Jamie Raskin

Mr. RASKIN

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Simon).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to include in the Record the text of this amendment immediately prior to the vote on the motion to recommit.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Washington.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield the gentleman from New York an additional 15 seconds to conclude.

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I am delighted to be here with you and with the gentlewoman from Florida. Mr. Speaker, America's immigration laws are like an admissions policy for the country: How do you get into America, who gets kicked out of America, and for what reasons. Our immigration laws today will get you kicked out, deported from the country if you commit rape, other sex offenses, domestic violence, or, indeed, any other crime of violence. That is the law today. You are convicted, you are deported, you are out. That has been the law for decades in America. Our immigration law establishes a similar policy on the way in. It provides that anyone seeking admission to America who has committed a violent sex offense or a crime of domestic violence is inadmissible to our country. Since the 1930s, case law has made it perfectly clear that rape, domestic violence, and sexual battery are all ``crimes involving moral turpitude,'' which make the perpetrator inadmissible to America. That has been the law in our country for decades. What does H.R. 30 add? If committing a sexual assault or domestic violence will already render you deportable and inadmissible under our laws, why do we need to create another section of the law doing the same thing? Is it necessary, or is it redundant? Of course, its being redundant or unnecessary may not be a sufficient reason to vote against the bill. After all, I cheerfully admit that this body, under the stewardship of our friends, passes a lot of unnecessary and redundant legislation in the House just to send a message, as they say. Perhaps this is what our friends set out to do today, to pass another simple messaging bill. The complication today is this: The way this messaging bill is actually written will create big problems for many, many victims of domestic violence. That is why more than 200 national, State, and local groups advocating for the victims of rape and the survivors of domestic violence, the people across America we should be listening to today, strongly oppose the bill our colleagues have brought forward. The National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence sent us a letter urging us to reject H.R. 30. I urge every single Member of Congress to read this letter carefully before you vote on this bill. The groups fighting domestic violence warn that this legislation ``can ultimately have devastating consequences for immigrant victims of domestic violence.'' The signers of this letter include a range of national groups like the YWCA, National Council of Jewish Women, AFL-CIO, Coalition of Labor Union Women, and dozens of State and local groups, like the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault, Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault, Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Catholic Charities in Omaha, Nebraska, and dozens and dozens more from States across the country. Please read this letter. These are groups working to change the law and culture to stop rape and domestic violence in our country, but they see that this poorly drafted legislation would end up harming untold numbers of victims of domestic violence themselves, the putative beneficiaries of the act. Here is why: When it comes to crimes involving moral turpitude, there are exceptions in the law to protect domestic violence victims who often get swept up in the very laws designed to protect them. Anyone who has ever been a prosecutor or a public defender in this Chamber knows that it is common for abusers to accuse their victims of domestic violence themselves and assault, sometimes truthfully, often falsely. In any event, it is well known that the victims get arrested, prosecuted, and sometimes even convicted simply for defending themselves and fighting back against their abusers and rapists. Here is a real-life example drawn from the domestic violence survivor advocacy groups opposing their legislation. A young woman on a student visa here was trapped in an abusive relationship, and her estranged boyfriend tried to rape her. She fought back, biting his ear and drawing blood. She then called the police to report the rape, but upon seeing the boyfriend's injury, the officers also arrested the female victim, whose language skills kept her from comprehensively explaining what had happened at that point. She spent several days in jail and was ultimately convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence, but the judge sentenced her to time served once she got a lawyer and translation services, which allowed the context of the violent abuse that she had been enduring to become made plain to the police and the court. Because of exceptions that exist in our laws today, this woman was not deemed inadmissible to America because her simple assault charge carried less than a 6-month penalty. Under the new bill, which would establish inadmissibility without any waivers or exceptions at all for victims, she would clearly have to be deemed inadmissible to America. No exceptions would exist any longer for domestic violence victims who have committed minor crimes in the context of resisting their violent abuse. This means that the victim in this case, who is legally in the United States on a student visa while she attends college, would be barred permanently from obtaining a green card or any new immigration status simply because she was a victim of an attempted rape who fought back against her attacker. With no ability ever to adjust her status under the law, she would be deported and kicked out of our country permanently. Some might say that this is the price she should rightly pay for biting or hitting back at her violent abuser, but do we really want to say that we would not want our daughters, sisters, or mothers to do the same in that situation? Should we really compound the horrors of domestic violence and assaults with a harsh immigration penalty on victims? Do we want to give domestic abusers more power over their victims by giving them more opportunities to file charges, true or false, against their victims to keep them from reporting their abuse to authorities? It seems we live in a time, Mr. Speaker, when it is very easy to forgive sexual abusers, assailants, rapists, and sexual harassers who have a lot of power and wealth in society but very hard to forgive their victims for fighting back. Look what is going on across the hallway. Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman at a conference in 2017 and entered into a major private financial settlement over the charges, and there are people planning to vote for this legislation today who also support his nomination. Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon and her husband were recently sued for failing to act on credible allegations of sexual abuse within the World Wrestling Entertainment organization. Finally, of course, the President-elect's initial pick for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, faces numerous allegations of sex trafficking a minor and statutory rape. There are civil adjudications of sexual abuse going to the very top of the new administration. The law, as it stands today and as we have had it for decades, provides for waivers to protect the immigration status of victims of domestic violence who are charged with fighting back against their abuser. While the proposed bill would retain waivers for victims in the deportability context, it would not allow for waivers or exceptions in the inadmissibility context. I don't know why this asymmetry and discordance were written into this legislation, whether it was deliberate or just accidental, but the upshot is that the entire national movement working to arrest and reduce domestic violence in America is now opposing this bill that claims to be in support of the victims of domestic violence. We note another serious problem with the bill, which makes it backfire again against victims. It would significantly expand the definition of ``domestic violence'' to include the statutory Violence Against Women Act definition that is used for the civil context of grants and funding. This much broader definition was never designed to be used in criminal law. In fact, the definition explicitly says that it covers conduct ``that may or may not constitute criminal behavior.'' The definition of domestic violence under existing Federal criminal law, which is currently also used in immigration law, focuses on the element, Mr. Speaker, of physical force, but the broader VAWA-based definition appropriately fitted for grant and funding purposes sweeps in a broad range of behaviors, including verbal, psychological, economic, or technological abuse. Once again, in the inadmissibility context, this transposition can have severe consequences. Imagine a domestic violence victim covered by DACA who flees her abuser and removes half of the money from their joint bank account, enough to get a train or bus ticket to get away. Imagine the abuser calls the police and claims that she stole money from him and committed a theft. By merely admitting to the fact that she took funds out of their bank account, the victim could end up being deemed inadmissible and then removed from America. Remember, the new inadmissibility grounds created by this bill do not require a conviction but a mere admission of the underlying facts. The point is clear: If our goal is to prevent violence against women by illegal aliens, as the bill's title says, our current criminal and immigration laws already do that. We have strict punishments in place for anyone who commits such crimes, including deportation and inadmissibility for foreign nationals. This bill would only make the immigration laws much harsher on the victims of domestic violence, sexual battery, and rape, which is the opposite of what we should be doing. America, when it lives up to its ideals, as Tom Paine said, will become an asylum to humanity, not an insane asylum, mind you, but a place of refuge for people seeking freedom from religious, political, and economic oppression, and also, I might add, the kind of private gender violence that creates oppression and tyranny in the home. Two centuries later, Ronald Reagan echoed the sentiment, reminding us that America was a ``shining city upon a hill,'' a refuge ``for all the Pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.'' Last year, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act, and we must continue our work to oppose the tyranny of domestic violence over women in our country, but this legislation would set back our efforts to protect survivors and to stop abuse. Mr. Speaker, I ask the majority to reconsider this legislation and for my colleagues to join us in opposing it. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I wonder if our colleagues could explain why more than 200 groups advocating for women's rights and women's security are opposing this legislation? Can they explain why the groups that are on the front lines of opposing domestic violence reject their legislation as sloppy and bound to hurt the victims? We have heard no explanation about that, and we reject the slur that we are somehow standing up for the abusers here when we are standing up for the victims. This legislation, if it were to pass, would actually make it a lot easier for the abusers to terrify and intimidate the victims. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the very distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. Correa).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 15 seconds to the gentlewoman from Wisconsin.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Wisconsin (Ms. Moore).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. I can't blame my colleagues because they ran on a platform of doing better than Joe Biden on the economy, but he gave us an economy that is the glory of the world and ``the envy of the world,'' as The Economist magazine put it recently. It created 16 million new jobs, a roaring stock market, and a revived manufacturing sector. Instead of doing anything to lower the price of groceries, which is what they promised, and to lower the price of energy, which they promised, they come back and basically ask us to pass what is already in the law but they subtract from their duplicative and redundant section the waivers and exceptions that protect the victims and survivors of domestic violence. Instead, they just want to associate all immigrants with criminal delinquency. The vast majority of rapes in America of American women are committed by citizens, and the vast majority of noncitizens never commit rapes. Donald Trump released 58,184 noncitizens with criminal records who came in during his administration, including 8,620 violent criminals and 306 murderers. ICE ended up rearresting 11,000 noncitizens who had been admitted under Donald Trump. We can sit here and demagogue back and forth and say, ``You let someone in who did something bad. You let someone in who did something criminal,'' but we are not going to do that. We want to make progress for America. Let's reject this opportunistic, silly bill, and let's move forward to guarantee the safety of America's women. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining?

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, the Biden administration brought us back from a devastating pandemic and the Trump economic crisis by investing in American workers, American manufacturing, and American infrastructure. Our policies for the working-class majority instead of the tiny rapacious billionaire class pulled our economy back from the brink. Today, our Nation's economic strength is ``the envy of the world,'' as The Economist magazine put it, with an unemployment rate of 4.2 percent, wages rising across America, and the gross domestic product growing at a robust 3.1 percent. Moreover, the murder rate is way down in America. Unlawful immigration at the southern border is now below where it was when Donald Trump left office 4 years ago. The roaring stock market, which is what Trump and his billionaire entourage care about, just completed its strongest 2 years in a quarter century. Now, it is time to make sure all Americans enjoy the benefits of this astonishing economic growth. We should be coming together today to increase the minimum wage, to lift children out of poverty, and to strengthen unions, Social Security, Medicare, and the middle class. Donald Trump is instead assembling a billionaire Cabinet from the top 0.00003 percent of the wealthiest Americans, drawing the top tier of his new administration from poolside cocktail hour at Mar-a-Lago and setting up the broligarchs and the plutocrats to plunder an even larger share of government contracts and public resources. Trump campaigned on the seductive promise of bringing down the high post-COVID-19 prices for rent, groceries, consumer goods, and healthcare, but now he is preparing to give power over the economy to his team of globe-trotting, dictator-dealing CEOs and billionaires, the very people responsible for exploiting the pandemic to increase prices in the first place. I doubt the billionaire oligarchs have any interest in bringing down the cost of living for the working middle class in America, but if they do, Democrats stand ready to work with them. After all, we are the ones who dramatically lowered prescription drug prices in Medicare, capping out-of-pocket monthly expenses at $35 a month. I had constituents who were paying $500 a month for insulin as diabetics before that, and it is capped now at $35 a month. We capped annual total out-of-pocket expenditures for prescription drugs at $2,000 a year. It was the MAGA Republicans deep in the pocket of Big Pharma who categorically and vehemently opposed us every step of the way on lowering prescription drug prices in Medicare. If our colleagues now have good policy proposals for continuing to lower prices as we have done, which is what they campaigned on, by all means, bring the proposals forward. Let's see them. Democrats have repeatedly crossed the aisle to hammer out bipartisan compromise. Last year, President Biden and Senate Democrats worked with the ultraconservative Republican Senator James Lankford to arrive at a tough bipartisan border security deal, but President Trump aggressively tanked the deal, openly expressing his preference for rallying against a border crisis rather than actually developing a border solution. Now, today, the Republicans are on the floor but not with their long- awaited, entirely missing policy solutions to the problems of inflation or immigration. Instead, their bill today is an empty and opportunistic measure. It is not, like the compromise they tanked in the last Congress, a bill for greater border security or better technology in the ports of entry, expanding legal pathways to immigration and citizenship for millions of people, or addressing huge immigrant visa backlogs. No, this bill would upend 28 years of mandatory immigration detention policy by requiring that any undocumented immigrant arrested for theft, larceny, or shoplifting be detained even if they are never convicted or even charged with a crime. This is a radical departure from current law, which since 1996 has generally required mandatory detention only for persons who are criminally convicted or who admit to having committed certain serious crimes--that is, when criminal guilt is certain and established beyond a reasonable doubt. Under this bill, a person who has lived in the United States for decades, say for most of her life, paid taxes, and bought a home, but who is mistakenly arrested for shoplifting would not be free to resume her life. Rather, she would be detained and deported even if the charges are dropped and even if the police admit that the arrest was mistaken. Consider a young Dreamer or TPS recipient who is with a group of friends after school and someone in the group shoplifts, stealing a candy bar. To scare the whole group straight, everyone is arrested, whether they were involved in the shoplifting or not. However, nobody is charged, and the charges are dropped. For most of the kids, it is a humiliating afternoon and a valuable life lesson, but for one of them, a young person who has been in America lawfully for years with his or her family, the consequences would be devastating under this legislation--mandatory detention and deportation from the country just for having been arrested, even if never charged. It seems to me passing strange, Mr. Speaker, that our friends are taking this position when they do not even believe that the criminal justice system can be trusted when a jury unanimously convicts someone who has had the best legal representation money can buy in the State of New York on 34 different felony criminal counts after an extended criminal trial with all due process protections, including cross- examination and the right to counsel being afforded. If the criminal justice process cannot be trusted to identify a truly guilty person even when that person has been arrested, charged, indicted, prosecuted, represented at every stage, given an opportunity to cross-examine all witnesses, and to testify personally, and then is unanimously convicted by a jury of his peers beyond a reasonable doubt, how can the criminal justice process be trusted to identify a truly guilty person just with an arrest and no indictment, no prosecution, no cross-examination, no neutral adjudication by an impartial judge, no fact-finding, and no criminal conviction by a 12-person jury beyond a reasonable doubt? Mandatory detention has always been reserved for people who are convicted of crimes and actually commit crimes. Expanding the detention requirement to include every person who has merely been accused of or arrested for, even if not charged for shoplifting, for example, collapses the distinction between actual conviction on serious events versus simply being charged with or arrested for something very minor even if the charges don't even lead anywhere. Congress has never even appropriated sufficient resources to detain all noncitizens who do fall under the currently serious mandatory detention categories. Even President Trump, during his first term, never tried to detain all migrants theoretically subject to mandatory detention. Therefore, this extremely elastic new provision adds nothing to the equation other than more empty rhetoric and greater bureaucratic bloat. The bill also seeks to give State governments authority and control over the Federal immigration system by trespassing on the Article II executive power in a way that eight out of nine Justices on the Supreme Court completely repudiated 2 years ago as a blatant violation of the separation of powers. The bill seeks to give State attorneys general precisely what the Supreme Court has denied: constitutional standing to sue the Federal Government in court for perceived violations of sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act so States can block Federal immigration policies, capsizing the Supremacy Clause and expanding judicial power to encroach upon executive discretion under Article II. In June of 2023, the Supreme Court in the United States v. Texas emphatically rejected the alleged standing of States to sue the Federal Government to alter the government's immigration arrest policies. This bill attempts a legislative bypass of this constitutional decision in U.S. v. Texas written by Justice Kavanaugh and joined by eight of nine Justices on the Court. In rejecting the States' standing argument, the Court observed, among other things, that lawsuits alleging insufficient arrests or prosecution run against the executive branch's exclusive Article II authority to enforce immigration law, which includes the discretion to determine enforcement priorities in the face of a chronic lack of resources and shifting public safety, public welfare, and foreign policy needs and priorities. If this bill were to become law, both provisions would have the perverse effect of undermining the Federal Government's efforts to prioritize the detention and the deportation of the truly most dangerous convicted felons. With the vastly expanded new statutory scope and new authority for States to get legal standing on steroids, the government can be sued by a State for not detaining everyone charged with or not even arrested for the pettiest of crimes like shoplifting. This bill tries to give States standing to sue for harms as small as $100, dramatically shifting power from the executive branch to the courts and the Federal Government to the States, both in ways considered completely dubious by the Supreme Court. Like many of the immigration-related bills the GOP is now advancing, this one seems to follow a simple strategy: Pick a crime, paste into it a template immigration law covering convicted criminals, and then require detention or deportation of certain persons merely accused of committing the crime or arrested for committing the crime. No due process is required at all. This allows us to get up and demonize immigrants without doing anything to fix the immigration system and to act tough without actually making America safer or solving any of the problems within the immigration laws. We should be working together on comprehensive, meaningful reform. My colleague from California invites us to believe that the only crimes committed by undocumented aliens are those who entered during the Biden administration. Well, in fact, if you look at it, hundreds of thousands, 500,000 crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in the first Trump administration, and over 1.1 million people who crossed during the first 4 years of his administration were eventually released from custody. One of the people released from custody, an undocumented alien, is charged with murdering 19-year-old Adam Luker from Alabama. Why don't we have a bill named after Adam Luker? Is it because of the inconvenient fact that the undocumented alien who killed him came in under Donald Trump? I would hate to think so. However, we can find lots of cases like that. That is not what we should be doing here in Congress. We should be seriously confronting the problems in a serious way together rather than just trying to make partisan hay out of other people's tragedies in their lives. Mr. Speaker, this legislation does not move the ball forward on any of the problems facing America, and they are being moved under closed rules without a hearing, without any legislative scrutiny. This means that no Member--not only just Democrats, but Republicans, too, no Member--can offer any amendments to repair the gaping flaws and gaps in these slapdash political bills. I would urge our colleagues to take a much more serious approach here. The murder of Laken Riley was an unspeakable and appalling crime, a heinous act, and no parent, no family should ever have to bear such a calamity. We must take clear steps to make sure that people who commit crimes like this are punished to the full extent of the law. I trust that my friends agree that those who commit horrific, violent crimes like these must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This bill fails to take any meaningful action to improve our broken immigration system and to prevent crimes like this from occurring again, whether the undocumented aliens entered under a Democratic administration, as they have, or a Republican administration, as they have. We are asked to vote on a bill that fails to address any of the real issues at stake, and we are foreclosed from offering any amendments to improve this sloppy and political product. Mr. Speaker, I urge all my colleagues to oppose this legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, in fact, the Democrats got behind a bipartisan border security bill, which beefed up law enforcement at the border, which beefed up judges at the border, and that was tanked by Donald Trump and by Republicans in the House. They are the ones, Mr. Speaker, who refuse to engage in meaningful legislative work to get the job done here. Democrats won't be lectured by our colleague that we don't stand up for the American people. The author of this legislation actually yesterday sent out a tweet, a social media statement, characterizing the January 6 violent assault on this Chamber where 140 officers were wounded, injured, and hospitalized by a rampaging mob this way: ``On this day in history, 2021,'' said the gentleman, ``thousands of peaceful grandmothers gathered in Washington, D.C., to take a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol Building.'' I like that touch, ``albeit unauthorized.'' ``Earlier that day, President Trump held a rally, where supporters walked to the Capitol to peacefully protest the certification of the 2020 election. During this time, some individuals entered the Capitol, took photos, and explored the building before leaving.'' Well, isn't that sweet. We see exactly how much faith and confidence they really have in the American criminal justice system and how much they really stand on the side of law enforcement. Yeah, it was a just a leisurely stroll by a bunch of peaceful grandmothers on January 6. These are the people that now are inviting us to dramatically change the immigration laws without even a hearing as to what it is going to mean in any particular case. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal).

Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. In answer to the distinguished gentleman, he stated precisely what the law is now. He said: How can we go back to our districts and not defend the immediate deporting of people who have committed theft? That is what the law is. They want to change the law to go from someone who has actually committed theft, or been convicted of theft, to people who have been charged with it, even if the charges have been dropped, or arrested for it, even if charges were never brought in the first place. I think that the misstatement of the meaning of this legislation speaks very deeply to what an opportunistic exercise this really is. What the gentleman was asking for is the law today. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Washington.

Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, I am moved by the words of the gentleman from New Jersey who said: Don't give us words. Words don't matter. Speeches don't cut it. Speeches don't do it. It sounds like an absolute echo of what you hear from our colleagues whenever there is an explosion of gun violence in any of our communities. We hear thoughts and prayers, lots of words, but no action. The fact that there is sympathy or condolences, I agree with the gentleman, is not enough. We need real public policy changes that will be effective and that will be constitutional. That is what the discussion is about today. Will these policy changes, in fact, be effective? Will they be constitutional or not? I agree that we should move from the situation of identifying and empathizing with people who have suffered terrible family tragedies and private tragedies to effective public policy. That is our job as legislators. Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time to close, and I thank the distinguished gentleman from California for this debate. I must say that the legislation before us and the approach that it embodies reflect a profound disrespect for our criminal justice system and for our constitutional values. To begin with, they want to change the mandatory detention provisions which we have had since 1996 on a bipartisan basis for the last 28 years. We have operated on the basis of criminal conviction, which is obviously congruent with the constitutional demands and values that we have in our country. Now, without having a legislative hearing, they want to radically revise the statutes to say that it is sufficient for somebody to have been charged with or arrested for an offense like shoplifting or theft, even if the charges are dropped and even if charges are never brought after an arrest is made. It seems to me that they are backtracking from purported fidelity to our constitutional values. Similarly, they want to essentially overthrow Justice Kavanaugh's 8-1 decision in the United States v. Texas from just a couple of years ago where the Supreme Court determined that States do not have standing to go to court to say that they don't like the way that a particular administration is allocating its resources and implementing a public policy. Now, if they want to argue that there is a law that is unconstitutional, they can argue that, but they can't go to court and simply say that the executive branch is implementing the law in a way that a particular State doesn't like. Yet, they want to occasion that massive shift of power, as Justice Kavanaugh characterized it, so that the States would essentially be able to control Federal immigration policy. I am still reeling from reading the author of this legislation's statements yesterday, which I think also speak to a fundamental disrespect for the rule of law, which says: Since January 6, hundreds of peaceful protesters have been hunted down, arrested, held in solitary confinement, and treated unjustly. Countless hours and taxpayer dollars have been spent pursuing innocent grandmothers and raiding President Trump's home while terrorists and millions of illegal immigrants continue to cross our Nation's borders. That is the fundamentally demagogic and lawless approach to this whole debate that they have taken. Our body was invaded by a mob of insurrectionists who injured 140 officers, wounding them and hospitalizing them, and they cannot even acknowledge that as a fact but instead change the subject to millions of people crossing the border illegally, which over the decades has undoubtedly happened under both Democrats and Republicans. That is what we should be working on today. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise in support of H.R. 9595, the FIT Procurement Act. This bill is modeled after a bipartisan Senate bill led by Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Gary Peters, along with Senator Cruz. The act streamlines and simplifies Federal procurement to help agencies acquire commercial technology in a timelier way and to make it easier for businesses to compete for contracts. Mr. Speaker, I am happy to support this bill today. I associate myself with the remarks of the distinguished gentleman from Missouri. I urge passage of this bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.