Providing for Consideration of H.R. Midnight Rules Relief Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. STEVENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank my profound and wise colleague, the ranking member of the Rules Committee and former chairman, Jim McGovern, for yielding to me.

Mr. Speaker, the gentleman is absolutely right that H.R. 1101, the Taxpayer Data Protection Act, which I was so pleased to author and introduce last week alongside my colleague, Sean Casten, and alongside our Democratic leadership is where we need to move.

We need to ensure that we have some guardrails in our Treasury Department. I was a former Treasury Department official myself in the very beginning days of a new administration, the administration of Barack Obama, when actually a bipartisan group of us came together to respond to the economic and fiscal crisis of the time.

I was put on the auto rescue team, the team responsible for saving General Motors and Chrysler from liquidation. Again, it was a bipartisan effort, and it saved 200,000 Michigan jobs and millions of jobs across the country.

Nowhere in that process, when we were working with the troubled asset relief program dollars, did anyone dare to think about going into the Bureau of Fiscal Service and tapping the wires and the accounts of the American public and jolting and shaking the very foundation of trust.

This bill is a very simple measure saying: Let's make sure that we have true public servants, people who have passed protocols, people who have top security clearances, people who don't have conflicts of interest. The American people deserve that modicum of trust.

Mr. Speaker, what is even more outrageous, as we are talking about the rulemaking and the rolling back and the ways in which we choose to legislate here, is we are not talking about the costs that are impacting everyday Americans.

I got sworn in on January 3 into the 119th Congress.

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Ms. STEVENS. Mr. Speaker, I am waiting for the bill to lower egg costs. I am seeing headlines that eggs are being stolen. I am hearing from constituents who are nervous about Elon Musk having access to their records and their payment system, and they are wondering why they can't go to the grocery store and find eggs. They are wondering about the high cost of everything. They are wondering why prescription drugs are about to go up because of an executive order.

Where are we working on that?

Mr. Speaker, let's pass the amendment, let's do H.R. 1101, and let's get back to business for the people of this country.

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