Jamie Raskin

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record ``The Lost History of the `Universal' Injunction,'' a law review article by Mila Sohoni refuting what was just stated by the gentleman. The universal injunction, the nationwide injunction, goes back at least to 1913 and has been used repeatedly over the last century. [From the Harvard Law Review] The Lost History of the ``Universal'' Injunction (Mila Sohoni) The issuance of injunctions that reach beyond just the plaintiffs has recently become the subject of a mounting wave of censorious commentary, including by members of Congress, a Supreme Court Justice, the Solicitor General, the Attorney General, and the President. Critics of these ``universal'' injunctions have claimed that such injunctions are a recent invention and that they exceed the power conferred by Article III to decide ``Cases[ ] in . . . Equity.'' This Article rebuts the proposition that the universal injunction is a recent invention and that it violates Article III or the traditional limits of equity as practiced in the federal courts. As far back as 1913, the Supreme Court itself enjoined federal officers from enforcing a federal statute not just against the plaintiff, but against anyone, until the Court had decided the case. If the Supreme Court can issue a universal injunction against enforcement of a federal law, then--as an Article III matter--so can a lower federal court. Moreover, lower federal courts have been issuing injunctions that reach beyond the plaintiffs as to state laws in cases that date back more than a century, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly approved of these injunctions. If Article III allows such injunctions as to state laws, it a fortiori allows such injunctions as to federal laws. Mapping these and other pieces of the lost history of the universal injunction, this Article demonstrates that the Article III objection to the universal injunction should be retired and that the unfolding efforts to outright strip the federal courts of the tool of the universal injunction--whether by statutory fiat or by a judicial redefinition of Article III--should halt. But I would speak to the consciences of honorable men, and ask, how they can venture . . . to recommend changes, which may cut deep into the quick of remedial justice . . . . Surely, they need not be told, how slow every good system of laws must be in consolidating; and how easily the rashness of an hour may destroy, what ages have scarcely cemented in a solid form. --Joseph Story, Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1812- 1845) introduction The Trump Administration and the Obama Administration do not seem to have much in common. But they have had one shared foe: the ``universal'' injunction. Across both administrations, federal district courts have issued a slew of injunctions blocking the executive branch from enforcing federal laws, regulations, or policies ``not only against the plaintiff, but also against anyone,'' even in cases not certified as class actions. The federal courts' power to issue such injunctions--which are variously called ``national,'' ``nationwide,'' ``universal,'' and even ``cosmic''--is now under fire. In Trump v. Hawaii, Justice Thomas concurred separately to urge the Court to take up the question of the legality of such injunctions, suggesting that they are a modern innovation and that they might fall outside the judicial power of Article III courts. In 2018, the House Judiciary Committee of the 115th Congress released a markup of the Injunctive Authority Clarification Act, which would curtail the authority of federal courts to issue such injunctions. In December 2018, the Solicitor General's Office called for the Court to ``arrest'' this ``disturbing but accelerating trend,'' which it cast as a ``rapidly expanding threat to the respect that each coordinate Branch of our Nation's government owes the others.'' In guidelines to Department of Justice civil litigators, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions referred to such injunctions as ``abuses of judicial power,'' a ``threat[ ]'' to ``the rule of law,'' a ``danger to our constitutional order,'' and a ``kind of judicial activism [that] did not happen a single time in our first 175 years as a nation.'' Several states--including states that earlier sought and won such injunctions--now contend that ``universal injunctions contradict the rest of Anglo-American jurisprudence.'' The Trump White House, in its characteristically measured tones, has hinted that the practice is perhaps not beyond criticism. A growing vein of scholarship concerning such injunctions has also developed. This Article demonstrates that the universal injunction is a tool with a more venerable lineage than heretofore recognized. Surveying cases involving both state and federal law and drawing on decisions by courts at all three levels of the federal judicial hierarchy, this Article shows that Article III courts have issued injunctions that extend beyond just the plaintiff for well over a century. Building on this lost history, this Article argues that the Article III objection to the universal injunction should be retired and that legislative efforts to outright strip the federal courts of the substantive power to grant such injunctions should halt. Let us begin with the history. The universal injunction against federal law did not ``emerg[e] for the first time in the 1960s,'' as many critics of the universal injunction have claimed. The Court itself issued a universal injunction in 1913, in the months preceding its opinion in Lewis Publishing Co. v. Morgan, when it temporarily enjoined a federal statute from being enforced not just against the plaintiffs but also against ``other newspaper publishers.'' In the following decade, the Court issued two other preliminary injunctions that barred a federal law's enforcement beyond the plaintiffs within a single judicial district, and in one of those cases it specified that similarly broad final relief should issue. Moreover, at least as far back as 1916, three-judge federal courts issued injunctions against the enforcement of laws that reached beyond the plaintiffs in those suits. The laws thereby enjoined were state laws, not federal laws, but the injunctions possessed the characteristic that matters most to the Article III debate over the injunctive power: those injunctions gave sweeping protection to nonplaintiffs who would otherwise have been vulnerable to the law's enforcement. When the state defendants in those suits appealed directly to the Supreme Court--as procedural law at the time allowed them to do--the Court on several occasions affirmed the lower courts' injunctions, and sometimes did so in single-sentence, unanimous, per curiam decisions. In one important (though not unique) instance--Pierce v. Society of Sisters--the Court affirmed a universal injunction barring the enforcement of Oregon's compulsory public-schooling law in a landmark precedent that remains good law to this day. Not long thereafter, the universal injunction was brought to bear upon federal agency action. In 1939, the D.C. Circuit issued a universal injunction against federal agency action in Lukens Steel Co. v. Perkins. That highly consequential decree altered the federal government's purchasing activities with respect to the iron and steel industries for a whole year in the run-up to America's entry into World War II. When the Supreme Court took up the case in Perkins v. Lukens Steel Co., the Court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing and were thus not entitled to seek any kind of relief, the steel companies' suit, the Court held, ``contains no semblance of these elements which go to make up a litigable controversy as our law knows the concept.'' Crucially, Perkins left intact the propriety of injunctions reaching beyond the plaintiffs as remedies in cases brought by plaintiffs with standing, indeed, Perkins is bookended by decisions in which the Court continued to approve that practice. In Hague v. CIO, less than a year before Perkins, the Court affirmed an injunction that protected those who acted in sympathy with the plaintiffs from enforcement of a city law; in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, shortly after Perkins, the Court affirmed an injunction that reached beyond both the plaintiffs' children and the alleged plaintiff class to shield ``any other children having religious scruples'' from a state law requiring students to salute the American flag. This history has important implications for how we should understand Article III. Today, critics of the universal injunction contend that Article III courts should adhere--or, as they sometimes frame it, revert--to the rule that injunctions must be solely ``plaintiff-protective.'' They have urged the Advisory Committee on Federal Rules to create such a rule by amending the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures. They have pressed Congress to institute such a rule by statute--and indeed, the 115th Congress lately considered doing just that, holding hearings on whether it should forbid what the bill at issue styled as ``orders purporting to restrain enforcement against non-parties'' in cases not certified as Rule 23 class actions. Justice Thomas, as noted, has suggested that Article III may forbid injunctions that reach beyond the plaintiffs. We must be clear about one thing: it would be a sharp departure from precedent and practice to treat Article III as requiring the equitable remedial powers of federal courts to be cabined in that manner. Article III confers a singular power upon all federal courts to decide ``Cases[ ] in . . . Equity.'' It does not allocate different types of equitable remedial power to courts at different levels of the federal judicial hierarchy, and it draws no line between state and federal government defendants. That singular judicial power must be uniformly interpreted, and its scope cannot sensibly be regarded as hinging on the surmounting of hurdles to class certification that were not created until 1966. If the Supreme Court can issue a universal injunction against enforcement of a federal law in a suit by a single plaintiff, then so can a federal district court as an Article III matter. If a federal district court issue a universal injunction against enforcement of a state law in a suit by a single plaintiff, a federal district court must also have the power to issue such an injunction against enforcement of a federal law as an Article III matter. There is only one ``judicial Power,'' and that power includes the power to issue injunctions that protect those who are not plaintiffs. Finally, some critics of the universal injunction have invoked a strict form of originalism in support of their case against that remedy. But the logic of that argument would extend well beyond the universal injunction. At the time of the Founding, English officers were kept to heel not with injunctions issued by the Chancellor in equity, but instead with common law damages suits or ``prerogative'' writs (mandamus, quo warranto, and so on) issued by the King's Bench--a common law court. And American federal courts did not issue ``Young- type'' injunctions against enforcement suits brought by state and federal officers until well after the Founding. A strictly originalist approach to the judicial power in equity would therefore jettison not just the universal injunction-- it would equally undercut the propriety of an injunction that protected just a single plaintiff from enforcement of even an egregiously unconstitutional law by a government officer. Such a straitened conception of the equitable power of Article III courts cannot be squared with either a century- plus of practice or with ``the implicit policies embodied in Article III'' itself. Nor, fortunately, is that result demanded by Grupo Mexicana de Desarrollo v. Alliance Bond Fund, Inc., for that decision rested not only on the meaning of equity in England in 1789, but also on how American federal courts treated that concept in decisions extending through the twentieth century. Measured by that yardstick, the universal injunction against federal law is constitutionally legitimate. At bottom, the current debate over the universal injunction is as much a debate over the proper role of the federal courts as it is a debate over the arcana of equitable remedies. May courts decide disputes only for the parties before them, or may they declare the law for nonparties, too? This Article's contribution to that evergreen debate is to show how, in the period from 1890 to 1943, the law- declaration model animated and guided the actions of federal courts as they issued decrees on myriad questions of public law. Expanding the frame of our inquiry even by this much reveals that the injunction reaching beyond the plaintiffs-- and the law-declaration model of the judicial power that this remedy implies--is not some late-blooming efflorescence of post-Warren Court judicial hubris. Rather, it is a tool that developed in tandem with, and in support of, the regime of routinized judicial review of state and federal official action that we continue to live under today. Our government is not a monarchy, and our federal judges are not Westminster chancellors; in no small part, the one has followed from the other. The Article proceeds in six Parts. Part I maps how the current discourse concerning universal injunctions has gerrymandered the analysis of judicial power and has thereby cast undue doubt on the propriety of this remedy. Part II explores how the Supreme Court in the 1890s endorsed an expansive view of the powers of federal courts to control the rights of nonparties through injunctive decrees. Part III describes injunctions against enforcement of federal statutes issued by the Court itself in the 1910s and 1920s and examines their implications for the Article III analysis. Part IV describes injunctions against enforcement of state law issued by lower federal courts from the 1910s through the 1930s and then similarly outlines their implications for the Article III analysis. Part V turns to federal agency action, focusing specifically on Perkins and two cases involving state and local laws that are important for understanding Perkins; this Part spans the 1939-1943 period.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, the link to the entire document can be found here: https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/920- 1009__Online.pdf. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Both Democrats and some Republicans have assailed the clearly unlawful nature of this trade war instituted by President Trump based on tariffs against the entire world except for Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Congress has the power under Article I of the Constitution to regulate commerce internationally. We have the power over tariffs. The President purportedly is asserting powers under a statute which applies to emergencies in extraordinary and unusual situations. Then he said this has been going on for decade after decade. Well, then how could that be an emergency? How could that be extraordinary and unusual? There will be a lawsuit on this, and what our colleagues are saying is that if there is a bipartisan lawsuit that goes to court which stops these tariffs that are crippling businesses and farmers and wiping out people's retirements across the country, and if they succeed in one district, say, in Minnesota or Wisconsin or New York, you have to go to every one of 94 different districts in the country to get the benefit of that. That is what they want to do. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, nationwide injunctions are something that my friends across the aisle not only endorsed but took liberal advantage of in the last administration. Remember Judge Matt Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas? They were lining up around the block to go forum shopping in his little district because he was the only judge to get cases against Biden there. Then Republicans praised the nationwide injunctions he issued. The gentleman who just spoke signed a letter in praise of a nationwide injunction that was offered by Judge Kacsmaryk. If the gentleman wants to change his position, fine, but please explain to us why the position has changed since the gentleman was praising nationwide injunctions in the last administration. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Neguse).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his astute observations there and say that Judge Kacsmaryk was reversed several times by higher courts. We never came out and said, therefore, let's ban nationwide injunctions. We did say we should reform judge shopping and forum shopping. That is the real problem. Yet, it is not a problem if there is a nationwide crisis created by illegal action by an executive that a judge has the authority to counter that with an injunction and then it gets appealed up to the Supreme Court. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, just to answer a couple of things raised by the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Jordan), my friend. First of all, that is not what the Supreme Court said. The Supreme Court simply said that this was not a case that should be going through the Administrative Procedure Act under the Immigration and Nationality Act. It should be done through a habeas corpus in the district of confinement, in Texas. Mr. Speaker, in fact, the Supreme Court affirmed that there must be due process for people who were illegally taken out of this country and sent to El Salvador. Secondly, the gentleman gives us a false choice when he says: Who gets to decide? Is it the person who puts his name on the ballot and goes out and campaigns, or is it an unelected Federal district judge? Decide what? If we are talking about deciding the constitutionality of a law, obviously it is the judge under Marbury v. Madison. I know that the distinguished gentleman from the Committee on the Judiciary knows that the fact that Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by 2 million votes is neither here, nor there. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 7 million votes, and they still went to court pretty much on a weekly basis to try to get Joe Biden's legislation and his programs struck down. The majority believed in judicial review then. We should understand that it is very convenient for Republicans to say, all of a sudden, that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't believe in judicial review just because they have the Presidency. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Ross).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, the Supreme Court has already rejected at least two of the actions that Donald Trump has taken since he got in. One was firing the executive director of the Office of Special Counsel. He was reinstated. The other was reinstating a $2.1 billion aid grant that was essentially impounded and diverted by the administration. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the very distinguished gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Subramanyam).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Bell).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I will answer my good friend, the chairman of the subcommittee, about the remarks he just made. He is correct that the President, of course, like Members of Congress, must also interpret and enforce the Constitution. In fact, that is the core part of the President's job, to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, says Article II, not distorted or rewritten, but to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. That doesn't negate the fact that under Marbury v. Madison, it is emphatically the province and the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is in the event of an actual case or controversy. The gentleman invoked George Washington. There is a beautiful portrait of Washington, the Trumbull portrait, that we have in the rotunda and it is a picture of George Washington surrendering his commission as the general of the Continental Forces, which Napoleon said made him the greatest man ever, that he could have stayed on as a dictator forever, and he gave up his power. He could have been President forever, but he gave up his power. When we compare that to Donald Trump who is saying he is going to run for an unconstitutional and, yes, an illegal third term, that would be an illegal third term for him to run again to try to take office, so that is why we have courts in order to cabin the potentially limitless ambitions of Presidents. That is why we don't have kings; we have Presidents here. Secondly, there seems to be a myth on the other side that if a President campaigns on something, then it is constitutional and the courts can't strike it down. So if the President campaigns on running again for a third term, then it is okay. Where does it say that in the Constitution? That can't be right. We are all bound by the Constitution no matter what we say during the campaign. A person could run around saying, ``I am going to be king,'' or if President Trump said, ``I will be dictator on day one.'' No, you will not be dictator on day one under the Constitution of the United States. Why did the judge tell the administration to turn the planes around? Because of the two most beautiful words in the English language, ``due process.'' Because what they can do to noncitizens, they can do to citizens. If they can sweep anybody off the street and say we are going to send you to a torturous prison in El Salvador without any kind of hearing at all, it can happen to citizens as well as noncitizens. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\3/4\ minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Goldman).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, listening to the debate, it occurs to me that Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid should have just denounced traditional activism and moved to change the Federal rules of civil procedure: Always better to blame the judge than to take responsibility for your own unlawful actions. Mr. Speaker, I will close by quoting Thomas Jefferson who said during the time of the Alien and Sedition Acts: ``A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.'' In the meantime, we are suffering the horrors and malignities of this period, but if the game runs against us sometimes as it will, we must have patience because it is a game where principles are at stake. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, thousands of my constituents have been illegally fired by Elon Musk and by Donald Trump. One of them was with me last night, Dr. Lauren McGee, who was an NIH pediatric cancer specialist heading up a team looking into osteosarcoma, bone cancer for children. She got fired on February 14 because she was a probationary employee. Probationary, not because she had done anything wrong, but because she had been promoted into the new job. She was with me last night, and she had to sit here and listen, along with me--and I had spent the day with her--to Donald Trump saying one of their top priorities is to fight childhood cancer, and she got sacked on that Valentine's Day massacre. Now they want to censure the gentleman from Texas. Why? Because he challenged the President about his claim that he has a mandate to cut Medicaid, and that is what the gentleman was trying to raise. We have Republicans in the Chamber who have never voted to impeach Donald Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against this Congress, this Constitution, and his own Vice President, who have never voted to even censure the President for doing that, and yet they want to censure the gentleman from Texas. Last night, President Trump called a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts ``Pocahontas,'' using an ethnic slur to go after her. If you really want to proceed to censure the gentleman from Texas for talking about no mandate to cut Medicaid, then certainly we are going to have to move to censure the President for using a racial and ethnic slur against a sitting United States Senator. I would prefer to stand by the tradition of free speech and even the tradition of heckling. There is a fine American art of heckling. If you read the Lincoln-Douglas debates, I recommend the Harold Holzer version of it because the newspapers carried all of the hecklers' comments, too. People would get up and heckle, and Lincoln would interact with them and Douglas would interact with them.

Mr. RASKIN. Let's stop clutching our pearls. There has been lots of heckling over on that side of the aisle. I saw the gentlewoman from Georgia heckle the last President and have a whole heckling section there. We didn't try to censure them or kick them out of Congress or anything. We actually not only say we believe in free speech but we believe in free speech. We will stand up for people's right to speak. Now, I don't believe in the kind of heckling where you drown somebody out and you make it impossible for them to speak, but the gentleman was trying to start a conversation as opposed to just being spoken to all night.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I begin with an urgent constitutional public service announcement based on millions of calls and messages that have been flooding Congress. There is a serial constitutional violator at large right now in the District of Columbia whose overall project to dismantle our Constitution and rule of law is now the target or subject of at least a dozen different Federal court temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions across the land and also faces emergency civil actions in dozens of other courts and jurisdictions. The suspect has been described as a very evil individual by Steve Bannon and has been operating in a clandestine fashion with a night crew of computer-hacking juvenile associates, one of whom goes by the alias of ``Big Balls'' and another one they call ``the kid,'' who has been known to post racist and anti-Semitic provocations online. The accelerating spree of constitutional offenses alarming the Nation involves dozens of episodes of computer fraud and data theft affecting potentially 300 million Americans and escalating threats against congressionally created Federal agencies serving the people from the NIH to the National Weather Service to NOAA to the Department of Justice; public workers; teachers and students; prosecutors of cop- assaulting criminals and seditious conspirators against our government; FBI agents; and anyone who depends on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, or any other computerized public payment system. The apparent ringleader of all the constitutional mayhem is a reported father of 12, a formerly deportable undocumented immigrant who worked illegally in the country and is apparently part of a loose network of Silicon Valley billionaires who oppose American constitutional democracy and openly favor creation of a monarchical techno-state under their control. The suspect was seen yesterday in the vicinity of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW and is known to have been consorting as recently as a few days ago with a convicted felon from New York. Described as the richest person in the world, the suspect is both a government contractor with billions of dollars in defense contracts-- and we learned yesterday $400 million slated from the State Department for some of his armored Tesla vehicles--and also he is a part-time government worker whose many taxpayer-supported businesses are being investigated, fined, or sued by numerous Federal agencies, including the Department of Transportation, the National Labor Relations Board, the Department of Justice, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The suspect has allegedly been working to seize control over several of these same agencies to shut them down, which would presumably terminate all of the relevant threatening investigations. The public has never received from the suspect any ethics disclosure forms required of all Federal workers nor any conflict of interest waiver to resolve his glaring conflicts of interest. The suspect spent his formative years in apartheid South Africa and has been known to post racist and anti-Semitic material and to engage in a Nazi salute in public. Steve Bannon calls him a truly evil individual. The ringleader and his associates, sometimes called the Muskovites, have been seen by numerous Federal workers violating the separation of powers and the Spending Clause, usurping the powers of this body, trampling the civil service laws, and violating the rights of both his Federal and corporate workers. The suspect, his sponsors, and accomplices should be considered dangerous to the constitutional rights, freedoms, and institutions of the people as well as their property, their jobs, and their livelihoods. If you know anything about the situation and you are a Republican Member, please get in touch immediately with the Democrats so we can form a majority to stop this unprecedented attack on the Constitution and American law and order before we end up like apartheid South Africa or Orban's Hungary or Putin's Russia. Now, back to our regularly scheduled program where we avoid the constitutional crisis overtaking the first and greatest multiracial, multiethnic constitutional democracy on Earth and instead pass completely redundant, unnecessary, and sloppily drafted laws that allow us to vote against immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, as Elon Musk was, without either engaging in comprehensive immigration reform or fixing the border. Now, with this bill, House Republicans are once again seeking to take political advantage of a horrific crime by seizing on the death of Agent Gonzalez in the performance of his duties, while doing nothing to make our border more secure or to repair our broken immigration system. Everyone knows, of course, that they blew up the bipartisan border security deal that we had at the end of the last Congress. H.R. 35 seeks to establish new criminal and immigration penalties on anyone--citizens, permanent residents, documented immigrants, or undocumented immigrants--for this offense: fleeing a Border Patrol agent or a law enforcement officer who is working with the Border Patrol. Fleeing Border Patrol at the border already carries substantial criminal and legal penalties under current law. That is already a crime. Under 18 U.S. Code 758, whoever flees or evades a checkpoint operated by the Customs and Border Protection, or any other law enforcement agency, in a motor vehicle and flees from Federal, State, or local law enforcement in excess of the legal speed limit can be charged with and convicted of high-speed flight from an immigration checkpoint. Furthermore, many decades of prosecution and case law make it perfectly clear that fleeing law enforcement is a crime involving moral turpitude for which a conviction will render a noncitizen, whether documented or undocumented, immediately deportable and inadmissible to the country. In other words, what they are dragging us through again is already against the law. If all of it is already a crime, why do we need another version of it, except for plainly opportunistic political purposes. I know those are the only bills they have been bringing forward. They have got no other agenda for the country. They have handed over the legislative authority of the Congress of the United States to Elon Musk, the fourth branch of government. In any event, they want us to pass again something that is already against the law. We don't need it. In fact, this characteristically poorly drafted, pile-on bill is so poorly drafted this time that it could subject not just undocumented people, not just permanent residents, but American citizens to prison sentences for conduct that the vast majority of Americans would not even recognize as a crime at all and would not see as a crime. Now, unlike existing Federal law or similar State statutes, the bill does not define what it means to ``flee.'' In their haste to get this to the floor, they just rushed over that element of the crime, which is of extraordinary interest to every other jurisdiction and even Congress before when dealing with it. Leave that aside, it does not even require evidence of criminal intent, a guilty mind, what lawyers call mens rea, the intention to do the evil thing. In other words, this bill does not require a person to know that they are fleeing Border Patrol in order to be charged with that crime. Think about it, Mr. Speaker. It applies to citizens, not just noncitizens, and you can be prosecuted and jailed for fleeing from a Border Patrol that you didn't know was Border Patrol. This is a radical departure from the prevailing rule in American jurisdictions. For example, in Maryland--I looked up my State--the offense of fleeing or eluding law enforcement requires that a uniformed officer gives a person a visual or audible signal to stop and prominently displays their official badge or other insignia. If an officer is not in uniform, Maryland requires that an officer give a visual or audible signal to stop while in an officially marked police vehicle to establish the necessary mens rea before we put somebody in prison. Under either circumstance, a visual or audible signal can be by hand, voice, emergency light, or siren. It is not only blue States like mine that require evidence that the accused knew what they were doing was wrong before convicting them of purposefully fleeing from law enforcement. That is the rule almost everywhere. I am sure the Crime and Federal Government Surveillance Subcommittee chairman, Mr. Biggs, and the sponsor of this bill, Mr. Ciscomani, are aware that, in Arizona, the offense of unlawful flight from pursuing law enforcement requires proof that the officer's vehicle had markings indicative of an official police vehicle, evidence that the driver knew that the vehicle was an official law enforcement vehicle, or the defendant must admit knowing that the vehicle was an official police vehicle. In other words, their own State takes the exact painstaking precautions that they just run roughshod over in order to get this bill, which has not had a hearing, to the floor of the United States House of Representatives. Should a defendant choose to exercise their right to trial by jury, the trial judge in Arizona would instruct the jury that they may consider whether the officer operated their emergency lights or siren to determine whether the defendant is guilty of unlawful flight from an actual pursuing vehicle. As was stated in the collaborative reports ``Without Intent'' and ``Without Intent Revisited,'' published by The Heritage Foundation, which is adamant about mens rea, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, ``Ensuring that an adequate mens rea provision is included in statutes and regulations that create criminal offenses is critical.'' The Heritage Foundation says that it is critical to specify that there must be a culpable or guilty state of mind before we put people behind bars. It appears that nearly every State recognized this fact when drafting their statutes carefully to address the fears and consequences associated with people fleeing law enforcement. We don't want people going to jail because they were simply moving away from a person they thought was a criminal who turns out to be, for example, an undercover police officer. As a matter of fact, of the States represented by the 32 cosponsors of this legislation, all but two of them specifically require, at minimum, an audible or visual signal to stop the vehicle to prove that there was intentional flight from a pursuing officer. Looking at statutes that address similar conduct in all 50 States, there are only 6 that do not explicitly require an order, direction, request, or signal to stop the vehicle. Despite this widely accepted approach to legislative construction, H.R. 35 would allow Donald Trump's Department of Justice to not only convict noncitizens but citizens of a violation of this so-called offense and to deport noncitizens without allowing them their day in court and without requiring any evidence of any knowledge that they were actually fleeing a government agent. Without any limiting characteristics, under this bill, a citizen could be sent to prison because they did not immediately pull over when hailed by someone--for example, a local undercover officer assisting Border Patrol. Similarly, in the immigration context, admitting to acts that constitute this nebulous and vague conduct would render a green card holder deportable. The bill applies its criminal immigration penalties even if the law enforcement officer is in plain clothes and is driving an unmarked undercover vehicle. There are a lot of good reasons why a law-abiding citizen or permanent resident might be wary of pulling over for an unmarked vehicle. Just last week, reports emerged of an alarming trend across the country of rapists, criminals, or vigilantes pretending to be immigration enforcement personnel targeting people whom they thought might be undocumented in order to rape them, assault them, harass them, or what have you. I saw on TV a case last night of a sexual assailant who accosted a woman and forcibly assaulted her while pretending to be an ICE agent. I saw that last night. Another man, Sean-Michael Johnson, was arrested for impersonating a law enforcement officer, along with felony kidnapping, larceny, and assault and battery, after he impersonated an ICE agent and stopped a group of men in their car because he told them they were not lawfully present in the country. In this environment, Mr. Speaker, it would be neither unreasonable nor surprising for law-abiding citizens to be wary of pulling over for an unmarked car that claims to be working with Border Patrol. Further, given that the Trump administration is deputizing anyone they can to get to aid immigration enforcement efforts, the number of officers, both in police clothing and in unmarked clothing, to whom this law would apply is staggering. In backing this bill, our colleagues want to impose extraordinary criminal and immigration consequences for not immediately pulling over when an unmarked car driven by a total stranger hails you at a time when criminals, including a pardoned January 6 felon, by the way, are going around impersonating immigration enforcement officers. That is a real trend happening now, and I would love to be convinced it is not if the gentleman has reason to think that all of these reports and arrests of people impersonating officers are wrong. This is a trend in the country. All of this is simply to give more power to target immigrants, which already exists, just for the purposes of a legislative show. This is outrageous. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose the legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, yes, we have hundreds of thousands of Federal employees who live in Maryland, and we are very proud of them. I assume the distinguished gentleman from Virginia is proud of the hundreds of thousands of Federal employees who live and work in Virginia, including in Roanoke. They have constitutional rights just like other American citizens have. None of our rights, whether they are constitutional or in the civil service, should be trashed by an unelected billionaire bureaucrat who doesn't understand our system of government. As to the merits, the distinguished gentleman talks about high-speed chases, which is what most statutes talk about in the country. This bill--I don't know if the gentleman read the language--doesn't mention high-speed chases or any speed at all. It just says ``fleeing.'' It is the only statute I could find in the country that doesn't define what ``fleeing'' means. It is a very sloppy bill that has not had a hearing and that was brought to the floor for political entertainment purposes. Mr. Speaker, I yield 6 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal), who is the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 20 seconds to the gentlewoman from Washington.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, just in answer to a couple of the recent comments that the good gentleman, the floor manager, says: How could it be possible that this bill is both duplicative and wildly expansive? Mr. Speaker, it is duplicative of the actual criminal offense. That already exists. It is already a crime for somebody at the border to flee in a high-speed chase away from an officer. That is already a crime. What is expansive is this applies to citizens. It goes way beyond the border. It goes all over the country. It doesn't define what it means to flee. It doesn't require a high-speed chase. As the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal) was saying, it can apply to a woman who hears on the news, the way I heard last night, that there is a maniac out there claiming to be an ICE agent who is attacking women. She hears about it, and then a plainclothes officer in an unmarked car begins to chase her. If she moves away and stops three or four blocks later, she is guilty of violating their sloppily drafted bill. If Republicans are serious about it, we should go back and have a real hearing, and the majority should look at what States across the country are doing. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Bynum).

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Ms. Tlaib).

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, the distinguished chairman of the Judiciary Committee (Mr. Jordan) invites us to believe that we should just suspend our own interests in legislative power. We should no longer defend the laws we have passed, the programs we have adopted, the money we have appropriated but that we should turn it over to the new fourth branch of government, Elon Musk, who can do whatever he wants. Then he wants to also delegate to Mr. Musk our oversight power. We have an entire committee chaired by Mr. Comer. We have our own subcommittee on Oversight in the Judiciary Committee, but do they want to have hearings on Big Bird and Ernie and all of the alleged waste, fraud, and abuse that Mr. Musk is finding with his untutored, unvetted, juvenile computer hacker crew? Come on. Let's show some institutional self-respect. This is the Congress of the United States. We are not delegating our power to Elon Musk or anybody else. Mr. Speaker, many of our great heroes have understood that sloppy legislation undertaken as part of an attempt to whip up anti- immigration hysteria comes to haunt not just the immigrant community, of course, but citizens, too. This bill is a great example of that because I don't know if they meant to write it this way, but it applies to citizens. It doesn't require mens rea, so call the Heritage Foundation about that. They are opposed to bills like this that don't require you prove that people have a specific intent to violate the law and commit a criminal offense. It doesn't define what fleeing even means. It doesn't require a high-speed chase, which is what they keep talking about. That is already against the law in lots of places. It is a sloppy bill that is going to come back and haunt us if it were ever to become law, which it won't. Thomas Jefferson said during the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts where people were trying to whip up hysteria--

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

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