Constitution Day and the President's Assault on the Constitution

Floor Speech

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Ms. WATERS. Madam Speaker, I rise to honor Constitution Day. Every year, on September 17, Constitution Day reminds us that while we are a nation of diverse races, ethnicities, religions, backgrounds, and stories, we share at least one commonality: a collective belief in the amended document that founded our nation.

The Constitution represents what our nation strives to be: a country of laws, fairness, and justice. A nation that strives to protect the rights of each of its citizens and inhabitants and embolden, not subvert, the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

The Founding Fathers always realized that the Constitution is an imperfect document, and that is why they allowed it to be amended. It has been amended twenty-seven times since its original ratification, and there are still people who are proposing additional amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment abolished the provision that counted African American slaves as three- fifths of a human being. The Nineteenth Amendment gave most, but not all, women the right to vote. Some provisions of our Constitution are still being debated by the American people, such as the Second Amendment.

The Founding Fathers allowed for these amendments because they understood that the Constitution would always represent a vision of a more perfect nation, and that vision must necessarily change and evolve over time. The Founding Fathers risked their lives to rebel against tyranny, and their struggle to win the freedom to write the Constitution must serve as a reminder to us that we too, if need be, must struggle to defend it.

We must honor Constitution Day not only by celebrating the document, but by pledging to protect it. Because this year, the Constitution is in need of our protection.

The President of the United States took an oath to ``preserve, protect and defend the Constitution''. It is an oath required by Article Two, Section One of the Constitution. Yet it is an oath that has not been taken seriously or upheld for four years now.

The First Amendment protects our freedom to peacefully assemble. Yet this President has deployed unmarked, unidentified federal agents to localities to tear gas and attack Americans who are peacefully assembling.

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, yet an executive order was signed this year directing the federal government to reconsider the laws governing online speech after the President's online posts were marked as false and misleading. The executive order was an attempt to silence this President's critics, in clear violation of the First Amendment. If a person's right to free speech depends on a ruler approving what is said, then free speech does not exist at all.

The First Amendment protects the freedom of the press. In violation of this amendment, the President has called the press the ``enemy of the people''.

Article One of the Constitution contains the Foreign Emoluments Clause, which prohibits the President from receiving any gift of value without the consent of Congress. This President has never divested from any of his holdings and refused to place his assets in a blind trust. Funds from foreign governments continue to flow into this President's personal accounts, in blatant violation of Article One.

Article Two, Section Three of the Constitution obligates the President to ``take care that the laws be faithfully executed'', yet this is a President who, on at least ten separate occasions, deliberately attempted to interfere with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into collaboration between Russia and the President's campaign.

The Fifth Amendment states that all persons, citizen or otherwise, shall be afforded due process of law. This President created a family separation policy that tore children from their families and indefinitely imprisoned them in cages, in flagrant violation of their Fifth Amendment rights.

The Constitution protects freedom of religion and guarantees all people equal protection under the law. In direct violation of these freedoms, this President banned people from entering the United States based on nothing more than the religion they practice. He even called it a ``Muslim Ban''.

The Constitution states that Congress has the power to establish post offices, and this President took an oath to defend this provision of the Constitution. In violation of his oath and this constitutional provision, this President is making every effort to dismantle the agency that, today, is an inseparable part of our shared American identity.

The ``right to vote'' is mentioned five times in the Constitution. Yet this President admitted to voter suppression when he stated that he did not want to fund the U.S. Postal Service because doing so would help Americans vote by mail.

Upon exiting the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of people asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: ``A republic, if you can keep it''. On this Constitution Day, let us remember our responsibility to defend the Constitution, so that we may ``keep it''.

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