Cashless Bail Reporting Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Harris for his thoughtful remarks.

I rise to support and will vote for H.R. 5625, the Cashless Bail Reporting Act, because it would simply direct the Attorney General to publish a list of State and local jurisdictions that permit cashless bail.

This is already publicly available information. I just googled it. The answer seemed to come up, but it would be good to have some, perhaps, professional refinement and certification that these are actually the numbers.

Mr. Speaker, National Police Week is typically an opportunity for us to bring meaningful legislation forward that will support law enforcement and help them to perform their critical, lifesaving duties because Congress wants to support and honor their work. I am not quite sure that we are living up to this high calling in this National Police Week.

This bill, for example, is unobjectionable, but it doesn't do much work at all. It is hard to see how issuing a report advances community safety or justice.

Given the strangely hostile rhetoric that we are hearing from our colleagues about cashless bail, I thought I would take a moment to talk about what bail is and what it is not.

As the gentleman correctly states, bail is not a mechanism for punishment. In America, everybody is innocent until proven guilty. Whether you are the President, the Pope, or a pauper, you are considered to be innocent and presumed to be innocent until you have been proven guilty in a court of law, observing due process, by a jury of your peers, beyond a reasonable doubt, and with the prosecution satisfying every element of the burden of proof.

People have a right to their freedom while they are preparing to stand trial, among other reasons, to get ready for trial, unless they are a flight risk or unless they pose a danger to themselves or to other people.

That is basically the rule, as I understand it. In fact, that is the rule we have been using in the Federal system for more than 60 years. We have a cashless bail system under Congress in the Federal courts. There are 94 Federal district courts all across America, operating in red States, blue States, purple States, and everything in between. They all use a cashless bail system.

Mr. Speaker, when a person is brought forward on an arraignment before the court, those of us who have practiced law or have been prosecutors know this process in a very familiar way. The court asks one simple question, which is: Is this person a flight risk, or do they pose a danger to themselves?

They could be the richest person in the world, but if they are a flight risk, as, for example, some of the Epstein defendants clearly are--these are globetrotting criminal defendants--it shouldn't make any difference how much money you have to pay for bail. The money should be irrelevant to it.

Conversely, if you are not a flight risk, if you are not a danger to the community, but you are a pauper and have no money, you should not be held simply because you can't pay $5,000, or whatever the bail is.

Somebody might be able to put up $1 million or $1 billion, but if they are going to abscond, if they are going to run away, they should be held. That is the Federal system. Money doesn't enter into it.

To my knowledge, I don't think there are any bills out there--my staff will correct me--that seek to overthrow the Federal bail system, which is a cashless system.

I don't know of a single candidate in America who is running for Congress on the premise that we need to overthrow the cashless Federal bail system, which is working great everywhere.

Mr. Speaker, cash bail is a billion-dollar, for-profit industry. Who makes money off of that? The bail bondsmen make money off of it, and they are very politically active. They don't want to see any change. They don't want to see the Federal system being adopted by States and jurisdictions around the country.

A cash bail system asks a different question. It doesn't focus on: Are you dangerous or a flight risk? It focuses on: Can you pay? Can you pay?

From the standpoint of the Federal system, that is an irrational, arbitrary issue that just confuses the question of why a person, who is presumed to be innocent but is now facing serious criminal charges, should be held in jail during the pendency of their trial or waiting for their trial to take place.

Mr. Speaker, I don't know why I am surprised that there are Members of Congress who are demonizing jurisdictions simply because they prefer to employ a policy that exactly mirrors Federal law. To say that that is somehow soft on crime strikes me as just bizarre, unless the entire Federal system is soft on crime because of the system that we have used.

I am not, in any way, afraid of or intolerant of this debate. I think we should have the debate. To the extent that this bill is just asking DOJ to compile information that is already publicly available, it is fine with me. I am going to vote for it.

Nothing currently prevents the Attorney General from compiling and publishing this information right now. Due to the miracles of artificial intelligence, it seems to be pretty quickly readily available. I think I got it in less than 1 second.

This bill could help to officially coordinate the collection of this information and ensure that it is reported accurately, so I plan to vote for it.

Mr. HARRIS of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the support of this bill by the ranking member of our committee and what he has shared.

I thank the gentleman for his thoughtful remarks there. We certainly don't want to see anybody being released without regard to whether or not they pose a danger to the community or whether they will abscond and disappear.

A good example of that happening recently was when President Trump en masse pardoned more than 1,500 convicted felons who were Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, rioters, and insurrectionists who assaulted 150 police officers right here on the Capitol campus. Departing from the traditional process of examining each case individually, which is what the Department of Justice has done in the pardon office, he just pardoned all of them. So he didn't look to see which ones had been convicted before of domestic violence, armed robbery, or other forms of felony crimes.

Some of them had no criminal record. Some of them had serious, violent criminal records. All of them were released. And what do you know, dozens of them have since reoffended since that terrible process took place.

One guy recently, Andrew Paul Johnson in Georgia, was released by Donald Trump, pardoned by him. He got out of jail and went and sexually assaulted two 12-year-olds. When they and their families were about to go to the police to report the crimes, he said: Well, I am about to get millions of dollars from Donald Trump because I am a J6er. I will split the money with you if you don't go in. Thankfully, they went and reported him to the police. He was prosecuted, and he was just sentenced to life in prison. Those two kids' lives are irrevocably altered because of the process that took place, which was no process, which is I am just going to go ahead and release everybody.

We have had other J6ers who were pardoned by Donald Trump who have since been convicted of offenses including domestic violence, violent assault, home invasion, and so on.

So I could not agree more with the point that people should not be getting out of jail or prison without any regard to the danger that they pose to the community.

Now, how does this all relate to bail? Well, I hope we agree that nobody should be getting out of jail without regard or without the court taking an analysis of whether they are a flight risk or whether they pose a danger to the community. That is what the focus should be.

So certain jurisdictions have said, including the Federal system, that is all we need to know. You could be the richest person in the world. You could be worth a billion dollars. It doesn't make any difference. If you are a flight risk, if you are a community danger, we are not going to let you out.

Conversely, you might be the poorest person in the world, but if you pose no flight risk, if you pose no danger, then you should be allowed to be released because that is the constitutional presumption, the presumption of innocence.

So the injection of a financial payment into the process just confuses the issue.

Now, I am not saying every State has to follow what the Federal courts do and what we have done for more than 60 years. That is up to them. That is a question of federalism.

That is why I am trying to prefigure where this whole inquiry leads. It looks like it is leading to an attack on the States who want to do it the way the Federal system has done it for more than a half century. I am just raising the point that I think we should look very carefully before we go down that road and we impose a different view on the States in some kind of straitjacket as to their criminal justice policies that we don't accept for ourselves because the current system is working great here.

So I agree with the prior speaker. We don't want people getting out of jail for any reason, whether it is bail or parole or a pardon from the President, without due consideration of what the effects are going to be on the community.

Mr. Speaker, in closing, I would say I want to thank the gentleman for his bill. I am going to vote for his bill. More information always better. I have got no problem with that.

The only thing I reject is the insinuation that the States that do it differently from the Federal system are somehow better than the States that do it in accord with the Federal system. We have had cashless bail at the Federal level for many decades, and our system zeros in on the critical criteria of whether or not this criminally charged suspect poses a flight risk or a danger to the community.

I hope that we can continue the conversation about what we can really do to advance and enhance community safety.

Mr. HARRIS of North Carolina.

I do thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin) for his support of this bill and for his statements and I do hope that we will be able to continue conversations.

I would say in closing, Mr. Speaker, how many more victims must there be before we act? Cashless bail policies have proven to be a disaster. Soft-on-crime jurisdictions have released criminals on mere promises to reappear in court without adequately considering the flight or safety risk they pose to those around them.

I believe the American people believe enough is enough. The American people deserve to live in safety. The American people deserve safe public transportation. The American people should not have to live with the consequences of reckless bail policies, and it should not take brutal murders for these reforms to happen.

We must stop prioritizing ideology over safety. We must stop playing politics with bail policy. We must fight for a safer America, regardless of State or locality.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all Members to stand for public safety and to support this bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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