Jamie Raskin

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN.--despite the fact that DHS still has $100 billion sitting around unspent, and despite the fact they have done nothing, zero, to reform the King Kong police practices that left two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, dead, lying in their own blood in the streets of Minneapolis. Vote ``no.''

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I rise to remember the great Colman McCarthy, who recently passed away at the age of 87. For decades, Colman McCarthy cut a singular figure in Washington, D.C., known for both riding his three-speed Raleigh bicycle to work every day and for putting his sharp writing to good use challenging militarism, fascism, materialism, capital punishment, the war complex, and mindless overconsumption. Above all, he was a beloved colleague, active citizen, faithful friend, devoted husband, father, grandfather and irrepressible teacher who dedicated his life to education for peace and justice. Colman was born on Long Island, New York to a family of Irish immigrants. All he wanted to do when he graduated high school was write and play golf. He had just graduated from a small Jesuit college in Alabama with the intention of joining the PGA Tour when he made a small detour at a Trappist monastery in Georgia. He ended up staying there for five years, where he devoured great volumes of literature and wrote stacks of journals. Though he had taken vows as a lay brother, Colman could never quite cut ties with the outside world and would jump at every opportunity to donate blood at the town's Red Cross, where he could devour the newspapers and magazines. One day, the abbot gave Colman $50 and an old suit and drove him directly to the airport. Soon after landing in New York, Colman got a job as a sports journalist. It turned out he was much better at playing golf than he was at writing about it. He somehow still found his way to Washington, D.C. after he wrote a mildly critical piece about Sean Shriver, then the Director of the U.S. Peace Corps. Shriver hired Colman as a speechwriter because, he said, there were too many ``yes men'' surrounding him. Colman's career returned to journalism when in 1969 he became a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, where he set his golden pen to opposing the Vietnam War and corruption. In 1985, he tired of simply writing about peace and founded the Center for Teaching Peace with his beloved wife, Mavourneen. Over the next several decades, he taught free classes about peacemaking to hundreds of students at the Georgetown Law Center, Woodrow Wilson High School, and the School Without Walls before settling in at Bethesda Chevy Chase High School in Maryland's beautiful 8th District. He did not believe in grades, as he was convinced they were ``academic violence,'' and perhaps it was this unshakeable conviction and his mad love for knowledge that made him so beloved and his classes so sought-after by his many students. Colman opened every class he taught on peacemaking with the same routine. He would pull out a $100 bill from his wallet and tell the assembled students that it would be theirs if they could answer every single one of his questions correctly, questions like: Who was Robert E. Lee? Who was Napoleon Bonaparte? Easy enough. But then the questions would get harder. Who was Dorothy Day? What about Emily Greene Balch? Jody Williams? Jeannette Rankin? The $100 bill would go back into Colman's wallet. But he never used this long-practiced routine to embarrass or shame his students, young people whom he treated seriously and respectfully. He instead used the bit to make a point about our education system. Students have ``been well taught about men who break the peace,'' he wrote, ``but know little or nothing about women who make the peace.'' He would then offer his students singular opportunities to meet legendary Nobel Peace Prize winners like Adolfo Perez Esquivel and the singer-songwriter Joan Baez, before introducing them anew to Lily Flores, the custodial worker at Bethesda Chevy Chase who shared her experience fleeing violence in El Salvador to build a new life in the United States. Colman inspired an untold number of his students to channel their careers into politics for social good. Many of them have become social workers or public interest lawyers. A few of his students have run for Congress, like my great friend from Massachusetts, Representative Jim McGovern. He was cherished by his friends and family alike. Colman met the love of his life, Mavourneen ``May'' Deegan Colman, in 1967. She passed away in 2021. She not only shared his values but put up with his various vegan diets and his commitment to freeganism with good humor. They had three sons, John, James, and Edward and treasured their six grandchildren. His radiant legacy lives on within his family and also among his many students, who will recall the only homework assignment he ever gave; at the end of his lessons, he would command his class to ``tell someone that you love them today.'' We in Congress and the country would do well to remember it.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the extraordinary Colman McCarthy, an accomplished writer, philosopher of nonviolence, Catholic activist, educator, golfer, and runner, who cut a singular figure in Montgomery County, Maryland, and in the Washington, D.C., area. Colman spent his life and his career challenging war, militarism, and what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, writing every week a column that was beloved by thousands of people. But Colman was not always a famed peace activist. He nearly became a PGA champion and also a Trappist monk before finding his life's work as an educator for peace. Students who took his classes at BCC High School remember him coming to school on his Raleigh three-speed bicycle and the only homework assignment he ever gave his students: to tell someone that you love them that day. I hope his memory remains an eternal blessing to our community and a source of joy and comfort to his three sons, John, James, and Edward; his six beloved grandchildren; and to all of his many students, friends, and admirers, among whom I count myself. A link honoring the life and career of Colman McCarthy can be found at: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/business/media/colman-mccarthy- dead.html.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Harris for his thoughtful remarks. I rise to support and will vote for H.R. 5625, the Cashless Bail Reporting Act, because it would simply direct the Attorney General to publish a list of State and local jurisdictions that permit cashless bail. This is already publicly available information. I just googled it. The answer seemed to come up, but it would be good to have some, perhaps, professional refinement and certification that these are actually the numbers. Mr. Speaker, National Police Week is typically an opportunity for us to bring meaningful legislation forward that will support law enforcement and help them to perform their critical, lifesaving duties because Congress wants to support and honor their work. I am not quite sure that we are living up to this high calling in this National Police Week. This bill, for example, is unobjectionable, but it doesn't do much work at all. It is hard to see how issuing a report advances community safety or justice. Given the strangely hostile rhetoric that we are hearing from our colleagues about cashless bail, I thought I would take a moment to talk about what bail is and what it is not. As the gentleman correctly states, bail is not a mechanism for punishment. In America, everybody is innocent until proven guilty. Whether you are the President, the Pope, or a pauper, you are considered to be innocent and presumed to be innocent until you have been proven guilty in a court of law, observing due process, by a jury of your peers, beyond a reasonable doubt, and with the prosecution satisfying every element of the burden of proof. People have a right to their freedom while they are preparing to stand trial, among other reasons, to get ready for trial, unless they are a flight risk or unless they pose a danger to themselves or to other people. That is basically the rule, as I understand it. In fact, that is the rule we have been using in the Federal system for more than 60 years. We have a cashless bail system under Congress in the Federal courts. There are 94 Federal district courts all across America, operating in red States, blue States, purple States, and everything in between. They all use a cashless bail system. Mr. Speaker, when a person is brought forward on an arraignment before the court, those of us who have practiced law or have been prosecutors know this process in a very familiar way. The court asks one simple question, which is: Is this person a flight risk, or do they pose a danger to themselves? They could be the richest person in the world, but if they are a flight risk, as, for example, some of the Epstein defendants clearly are--these are globetrotting criminal defendants--it shouldn't make any difference how much money you have to pay for bail. The money should be irrelevant to it. Conversely, if you are not a flight risk, if you are not a danger to the community, but you are a pauper and have no money, you should not be held simply because you can't pay $5,000, or whatever the bail is. Somebody might be able to put up $1 million or $1 billion, but if they are going to abscond, if they are going to run away, they should be held. That is the Federal system. Money doesn't enter into it. To my knowledge, I don't think there are any bills out there--my staff will correct me--that seek to overthrow the Federal bail system, which is a cashless system. I don't know of a single candidate in America who is running for Congress on the premise that we need to overthrow the cashless Federal bail system, which is working great everywhere. Mr. Speaker, cash bail is a billion-dollar, for-profit industry. Who makes money off of that? The bail bondsmen make money off of it, and they are very politically active. They don't want to see any change. They don't want to see the Federal system being adopted by States and jurisdictions around the country. A cash bail system asks a different question. It doesn't focus on: Are you dangerous or a flight risk? It focuses on: Can you pay? Can you pay? From the standpoint of the Federal system, that is an irrational, arbitrary issue that just confuses the question of why a person, who is presumed to be innocent but is now facing serious criminal charges, should be held in jail during the pendency of their trial or waiting for their trial to take place. Mr. Speaker, I don't know why I am surprised that there are Members of Congress who are demonizing jurisdictions simply because they prefer to employ a policy that exactly mirrors Federal law. To say that that is somehow soft on crime strikes me as just bizarre, unless the entire Federal system is soft on crime because of the system that we have used. I am not, in any way, afraid of or intolerant of this debate. I think we should have the debate. To the extent that this bill is just asking DOJ to compile information that is already publicly available, it is fine with me. I am going to vote for it. Nothing currently prevents the Attorney General from compiling and publishing this information right now. Due to the miracles of artificial intelligence, it seems to be pretty quickly readily available. I think I got it in less than 1 second. This bill could help to officially coordinate the collection of this information and ensure that it is reported accurately, so I plan to vote for it. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Georgia (Mrs. McBath), the very distinguished ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance under the Judiciary Committee.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. I thank the gentleman for his thoughtful remarks there. We certainly don't want to see anybody being released without regard to whether or not they pose a danger to the community or whether they will abscond and disappear. A good example of that happening recently was when President Trump en masse pardoned more than 1,500 convicted felons who were Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, rioters, and insurrectionists who assaulted 150 police officers right here on the Capitol campus. Departing from the traditional process of examining each case individually, which is what the Department of Justice has done in the pardon office, he just pardoned all of them. So he didn't look to see which ones had been convicted before of domestic violence, armed robbery, or other forms of felony crimes. Some of them had no criminal record. Some of them had serious, violent criminal records. All of them were released. And what do you know, dozens of them have since reoffended since that terrible process took place. One guy recently, Andrew Paul Johnson in Georgia, was released by Donald Trump, pardoned by him. He got out of jail and went and sexually assaulted two 12-year-olds. When they and their families were about to go to the police to report the crimes, he said: Well, I am about to get millions of dollars from Donald Trump because I am a J6er. I will split the money with you if you don't go in. Thankfully, they went and reported him to the police. He was prosecuted, and he was just sentenced to life in prison. Those two kids' lives are irrevocably altered because of the process that took place, which was no process, which is I am just going to go ahead and release everybody. We have had other J6ers who were pardoned by Donald Trump who have since been convicted of offenses including domestic violence, violent assault, home invasion, and so on. So I could not agree more with the point that people should not be getting out of jail or prison without any regard to the danger that they pose to the community. Now, how does this all relate to bail? Well, I hope we agree that nobody should be getting out of jail without regard or without the court taking an analysis of whether they are a flight risk or whether they pose a danger to the community. That is what the focus should be. So certain jurisdictions have said, including the Federal system, that is all we need to know. You could be the richest person in the world. You could be worth a billion dollars. It doesn't make any difference. If you are a flight risk, if you are a community danger, we are not going to let you out. Conversely, you might be the poorest person in the world, but if you pose no flight risk, if you pose no danger, then you should be allowed to be released because that is the constitutional presumption, the presumption of innocence. So the injection of a financial payment into the process just confuses the issue. Now, I am not saying every State has to follow what the Federal courts do and what we have done for more than 60 years. That is up to them. That is a question of federalism. That is why I am trying to prefigure where this whole inquiry leads. It looks like it is leading to an attack on the States who want to do it the way the Federal system has done it for more than a half century. I am just raising the point that I think we should look very carefully before we go down that road and we impose a different view on the States in some kind of straitjacket as to their criminal justice policies that we don't accept for ourselves because the current system is working great here. So I agree with the prior speaker. We don't want people getting out of jail for any reason, whether it is bail or parole or a pardon from the President, without due consideration of what the effects are going to be on the community. Mr. Speaker, in closing, I would say I want to thank the gentleman for his bill. I am going to vote for his bill. More information always better. I have got no problem with that. The only thing I reject is the insinuation that the States that do it differently from the Federal system are somehow better than the States that do it in accord with the Federal system. We have had cashless bail at the Federal level for many decades, and our system zeros in on the critical criteria of whether or not this criminally charged suspect poses a flight risk or a danger to the community. I hope that we can continue the conversation about what we can really do to advance and enhance community safety. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition to the Keeping Violent Offenders Off Our Streets Act, which is a truly strange bill. The bill, first of all, refers to violent offenders, but it is unclear exactly why. It applies to all offenders. In any event, it would redefine the business of insurance to include the posting of monetary bail, criminal bail bonds, and Federal immigration bail bonds. It would accomplish this dramatic reclassification for the purposes of prosecuting and punishing community bail funds as a form of criminal insurance fraud. Only in surreal MAGA Washington would someone think to change the definition of insurance fraud to include the posting of bail and bail bonds. I can't even begin to reconstruct the giant mental leaps that must have been used to get to this fallacy. This week is National Police Week, and as we do every year, we recognize and honor the men and women who put their lives on the line for us to protect our communities. Our colleagues have vaguely and inscrutably billed this legislation as pro-police, although they have yet to show how it would support the police or address the articulated needs of police officers anywhere in the country. The true aim of H.R. 6260, apparently, is to discourage and destroy not-for-profit bail funds that raise money for people who cannot afford to pay bail for themselves. These groups try to address the basic injustice that results when wealthy people can walk free while poor people are held in jail pending trial for no reason other than their inability to pay, which is why the Federal system, as I was arguing in our last bill, eliminates money from the equation entirely and says that the only question is whether a person presents a flight risk or danger to the community. Now, my distinguished colleague, the author of the legislation, ties the beginning of these bail funds I think he said to 2020 with the killing of George Floyd. Actually, the history of these funds goes back a lot further than that. It really begins during the period of abolitionism in the Civil War when various people were being jailed for either assisting enslaved people in the Underground Railroad or being arrested for their attempts to interfere with the fugitive slave law. In any event, money was raised to get people out of jail for those purposes. That lasted through the Civil War, and it went into the Reconstruction period as well, because we know that the criminal justice system in the South was turned into an instrument of incarceration and domination and reimposing discipline on the freed slave population. That is what they were using the criminal justice system for, and so people throughout the country were raising money to try to get people out of jail to repurchase their hard-won freedom. However, this process of communities raising money to pay bail has persisted all the way through the 20th century and into the 21st century. The ACLU did it. They created a bail fund for people swept up in the Palmer Raids, the Red Scare, and the obscenity prosecutions for people who couldn't afford to get themselves out of jail. It was critical to Reverend Martin Luther King and the SCLC, and John Lewis and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Bail was raised. Bail money was raised to get people out of jail for often pretextual and fraudulent arrests and incarceration throughout the South. It has continued to be used since then. It was being used during the anti-Vietnam war movement when bail money was raised to get people out of jail, again, in mass, dragnet arrests without regard to what people themselves had done. It is being used today in the LGBTQ community. It has been used, as the gentleman references, in Minneapolis where we saw exactly what ICE was doing when they shot dead in broad daylight at pointblank range U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti. If they are willing to kill people, then they are certainly willing to rough them up, beat them up, and arrest them falsely. Yes, the people of Minneapolis, to their great credit, came together to create funds to bail people out of jail when they were mistreated by the police. Should we twist the law of insurance fraud into unrecognizable knots in order to deter and destroy bail funds and to threaten people with felony convictions like people who go out and sell fraudulent insurance policies? It is hard to see why we should do that. By the way, it is not just those we would put on the liberal or progressive side of civil movements in American history because the exact same thing happens with anti-abortion protesters with the pro- life movement. Mr. Speaker, you had better check with the pro-life movement before you vote for this legislation because they could get swept up with it too. They have raised a lot of money for people who are willing to put themselves in the way of a woman's reproductive clinic, a health clinic. They consider those killing places. Obviously, we have a profound disagreement about that. We believe that people have a constitutional right to their own healthcare. In any event, set that aside. These people are sincerely motivated in what they are doing, and, yes, they have raised money to bail people out of jail when they get arrested for blockading abortion clinics. Now, should we describe that as a form of insurance fraud so it can be regulated, and then if somebody misstates something on a form or on a bail statement and they don't properly record it or whatever, then suddenly the whole Orwellian dragnet of the Federal Government can come down on them? By the way, what is the Federal interest in this anyway? That is very hard to see. The original law creating a Federal crime around interstate insurance fraud was all based on the idea that the insurance has an interstate nexus because it is being sold across State lines, but the vast majority of protests take place in one town, in one city. Where is the interstate nexus that would even give us jurisdiction to adopt this dramatic expansion of the law governing insurance fraud? I would love the distinguished gentleman from Wisconsin to illuminate where is the interstate nexus or character that justifies this dramatic enlargement of law governing insurance fraud in the United States. I understand that, for some reason inscrutable to me, they want to target basically the Federal system of bail during Police Week. I don't see what the connection is, but, in any event, this is a step way too far. I was willing to go with the Attorney General report out of deference to my friends. We will support the Attorney General report so we can get a clearer picture of what is going on, but to change insurance fraud law and policy in America to target, when you think about it, a really noble and honorable practice used by both people on the left, people on the right, and people in between, to support those who either deliberately engage in civil disobedience or are falsely targeted by the police, strikes me as a very bizarre thing to do and a strange way to honor Law Enforcement Week. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, another gigantic, logical leap in this legislation just occurred to me, which is that the Republicans are blaming the bail funds for this or that person getting out of jail. They have skipped over a major step, which is the judges who are the ones who are actually deciding whether or not someone poses a flight risk or a danger to the community. If there is a judge who is not doing their job, they shouldn't be on the court. They just shouldn't be there. As we have seen in the Federal system, the vast majority, if not all, of the judges can act and behave responsibly with respect to the essential criteria for deciding on bail, which we know. Really, what they are saying is: We like a for-profit system that benefits the bail bondsmen all over America. They make 10 percent--it might be 15 percent now, I am not sure--on all the bail posted. If you are a criminal defendant, and you have shown you are not a flight risk or a danger to the community, you are not done yet. In those cash jurisdictions, they want $10,000 from you. If you don't have $10,000, you get it from a bail bondsman, but you owe the bail bondsman $1,000. The bail bondsman essentially takes out $11,000 in the loan and gives you $10,000. You give it to the State, and they pocket $1,000. This is extremely lucrative. There are a lot of very wealthy bail bondsmen and -women out there. That means that it is the court that is responsible. It is not the people who raise the money. Now, they want to say: Well, it is only the rich people who should be able to make bail in the cash jurisdictions. If you are arrested, if you are a pro-life protester and you do civil disobedience at an abortion clinic--that is your decision to make. I am not going to say it is your First Amendment right. It is not exactly a right, although you have been written into the FACE Act for these purposes. You decide to do it. You are willing to pay the consequences. If you don't have the money, it means your political supporters can't raise money for you. If you are participating in a peace protest or a civil rights protest, but happen not to be rich enough to pay the bill yourself, they are trying to impede your ability to get money from other people by threatening these bail funds--which are a venerable part of American society--with insurance fraud charges. That is amazing. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Simon), my friend.

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, it occurred to me to go back to check Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, what happened in their cases. In a cash bail system in Florida, Jeffrey Epstein was freed and allowed to go operate his dubious affairs before he was convicted. In the Federal system, there was no bail. He was denied bail because he was clearly a flight risk and a danger to the community. The same thing with Ghislaine Maxwell, she offered to put up $30 million to get out of jail, and the Federal system said: We don't do that. We don't release people based on money. You are a flight risk, and you are a threat to the community. That is the only thing that should count. It shouldn't be like an auction that you go to and whoever can put up the most money gets out of jail free, and then the poor people don't. Now, they want to go beyond that to say poor people can't even pool their resources and get support from people in the community or other parts of the country because that could constitute insurance fraud. That strikes me as ridiculous. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Menefee).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Georgia (Mrs. McBath).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Georgia.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, let me address a few points that are still lingering out there. As I listened to the distinguished ranking member on the Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance, and Mr. Menefee, a couple other points occurred to me. One is that our same colleagues who want to crack down on the ability of people to associate and raise money for the purposes of providing bail for people who can't afford it are also the ones who basically want to blow the doors off the hinges when it comes to campaign finance. They believe in an absolute deregulation of money going into the political system. Yet, when it comes to community groups, neighbors, and people across the country in sympathy or solidarity with people who may be caught up in the criminal justice system, through no fault of their own or through civil disobedience--you could say peace protestors, environmental protestors, pro-life protestors--they want to cut down on that form of association and that form of freedom of speech and assembly, which is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Moreover, we don't even know what Federal power is being purported to cover this exercise of Federal jurisdiction. They are pasting this onto the law against interstate insurance fraud, which is a categorical extension of Federal power when people engage in interstate insurance maneuvers and are defrauding somebody out of their money. But now they want to apply that to money that is raised locally for purposes, like in Minneapolis, of defending people who are arrested in an anti-ICE protest, for example. Where is the Federal interest? Is it the Commerce Clause? It is certainly not the First Amendment because it cuts directly against the First Amendment. I don't think it is section 5 of the 14th Amendment. What is the asserted basis of our constitutional authority to criminalize as insurance fraud people raising money locally to support local protestors? I just don't get that. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, I oppose H.R. 6260 for the aforementioned reasons, but also because the bill does nothing to actually support law enforcement officers on Law Enforcement Week. For this reason, at the appropriate time, I will offer a motion to recommit this bill back to the Committee on the Judiciary. If the Republican House rules permitted, I would have offered the motion with a very significant amendment to the bill. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment into the Record immediately prior to the motion to recommit.

Mr. RASKIN. My amendment would bring not just rhetorical support, but real support to police officers, specifically, the police officers who defended this Chamber, this Capitol, this Congress, all the Members of Congress, the Vice President, and our democracy during the January 6th attack by creating the January 6th Law Enforcement Heroes Compensation Fund, to provide compensation for any injuries inflicted on our officers that day, as well as any corresponding economic losses. These are people who serve with us every day. You see them every day, and you may know some of them. More than 140 of them from the Capitol Police, from the Metropolitan Police Department, and several other regional police departments, including the Montgomery County Police Department in Maryland were wounded, injured, and hospitalized as a result of the mob attack on our country, where our officers fought valiantly for hours against atrocious violence that one of the officers likened to medieval battle. Many officers were forced out of policing by the injuries inflicted on that day. Many suffered grievous physical and emotional injuries, including posttraumatic stress, for which they are still being treated and for which they may never fully recover. One of them I know, Sergeant Gonell, suffered a crushed right foot and a destroyed rotator cuff. Because he could barely lift his arm and he could barely walk, he was forced out of his dream job of being a Capitol Police officer. He became a Capitol officer because his high school class from Long Island, New York, came and visited the Capitol, and he saw what the officers were doing. He said: One day I am going to do what those officers do, and I am going to protect the Congress of the United States. In the middle of his career, he was so disabled by the attack that he had to leave it, despite wanting to stay, but he simply could no longer live up to the physical expectations of the job. Now, his family is living on a fraction of the salary that he had before. We could tell you lots of stories like this. Some of the officers, like Officer Brian Sicknick, who died on January 7, gave the ultimate sacrifice, the last full measure of devotion to this body. Several took their own lives after this brutal and nightmarish convulsion, an attack incited by the President of the United States as determined by the House of Representatives. Some of these people are disfigured and disabled for life, but all of them--and their politics are irrelevant. Some of them are Republicans. Some are Independents. Some are Democrats. All of the officers responded on January 6 like heroes, and they deserve our eternal thanks. They deserve more than that. They deserve the actual commitment of this body to help them. The Trump administration wrote a check for nearly $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt, even though two separate investigations determined that our police officers acted responsibly, lawfully, and reasonably to defend this Chamber and the people who worked in it on that day, yet they gave them nearly $5 million. Do you know what they have given to the families of the police officers injured and wounded, whose lives were irrevocably changed on that day? Zero. Nothing. It is time for us to pass this legislation and show that our commitment is real to the police officers who work with us right here every day. That is what we need to be doing, and I urge everybody to support the January 6th Law Enforcement Heroes Compensation Fund. 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 hope my colleagues will join me in voting for the motion to recommit so we can move forward with this absolutely essential legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

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

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, Federal monitorships are a critical tool for Federal courts and Federal judges. Monitors ensure compliance with court orders, settlement agreements, and consent decrees, all to remedy entrenched, systemic violations of Federal law in matters of school desegregation, prison conditions, civil rights, policing, detention, disability rights in education, the environment, and antitrust law. This bill appears to have been written as part of an attempt to undermine Federal monitorships, but, indeed, focused on one very special monitorship in particular. The bill targets the ongoing Federal monitorship of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona, which, as the gentleman just discussed, was put in place after a Federal judge determined that the office, under the notorious tenure of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, had displayed a pattern and practice of using race and ethnicity, rather than objective evidence of criminality, to target people for criminal investigation and detention and for a profusion of illegal stops, seizures, and frisks, in violation of fundamental rights protected by the U.S. Constitution. One expert called it the worst pattern of racial profiling by a law enforcement agency in the history of the United States. Following this ruling, the Federal district judge placed the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office under supervision by a court-appointed monitor to ensure that it would take the steps necessary to correct its structural violations of the law and violations of the rights of the people. For years after the initial court order, Sheriff Arpaio proudly and gleefully violated a succession of court orders, refusing to end his office's practice of rampant, unlawful racial and ethnic profiling, which eventually led Federal judges to find him in civil contempt, in criminal contempt, and then, finally, in need of a Presidential pardon, which, of course, he got from the king of pardons when he took the White House. As a result of all of this defiance and contempt, the court had to issue subsequent orders each time to more specifically articulate and delineate the steps that the sheriff's office needed to take to come into compliance with the law. Recently, our colleagues held a field hearing in Phoenix, the gentleman's hometown, where they took issue with the fact that the sheriff's office is still under a Federal monitorship more than 10 years later in his home State. They did not take issue with the fact that the office has gone for more than 10 years without fully and meaningfully complying with the court order. The monitor is in place only because the sheriff's office has failed to remedy its egregious and systemic violations of the law, despite multiple court orders directing them to do so. More than a decade later, and even under a new sheriff, data reveal that racial disparities in the sheriff's office's arrest rates persist to this day. Mr. Speaker, Democrats are open to having a serious, nationwide policy discussion about ways to strengthen and improve the Federal monitorship process. Democrats are always up for that, but the bill before us today is focused on one case, one monitor, and, therefore, ignores the entire dynamics of monitorship nationwide. They haven't even pretended to claim that whatever is taking place in that district that they don't like is reflective of what is going on in the rest of the country. I heard the gentleman say that this is some kind of codification of recommendations made by Attorney General Merrick Garland and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta in a 2021 DOJ memo on monitors, which they like, but that is not the full story. The bill, as opposed to the memo, scoops up the points that they like within the memo, like a kid scooping up Easter eggs in the backyard, but then discards the rest. The bill includes some of the recommendations, changes others, and simply excludes others. Critically, Attorney General Garland said that at the end of a 5-year period there should be an analysis of how well the monitorship is going, should it be terminated, or should it be continued based on the facts. Well, the gentleman's bill takes that 5-year number but says we are just going to cut it off after 5 years. We are not going to do an analysis of it. We are not going to assess the situation. We are not going to see whether the monitor is needed to go forward. We are just going to take the 5-year number and say it is over. So that person is gone, and if you need a new one, bring somebody else in. All of that institutional knowledge, everything they understand, is out the window. Now, I understand that would accomplish the gentleman's objective, which is they want to terminate the monitor out in Maricopa County. They don't like that monitor. That is not really how we should be legislating Department of Justice policy for the entire country. Far from making this a more efficient process, the various requirements put in would delay, prolong, and confuse as a new monitor and a new judge would have to attempt to get up to speed on the complicated history of the case and the progress completed by the party prior to this new abrupt appointment. They would have to review years' worth of briefs, orders, reports, motions, replies, pleadings, and so on. Together, these provisions could incentivize a reluctant party to simply run out the clock until a more indulgent monitor and judge are appointed to the case. The retroactive application of the bill is, of course, curious. The Garland memo warned against retroactivity, noting that because existing consent decrees and monitorships are the product of extensive negotiations with approval by the Federal court, the specific recommendations should apply only to consent decrees and monitorships used in future cases. But the whole trick here is to make this apply retroactively to get at the guy that Republicans don't like, and of course, that is not up to us. Congress doesn't go out and decide specific cases. If Republicans have got a problem with what the monitor is doing, bring it to the judge in that case, but don't change Federal law and make a Federal case out of it. Look, if the majority is serious about improving the appointment and use of Federal monitors, and I am sure they are, then I urge them to work with us to do a nationwide study. Let's craft a bill fully reflecting the recommendations of the Attorney General. Let's invite Attorney General Garland to come in and testify about it. He is a constituent of mine. I am happy to write him and have him come in and testify about what should be done, rather than rushing through this last-minute, case-specific, makeshift legislation. I urge all my colleagues to oppose this bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The gentleman asks why Members of the minority didn't come to his hearing in Arizona, and because he asked, I am afraid I am going to have to tell you the truth. We don't think it was a serious hearing. It was about one monitor in one case to target one guy in the context of the gentleman's exciting campaign for Governor of Arizona. I understand the gentleman prefers to be in Arizona. Well, we prefer to be in our districts, too. I will happily leave my district for a serious substantive hearing, but I am not going to be part of a witch hunt or attack against one particular monitor. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Georgia (Mrs. McBath).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Just to restate for everybody where we are. The monitor serves at the discretion and the pleasure of the judge. If the judge thinks the monitor is doing a bad job or feathering his nest or taking money, the judge would get rid of the monitor immediately. That is up to the judge. If you have got a problem with a particular monitor, bring a motion before the judge to change the situation. Instead, the gentleman wants to make a Federal law out of it. I appreciate it is his last few months in Congress, and he wants to try to accomplish something in that particular case, but it really doesn't relate to the rest of the country. There has been no study done of monitorships generally, except for what Attorney General Garland did, and his bill departs radically from what Attorney General Garland was talking about. Just take, for example, this 5-year idea. The idea is, look, the judge can review the monitor at any point in the course of the monitorship. But there should be, Attorney General Garland said, a 5- year review where they look and see how it is going and is the jurisdiction complying or not. If they are not complying, as is taking place in Maricopa County, why not? What needs to be done? Is the monitor actually showing up at work and being a zealous individual about it or not? That can happen right now. But in any event, Attorney General Garland says, have a 5-year review. Their bill says terminate the monitor, regardless of whether or not that person is doing a good job, after 5 years. They could be doing the best job in the world, but no, they want to start all over again and take all of the time and energy required in getting somebody else up to date on the case. It is just not serious legislation, which is perhaps why there is not a counterpart over on the Senate side; there is no companion. So good luck to the gentleman about actually getting this done before the election in November. Perhaps people will be impressed by catalyzing all of this attention to one case, but it tells us nothing about what is happening in the rest of the country. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Landsman).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentleman from Ohio.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The gentleman says that if we had come, it would have been serious. I applaud the implicit concession it wasn't serious. But in any event, it would not have been relevant because studying what goes on in one office is not relevant. Now, if you want to take the Attorney General's handiwork and turn it into law, we could do it, but that is not what the gentleman is proposing to do. He has changed it and contorted it in a lot of different ways in order to fit his particular case. In any event, I don't think we should rely exclusively on the executive branch. I think we should have our own serious hearings with the whole committee. Only two Republicans joined that trip to Phoenix, Arizona, although there was another Republican Member who I think was a key witness there. I think Mrs. Lesko testified before the committee, increasing the sense of the closed circle that they have there. In any event, why don't we look at this as a serious national problem? In any event, of the top 25 things Americans are thinking about, I can guarantee you that is not one of them. One of them, though, is the billion dollars that the administration is asking for, for the big, wretched ballroom that they want to build over at the White House since they bulldozed the East Wing of the White House. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Boyle), the ranking member on the Budget Committee.