Jamie Raskin

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I have images of three politicians in my office: Abraham Lincoln, Robert F. Kennedy, and Samuel H. Bellman, who was the first Jewish person ever elected to the Minnesota Legislature, a great champion of civil rights and civil liberties in the Constitution and of the creation of the State of Israel, the Jewish democratic state in 1948. He was my grandfather. He was elected at a time of terrible anti-Semitism, not unlike today. Minneapolis was actually called the anti-Semitism capital of America, and my grandpa told me a story I will never forget. The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and Republican Caucuses both had their annual retreats at a country club that did not allow Jews or Blacks to enter. My grandfather complained privately to the speaker about the fact that he wouldn't be able to go to his own retreat. The speaker apologized but said that it was a tradition. So my grandfather, the only Jewish person in the chamber, spoke on the floor about anti-Semitism. He was booed and jeered at, and members left as he tried to speak. When the minority leader asked me to manage our time today, I thought about my grandfather and how he must have felt on that day. I rise here not in spite of the fact that I am a Jewish American who supports the Constitution and the Jewish democratic state and hates all the anti- Semitic tyrants and terrorists of the world, from Putin in Russia and Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia to Hezbollah in Hamas. I am here because of these things and because of everything that I believe in and stand for. At this moment when democracy is under siege all over the world, America must stand tall for the Constitution of the United States. This resolution is about one thing and one thing only: the punishment of speech. We have the chance to show the world what the American Constitution means and how we hold fast to our core principles even when we are drawn away from them by our passions and our righteous anger. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and the very heart of it is our First Amendment, which protects every citizen's freedom of speech and says Congress shall make no law abridging it. The freedom to speak includes the freedom to disagree, the right to think radically differently from the majority about important things, or else it is no freedom at all. It is easy to defend freedom of speech for people when you agree with them. The test for each Member today is whether you can defend freedom of speech for people when you most fundamentally and vehemently disagree with them. The First Amendment is like an apple, and everybody wants to take just one little bite out of it--leftwing speech, rightwing speech, sexist speech, feminist speech, homophobic speech, pro-LGBTQ speech, anti-war speech, pro-war speech, religious speech, sacrilegious speech. Everybody wants a bite out of the apple. At the end of the day, after everybody has taken his or her bite, do you know what is left? Nothing. There is nothing left. If you want to save the apple, you have to learn to tolerate not just the speech you love the most but the speech you hate the most. Now, like the First Amendment, the Speech or Debate Clause embodies this central value in the proceedings of this body. It states that Members of Congress ``shall in all cases, except treason, felony, and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.'' In the two-and-a-half-century history of this great Chamber, Members have been overwhelmingly censured for their actions, not for their speech--actions like participating in the violent assault against Charles Sumner of Massachusetts; assaulting Representative Grinnell, of Iowa, with a cane; selling military academy appointments; taking bribes; engaging in mail fraud and payroll fraud; improper spending of campaign funds; embezzling congressional money; engaging in sexual misconduct with a House page. Do you see the difference? It is not what they said. It is what they did. I can find only three categories of cases where speech is the sum and substance of the charge, and all are exceptions that have been ratified by the Supreme Court: One, violent threats against other Members of this body, which the Court has found, as recently as April, are not protected by the First Amendment. Two, fighting words: the use of unparliamentary or aggressively insulting language on the House floor that constitutes a direct affront to another Member. The Supreme Court has said that fighting words are not protected. Three, speech advocating or promoting treason, secession, or insurrection, all of them outside of the First Amendment because of numerous provisions in our Constitution condemning and opposing insurrection. That is it: violent threats against other Members, fighting words on the floor, speech inciting insurrection. The resolution offered against the gentlewoman from Michigan is all about censuring her for her political speech and literally nothing else. No actions, no conduct, is being alleged or punished. The entire motion is about her speech and how much we hate it and how wrong we think it is, and all of that is fine for all of us to express individually on the floor, in the media, on social media. I have said to Ms. Tlaib myself that the phrase ``from the river to sea'' is abhorrent to me, even with her published explanation of what she means by it, which is very different from what Hamas says about it and how Hamas uses it, but I would never think of punishing her or disciplining her because we disagree about that. The resolution proposes to condemn her for quoting this objectionable phrase in her video, a video which is indisputably protected speech under the First Amendment. Unlike the gentleman from New York, Mr. Santos, whose proposed expulsion by members of the majority was rejected by a commanding bipartisan majority last week because he has not been convicted of either the criminal or the ethics charges outstanding against him, Ms. Tlaib has been criminally charged with nothing. She has been civilly sued for nothing. She has no ethics charges outstanding before the Ethics Committee in any way. It is easy to see why. She cannot face criminal punishment or civil liability for her speech because, in the United States of America, we don't punish people for their political ideas, no matter how wrongheaded or offensive we think they are. The majority might think they are, or it might not, but in any event, it doesn't make any difference. She won reelection with 71 percent of the vote in Michigan's 12th District, and if anyone is going to punish her for her political ideas or performance, it must be the people of her own district who sent her here to represent them. Mr. Speaker, the disciplinary process should never be used to punish the political speech or viewpoints of a Member of this Chamber just because the majority disagrees. The punishment of political viewpoints will mean that Members will be censured just for being in the minority rather than in the majority, and that will come to stifle our dialogue and haunt all of our work. For example, the good Speaker of the House, who is my friend from the Judiciary Committee, has taken positions in the past arguing that sex between consenting gay adults should be a crime, that the Supreme Court was wrong to strike down sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas and wrong to give gay people the right to marry in Obergefell, a right that he said is ``the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.'' The vast majority of Americans reject these positions as extreme in public opinion polls and believe all citizens should have the freedom to pursue their own love lives and to marry. If the House majority changes hands, should we actually censure the former Speaker of the House for his constitutional apostasy and thought crimes against the rights of millions of Americans? I sure hope not because the gentleman from Louisiana is absolutely entitled to his political and religious views, no matter how far outside the constitutional and American mainstream they are. Under the First Amendment, extremism is in the eye of the beholder, but how will we resist the temptation to punish him in the future if we set a precedent today that Members can be censured and canceled simply for their political heresies in the eyes of the majority controlling the House? If we say the gentlewoman can be punished because her views of history are wrong, as I heard my friend say, can we then punish Members of this body who refuse to vote to take down in our Halls the statues of Members of Congress from the 19th century who joined the Confederacy and committed treason against the Union, people like John Breckinridge, a former Vice President and U.S. Senator who was expelled from the Senate after he defected to the Confederacy? Should we use the disciplinary process to impose historical orthodoxy? If anything, there is a stronger constitutional case for punishing the 120 Members of the House who voted against taking down statues of Confederate traitors because multiple provisions of the Constitution explicitly forbid and punish participation in insurrection. Do Members who voted that way want to risk being censured in the future by establishing that divergent minority views on history are a legitimate matter of institutional discipline? What about the Members who defended conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and stated that Sandy Hook and Parkland mass murderers of dozens of schoolchildren were staged by Hollywood to generate support for gun safety? That is not even a matter of opinion but adjudicated positive fact, and still, the Constitution protects your right to be wrong about facts unless you are deliberately defrauding or cheating someone out of something like money or campaign contributions. What about all of those Members who have followed the former President in advancing the big lie that he actually won the 2020 election? Should we convert the 60 Federal and State court decisions rejecting claims of election fraud and corruption into discipline and punishment of Members who still cling to that view? What about the 11 Members of this body who lost the 405-11 vote in 2019 recognizing that the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I was a genocide? Does their denial of the genocidal character of the deaths of more than 1 million Armenians qualify them for collective punishment today, institutional punishment? Can we convert differing interpretations of history into the basis for disciplinary action? Well, perhaps you say political dissent should be uniquely punishable when it comes to foreign policy. Of course, the First Amendment doesn't distinguish between speech having domestic or foreign policy content. All of it is protected. If not, every Member of this body who has voted against aid to Ukraine and praises Vladimir Putin, as the former President did for his ``genius'' and his ``savvy,'' or says Putin is not our enemy, as a number of Members have, could be censured for it by this body. This resolution not only degrades our Constitution but cheapens the meaning of discipline in this body for people who actually commit wrongful actions like bribery, fraud, violent assault, and so on. When people are punished for their political ideas and expression, they will wear it as a badge of honor. They will fundraise on it. Millions of dollars will flow to people who are punished that way, and they will join the public in mocking the new speech censors of Congress. A secure constitutional republic, which actively protects the freedom of dissenting speech to allow for serious debate and growth as society, shows its strength, not its weakness. As Thomas Jefferson, whose beautiful statue is right outside of this room, put it: ``If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.'' Now is a moment when we will get to see who in the House of Representatives believes in the freedom of speech, even the speech they hate, versus those who want to impose a new political straitjacket of cancel culture on America and Congress. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), the ranking member of the Rules Committee.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal).

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Missouri (Ms. Bush).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Bowman).

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Carson).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 10 seconds to the gentlewoman from the Virgin Islands.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Massachusetts (Ms. Pressley).

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

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from the Virgin Islands (Ms. Plaskett).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Mrs. Dingell).

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker Pro Tempore, I rise to honor the Pancretan Association of America (PAA) on their many achievements throughout their 94 years of dedicated service. I am thrilled to congratulate the PAA on the establishment of their first-ever National Headquarters at the Hellenic Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and on the recent election of their organization's first female president, Diane Kounalakis. The PAA and the Pancretan Youth Association (PYA) offer a rich array of programs to cultivate and preserve the extraordinary heritage of the island of Crete. The PAA and PYA have supported the enrichment and personal development of both Cretan Americans and the general public through educational events, study abroad scholarships, dance and music workshops, and translations of Greek literature. The PAA also has a long and storied history of advancing essential causes on the island of Crete and throughout both Greece and the United States. From helping to establish Crete's first public hospital in the 1950s to supporting orphanages, food pantries and disaster relief today, the PAA has made immense contributions. I have no doubt that President Diane Kounalakis, a longtime PAA member and volunteer, will be an exemplary leader for the PAA. Mr. Speaker Pro Tempore, I urge my colleagues to join me in applauding the PAA for its many decades of service, and in wishing the PAA all the best in the years to come.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. As ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, I rise in strong support of H.R. 4502, the Modernizing the Acquisition of Cybersecurity Experts Act. I thank my distinguished colleagues, Representative Nancy Mace from South Carolina, who is the chair of the Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation Subcommittee, and Representative Katie Porter, who is the ranking member of the Health Care and Financial Services Subcommittee, for their excellent bipartisan work on this bill, something that, yes, does still exist in the U.S. House of Representatives. This year, more than 750,000 cybersecurity jobs in the United States will be left unfilled. Each one is a missed opportunity for a talented person and also a missed opportunity for our country. These are well-paid positions with great job security. They are essential to the protection of our government, the prosperity of our businesses, and the security of our communities. One big barrier to entry for many of these jobs is the requirement that applicants have a college degree, even if that degree has no bearing on the technical expertise required to satisfactorily meet the demands of the job or to successfully perform the work. Remember that Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college before he created Facebook. According to a 2017 study by Harvard Business School, more than 60 percent of employers turned down qualified applicants in the IT field because they didn't have a college degree. Many such applicants were turned down even when they sought to fill jobs vacated by individuals who also didn't have college degrees. This degree inflation excludes people from opportunity. In 2022, less than 40 percent of the population over the age of 24 had a bachelor's degree. As technological and cultural advancements continue to transform the nature of the workplace, businesses and public-sector entities alike have begun to realize that college degrees are not always effective proxies for job qualifications and skills. Often, highly capable candidates became that way precisely because they pursued their own path in life, a nontraditional route into the workforce. To remain competitive and to attract top talent, hiring authorities could no longer allow degree inflation to automatically disqualify more than half of our workforce. H.R. 4502 applies the same logic to the Federal cybersecurity workforce which performs the critical work of defending our Federal networks and our Federal data from attack. Recognizing the government must be competitive to attract high-demand cybersecurity talent to public service, the bill eliminates the requirement that a BA degree is a prerequisite to Federal hiring for cybersecurity. Eliminating unnecessary degree requirements isn't just good for business, it is good for workers and especially minority workers who are too often excluded from opportunity. In 2022, less than 30 percent of the Black population had a bachelor's degree. For the Hispanic population, that number is even lower at 21 percent. Addressing degree inflation and advancing legislation like this takes steps toward creating the more inclusive and fair society that the public wants. This bill contributes to a record of strong bipartisan cooperation to strengthen Federal cybersecurity and its workforce. Democrats led passage of the CHIPS and Science Act last year with increased funding for Federal cyber workforce programs, and the Office of the National Cyber Director recently published the Biden-Harris administration's National Cyber Workforce and Education Strategy. This strategy includes a provision encouraging employers to take a more skills-based approach to hiring for these cyber positions. While Republicans in the House continue the crusade to shut down the government--let's hope they have thought better of it now--I do hope that Americans see that it is still possible for Congress to come together on commonsense legislation like this to advance meaningful opportunity in a well-functioning government. Mr. Speaker, I urge everyone to support this bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Porter).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I thank the distinguished gentlewoman from California for her introduction of this legislation with Congresswoman Mace and for her leadership here. The gentlewoman is absolutely right that there are people who may have gotten a college degree and a Ph.D. in some other field but are completely unprepared and unqualified to have a cybersecurity professional's job in the Federal Government, and there are those who never went to college at all who would be excellently prepared based on what their professional and life experience has been. I thank them for moving in this direction, and I hope we can look at some other parts of Federal hiring to make sure we are making equivalent adjustments, so we are getting, as the gentlewoman says, the best candidates. I am wondering--and I would yield to the gentleman for a second, if he knows the answer to this. Is it just a happy coincidence that the acronym for this legislation is the MACE Act? Was that pure coincidence? I don't know. In any event, I congratulate Ms. Mace and Ms. Porter on this excellent legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentleman from Illinois for his remarks about the naming of this post office, and I strongly encourage all of our colleagues to endorse this significant legislation. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise in strong favor of H.R. 2379, designating the facility of the U.S. Postal Service located at 616 East Main Street in St. Charles, Illinois, as the Veterans of the Vietnam War Memorial Post Office. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Krishnamoorthi).

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentleman from New Orleans for his eloquent words about Dr. Lombard. May I add, not only was he a hero to the people of New Orleans and Louisiana, but he was also a nationally recognized civil rights advocate who was the vice president of CORE when he was a student at Xavier University. He is remembered for leading a 1960 sit-in at McCrory's Five and Dime store to peacefully protest Jim Crow in Louisiana with a group of people famously known as the ``CORE Four.'' So the naming of this post office will be an opportunity not just for the people of his city and State, but for the people of the United States to recognize him. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 996, to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 3901 MacArthur Boulevard in New Orleans, Louisiana, as the Dr. Rudy Lombard Post Office. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Carter), my distinguished colleague.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Second Lieutenant Patrick Palmer Calhoun was born on March 19, 1941, and raised in Mount Vernon, Georgia. He graduated from the University of Georgia and enlisted in the U.S. Army in the middle of the Vietnam war. While stationed in South Vietnam, Second Lieutenant Calhoun served heroically for his country as a rotary wing aviation unit commander. On April 19, 1965, his helicopter was shot down by enemy fire in the Pleiku Province. He was later declared killed while missing in action at the tender age of 24. I encourage my colleagues to join us in honoring the life of Second Lieutenant Calhoun by naming a post office in Mount Vernon, Georgia, after him. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers. I urge passage of H.R. 292, and I yield back the balance of my time.