For the People Act of 2021

Floor Speech

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Mr. COMER. Madam Speaker, I urge all Members, on a bipartisan basis, to support this amendment.

When reviewing H.R. 1 as introduced this Congress, I noticed it was missing several ethics provisions that were included in the bill last Congress when Donald Trump was President. But now that Joe Biden is President, those ethics provisions conveniently disappeared.

What was missing from this updated version of H.R. 1 were the following provisions:

Requirements that Presidential transition teams disclose a list of all positions each transition team member held outside the Federal Government for the previous 12-month period, including paid and unpaid positions.

Requirements that Presidential transition teams disclose sources of compensation for each transition team member exceeding $5,000 a year for the previous 12-month period.

And a requirement that the head of the Federal department or agency, or their designee, shall not permit access to the Federal department or agency, or employees of such department or agency, that would not be provided to a member of the public for any transition team member who does not make the required prior employment and conflicts of interest disclosures.

It is clear the absence of these provisions was pure politics, but my amendment adds those provisions back since what is good for a Republican President is good for a Democrat President or his or her administration.

Ethical principles are supposed to be universal. They are supposed to apply equally. And this bill, that so obviously exempts one political party from ethics rules, is not itself ethical. Many Democrats should vote for this amendment since it restores what Democrats proposed in the last Congress. We took the exact language and included it in this bill.

If this bill had gone through regular order and had been marked up in a committee, we could have addressed these discrepancies at the committee level instead of imposing this extended amendment process on the whole House. But this bill did not go through regular order, and so I offered this amendment at the Committee on Rules. This amendment restores to the bill ethics provisions that were originally intended to apply for President Trump and his advisers but were dropped from the bill for President Biden's administration.

Applying ethics rules to one political party but not another is wrong. The Committee on Rules, to their credit, took a step toward correcting this wrong by making this evenhanded amendment in order. Now, it remains for the full House to pass this amendment and to show its agreement on a bipartisan basis that ethics rules should apply equally.

Madam Speaker, I urge all members to join me in supporting the Comer amendment No. 18 in en bloc No. 2.

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