Issues of the Day

Floor Speech

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Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, we have someone running for President, a former President, who claims that there were no deaths of our soldiers in Afghanistan for 18 months under his Presidency. Clearly false. Identified as false. We will see the statistics. We see that 163 of our best and finest died in Afghanistan during the Trump Presidency, and they died in every year he was in office.

Now, more died under the Obama administration, but at least under the Obama administration, we got something. We got bin Laden. Let us not forget that on 9/11 we lost more Americans than Pearl Harbor, we lost more Americans on American soil than had been lost at any time since 1865.

Madam Speaker, 163 of our soldiers and marines died in Afghanistan under Trump, and what did we get for it? Did Trump leave Afghanistan better than he found it? Did Trump leave Afghanistan at all? No.

The Afghanistan he left his successor was identical to what he inherited from his predecessor, but 163 Americans died. He left the withdrawal, knowing it was very difficult, to the Biden administration, and then the attack is that we lost 12 soldiers under the Biden administration. We lost 163 under Trump. He did not leave Afghanistan better than he found it. He did not leave Afghanistan at all.

While focused on 9/11, we have to remember Dr. Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who helped us get bin Laden and has been in a Pakistani jail for a decade and a half since then. We should leave no man behind, and certainly not Dr. Afridi.

There have been proposals to trade Dr. Afridi for Dr. Siddiqui, a terrorist who tried to kill Americans, but didn't kill any Americans, who is now a mental patient in a prison hospital. We should make that trade whenever it becomes available.

Pakistan, right now, is in a period of unrest. We have to demonstrate our dedication to democracy and human rights around the world and particularly in Pakistan.

Yesterday, I got a commitment from the State Department official who deals with all of our policies in South Asia to consider directing Ambassador Blome to go visit Imran Khan in jail. For this man, a former prime minister--more votes than anyone else in Pakistan--a demonstration by the United States that this statesman should not be killed in prison is very important. Condemning Anti-Israel, Pro-Hamas Demonstrations

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Mr. SHERMAN. Madam Speaker, I join Vice President Harris in condemning yesterday's anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstrations.

The demonstrators may not know that their leaders are funded by Iran and Qatar, which fund the organizations and the propaganda. These same leaders glorified October 7. They rejoiced at the death of every Israeli civilian.

They condemned Israel on October 7 before Israel had done anything to respond because their demonstrations were not about whether Israel should not respond. Their demonstrations were a glorification of the death brought by Hamas.

Now, the followers chant, ``From the river to the sea,'' but some of them don't even know which river, which sea. What they don't know is the background of that slogan, ``From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free.'' It is a declaration that every Jew who lives from the river to the sea should be killed or ethnically cleansed.

Since, as we saw in the 1930s, there is no country that wants to accept millions of Jewish refugees, that means they should all be killed. That is the chant that we hear, ``From the river to the sea.''

Prior to October 7, we needed to see a two-state solution, and I hope we get there, but there is this effort to convey the life of those who lived in Gaza as being somehow equivalent to the Rohingya refugees, refugees living in camps in Bangladesh.

The fact is that those living in Gaza had longer life expectancies than the average person in the world, considerably longer than those living in Russia, roughly equal to those living in Saudi Arabia. All of that was destroyed on October 7.

Hamas knew exactly what they were doing. They conducted this attack for the purpose of the response because they know they cannot achieve their political objectives, which, remember, is to expel or kill every Jew from the river to the sea.

They can't possibly achieve those objectives unless they massively change world opinion. They know and have said on the record in their own comments that every death of a Palestinian civilian helps them achieve their ugly purpose.

That is why we had, in our great Capital, the waving of the Hamas flag while they burned the American flag. Make no mistake about it, those who hate Israel also hate America. We see our statues desecrated, and we see a call by the demonstrators for the final solution. At least a few of them understand that ``from the river to the sea'' means killing 7 million Jewish Israelis. Problems With Cryptocurrency

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Mr. SHERMAN. Madam Speaker, we have seen a discussion of cryptocurrency. It was the one thing the Biden-Harris administration agreed with Donald Trump on. We know that the Biden-Harris administration has been relatively tough on crypto, but here are the words of Donald Trump from 2019: ``I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated cryptoassets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity. . . . We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable. It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the world.''

That is what Donald Trump said until he realized that he could get tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from the crypto billionaire bros if he was willing to change his position, and that is exactly what he is doing.

He is going to the Bitcoin 2024 Nashville conference to pledge his allegiance to the bitcoin billionaires. You can be sure his campaign will get tens of millions--no, hundreds of millions into supersecret PACs to try to propagandize the American people. God only knows whether he will personally get tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. We will never know because, as I will explain, cryptocurrency is the favorite device, a well-tailored device, for those committing bribery and other crimes.

Some consultants have come to Vice President Harris--and thank God she has not yet taken the suggestion of these consultants--and told her to go to Bitcoin 2024 Nashville, and there will be hundreds of millions of dollars for her campaign.

Why do these bitcoin bros have so much money? Well, they are in the business of making money. Everybody else in business has to actually make a product and sell it to get money. With crypto, you just call it a currency, and it is money, and you make sure you have a billion coins for yourself before you sell the rest.

There are those in the Harris campaign or some outside the Harris campaign who will tell the Harris campaign, hey, the political thing to do is to get money from the crypto billionaires. The fact is that is not the case.

I have never seen a political year in which there is so much money available for candidates to communicate their messages. What will win in 2024 is not money but message.

The message has to be clear: Democrats don't sell out.

When Trump didn't see money on either side, he said he was not a fan of Bitcoin. Now, he is going to become a Bitcoin fanboy in Nashville. Our candidate won't sell out.

What is the risk posed by crypto? When the crypto bros tell you what they plan to do, you should believe them. Right now, crypto is just something interesting to bet on. You buy Ethereum today, maybe it is worth less tomorrow. Maybe it is more tomorrow. It seems as harmless as betting on the Dodgers or the Angels, but that is not the purpose of cryptocurrencies.

Cryptocurrencies aspire to be a currency. What have the crypto bros told us? That they plan to displace the dollar as a medium of payment and as a store of value, as a reserve currency.

How important is the dollar's current role as a reserve currency? Our fiscal policy, our budget deficit, is enormous. It would make Argentina blush. Our trade deficit is larger than any country in the history of the world, yet we continue to have a relatively prosperous country. We do that because of the role the dollar plays in international finance because the dollar is the reserve currency for everywhere around the world.

The bitcoin billionaire bros say, hey, that is a good idea. It supports the lifestyle of over 300 million Americans. Maybe we can divert those profits to ourselves. They tell you upfront they want to challenge the dollar's role.

If that role is successfully, even partially, challenged, we will have to cut expenditures, including Social Security. We will have to raise taxes. We will be in a very difficult circumstance.

I know people come here and say that we are going to have a balanced budget. We last had that under Clinton. Nobody has proposed a system for getting there anytime soon.

Yet, it is not just a potential reserve currency. It is designed to be a payment system. Now, how is it going to be better than the dollar? Well, it is electronic. So is Venmo. So is a host of other things that already exist.

I am sure that millions of transactions will take place where people are buying things today using the U.S. dollar in an electronic system. Most people can go a week or several weeks without touching a paper dollar or paper check. What is the thing that the crypto bros think makes their currency better? It is not the fact that it is electronic. It is that it is a perfect device to evade the law. The crypto transactions are on the blockchain, but no one knows who owns any blockchain account.

It is the preferred method--growing method--for bribery, drug dealers, human traffickers. It is, though, particularly valuable to tax evaders. The goal, the self-expressed goal, of the crypto bros is that income tax will only be a tax on wages and maybe a bit of voluntary contributions from those who make their money elsewhere.

Trump's Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service testified that we have basically a trillion dollars a year of uncollected taxes, mostly from the very wealthy. That means they have to conceal $3 trillion of income to avoid paying taxes or evade $1 trillion of tax. That means, in every decade, we are talking $30 trillion of assets that need to be concealed.

Cryptocurrencies are the perfect device to achieve that if they become currencies, if you can buy a yacht for a bitcoin or a bunch of bitcoins.

Harris will have a powerful issue in demonstrating that Trump knows full well that Bitcoin is a crock, that he sold out and that we won't, that her loyalty is to the American people who benefit from the role that the dollar plays in international transactions and as a reserve currency, that they benefit from a system in which we are able to collect taxes not just from those who get W-2 forms but from everybody who makes money in our society.

Now, I am not sure that the government will stop crypto, but I believe that crypto will stop crypto. There are a limited number of government currencies. You have a U.S. dollar. You have a Uruguayan peso. The Uruguayan peso will always have value because there will always be a Uruguay. The U.S. dollar will always be more valuable in total than the Uruguayan peso because America will always be bigger.

There is no inherent value of any cryptocurrency. Sure, we have bitcoin, but why isn't hamster coin worth more than bitcoin? There is no particular reason.

We have hamster coin. I always thought it was a joke and said so in a hearing until my staff said: No, boss, there is a hamster coin. Then I said, what about cobra coin? Well, no. We have cobra coin. A cobra could eat a hamster, but there is already a cobra coin.

I said, well, gee, there could be mongoose coin, and I proposed it in a hearing as a joke. Lo and behold, by the end of the day, they had created mongoose coin, which leads to the question: What about skibidi coin? I thought that was a joke until I was told that there already is a skibidi toilet coin.

Once they make the skibidi coin, skibidi toilet movie, will skibidi coin go to the Moon? We don't know. Why is bitcoin more valuable than skibidi coin? It is today, maybe not after the movie.

The promoters of crypto say, well, there is a limited number of Ethereum. There is a limited number of bitcoin. You can't have anymore, but you can have an infinite number of competing coins.

There are roughly 200 countries in the world, not an unlimited number, and it is obvious that by the order those countries are in, Uruguay will always be smaller than the United States. Engineered Intelligence

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Mr. SHERMAN. Madam Speaker, I want to focus on engineered intelligence. There are two groups of engineers who are in a race that they don't know about.

One are the bioengineers creating new DNA, perhaps a new species. By the end of this century, who says they won't have a thousand-pound mammal with two 80-pound brains, which will probably beat my grandkids on the law school admissions test.

We all know even more about computer engineers, and we know the upside of artificial intelligence. We heard our good friend, Jennifer Wexton, address this House, thanks in part to artificial intelligence.

We are not going to stop artificial intelligence. Hopefully, we will make sure that it does not somehow lead to bias and discrimination, but we do have to make sure of one thing, that artificial intelligence remains a tool, not a creature.

We need to do the research so that we have the capacity to monitor for and to prevent artificial intelligence from becoming self-aware, developing volition, developing ambition, and developing a survival instinct.

I know it sounds like science fiction, but if somebody describes for you the future, and it seems like they are describing a science fiction movie, they might be right in their description of the future. If somebody describes the future, and it doesn't look like a science fiction movie, you know they are wrong.

Our kids and our grandkids are going to be living in a science fiction movie. We just don't know which one. I hope it is not ``Terminator.''

We need to take seriously not only how artificial intelligence can be used as a tool to carry out, hopefully, benign objectives of its human programmers, but we do have to also monitor whether artificial intelligence becomes a creature, a self-aware entity interested in its own survival, aware of its surroundings with volition and ambition. Nation of Immigrants

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Mr. SHERMAN. Madam Speaker, I have cringed again and again when I have seen Republicans condemn immigrants by identifying individual crimes committed by individual immigrants.

Madam Speaker, imagine how much crime is committed in this country by bald people. All those crimes would be eliminated if bald people were somehow excluded from the country.

Every group has its saint and its sinners. You can turn to any group, God forbid bald people could be your choice, and identify individual criminals.

What I haven't heard is somebody coming to this floor and talking about the hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans who have been saved by immigrants, immigrants who are emergency medical technicians, home healthcare workers who are the difference between life and death for those they care for, those they feed, those they help prevent from falling, from our hospitals where you may have an immigrant as a janitor, preventing the spread of biological diseases throughout the hospital, or a hospital where you have the emergency room physician who is an immigrant.

Let us have a Republican come to this floor and say they don't care about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are alive today because of the lifesaving work of immigrants.

Let us work toward a more sensible immigration system. We had a chance of getting there with the bipartisan bill that was being worked on in the Senate that would have brought order to our border. Instead, it was killed by Donald Trump, who was remarkably honest and simply declared that he didn't want us to solve the problem because as long as the problem was there, it helped his campaign.

Let us realize that we are a Nation of immigrants, that every group, including immigrants, includes both lifesavers and includes those who commit crimes. Keep in mind that on a per capita basis, immigrants commit less crime than those of us who are native born.

Let us remember and praise all of the immigrants that have saved American lives and continue to do so today.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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