Relating to the Consideration of House Report and An Accompanying Resolution
Floor Speech
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 1023 and ask for its immediate consideration.
The Clerk read the resolution, as follows: H. Res. 1023
Resolved, That if House Report 117-284 is called up by direction of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol: (a) all points of order against the report are waived and the report shall be considered as read; and (b)(1) an accompanying resolution offered by direction of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol shall be considered as read and shall not be subject to a point of order; and (2) the previous question shall be considered as ordered on such resolution to adoption without intervening motion or demand for division of the question except one hour of debate equally divided among and controlled by Representative Thompson of Mississippi, Representative Cheney of Wyoming, and an opponent, or their respective designees.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Reschenthaler), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only. General Leave
Mr. Speaker, on Monday, the Rules Committee met and reported a rule, House Resolution 1023. The rule provides for consideration of the resolution accompanying House Report 117-284 under a closed rule if the report is called up by direction of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The rule provides 1 hour of debate equally divided among and controlled by Chairman Thompson, Vice Chair Cheney, and an opponent.
Mr. Speaker, if 90 percent of success in life is just showing up, then 90 percent of acting in contempt of Congress is not showing up by failing to respond to multiple subpoenas you have been lawfully served. The rest of contempt is not turning over documents you have been ordered to produce and acting with open disregard and scorn for the rule of law, Congress, and representatives of the American people.
Neither Dan Scavino nor Peter Navarro has shown up in response to repeated congressional subpoenas. They have blown us off completely.
Neither Mr. Scavino nor Mr. Navarro has produced a single document or offered 1 minute of testimony in response to the subpoenas sent by the House of Representatives.
While more than 800 Americans have come forward voluntarily or properly responded to congressional subpoenas, which are orders under penalty of law, saying you must show up to testify under oath and invoke any asserted privileges in person, Scavino and Navarro have followed Steve Bannon and are acting as if they are way too busy and way too important to bother with the mere United States House of Representatives. They think that having worked for a former President of the United States excuses them from complying with lawful orders.
This is clearly false; this is clearly wrong; and we must make an emphatic statement about it today.
Mr. Speaker, I ask America to consider this: If your son or daughter were subpoenaed to come testify before the Congress of the United States, would you advise them to sit home on the couch and blow it off? I know I wouldn't.
Every year, thousands of Americans are held in criminal contempt for ignoring their legal obligations to comply with a lawful subpoena issued by courts or legislative bodies.
Here in the District of Columbia, you can be sent to jail for 6 months and fined $1,000 for acting in contempt of a subpoena and not showing up. We have checked on multiple days and found, on any given day, 7, 8, 10, or a dozen people are being found guilty of contempt in the courts of the District of Columbia.
That is the exact same criminal offense that Mr. Scavino and Mr. Navarro committed, and that is the exact same penalty they are facing for their misconduct.
Each of these witnesses was given ample and repeated opportunities to comply, opportunities that continue to this day. Yet, they openly and brazenly flout the authority of the Congress and mock their own personal duty to comply with the rule of law.
Legal contempt exists for those who act with open disregard or disobedience of the law, especially when acting with scorn for the authority of government. It exists precisely for cases like this.
Here is what has happened with Mr. Scavino. In September of last year, the committee issued its first of three subpoenas. We asked him to come testify before us on October 15, 2021, last year.
When he could not be found to actually accept service of the first subpoena, we issued a second subpoena, asking him to appear before the committee on October 28, 2021. He told the committee that wasn't enough time for him; he needed 1 extra week.
We generously gave him a week, and we set a third deposition date of November 4, 2021, but he didn't come on November 4 either. Instead, he requested another extension.
Bending over backward to accommodate this witness, we set a fourth deposition date of November 12, 2021. Still, that wasn't enough time for him.
We acted in good faith again, and assuming he was acting in good faith, we set a fifth deposition date of November 19. When that day arrived, did he finally show up to do his civic duty? No, he did not. Instead, he waited until the eve of the deposition and then, for the first time, challenged the service of the subpoena.
Out of an abundance of deference and caution, and to make every effort to demonstrate the respect for the rule of law that Scavino was not showing, we issued yet a third subpoena inviting him to come testify before us once again on December 1, 2021.
Finally, with Scavino completely out of excuses and the committee out of patience, his final deposition date of December 1 arrived, and he simply did not show up.
Six times this committee invited Scavino to testify, and six times he stood us up. He stood the American people up. He refused to testify before Congress about what he knows about the most dangerous and sweeping assault on the United States Congress since the War of 1812, which was by a foreign power.
But even after he failed to show up in December, the committee held an open door for Mr. Scavino to come in and testify. But in the more than 6 months since the committee's first subpoena was sent to him, he has never once come in to speak with us. He has not given us a single document, Mr. Speaker.
It is the same basic story with Mr. Navarro. On February 9, we issued him a subpoena to produce documents on February 23 and to testify on March 2. There have been repeated evasions and contortions by the witness since then.
Generous accommodations have been offered by the committee, all of it leading to nothing but his open contempt and mockery for this process and for the rule of law. He never showed up, and he never produced a single document.
When more than 800 Americans have voluntarily testified and complied with the subpoenas rendered by our committee, the witnesses have nothing but excuses for their noncompliance, excuses you would not accept from a teenage child.
Navarro says he wants us to send him written interrogatories, and he will answer his questions in writing. Wouldn't that be nice? Any witness to a car accident, a murder, an assault, or an insurrection in the land would love not to have to answer actual questions under sworn oath, but that is not how our system works.
The word ``subpoena'' means ``under the penalty of law.'' ``Sub'' means under; ``poena'' means ``penalty of law.'' Under the penalty of law, you show up and you answer questions in the United States of America. If you think you have a legal privilege excusing you from answering questions, you assert your privileges under oath, at the time of questioning that you show up, to specific questions, whether it is the attorney-client privilege; the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, which a number of witnesses have asserted before our committee, as it is their legal right to do; the priest-penitent privilege; or the executive privilege.
The Court has been clear. The Supreme Court has been clear. If you think you have one of these privileges, you show up and you assert it to the specific questions being asked to you. But the privilege against self-incrimination, the executive privilege, the marital privilege, none of these is a magic wand that you can wave from your sofa and not show up under a subpoena to a lawful proceeding.
But Navarro continues to mutter the words ``executive privilege,'' as if it is some kind of magic wand that would keep him from ever having to testify about anything, like Harry Potter's invisibility cloak. He even says, repeatedly, the executive privilege is not mine to waive, which is high comedy, Mr. Speaker, because it is not his to waive, which means, by definition, it is not his to invoke in the first place.
We know it is not his to invoke. The Supreme Court has been clear about this, too. The executive privilege belongs to the President of the United States of America, the actual President. President Biden has specifically decided not to invoke executive privilege in Navarro's case or in Scavino's case.
Yet, Navarro says the executive privilege here belongs to ex- President Donald Trump, which is not only extremely dubious but totally irrelevant.
It is dubious because the Supreme Court just rejected a claim by Donald Trump himself, in Trump v. Thompson, that his materials were protected from disclosure to the January 6th Select Committee in Congress by executive privilege.
Even if Trump were still the President, the Court essentially said there is an overwhelming public interest in these materials that dwarfs whatever dubious interest in executive secrecy may linger. So the claim would fail, even if President Joe Biden were himself here to assert it on behalf of Navarro and Scavino.
But Navarro's attempt to stand above the law by mentioning Donald Trump's name is also completely irrelevant. Why? Everyone, please take note of this: Because Donald Trump has never even asserted the executive privilege to cover Peter Navarro, not once. We have received no communication from Donald Trump, either directly or indirectly from Navarro, showing that Trump is trying to exercise an executive privilege claim, which is doomed to failure anyway under the logic of the decision just rendered by the Supreme Court.
Mr. Speaker, so what do we have? Two guys in the District of Columbia blowing off a congressional investigation and subpoenas into a deadly insurrection, which caused multiple deaths; inflicted brutal, savage injuries on 150 of our officers, who ended up with broken jaws, necks, vertebrae, noses, traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress syndrome; and interrupted Congress from executing its constitutional duties of counting electoral college votes for the very first time in American history--oh, yes. And it nearly succeeded in overthrowing the 2020 Presidential election and toppling the peaceful transfer of power, perhaps for all time, as United States District Court Judge Carter wrote in a blistering opinion last week, rejecting this exact same and equally ridiculous claim of John Eastman, who helped cook up the absurd legal camouflage for this attempted coup in the first place against the American constitutional system of government.
The gentlewoman, I think, said something about the Russian hoax or Russian collusion. I accept the heckling, Mr. Speaker. That is all right because if she wants to continue to stand with Vladimir Putin and his brutal, bloody invasion against the people of Ukraine, she is free to do so.
We understand there is a strong Trump-Putin axis in the gentlewoman's party. If she wants to continue to stand with Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, that is her prerogative, but please do it on her own time forthwith.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
This is not a partisan investigation. We were created under House Resolution 503 after, I am afraid, the gentleman and his colleagues voted to thwart a totally bipartisan, independent outside commission made up of five Democrats and five Republicans with equal subpoena power simply because Donald Trump exercised his veto within the Republican Party; the same Donald Trump who calls the madman, mass murderer, Vladimir Putin, a genius, but we know we have some people echoing all of Trump's complicity with Vladimir Putin from the Georgia delegation back there.
This is a bipartisan committee. It is the only committee I am aware of that has a Democratic chair in a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives and a Republican vice chair, Ms. Cheney, who was the head of the GOP Conference. She was the head of the House Republican Conference, now the vice chair of this committee, and they call it a partisan exercise.
The second point I need to make is that executive privilege must be asserted by the President. This one isn't even asserted by the former President. It is just somebody going in and saying, ``I have got an executive privilege.''
Is that really the precedent that my colleagues want to set, Madam Speaker? I mean, that is pretty astonishing if that is the position that they are taking.
Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms. Scanlon), my very distinguished colleague.
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Mr. RASKIN. No, I don't yield for that purpose, which is an extraneous and irrelevant distraction from the resolution. All time yielded is for the purposes of debate only.
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Mr. RASKIN. I am sorry?
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Mr. RASKIN. Are you yielding?
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Mr. RASKIN. You have not been heckled by any of our Members, while I was heckled by----
More than 800 Americans have come to testify before our committee, the minority leader should be notified before he leaves the Chamber. Four of them have categorically refused and blown off the subpoenas of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The minority leader attacks our committee as partisan and political, as some of his colleagues do. Well, we are a bipartisan committee with a Democratic chair and Republican vice chair.
But today, the minority leader gave the game away as he boiled over with rage toward our committee. He gave the game away. He is very upset that the former chair of the House Republican Conference has been telling the truth about Donald Trump's big lie, his incitement of violent insurrection, and the attack on American constitutional democracy.
And that is why he is in the very embarrassing position of having supported, offered, and pressed for an independent, 9/11-style commission about the January 6 attack. And as the minority leader, he asked for five Republicans and five Democrats. He asked for equal subpoena power on both sides, equal staff on both sides.
And Chairman Thompson, who now chairs the January 6th Select Committee and chairs the Homeland Security Committee, he agreed to it. A lot of Democrats were upset about that. They said, we are in the majority. Why should we agree to have everything 50/50, right down the middle? But he agreed, and the Democrats agreed, because that is what the Republicans offered.
Great. We were going to have a 9/11-style independent commission.
And then you know what happened? You know who vetoed it? The fourth branch of government, Donald Trump, who some of their Members slavishly report to like sycophants.
And Donald Trump said he didn't want any investigation into the attack on this body, the Congress of the United States. He didn't want any investigation at all.
And you know what the minority leader did? He walked it back. They pulled the plug on the independent commission, and that is why we ended up with the January 6th Select Committee in the House of Representatives, which the Speaker has made sure is bipartisan and has operated, in my experience, Mr. Speaker, as the most bipartisan committee I have ever been on.
Why? Because we don't spend an hour at the beginning of each meeting with a bunch of empty partisan gimmicks and stunts; the kind we just saw, wasting the taxpayers' money and time; 20 minutes of that nonsense going nowhere; at the same time that there is an actual hearing taking place in Cannon 310, right now, by the Committee on Homeland Security, on the question of the border.
But instead of attending the hearing, I counted at least five or six different Members who were in that conga line. I will be interested to know whether they are even going to go to the hearing afterwards. Instead, they come and participate in that empty, absurd ritual, wasting the time of this body.
But the minority leader comes here and, amazingly, attacks our committee, when he sabotaged his own idea. But this committee is closing in on the truth, and that is why we get all these circus antics and all the attempts to distract the American people.
Mr. Speaker, if I had been dealt the hand that my friend from Pennsylvania has been dealt today, as a lawyer, as a Member of Congress, I suppose I would have done everything in my power to distract the House of Representatives also from the business at hand.
We have two people who are flagrantly, brazenly defying the authority of the House of Representatives of the United States in order to avoid coming here to tell the truth. They are acting in contempt of Congress, and we must hold them in contempt of Congress because of that.
I wanted to go back to something else that the minority leader said in echo of the minority floor leader's points.
They cling to the suggestion that there is no valid legislative purpose being conducted by the January 6th Select Committee; and they also say it is unlawfully composed.
Well, that has been rejected by several courts. In fact, all of the arguments that they are making have been rejected by the courts. I don't think they have won a single case in court yet.
But check out Budowich v. Pelosi with Judge Boasberg, or Eastman v. Thompson, where these courts said, not only is there a valid legislative purpose, but this is the quintessential legislative purpose; that is, guaranteeing the preservation of democratic self- government. If it is not a valid legislative purpose to investigate violent attacks, insurrections, and attempted coups against the government of the United States, then what is a valid purpose? The courts have said, the courts have got that right. They have written opinions.
I guess we are going to have to send a copy to the minority leader because he is apparently oblivious to it.
But even without the courts slapping down everything they are saying over there, just think about it. Would they really want to say that if there are violent attacks taking place against the Capitol we can't investigate it?
The Eastman decision also rejected the claim that we are somehow unlawfully composed.
I have got to say something on behalf of Representative Liz Cheney, who I probably disagree with on 90 percent of the issues we vote on here. But she was just maligned and castigated by the minority leader in an utterly unfair way.
She has operated with nothing but patriotism for this country and constitutional patriotism for the rule of law and the processes that define us. And they can overthrow her as the head of their caucus because she doesn't bow down on the altar of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin the way that the gentlewoman from Georgia was heckling me does. And they can attack her because she thinks for herself and doesn't act like a cult member.
But we won't do that, even though we disagree with her on a lot of issues, but she is a constitutional patriot, and I feel she is owed an apology.
Mr. Speaker, before the gentleman goes, I want to tell the gentleman from Texas that I would never accuse him of performing a stunt. I was referring to the people who should have been in the Homeland Security Committee hearing actually dealing with the issue they profess to be talking about here on the floor under completely different auspices.
Let me go back to the questions offered by my distinguished friend from Pennsylvania who said, well, if they really did have a valid legislative purpose, as all these courts are saying, then they would be talking to the former Sergeant at Arms--well, we have--and we would be talking to the National Guard--we have.
Somebody is going to have to dust off the talking points over on that side because we have heard from more than 800 people who were involved.
This has nothing to do with any kind of ideological witch hunt; this has to do with an assault on American democratic institutions.
Mr. Speaker, before the gentleman leaves, I want to say a word about the distinguished gentleman from New York. We are all blessed to have Mr. Katko as a colleague. He is a brilliant lawyer and a man of exceptional character and honor.
He was the one who had been tasked by the minority leader to negotiate with the majority about creating an independent commission to investigate the assault on American democracy that took place on January 6. He was given very specific instructions, and he came back a winner. He had gotten an agreement for five Republicans and five Democrats, equal subpoena power right down the middle.
Alas for his caucus, alas for this Congress, alas for the country, the leadership pulled the rug out from beneath him.
We are going to be very sorry to see Mr. Katko leave Congress at the end of this session. We will all be impoverished by his absence.
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Mr. RASKIN. Jackson Lee).
Ms. JACKSON LEE. Mr. Speaker, the people of the United States deserve to know the truth. With all the ranting of my friends across the aisle, the Constitution indicates that this Nation was formed to create a more perfect Union.
There were those who incited January 6. There were those who surrounded President Trump who did nothing to stop the violence and terrorism of January 6. If witnesses come before a duly authorized bipartisan committee and refuse to provide the American people with the truth, then we need to stand here and provide them with a contempt order so that the truth can be found.
Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in voting for this contempt order for the truth for the American people and the sanctity of the Constitution.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I do want to thank my friend from Pennsylvania. Sometimes when I hear him in the committee, I think about another great Republican who served in the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, Thaddeus Stevens. But today, my friend let me down a little bit because Thaddeus Stevens was a great enemy of insurrection and rebellion. He led the forces in this Congress who insisted upon accountability for the people who would dare wage war against the Congress of the United States and against the Union and the people who were all elected to serve and to represent.
Justice Kavanaugh, of course, was not ruling in the case that my good friend cited before. He was just opining. There was no ruling there. So that was one Justice's opinion.
My friend cuts me to the quick when he says that we don't care about the separation of powers. I think I am going to have to turn that insult around and say that they don't care about the separation of powers because the executive privilege of the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, going all the way back to 1953, in a case called the United States v. Reynolds that the executive privilege may be invoked only by the President of the United States.
And this President of the United States, who represents the Article II branch, has said he is not invoking it on behalf of Scavino or Navarro. He has rejected it.
The funny part is that the former President they talked about hasn't even shown up to try to invoke it. And what they are talking about doing could never be the subject of executive privilege anyway because it is political activity, which is a crime under the Hatch Act. It is criminal activity. It is a crime to engage in insurrection and coup.
How could executive privilege--even if you had a President who wanted nothing more than to try to drape the activities of Scavino and Navarro in executive privilege, how could that President ever prove that it applied? Navarro's job, for example, was the trade adviser. This has nothing to do with trade. He was engaged in trying to overthrow a Presidential election, as Judge Carter said last week.
Mr. Speaker, this is a matter of the utmost solemnity and seriousness to the American people. We are talking about the survival of American democratic government. For most of human history, people have lived under people like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, the kings, the queens, the dictators, the tyrants, and the bullies whom some people would want to flatter.
But we have something else going on here in America. We have got a project in democratic self-government. Lincoln knew how tenuous it was. He asked whether government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall last or shall perish from the Earth.
That is the question facing us, too. So let's deal with all the issues and controversies we want. But couldn't we get together and all stand up for the institutions of the country?
We are doing that in our committee, which is bipartisan. I fear that sometimes we are moving into a Democratic/Republican caucus in Congress and a Trump caucus. There are those of us, like Ms. Cheney, like Mr. Kinzinger, and like Mr. Thompson on the committee, who want to work together to get to the bottom of this and then to deal with the problems of the country. And then there are those, like the minority leader, who will follow the will of Donald Trump if he says he doesn't want any investigation at all.
I am sorry, Mr. Speaker, but that is where we are today. These two witnesses have acted with contempt towards Congress and the American people. We must hold them in contempt of Congress and the American people.
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