Brad Sherman

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, let's look at the historic timeline. The Reagan administration and other administrations have failed in the past to veto anti-Israel resolutions, and that failure has not been helpful to the cause of peace. Over the last two decades, Israel has frozen or removed settlements in an effort to negotiate peace, all to no avail. On November 29 of last year, this House unanimously urged our U.N. Ambassador to veto any U.N. resolution that sought to impose peace settlement terms. But a month later, our U.N. Ambassador ignored the input of this House and allowed the U.N. to adopt a one-sided resolution that sought to impose peace terms on the parties. Worse yet, that U.N. resolution equates the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site, with outposts deep in the West Bank that are illegal under Israeli law. Today we consider a House resolution that has over 30 Democratic cosponsors. It is not a pro-settlements resolution. It strongly and repeatedly reaffirms our support for a two-state solution, achieved through direct negotiations, and it objects to a U.N. resolution that set back the cause of peace. Vote ``yes.''

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise to support H. Con. Res. 40. I am pleased to support this measure that was introduced by Congressman Charlie Rangel of New York, and I associate myself with the chairman's remarks in the praise of Charlie's service not only during the Korean war, but after that war, to focus on families that are both here and in Korea who were affected by that conflict. A decorated veteran of the Korean war, Representative Rangel has been a tireless advocate for peace and security on the peninsula and for the Korean American community here in the United States. His achievements are many, and as he retires after 40 decades of service here in Congress, he will, of course, be missed. What Congressman Rangel and the many cosponsors of H. Con. Res. 40 bring forth today--154 bipartisan cosponsors, including the chair and ranking member of the committee, myself, and so many others--is a reminder not just of the complex security situation on the peninsula, but of the human dimension of a war that has not been formally ended. As this resolution reminds us, there are 10 million people on the Korean Peninsula and around the world who are victims of this family division, and there are some 100,000 American citizens who are still waiting to see--perhaps for one last time--family members that they have not seen for 60 years, who have remained north of the 38th parallel in the aftermath of the Korean war. There are approximately 1.7 million Korean Americans here in the United States. As I mentioned, over 100,000 of them have relatives who are north of the DMZ, and I am pleased to say that over half of those Korean Americans reside in the State of California. The Korean Americans who have been divided from their families in North Korea are now in their senior years. Time is running out for these separated families to reunite--perhaps for just one last time-- with parents, siblings, children. For many, reunification will be the only contact they will have had in so many decades. As of yet, Korean Americans have not been permitted to participate in family reunions. North Korea should encourage reunions for the sake of their own citizens who are divided family members, for Korean Americans, and for those affected by the war no matter where in the world they live. H. Con. Res. 40 urges the North Korea regime to resume family reunification visits, which have been suspended for over a year, and to allow families that chance to get together. It also calls on North Korea to take concrete steps to build goodwill that is conducive to peace on the Korean Peninsula. This is particularly important given the nuclear weapons tests and missile tests that we have seen from the north. The reunification of families is a goodwill gesture that can help put the world and northeast Asia on the road to peace. That is why I support this resolution and urge all of my colleagues to do the same. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel), the author of this resolution and a champion for the Korean American community. (Mr. RANGEL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Connolly).

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I salute the author of this resolution, Representative Rangel, and urge its adoption. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, this resolution reaffirms longstanding American policy that can be summarized in five points: talks must be direct and bilateral; a solution cannot be imposed on the parties; both sides must be willing to make important compromises; disagreements should be resolved privately; and the United States should work closely with the State of Israel. This resolution deserves the support of those on both sides of the aisle. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Connolly).

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise today in support of H. Con. Res. 165. This is a bipartisan resolution put forward by the chair and ranking member of our committee, Mr. Royce and Mr. Engel, cosponsored by myself, with a host of other bipartisan cosponsors. This resolution comes at a precarious time for the two-state solution, with a new administration preparing to enter office and as turmoil continues in the Middle East. I, myself, have always been a supporter of a negotiated solution between the Israeli and Palestinian sides of this conflict which would result in a secure, democratic Jewish State of Israel alongside a stable and democratic state for the Palestinian people. This resolution reaffirms this commitment, which has been longstanding American policy. The United States has provided important leadership as the two parties have negotiated. We would hope to see bilateral negotiations in the future. Peace must be made by the parties themselves. A peace settlement will only come through direct bilateral negotiations. These negotiations are delicate and they are complicated. As President Barack Obama said in 2011: ``Peace is hard work. Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United Nations. If it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now.'' The President continued: ``Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians who must live side by side. Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians, not us, who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them . . . `' This resolution is consistent with administration policy and consistent with the policy of several prior administrations. We must heed this advice. Imposing a solution on the parties will not work. In fact, it will be counterproductive to peace. It would undermine incentives for the Palestinian authority to make the necessary changes that are prerequisites for peace. Statehood can be accomplished by ensuring security, eliminating incitement, and demonstrating that the Palestinian side can live peacefully with Israel. This resolution expresses a sense of Congress as follows: That the Israeli-Palestinian peace will come only through direct bilateral negotiations; That recognition of a Palestinian state without a peace deal would cause harm to the peace process; That efforts by outside bodies to impose an agreement or the parameters for an agreement are likely to set back the peace process; The United States should veto any one-sided United Nations Security Council resolutions, or those resolutions that would seek to impose solutions on final status issues--again, consistent with the administration policies; And finally, of course, that America will continue to support negotiations without preconditions between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own. The Israeli people deserve to live in peace as Jews in the State of Israel. In this spirit, I call upon my colleagues to join us in passing this resolution. I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I voted against H.R. 5063, the Stop Settlement Slush Funds Act of 2016, and voted in favor of amendments that would reduce its scope. I recognize that the power of the Attorney General to impose fines (or civil settlements that have the same economic effect) should normally be used to generate funds for the United States Treasury. Normally the amount paid by the wrongdoer should go to the United States Treasury, and it should be up to Congress to appropriate funds. When appropriate, Congress should provide funds to mitigate the damage done by the wrongdoer. However, the bill that came to the floor of the House was in essence a purely Republican bill with substantial flaws. In particular, it did not provide a mechanism for major settlements to be reviewed and approved by Congress when those settlements provided for payments to third parties. I look forward to working next year on truly bipartisan legislation designed to address the concerns voiced by the supporters of the bill.

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Chair, the last amendment dealt with the actual sale of the planes. The Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, does provide that we should license those planes if we are sure they are going to be used for civilian purposes. So there is, at least, some argument about what Iran is supposed to get under the JCPOA. This amendment deals with whether we finance airplanes, whether they are made by Boeing or Airbus or anybody else, and exactly what we are going to let our banks finance. This amendment has nothing to do with the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. Nothing in that agreement promises, hints, or even discusses the possibility that we would go so far as to lend money to one of the state sponsors of terrorism. I know there is concern: Do we want to boycott everybody in the world? There are only three countries that are state sponsors of terrorism, and two of them--Syrian and Sudan--no bank would lend money to. So this is one country that we have to deal with that is a state sponsor of terrorism that might borrow money. Why shouldn't we allow it? First, because we shouldn't allow our banks to endanger their depositors' money with loans to Iran. Second, because we don't want major banks lobbying this Congress and saying: ``Oh, my God, you have got to be nice to the Iranians or we won't get paid back and we might fail and then you will have to bail us out.'' We don't need Wall Street to become a lobbyist for Iran. Finally, because when it comes to fairness under the Iran deal, some say the Iranians have violated it. Some say they are barely technically complying. But everyone agrees they are not overperforming, they are not erring in the direction of being consistent with the overall purposes of the deal. There is no reason we should massively overperform and provide financing we didn't even hint that we might do. Finally, keep in mind what we would be financing if we finance these planes. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed. Most of the country is either in an internal exile or is fleeing the country. Bodies wash up on the beaches of Greek islands from people who risk their lives to escape an Assad regime that is kept in power by the thugs, the money, and the weapons carried to Damascus by Iran. We don't have to finance this terrorism. We're not obligated to do so, even if we are going to be in the strictest compliance with the JCPOA. We shouldn't expose our banks to that risk.

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to bring up H.R. 1217, the bipartisan expanded background checks legislation, to honor the memory of Gerardo Hernandez of Chatsworth, a victim of gun violence who never received a moment of silence on this House floor.

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, as my colleague from California pointed out, we in Porter Ranch experienced the largest natural gas leak in history. Seven thousand families were evacuated for months, and yet, as I speak, there are no Federal regulations for underground natural gas storage facilities, and the State regulations are surprisingly minimal, even in famously green California. Why? Because the natural gas industry and regulators believed that natural gas was only a problem if you were within a few hundred feet. What we have experienced with this multibillion-cubic-foot leak is 7,000 families evacuated from an area in a 5-mile radius because the volatile organic compounds and the mercaptan in that natural gas caused enormous health problems. That is why I went to the President of the United States and the Vice President at the caucus that we attended and got a public commitment that we would get regulations probably this year. This legislation is important because it makes it clear that, while PHMSA has the regulatory authority to act, if they don't act, they are required to act within 2 years under this legislation. I am pleased to say that the legislation includes a provision that I think is very important and which I have championed from the beginning, and that is to clarify that a State can adopt tougher standards than whatever the Federal Government adopts. The legislation also officially establishes the Department of Energy's Aliso Canyon natural gas task force. That task force is already up and running. We are working with it. It is the brainchild of Senators Boxer and Feinstein, and I think formally establishing it in this regulation makes sense. We need to adopt tough natural gas storage safety regulations for this entire country because Aliso Canyon, the storage facility next to Porter Ranch, was only the fifth largest natural gas storage field. There could be others. It could be in your district. That is why we need tough standards, and if we don't get them from PHMSA this year, we will have legislation requiring them within 2 years after the enactment of this legislation. I urge a ``yes'' vote.

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise to report to this Congress on the Porter Ranch gas leak, the largest methane leak in the history of our country. It began last October 23, and it lasted for, roughly, 5 months. The amount of natural gas that escaped is measured in billions of cubic feet. Some 8,000 families were evacuated for months. Our family, because we live just about as close as anyone to the leaking well, chose not to evacuate but, rather, to rely on filtration systems and the fact that we spend much of our time in Washington. So how should Congress respond? We must say never again--not again in Porter Ranch, not again anywhere in this country--but it could happen again because this natural gas storage facility was the fifth largest in the country. That means there are four other areas that could have an even larger natural gas leak. There are no Federal regulations for the safe storage of natural gas, and State regulations are so minimal that they are incredibly minimal even in famously green California. Currently, PHMSA, an agency of the Department of Transportation, acknowledges that it has the authority to write Federal regulations. They have decided to do so, and my hope is that they will have them this fall. This arises, in large part, because I had a chance to discuss this with the President of the United States back in January in front of about 80 or 100 of our colleagues, and he made a commitment that his administration would work to make sure this never happens again. Not only is PHMSA working on the regulations, but the OMB has assured me that they will act promptly on approving those regulations once they are finalized. We in Congress are working on legislation that is designed to prod PHMSA into acting quickly, but it is important that we not pass legislation that actually narrows the existing statutory power or gives sentences in statutory provisions that could be used by the oil and gas industry to invalidate tough regulations. That is why it is critical, for example, that any statute we pass, as the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's product provides, states explicitly that we are not preempting higher, tougher State regulations and that the action taken in Congress will not make people less safe than their States would have them be. Two issues confront SoCalGas, which is the utility that is responsible for this leak. The first is that they are going to try to get consumers to pay for the cost of their negligence, using the phrase that they should pass through to consumers the ``reasonable cost'' of dealing with this disaster; so the consumers around Los Angeles should pay for the cost of providing relocation assistance to 8,000 families, many of whom have been out of their homes for 5 months and longer; the ``reasonable costs'' of plugging the leak should be passed through to consumers. The reasonable costs of repairing unreasonable negligence is never an ordinary and necessary expense to be passed through to consumers. This leak resulted from SoCalGas' negligence. There was a subsurface safety valve on the well in question that was installed in the 1950s, that was removed by SoCalGas in the 1970s, and was never replaced. This well they used to inject and remove natural gas, not through the piping that was intended or the tubing that was intended for that purpose, but through the casing that was never intended for that purpose; and the pressure, which is the amount of gas crammed into the field, seems to be inconsistent with the age of the wells--some going back 60-years plus--that were being used to inject and withdraw the natural gas. The costs of this event must not be passed through to the consumers of Los Angeles. Second, realizing they may have to bear the costs themselves, SoCalGas has decided to shortchange the residents who have evacuated. They have decided they don't want to pay for the required cleaning protocol that is necessary to make homes safe. That is in their release of just a couple of days ago. That is outrageous. The cleaning is necessary to make the homes safe. LA County Public Health says so, and SoCalGas should pay that cost, too.

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, how does America get saddled with these bad trade deals? If we look at our free trade agreements, we see a 425 percent increase in our trade deficit with those FTA countries. You get that statistic if you include NAFTA, which, of course, is the granddaddy of all of our free trade deals, and that doesn't even count our worst deal, which was granting most favored nation status to China. So how do we end up with such bad deals? First, the elites convince themselves that it is good for the country. They do this because they love the theory of the economic textbook and don't feel comfortable looking at the practice of how business actually works. Second, the elites benefit from these deals. These deals help economists and Wall Street and attorneys, so they convince themselves that they are good for the country as a whole and create a subcultural echo chamber in which it is a subcultural norm that all smart people realize that these are good trade deals. In having convinced themselves to support these deals, they use a combination of condescension, false appeals to patriotism, and sneaky tactics to saddle the American people with these trade deals. Take a look at the effect on working families. America needs a raise. To get it, we need a severe labor shortage. We would have millions of additional jobs, a desperate labor shortage, if only we had balanced trade with the world. Let's look at TPP and its inclusion of Vietnam. We were told that the Trans-Pacific Partnership will give us free access to the Vietnamese market. There is only one problem: in Vietnam, there is no freedom and there is no market. In fact, we will not have access except as the Communist Party of Vietnam decides to grant it on the basis of crony capitalism, but our workers are going to have to compete against 40- cent-an-hour Vietnamese labor. Now, we are told that in Vietnam, under this deal, it won't be illegal to organize a union. They won't put you in jail for organizing a union. What they will do is they will plant drugs on every union activist and arrest them for that. You are not going to see free unions in Vietnam, and that will hurt working families in the U.S. So how do they sell it? They claim that it may take jobs away, but it is a necessary sacrifice because we have to contain China. As the ranking member of the Asia and the Pacific Subcommittee, I am here to tell you the TPP is great for China. First, we are told, well, we get to write the rules. No. These are Wall Street's rules. They are not the rules of the American working family. Second, TPP enshrines the idea that currency manipulation is just fine. So China gets the single most important change in the rules of international trade. Finally and most obscurely, there are the rules of origin. Now we know that, under this deal, goods that are made in Vietnam or Japan come right in to the United States with no tariffs. What you don't know is the goods that are 50, 60 percent, 70 percent made in China then go to Vietnam or Japan where they can put a made-in-Japan sticker on it and send it to the United States--that is when they admit that it is 50 or 60 percent made in China. As a CPA, I will tell you, if you are in a position to admit that your goods are 60 percent made in China, that means they can be 90 percent made in China. So China gets to fast-track their goods into the United States, no tariffs, and we get no access to the Chinese markets. So it is a really bad deal. How do you pass it? You use sneaky tactics. They don't have the votes to pass it now. The American people would rise in opposition to try to pass it now. So they are going to wait for the lame duck and then have a group of retiring Members of this body shaft the American people with the TPP. We do have a solution. We need to get all three remaining Presidential candidates to declare, if sneaky tactics and lame duck sessions are used to impose TPP on America, that they will, in their first month in office, pull us back out of TPP. Unless we hear that clearly from the three Presidential candidates, all of whom oppose TPP, that they not only oppose it, but they will erase anything that happens in a lame duck session, then the elites will prevail. We will lose jobs again. Our workers will have to compete with 40-cent-an-hour labor. Chinese goods will be fast-tracked into the United States with ``Made in Japan'' and ``Made in Vietnam'' stickers on them. It is time for the Presidential candidates to go beyond saying they are against it. They have to declare that they will make sure that any lame duck approval of TPP that happens in December will be erased the following January.

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I join President Obama in recognizing April as National Financial Capability Month and highlight the vital role that the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and State CPA societies play in educating all Americans. CPAs have been leaders in increasing the financial capacity of Americans by creating and distributing free programs, tools, and resources. Through the American Institute of CPAs' 360 Degrees of Financial Literacy program, some tens of thousands of CPAs volunteer to educate Americans and to open doors to the middle class. The AICPA National CPA Financial Literacy Commission leads a nationwide effort to advance financial literacy. This is the tenth year of the Feed the Pig program, the AICPA's public service campaign along with the Ad Council that provides free resources to make smart saving decisions. Literacy begins with the letters A, B, C. Financial literacy begins with the letters C, P, A.

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to join President Obama in recognizing April as National Financial Capability Month, and highlight the vital role that the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants or AICPA, state CPA societies, and CPAs across the country play in educating all Americans about their personal finances. National Financial Capability Month is a yearly reminder of how important it is to improve Americans' understanding of their personal finances. The Great Recession showed the need to support informed financial decision-making and help ensure economic security for all. Financial education is an essential component to making smart financial choices and protecting hard-earned income. In May 2004, the CPA profession launched a unified financial literacy initiative: 360 Degrees of Financial Literacy. The effort brings together the AICPA, state CPA societies and individual CPAs to address a growing public issue: financial illiteracy. The program combines grassroots financial literacy efforts with free resources for the public and tools that CPAs can use at a local level to volunteer to educate Americans of all ages on financial topics. CPAs are deeply concerned about Americans' high financial illiteracy levels and are working to ensure they have tools and knowledge to make educated financial decisions. The initiative sends the message that financial education should be a lifelong endeavor--from encouraging children to save their allowance to helping adults plan for a secure retirement. The AICPA National CPA Financial Literacy Commission is leading the CPA profession in a national effort to advance the financial literacy of Americans. Toward this end, this group works to increase awareness of the importance of financial literacy education, builds liaisons within the financial literacy community, and serves as media spokespeople. Educating young adults about their finances is a difficult task. To help solve this problem, the AICPA recently launched a new financial literacy version of the Bank On It game for high school students. Bank On It is a free, online game. The financial literacy version covers topics students need to master to be money-savvy in the real world, such as balancing a checkbook, understanding credit scores and student loans, and even investing in a cool startup company. Game questions were reviewed by CPAs across the country, giving students have an opportunity to learn financial management skills in an engaging and positive way. This year is the 10th anniversary of Feed The Pig, the AICPA's public service campaign with the Ad Council that provides Americans ages 25-34 with free tools and resources to make smart saving decisions. Over the past 10 years, millions of young adults have benefited from AICPA's free resources by creating and keeping personal financial goals. And the profession's leadership in this area is working. According to a new survey from the AICPA and the Ad Council, one in three millennials (34 percent) ranked saving as their number one goal for the year--ahead of living a healthy lifestyle (20 percent), paying off debt (19 percent), and losing weight (14 percent). But while saving was a top priority, a majority of millennials attributed their lack of saving to impulse buying (65 percent). Additionally, according to recent data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, young people now have less debt overall than they did in 2003, even in the face of significant increases in college tuition since that time. But there is still much work to be done. The same Federal Reserve survey shows that debt held by borrowers between the ages of 50 and 80 increased almost 60 percent over the same time period. We must ensure that everyone, from elementary school to older Americans, has the knowledge to make educated decisions about their finances. It is essential to restoring the faith in our financial system and keeping the American dream alive.

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise in support of H.R. 4403, the Enhancing Overseas Traveler Vetting Act. I want to associate myself with the comments of our committee chair, particularly his praise for the hard work of Mr. Hurd and the involvement of Chairman McCaul of the Homeland Security Committee. I am a cosponsor of this legislation, and I supported it in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which considered the bill on February 24, and voted it out by voice unanimously, with no opposition. It is also my understanding that the bill also passed unanimously in the Committee on Homeland Security. As the chairman of our committee explained, this legislation authorizes the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to develop open-source versions of software that vets travelers against terrorist watch lists and law enforcement databases. Once the software is developed, we will be able to share it with our allies and multilateral organizations involved in police work, such as INTERPOL. That means that we will have better software in the hands of worldwide law enforcement sooner and it will be interoperable. As things stand now, we do not have a comprehensive global database for identifying and tracking terrorists. As the bipartisan Task Force on Combating Terrorist and Foreign Fighter Travel, which was established by Chairman McCaul and the Committee on Homeland Security, highlighted in its September 2015 report, ``countries, including the United States, rely on a patchwork system for swapping extremist identities, increasing the odds foreign fighters will slip through the cracks.'' The Paris and Brussels terrorist attacks demonstrate the need for a global system. Since those tragedies, there has been finger pointing about missed intelligence and criticism over the lack of information sharing across borders. Just in February, Europol warned that more than 5,000 Europeans with European passports had traveled to ISIS and Syria to become ISIS fighters. In late March, European security officials told the Associated Press that the Islamic State group had trained at least 400 attackers and sent them to Europe to carry out specific attacks. Of course, we have a visa waiver relationship with most of Europe, and that means these European passport holders will be able to visit the United States without special vetting by our officials. There is an exception to that for those European passports that have been stamped indicating they visited Syria or Iraq. This should not give us a whole lot of false security because, typically, foreign fighters who want to join ISIS travel to Turkey, where their passport is stamped with a Turkish stamp and then they sneak into ISIS-controlled areas. ISIS does not stamp their passport entry into the Islamic State, so the passports of these Europeans that have gone to fight for ISIS in Iraq and Syria do not bear a Syrian or Iraqi stamp. In addition, if, for some reason, they did bear such a stamp, any European can simply go and ask for a replacement passport and, in most cases, there will be no record available to the United States that this person had ever visited Syria or Iraq. So we need a system that gives us the best possible opportunity to identify foreign fighters, but especially those who hold European passports. If we are going to fight and prevent global terrorism in tandem with other countries, the United States and our allies must be on the same page when it comes to vetting travelers and tracking would-be terrorists. This legislation helps us do just that. I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 4403. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, seeing as I have no additional speakers, I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 4403, the Enhancing Overseas Traveler Vetting Act. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, in light of the recent attack in Brussels, it is appropriate to reevaluate our anti-ISIS policy. The Obama administration's basic policy is sound in three parts--don't be suckered into declaring war against 1.4 billion Muslims around the world; don't be suckered by a small group of misguided psychopaths. Second, bomb ISIS appropriately. Third, arm the right rebels in Syria-- but, in the details, the policy needs to be strengthened. We have armed dozens, rather than thousands, in Syria because we insist that those whom we arm swear that they will not attack Assad. Assad has killed 200,000 civilians. Patriotic Syrians will wage war against that regime. Second, in our bombing, we have a zero civilian casualties policy. We will not hit a tanker truck that carries ISIS oil if it is moving, which means there is a driver in that truck, and that driver might be a civilian. We provide free electricity to ISIS- controlled areas. It is time to get serious about our efforts against ISIS.

Mr. SHERMAN

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

Mr. SHERMAN

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a friend and leader in the Jewish community, Rabbi Joshua B. Gordon, who passed away on February 8, 2016. Rabbi Gordon and his wife Deborah came to the San Fernando Valley in 1973 as emissaries of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the worldwide Chabad movement of Judaism. In his more than 40 years of leadership, Rabbi Gordon oversaw the growth of Chabad of the Valley to 26 centers that provide religious education, spiritual inspiration and charitable services to thousands. In fact, Rabbi Gordon's reach was worldwide through his popular audio and video Torah classes that continue to educate people online. I had the privilege of learning directly from Rabbi Gordon as a congregant of his spiritual home, Chabad of Encino, where I would often attend High Holiday services. The highlight of each Rosh Hashanah was to listen to Rabbi Gordon's stories and parables. I extend my sincerest condolences to Rabbi Gordon's wife, Rebbetzin Deborah Gordon, and children, Rabbi Yossi Gordon, Yochanon Gordon, Faygie Herzog, Rabbi Eli Gordon, Dena Rabin and Chaya Mushka Drizin; as well as his siblings and 21 grandchildren. A man with 21 grandchildren is truly blessed. It is Rabbi Gordon's enduring legacy that future generations of Valley residents will learn, grow and come together as a community.

Mr. SHERMAN

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

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I commend the gentleman from Texas for his speech and the gentleman from Nebraska who spoke earlier for his introduction of this resolution, along with my colleague, Anna Eshoo, from California. And, of course, I commend Chris Smith for a lifetime of work on human rights. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume, and I rise in strong support of the resolution. Mr. Speaker, this resolution deals with the crimes of ISIS. I want to thank my colleague from California, Anna Eshoo, and our colleague from Nebraska, Jeff Fortenberry, for their drafting of this resolution which I and so many others have cosponsored, and I want to thank the chair and ranking member of our committee for their work in preparing the amendment that we adopted in committee. This resolution, H. Con. Res. 75, identifies the violent acts of ISIS by their right name: war crimes, crimes against humanity, and, where appropriate, genocide. We could and will be conducting a complete analysis in the future to identify which atrocities of ISIS are merely war crimes and which atrocities of ISIS are part of an overall systemic genocide. But it is clear that at least some of the war crimes are part of a planned genocide against religious minorities in the areas that ISIS occupies. This resolution also includes a call upon the United States and all the states of the U.N. to conduct measures designed to prevent these crimes and genocide in the future. Now, it is said that People of the Book, most relevantly Christians, are being told by ISIS that they only have to pay a jizya and they will be allowed to live, a special tax imposed upon them. But the fact is that we know that the Yazidis are not even given that option but are subject to extermination; whereas, Christians may be told to pay the tax and then, when they run out of money, be executed because they are not paying more. So we know that ISIS is guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. In addition to passing this resolution, we ought to focus on the most significant thing the United States is doing against ISIS, and that, of course, is our airstrikes. I believe our airstrikes have been subject to rules of engagement that are far too limited. For example, we have learned that we try to cut off ISIS' flow of money by hitting the tanker trucks that are taking the oil out of ISIS areas for sale, but we are only hitting those trucks when they are parked, not when they are moving. It is true that, if you hit a moving truck, you may kill the driver, and that driver may be an ISIS soldier or may be a civilian; but if you look at the strategic bombing that we engaged in during World War II, not just the strategic bombing of Germany, but the strategic bombing of occupied France and occupied Belgium and so many other occupied countries, you will see that we hit munitions plants and transportation tanker trucks whether or not those people operating the transportation devices and operating in the munitions plants were civilian or military. If we are going to get serious against ISIS, we have to be willing not to target civilians but, instead, to do everything we can to prevent killing civilians; but we have to be willing to hit strategic targets even if we are not 100 percent sure that all civilian casualties will be avoided. So I look forward to our working both diplomatically and militarily for the destruction of ISIS and eventually holding ISIS' leaders to account for their war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.