Providing for Consideration of H. Res. Insisting Department of Justice Comply with Requests and Subpoenas

Floor Speech

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Collins) for yielding me the customary 30 minutes.

Mr. Speaker, I hardly know where to begin. With all that is going on in the country and in the world--we have children being ripped apart from their families at the border; we have Republicans working with the White House trying to take away healthcare protections for the American people; and we have a President who seems unhinged--with all that is happening, this is what we are dealing with today on the House floor this morning. Basically, it is a resolution to try to undermine the Mueller investigation, which is investigating potential Russian involvement and collusion in our election.

That is a big deal. We should all want to get to the bottom of this. We should all want the truth. Instead of wanting to get to the truth, my Republican friends throw roadblocks in the way, one after another after another, to try to get people to try to discredit the investigation and to try to derail the investigation. It is unbelievable to me.

The President this morning tweeted that Russia continues to insist they had nothing to do with meddling in our election. I can't believe the President of the United States is tweeting that. What is wrong with him?

Every single intelligence agency in our government says that the Russians meddled in our election, and we have the President of the United States this morning tweeting that Russia says they didn't do it, so we have got to believe Russia.

I don't know how my friends can defend this. At some point, you have to say, ``Enough.''

I get it. Republicans want to constantly circle the wagons around the President with every outrageous thing he says and does, but this is about a foreign power--an adversary--meddling in our elections.

What is the response? Let's try to disparage the investigation. Let's try to undermine the investigation.

It is unreal that we are going through this exercise today, but I guess we have come to expect this.

Mr. Speaker, let me just say, also, that the process in this House that got us here today to debate this resolution was a disgrace and an affront to the way this Chamber is supposed to conduct business. In all my time here, I haven't seen a committee minority of either party treated as disrespectfully as Democrats were on Tuesday. That is when the Judiciary Committee considered this resolution of inquiry.

Democrats showed up on time and sat patiently waiting for this hearing to begin--and they waited, and they waited, and they waited because the Republican majority gaveled the hearing to order more than an hour after it was supposed to begin. They didn't even have the courtesy to tell the minority about the delay.

Things got only worse from there. When the hearing actually got underway, Democrats were cut off at every turn. The Republican majority moved the previous question, cutting off debate and preventing consideration of Democratic amendments. They blocked parliamentary inquiries and a unanimous consent request. Committee Republicans even took the extraordinary step of overruling their chairman after an amendment was ruled out of order. It was heavy-handed, and it was undemocratic.

My Republican colleagues should be ashamed of the way they conducted themselves. Maybe they are, because the chairman of the committee appeared to hide in the hallway during the vote until he was called by another Member, and when he did vote, he voted ``present.'' So did the Acting Chair.

Mr. Speaker, were they unwilling to stand up to the more conservative elements of their caucus? or did they condone what went on?

I don't see how anybody in this Chamber could endure such an embarrassing process. It is unfortunate that the majority of the Rules Committee essentially enabled it by using emergency procedures to quickly move this resolution.

This is a new low for a majority that has already turned this Congress into the most closed Congress in history. There have already been 89 closed rules this Congress, and it is only June. There has not been a single open rule under Speaker Ryan--not one.

It is fitting that this measure from the Judiciary Committee is being considered under the majority's 90th closed rule because the Judiciary Committee is now the second most closed committee in this Congress.

Mr. Speaker, what does the majority have to show for this bad process? We have another bad product here, this time a partisan measure meant to undermine the Russia investigation.

Now, we know this isn't a serious attempt at oversight because the Republican majority apparently doesn't believe in fulfilling its oversight responsibilities to begin with. Republicans have refused, for example, to examine foreign payments to the Trump organization. They refuse to examine extravagant travel by members of the administration. They refuse to examine HUD Secretary Carson's $31,000 dining set.

Who buys a $31,000 dining set? Where do you find a $31,000 dining set?

They refuse to investigate the use of private email by administration officials, including Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller, and countless other scandals involving EPA Administrator Pruitt.

The list goes on and on and on and on. We actually have a long list here, Mr. Speaker, of what we should be investigating. If my Republican colleagues would like a copy, I am happy to provide it to them. But suffice it to say, there is no oversight with regard to the misdeeds of this administration.

Mr. Speaker, what happened to the Republicans' zeal for oversight? Former Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Issa subpoenaed the Obama administration more than 100 times in just a 4- year span. I didn't always agree with him on his investigations, but at least the Oversight and Government Reform Committee was performing some oversight.

Republicans today are completely missing in action under President Trump. This is an administration that has been embroiled in one scandal after the next. It is an administration dripping with corruption. This makes the Nixon administration look like Common Cause. I have never seen anything like it. Apparently, the Republicans only believe in oversight if it involves President Obama or Secretary Clinton.

Let me remind my Republican colleagues that there wasn't a single scandal in President Obama's 8 years in office that implicated him: no Cabinet official was forced to resign in scandal; no senior White House official had to leave in the face of wrongdoing. Only with the Trump administration can you have one scandal start at breakfast only to have another one by the time you sit down for dinner.

We should be doing our job--getting to the bottom of what is happening and holding people accountable--but instead we are throwing sand in the gears of the Russia investigation. This is crazy.

Now, let me remind everyone of what Special Counsel Mueller's investigation has yielded so far.

Twenty people and three companies have either been indicted or pled guilty. That includes George Papadopoulos, foreign policy adviser on President Trump's campaign, who pled guilty to making false statements to the FBI; Michael Flynn, the President's former National Security Advisor, who also pled guilty to making false statements to the FBI.

Paul Manafort, his former campaign chair, was indicted on charges of conspiracy, money laundering, and making false statements. He was later also charged with tax, financial, and bank fraud charges. He is sitting in jail today. As we have this debate right now, Paul Manafort is in jail.

Rick Gates, the President's campaign aid, was also indicted on similar charges.

That is just a small sample based on what we know today. We will see what else the Special Counsel's investigation finds.

So this goes beyond your basic policy disagreements. This is about whether the minority in this Congress is allowed to do the job they were elected to do--not just this Democratic minority, but any minority, because we have seen and we could see again this year just how quickly power shifts in Congress. This is about whether this Congress is going to fulfill its oversight responsibilities or sweep possible wrongdoing under the rug.

Now, we have a chance today to demand better from this majority, so we should vote against this rule and demand a better process. That is the only way we are going to see a better product.

Just one final thing before I reserve my time. I say to my Republican friends: Look at what you are doing to this institution. You are destroying it. Not only the closed process, the most closed Congress in the history of our country, but the way you move legislation forward. The way Democrats in the Judiciary Committee were treated on this resolution, in all my years here, I have never seen anything like it.

I get it. We have a President who wants to behave like a king and who thinks, when he speaks, everybody should sit up to attention just like they do when Kim Jong-un speaks. But this is supposed to be the people's House, and you are diminishing this institution. This has to stop.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, as I said in the beginning, there are a whole bunch of troubling things happening in our country today. The Supreme Court's Janus decision was just yet another very disturbing development that really attacks working men and women.

Mr. Speaker, a union's ability to collectively bargain benefits both its members and nonmembers alike. Unions are responsible for many of the worker protections Americans enjoy today, and they continue to fight for fair pay and good working conditions, including for 17.3 million public employees.

We have unions to thank for our weekends, for paid vacations, for overtime pay, for the 8-hour workday, for child labor laws, for pensions, for the minimum wage, for sick leave, for Social Security, for parental leave, for holiday pay, and the list goes on and on and on.

However, yesterday, the Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to hardworking employees, the unions that represent them, and the protections they provide us. In a 5-4 ideological decision, the Court invalidated the laws of 22 States and undermined public sector unions. This decision enables free-riding by those who benefit from union agreements but do not want to help cover the costs of collective bargaining and enforcement.

Unions fight for every single worker. Therefore, every worker should pay their fair share.

Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to bring up Representative Cartwright's legislation, H.R. 6238, the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. This bill protects the rights of State and local government employees to join unions and collectively bargain.
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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire from the gentleman how many more speakers he has.

Mr. Speaker, as I said at the outset, there are lots of things that we should be doing oversight on and that they we are not.

The Oversight Committee has chosen not to look into all the scandals in this White House. They have chosen instead to look the other way.

I mentioned EPA Administrator Pruitt. He has demonstrated over and over that he has no regard for taxpayer money. He is living a lifestyle of the rich and famous at EPA. He has no respect for his position and no desire to follow our ethics law. His many abuses of his position demand that we fully investigate his actions.

For example--I love this--he spent $43,000 on installing a soundproof booth in his office. Who does that? GAO stated that he was required to notify Congress before spending more than $5,000 on office improvements, but he goes ahead and spends $43,000 on a soundproof booth, I guess to make private phone calls. He racked up nearly $200,000 flying first class and luxury aircraft on the taxpayers' dime. One of those trips was to Italy. It cost $30,000. He rented an apartment from an energy lobbyist for $50 a night here in Washington. He enlisted an aide to help find his wife a job.

You can't make this stuff up. And crickets from the Oversight Committee and my Republican friends in Congress.

Congress needs to investigate the alarming drug price trends in this country. This is an emergency, a life or death issue for our constituents. Because of high drug prices, one in four Americans cannot afford to fill a prescription. These high drug prices are not due to foreign markets, but they are due to our unfair pricing system.

We issue patents to drug companies, allowing them to have exclusive rights on drugs. Make no mistake, patents are important for incentivizing and rewarding innovation. However, drug companies found ways to game the system by prolonging their patents and continuing their tight hold on lifesaving medications.

A study by UCLA found that 74 percent of new patents from 2005 to 2015 went to drugs that already existed. Patents allow these drug companies to charge patients unfair prices without facing competition. That is just unacceptable.

But I guess we shouldn't be surprised that there is no investigation, because my Republican friends are working with this White House to undue patient protections in the Affordable Care Act. They are even trying to take away preexisting condition protections.

Right now, because of the law, if you have a preexisting condition, an insurance company cannot discriminate against you and demand that you pay more. They have to give you the insurance. They want to take that away. This is unbelievable. We should be investigating this stuff.

I could go on and on and on, but we are not doing that. What we are doing is, we are bringing a resolution that has been put forward by some who are trying to undermine the Mueller investigation and who do not want the American people to focus on the involvement between Trump operatives and the Russians.

When I would go up to Massachusetts on the weekends, it used to be that people would ask me who in the Trump administration met with the Russians. Now the question is: Who in the Trump administration didn't meet with the Russians?

What I love about the people who are testifying before the Mueller committee, they now are getting in trouble because they are realizing that, if you lie, there is a consequence, so they all have amnesia. They met with Russian operatives time and again, and they forget. They mysteriously remember when they are confronted with the evidence.

We all should be shocked by this. A foreign adversary interfered in our election. Every single intelligence agency in our government confirms that. And yet you have the President of the United States today tweeting: Oh, Russia insists they didn't meddle in our election.

Oh, my God, I can't believe this. The President of the United States is tweeting that today. It is shameful. Stop defending this unacceptable behavior, and stop defending a process that is unacceptable as well.

I mentioned the terrible treatment Democrats received in the Judiciary Committee when this thing was reported out. I have never seen anything like that in my life. Democrats waited for an hour and they were just shut out of any opportunity to amend the measure or even speak.

Welcome to the United States Congress. This is supposed to be the people's House. This is supposed to be the shining example of democracy, and you get people who have questions or who have ideas who are shut down in committee.

Then we bring it to the floor after going through the Rules Committee last night, and it comes to the floor under a closed process. This is the most closed Congress in history. This is the 90th closed rule.

What does that mean? It means that this legislation cannot be amended. There is limited debate. You have to vote for it up or down, my way or the highway. Everybody, Democrats and Republicans, are blocked from offering any of their ideas or any of their potential improvements to this bill. Nothing.

This is the 90th closed rule, completely closed rule, in this Congress, the 90th bill that has come before us where neither Democrats nor Republicans can offer anything.

It is frustrating beyond words to be here today. The system here is rigged. This is going to pass on a party-line vote, I guess. But this is not the way the people's House should be run. This is disgraceful. At some point, my Republican friends who care about this institution have to say enough is enough. They have to demand a more open, more transparent system here. This cannot stand.

So, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the previous question, so we can address the terrible impacts of the Supreme Court decision in the Janus case and vote ``no'' on the rule. We should not be doing this today. We should not be engaged in an attempt to try to defend the indefensible or undermine an important investigation into Russia's meddling in our election.

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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

A recorded vote was ordered.

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