Jamie Raskin

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Nevada (Ms. Titus), representing the First District of Nevada.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, in closing, let the word go out to all of the organized retail criminal conspiracies, outfits, operations, and racketeering enterprises across America and the world that we are going to have an Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center. We are going to be working between the Federal Government and the State and local governments in order to crack down on this very serious threat to our small businesses, some bigger businesses, and to all of the consumers and the people of the country. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished former prosecutor and Congressman from North Carolina (Mr. Knott) for his leadership on this. We are not powerless. There is definitely something that we can do to stop this. This is a clear and effective bipartisan solution before us. Mr. Speaker, I urge all of our colleagues to support H.R. 2853, and I am happy to yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I do not oppose the motion.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The Senate just unanimously passed this 43-day extension. Yesterday I was struck by a point my colleagues from the House Intelligence Committee made here on the House floor that the FISA 702 authorities were too important to turn off. We agree. But I also know that we cannot turn off our constitutional values and principles. Nothing about protecting our safety should prevent us from protecting our rights. We can have both. When we talk about protecting civil liberties, we are not speaking of theoretical threats. We are talking of real violations perpetrated by the FBI, not just in 2022, but over the past year and still going on today. The March 2026 FISC opinion describing the FISC judge's concerns about the FBI's violations of FISA is still classified by an administration that seems intent on keeping the public in the dark as we debate this fundamental problem. We can say with some confidence that the FBI has no idea how many U.S. person queries they ran last year, how many times they spied on American citizens. We should not have to take this vote without being able to explain these serious deficiencies. We have a right to know how many times the communications of American citizens were accessed. Every day that goes by where the Trump administration and Kash Patel's FBI can circumvent our constitutional values to spy on American citizens is one day too many. I won't oppose this short extension but only because it is my fervent hope and determination that it will give us the time to work together across the aisle to implement meaningful reform. It is long past time for Speaker Johnson to stop blocking Members of this body from coming together across party lines to work in good faith to strike a bipartisan deal on section 702 that is the support of a robust, bipartisan majority which believes that the program is important for foreign intelligence but must be made consistent with the essential constitutional values of our privacy rights under the Constitution. A significant majority of Members in this Chamber, Democrats and Republicans alike, want real reforms to protect Americans' privacy and civil liberties, not the paltry restatements of current law that have been offered to us so far. The vast majority of Members of this body and the American people want a Federal judge, not an FBI agent or an FBI lawyer, to stand between them and their private communications. That is the constitutional design. You go to a judge. You don't leave it to the executive branch itself to check its own behavior. The Speaker must allow the House to work its will. The Speaker must allow the House to serve the American people, to bring to the floor legislation that lives up to the spirit of the Fourth Amendment and ensures Americans are protected from their government as the Founders intended. So as a gesture of good faith, we will give a few-week extension here, but we would love the Speaker of the House to get serious and allow us to have meaningful, bipartisan negotiation and compromise. I have heard from so many distinguished Republican Members over there, including a number of former Federal prosecutors, who say: We can work this thing out. Let us do the people's business, and let's work it out. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I thank my friend from Kentucky for his always unswerving leadership on behalf of constitutional values, privacy, and the civil rights and civil liberties of the people. The question here is how are we actually going to move the Speaker, who seems to be immersed in some combination of inertia, bureaucracy, and chaos, and the Senate, which doesn't seem to be living up to its traditional role in trying to reconcile our foreign policy and national security agenda with the constitutional values of the people? We are saying, let's give it a few weeks now. I hope that Chairman Jordan will echo my endorsement of us really getting together to have bipartisan negotiations and compromise on this. This is not a partisan problem. We have people on all sides of this on both sides of the aisle. The vast majority of the Democrats want to make sure that we have a program that protects the privacy rights and the civil liberties of the people. No, we do not trust Kash Patel to have conversations with Tulsi Gabbard as a successful substitute for the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. I am sure you don't trust whoever you would liken to Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard on our side. That is fine. That is partisan politics. That is why we want this to rest on some level of constitutional principles that will cut across party lines. Let's take a few weeks to have serious, meaningful discussion. As a gesture of good faith, we say we will work with the Speaker if the Speaker will work with us. We see him conducting negotiations in the middle of votes on the House floor. How about we all get together the way that Congress is supposed to and have meaningful discussion and dialogue? Let's do the same thing with people in the Senate. I challenge the Members of the Senate to stand up for a system that the American people can believe in. We simply cannot leave it up to Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard and Donald Trump to enforce our civil rights and civil liberties for us. That is not going to work. They are partisan actors. They have proven themselves to be partisan actors, and they don't make any bones about that. They are unashamed of it. That is fine. Then we need to put principles in place that are going to protect the American people. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The critical point is that we need to have a judge standing between the FBI and the private communications of the American people. This has got to be the essential constitutional value that is vindicated here. We need to interpose the authority and the independence of a judge between the FBI and the communications of the people. The reform that my friend from Texas just mentioned is to have Kash Patel report his abuses to Tulsi Gabbard. If you think that is a good substitute for the Fourth Amendment, well, then you can go with what the gentleman was talking about, which was this 3-year extension. We are not willing go with the 3-year extension. 191 of us voted against it, including a dozen Republicans. We are willing to give you 40 more days or 45 more days for us to negotiate this thing, if the Speaker will actually sit down with us. We want the Speaker to sit down with us, and we want the Senate to take its constitutional responsibilities seriously here. The privacy rights of the people are too essential, and the privacy rights of the people should not be pitted against the national security interests of the country. We can make this happen if we are willing to get rid of all of the chaos and the pandemonium that we have seen over the last several days and simply sit down and have a meaningful conversation and write the legislation. 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. Mr. Speaker, we can reconcile the essential constitutional values of the country with the national security of the country. This 45-day continuation is a mandate. It is a mandate to the Speaker to allow the House to finally come together to develop compromise legislation that guarantees that judges--not Kash Patel, not Tulsi Gabbard, and not Donald Trump--will be the ones to ensure our privacy and our civil liberties. Let's use this period to engage in real legislative compromise and negotiation in the interests of the American people. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, last year, devil-may-care, footloose, free- spending, Trump-enabling MAGA Republicans cut ICE and CBP a check from the American people for $170 billion with no oversight, no accountability, and no programmatic details. And in the months since they passed their staggeringly irresponsible budget-busting, debt-enlarging big, beautiful bill, the American people have seen the consequences of handing billions of dollars to a rogue agency headed up by terrible leaders like Kristi Noem. ICE now routinely tramples the constitutional rights of the people. It thumbs its nose at Federal court orders, and it brings fear and terror to communities across the country. Look at what Federal courts have said about ICE, which didn't just lie about the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. In dozens of cases, Federal judges have found that ICE officials are lying in court. A Reagan-appointed judge rejected the testimony of the acting ICE director as ``disingenuous, squalid, and dishonorable.'' Another judge called the affidavit of a top ICE official: The sorriest statement I have ever seen in court and said that if you were asking to get a warrant issued on this I would throw you out of my chambers.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, now our colleagues, rather than deal with the reality of what they have created, a monster year with American citizens being shot down in cold blood at point blank range, in Minneapolis Alex Pretti and Renee Good--rather than deal with that reality, they just want to double down on their world historical error by giving up another $140 billion with basically no strings attached to the people at ICE that have unleashed this chaos against us. Mr. Speaker, I am voting ``no.''

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I urge all of our colleagues, with constitutional patriotism still beating in their hearts after this tortured and demeaning and visibly transactional process we have seen today, to oppose the legislation. This bill is a 3-year permission slip and blessing for the Trump administration and the next administration to keep abusing the sweeping FISA section 702 surveillance authority to spy on American citizens' private communications and to violate the privacy rights of the people. I want every Member of this body to be clear on exactly what is in this bill. It has no warrant requirement for queries of U.S. citizens. It has no probable cause requirement. It provides for no judicial oversight of these government queries. It subjects U.S. citizens to completely subconstitutional standards, avoiding the Fourth Amendment entirely. It is in a parallel universe from the Constitution--or perhaps I should say a perpendicular universe to the Constitution. The Constitution interposes a judge--a neutral, independent magistrate--between the government and a search of persons and their things. This 3-year blank check to Trump, Patel, and company leaves the executive branch free to conduct these searches with self-reporting and self-policing as the sole protection against their abuse of the section 702 program. Without any meaningful guardrails, this U.S. person information collected under foreign intelligence standards that have nothing to do with the Fourth Amendment is ripe for abuse. It has been systematically abused to spy on American citizens in the past, and it will be used in exactly the same way by Kash Patel and Todd Blanche in the future if we pass this bill. Last week, it came to light that FBI Director Kash Patel was unhappy about a New York Times article, which focused on the fact that he had used FBI SWAT teams and jets to chauffeur his girlfriend around the country at taxpayer expense. What did he do? He didn't decide to change his policy on how he uses the people's resources. Instead, he had his agents query FBI databases for dirt on the reporter. Was the FISA section 702 program one of the databases he searched? The FBI says no. He just searched every other database at the FBI. We have no idea because they don't have to go to a judge before searching an American citizen's information. We depend now, in this system, on Kash Patel to be the check and balance against Kash Patel. We only know about the fact that it even happened because a reporter got the information. Otherwise, we wouldn't even have known anything about it. Let it be a warning to people vigilant about our civil rights and privacy, about what actually goes on. Even Republicans on the Rules Committee last night were registering their displeasure with these reports. Look, the FISA section 702 program has been misused and abused under every section. Section 702 authorizes the government to collect information from electronic communication companies in the U.S. about non-U.S. persons who are physically outside the U.S. When the government gets communications to and from these foreign targets, it also incidentally collects large amounts of information about American citizens. In 2022, the FISC, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, detailed a historical pattern of noncompliant queries at the FBI. Improper searches swept in elected officials, political campaign donors, Black Lives Matter protesters, and many others. At other agencies, analysts used section 702 to query their own names, the names of their relatives, and even the names of former romantic partners. Just last month, Federal judges on the FISC issued an opinion to sound the alarm about how the FBI is currently abusing FISA, violating the law and flouting the safeguards Congress imposed 2 years ago to snoop on Americans' private communications. The administration is deliberately keeping this opinion totally classified in a basement SCIF here at the House. Reforms that we made during the last FISA section 702 reauthorization, which I strongly supported and voted for--unlike my friend Chairman Jordan--those reforms relied on internal watchdogs and required agencies to track and report the use of section 702 data to spy on Americans. I strongly supported that reform, but, 1 year and change into the Trump administration, the watchdogs are all but gone. After returning to the White House, President Trump quickly removed the internal watchdogs charged with verifying FBI's representations that the reforms are working; he illegally fired a majority of the members of the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board; and his Department of Justice reassigned other key compliance personnel. The watchdogs have been removed from the scene of the crimes. The administration repeatedly claims that FBI compliance exceeded 99 percent in 2024 and 2025. Even if those claims are true--and I seriously doubt it--that is an admission that the FBI has illegally accessed the data of thousands of American citizens. More importantly, these numbers are based on the violations and abuses that Kash Patel and Todd Blanche are willing to identify themselves and self-report. How can we believe these numbers when the administration has returned all the watchdogs to the pound? They are no longer there. The FISC judges warned us just last month that the FBI is abusing its authorities to spy on Americans, so what makes us think that a 3-year blank check renewal will lead to self-correction? Proponents of the bill claim that it protects privacy, but asking Kash Patel's FBI to self-report abuses of our civil liberties to Tulsi Gabbard's DNI is like asking Donald Trump to self-report his collection of millions of dollars from foreign governments directly to the U.S. Congress. That is actually the law under Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, the Foreign Emoluments Clause. Yet, he has never once come to ask for our permission for him to keep a foreign government emolument, whether pocketed through the Trump Hotels, the Trump golf courses, or the other Trump enterprises in crypto coins and scams, and so on. If you think self-reporting is working well under the foreign government Emoluments Clause, go ahead and vote for self-reporting under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. For me, I am sticking with the Fourth Amendment and the Constitution. Under our Constitution, it is judges, not FBI agents or government lawyers, who must protect our privacy and our civil liberties. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lofgren).

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

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, the key point is this: Under this bill, FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans' communications without any review from a judge. It is the heart of the Fourth Amendment, Mr. Speaker, that search warrants have to be based upon probable cause, and you have to go to a judge to get a search warrant before you can invade the private expectations of the people in their places and in their things. This bill leaves intelligence agencies in charge of policing their own compliance with the law. Asking Kash Patel to self-report his abuses to Tulsi Gabbard does nothing to protect the civil liberties of Americans. That is not how our Constitution was designed. The whole reason we have the courts involved is to make sure that the executive branch doesn't get to be its own check and balance against itself. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, Kash Patel has been using government resources to chauffeur his girlfriend all over the country. Then when it was learned by the press that he was doing that, there was an article about it. When he got mad about it, rather than say: Well, yeah, maybe there is a problem using an FBI SWAT team to shepherd my girlfriend around the country. Instead of changing the policy, he decided to go after the reporter and search the databases on the FBI. This is while we are debating FISA. If you need any more vivid demonstration, Mr. Speaker, of the danger of allowing law enforcement officials to govern themselves and to regulate whether or not they are violating the Constitution, check that out. We may disagree a lot about this FBI director's record. That is not directly relevant to this point. Say you trust him, we don't, but we know you haven't trusted other people in the office before, Mr. Speaker. Let's legislate in a way that is consistent with the Constitution of the United States. In closing, Mr. Speaker, the reason why we have to hold fast to the Constitution is precisely because we are all imperfect beings. I stood strongly for FISA 702 last time without the necessity of a search warrant because of all the reforms that I believed that the Biden administration would engage in, and they basically engaged in them. Now the Trump administration is in, and President Trump came in and dismantled all of the safeguards we put in and just chased the watchdogs out of the FBI. That is why we must stick very closely to the Constitution, as my good friend, the chairman of the committee, argued the last time we debated this. He has convinced a lot of people that we need to stick to the Constitution. I am sorry we are not on the same side today. The key point is that we do not trust government officials to regulate themselves. That is why law enforcement officers across the country, FBI, have to go to a judge to get a Fourth Amendment search warrant before they invade somebody's privacy unless there is exigency, unless there is an emergency, and we have accounted for that. We can deal with that problem. Let's stick with the Constitution. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, yes, it is foreign intelligence, which is why when it comes to U.S. persons--U.S. citizens--the Fourth Amendment has to apply. The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), my distinguished colleague, said that the legislation is bipartisan. I tell you what else was bipartisan--in fact, unanimous: the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Everybody got behind that. We are assured that there is reporting, but it is self-reporting. The distinguished ranking member says that it is by nonpolitical staff. Yes, the nonpolitical staff left over after Kash Patel fired everybody at the FBI who they considered insufficiently loyal to MAGA and to Donald Trump and for those who worked on the January 6 case. Then, we are told that the courts still can get involved at some point. Well, the courts are telling us right now that the FBI has been secretly breaking the law. Last month, the FISC court found that many of the government's 702 searches violated Federal law. We should be paying close attention to that as we move forward.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, please forgive me because I didn't even have 15 minutes to read it. I had to drive down from Maryland's beautiful Eighth District, so I have had about 90 seconds to review this product that we were supposed to have been working on for the last several months. Let me do my best to try to analyze for people what is happening because already the machinery of propaganda and disinformation has set in, and people are talking about a magic warrant requirement which has appeared in here, which is complete and utter nonsense. Let me start by echoing the distinguished ranking member of the Rules Committee that this is an appalling Kafkaesque process leading to an absurd Orwellian result. This is much worse than what was being offered before of the clean 2-year reauthorization. The substance of this proposal is utterly appalling. They say you shouldn't look to see how the sausage gets made. This isn't even sausage. This is scrapple. It is scrapple with dogfood mixed inside of it. Mr. Speaker, I am going to have to try to read through it to understand what they are doing. Let's start with this: Originally, they proposed an 18-month clean reauthorization, and the Democrats and some members of the Freedom Caucus were very skeptical of the enterprise. They said: 18 months? That is not like any short-term extension we know around here. Usually, we talk about 72 hours or 1 week or 2 weeks. Eighteen months? That is a huge, massive expansion. Then they went into some kind of compromise session with the White House. None of us were invited, so we don't know who was there or what was spoken, but they went from 18 months to 5 years. They went from a clean 2-year reauthorization to a 5-year dirty deal. The saving grace of it is supposed to be a so-called warrant requirement--which I will investigate in a second--which doesn't kick in for another 2 years. We have 2 years without their illusory Band-Aid that they are putting on this process, this fake warrant requirement, so the Trump administration can do whatever they want even without this mythical, inscrutable warrant requirement, and then we get 5 more years of this. This is the compromise that they worked out behind our backs, and all we could rely on was the goodwill of the handful of members of the Freedom Caucus who were standing up for the Constitution and the civil liberties and civil rights of the people. I don't think that our friends in the Freedom Caucus have done the American people any favors if they are signing off on this. The first thing that they do is they change the terms of the length of the legislation, a 5-year authorization with the fraudulent warrant requirement not kicking in for 2 years. Let's look at the much-vaunted warrant requirement, which appears on page 3. Let's start with this in trying to understand the gobbledygook here. ``The Federal Bureau of Investigation may not ingest unminimized information acquired under this section into its analytic repositories unless the targeted person is relevant to an existing, open, predicated full national security investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If the subject of such predicated, full national security investigation is a United States person, for purposes of this paragraph, the investigation must be supported by probable cause.'' This is supposed to be the big concession to the people who were saying that the Constitution governs and the Fourth Amendment is still alive, right? Well, what is the first thing that I notice as someone who spent 25 years as a constitutional law professor? Well, the operative part of it is the last eight words there: ``the investigation must be supported by probable cause.'' It doesn't say it has to be supported by a search warrant, much less does it say it has to be supported by a search warrant or probable cause determined by a judge, by a court. That is not in there. Who is going to figure out whether it is supported by probable cause? We are not talking about evidence of a crime. We are talking about a predicated, national security investigation. If you flip the page, you find out that the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence shall jointly establish procedures and standards for officers and employees of the United States Government to determine the existence of probable cause. Well, there goes the requirement, the constitutional requirement of an independent magistrate issuing a warrant. The FBI will be the judge of its own warrant. In other words, we are right back to the problem that got us here in the first place. Mr. Speaker, look above there. We are told, ``Pursuant to subsection (b), no officer or employee of the United States Government may intentionally target for acquisition the communications of a United States person pursuant to an authorization issued under subsection (a). Pursuant to other provisions of this Act and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the Government may seek a warrant or other appropriate order supported by a probable cause showing to target for collection the communications of a United States person if there exists probable cause that the United States person . . . is a foreign power,'' et cetera, et cetera. May. Suddenly, we go from the Constitution's imposition of a mandatory requirement for a warrant, right, that no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause and there must be a warrant for a search unless there is a specific exception to it. But this simply says they may seek a warrant. They don't have to. They may seek a warrant. In other words, this provision, too, is meaningless. It just returns us to exactly where we were.

Mr. RASKIN. It takes us right back to the status quo. It says that the Attorney General, that would be Todd Blanche, or the Acting Attorney General, and the Director of DNI, shall establish the procedures for determining if there is probable cause. I thought that James Madison and George Mason had taken care of that. I thought the Constitution established the meaning of probable cause. Now, it is being delegated to the Acting Attorney General. It doesn't even say the acting but whoever the Attorney General might be. Perhaps acting is imported through this language. Who knows? Do we really want Pam Bondi or Kash Patel or Todd Blanche figuring out what our Fourth Amendment rights are and then they get to decide for themselves without going to a court? At the very least, even if we are not going to have an actual warrant, there must be an independent judge, a magistrate, involved in defining whether or not there is probable cause to search American citizens. That is the bottom line here. Everybody knows and understands our Constitution and, yes, our Constitution applies in peacetime. It applies in wartime. It applies to American citizens in America. It applies to American citizens abroad. Mr. Speaker, we are very willing to sit down to try to figure out some way we can deal with this thorny area of the law, but sneaky meetings at the White House behind everybody's back and then votes at 2:30 in the morning are not going to do it for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the American people.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentleman from Georgia for his points, but I hope that their entire case doesn't rest on the argument that he just advanced from page 5. He quoted the section saying that any information concerning a United States person acquired under 702 may not be used in evidence against that person in any criminal proceeding if such information was acquired in violation of subsection (o). If you go to subsection (o), it says: ``Pursuant to subsection (b), no officer or employee of the United States Government may intentionally target for acquisition the communications of a United States person. . . . '' That is precisely the law today. This is a restatement of what is already the law. FISA is called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It is all about the surveillance of people abroad. It is not about surveilling the people here. If somebody were deliberately targeted, every judge in the land, even those most faithfully reporting to Donald Trump, would say: I am sorry. You can't target U.S. citizens on that under FISA. This is all about the collection of incidental data. I thought that everybody understood that that was the premise of our whole legislative discussion here, that this is about the collection of incidental data affecting hundreds of thousands of American citizens. That is what we are talking about. The passage that the gentleman just read is a restatement of what the law is today, which is that if they set out to go after American citizens here, of course, the exclusionary rule operates at that point. It would be prohibited. The question is, what happens if they incidentally collected. Under this new language, nothing happens unless somebody permissively decides that they want to adopt a rule over at the Department of Justice making it a problem.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding and the gentleman from Texas for his remarks. I rise today in strong support of H.R. 6310. This is a bipartisan bill to rename the Olney Post Office after Sergeant Edward Lawrence Ramsey. Mr. Ramsey was a true American patriot. After serving honorably for more than two decades in the U.S. Army, he brought his passionate commitment to public service to Montgomery County, Maryland, where he served as a postal clerk for 27 years, first in Glen Echo and then in the beautiful town of Olney. Mr. Ramsey's dedication to our community and his magnificent spirit brought joy and connection to generations of families, friends, community members, and colleagues throughout his career in the Postal Service. Many have shared with me inspiring stories of Mr. Ramsey's work in the community. He often worked on the holidays to guarantee continued stellar postal service. He would cover for colleagues who couldn't make it to work because of a storm. He regularly dropped by the post office to ensure that things were going well for his colleagues and for customers even when he, himself, wasn't on duty. When a customer could not afford postage, it was always Mr. Ramsey who always quickly covered the cost out of his own pocket. He even helped resolve special after- hours requests for many customers whom he considered his friends. It is no surprise for me to learn that visitors to the Olney Post Office would often wait in his line, a longer line, just to visit with him and to enjoy his vibrant and warm presence. Mr. Ramsey's kindness and his enthusiasm for his work extended to his postal colleagues who became like an extended family to him. Mr. Ramsey was a dedicated and devoted husband to his wife of 31 years, Sharon Mosley Ramsey, and a proud father of four sons, Edward Spencer, Lance Stanton, Hunter Shane, and Marcus. Mr. Ramsey passed away in January of 2022 following a medical emergency he experienced while on duty at the Olney Post Office. We will hold his memory in our hearts, and we hope it will be a blessing to his loved ones and family. We are forever thankful to Mr. Ramsey for his 47 years of dedicated service to our Nation and to our community in Maryland. Renaming this post office the Edward L. Ramsey Olney Post Office Building will honor Mr. Ramsey's outstanding life and legacy, and it will be a beacon to people in our community forever. Mr. Speaker, I urge all of our colleagues to join me in supporting H.R. 6310.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I rise to celebrate the B'nai Israel Congregation's Centennial. B'nai Israel is an essential part of Maryland's 8th District's vibrant and diverse Jewish community, and it is a privilege to represent a congregation with one hundred years of storied history and activism. The B'nai Israel Congregation began as a small gathering of committed friends who met at a congregant's home on Georgia Avenue in Northwest D.C. It grew so quickly that the congregation had to occupy two buildings in the District before finally finding its permanent home in Rockville in 1976. In 2026, the B'nai Israel Congregation is one of the largest synagogues in the movement of Conservative Judaism. Today, over 1,100 families attend temple services, participate in b'nai mitzvahs and celebrate life milestones together. The people who call the B'nai Israel Congregation their spiritual community share core values of connection and service that have defined the Congregation throughout these one hundred years. The Congregation supports lifelong Jewish learning opportunities, from the Schilit Early Childhood Center to a busy adult education program. The synagogue maintains a close relationship with several communities in Israel. And every month, congregants enact their commitment to community by delivering nutritious meals to local women experiencing homelessness. The entire congregation gathers for Mitzvah Day in December to bring mitzvot to people across Montgomery County. This tradition of service flows from the B'nai Israel Congregation's deep well of moral solidarity and civic engagement. During their own migration from D.C. to Rockville, members of B'nai Israel helped lead the urgent project to free Jewish people trapped and persecuted by the Soviet Union. Today, congregants and clergy at the B'nai Israel Congregation are active participants in Montgomery County's interfaith coalition. They invest deeply in educating each generation about our own struggles in America for social justice and lead educational trips to historic sites of the Civil Rights Movement. Montgomery County and the wider DMV have been fortunate to be the home of the B'nai Israel Congregation over the past one hundred years. Liberal democracies are sustained by vibrant and engaged communities like the B'nai Israel Congregation. May the congregants and clergy of B'nai Israel continue to go from strength to strength for the next century to come--yasher koach.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, here is what America is talking about: Donald Trump's unauthorized, undeclared war of choice, a forever war in the making, which is costing us between $1 billion and $2 billion every single day and has killed already 13 Americans in uniform, wounding more than 200 Americans in uniform, and killing more than 1,000 Iranians, including 170 school children who were bombed at an all-girls school in Iran. Americans are talking about the fact that gasoline now costs $3.84 a gallon. It has gone up more than 25 percent in 1 week because of Donald Trump's unauthorized, undeclared, illegal war of choice in Iran. Crude oil is now soaring to more than $109 a barrel because Donald Trump's war planners could not have predicted that Iran would try to strangle commerce in the Strait of Hormuz. That is what America is talking about this week. America is talking about when there will be justice for Renee Good and Alex Pretti, American citizens exercising their First Amendment and Second Amendment rights who were shot down in cold blood by government agents in Minneapolis, and the most recent Secretary of Homeland Security libeled them as domestic terrorists and refused to recant from that defamatory lie. That is what America is talking about. When are they going to reform ICE, and when are they going to start paying members of the Coast Guard, TSA, FEMA, and CISA? We have a discharge petition to say: Pay those people, and don't let all of the illegality of ICE bring down the faithful public servants at the Coast Guard, TSA, FEMA, and other Federal agencies. That is what America is talking about this week. Well, what are MAGA Republicans in Congress talking about this week? They are talking about the BOWOW Act. The BOWOW Act? Now, how did they come up with this bill and this title? Well, the President's poll numbers are sinking like a stone, so they needed to find something to do in Washington to put on the floor. They can't talk about Trump's ruinous tariffs that have plunged so many small businesses into oblivion and cost American consumers hundreds of billions of dollars. They can't talk about that because the Supreme Court, which they gerrymandered, sliced and diced, and packed and stacked, struck it down. Even the extremely right-leaning Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump's tariffs. We told them that it was unconstitutional. We told them that only Congress has the power to impose taxes and to regulate commerce with foreign nations, but no. Like lemmings, they followed Donald Trump off of the side of the ship, and now those tariffs are not only economically ruinous for the country, but they are discredited and struck down. They can't talk about that, which was their big policy hit of the administration so far. No, they can't talk about that. Well, they are not talking about the war in Iran. That is splitting even the MAGA base right down the middle because they had talked before Donald Trump about the importance of Congress actually making decisions about going to war. After all, that is what the Constitution says in Article I, Section 8, Clause 11. It is Congress that has the power to declare war. Mr. Speaker, they are not talking about that. They are not talking about the lives that have been lost in Iran with this bizarre, impetuous war of choice that has been thrust onto the country when the President promised us that there would be no more forever wars and regime-change wars. They can't even settle on whether this is a regime-change war or not. Some of them say that it is. Some of them say that it isn't, so we don't know. They can't talk about that. Maybe they can talk about the healthcare public policy, which Donald Trump has been promising for more than a decade. It is a decade of, in 2 weeks, we will get you our plan. They don't like the plans that we have under Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which have delivered healthcare to millions of Americans. They have done whatever they can to dismantle those healthcare plans. Maybe they could come up with a healthcare plan. No, they are not uttering a peep about that. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, and Donald Trump fundamentally is not interested in delivering a healthcare plan to America. Then someone says, ``Well, let's go back to immigration,'' but they have already been told not to talk about mass deportation. We pulled out of Minneapolis because we disgraced ourselves there. We know that America reviles the policy of shooting down American citizens in cold blood for exercising their First Amendment and Second Amendment rights, so we can't talk about that. Then somebody discovered Freddie and said: There is a case at Dulles Airport with a dog, and we can at least go to the dog people with the BOWOW Act. I am co-chair of the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus, and I have one of my dog's dog hair all over this suit, even though I tried to get it off before I came out this morning. If anybody is going to be a sucker for something called the BOWOW Act, it is me. I don't vote for a lot of MAGA legislation, but every dog has his day, and I was willing to look at this one. I was moved by something called the BOWOW Act. I looked up the incident that the gentleman from California has referenced, and it was outrageous. I was outraged to learn about what happened to Freddie. It all started when Freddie the Beagle, the canine detective at Dulles Airport who works with CBP, Customs and Border Protection, to detect smuggled agricultural products, alerted his superior officers at Dulles to the presence of over 100 pounds of prohibited food items that appeared in the baggage unloading area. It turns out Freddie did his job. He barked and alerted his superior officers to what was happening. They determined that there was a guy coming over from Egypt, a foreign national, named Aly Marie. Mr. Marie, age 70 years old, who was traveling to the airport and had all of this illegal food, contraband, was foiled by Freddie's excellent detective work. This frustrated Mr. Marie guy kicked Freddie. He kicked him so hard that the poor dog became airborne and had bruised ribs. Now, if you are a major dog person and believe in animal protection, like me, you say to yourself: You have to be kidding me. That should be illegal. Kick that guy out of the country immediately. Don't let him in. Guess what. That is exactly what happened. He was arrested immediately. He was charged immediately. He was held by the authorities. He was charged with one count of harming animals used in law enforcement under 18 U.S.C. 1368. He was convicted in a trial on his second day in America. He was held overnight, arrested, charged, convicted the next day, and then removed. He was sentenced to time served. He was ordered to pay for the veterinarian bill for Freddie's bruised ribs, which the court records show is $840, and he was promptly deported right back to Egypt after the court hearing on day three. I am happy to report that, according to the CBP, Freddie is doing fine today. The law worked. Imagine if Alex Pretti and imagine if Renee Good had that kind of criminal law enforcement and justice. What if their killers had been apprehended, arrested, charged, and convicted in 3 days? That would be a great thing, but no. What do we hear from Pam Bondi? What do we hear from Kristi Noem, the now-deposed former Secretary of Homeland Security? It is under investigation. The whole world saw it right on video. It is under investigation. Nothing is happening there. Freddie got justice. We have a system that actually works there. Mr. Marie served 3 days in jail. His food was confiscated, taken away, and he was deported from the country. Why? Because assaulting a dog like that is a crime of moral turpitude. Under the Federal laws, a crime of moral turpitude like that gets you kicked out of the country. It all worked. They have nothing else to talk about, so they want to double down and pass redundant legislation to say that somebody who does this should be deported, which is already what happened in this case. The opportunity to propose a redundant, unnecessary, superfluous bill to score meaningless political points, when the rest of the world is talking about war and inflation caused by this President, proved impossible to resist for our colleagues. H.R. 4638 would render inadmissible and deportable any noncitizen who willfully or maliciously harms a police dog or a police horse, as current law already requires. There is one change. It removes the requirement that immigrants to the country, whether travelers like the doggone Mr. Marie or a green card holder, it removes the requirement that a noncitizen actually be convicted of a crime. It is enough that you be charged with it or they say you admitted it, or whatever, but the conviction requirement is removed. Now, that has been a trend for our colleagues in this session. They have been taking things that are already crimes and saying: Let's make that a matter of deporting and removing someone. Well, they already can be deported and removed, yes, but now they want to excise the conviction requirement to do it without complete due process. Why would they do this? Thomas Jefferson said at the time of the Alien and Sedition Acts that there will be a temptation to go after the immigrants. He said that when you water down constitutional requirements as they apply to noncitizens, that is going to come to affect the citizens, too--a bitter lesson learned by the families of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. In other words, if you train the ICE agents that they can do whatever they want, that they are beyond the law, that they can put on masks, bust down people's doors, and enter without a Fourth Amendment search warrant issued by a neutral magistrate, if they can do that kind of thing, if they can abuse people as we have seen all over the internet, if they can rough up people, what difference does it make really if they are immigrants or if they are citizens if they are beyond the law? Now, we have dead Americans at the hands of our own Federal agents, with nobody charged, nobody arrested, and nobody being prosecuted. They want to just get rid of the conviction requirement before people are deported. They can already be deported once they are convicted, but they want to get rid of the conviction requirement. This case illustrates how completely unnecessary the bill is. Harming animals in law enforcement, or any form of animal cruelty, is already a crime involving moral turpitude and has been for a long time. It is a deportable offense, and everybody knows it. If it wasn't, Mr. Marie would not have been deported 3 days after he kicked Freddie. Bizarrely, because their bill doesn't require a conviction, if this legislation had been in place and Mr. Marie had been deported on day two instead of day three, and there had been no trial, he never would have had to pay restitution. Think about that. Due process helps a lot of people. It is not just for the benefit of that defendant who might be innocent, as Mr. Marie was not, but it also benefits the victims because the victims can win restitution and fines in this way. They want to deport first and not have a trial. They just want to eliminate due process. I don't understand it. President Trump has had his experiences in the criminal justice process, and he had every right guaranteed to people under due process: the right to a lawyer, the right to be heard, the right to introduce evidence, the right to cross-examine, the right to trial by a jury of his peers. Even after going through all of that, there are still people who say: That wasn't enough. It didn't really work for him. He didn't really get due process. He wasn't really guilty of committing fraud. If that is the case for someone who had every conceivable benefit of due process, what about somebody now who gets no due process at all and no trial? That is what they are suggesting. I don't understand why, really, other than the possibility of just introducing an unnecessary, redundant bill and giving them something to talk about when they don't want to talk about what is really going on in the world, what is really going on in America, with gas prices soaring out of control, people unable to pay for their healthcare, and people unable to afford groceries. They don't want to talk about any of that. They want to talk about Freddie. Well, there is a lot of meaningful animal protection work we can do together, and those of us in the Animal Protection Caucus would be very happy to meet with the gentleman from California about all of the things we can do to really help animals in America. But right now, Freddie is doing fine. That case worked out fine. This bill is unnecessary. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. We want the immigration laws enforced. We also want the Constitution of the United States to be enforced. They think somehow it has been suspended, and the President of the United States can do whatever he wants. We are trying to stand up for the rule of law in America and for our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Jayapal).

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

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