Repeal of Senate Notification Requirements Relating to Legal Process on Disclosures of Senate Data

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Wisconsin for his leadership here and managing this bill on the floor on behalf of my friend from Georgia, who rightfully raised this issue in the Rules Committee on which he and I both serve. We both immediately raised this issue in front of the Rules Committee and for the entire body.

There is nobody, to the best of my knowledge, in this body who supports this language that was inserted in the end of the funding bill that we passed last week. I don't know anybody. I have yet to meet one person who supports it.

Mr. Speaker, rather than my colleagues on the other side of the aisle coming together in a bipartisan agreement that we are going to, as the House, hip-check the Senate for having put a provision in there that we disagree with, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to try to make this a partisan issue when, in fact, Senate Democrats were equally involved in making sure that this provision got inserted. In fact, they were very specific about only wanting a provision if it was only focused on the Senate.

They didn't want it to be used, for example, to help J6ers or FACE Act individuals who were abused by the Department of Justice under President Biden. They didn't want it to be a more expansive private right of action. Instead, they wanted it to be narrow and narrow for the Senate.

Rather than the House being in a bipartisan agreement, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to make it partisan. If we are going to make it partisan, let's be very clear: The reason we were in the position that we were in last week was that we had been shut down for 43 days. Why? Because my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have literally nothing to run on.

The only thing my colleagues on the other side of the aisle can run on is shutting down the government, making up nonsense about health in which they are going to enrich insurance companies in the process, and have nothing to take to the American people other than trying to create division.

The fact of the matter is, we are going to pass this legislation within days. We are going to send it to the Senate. We are going to make clear to the Senate that they need to correct this issue because the American people rightly are with us. The House of Representatives, Republican and Democrats, are rightly checking the Senate.

There is one last really important piece to this which is the Arctic Frost investigation itself, which specifically targeted United States Senators in an egregious abuse of power. It was targeting those Senators for their information and their records. That is something that is an absolute affront to separation of powers and to our constitutional order to have the Department of Justice targeting those Senators.

Those Senators were rightly wanting to find ways to stop Jack Smith and the abuses of the Department of Justice. We in this Chamber just simply believe that if you are going to do something like that, it should apply to all Americans and not be something specific to the United States Senate.

We are correcting this now. We should pass it immediately. The Senate should take it up and pass it. Also, a little personal message to the Senate: Take this up and pass it, or you are not getting any support from this Member for any of your measures that come over to this body.

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