[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 121 (Thursday, July 25, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H4940-H4943]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ISSUES OF THE DAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 9, 2023, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from California 
(Mr. Sherman) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, we have someone running for President, a 
former President, who claims that there were no deaths of our soldiers 
in Afghanistan for 18 months under his Presidency. Clearly false. 
Identified as false. We will see the statistics. We see

[[Page H4941]]

that 163 of our best and finest died in Afghanistan during the Trump 
Presidency, and they died in every year he was in office.
  Now, more died under the Obama administration, but at least under the 
Obama administration, we got something. We got bin Laden. Let us not 
forget that on 9/11 we lost more Americans than Pearl Harbor, we lost 
more Americans on American soil than had been lost at any time since 
1865.

                              {time}  1245

  Madam Speaker, 163 of our soldiers and marines died in Afghanistan 
under Trump, and what did we get for it? Did Trump leave Afghanistan 
better than he found it? Did Trump leave Afghanistan at all? No.
  The Afghanistan he left his successor was identical to what he 
inherited from his predecessor, but 163 Americans died. He left the 
withdrawal, knowing it was very difficult, to the Biden administration, 
and then the attack is that we lost 12 soldiers under the Biden 
administration. We lost 163 under Trump. He did not leave Afghanistan 
better than he found it. He did not leave Afghanistan at all.
  While focused on 9/11, we have to remember Dr. Afridi, the Pakistani 
doctor who helped us get bin Laden and has been in a Pakistani jail for 
a decade and a half since then. We should leave no man behind, and 
certainly not Dr. Afridi.
  There have been proposals to trade Dr. Afridi for Dr. Siddiqui, a 
terrorist who tried to kill Americans, but didn't kill any Americans, 
who is now a mental patient in a prison hospital. We should make that 
trade whenever it becomes available.
  Pakistan, right now, is in a period of unrest. We have to demonstrate 
our dedication to democracy and human rights around the world and 
particularly in Pakistan.
  Yesterday, I got a commitment from the State Department official who 
deals with all of our policies in South Asia to consider directing 
Ambassador Blome to go visit Imran Khan in jail. For this man, a former 
prime minister--more votes than anyone else in Pakistan--a 
demonstration by the United States that this statesman should not be 
killed in prison is very important.


            Condemning Anti-Israel, Pro-Hamas Demonstrations

  Mr. SHERMAN. Madam Speaker, I join Vice President Harris in 
condemning yesterday's anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstrations.
  The demonstrators may not know that their leaders are funded by Iran 
and Qatar, which fund the organizations and the propaganda. These same 
leaders glorified October 7. They rejoiced at the death of every 
Israeli civilian.
  They condemned Israel on October 7 before Israel had done anything to 
respond because their demonstrations were not about whether Israel 
should not respond. Their demonstrations were a glorification of the 
death brought by Hamas.
  Now, the followers chant, ``From the river to the sea,'' but some of 
them don't even know which river, which sea. What they don't know is 
the background of that slogan, ``From the river to the sea, Palestine 
shall be free.'' It is a declaration that every Jew who lives from the 
river to the sea should be killed or ethnically cleansed.
  Since, as we saw in the 1930s, there is no country that wants to 
accept millions of Jewish refugees, that means they should all be 
killed. That is the chant that we hear, ``From the river to the sea.''
  Prior to October 7, we needed to see a two-state solution, and I hope 
we get there, but there is this effort to convey the life of those who 
lived in Gaza as being somehow equivalent to the Rohingya refugees, 
refugees living in camps in Bangladesh.
  The fact is that those living in Gaza had longer life expectancies 
than the average person in the world, considerably longer than those 
living in Russia, roughly equal to those living in Saudi Arabia. All of 
that was destroyed on October 7.
  Hamas knew exactly what they were doing. They conducted this attack 
for the purpose of the response because they know they cannot achieve 
their political objectives, which, remember, is to expel or kill every 
Jew from the river to the sea.
  They can't possibly achieve those objectives unless they massively 
change world opinion. They know and have said on the record in their 
own comments that every death of a Palestinian civilian helps them 
achieve their ugly purpose.
  That is why we had, in our great Capital, the waving of the Hamas 
flag while they burned the American flag. Make no mistake about it, 
those who hate Israel also hate America. We see our statues desecrated, 
and we see a call by the demonstrators for the final solution. At least 
a few of them understand that ``from the river to the sea'' means 
killing 7 million Jewish Israelis.


                      Problems With Cryptocurrency

  Mr. SHERMAN. Madam Speaker, we have seen a discussion of 
cryptocurrency. It was the one thing the Biden-Harris administration 
agreed with Donald Trump on. We know that the Biden-Harris 
administration has been relatively tough on crypto, but here are the 
words of Donald Trump from 2019: ``I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other 
cryptocurrencies, which are not money and whose value is highly 
volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated cryptoassets can facilitate 
unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity. . . 
. We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than 
ever, both dependable and reliable. It is by far the most dominant 
currency anywhere in the world.''
  That is what Donald Trump said until he realized that he could get 
tens or hundreds of millions of dollars from the crypto billionaire 
bros if he was willing to change his position, and that is exactly what 
he is doing.
  He is going to the Bitcoin 2024 Nashville conference to pledge his 
allegiance to the bitcoin billionaires. You can be sure his campaign 
will get tens of millions--no, hundreds of millions into supersecret 
PACs to try to propagandize the American people. God only knows whether 
he will personally get tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in 
cryptocurrency. We will never know because, as I will explain, 
cryptocurrency is the favorite device, a well-tailored device, for 
those committing bribery and other crimes.
  Some consultants have come to Vice President Harris--and thank God 
she has not yet taken the suggestion of these consultants--and told her 
to go to Bitcoin 2024 Nashville, and there will be hundreds of millions 
of dollars for her campaign.

  Why do these bitcoin bros have so much money? Well, they are in the 
business of making money. Everybody else in business has to actually 
make a product and sell it to get money. With crypto, you just call it 
a currency, and it is money, and you make sure you have a billion coins 
for yourself before you sell the rest.
  There are those in the Harris campaign or some outside the Harris 
campaign who will tell the Harris campaign, hey, the political thing to 
do is to get money from the crypto billionaires. The fact is that is 
not the case.
  I have never seen a political year in which there is so much money 
available for candidates to communicate their messages. What will win 
in 2024 is not money but message.
  The message has to be clear: Democrats don't sell out.
  When Trump didn't see money on either side, he said he was not a fan 
of Bitcoin. Now, he is going to become a Bitcoin fanboy in Nashville. 
Our candidate won't sell out.
  What is the risk posed by crypto? When the crypto bros tell you what 
they plan to do, you should believe them. Right now, crypto is just 
something interesting to bet on. You buy Ethereum today, maybe it is 
worth less tomorrow. Maybe it is more tomorrow. It seems as harmless as 
betting on the Dodgers or the Angels, but that is not the purpose of 
cryptocurrencies.
  Cryptocurrencies aspire to be a currency. What have the crypto bros 
told us? That they plan to displace the dollar as a medium of payment 
and as a store of value, as a reserve currency.
  How important is the dollar's current role as a reserve currency? Our 
fiscal policy, our budget deficit, is enormous. It would make Argentina 
blush. Our trade deficit is larger than any country in the history of 
the world, yet we continue to have a relatively prosperous country. We 
do that because of the role the dollar plays in international finance 
because the dollar is the reserve currency for everywhere around the 
world.

[[Page H4942]]

  The bitcoin billionaire bros say, hey, that is a good idea. It 
supports the lifestyle of over 300 million Americans. Maybe we can 
divert those profits to ourselves. They tell you upfront they want to 
challenge the dollar's role.
  If that role is successfully, even partially, challenged, we will 
have to cut expenditures, including Social Security. We will have to 
raise taxes. We will be in a very difficult circumstance.
  I know people come here and say that we are going to have a balanced 
budget. We last had that under Clinton. Nobody has proposed a system 
for getting there anytime soon.
  Yet, it is not just a potential reserve currency. It is designed to 
be a payment system. Now, how is it going to be better than the dollar? 
Well, it is electronic. So is Venmo. So is a host of other things that 
already exist.
  I am sure that millions of transactions will take place where people 
are buying things today using the U.S. dollar in an electronic system. 
Most people can go a week or several weeks without touching a paper 
dollar or paper check. What is the thing that the crypto bros think 
makes their currency better? It is not the fact that it is electronic. 
It is that it is a perfect device to evade the law. The crypto 
transactions are on the blockchain, but no one knows who owns any 
blockchain account.
  It is the preferred method--growing method--for bribery, drug 
dealers, human traffickers. It is, though, particularly valuable to tax 
evaders. The goal, the self-expressed goal, of the crypto bros is that 
income tax will only be a tax on wages and maybe a bit of voluntary 
contributions from those who make their money elsewhere.
  Trump's Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service testified that 
we have basically a trillion dollars a year of uncollected taxes, 
mostly from the very wealthy. That means they have to conceal $3 
trillion of income to avoid paying taxes or evade $1 trillion of tax. 
That means, in every decade, we are talking $30 trillion of assets that 
need to be concealed.

                              {time}  1300

  Cryptocurrencies are the perfect device to achieve that if they 
become currencies, if you can buy a yacht for a bitcoin or a bunch of 
bitcoins.
  Harris will have a powerful issue in demonstrating that Trump knows 
full well that Bitcoin is a crock, that he sold out and that we won't, 
that her loyalty is to the American people who benefit from the role 
that the dollar plays in international transactions and as a reserve 
currency, that they benefit from a system in which we are able to 
collect taxes not just from those who get W-2 forms but from everybody 
who makes money in our society.
  Now, I am not sure that the government will stop crypto, but I 
believe that crypto will stop crypto. There are a limited number of 
government currencies. You have a U.S. dollar. You have a Uruguayan 
peso. The Uruguayan peso will always have value because there will 
always be a Uruguay. The U.S. dollar will always be more valuable in 
total than the Uruguayan peso because America will always be bigger.
  There is no inherent value of any cryptocurrency. Sure, we have 
bitcoin, but why isn't hamster coin worth more than bitcoin? There is 
no particular reason.
  We have hamster coin. I always thought it was a joke and said so in a 
hearing until my staff said: No, boss, there is a hamster coin. Then I 
said, what about cobra coin? Well, no. We have cobra coin. A cobra 
could eat a hamster, but there is already a cobra coin.
  I said, well, gee, there could be mongoose coin, and I proposed it in 
a hearing as a joke. Lo and behold, by the end of the day, they had 
created mongoose coin, which leads to the question: What about skibidi 
coin? I thought that was a joke until I was told that there already is 
a skibidi toilet coin.
  Once they make the skibidi coin, skibidi toilet movie, will skibidi 
coin go to the Moon? We don't know. Why is bitcoin more valuable than 
skibidi coin? It is today, maybe not after the movie.
  The promoters of crypto say, well, there is a limited number of 
Ethereum. There is a limited number of bitcoin. You can't have anymore, 
but you can have an infinite number of competing coins.
  There are roughly 200 countries in the world, not an unlimited 
number, and it is obvious that by the order those countries are in, 
Uruguay will always be smaller than the United States.


                        Engineered Intelligence

  Mr. SHERMAN. Madam Speaker, I want to focus on engineered 
intelligence. There are two groups of engineers who are in a race that 
they don't know about.
  One are the bioengineers creating new DNA, perhaps a new species. By 
the end of this century, who says they won't have a thousand-pound 
mammal with two 80-pound brains, which will probably beat my grandkids 
on the law school admissions test.
  We all know even more about computer engineers, and we know the 
upside of artificial intelligence. We heard our good friend, Jennifer 
Wexton, address this House, thanks in part to artificial intelligence.
  We are not going to stop artificial intelligence. Hopefully, we will 
make sure that it does not somehow lead to bias and discrimination, but 
we do have to make sure of one thing, that artificial intelligence 
remains a tool, not a creature.
  We need to do the research so that we have the capacity to monitor 
for and to prevent artificial intelligence from becoming self-aware, 
developing volition, developing ambition, and developing a survival 
instinct.
  I know it sounds like science fiction, but if somebody describes for 
you the future, and it seems like they are describing a science fiction 
movie, they might be right in their description of the future. If 
somebody describes the future, and it doesn't look like a science 
fiction movie, you know they are wrong.
  Our kids and our grandkids are going to be living in a science 
fiction movie. We just don't know which one. I hope it is not 
``Terminator.''
  We need to take seriously not only how artificial intelligence can be 
used as a tool to carry out, hopefully, benign objectives of its human 
programmers, but we do have to also monitor whether artificial 
intelligence becomes a creature, a self-aware entity interested in its 
own survival, aware of its surroundings with volition and ambition.


                          Nation of Immigrants

  Mr. SHERMAN. Madam Speaker, I have cringed again and again when I 
have seen Republicans condemn immigrants by identifying individual 
crimes committed by individual immigrants.
  Madam Speaker, imagine how much crime is committed in this country by 
bald people. All those crimes would be eliminated if bald people were 
somehow excluded from the country.
  Every group has its saint and its sinners. You can turn to any group, 
God forbid bald people could be your choice, and identify individual 
criminals.
  What I haven't heard is somebody coming to this floor and talking 
about the hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans who have been 
saved by immigrants, immigrants who are emergency medical technicians, 
home healthcare workers who are the difference between life and death 
for those they care for, those they feed, those they help prevent from 
falling, from our hospitals where you may have an immigrant as a 
janitor, preventing the spread of biological diseases throughout the 
hospital, or a hospital where you have the emergency room physician who 
is an immigrant.
  Let us have a Republican come to this floor and say they don't care 
about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are alive today 
because of the lifesaving work of immigrants.
  Let us work toward a more sensible immigration system. We had a 
chance of getting there with the bipartisan bill that was being worked 
on in the Senate that would have brought order to our border. Instead, 
it was killed by Donald Trump, who was remarkably honest and simply 
declared that he didn't want us to solve the problem because as long as 
the problem was there, it helped his campaign.
  Let us realize that we are a Nation of immigrants, that every group, 
including immigrants, includes both lifesavers and includes those who 
commit crimes. Keep in mind that on a per capita basis, immigrants 
commit less crime than those of us who are native born.

[[Page H4943]]

  Let us remember and praise all of the immigrants that have saved 
American lives and continue to do so today.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________