Jamie Raskin

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, first of all, I am baffled and amazed that the gentleman would bring up the economy under President Biden. A month before the Presidential election in 2024, The Economist magazine had a cover story titled: ``The envy of the world. The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust. Expect that to continue, argue Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr.'' That was what President Biden left to Donald Trump when he took over, an economy that was the envy of the world, inflation down, unemployment down, small business sector roaring, the economy roaring, opportunity for young people. Donald Trump has taken an economy that left other rich countries in the dust, and he has covered us in mud and dirt. He has put us in the dust. Now gas prices are up 25 percent in 2 weeks. I don't need to refute all this propaganda and disinformation. People go to the gas station and it refutes all the propaganda and disinformation that we are hearing from them. They are better off sticking to the BOWOW Act. Under President Biden, we passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a $1.2 trillion investment in America, in our bridges, our roads, our highways, our ports and our airports, not blowing up stuff in other peoples' countries, precisely what Donald Trump had promised he wouldn't do. That is where our money is going now, draining the U.S. economy by $1 to $2 billion every day. They are spending that on an undeclared, unauthorized war, and our colleagues would not even want to have one honest debate and one honest vote in Congress on whether or not to declare war on Iran. They won't utter a peep about it today or yesterday or tomorrow. They won't say anything about it, nothing, but they let President Trump have their way with them. Now the gentleman somehow accuses us of not being interested in animal rights and animal welfare. I am sorry, I usually don't go running to rightwing MAGA forces for the protection of animals against animal cruelty and the industrial slaughterhouses and so on. They don't show so much interest in that, but now in Freddie's case because there was an immigrant traveler involved, they want to pass a law which is an exact echo of what the law is. The gentleman has not explained to us why we need to pass a law when Freddie's kicker was arrested, jailed, charged, prosecuted, convicted, and sent back to Egypt all within 3 days. He never saw anything outside of a jail cell in the United States of America, and yet they tell us we need, essentially, to go back and pass the law that mimics what the law is today, except now they want to sneak in a provision saying that we are going to remove the necessity of a conviction. Why wouldn't it have been better to deport Mr. Marie on day two before he was fined $800 or $900 for Freddie's veterinarian bill? Why would that have been better? The gentleman hasn't explained. That is the only substantive change I can imagine coming from the BOWOW bill because the bowwows are already protected as we saw in this case. I wish he could summon up for the GOP caucus the same kind of fervor, passion, and commitment they are now demonstrating for animal rights and welfare, summon that up for human rights and human welfare, for people like Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who were shot down by out-of-control ICE agents in Minneapolis, and then ICE and Homeland Security say that they will not cooperate with local police authorities in Minneapolis and State police in Minnesota. Why not? All of a sudden they care just about dogs. They want to rewrite a law that already exists that already protects dogs, as we saw in this case, and not explain why they want to do it. It is an absolute diversion. It is an absolute distraction for the country. They can't talk about gas prices. They can't talk about inflation. Remember, President Trump said he was going to bring down prices on day one. He hasn't done one thing to bring down prices. Now, they are soaring out of control throughout the entire economy because of his illegal, unauthorized war that is splitting even their own base. It is the most unpopular war at the beginning that we have seen, maybe in American history, certainly in this century, because nobody explained why they were doing it. That is why the Founders said it has to be Congress that decides whether we go to war. James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Payne, the whole founding generation knew that the Kings were always plunging their countries into impetuous wars of conceit, vanity, imperial ambition, foreign intrigue, and corruption. They didn't trust one guy with that decision; they put that decision in us. They reposed it in us, whether or not we wanted it. They are running away from it. They don't want to make a decision about this war, which Donald Trump now calls the ``little excursion,'' the little excursion in Iran, the little excursion that has already taken the lives of 13 U.S. citizens in uniform, wounded more than 200 Americans, and killed more than a thousand Iranians, including 170 schoolchildren who got bombed in this reckless, impetuous war. They don't want to talk about that. It is the BOWOW Act, but they have not made one good argument about why we need to add a redundant, superfluous law in this way. 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. I rise to oppose H.J. Res. 139, a feeble attempt by the President's budget-busting, blank-check enablers in Congress to distract America from their own staggering and historic fiscal irresponsibility. Everyone knows they control the House. They control the Senate. They control the White House, and they have used their total power over our Federal Government to drive our country into a deep ditch of deficits, debt, illegal tariffs, undeclared wars, and economic destruction. After adding $4 trillion to our national debt with their tax breaks for the super rich, every Republican in the Chamber but Representatives Massie and Davidson voted to allow President Trump to keep spending between 1 and $2 billion every day, not of his own money but of our money, on his unauthorized and unconstitutional war in Iran, without so much as a single vote or a single honest debate on the floor of the House. This war of choice and aggression, which is spiraling out of control now in the Middle East, and which President Trump now calls this ``little excursion,'' has already cost 13 American servicemembers their lives and wounded over 200 Americans in uniform, while killing more than a thousand Iranian civilians, including 170 children at a girls' school that was bombed in the first week of Donald Trump's war. But still our colleagues sit there passive, invertebrate, and complicit in the face of this brazen usurpation of congressional war powers, rising from their constitutional stupor only to vote ``no'' on our War Powers Resolution, which every self-respecting Member of the Article I branch should have voted for. The administration reports that the first 6 days of this war cost the taxpayers $11.3 billion, or $1.9 billion a day. Have Republicans come to the floor to explain why this war was necessary or to offer evidence of an imminent threat posed to the American people? Have they asked for a special Iran war tax to demonstrate their fiscal responsibility? No. They just put Trump's little excursion, as he calls it, on the national credit card like an impulse trip to Disney World. But our constituents are paying through the nose for this historic folly right now, not just as taxpayers but as consumers. We have already been buffeted by Donald Trump's illegal tariffs and imbecilic trade wars against the rest of the world and the soaring cost of living under his corrupt economic policies. Now, we also have to contend with skyrocketing gasoline prices thanks to their foolish disruption of the global oil supply. Gas prices have shot up more than 25 percent since the lawless mullah theocrats of Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz after the lawless MAGA theocrats of America bombed Iran. Now, our Republican colleagues present a doomed proposal to deface our Constitution with the same kind of witless, self-incriminating graffiti someone recently scrawled on the exterior front wall of the Kennedy Center, which they call the Trump-Kennedy Center. This proposed constitutional amendment pretends to address a problem that the Republicans created and that Republicans have refused to address legislatively, even though they have all the political control and all the legislative tools they need at their disposal to address it. We don't need a balanced budget constitutional amendment. We just need a balanced budget. If you believe in a balanced budget, bring us one. Show it to us. You control the Congress. But don't start a fiscal wildfire with your out-of-control spending and then throw the Constitution into the flames, too. If this proposed amendment were in effect today, the GOP-controlled Congress would be forced to pay for Trump's war by further cutting critical programs for America's working families. If we gain the majority and try to repeal the trillion-dollar tax cut that they handed to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, we would have to get a two-thirds vote in the House and a two-thirds vote in the Senate in order to engage in an act of fiscal responsibility. But if they wanted to pass another trillion-dollar tax cut for Elon Musk and the richest Americans, they would only need to get a majority vote in the House and the Senate. Mr. Speaker, even Republicans are denouncing the gigantic, runaway deficits that result from out-of-control Republican spending and stupendously reckless Republican tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations. One of our GOP colleagues, Representative Chip Roy, described their One Big Beautiful Bill Act as garbage prior to the House vote, saying: ``If we're going to do the tax policy, at least do the spending policy. Have the courage and the fortitude to do what you campaign on when you're talking about balancing the dang budget.'' Representative Roy's outrage makes sense. Republicans control the House. They control the Senate, and they control the White House. Yet they have not once balanced the Federal budget or even tried to present a balanced budget to Congress. Their obscene, ugly, profligate law added a jaw-dropping $4 trillion to the national debt because of their massive giveaways to billionaires and corporations, which is the true political mission on their side of the aisle. They paid for a fraction of their profligacy by stripping health insurance and food assistance from tens of millions of working-class Americans who are now living with these Marie Antoinette policies concocted by billionaires and cyber barons throwing Great Gatsby parties at Mar-a-Lago and bulldozing the White House to build themselves one more gilded ballroom. Now, rather than showing some discipline and hard work and reversing some of their terrible fiscal blunders from the past to propose an actual balanced budget, no, they waste their time to keep the party going by inviting us to spend the day finger painting on the Constitution of the United States. To observe the semiquincentennial of the country, they want us to use our Constitution to make them do what they claim they want to do but refuse to do at a time when they possess all the power they need to do it. With the same foresight and expert planning, the White House has used in their chaotic, forever war in Iran, they will put our government into a fiscal straitjacket forever to cover up for their gilded incompetence and misplaced priorities. It would mean, for example, that a responsible leader, like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Bill Clinton, would no longer have the flexibility to deal with economic crises created by Republicans like Herbert Hoover or Calvin Coolidge or George W. Bush. The simple truth is that we don't need a constitutional amendment to balance the budget or have responsible fiscal policies. They have got one-party control of every branch of government. They have never stopped talking about balanced budgets. Why don't they just bring us one? That is all we need to do. However, billionaire rip-off artists like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel don't get rich off balanced budgets. They get rich when the GOP opens the spigots of taxpayer money in Federal Government contracts and giveaways for billionaires and the high-flying, rent-seeking corporate class. Republicans have run up historic corrupt deficits in this Congress and have never once submitted a single balanced budget. We don't need a constitutional amendment to force the majority to do the right thing. We need a new majority. Republicans may as well introduce a constitutional amendment saying that Federal agents shouldn't shoot American citizens in the face for exercising their First or Second Amendment rights, or a constitutional amendment saying Federal agents shouldn't shoot someone 10 times for lawfully carrying a firearm in Minneapolis. Mr. Speaker, you don't need a constitutional amendment to respect the law, and you don't need a constitutional amendment to do the right thing for the American people. You just need a new majority, and, Mr. Speaker, it is coming. Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to oppose this foolish diversionary legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I am glad that the gentleman from Arizona has conceded that the last time we had a balanced budget was under President Bill Clinton, the elected Democratic President for two terms who turned over a surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars to his successor in office. Compare that to President Trump who has been President for a total of around 5\1/2\ years and has added one-quarter of the national debt from George Washington all the way to today. One-quarter of that has come from Donald Trump himself. Mr. Speaker, look not at what they say but at what they do. That is because it is the Democrats who have always been the party of fiscal responsibility. Like they are doing in their Iran war right now, they are spending us into oblivion without even coming to Congress to get the war declared. It is unauthorized-- much less telling us how they are going to pay for it other than putting it on a credit card for our children and our children's children to pay for many generations into the future. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Yes, it is unchecked Federal spending by President Trump, who is spending up to $2 billion a day on an undeclared, unauthorized, and unconstitutional war in Iran. Our colleagues won't utter a peep about it, and they won't bring us a balanced budget, but they will bring us a balanced budget constitutional amendment. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for that refreshing intervention in the debate, but I think, as the President Clinton example demonstrates, we can have and we have had the political will at different points to balance the budget. It is not politically impossible, but it does start with some people taking some courageous votes. For example, let's vote on whether or not we should be at war in Iran, costing the American people $1 billion to $2 billion a day. If you can't even have the courage to decide that we will exercise our warmaking powers and our power to declare war under Article I, Section 8, and our spending power to do it, then nothing will save you, I am sorry. You can pass a constitutional amendment saying don't shoot people in the face, but still, you have to tell ICE not to shoot people in the face. You have to demonstrate your commitment to actually making that policy real. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott), a very distinguished legislator.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished former majority leader of the House.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I am charmed by the story that the gentleman from Pennsylvania just told us about having gone to the White House to talk to the President and telling the President he is spending too much. I am just recording the story as it was presented to us. He said to the President: You are spending too much. That is the understatement of the 21st century. He is spending $1 billion to $2 billion a day on an undeclared, unauthorized, unconstitutional war in Iran. He has given us one-quarter of all the debt that has been created in the United States from George Washington until today. That is under the Trump administration. The gentleman represents that he spoke to the President and said: You are spending too much. The President's response was: I know we are, but I can't get them to stop spending more. Who is ``them''? Was that an implied critique of the Democrats? They control the House. They control the Senate. They control the White House. Who is President Trump in that vignette referring to? Is he referring to the Republicans? He must be because they are the ones who are controlling the Chamber, as they are proud to tell us. At least until the end of this year, they are the ones doing it. If Republicans think they support a balanced budget amendment, why don't they start with a balanced budget? Just bring us one balanced budget. That is all that we need from them. Mr. Speaker, they have taken what is a math problem and tried to turn it into a constitutional problem. Every family in America knows they have got to make their expenses come within their means and within their resources. Every family does that. Republicans don't want to do that. They want to turn what is a simple math problem or an economic problem into a constitutional problem. To celebrate America's semiquincentennial, 250th anniversary, for the first time they want to say that what we need to do is to amend our Constitution to make us do what we want to do but we can't do. We don't have the will and political courage to do it. It was offered by the majority itself. We have got the will on our side to do it. President Clinton did it, and we will fight to try to make our resources match up with our expenses. We have already heard that their side of the aisle is looking for a military budget of $1.5 trillion for next year. They are looking for $1.5 trillion for the war budget, for Secretary of War Hegseth. They want $1.5 trillion. That is where they are headed: endless wars in the Middle East, undeclared wars of choice, wars of aggression, not authorized by Congress. None of them will even utter a peep about it today. That is where we are hemorrhaging money in America. Instead, they want to talk about a hypothetical pie-in-the-sky constitutional amendment that no other generation of Americans has ever needed before in order to do the right thing. What is their loyalty and fidelity to the Constitution? Let's say they got their amendment. Right now, Article I, Section 8 says that Congress must declare war. It is not the President, not Donald Trump, not JD Vance, not Tulsi Gabbard, or somebody in their chat group. Congress must declare war. What do they do? They do nothing. They just let the President go ahead and enter into his wars of whim and caprice, vanity, conceit, imperial ambition, whatever. They do nothing. They won't even have a vote to support it or oppose it. They won't have an honest debate about it. That is the war power, which Madison said was one of the essential powers Congress must have, because the kings were always plunging their countries into wars of conceit and vanity, imperial plunder and corruption. So it had to be vested in the Representatives of the people, but they won't follow that. Mr. Speaker, how about the spending power? Exclusively Congress has the power to spend money. It has to arise here in the House of Representatives. We have the power to spend, and we have the power to tax. The administration has been struck down dozens of times for abusing our spending power, and they won't say a word about it. What about the taxing power? Donald Trump became the first President in American history to unilaterally impose tariffs, which is a huge tax on our people. It is not on other countries and not on China. It is on us. We told him it was unconstitutional. They wouldn't do anything, with the exception of Representative Massie from Kentucky, who is the conscience of the Republican Conference--although I don't mean to damn him with faint praise--maybe a handful of others opposed the tariffs. They all went along for the ride, even though we have the power to impose tariffs. It has always been Congress that has established the framework for tariffs, not the President. We can't make it up as we go along, but that is what he did. Of course, he was struck down even by the Supreme Court that has been sliced and diced and gerrymandered to his advantage. Even that Supreme Court struck it down on a 6-3 vote, but we hear nothing from our colleagues about it. What about the First Amendment? There shall be no law abridging the freedom of speech. Yet, this is the most anti-free speech administration the United States has ever seen. Donald Trump's chairman of the FCC the other day said that broadcast licensees, television stations, better watch out what they say about the war. I can't think of a more naked violation of the First Amendment than the government threatening to revoke broadcast licenses of media entities who disagree with the President's policy, especially about something as important to the American people as war. They don't utter a single word about it. That is their demonstrated fidelity to the Constitution. They are now saying: Yes, we are not balancing the budget. We haven't presented a single balanced budget. If we are made to do it through the Constitution, we will follow the Constitution. Fool me once, well, blame on you. Fool me twice, blame on me. We are not falling for 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 thank my distinguished colleague from Arizona for a spirited discussion of this important issue. Mr. Speaker, I will take the example offered by the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs) of President Clinton. We could take many historical episodes, but we have time only for one. President Clinton was determined to balance the budget, and he returned hundreds of billions of dollars in a surplus to his successor in office. He worked with the Republican-controlled Congress and led them along to eliminate the deficit. The government ran a huge surplus without the aid of a contrived balanced budget constitutional amendment. Clinton bequeathed to his successor, George W. Bush, famously a budget surplus of $236 billion, which Bush and the GOP Congress quickly squandered on tax cuts for the richest people in the country and then the staggeringly costly forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan Mr. Speaker, what do you know? History repeats itself. If it doesn't repeat itself exactly, it certainly rhymes. What do we have now? They have added $4 trillion to our debt with their massive giveaways to the richest people in the country and the richest corporations. What are we in now despite all of Donald Trump's campaign promises? We are in another undeclared, unauthorized, forever war of regime change, although it is not really a regime change war because the President obviously doesn't care about democracy or human rights in Iran any more than he cares about democracy or human rights in America. In any event, we are there. We are in that war, spending $1 billion to $2 billion a day. What do our colleagues do to try to deal with this fiscal catastrophe? They offer a balanced budget constitutional amendment, saying this is a bipartisan problem we are in. It is a pox on everybody's house. Let's just amend the Constitution to make us do what we really want to do but we can't do because we don't have the political resolve and the courage to do it. At the same time, they don't have the political resolve and courage to exercise Congress' powers over war. They don't have the resolve and courage to exercise Congress' power over spending or over taxes or over our ability to regulate commerce domestically or nationally. They have given it all away to the President of the United States, when we are the Article I branch. We have the power. We can do it if we are willing to exercise it. What is the President's power? It is very simple: to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. If we pass a balanced budget, the President will have to remain within it. If we are going to say that we are going to have a debate about that war, that he can't just run off to war and start plundering the public fisc and spending billions of dollars of the people's money, he can't do it. Yet, our colleagues in the majority will not exercise any kind of discipline or institutional self-respect. Mr. Speaker, the Framers of the Constitution thought that people in Congress would stand up for congressional power, just like the President would stand up for Presidential power and would always try to aggrandize the power of the executive branch, and the Supreme Court would stand up for the power of judicial review and what the courts do. Yet, they thought that, as Madison put it in Federalist 10, ambition would counteract ambition. We would stand up for ourselves. Our colleagues in the majority will not stand up for congressional powers under the Constitution of the United States, so they want to finger paint some more on the Constitution by adding their balanced budget constitutional amendment. We don't need a balanced budget constitutional amendment, which will be a fiscal straitjacket in times like COVID-19 or times of war, where Congress needs the flexibility. All we need is for the majority to bring us a balanced budget, show some fiscal discipline, and show some fiscal resolve. Then, we can take it seriously. Otherwise, it just seems like a massive, fantastical distraction from what is actually taking place in America today and on Earth, which is we have a President who is bulldozing everything from the White House itself to the Bill of Rights to the separation of powers. What do we have on the other side of the aisle? It is nothing but legislative accomplices in all of this fiscal and constitutional irresponsibility. They want to take a simple math problem and displace everybody's attention by trying to turn it into a constitutional issue. Mr. Speaker, that wasn't the handiwork of James Madison. That wasn't the handiwork of Alexander Hamilton, who took balanced budgets very seriously. They didn't think that America needed it. If the political leadership is not rising to the task, then we need new political leadership. If this congressional majority can't do it, let's elect a new congressional majority, but let's not throw the Constitution into the fire with all of the other constitutional principles that have been set ablaze by this administration. Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, another week, another redundant and completely unnecessary immigration crime bill. This one purports to make the commission of certain fraud offenses into deportable offenses, but conviction of a fraud offense is already a deportable offense, as the gentleman's recitation of all the cases involving people who were convicted of a crime and then deported and removed from the country demonstrates. Fraud is considered a crime involving moral turpitude and a specifically enumerated aggravated felony, the conviction of either of which subjects any immigrant to deportation and removal from the country. In the past, we have heard our colleagues claim these bills are necessary to resolve an undefined ambiguity in the law, but there is no ambiguity. Section 101(a)(43) of the Immigration and Nationality Act specifies fraud as an aggravated felony, which is by definition a deportable offense. Supreme Court precedent for more than 70 years has treated fraud as a crime involving moral turpitude and therefore a deportable and removable offense. I know that President Trump, who knows a lot about the criminal justice system, wants to strike a new pose of being tough on fraud. We still have a First Amendment, so that is his right. But at every turn, the Trump administration has dismantled the government programs and offices that actually combat fraud. At the DOJ, they disbanded key anti-kleptocracy efforts. They eliminated the Consumer Protection Branch that prosecuted corporate fraud. They gutted core anticorruption units like the Public Integrity Section and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Unit. As all of America knows, they have completely ravaged and shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the first and only agency devoted solely at the Federal level to protect American consumers against being cheated by scammers and fraudsters and big corporations. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau delivered $21 billion back to more than 200 million Americans who were victims of fraud, scams, and other predatory business practices, and the administration has been gutting it because they are soft on corporate fraud and white-collar crime. That is the reality of what is going on here. Hell-bent on meeting Stephen Miller's arbitrary mass deportation monthly quotas, this administration has directed FBI agents to deprioritize white-collar crime and instead devote their time to the big immigration roundup, whose beautiful results we can see in the nightmare of Minneapolis, where American citizens were shot down for exercising their constitutional rights. As a result, prosecutions of white-collar crimes, which include a variety of fraud offenses, were down more than 10 percent in the Trump administration in 2025. If that weren't enough, ICE is interfering with States' abilities to successfully prosecute crimes, like fraud and theft, and to ensure that perpetrators pay their fines and make restitution to their victims. Why is that? Well, they are deporting people before they can actually be tried and fined and before the fines are paid. Take the case of Jeson Nelon Flores. He was accused of stealing $100 million worth of diamonds. Before his trial was set to take place, ICE swooped in and simply deported him before trial. That meant he served no jail time and was never ordered to pay any restitution to his victims, leaving them with lots of questions about where the $100 million of diamonds are but no justice. By bypassing the conviction requirement, this legislation would hand a literal get-out-of-jail-free card to immigrants who commit fraud by deporting them without going through the criminal justice system and giving their victims a day in court. This is part of a broader trend of this administration siding with the perpetrators against the victims, a trend America has seen in the administration's shameful decision to cover up for Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's co-conspirators, accomplices, and enablers, while outing the identities and even the photographs of survivors. It is a trend that includes the President's outrageous abuse of the pardon power to let fraudsters, who also happen to be MAGA donors, to purchase a pardon and skip out on their obligation to pay any fine or restitution to their victims. That includes Trevor Milton, who defrauded investors in his company to the tune of $676 million. Milton and his wife donated $1.8 million to the President's reelection campaign. In March of last year, Milton got his pardon, and erased all of the restitution, the hundreds of millions of dollars he owed to his victims. Take Lawrence Duran, who was sentenced to the longest prison sentence in American history for Medicare fraud in September of 2016. He filed hundreds of thousands of false claims with Medicare, bilking the taxpayers out of more than $87 million. Then he got his Trump pardon and skipped away without having to pay any of the fines or the restitution. If you can remember one statistic from today, in just 1 year, Donald Trump's pardons wiped out more than $1.3 billion in restitution and fines to victims and survivors of fraud and other scams and white- collar offenses. This bill is simply another effort to push a fake narrative while ignoring all of the fraud that engulfs us, which the administration has tolerated or even approved through these outrageous pardons. The administration used fraud as an excuse to send thousands of masked Federal agents to terrorize the people of Minneapolis and surrounding areas, a blunder so egregious our colleagues are told not even to use the phrase ``mass deportation'' anymore because the vast majority of Americans reject what they saw on the streets of Minneapolis, agents beating up peaceful protesters and killing them. American citizens are dying because they dare to exercise their First Amendment rights and their Second Amendment rights in public. We saw the price of this authoritarianism. Every day this administration is pushing lies to try to get the American people to ignore the reality that is discernible by our own senses. That is the real fraud on the American people. Now, they want us to believe that they are combating fraud when they pardon it, and they wipe out all of the government units that are designed to ferret out fraud. They started by firing 17 inspectors general, whose job it is to fight fraud, waste, corruption, and abuse in the Federal Government. They sacked all of them to make it possible for the kind of rampant corruption we have seen to take place. The American people can see what is going on. Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to oppose this redundant, unnecessary, and distractionary bill. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, they are entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts. I am afraid that the gentleman owes former President Biden a major apology for what he just said. He said that hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution owed by people whom Joe Biden pardoned was forgiven. According to a study by the Cato Institute, which the gentleman can look up, all of the fines and restitution forgiven by Joe Biden was $680,000, not even $1 million; whereas, Donald Trump has forgiven $1.3 billion in fines and restitution owed by the fraudsters and conmen and white-collar criminals whom he has pardoned since he got back into office under their pay-to-play pardon operation they have got going over there right now. That is the reality and the fact. That is the truth of the matter. No, Joe Biden did not forgive hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. What Donald Trump has done is utterly aberrational in American history. I see the gentleman is fleeing the Chamber right now rather than dealing with the facts and the reality of it. The gentleman was completely wrong. The gentleman was fleeing the Chamber rather than deal with the reality that he was absolutely wrong when he accused President Biden of forgiving hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and restitution to people he pardoned. It never happened. It was less than $1 million. It was $680,000. Mr. Speaker, I will submit the Cato Institute report for the Record. Mr. Speaker, I would love to be contradicted if there are any facts over on that side of the aisle. If anybody wants to traffic in facts-- but, no, maybe it is more imaginary and delusional sophistry from the gentleman. Does he have any facts? It is no problem just saying: I made a mistake. It is like Secretary Noem calling Alex Pretti a domestic terrorist, calling Renee Good a domestic terrorist. That was a terrible mistake and a blunder, but she couldn't admit it. Will the gentleman admit that he was wrong about that or does he have facts? I don't know. I ask you, Mr. Speaker, whether there might be some way of determining whether there are any facts available to contradict me on this, but the study that I have shows that all of Joe Biden's pardons result in less than $1 million in fines and restitution to be forgiven. Mr. Speaker, do you know why that is? It is because up until President Trump, every other President had demanded ordinarily as a matter of course that fines be paid and restitution be paid. I hope that there are some people on the other side of the aisle-- they have got a huge staff of hundreds of people, can somebody find a fact that would contradict what I have just said. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal), who is the ranking member of the Subcommittee of Immigration Integrity.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. That was an amazing evasion of what we are really talking about. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record the Cato Institute study, ``President Trump's Pardons: An Embarrassment of Riches.'' [From the Cato Institute Blog, Feb. 11, 2026] President Trump's Pardons: An Embarrassment of Riches (By Dan Greenberg) Yesterday, I described the final scandal of the Clinton administration: Bill Clinton's midnight pardon of Marc Rich. If the Rich pardon was a snowflake, then the pardons of President Trump's second term are a blizzard. The scope and magnitude of Trump's second-term pardons are unprecedented. Joe Biden granted 80 pardons in his four-year term, but Trump's pardons make his predecessor's look like a drop in the bucket. In the first year of the second Trump administration, the president issued 166 individual pardons, as well as a mass pardon that erased the verdicts of more than 1,500 January 6 Capitol rioters. In other words, even putting aside the rioters' collective pardon, Trump is now issuing pardons at eight times the rate Biden did. Nonetheless, the fact that a president issues more pardons than his predecessors is not necessarily problematic. The real problem lies in the great number of particular second- term pardons that appear indefensible. Such pardons fall into five categories. First: Biden's pardons eliminated roughly $680,000 in financial penalties (fines, restitution, and forfeitures) owed to victims or the government. In contrast, Liz Oyer, the former lead pardon attorney of the United States, has calculated that Trump's second-term pardons have forgiven criminal debts of more than $1.5 billion. This staggering sum--composed of money owed to crime victims and to government treasuries--has been zeroed out by presidential edict. Trump's pardon pen was a boon to ex-criminals like Trevor Milton (who no longer must repay the investors he defrauded $660 million) and Lawrence Duran (who no longer must repay the government he defrauded $87 million). It was also a boon to HDR Global Trading Ltd., which owed the nation a $100 million fine; in this case, Trump also made history by granting the nation's very first pardon to a corporation. Second: Trump has normalized the pardoning of disgraced politicians, such as former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez (who orchestrated a spree of state-sponsored drug trafficking leading to a 45-year prison term), Nevada legislator Michele Fiore (who embezzled $70,000 out of a police memorial fund for personal expenses like rent and plastic surgery), Virginia sheriff Scott Jenkins (who handed out badges to untrained businessmen in exchange for $75,000 in bribes), and Tennessee House Speaker Glen Casada (who defrauded state government with a fake-payee kickback scheme). Perhaps I should disclose my proximity to one such pardon recipient, Arkansas legislator Jeremy Hutchinson (who traded official acts for bribes, embezzled from campaign funds, and filed false tax returns); Hutchinson's tenure in the state Senate, which ended with simultaneous indictments in three federal districts, began when he defeated me in a Republican primary. Third: Trump's pardons are beginning to undermine the contemporaneous work of his own Department of Justice. Alina Habba, Trump's own US attorney in New Jersey, announced Joseph Schwartz's three-year sentence for $38 million in tax fraud in April; Trump pardoned him seven months later. Real estate developer Timothy Leiweke was charged earlier this year with conspiring to rig the bidding process for a Texas sports arena; Trump pardoned him in December. Federal investigators and prosecutors must find such pardons demoralizing and self-negating. Fourth: [REDACTED] For instance, the ordinary vetting procedures of the Office of the Pardon Attorney have often been sidestepped. Formality in pardon deliberation is desirable because it immunizes the president from the appearance of pay-to-play; the absence of such formality makes it plausible that a multitude of recent pardons are transactional. Trump pardoned Paul Walczak (who evaded millions of dollars in taxes) after Walczak's mother raised millions of dollars for MAGA candidates and paid a million dollars to dine with the president at Mar-a-Lago. Trevor Milton--the securities fraudster mentioned above--donated $1.8 million to Trump's campaign before a presidential pardon wiped out all $660 million of his restitution obligations. (That is, if nothing else, an impressive ROI.) Before Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao--who headed the cryptocurrency exchange Binance while it fostered more than 1.5 million illegal virtual trades as well as prohibited transactions to Al Qaeda, Isis, and Hamas--Zhao had brokered a $2 billion investment in Eric and Donald Trump Jr.'s cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial. (When asked about Zhao in a subsequent 60 Minutes interview, Trump explained, ``I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden administration.'' [REDACTED] Trump evidently hoped Cuellar would return the favor by switching parties to the GOP; when that didn't happen, the president released an angry statement on Truth Social, criticizing Cuellar for ``Such a lack of LOYALTY, something that Texas Voters, and Henry's daughters, will not like. Oh well, next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!'' Previous presidents would surely take offense at the suggestion that a pardon could be traded for something of value; [REDACTED] Fifth: Here is another occasion for alarm bells: Donald Trump has increasingly focused on providing pardons to his campaign supporters who stretched or broke the law, such as John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Jenna Ellis. (As the president's pardon attorney, Ed Martin, famously explained on X, ``No MAGA left behind.'') Indeed, Trump apparently views the exercise of his pardon authority to forgive federal crimes as insufficient; Trump's inability to eliminate state- level convictions has apparently led him to pressure state government officials to pardon state-level offenses related to the 2020 elections. I am not the only Cato analyst who has explained the risks of political and constitutional crisis created by presidential attempts to get state-level election criminals pardoned; normalizing such actions will inevitably create ripple effects in future elections. Historically, the central principle of the Justice Department's role in elections has been ``prosecution, not intervention.'' The latest edition of the DOJ's governing manual in this sphere, Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses, explains that the states have primary responsibility for overseeing elections--and that any federal investigation of elections must minimize the likelihood of affecting that election or otherwise ``chill legitimate voting activities.'' That edition of the manual has disappeared from Justice's website. Bob Bauer, Obama's former White House counsel, has speculated that the manual is being revised to match Trump's goal of ``nationalization'' of election administration. The Supreme Court has explained that pardons are justified if ``the public welfare will be better served.'' It is impossible to see how the public welfare is served by many of Trump's pardons today. The president's power to pardon federal crimes is practically absolute. It cannot be modified by Congress. Furthermore, just as an uninvolved citizen lacks standing to challenge a prosecutor's actions, a third party likewise may not challenge the grant of a presidential pardon. [REDACTED] It looks like the floodgates will remain open for the foreseeable future. Perhaps future presidents will behave better; perhaps a future constitutional amendment will encourage them to do so. At least the specter of corruption in previous presidential administrations (Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich, or Biden's pardon of his son) appeared to be an exception to the rule. [REDACTED]

Mr. RASKIN. In it, it answers the question between the gentleman and me. I thought that I was submitting a very simple, humble request, that he withdraw the false statement that Joe Biden, as President, had forgiven hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and restitution. That is an absolute falsehood. It is inaccurate. Now, look, let's start with this: I am going to educate the gentleman to the extent that he wants to be educated any further on the matter about the difference between pardons in the Biden administration and the Trump administration. Joe Biden granted a total of 80 pardons in his 4-year term. President Trump issued 166 individual pardons in his first year and then, of course, famously, the mass pardon of 1,500 January 6 rioters and insurrectionists who stormed this Chamber and the Capitol. I am quoting directly from the Cato study, for the benefit of the gentleman from Arizona: ``Biden's pardons eliminated roughly $680,000 in financial penalties (fines, restitution, and forfeitures) owed to victims or the government.'' This is money that a court has determined is owed and must be paid. Biden forgave $680,000. Now, I am sure that if you are one of the victims, you are not happy to hear about that, that that was forgiven, but that is within the power of the President. ``In contrast, Liz Oyer, the former lead pardon attorney of the United States, has calculated that Trump's second-term pardons''--that is just 1 year of pardons--``have forgiven criminal debts''--fines, restitution, and forfeitures--``of more than $1.5 billion.'' In other words, Biden didn't even forgive $1 million. President Trump has forgiven more than $1.5 billion to the fraudsters, white-collar criminals, and scammers who have found their way to Mar-a-Lago and the White House and have been able to finagle the pardon that they always wanted. ``This staggering sum,'' as the Cato Institute puts it, ``has been zeroed out by Presidential edict.'' That is in a completely different galaxy than what President Biden or any other President, Democrat or Republican, has done in American history. It is stratospheric. I am glad that the gentleman's blatant misstatement and his refusal to retract it have given us the opportunity to focus on this extraordinary corruption that is taking place because it tells the true story of fraud and how fraud is being treated by the current administration. Cato says to consider the case of Trevor Milton, ``who no longer must repay the investors he defrauded $660 million'' that he owed them. Take the case of Lawrence Duran, ``who no longer must repay the government he defrauded $87 million.'' You can add up all the people who were pardoned by President Biden, and you don't even get to $1 million. Then, you have individual criminals whom Donald Trump pardoned after they made various kinds of overtures to the White House or showed up at Mar-a-Lago, and those people were getting hundreds of millions of dollars or tens of millions of dollars forgiven in fines. The gentleman got back up to say these people were either convicted for or accused of tens of millions of dollars in fraud under President Biden. I am talking about what a court ordered them to pay. That is the apples-to-apples comparison that the gentleman doesn't want to deal with. It is interesting that he happened upon that particular issue because it is not one that benefits their side of the argument at all, as they claim to be interested in saving the victims of fraud. Victims of fraud, thousands of them, have lost more than a billion dollars because of the pardons of Donald Trump. That is the direct policy of the administration. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, some of our colleagues jump up like a jack-in-the-box whenever the President tells them to do that. Others in the Chamber want to stand up for American citizens exercising their First and Second Amendment rights, like Alex Pretti and Renee Good. They were shot down by ICE agents, who somehow believed that, with this Trump administration, they are above the law and beyond the law. We are going to stand up with the American people. We are not going to take orders from the executive branch, which is utterly humiliating and self-defeating for a Member of the Article I branch of the Congress of the United States. The gentleman, I think, accuses us of something he called the deranged Trump syndrome, which I can only imagine means following a President who plunges the country into an illegal, unauthorized, undeclared war, spending $1 billion or $2 billion a day, and then not asking any questions about it because somehow you think your political destiny is intertwined with the President, who has shown no loyalty to the people who show loyalty to him. That is a personal problem on their part. We don't have deranged Trump syndrome. I think that falls on that side of the aisle. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, there is such a thick fog of propaganda and disinformation in the Chamber that I think we have lost sight of what the bill is about and what the law is. The law is very clear today, which is: Conviction of a criminal fraud offense is already a deportable offense. It already gets you deported. That is why the majority began with a whole litany of cases where people were being deported after committing crimes. They didn't like the fact that they had the right to appeal it. They don't like the fact that there is due process, but they appealed it. Then, they were deported. That is what the law is. Their bill is simply an effort to say you don't need a conviction anymore. You could just deport them based on hearsay evidence. An ICE agent says that this person admitted to me that they had committed fraud, and that substitutes for a prosecution, trial, and conviction by a jury. In the meantime, we have hundreds of judges in America who are condemning ICE for lying in court. We have Department of Justice lawyers who are saying literally in court that their job sucks because they can't defend what is taking place with ICE. We have judge after judge denouncing the fantastical, misleading, deceptive, mendacious testimony of people from ICE, and now you want to just trust an ICE agent to say this person admitted to me that they committed criminal fraud. We are just going to kick them out of the country without a trial. Thomas Jefferson said during the Alien and Sedition Acts that there are people who want to strip away the rights of aliens and who will inevitably come to attack the rights of citizens, too. We already saw that in Minneapolis. There were a lot of people in this Chamber willing to look the other way when they were knocking down the doors of immigrants without a search warrant, without probable cause, when they were roughing up immigrants, or when immigrants were dying in custody. Then, suddenly, these ICE agents thought they could get away with it when it comes to U.S. citizens, and that is when America woke up to this threat and said no. ICE agents are not superior to the rule of law. They are not above and beyond the law. Even President Trump understood that, which is why he has pulled a lot of people out of Minneapolis. They wanted to change the subject. They said stop using the words ``mass deportation.'' A majority of the American people reject these authoritarian tactics that have been unleashed against both citizens and immigrants. This is a nation of laws. It is a nation under the rule of law and under the Constitution. Their bill is, at best, if not completely redundant, unnecessary, and silly, a gloss on what the law already is, which is that if you are convicted of fraud and you are an immigrant, you get kicked out of the country. You are removed. They want to pick a fight on a nonsensical problem. We don't need to degrade our own rule of law by taking action against people without a criminal conviction. The criminal justice system works just fine, so we should be encouraging government agents not to lie to judges, not to render false testimony, as judges across the country have been saying. Both Republican and Democratic appointees have been rejecting what is coming out of this administration. This bill, as far as I know, is not about naturalized citizens. I think our distinguished chairman said something about that. He may have gotten it confused with another bill, but this bill is unnecessary and redundant. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, before the distinguished gentleman leaves, I would be happy to yield to him for an answer to a question. The bill, as he originally introduced it, required a criminal conviction. I wonder why it was changed and whether that was changed with his approval or not. What was the logic for changing it? I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Taylor) for the purpose of a colloquy.

Mr. RASKIN. Representative Taylor, this is your bill, H.R. 1958. It begins like this: ``Any alien who has been convicted of an offense that involves defrauding the United States Government or unlawfully receiving a Federal public benefit . . . or a State or local public benefit . . . is deportable.'' You have got the language of ``convicted'' in there. It was changed by the Committee. I am just wondering: Why did you originally have it in such a way as to require a conviction?

Mr. RASKIN. That is the way it has been changed. It has been altered to that. When you introduced it, it required a conviction. I am just wondering: What was your original logic, and why did you change your mind about that, if you did? Maybe you didn't.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I will reclaim my time. I supported the original vision. It was basically unnecessary because it was a restatement of what the law is, to put it all in one place, so I could certainly support that. Then your language was completely diluted in committee to open up this huge, gaping hole to say that you don't need a criminal conviction before deporting someone. We have enumerated the problems with that. For one thing, it deprives victims of a crime the opportunity to be heard and perhaps to get their restitution and to get their proper justice in court. Also, it sets a terrible precedent. This is the Thomas Jefferson point. When we say we are going to have lesser standards relating to immigrants, that then carries over to citizens. We have seen already in this huge immigration roundup what that means in terms of the trampling of the rights of our people under the Bill of Rights. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for this lively debate. This bill is redundant. It is unnecessary. It is dangerous in terms of eroding a basic principle that we have, which is that there should be full due process and people should not be deported without a criminal conviction. The prosecution is not always right, but also everybody should have their day in court, including the victims. At a time when we have seen Big Brother bloated beyond belief in terms of budget and in terms of power, the last thing we should do is to look for further ways to aggrandize the power of the executive branch at this point. 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 thank Mr. Nadler for his extraordinary leadership on this legislation and on this issue. I rise in strong support of S. 1884, the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2025. This bill, which has already passed the Senate by unanimous consent, amends the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 in a number of key ways to ensure that Holocaust survivors and their heirs have a fair opportunity in court to recover all of the artwork that was stolen by the Nazi regime or what is left of it. In doing so, this bill will provide these victims the chance to obtain some small measure of justice for the horrors and the injustices and indignities their families have endured. During its reign of hatred and terror, the Nazis committed theft and murder on a mass industrial scale through the relentless killings of the Einsatzgruppen in the Bloodlands of Europe and through the death camps they established at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, and many others. For the victims' families, these pieces of art are both stolen objects and stolen connections to their own family members whose memories the Nazis have tried to permanently erase from history. In many cases, the artwork serves as the final tangible connection of the victims' families to their lost family members, providing proof of their existence and a testament to their suffering and their loss. Congress passed the 2016 HEAR Act, which established a 6-year Federal statute of limitations for claims arising from Nazi-stolen artwork out of concern that the State statutes of limitations would prevent most litigation. In its findings, Congress observed that the unique and horrific circumstances of World War II and the Holocaust make statutes of limitations especially burdensome to the victims and their heirs. It further noted the difficulty of piecing together their cases from a fragmentary historical record ravaged by persecution, war, and genocide. This costly process often cannot be done within the time constraints imposed by what was then the existing law. Alas, several court decisions since the 2016 HEAR Act's passage have undermined the statute's purpose of trying to give victims a fair hearing on the merits of their cases regardless of the passage of time. These decisions have dismissed numerous cases precisely based on passage of time defenses like laches or adverse possession or other non-merits defenses like forum non conveniens, the act of state doctrine, or foreign sovereign immunity. This bill addresses these court decisions and related concerns. It eliminates the HEAR Act's sunset provision so that defendants no longer have an incentive to simply run out the clock on victims' families. It also prohibits courts from dismissing lawsuits on grounds related to the passage of time or other non-merit defenses. Finally, it clarifies that claims for recovery of the artwork fall within an existing expropriation exception to foreign sovereign immunity regardless of the victim's citizenship or nationality. This bill will help give victims and their heirs the chance to obtain a small measure of justice for the grave and dehumanizing wrongs they suffered as a result of the Holocaust. It will also give victims' families a chance to recover at least a partial connection to their loved ones, a connection that was stolen in every single way possible by the Nazis. I applaud Representative Lee, and I applaud our Senate colleagues who have worked to advance this bill. I especially recognize my colleague Representative Nadler for his longtime aggressive and unswerving leadership on seeing justice done in this case and to see passage of both the 2016 Act and this bill. Mr. Speaker, I strongly advocate for this legislation, and I urge all of our colleagues to support it.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member for yielding time. Mr. Speaker, yes, use all lawful and constitutional means. I heard one of our colleagues across the aisle just say: Well, yes, Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 does give Congress the exclusive, plenary, comprehensive power to declare war and not the President, and we could be debating it, but the President has already taken us to war, so it is too late. It would undermine the cause for us to debate it. What a humiliating, self-defeating argument for a Member of the Article I branch of Congress to make. Don't my colleagues understand that destroys our power to declare war if any President can plunge us into a war and thereby defeat our exclusive, plenary power over it? The Framers weren't fooling around when they did that. They knew that the kings were constantly plunging their people into wars of deception, conceit, plunder, imperial avarice, and fantasy. The kings were constantly doing that. They didn't want to leave it up to one person to decide whether to send a whole country to war and to put our sons and daughters at risk. That is an awesome and solemn responsibility that must be vested in the Representatives of the people, all the people, which is why both the House and the Senate are involved in it. Whether my colleagues think this war is the most brilliant and strategic breakthrough and moral cause since World War II, or they think it is an absolute strategic blunder built on lies like the last wars in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan, which cost thousands of lives and more than $1 trillion, wherever my colleagues are on that policy question, can we not agree as Members of the Article I branch that it is up to us? We have to vote on it. We have to debate on it. I am hearing very interesting and good arguments all over this spectrum on this. That is why it is reposed in the Representatives of the people to decide it. It is not Donald Trump, not JD Vance, not Tulsi Gabbard, or anybody else in the executive branch. It is our decision. Everybody should vote ``yes'' on this resolution.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentlewoman from Georgia for her extraordinary leadership for gun safety and public safety in America. Mr. Speaker, this bill would rip a dangerous new loophole in the Gun Control Act by changing the definition of firearm throughout the entire criminal code to exclude from coverage certain less-than-lethal but still highly dangerous weapons, such as tasers, which have been identified as a contributing factor in more than 500 deaths throughout the United States of America. Mr. Speaker, this bill would exempt these weapons, which are currently classified as firearms, from all regulations under all Federal firearm laws. These weapons would be exempted from the laws, regardless of who uses, purchases, possesses, or manufactures them. Mr. Speaker, 20 million people who are presently not allowed to possess or buy firearms in this country--convicted domestic abuses, convicted felons in every State, fugitives, and other prohibited purchasers--would legally be able to buy these dangerous weapons, like tasers, that are designed to incapacitate their targets. A convicted domestic felon, who has been deprived of his right to have firearms because he has been proven to be a danger to people in his family, in his home, his wife, his girlfriend, would be able to go out and get a taser. They would be able to go and get that taser without going through a single background check. They would just be able to go get it. The bill exempts these weapons from the requirement that they have a serial number and that they be traceable so that law enforcement can identify their owners if they are used in violent crimes. It would also exempt them from the Undetectable Firearms Act, which requires that firearms be detectable by metal detectors and X-ray machines used at airports. This detection element is key to preventing weapons from getting where they shouldn't be and preventing serious crimes. If the bill becomes law, nothing would stop a convicted felon or a convicted domestic violence abuser from purchasing an undetectable taser and smuggling that weapon past security, onto an airplane, into a school area, indeed, into the Capitol, unbeknownst to anyone before it is too late. The bill would make everybody less safe. Supporters say it is needed so law enforcement can use these less- than-lethal weapons. Mr. Speaker, 18,000 law enforcement agencies are already exempt from many of the provisions in this act and are already using taser technologies. Everybody knows that police have access to tasers. Police departments in all 50 States are using tasers today. Likewise, the tax exemption in this bill does nothing for law enforcement agencies either because they already purchase these weapons completely free of the excise tax. The combination of these exemptions is no accident. They do nothing for law enforcement. They both provide unfettered, even tax-free, access to dangerous weapons to civilians, including at least 20 million who shouldn't have them and wouldn't have them under current law. Supporters argue the change is needed because the classification of these weapons as firearms may result in the use of the weapon being considered deadly force, even though the device is designed to be less than lethal. We have been asking for years, and they cannot provide us a single case where this problem exists. In fact, courts have readily distinguished between deadly force and intermediate force in cases involving law enforcement. They don't have a single case. They just say that some State attorney somewhere heard from another lawyer they were nervous about it. Mr. Speaker, come on. That is not how we should be legislating in the Congress of the United States. Congressman Mike Thompson and 18 of our colleagues submitted an amendment to ensure that less-than-lethal weapons are not considered firearms only when they are used by law enforcement in their official capacity, which is purportedly what this is about. They rejected it. The Republicans didn't want to hear it because we know that, in fact, there is a commercial purpose that pervades this entire legislation. It is all about opening up a huge, new market to sell tasers, including to millions of people who nobody should want to have them. I have repeatedly supported and will continue to support legislation to give law enforcement every tool and training they need to keep us safe. I have got to oppose this legislation that could put law enforcement officers and the rest of us in danger. I stand with the huge number of gun safety groups working to combat gun violence and domestic violence and who strongly oppose and condemn this legislation. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to join us in opposing H.R. 2189.