{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://raskin.house.gov/2023/11/raskin-floor-remarks-on-h-res-845", "Raskin Floor Remarks on H. Res. 845", "2023-11-07", "2023", "2023-11", "Democrat", "House", "MD", "Jamie Raskin", "R000606", "raskin.house.gov", "raskin", "https://raskin.house.gov/press-releases", "scraper", "Washington, DC - Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) today gave the following remarks on the House Floor while managing the debate of House Resolution 845, a resolution to censure Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (MI-12). Raskin urged the House to respect and protect the right to political free speech granted under the First Amendment and the Speech or Debate Clause by not using the House disciplinary process to punish Members\u2019 political speech; warned of the chilling effects that politicizing and weaponizing the House\u2019s censure mechanism would have on the speech of all Members; and noted that, in the history of the House of Representatives, the overwhelming number of censures have been for conduct, like taking bribes, embezzling funds, assaulting other Members, engaging in mail fraud, and having sex with pages, and that the only kinds of speech that have ever been punished have been true threats of violence, fighting words on the floor towards other Members, and incitement to insurrection and secession, none of which are protected by the Constitution and none of which are implicated here.\n\nCongressman Raskin: I have images of three politicians displayed in my office: Abraham Lincoln; Robert F. Kennedy; and Samuel F. Bellman who was the first Jewish person ever elected to the Minnesota legislature, a great champion of the Constitution, civil rights and civil liberties, and human rights, and of the creation of Israel, the Jewish Democratic State, in 1948.\n\nAnd he was my grandfather.\n\nHe was elected at a time of terrible antisemitism, not unlike today. Minneapolis was called \u201cthe antisemitism capital of America\u201d and my Grandpa Sam told me a story I\u2019ll never forget.\n\nThe DFL and Republican Caucuses both had their annual retreats at a country club that did not allow Jews or blacks to enter. My grandfather complained privately with the Speaker that he would not be able to go, and the Speaker apologized but said this was the tradition.\n\nSo my grandfather, the only Jewish person in the Chamber, spoke on the floor about antisemitism and he was booed and jeered at and Members left as he tried to speak.\n\nWhen the Minority Leader asked me to manage our time today, I thought about my grandfather and how he must have felt on that day.\n\nSo I\u2019m here not in spite of the fact that I am a Jewish American who supports the Constitution and the Jewish Democratic State and hates the antisemitic tyrants and terrorists of the world, from Vladimir Putin in Russia and Mohammed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia to Hezbollah and Hamas; I am here because of these things and because of everything I believe in and stand for.\n\nAt this moment when democracy is under siege all over the world, America must stand tall for the Constitution. But this Resolution is about one thing and one thing only: the punishment of speech.\n\nSo we have the chance to show the world what the American Constitution means and how we hold fast to our core principles even when we are drawn away from them by our passions and our righteous anger.\n\nThe Constitution is \u201cthe Supreme Law of the land,\u201d and the very heart of it is in our First Amendment, which protects every citizen\u2019s freedom of speech and says Congress shall make no law abridging it.\n\nThe freedom to speak includes the freedom to disagree, the right to think radically differently from the majority about important things, or else it is no freedom at all. It\u2019s easy to defend free speech for people when you agree with them; the test for each Member is whether you can defend free speech for people when you most fundamentally and vehemently disagree with them.\n\nThe First Amendment is like an apple. Everybody wants to take just one bite out of it. Someone wants to punish left-wing speech someone right-wing speech, someone sexist speech, someone radical feminist speech, homophobic speech or pro-LGBTQ speech, anti-war speech, pro-war speech, religious speech, sacrilegious speech and everybody wants a bite of the apple, but then at the end of the day, once everyone has had his or her bite, the whole apple is gone.\n\nThere\u2019s nothing left. If you want to save the apple, you have to learn to tolerate not just the speech you love the most, which is easy, but the speech you hate the most.\n\nLike the First Amendment, the Speech or Debate Clause also embodies this central value in the legislative process. It states that Members of Congress \u201cshall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony, and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their attendance at the Session of their Respective Houses, and in going to and from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.\u201d (emphasis added)\n\nThe Speech and Debate Clauses in the thirteen original colonies were the basis for the freedom of speech later established for all citizens; indeed, of the original 13, only Pennsylvania\u2019s Constitution protected \u201cfreedom of speech\u201d for anyone but legislators. In other words, we had better take freedom of speech seriously for legislators because if we don\u2019t protect our own free speech, how can we protect freedom of speech for the people we represent?\n\nIn the two-and-a-half century history of our Chamber, Members have been overwhelmingly censured for their actions, not for their speech. Actions like:\n\nParticipating in the violent assault against Charles Sumner. Assaulting Representative Josiah Grinnell of Iowa with a cane. Selling military academy appointments. Taking bribes.\n\nSelling $33 million of stock in the Credit Mobilier scandal to fellow Members at an undervalued price to bribe them.\n\nEngaging in mail fraud and payroll fraud.\n\nImproper use of campaign funds and Congressional funds.\n\nEngaging in sexual misconduct with a House page.\n\nDo you see the difference? Not what they said, what they did.\n\nI can find only three categories of cases where speech is the sum and substance of the charge and they are all exceptions that have been ratified by the Supreme Court.\n\nOne is where the speech makes violent threats against other Members of the body. As the Supreme Court found as recently as April, in Counterman v. Colorado, \u201ctrue threats\u201d of violence are never protected under the First Amendment.\n\nA second category is essentially fighting words, the use of unparliamentary or aggressively insulting language on the House floor that constitutes a direct affront to another Member.\n\nThe Supreme Court has also said fighting words are not protected.\n\nThe final is speech advocating or promoting treason, Confederate secession or insurrection, all of which arguably lie outside of the First Amendment because of numerous provisions opposing and condemning insurrection.\n\nThat\u2019s it: violent threats against another Member, fighting words on the floor, speech inciting insurrection or secession.\n\nBut the Resolution offered against the gentlewoman from Michigan is all about censuring her for her unpopular political speech and literally nothing else. No actions, no conduct is being punished.\n\nThe entire censure motion is about her speech and how much we hate it and how wrong we think it is. All of that is fine for all of us to express individually\u2014in newspapers and the media, on the floor and in committee, in social media and in conversation\u2014and I have told Ms. Tlaib that the phrase \u201cfrom the river to the sea\u201d is abhorrent to me and cannot be salvaged politically, at least to my taste, even with her published explanation of what she means by it, which is certainly very different from the way Hamas uses it.\n\nBut, in any event, I would never think of disciplining her or punishing her because we disagree about that and have a dramatic difference in our political views.\n\nBut the Resolution proposes to condemn her for quoting this objectionable phrase in her video, which is indisputably protected speech under the First Amendment. Unlike the gentleman from New York, Mr. Santos, whose proposed expulsion by Members of the Majority was rejected by a commanding bipartisan majority because he has not yet been convicted of either the criminal or ethics charges against him, Ms. Tlaib, has been criminally charged with nothing and has been civilly sued for nothing and has no ethics charges outstanding before the Ethics Committee.\n\nIt\u2019s easy to see why. She can\u2019t face criminal punishment or civil liability for her alleged speech offenses because in the United States of America we don\u2019t punish people for their political ideas, no matter how wrong and offensive other people think they are. Congresswoman Tlaib won reelection with 71% of the vote in Michigan\u2019s 12th district and if anyone is going to punish her for her political ideas or manner of expression, it must be the people of her own district, who sent her here to represent them.\n\nMr. Speaker, the disciplinary process should never be used to punish the political speech or viewpoints of a Member of this Chamber just because the majority disagrees. If you disagree, why don\u2019t you get up and explain why your ideas are better than hers or where you think she has gone wrong in her values or analysis or explanation? Don\u2019t punish her for not thinking the way you do.\n\nThe punishment of dissenting political viewpoints will mean that Members will be censured just for being in the minority rather than actually doing something wrong. And that will come to stifle significant dialogue and haunt all of us in our work.\n\nFor example, there\u2019s another censure motion being proposed now against the Representative from Florida who compared \u201cPalestinian civilians\u201d to \u201cNazi civilians\u201d and stated that \u201cthere are very few innocent Palestinian citizens.\u201d\n\nThe Resolution stated that his outrageous conflation of innocent Palestinian civilians with Hamas terrorists is \u201cfalse, misleading, dehumanizing, dangerous and unbecoming of a Member of Congress.\u201d\n\nThis motion is the mirror image of the complaint against the Gentlewoman from Michigan, although in this case, significantly, the alleged offense consisted of statements that the Member himself made in his own words in the House.\n\nBut, in any event, both Members are being charged with what are inescapably speech offenses and thought crimes. And yet the case against the Representative from Florida has been held while we have moved to a vote against Ms. Tlaib. Why is that?\n\nSolely because the Gentleman\u2019s party is in the majority. But a disciplinary process which operates on the basis of raw partisan voting power has no integrity or legitimacy in the eyes of the public.\n\nThe minute we start punishing the content or viewpoint of Members\u2019 political speech, the process inescapably loses its legitimacy and becomes just a partisan weapon.\n\nFor example, the Speaker of the House has taken positions in the past arguing that sex between consenting gay adults should be a crime, that the Supreme Court was wrong to strike down sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas and wrong to give gay people the right to marry in Obergefell, a right he said that is \u201cthe dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest Republic.\u201d He even supported the idea that gay people could be cured of their malady with so-called \u201cconversion therapy,\u201d which has been discredited by science.\n\nNow, the vast majority of Americans reject these positions as extreme in opinion polls and believe that all citizens have the freedom to pursue their own love lives and to marry someone they love. If the House majority changes hands, should we censure the former Speaker for his constitutional apostasy and thought crimes against the rights of millions of Americans?\n\nI sure hope not, because the Gentleman from Louisiana is absolutely entitled to his extreme political and religious views no matter how outside the constitutional and American mainstream they are and no matter how much I reject them. Under the First Amendment, extremism is in the eye of the beholder. But how will we resist the temptation to punish the former Speaker in the future if we set a precedent today that Members can be censured and canceled simply for their political heresies in the eyes of the majority?\n\nIf we say that the gentlelady can be punished because her views of history are wrong, can we then punish Members of this body who refused to vote to take down in our halls statues of Members of Congress from the 19th century who joined the Confederacy and committed treason against the Union, people like John Breckenridge, a former Vice President and U.S. Senator who was expelled from the Senate after he defected to the Confederacy?\n\nShould we use the disciplinary process to impose historical orthodoxy? If anything, there\u2019s a better case for punishing the 120 Members of the House who voted against taking down statues of Confederate traitors because multiple provisions of the Constitution explicitly forbid and punish participation in insurrection. Do Members who voted that way want to risk being censured by establishing that divergent minority views on American history are a legitimate matter of institutional discipline?\n\nWhat about Members who defended conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and stated that the Sandy Hook and Parkland mass murders of dozens of schoolchildren were \u201cstaged\u201d by Hollywood to generate support for gun safety measures?\n\nThat\u2019s not even a matter of opinion but adjudicated positive fact, and still the Constitution protects your right to be wrong about facts unless you\u2019re deliberately defrauding or cheating someone out of something, like their money or campaign contributions.\n\nWhat about all of those Members, including the Chair of the Judiciary Committee, who follow Donald Trump in advancing the Big Lie that he actually won the 2020 election? Should we convert the 60 federal and state court decisions rejecting claims of election fraud and corruption, decisions that the Supreme Court never changed in any way, into a mass disciplinary offensive? Should we convert indisputable historical truth into discipline and punishment of dissenters and heretics?\n\nWhat about the 11 Members of this body who lost the 405-11 vote in 2019 recognizing that the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I was a genocide?\n\nDoes their denial of the genocidal character of the deaths of more than one million Armenians qualify them for institutional punishment? Can we convert differing interpretations of history into the basis for legislative punishment?\n\nPerhaps you say that political dissent should be uniquely punishable when it comes to foreign policy. But the First Amendment does not distinguish between speech having domestic policy or foreign policy content. All of it is protected. If not, every Member of this body who has voted against aid to Ukraine and praises Vladimir Putin for his \u201cgenius\u201d and \u201csavvy,\u201d as former president Donald Trump did, or says \u201cPutin is not our enemy,\u201d as several have, could be censured for it.\n\nThere were 50 Members who voted against our entrance into World War I. Maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong, but surely, they shouldn\u2019t be censured for it.\n\nThe Congresswoman from California, Ms. Lee, was the only Member for the House to vote against the open-ended authorization of use of force following 9/11, which led to our longest war in Afghanistan. Although she was vilified at the time for her vote, in the wake of 20 years of war in Afghanistan her vote today is seen as visionary by many people. Should she have been arraigned on the floor of the House of Representatives and censured for her unorthodox ideas about the dangers of war?\n\nThis Resolution not only degrades our Constitution but it cheapens the meaning of discipline in this body for people who actually commit wrongful actions, like bribery, fraud, violent assault and so on.\n\nWhen people are punished for their political ideas and expression, they will wear it as a badge of honor; they will fundraise on it, as several have done in the past, raising millions of dollars from an outraged public; and they will join the public in mocking the speech censors of Congress.\n\nA secure constitutional Republic which actively protects the freedom of dissenting speech to allow for serious debate shows its strength\u2014not its weakness. As Thomas Jefferson put it, \u201cIf there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.\u201d\n\nNow is a moment when we will get to see who in the House of Representatives believes in the freedom of speech, even the speech they hate, versus those who want to impose a political straitjacket of cancel culture on America and Congress.\n\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-08T01:01:09Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://raskin.house.gov/2023/11/raskin-floor-remarks-on-h-res-845"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.7572981305420399, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}