[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 14 (Thursday, January 23, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H360-H363]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              PARDONING PRO-LIFE ACTIVISTS TARGETED BY DOJ

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Mackenzie). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 3, 2025, the Chair recognizes the gentleman 
from Texas (Mr. Roy) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, today, the President of the United States 
issued 21 very important pardons of individuals who had been put in 
jail, prosecuted, persecuted, for their religious beliefs and exercise 
of their speech. These are individuals who are pro-life who had been 
put in jail because a weaponized Department of Justice was unleashed 
against these individuals, very specifically and purposefully because 
they were espousing their pro-life views.
  In the President's action to formally pardon these 21 individuals, he 
rights a wrong that was carried out against them. More importantly, he 
sends a loud message that the Department of Justice cannot and should 
not be targeted toward individuals for their political beliefs and 
their political actions. That is precisely what happened to those 21 
individuals.
  How do we know this? If you look at the application of the so-called 
FACE Act that was used to prosecute these individuals, to arrest and 
prosecute them, 97 percent of the FACE Act prosecutions between 1994 
and 2024 were initiated against pro-life Americans.
  I want you to pause and listen to that again. Ninety-seven percent of 
the prosecutions under this one act were carried out against pro-life 
Americans--this despite the fact that there have been numerous attacks 
on pro-life facilities and crisis pregnancy centers in the wake of 
Dobbs. Ninety-one pregnancy resource centers have been attacked since 
the Dobbs opinion was leaked.
  In 2022, pro-life activist Mark Houck was arrested by the FBI for 
FACE Act violations related to an incident outside of an abortion 
facility. They didn't charge him in Pennsylvania--in fact, they 
passed--but the Feds went after him.

                              {time}  1800

  Mr. Speaker, you have to ask yourself: Why is that true?
  There have been 411 recorded attacks on Catholic churches since 2020.
  Was the FACE Act used once by the Department of Justice against any 
of these Catholic churches?
  No.
  So what does that look like for these 21 individuals?
  By the way, I think this is really important in the context of the 
speeches that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle were just 
giving with respect to the treatment of those individuals incarcerated, 
charged, and prosecuted in the wake of January 6. I will come back to 
that in a minute.
  Regarding these individuals whom I am talking about with respect to 
the pro-life prosecutions by the Department of Justice under Joe Biden, 
as one of the attorneys for one of the defendants put it:
  ``While Biden's prosecutors almost entirely ignored the firebombing 
and vandalism of hundreds of pro-life churches and pregnancy centers, 
they viciously pursued pro-life Americans.''
  ``And had they been opposing anything but abortion, Joe Biden would 
have given them medals. Instead Biden wanted them branded as convicted 
felons and imprisoned for years in a Federal penitentiary.''
  Eva Edl is an 89-year-old survivor of a Soviet concentration camp who 
sat in front of the entrance to an abortion clinic in a wheelchair. She 
was one of those targeted by the Biden Department of Justice.
  Let's be clear. She described how she was shipped off in cattle cars 
to concentration camps in Yugoslavia at age 9. They were packed in body 
to body with no food and no water. She lived through that. She is 89 
years old.
  Again, I want everybody to understand who is listening to this at 
home: An 89-year-old survivor of gulags in Europe was prosecuted by the 
Biden Department of Justice at age 89 for being in a wheelchair in 
front of an abortion clinic--a Federal crime, Federal Department of 
Justice.
  Paulette Harlow is a 75-year-old grandmother from Kingston, 
Massachusetts. She has six children and is a grandmother to eight. She 
is suffering from health issues: liver disease and arthritis. She was 
prosecuted and sentenced to jail in a 25-month sentence in Texas, miles 
away from her home in Massachusetts. She is 75 years old.
  Why?
  It is because she was at an abortion clinic professing her faith and 
her hope

[[Page H361]]

that they would not carry out abortions.
  Lauren Handy is a peaceful, pro-life activist and was formally 
sentenced to 57 months, almost 5 years, plus 3 of supervision, for her 
efforts to peacefully save the lives of the unborn. I want to be very 
clear. Lauren, whom I met, is actually a progressive activist. She and 
I don't agree on a lot of issues, but she was out advocating for life, 
and she was sentenced by the Biden Department of Justice under Merrick 
Garland to 57 months in jail.
  Again, I want everybody to think about that.
  She was protesting an abortion clinic. Nobody here, Mr. Speaker, by 
the way, is saying that there isn't room for misdemeanor-type 
prosecutions if you are in the way and you won't listen to the calls 
for you to leave. Call it a misdemeanor, pay a fine, whatever it might 
be. It was a Federal prosecution and she was sentenced to 57 months.
  John Hinshaw, 68 years old, was sentenced to 21 months. He said: 
``People are having prayer services all over the place for us. The 
expression of support has just been tremendous.''
  Today, the President of the United States righted those wrongs. He 
righted those wrongs for those four I have just described and 17 others 
for a total of 21. He also sent a loud message, as I said before, that 
the Department of Justice never again should be politicized to target 
people for their beliefs and to be used as a political weapon as it has 
been under the Joe Biden regime.
  It is a new day, and it is an important day.
  I want to follow up, though, on my colleagues here who took the floor 
regarding January 6. I was very clear on this House floor 4 years ago 
during January 6 that what occurred was wrong. What was occurring and 
what had occurred was wrong. Those who had broken the law should be 
prosecuted for breaking the law. I don't know anybody who disagrees 
with that. I really don't.
  There are differing facts for each one of those 1,500 cases. Some of 
them are pretty bad facts, and regarding some of them there are 
absolutely no facts at all, but they were pursued anyway.
  Therein lies the problem.
  I want everybody to really listen to this point. There is going to be 
time for us to study all 1,500 cases, and we can look and we can judge 
what was the nature of how they were arrested, where they were 
arrested, where were they put in jail, how long were they in jail, what 
were the conditions in the jail, and how many of their loved ones could 
they talk to.
  What was their access to defense counsel?
  What was the nature of the prosecution?
  What did the judges do?
  What were the sentences?
  We need to look at all those things.
  Notably, the President commuted I think 14 individual sentences. I 
don't have it right in front of me, but I think it was 14, which tells 
me that the President and his team went through and tried to 
differentiate some of the worst, most egregious acts in their view that 
shouldn't be pardoned but rather commuted to time served.
  I would also note this: we are now 48 months beyond the events. Many 
of these individuals were arrested early in the process, they have been 
in jail, they have been in the judicial system and have been dragged 
along. I have talked to dozens of parents, family members, wives, 
husbands, and spouses of the people who were jailed who were unable to 
talk to their loved ones. These are people without criminal records, 
people who had done nothing else.

  Many of these people were charged with just parading here in the 
Capitol complex which then the court said: Well we are not sure about 
that, and then crossing a line and being in a place you are not 
supposed to be in, the obstruction issues.
  What were you obstructing exactly?
  Again, I think it is important to note that what occurred that day 
should not have occurred, that many of the acts that occurred should 
and have been punished. Some that were punished should have been 
punished, but when you completely ignore the rule of law, when you 
politically charge people, and when you use the Department of Justice 
as a political weapon, Mr. Speaker, then you undermine the rule of law 
and you turn it on its head, so that there is no differentiation 
between the right and the wrong.
  Mr. Speaker, when you literally go prosecute an 89-year-old gulag 
survivor because she was exercising her pro-life views at an abortion 
clinic, what do you think one's view is of the righteousness of the 
other actions of the Department of Justice?
  Mr. Speaker, how do you look at the 1,500 and go through and break 
them down in a way when 48 months later, as a father was on a news show 
today talking about his son and saying that his son had been moved from 
jail to jail, had had to filter the water through a sock because there 
was so much rust in the water, that they weren't able to talk to him 
for 3 weeks over Christmas, they didn't even know where he was and he 
couldn't get access to counsel during a lot of those times. What are we 
supposed to do with that?
  Ignore it?
  The President came in and made a judgment that these 1,500 people of 
varying forms, some sentenced and some not, some had taken plea deals 
and some not, had had 48 months of their life turned upside down by a 
Department of Justice who wanted to try to make an example out of them 
and the President of the United States said: Enough.
  Do you know what, Mr. Speaker?
  I agree.
  That is because at the end of the day, 48 months later, many of them 
having been in jail for all or a lot of that time, many of them had 
their doors broken down, and many of them had FBI raids--I had two 
grandmas driving from Austin, Texas, out into the hill country just a 
few months ago who were arrested and jailed overnight because they were 
physically present here at the Capitol. They were not even inside, to 
the best of my knowledge. I think they might have just crossed one of 
the bike lines.
  Three years later two grandmothers are arrested and put in jail?
  Does anybody see what happens when we politicize the justice system 
and the scales of justice become something that we can't look at as 
blindfolded?
  Again, why am I talking about this?
  It is because today the President righted the wrongs of those 21 
individuals who were literally protesting, in their view, and I share 
that view, the murdering of unborn children. I think that stuff 
matters. I think it matters a lot because had Joe Biden and had Merrick 
Garland not politicized the Department of Justice, then maybe 20 or 30 
cases of individuals who had done something that were particularly 
egregious that were prosecuted, maybe those wouldn't have been 
pardoned. I don't know. I haven't studied every case.
  However, Mr. Speaker, when you are looking at 1,500 cases and all the 
people who are being abused, I think the President did the right thing 
and again differentiated between those with the commuted sentences.
  Meanwhile, what the President is doing besides, I think, trying to 
restore balance to the justice system is he is keeping his promises to 
secure our country.
  One of my colleagues over there said that the first thing the 
President did was make us less safe.
  Is he serious?
  Is he serious?
  He thinks reversing politicized political prosecutions 4 years later 
is making us less safe.
  May I remind my Democratic colleagues that the individual who burned 
down a police station, a career criminal, got 27 months. That is the 
idea of justice from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
  Let's put aside the $2 billion worth of damages nationwide in the 
wake of the Floyd riots, and let's put aside all the other damage that 
flowed from that.
  Meanwhile, what is the President doing?
  He is making our Nation much more safe. There was an executive order 
declaring a national emergency at the border.
  In the first Congress that I was in office, I introduced the Border 
Visibility and Security Act to help regain operational control of the 
border. I put together a bill calling on the designation of cartels as 
foreign terrorist organizations, and I am pleased that that was one of 
the President's executive orders this week, declaring cartels as 
foreign terrorist organizations.

[[Page H362]]

  He issued an executive order requiring Homeland Security to deport 
aliens with orders of removal. There are over 1 million with orders of 
removal that Joe Biden wouldn't do.
  Again, the lawlessness of the previous administration set the stage 
for the dangers that we have experienced, and now President Trump is 
undoing that damage.
  There was an executive order saying categorical parole policies, 
undoing the CBP-1 app that was used to flood the zone with people who 
came into our country and were released and did things like kill 
Jocelyn Nungaray, whose mother Alexis I have gotten to know and who was 
with me for the inauguration this weekend.
  There is an executive order to end the catch-and-release program and 
an executive order to resume the successful migrant protection 
protocols and return to Mexico, so we can stop the flow. To 
reinstate recognition of title 42 where you cannot travel through the 
country with communicable diseases. An executive order ending 
birthright citizenship, as it has been applied wrongly and incorrectly 
for years, to people who have manufactured or have used a manufactured 
cottage industry in which people pay money to get delivered into the 
country, have a baby, get the citizenship, and then it is what is known 
as anchor babies. It is real, it is pervasive, it is problematic, and 
it turns our country's system on its head.

  By the way, yes, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle will 
say: Yeah, but a court today ruled that that is not constitutional, so 
they put an injunction on it.
  We will see. We will see how this plays out in the legal system.
  From my reading of the law, when the 14th Amendment was passed in 
1868, a mere 4 years later, the United States Supreme Court in the 
Slaughterhouse Cases, explicitly said--4 years removed from the passage 
of an amendment to the United States Constitution, the then-sitting 
Supreme Court said that it did not apply to people who were here as the 
children that were being born here of people who were foreign citizens. 
Another court echoed that a decade or so later.
  One court came in and said: Well, no, we think there is birthright 
citizenship if you are born here to a foreign national, but only if you 
are a legal permanent resident.
  I believe the President's executive order is correct, I believe it is 
lawful, I believe it is constitutional, and I believe he ought to 
continue to enforce it.
  We ought to be challenging this all the way up to the courts and 
immediately win this. I believe this Supreme Court will side on the 
right side, which is that you are a citizen if you are the child of an 
American citizen. Subject to the jurisdiction thereof has to matter.

                              {time}  1815

  The President is restoring our border, restoring law and order, and 
reversing the damage, and he should be. He should be thanked and 
congratulated for it.
  What else has he been doing in the last, what am I adding up, 78 
hours? President Trump, 78 hours in, has been withdrawing us from the 
disastrous World Health Organization, a globalist entity that has been 
undermining our sovereignty and wants to take away our own 
decisionmaking and make us subject to foreign powers on our health 
issues; withdrawing us from the disastrous Paris climate treaty that 
was making us beholden to China and foreign nationals and unable to 
advance and promote our own American energy.
  By the way, had we not reversed all of that, we wouldn't have been 
adding fuel to the fire of Russia going into Ukraine, so to speak.
  The President has been declaring a national energy emergency; 
unleashing American energy; opening up exploration; reversing Biden's 
ridiculous bans on offshore drilling; making it the policy of the 
United States to recognize two sexes, male and female; ending 
affirmative action and DEI in the Federal Government and trying to get 
us back to the actual view of a government that does not look through 
the lens of color or sex, but, rather, merit and hard work; and 
requiring that everybody actually shows up to work. Who knew?
  All of those things are things that the President has been doing in a 
matter of 78 hours since getting sworn in a few feet from this Chamber 
and making our country immensely better off for it.
  We have already seen a massive decline in the number of people trying 
to come across our border. Who knew? Who could have predicted that if 
the law is enforced maybe people will say: I guess we can't come now. 
Maybe the cartels will say: This may not be the profit center that we 
have at the moment.
  Just last night, a guy was apprehended by ICE somewhere up in New 
York or somewhere in the northeast, and he lost his mind. He started 
swearing at Trump, F Trump, all this stuff. I am with Biden forever. I 
am not going back to Haiti, he said.
  Yeah, he is. He is, and so are a lot of other people because prisons 
of the world shouldn't be dumped onto the streets of America, 
endangering our citizens. That is what Biden did, and that is what 
Trump is reversing.
  Now we have to deliver. This is my message to my colleagues here. We 
have to deliver. My friends in the Freedom Caucus, other conservatives, 
we have put forward a plan that we believe would deliver and deliver 
quickly.
  We don't have time to waste. The President needs resources. Tom Homan 
needs resources. The Border Patrol met with the union this last week. 
They need resources. ICE needs resources to do their job, so let's do 
it.
  They want $86 billion. Let's find it. We can. The defense needs to be 
modernized, built up after getting undermined and focused on all sorts 
of ridiculous woke and DEI policies. We need a new, modern, robust 
military to beat China. We can do that.
  We put forward $200 billion over 4 years under President Trump to 
modernize the military, an additional $50 billion a year. Let's do it. 
We can do it, and we can pay for it. We said we would raise the debt 
ceiling over 2 years, about $4 trillion. We are not inclined to want to 
raise the debt ceiling, if it hasn't been noticed, but we will do it.
  The President wants us to get that aside so Chuck Schumer can't play 
games with the bond market, so let's get rid of the debt, or let's 
increase the debt ceiling. Let's get $86 billion for Border Patrol. 
Let's get $200 billion for defense. Then let's apply a handful of cuts 
to pay for those things. I don't know, how about we repeal the student 
loan fiasco? It is $100 billion to $270 billion.
  How about let's just apply Medicaid work requirements so that, if 
citizens are on Medicaid for able-bodied Americans--not all, but the 
able-bodied Americans--that they must work? It is a pretty popular 
issue. Every Republican has voted for it, and it is $120 billion.
  We can pay for defense, pay for Border Patrol, make our Medicaid 
system better, and reverse the ridiculous student loan bailouts which 
are giving money from one American to another.
  The plumber who never went to college is subsidizing the sociology 
major sitting in their parents' basement tweeting about nonsense. How 
about we end that? The sociology major pays their student loans. They 
took the loans out. The plumber who didn't can go do their thing. Every 
American who I know who works hard agrees with that. We can do that.
  Conservatives, the Freedom Caucus, have put that forward. We want to 
support President Trump. We want to make sure that President Trump can 
deliver on the border, get the debt ceiling away from being used 
politically by Chuck Schumer, and so we put that plan forward.
  I think we should have already done it. As usual, we sit in this 
body, and we debate, and we continue to debate. Unfortunately, we are 
still debating. Unfortunately, in my opinion, we are going to continue 
to debate because there is a real debate going on about taxing and 
spending. I am blowing Republicans' minds when I say that I am all for 
tax cuts, but Members better cut the spending so that we can actually 
reduce deficits.
  I have been pretty clear about that. A lot of my colleagues have been 
pretty clear about that. Some of my colleagues here seem to want 
nothing but tax cuts and no spending cuts.
  I will also hear a lot of my colleagues say: Yeah, I am for the 
spending cuts. I will say: Okay. Well, how many? How much? Well, I 
mean, as many as we can get.

[[Page H363]]

  Okay. Are we going to reduce deficits, or not? I mean, that is the 
question I am going to be asking everybody. Can they do math, and are 
we going to reduce deficits? That is the question every American sent 
us here to do. Do the hard work. Sit at the table. Why don't we put the 
microphones down, put the cameras away, use these tables, roll our 
sleeves up, get the paper out, and do the math?

  Yes, tax cuts can and do produce economic growth. It puts more money 
in the hands of the people. Yes, it is morally correct to leave more 
money in the hands of the American people. I would gladly vote to get 
rid of the income tax, zero it out, leave the money in the hands of the 
people, but guess what? Whether it is President Trump's vision or views 
on tariffs, whether it is something else, there has to be some amount 
of revenue to pay for all of the promises and all of the programs that 
every politician loves to go home and run on.
  Now the rubber meets the road, or the piper needs to be paid, or 
whatever metaphor one wants to use. We cannot have our cake and eat it, 
too. We can't run around and beat up the CBO and blame the CBO and say: 
They never score anything right. That is probably correct. They are 
human beings, and maybe they are biased. Fine.
  Okay. My colleagues think they are biased? Great. Come in with 
models. Come in with somebody else's models and show me how the math is 
going to work out, that if we do all of these tax cuts and do no 
spending cuts, that somehow we are magically going to have deficits 
going down because it is just not going to be true in the aggregate.
  When Ronald Reagan cut taxes in 1981 from the confiscatory top rate 
of 70 percent under Jimmy Carter to 28 percent on the top marginal 
rate, there was a lot of good economic growth.
  Corporations aren't these blobs. They are people. When we cut 
corporate rates 8 years ago from 35 percent to 21 percent, there was 
pretty significant economic growth. That was pretty meaningful in 
trying to keep more capital here.
  Expensing, research and development, all of these things create 
growth. A lot of tax cuts don't. Take the child tax credits. I get how 
child tax credits can be argued to be good policy, pro-family policy, 
good for hardworking families that have kids. There are a lot of 
arguments for child tax credits.
  They are not going to be massively stimulative. They cost about $800 
billion over 10 years. So my point is, over here, it is like what are 
you cutting? What are we cutting because we can't continue to rack up 
deficits?
  I think I am running close on time, and I just want to close with 
this: Right now, we have $36 point whatever trillion in debt. Right 
now, we are racking up about $1.8 trillion to $2 trillion a year in 
deficits.
  When the interest on the bonds that we currently hold are getting 
refinanced over the next couple of years, those interest payments are 
going to go up, probably to the tune of another $200 billion to $300 
billion a year.
  If we renew all of the tax cuts, which I support, but we don't offer 
any cuts correspondingly, we will add hundreds of billions, if not 
several trillion dollars of deficit spending. The job for us, 
Republicans and Democrats, is to not do that.
  I am asking for deficit neutrality on the tax bill. Let me just be 
clear. If all of my colleagues who want deficit neutrality or deficit 
reduction on the tax bill combined with spending cuts, being debated in 
reconciliation right now, if I win that fight that I am having right 
now with colleagues--because they are like, I don't know--the best we 
will get is the current deficit, that is how we would end up with 
exactly what we have right now of roughly $2 trillion deficits.
  By the way, it will get worse because of the interest I mentioned if 
we keep financing and refinancing our debt, and interest goes up.
  What I am trying to scrap for in this body is just trying not to make 
it worse. It is like ``Christmas Vacation.'' ``Worse? How can it get 
any worse?''
  This is how it can get worse: Vote for more deficits. We shouldn't do 
that.
  My actual last point with, I think, 1\1/2\ minutes remaining, is 
that, if we are going to do anything at all in reconciliation on 
policy, we should be fighting for healthcare freedom.
  My office put out a report 2 days ago entitled: ``The Case for 
Healthcare Freedom.'' It is 48 pages that outlines all of the ways in 
which we are destroying the average American's access to healthcare; 
that we need to restore the doctor-patient relationship; that we need 
to break down the stranglehold that insurance companies and hospitals 
and pharma have on our healthcare. We need to free them up with 
expansive health savings accounts and allow them to decouple that so 
they can go out in the market and get actual insurance, go to direct 
primary care and actually get care for themselves instead of paying 
$25,000 a year between their employer and themselves to be able to go 
to an insurance company and be told that they can't get care.
  If we want to transform this country, we need to reduce the deficits, 
give the President what he needs to secure the border, and give us 
healthcare freedom. That is my call to my colleagues.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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