{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://sarajacobs.house.gov/news/press-releases/rep-sara-jacobs-calls-on-speaker-johnson-to-cancel-recess-to-act-on-ai-speaker-johnson-starts-recess-early", "Rep. Sara Jacobs Calls on Speaker Johnson to Cancel Recess to Act on AI; Speaker Johnson Starts Recess Early", "2026-09-16", "2026", "2026-09", "Democrat", "House", "CA", "Sara Jacobs", "J000305", "sarajacobs.house.gov", "sarajacobs", "https://sarajacobs.house.gov/news/press-releases", "scraper", "Rep. Sara Jacobs (CA-51) joined Reps. Don Beyer (VA-08), Ted Lieu (CA-36), and Lori Trahan (MA-03) at a press conference, calling on Speaker Johnson to cancel the upcoming congressional recess and keep lawmakers in Washington to find consensus and pass AI safety legislation; instead, Speaker Johnson sent lawmakers home a day early.\n\nEarlier today, the congresswoman joined a bipartisan delegation in pushing House leadership of both parties to take immediate, urgent action to address risks posed by rapidly advancing AI.\n\nWatch Rep. Sara Jacobs\u2019 Remarks Here\n\nRep. Sara Jacobs said:\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve spent over a decade working on and thinking about AI. I even served as a UNICEF representative to the AI for Good Summit in Geneva in 2017\u2026before it was cool. And what that decade has taught me is two things \u2013 that this technology could, emphasis on could, make the world a better place. And it can hurt people \u2013 in small everyday ways, and in catastrophic ones.\n\n\u201cAnd Congress hasn\u2019t done enough to make sure it\u2019s the former and not the latter.\n\n\u201cAI feels out of control to most Americans right now. Ask any young person, and they\u2019ll tell you. For the first time, Pew Research found that most adults under 30 are more concerned than excited about it.\n\n\u201cAnd yet, Speaker Johnson and President Trump keep repeating the same bad-faith arguments that if we regulate AI, then we\u2019ll lose to China. It\u2019s a complete lie, and it\u2019s a fundamental misunderstanding of how and why people use technology.\n\n\u201cThe race with China isn\u2019t only about who can build the most advanced model first. Getting to the best system first doesn\u2019t matter if people don\u2019t use it or if AI has killed all of us in the meantime. Winning the competition is about which models people use, which models people trust more to use and adopt.\n\n\u201cPutting guardrails on AI \u2013 stopping the everyday harms already happening when an algorithm gets to decide who gets a mortgage or a job interview, and getting ahead of the bigger risks before they arrive\u2026that isn\u2019t losing the AI race. That\u2019s how we win it.\n\n\u201cThe FAA didn\u2019t make us lose the competition on air travel, it helped us win it. The Clean Air Act helped car companies learn to innovate with catalytic converters, it didn\u2019t get in the way of their innovation.\n\n\u201cBut since January of last year, Speaker Johnson has cancelled 62 of 261 scheduled voting days \u2013 that\u2019s almost a quarter of the days that Congress could have been in session to pass any one of the bipartisan AI bills sitting in this chamber. It\u2019s 62 days that could have moved the 89 recommendations that the Bipartisan AI Task Force identified almost 2 years ago to guide federal AI governance and innovation.\n\n\u201cBut instead, Speaker Johnson has been twiddling his thumbs and preaching that Big Tech can police itself. It can\u2019t. It\u2019s our job, and we\u2019re not doing it.\n\n\u201cEnough is enough. The American people have waited long enough for Congress to act on AI, and we can\u2019t let all these warning signs pass without action. Speaker Johnson needs to cancel recess so we can get to the hard work of Congress of getting to real consensus, hammering out the details, and passing real AI safeguards.\u201d\n\nBackground: Rep. Sara Jacobs has been a leader in AI safety throughout her tenure in Congress, sitting on the House Bipartisan Task Force on Artificial Intelligence last term and currently on the House Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy. She\u2019s introduced several bills to address the everyday harms and catastrophic risks posed by AI, including the Sectoral AI Governance Act, the bipartisan AI Foundation Model Transparency Act, the bipartisan Economy of the Future Commission Act, the bipartisan ATOMIC Act, the AI Tax and Work Protection Act, and more. She\u2019s also passed legislation into law to prevent AI from autonomously launching nuclear weapons and strengthening oversight and accountability of the Pentagon\u2019s use of AI.", 1, "2026-09-17T09:52:05Z", "2026-09-17T09:53:00Z"]], "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://sarajacobs.house.gov/news/press-releases/rep-sara-jacobs-calls-on-speaker-johnson-to-cancel-recess-to-act-on-ai-speaker-johnson-starts-recess-early"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.8263529743999243, "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"}