Raising A Question of the Privileges of the House

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, thousands of my constituents have been illegally fired by Elon Musk and by Donald Trump. One of them was with me last night, Dr. Lauren McGee, who was an NIH pediatric cancer specialist heading up a team looking into osteosarcoma, bone cancer for children. She got fired on February 14 because she was a probationary employee. Probationary, not because she had done anything wrong, but because she had been promoted into the new job. She was with me last night, and she had to sit here and listen, along with me--and I had spent the day with her--to Donald Trump saying one of their top priorities is to fight childhood cancer, and she got sacked on that Valentine's Day massacre.

Now they want to censure the gentleman from Texas. Why? Because he challenged the President about his claim that he has a mandate to cut Medicaid, and that is what the gentleman was trying to raise.

We have Republicans in the Chamber who have never voted to impeach Donald Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against this Congress, this Constitution, and his own Vice President, who have never voted to even censure the President for doing that, and yet they want to censure the gentleman from Texas.

Last night, President Trump called a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts ``Pocahontas,'' using an ethnic slur to go after her. If you really want to proceed to censure the gentleman from Texas for talking about no mandate to cut Medicaid, then certainly we are going to have to move to censure the President for using a racial and ethnic slur against a sitting United States Senator.

I would prefer to stand by the tradition of free speech and even the tradition of heckling. There is a fine American art of heckling. If you read the Lincoln-Douglas debates, I recommend the Harold Holzer version of it because the newspapers carried all of the hecklers' comments, too. People would get up and heckle, and Lincoln would interact with them and Douglas would interact with them.

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Mr. RASKIN. Let's stop clutching our pearls. There has been lots of heckling over on that side of the aisle. I saw the gentlewoman from Georgia heckle the last President and have a whole heckling section there. We didn't try to censure them or kick them out of Congress or anything. We actually not only say we believe in free speech but we believe in free speech. We will stand up for people's right to speak.

Now, I don't believe in the kind of heckling where you drown somebody out and you make it impossible for them to speak, but the gentleman was trying to start a conversation as opposed to just being spoken to all night.

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