Jamie Raskin

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Chair, a regime of fear has descended on the Federal workforce, and I have got 88,000 Federal employees in my district. If they insist on this legislation--unnecessary, redundant, confusing, and chilling--at the very least, we must pass the gentlewoman's amendment to say that it does not trench on the First Amendment rights of our citizens who are simply exercising in a viewpoint-neutral, in a content-neutral way the determination of the agencies to solicit public input. You say you support on your side the input of the public. You say you support the intent of the amendment. Let's accept the amendment, and let's all embrace the First Amendment together.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Chairman, this redundant and duplicative and, again, chilling amendment will only add more red tape, divert the time of agency officials to produce more paperwork that is unnecessary, and point us right back to the central flaw of the legislation. My distinguished opponents have mobilized all of one case to demonstrate the necessity of this legislation, and it was a case which was properly resolved by the GAO, and everybody agrees to it. So I understand the urge to get up and say we need more legislation to do what we have already been able to accomplish under existing law, I understand that everybody wants to make a point about the righteousness of legislative change, but sometimes we just don't need another law. The law works as it was. We don't need another law. And again, I am just impressed by the irony of saying we need another law to eliminate excessive and redundant regulation when the current law already does it. It is almost like a caricature of what we do here in Congress. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Chairman, I rise only to note the remarkable irony of the gentleman making an argument for the reduction of duplicative regulations by adding another duplicative regulation. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Jayapal. She has been a sensational leader within the Democratic Caucus and within the Congressional Progressive Caucus, especially on the issues of immigration and the rights of refugees. It is such an honor to be able to serve with her. I appreciate being able to spend some moments just reflecting on what took place in our Chamber last night with the President's speech. We should start by giving credit where credit is due. This speech was not ``American Carnage II.'' It was a vast improvement, I would say, over all of the violent and apocalyptic imagery and rhetoric that we saw in the inaugural address. So hats off to the President's new speech writer, whoever that may be. However, having said that, I think it is simply old wine in a new bottle. The same basic extremist Steve Bannon infrastructure governed that address despite the fact that the manners had improved considerably. When I thought about President Trump's speech in this Chamber last night, I thought about George Orwell. Not because of 1984, although I admit that my well-thumbed copy of this great dystopian novel is sitting on my desk right now and the words ``war is peace'' and ``ignorance is strength'' have been running through my mind over the last several weeks. No, I thought of Orwell not because of 1984, but because of a great essay he once wrote called ``Notes on Nationalism.'' In this essay, George Orwell contrasted patriotism and nationalism-- two concepts that often get conflated. But at least, in his view, they represented two very different things. Patriotism, he argued, was a positive emotion, a passionate belief in one's own community--its people, its institutions, its values, its history, its culture. An American patriot today, I would argue, believes in our magnificent constitutional democracy--our Constitution; our Bill of Rights; our judiciary and our judges; our States and our communities; our poets like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes and Merrill Leffler; our philosophers like John Dewey and Ralph Waldo Emerson; our extraordinary dynamic culture which invites and absorbs new waves of people from all over the world, our artists, our musicians like Bruce Springsteen, the Neville Brothers, and Dar Williams. All of these people and things are what we love about America, and they evoke the positive emotion of patriotism. Patriotism is all about uplifting people; drawing on what is best in our history; finding what is best in our culture; invoking our Founders, Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, and Tom Paine; invoking the people who founded the country once again through the Civil War and the reconstruction amendments, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass; the people who transformed America in the women's suffrage movement, like Susan B. Anthony; the people who remade America once again in the civil rights movement, like Martin Luther King, Bob Moses, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; the people who blew the doors off of discrimination and oppression against other groups, like the LGBT community, like Harvey Milk. All of these people stand for a progressive dynamic and inclusive concept of America, and patriots want to draw on this culture in history in order to continue to make great progress for our people today. A patriot wants to improve the health of our people, the education of our people, the critical thinking skills of our people, the well-being of America. Now, nationalism is different. If you look at it historically as Orwell did, nationalism has been not about building people up and improving their lives, it has been about militarizing society and getting everyone to sync their individuality, their creative personality into a large corporatist and authoritarian state, one that is destined to exploit people's goodwill by mobilizing them for groupthink and endless hostility in war, the kind that Orwell dramatized so frightfully in 1984 and in ``Animal Farm.'' Well, I am sorry to say that I didn't see a lot of patriotism in Orwell's terms in the speech last night. Ninety percent of our kids go to public schools, but 90 percent of this President's energy and administration's energy seems to go into maligning and defunding public education and diverting public money away from public schools into private education. That is the Betsy DeVos agenda. Or take health care. The Affordable Care Act represents a magnificent national investment in health care of our own people. More than 22 million of our fellow citizens, previously uninsured, got health care because of the ACA. Thirty million if you include the expansion of Medicaid that took place under the ACA. If you decide to go to a town hall, yours or someone else's, you will meet people who will tell you that their lives were saved because of the Affordable Care Act--victims of breast cancer and colon cancer and heart attacks and strokes and on and on. These things are just in the nature of life. We are all subject to medical misfortune. If you learn you have cancer or if you have a heart attack, that is a misfortune. It happens to people every day. But if you have cancer or leukemia or you have a heart attack and you can't get health coverage because you lost your job or because you are too poor, that is not just a misfortune, that is an injustice because we can do something about that. Because that has to do with how we have organized our own affairs as a society. But what did we hear from the President last night about the health care and well-being of our people? Repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. They voted more than 50 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act and never once to replace it. They have got no plan. The President did not offer a plan. The President restated the values of the Affordable Care Act itself. And understand, the Affordable Care Act was the compromise because the logical thing to have done, as President Obama said, if we were starting from scratch, would be to adopt a single payor plan. But because we were along a certain path, he felt we couldn't do that. So he took the plan that was adopted at The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, the one that was put in in Massachusetts by Governor Romney--RomneyCare. That is the Affordable Care Act. But they couldn't tolerate that because they cared more about scoring political points against the President than they did about actually making health care available to as many Americans as possible. So the President showed up empty-handed again. No plan whatsoever. If there were a plan, we would be debating it. If they had something to offer, we would be talking about it. But they don't have it. They just want to repeal and consign everybody back to medical oblivion. Millions of people going back to not having it. Making everybody else's insurance premiums skyrocket and just turning our backs on the families that now depend on the Affordable Care Act. Now, I will say the President mentioned in passing something that he made a big deal of during the campaign, and I was happy he did. He went back to saying that we needed to give the government the authority to negotiate with the large drug companies, the prescription drug companies, for lower prices. And I was happy to hear my colleagues from the other side of the aisle in talking about the pharmacist just now, also talking about the extraordinary power of the pharmaceutical companies and their predatory practices. Well, what the President has said makes perfect sense on this point, which is there was some special interest legislation that came out several years ago saying that the government could not negotiate for lower prices with the drug companies when it comes to Medicare. We do it with Medicaid, we do it with VA drug benefits, but we can't do it for Medicare drug benefits because some lobbyist was able to get somebody to stick that into the bill, and the GOP majority stands by it now. And so I appeal to the President, if you are serious about it, I will work day and night to get every Democratic vote I can to side with you in giving the government the authority to negotiate for lower drug prices. That is a common ground agenda. Let's do that. But as to the general picture of health care in the country, the President gave us nothing last night. We also got no jobs plan. We got no plan to confront the shameful inequality in our society. When the President and his Cabinet entered the Chamber last night, the net worth of this room went up by $9.6 billion. This is the richest Cabinet in American history. These 17 people in the Cabinet have more wealth than 43 million American households combined. That is one-third of American households. When you look at the Trump Cabinet, you can see the net worth of one-third of American families together. And the President, who campaigned like a crusading populist, like William Jennings Bryan, for working people, creates a Cabinet of billionaires and CEOs, people who profited like mad from NAFTA and all the trade deals that the President now denounces. He closed his campaign by railing against Goldman Sachs. But Goldman Sachs may as well be the nickname of this Cabinet. From Secretary Tillerson to Steve Bannon and many others, Goldman Sachs is all over this administration. And last night, we also got more immigrant bashing. And I know my friend and colleague, Congresswoman Jayapal, will discuss this. How patriotic is immigrant bashing? I would say not very. Tom Paine said America would be a haven of refuge for people fleeing political and religious repression all over the world. Madison said it would be a sanctuary for religious and political refugees. America would come to be symbolized by the Statue of Liberty. ``Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,'' that is the spirit of America. We are a nation of immigrants. Other than Native Americans, we were here before everybody else got here. And the slaves were brought here against their will. But everybody else, we are immigrants or we are the descendants of immigrants. So if you attack immigrants, you are really attacking the dynamic and inclusive culture of America, a community of communities. And then there is the big proposal we got to slash $56 billion in domestic spending and put it into a great big, new military buildup. And here we see the fingerprints, of course, of Steve Bannon. We could destroy the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the State Department, the Peace Corps, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Election Commission, the CFPB, and on and on, and still not come close to the $56 billion that they want to rip out of the domestic priorities of the American people and simply give to the Pentagon. And for what? Why? No one has told us why. What is all of that money going to buy? Who is going to get rich off of all of that money? Ladies and gentlemen, when you add it all up, this program seems like it partakes of the ultra-nationalist politics that Orwell perceived in authoritarian regimes, not the kind of patriotism that reflects the best in our own Democratic political culture. The great thing is that Americans are deep patriots. We love our communities. We love our institutions. We love our values. We love our Constitution. We love our Bill of Rights. And we are not going to fall for a right-wing, ultra-nationalist agenda that takes us away from everything that we love.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, this is the final amendment to the bill, which will not kill the bill or send it back to the committee. If adopted, the bill will immediately proceed to final passage, as amended. The purpose of this amendment is simply to carve out from the provisions of the legislation any rules that we have adopted in order to prevent conflicts of interest and in order to promote financial transparency and disclosure by executive branch employees. Mr. Speaker, since I became a Member of the House in January and joined the Judiciary Committee, we have been subjected to an onslaught of bills seeking to free corporate polluters, lead paint and asbestos manufacturers, and other abusers of the rights of consumers and citizens from having to face the people they injure in court and having to comply with the rules that have been worked out over the decades to protect our air, our water, our land, our people, our health, and our workplaces. In most cases, we don't even get hearings on these bills. In the Judiciary Committee, I have not seen a victim of toxic torts or lead poisoning or medical malpractice testify, but their rights are being flattened every single day by the legislative bulldozer that is running amuck. These bills are flying at us with lightning speed--no hearings, no real debate, no time to study the measures, no time to do the proper information gathering for our constituents. Now the SCRUB Act would establish an unelected roving commission with unlimited subpoena power. It would be controlled by the President who gets to appoint a clean majority--five members at his own discretion; and four more, two Republicans and two Democrats. So when they say it is bipartisan, remember what that means: Seven spots for majority appointees and two spots for minority appointees. More importantly, this roving commission can be lobbied behind closed doors by the special interests that want to splice and dice the regulations that we have worked out over the decades to protect the public against harm. In all of the rules that our democracy has put in place--not just old rules, not just obsolete rules, not just silly rules--all of them are going to be in the crosshairs of this roving commission--no exceptions, no firewalls, no protections for rules governing public health and safety--like the Clean Water Act or like the Clean Air Act. They just rejected the amendment to carve that out. There are no protections, significantly, and this is what the amendment is about, for rules guaranteeing transparency in government and integrity in government. My motion to recommit, Mr. Speaker, would incorporate into the underlying legislation an amendment that I advanced in committee that goes to the heart of the crisis of confidence in Washington, in America today. I think every Member of this body can support it without betraying any of their principles or their party. On the contrary, I think it strengthens all of our principles and it strengthens our parties by building public confidence in the political system as a whole. It makes sure we can keep draining the swamp, as the President of the United States said in this Chamber last night. My amendment states very simply that the Commission may not target for destruction any rules relating to any law governing a potential conflict of interest of an employee or officer of the executive branch, or any law governing the financial disclosures of executive branch employees, and bribery. Right now, we know there is a dangerous crisis in popular confidence in the national government. This administration has brought to Washington a web of complicated conflicts of interest, real or potential, attendant to a global business empire that engages in business with foreign governments, foreign and domestic corporations, and a huge host of regulated entities. Just a mile from where we sit today, for example, the Trump Hotel is renting out guest rooms, ballrooms, meeting rooms, and whole floors to foreign governments, embassies, and large corporations in flagrant violation of the Emoluments Clause, article 1, section 9, which requires the President to come ask us--Congress--for permission to receive payments from foreign governments. They even have a director of diplomatic sales now. Furthermore, the standard lease that the Trump Hotel has with the General Services Administration forbids any elected official of the United States Government or the District of Columbia from deriving any profit or value from the lease. Clearly, there is a breach in this lease right now. The problem is that the President is not only the tenant, he is, for all intents and purposes, the landlord too because he controls the GSA and appoints its director. So President-landlord Donald Trump would have to go to court to sue tenant businessman Donald Trump for breaching the lease by collecting money under it as a public official. This just scratches the surface of a welter of ethical conflicts. Mr. Speaker, this is the final amendment to the bill which will not kill the bill or send it back to committee. If adopted, the bill will immediately proceed to final passage as amended. Since I became a member of this House in January, my Freshman colleagues and I have been engaged in two activities. First, we've been sitting in hearings and trying to make sense of bills that fundamentally change the legal and regulatory structure of America--and we've done so without hearing from witnesses, without time to study measures, and without time to do the proper information gathering that I believe is necessary to serve our various constituencies. Second, we've come to the floor at the end of each day to cast votes on deregulation. This house has been in the business of loosening rules on everything. We've made it easier to pollute, easier to harm consumers--all in the name of cutting regulatory costs. And so it's no surprise that a bill like this sailed through the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to the floor. This bill would establish an unelected commission with unlimited subpoena power and partisan majority to chop through the Federal Register with a chain saw. There are no exceptions, no firewalls, no protections for rules and regulations governing health and safety and there are no protections for rules guaranteeing transparency in government. My motion to recommit would incorporate into the underlying legislation, an amendment I offered in committee. It's straightforward and unburdensome. In fact, when I offered it in committee one of my colleagues on the other side indicated that the priority of this bill is ``major rules with massive costs.'' If passed, this MTR would make certain that no provision of the SCRUB Act could be used to eliminate rules relating to laws that govern conflicts of interest of executive branch officers or employees. That's it--it reinforces existing law and clarifies provisions of this bill. Surely, we can agree that rules designed to help maintain the public trust in those representing them in the Executive Branch are sacred enough to be explicitly protected. And if anyone should ask why it's so important, we don't have to look too far. This administration is a walking, talking billboard for the need to protect laws that protect the public trust. I urge my colleagues to support this common sense measure. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Chairman, my amendment would protect all rules relating to the enforcement of the Clean Air Act, which are in danger now under H.R. 998, the SCRUB Act, which seeks to authorize a brand new $30 million Presidential commission of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats to wipe out agency rules across the whole field of government. Mr. Chairman, last night in this Chamber, the President of the United States came and articulated policy areas where he said his administration ``wants to work with Members of both parties.'' One of these was to promote clean air and clean water. I was happy to hear it because earlier in the day he signed an executive order to clear the way for weakening safe drinking water standards through redefinition of which small bodies of water are covered under the Clean Water Act. Now, the amendment I propose provides a chance for all of us to start fresh in demonstrating our seriousness about this new bipartisan commitment to protect the water we drink and the air that we breathe. The SCRUB Act proposes to create a commission to do what Federal agencies and commissions already do, which is to review and update their rules. That is why a lot of us are deeply skeptical about spending $30 million to create a new roving commission to hack away at rules protecting the public interest. This commission would be made up of five members appointed directly by the President at his discretion and four members by the President from congressional nomination, too, from each party. The advocates for this legislation say it is not about dismantling the rules that protect the water that our children drink or the air that our children and our grandparents breathe or the food that all of us eat. It is just about getting rid of unnecessary and obsolete and profligate regulations. And I take them at their word that that is what it is about. So let's all agree that the new supercommission that you seek to establish under the SCRUB Act will not touch, in any way, the rules adopted under the Clean Air Act. If that is not the purpose of this legislation, to undermine the Clean Air Act regime, as its advocates repeatedly insist, then there should be no problem having us formalize this commitment on a bipartisan basis. Right now, the SCRUB Act does not explicitly protect clean air--or clean water, for that matter--from the prospects of a roving bureaucratic attack. Thus, it exposes all of us to unnecessary harm, threatening to scrub away the rules that protect the air we breathe. What will that mean for 17 million Americans with asthma, for the millions of people with lung cancer and other respiratory diseases, for more than 30,000 people struggling with cystic fibrosis? All of these people are potentially in danger simply because of an overblown ideological attack on regulations, which are just the rules that we adopt as a constitutional democracy to protect ourselves from harm. In answer to objections about the bill, the majority says that Congress will still have its say; but if you read it carefully, you see that congressional authority has actually been placed in a straitjacket. The bill requires an up-or-down vote on the commission's recommendations as a complete omnibus package rather than voting on each proposal individually. So if you agreed with loosening some regulations, for example, in the Title X Family Planning program, which has a lot of rules, but you don't want to eviscerate the regulatory infrastructure under the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act, you would have to vote on the entire package at once. This makes Congress into an embarrassing rubber stamp for a nine-person body effectively controlled by the executive branch. Dear colleagues, let's not play games with the health and safety of our constituents. If this bill passes as is, rules that govern the very air we breathe would be subject to the SCRUB Act's unelected, unaccountable, and unbounded practitioners. My amendment closes a gaping and dangerous hole in the legislation. I ask my colleagues to think about public health and safety first, and not the magical thinking and scientifically ungrounded cost-benefit analysis promised by the SCRUB Act. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. RASKIN. I am, indeed.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as he may consume to my colleague from Maryland (Mr. Cummings).

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor David Burwell who passed away on February 1, 2017. David will be remembered as a passionate activist for conservation and environmental advocacy. In a decades-long career, he made many important contributions to environmental progress through his early work with the National Wildlife Federation, by co-founding the visionary Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (RTC), and in serving as director of the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Burwell is remembered by his RTC co-founder Peter Harkin as ``a voracious learner and a fearless instigator,'' for whom ``no unexplored fact was too insignificant, and no challenge was too large.'' These qualities served him well in the 1980s, when all across the country, thousands of miles of railroad were falling out of use each year. Instead of simply watching this land be sold-off and re-developed, Mr. Burwell worked with Congress to preserve railroad corridors as hiking trails for current and future generations of outdoor enthusiasts and railroad history buffs. He is survived by his wife Irini, his son and daughter-in-law, his two granddaughters, and his brother. May his life's work be an inspiration to all of us.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise in support of H.R. 1033, the Open Book on Equal Access to Justice Act. Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by echoing the praise that the chairman offered to Mr. Collins and Mr. Cohen for their leadership on this important legislation which I support for several reasons. To begin with, it strengthens the Equal Access to Justice Act, a crucial law that has helped senior citizens, veterans, the disabled, and not-for-profit groups vindicate their rights against unreasonable or arbitrary governmental action. Now, as the chairman stated, under the so-called American rule, parties to adjudicative matters typically pay their own litigation costs, subject to certain statutory exceptions; and one of these exceptions is the Equal Access to Justice Act, which allows a party to be reimbursed for litigation costs when he or she is victorious against the Federal Government under specified conditions. But if the U.S. can show that its position was substantially justified, or that special circumstances would make an award unjust, then the prevailing party is not entitled to be reimbursed for his or her litigation costs. In addition, only certain parties are eligible to be reimbursed for their litigation costs under the act, based on their net worth or tax exempt status, among other factors that are built in to the statute. Whether these restrictions still make sense is an open question, as Congress simply does not have the adequate information to assess the continuing effectiveness of the act. This is because there has been no comprehensive Federal report on the total amount of fees awarded under the act since 1995, and, as a result, all we have is conjecture and extrapolation. Fortunately, H.R. 1033 addresses this problem by requiring annual reports on the amount of fees paid under the act to prevailing litigants against the government. As a result of this legislation, Congress will know now, on an annual basis, the agencies required to reimburse parties for their litigation costs; the claims that first gave rise to the litigation; and the amount of awards made under the act, as well as the basis for them. With this information, Congress will be in a much better position to assess the ongoing implementation of the act and the performance of the agencies as litigants. Another reason why I support this legislation is that it respects the privacy interests of the parties who are reimbursed for their litigation costs pursuant to the act. Unfortunately, prior versions of this legislation were unnecessarily intrusive. Organizations, like the National Organization of Social Security Claimants' Representatives and the Paralyzed Veterans of America, expressed their serious concerns that prior versions of the bill might ``infringe the privacy of vulnerable people who have applied for Social Security and veterans' benefits.'' These are serious concerns, especially given the fact that the bill requires the information collected to be made available to the public and transparent through posting on the internet. As currently drafted, however, H.R. 1033 strikes the proper balance between encouraging transparency and respecting the legitimate privacy interests of parties that have been raised as an issue in the past. The bill specifically provides that the annual reports required to be made publicly available may not reveal any information the disclosure of which is prohibited by law or court order. Finally, I support H.R. 1033 because it recognizes the important role that the Administrative Conference of the United States has historically played in helping Congress identify inefficiencies among the Federal agencies and ways to save taxpayer dollars through the proper economies. I am particularly pleased that the current version of this legislation reflects various thoughtful suggestions shared by the Administrative Conference with our staffs. Given the excellent work and scholarly analysis that have been the hallmarks of the Administrative Conference of the United States, I expect its report and its attendant findings will be an invaluable aid to Congress. As the Judiciary Committee is the authorizing committee for the Conference, I encourage our friends on the Appropriations Committee to ensure that the Conference has adequate funding to implement this very important legislation. Like the Administrative Conference, H.R. 1033 requires only a modest investment that will result in a very valuable return for all Americans. Accordingly, I urge my colleagues to support this measure, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Georgia has made a very powerful argument for a bipartisan push for transparency and accountability. I yield such time as he may consume to the distinguished gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cohen).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, in closing, I want to recognize my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. As Mr. Cohen has pointed out, this legislation has been a model of bipartisan collaboration, and the work product shows the investment of both sides in it. So I want to salute everybody for their diligence in helping to craft this important legislation. The gentlemen from Georgia (Mr. Collins) and the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Cohen), as well as our former colleague, the gentlewoman from Wyoming, Ms. Lummis, have cooperatively worked to effectuate a very effective, commonsense bill that will improve the accountability and the transparency of the Federal Government. This is a commendable accomplishment. Accordingly, I would ask all of our colleagues to join us in supporting this legislation. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all the Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, we should be joined momentarily by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee. I want to close out, though, my own thoughts by responding to something I have been hearing over the last week here in the Halls of Congress. Now that it is clear from our intelligence agencies, 16 of them, including the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and so on, that Vladimir Putin had a deliberate campaign of espionage, cyber sabotage, propaganda, and fake news to undermine American democracy in the 2016 election, and now that it is clear that there were high-level contacts between Trump associates and officials of the Russian Government, it is no longer being denied by anybody on either side of the aisle. What I have started to hear is, well, sure, they tried to hack our election, and, sure, they leaked thousands of emails, and, sure, they changed the dynamics of the campaign and what people were talking about in the campaign, but there is no proof that they stuffed any ballot boxes or they hacked into the computers. And that is true; we don't know that they stuffed any ballot boxes or hacked into computers, and we will have to see if anything comes out about that when we finally get to do a real comprehensive investigation. But, Mr. Speaker, the reality is that we should be terrified and appalled and outraged that they were allowed to go as far as they did. How many people in this body would accept a foreign entity coming into our congressional districts and spending millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars against us, hacking into our computers, releasing our emails, and completely changing the dynamics of the campaign? So when I hear from colleagues that, well, yes, they distorted the campaign, they hacked into the campaign, but they didn't steal the election, I think that they are making a distinction with no difference at all. If you derail the campaign, you kidnap the campaign, you hijack the campaign, you have altered the outcome of the election, especially one in which your opponent gets 2.9 million votes more than you did, especially in an election where you were able to torture out only the slenderest of electoral college victories in three States by 70,000 votes. So I simply reject the constant claim that I am hearing from colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that we don't need to worry about Russian subversion of the 2016 election because it only affected the campaign; it didn't necessarily affect the election outcome. To influence the campaign is to influence the election outcome. Mr. Speaker, I am seeing Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee is not here, so I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn), my good friend, the Assistant Democratic Leader. Honoring Voorhees College and Denmark Technical College

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I love magic, and I bet a lot of people out there watching today love magic, too. Ever since I was a kid, I loved the cup tricks, the card tricks, and the rabbit coming out of the hat. When I was in college, I even used to entertain at elementary school birthday parties, helping to pay my way through college. The key move in magic, as you know, Mr. Speaker, is the sleight of hand. I looked up the definition of ``sleight of hand'' in the Merriam- Webster Dictionary, which defines it as a cleverly executed deception. A sleight of hand is also sometimes called a prestidigitation, quick fingers, or legerete de la main, which is the French phrase for ``lightness of hand.'' It is defined as the set of closely related techniques used by a stage magician to manipulate the perceptions of the audience. Sleight of hand depends on the use of psychology, careful stage misdirection, constant blabbering, and strategic confusion to distract the audience. Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States has been masterfully deploying sleight of hand ever since his inauguration. With his nonstop tweeting and his incessant mad antics, the President distracts us from the real action, which is what is happening here in Congress. We are witnessing a magic trick on the world's largest stage, the auditorium of American democracy. And we, the people, are the captive, bedazzled, and totally distracted audience of the President. The tweets are a massive sleight of hand distracting us from the serious destruction of public policy and law that is taking place right here in Congress. I want to say, at the outset, I prefer to think of this as a magic trick because the alternative that the President simply can't control himself is almost too horrific to contemplate. The Constitution does have a way of dealing with that problem, too, and you can find it in the 25th Amendment. Today, we are going to assume that all of this is a magic show. I used to coach kids' soccer. And when I coached soccer, I would always tell the kids: Don't bunch. Keep your eye on the ball. Stay in your lane and pass the ball. Without fail, the youngest kids who are just starting out, they all chase the ball. They move around the field in a big clump, a big mob. And I would say: Don't follow the mob that is following the ball. Go to where the ball is going to be going. When they are young, they don't know how to do it. I think that advice applies here as well to America, to the body politic. Don't follow the mob that is following the ball. Let's not be distracted full time by all the tomfoolery and tweetfoolery. There are important and dangerous things happening right here in Congress right now. While the President is tweeting insults and fake news and inflating his slender college victory and the size of his inaugural crowd and making fun of Meryl Streep and chatting about Nordstrom's department store and talking about how he is going to make Mexico pay for his wall and so on, what is taking place in Congress is the systematic dismantling of the regulatory apparatus that the American public depends on for clean air, clean water, safe food, a decent environment, and control of criminality in the country. The fundamental political action that we must be paying attention to now is the dismantling of the regulatory apparatus of the Federal Government, which is happening every day right here in the Halls of Congress. This is the apparatus that protects our food, our air, our water, our health care, our financial system, the ability of people to invest safely on Wall Street, occupational safety and health for our workers. All of this is being attacked in terrifying and often invisible ways. Behind the scenes, while the wizard of odd convenes a dinner in Mar- a-Lago where he entertains a national security crisis discussion in full view of other diners who begin to tweet out and Facebook out what they are seeing happen, while all of that is happening, Congress is rolling back environmental protections to protect streams, rivers, and drinking water from pollution. They are savaging the rules that restrict the volume of greenhouse gas emissions that are leaked into the atmosphere, destabilizing our climate system. Check out H.J. Res. 38 and 36. While the distractor in chief whines about leaks, while his whole campaign was based on leaks of emails that were captured by Russian agents working to get him elected, in Congress, they are rolling back financial regulations which ensure that workers have retirement savings options, H.J. Res. 66, and which protect consumers from excessive financial risks, H.R. 78. They have also targeted and rolled back labor regulations that promote safe and healthy workplaces and fair employment practices, H.J. Res. 37. Amazingly, while President Trump's National Security Adviser, General Flynn, was forced to resign when it was revealed that he had been colluding with Russians to lift the sanctions that the Obama administration had imposed on Russia, here in Congress, we are passing joint resolutions to rescind anticorruption regulations that required oil and gas companies to report monetary payments that they made to foreign governments, H.J. Res. 41. So Trump tweets about leaks, while his administration is one vast leak to the Russians. And here, Members of the GOP are working to throw an invisibility and secrecy cloak over corporate payments being made to foreign governments and corporations. While the world is distracted by all of the sleight of hand, this Congress is passing bills to give government back to giant corporations and special interests that care not for the common good but simply for their own bottom line. Mr. Speaker, as a freshman, I have been here for only 8 weeks. I have to tell you that I am disappointed that I have not voted on a single bill in the House Judiciary Committee that has had so much as a hearing. Yes, I want to repeat that. We have voted on five bills since I got here and not one of them has had a hearing. Now, I come from the Maryland State Senate where I proudly served for 10 years as a State senator. When we had a bill coming up, no bill could be brought to the floor without a hearing first, and anybody who wanted to come testify on the bill could come testify on it. Now, that is not practicable here in the U.S. Congress. However, we could at least have experts relating to the bill and people who are affected by the bill come in and testify, but we haven't done that in the House Judiciary Committee. Instead, we voted on a series of bills which, to my mind, dramatically curtail the public interest. Yesterday, we voted on a bill to dismantle, essentially to put into a stifling straightjacket, the class-action mechanism that has been used over the decades to vindicate the interest of people who are victims of sex discrimination, victims of race discrimination, victims of toxic torts, victims of asbestos poisoning. We voted basically to trash class action yesterday without even so much as a bill. Now, on some of the other bills, it was said to me: Well, there were hearings in prior Congresses. One Member said: We had a hearing on that back in 2012. This is 2017, 5 years later. But on this particular bill that I am talking about, nobody even heard the bill. There was no hearing on it. It was simply brought up for a vote. That is irresponsible legislation. That is not real democracy when you don't even have a hearing and people who are affected by the legislation don't have the opportunity to come and talk about it. Now, they are not having hearings because they think--and they are probably right--we're not paying attention. What are we paying attention to? We are paying attention to the magician. We are paying attention to the wizard of odd. We are paying attention to the tweets instead. The good news is that the audience is starting to wise up. The whole country is waking up to the profound dangers of the administration's financial and political entanglements with Russia, with the Russian corporate and governmental elite. Just this week, the National Security Adviser, Mr. Flynn, resigned after reports came out about his communications with the Russian Ambassador while President Obama was still in office, communications dealing with the lifting of sanctions on Russia, communications that General Flynn lied about and was forced from office because of it. He misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his conversations with the diplomat, which was being monitored and recorded by the intelligence community. Now, Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen, my fellow Americans, let's think about this for a moment. As a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Mr. Flynn was no innocent about the world of spy versus spy. He must have known that his telephone call with the Russian Ambassador was being monitored and recorded. If he really wanted to go rogue and operate on his own without the permission and the license of President Trump, he never would have allowed that telephone conversation to be recorded. But he did allow it to be recorded. He made the call with presumable full knowledge that other people in the intelligence community would be listening in on it, which leads me to the inescapable, logical conclusion that Flynn knew that, in making that call, he enjoyed the full support of the one person above him who could remove him from his job, the President of the United States. Now, do I know that? No, I don't know it. I surmise it. How are we going to know whether or not this is true? How do we get to the bottom of the Russian connection in the campaign? How do we get to the bottom of the Russian connection in the Trump administration? We need to have a full, complete, independent investigation by experts, like the 9/11 Commission, which gets to the bottom of this profound danger, this dagger pointed at the throat of American democracy. Mr. Speaker, everybody loves magic, I think. Everybody loves the enchantment of being fooled, of being distracted, of being diverted. That is why people go to magic shows. It is diverting. It is amusing. It is fun. Everybody loves a great magician, too. None was greater in our history than the great Houdini, who dazzled the world with his extraordinary optical illusions and effects, his amazing ability to simulate telepathy and telekinesis. Houdini also had a very strong ethical and professional code about being a magician. He never revealed a trick. More importantly, he never tried to fool people in order to defraud them. He never tried to fool people in order to humiliate them. He never tried to fool people in order to take away their rights. He never tried to fool people in order to demoralize and crush them or to strip them of their freedom. He never tried to fool people in order to victimize them. Indeed, in the 1920s, Mr. Houdini channeled all of his magnificent energy away from doing his magic shows and instead put it into the separate but related task of exposing psychics, mediums, con men, charlatans, and practitioners of the occult and the dark arts who did take advantage of people's good will, who did take advantage of people's impressionability to defraud them, to take their money, their belongings, and to distract them from the real world, and to undermine the moral and ethical principles that should govern human behavior and must govern social life. Although Houdini is no longer with us, he has great heirs today in socially responsible magicians like the Amazing Randi and Penn & Teller. Already millions of Americans themselves--millions of us in the audience--have woken up to the fact that we have been pulled into an irrational and dangerous fantasy world, an echo chamber of malignant narcissism, cruelty, and paranoia. It is time for all of us to stop being distracted, to stop being bedazzled, and pay attention to the real game, which is, one, trying to get America to join with Vladimir Putin, a dictator and an autocrat who said that the single greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in order to create an international league of dictators, demagogues, and despots to violate human rights and crush liberal democracy; and, two, to dismantle at home the public regulatory infrastructure which protects our land, our air, our water, our climate, our liberties, our freedoms, our equal rights, and our capacity to function as the greatest democracy on Earth and to function as an efficient and effective government meeting the needs of the people. The magicians out there--there aren't many--but you have a special obligation to help us blow the whistle, and you are doing it. But it is really the American people--it is all of us who must stand up. The Constitution talks about three branches of government. Article I is Congress. Article II is the executive. Article III is the judiciary. Let's call Congress the first branch. But when you think about it, what is even more important than the Congress is the trunk, the roots of democracy. Everything grows up from the people. The branches are out there, but Congress works for the people. The President works for Congress and the people. The Supreme Court and the judiciary work for the people. It is time for the people to dissolve the spells that have been cast over the country, to say this is a democracy. We operate by the Constitution and the rule of law. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky).

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be with you this afternoon. I have a series of other speakers who will be joining me later in the hour from the Progressive Caucus, as we discuss some of the key events of the week from our perspective. General Leave