Jamie Raskin

“I support this bill. It adds federal court locations in southern Texas and southern California. People who live there now have to drive for hours to go to court or serve on a jury. This bill lets the courts use buildings that already exist, so it costs no new money.”

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of S. 32, which would amend title 28 to provide an additional place for holding court in the Southern District of Texas and in the Southern District of California. Under due process and equal protection, our basic access to justice rights don’t change or shouldn’t change depending on where we live. But in practice, that is exactly what is happening, as my distinguished colleague Mr. Schmidt just explained. When residents of the Southern District of Texas or the Southern District of California need to drive for hours to attend court or to go serve on a jury, which is a civic obligation, they have less access to justice than other citizens with easy and direct physical access to the court system. It makes no sense that just because someone lives in a more rural district they should incur dramatically increased travel time and administrative expenses just to seek justice. With the price of gasoline and diesel soaring today with inflation, that is no joke. Adding courthouses is a small step in the right direction toward making the courthouse doors accessible to all Americans, no matter where they live. The Southern District of Texas spans 43 counties, and the Southern District of California includes San Diego County, the second most populated county in California. Residents there have the same problem many people are experiencing across the country. To access both the physical and the metaphorical courthouse doors, they need to travel long distances and wait in the backlog before having their day in court. The easiest way to alleviate the burdens on the residents of these two growing districts is to add a courthouse. This change is cost free because there is an existing judicial facility available for the court to use in both of these places. Making use of this existing building would ensure that litigants, attorneys, witnesses, and other court users would have greater access to the justice that our Federal courts and our Constitution provide. The administrative body for the Federal court system, the Administrative Office of the Courts, supports this bill. They know, like we do, that our country cannot have a flourishing justice system when its buildings are falling apart, its staff are underpaid, and there is a perpetual shortage of judges to administer the laws. We have a lot to do to ensure Americans have equal access to our laws and a judiciary that they can trust to fairly hear them out and adjudicate their disputes. This bill won’t fix all the problems, but it will help more than 13 million Americans who deserve equal access to justice and greater access where they live. I appreciate Representatives McCaul, Ruiz, and Issa for their bipartisan work on this issue. I want to recognize Mr. Schmidt for his distinguished stewardship of this bill. Mr. Speaker, I urge all my colleagues to support this commonsense legislation, and I yield back the balance of my time.”

“I want the House to pass this bill. It lets federal courts ban violent criminals and sex offenders from ever contacting their victims again.”

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Some States have already moved to institute permanent, lifelong no- contact orders, but right now there is nothing at the Federal level that would allow a victim to receive a lifelong, permanent no-contact order, and that is what we are doing. There is no way of undoing a violent act like a rape that has taken place in the life of a victim, but at least we can seal off the victim’s future from further harassment, taunting, leering, insulting, intimidation, and so on from someone who committed the crime. I am proud that we are moving this on a bipartisan basis, and I hope that all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will vote ``yes’’ to ensure the protection, the security, and the peace of mind that will result from this legislation. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.”

“I want the House to pass this bill. It sets national rules to protect federal prison workers from sexual assault and harassment by inmates. Prison staff deserve to be safe at work.”

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, I should note that the bill does not address staff-on- inmate sexual harassment or assaults, but the Prison Rape Elimination Act does. Yet, this administration has been actively dismantling the protections of this legislation. I hope we can work together on that as well. This bill would require the AG to adopt nationwide standards to prevent the sexual harassment and assaults of BOP staff members by inmates. It would also improve BOP’s efforts to address this conduct if it takes place, and it will strengthen oversight of the Bureau of Prisons so we can improve the safety of staff working in every corner of the country. Nobody should fear harm of this kind while on the job, regardless of where they are employed in America. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for their hard work on this bipartisan legislation. I encourage all of our colleagues to join us in supporting this legislation that has been broadly endorsed by organizations, including the American Correctional Association and the Fraternal Order of Police. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.”

“I want the House to pass this bill to protect people's privacy. When the government searches someone's online messages or phone records, it can get a court order that stops companies from telling that person. Right now, the government can keep these searches secret forever. This bill limits those secrecy orders to 90 days and makes prosecutors prove they really need them.”

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, welcome back to you and to Mr. Fitzgerald. I am pleased we are working together to address a real flaw in government surveillance authorities and to safeguard Americans’ privacy and civil liberties by moving the NDO Fairness Act today. Under the Stored Communications Act, prosecutors can go to a judge to get a search warrant for the content of private communications and documents that Americans send over the internet and store in the cloud. Third-party providers store our emails, our private chat messages, our work documents, and our phone records on their servers. Most of these can be searched if the government gets a warrant based on probable cause that the search will reveal evidence of criminal activity, but unlike the searches most Americans are familiar with from TV dramas where an officer shows up at a suspect’s house with a warrant, the Stored Communications Act allows Federal investigators to request a nondisclosure order, also known as an NDO, from a Federal judge, preventing your service provider from ever telling you that your email account or phone records had been seized. There is no statutory time limit. NDOs can exist in perpetuity, allowing the government to forever hide their searches from the searched. There are good reasons why prosecutors might need or want a nondisclosure order, an NDO, for a brief period of time. In some cases, immediate notice might put an undercover agent in direct danger or risk the destruction of key evidence or compromise an ongoing investigation, but 40 years after passage of the Stored Communications Act, the government’s use of nondisclosure orders has expanded well beyond these high exigency cases. Under current law, the request has become little more than a simple box-checking exercise. The statute allows the government to maintain these nondisclosure orders indefinitely. DOJ’s current policy limits the duration of the NDOs to 3 years, and that policy is itself totally voluntary and flexible. DOJ can rescind, suspend, or even just ignore it at will. We need laws, not voluntary, dismissible DOJ policies, to protect our privacy under the Constitution. By limiting nondisclosure orders to 90 days with the possibility of renewal if there is an actual emergency still ongoing, the NDO Fairness Act ends the so-called forever NDOs where nondisclosure orders have no end date and no end in sight. By requiring prosecutors to explain the rationale for their requests, we end the so-called rubberstamp NDOs in which applications for an NDO are submitted with boilerplate language and no evidence demonstrating any true or compelling need for nondisclosure. By ensuring that judges apply the proper strict scrutiny standard to the requests, we limit nondisclosure orders to those where secrecy is actually necessary to the pursuit of the investigation. In this way, the NDO Fairness Act will protect all Americans who keep an increasingly large percentage of their information online and should expect notice if the government is rifling through their records. Most recently, we have heard about NDOs in the case of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Trump’s effort to interfere with the results of the 2020 election, an effort that culminated in an attack on this building, the U.S. Capitol, on January 6, 2021. It has been well-known for years that in the days leading up to the attack and while the mob was still rampaging in the Capitol, President Trump and his enablers, like Rudy Giuliani, made a series of phone calls to Members of Congress trying to convince them not to certify the election, even as the insurrectionists were tearing through the building. As part of his investigation into that attack, Special Counsel Smith asked a Federal grand jury to subpoena the phone companies for the records associated with individual Members of Congress known to have been in contact with the White House over a 4-day period running from around January 6, 2021. The subpoena sought call records, the kind of information that is on your phone bill, not the content of any calls or text messages, but a record of who called who when. He also asked a Federal judge to issue an NDO for those subpoenas. He did so after receiving permission to do so from the Public Integrity Section and in full compliance with both existing law and DOJ policy. It is no secret that the President had made it a habit to pressure witnesses not to testify against him. In August 2023, while he was being prosecuted for these efforts to overturn the 2020 elections, he posted the message: ``If you go after me, I am coming after you.’’ Senators were upset by these completely lawful subpoenas and well- justified nondisclosure orders under the law as it was understood. Their response was to pass a law giving them, and them alone, the right to collect $1 million apiece each time the government sought their communications records, in the past and in the future. Instead of acting to protect all Americans, all of us, they sought a multimillion-dollar payday for themselves as U.S. Senators. They did not even include mere lowly Members of the U.S. House of Representatives in their legislation. Fortunately, that selective, self-serving authority was short-lived, and we succeeded in overturning, I think unanimously in this body, that stunningly corrupt law. The proposal before us today addresses the problem at its root for all Americans and protects all of us, not just the 100 Americans who we get to serve with in the Chamber down the hall. Prosecutors under Presidents of both parties have routinely sought NDOs in all kinds of probes. The number of orders accompanied by NDOs that electronic communication companies receive has only increased since this legislation was first introduced over 4 years ago. This body has proudly already passed this bill twice. I am hopeful that our colleagues in the Senate may now realize and act on the fundamental importance of this legislation for everyone in America. Our laws should protect the civil liberties of all 340 million Americans just as the Equal Protection Clause demands. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Nadler for leading the NDO Fairness Act since this legislation was first developed, and I thank Mr. Fitzgerald for ably leading the charge in this Congress. I look forward to voting ``yes’’ on this important legislation. Mr. Speaker, for the aforementioned reasons, I enthusiastically endorse this legislation and encourage all of my colleagues to support it. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.”