[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 50 (Thursday, March 19, 2026)]
[House]
[Pages H2612-H2615]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
{time} 1140
SPEAKING TRUTH ABOUT CRYPTO AND CONGRESS
(Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. Green
of Texas was recognized for 30 minutes.)
Mr. GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, and still I rise. I rise today, Mr.
Speaker, with a very special topic. I rise today, Mr. Speaker, because
I am a liberated, unbought, unbossed Democrat.
I not only speak the truth to power; I speak truth about power. You
speak truth to power by simply saying: ``Power, there is a problem.
Let's solve it.'' It is a great thing to do. When you speak truth about
power, you say: ``Power, there is a problem, and you are it.''
Today, I am going to speak truth about power. I am going to do so
because I will not allow the power that I am to speak about to
intimidate me. I insist on having the full benefit of my
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free speech rights, and I will take advantage of them. If it should
cost me, I will pay the price. I plan to speak truth, not only to
power, but also speak truth about power.
Today, I am going to embrace the topic that has caused a good deal of
consternation in this Congress, a topic that many people would say that
it would be injudicious to embrace because of the consequences, but
there comes a time when you have to take a stand. Consequences are
things that have to be considered, but when it comes to my country and
when it comes to the American consumer, I am willing to take on those
consequences. I am willing to do what I believe to be not only the
right thing but the righteous thing.
Today, I will embrace the topic: Why the crypto industry is spending
mega-millions of dollars to control Congress.
Why is the crypto industry spending mega-millions of dollars to
control Congress, not to have debates in Congress, not to allow the
American people to hear all sides of issues, but to control Congress to
the extent that but one side is going to be presented?
Today, I stand and I speak for all of those people who agree with me.
I don't speak for people associated with any party. I don't speak for
people associated with any caucus. I speak for everybody who agrees
with me, and there are a good many. Not all will say what I say, but
they agree with me.
By the way, I say what I say, and I don't expect others to say what I
say because I think I am uniquely qualified to say what I say. I sit on
the Committee on Financial Services. I have chaired the Subcommittee on
Oversight and Investigations for the Committee on Financial Services. I
am proud to say that I have lived under the leadership of the Honorable
Barney Frank and the Honorable Maxine Waters, and I am proud to say
that at some point, I believe that we will have the leadership on that
committee again. This is why the crypto industry is so concerned about
Members who might take the position that I take.
The topic again: Why the crypto industry is spending mega-millions of
dollars to control Congress. Let's start with what is actually
happening right now in Congress. The Congress is the House and the
Senate. We are in the House of Representatives, but it is the House and
the Senate. The Senate has passed a piece of legislation that deals
with housing. It is styled the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act.
I have a section-by-section breakdown. I am not going to go through
every section, but I can tell you that there is language in here that,
if implemented, will be of great benefit to people in the area of
housing, people who are in need of housing, people who are in need of a
place to call home. There is language in here that I support.
I also want you to know that in this bill that deals with housing,
the crypto industry decided that something was germane that I totally,
absolutely, and completely disagree with. The crypto industry decided
that near the very end of the bill, on the last page of the document
that I have, after having topics styled ``Rental Assistance
Demonstration program,'' ``Increasing Housing in Opportunity Zones,''
``Whole-Home Repairs Act,'' and many other things that are beneficial,
the crypto industry--this is on the very last page of the summary that
I have--found reason to believe that what I am about to articulate is
germane. I don't think it is germane, but it is in the bill.
The crypto industry has included language in section 1001, section
1001, styled ``Central bank digital currency,'' crypto industry,
central bank legislation in a housing bill. Here is what it would do.
This section pauses the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank
digital currency, pauses, pauses for approximately 5 years.
It pauses it. That pause is not good enough for some people. There
are some people who want a permanent ban on a central bank issuing a
digital currency.
Now, I have to give some edification to many people who are
listening. Let's start with this. Right now, if you desire to, you can
transfer with crypto dollars--cryptocurrency, I should say--money from
one person to another without it going through any other entity or
going to any other person, one person to another without going to any
other person, friends.
That kind of transference is beneficial in many ways to many people.
Some people who would do dastardly deeds are indeed enthralled with
this methodology. They are enthralled with it because, when they can
transfer from one person to another, if they want to transfer funds to
someone engaging in some sort of illicit activity, they can make that
transfer and remain anonymous.
There is something called pseudonymous. They are pseudonymous. They
have pseudonymous positions that allow them to be secretive within the
transaction. It is called pseudonymity. They have pseudonymity.
This pseudonymity allows people to do dastardly things and not be
recognized for their dastardly deeds. It makes it very difficult to
catch them. For example, someone who wants to send money to a terrorist
organization, you can do this anonymously. You have pseudonymity.
Also, you might recall some time ago not so long ago, there was a
group of people, maybe one person--I am not sure--who wanted to extort
money from a very notable family. They wanted that money to be
transferred in crypto dollars, crypto fashion, digital currency. They
wanted it to be transferred digitally because they knew that it would
prevent them from being caught.
Now, maybe they would be caught. Maybe there is some super means of
spying and finding out, but their chances of being caught were very
slim if they could have the money transferred from one person to
another, not go through a central bank, and, as a result, claim their
ill-gotten gains and go off into the world unknown to people as the
criminals they would be.
{time} 1150
It is great for those persons who want to extort money, this direct
transfer of money from one person to another.
Now, it would be against the law to do this, but it would also be up
to the law to find some means by which you can prevent this or you can
at least arrest the people who do this. But with this pseudonymity,
they have the ability to do this and not be caught. If they are caught,
it would be very difficult to accomplish the actual act of catching
them after they committed the crime. So extortion is one means by which
this kind of direct transfer can be used.
But there is another means. This means is something that applies to
people who have large sums of money but don't want to pay taxes. Some
things bear repeating. There are people who have large sums of money
who do not want to pay their fair share of taxes.
With this direct ability to transfer dollars from one person to
another, transfer them digitally, transfer them at a later point into a
currency that is tangible, this ability to do this also opens the door
for them to not only avoid taxes, which is legal, but to evade taxes,
which is illegal. It is lawful to avoid; illegal to evade.
Many people in this country--I know it is a surprise to some people
to know that there are some people who would evade taxes. My dear
friends, my dear brothers and sisters, there are people in this country
who, if given the opportunity to pay zero taxes, they would pay zero
taxes, notwithstanding the fact that they have large sums of money.
Well, I believe that taxation is something that is necessary. If I
want the roads that I traverse, if I want the bridges that I cross, if
I want the infrastructure that we have, taxation is necessary. You
don't pass an offertory. You don't pass an offertory for
infrastructure.
We need taxation to help us with hospitals. Sometimes we have to
build the infrastructure with tax dollars to aid and abet people who
are sick. Aid and abet might not be the best choice of words. Sometimes
my diction is less than superb.
The point is, we need tax dollars to do things to help people in this
country that we have concluded are in need of help, and it is necessary
to do so. That is what we do here in Congress. We pass legislation
quite regularly to help people, and we decided that this is a good
thing to do.
But you can't get the tax dollars from people who are evading because
you don't know that they are actually in the business of evading until
you
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can prove it, you can't prove it if you can't catch them, and you can't
catch them if they are making these direct transfers from one person to
another, one entity to another. They are anonymous.
I am not saying that all of my colleagues had this in mind when they
say they want privacy. Privacy is a big issue. They are saying that the
government ought not know that I am moving my money from one place to
another, that that's my personal business.
Well, it is your personal business until you break the law. Then the
question becomes if your position is to break the law, how do we
prevent it. The way you prevent it is to have a third entity involved
in this transaction, a third entity. That entity, that third entity,
can then have some means by which your anonymous position is known.
If you go to the bank now and you want to withdraw funds, you can do
so. It is your money. You can do so, but you can't withdraw it to send
it to a terrorist organization. I think that is a pretty good thing. I
don't want terrorists to be able to get money easily. In fact, I don't
want them to get it at all. But if we make it easier for them to get
it, this system will be utilized.
Let me give you an example. I have it on good authority that the drug
traffickers--there is a big issue in this country about drug
trafficking. The drug traffickers, the people who are dealing with
cross-border selling of guns, they use crypto methodologies. They use a
crypto method to transfer the dollars involved. Well, we don't want
them to be anonymous. We want to catch them. These are the people who
are indirectly killing American citizens. We want to capture them. We
want to stop this.
They can transfer the guns, and once the guns are received, the money
is transferred. It is done from one person to another, and the
government cannot seem to be able to find a way into that transaction
such that the people who are committing the crime can be properly
prosecuted.
That is pseudonymity, unknown persons transferring large sums of
money for unknown reasons.
A third entity in this process that allows the money to get into it,
digital dollars--we might call it a digital dollar, digital currency--
gets into this third entity, and the identity is exposed. We know that
you are transferring this huge sum of money. It is okay for you to
transfer it, but we want to know who is getting it. That is what we can
do with some sort of third entity that we can call a central digital
bank. You can have it by any name, but the point is, a third entity
that gets in between the direct transfers of these huge sums of
dollars.
By the way, currently, without this, you can literally transfer
unlimited amounts of money, and no one will know. It is illegal to do
some of the things that are being done, but how do you deal with the
illegality if you can't deal with the people who are actually engaged
in illegal transactions. That is the issue.
So the crypto industry has decided: Here is what we will do. All the
people who think as I think, we will just take them out of Congress. We
will just have a Congress that has one mindset, and that is an absolute
ban on any kind of centrality associated with this movement of money,
an absolute ban.
Now, the bill that I called to your attention, this bill, just has a
pause, as it is called in the bill--just has a pause for a period of
time, just a pause.
There are people in this House who are antithetical to a pause. They
want permanency. They are willing to kill a housing bill because they
can't have a permanent ban. They will kill a housing bill because they
cannot get a permanent ban against some sort of centrality in the
digital currency world.
This legislation should not have the ban that it has in it. It is a
pause. Excuse me. It shouldn't have the pause that it has. Somebody
said: Okay, we are going to compromise.
The art of compromise is how things get done. I appreciate it. They
made a compromise.
But a temporary pause is not good enough. There has to be a permanent
ban, because they want the permanent ability to move money from one
person, unlimited amounts, to another person with anonymity,
pseudonymity. It is pseudonymity because they assume an identity that
is not necessarily a name that belongs to the person. They get another
name of some sort.
{time} 1200
Mr. Speaker, this shows you the length and the extent that the crypto
industry is willing to go to have its way. They are literally willing
to kill a housing bill because they cannot have language in it that
would prevent the transfers of funds from one person to another in this
pseudonymous fashion, this pseudonymity, this means of avoiding and
evading.
That is not all they seem to be interested in doing. Yes, I am
talking about the crypto industry, so call them up and tell them: Al
Green is on the floor, and he is doing it again.
Yes, here is what Al Green says that they want also. They also are
eliminating, as best as they can, the notion of seniority meaning
something, the notion of upward mobility in Congress being affixed to
some extent with seniority. Seniority is being in a position for some
time, understanding of the rules of the road, understanding the bills
that have already passed, having the institutional knowledge to bring
forth what is necessary to present the counterargument. Seniority is
how you acquire this. You can't get it by being anyplace other than
here and serving time here--well, serving in Congress. Serving time is
not an appropriate way to say it. It is by being in Congress and
serving in Congress. You have to be here.
They want to eliminate that. If they eliminate this, then, Mr.
Speaker, money will rule. Money will be the methodology by which you
can acquire chairmanships, and when money becomes a means by which one
can acquire chairmanships, the Al Greens of the world will not be in
Congress. That is because we don't have the connection to the dollars
and because some of us refuse to take certain money.
I don't take money from the crypto industry. They graded me out just
recently, and I graded an F. I graded an F. When you get an F, Mr.
Speaker, that means that they don't like you. That means that when they
don't like you, they will do whatever they can, it seems right now,
within the law, to expel you and to evict you.
Mr. Speaker, we cannot allow money to have a greater influence on
elections than it already has.
There are Members of Congress who are here because of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965 or because of what happened at the Edmund Pettus
Bridge. They are not going to be here if seniority is eliminated. A
good many of us won't be here, a good many.
Congress will then become a place influenced by and controlled by
mega-dollars. People will have to raise millions of dollars, not just 1
million, not just 5 million, not just 10 million, 20 million, or 30
million. $40 million easily becomes the amount of money that one would
have to raise to become a Member of Congress.
So it becomes more about money than about issues in general. There
will be specific issues that will come to the floor, and they will be
unopposed because the crypto industry and the persons of that ilk
associated with the industry will have the money to own Congress. At
this point, we will literally have the best Congress money can buy. We
will have the best Congress that money can buy.
It depends on where the money is coming from as to which issues are
going to be brought to the well of this Congress and voted on. There
will be issues of greater importance that will never get voted on
because the mega millionaires won't allow it. They will control
Congress. They already have an inordinate amount of influence. They
will have an overwhelming amount of influence. They will be able to
determine what issues are important in the Congress of the United
States of America.
I stand in the way. I stand in the way now, and I will stand in the
way as long as I am in Congress. They know this, and they know that the
Al Greens of the world are the people who are not likely to support
what they are doing.
I do believe in compromise, so I haven't written off compromise
legislation, but this notion of a permanent ban, I think we have got to
be very careful.
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There are additional reasons we ought to be careful. It is because
China does not ban centrality. Now, here I am mentioning China. China
doesn't have our best interests, China has China's best interests at
heart. While we are pausing and banning, they are going to be moving
forward with a digital currency, a digital currency that is backed by
another form of currency. It will have some backing.
There is a war for currency supremacy in this country. There is a war
to dethrone the American dollar as the king of reserve currencies. As
such, we can borrow money at a lower cost. As such, we are able to
impose these sanctions that you hear us talking about, Mr. Speaker,
that we can impose. That is because countries hold dollars in reserve.
They hold dollars in reserve because they believe that our treasuries,
our dollars, are going to be there, and they will be the last dollar
standing.
If they hold it in reserve, there is another reason why, and I
simplify it. There is another reason why they hold it. It is because
they know that we have the biggest guns, and nobody is going to take
anything from the United States of America. They are not going to take
our currency. They are not going to destroy us from within because we
can protect ourselves.
People value the American dollar. That is why there is this war, this
war for currency supremacy. If the yuan replaces the dollar or some
other currency, then that means that that country will have lower
interest rates when they borrow. It means that that country can then
influence the dynamics associated with sanctions across the globe. That
country will then displace the United States of America as the
preeminent country in the world with the ability to influence
geopolitical circumstances with what I would call soft power, the soft
power of the American dollar. It is an awesome power that we have.
There are people willing to sacrifice this just so that they can make
more money and just so that they can hold on to money. Too much is not
enough. A billionaire wants to be a trillionaire. Too much is not
enough. Well, Mr. Speaker, have all you want. Just do it lawfully, pay
taxes on it, and I will salute you, Mr. Speaker.
However, this notion of doing things that would damage the American
dollar I am going to defend. I defend the dollar. I defend the American
consumer, and I defend the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Al, why do you bring the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into
this statement?
Here is why. It is because my colleagues across the aisle are doing
everything that they can to eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau. That is the one entity that is designed to protect the consumer
and that would be there to look into illicit transactions of dollars by
way of cryptocurrency. They are the one entity they are willing to
eviscerate, to decimate, and to eliminate.
Mr. Speaker, I do want to have closing comments. How much time do I
have remaining?
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Hurd of Colorado). The gentleman from
Texas has 45 seconds remaining.
Mr. GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, in closing, I have been censured but
not silenced.
In closing, I still say the solution is impeachment. We are still in
a countdown to impeachment.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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