Jamie Raskin

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from Georgia (Mrs. McBath), the author of the legislation and a real leader on criminal justice reform.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I thank the distinguished gentlewoman from South Carolina for her great leadership on this as well as Mr. Connolly from Virginia for his very hard work on it, too. In this century, public confidence in the Federal Government depends on ensuring that our Federal information technology systems and websites are secure, safe, and effective. We invest more than $100 billion every year in Federal IT needs. Outdated legacy IT systems and infrastructure are costly to maintain and very challenging to secure against the onslaught of cyberattacks by adversaries and criminal organizations. The constantly changing landscape of information technology requires resources if Federal agencies are going to be able to protect data privacy, complete their missions, and effectively serve our people. The Modernizing Government Technology Reform Act would ensure this important work continues smoothly by extending the Technology Modernization Fund's sunset from December 2025 to December 2031. It would also clarify the use of funds and maintain the repayment flexibility adopted by the Technology Modernization Fund, known as the TMF, in recent years while ensuring its solvency by setting minimum reimbursement requirements. Additionally, the bill sets requirements for regularly updated inventories and lists of legacy Federal IT systems and high-risk Federal IT systems, as well as of the legacy systems that present the greatest security, privacy, and operational risks. This timely and comprehensive picture of the Federal Government's most serious IT modernization needs will inform the ability of the TMF, the administration, and Congress to make the best investments. The TMF provides a self-sustaining funding model that has become an essential tool for Federal agencies to address these challenges. It supplies upfront funding for IT projects in exchange for future reimbursement once a project's cost savings are realized, allowing agencies the flexibility they need to address modernization needs outside of the traditional budget cycle. The TMF also instills accountability safeguards to ensure that taxpayers are getting strong returns on our investments. Projects are selected for funding after rigorous review by the TMF board of technology experts, and written funding agreements outline specific requirements and milestones that have to be met. Funds are distributed incrementally based on performance as assessed by quarterly reviews by the board, and technical experts provide hands-on support toward successful execution of the projects. Committee Democrats have supported robust oversight and funding for the TMF, including a historic $1 billion investment through the American Rescue Plan. With this infusion, high-priority projects were also allowed reduced repayment requirements, if warranted. Since the infusion of these moneys, the TMF has received more than 220 agency proposals requesting more than $3.5 billion, far outpacing our funding availability. To date, the TMF has provided over $900 million to 57 IT modernization projects across 32 agencies, and the Biden-Harris administration has embraced it as an indispensable tool to better serve the American people. For example, TMF funding is helping to digitize veterans' records, ensuring that more than 1 million people and their family members who reach out to the National Archives and Records Administration every year get timely access to the documents they need to verify their qualification for important lifesaving benefits. TMF funding is also expediting the speed and safety of food inspection at the USDA, leading to better meals for school kids and servicemembers alike. TMF funding also better secures all of our personal data at the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education. I thank Representatives Mace and Connolly for their great work on this important project. I urge my colleagues to support the bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I have no further speakers. I yield myself such time as I may consume for the purpose of closing. Madam Speaker, I urge everybody to support this fine legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentlewoman, again, from South Carolina, and I thank my wonderful colleague from California, Mr. Ro Khanna, for his leadership on H.R. 5887, the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act. I am really proud to declare our support for this bipartisan legislation. Federal Government services should be accessible and responsive to the American people. This means ensuring agencies have the resources and staffing they need to fulfill their missions, as well as the infrastructure and technology they need to have effective interactions with the public. Committee Democrats have fought for adequate funding so that the government makes the necessary Federal IT modernization investments that our agencies need to deliver for the people. It also means strengthening and standardizing Federal agencies' efforts to improve the delivery of government services. Mr. Khanna's bill would create a Federal Government service delivery lead position in the Office of Management and Budget to coordinate government-wide efforts to improve the delivery of services. Working with lead service delivery officials designated at each Federal agency, the service delivery lead at OMB would develop and oversee the implementation of government-wide standards, policies, and guidelines to improve government service delivery, and would evaluate agency progress, including by collecting and reporting information, data, and metrics. This bipartisan bill will help ensure the Federal government is providing the best service possible to the people and that it is acting in transparent, methodical, and accountable ways to improve our delivery of government services. I urge all my colleagues to support H.R. 5887. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from California (Mr. Khanna).

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I thank the gentleman for pointing out that I accurately cited the statistics for all of the declines in crime and violent crime and homicides in the District of Columbia in 2024. Alas, I do have to correct my friend in his history because there might be some students watching this. Thomas Jefferson never signed the Constitution. He was, of course, on a diplomatic mission when the Constitution was being signed in Philadelphia, but he did write the Declaration of Independence. The other side says, bizarrely, that the District of Columbia Council and the Mayor should be denied the authority to increase criminal sentences forthwith because they have shown no inclination to increase criminal sentences. Leaving aside the absolute illogic of the argument, it is also false because the District of Columbia in the secure D.C. act, passed just 2 months ago, increased criminal sentences across the board, which I am afraid my friends were completely oblivious to when they started this legislation. They weren't aware of it. The people who claim to be speaking for the populous of Washington, D.C., didn't know that the Council had just acted to dramatically increase criminal penalties in the city. They denied them the right to further increase criminal penalties in the city because they say they haven't shown any inclination to do so which, of course, makes no sense and is also completely false. All of this is pure political theater. It is bad political theater. Somebody decided a long time ago that it works for people who would never try to kick around their own State legislatures, their own county councils, or their own city councils to kick around the people of Washington, D.C. My friends think that they have scored some kind of huge rhetorical coup, pointing out Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the Constitution, which indeed says that Congress shall exercise exclusive legislation over the District, constituting the seat of government from land that is ceded by various States. Nobody on this side of the aisle, including the distinguished gentlewoman from the District of Columbia, has denied that for a second. What we have said is this is a massive assault on home rule, and it is also an embarrassing one because it cuts completely against all of the rhetoric that we are hearing from our colleagues across the aisle. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, I think we have made some progress in this conversation because a plain reading of the distinguished gentleman from Florida's legislation indicates that what he is telling the District of Columbia is you may never increase criminal penalties again. The only time there can be an increase in criminal penalties in the District of Columbia is if Congress does it. Unfortunately, this Congress has a hard time even keeping a Speaker in place without them trying to vacate the chair and topple the Speaker. This Congress, as the whole country knows, has been absolute chaos and dysfunction and disorganization from the beginning. I don't blame the people from Washington, D.C., who sent us these letters; the Mayor, the Council, and the Attorney General of D.C. saying thanks, but no thanks. We will take it from here. The people in D.C. are perfectly able to decide what criminal offenses they need in the District of Columbia and how the sentences should be set and fixed. They have courts in the District of Columbia, they have a legislature, the Council for the District of Columbia, which is elected from their eight wards and four at-large members and the chairman of the Council, and they have a Mayor. They have advisory neighborhood commissions. I wonder if any of my colleagues over there are active in any of the wards or advisory neighborhood commissions where they live. I tend to doubt it. The people of D.C., I understand from Congresswoman Norton, are actually involved in the governance of their city and the management of their local affairs. Yet, in this totally ham-handed and almost comically dysfunctional attempt to score points against D.C., they come up with legislation which says D.C. can never increase criminal penalties, again, when they are accusing D.C. of being too soft on crime, despite the fact that we are able to show that D.C. has tougher criminal sentences than many of the States represented by the Members who have been speaking about this over the last several days. All of it feels a lot, to me, like a silly election-year stunt. I don't think anyone thinks that this is serious legislation, but I am glad at least that the other side has conceded that the bill means what it says. They want to strip the District of Columbia of any power to increase criminal sentences in their city. I simply think that that is a terrible form of public policy and is a major inroad against home rule over the last several decades when, in fact, what we should be doing is giving the people of D.C. greater political self-government and giving them the rights to equal representation which, of course, was the aforementioned Jefferson's ideal for the country. If you go back and read the Northwest Ordinance, he thought that every part of the country would eventually attain a level of political equality by admission to Statehood through Article IV of the Constitution. That is the spirit of the Constitution, not kicking around people, our fellow citizens, because we think we have more power than them, and we can score some political points off them. Why don't we have a hearing about Statehood for the District of Columbia, and let's keep the engines of democracy, freedom, and political equality in the country moving. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Before the gentleman leaves the Chamber, I thought I might note, I am going to give him some examples, some anecdotes and data since he appears to be legislating by vignette: In Summerville, South Carolina, last week there was a severe armed carjacking by three teenage suspects. In April, a man wanted for murder in Rock Hill was captured following another carjacking at a Huntersville QuikTrip. I could give you a dozen of those. I don't think that the answer to any of that would be to disenfranchise the people of South Carolina or to have Congress usurp the State legislative authority or the local authority there. My friend from Florida describes the District of Columbia as a Federal enclave, which of course it is not. A Federal enclave is a Federal property or land, like in Rockville, Maryland, which is my district, where we have the NIH. That is a Federal enclave. This is the District constituting the seat of government set forth in Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 of the Constitution. Now, both of my friends over there say, well, we are going to take just a small step in the right direction. How is it the right direction to deprive the people of the District of Columbia the power to have control over their own criminal sentencing, including the power to increase criminal sentences? If they had passed this legislation at the beginning of the year, they would have foreclosed the ability of the District of Columbia to increase criminal penalties across the board on a whole range of offenses and perhaps even to create new criminal offenses in the District. The gentleman from South Carolina lectured the people of Washington, D.C., about criminal incidents taking place here, and of course there are criminal incidents taking place also in South Carolina in the exact same way. However, how about something that took place even closer to home? How about the violent mob insurrection where a mob incited by the ex- President violently assaulted Capitol Police officers and Metropolitan Police Department officers who were forced to deploy to the Capitol, and nearly 150 of them ended up brutalized, wounded, and hospitalized after being hit over the head or in the chest or stabbed or speared by steel pipes, Confederate battle flags, Trump flags, and American flags, shamefully? Yet, we have the ex-President and a number of people who are his sycophants over on that side of the aisle describing people who are in jail for that, a majority of them having pled guilty for those offenses, the others convicted after due process of law, calling those people hostages. A hostage is someone who has been illegally abducted by a terrorist or criminal entity, like Hamas, and held for a financial or political ransom. Yet, shamefully, there are people on that side of the aisle who call the prisoners who have been convicted after having been given every aspect of American due process and right to counsel, they are calling them hostages or political prisoners, like Alexei Navalny or Nelson Mandela. That is what they have come to. They want to denounce a criminal event that happened six blocks away. What about the massive criminal event, the most massive criminal event in the history of the Nation's Capital that came right into this Chamber, forcing the Senators and Representatives to flee, and they won't say a word about it. Yet, they get up and they denounce lawlessness, and they won't even denounce lawlessness that comes right into the Congress and the Capitol of the United States. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, the distinguished gentleman from Arizona invites us to believe that the people of Washington, D.C., don't want to respond to spikes in crime in their own city. It is only in response to hearings called by Republican Members of Congress. I think that is an affront to our fellow citizens who obviously care deeply about what is going on in their own city, and I daresay a lot more than those of us who represent other jurisdictions, because we care principally about the places that we represent. Mr. Speaker, I will say before yielding to my friend from the District of Columbia that you don't have to look like a monarch or a tyrant to act like a monarch or a tyrant. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton), the distinguished, nonvoting delegate.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Bishop), momentarily, so that he can answer my question. Are we interpreting it properly?

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I start by humbly suggesting that the majority needs someone new working on legislative acronyms for these messaging bills. This is the DC CRIMES Act, which stands for the D.C. Criminal Reforms to Immediately Make Everyone Safe Act of 2024. ``Immediately make everyone safe.'' That doesn't sound like legislation. It sounds like a Penn & Teller magic trick to me. If the gentleman from Florida can actually immediately make everyone safe, the gentleman should not only be Donald Trump's running mate, as I keep hearing about, but the gentleman should be the Mayor of the District of Columbia. The D.C. Criminal Reforms to Immediately Make Everyone Safe Act is the fourth bill that the majority has brought to the floor to vilify, heckle, and micromanage the elected Mayor and Council of the District of Columbia on the appalling conceit that the distinguished Members of the Republican Conference from Florida or Kentucky or Arizona care more about public safety and public welfare in Washington, D.C., than do the 700,000 people who live there and their elected officials on the D.C. Council and the Mayor. This one is even more sweeping and radical than their prior bills. It doesn't simply overturn one specific current D.C. law. It permanently strips D.C. of authority over any of its criminal laws, making this legislation, perhaps inadvertently, I concede, the largest proposed rollback of D.C.'s authority to govern itself in nearly 30 years. Our colleagues may be shocked to learn during this debate what exactly it is they are being asked to vote for today. At the Rules Committee meeting yesterday, I asked the Republican Members whether they understood what this bill actually does if you take the time to read the language. None of them seemed to know. Let me explain. The bill amends the D.C. Home Rule Act to say that the D.C. Council may not ``enact any act, resolution, or rule to change any criminal . . . sentence in effect on the date of the enactment of the DC CRIMES Act of 2024.'' In other words, if this bill becomes law, the D.C. Council could never increase criminal penalties again without Congress acting first, nor could it create any new criminal offenses at all. This is their big tough-on-crime package the majority offers the Congress: No increases in criminal sentences indefinitely in the District of Columbia, and no new offenses can be passed at all. Say the D.C. Council wanted to create a new criminal offense for directing an organized retail theft ring. Mr. Donalds' bill would prevent them from doing it. Say D.C. wanted to make it a crime to possess a firearm with a removed or altered or mutilated serial number. Under Mr. Donalds' bill, they would be barred from doing so. In fact, that is precisely what D.C. just did a few months ago. My Republican colleagues seem blissfully oblivious to the fact that, earlier this year, responding to the spike in crime occurring across America--not just in Washington, D.C., of course--the D.C. Council passed a 63-page law called the Secure DC Omnibus Emergency Amendment Act of 2024, which dramatically increased criminal penalties for nine different crimes and created six new criminal offenses. The D.C. bill, which was passed unanimously by the council and signed into law by the Mayor, does what Republicans have so eloquently been orating about on the floor. It increased criminal penalties, including for gun crimes, violence in parks, violence committed against vulnerable people, and violence committed against rideshare drivers, Metro drivers, and transit workers. The Secure DC Omnibus Emergency Amendment Act also created a host of new offenses, including directing a retail theft ring, strangulation, firing bullets in public, possessing a firearm with a removed or altered serial number, and unlawful discarding of firearms or ammunition. They addressed the actual problems that they are experiencing in their city, something our colleagues seriously know nothing about and don't care about. If Mr. Donalds' bill had actually been law at the time, the D.C. Council would have been barred from enacting all of these tough-on-crime penalties altogether, and they will be barred in the future from responding to the kinds of spikes in crime that they experience. Amazingly, the gentleman proposes this naked power grab against Washington, denying them the crime-fighting tools they need, despite the fact that they have done a good job and total crime in D.C. is down 16 percent in 2024 compared to the same period last year, which was conceded by the Republicans in the Rules Committee yesterday. There has been a 26-percent reduction in violent crime in 2024, which they conceded in the Rules Committee yesterday, and a 22-percent reduction in homicides. In other words, local democracy works. Let the local governments respond to the problems they are having, but our colleagues insist that crime is still spiking in D.C., despite the evidence to the contrary. What is their big tough-on-crime solution? The bold solution Republicans offer us to combat crime in the Nation's Capital is to prohibit the D.C. Council from ever increasing any criminal penalties and blocking the D.C. Council from ever creating any new crimes. If that is not what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle intend to do, then I think my colleagues need to go back and try again with some new legislation. In any event, for my Republican colleagues who love to castigate the people of D.C., who I concede voted more than 90 percent against Donald Trump in the last election, I would respectfully suggest that the majority considers the following fact: D.C. has higher maximum criminal penalties than many Republican States do. Let's compare. The maximum penalty for armed robbery in D.C. is 30 years. In Kentucky, represented by the chairman of the Oversight Committee, the maximum is 20 years, 50 percent less. In North Dakota, it is 10 years, or 66 percent less. In D.C., criminals can receive a 40-year sentence for armed carjacking. In Kentucky, represented by the chairman of the Oversight Committee, carjacking is not a separate independent offense. You have to charge somebody with armed robbery, but even then, you can only get half the sentence you can get in D.C. for carjacking. Despite all of the fine election-year rhetoric we have heard, there is something profoundly antithetical to our system of government in what the gentleman is proposing. If you read the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson set forth a bill of particulars against King George and the Parliament, and one of the central allegations of it was that they were denying the colonists the right to define criminal offenses for themselves. People over in England were dictating to people in our country what the criminal offenses should be, and that is like, with all due respect, the gentleman from Florida dictating to the people in Washington, D.C., how they should order their affairs when it comes to the criminal law. Jefferson would have understood very well the situation that we are in, and our friends in Washington, 713,000 taxpaying, draftable U.S. citizens, have petitioned for statehood because they no longer want to be kicked around by other people's Representatives. They want to have an equal say in this body and an equal say in the U.S. Senate. They don't want other people's Representatives telling them that they can't pass the criminal offenses or the increased criminal sentences that they want for their crimes. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Let's see, no one on the other side has contradicted the plain, commonsense interpretation of this bill, which is that the District of Columbia Council will now be disabled from ever increasing a criminal penalty again, a criminal sentence again, and the District of Columbia Council will never be able to create a new criminal offense like the one they just created for running a retail theft ring, which has become a problem across the country in a lot of places. A lot of States have legislated on that. I know Maryland has legislated on that. I am just wondering whether anyone on that side would yield for a question whether this is the deliberate intention of this legislation or it is just a mistake or whether they don't accept that plain, commonsense reading of the language of the bill because we are voting on something far more drastic and sweeping than what was represented by the sponsor's original statement.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I rise to celebrate the life and achievements of Zach Polett, one of our Nation's greatest recent community organizers. A humble and unassuming figure, Zach was a brilliant political strategist and dedicated activist who--among other accomplishments--helped organize the first health care workers' union in the South, pass statewide minimum wage and campaign finance ballot initiatives, design nationwide voter registration programs and cultivate a new generation of community activists. The loss of Zach in September 2023 has been deeply felt by those fighting for social justice across the country. The soul of our democracy is sustained by people like Zach, who believe in the fundamental dignity of every human being and the power of collective action to address our most pressing challenges. Though active in many social movements in college to oppose the Vietnam War and support the Civil Rights Movement, Zach originally set out to study medicine at Harvard University and Stanford Medical School. It turns out that his career as an organizer wouldn't stray too far from his original intent. Instead of treating people, Zach treated the structural ills that afflict our communities. He set out to heal the world. After medical school, Zach moved to Little Rock for an internship with a small nonprofit called Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). That internship would change his life and the lives of so many others. Through ACORN, Zach quickly found his calling to help Americans from all walks of life channel their desire for change into community power. Zach was uniquely talented in the nuts and bolts of organizing, like forging strong connections with people from all walks of life, formulating the hard-nosed political strategy required to win change and managing the administrative tedium essential to the functioning of any organization. His talents were recognized when he was asked to establish ACORN's activities in Louisiana, California and Florida. He helped organize the South's first union of health care workers. He oversaw Project Vote's campaign to register millions of voters. And he created a strategy to pass a ballot initiative raising the minimum wage for hardworking Arkansans in 2014. When he eventually served as Senior Vice President of the Public Interest Network, Zach refused to leave his adopted home state because of his commitment to the people of Arkansas. Zach met the love of his life, Mary Mayeaux, while searching for ACORN volunteers in Louisiana. He and Mary raised their two sons Mark and David in Little Rock, and became the loving grandparents of Kian, Luka, Luna, and Vera. Zach's family and his chosen family of progressive organizers across America continue to feel the pain of his loss as a husband, father, grandfather, and leader. In his honor, we must continue his life's work to defend our democracy, build power from the ground up and steer our course towards a freer and more just future for all.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Illinois (Mrs. Ramirez).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The last President tried to include a citizenship question on the decennial Census in 2020 and tried to count only U.S. citizens for the purpose of Census and reapportionment, and the effort failed miserably in court, for obvious reasons. Section 2 of the 14th Amendment states that apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives is based on ``the whole number of persons in each State,'' persons being the all-encompassing category, much larger than that of citizens. When the Framers wanted to impose a citizenship requirement in the text of the Constitution, they knew how to do it. Take the President of the United States, for example. It says that you have got to be a born U.S. citizen in order to run for President. Some of the historians tell us that was because Thomas Jefferson was trying to block Alexander Hamilton from running for President. He was foreign born. In any event, however, it was very clear that you needed to be a born U.S. citizen to run for President. For those of us in the House, it says we must have been a citizen for at least 7 years. There are lots of citizenship requirements in the Constitution. There is no citizenship requirement for being counted in the Census and for purposes of reapportionment. On the contrary, the Census and reapportionment have included all persons, including noncitizens, like permanent resident green card holders, since 1790. That has been the unbroken practice since the beginning of the Republic. This point was made even more clearly and emphatically by the Supreme Court in its unanimous 2016 decision in Evenwel v. Abbott, rejecting precisely the argument my distinguished friend is trying to make. Like this legislation itself, Evenwel involved a challenge to congressional apportionment based on a total count of the entire population instead of a limited count of the total citizen or voter population. Justice Ginsburg held for a unanimous court that section 3 of the 14th Amendment ``retained total population as the congressional apportionment base.'' She cited the speech made on the floor of the Senate by Senator Jacob Howard upon introduction of section 2 of the 14th Amendment: ``The basis of representation is numbers . . . . The committee adopted numbers as the most just and satisfactory basis, and this is the principle upon which the Constitution itself was originally framed, that the basis of representation should depend upon numbers; and such, I think, after all, is the safest and most secure principle upon which the government can rest. Numbers, not voters; numbers, not property; this is the theory of the Constitution.'' My colleague needs to remember that when the Republic was founded, the vast majority of people were not citizens who could vote. Women could not vote, children could not vote, enslaved Americans, obviously, could not vote. So the Census and apportionment was for everybody who was here. That was the whole basis of the three-fifths compromise. Because enslaved Americans were being counted, too, what percentage should they count for purposes of reapportionment? Well, Congress arrived at 60 percent, three-fifths. It was the Southern States who were saying they should count completely for these purposes because they wanted the enslaved Americans to be enlarging and inflating the congressional delegations from the slave states. For these purposes, the Northern States said: No, they shouldn't count at all; they should count zero percent in the apportionment. They arrived at three-fifths. In any event, everybody agreed that everybody would be counted. Justice Ginsburg included lots of decisive legislative authority like this, including the floor statement here in the House of Representative James Blaine, who stated: ``No one will deny that population is the true basis of representation; for women, children, and other nonvoting classes may have as vital an interest in the legislation of the country as those who actually deposit the ballot.'' For all of you constitutional textualists out there, the plain reading of the text is clear as day. For all of you constitutional originalists out there, the original purposes of the passage of the 14th Amendment have been carefully articulated by the Supreme Court on a unanimous basis and never rebutted. For all of you Members who like to follow precedent, every apportionment since 1790 has included every single person residing in the United States, not just those lucky enough to have been given the right to vote. As the Evenwel Court noted, the 14th Amendment contemplates that ``Representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible or registered to vote.'' The constitutional meaning is indisputable, a point which settles this for those who actually want to follow the Constitution in all cases, not just when it favors our own preferred policy outcome. The House should be getting real work done instead of wasting more time on another MAGA bill that will never pass the Senate, let alone get signed by the President, much less approved by the courts. The bill is an insult, and it is an affront to the great radical Republicans who wrote the 14th Amendment. Their party was a profreedom, pro-union, proimmigrant, anticonspiracy theory, anti-Know Nothing Party that wanted to make sure everybody in the country was counted and made visible. The Census is essential to democracy. Just as the Framers endorsed Thomas Paine's ``Common Sense,'' they endorsed a common Census, but this bill would destroy the accuracy of the Census, which may have something to do with its actual legislative motivation. In the 2010 Census, the undercount of Hispanic citizens was 1.4 percent. In 2020, that number grew to 5 percent, with many observers crediting that jump to the Trump administration's simple attempt to add a citizenship question to the Census and all of the intense publicity and rumor surrounding it. The addition of a question about citizenship will indeed deter many immigrants, including people who are permanent residents, including citizens, from completing the Census. Many noncitizen immigrants who are seeking asylum or are refugees will avoid responding because of uncertainty over their status and fear of arbitrary law enforcement action. Extensive research over the last decade shows that many residents wrongly believe the Census Bureau will share their responses with other agencies. To be clear on this point, it does not. Federal law prohibits it. However, that pervasive worry has prevented some people from answering questions about immigration status or responding to the Census at all. Mr. Speaker, we strongly oppose this legislation as unconstitutional and unwise. It dishonors our own history and the values of the Nation. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The gentleman from North Carolina observes that we don't have anybody wearing a black robe in the House of Representatives today, but you don't have to wear a black robe in order to read the Constitution, interpret the Constitution, and follow it. If you need people with black robes, then I would urge the gentleman to read the Supreme Court's decision in Evenwel v. Abbott, where the Supreme Court unanimously found that the Census and reapportionment must include the entire population, all persons; not all citizens, not all voters, the alternative suggestions that are being made today. Mr. Speaker, what do we have here? Since 1790, all persons have been included in the Census, in every Census on a decennial basis since the beginning of the Republic. The Supreme Court rejected the theory that is being advanced by my friends in the majority today in Evenwel v. Abbott that the Constitution requires citizens rather than persons, and the gentleman from North Carolina invites us to think it has something to do with immigration. We actually had an immigration deal coming out of the Senate for hundreds of new Border Patrol officers and asylum officers and asylum judges and fentanyl detection machinery, and it was vetoed by the fourth branch of government, Donald Trump, who said he didn't want a border solution, he wanted a border crisis to run on. Despite the fact that Senator Lankford, perhaps one of the most conservative Senators that we have in the Republican Party, said that this was a great deal and the best that he had ever seen coming out of the Senate, and despite the fact that Senator McConnell was for it, they blew it all up. You judge for yourself the seriousness of the claims that they want to do something about immigration. This is another useless and needless distraction. I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Barragan).

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, why do you need to amend the Constitution if you can just go ahead and do it by statute here? That is rather curious. I think the gentleman doth protest just a little bit too much. I admire the intellectual honesty in putting forth a constitutional amendment, because that is precisely what needs to be done. I am happy to look at that. I appreciate his candor in admitting that the Constitution needs to be amended in order to overturn more than 2 centuries of practice and everything the Supreme Court has ever said about the issue. It also should be clear to everybody that only U.S. citizens of majority may vote in Federal elections, that is Federal law, but everybody, including children, who are U.S. citizens are counted even though they can't vote in Federal elections. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time to close. Mr. Speaker, I don't want to be in the position of lecturing my colleagues about something that they often like to say, but the Constitution is the Constitution, and nobody yet has laid a glove on the Constitution or explained how the Supreme Court erred in the unanimous Evenwel decision. None of them has been able to explain away the very plain language of the 14th Amendment, that it is all the persons of the States who are counted, not the citizens, and that has been the basis for both the Census and the reapportionment since the country began. So the rest of it just strikes me like election year political rhetoric. To the extent that we want to deal with immigration, we had a great bargain that came out of the Senate, which everybody in this body and that body seemed to be behind, until they heard from Donald Trump that no, he didn't want to see any legislative progress, he wanted to be able to demagogue the immigration issue out on the campaign trail, although he has been severely undermined by all of the exposure that went into that decision. Again, I haven't heard anyone either explain why their legislation is constitutional, nor have I heard anybody explain what is wrong with the immigration package that we have for hundreds of new Border Patrol officers, hundreds of new Border Patrol and asylum judges and a crackdown of drugs at the border. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I am about to yield to my friend from New York (Ms. Meng), but I am inspired by the remarks of the gentleman from Wisconsin, especially about the word ``Republic'' which, of course, comes from res publica, the public thing. He happened upon a subject that is of a lot of interest to me because I wrote a paper about it when I was in sixth grade. The Pledge of Allegiance was written by a radical Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy--I am not sure if the gentleman is aware of that--on the 400th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the new world. Reverend Bellamy, who was an abolitionist in Vermont, was concerned about the continuing salute of the Confederate battle flag in the southern States. He wanted to write a flag salute that would be unifying for the union, and he wrote: I pledge allegiance to my flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, with liberty and justice for all. You notice what is not in there. He did not have ``under God.'' That was added in 1954 by Congress several weeks after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In any event, I am not quite sure what the relevance is of the gentleman's invocation of the Republic or of Ben Franklin and the famous vignette about him saying: If you can keep it. Ben Franklin was, of course, a big supporter of immigration to the country, although he did display an anti-German bias in some of his writings. I will tell you a little story about Ben Franklin that might be of relevance to what the gentleman is talking about because I just did a tour in Philadelphia with the Ben Franklin people up there, and we learned this wonderful story. He made a loan to a friend of his for $100, and then he recorded in his diary that this gentleman he made the loan to for $100, Josiah, was always disappearing behind a tree or a building whenever Ben came along. He finally caught up with him, and he said: Josiah, I loaned you a hundred bucks, and I am wondering, am I going to be able to get my principal back or at least the interest? Josiah said: Well, Ben, look. The $100 is well invested somewhere else, so you don't have to worry about that. Franklin said: Well, what about the interest? Josiah said: Well, I forgot to tell you that it is against my religion to pay interest, so I can't pay you the interest. Franklin said: You mean to tell me it is against your principle to pay me the interest, and it is against your interest to pay me the principal? Josiah said: That's right. Franklin said: Well, I can see I am not going to get either. Well, here our principles and our interests converge very much. The principles are set forth in the Constitution, which is we count everybody, and everybody is part of the Census, and everybody is part of the reapportionment process. It has been like that since 1790. We don't need to start finger painting on the Constitution with this silly election year proposal. It is also in our interest because, as my colleagues have said, this is a land that is built on immigration. Except for the Native Americans who are already here and the people who were brought over as slaves, all of us are the descendants of immigrants to this country. Tom Paine, when he got to America in 1774, 2 years before the Revolution, he said: This land, if it lives up to its principles, will become an asylum to humanity--not an insane asylum, mind you--an asylum to humanity, a place of refuge for people seeking freedom from religious, political, and economic oppression. That is who we are. Every day I have in my office people from the hotel industry, people from the construction industry, and people from the restaurant industry saying: We have huge labor shortages. We need people in America. I am for a whole lot more lawful immigration to America, less unlawful immigration to America like the deal that was worked out in the Senate that was rejected by the Republicans, and a lot less demagoguery about who we are as a country because the Census and reapportionment provisions in the 14th Amendment tell it all. This is a country that is for everybody seeking opportunity and hope, willing to follow the law and follow our Constitution.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Meng).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I know Mr. Burchett's prayers go right to the top.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. If you strip away all the bombast and all the rhetoric, the gentleman just basically delivered a tirade about immigration but never addressed the fact that their legislation is totally unconstitutional. If you want to deal with immigration, we had a bill, and the bill would have added hundreds of Border Patrol officers, asylum officers, and judges. The Republican leadership in the Senate said it was a great deal. They got most of what they wanted. It was a great compromise. Yet, who didn't want it? Donald Trump, still the putative leader of those who are left in the GOP, Lincoln's party. Donald Trump didn't want it because he didn't want a border solution. He wants a border crisis. They are left with a bunch of completely superficial, empty bills like this one, which I doubt will even pass the House. If it does pass the House, it certainly won't pass the Senate. It will never be signed by the President, and it would be struck down immediately by the Supreme Court. Why are we wasting our time on that instead of getting to the legislation that actually a majority of the Senate was behind? I wish one of my colleagues would address that. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.