MEMBER OF CONGRESS

Jamie Raskin

Democrat MD 26 statements translated

Raskin reliably echoes the party line, with frequent jabs at the other side for being 'socialist' or 'bad'. He pushes for more federal power and money in a few areas like DEI hiring and lifetime abuse protections. While Raskin opposes a constitutional amendment to lock in 9 Supreme Court justices, arguing Congress should retain that power, he notably doesn't explain his own preferred number.

House of Representatives

Local Access to Courts Act

2026-08-31

“I agree with the previous speaker. It is unfair that some people have to drive far to go to court. I want this bill to pass. It will add new courts in two districts. This is good for people who need to go to court. I say this bill will help many people. Our courts have problems. This bill is a small fix.”

Official Congressional Record

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.

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House of Representatives

Kayleigh's Law Act of 2026

2026-08-31

“I want this bill to pass. It will help victims of sexual violence. The government should protect victims. Victims should not have to see their abusers again. I am proud that we are working together on this. I want my colleagues to vote for it.”

Official Congressional Record

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.

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“I also want this bill to pass. It will help some victims of sexual violence. A victim will be able to ask for a no-contact order that lasts for life. This bill can help people escape abuse. Many people are abused. Abuse is bad for people. Some states made their laws stronger to help victims. Now the Federal government should do the same. I am glad we worked together on this bill. I want my colleagues to vote for it.”

Official Congressional Record

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this bill to strengthen protection for victims and survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Kayleigh's Law Act of 2026 would require Federal courts to issue lifetime no-contact orders against defendants who are convicted of certain offenses, including child sexual exploitation, sex trafficking, stalking, and sexual abuse, upon request or consent of a victim but independent of the criminal case. Hundreds of thousands of people live under conditions of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and other kinds of sexual abuse, and this legislation will help many of them escape that trap and turn their lives around. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, an average of 24 people every single minute become victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner. That is more than 12 million American women and men every single year. Nationwide, more than one in five women have been raped or subjected to attempted rape, and 60 percent of the rapes are committed by someone they know, a number that increases dramatically for minor victims, going up to 93 percent who actually knew their abuser. The lives of survivors of sexual and domestic violence can be radically altered even long after the abuse has ended, and many suffer from a wide range of chronic physical, mental, and professional problems. They pay a heavy price financially for medical and therapeutic treatment, lost work, and legal expenses. The weight of these burdens is even greater for survivors who have fewer resources and smaller networks to draw upon. In recent years, some States have passed laws to strengthen protections, often thanks to the advocacy of survivors themselves, like Kayleigh Kozak, who was abused by her soccer coach beginning when she was only 12 years old. Because of her undaunted advocacy in her home State of Arizona, survivors of sex crimes and other violent crimes may now petition the court in their State for a permanent order of protection against their abusers, totally separate and apart from the criminal case. Other States have enacted similar laws. I am proud to say that my State, Maryland, is one of them. These laws empower victims and survivors to feel a lot safer and to move forward with their lives. It is wonderful that we are advancing a version of the Kayleigh's Law Act that will allow Federal courts to issue no-contact orders to victims and survivors of the worst offenses. I am pleased we were able to work together in committee on a bipartisan basis to ensure that this legislation would advance and prioritize the protection and the needs of victims and survivors. Mr. Speaker, I strongly support H.R. 8481. I urge all of my colleagues to do the same, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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House of Representatives

Prison Staff Safety Enhancement Act

2026-08-31

“I want this bill to pass. It will help protect prison staff from sexual harassment and assault by inmates. The bill does not address staff-on-inmate sexual harassment or assaults. Another law does that. But this administration has been dismantling the protections of that law. I hope we can work together to stop that. This bill will require the Attorney General to adopt standards to prevent sexual harassment and assaults of prison staff by inmates. It will also improve efforts to address this conduct if it takes place. The bill will strengthen oversight of the Bureau of Prisons. This will improve staff safety 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. 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. It has been endorsed by many organizations.”

Official Congressional Record

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.

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“I want this bill to pass. It will help protect prison staff from sexual harassment and assault. Many staff are harassed or assaulted. This is a big problem. The government should make rules to protect staff. We should help the people who keep our prisons safe. I want my colleagues to support this bill. I also want Congress to fully fund another bill we passed before. That bill will help make prisons safer too. Prisons are hard places to work. Many bad things happen there. We need to stop those bad things. We should make prisons safe for inmates and staff.”

Official Congressional Record

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the Prison Staff Safety Enhancement Act, which would require DOJ to improve the safety of Bureau of Prisons facilities across America. More specifically, S. 307 would make improvements to how BOP assesses and responds to sexual harassment and assault by inmates of staff members. Federal prison staff go to work every day to protect the public safety, to prepare people for successful reentry into our communities, and to keep our communities safe. Yet, they often face threats of sexual harassment and sexual assault by inmates. A 2023 report from DOJ's inspector general found that 40 percent of more than 7,000 surveyed BOP staff reported that they themselves had been sexually harassed by an inmate. The report found that reports of sexual harassment were even more prevalent among female staff members. Mr. Speaker, 69 percent of female BOP staff said they had been sexually harassed by an inmate on the job. This harassment included whistling, catcalling, genitalia exposure, sexual remarks, and sexual gestures. The inspector general also found the true scope of the problem is not really known because BOP has not adequately or consistently collected data on the problem. This has prevented BOP from taking effective action. That is why the act would require BOP to fully implement recommendations made in the 2023 IG report or explain why it cannot do so. It would also require BOP to provide updated data to the inspector general on the number and prevalence of inmate-on-staff sexual harassment and sexual assault episodes, require the IG to analyze the sufficiency of the data, and make any necessary recommendations to Congress and the Attorney General on how the Bureau of Prisons can reduce the pervasiveness of these incidents. Lastly, it would require the Attorney General to adopt nationwide standards for prevention, reduction, and punishment of sexual harassment and assault committed by incarcerated individuals against BOP employees. By requiring BOP to fully implement the recommendations of the IG report, this act would improve BOP's data collection, training, and policies on both sexual harassment and assault. It would also require BOP to conduct regular risk assessments within individual facilities and across BOP, with an emphasis on the risks for female staff. I applaud Senator Ossoff for his work on this legislation. He has worked to improve the conditions and safety of our Federal prisons for both the staff and inmates. I was proud to support passage of the Federal Prison Oversight Act, a bipartisan, bicameral bill that he led with my colleague, the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Crime, Congresswoman McBath. That bill was signed into law in 2024 and established new independent oversight of BOP. It received broad support from civil rights groups, prison employees, and criminal justice groups, but its full potential is yet to be realized. Congress should fully fund the Federal Prison Oversight Act so it can be fully implemented and add to the safety improvements in the bill before us today. We know from past failures in oversight that we must do more to make our prisons safer for inmates and staff alike. Such failures include years of systemic sexual assault of incarcerated women and whistleblower retaliation at one of the Federal woman's prisons in Dublin, California, that led to closure of the facility and criminal convictions of nine BOP officers, including the warden himself. This never should have happened. I hope we can continue to work together to make sure our prisons are safe for everybody who enters them, whether involuntarily as an inmate or voluntarily as a staff person. Our prisons are some of the most challenging and difficult work environments in America. BOP has faced longstanding staffing challenges, from poor morale to ever-declining recruitment and retention rates. By working to reduce the intolerable sexual harassment and assault of staff members, this legislation would take an important step toward improving safety across BOP facilities and the ability of staff to carry out their crucial public safety mission. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support S. 307, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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House of Representatives

Ndo Fairness Act of 2025

2026-08-31

“I want this bill to pass. It changes some rules about how police can search your digital files. Right now police can ask companies to see your files and not tell you. This bill makes it harder for them to do that. Police can only keep searches secret for 90 days unless a judge says they can. This helps protect everyone's privacy.”

Official Congressional Record

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.

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