Protecting American Agriculture From Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024
Floor Speech
Mr. Speaker, before I begin, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Today will serve as a reminder that we should work hard to guard against terrorism and always stand against hate.
Mr. Speaker, moving to the debate on H.R. 9456, I would like to start by noting that Democrats, especially those serving on the Financial Services Committee, have a strong record of working with Republicans to counter threats from the People's Republic of China. In fact, just yesterday, the House passed two bills from our committee.
Unfortunately, H.R. 9456 is not an example of that kind of bipartisanship. In fact, this bill undermines a bipartisan law that we passed just 6 months ago. Yes, it was 6 months ago that the House and Senate worked across the aisle and with the Biden-Harris administration to pass legislation that would protect our national security from adversarial countries like China acquiring critical agricultural land in the United States.
To help review foreign investments involving U.S. agriculture, this bipartisan law added the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which is the interagency committee that determines whether a foreign investment in a United States company or asset could pose a threat to our national security. That law further codified reporting and coordination between the Secretary of Agriculture and CFIUS.
I mention this law, Mr. Speaker, because I think my Republican colleagues have forgotten what we did only 6 months ago. In their rush to pull together bills for the so-called China week, they appear to have brought up a poorly drafted copy of legislation we already passed.
However, in the frenzy to bring this bill to the floor, H.R. 9456 doesn't duplicate the law. Rather, it results in the Secretary of Agriculture having to report countless transactions to the committee that have nothing to do with our national security.
Currently, the law provides to the Secretary of Agriculture the support of the United States intelligence community to identify those transactions that may pose a threat to our national security. Inexplicably, H.R. 9456 removes that intelligence community assistance, leaving the Secretary to guess which transactions might pose a threat to our national security.
Further, unlike the law that was passed just 6 months ago, the bill broadens the scope from ``foreign governments and entities of concern'' to now include ``foreign persons,'' which means all individuals and entities of China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. This means anyone with citizenship in those countries, including refugees or people who are here in the United States with green cards or other visas.
The bill's broad-brush approach of targeting individuals from China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran amounts to racial profiling. This bill's focus is similar to the restrictive, xenophobic real estate laws passed in a number of States, like Florida, where citizens of the same countries are banned from buying property and which has resulted in numerous instances of discrimination.
It is for this reason that this bill is opposed by the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, the National Iranian American Council, Stop AAPI Hate, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans, the Asian American Scholar Forum, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The Biden-Harris administration has also put out a Statement of Administration Policy, saying that is it inconsistent with CFIUS process and would not be implementable as drafted.
Mr. Speaker, these deficiencies, taken together, will divert precious resources from CFIUS' targeted national security reviews. This is a bad bill that harms the bipartisan work we already passed this year and would sow divisions among neighbors across America.
Mr. Speaker, for these reasons, I will vote ``no,'' and I reserve the balance of my time.
I want to highlight just how rushed the process for this bill has been. I remind my colleagues that this bill was only introduced 5 days ago, on Friday of last week.
The notice of the Rules Committee hearing for this bill went out the same day that the bill was introduced, and the hearing happened the very next Monday.
That timing didn't give Members and staff so much as a single business day to prepare, let alone for the Treasury Department and outside groups to conduct their own analyses. Needless to say, there hasn't been a single hearing on this bill, nor has it ever been marked up. To top it all off, the rule providing for consideration of the bill gives Members no opportunity for amendment.
Considering we just passed legislation to address the very concerns that this bill purports to tackle, I can see no policy reason as to why we are moving ahead with this bill so hastily. Given the serious defects with this bill, I don't understand why Republican leadership is denying Members the opportunity to properly assess these issues.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have insisted on following regular order again and again, so I would urge them to heed their own calls on this bill and allow this body to properly consider this legislation.
Mr. Speaker, my colleague is exactly right that the Financial Services Committee passed language that is similar in some respects to Representative Newhouse's bill just 6 months ago in the Consolidated Appropriations Act.
That language reflected bipartisan work done by the Financial Services Committee on two Republican bills that had been marked up by our committee with unanimous votes. We continue to work in a bipartisan manner as well as with the Senate and the Treasury Department to get language that reflected these two bipartisan bills into the appropriations bill, which ultimately got passed into law.
It is simply false to claim that the bill we are considering today is somehow a harmless duplication of what we have already enacted, as I have laid out in detail already.
This bill undermines the bipartisan work that we have done on this issue and raises serious concerns about both national security and racial profiling. We already did the work to strike a reasonable bipartisan compromise on this front, but Republicans are choosing to undermine that bipartisanship with this bill.
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Ms. WATERS. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Several groups have come out in opposition to this bill over concerns of racial discrimination and profiling, including the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, the National Iranian American Council, the Stop AAPI Hate, the Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans, the Asian American Scholar Forum, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
For example, according to the American Civil Liberties Union:
This legislation discriminates and targets individuals solely because of their citizenship and tends to conflate individuals from covered countries with their governments. It does this despite the lack of any showing that it is necessary or that passing this bill would do anything to protect U.S. national security interests.
According to the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus:
H.R. 9456 is not an effective way to address national security. It is a continuation of our Nation's shameful history in enacting racist alien land laws from the 19th and 20th century that barred Chinese and Japanese immigrants from purchasing land and which eventually laid the groundwork for mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.
We cannot go back to those shameful parts of our history where we denied equal protections and due process for entire ethnic groups simply because of their ethnic heritage.
The bipartisan language that we already passed into law appropriately tailors reporting from the Secretary of Agriculture to include only those transactions that have a national security nexus, including transactions that involve foreign governments or entities of concern, which is defined to include foreign terrorist organizations or sanctioned entities on the Treasury Department's economic and trade sanctions lists.
The law also provides support to the Secretary of Agriculture from the United States intelligence community to determine which transactions may pose a national security concern.
This bill overturns that bipartisan compromise and would treat refugees and legal immigrants from any of these countries in the same manner as known terrorist groups.
This is outrageous. I hope that both sides of the aisle will do what is right, do what is fair, and recognize the history that we are not proud of as it relates to racial profiling.
I hope that we would do the right thing on this bill. This bill should not be passed. We have already done what was needed in a bipartisan way. I don't know why they would take time to undermine the work that we did, and I certainly want a ``no'' vote on the bill.
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Ms. WATERS. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
My colleague across the aisle has pointed out that the language that we passed into law as part of the Appropriations Act just 6 months ago may expire along with the appropriations.
While that may be the case, it is simply false to claim that all this bill would do is ensure that the language survives past that expiration. If that were all this bill were doing, I would support it, the same way I supported that language before.
In fact, I would urge Republicans to bring a bill to the floor that would exclusively eliminate any expiration on the bipartisan language that we have already passed so that we can continue to work in a bipartisan manner on this issue, instead of moving this harmful bill that we are considering here today.
As I laid out in my opening remarks, this bill confusingly duplicates and conflicts with existing law.
To be clear, this bill would add new language rather than amending the existing language that is already in law. Having two conflicting laws creates significant legal ambiguity as to how to interpret these competing texts.
It would undoubtedly result in litigation as agencies struggle to determine what their legal obligations are, tying up limited resources at both CFIUS and the Department of Agriculture.
This hastily written text does not appear to have appropriately taken into account the resulting legal ambiguities, and I would urge all of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to, at the very least, take the time to address these legal ambiguities and provide a clear mandate.
H.R. 9456 undercuts not only a bipartisan accomplishment from 6 months ago, but also our government's ability to stop adversarial countries like China and Russia from acquiring companies, technology, and land that are critical to our national security.
This bill will also cause financial harm to lawful, permanent residents and other immigrants based solely on an investor's citizenship.
Members of this body considered this issue just 6 months ago, passing bipartisan legislation to add the expertise of the Secretary of the USDA to CFIUS and improving the process by which agricultural land transactions are shared with and reviewed by the government.
That bill was drafted in coordination with the Biden-Harris administration as well as Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate. It was passed into law through the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024. There is no need to rewrite this law.
H.R. 9456 is a rush job by the House Republican leadership, and it shows how harmful this bill is to both our national security and the people who we serve.
I would just say to my colleagues that if you are really concerned about security, if you really want to support ag and the farmers, why did you just pull the continuing resolution that we were supposed to take up to continue government functioning?
Now, I guess you don't have the votes, and you are doing nothing to protect the very people who you purport to want to protect. Wow.
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