Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022
Floor Speech
I just want to read from the title of the bill.
``H.R. 350, 117th Congress, 2d Session. To authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent terrorism.''
Well, we already know what this looks like. We have already seen this happen. The Department of Justice went after parents who showed up at school board meetings to voice concerns about what was happening in their child's school.
Never forget what they did. They put in place this apparatus to report, to snitch, on parents.
The timeline here, I think, is so important. September 29, last fall, the leftwing political organization National School Boards Association writes a letter to the Biden administration asking exactly what this bill does. It says: Use domestic terrorism/counterterrorism measures against parents.
And guess what. Five days later, the Attorney General of the United States writes a memorandum that does just that, again, what this bill would codify and put into practice. He sends out a memo to every single U.S. Attorney around the country. In that memo, he says: Set up a dedicated line for threat reporting, a snitch line on parents.
And guess what happens after that. Sixteen days after that, the FBI sends out an email to agents all across the country saying: When you investigate these parents, when you are doing this, parents who reported on the snitch line the Attorney General established, put this designation, this threat tag label, on their name. All of that happened, and we know it happened, because whistleblowers came forward and told us about two dozen cases where this took place.
This bill is going to codify exactly what they have been doing. That is why this bill is so harmful.
One of the situations, one of the cases, a mom who showed up at a school board meeting was reported, and the person who filed the complaint said: Well, she is in the group Moms for Liberty, and she owned a firearm. Imagine that, a mom who cares about freedom and actually exercises her Second Amendment liberties.
Now, what happened in Buffalo we know is as wrong as wrong can be, but this legislation wouldn't prevent the terrible crime that took place there. This bill is the same bad bill that Democrats pulled 2 weeks ago because a few of them actually had concerns about First Amendment protected activity and what this legislation could do. Again, specifically, it says it wants to create new offices to investigate folks in our armed services, in our military, and in our law enforcement for the possibility of infiltration by white nationalism.
But, of course, it says nothing about threats from the left, threats like antifa. We know what happened the summer of 2020. It says nothing about that.
This bill is dangerous because we have already seen the weaponization of government. We saw it in the IRS a few years ago. We have seen it in the FBI, as I just pointed out, most recently the Department of Justice working with the FBI to go after parents. This bill formalizes what we have already seen. That is why it is so dangerous.
I urge a ``no'' vote on the legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, we don't give cover to anything. White nationalism is wrong. We have always said so. Everyone knows that.
But I tell you who does give cover, when the chairman of the Judiciary Committee says that antifa is a myth, that is giving cover. That is a statement made by the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee after we had testimony from FBI Director Wray talking about the dangers of antifa, after Attorney General Barr told us that antifa was involved in instigating and participating in violent activity. Talk about giving cover. Give me a break.
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Mr. JORDAN. Will the gentleman yield?
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Mr. JORDAN. Mr. Speaker, is it legitimate political discourse what is going on in front of the Supreme Court Justices' homes all last week, maybe even as we speak? Was it legitimate political discourse what took place over 100 days straight in Portland, Oregon, where antifa attacked a Federal court building? Was that legitimate political discourse as well?
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Mr. JORDAN. Mr. Speaker, the majority leader of the House just said we don't condone violence by anyone. That statement is just not accurate.
The entire summer of 2020, folks in the Democratic Party said rioters and looters were peaceful protestors. Republicans have condemned violence every time it happened. When it happened on January 6, we said it was wrong. When it happened in the summer of 2020, we said it was wrong, but they didn't.
The Democratic chair of the Financial Services Committee said to the rioters and looters that summer ``get more confrontational.'' The Vice President of the United States supported the effort to raise money to bail those rioters and looters out of jail.
We should condemn all violence, and we should prosecute people who commit crimes. We shouldn't be raising bail money to get them out of jail, and we shouldn't be encouraging with the comments people make as happened all that summer from the Democrats and from the left.
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