For the People Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. HICE of Georgia. Madam Chair, the Office of Government Ethics is a prevention and education agency. OGE is responsible for ensuring compliance with ethics requirements, such as financial disclosure and conflict of interest rules.

These are the folks that the executive branch employees call when they have an ethics question. Their mission is to advise Federal employees on ethics matters.

OGE is not an investigative office, but that is exactly what H.R. 1 wants to turn OGE into, by granting the director the authority to subpoena information and records.

Here is the thing. OGE does not even need to have subpoena authority. It already has the power to request any information needed from Federal agencies, and the Federal agencies are required to comply under the Ethics in Government Act.

The only reason to give subpoena authority is to empower OGE to harass executive branch employees. This is not farfetched, Madam Chair.

The former director of OGE, Shaub, was openly hostile to the Trump administration and to Mr. Trump personally, even before he took office. Under Shaub, OGE went so far as using its official Twitter account in an attempt to coerce President-Elect Trump to divest his business interests. That is not what OGE's role is supposed to be.

We don't want to allow an office that has become so partisan to have subpoena authority and thereby open the door to overt harassment to executive branch employees.

I would just remind my Democrat friends that if this bill does become law--and it won't--but if it does, a future Democratic administration will eventually also have to deal with the same type of issues with the Office of Government Ethics.

Let me further remind everyone that the inspector general of the agency already has authority to subpoena information and documents, so we don't need to expand this and extend it to the director.

At the end of the day, this bill has much bigger problems than this small OGE subpoena authority provision. It is a bad bill. I will not be supporting it, obviously, but I know that many of my friends on the other side of the aisle will be supporting this bill.

Frankly, there is no amendment that is made in order by the Rules Committee that can fix this legislation. Some amendments, I believe, including this one, can at least make it marginally better, but it is a bad bill through and through.

I believe the American people, frankly, are going to be outraged when they find out what is in this piece of legislation, such as public financing for congressional candidates. The American people don't want that. They don't want tax dollars, particularly, six times going to Federal candidates.

And then there is the automatic voter registration requirement. I think the American people will be irate when they find out about this. This particular provision forces States to transfer individuals' personal information from government agencies and services and then transfer those over to election officials for voter registration.

Obviously, that is a violation of the 10th Amendment, but it is even worse than that. The Democratic authors of this legislation will not tell the American people that this provision will lead to huge numbers of illegal aliens and noncitizens being registered to vote.

And here is the problem. Illegal aliens and noncitizens use government agencies and services. Their information, according to H.R. 1, would then be sent to election officials, along with everyone else's, and they will be registered to vote.

The only safeguard that H.R. 1 has to prevent an illegal alien from being automatically registered to vote is if the alien proactively declines, which is not likely to happen because they don't want to draw attention to themselves to begin with because they are here illegally. So for us to expect that they would go publicly and draw attention to themselves, it just simply is not going to happen. That just flies in the face of logic.

Not only does H.R. 1 make it significantly more likely for ineligible voters to be registered, it also makes it next to impossible for States to remove ineligible voters from the voter registration list once they are on there. I doubt that anyone could have devised a better way, or a worse way, as it really is, to ensure illegal aliens get registered to vote.

I urge my colleagues to vote against H.R. 1, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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