[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 16550-16552]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  PROGRESSIVE CAUCUS: AMERICAN IDEALS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2017, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to have this opportunity to 
speak. I want to start by saying that my colleague from North Carolina 
is here, and I know there is going to be a group of Members from North 
Carolina who are coming to address their constituents. So if you are a 
North Carolinian looking in on this, you have come to the right place, 
but you are going to have to hear me first. I am speaking on behalf of 
the Progressive Caucus.
  I don't know if Representative Zeldin is still in the room. I 
couldn't quite resist the opportunity to respond to his provacative 
remarks where he said that it appears there are people in Congress who 
are so determined to take the President down.
  I couldn't really figure out who he was talking about. Then I 
realized he is probably referring to Republican Senator John McCain 
from Arizona, or maybe Republican Senator Jeff Flake from Arizona, or 
maybe Republican Senator Bob Corker from Tennessee, all of whom have 
blown the whistle this week on the egregious violations of the basic 
norms of the Presidency by this President, who continues to demonize 
and vilify U.S. citizens and engage in the pettiest and most juvenile 
of exchanges with people and generally demonstrate what most Americans 
now regard as his unfitness for the Presidency.
  So it seems like there was an attempt to make it a partisan issue. I 
think if he has got a partisan problem with what someone is saying 
about the President, he needs to talk to members of his own party who 
are the ones who are screaming the loudest about the outrageous 
excesses and abuses coming from the White House today.
  That is not what I came here to talk about, Mr. Speaker. I just 
thought it was a little bit beyond my humanity to endure that lecture, 
especially about impeachment, when the Representative comes from a 
party that impeached President Clinton over one lie--one lie about 
sex--and we get a profusion of dozens of lies every single day from the 
White House, from this President, about matters of public policy, 
crucial matters of national security, and so on.
  That is not even to get into the question of admitted obstruction of 
justice, bragging about the fact that he had fired the FBI Director 
because he was involved in the Russia investigation; not even talking 
about the rampant abuse of power that we see as recent as this week 
with apparently corrupt dealings in terms of the Puerto Rican rescue, 
when 80 percent of the island is still without power, and it looks like 
there are all sorts of sweetheart contracts that are afoot there.
  It is not even to go to the question of the domestic Emoluments 
Clause and the foreign Emoluments Clause, which are defied every single 
day with the money that is pouring forth from foreign governments 
directly to the Trump Hotel and Trump Tower and the Trump golf courses 
all over the world.
  I am not going to get into any of that stuff because I want to talk 
about something hopeful and uplifting tonight. I want to talk about 
America's responsibilities in the world, something that we used to take 
really seriously.
  I want to talk about what America is and who we are and what debt of 
responsibility we owe to the rest of the world and how well we are 
doing today, given what is taking place around the world.
  Now, in America, unlike most countries in the world--or at least a 
lot of countries in the world--we are not defined by virtue of being 
one race or one ethnicity or one religion or one political party or one 
system of belief. We are unified just by virtue of the fact that we 
have one Constitution and one Bill of Rights. We all agree to adhere to 
it and live under it and struggle for a more perfect union under that 
umbrella.
  Mr. Speaker, every day we get to come to work, and we see the busts 
and the statues and the portraits of great Americans. We see Frederick 
Douglass, we see Thomas Jefferson, we see John Adams, we see George 
Washington.
  Mr. Speaker, America was the first Nation on Earth conceived in 
revolutionary insurgency against a monarchy, an arbitrary political 
leadership, and the fusion of church and State.
  Our forebearers rebelled against centuries of religious warfare 
between the Catholics and the Protestants every bit as vicious and 
bloody as what we see in the Muslim world today between the Sunni and 
the Shia. They rebelled against the idea that, as Tom Payne put it, the 
king is law. He said that in the democracies, law would be king.
  That was the idea behind America. We would govern ourselves. As 
Jefferson put in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created 
equal, all of us are endowed with inalienable rights--life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness--and government is legitimately erected 
only on the basis of the consent of the governed.
  Now I hasten to say that all of those beautiful ideals were not 
realized at the start of our Nation. Let's not make-believe. Let's not 
pretend.
  We didn't start, in the words of that great Republican President, 
Abraham Lincoln, as a nation of the people, by the people, and for the 
people. We started as a slave Republic of White male property owners 
over the age of 21, where the vast majority of people could not vote 
and could not participate: indentured servants, slaves, women, and so 
on.
  But still, the idea was there, and those beautiful, tantalizing 
ideals were inserted by Thomas Jefferson, whose memory was defended 
recently by a group of hardy and defiant University of Virginia 
students who surrounded the statue of Thomas Jefferson to defend it 
against the rampaging mob of racist skinheads and Klansmen who had come 
to desecrate the memory of Jefferson and everything that he believed in 
with his ideals and the words that he put in the Declaration of 
Independence.
  Those were the founding ideals of the country, and through successive 
waves of political and social struggle and constitutional change, we 
have opened America up. Through the Civil War and the Reconstruction 
amendments, we opened America up:
  The 14th Amendment gave us equal protection and due process. The 13th 
Amendment abolished slavery. The 15th Amendment said no discrimination 
on the basis of race in voting. The 17th Amendment shifted the mode of 
election from the State legislatures to the people. The 19th Amendment 
gave us woman suffrage. The 23rd Amendment said people here in the 
District of Columbia could participate in Presidential elections. The 
24th Amendment abolished poll taxes. The 26th Amendment lowered the age 
of voting to 18 all across the whole country.
  The whole trajectory of our constitutional development has been 
towards greater equality and freedom for the American people. That is 
who we are. We are a nation that united with other nations around the 
world to defeat fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, communism, and 
totalitarianism in the last century. We did that.

[[Page 16551]]

  We stood with Eleanor Roosevelt and the United Nations in proclaiming 
the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrined the 
rights of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of 
assembly, and freedom of the press, taking all those rights and 
freedoms that we fought for in America that are in our Constitution and 
trying to make them a global ideal so that all of the people of the 
world could enjoy the fruits and the experience of liberal democracy.
  When we stood at our best as a country, we have been on the side of 
freedom movements. We have been on the side of human rights. We have 
been on the side of victims of government authoritarianism and 
persecution. That is who we are as a country.
  It is all being forgotten and frittered away with the chaos that has 
descended not just upon the White House--that is too easy, I would say 
to my dear friend Mr. Zeldin--on this institution, on lots of 
institutions in Washington, D.C. We are forgetting who we are.
  Tom Payne said America was a nation conceived as a haven of refuge 
for people fleeing from religious and political persecution from all 
over the world. That is why our great symbol has been the Statue of 
Liberty and not a 14th century wall and barbed wire. That is not the 
real symbol of America.
  Now, we are living in a time of rising authoritarianism and tyranny 
all over the world, from Russia to Saudi Arabia to Hungary to the 
Philippines to Venezuela. You name it. Authoritarian states everywhere 
are cracking down on free speech and free press, jailing enemies of the 
states and journalists, persecuting citizens for their religious 
beliefs and denying the essential human rights that are encoded in our 
national DNA, in our Constitution, and in the U.N. Universal 
Declaration of Human Rights and in the International Covenant on Civil 
and Political Rights.
  While the White House and this administration have abandoned U.S. 
leadership for human rights, the governments of the world are stepping 
up their authoritarianism. In Burma, in Myanmar, the government is 
waging brutal ethnic and religious violence against Rohingya Muslims, 
thousands of whom have been killed and more than 100,000 of whom have 
fled the country, in terror.
  Now, this savage campaign of ethnic cleansing in Burma by the 
Buddhist-led government is being turned on all Muslims in that country. 
And what is our government doing? Nothing.
  In Turkey, which I will have a little bit more to say about in a 
moment, there is a vicious crackdown on free speech and free press, and 
the jailing of journalists and citizens without due process. In Russia, 
there continues to be outrageous human rights abuses against the 
personal political enemies of Vladimir Putin; against the LGBT 
community, which continues to be reviled and demonized by the 
government. In Chechnya, there are campaigns against journalists, and 
so on. In the Philippines, President Duterte has overseen the killing 
of thousands of people in a brutal war on drugs, with no due process at 
all, where the police can simply declare that you look like a drug 
user, you look like a drug dealer, and then they can have you killed.
  It is also in Venezuela, where Maduro has consolidated his power and 
is denying the rule of law at every turn; in Saudi Arabia; in Iran, 
which was mentioned before, with brutal campaigns against ethnic 
minorities--one of the leading administrators of capital punishment on 
Earth, fomenting terror abroad.

                              {time}  2000

  Saudi Arabia, which Freedom House calls among the worst of the worst, 
where torture is present, where women are victims of almost pervasive 
sex discrimination--I think just a couple of months ago they won a 
limited right to drive in 2017--and on and on.
  And across the world, governments have passed laws against blasphemy, 
against heresy, against apostasy, against witchcraft, against sorcery, 
against all kinds of imaginary religious offenses which were wiped off 
of the books of our State laws centuries ago under the First Amendment, 
and yet there are people rotting in jail today because they belong to 
the wrong religious group and they are accused of blasphemy or apostasy 
in Iran or in Saudi Arabia or Bangladesh, or any other number of 
countries which use the tools of the state to oppress people because of 
their religious faith and their religious worship.
  What does President Trump do? Well, he personally praised Rodrigo 
Duterte in the Philippines and invited him to come to America. His 
first state visit was to Saudi Arabia, where he publicly said that he 
was not going to take issue with anything that they were doing in terms 
of human rights, didn't speak about any of the people rotting in jail 
in Saudi Arabia in a way that completely violates the human rights 
understandings and norms of the world.
  He has praised Erdogan in Turkey. And, of course, we know of his 
infamous and somewhat inscrutable relationship with Vladimir Putin, 
certainly has nothing to say about human rights violations taking place 
against Russians, tens of thousands of whom have summoned up the 
courage since the President took office to march in the streets against 
political corruption and for human rights. And our government does 
nothing to support the people in civil society in Russia who are trying 
to stand up for the idea of human rights in their country.
  Trump says, when he goes to Saudi Arabia: We are not here to lecture. 
We must seek partners, not perfection.
  And he has found those partners all over the world: Duterte in the 
Philippines, Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary. On and on down the 
list, you find a despot, you find a tyrant, you find a kleptocrat and a 
bully, you have found a newfound buddy of the United States of America.
  Now, over the summer, media outlets reported that the State 
Department wanted to drop the promotion of democracy and human rights 
from the Department's mission. The State Department has since 
eliminated the www.humanrights.gov website and moved its content to an 
alternative and more obscure web address.
  In May of 2017, Secretary of State Tillerson reversed decades of 
bipartisan consensus that human rights and democracy are not only 
essential components of U.S. foreign policy and national security, but 
universal values that the U.S. has adopted as a guiding principle of 
international legitimacy. And, of course, everyone knows of President 
Trump's attempts to withdraw from treaties and agreements all over the 
world, including, of course, the Paris accord on climate change.
  Now, all of these actions, all of these statements are a betrayal of 
who we are as a country. We are not defined by race. We are not defined 
by ideology, unlike other countries around the world. We are not 
defined by religion. We are defined by an idea of liberal democracy 
committed to equality and freedom for all. If we give that up and we 
surrender that, we surrender what is most precious and defining about 
the United States of America, Mr. Speaker.
  And guess what. We have got human rights problems right here at home 
that we need to be dealing with.
  Do you know we have millions of Americans who can't vote and are not 
represented in Congress? This anomaly was brought home to us in a very 
sharp way over the last several weeks with the crisis in Puerto Rico, 
where people still lack access to medicines that they need, where 
people--a majority of the population still lacks access to clean water, 
and power is out for four-fifths of the population. Those are our 
people. Those are our citizens. Those are Americans in Puerto Rico.
  But why were they treated differently? Why was there this notorious 
negligence and lethargy in responding to the plight of people in Puerto 
Rico? Well, they have no voting representatives in this Chamber or in 
the United States Senate, so we have got millions of people 
unrepresented.
  Right here in the Nation's Capital, in the District of Columbia, we 
see the exact same democratic deficit, the exact same discrepancy and 
discord between our values and our ideals and what the reality of daily 
practice is. We are the only democratic nation left on Earth where the 
people of the capital city are disenfranchised in their

[[Page 16552]]

national legislature. We are the only one.
  I have only been in this body for 10 months, Mr. Speaker, but I have 
noted how frequently and how joyfully this body will rise to trample 
the local legislation adopted by people in the District of Columbia who 
can't fight back because they don't have voting representation in 
Congress, and so we are very happy to kick them around if they have got 
a different point of view on death with dignity. Of course, death with 
dignity in the District of Columbia should be of no concern to us. What 
should be of concern is life with democracy in the District of Columbia 
if we are going to be faithful to our ideals.
  They get to decide, not us. But as long as they are excluded from 
representation in the national legislature, they are going to continue 
to be kicked around on questions of gay rights and whether or not poor 
women can be given full access to reproductive healthcare in the 
District of Columbia, another issue where the majority in this body 
decided to squash the political self-determination of more than 650,000 
American citizens who live right here in the Nation's Capital.
  We have got millions of people who are disenfranchised. That is a 
human rights problem. So we have got to deal with that. Maybe if 
America begins to stand up again for human rights around the world, we 
will begin to stand up again for human rights in our own country.
  So this is not a partisan issue. Of course, one of our great leaders 
in the advancement of human rights in America was President Abraham 
Lincoln, a great Republican, and his friend Frederick Douglass, a great 
Republican. I take pride in that. I take pride in the Republicans who 
fought for freedom and democracy in America. They are as much a part of 
my legacy as great Democrats like Franklin D. Roosevelt or President 
Barack Obama, the people who fought for civil rights and civil 
liberties in my party. So we should cherish everybody in our history 
who moved forward the engines of freedom and democratic change in the 
country.
  Mr. Speaker, I just want to say these are tough times in America. 
There is a lot of chaos that has descended upon our country, and, Mr. 
Speaker, we need all Americans to know, but especially young Americans 
to know, what we really stand for.
  We have a claim, a very strong claim to being the greatest nation on 
Earth, and it has got nothing to do with the military, and it has got 
nothing to do with our GDP. It has got to do with the way we were 
created, what our founding ideals were, and then the commitment of the 
people always to try to realize those ideals and engender a more 
perfect Union as we go along.
  Let's keep America moving in that direction so we will continue to be 
a beacon of light to oppressed people all over the world.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Ferguson). Members are reminded to 
refrain from engaging in personalities toward the President.

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