[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 116 (Wednesday, July 11, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H6049-H6050]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      OUR GUARANTEED FOUR FREEDOMS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Swalwell) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SWALWELL of California. Mr. Speaker, it was in this Chamber in 
1941 that Franklin Roosevelt told the world that every man, woman, and 
child in the world should be guaranteed four freedoms: the freedom of 
speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from fear, and the freedom 
from want.
  And Mr. Speaker, today, our President has taken a wrecking ball to 
all four of those guarantees. He has declared that the press is the 
enemy of the American people--going after that treasured freedom of 
speech, the right for me to speak here in this well, for people to 
assemble outside, and for the journalists behind me in the gallery to 
report on it--the freedom of worship that every man and woman and child 
could pray to the God of their choosing and not be discriminated 
because of it. Our country, as we speak right now today, has a Muslim 
ban in place.

                              {time}  1100

  Freedom from fear: Nearly daily, the President tweets out that the 
immigrants fleeing the harshest places in the world from violence and 
abject poverty are the problem, that they are murderers and rapists.
  And freedom from want: The idea that if you work hard, it will mean 
something. Well, Mr. Speaker, this Chamber passed, and the President 
signed, a tax cut where 83 percent of the benefits went to the 
wealthiest among us. Not a tax cut that told our businesses: You can be 
more competitive, but you have to share the profits with those who 
generated your productivity.
  Those four freedoms that we have all relied upon and depend upon in 
our country are being knocked down. We have an opportunity in this 
Chamber, Mr. Speaker, to unite and work together to restore those 
freedoms and rebuild them.
  Our Founders, in their wisdom, envisioned that you could have a 
wrecking-ball, out-of-control Presidency, and they did not leave us 
helpless. They envisioned that the Article I check and balance of a 
Congress, elected by the

[[Page H6050]]

people, could be a check on the President.
  As our President right now is abroad, insulting our allies, drawing 
us closer to adversaries like Russia, we can be a check. We can say, 
when it comes to those families separated at the border, we are not 
going to put a single priority of the President forward until he 
reunites all of them. When it comes to the press, who are under attack 
in speech that is constantly being suppressed, we can pass the 
Journalist Protection Act, which I recently introduced, which would 
make it a Federal crime to commit violence against anyone in the news 
gathering business. There is a lot we can do together.
  And as it comes to our democracy, Mr. Speaker, we are just 4 months 
away from an election. The adversary that our President is meeting with 
is determined to interfere again. The best antidote to stop that would 
be for us to unite and pass legislation to have an independent 
commission. That is bipartisan legislation that is out there.
  We can be the check that our Founders envisioned. We can be the check 
that our constituents really need us to be during these trying times.
  We are not helpless, Mr. Speaker. We can pick up the pieces, and we 
can rebuild and restore those freedoms that FDR stood in this Chamber 
and guaranteed to the world that we would have. That should still be 
true today in America.

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