Mr. President, this morning, I rise to discuss S.Res.195, which is a vote on a motion to discharge that will be the next pending vote in the Senate.
It is actually a pretty simple bill about very basic concepts: Do you believe in the Constitution or not? Do you believe in the rule of law or not? Do you believe in due process or not? Do you believe that final orders of the U.S. Supreme Court should be respected or not? Those are the questions at issue on S.Res.195.
Our President, President Trump, has entered into an agreement still shrouded in some secrecy with the President of El Salvador, President Bukele, to deport American residents into El Salvador and imprison them in prisons in a country that has been charged by the United States and others with gross human rights violations.
The Congress that is in charge of appropriating taxpayer dollars should want to know the circumstances of this imprisonment and whether U.S. law is being followed. The $6 million payment to the El Salvadoran prison likely violates human rights law in accord with many experts who looked at the details as they emerged, and that is where we begin. These are dollars that Congress has appropriated, but the precise mechanism for the transfer of these moneys and the President’s authority to both spend the money and carry out the deportations is questionable.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of one of these individuals who it admits was deported by mistake--and there are many others similarly situated--is defying an order of the Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a nine-to-nothing ruling that the administration should facilitate the return of Mr. Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Thus far, nearly a month later, that has not occurred.
This is about fighting lawlessness. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, to which we all pledge fealty, is pretty straightforward:
“No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
That was the clause that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously interpreted to mandate the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia.
The President was asked recently whether he had an obligation to uphold the Constitution, which he swore an oath to in the witness of all of us on Inauguration Day. He was asked if he had to uphold the Constitution. Just within the last week, he said he did not know. We know the answer to that question, but the President does not. The particular country to which these American residents have been deported, El Salvador--this now goes back a year--has a track record of imprisoning individuals--innocent individuals. The last thing any of us should want is an innocent individual in prison, especially if that innocent individual is an American.
But this is the punch line: The President has indicated that this is not just for those who are here with questions about their legal status. President Trump has said “homegrowns” are next. Trump doubles down on sending American criminals to foreign prisons. We have a prison system in the United States--local jails, State prisons, Federal prisons. The notion of sending American citizens to foreign prisons without scrutiny is truly shocking, and that is the reason that I filed the resolution.
What is this resolution?
It is a privileged motion--available to any Senator--directing the administration to produce a human rights report about a nation--in this case, El Salvador. S.Res.195 directs the Secretary of State to produce a report to this body that would be available not only to us but to the American public about the human rights record in El Salvador, and a couple of the clauses of the resolution, I think, are specific about this particular case.
The report should contain information about the treatment of citizens or residents of other countries, including the United States--non-Salvadorans--who are being detained or imprisoned in El Salvador, including any opportunity provided to such citizens or residents to demonstrate that they are being wrongfully detained or imprisoned.
We should all want to know whether Americans detained in El Salvador have an opportunity to demonstrate that they are wrongfully imprisoned. The report will require that.
The report would require an assessment from the Secretary of State of the conditions in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, including an assessment of allegations of torture and other gross violations of human rights.
Remember again that the Trump administration has acknowledged that at least one of the individuals who was deported was deported mistakenly. He has been in prison for some time. If he is not there now, he was for some time in CECOT. We should want to know whether Americans in prison there are subject to torture or to other gross violations of human rights.
The report should include a description of any actions that the U.S. Government has taken to ensure that the Government of the Republic of El Salvador releases U.S. citizens being detained or imprisoned in El Salvador in compliance with U.S. court orders regarding their return.
Finally, the report would require information--a description of actions--the U.S. Government is taking to provide due process in compliance with U.S. law for relevant persons detained or imprisoned in El Salvador.
Why would anyone in this body, in understanding this record--the forceable deportation of American residents, some admittedly deported by mistake and whom the Supreme Court has ordered returned into El Salvadoran prisons--why would anyone in this body not want to get a human rights report about the conditions of that confinement, particularly given the fact that President Trump has indicated that he may intend next to send U.S. citizens into those same prisons?
This information will be very relevant to important decisions that we take in our relationship with El Salvador and also in our decisions we take with respect to the Appropriations Act. So I urge my colleagues to vote for S.Res.195.
Random excerpts from the House
Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition.
I thank my colleague from South Carolina for his excellent presentation, but this bill is a case study in a legislative majority that is in search of not common ground and common sense but rather extreme measures that divide and polarize the Congress and the people.
Once upon a time this was a sensible, bipartisan bill led by our Democratic colleague, Val Demings from Orlando, Florida, who had been a police chief. Her bill allowed Federal agencies to sell handguns that they were no longer using to the active-duty officers, who previously carried those handguns, for fair market value as long as they completed a background check like everybody else in America.
Mr. Speaker, last Congress, Republicans weakened that bipartisan bill, which I think commanded unanimous support in Congress, by stripping the background check requirement while still restricting the bill to handgun sales to current law enforcement officers only. So we were willing to go along with that compromise. We accepted that in the last Congress.
When the bill came to the floor for a vote, however, Republicans filled the bill with a menagerie of more outlandish and extreme provisions, and that is the version that they started with in this Congress which is before us today.
When we marked up this legislation, we offered an amendment that would allow them to go back to the compromise version of the bill, a version of the bill that they themselves had introduced and that we support, but they refused to do it.
So today, in place of a reasonable, commonsense, and common-ground bill, Republicans are dug in on another extreme proposal that riddles our gun laws with loopholes and politicizes what should have been a simple, bipartisan measure.
The bill before us today would allow surplus firearms to be sold not only to active Federal law enforcement officers in good standing, but also to retired law enforcement officers.
Because the bill now has no background check requirement, it could create a situation in which it would be possible for an officer to retire and commit a crime, such as domestic violence or assault, that would ordinarily render him or her ineligible to purchase and possess firearms but then still be able to buy a firearm from the Federal Government without any background check at all.
While the bill includes a good standing requirement, as they remind us, this is plainly meaningless as applied to retired officers who may have left the department in perfectly good standing but could not pass a background check today.
Agencies can certify that an officer is in good standing when they retire, but they have no way to track the behavior of their former officers after that if they cannot do a background check. So an agency could unknowingly sell a surplus firearm to someone who cannot lawfully buy a gun, and all of this would occur under the statute without any background check at all.
The bill also allows for the sale of any firearm except machine guns. That includes not just handguns, but also assault weapons, destructive devices like hand grenades, rocket, missile having explosive or incendiary charge of more than 1/4 ounce, mine, device, and so on.
Moreover, it allows them to be sold at salvage value, effectively making it so that the Federal Government and the taxpayers would actually be subsidizing gun sales. They replaced fair market value with salvage value.
My colleagues have claimed that the bill would not really allow for the sale of all of these types of firearms because it only applies, they say, to service weapons. However, they need to read their own bill. It allows for the sale of any firearm other than a machine gun that is issued to an officer. That means if an officer uses not just a handgun, but an assault rifle, a grenade launcher, or anything classified as a destructive device, any firearm or destructive device used by a SWAT team, any firearm or destructive device used by the Secret Service, so long it is not a machine gun, if issued to an officer, can be sold back to him or her without a background check under the bill at salvage value.
If that is not what they mean, and they have been scrambling to deny it, then they should change the language of the bill because that is plainly what the bill says. Forgive me for insisting on scrupulous attention to words, Mr. Speaker, but that is the business we are in when we enter the legislative process.
Taken together, the bill makes it so that an officer could retire, commit a crime, become a person who may not legally own firearms under Federal law, then buy from the Federal Government a handgun, a semiautomatic assault rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, or even a grenade launcher, at a discount, with no background check at all.
Now, Mr. Speaker, this is a famously do-nothing or do-very-little Congress. They don’t have much on their agenda other than slashing $880 billion from Medicaid, SNAP, Meals on Wheels, Head Start, and the other programs that actually serve Americans who don’t live like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. However, Mr. Speaker, you would think they would have the time at least to write a bill that would not permit these kinds of things to happen.
These are unacceptable risks of dangerous weapons being sold to a person who may not legally have one. So reluctantly, I must oppose this bill which began as a Democratic bill which commanded unanimous, bipartisan support before.
Nothing in this bill is going to help law enforcement officers actually do their jobs, which was how all of this was introduced when we first started out today. Indeed, it doesn’t provide a single Federal dollar to help local law enforcement.
In fact, our colleagues have not advanced a single bill during this entire Police Week or even this entire session of Congress to increase funding to State and local police.
In fact, the party that now controls the White House and both Chambers of Congress is now letting DOGE, Elon Musk, and their midnight crew of computer hackers dismantle entire agencies, fire thousands of Federal workers without cause, and generally wreak havoc across the government.
Last month, DOGE decided unilaterally to cancel more than $500 million of Department of Justice grant funding for local law enforcement, public safety, and crime prevention programs all over the country in our communities.
What did we hear from our colleagues across the aisle?
Did they stand up to DOGE and object to this defunding of the police?
No, Mr. Speaker. Our colleagues said absolutely nothing, and I mean that literally.
During the Judiciary Committee markup of the reconciliation bill, Democrats offered a simple amendment to immediately restore hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the police and for hundreds of other essential public safety grant programs dismantled by, as far as we can tell, one employee at DOGE.
Every single one of our GOP colleagues voted against that amendment, but they refused to utter a word in favor of Elon Musk’s chainsaw massacre of local law enforcement and public safety programs. They don’t want to be quoted supporting DOGE, but even if their quotes don’t support DOGE, their votes support DOGE, and they have voted not to restore hundreds of millions of dollars that DOGE cut from our State, local, and county law enforcement and public safety organizations.
In case some of our colleagues haven’t heard yet from their outraged constituents about this, let me offer just one example of more than 365 grants that were abruptly terminated by DOGE. That is one grant program per day all across the country.
DOGE cut funding for a program called the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative, which provided funding to dozens and dozens of rural law enforcement agencies across America allowing them, with their strapped budgets, to hire more officers and purchase up-to-date equipment and technology. They also supported rural victim services and crime prevention programs. This program was created to assist small, rural agencies that need Federal funding but are so small, short-staffed, or underresourced, they wouldn’t even have the ability to apply for the funding.
One such recipient of this grant from the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative was the Shawano, Wisconsin Police Department, which was using the funding to pay for a detective dedicated to investigating and solving unsolved violent crimes and to stop narcotics trafficking in their community.
The police department said that the additional detective would build trust with community members, increase patrols in hot spot areas, enhance crime prevention, and sustain a reduction in violent crime in narcotics-related crime. This is just one of the hundreds of rural police departments and other agencies using this funding from this one grant program from 365 that were suddenly terminated by one DOGE employee running amuck in the Department of Justice.
This is funding, Mr. Speaker, that we in the House of Representatives voted for on an overwhelming bipartisan basis and that the Senate overwhelmingly voted for on a bipartisan basis. We had bicameral passage and presentment to the President. The President signed it into law. The Department of Justice got the funding. The Department of Justice programmed the funding, and the Department of Justice awarded those grants all across America.
Mr. Speaker, guess who stopped it without my knowledge, without their knowledge, and without anybody’s knowledge?
It was one DOGE employee, one of Elon Musk’s junior lieutenants who spent his career at Tesla, and then he decided he was going to wipe out hundreds of millions of dollars going to our people.
Mr. Speaker, are our colleagues going to allow DOGE to get away with this critical destruction of law enforcement in rural communities, urban communities, and suburban communities across the land?
Apparently so. They remain silent on it. They won’t utter a word in favor of it, but they don’t utter a peep against it. They just vote for it. They just sheepishly get in line and support this destruction of what we had already voted for to put into action.
Mr. Speaker, I oppose this legislation, which is a trivial distraction from what is really going on in America today. They are dismantling the priorities of the people as passed through the people’s House and through the Senate and signed into law.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to join us in actually standing up for law enforcement, for the police, and for community safety. I would invite them to join us in actually standing up for the Article I powers of Congress. I hope they will join us in rejecting DOGE’s deranged funding cuts that are undermining public safety and harming law enforcement across the land.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD-8)
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