Respect for Marriage Act
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. JOHNSON of Louisiana. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend, a champion for freedom from Ohio (Mr. Jordan). There is a lot to talk about here today, but I have to comment on what he just led in with and this violence that we supposedly all decry. It is a bit of a double standard, isn't it?
These care pregnancy centers are a vital institution in our country. They are in all 50 States. There are over 2,700 of these centers doing vital work every single day. They help millions of American women every year. They employ and work with over 10,000 medical professionals.
Do you know what their singular goal is?
It is to help women who are in difficult pregnancy situations, to help care for their unborn children. Who in the world could be opposed to that?
You know what?
Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke for a lot of our colleagues on the other side last week. She came out and shrieked they needed to be put out of business in her State. They needed to get rid of these centers. It is just incredible.
In the debate on the rule here on this floor in the last couple of hours, I went down the litany of all those 50 occurrences--at least the ones we know about, and there are more--where violence has been perpetrated against these centers--these people who are doing extraordinary work down in the trenches to help their fellow man.
I ran out of time, I could not list all of them and all of the vandalism and the destruction and the Molotov cocktails and the hatred that is spray-painted on the sides of these facilities that are funded, by the way, by churches and nonprofits and individuals who care about the sanctity of every single human life in America. Yet, there is just complete silence on the other side. That is a really sad statement about where we are.
I used to be legal counsel for a number of those care pregnancy centers, so I speak to this with personal experience.
Let me get to the issue of the day. This bill is just another superfluous exercise. This bill is completely and clearly unnecessary.
Do you know what, Mr. Speaker? The sponsors of this bill know that. They know that we are in a very divisive time in the country, and they are doing this anyway.
This bill is not only unnecessary; it is more of the same. It is yet another effort to delegitimize the Supreme Court. As Mr. Jordan explained, they have been doing that in earnest. Senator Schumer went to the steps of the Supreme Court and infamously called down the whirlwind on Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. By the way, it led to a planned assassination of Justice Kavanaugh, all the lawless protests on their lawns, threatening their children, and doxing the addresses of Supreme Court Justices' children. It is just unconscionable. It is against the law, the plain letter of the law, yet crickets from the other side.
They want to delegitimize the Court. They tried to pack it. They want to put four liberal Justices on the Court because they are concerned about the conservative majority right now. It is a lawless approach and a lawless response to the lawlessness of the radical left. So, this is another effort to delegitimize the Supreme Court.
It is also a continued disregard, an utter and total disregard, for the regular order in this body. I will explain in just a moment why that is so perilous in a situation like this with a bill like this.
It is also more desperation to focus on anything other than their policy failures, which Mr. Jordan articulated here a few moments ago.
Nonetheless, there is this bill before us today. Clearly, it is about simple fear-mongering. This is a partisan bill to make partisan arguments and to run ads in an election cycle. Do you know why we say that, Mr. Speaker? Because, as Mr. Jordan said, in the Dobbs opinion, which supposedly precipitated all this, it is clear if you read the opinion that this is not only an unnecessary piece of legislation, but it is divisive and misleading, and they know it. Because why? Anybody can read the opinion for themselves. Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion, of course, and he clarified it.
I am a constitutional law attorney. I used to litigate cases about the Constitution, what it means, and how it should be applied. I did that for 20 years before I got to Congress. Scarcely is there ever language this clear written in a Supreme Court opinion.
Let me give you the quote again, Mr. Speaker, in case anybody missed it, in case you didn't see it or you didn't want to see it. Justice Alito said in the majority opinion: ``And to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right.'' He continues: ``Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.''
Does everybody hear that? I will say that again: ``Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.''
Do you know why, Mr. Speaker? Because abortion is a unique area of the law. Abortion is about taking the life of another unborn person, another person, so the Court recognized that this is different and distinct, and everybody knows that. Everybody recognizes that, even Justice Clarence Thomas, whom they have worked so hard to demonize.
If you look at page 119 of the opinion, Mr. Speaker, you can see it for yourself. Justice Thomas said: ``The Court's abortion cases are unique . . . and no party has asked us to decide `whether our entire Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence must be preserved or revised' . . . Thus, I agree that''--and he quotes Justice Alito--nothing in the Court's opinion ``'should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.'''
That language is so clear. Anybody in this country can read that and understand obviously and plainly what that means, every civics student, every child. But, apparently, our friends on the other side don't like that language, or they don't want to see it, so they have manufactured this crisis, this demeaning and divisive debate, trying to reopen Pandora's box that no one has opened except the Democrats.
This is crystal clear. We ought to take a moment to remember, too, what did not happen after the Obergefell ruling that did happen after the Dobbs ruling. Did anybody harass Justice Kennedy at his home after Obergefell was handed down? No. Did conservatives--those who adhere to the Judeo-Christian heritage of the country, Evangelicals, and Catholics--did anybody vandalize businesses to promote their own viewpoints? Absolutely not. Did Republicans call to abolish the filibuster and add Justices to the Court? No, because we respect the institutions of this Nation.
But that is exactly what we are seeing from the left: a death threat on a Justice, endless protests outside the homes of the Justices, threats on their children, and threats to pack the Court.
Mr. Speaker, we live in an extraordinarily divided time, and reopening this policy, which is under no threat of any legislative or judicial body anywhere, seems more like an attempt by Democrats to stoke fear before the November elections rather than bringing the country together.
Mr. Speaker, we could use an effort to bring the country together right now. To that end, since the Democrats refuse to discuss what Americans are most concerned with, I will take just a moment, since we have the moment here, to walk through the failures of the Democrat policies. It is a quick summary. I won't take long on it.
I have been doing townhalls back in my State of Louisiana, and I can tell you what the people are concerned about, Mr. Speaker.
They are concerned about soaring prices in the grocery store, at the gas pump, and their mortgages.
They are concerned about uninhibited illegal immigration at the border and the utter lawlessness that threatens the very sovereignty, safety, and security of our country.
They are deeply concerned about rising crime in our cities.
They are concerned about the stunning incompetence at the most basic functions of government from the Biden administration.
These are what I am hearing back home as I travel the district holding townhalls and talking to constituents. Those constituents sent us here--the voters, the people--to be their Representatives and to work on their behalf, to work on behalf of them and their ability to provide for their families with little government overreach into their lives.
From economic failures at home to failures on the border, the Democrats have time and time again refused to work with Republicans on how to address the issues at hand. Today is just another example. It is just more of the same. Here we go, from one vote on an unnecessary bill that is only being used as a distraction from those failures that I referenced to a vote on a spending bill that will only make those failures worse.
I mentioned that part of the problem here, too, is the Democrats are rushing this bill to the floor outside regular order. They just completely defied regular order. They released the text for this bill only hours before its consideration in the Rules Committee last night. Democrats have held no legislative hearing and no markups on this bill.
We serve on the Judiciary Committee. This would have been within our jurisdiction. They didn't bother to bring it to a committee.
I remember from civics class that they taught us that this is how a bill becomes a law: You go through the process; you go to the committee. We shouldn't even teach that to kids anymore because it doesn't happen here anymore.
But that recklessness, that carelessness, and that defiance of the rules, order, and tradition here have real consequences because one of the consequences in the language of this bill, just one by way of example, is on page 3 of this private right of action clause. It raised a lot of eyebrows. We didn't have time to analyze that, debate it, and thoughtfully talk about that approach. Would that declare open season on religious persons and institutions? I don't know. It is a question a lot of people are asking today, scratching their heads, but, again, we had no opportunity to delve into that, to talk about it, and debate it. Nothing. So, they present this bill, and they drop it on the country.
Again, I just would reiterate, in summary, people back home ask us, there are lots of problems with things that are going on there, but this particular bill, what is the problem?
I just summarized it by saying that it is unnecessary, divisive, and misleading. What is worse is that the proponents of the legislation know that.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. JOHNSON of Louisiana. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
We have just been treated to a master class of misinformation. The Speaker also just said, ``Can you believe they are going after contraception?''
Give me a break. She knows that is not true. There is not a single Republican even talking about that or any of these other categories of the law. This is designed to divide the country. This bill is a shameful effort at that.
Mr. Nadler, when we were talking about our concerns about the care pregnancy centers being under assault, to make his case that pro-lifers are violent, he referenced the terrible murder of Mr. Slepian, an abortion provider, in 1998. That was a quarter century ago.
We are talking about the last 11 weeks. We have had 50 care pregnancy centers vandalized, attacked with Molotov cocktails, spray-painted, threats being made to Supreme Court Justices. There is no equivocation here at all.
Mr. Cohen implied that the conservative Justices misled the Senate in their confirmation hearings. We have got the receipts on that. It is demonstrably untrue.
Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs, said during his 2006 confirmation that Roe was `` . . . an important precedent of the Supreme Court.''
``It was decided in 1973, so it has been on the books for a long time.''
But he declined to call the ruling ``settled law.''
Justice Thomas, in 1991 in his hearings, he declined to comment on his views on Roe at all. He said, ``I do not think that at this time that I could maintain my impartiality as a member of the Judiciary and comment on that specific case.''
Justice Gorsuch, 2017 confirmation hearings, he said Roe was `` . . . a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was reaffirmed in Casey in 1992 and in several other cases.''
``So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other.''
However, he refused to signal how he would rule in future cases on abortion.
Justice Kavanaugh, 2018 confirmation hearings, echoed Gorsuch by saying that Roe was an ``important precedent,'' but he indicated during his confirmation that he would be open to overturning ``settled law,'' including Roe, citing a long list of past Supreme Court cases.
Justice Barrett, she was much more reserved on the Roe precedent.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. JOHNSON of Louisiana. Mr. Speaker, in her confirmation hearings in 2020, she said she was committed to obeying ``all the rules of stare decisis,'' promising that ``if a question comes up before me about whether Casey or any other case should be overruled, that I will follow the law of stare decisis, applying it as the Court is articulating it, applying all the factors, reliance, workability, being undermined by later facts in law, just all the standard factors.'' ``I promise to do that for any issue that comes up.''
She said that she had to remain neutral on it as an umpire, as they all did.
The record is clear. The quotes are there. Anybody can Google this. What they are presenting here on this floor is not true. It is demonstrably untrue, and they are doing it for partisan purposes. Every time they talk, they reaffirm our position on that.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source