Enhanced Presidential Security Act of 2024
Floor Speech
Mr. Speaker, H.R. 9106, the Enhanced Presidential Security Act of 2024, requires the Secret Service to apply the same standards for determining the number of agents required to protect Presidents, Vice Presidents, and major Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates.
It also directs the Secret Service to conduct a review of the provision of protection provided to these individuals and to report its findings and recommendations to Congress.
I support this legislation to ensure that the Secret Service has the tools, resources, and procedures necessary to keep our highest elected officials and candidates safe, which is critical to our democratic system of government.
In advancing this legislation, Republicans are hoping to distract from the common denominator in every successful assassination of a U.S. President, as well as the attempted assassination of President Reagan and the attempted assassination of former Presidents and Presidential candidates Theodore Roosevelt and Donald Trump. In every single one of these events, the weapon used was a gun.
The fact is that the work of the Secret Service is made infinitely more difficult by our lax gun laws.
This Congress, the Republican majority has repeatedly sought to further weaken our gun laws, endangering our children, our law enforcement officers, our communities, and even their own Presidential candidate.
Last year, after a mass shooter killed six people, including three children, at a school in Nashville, Republicans fought to make sure everyone could continue to acquire the accessory that shooter used in circumvention of the National Firearms Act.
Earlier this year, our Republican colleagues cheered as the Supreme Court, stacked with Republican nominees, struck down the regulation of bump stocks, allowing the accessory used in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history to again be available to the public without even a background check.
When the Senate tried to bring up legislation to again regulate bump stocks, Senate Republicans blocked it. Similar legislation in the House has just one Republican cosponsor, and the Republican majority has refused to advance it.
Just today, Republicans used their control of the Judiciary Committee to advance a bill that would weaken the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, reinvigorate the black market for guns, and reopen the online and private sale loophole. That legislation would make it so that convicted felons, domestic abusers, and other dangerous persons who are prohibited from possessing a gun could easily get one without a background check. It would make it so that unlicensed sellers could, once again, profit from endangering our communities.
It doesn't stop there. Not only have they sought to unravel our gun laws through legislation and our courts, but our Republican colleagues have also sought to defund the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the primary agency tasked with enforcing our gun laws, including by helping State and local law enforcement solve violent crimes and keep guns out of the wrong hands.
The cumulative effect of these efforts is clear. We know from headline after headline that it is far too easy for violent individuals to get a gun and end a life or many lives in a matter of seconds. That is true whether the attacker targets schoolchildren, a domestic partner, a house of worship, or a Presidential candidate.
The challenges faced by the Secret Service would be vastly diminished if we passed any one of our many proposals to keep guns out of the wrong hands, but over and over, Republicans have prioritized access to deadly weapons over the safety of our communities.
I support this legislation because the Secret Service must be able to protect our highest elected officials and candidates, but this legislation will do nothing to make the rest of us any safer or change the fact that gun violence continues to take the lives of more than 100 Americans every single day.
As Republicans yet again rush headlong toward a government shutdown, unable to even manage the most basic aspects of governing, and as they continue to oppose every action to prevent gun violence, Democrats will continue to fight to make our communities safer for every American.
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Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, this Nation is awash in guns. It is the only Nation where we have, time after time after time, school shootings, where we aren't even surprised at mass shooting events in schools. We are the only Nation that has mass shooting events because of our lax gun laws, because we are awash in guns.
Mr. Lawler says we should prosecute people who use guns in crimes. I agree. We certainly should. We certainly should do that, and if the people of New York aren't, they should. I can't comment on the New York laws. I haven't been in the legislature in 32 years. Mr. Lawler has been there more recently.
The fact of the matter is, this country is awash in guns, and Mr. Jordan says that a left-winger attempted to assassinate former President Trump. We don't know that. The person who attempted to assassinate him, we know, researched the whereabouts of former President Trump. He researched the whereabouts of President Biden. He seemed to want to kill somebody, and the evidence seems to point out that the reason he attacked Trump and not Biden was because Trump was holding a rally near where he was. However, the fact is he is dead, and we don't know. We certainly don't know his political opinions.
In any event, this country is awash in guns.
While this bill is a good bill, we should equally protect our Presidential candidates, whether they are the incumbent President or the would-be President and Vice-Presidential candidates. The fact is that Presidential candidates and all of us are less safe because this country is awash in guns, and it is the only country in the world--I shouldn't say that--there are countries where genocide is being committed, like Darfur in Sudan, but it is one of the only countries in the world awash in guns.
Mr. TORRES of New York. Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, I am proud to partner with my colleague, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Lawler), on a matter of urgent importance to our Nation.
The United States is entering an age of ever-escalating political violence, as evidenced by the violent assault on the United States Capitol on January 6 and as evidenced by not one but two attempted assassinations of a former President.
On July 13, the difference between an attempted assassination and a completed assassination was not the skill of the Secret Service. It was luck.
If the gunman had been slightly more precise in his shooting, or if the former President had moved ever so slightly to his right, the former President would have been killed. The fact that America stood inches and seconds away from a national crisis is itself a crisis.
The security of a major Presidential candidate, whether it be Democratic nominee Vice President Harris or Republican nominee former President Donald Trump, cannot be left to chance.
Hoping for the best and lucking out is not a policy prescription for protecting a President or a Presidential candidate.
Both the House and the Senate, both Democrats and Republicans, should be dedicated to a bipartisan, bicameral proposition that both major Presidential candidates of both parties are entitled to the highest level of Secret Service protection, not only for their sake, but for our Nation's.
One final point is that the Secret Service urgently needs not only more resources but also deeper structural reforms. Only 30 percent of the Secret Service budget is dedicated to protective operations. The remaining 70 percent is spent on legacy functions that trace back to the Secret Service's time in the Treasury Department.
The role the Secret Service plays in financial law enforcement does not reflect a rational allocation of resources and responsibilities. It is an accident of history and a relic of the past that should be reexamined by the United States Congress.
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Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I yield myself the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, once again, the Federal Government is just as it was this same time last year, on the brink of shutting down, threatening to cut off essential services for millions of Americans.
Instead of addressing the real needs of the American people, Republicans have spent this week spreading misinformation about immigrants, attempting to hide from their own record on reproductive care, and evading their responsibility to govern.
In bringing up this legislation, they seek to distract the American people from the fact that their own actions have repeatedly made every American, from Presidential candidates to schoolchildren, more at risk of gun violence.
When Democrats take back the House, we will work to make everyone in this Nation safer, but for today, I urge Members to support this legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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