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Mr. Speaker, I certainly appreciate my good friend from Georgia for yielding to me to speak on this Secret Service reform bill and on the work of the chairman of the committee, Mr. Goodlatte from Virginia, on this bill.
Our Oversight and Government Reform Committee held several hearings on Secret Service reform, and much of the content, I am pleased to say, is reflected in H.R. 1656. There, of course, have been an increasing number of fence jumpers in recent years, but it took a stunning penetration to the very interior of the White House by Omar Gonzalez last year to make it clear that the reform of the Secret Service was urgent.
At hearings, we learned that there had never been--not once--a top-to-bottom review of the Secret Service in its more than 100 years of existence. This was, clearly, urgently needed; so Secretary Jeh Johnson appointed the first independent review panel. What it found was, across the board, weakness and flaws in the United States Secret Service.
Although its mission has expanded greatly over the years, today, the Secret Service simply does not reflect the post-9/11 experience, much less that of today's ISIL and domestic terrorism. The fence jumpers had already shown that the Secret Service could not be expected to meet its zero failure mission.
Today's bill shows that Congress takes the reform of the Secret Service very seriously. The funding, which is usually missing from such reform these days, is authorized, and the bill adopts much of the independent review's recommendations:
Instead of blaming overworked uniformed Secret Service and agents who have been working 6 and 7 days a week for 12 hours a day because of no additional personnel, the bill authorizes the addition of 80 agents and 200 Uniformed Division personnel, which is virtually what the independent review panel recommended;
The bill increases the number of hours of training to meet the Secret Service's expanded mission;
It faces the need to make greater use of technology, and it even takes note of a post-fence jumper phenomenon, the unmanned drones that have become a new form of fence jumping.
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I appreciate that.
Mr. Speaker, the space in front of the White House is a First Amendment park. I was invited down to a commemoration by citizens, who come every Monday to urge the reform of our gun laws.
To respond to fence jumping, some had talked of making it difficult for the public to come to that space in front of Pennsylvania Avenue. At hearings, I was assured that that was not necessary; and this bill backs that up. Spikes have been added for the fence jumpers, making it difficult to jump over, but Mr. Speaker, I was pleased to see today that the public continues to use Pennsylvania Avenue as the First Amendment space it has always been.
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