Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, we are in a cold war with China and some of my colleagues want to ignore this fact. We have legislation before us that is 12 pages long.

The bill is not a ban. It forces foreign adversaries, including Chinese Communists, to divest. The bill is not a bill of attainder; it is prospective, not retrospective.

The bill does not violate the First Amendment. It focuses on conduct, not content. It requires both being controlled by a foreign adversary and conduct that itself is espionage. If you just had one alone, it might be debatable, as the gentleman from North Carolina or Senator Paul notes, in that it might protect Americans' rights to seek out and obtain foreign propaganda. However, again, that is not this case because we have, and have as a trigger in the bill, demonstrated national security conduct harm.

To be clear, we have properly taken action at the device layer by banning Huawei and ZTE spy gear. We have taken action at the carrier level, prohibiting China Mobile and China Telecom from connecting to our networks based on a determination they are controlled by the CCP and a national security threat.

We now need to take action at the application level when malign CCP control has been demonstrated lest we render meaningless our past actions to protect the United States of America.

We should ban Chicom ownership of our farmland or drug manufacturing, but we should fight them here and ban the foreign ownership and control of American data and stop apologizing for the Chinese Communists.

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