H.R. 8481, the Kayleigh’s Law Act of 2026; H. J. Res. 1, Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to require that the Supreme Court of the United States be composed of nine justices; H.R. 5437, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Stone Slab Products Act; H.R. 175, the Deport Alien Gang Members Act; H.R. 1869, the Protecting American Industry and Labor from International Trade Crimes Act of 2025; and H.R. ____, the Congressional Records Protection Act
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House Judiciary U.S. House of Representatives
Follow its sittingsAndy Biggs
I'm grateful for the collaborative effort that brought us to this point. Ultimately, this bill is victim-centered and prioritizes public safety. Kayleigh's Law helps ensure that our criminal justice system works for victims, not against them, and I urge my colleagues to support this bill and Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Jamie Raskin
Gentleman yields back, the chair now recognizes the ranking member Mr. Raskin for an opening statement.
Mr. Chairman, thank you very much and I am very happy to strongly support this legislation to strengthen protection for victims and survivors of domestic and sexual violence. H.R. 8481, Kayleigh's Law of 2026, would require federal courts to issue lifetime no-contact orders against defendants who are convicted of certain covered offenses including child sexual exploitation, sex trafficking, stalking, and sexual abuse upon the request or the consent of the victim, but independent of the criminal case. Hundreds of thousands of people live under conditions of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and other kinds of sexual abuse and this legislation will help them to turn their lives around. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, an average of 24 people a minute become victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States. That's more than 12 million women and men every year.
Nationwide, more than one in five women have been raped or subjected to attempted rape and 60% of the rapes are committed by someone known to the victim, a number that increases dramatically for minor victims going up to 93% who knew their abuser. The lives of survivors of sexual and domestic violence are radically altered even long after the abuse has ended and many suffer from a wide range of chronic physical and mental health problems. They pay a heavy price financially for medical and therapeutic treatment, lost wages, and legal expenses and the weight of these burdens is even greater for survivors who have fewer resources and networks to draw upon.
In recent years, some states have passed laws to strengthen protections for survivors, often thanks to the advocacy of survivors themselves, like Kayleigh Kozak, who was abused by her soccer coach beginning when she was 12 years old. Because of her undaunted advocacy in her home state of Arizona, survivors of sex crimes and other violent crimes may now petition the court in their state for a permanent order of protection against their abusers, totally separate and apart from the criminal case. Other states have enacted similar laws, and I'm proud to say that Maryland is one of them. These laws empower victims and survivors to feel a lot safer and to move forward with their lives. It's wonderful that we're advancing a version of Kayleigh's law that would allow federal courts to issue no-contact orders to victims and survivors of the worst offenses.
And it's wonderful that we are doing this on a bipartisan basis, and I must say it is a welcome break from the administration's retreat from a strong federal role in supporting victims and survivors. The administration's actions have resulted, as members of this committee know, in the elimination of hundreds of programs that Congress created and funded to address the needs of victims and survivors of some of the very crimes we're talking about here today. But I'm very happy that we can join together on this legislation, and I strongly support it. I yield back to you, Mr. Chairman.
Tom McClintock
Gentleman yields back. Without objection, all other opening statements will be included in the record. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Arizona to offer an amendment in the nature of a substitute.
Clerk will report the amendment.
Speaker 9
Amendment in the nature of a substitute to H.R. 8481 offered by Mr. Biggs of Arizona.
Speaker 15
Without objection, the amendment in the nature of a substitute shall be considered as read and shall be considered base text for the purposes of amendment. Chair now recognizes the gentleman from Arizona to explain the amendment.
Andy Biggs
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This amendment makes both technical and minor substantive changes to the legislation. It first addresses clerical corrections in the bill. The amendment further adds stalking to the list of covered offenses, closes a loophole regarding time of sentencing, strengthens the definition of crimes of violence, and lastly clarifies language to further strengthen victim autonomy throughout the process of attaining the order. These changes were made with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, and they are bipartisan in nature, and I yield back.
Gentleman yields back. Is there any discussion on the amendment? Gentleman from Arizona.
Speaker 10
Amendment to the amendment in the nature of a substitute to H.R. 8481 offered by Mr. Biggs of Arizona.
Without objection, the amendment will be considered read.
And Mr. Chair, if I could reserve a point of order.
Gentleman reserves a point of order. The gentleman from Arizona is recognized.
Andy Biggs
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This amendment clarifies only violent and sexual crimes are covered offenses under the legislation. The amendment also mirrors language in the Arizona statute to assure due process for the defendant upon which the order is served. I urge support for the amendment and I yield back.
Gentleman yields back. Does the gentleman...
Withdraw.
Andy Biggs
Gentleman withdraws his point of order. Is there any discussion on the amendment offered by the gentleman from Arizona? Seeing none, the question is on the adoption of the amendment. Those in favor of adopting the amendment will say aye.
Aye.
Andy Biggs
Those opposed say no. The ayes have it, the motion carries, and the amendment is adopted. The question is now on adopting the amendment in the nature of a substitute. Is there further discussion? Seeing none, the question is on the adoption of the amendment in the nature of a substitute.
This will be followed immediately by a vote on favorably reporting the bill. Those in favor say aye.
Aye.
Andy Biggs
Those opposed say no. In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it, and the amendment in the nature of a substitute is adopted. The question is on favorably reporting the bill as amended.
Mr. Chairman.
Request for a roll call.
Gentleman requests a roll call. Clerk will call the roll.
Clerk
Mr. Jordan. Mr. Issa. Mr. Biggs. Mr. Biggs votes aye. Mr. McClintock.
Mr. McClintock votes aye. Mr. Tiffany. Mr. Massie. Mr. Roy. Mr. Fitzgerald.
Mr. Fitzgerald votes aye. Mr. Cline. Mr. Gooden. Mr. Van Drew. Mr. Nehls.
Mr. Moore. Ms. Hageman. Ms. Lee. Mr. Hunt. Mr. Fry.
Mr. Kiley. Mr. Grothman. Mr. Knott. Mr. Harris. Mr. Onder.
Mr. Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt votes aye. Mr. Gill. Mr. Baumgardner. Mr. Raskin.
Mr. Raskin votes aye. Mr. Nadler. Mr. Nadler votes aye. Ms. Lofgren. Mr. Cohen.
Mr. Cohen votes aye. Mr. Johnson. Mr. Lieu. Ms. Jayapal. Mr. Correa.
Ms. Scanlon. Ms. Scanlon votes aye. Mr. Neguse. Ms. McBath. Ms. Ross.
Ms. Ross votes aye. Ms. Balint. Ms. Balint votes aye. Mr. Garcia. Mr. Garcia votes aye.
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. Mr. Moskowitz. Mr. Goldman. Ms. Crockett. Mr. Moore.
Mr. Moore votes yes. Mr. Gooden votes yes. Ms. Kamlager-Dove you are not recorded. Yes. Ms. Kamlager-Dove votes yes.
Aye. Mr. Grothman votes aye.
Speaker 18
Mr. Johnson, you're not recorded. Mr. Johnson votes yea. Mr. Fry, you're not recorded. Mr. Fry votes aye. Ms. Lofgren?
Ms. Lofgren votes yes.
Mr. Jordan?
Yes.
Mr. Jordan votes yes. Ms. Lee?
Yes.
Tom McClintock
Vote being 23 in the affirmative and zero in the negative, the ayes have it, the bill is passed and ordered to be reported favorably to the House. Members will have two days to submit views. Without objection, the bill will be reported as a single amendment in the nature of a substitute incorporating all adopted amendments and staff is authorized to make technical and conforming changes. Pursuant to notice, I call up H.R. 1869, the Protecting American Industry and Labor from International Trade Crimes Act of 2025, for purposes of markup and move that the committee report it favorably to the House. The clerk will report the bill.
Speaker 21
Without objection, the bill will be considered as read and open for amendment at any point. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin for an opening statement.
Thank you, Chairman. While we're waiting on the return of Congressman Issa, I thought I would just, in fact, include his opening statement. Mr. Chairman and colleagues, U.S. trade policy is a vital tool to protect American businesses and workers, ensure American competitiveness, and achieve our foreign policy objectives. It's not enough merely to have a smart trade policy that puts American workers and businesses first. For U.S. trade policy to be effective, we have to resolutely, resolutely enforce the laws implementing that policy.
Today, criminal enterprises and bad actors, predominantly based in the People's Republic of China, are breaking U.S. trade laws with impunity. Trade-based financial crime is a 1.6 trillion dollar per year problem. For example, in just the past decade, law enforcement has identified hundreds of instances of trade fraud, most of which originated in the PRC. Tariff and duty fraud committed by the PRC-based companies alone has been estimated to have cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue in that time. Not only has the fraud deprived us of revenue from tariffs and duties, but has seriously undermined our trade policy.
Additionally, in just FY 2025, U.S. authorities seized over 7.4 billion dollars of counterfeit goods, with the PRC accounting for approximately 90 percent of those seizures by value. Those seizures reflect billions of dollars stolen from U.S. businesses and workers, which undermines the trade policies designed to protect them.
The scale of Chinese counterfeiting operations shows how much American consumers have been exposed to potentially deadly fake goods, including pharmaceuticals. Since June of 2022, law enforcement has also identified nearly $1 billion worth of goods mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part in Xinjiang and Uyghur autonomous regions. These goods carry significant risk of having been produced by forced labor and are illegal to import into the United States. We must do more to punish the criminals that are breaking our trade laws and inflicting serious harm to our economy to the tune of over a trillion dollars every year. Only then can we stop the bleeding, protect our citizens, and ensure the continued credibility of US trade policy.
HR 1869, the Protecting American Industry and Labor from International Trade Crimes Act of 2025, will establish the structure needed at the Department of Justice to go after criminals who perpetrate trade crimes. These crimes include trade fraud, tariff and duty evasion, illegal smuggling, trade-based money laundering, trafficking in counterfeit goods, and much more. This bill will enable DOJ to dedicate specialized personnel to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes. As more crimes are investigated, more criminals are caught, and more prosecutions put those criminals in jail, US trade policy will better protect Americans and better protect the strength to adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party. The importance of these issues to all Americans is clear from the broad bipartisan group of members sponsoring this bill.
I want to thank all sponsors for their hard work, as well as hard work by the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party to put together this excellent legislation. We advanced nearly identical legislation on a bipartisan voice vote last Congress, and I urge all my colleagues to support this legislation once again, and I yield back.
Speaker 22
Gentleman yields back. The chair will recognize the ranking member for a statement on the bill.
Jamie Raskin
Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. I strongly support this legislation. The bill would create a trade crimes task force within DOJ to investigate or to strengthen our capacity to investigate and prosecute trade-related crimes. Trade crimes are an ongoing problem for our people and our businesses. Foreign hackers equip computer chips with spyware and slip them into our stream of commerce and our businesses.
Market opportunists use unstable materials to create counterfeit batteries that explode and maim some of our unsuspecting e-cigarette users, which does not seem like a fair punishment for smoking e-cigarettes, and handbags made with forced Uyghur labor passed off as fair trade materials make American consumers unwittingly complicit in outrageous human rights crimes. Cyber intrusions can risk a company's trade secrets without their knowledge. They may never even become aware that they were a part of a data leak, but a foreign competitor can use the intellectual property to unfairly compete against targeted US companies. The deluge of counterfeits has made it increasingly difficult for prosecutors at DOJ to enforce our laws. This legislation as drafted would help the government prevent trade loss by creating a task force to identify, investigate, and help prosecute trade crimes that hurt Americans in every industry.
This legislation's bipartisan. I thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle on the Select Committee on China, the House Appropriations Committee, and the Judiciary Committee for working to carefully negotiate a bill that, if properly funded, would help the US crack down on foreign entities that try to circumvent our trade laws.
Policing counterfeits that harm American consumers, endanger our national security, and destroy billions in profits for US companies is important work. I'm glad we all agree that DOJ prosecutors should focus on keeping our country safe. I support this legislation and I encourage my colleagues to do the same, and I yield back the balance.
Speaker 26
Gentleman yields back. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin to offer an amendment in the nature of a substitute.
Clerk will report.
Amendment in the nature of a substitute.
Speaker 29
Without objection, the amendment in the nature of a substitute will be considered as read and shall be considered as base text for the purpose of amendment. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin to explain the amendment.
Speaker 21
This amendment in the nature of a substitute updates the year from the title of the bill and strikes the appropriations language in section six. On May 13th, the House Committee on Appropriations voted on the fiscal year 2027 Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agency bill, which included the appropriation to address trade crimes within the criminal division of DOJ. As a result, the appropriation language in the bill is unnecessary and duplicative of the work already done by the House Committee on Appropriations. I urge my colleagues to support the amendment and I yield back.
Speaker 23
Gentleman yields back. The gentlelady from North Carolina is recognized.
Speaker 28
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'm in very strong support of this bill and am a co-sponsor of it. We are working on this issue in North Carolina. As a matter of fact, our Secretary of State has her own division that works on these issues. But they are overwhelmed and they need federal help, particularly when things cross state lines and for all of this international, really, let's just say theft of people's goods and their innovation.
And so I commend the bill and I really look forward to seeing it on the floor as soon as possible. Thank you and I yield back.
Speaker 25
Gentlelady yields back. The question is on adoption of the amendment in the nature of a substitute, of course that'll be followed by a vote on reporting of the bill. All those in favor say aye.
Jim Jordan
Those opposed, no. Opinion of the chair, the ayes have it and the amendment in the nature of a substitute is adopted. The question is on favorably reporting the bill as amended. All those in favor say aye.
I ask for a recorded vote.
Speaker 30
Those opposed, no. And a recorded vote being requested, the clerk will call the roll.
Mr. Jordan.
Mr. Jordan votes yes. Mr. Issa. Mr. Biggs. Mr. McClintock.
Mr. Fitzgerald votes aye. Mr. Cline.
Clerk
Mr. Cline votes aye. Mr. Gooden. Mr. Van Drew. Mr. Nehls. Mr. Moore.
Ms. Hageman. Ms. Lee. Mr. Hunt. Mr. Fry. Mr. Kiley.
Mr. Grothman. Mr. Moran. Mr. Gaetz. Mr. Bentz. Mr. Bishop.
Mr. Ivey. Mr. Johnson. Mr. Fry. Mr. Kiley. Mr. Grothman.
Mr. Moran. Mr. Gaetz. Mr. Bentz. Mr. Bishop. Mr. Knott.
Mr. Harris.
Mr. Raskin votes aye. Mr. Nadler.
Mr. Nadler votes aye. Ms. Lofgren.
Ms. Lofgren votes aye. Mr. Cohen.
Mr. Cohen votes aye. Mr. Johnson.
Clerk
Mr. Johnson votes aye. Mr. Lieu. Ms. Jayapal. Mr. Correa.
Ms. Scanlon. Ms. Scanlon votes aye. Mr. Neguse. Ms. McBath. Ms. Ross.
Ms. Ross votes aye. Ms. Balint. Ms. Balint votes aye. Mr. Garcia. Ms. Kamlager-Dove.
Mr. Moskowitz. Mr. Goldman. Ms. Crockett.
How am I recorded?
Mr. Issa, you are not recorded.
I'm a yes.
Speaker 33
Mr. Issa votes yes. Mr. Gooden votes aye. Mr. Moore. Mr. Moore votes yes. Mr. Garcia, you are not recorded.
Speaker 33
Ms. Kamlager-Dove votes aye. Mr. Biggs votes yes. Mr. Van Drew, you are not recorded.
Speaker 18
Mr. Van Drew votes yes. Mr. Grothman. Mr. Grothman votes aye. Mr. Lieu, you are not recorded.
Speaker 26
I apologize. It's not every day you have a member come in in a wheelchair, so I was checking out Mr. Harris, what happened over the weekend, he was in a little accident, and I thought we were one short. The clerk will report.
Jim Jordan
The bill is approved. The ayes have it and the bill is ordered to be reported favorably to the House. Members will have two days to submit views. Without objection, the bill is reported as a single amendment in the nature of a substitute, incorporating all adopted amendments, and staff is authorized to make technical and conforming changes. Pursuant to notice, I call up H.R. 175, the Deport Alien Gang Members Act, for purposes of markup and move the committee report it favorably.
H.R. 175.
Jim Jordan
Without objection, the bill will be considered as read and open for amendment at any point. The chair now recognizes the gentleman, the chairman of the subcommittee, Mr. McClintock from California, for an opening statement.
Tom McClintock
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. During the Biden administration, the Democrats opened our borders to the largest illegal mass migration in history. This included some of the most violent criminal gangs and cartels in history, which quickly established themselves in our communities and began a reign of crime that included human trafficking, drug trafficking, vehicular manslaughter, extortion, burglary, robbery, assault, and murder. Today, an estimated 10,000 MS-13 gang members are loose in our country. Tren de Aragua is active in at least 19 states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, as well as Washington, D.C.
The sheriff of Tulare County, California, testified to our subcommittee that the Sinaloa cartel now operates throughout the state of California, including extensive drug and human trafficking, extortion, and even organized execution squads. He estimates that half of the crime he deals with in his rural county involved illegal aliens, many serving organized criminal gangs. The toll of this deliberate policy of the Democrats mounts with every news cycle. Despite this carnage, there is no specific provision in law to allow authorities to immediately deport members or accomplices of these criminal gangs and to summarily deny them immigration benefits and admission based on their involvement with these criminal organizations. This bill fills that glaring gap in our nation's defenses.
It creates clear grounds of inadmissibility and deportability for aliens who are members of criminal gangs or who have promoted, aided, conspired with, or participated in gang activities. It provides immigration authorities with the tools necessary to act before these individuals commit additional crimes on American soil, rather than waiting until innocent Americans suffer the consequences. This legislation also establishes a clear statutory definition of a criminal gang. The offenses covered under that definition are not minor infractions; they include drug trafficking, firearms offenses, crimes of violence, human trafficking, identity theft, money laundering, alien smuggling, and other serious criminal conduct. These are the very activities that fuel organized criminal enterprises and threaten public safety throughout our nation.
This bill also requires the detention of gang-affiliated aliens during removal proceedings. This provision reflects a simple reality: individuals who have demonstrated allegiance to criminal organizations represent a substantial public safety risk and should not be released into our communities while their immigration cases are pending. This closes loopholes that allow gang members to obtain immigration benefits that were never intended to protect violent criminals. Under this legislation, gang members would be ineligible for asylum, temporary protected status, special immigrant juvenile status, and other forms of immigration relief. These humanitarian protections were created to assist vulnerable individuals fleeing persecution or hardship, not to provide safe haven for members of organized criminal enterprises.
Now, we've often heard the Democrats argue that existing law is sufficient. Well, if that were true, we would not continue to see criminal gangs of illegal aliens operating in American communities from coast to coast, now would we? We would not see local law enforcement agencies struggling with gang-related violence from people with no legal right to be here. We would not see repeated instances in which dangerous individuals evade removal despite clear evidence of their gang affiliation.
The President put a simple question to members of Congress during his State of the Union message: "Stand if you believe the United States government should put the needs of American citizens ahead of illegal aliens." Not a single Democrat stood. They keep telling us that they support removing dangerous criminal illegal aliens from our country while they do everything they possibly can to keep them here, including storming detention facilities, assaulting law enforcement officers, and defending sanctuary laws that are specifically designed to keep criminal illegal aliens in our communities when the law requires that they be removed. So here's yet another chance for the Democrats to join us in requiring the removal of criminal gang members and their accomplices from our country immediately and automatically. This restores clarity to the law, strengthens public safety, and reinforces the principle that the United States will not serve as a sanctuary for foreign criminal organizations.
I urge my colleagues to support this legislation and I yield back.
Speaker 26
Gentleman yields back, the chair now recognizes ranking member for an opening statement.
Jamie Raskin
Thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman. Our colleagues invite us to believe that this legislation is necessary to repair a gaping loophole in our laws permitting alien criminal gang members to freely enter and remain in our country and do their dirty business, and somehow preventing the administration from removing them. If that were true, of course, we would gladly support legislation to close such a dramatic and overlooked loophole. But despite all of the dramatic rhetoric, that is not remotely the case. If there's anyone who really believes that we can't remove alien criminal gang members from the country today, they're too innocent to be let out of the house by themselves.
The administration has ample, broad authority under our existing immigration laws to deny entry to or remove criminal gang members. Current law already contains numerous provisions ensuring that convicted criminal gang members are deportable and inadmissible. Section 212(a)(3)(A) of the INA allows the administration to exclude anyone who seeks to enter the United States and intends to engage in any unlawful activity at all. Section 237(a)(4)(A) renders deportable any non-citizen who's engaged or is engaged in any criminal activity endangering public safety. These provisions obviously provide ample authority to render deportable and inadmissible any gang member.
So, why is the majority bringing forward this legislation when the people it claims to be targeting are already clearly covered by current law? Perhaps it's because this bill would allow the administration to claim it's cracking down on foreign criminal gang members, the worst of the worst, without having to offer any real evidence in particular cases. This legislation grants the administration sweeping authority to declare anyone to be a past or present gang member so long as an officer asserts he has reason to believe that they are a gang member or once were a gang member. The outrageous and lawless treatment of people alleged to be gang members has already led to huge miscarriages of justice even without this legislation being passed. Take the case of Hersey Reyes-Barrios, a 36-year-old professional soccer player and coach.
He was an asylum seeker from Venezuela awaiting his asylum hearing, but unbeknownst to his family, he was swept up and flown out of the country under the Alien Enemies Act to a torture prison in El Salvador as part of the government's dragnet campaign against Tren de Aragua. He had no criminal record and no criminal charges were ever filed against him, but he was sent to a dictator's prison in El Salvador because he was simply declared to be a reputed gang member. And why? Because he has a tattoo on his right arm which was mistakenly associated with the gang.
In fact, the tattoo is of a soccer ball topped with a crown, which signifies the soccer club Real Madrid. Take the case of Andre Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist and barber who fled Venezuela's brutal Maduro regime, which was persecuting him simply because of his sexual orientation and because he was against their corrupt government. His asylum claim was pending when he too was swept up in the government's campaign because of his benign tattoo of two crowns, one symbolizing his father and one symbolizing his mother. His tattoo for his parents was the only evidence used by the administration to claim that he was a "quote" gang member and then to send him to the infamous torture facility in El Salvador. To this day, the government has never provided any other evidence beyond that tattoo that Andre was actually a gang member.
The Trump administration also tried to deport a Venezuelan couple with temporary protected status multiple times, claiming without evidence that they were members or were associated with Tren de Aragua. Judges threw both of their cases out, with one saying she would have literally thrown administration officials out of her chambers if they had asked her for an arrest warrant in the case based on the completely weak and pathetic evidence presented. ICE, we learned today, even lies about US citizens. I knew about this case for a while, but they had not gone public with it. A US citizen from Maryland was arrested by ICE agents in December and held for 25 days.
This is a US citizen, like the vast majority of the people in this room today, held for 25 days despite her offering proof of her citizenship, but they didn't believe her and she was held for nearly a month despite all of her protests and her family's protests that she was born in the United States. The DHS continually claimed that she was an illegal alien from Mexico. They've not apologized, but they've issued her a passport. She didn't have one, like half of the people in the United States, half of the US citizens in the United States don't have a passport. So look, judicial frustration with the administration's cavalier attitude towards the rules of evidence and the burden of proof tells us everything we need to know about this new proposal.
Judges across America have openly rebuked the administration for systematically lying to them in court. The conduct of DOJ attorneys has gotten so bad that judges are questioning if this administration is deserving of the long-running presumption of regularity in the operation of governmental law enforcement. If judges can no longer assume that executive branch officials have properly discharged their duties, why would we give them even more wide-open discretion and vague language with which to abuse their government offices? What of the administration's claim that it's taking on drug cartels and going after the worst of the worst, which is why it needs this legislation suddenly? Well, it turns out that's totally bogus too.
President Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez for his crime of helping drug traffickers move hundreds of tons of cocaine, more than 800,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States. The President of Honduras, Hernandez, said that he was going to stuff it up the nostrils of the gringos. Hernandez was also accused of taking huge bribes from El Chapo and getting millions of dollars from other drug trafficking cartels. Trump not only pardoned him and blamed Biden for his harsh treatment of this global narcotrafficker, but Trump also pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the mastermind behind the dark web platform Silk Road that was used by drug dealers to sell more than $200 million worth of narcotics online.
That guy was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole, and yet after Trump pardoned him on day one of his administration, that guy is now back at work, a completely unrepentant criminal and a threat to public safety. It's difficult to take seriously the argument that suddenly we need massive new redundant legislative authorities to hunt down criminal gang members and international drug traffickers when the convicted drug traffickers at home and abroad are getting full presidential pardons and the red carpet from the Trump administration. The administration's bombing campaign wiping out fishing boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific has led to no detectable decrease in the amount of cocaine flowing into our country, and federal drug prosecutions are at an all-time low. ICE's dragnet mass deportations have obstructed federal prosecutions of cartel drug smugglers by deporting the witnesses, the victims, and the informants, as we've described in our report, acquittal by removal. Under this administration, gang members and drug traffickers get pardoned while innocent people are falsely accused of gang membership and sent to torture prisons abroad.
We blow up fishermen, decimating the rules of war and our notions of due process, while cocaine flows freely in our country and we've got no meaningful plan for treatment of our people. ICE and CBP are shooting American citizens like Rene Goud, like Alex Preddy, brutalizing protesters. Far from targeting the worst of the worst, the administration has detained and deported people who've committed no crime at all and pose no safety threat, and now the majority wants to give them even more power to abuse. This administration has demonstrated it cannot be trusted to accurately identify real gang members. The few guardrails this bill tries to insert are completely inadequate.
The definition of a criminal gang in the bill is dangerously broad and loose and allows the administration to label all sorts of people as gang members without requiring any evidence at all. The bill states a criminal gang is an ongoing group, club, organization, or association of five or more persons that has as one of its primary purposes the commission of a felony drug offense, including simple possession of marijuana. This could mean a group of high school kids who have gathered on the weekend to smoke marijuana could be deemed a criminal gang under the bill. It also includes harboring undocumented people. This provision is not restricted to those in the business of smuggling, but includes anyone who provides shelter, transportation, or support to undocumented immigrants and thus could be read to cover clergy members who provide undocumented immigrants a place to stay or food for their children, as many of them do.
The Catholic Church has come out forcefully against this government's abuse and mistreatment of migrants, and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops opposed a similar bill the House voted on nine years ago. Would this administration use the powers granted to them by the bill to declare Pope Leo as the leader of a criminal gang for harboring undocumented people? Donald Trump has already called the Pope weak on crime. Is this the next step? I oppose this really dangerous bill, which gives the administration broad, loose discretion and authority that it simply cannot be trusted with, as they have demonstrated time and again.
I urge our colleagues to oppose this bill. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Gentleman yields back. Without objection, all other opening statements will be included in the record. Chair now recognizes the gentleman from California to offer an amendment in the nature of a substitute.
Clerk will report.
Jim Jordan
Amendment in the nature of a substitute. Without objection, the amendment in the nature of a substitute will be considered as read and shall be considered base text for the purposes of amendment. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from California to explain the amendment.
Tom McClintock
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The ranking member would rather wait until the MS-13 gang member who's here illegally rapes, assaults, or murders a fellow American before taking any action.
Jerrold Nadler
Point of order. The gentleman is not explaining the amendment in the nature of a substitute.
Speaker 26
Gentleman, gentleman's recognized. He can explain it the way he wants to explain it.
Tom McClintock
Thank you. If the individual's an MS-13 member, that should be enough to insist that they be removed. I mean, if a rattlesnake is curled up in your bedroom, would you wait to remove it until it strikes, or would you get it out of your bedroom before it can harm you or your family? That's the fundamental question here. There's a new term afoot called suicidal empathy.
It describes virtue signaling that is so naive that it invites actual harm. And I want to thank the ranking member for illustrating that disorder in real life. As to the amendment, it makes a small change in the short title of the bill. It expands the immigration relief ineligibilities. It makes technical changes to the TPS provision, criminal gang definition, mandatory detention provision, and withholding of removal provision.
Adds crimes such as kidnapping and racketeering to the criminal gang definition and makes technical changes to the grounds of inadmissibility and deportability. And with that, I yield back.
Jerrold Nadler
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I start out by endorsing everything the ranking member said. But I'll go a little more specifically. One, if it is made here a crime to be a member of a gang, the bill doesn't require conviction. How can you act on someone based on the allegation that he's committed a crime, namely being a gang member, without convicting him in a court of law of that crime?
So no evidence need be given that he is a member of a gang. Somebody simply must assert it. This is about the most un-American thing I can think of since the Bill of Rights was enacted in 1791. Second point, talking about the strikes in the Pacific. They are murder, murder straight and simple.
What was wrong with our old policy? If you suspected a boat of having narcotics, the Coast Guard intercepted that boat and inspected it. And if there were narcotics on it, arrested the occupants and confiscated the narcotics. And if there were no narcotics, tipped their hat and said, go on your way. Instead, with no evidence whatsoever, the president orders that boats be destroyed and the people on them killed.
This is murder pure and simple. There is no doubt in my mind that the president in the next administration should be prosecuted for murder. But unfortunately, the Supreme Court decision in the Trump case that said that a president cannot be questioned for anything his official duties precludes that. But I have no doubt that in the next administration, Pete Hegseth should be and will be prosecuted and convicted of murder. I yield back.
Could the gentleman yield?
I yield to the gentleman.
Jamie Raskin
Thank you. Thank you for your comments, Mr. Nadler. The destruction of those alleged drug boats in the Pacific have nothing to do with war, as you point out. We're not at war.
There's been no declaration of war. I know that Donald Trump doesn't think he needs a declaration of war, but they weren't even asserting these were acts of war. So what were they? As you were saying, that was just lethal violence administered against people without any kind of due process at all, right? So we appointed ourselves not just the officers, but the prosecutors, the judges, and then the jury, laying down a death sentence against the people who were on the boats, whoever they were, whether they were involved in drugs or not.
It could be a case of mistaken identification. That's what due process is all about. The last time we discussed this, I remember one of my colleagues said to me, well, you're not for due process for guilty people, are you? That's the whole point. We don't know if they're guilty until they've had due process.
That's why those are about the two most beautiful words in the Constitution, if not the two most beautiful words in the English language. If you think the government is infallible, which is not something I usually hear from my friends on this side of the aisle, although I do hear it increasingly more under Donald Trump, but if you think the government is infallible, then great, you don't need due process. If you think the government can make mistakes, and government officials and officers and prosecutors can make mistakes, then you need due process. That's why the framers built it into the Constitution. And so this legislation is a further part of exactly what the gentleman from New York is describing, which is a demolition of our basic ideas of due process.
Now it's enough simply to label somebody a member of a gang, which can be any kind of club or organization or association that has ever advanced one criminal aim, including smoking marijuana. Or look, I mean, we've got a president of the United States who's convicted of fraud. Is fraud one of those? I don't know if fraud is in there. Could that be a criminal gang?
I mean, come on. Let's walk our way back from this intense attempt to give the government complete and total discretion to do whatever it wants. It leads to situations where totally innocent people are put into solitary confinement or pinned up against other prisoners in torture facilities around the world. And I want to thank the gentleman for his point.
Jerrold Nadler
In reclaiming my time, I'll point out the president was convicted not of fraud, but of sexual assault. And sexual assault is certainly a... Well, that was a civil adjudication. I was referring to the criminal conviction, yeah. Okay, but it was nonetheless a civil adjudication of sexual assault.
And just saying everything else again, you cannot label someone a gang member and take action against that person without the evidence that will convince a jury. That's the basis of our Constitution and of our Bill of Rights. I yield back.
Gentleman yields back. Gentleman from New Jersey's recognized.
Jefferson Van Drew
Thank the chairman. I want to thank Mr. McClintock for putting this good legislation forward and all the work that he's done on these issues in this area. I think, you know, again, it's important to hear the other point of view, but we've had this argument before. And I don't know why time after time, and I'm going to stay cool, calm, and collected today, the one side is always defending criminals, always defending illegals. We've had people here who have been victims over and over again.
And while we hear some words, we don't see any action. For the victims out there, for the people who are hurt, let's start out by understanding that the people we're referring to are not legal Americans in any regard. We would have the right to deport them even if they weren't gang members. But we're trying to, I guess, be as open-minded, I'm not even sure what the right words are for, and say if you are illegal and you are a gang member, that you must be deported.
Not that we can think about it, we can still in a different administration let you go out and do what you do, that you have to be deported. And you know, in America we do have processes. The very fact that the ranking member was able to discuss different individuals that may or may not have been, I don't know all the cases, I knew of some of them, that were going to be deported and have some issues and then it was determined no, that wasn't correct. That very fact that he was able to discuss that and point that out in a handful of cases shows that the system works. But for us to keep people here who we know are dangerous, we know are criminal, we know are member of criminal gangs, we know that don't belong here, we know that there are many victims, people who have been hurt, who've lost family members, who've been raped, who've been attacked, who we have felons, I won't go through all, I can give you lists of people who've done the wrong thing.
That's wrong to keep them here. I don't get it. I don't understand it. We keep talking about the American people. The American people don't understand that piece of it.
Secondly, when we talk about the drug boats, these are not just innocent fishing vessels. They investigate, they find out what they're doing, they know what they're doing. They're hurting our babies, our children, our American people, our American citizens. They're killing them. And yeah, we do have to keep our borders closed and we do have to defend our borders and those that would push those drugs on others have to be stopped.
I can't speak to the other issues and the pardons or whatever, but I know that we need to stop those that would hurt our American people.
Will the gentleman yield?
Jefferson Van Drew
In one second. What they're doing is murder, pure and simple. With so many, you all have sat here where we've had the angel moms. You've sat here where brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and mothers and fathers have talked about the people they lost that shouldn't have happened, that wouldn't have happened if Mr. McClintock's legislation was law and many of the other things that we want to do. Again, I will yield and I'm going to wrap up by saying, and I may reclaim my time, we're not speaking about American citizens.
We're speaking about people who broke law already, but now have gone an extra step and are also committing atrocious criminal acts. I yield.
Jerrold Nadler
I thank the gentleman for yielding. I just want to point out that with respect to the boats, I wasn't aware that under our law, drug smuggling is a capital crime. I yield back.
Jefferson Van Drew
I reclaim my time. You know, again, if it isn't, maybe in certain cases it should be when you're moving large quantities of drugs and focus on one particular nation, in this case the United States of America. And again, you know, we're not going to do that. We could drag the families in here, we can drag the real Americans. We all love to bring up what does America think, the real people.
I know, I meet people every day who tell sad stories about what's happened to their family because of drugs. It's an epidemic. And it's not only, you know, we've got to do more with drugs than just wait till they're here and wait till people are addicted and then have social workers and doctors and nurses have to deal with that. We need to do that, we need to do it unfortunately, but how about we try to stop the drugs from flowing in and our Americans from getting addicted, fentanyl in China, South America, the stuff that comes over from all over the world trying to destroy our nation.
No other country would allow this. And by the way, if you had American gang members in other countries that are law-abiding countries, see what happens to them. Watch, listen, and see what happens to them. I gotta tell you, American gang members in other countries would be in a lot of trouble. They don't want it.
I yield back.
Speaker 37
Gentleman yields back. Gentlelady from, I think, I think gentlelady from Vermont, then we'll get to you, Mr. Gaetz.
Becca Balint
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just, just briefly to respond to my colleague, Mr. Van Drew. Due process is there to protect all of us, not just the accused. When we have due process, we can gather evidence. We can talk to witnesses.
We can find out in the, in the case of these drug boats that are being blown up, we are not just attacking those boats, we are attacking witnesses, if in fact they are running drugs. Then you would think that what's valuable to us to crack those cartels is to have us able to question those people. And our colleagues who serve on the committees of jurisdiction have asked for the evidence, have asked for this government to get back to us about the evidence because we do want to prevent drugs from coming in here. And when we kill witnesses, when we kill people who may be part of larger rings, then we are not taking full advantage of what due process does for all of us. We are literally killing the people that can help us crack these cartels, if in fact they're part of cartels.
Why don't we have that evidence is, I, I yield to the ranking member.
Jamie Raskin
Well, thank you for that excellent point. Due process protects not just the accused, it protects all of us. It allows us to conduct the criminal investigation. But there's another group that it protects, which is innocent people who are swept up in the dragnet. The distinguished gentleman from New Jersey says that the fact that we're able to identify people who were wrongfully deported to a torturer's prison in El Salvador and could have spent the rest of their lives there had there not been protests, which I don't believe the gentleman was part of, he thinks that that somehow vindicates the system.
Those people were never prosecuted. They were never given a hearing. They were literally swept up in the early days of the Trump administration in the Tren de Aragua dragnet sweep and just sent out of the country. And that's exactly what we're trying to avoid here. I mean, these people were 100% innocent.
They've been returned to their lives. Nobody has advanced a single iota of evidence against them. And I don't think we can just, you know, roll our eyes and say, well, c'est la vie, because there might be people still down there who haven't been released because of it. And I hope the next time it happens, we will be able to work together on a bipartisan basis to insist that the rigors of due process be applied to everybody because people's liberty is way too sacred simply to entrust to lawless government agents. And so what we're afraid of here is, look, does anybody really believe that we don't have the power to deport criminal aliens from the country right now or to prevent them from coming in the country?
I mean, give me a break. Nobody believes that. You're telling me that we went through the entire first Trump administration and nobody noticed that there was a law permitting criminal alien gang members to get in? I mean, it's ridiculous. So this is obviously just for political value, but in the process, what you're doing is you're creating hopelessly vague and loose language that will lead to more miscarriages of justice.
So I would yield back to the gentlelady.
Becca Balint
Just some moment.
of not trusting this administration to be clear with us and the American people about the evidence that they have against those who are accused. We had an incident where you had DOJ and Homeland Security taking to the public airwaves constantly about cases, whether it was Rene Good, whether it was Alex Preddy, whether it was somebody who they superimposed a tattoo on their hand that didn't even exist. We do not want vague language that can empower any administration, Democrat or Republican, without evidence to go after American citizens, Mr. Van Drew.
Jefferson Van Drew
Briefly I will. Okay, it'll be very brief. When drug lords are patrolling our waters and our country and pushing drugs on our kids, the best thing they can learn is they're not going to get away with that and yes, they are going to be punished.
I will. I'll finish up. I reclaim my time.
Jamie Raskin
We can teach them they're not going to get away with it until Donald Trump pardons them, because he has pardoned dozens of criminal fraudsters and international drug traffickers and other criminals. So that's why it's hard to take this seriously. By the way, fraud is included under this law, and so that does make relevant the criminal fraud conviction on dozens of counts in New York City. I yield back, thank you.
Speaker 42
Thank you. I believe that my colleagues may have been confusing the civil action against the president with former Congressman Bob Filner, who was convicted of his crimes of assaulting women. The president has been exonerated, the lawfare used against President Trump has been overturned by the process, and I would hope that we would move on from the false allegations that occurred under the last administration. President Reagan was always kind to liberals, and rightfully so, he said liberals aren't stupid or poorly educated, they just know things that don't happen to be true. And I think that's exactly where we are at this moment.
Mr. Van Drew recognizes the phrase. The fact is, there is a difference between a right and a privilege. This legislation is dealing with a recognition that non-citizens are privileged to be here. Yes, they have rights under the Constitution, however, the privilege of being in the United States can be revoked at any time and due process is by definition limited. Decisions can be made, rightfully so, to evacuate them.
But that's not even what we're dealing with here. We're dealing with ten plus million people, many, many, many of them criminals, but even those who were not, who were all let in by the previous administration. An invasion of our country occurred under four years of Joe Biden, and the measures that everyone is complaining about on the other side of the aisle are the measures that will only undo a fraction of what was allowed during the last administration. What the president's trying to do is pump bilge water out of a boat that was allowed to essentially open all the orifices, and you can bring water into a boat much faster than you can pump it out, and that is exactly where we stand. As to the fast boats, if our third president were alive today, President Thomas Jefferson would have looked and said, these are pirates.
They bear no flag, they operate ships designed for speed well beyond any fishing boat, and they do not heave to when alerted to. These crafts that are being shot and yes, they are being doused, are in fact the ones that we know with great certainty exist for one purpose: to smuggle. They have massive amounts of engines and they are moving quickly. They in fact bear no flags and they do not stop when summoned to. So the idea that there's some sort of innocent and that you should give on the high seas due process to these boats carrying massive amounts of drugs into America is simply a matter of being well-educated and knowing things that aren't true.
To believe that in fact due process is working and that we can undo the damage of 10 plus million people ushered into the United States, including many of them that have been just emptied out of foreign jails in a timely fashion by doing the same process as the Democrats would approve, is simply fantasy. If we want to come close to getting rid of a small portion of the worst of the worst during this time of just four short years of President Trump, he has to work as aggressively as possible, use all the tools at his disposal, and yes, we should provide tools to expedite as much as possible that ability. And again, that would not be necessary if we had not had a president who failed to faithfully uphold his duties under the Constitution. Now President Reagan, citing him again one more time, asked famously at the end of four years, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"
Speaker 42
Wait a moment. The fact is, are we safer today than we were less than two years ago? The streets of our cities are safer because of this removal. The streets are safer because of the president's use of his authority, including in the nation's capital where we sit today. So thank you, Mr. President, and I look forward to voting to give you just a little more defined ability to do the job that you are doing for America.
Would the gentleman yield?
And I would yield eight seconds.
Jerrold Nadler
I thank you. I just want to point out that I visited Delaney Hall detention center last week and I found there a high school student... I yield back my time has expired.
Can I have a UC?
The ranking member's recognized for UC.
Jamie Raskin
Thank you. I ask unanimous consent for the following statements to be made part of the record: the US Conference of Catholic Bishops statement against this legislation, a letter from 24 faith-based groups including Church World Service and World Relief, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Speaker 45
Without objection. I believe, I don't know who's next, but I'll go in whatever... I thought it was Mr. Johnson, but if that's all right, we'll go to Mr. Johnson.
Speaker 47
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'll yield to the gentleman from New York to finish his point.
Jerrold Nadler
Thank you. I visited, as I said, I visited last week Delaney Hall, an ICE detention facility in Newark run by a private company. I found there a high school student who'd been taken away just before her prom, a girl who's lived here since she was one year old, and convicted of nothing, not the worst in the world. I found there someone who was suffering from colon cancer and getting no treatment. I found there someone who was diagnosed with breast cancer a month ago and is waiting for a mammogram.
I found there that the only medical treatment people get for anything is Tylenol. So I don't know how we can in good conscience say that we're deporting the worst of the worst or that our detention facilities don't violate every law on the books. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Henry Johnson
Gentleman is welcome. And I rise in opposition to this bill. This bill allows the Trump administration to deny someone entry to the United States if they have reason to believe the person is a member of a criminal gang. That's just like, you know, they're doing with these drug boats, so-called drug boats down in the Caribbean, saying that we have reason to believe. They won't share their reasoning with you, so you have no way of independently determining whether or not their actions in extrajudicially killing suspected or alleged drug dealers is correct or not.
You're just asked to believe that and accept it. Well, I don't. This administration cannot be believed. They compulsively lie, distort, they trick you. You can't believe anything they have to say.
This legislation allows the Trump administration to deport green card holders if a Trump administration official decides that the green card holder is or has been a member of a criminal gang. And there's no due process for that determination, just like there's no due process for these speedboats. When did it become illegal to operate a speedboat in the Caribbean or in the Eastern Pacific? If you can do it, some person from Venezuela can operate a speedboat. That doesn't mean they're a drug dealer.
We've already seen this administration make unfounded accusations of gang affiliation. The Trump administration deported young men because they had tattoos, even though those tattoos had nothing to do with gangs. And federal agents conducted a nighttime raid on a Chicago building, claiming there were gang members inside, even though the government produced absolutely no evidence of alleged gang membership. When these are just simply magic words that the government can use to deport people without showing any evidence, they become ripe for abuse. And we know how abusive this administration has been.
It is all too easy to see the government using this language to deport people who dare exercise free speech or who oppose the administration's policies. Instead of making us safer, this will cause our communities to live in even more fear. If the Trump administration cared about public safety, they would not create a $1.8 billion slush fund to reward people who stormed the Capitol and attacked Capitol Police. If Trump cared about public safety, he would not pardon a major cocaine trafficker. And if the Trump administration cared about public safety, it would allow federal law enforcement to work on gun prosecutions and child exploitation cases instead of pulling them off to work only on immigration enforcement.
But this bill is not about public safety. It's a dangerous bill that gives the Trump administration unfettered power to deport someone without proof of wrongdoing. I oppose it, I urge my colleagues to do the same. And I would also point out that this legislation comes at a time when people are finding it more and more difficult to make it financially. The cost of living is just so high and people are living day to day at this point, not knowing what's going to happen the next day.
And instead of addressing those concerns, we are here giving the Trump administration the power to deport people for allegedly being a gang member. With that, I yield back.
Andy Biggs
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So, last week I met with the Phoenix DEA office and their personnel and toured their lab as well. And also I met with the director of the Office of National Drug Policy, and they will tell you, contrary to what we heard from the other side, they are actually interdicting more illicit drugs, including fentanyl and cocaine, than ever before. I also, however, got to meet with eight Angel families. And these families have endured the worst pain imaginable because their government failed to do its most basic job: protect innocent Americans.
I sat with Mary Ann Mendoza and thought about her son Brandon, who was killed by a repeat criminal illegal alien who never should have been in this country. I thought about Steve Ronnebeck and his son Grant, murdered by an illegal alien who should never have been here. I heard from the Basurto family, whose son Fernando was killed by a repeat illegal alien offender who should have been removed long before he had the chance to hurt anyone else. I spent time with Patty Fox and her daughter Carissa, whose life was permanently changed by someone who should never have been allowed to remain in the United States. She will be bound and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life because someone was here that should not have been.
I listened to Shannon Estes describe her daughter Shayley, murdered in her own home by a Russian national living here illegally, someone who should never have been in this country. I thought about Patricia and Doug Quetz, whose son Nicholas was murdered by criminal gangs in Mexico. These aren't statistics. These are families who wake up every day carrying a burden that never goes away. And every one of them asked for the same thing: do everything you can to stop this from happening to another family.
And that's what this bill is about. It's about keeping a promise, a promise that we will do everything within our power to prevent the next family receiving that horrible phone call. A promise that we will not accept preventable tragedies at the cost of failed policies. A promise that we will put the safety of American families first. Because we need to be honest about what we are dealing with.
Foreign criminal gang members do not come to the United States to contribute to our communities. They do not come here to build businesses, raise families, or strengthen our neighborhoods. They come to sow chaos, to traffic drugs, exploit vulnerable people, traffic children, traffic and rape women. They come to commit violence, and they come to terrorize communities that hardworking Americans have spent generations building. That's what criminal gang members come here to do.
And right now in Phoenix, Arizona, it was reported to me that there are more than one thousand drop houses still today. The number one human drug and trafficking corridor is in my state. It comes because we have a sixty-two mile stretch that we can't close. We can't close. On the south side of the border there are seven plazas controlled by the Sinaloa cartel, just even with Arizona border.
And they continue to pour over and there is, according to the DEA as they listed, the number of communities that have cartel and gang members in them. The cartel are gang members. Under current law, gang membership alone is not always enough to make an alien inadmissible or deportable.
American people are tired of watching preventable tragedies unfold while politicians search for excuses. The families that I met with last week do not want speeches, they want action, they want accountability. Now I'll just speak to the drug boats. The drug boats are not bucolic fishermen out for a leisurely sail. They've been designated foreign terrorist organizations, and that changes the very nature and makes them not subject necessarily to civil law, but actually to military law.
And when there's military authority, they can go ahead and be destroyed. That's the drug boats, whether you like it or not, that's the authority. The other thing about visiting detention facilities, I have visited dozens of facilities all along the border. I've never heard of any ill patient being said, "Oh, we're going to give you, you know, some kind of painkiller, just a, you know, a Tylenol." I have never seen anyone there where there's not a contracted medical officer there, and that's the way that goes.
Will the gentleman yield?
Speaker 49
I don't have anything left to yield, Mr. Nadler, but I can tell you this: I don't believe you for a second on that. Yield back.
Speaker 50
Gentleman yields back. The gentlelady from Pennsylvania... Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, trying to stick with the order. The gentleman from Illinois is recognized.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I move to strike the last word.
Gentleman's recognized.
Speaker 51
H.R. 175 is yet another effort by Republicans to violate due process and give the Trump administration blanket authority to persecute any non-citizen that it wants. And as someone who's not running for reelection or higher office, I want to say this: this is a stunningly broad bill that would empower DHS agents to classify any non-citizen as a gang member and subject them to mandatory detention and deportation. It would even bar them from critical forms of protection like asylum, the violation of domestic and international law. This is a breathtaking assault on due process. Reason to believe is a stunningly low standard of proof and arbitrary designation of gang affiliations that will enable mandatory detention and deportation without any criminal conviction, as has been pointed out.
The bill also codifies racial profiling with an absurdity broad definition of criminal gang and no reliable standard to prove gang membership. It's a loaded gun that the Trump administration will use especially against brown and black people and anyone else that it wants to smear as a gang member, including children. The bill is not even necessary. Our immigration laws, as has been stated, already bar people from entry and trigger deportation for a wide range of conduct, including gang involvement. So what is this really about?
It's about giving the Trump administration more power to weaponize the immigration system and inflict violence on our communities. We already know how Trump and his cronies lie and cover up about alleged gang membership to strip immigrants of due process.
We saw that when they rendered hundreds of men to a torture prison in El Salvador with no evidence of gang membership. We also saw it in Chicago last summer. Federal agents conducted a militarized raid on an apartment building in the dead of night that resulted in US citizens dragged out of bed and children, some naked, zip-tied and detained for hours. The Trump administration claimed the building was filled with Tren de Aragua gang members and said they captured two confirmed gang members. Yet prosecutors have still not filed one single criminal charge against anyone who was arrested, nor have they revealed any evidence showing anyone belonged to the gang.
Court filings have shown that the operation had nothing to do with gang membership. It was just one more dragnet of racial profiling by this administration. I've seen firsthand the devastation caused by this raid, including to US citizens who no longer trust their government. I find it ironic that Republicans want to talk about gang membership. We have gangs of violent masked thug agents who work in DHS who are kidnapping, brutalizing, shooting, and killing people on our streets without accountability.
We have gangs of corrupt criminals inside this administration who are using the federal government as their personal slush fund. The president himself is hell-bent on using the power of his office to turn our country into a gangster state where extremist organizations like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers are empowered after trying to overthrow the government. As usual with Republicans, every accusation is a confession. Instead of wasting our time with another bill that guts due process and advances a racist anti-immigrant agenda, maybe it's time that we deal with the criminality of the highest levels of our government. Thank you and I yield back.
Jamie Raskin
Would the gentleman yield if you have 40 seconds? Thank you for those very powerful and lucid remarks. I wanted to take a second just to respond to the gentleman from California who said that he strongly suggested that the president's criminal convictions in New York on fraud were reversed. They were not reversed. He was found guilty by a unanimous jury on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the hush money case.
And that has not been reversed. I think he was confusing it, and it's understandable because the president has a very thick docket, but with a separate civil fraud case where the judgment was upheld by the highest court in New York, but the amount of damages was reduced from $500 million to something lower. Thank you and I yield back.
Tom McClintock
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Democrats keep insisting that this law is redundant of current law. Well, if it's redundant of current law, why do they object to it? The Democrats tell us that there needs to be a conviction of being a gang member before we can remove him from our country. Well, we don't require a conviction of being a member of a terrorist group in order to remove them from our country or to refuse them admission to our country.
The mere affiliation is enough. The fact is, for decades, federal immigration laws provided federal officials the ability to designate terrorist organizations. This bill simply gives officials the same ability to designate dangerous groups such as criminal gangs. The bill has the exact same rights and procedural protections that the law already applies to foreign terrorist organizations. Includes the same procedures related to classified information, the same procedures related to judicial review, and the same standards for courts to apply.
It also includes the same procedures for congressional notification and publication in the Federal Register. Remember, every person who is legally entering our country is questioned about their plans and intentions by a consular officer if they're applying for a visa, or by an immigration officer at a point of entry, and they can be denied entry and be returned to their own country if there's reasonable suspicion over those circumstances. No conviction is required. The murderers of Kayla Hamilton and Laken Riley were gang members, but they were not convicted of any crime. Laken Riley's murderer even had a pending asylum claim.
One was an MS-13 member, the other Tren de Aragua, and they could not have been admitted into this country if this law had been in effect then, and Kayla Hamilton and Laken Riley would be alive today. And theirs is a tragic story told over and over across this country with every new victim. And by the way, deportation is not a punishment. Deportation is an administrative act recognizing that an individual is not legally here and removing them from the country. Those illegal aliens in detention are perfectly free to leave anytime they want to any country that will accept them.
They are simply not free to return into our country. This bill simply says an illegal alien who's affiliated with a criminal gang cannot be released into the United States as the Democrats gleefully did for four years, or access other privileges that we accord to immigrants. I yield back.
Gentleman yield?
Yes, I yield to the gentleman.
Jim Jordan
I appreciate the gentleman yielding. So the Democrats' position is if you're here in the country, maybe illegally, but you're not a citizen, you're here in the country and you're affiliated with a gang, you can't be removed. That's their position. We actually think you should, and that's what the bill does. But that's not where they stop.
Remember, we just had a hearing two weeks ago. They don't stop there. They actually want preferential treatment for someone. We saw Mr. Descano sit right there. He gives preferential treatment to individuals who are here illegally and commit another crime.
He changes the plea agreement, what he might charge, depending on their immigration and deportation status. So they take it a step further. All we're saying is if you're here, not a citizen, you're a member of a gang, we don't think you should stay. Plain and simple. They say no, you should stay, and we're going to take it a step further.
And as I've said now several times, it's all part of their systematic, I call it their four-part plan. Step one, as the chairman of the subcommittee's pointed out, they let in 10 million illegal migrants during the Biden administration. Step two, create sanctuary jurisdictions which makes it difficult to remove those migrants when they commit another crime. Step three, don't fund the people who do the removing. We're having that debate as we speak.
They won't fund ICE. And then step four, prosecutors say we're not even going to charge them, or we're not going to charge them the same way we would charge an American citizen who commits the exact same crime. Such a deal, such a plan. That is what they're executing. And all this is just good common sense.
And so I appreciate the work of the chairman of the committee and what he's done on this bill and would urge a yes vote. With that, I would yield back the time.
Simply repeat the point, if a rattlesnake's curled up in your bedroom, would you wait to remove it until it strikes, or would you get it out of your bedroom before it can harm you or your family? That's precisely what this bill is about.
Earlier, if the gentleman would yield one more time. Earlier, the ranking member said we need to walk our way back. I can't remember the context. What we need to walk our way back from is this sanctuary jurisdiction. Almost a third of the country, 18 big, big blue populated cities, 11 states, three counties, District of Columbia are sanctuary jurisdictions.
So American citizens live in there and understand in simple terms what that means. The politicians tell local law enforcement don't work with federal law enforcement when it comes to enforcing federal law. That is just plain stupid. But that is what's going on in almost a third of the country. That's what we need to walk our way back from.
We need to keep all this in context. Again, I yield back.
Gentleman's time has expired. The gentlelady from Pennsylvania is recognized.
Mary Gay Scanlon
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think we need to level set here a little bit. I mean, we've just heard Democrats think this, think that. Most of that was fiction. Certainly, no Democrats are advocating—
What part was fiction?
Jim Jordan
The part that says 31.5% of the country lives in a sanctuary jurisdiction.
No, no, no, it's still my time.
Jim Jordan
No, but I'm just asking what part was fiction. You said what I said was fiction.
I'm reclaiming my time. Can I start over?
I'll give you all the time you want, I'd like you to answer the question.
Mary Gay Scanlon
Okay, great. So the chairman just suggested that Democrats want to allow in criminals, want to allow in violent criminals, and don't have any interest in getting rid of violent criminals. That's just fiction. That's why there are laws on the books that Democrats and Republicans have voted for. But what we are objecting to is the absence of due process in all of these bills that you keep bringing forward.
I mean, what makes America different is our fealty to the rule of law, is that we observe due process. And that simply means if you've got a gripe about something, if you think someone's a criminal, well then you have to prove it. And the problem we have with this administration is they keep making accusations of people, particularly if those people are immigrants to this country, and they can't prove them because those are false allegations, whether it is claiming that people who they are blowing out of the water in the Caribbean are drug dealers when we haven't seen proof that they all are. It certainly appears from reporting that some of them were fishermen, that many of them were not bringing drugs into this country. This idea that the gentleman from California said, oh, they refused to hail over, there was nothing to hail over to, they're being bombed by drones and by airplanes.
So, you know, if you think that amounts to due process, then we should be having hearings on that because it doesn't meet any standard of due process that we've ever seen. Then we hear an alternative justification that well, we don't need to do due—we don't need to observe due process because this is actually the law of war. Well, when we talk to the folks who are experts in the law of war, they say in fact what's been going on with bombing these boats has often constituted war crimes. So once again, we are not living up to what the American ideals are with respect to if you accuse someone of something, if you are going to murder them, if you are going to send them to jail, if you're going to send them to some foreign gulag, you better be able to prove the allegations you're making against them. And this administration has been particularly suspect when it makes allegations about people that it views as enemies.
Heck, they've accused Americans who were standing up and exercising their First Amendment rights of being domestic terrorists. So, I think we have very strong reasons not to trust without proof, without due process, when the whole of government is being weaponized for political purposes. I was however heartened by Mr. Biggs' remarks and I agree with him, the American people are tired of watching preventable tragedies occurring because of bad policies. And if that's his opinion, I think he should be joining with us on some of the gun safety legislation that has been waiting for hearings and waiting to be moved because we see every day across this country, we see people being killed because of bad policy, because of the failure to enact common sense gun safety laws in this country that will help our law enforcement actually enforce the laws on our books.
With that, Mr. Raskin, I yield to you.
Jamie Raskin
Thank you. I want to thank the distinguished gentlelady from Pennsylvania for her excellent comments. Let me just add a couple things. Our colleagues talk about murder and rape. Murder and rape are against the law, and anybody who commits it should be given due process rights, prosecuted, and if they're guilty, found guilty and sent to jail.
And if they are if they're not a citizen of the United States, they should be deported after they have been convicted and after we've gotten all the evidence. In just one sec, I just wanted to make one other point. The gentleman says, and this is indisputably true, if certain undocumented people weren't in the country when a crime was committed, then the crime wouldn't have been committed. That is indisputably true. It is like also saying if Donald Trump had not pardoned Andrew Paul Johnson, he would not have been able to commit those two sex crimes against 12-year-olds and then be sentenced to life afterwards.
So yes, we need to have bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform. Let's stop using this as just an opportunity for demagoguery. Why don't we actually sit down and legislate? That's what we should be working on. And I thank you for yielding.
Speaker 57
Thank you. And I just wanted to conclude with the rattlesnake analogy. I mean, before you kill a rattlesnake before it strikes, maybe you should prove it's a rattlesnake instead of just a garter snake. Thank you.
Jim Jordan
Gentlelady yields back. Question on the adoption of the amendment in the nature of a substitute. This will be followed immediately by a vote on reporting the bill. All those in favor say aye. Aye.
Those opposed, no. No. Opinion of the chair, the ayes have it, and the amendment in the nature of a substitute is adopted. The question on favorably reporting the bill as amended. All those in favor say aye.
Aye. Those opposed, no. No. The ayes have it, and the bill is ordered to be reported favorably to the House. Members will have two days to submit views.
Jim Jordan
I wonder if the rule is if I get through that line. Almost made it. If I get the there was like another sentence I had to get to though. The recorded vote being requested, the clerk will call the roll.
Mr. Jordan.
Mr. Jordan votes yes. Mr. Issa.
Mr. Issa votes yes. Mr. Biggs.
Mr. Biggs votes yes. Mr. McClintock.
Clerk
Mr. McClintock votes aye. Mr. Tiffany. Mr. Massie. Mr. Roy. Mr. Fitzgerald.
Mr. Cline. Mr. Gooden. Mr. Van Drew. Mr. Nehls. Mr. Moore.
Mr. Schmidt votes aye. Mr. Gill.
Mr. Raskin votes no. Mr. Nadler.
Ms. Balint votes no. Mr. Garcia.
Clerk
Ms. Kamlager-Dove votes no. Mr. Moskowitz. Mr. Goldman. Ms. Crockett. Mr. Fry, you're not recorded.
Russell Fry
Mr. Van Drew, you are not recorded. Mr. Van Drew votes yes. Mr. Onder, you are not recorded. Mr. Onder votes yes.
Speaker 18
Mr. Arrington? Mr. Arrington votes yes. Mr. Hunt? Mr. Hunt is not recorded. Mr. Knott?
Mr. Knott votes yes. Clerk will report.
Mr. Chairman, there are 15 ayes and 8 noes.
Jim Jordan
The ayes have it. The bill is ordered to be reported favorably to the House. Members will have two days to submit views. Without objection, the bill will be reported as a single amendment in the nature of a substitute incorporating all adopted amendments and staff is authorized to make technical and conforming changes.
Pursuant to notice, we call up H. J. Res. 1 for purpose of markup and move that the committee report it favorably to the House. The clerk will report the joint resolution.
H. J. Res. 1.
Jim Jordan
Without objection, the joint resolution will be considered as read and open for amendment at any point. The chair now recognizes the gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Biggs, for an opening statement.
Andy Biggs
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Founders built a system of checks and balances to protect the American people from concentrated power. They understood that liberty survives only when power is divided, restrained, and accountable. A central part of that design is the Supreme Court. Its duty is to defend the rights and freedoms of every American, not to serve as a political tool for any party or administration.
Alexander Hamilton made this clear in the Federalist 78. He wrote that the court must remain independent from the political branches so it can stand as a barrier against unconstitutional acts. The judiciary was designed to be the quiet guardian of liberty, insulated from the passions of the moment, and be the weakest branch. Opposition to court packing is not new and not partisan. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned that court packing was a "bad idea" and that "if anything would make the court look partisan, it would be that."
Justice Stephen Breyer called court packing a structural alteration that would erode trust in the judiciary and reminded his own party, "what goes around comes around." Even President Biden, back in the day when he still believed in judicial independence, called FDR's court packing plan a bonehead idea and a terrible, terrible mistake that threatened the independence of the Supreme Court. Now that's something that President Biden said that I could really agree with. President Biden's own Supreme Court Commission refused to endorse court packing. The commission admitted that it was divided on expansion and warned that adding seats would undermine the court's legitimacy and damage democratic values.
They concluded that the risks of court expansion were considerable, including the likelihood that it would erode, not restore, public trust. Court packing is a direct assault on that independence. It is an attack on the Constitution itself. It is an attempt to turn the Supreme Court into an extension of political power rather than a check on it. We must ask a simple question: how can the Supreme Court protect Americans from government overreach if the same government can pack the court whenever it dislikes a ruling?
How can the court restrain unconstitutional power if it can be punished for doing its job? And history gives us a clear warning. When President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court in 1937, Congress, including Democrats, rejected it outright. FDR even attacked the justices personally, claiming "lowered mental or physical vigor" made them unable to understand modern problems. Congress responded with bipartisan outrage.
Members introduced at least 10 constitutional amendments to fix the court at nine members. The Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee called FDR's plan "an invasion of judicial power that violates every sacred tradition of American democracy," and the Senate voted 70 to 20 to strip every court packing provision from the bill. Both parties understood then what we must understand now: court packing is a direct threat to the Republic. But many of my colleagues across the aisle have pushed court packing schemes for years. It's not new.
The ranking member Raskin, ranking member Johnson, and others made it a central goal during the Biden-Harris era. Their objective has been the same from the start: intimidate the court, pressure the justices, clear the way for their agenda. And let's be honest, they had no problem with the court when it delivered rulings they liked. They celebrated Roe v. Wade for decades. But the moment the court issued rulings they disagreed with, they demanded the institution be blown up and rebuilt to guarantee political outcomes.
Their goal is not ethics, it's not policy, it's power. One of their own members, former Representative Mondaire Jones, said the quiet part out loud: "Nothing will be enough to protect our democracy short of sending this far-right majority on the court to its rightful place in the minority and into the dustbin of history by expanding the Supreme Court." That's not about legitimacy. That's about punishing the court for doing its job.
After the Dobbs decision, Democrats held hearings designed to delegitimize the court and inflame their base. They claimed other rights, interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, contraception, were at risk, even though the Dobbs majority explicitly stated otherwise. They used the hearing to launch personal attacks on Justice Thomas for expressing views he has held for decades. Some even insinuated he omitted Loving versus Virginia because of his interracial marriage, a disgraceful and baseless smear. This is not about protecting rights, that was about intimidating the court and rallying the far left.
And look at Virginia, one ruling they did not like and Democrats immediately called for wiping out the entire state Supreme Court. That's not reform, that's retaliation. They're not defending an institution, they're pursuing raw power and they're willing to tear down every guardrail the founders put in place to get it. We have watched Democrats on this committee launch personal attacks and smear campaigns against sitting justices. They have questioned their integrity, their families, their faith, their right to serve, their qualifications.
They have done this not because of ethics, but because they want political outcomes. Their reckless rhetoric has consequences, very real consequences. A left-wing radical was arrested outside Justice Kavanaugh's home, armed and prepared to assassinate him. Law enforcement stopped him, but Democrats' dangerous words helped fuel that attempt. Their attacks created an environment where violence became thinkable.
And we have seen the same pattern in the repeated attempts by radical leftists to assassinate President Trump not once, not twice, but at least three times. This is what happens when extremists put power above country, when they treat political opponents as enemies, when they tell their supporters that institutions must be destroyed if they stand in the way. This assault on the Supreme Court must stop. This assault on the Constitution must stop. Democrats' efforts to pack the court, impose political ethics codes, or force term or age limits on justices are all part of the same campaign.
They want to weaken the judiciary, they want to silence constitutional limitations on their power. They want a court that obeys them, not the Constitution. This constitutional amendment proposed today will fix the number of justices at nine members and will stop their court-packing scheme. It will protect the court's legitimacy. It will preserve the checks and balances that safeguard our freedoms and it will ensure the right of all Americans that they remain secure no matter who holds political power.
The Supreme Court must remain independent, it must remain strong enough to do its job, and it must remain a guardian of liberty, not a casualty of partisan ambition. I yield back.
Jamie Raskin
Gentleman yields back, the gentleman from Maryland is recognized.
Thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman, I oppose this resolution precisely because it undermines the constitutional design and the framers' separation of powers. It's fascinating to me that our friends would cite the framers and the Federalist Papers to undo the handiwork of the framers. The question before us today is not really about whether nine should become a magic number and elevated above all of the other numbers, it's about whether this Congress, which has already surrendered congressional war powers, congressional taxing and tariff powers, and congressional spending powers to a president clearly desiring to be a king, should now permanently relinquish another constitutional power that we've got that the framers endowed us with in Article One of the Constitution.
That's why we've got the power of impeachment and trial, conviction, removal, and permanent disqualification. We've got the power of oversight. We've got the power of the purse. Alas, over the last year and a half, we've seen this GOP-controlled Congress act in an utterly obsequious and invertebrate fashion before a president who thinks he can go to war without Congress, impose the largest tax in American history in a tariff in the form of a tariff without Congress, create billion-dollar slush funds without Congress, give himself and his family permanent forever in all caps immunity in in all cases relating to crimes and civil wrongs that he or his family members have committed without Congress having any say in it, and reduce the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary to being the pure instrument of his will. Now, placing loyalty to party over loyalty to the Constitution, MAGA House Republicans have repeatedly declined to act in any way to reject these outrageous usurpations by the executive.
In fairness to the Senate Republicans, they have properly reacted with outrage and scorn for the president's sordid attempt to deal himself a 1.776 billion dollar slush fund to bankroll his private militia and ship of fools political operation. But this joint resolution from the GOP takes us much further down the road of institutional capitulation and surrender. This is not constitutional conservatism in any way, but rather one more abdication striking at the very architecture of our republic. The founding fathers designed Congress to be the predominant branch, the one representing the people directly, and the one most capable of standing as a bulwark against a president grasping for kingly powers. As the people's representatives, we are meant to protect the Constitution, not surrender its authority whenever a president likes his particular stacking and packing of power on the Supreme Court and wants to freeze it into place for all time.
But that's what the administration now demands, and our colleagues fall into line like good foot soldiers, proactively and permanently ceding another one of Congress's powers to the presidential will for no good reason. Over the course of our history, Congress has repeatedly exercised its authority to change the size, the structure, the jurisdiction, and other aspects of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, and for a variety of reasons. The Judiciary Act of 1789 established the first Supreme Court with six justices. I guess that would have been unlawful and not to the liking of our friends. Then in 1801, President John Adams and Congress shrank the size of the court from six to five to limit President Jefferson's ability to make appointments.
I guess that would have been unconstitutional too. But when President Jefferson and his Republican majority came into power, they restored the sixth seat. In 1807, Congress expanded the size of the court to seven seats when it created the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. And that became the pattern then, that there should be one justice for each federal circuit. Again in 1837, Congress expanded the number of federal circuits to nine and the corresponding additional two seats to the court, bringing the total number to nine.
Of course, added a tenth justice, giving President Lincoln another justice to appoint. In 1866, Congress abolished that tenth circuit and then reduced the size of the court to seven justices. Congress did that to deny President Andrew Johnson the ability to nominate justices who might undermine reconstruction with them. Again, in 1869, President Grant increased the court to nine with another Judiciary Act, which set the number at nine justices for nine circuits, matching the number of justices again for the number of circuits. The court remained here until Senate Republicans changed the size of the court again in 2016.
Let's see. Wait, what was, I'm sorry, oh, with Merrick Garland, yes. And we were down to eight without Merrick Garland by blocking the filling of that Supreme Court seat. So why would we propose a constitutional amendment now, after this history, to tie our own hands and the hands of every future Congress? What's going on?
Well, the resolution is obviously meant to cement into place a profoundly lopsided and partisan Supreme Court that was successfully stacked and packed, gerrymandered and engineered by Mitch McConnell after the deaths of Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg. In the former case, when President Obama nominated Merrick Garland, one of the most qualified people ever to be nominated to serve, being the chief judge of the DC circuit, to fill the seat, McConnell did not even allow hearings, much less a vote, a full 11 months before the next election because he said that the people should decide. Well, of course, the people had decided in electing President Obama to one of those genuine four-year presidential terms. In the latter case, he rushed a vote for Amy Coney Barrett, check this out, eight days before the presidential election. And he wouldn't allow hearings or a vote in the case of Merrick Garland's nomination 11 months before.
So give me a break with all the talk about court packing. The court has been packed. Any changes now conceivably could lead to unpacking of the Supreme Court. This measure today is not a serious effort to improve our constitutional system. It's an attempt to pacify the president again by freezing the illegitimate handiwork of the MAGA senators into place for all time.
Our colleagues are trying to give away another tool that our Constitution deliberately gave to Congress to check the other two branches simply because Donald Trump is demanding it. And we shouldn't be surprised. It's in keeping with the pattern we've seen since January 20, 2025, where the leadership here has overseen in a completely passive way the unprecedented expansion of executive power and celebrated it. So this proposed constitutional amendment is not headed for ratification. Everybody knows that.
So I turn back to the question before us, which is whether Congress should permanently surrender another one of its essential constitutional powers. The framers answered that question well for us more than two centuries ago, and I stand with them. Congress was designed to check executive power, not succumb and surrender to it. I oppose this misguided resolution. I yield back to you, Mr. Chairman.
Jim Jordan
Gentleman yields back. Without objection, all other opening statements will be included in the record. The chair now recognizes, I think the gentleman from Tennessee was first, but I'll get to you then, Mr. Nadler.
Gentleman's recognized.
Steve Cohen
This committee has proper jurisdiction over constitutional amendments, of which I've had several over the years, dealing with pardon powers, dealing with emoluments clauses, and other areas where the president has trampled over our Constitution. It's a heavy responsibility to deal with constitutional amendments, and we should use it to address important structural reforms in our democracy, not to try to find political wedges.
As Mr. Raskin has well pointed out, the number of justices on the Supreme Court is an historical artifact, not a component of our system of government. It's not the number that's important, it's that justices are impartial and act in accordance with the law. The justices on the Roberts Court, at least six of them, have it entirely wrong. They are supposed to have integrity, impartiality, fealty to the Constitution, and be unencumbered by the politics of the day. But today we have a court that refuses a binding code of ethics, even in the light of trips, multi-multi-multi-tens of thousand dollar trips to Asia, to hunting in Texas, all over the globe, and gifts to take care of justices' grandchildren's education and their mothers' houses from private individuals.
Those refusing to have a binding code of ethics has allowed Justice Roberts' wife to interview and sell for up to $100,000 spots in large law firms that practice before the Supreme Court as a recruiting fee that Chief Justice Roberts never disclosed. Because they don't have a code of ethics, and they don't have ethics. The Supreme Court does not show ethics to the people and morality. They operate as a political arm. It undercuts our core and explicit constitutional principles, like that no one is above the law, and meddles in politics in pursuit of partisan interests.
For years I defended this court, particularly Chief Justice Roberts. I thought that despite the outrageous conduct of Justices Alito and Thomas, who took these trips all the time, that the Chief Justice really wanted to preserve the court as an institution, which he said. I thought he would be the one to stand up for the court. But the past several years have shown he's incapable of doing that or didn't want to do it. Like other justices, when they're sworn into office, they take two oaths, one a judicial oath and two a dose to the Constitution.
And they swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and they'll bear true faith and allegiance to that, and that they take the obligation freely without any mental reservation. That those oaths are taken, but Justice Roberts has not abided by it. He's lived up to neither. That's why I introduced six articles of impeachment on the Chief Justice. And I'd ask each member of this committee and each member possibly listening to join, because Chief Justice Roberts unfortunately deserves to be impeached and convicted and removed from the court because he has not done his duty and he's violated his oath.
Article one of that resolution holds that he has enabled the court to become a political force and partial to specific partisan interests with unequal application of the law. He's interfered with elections. Article two, he's violated the Constitution by creating a system that undermines the will of the people and can enrich, entrench minority rule, partisan gerrymandering. When Virginia passed a democratic redistricting provision on the ballot in April, seven or eight days later the Supreme Court released the Caley decision, which they could have done anytime since last October when they had the hearing. But instead they released the Caley decision right after Virginia.
If Justice Roberts cared about caring about the institutional respect for the court, he would not have issued that opinion then, when it would interfere with elections that were going on in Tennessee, mine, Louisiana, Alabama, and other states. But he didn't care. He released it. And if he didn't realize the public would think that was political, seven days after Virginia and just in time to get some things going in the South where the former Confederate states could get rid of African American districts, which they've been wanting to do forever, he was foolish and incapable of having his job and applying his oath properly.
And then just this past week, he jumped up when Alabama wanted to move up and get a court that was different than the court that they had approved earlier with the two minority districts and they said, oh fine, do it. Let them run under the district with just one minority district. They didn't care about the Purcell rule then, and he applies the Purcell rule when he wants to. They came up with something that let the president be immune from criminal liability and they grabbed that out of their backsides. There's no place in the Constitution that that would have allowed them, but they pulled it up because they wanted to take care of Trump.
Steve Cohen
So that's why I filed that resolution and I urge people to support it and urge Chief Justice Roberts to resign and get out of the seat that he can't hold properly.
Speaker 64
Gentleman's time is expired. Recognize the gentleman from Missouri, Mr. Schmidt. Kansas, sorry, Mr. Schmidt.
Derek Schmidt
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That's the other Schmidt. He spells both of his names wrong, he's in the wrong body, but other than that, it's all good. Mr. Chairman, thank you. I want to thank you for sponsoring this amendment, thank the chairman of the full committee for teeing it up, first for hearing in subcommittee and now for action today.
Before I was in this role, when I was Attorney General in Kansas, I was one of the original supporters of the so-called Keep Nine movement, one of the first to lend my name to it. I think we ought to ask the people of this country through the constitutional amendment process whether they want to take off the playing field the possibility of expanding the court for the purpose of stacking its membership to try to influence the outcome of its decisions as a tool for an aggrieved political party, either party, to use when at that moment in history the court's decisions are not going as that party would prefer. This discussion in this committee today is nothing new in our history. We've had these same debates since the founding. We've had them throughout our history.
John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it. We had this debate in the 1930s. I always get a little bit of a chuckle when people talk about kings and no kings. I mean, my goodness, we had to ask the people whether they wanted to amend the Constitution, changing the original framework, I would say to my friends on the other side, that's what the amendment process is about, in order to prevent a president at that time who many in the public called a king from seeking reelection yet again, four terms. But one thing that was rejected in the 1930s when there was a lot of turmoil in the architecture of our system was packing the court by expanding it.
In fact, it was proposed and it was rejected by bipartisan majorities, including majorities led by members of the other party, the president's party, in both houses of Congress because our predecessors in these roles had the wisdom to understand that fundamentally rewriting the rules of the game by expanding the court to get a preferred outcome in your cases is counter to how we should govern ourselves in this country. It's not only just not fair, it's unwise. As our witnesses testified in the subcommittee on this measure, on this topic, it has no limiting principle. If you expand from nine to 10 to 13 today because one faction in our country wants it, when a different faction is in power, what's to stop them from expanding to 15 or 20 in order to get their preferred outcome? We have settled at nine justices for the majority of our country's history.
As our friend, the ranking member, said in his exposition on the history of this issue, we've been at nine since just after the Civil War. That's prudent. It works. Justices of both philosophies appointed by presidents of both parties have said nine's a good number, you ought to stay there. This proposed constitutional amendment asks the people of the United States through the constitutional amendment process whether they want to keep nine as the magic number, to use the phrase of my friend on the other side.
That is not only exactly what this debate is about, it's all this debate is about. All of these other discussions, grievances with the court, they may have their day. People can propose what they want, we can debate and vote, but that's not today. This is about whether or not the people ought to be asked if they want our Constitution to set the size of the court at nine, to take away the temptation of politicians in the heat of the moment to stack the court with new members to get their preferred outcome on issues that are important to them. I think we ought to ask the people if that's what they want.
I think we ought to advance this amendment. I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for bringing it forward. I urge my colleagues to support it. Let's get it on the floor, let's get it out of the chamber, let's get it out to the states, and let's let our people decide what they want their government to look like. I yield back.
Yes, absolutely.
Andy Biggs
Thank you. So the argument has been made that this court is already packed with judges loyal to President Trump and is intent on remaking wide swaths of law. But it seems my Democrat colleagues have some amnesia there. Just in this term, Supreme Court overturned President Trump's signature bill on tariffs. It stopped his National Guard deployment to US cities.
So there's some independence there. You can laugh as you will, but the reality is this court is a neutral, responsible arbiter and overturns presidents less often and rules unanimously more often than any of its historical predecessors. Time, I yield back.
Mr. Chairman, do I have any time to reclaim?
Yeah, you're out of time. Well, then I won't reclaim it.
Jerrold Nadler
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me start by saying I resent you for calling me a liar. I saw what I saw in Delaney Hall. Congressman Goldman and I were together and we saw what we saw. I didn't even mention that they told us that there was medical staff available, doctors, from nine to five, Monday through Friday, and we were there from three to five on Wednesday and there was no doctor there.
We saw the maggoty food. So I resent you calling me a liar unless you've been in Delaney Hall. Secondly, to the subject of the bill. Since taking office, the Trump administration sought to tear apart our democratic institutions through unlawful and unconstitutional actions. The Roberts Court has acted as a rubber stamp.
Across 245 federal court orders, challenges to the Trump administration prevailed 59% of the time. At the circuit level, the challenges prevailed 54% of the time. Despite this adherence to the rule of law by the lower courts, the Supreme Court appears to be the most dependable venue for reviving Trump's authoritarian actions. Let me put this into a historical context. The Dred Scott decision was probably the most despicable decision in American history in which Justice Taney and the Supreme Court declared that black people had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.
We had a Civil War. Congress passed the 13th Amendment and the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment, the latter giving specifically giving black people the right to vote, black men the right to vote. The court and the Congress passed the 1875 Civil Rights Act to give substance to that.
The court immediately declared the 1875 law unconstitutional, civil rights law unconstitutional, and you had the first redemption where black people were robbed of all their rights. And then you had Plessy versus Ferguson, which continued in that. And then we had the Warren Court, which finally, after all those years, starting in 1965 or 1954, started restoring those rights. And you had the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and 1968 restoring, you know, guaranteeing voting rights. But then you had a series of Supreme Court decisions ending with Louisiana versus Callet, which is a second redemption, effectively repealing the protections for black voting rights.
And that's this court. What a disgusting court it is, right in the tradition of the court which issued Dred Scott. But to the substance of the bill before us, the constitutional amendment, as the ranking member mentioned, the size of the Supreme Court has been altered from time to time by Congress. Historically, the idea was to have one justice for each circuit. We now have 13 circuits.
Some justices are doing double duty and it's very difficult. We should have 13 justices as we historically have had, one for each circuit, and that should be restored. This constitutional amendment has no purpose other than an obviously partisan purpose to lock in the current right-wing majority on the Supreme Court. And also, aside from all the arguments on the merits, why would you waste our time knowing perfectly well you're not going to get a two-thirds vote in the House and two-thirds in the Senate? It's a total waste of time as well as being protective of a court that deprives people of civil rights in every conceivable respect.
I yield back.
Jamie Raskin
But I just wanted to make a point that was made to me by our dear colleague from Tennessee, whose majority African-American district has been dismantled by this series of court actions. This attempt to gerrymander and pack and stack and engineer institutions for partisan purposes is not limited to the judiciary. It's exactly what President Trump has done with respect to congressional redistricting itself. We had always thought we were bound by the 10-year redistricting principle, but now suddenly the president has plunged us into this mid-decade Texas chainsaw gerrymander massacre. And all over the country, we have an attack on the majority African-American districts and on people's right to vote.
So it's very much in the same vein, and I thank you for yielding. I yield back.
Gentleman yields back. Gentleman from Georgia is recognized.
Henry Johnson
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I move to strike the last word. It is rich that MAGA Republicans are standing before the American people pretending to be guardians of judicial integrity. For decades, however, these same Republicans, aiding greedy, selfish billionaire fraudsters and polluters and fat cat multinational corporate interests, have spent billions of dollars to build a Supreme Court that protects their financial interests while taking away our right to vote and our reproductive freedom.
And they got the Supreme Court that they've paid for, the Roberts Court, which has opened the floodgates to unlimited dark money in our political system, empowering billionaires and oligarchs like Elon Musk, the Koch brothers, Leonard Leo, Harlan Crow, and other powerful special interests to distort and corrupt our political system and to reshape the United States Supreme Court. All the while, they're drowning out the voices of ordinary Americans. This court granted Trump unprecedented immunity, placing him virtually above the law. This Supreme Court, before he took office, gave him immunity and rubber-stamped after that all of his illegal policies. This resolution is just, this, this, this Supreme Court has resulted in you having to pay higher prices and costs while at the same time this president fattens his own pockets and those of his wealthy billionaire big-shot dark money billionaire friends.
This resolution is just another example of MAGA Republicans giving away Congress's power in order to please a president who does not want us to hold anyone, especially himself, accountable. Congress can pass a law changing the size of the court just like it can pass a law that mandates an enforceable ethics code for the court. But MAGA Republicans don't want to do that, and they're tripping over themselves to limit the tools in our congressional toolbox. They want to give Congress's power away to Trump and then stick their heads in the sand and hope everything works out as it will for the billionaires, but unfortunately not for the regular working people in this country. But more than anything, this is just a MAGA distraction.
The prices of groceries, healthcare, housing, and gas are skyrocketing for everyday Americans. Yet Trump keeps getting richer and richer at our expense. He has bought shares in companies like Nvidia and Palantir before taking policy actions that gave those companies a boost. And he is even profiting off of this war that he started in the Middle East. That's despicable.
Trump bought stocks in oil companies and defense contractors that stand to profit the longer that the war continues. The government purchased drones from a company linked to Trump's son, and the White House directly intervened before the government made a 620 million dollar loan, the Defense Department actually made a 620 million dollar loan. What is the Defense Department doing making a loan and it going into a startup linked to the president's son, Donald Trump Jr.? So don't be distracted by gambits like this. A constitutional amendment requires two-thirds of the House and Senate and three-quarters of the states to ratify it.
And we all know that that's not going to happen here. This is just another way for Trump and his MAGA allies, including those here on this panel, it's an effort to obstruct and distract from the corruption and the chaos.
Because I believe we have a role to play in ensuring the public can trust our Supreme Court, I urge my colleagues not to give away Congress's power. And because we need to focus on what matters to the American people, I urge my MAGA colleagues to reject this cynical resolution, as I know all Democrats will do on this panel. And let's just get to work trying to help make life more affordable for Americans. And with that, I'll yield back.
Speaker 69
Gentleman yields back. We got a number of folks in the queue. I think it's the gentlelady from Texas, then we'll go to Vermont. Gentlelady from Texas.
Speaker 70
It is, um, it's hard to imagine how you can argue with a straight face that this is what we should be doing in this moment, or ever. You see, because this is the same time as you heard an emotional Representative Cohen. Now, Representative Cohen is a white man, but in Memphis, Tennessee, the district that he represents, it is a majority-black district, and black folk decided that he should be in Congress and be their voice. When you look at what they are proposing to do in Georgia, where it's my understanding that they plan to go after Lucy McBath's seat yet again. When you look at the type of seat that Hank Johnson currently sits in, it is also a VRA district.
When you look at the state that they started in, Texas, they decided to go after majority-minority districts to the extent that two black incumbents down in Houston just went head-to-head for a seat in which only one would survive. We know that there are currently debates taking place because Debbie Wasserman Schultz is now wanting to run in one of the few VRA districts that is left so that black people can have representation. You see, the reason that y'all want to do this right now isn't because you're afraid that we are after a power grab, it's because you want to lock in this racist agenda for decades to come. Because that's exactly who this court is. This court is racist, this court is immoral, and this court lacks any semblance of ethics.
The fact that this court just on last night decided that they want to go after yet another Alabama seat, and then they decided to throw out the votes of the voters in Louisiana because they decided that they wanted to go after yet another black seat in Louisiana. The fact that Virginia decided to stand up and fight back, and it was this same Supreme Court that decided, forget the will of the people and the fact that they voted, we're going to throw that out. This isn't what democracy is supposed to be. So let me be clear about a couple of things. Number one, the court absolutely needs to be expanded because it's been expanded in the past, and yes, it makes sense if we have 13 circuit courts that we should have 13 judges.
But let's just pretend that the size of America was the same, let's pretend that the complexity of the cases was the same as it was when we originally got the nine. I would still argue that it is time to not only expand the court, to introduce some form of ethics, and to put term limits on because you have bad actors like Mitch McConnell. This court was packed by the Republicans, and that is the reason you don't want it unpacked. You see, as a trained attorney, I don't understand how the very same court could say that in the state of Texas, four days before we were to have the end of filing, it is too close to the end of filing and so therefore we've got to go ahead and go forward with these intentionally discriminatory maps.
Speaker 73
And these are the words and the characterization of a Trump-appointed justice. It's got to be bad when a Trump-appointed justice decides that something is racist and is willing to call a thing a thing and put it into writing, but they did that. They didn't just say it, they laid it out in an opinion that was more than a hundred pages long. But this very same court will decide that after votes have been cast to throw those votes out. The reason that we need to do something about this court is because this court has decided that it will bend to the will of a wannabe king.
We have never in the history of this country needed a court to say that absolute immunity should be given to a president because historically we don't actually keep criminals in the presidency. But we know that even after he had been found guilty by a jury of his peers, y'all went out and y'all wanted to say yes, this is our guy. The same way that right now in the state of Texas for the Texas Senate race, I'm sure all of y'all will line up behind that criminal as well. So I don't want to hear about law and order, I don't want to hear about this is the right thing to do, just be honest about what it is because y'all are basically saying that we're stupid. You're playing in our faces.
We know that this is about locking in this agenda because you will never do right by the people. The reason that we have elections is because the people are supposed to decide whether or not your policies are actually working for them. But because you have killed our economy, because we are sitting in the midst of an unconstitutional, unlawful war, because we have a president that is lining his pockets and the pockets of his friends and his families in violation of the Emoluments Clause and so many other laws, y'all want to lock in absolute power by any means necessary. And the last thing that I'll say is I got to respect your gangster because that's exactly how y'all are acting, like real gangsters. Y'all are mobbing out and that's one reason that the Democrats are struggling right now because they have always tried to play by the rules.
I am here to say that I applaud the people of Virginia, I am here to say that I applaud the people of California, I am here to say that we need to meet fire with fire and fight y'all tooth and nail so that we can do right by the people.
Gentlelady's time has expired.
Jim Jordan
Gentlelady yields back. I would just remind the gentlelady that we didn't introduce the bill to take the court to thirteen, the Democrats did. I think Mr. Nadler was the chief sponsor just a couple Congresses back. We didn't leak the Dobbs opinion. I think, well, I don't know if we can blame it on Democrats, but we didn't leak the Dobbs opinion.
We didn't threaten the court like what this now famous quote from the top Democrat...
My time.
Oh, I didn't know that you didn't have your own.
Jim Jordan
Yeah, I'm taking my time. And I gave you like six minutes, so it's my time. But here's what Senator Schumer said: "I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh, you've released the whirlwind and you will pay the price, you won't know what hit you if you go forward with these decisions." So we didn't threaten the court, we didn't introduce a bill to take it to thirteen. People say why are we doing this, we don't have the votes.
We don't know. Maybe you guys will see the light and do the right thing and keep it at nine when it comes for a vote. We'll see. You'll get a chance to do that, I think. Pretty sure it's going to pass and it's going to be on the House floor and if you guys suddenly find the good Lord and do the right thing, okay, God bless you.
That's how it works. But you said all kinds of things about Republicans, all I'm saying is you introduced the bill to go to thirteen. The top Democrat in the United States Senate threatened the Supreme Court. The Dobbs opinion was leaked. You've done all, said all kinds of things about Supreme Court justices like Justice Thomas, Justice Alito.
You had a hearing where you brought in a pastor, a pastor for goodness sake, who just lied to the committee three years ago. So okay, you can obviously say what you want, but I think it's important that we get the facts here. And with that, I would yield back.
Would the gentleman yield?
Andy Biggs
Thanks, Mr. Chairman. So, you know, when you hear all the consternation on the other side, and we've gone through the history and how back in a more rational day, Democrats rejected absolute expansion of the court. And that's what we're talking about. We're not talking about packing the court. We're talking about preventing an expansion of the court.
See, and those are really two different things because the Democrats are saying that the court is packed now. Well, you got nine, so why would you be opposed to just setting it at nine if you can pack at nine? Not only that, Supreme Court justices come and they go. It is not locked in. I remember thinking as I was going in law school and I was reading all these Warren Court decisions and I thought, wow, that's a long time.
That court was there for a long time. Sure felt like it, anyway. I thought, I love Justice Douglas saying, I reach my decision and then see if I can find any support for it. I loved that. That was great.
That was a paraphrase. I'm not quoting him directly, but that was one thing he said one time. But here's the deal. We know that setting it at nine is something very comfortable for all Americans. It doesn't favor one party over the other.
Man, you guys were after Roe v. Wade passed, maybe people were, I don't remember, I was kind of young at the time, but I don't remember people saying, well, we got to reap the whirlwind on the Supreme Court because pro-lifers didn't like it. I don't remember that, man. I don't remember that. But maybe it happened. But the reality is we're talking about locking in constitutionally a number that is very, very comfortable to the American people.
And as even Supreme Court Justice Breyer said, if you were to expand the number, you would denigrate the trust that the American people have in the court. Now, you guys don't like the decisions. I get it. You don't like the decisions. There are decisions that happen even now that I don't particularly like.
But the bottom line is we're not talking about packing the court. We're talking about setting the boundaries of the court at nine. Nine members. And quite frankly, that's what the American people expect. That's what they're used to.
And I'm hoping that you guys come around and get on the Ruth Bader Ginsburg bus and the Stephen Breyer bus and your commission bus, the Biden commission bus, and the Joe Biden bus. And back then when even the Democrats said, look, you know what, it's wrong because it was almost unanimous rejection of FDR's attempt to expand the number in the court. Hope you get on that bus. And I'll yield back to you, Mr. Chairman.
Speaker 74
Yield to the gentleman, or I can recognize you next too, if that's better.
I just had a question, Mr. Chairman.
The gentleman's recognized.
Derek Schmidt
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Appreciate you yielding. I just wanted the gentleman from Arizona made the comment, you know, there are decisions you don't like and so our friends on the other side get upset with the justices. And, you know, the shoe's been on the other foot. I mean, there have certainly been decisions I've not liked from time to time.
I've sat at the counsel table seven times now. I've argued three and I second-chaired four. We came out ahead on all seven of them. I decided to quit while I was ahead. But we also argued a whole bunch where we were on the briefs that didn't turn out the way we wanted.
So, you know, you win some, you lose some. That's the nature of arguing in front of any court, including the Supreme Court.
My question, Mr. Chairman, the gentleman from Arizona says, you know, you like some, you don't like. I was just looking at the numbers from this last term, the October 24 term. And if you look at the six to three cases, in 15% of those cases, the three dissenting justices, who presumably didn't like it, didn't like the outcome, were the three generally perceived as liberal judges. But in 28% of those six to three cases where there were three dissenters, it was three of the conservative justices who didn't care for it. And I'm just wondering if this court is so stacked, why are the conservatives in the discontented minority more often than the liberals?
Jim Jordan
Well said. And the president's, I think, expressed his concern about that, some of those decisions as well. So, well said. I yield back. Time, time has expired.
The gentlelady from Vermont is recognized.
Becca Balint
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to start by thank you, thank my colleague, Mr. Schmidt. I appreciated your comments about why it was that you support this. And I just want to say I reject this in the strongest possible terms because when I reflect on, if I bring it back to the people and what I'm hearing from, and I do believe Congress is closest to the people, what I hear from my constituents is they want us to protect the congressional power that we have right now. So in this moment, what I'm hearing is why would you give up any more of your power to the executive, regardless of who is in the White House?
If in fact we believe Congress is closest to the people, then why would we not be protecting our Article One powers in this moment? When I am at town halls, when I am at the grocery store, when I am at the post office and the bank, again, these are the times when we actually interact directly with our constituents. There is nobody that is saying to me in this moment that we should be giving up any further power to the executive. And as a former social studies and history teacher, right, we are supposed to be a check. I take that very seriously.
It's one of the reasons why I often bring up Article One powers and the importance of protecting them.
Will the gentlelady yield?
Becca Balint
Not yet. I've got a couple more points, Mr. Knott. And I wanted to speak to something that my colleague Mr. Biggs said about issues around trust of this Supreme Court. And when you look at polling over the last year, whether it's Quinnipiac, whether it's Yahoo, whether it's Gallup, consistently a strong majority in this country actually does not have faith and confidence in the Supreme Court right now. Some of that is over the fact that they did pass ethics, an ethics code finally in 2023 with absolutely no mechanism to enforce it.
There is no explicit mechanism for them to do anything once they have found that they are violating their own ethics code. And so strong majorities, depending on the poll, between 63 and 74% of Americans saying we actually don't trust in this court right now. So in this moment, I don't see why we as Congress would be giving up a tool that we have in our toolbox, not saying that we're going to use it. This isn't the moment for us to be contemplating giving up any more power to the executive. And I yield to Mr. Knott for a question.
Troy Nehls
Yes, just as a broader point, I fully support your desire to pull back power from the executive. And I'm curious, one topic that I'm most interested in is pulling back the sort of unchecked executive authority in the rulemaking process. Is there any bandwidth with you or your colleagues to engage on some type of mechanism to pull approval of rulemaking back to Congress from agencies, whether it be IRS, EPA, otherwise, that have really far-reaching effects? Because I agree with you. We as a body have given far too much authority to the executive, and I would like to pull some of that back.
I appreciate that. And I see that the ranking member would like to weigh in here.
I would love to work with you on that, Mr. Knott.
Yes, sir.
Jim Jordan
Gentlelady yields back. We do have, I think we have an amendment. Yes. So maybe we'll have you offer that. I do know we, votes have been called, right?
Yes. So let's maybe get the amendment, we can do a little debate and then... I have an amendment at the desk. Okay. Clerk will report. Point of order being reserved by the gentleman from Arizona.
Amendment to H. J. Res. 1.
Jim Jordan
Without objection, the amendment will be considered as read. The gentleman is recognized to explain the amendment.
Jamie Raskin
Thank you. Could I just see the text of it? Okay. The amendment reads simply, the, I guess the, the base text says that, that the number of Supreme Court justices shall be limited for all time to nine, and the amendment says unless each circuit is not represented, in which case an additional number of justices equal to the number of unrepresented circuits may be added by Congress. And the reason for this, Mr. Chairman, we've, we've raised this before, is that the number of Supreme Court justices has historically been tied to the federal circuits, and that's where the phrase circuit riding comes from.
Each justice used to go back to their circuits and then handle a series of emergency petitions, administrative matters, and so on. That continues to be the case today, where each individual Supreme Court justice is assigned to a particular federal circuit for the purpose of handling emergency applications and administrative matters such as motions for extensions of time, bail and release orders, injunctions and other emergency applications, motions for a stay of execution, and other motions relating to the death penalty. So all this says is that we're, that you guys have a presumption for the magical number nine, but we shouldn't be confined to nine when we have at least four federal circuits who are not represented. And I would consider it an emergency situation today, Mr. Chairman. There are four federal circuits, the first, the sixth, the eighth, and the ninth, covering 242 million people, where there is not a single justice who comes from there.
Seven justices come from either the New York metropolitan New Jersey area or Washington, D.C. Seven of the nine. There are only three law schools that are represented on the Supreme Court today: Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, and Notre Dame because of Justice Barrett. There's this overwhelming coastal domination of the Supreme Court. Let's take the sixth circuit, which is your circuit, Mr. Chairman, that includes not just Ohio, but Michigan, Tennessee, and Kentucky.
Millions of people live there. There's not a single justice on the court. And I don't know how a member can go back to their own constituent, their own state, and say there's nobody on the Supreme Court who comes from the great law schools in Ohio, there's nobody who comes out of the sixth circuit itself, there's nobody who's been a federal district court judge in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, or Tennessee who's made it up to the Supreme Court. It continues to be the domination of this eastern coastal elite, which continues to give us pro-Wall Street corporate rulings one after another. So why would we cement into place the historical contingency of nine justices when the vast majority of the American people are not represented on the Supreme Court?
You know, the Federal Reserve Board also has a geographic, an explicit geographic representation requirement where, and precisely because lawmakers recognized that placing a single central bank in Washington, D.C. or New York would propound this kind of geographic bias and preference. So to build public trust, they said that a new system needed regional representation and independence and coordination, and that's why there are 12 banks regionally, and there also is a geographic representation requirement on the central bank. And I think that we need to think of the Supreme Court in those terms, and that's rooted in the history of the Supreme Court precisely because of the circuit riding duties that each justice had. So I, a number of the justices happen to live in my district, including Justice Gorsuch, Justice Kavanaugh, Justice Jackson, there might even be some more. So we know that there's a concentration coming from the D.C. circuit, from the second circuit out of New York and New Jersey, but why?
Don't we have a big country and can't we find superb legal talent from all over America to do it? So in any event, if you prefer nine, I mean, we don't think we need to monkey with the handiwork of the framers, but if you think you need nine, at least you should account for the possibility that people from your own federal circuits should have a place on the Supreme Court. And I yield back.
Speaker 80
Gentleman yields back, the gentleman's, the gentleman withdraws his point of order.
Speaker 81
Point of order, gentlelady from Wyoming is recognized.
Thank you, just in order to respond to that, to this particular amendment, wow. These aren't lawmakers, they interpret and apply the laws that we pass and the Constitution. It doesn't matter if they're from Nebraska or Ohio or California or Wyoming, federal law is federal law. That's what they're applying, that's what they are interpreting. I, I'm just kind of stunned that that would be the argument that would be made.
I think that it is critically important that we have this particular amendment for the specific reason that it is the Democrats that have repeatedly stated that they want to stack the court, not because the decisions of the court are wrong. In fact, as I listen to the debate that has taken place today, there is very little discussion about the actual substance of the decisions that have been issued by the United States Supreme Court, whether it is the Sackett decision involving the Clean Water Act, or well, Roe versus Wade because they're obsessed with abortion and killing babies. But other than that one, they don't really talk about the substance of the decisions that they seem to dislike that have been issued by the United States Supreme Court. It is instead name-calling and attacks, personal attacks, collective attacks, MAGA. I, I mean, we could start a drinking game and maybe every time that they say MAGA we can take another shot and see if we can maybe get through some of these insane arguments that are being made about whether we should have nine justices.
The idea that we have a supermajority legislature that oversees the various districts throughout the country to make sure that there's a law that comes from Ohio or a law that comes from Nebraska or a law that comes from Arizona and we're going to interpret it differently and apply it differently than if you're from Washington, that makes absolutely no sense when we're talking about the United States Supreme Court. I want to give you a couple quotes. There's a commission that was done by the presidential commission by President Biden. They actually recognized the risks associated with the Democrats' drumbeat of packing the court every time there is a decision that is issued with which they disagree. And what they stated is actually there is a profound disagreement over whether court expansion at this moment in time would be wise.
poorly based decisions that are issued by the Supreme Court that the other side disagrees with. That is the bottom line about this discussion. Are there times when the Supreme Court disagrees with me or I disagree with what the Supreme Court has said? Absolutely. But I don't turn around and say well we got to get rid of them.
That's a totalitarian despotic way of looking at what our judicial system is. We have Article 1, Article 2, and Article 3 for a reason. Article 3 covers the judiciary. We are not supposed to be interfering and every time that the Democrats attack these justices personally, they put them at first at physical risk in addition to which they are sending a message of if you don't do what we want we are going to continue to attack you. You gave statistics about people not trusting the court.
What do you expect when half of the the people in Congress come out and constantly attack the the attacks that I've listened to today, the MAGA and they hate everybody and they only care about Wall Street and all they care about is the rich guy and they just want everybody to suffer. Why in the world would anybody make those kinds of accusations when we're talking about the upstanding people that we have on the United States Supreme Court right now, all nine of them including the ones that I vehemently disagree with on a repeated basis. The fact is what you guys are doing is heading down the same damn road that you see in Venezuela and other South American countries every time you attack the court and try to pretend that you are doing this from an upstanding standpoint. You won't even talk about what constitutional provisions or what statutory provisions you think they're violating. You just attack them personally.
This is despicable, this is why we need this amendment, with that I yield back.
Jim Jordan
Will the gentlelady yield? Will the gentlelady yield? I appreciate you yielding and and I appreciate your analysis and insight there. But I was struck more by, I don't know if y'all picked up that the ranking member from Maryland who went to Harvard was criticizing the coastal elite. I thought that was that was somewhat interesting.
Speaker 83
I submit myself to the voters, Mr. Chairman, just as you do. I'm not demanding a Supreme Court.
Speaker 84
Well I could add to that the ranking member from Maryland who's got how many I think you said five Supreme Court justices in his district who went to Harvard who then taught at Harvard is criticizing the coastal elite but anyway I will I if if you will yield to the gentleman from Kansas I yield back.
Derek Schmidt
I was just observing I mean I'm looking at the amendment and it doesn't actually do anything. I mean it just locks in basically the status quo because Congress can change by statute the number of circuits which then would change the number of justices. Thank you Mr. Chairman and I appreciate my colleague from Wyoming. So it doesn't really do anything. I suppose the one thing it does do is it injects into the Constitution this whole concept of a circuit court, which isn't there now, it's created by Congress and I think that strikes me as a little bit contrary to what I thought my friend from Maryland was arguing before, which was we shouldn't change the architecture.
But nonetheless, that's beside the point. But I just as I was listening it really has nothing to do with this amendment although it was a nice speech but I really appreciated the comments of our colleague friend from Maryland with respect to, you know, wishing we had a bit more geographical diversity on the court. I've made that argument before, I believe it, and I I didn't know my friend from Maryland at the time of the first Trump administration when we hadn't served together or met but I'm wondering if he shared my glee when President Trump appointed Justice Gorsuch who came from Colorado and was from my home circuit the 10th Circuit and seems to satisfy, you know, one of the critiques he has.
Jamie Raskin
If if I might. Hopefully never going to give up. Go ahead. I thank the gentleman and I thank you for disagreeing with the gentlelady from Wyoming who said it made no difference where you come from geographically. I'm with you.
I think it makes a huge difference which is why we take cases up to the court because of a circuit court split. The federal circuits are split because they have a different approach to a particular issue and that's one of the major pathways to getting on the court. So I agree with you and I do think that we should embody it in this amendment if we're going down the road of micromanaging the number and divesting ourselves of authority as Congress from doing it then we should deal with this problem that we have this incredibly lopsided concentration of members coming from particular districts and I thank the chairman for his comments about me because I submit myself to the voters. I am not somebody who thinks that I should just get appointed to an office because of where I went to law school. But thank you.
All right.
Speaker 85
The the committee will stand in recess while we head to the floor to vote.
Speaker 86
We will come to order. We have an amendment offered by the gentleman from Maryland. Who seeks recognition? The gentleman from Georgia is recognized.
Henry Johnson
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Before we left out to go vote, I was kind of reminded of my years in middle school, junior high we used to call it. You know, and we'd be in the lunchroom around the table and folks would be laughing and giggling and making comments and, you know, it was like a popularity contest. And, you know, the alpha male would say something, would look at somebody and make a joke. And then everybody, all of the followers, the wannabe alpha males and females, would laugh.
And then, you know, it's at the expense of the poor person sitting there at the table, defenseless. And then everybody moves on. And they tried to do that to the ranking member, talking about the coastal elites and, you know, mocking him for allegedly being a coastal elite. You're from there, so you, and you went to Harvard, and so you must be a coastal elite. And by mocking the ranking member, they kind of showed their hand who they were really for.
They are really for those coastal elites. Now, who are the coastal elites that the ranking member was referring to? It's not everybody that goes to Harvard or everybody that lives in New York or California. He was talking about Wall Street, the Wall Street billionaires who've spent so much money corrupting this system. He was talking about the billionaire West Coast bros, you know, the artificial intelligence titans, the data center purveyors around the country.
That's who he was talking about. He is actually talking about an amendment to this bill that would bring in the voices of regular, ordinary people throughout America, not just those who went to Harvard and Yale. And by the way, they're doing away with the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at those institutions, and so making them even more elite at the instance of the same folks that these, that the alpha male and his followers were laughing about.
You know, I mean, it's crazy that they would be mocking somebody who's looking to bring the voices of the unheard into the equation. So the people throughout America are the ones that Representative Raskin is trying to protect with this amendment, which would simply add a requirement that instead of confining ourselves to a Supreme Court made up of elites, that we balance it out and have all people of America represented on the Supreme Court. It doesn't have to be an inordinate number of regions that need to be represented. It could be folks from the South, folks from the Midwest, folks from the Northwest, folks who've been traditionally left out at the Supreme Court, whose voices and cultures and whose experiences are not brought to bear on the decisions that the Supreme Court, its elites, make that bind us all for generations. Someone else talked about how they were, you know, I mean, they wished that the Warren Court would come to an end.
Well, you know, the Warren Court established rights for people who had none, and it lasted for about 14, 15, 16 years. But I tell you, I share the concerns of my colleague who wanted to get rid of, who wondered when were we going to be done with that Supreme Court. We've been dealing with this Roberts Court now for 21, 22 years, and what they've done is taken away those rights that the Warren Court gave. And it's time for us to do something that is very popular with the American people, and that is Supreme Court reform. This amendment sends us in the right direction in reforming the Supreme Court.
And so I support this amendment. I think it's a common sense amendment. It appeals to people throughout the country, and I hope that my colleagues on the other side would take a second look at it instead of laughing about it. Let's give it the look that it deserves, and let's go ahead and pass it. I support it, and with that I yield back.
Jim Jordan
Gentleman yields back. I wasn't mocking or being, I'm just having a lighthearted moment with my friend, the ranking member. So you can take whatever analysis you want. Anyone else seek recognition? The question occurs on the amendment offered by the gentleman from Maryland.
All those in favor say aye.
Those opposed, no.
Could we have a recorded vote?
Recorded vote being requested, the clerk will call the roll.
Mr. Jordan.
Mr. Biggs votes no. Mr. McClintock.
Clerk
Mr. McClintock votes no. Mr. Tiffany. Mr. Massie. Mr. Roy. Mr. Fitzgerald.
Mr. Cline. Mr. Gooden. Mr. Van Drew. Mr. Nehls. Mr. Moore.
Clerk
Mr. Moore votes no. Ms. Hageman. Ms. Lee. Mr. Hunt. Mr. Fry.
Mr. Kiley. Mr. Grothman. Mr. Knott. Mr. Harris.
Clerk
Mr. Harris votes no. Mr. Onder. Mr. Schmidt. Mr. Gill. Mr. Baumgardner.
Mr. Raskin.
Mr. Raskin votes aye. Mr. Nadler.
Mr. Nadler votes aye. Ms. Lofgren. Mr. Cohen. Mr. Johnson.
Clerk
Ms. Scanlon votes aye. Mr. Neguse. Ms. McBath. Ms. Ross.
Mr. Johnson votes aye. Mr. Lieu. Ms. Jayapal. Mr. Correa. Ms. Scanlon.
Ms. Scanlon votes aye. Mr. Neguse. Ms. McBath. Ms. Ross. Ms. Ross votes aye.
Ms. Balint. Mr. Garcia. Ms. Kamlager-Dove. Mr. Moskowitz. Mr. Goldman.
Ms. Crockett. Mr. Garcia, you're not recorded. Mr. Garcia. Mr. Garcia votes aye. Mr. Cline votes no.
Mr. Gooden votes no.
Speaker 18
Ms. Van Drew, you are not recorded. Mr. Van Drew votes no.
Ms. Kamlager-Dove, you are not recorded. Ms. Kamlager-Dove votes aye.
Clerk will report.
Jim Jordan
The amendment is not agreed to. Gentlelady from Pennsylvania is recognized.
Speaker 89
Clerk will report. Point of order reserved by the gentleman from Arizona.
Amendment to H. J. Res. 1.
Speaker 88
Objection, the amendment will be considered as read, and the gentlelady is recognized to explain her amendment.
Mary Gay Scanlon
Thank you. Mine is a straightforward amendment. It would require that Supreme Court justices be bound by the same code of conduct that applies to all other federal judges. It would insert a line saying that the justices shall be bound by the code of conduct that applies to all other federal judges. Now, I know this amendment can't fix a measure as flawed as H. J. Res. 1, but at least my proposal would address one of the issues that's called into serious question the court's credibility and its legitimacy and would make this misguided legislation a little bit better.
I want to make clear that I oppose the proposed constitutional amendment to forever cap the Supreme Court's membership at nine justices because, frankly, no one has advanced a compelling reason why we should alter our constitutional framework, and particularly at this time when the court has effectively been packed with a conservative majority. The power of Congress to determine the number of Supreme Court justices is carefully rooted in the calibrated systems of checks and balances established in our Constitution, intended to serve as a bulwark against tyranny by any branch of government. While it's true that the framers intended for the Supreme Court to be insulated from day-to-day politics and factional interests, they also recognized the need for the democratic accountability of our courts, even for unelected federal judges. That's why our Constitution gives Congress, the American people's elected representatives, significant power to shape the structure and jurisdiction of the court in various ways while ensuring judicial independence through various protections for courts and judges. By taking away Congress's authority to determine the number of Supreme Court justices, a power that Congress has exercised multiple times in our nation's history, this proposed constitutional amendment erodes that system of checks and balances, flying in the face of the framers' wisdom in distributing power among the branches of federal government to ensure that ambition checked ambition.
While I oppose the resolution and constitutional amendment it proposes, I offer my amendment to mitigate some of the damage this legislation would do by requiring Supreme Court justices to follow the same ethics code that binds all other federal judges. This simple, important step could help the court regain some of its democratic legitimacy at a time when the political manipulation of the court's membership by the Republican Senate has dramatically undermined the American people's trust in this important institution. All lower court federal judges must follow the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which regulates issues like the acceptance of gifts and the circumstances in which judges must recuse themselves from cases. This code prevents even the appearance of corruption and impropriety and conflicts of interest, and in doing so, safeguards the judiciary's integrity and legitimacy.
Yet the Supreme Court has stubbornly resisted being governed by these same requirements. When a series of ethical conflicts by justices were exposed in recent years, the court finally adopted its own code of conduct, but that 2023 code is largely toothless. It lacks an enforcement mechanism and contains loopholes that don't apply to lower court judges. It relies solely on self-policing by the justices themselves, thereby making accountability optional. Given recent disclosures of apparent ethical misconduct by justices, it's clear that self-policing is inadequate, and the American people are right to be concerned.
Over the course of his career, Justice Clarence Thomas has reportedly received nearly 200 gifts worth more than $4 million and disclosed only a fraction of them. He's also refused to recuse himself in cases where people who've lavished gifts on him may have a financial interest, such as billionaire Harlan Crow, who treated him and his wife to luxury travel, including an Indonesia island-hopping trip valued at a half-million dollars. I oppose H. J. Res. 1 because it would undermine our Constitution's system of checks and balances and democratic accountability for a powerful institution of government, the Supreme Court. But if our Republican colleagues want to change the Constitution, let's make it abundantly clear that Supreme Court justices should be bound by a real code of ethics, just like every other federal judge. That way we can ensure at least a small measure of accountability.
I urge everyone to support my amendment, and I yield back.
Speaker 90
Gentlelady yields back. Does the gentleman from Arizona insist on his point of order?
I do, Mr. Chairman.
Gentleman is recognized.
Andy Biggs
The gentlelady's amendment would introduce material beyond the scope and purpose of the bill before us and therefore violates House Rule 16, Clause 7. I yield back.
Speaker 26
Gentleman yields back. The gentleman's correct, the amendment does not satisfy the subject matter and fundamental purposes test, therefore is not germane and is out of order. Who seeks recognition? Gentleman from Georgia is recognized.
Clerk will report.
Reserve a point of order.
Point of order reserved by the gentleman from Arizona.
Amendment to H. J. Res. 1.
Henry Johnson
Without objection, the amendment will be considered as read. The gentleman is recognized to explain his amendment.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This amendment is straightforward. It creates an 18-year term limit for justices, which will restore integrity while removing partisan politics from the court's confirmation process. Life tenure at the Supreme Court has become a tool of politicization, but it does not have to remain this way. Because of the uncertainty of appointment timelines, some presidents appoint no justices at all, and some have appointed as much as a third of the entire bench, i.e. Donald Trump, with a MAGA majority on the Supreme Court, he appointed three of the nine.
This means the bench is not actually representative of the entire country. Instead, one president can end up having a wildly outsized ideological influence over the highest court in the land, lasting potentially for generations after that president leaves office. We can't afford that, America, to extend the influence of their own Supreme Court pick as long as possible. The current system incentivizes presidents like Trump to nominate young, relatively immature and strident, unseasoned, radical and unwise justices who presumably could sit on the bench for three or four decades over justices who are perhaps more qualified or experienced and wise but are later in their career. Our current system also incentivizes strategic retirement from the bench to give their preferred president a chance to appoint an ideologically similar replacement justice to further influence the future of the bench.
Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are great examples of strategic retirements that would give Trump the frightening opportunity to replace them with two young extremists who will wreak havoc on democracy for all for the next 30 or 40 years.
That is not good for democracy. Lifetime appointments to the United States Supreme Court no longer are viable for our democracy, and we must change it. A regularized appointment schedule for 18-year active terms would mean that each president would appoint two justices, balancing the court with a new justice ascending to the bench every two years and a fair system for each president to make their nominations. It benefits no one, no one political party, and instead creates a court that is actually representative of the American people as time passes and new presidents are elected. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this restorative, nonpartisan amendment to protect the Supreme Court from corruption derived from lifetime tenure and also bring needed reform to the hyper-partisan confirmation process.
And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Jim Jordan
Gentleman yields back. The gentleman from Arizona is recognized on his point of order.
I insist on my point of order, sir.
Gentleman's recognized.
Andy Biggs
The gentleman's amendment would introduce material beyond the scope and purpose of the bill before us and therefore violates House Rule 16, Clause 7. I yield back.
Jim Jordan
The gentleman is correct. The amendment offered by the gentleman from Georgia does not satisfy the subject matter and purpose test, therefore is not germane and is out of order. Who seeks recognition? Question then, okay, the gentlelady from California is recognized.
Speaker 92
Gentlelady's recognized.
You know, I would be supporting both of these amendments, and I think the fact that the majority is trying to suggest that they're not germane probably means that they're incredibly accurate and on point. I just want to say, you know, this Supreme Court's approval ratings are at historic lows. 48% of the American people approve of this Supreme Court. That's down from 70% just five years ago. I mean, that is a precipitous drop.
And when you talk to people, they want term limits for these justices. They want an enforceable code of ethics for these justices. After this Caley decision, folks have been up in arms because they see that it is just another unraveling, a continuation of the unraveling of so many rights. And you can say, well, that's just, you know, Sydney Kamlager-Dove talking, of course you'd say that, she's a Democrat. But how interesting that the Chief Justice, Justice Roberts, is now on the circuit.
He is on tour, having meetings with folks trying to remind them or persuade them or gaslight them into thinking that this court is still credible, is still legitimate. If it weren't, he wouldn't be out here going on all these tours, talking to folks saying, oh no, we're not partisan. You know, it is, I mean, Justice Barrett just was at an event and said, oh yes, you know, the bench is comprised of, we have to let people know, persuade people, tell people that we are not comprised of partisan hacks.
So they know that the public is onto them and that the public is tired of them. They wouldn't be saying this if it weren't true. Which is why this amendment is actually really relevant because it would suggest that at least folks in this committee are not asleep at the wheel, that we're listening to our constituents, we are feeling and sensing the anger and the disenfranchisement that so many Americans across this country are feeling because of these recent decisions by SCOTUS. And because they're appointed for life, they can calcify in these really disastrous, disturbing, disenfranchising, demoralizing decisions. And I, you know, I have to say with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, that was bipartisan law that was passed decades ago.
The people were not clamoring in the street saying, oh my god, I've been wronged because black people have been allowed to vote. So this has been a Supreme Court justice in Justice Roberts that has been patiently waiting to figure out a way to disenfranchise, you know, representation in the South and when it counts for black voters who are interested in voting for whomever they want, but they want a choice. And then feeling the heat and then going out on tour trying to tell people that what you are seeing with your eyes is not the truth. No, Justice Roberts, what we are seeing is the truth. We have partisan hacks that have taken over this SCOTUS bench.
And if I'm going to be honest, it started with Mitch McConnell court packing by denying Barack Obama the ability to nominate a justice. And he said, Mitch McConnell said, I'm going to wait it out. I'm going to wait it out in hopes that the next president will be the president of my choice so that we are able to control the court. So if we're going to tell the truth, just tell the whole truth. And it is okay for Republicans to say, yeah, he did it, I'm glad he did, we're in the majority.
You should just say it and own it. But you also should own the fact that we are offering up these amendments because we're trying to tell you the truth about how the rest of America feels about what is going on at that Supreme Court, that corrupted, corrosive Supreme Court. So I do support this amendment and I hope we are able to vote on it because I would certainly be a yes, and with that I yield back.
Mr. Chairman.
Jerrold Nadler
Mr. Chairman, I appeal the ruling of the chair in that the amendment or the bill proposes an amendment to the Constitution dealing with the composition of the court, the amendment likewise deals with the composition of the court.
Jim Jordan
Gentleman, appealing the ruling of the chair happened five minutes ago and we've already moved on to other business. I don't think it's in order, so therefore we can't, can't deal with that.
UC request.
Unanimous consent request from the gentleman from Arizona.
Andy Biggs
I'd like to include into the record several articles, one entitled Democrats Promise to Wreck the Supreme Court.
Without objection.
Speaker 97
James Carville Urges Democrats to Consider Expanding Supreme Court if They Regain Power.
Without objection.
Without objection.
Without objection.
Andy Biggs
Don't Repackage Court Packing, Democrats Renew Calls for US Supreme Court Overhaul After Voting Rights Decision. I yield back.
Jim Jordan
Gentleman yields back. The question occurs on favorably reporting the joint resolution from the gentleman from Arizona. All those in favor say aye.
Those opposed no.
Jim Jordan
The ayes definitely have it and the joint resolution is ordered to be reported favorably to the House. Members will have two days to submit views. Without objection.
Speaker 100
I'm going to just interrupt because I don't want to lose my chance here. So if we could ask for a roll call that'd be great.
Mr. Jordan.
Mr. Biggs votes aye. Mr. McClintock.
Clerk
Mr. McClintock votes aye. Mr. Tiffany. Mr. Massie. Mr. Roy. Mr. Fitzgerald.
Mr. Cline.
Clerk
Mr. Cline votes aye. Mr. Gooden. Mr. Van Drew. Mr. Nehls. Mr. Moore.
Ms. Hageman. Ms. Lee. Mr. Hunt. Mr. Fry. Mr. Kiley.
Mr. Grothman. Mr. Moran. Mr. Harris. Mr. Van Orden. Mr. Schmidt.
Mr. Gaetz. Mr. Baumgardner. Mr. Raskin.
Ms. Ross votes no. Ms. Balint.
Ms. Balint votes no. Mr. Garcia.
Mr. Garcia votes no. Ms. Kamlager-Dove.
Clerk
Ms. Kamlager-Dove votes no. Mr. Moskowitz. Mr. Goldman. Ms. Crockett. Mr. Gaetz, you're not recorded.
Mr. Gooden votes yes. Mr. Harris.
Mr. Hunt?
No, I'm not recorded.
Mr. Knott votes yes. Mr. Onder?
You're not recorded.
Mr. Schmidt votes aye.
I vote yes.
Clerk will report.
Andy Biggs
The ayes have it and joint resolution is ordered to be reported favorably to the House. Members will have two days to submit views. Without objection, staff is authorized to make technical and conforming changes. Pursuant to notice, I call up HR 5437, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Stone Slab Products Act, for purposes of markup and move that the committee report it favorably to the House. The clerk will report the bill.
Andy Biggs
Without objection, the bill will be considered as read and open for amendment at any point. Chair now recognizes the gentleman from California, Mr. McClintock, for an opening statement.
Tom McClintock
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This legislation addresses a fundamental question of fairness in our civil justice system. Who should be held responsible when workplace safety laws are violated? Who is liable when an otherwise safe product is misused? The party that responsibly, safely, and legally manufactured that product, or the party that dangerously, recklessly, and illegally misused that product and injured their workers as a result?
Now, the answer should be self-evident to any fair and reasonable person. Stone slabs are used for kitchen and bathroom countertops in millions of American homes. Stone slab manufacturer produces about 30 billion dollars a year for our economy. It employs 100,000 American workers who depend upon it to feed their families. When these stone slabs leave the factory, they're entirely safe as long as they are then fabricated according to health and safety laws.
Now, these products are then shipped to fabricators to be cut to fit your kitchen. The manufacturers have no control over the fabricators. Fabricators are completely unrelated and independent businesses. Those fabricators are required by law to use safe processes to cut these slabs to assure that harmful silica particles aren't released into the air. If inhaled, these particles can cause debilitating and permanent lung damage, a condition called silicosis.
OSHA has established detailed standards governing exposure to respirable crystalline silica. Employers are required to implement engineering controls, provide protective equipment, conduct monitoring, and train workers. States such as California have adopted additional requirements. Now, most fabricators abide by the law and employ these practices to protect their workers. Unfortunately, there are some sweatshops that ignore health, safety, labor, and immigration laws to undercut their competition.
Instead of obeying the law and using state-of-the-art equipment to prevent silica dust, they simply have their workers dry-cut these slabs, releasing silica particles that injure their workers. So who's responsible for these injuries? The manufacturer who obeyed all the laws, who safely manufactured the slab and had no control over the fabrication process once their product left their factory? Or the fabricator who broke all the applicable safety and labor laws and ordered their workers to expose themselves to injury? Well, according to some unscrupulous trial lawyers, it's the innocent manufacturer who should be held liable.
We're now seeing crippling lawsuits that ignore the guilty fabricators and instead sue the manufacturers because that's where the money is.
This doesn't protect workers, indeed it imperils a new class of workers, every one of the 100,000 Americans employed in the safe manufacture of this product. And that's because this litigation threatens to shut down American stone slab manufacturers. Now some say good, or as the socialist mayor of Seattle recently giggled, bye. Well, 100,000 American workers lose their jobs. 30 billion dollars of the American economy vanishes.
But at least we protect the workers in the unscrupulous fabrication shops, right? But of course we don't. Stone slab manufacture will simply shift to foreign suppliers who are beyond the reach of this litigation and the unscrupulous sweatshops will remain. If you truly care about the workers, you'd protect the innocent and hold the guilty responsible for violating health and safety laws. That's what this bill does.
It preserves workers' rights to seek relief from those who caused their injuries while preventing abusive litigation against parties who neither created the hazard nor controlled the workplace. It says that manufacturers and sellers of stone slab products cannot be sued for injuries arising from fabrication activities that were conducted entirely beyond their control. It does not shield employers who violate OSHA requirements. It does not prevent workers from seeking remedies against those responsible for unsafe working conditions. It simply prevents liability from being imposed on parties that neither controlled nor caused the alleged harm.
At its core, this legislation reaffirms the principle that should unite all of us regardless of party. Liability should be based upon responsibility. Those who cause harm should be held accountable and those who don't should not. I yield back.
Speaker 107
Gentleman yields, chair now recognizes the ranking member Mr. Raskin for an opening statement.
Jamie Raskin
Thank you very kindly Mr. Chairman and I came in to hear the distinguished gentleman denouncing sweatshops and criticizing a socialist mayor from the left, so I knew something unusual was afoot today. I've got to oppose this legislation which is a shameful effort to shield stone slab manufacturers from lawsuits as workers get sick and die from acute silicosis, an extremely fatal dangerous lung disease caused by exposure to highly concentrated silica dust. Although silicosis is not a new disease, a new silicosis epidemic has emerged among workers who cut and finish artificial stone countertops, also known as engineered stone or quartz countertops. Artificial stone silicosis is a rapidly developing disease that manifests within a few months or years, killing even young workers quickly rather than the slowly progressive past forms of the disease. If you get it, acute silicosis is a disease that essentially renders your lungs useless.
You struggle to breathe as fluid fills up your lungs, completely cutting off your oxygen supply. There's no cure and if you don't receive an excruciating grueling million dollar double lung transplant, you effectively end up drowning on dry land. The disease is contracted when workers who fabricate artificial stone inhale nanoparticles that settle in the lungs. These particles are so small and plentiful in artificial stone that they can escape any respirator and evade any protections designed for avoiding harms from silica in natural stone, such as the use of wet saws. Artificial countertops were the most commonly used countertop material in the United States over the last decade, yet medical experts agree that the only safe way to cut artificial stone is to wear a full hazard suit or to have machine only fabrication, neither of which seems to be technically or economically feasible yet.
So what do my colleagues across the aisle propose to do about this problem? Do they want to leave it up to state law and state courts to figure out these complicated traditionally state tort issues?
No. Do they want to ban artificial stone nationally? That's what they did in Australia as an inherently dangerous substance. No, they don't want to do that. Do they think we should prosecute the artificial stone CEOs when they deliberately or negligently fail to warn the workers that they could end up dying from this condition, as Spain did in 2023?
No, they don't want to do that. Do they want to just let our American court system do what it does best and hear claims on a case-by-case basis under the general principles of American tort law and products liability? No, they don't want to do that. What they want to do is to immunize the big, primarily foreign-owned manufacturers from being held accountable or liable for the results of this process in our court system. Now, that's baffling to me.
They want to ignore the epidemic, not do anything to turn it around, and simply pass an absolute liability shield for manufacturers, mostly foreign, who poison workers here. And it just defies logic that anyone would embrace a nothing-to-see-here approach when young people, mostly men, are dying from a disease that is only contracted from what's referred in the business as fabricating or cutting artificial stone countertops. The science is clear. Other countries are acting to keep their workers safe or to impose greater liability, not eliminate it. Australia, an early adopter of artificial stone, saw the first cases of acute silicosis.
The government commissioned a study that determined artificial stone is inherently dangerous to the workers who have to cut the slab in order to use it. In response, Australia just banned it. Now recycled glass countertops have sprung up and taken off there, and previous artificial stone suppliers have shifted to glass. In Spain, the government prosecuted the CEOs for negligent failure to warn their workers. The owner of Spain's leading kitchen worktop manufacturer, Cosentino, eventually accepted a plea bargain that included a six-month suspended prison sentence for gross negligence for failing to warn the workers that his product could kill them.
So what's our government done to address this crisis? Absolutely nothing, except that which is counterproductive. Following the philosophy of RFK Jr., Donald Trump ended the programs researching silicosis last year and fired the researchers leading the charge to identify how workers die from this process. But apparently that wasn't enough. Now our colleagues want to immunize the big, primarily foreign-owned manufacturers from being held accountable under ordinary tort law principles in our court system.
And the closer we look at this industry, the more serious the questions are that are arising. Only 1% of artificial stone is manufactured here in the US, primarily by one company, Cambria. When we had our hearing on this issue a few months ago, Cambria sent their general counsel, not their CEO, and it's pretty obvious why the Cambria CEO didn't want to take our questions. Cambria CEO Marty Davis turns out to be a major Trump donor and a noted election denier.
Davis gave Donald Trump a $5 million loan to Truth Social in 2021 to keep his company afloat until it went public, on top of all of these very generous and prolific campaign donations. And things are going well for Mr. Davis today. Tariffs on artificial stone imports from China, India, and Vietnam increased last year to the benefit of the primary domestic manufacturer, Cambria. DODGE ended government research into silicosis in workers entirely. They just got rid of it.
And in February, the US International Trade Commission held a hearing on a request from Cambria and just two other companies in which they asked to limit artificial stone imports into the US and requested substantial tariffs on artificial stone brought to the US. Last month, in a decision the Wall Street Journal editorial board called dumb as rocks, the Trade Commission agreed with them and recommended tariffs of up to 40% on foreign imported quartz slabs for a four-year period, as well as quotas on how much can be imported. President Trump has until July 17th to approve or reject the ITC determination, making him the only barrier between Marty Davis and absolute dominance over the US supply of deadly quartz. But apparently that doesn't go far enough. My colleagues now want to immunize this very special Mr. Davis's company from the consequences of his poisoning his workers.
In 2016, Donald Trump promised five, 10 years from now, it'll be a different party. You're going to have a workers' party. Well, check out this legislation, which would protect one super-powerful, super-rich Donald Trump campaign donor from facing any accountability in the courts as young working men die from avoidable lung failure. It's clear that this promise of the GOP becoming a working man's party has been broken. The idea of the MAGA party being the party of working people is a bad and a cruel joke.
I oppose this legislation and I urge all of our colleagues to study what's really going on here and vote no today. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Andy Biggs
Without objection, all other opening statements will be included in the record. Chair now recognizes the gentleman from California to offer an amendment in the nature of a substitute.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.
Clerk will report.
Andy Biggs
Without objection, the amendment in the nature of a substitute will be considered as read and shall be considered as base text for the purposes of the amendment. Chair now recognizes the gentleman from California to explain the ANS.
Tom McClintock
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know, the ranking member's been quite clear, he wants to put the domestic manufacturer of stone slabs out of business. He doesn't like the politics of one of the manufacturers of stone slabs in the United States. Well, the 100,000 Americans who rely on that industry to provide for their families, they he's perfectly willing to throw into unemployment. What does he expect to happen if he's successful in shutting down American manufacture of this product?
Now, again, the effect of silicosis is devastating, but the product is safe when it leaves the factory. It is safe when it is fabricated according to health and safety laws. It is only unsafe when it's fabricated in violation of the law. This bill holds the guilty fabricators who break the law liable for the damages that they cause to their workers and protects the 100,000 American jobs in the safe manufacture of this product. The amendment in the nature of a substitute makes a few targeted changes to the definitions in section 4 of the bill.
First, it makes the definition of fabrication more precise, clarifying that the definition only includes actions similar to the examples listed. Second, the definition of qualified civil action is narrowed to limit the bill's prohibition to only cases involving silicosis or related injuries, which are types of cases currently being abused. Third, also in the definition of qualified civil action, it adds at the end an exemption to ensure that the prohibition does not affect an employee's ability to sue their own employer.
Fourth, it clarifies that both natural and man-made stone slab products can be qualified products. Finally, it emphasizes in the definition of qualified product that the fabrication of these products are subject to federal or state occupational health and safety statutes and regulations, including those pertaining to respirable crystalline silica. I'd urge my colleagues to support the amendment.
Will you yield to Mr. Nehls?
Yes, sir, I'll yield.
Troy Nehls
So it was, if you'll indulge the question just for my own clarity, it was described by the ranking member as basically a strict prohibition of any recovery, even for negligent behavior on the behalf of the producers or the people who fabricated these stone slabs. That's not what the bill does.
I believe you are correct, yes.
Troy Nehls
So explain to me exactly what we're prohibiting with the legislation and what would still be allowed.
Tom McClintock
When a product is mishandled by the fabricator, it simply shields the innocent manufacturer from being involved in that lawsuit. It maintains the right of the workers to seek damages from the employer who caused them the injury, who violated the laws in the manufacture of this otherwise safe product. It simply assures that the innocent manufacturer, who had nothing to do with the fabrication, cannot be sued as well. And that's what the trial lawyers are doing. They're reaching, the money is with the manufacturer.
Tom McClintock
No, we're protecting innocent behavior of manufacturers who produce a safe product when it leaves their factory and have no control over the fabricators who then misuse it.
Jerrold Nadler
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, artificial stone is causing a completely preventable epidemic among stone fabrication workers. The people who shape and install our countertops are getting sick with irreversible lung damage more quickly and more severely than in the past because of an inherently dangerous product. We should be here today to help these workers who are suffering. Instead, we're here to consider a bill to shield manufacturers and distributors from ever being held accountable for the workers they poison and kill.
The liability immunity offered by this bill means that suffering workers and their families would no longer be able to sue the companies that make the product that made them sick. Granting immunity to the entire supply chain means the costs of disease would be transferred from those who produce and distribute the toxic stone slabs to the workers who have been harmed and to the American people. Because this bill only makes lives harder for workers, the natural question becomes, why are we doing this? The answer is because a major Trump donor who owns the leading domestic stone manufacturing company keeps getting sued by sick workers. So we're not here to protect American workers, we're here to protect Donald Trump's wealthy friend.
Congress typically only gives this immunity in very limited cases. This bill completely upsets that precedent. We give immunity to provide for the common defense in the case of weapons of war, or to promote the general welfare in the case of vaccines, which are highly regulated before they go to market.
This bill puts stone slabs in the same category as guns, bombs, and vaccines. It goes even further than PLCAA, which granted sweeping immunity to gun manufacturers, but with certain exceptions for product liability and defect cases. This bill has no such exceptions, granting manufacturers and sellers of artificial stone slabs virtually unqualified immunity. Artificial stone slabs are uniquely toxic to the workers who cut and grind it. Silicosis has impacted miners and stoneworkers for hundreds of years, but artificial stone silicosis is a new disease.
Artificial stone slab products have a higher concentration of silica that makes them far more dangerous to work with. Fabrication workers are getting sick and stone silicosis and other occupational health diseases more quickly and more severely than they did before the rise of artificial stone. Manufacturers claim their product is perfectly safe. They tell us their product only becomes dangerous when you cut it. This argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
A cigarette is also perfectly safe until you light it up. These huge stone slabs are manufactured to be cut and grinded down into countertops, not just to look at. The majority claims that if proper precautions are taken during cutting, workers will not get sick. This is simply not supported by the evidence. There are cases where fabrication companies took every precaution possible: wet cutting, respirators, air filtration, and still their employees developed stone silicosis.
Studies have shown that these protections are not sufficient when working with engineered stone. Stone silicosis is a life-altering and entirely preventable disease. Those living with silicosis can expect to be placed on 24/7 oxygen or require a lung transplant, leaving those affected unable to work and suffering from chronic pain. Exposure to artificial stone dust also causes lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic kidney disease, and numerous other diseases. Stone manufacturers claim that this bill is necessary because of the volume of lawsuits they are facing.
But courts are entirely equipped to deal with these lawsuits. Courts and juries are designed to evaluate the complex factual record in each individual case to figure out who is liable. It should not be up to Congress to blanketly decide whether stone manufacturers should be liable for this harm. When a case does go to trial, courts can work out what share of fault might belong to the manufacturer. For example, if the wrong defendant truly is being sued, and a manufacturer or distributor has nothing to do with the worker's disease, courts will dismiss the case on summary judgment.
The majority claims that it's all the fabrication shop's fault. They can be held liable too. Courts weigh all the evidence and carefully assign damages based on the facts of the case. For example, in a case in Colorado, a jury decided that Cambria was 32% liable for a worker's harm for mislabeling their product. A majority of the fault in that case was attributed to the fabrication shop.
Other cases have had different verdicts, depending on the specific facts and circumstances of those cases. This bill would completely take away the ability of a jury to decide any of those things because the worker wouldn't be able to sue the stone manufacturer at all. When companies make a harmful product, litigation serves as a force to incentivize them to do better. If your product is so bad that you keep getting sued over it, maybe you should make a better product. I yield back.
Question, the gentleman from Georgia is recognized. Gentleman yields back.
Henry Johnson
Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I move to strike the last word. And I would point out to the public to not be deceived by anything that you may have heard this morning or this afternoon about this particular legislation. Its purpose is to prohibit, and I'm reading from it, to prohibit civil actions against manufacturers and sellers of stone slab products for injuries caused by exposure to respirable silica or other substances arising from or relating to the fabrication of such products by third parties.
So when you look at the fact that this is uh this legislation prohibits civil actions, that means an action to recover monetary damages for injuries that a worker sustained as a result of uh working with this uh they call it stone slabs, I call it fake stone, uh fabrication of fake stone, uh stone that uh looks like uh granite or uh some other substance. This is fake stone. But this seeks to uh preclude workers from being able to sue for injuries uh when they are working to cut this material so that it can be sold to consumers. And um you know I've often said that in this committee nothing comes to uh this committee if it has not been approved uh by uh the Trump administration, Donald Trump uh at the head of it. And in fact this committee is known to be putting forward legislation as directed by Donald Trump.
And this legislation may fit the bill uh because one of Donald Trump's investors, a man who has kept Truth Social afloat with a five million dollar investment, uh this guy owns Cambria, Marty Davis. He owns Cambria, which makes, which is the uh major producer of this fake stone here in America. And so Trump wants to see this bill passed as a payback to his friend Marty Davis for investing in his business. Now the uh impact that uh this legislation would have, it would be on the multitudes of workers who cut, drill, and polish these slabs into usable shapes and sizes for countertops. And when fake stone is cut, it releases silica particles so small and numerous that they evade workplace protections like water saws and respirators.
So even if workers use protection, these silica particles get into their lungs and cause scarring and inflation, inflammation, I'm sorry, making their lungs unable to function and within only, within only months or years these fake stone workers are getting silicosis and either undergoing lung transplants or dying. It's a serious uh situation and we're looking to bar lawsuits against Marty Davis for anything that his company as the manufacturer of the product may be responsible for. Instead of letting it be decided in a court of law before a jury, uh they want to, they want a payback to Marty Davis, the owner of Cambria. It's not doing anything to make American life more affordable for the people as Trump promised. Instead, it's just merely greasing the palms of his billionaire buddies like Marty Davis and enriching Donald Trump himself.
For all we know he's got a interest in Cambria.
And so once again, ladies and gentlemen, don't be fooled. This administration is not doing what it promised to do. It's actually doing the opposite, enriching Donald Trump, and at the same time, it's pulling money from your pocket to go into his pocket. Let's follow the, follow the money. He gets rich, you get poor.
There's a connection there. Your money's going into his pocket. And so, you know, I don't support this legislation, and I hope my colleagues will not do so as well. And with that, I will yield back.
Speaker 113
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I wasn't planning to speak, but I figured I needed to, to defend my colleague from California who introduced this, this bill. I don't know Marty Davis. I don't know Cambria. What I do know is that there's a, there's a facility in rural South Carolina, in a largely African American community, that employs a lot of folks in this field.
And they manufacture this, this stone slab. It's my time, sir. When you go to that facility, before you prejudge them, which you seem to be doing with impunity, you will see that their operation is safe. You will see that they're operating lawfully. And that even though when you go to mine quartz, you're subject to the Mine Safety and Health Administration under the Mine Act.
When you mine that quartz, state mining and other state agencies also regulate the mining of quartz. The EPA regulates this for water and environmental impacts when you mine that quartz. And then when you process that quartz at a place like Cambria, which you guys have used as a red herring to, to target Trump, or any other facility in the United States, there's water discharge regulations there. There's air emissions, the Clean Air Act, you've got to be permitted for. The new source performance standards you're subject to.
The hazardous air pollutant regulations, where applicable. These are governed pretty tightly by our own federal government. And if you go to a place that manufactures these, you will see pretty, because they're subject to those federal regulations, you will see a pretty good operation because at any moment's notice, a federal agency could show up to make sure that you are compliant. But here's the rub, and I think this is where the gentleman from California is going, or I think it is. When a manufacturer of these stone slabs puts these stone slabs into the, the stream of commerce, normal people who are professional know that you have to cut with a, with water, that you cannot do a dry cut because of the silica.
There is an exposure limit that is in federal, federal regulations. And most people cut it according to how it's supposed to be cut so that there is a minimal impact. There is a concentration requirement that's in the air, that's in federal regulations so that workers would not be exposed to this. But you know where the rub happens actually is in California under sanctuary policies that have encouraged illegal immigration. Bad actors, employers, are pulling these people in.
They're cutting these stone slabs without, without fear of the damage that it might cause to the employer. They don't care about the employees themselves. There are lawful people who are doing this in a great way that's providing a great service to the American people, a great product to the American people. But these individuals in California, I think where the gentleman is from, are doing this. And now there are lawyers out there that say, well, you know what, there's some deep pockets somewhere we can go do this.
No, how about go after the bad actors that are doing this? How about state regulators going after the bad actors in California who are employing people and not doing it according to our own federal regulations? That's where the liability rests. That's where the fault rests, not with the people who are doing, creating the products. Sure, there are health risks associated with this.
There's also federal regulations already on the books that govern the creation, the manufacturing, the mining, and yes, indeed, the cutting of these stone slabs that are retrofitted for houses. So why would we now go after, y'all want to talk about Cambria and whoever, whoever likes Trump. I'm talking about real world impacts in South Carolina. What does a salesman have to do with how somebody chooses to cut or not cut a stone slab?
Has nothing to do with it. There are, there are disclosure requirements on these stone slabs when they go out in the, in the first place. I mean, I think that's fairly accurate. If we want to talk about the adequacy of federal regulations, we can do that. But to open up a salesman or a manufacturer of these products to liability when all they've done is just create a product.
They're not the ones cutting it. They're not the ones employing these individuals. They're not the ones with, without proper equipment or ventilation in these sweatshops in California. Why aren't we going after them? Y'all want to go after the, the people who are creating jobs in rural South Carolina.
Why not go after the people who are really the culprits here? With that, I yield back.
Speaker 118
Gentleman yields back. The question is on the adoption of the amendment.
Jerrold Nadler
Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent request, if we can go quickly, we're voting on the floor. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I want to introduce for the record a letter from Doctors Jane Fazio and Shefali Gandhi, leading researchers and physicians from California opposing H.R. 5437 and explaining artificial stone cannot be fabricated safely. I ask unanimous consent to introduce a letter from the American Public Health Association opposing H.R. 5437. I ask unanimous consent to introduce a January 13th, 2026 letter from the AFL-CIO to the Courts Subcommittee, which highlights how this bill would make it safer for dangerous workplaces to harm workers.
And finally, I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record a letter from the Association of Occupational and Environmental Clinics to the Courts Subcommittee, which says that the claim that stone slab products are not inherently dangerous is false and a distortion of the facts and opposes H.R. 5437.
Jim Jordan
Without objection. The question is on adoption of the amendment in the nature of a substitute. This will be followed immediately by a vote on reporting the bill. All those in favor say aye. Aye.
Those opposed no. No. In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it and the amendment in the nature of a sub is adopted. We'll get that in a second. The question is on favorably reporting the bill as amended.
All those in favor say aye. Aye. Those opposed nay. No. The ayes have it and the bill is ordered to be reported.
A recorded vote being requested, the clerk will call the roll.
Mr. Jordan.
No, or excuse me, yes.
Mr. Jordan votes yes. Mr. Issa. Mr. Biggs.
Tom McClintock
Mr. McClintock votes aye. Mr. Tiffany. Mr. Massie. Mr. Roy. Mr. Fitzgerald.
Clerk
Mr. Fitzgerald votes aye. Mr. Cline. Mr. Gooden. Mr. Van Drew. Mr. Nehls.
Mr. Moore.
Mr. Knott votes aye. Mr. Harris. Mr. Onder. Mr. Schmidt.
Mr. Schmidt votes aye. Mr. Gill.
Mr. Raskin votes no. Mr. Nadler.
Clerk
Mr. Johnson votes no. Mr. Lieu. Ms. Jayapal. Mr. Correa. Ms. Scanlon.
Mr. Neguse. Ms. McBath. Ms. Ross.
Ms. Ross votes no. Ms. Balint.
Ms. Balint votes no. Mr. Garcia.
Sydney Kamlager-Dove
Ms. Kamlager-Dove votes no. Mr. Moskowitz. Mr. Goldman. Ms. Crockett.
I vote yes.
Mr. Van Drew.
Russell Fry
Mr. Cline votes yes. Mr. Gooden votes aye. Ms. Hageman, you are not recorded.
I vote yes.
Mr. Issa, you are not recorded.
Oh, I should be a yes.
Mr. Issa votes yes.
Clerk will report.
Jim Jordan
The ayes have it and the bill is ordered to be reported favorably to the House. Members will have two days to submit views. Without objection, the bill is reported as a single amendment in the nature of a substitute incorporating all adopted amendments. Staff is authorized to make technical and conforming changes. This concludes today's business.
The meeting is adjourned. All right, thank you all.
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