Cbdc Anti-Surveillance State Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. HIMES. Madam Chair, wow, the oppressed citizens of Canada, really? We have gone into conspiracy world here in what was otherwise a trajectory of remarkable bipartisan work on this new strange world of cryptocurrency and crypto assets. Now we are talking about the oppressed citizens of Canada, the surveillance state. They are going tell you what their cars and appliances are doing.

I guess we can't do too much bipartisanship before we have to revert to the madness of conspiracy theories.

Madam Chair, why did we do what we did yesterday with FIT21? It split my party. There were people of good will on both sides of that.

The reason a number of Democrats, including myself, supported FIT21, which was not our preferred bill, was because in the context of the possibility of innovation, you open options. We don't know what this stuff is going to look like 5 or 10 years from now, so we open options. That is why we did what we did yesterday.

Today, because of conspiracy world, we are closing options.

Now I don't know what a CBDC might look like 5 or 10 years from now. I suspect having written a white paper on it, that there might be a portion of the population that instead of using Joe's stablecoin might actually value a stablecoin that was backed by the full faith and credit.

I don't know and you don't know, so let's keep our options open. Let's allow for the possibility and research that, by the way, every other country out there, like the United Kingdom--not China but the United Kingdom--is doing, to see if we can open the path for innovation. Let's not close it.

I hear China, China, China. Guess what, we do contract law and police services and public safety radically different than China does, so don't scare us with China.

We can do this right. Let's just not in the context of innovation foreclose an option. Please vote against this bill, which is an anti- innovation bill.

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