Anti-Cbdc Surveillance State Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. DAVIDSON. Mr. Speaker, central bank digital currency poses an existential threat to western civilization. It is essentially, at its heart, communist banking.

Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, and Democrats in the Senate didn't walk around Omarova to be confirmed as a bank regulator because they were opposed to communist banking. They want it. That is what central bank digital currency is.

Our colleagues on the other side of this debate act like we need to study communism a little harder to figure out whether it works or not. We have got plenty of evidence it doesn't work. Central bank digital currency inserts government between you and your money.

Another word for central bank digital currency is programmable money. Who does the programming? The central bank. They can condition your access to your own money with whatever parameters they put in place. They can filter transactions. They can even set them to expire. Monetary policy wonks in the communist banking world think this is a feature, not a flaw. They think if they can set your access to your money to expire, then it would be a better future.

Every dystopian fiction that I have found--``Brave New World,'' ``1984''--says this is the future of money, that it is corrupted into a tool for surveillance, coercion, and control.

Frankly, our own current banking system has crept too close to that. We need to turn the other direction. The market is telling us that. That is why cryptocurrency was invented, frankly. That is why it is so popular and is a growing asset class. We need to say no to this, and we need to protect what the market is telling us consumers want.

We tested this under the Biden administration. They decided that they were going to spy on your bank accounts if you had $600 in your bank. The public said: Whoa, what? Why are you spying on my bank account?

In a communist world, they say: Well, if you have nothing to hide, then why should you have anything to fear.

But that is not our way of life in this country. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say that. It says if you have probable cause, and only then, then you get a warrant. Here, you build the surveillance into the program.

I get it. If all men were angels, this would never be abused, but we know they are not. We have seen massive abuse in our own country. In Canada we saw Trudeau, a fellow traveler on the communist long march, want to ban people's access to their own bank accounts because they were protesting his COVID policies at trucker rallies.

This is very easy to do when you have programmable money. We need to say no to this. It is an existential threat to our way of life, and ideally, we would do it at every opportunity.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all our colleagues to vote for Mr. Emmer's bill and stop this threat to our way of life.

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