[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 58 (Thursday, May 5, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H2995-H2997]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1200
                           PERSONAL PRIVILEGE

  Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I seek recognition on a question of personal 
privilege pursuant to rule IX of the rules of the House. I have placed 
at the desk the documentation on which this question is based.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. LaTourette). On the basis of House 
Report 109-51 and certain media coverage thereof, the gentleman may 
rise to a question of personal privilege under rule IX.
  The gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) is recognized for 1 hour.


                         Parliamentary Inquiry

  Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

[[Page H2996]]

  Have the corrections or the supplemental report to the committee 
report been filed yet?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The supplemental report authorized by 
section 2 of House Resolution 258 has been filed.
  Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  Mr. Speaker, the basis of my question of personal privilege concerns 
the manner in which amendments I offered during the Committee on the 
Judiciary's consideration of H.R. 748 on April 13, 2005, were 
characterized in the committee's report on that legislation, House 
Report 109-51.
  Specifically, the report, in the section required under clause 3(b) 
of rule XIII of the rules of the House reporting the votes of the 
committee described my amendments in a manner that denigrated my 
``rights, reputation, and conduct . . . in [my] representative capacity 
. . . '' within the meaning of clause 1 of rule IX.
  The language in question appears on pages 45 and 46 of the committee 
report, and it mischaracterizes my amendments in a manner that does not 
reflect the actual content of the amendments nor the actual intent of 
those amendments. In fact, it uses legislation to describe my 
legislative actions that is pejorative and inflammatory and that is 
highly damaging to my reputation.
  It is with great sadness and regret that I come to the floor today. I 
have never previously in my 12 years as a Member of this House, nor in 
my quarter century representing the people of New York, had the need to 
rise on a personal privilege. I have never had my reputation, or my 
legislative efforts, so terrible maligned in an official record of any 
legislative body in which I have served.
  It is my hope that this is the last time I will ever need to claim 
the floor in a question of personal privilege. I would observe that the 
filing a few minutes ago of the supplemental report to the Committee on 
the Judiciary report is a tacit acknowledgment of the inaccuracy and 
untruthfulness of the original report and its reputation in the public 
domain, and renders much of what was said in its defense in the 
Committee on Rules and on the floor, as the saying goes, 
``inoperative.''
  I commend the chairman for correcting the record and hope that with 
this correction of the slanderous report language, this unfortunate 
chapter can be brought to a close.
  While I would have hoped that this correction would have been 
accompanied by an apology and by an acknowledgment that this report was 
a violation of the tradition and norms of the House, that is, perhaps, 
in the regrettably poisonous atmosphere of the present day, 
unobtainable. I regret that things have reached such an unfortunate 
state.
  This situation is especially sad because it involves the Committee on 
the Judiciary's official report on this bill, which contained false and 
misleading, indeed libelous, descriptions of the amendments I and my 
colleagues offered in committee in good faith, and with the intent of 
protecting children and families in terrible situations.
  Those characterizations came in the section of the report, required 
by the rules, that simply requires an accurate report of all recorded 
votes.
  There are many places in committee reports where commentary is 
appropriate. Both the majority and the minority have the opportunity in 
the report to make their cases, and very much to the credit of the 
gentleman from Wisconsin (Chairman Sensenbrenner) the Committee on the 
Judiciary reports also contain a transcript of the markup.
  What has never been done, and I am not aware of the majority on any 
committee having so abused its power, is to distort the content of the 
amendments in the section reserved for reporting votes.
  Every Member of this House sits on committees; every Member knows 
what a report looks like, and every Member of this House knows this was 
an aberration and that it was wrong.
  I do not believe it is necessary to repeat the report language that 
gave rise to this point of personal privilege. The Chair has the 
offending language, and it has been plastered all over the Record, the 
press, and Web logs. I feel no need to repeat it. Enough damage has 
already been done.
  To place this report, and the slanderous language it used in context, 
the last time the Committee on the Judiciary reported a version of the 
same bill, the report said: ``An amendment was offered by Mr. Nadler 
prohibiting H.R. 476 from applying `with respect to conduct by a 
grandparent or adult sibling of the minor.' '' Same amendment, same 
committee, different year.
  Earlier versions of this bill have been reported by the Committee on 
the Judiciary on three prior occasions, going to 1998. In no case have 
any of my amendments been described in the inaccurate and pejorative 
fashion they were in this year's committee report.
  The Committee on Rules described the same amendment in the following 
manner when it reported it to the floor: ``Adds to the exceptions to 
the offense of transporting minors for the purpose of obtaining an 
illegal abortion grandparents of the minor and members of the clergy.''
  Even the Republican Study Committee, the voice of some of the most 
conservative of our colleagues, described the amendment this way: ``The 
amendment allows a grandparent of the minor or a clergy person to bring 
pregnant minors across State lines for abortions.'' These are factual 
descriptions of the amendment. They are nonargumentative factual 
descriptions as the rules call for.
  In fact, neither the bill itself nor the amendments contained the 
offensive terms used in the committee report to describe my amendments. 
No member of the committee described my amendments in this libelous 
manner at any time during the debate. Nobody in the majority, none of 
the Republicans in opposing my amendments in committee debate said that 
they contained the material which the committee report libelously says 
they do. As the transcript clearly shows, the transcript contained in 
the committee's report appearing on page 58 to 120 will clearly show.
  It is regrettable that even in filing the supplemental report, the 
majority felt the need to restate the slander, but this time in the 
section reserved for majority views. The majority, however, is entitled 
to its views, even if they are not factually based; and the appropriate 
place to express them is in debate and in documents reserved for 
expressing their views, such as the majority view section of the 
committee report.
  The minority has a similar right in debate and in its dissenting 
views, and I would not expect the majority to tell us what views we 
should have or how to express them.
  Not abusing the power the majority has over the contents and the 
filing of the report, which the minority does not get to see until it 
is filed, is really based on nothing more than the honor system. 
Unfortunately, in this system, the honor system failed.
  This abuse of power of mischaracterizing and slandering the 
amendments and the Members who offered them in the section of the 
report reserved for simply reporting amendments and the votes thereon, 
could not be allowed to stand or there would have been no end to it.
  This is not about party, nor is it about a bill, nor about an 
amendment, nor even about the underlying issue. It is about the 
``rights, reputation and conduct of Members, delegates or the resident 
commissioner, individually, in their representative capacity only.''
  When the majority abuses its power to attack the reputation of Member 
or Members, as it did in this case, the House must act to correct the 
injustice. The supplemental report filed by the majority is an 
important step in that direction, and I thank the chairman for agreeing 
to file the correction.
  We have strayed far from the customary comity and fair play to which 
this House has long adhered. That is no way to represent our views to 
the voters of this country. The voters have every right to expect us to 
fight for our beliefs, to represent them vigorously, and to speak out 
in clear terms on the important issues of the day.
  But, Mr. Speaker, there are limits. When Members of this House 
transgress those limits, we fail the people who sent us here and we 
fail the institution in which we are honored to serve. We are elected 
to 2-year terms. The office does not belong to us, but to the people. 
We are mere custodians of

[[Page H2997]]

the office. I hope that, in our conduct, we can prove ourselves good 
and responsible stewards of this public trust.
  It is my sincere hope that now that the correction has been filed and 
the slander abated, this will be the last time any Member has the 
unpleasant duty of rising in this House to defend his or her reputation 
and the traditions of this institution. I hope that this single 
aberration will be remembered as just that: a single aberration.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman 
from Virginia (Mr. Scott).
  (Mr. SCOTT of Virginia asked and was given permission to revise and 
extend his remarks, and include extraneous material.)
  Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record an 
editorial published this morning in the daily newspaper in Norfolk, 
Virginia, the Virginian Pilot, on this issue.

                 [From the Virginia Pilot, May 5, 2005]

                     A House Divided Against Itself

       The mood in certain precincts of Congress has become so 
     poisonous that people aren't speaking our common language 
     unless they're accusing political opponents of unspeakable 
     crimes.
       The ``Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act'' would 
     make it a federal offense to take a minor across a state line 
     to get an abortion without the consent of her parents, for a 
     physician to perform such abortions, and allows parents to 
     sue anybody who does.
       Democrats on the Judiciary Committee offered several 
     amendments that would have limited the law's scope. U.S. Rep. 
     Bobby Scott, for example, sought to insert this line: ``The 
     prohibitions of this section do not apply with respect to 
     conduct by taxicab drivers, bus drivers or others in the 
     business of professional transport.''
       Pretty straightforward, right?
       Should the U.S. government prosecute a bus driver because a 
     girl in one of its seats is traveling to end a pregnancy? No 
     matter your answer to that question, the congressman's 
     wording is pretty clear, unless you're a member of the 
     Judiciary Committee's staff, which managed Scott's amendment 
     into this:
       ``Mr. Scott offered an amendment that would have exempted 
     sexual predators from prosecution if they're taxicab drivers, 
     bus drivers or others in the business of professional 
     transport.''
       In other words, the staff of a committee on which Scott 
     serves accused him of trying to protect sexual predators, 
     arguably a crime in itself.
       It is the kind of libel--repeated against two other 
     Democratic members of the committee--that only nameless, 
     faceless bureaucrat would dare make. But, significantly, it's 
     also the kind of power-made mischief that the Republican 
     leadership felt deserved defense.
       The Congress Tuesday evening spent an hour debating a 
     resolution to require Republicans to change the descriptions, 
     which are supposed to be, and ordinarily are, written in dry, 
     neutral language.
       That debate was itself illustrative of how deep the 
     divisions in Congress have become. While the Democrats--
     including Scott and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi--talked 
     about how Republicans abused the truth to score political 
     points, the majority changed the subject entirely and re-
     argued the merits of the abortion bill, which passed the week 
     before.
       ``The issue is whether we can trust each other to deal with 
     each other fairly,'' said Wisconsin Democrat Rep. David Obey, 
     who had voted for the abortion bill.
       In the end, Tuesday's debate was a rancorous parry and 
     feint, lasted an eternity and came to absolutely nothing. The 
     resolution to change the descriptions, of course, failed on a 
     party-line vote.
       Still, for 60 minutes, the rudeness that now rules the hall 
     of the Capitol was on sharp display for all America to see.
       ``The rewrite says more about the person who wrote it, and 
     those who defend it, than it does about the amendment 
     itself,'' Scott said Tuesday.
       Scott's right. What is says is nothing kind, and not to be 
     forgotten.
  Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, not seeing the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. 
Jackson-Lee), I thank the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary 
for filing the corrected report, and I yield back the balance of my 
time.

                          ____________________