Protecting Speech From Government Interference Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Chairman, I thank the distinguished gentleman from New York for his excellent leadership on this bill today on the floor.

The distinguished gentlewoman from Colorado posed a question that I have been hearing my Republican colleagues utter over the last several days: Who decides what is true or false? How can we know what is true or false? The gentlewoman confided her fear that the Federal Government would end up defining what is true or false.

Well, my, my, my. That is an absolute assault on the Constitution of the United States because we have an entire Federal judiciary, which is based on people getting up in court and swearing an oath under God or the Constitution to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The whole point of what Federal courts do is to determine what is true and what is false.

Yet, now, we have an entire political party, which is organizing itself around this radical, moral agnosticism, claiming that there is no way we can know the difference between whether an election is on Tuesday or whether an election is on Thursday, as Vladimir Putin wants to tell us through his sinister propaganda put out by the Internet Research Agency.

The whole judicial system is based on the difference between truth and lies.

In fact, the administrative system, do you want to get Social Security? Either you are 65, or you are not. That is a matter of positive fact.

You qualify for Medicare, or you don't. Truth or fact.

Yes, our system operates on the basis of truth or fact. Don't throw up your hands and say: ``Oh, well, we can't know what the truth is. We can't know what lies are. We don't want bureaucrats telling us what that is.''

That is what democratic government is. That is how we operate, by our commitment to the truth. That is why we all swear an oath here to uphold the Constitution. That is why people go to court and swear an oath to tell the truth.

Now, they take their shocking nihilism about what is true and what is false, and they convert it to this entire Congress. It all starts, of course, with January 6 and, before that, the Presidential election. It all starts with the big lie, Donald Trump's big lie.

They say: ``Well, who knows? Maybe he won. Maybe he didn't. You say Joe Biden is President. We say Donald Trump is President.'' Nonsense.

Mr. Chairman, 60 Federal and State courts rejected every claim of electoral fraud and corruption that they put forward. They don't have a single court that ever ruled in their favor.

Donald Trump lost that election by more than 7 million votes, 306-232 in the electoral college, so then their big lie now has to stretch all the way over January 6. We have to disbelieve the evidence of our own eyes, of our own ears. We saw them come and descend upon this Chamber, this Congress, wounding and injuring 150 of our police officers, breaking people's noses, breaking people's fingers, putting people in the hospital.

Already, they are back on the news with big lies, saying, ``No, no, no. It was a tourist visit,'' like these real tourists up here who have come to watch Representatives in the United States Congress say there is no difference between truth and lies, real tourists who are not beating the daylights out of our police officers.

So the lie now extends to January 6. Who knows what really happened? Yes, we all saw it. We saw the Vice President of the United States getting chased out of the Chamber with people yelling, ``Hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence.''

We had a bipartisan committee for a year and a half with more than a thousand witnesses, a hundred subpoenaed witnesses under oath, most of them from the Trump White House and the Trump family and Republicans testifying about Trump's plan to overturn the Presidential election and get Pence just to install him in office.

Yet, they are agnostic about: ``Well, the truth and lies, who knows what really happened? Who knows?'' Yes. Who knows.

They have a perfect bill for you, then. We call it the Putin protection act. That is what it is, the Putin protection act.

The distinguished gentleman from New York explained Putin spent millions of dollars in 2016 to pump propaganda, electoral sabotage, into our political system. He did. Every security agency in the country told us that. We got a bipartisan report from the Senate saying it.

They are agnostic about it. When it comes to Putin, they see no evil, hear no evil, none of it. But we know that it happened.

That is Putin's plan. Why? Putin cannot beat America politically. He can't beat us economically. He can't beat us militarily. Putin can't beat us philosophically. There is one thing he has--the internet. Why? Because we are a wide open country. He says: Let's take advantage of it. Let's go on their social media platform. We will put people who oppose Putin on the internet in jail--which they do. If you send a tweet against Putin, you are going to jail.

If you put out a tweet against his filthy imperialist war, which some of them support in Ukraine, if you put out a tweet against that in Russia, you are going to jail.

He says: Let's take advantage of America's openness. We will take advantage of them, and we are going to put out propaganda. We will lie about when the election is. We will say it is on Thursday when it is on Tuesday. We will tell people to go vote next week, whatever.

That is the genesis of this whole thing. We have our security agencies who alert social media. They say they are putting up fraudulent information on your platform.

Now they come forward and say that the Democrats are trying to-- what?--tell the truth. Not Democrats, the government, our paid Federal Government agencies, are trying to tell the social media when foreign malign actors like Russia, China, and Iran are trying to interfere in our elections.

That is what this is about--Putin protection act. They want Putin and Xi to run free over our platforms, and then they want to fine Federal Government employees thousands of dollars if they alert our government to what foreign malign actors are doing.

The whole justification for it is their silly obsession with Hunter Biden's laptop and this New York Post story, which was taken down by Twitter for 1 day 3 weeks before the election as an exercise of their private decisionmaking.

Then Elon Musk buys Twitter, and he fires six journalists because they disagree with him. They have no problem with that because, of course, it is a private entity. They can do whatever they want. They want to fire journalists, they fire them. They want to take the story down for an hour or a day, they can do that.

Then they want to turn that into the basis for handcuffing the entire Government of the United States so we can't protect ourselves against Vladimir Putin and President Xi? Give me a break.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Chair, I just want to echo the very important point you just made. We have a sequence of trivial amendments that have been added by the majority, and they refuse to consider what I think is the central amendment that this legislation would need in order for it not to be an utter disaster for America if this legislation were to pass.

Now, they concede implicitly by their legislation that there is a problem with saying we are not going to allow any government officials to get in touch with the social media, because they create an exception for certain things: for child pornography, for human trafficking, and for drug dealing. And I agree with all of those. But are those more important and more grave than the national security interests of the United States itself?

What about assaults on our elections, which go right to the heart of national security? What about assaults on our energy security structure? What about assaults on our power structure? Not only do they not build that into their bill; they will not even allow us to put it on the floor for an open vote among all of our colleagues in Congress.

Why won't they do that? Well, because if there is a national security exception to their Putin protection act, at that point, the exception swallows the rule, because the rule is let's let Putin and Xi and every autocrat, theocrat, and dictator on Earth run amuck on our social media and not allow our government officials to say anything about it. That is the effect of this legislation.

I thank Mr. Goldman for yielding.

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