Protecting Privacy in Purchases Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. BARR. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 1181, the Protecting Privacy in Purchases Act. I thank my friend, the gentleman from Arkansas, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, for his leadership on the bill and for yielding.

I am proud to be a cosponsor of this legislation.

I thank Congressman Riley Moore for his leadership on this important bill. I thank Congressman Richard Hudson for his longstanding work defending the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens, and our colleague from New York, Elise Stefanik, for her original introduction of this bill in several previous Congresses.

At its core, this bill is about protecting privacy and preventing government surveillance on citizens simply for exercising their constitutionally enshrined Second Amendment rights.

H.R. 1181 prohibits payment card networks and financial institutions from requiring or assigning merchant category codes, or MCCs, that single out firearm retailers for separate tracking and monitoring.

Unfortunately, we have seen repeated examples of progressive regulators and government officials pressuring financial institutions to target lawful industries and lawful customers.

From Operation Choke Point under the Obama administration and Choke Point 2.0 under Biden to New York financial regulators pressuring insurance companies to abandon longstanding relationships with the NRA, Americans have legitimate reasons to be concerned about the weaponization of the financial system.

Despite what those on the other side of the aisle may say, this bill does nothing to prevent law enforcement or regulators from investigating criminal activity, nor does it change the stringent requirements on financial institutions to comply with existing anti- money laundering laws or suspicious activity reporting requirements.

However, what my friend from California who just spoke doesn't say, but it needs to be said, is that the lawful purchase of a firearm protected by the Second Amendment is not in and of itself suspicious activity, nor should it be surveilled by the government.

What it does is prevent the creation of a framework that could be used to monitor, flag, and discourage lawful purchases from federally licensed firearm retailers.

This is about preventing government actors from using financial data to target Americans who are engaged in conduct expressly protected by the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms, a fundamental liberty for Americans.

Americans should not have to worry that lawful purchases that they made will be used to create lists, databases, or surveillance tools aimed at this constitutionally protected activity.

My friend, the ranking member from California, cited statistics about annual and daily deaths that she says are the result of gun violence. Respectfully, the right to bear arms is not the cause of violence. One murder is too many in America, period. We all agree on that.

Rather than blaming gun violence, Congress would be more productive focusing on the root causes of homicide: the breakdown of the family, lack of active parenting, mental illness, open-border policies, policies to defund the police, soft-on-crime policies like no cash bail, and politically motivated violence, like the kind that was behind the murder of Charlie Kirk. Addressing these societal problems does not require unconstitutional surveillance of Americans.

H.R. 1181 establishes commonsense guardrails to prevent regulatory abuse and safeguards constitutional freedoms.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this legislation.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source