We Must Protect the Sovereignty of Our Nation
Floor Speech
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Perlmutter very much for yielding for just a moment. I was very moved by his comments. We know that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and I want to salute him for his vigilance and his zealousness in defending American freedom and our democratic process against foreign and potentially domestic enemies, those who would subvert and undermine our political processes.
It seems to me that, in Congress, we have two jobs that we need to do now. One is to defend the Mueller investigation and the Department of Justice against unfair attacks and attempts to subvert and undermine investigation; and two, and perhaps more importantly now, is we have got to work to fortify our election systems against a repeat in 2018.
The U.S. intelligence agencies, they told us, in January of 2017, that there had been a campaign of cyber espionage and cyber sabotage and cyber propaganda against the American elections. They have told us that the Russians are very likely to be doing the same thing with respect to the 2018 election. And, by the way, it is not just the Russians now. They may have just set the template for other bad actors who want to stick their nose into American elections, too.
You know, James Q. Wilson wrote this book called, ``Broken Windows,'' where he said if somebody throws a rock into a window and you have got a broken window and nobody does anything about it, it is an invitation for more people to come along and break some more windows. Well, right now, the U.S. Government has done nothing.
As you have said, we have not spent the money in the State Department to try to defend ourselves against the foreign subversion of our elections and cyber espionage and sabotage. And when we had the Attorney General come to the Judiciary Committee, we asked him what had he engaged in to try to defend our elections across the country against another attack, and he said basically nothing. And followup efforts by members of the committee to get the Attorney General to meet with us have resulted in nothing.
So, this week, we have asked for $14 million from the appropriators to go to the Election Assistance Commission, which is the only Federal body we have got that is charged with trying to help State election administrators defend themselves against cyber attack. That $14 million is urgent and necessary, and it is obviously a very small sum of money, given the amount of money we spend on defense in America, but this is defense of our elections.
We are also asking for $400 million to help update outmoded and weak election technology in the States today. That is another badly needed infusion of cash to the States so we can fortify our elections. We know that at least 22 States suffered attempted electronic probes by foreign actors in 2016, and they are coming back in 2018, and everybody wants to know what are we doing about it, and we have no coordinated plan. At the very least, we should get this money to the Election Assistance Commission so we can help the States harden themselves.
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