held a totally different conception about what should happen with respect to the sharing of information in books. In fact, he founded the library for this 179- year-old institution in Annapolis, Maryland. I represent Maryland. I am proud of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, but this is a low moment in the history of the academy, I must say. In response to this decision, one of its alums, Admiral James Stavridis, said: ``The Pentagon might have an argument if midshipmen were being forced to read these 400 books.'' By the way, he is an author, an academy alumnus, and a former Commander of all U.S. forces in Europe. ``As I understand it, they were just among the hundreds of thousands of books in the Nimitz Library which a student might opt to check out. What are we afraid of keeping from them in the library?'' I couldn't agree more with this question. ``Book banning can be a canary in a coal mine and could predict a stifling of free speech and thought,'' he continued. ``Books that challenge us make us stronger. We need officers who are educated, not indoctrinated.'' General Mark Milley is not a fan of the Trump administration. Certainly, the feeling seems to be mutual. You may recall, back in June 2021, this issue came up where they were challenging him with respect to something that was called critical race theory. We won't go into all of that, but keep in mind that K-12 schools never taught critical race theory. In any event, they brought it up with General Milley. He said: ``I have read Mao Zedong. I have read Karl Marx. I have read Lenin. That doesn't make me a Communist.'' He then offered an argument for expanding political studies in the service of defending the Constitution after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He said: ``I want to understand White rage, and I am White and I want to understand it. What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?'' Just a little aside on that point, there is a plaque that has been requested to be posted here in the Capitol that represents the brave men and women of the Capitol Police who fought to protect the people who were trapped here by the attacking mob. The Republican leadership refuses to post that plaque, but you can't change history. As another example, they wanted to eliminate information about Jackie Robinson, the celebrated baseball player, a Hall of Fame star, who was a great baseball player for sure but also celebrated because he integrated Major League Baseball. Prior to his arrival, African Americans were basically not allowed to play in the major leagues. They wanted to strip out this information about Jackie Robinson. This is an article that talks about Robinson's military service during World War II, when he served in the 761st Tank Battalion, the Black Panthers. It noted that he was court-martialed, but eventually acquitted, after refusing to move to the back of an Army bus in 1944. He received an honorable discharge later that year. This touches me a bit because my father-in-law served in World War II and was a decorated soldier, as well. In fact, after World War II, he reenlisted for ground combat in Korea. They made him wait a few days to make sure that he really knew what he was doing, and of course, he did. He is buried at Arlington now. He had a Silver Star and two Bronze Stars, outstanding service, and rose to the level of captain. When he came back from Italy, where he had been serving, to the United States, he was in an all-Black battalion. There were German prisoners who actually had a chance to ride in the front of the train, while he and his other Black colleagues still had to ride in the back because segregation continued. Even though the war against Hitler was supposed to be a war to end racism and fight Nazi discrimination, when he got back here, it was still the same old story. They also tried to strip out information about Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran and Mississippi civil rights activist who was assassinated in 1963. He had been a leader with the local NAACP and was assassinated because he was fighting for the right to vote for African Americans. They erased that information from the Arlington National Cemetery website. The Army removed, but subsequently reinstated, a website dedicated to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit in military history. That unit was made up of Japanese-American soldiers who fought despite the internment of their families. Those were the concentration camps that held Japanese Americans, largely in California but also in other parts of the country. Despite that, Japanese-American soldiers volunteered to fight in World War II. One of those soldiers, Daniel Inouye, later became a long-serving United States Senator from Hawaii. I remember Senator Inouye primarily from his leadership in the Watergate hearings. He was an outstanding public servant, a great American, and a great soldier, but they tried to eliminate his history from the history books here. We have this most recent incident, too. President Trump fired the Librarian of Congress. This one kind of came out of the blue, it seemed to me. She had served in that position for nearly 10 years, including during his first administration. She had been celebrated as a great Librarian, and she had done a great job in the position. Normally, you get long terms for your service, and there was no indication that she had done anything wrong until Trump two came back, Trump 47, and they decided to fire her. They gave her a two-sentence letter that said, after all of your years in service, you are still terminated. It kicked up such a controversy, the White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said there were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the Library for children. Keep in mind a couple of things. One is that the Library of Congress is not a lending library for the public, so there was no risk that any kids would be taking these books or any books from the Library of Congress. Secondly, the Library of Congress has over 178 million items. It is the repository for the United States Congress. The department that deals with copyright for books is under that, and the Congressional Research Service is under her authority, as well. Mr. Speaker, that is why they have so many books, including books that you or I might not want to read or we might not agree with. The point is all of the books need to be there because we need that repository. By the way, it is the Library of Congress. Those of us here in Congress know this is a resource for us. There is absolutely no reason that the President of the United States should be meddling with our repository. It is really inappropriate and wrong. That is why it hadn't happened prior to that. Congressman Gerry Connolly made this observation about the firing of Ms. Hayden, the librarian. With this decision, Donald Trump continues his attempts to censor our history, bend our culture to his will, and interfere with the free flow of information among the American people. It is a national disgrace. I couldn't agree more. The reality is that, despite the executive order, this administration is actually making it more difficult for children and adults to learn about American history. They are slashing museum budgets by gutting the Institute of Museum and Library Services. They are defunding public broadcasting and public television. The President does not decide what is worthy of being in a museum, and he shouldn't decide what is worthy of being in a library. He should not be deciding what our children learn in school, and he should not be afraid of American history. Knowing our history makes us stronger because knowledge is power. That power, the power of the truth, belongs to all Americans. It is the basis of our democracy. It is the key to our future. It is critical, as the United States moves forward, that we preserve our history, learn our history, and understand our history so that we don't repeat the negative aspects of our history. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues and the Congressional Black Caucus for their work on this matter.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, it is an honor to be here on behalf of the Congressional Black Caucus to address and speak to these issues because they are so timely. There are new developments that come every day that keep us guessing as to what the Trump administration is going to do from one moment to the next. I am going to talk about this plane from Qatar toward the end. Mr. Speaker, I want to speak today about my deep concern about the appropriations and budget processes as established by the Constitution because they are broken. I rise out of deep concern for our institution, our responsibilities, and for the American people who elected us to make decisions. The continuing resolutions that we have been passing are temporary stopgaps, but they have become the norm. It is not just a failure of a process. It is a failure of President Trump's leadership and House Republican leadership. Trump's economic failures include trying to make his tax cuts permanent, the DOGE cuts, and the irresponsibility of the tariff packages. Thank goodness, I think he backed away a few days ago with respect to cutting a deal with China, but that is only for 90 days. The challenge of the erratic and illegal behavior he has been exhibiting is that it really puts companies in a very difficult spot. Companies have to make decisions not just moment to moment, as apparently President Trump does, but over months and sometimes years, especially if they are going to make major decisions about something like investing to build a new plant. That can cost millions or even billions of dollars. When he does things like puts up 130-something percent in tariffs against one of the main trading partners of the United States, like China, it creates a major problem for companies that trade with China and that get their materials or send their finished products to China. Many of them are small American businesses. We have seen and heard from many of those over the past couple of days. I have been listening to some who are toy manufacturers. They talk about what has happened to their companies on the radio. They are concerned about what might happen for them during the Christmas holidays, a key time of year for their businesses. The Trump administration didn't pay any attention to that. In fact, he just moved forward with the tariffs that he put in place. He did so not just against China, not just against our adversaries, but against allies like Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, and other countries. It has been devastating to the American economy and businesses across the country. He ran for election telling the American people that he was going to make their economic lives better and that he was going to help them financially be better off than they were under the Biden administration. However, it is clear in the first 6 months that what he has been doing is he is not putting money in their pockets, he is taking it out. I think it is critical for us to make sure we understand fully what is going on here with respect to the packages that they are trying to move. He is trying to do this mainly through executive order. He has been unable to move major pieces of legislation through the House, and House leadership hasn't pressed him to do it, even though we are supposed to be doing these things through the appropriations process. As a matter of fact, the Constitution gave us the obligation to move these bills through the appropriations process, but the Republican leadership in the House has failed to do that. The failure to pass these appropriations bills has led to things like Federal workers are being forced out of their positions. Some of them are concerned about whether their paychecks are going to come. Small businesses, we just mentioned a moment ago, especially those who are relying on government contracts, are having trouble making payroll. In some of those instances, they have already done the work that they are supposed to get paid for. However, the Trump administration has done two things. One is it has withdrawn contracts, but it has also, even though they performed the work, refused to make the payments and forced some of these companies to shut down and fire some of their employees even though they already did the work. We are also going to have challenges I think, too, with respect to communities who have been hit by major disasters. Unfortunately, I just saw while we were waiting to start this process a few minutes ago, we had three major natural disasters today across the country, but FEMA is under attack, and the funding is being cut. With respect to reconciliation, as we just talked about a moment ago, the $881 billion in cuts to Medicaid are a shocking development. We know what that could mean for communities across the country is that hospitals have to shut down, medical treatment facilities might have to be closed, and people who perform medical services like doctors and nurses might not be available. Certainly, in urban areas and suburban areas like mine, there is going to be a major impact from that, and in red States and rural districts as well. I just heard a report on the radio last week. It was talking about a district in a rural area where I think they said that 70 percent of their funding comes through Medicaid in one way or another. If these cuts are made then that hospital is going to have to close and if that hospital closes then it creates, essentially, a medical desert going 200 miles each way. So the next time you have a serious car accident in that area, Mr. Speaker, they are going to have a tough time getting people the care that they need for any kind of medical emergency, say perhaps from a complication in a birth scenario or basic day-to-day medical services, they are going to have to drive hundreds of miles, in some instances, just to go see a doctor. With respect to the impoundment issue, I want to raise that too because the Trump administration has started making the argument that even though money has been appropriated, they don't have to spend it. The reason they are trying to do that is because they want to take control away from Congress. They want to take control of the power of the purse that was given to Congress through the Constitution. They want to do that so they can marginalize Congress and make the spending decisions that they want to make. We saw that with the $1.6 trillion, the Trump administration decided how to spend that because we didn't pass a regular appropriations set of bills. We had to do it through the continuing resolution. It left them discretion that I don't think they should have. I have to say I am concerned about the way he has used that discretion in some of these processes. They have made budget cuts, for example, to VOCA. That stands for the Victims of Crime Act. They are cutting grants to help people who are victims of crime. Why would he take a step like that? The Violence Against Women Act, VAWA, is to help women who are surviving sexual assault and domestic violence. Why would he cut a program like that? They cut USAID programs. One of our colleagues referenced earlier about how that has had a positive impact on the starvation issues, the USAID efforts. However, they are cutting programs that will to lead to, I saw one estimate, 1.6 million people who will die over the next year based on these cuts that he is making right now to foreign aid. We stopped funding AmeriCorps, which means less teachers in areas that are in desperate need of teaching assistants. We have a lot of schools out there who are short on full-time teachers. They are certainly short on full-time certified teachers. Cuts to AmeriCorps just exacerbate the problem. Cutting rental subsidies means that low-income families will have trouble keeping a roof over their heads. The Trump administration is going to make it even harder for them to do that. Why would we take that step? How is that consistent with the promise he made to help American people who needed help the most? He is making cuts to mental health services. We have got kids who are struggling in school. They are bullied sometimes. We have some scenarios where we have serious violent attacks in the schools. It might be a mass shooting from a gun situation. It might be something less serious than that. We have got kids who need assistance with their mental health challenges across the country, and making cuts to those sorts of programs only makes it harder for these kids to survive and get through the school process. There are cuts to NIH. Now, I know he had, frankly, a vendetta, essentially, against Dr. Fauci, and he is taking that out on many of the health institutions, like the NIH. However, at the end of the day, it is clear that the NIH has been and continues to be, hopefully, at least if it can survive these cuts, one of the premier institutions that do medical research that makes a difference here in the United States and around the world. He is cutting medical research on cancer. I am a cancer survivor. It is important to folks like me, and there are a lot of folks who are cancer survivors. The only reason we are still here is because of the medical advances that were made at places like NIH based on research that was done using government funding. That is how these things happen. Alzheimer's is another one. My father died from Alzheimer's. It is one of the most horrific diseases you can possibly imagine. Mr. Speaker, you would never even wish it on your worst enemy. It is hard to even explain how tragic it is to watch a human being slide from being the full person that they were into something ravaged by Alzheimer's. They cut funding for clinical trials for Alzheimer's at NIH. The thing about clinical trials that you need to remember, Mr. Speaker, it is not like an off switch. You don't just flick it on and off and it comes right back. If you shut down a clinical trial, Mr. Speaker, you might have to start that all the way from scratch. In some instances, the research and the projects that have been going forward under that have taken years. So he is setting that back years and months. Why? Why would he do that? He is making cuts to grants to help people who want to go into the science fields. The United States, certainly in the last 50 years and the postwar era, has been the premier nation with respect to science and technology and innovation. That is how we got Apple, that is how we got Microsoft, and that is why we have quantum computing. All of these fantastic innovations and giant steps forward came from the United States, in part because of the research that was funded in part by the Federal Government. The people who developed many of those advances got their training and got their college and Ph.D.s paid for using funding that helped them get through school. They wouldn't have been able to pay for it otherwise. Yet the Trump administration is making cuts not just to those programs but also to the grants and funding that help those people get through. To add insult to injury, he makes personal attacks on research institutions like Harvard, which has been the source of some of the best, the brightest, and most talented who have taken leadership in these fields. He is making threats to undermine those institutions and those universities just out of personal venom. It makes absolutely no sense. It is damaging to the United States, and it undermines our leadership in science and technology in the world. He says it is America first, but sometimes it feels like China first. Sometimes it feels as if he is actually trying to help the Communist Chinese Party leadership surge ahead of the United States in its leadership role in science and technology. Then there are $40 million in cuts for election security. I know he still says that he won the 2020 election. Okay, fine. However, one of the things we can all agree on for sure is that we know the Russians and the Chinese and, in some instances, Iran and terrorist organizations around the world are making efforts to influence our elections with misinformation, disinformation, and the like. Why would we ever make our elections more vulnerable to those kinds of attacks by cutting the funding that helps defend against it? I will stop with this regarding the plane. When I first saw that on the news, I thought it was a joke. I thought it was a clip from Saturday Night Live or something. I never imagined that the Trump administration or the Trump family would even consider taking a $400- million plane from a country like Qatar, which is not exactly an adversary country but certainly it is not an ally country. It is a foreign country. The reason the Emoluments Clause was put in place in the Constitution was to make sure that Presidents of the United States of America, whether it is number one or number 47, are not tempted or tested with these kinds of, essentially, bribes to try and get them to lean and issue support for their countries in making decisions. We want to make sure we have people like the President of the United States not tested by the money and not tempted by the money but always making the decisions for the best possible reasons and the best interests of the United States. However, here we have a $400-million plane, and apparently, he will eventually own it personally. Now, Mr. Speaker, tell me why that is beneficial for the country. It creates conflicts of interest and then some, because we have all of these issues with Qatar, including the negotiations with the Gaza conflict. How is this going to be beneficial to the United States to create these levels of conflict? Even if he can rise above them, the appearance of the conflicts is ridiculous, it is astonishing, and it is unacceptable. The National Review, not exactly a liberal rag and not exactly a liberal bastion, has said that the swamp is under new ownership. So much for the commitments that he made to the American people when he first ran and when he ran again to so-called clean up the swamp. Here we are. It violates the Constitution. I think on its face he should know better, and I am sure that everybody in the Congress knows that sometimes he needs guardrails. He always needs guardrails. This is the moment we have to make sure we stand up and put the guardrails in place. To my colleagues here in Congress: Let's get back to work. Let's stand up and address this issue. As far as the conflicts of interest with the plane, let's make it clear that we unanimously oppose him taking the plane, certainly on behalf of the United States, and certainly in his personal capacity. We unanimously want to move forward with a budget that is fair and reasonable and helps the American people, not one that takes $881 billion out of their pockets, out of the pockets of kids, out of the pockets of seniors, out of the pockets of the disabled, and the people who need it the most. We have to make sure that when the budget process is done, we are protecting the people who need it the most. Right now it looks like we are taking from the most vulnerable to give to the most wealthy, like Elon Musk and his allies. We have got to reverse that process. I want to commend the gentlewoman for pulling this together, my colleagues with the Congressional Black Caucus, my colleagues in the Democratic Caucus, and, hopefully, my colleagues in the Republican caucus who will stand up and say: We can't do this. We cannot cross these lines. The plane is over the line. The $881 billion in cuts to Medicaid is over the line. The no more appropriations bills, that is over the line. Let's get back to work. Let's engage in clear and proper oversight, and let's address these problems and do the work that helps the American people.

Mr. IVEY

Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from California, my colleague from Ohio, and the previous speakers. It is an honor to be here, not just as a Member of Congress, but to be here as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, especially at a time like this. I rise today not just with concern, but with alarm. In his first 100 days back in the White House, Donald Trump has unleashed a full-blown assault on America, on our institutions, on our workers, on the rule of law, and on democracy itself. This is not leadership. This is a broken promise. I will talk a little bit as we go forward about the promises that now President Trump made during the campaign, especially with respect to the economy. He said he was going to put money back in people's pockets, but as we have seen dramatically in the first 100 days, it has been quite the opposite. I had one friend tell me that his 401(k) had turned into a 101(K) after Trump put his destructive tariffs in place. It has been damaging not just for people who own stocks, not just for people who are small business owners, but for every American across the country. Unfortunately, it looks like it is going to get worse in short order. I will start first with government workers. The President promised to tackle government waste, but it has been anything but that, as we have seen his administration systematically targeted the Federal workforce, gutting critical agencies, sidelining career professionals, and pushing out civil servants not for failing to do their jobs, but for doing them too well. I will talk about the waste piece for just a moment here, too. I know they said he is out here trying to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, but we know that is not right because one of the first things he did was fire the investigators who were in charge of ferreting out waste, fraud, and abuse. They are called inspectors general. He fired 18 of them all at once almost on his first day in office, so you know he is not trying to cut back on waste, fraud, and abuse. What he is trying to do actually is eliminate nonpolitical Federal workers, people who have gotten their positions based on merit, people who are distinguished in their careers, have outstanding experience, great credentials, but he is trying to force them out so he can replace them with people who are politically loyal to him. I just want to chat a little bit about the firing of these people because I know a lot of folks across the country are not in love with government workers. They think maybe it is a good thing to get rid of government workers, but I am asking people to keep in mind the dire consequences of these terminations. For example, he terminated people who were running clinical trials at NIH, clinical trials on things like Alzheimer's, cancer, and measles. Take the measles one, for example. I ran into a woman at a church I was attending a few weeks ago. She had a Ph.D., and she was working on a clinical trial in measles. The idea was to figure out how to address the measles outbreak that has just been happening. On that front, think about this: Basically, measles had been eradicated in the United States. At this point, though, last I heard a few days ago, we have 2,000 people in the United States who are now suffering from measles, and we have actually had two people die--one of them a child--from measles, something that has been eradicated, and we have been addressing for decades now, but it is catching its steam again and starting to kill more people. The Alzheimer's piece is especially of concern to me. My father died from Alzheimer's, and watching that happen is like ripping your heart out. They had clinical trials going on Alzheimer's which were shut down based on the terminations of the Trump administration. The thing about clinical trials that you need to remember is it is not like a light switch. You don't just switch it right back on again. When you shut down a clinical trial, some of which have been running for years and have cost thousands, potentially even millions of dollars, you can't just start it right back up again. You have to start over with those. The decision he made to shut down these clinical trials will push back the ability to have cures for some of the most debilitating and dangerous diseases facing humanity today. Cuts to hospitals is another one. Now, closures of rural and urban hospitals in many instances are going to be a result of the Medicaid cuts that they are talking about making right now, and that is not just President Trump, that is some of my House Republican colleagues here, too. Make no mistake: That is going to lead to hospitals closing in the places where they are needed most. I just read an op-ed over the weekend about a doctor who was working in a rural area, and his hospital was dead center between hospitals that are 200 miles apart, so if his hospital has to shut down, you would have to drive 100 miles each way to get to another hospital. He talked about the emergency surgery that they had performed once when there was an accident near where his hospital was located. If they hadn't had the hospital there and been able to provide the emergency treatment that they provided, those people would have died. He is talking about closing these hospitals down. Make sure you understand, too, for many areas, this is the only access to medical care that those communities have. Not only that, those hospitals are economic engines for those communities because for many of them, those are the jobs in those communities that the people turn to and need the most. Schools. Terminating title I funding or cutting it back to the extent they have talked about I have been told could lead to the shutdown of a number of schools, not just in urban areas, but in rural areas, as well because the title I funding goes to teachers who are teaching at low- income schools, based on the formulas that they use to make those determinations. You are going to have teachers being lost, teachers who were terminated in the schools and districts where they are the most needed. In many of these areas, those are the schools that are still trying to catch up from the losses that were caused during the COVID outbreak. We shouldn't be shutting these down. We should be expanding the resources that they have, but those title I schools are at risk. Firing veterans. When they fire these government workers, one thing they don't seem to remember is that 30 percent of all government workers across the country are veterans. Keep in mind, too, these aren't just people in the D.C. metropolitan area. Eighty percent of government workers live outside of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. There are jurisdictions and States and communities across the country, providing services that those communities need. They won't miss the water until the well runs dry. Mr. Speaker, I will stop with this one, just on the government cuts piece. There have been cuts for victims of crime. There are VOCA cuts and VAWA cuts. VOCA stands for Victims of Crime Act, VAWA stands for Violence Against Women Act. These are the type of funds, grants that have been making a difference in law enforcement across the country and in fights against things like domestic violence and sexual abuse, and he is making the cuts there, too. It is not just there. I will chat a little bit about the rule of law issue here, too. The President promised to uphold the law, as he must do. All of us take an oath when we are sworn in--the President, all of us in Congress, I even took one when I was elevated to become a Federal prosecutor. He is not following that oath, though. As a matter of fact, we have seen this administration illegally deny due process rights despite a Supreme Court order to return my constituent, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, back to the United States. Just a moment on that. Kilmar was deported from the United States even though a judge had given an order saying that he could not be sent to El Salvador until another determination was made. Not only did they send him to El Salvador in violation of that order, they sent him to one of the worst jails in the world, which houses MS-13, which is the exact group that that judge said he was supposed to be kept away from. That is where they sent him. The Supreme Court said: You need to facilitate his return. The Trump administration has made no efforts whatsoever to do that. As a matter of fact, President Trump was sitting in the Oval Office with President Bukele, the President of El Salvador, and they were joking about it. Last week, when President Trump did an interview, he said, yeah, he could just pick up the phone and have him brought back, but he is not going to do it, despite the Supreme Court order. There have been other orders, too, that they are ignoring and not following. This isn't just a problem for Mr. Garcia. Think about that 4-year-old child who was deported last week, the one with stage IV cancer who was sent out of the United States with no medicine, no chance to talk to his doctor. Is that what America has become? Apparently that is what Donald Trump thinks the people want. I have to tell you, that is absolutely the wrong path for this Nation to be taking. I know we want to deal with the immigration issue, but we can't do it at the expense of children, and we can't do it at the expense of violating basic due process rights. Guess what, Mr. Speaker? The judges who have told him that are not just the Supreme Court but sometimes conservative Republican judges like Judge Wilkinson in the Fourth Circuit based in Richmond. He is one of the most conservative judges in the country and a Reagan appointee. He chastised the Trump administration for violating basic due process. Basically, he said it could not be more obvious than this, that a person should have a chance to have his day in court before something as drastic as deportation happens to him. Not only did Trump ignore that but he talked about deporting American citizens when he was sitting there with the President of El Salvador. I raised concerns about that. I had Republican friends who got on me about it. Guess what? The House Committee on the Judiciary and the Committee on Homeland Security had votes. The Democrats proposed amendments that said let's make it illegal, let's make a ban on deporting American citizens. Every Republican on both committees voted against that ban. That is where we are right now. Let me talk a little bit about tariffs. The President promised to make our lives more affordable. He said America was too expensive. Yet, his tariffs have sent the Nation into a tailspin. Mr. Speaker, I guess you could say there are times when tariffs might make sense, but he did it the exact worst way possible that it could be done. He did tariffs on all countries and on all products at the exact same time. There is no way that can work, and there is no reason to do it because sometimes tariffs are placed on things that we don't even make in the United States. We don't grow bananas. We don't grow coffee. We don't grow chocolate. Why is he imposing tariffs on those items? Then, the tariffs he imposed on some of our best allies, like Canada, disrupted the automobile market. They are still struggling to try to get their way. He backed off of the giant tariffs that he put in, but he left 10 percent tariffs in place. We are still in the middle of one of the worst trade wars we have ever seen in human history based on--what is it?--140 percent now with China. At some point, it is going to be zillions, I suppose, with those sorts of tariffs. The bottom line is it is going to take the country into a recession, and we know it. I hope that we get a sense of how to pull this back together. I saw the President making comments, and he doubled down on them the other day. This is the one about maybe kids will have to get just two dolls instead of 30 dolls or something. Maybe it will cost a little bit more. I guess that was his best ``bah, humbug'' imitation to sort of make light of the fact that these tariffs that he has put in place are going to make things more expensive for the American people. That is in contrast and the exact opposite of what he promised to do when he ran for office and was elected. That is not right. President Trump, Elon Musk, and their billionaire buddies have pushed a budget that is nothing short of a war on working families. While Trump and House Republicans push for new handouts for the wealthy, we have massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and SNAP. The same man who claims to champion the forgotten American is cutting healthcare for the disabled, for children, and for seniors. This is an administration that rules not with hope but with fear, and it is using the machinery of government not to serve the people but to punish the President's perceived enemies, including those who brought January 6 rioters to justice. I will take just a moment on that. He actually forced out the Department of Justice prosecutors who did nothing but handle cases that they were supposed to handle. I guess he is going to say that they were mishandled in some way. Guess what? The prosecution of the January 6 rioters resulted in more than 1,000 convictions. My recollection is there might have been two or three acquittals during that period, but everything else was a conviction. Let's say even more people have been acquitted. That doesn't mean these prosecutors did anything wrong. It certainly doesn't mean that they should be forced out of their positions. It is the same thing with the FBI agents. They sent over a list of 5,000 FBI agents to the Department of Justice. Guess what the common denominator was? They had all worked on January 6 investigations. Instead of our FBI agents focusing on terrorism or organized crime, they have to look over their shoulders because they know the President is coming after them. He has the Department of Justice weaponized not to go after the criminals but to go after career FBI agents who have done nothing but serve the public and fight crime for the American people. Mr. Speaker, let me be clear. As we move past 100 days, I will never stop fighting for those I represent against the abuses of this administration. We are not just battling over budgets. We are battling over the future of the country we wish to have--not a government for the wealthy and well-connected but a government that works for all people. This is not business as usual. House Democrats are standing up and fighting back. Mr. Speaker, I commend my colleagues for tonight and for pulling this together and doing such an outstanding job in moving this forward. I am thankful for the people out there, the people in communities across the country who have come to rallies. Some are Democrats; some aren't. Some are Republicans; some aren't. They are coming out to express their concerns about the direction this Nation is taking. Mr. Speaker, I thank them for doing that and for making sure they remember that they have the ultimate power. They are the ones who determine what happens with this democracy, and now is the time for them to stand up and for us to stand with them.