Floor Debate on Nadler Question of Personal Privilege Share on Facebook Share on X Print this Page Share by Email Washington, DC, May 4, 2005 Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I seek recognition on a question of personal privilege pursuant to rule IX of the rules of the House. I have placed at the desk the documentation on which this question is based. The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. LaTourette). On the basis of House Report 109-51 and certain media coverage thereof, the gentleman may rise to a question of personal privilege under rule IX. The gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) is recognized for 1 hour. PARLIAMENTARY INQUIRY Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry. Have the corrections or the supplemental report to the committee report been filed yet? The SPEAKER pro tempore. The supplemental report authorized by section 2 of House Resolution 258 has been filed. Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, the basis of my question of personal privilege concerns the manner in which amendments I offered during the Committee on the Judiciary's consideration of H.R. 748 on April 13, 2005, were characterized in the committee's report on that legislation, House Report 109-51. Specifically, the report, in the section required under clause 3(b) of rule XIII of the rules of the House reporting the votes of the committee described my amendments in a manner that denigrated my ``rights, reputation, and conduct ..... in [my] representative capacity ..... '' within the meaning of clause 1 of rule IX. The language in question appears on pages 45 and 46 of the committee report, and it mischaracterizes my amendments in a manner that does not reflect the actual content of the amendments nor the actual intent of those amendments. In fact, it uses legislation to describe my legislative actions that is pejorative and inflammatory and that is highly damaging to my reputation. It is with great sadness and regret that I come to the floor today. I have never previously in my 12 years as a Member of this House, nor in my quarter century representing the people of New York, had the need to rise on a personal privilege. I have never had my reputation, or my legislative efforts, so terrible maligned in an official record of any legislative body in which I have served. It is my hope that this is the last time I will ever need to claim the floor in a question of personal privilege. I would observe that the filing a few minutes ago of the supplemental report to the Committee on the Judiciary report is a tacit acknowledgment of the inaccuracy and untruthfulness of the original report and its reputation in the public domain, and renders much of what was said in its defense in the Committee on Rules and on the floor, as the saying goes, ``inoperative.'' I commend the chairman for correcting the record and hope that with this correction of the slanderous report language, this unfortunate chapter can be brought to a close. While I would have hoped that this correction would have been accompanied by an apology and by an acknowledgment that this report was a violation of the tradition and norms of the House, that is, perhaps, in the regrettably poisonous atmosphere of the present day, unobtainable. I regret that things have reached such an unfortunate state. This situation is especially sad because it involves the Committee on the Judiciary's official report on this bill, which contained false and misleading, indeed libelous, descriptions of the amendments I and my colleagues offered in committee in good faith, and with the intent of protecting children and families in terrible situations. Those characterizations came in the section of the report, required by the rules, that simply requires an accurate report of all recorded votes. There are many places in committee reports where commentary is appropriate. Both the majority and the minority have the opportunity in the report to make their cases, and very much to the credit of the gentleman from Wisconsin (Chairman Sensenbrenner) the Committee on the Judiciary reports also contain a transcript of the markup. What has never been done, and I am not aware of the majority on any committee having so abused its power, is to distort the content of the amendments in the section reserved for reporting votes. Every Member of this House sits on committees; every Member knows what a report looks like, and every Member of this House knows this was an aberration and that it was wrong. I do not believe it is necessary to repeat the report language that gave rise to this point of personal privilege. The Chair has the offending language, and it has been plastered all over the RECORD, the press, and Web logs. I feel no need to repeat it. Enough damage has already been done. To place this report, and the slanderous language it used in context, the last time the Committee on the Judiciary reported a version of the same bill, the report said: ``An amendment was offered by Mr. Nadler prohibiting H.R. 476 from applying `with respect to conduct by a grandparent or adult sibling of the minor.' '' Same amendment, same committee, different year. Earlier versions of this bill have been reported by the Committee on the Judiciary on three prior occasions, going to 1998. In no case have any of my amendments been described in the inaccurate and pejorative fashion they were in this year's committee report. The Committee on Rules described the same amendment in the following manner when it reported it to the floor: ``Adds to the exceptions to the offense of transporting minors for the purpose of obtaining an illegal abortion grandparents of the minor and members of the clergy.'' Even the Republican Study Committee, the voice of some of the most conservative of our colleagues, described the amendment this way: ``The amendment allows a grandparent of the minor or a clergy person to bring pregnant minors across State lines for abortions.'' These are factual descriptions of the amendment. They are nonargumentative factual descriptions as the rules call for. In fact, neither the bill itself nor the amendments contained the offensive terms used in the committee report to describe my amendments. No member of the committee described my amendments in this libelous manner at any time during the debate. Nobody in the majority, none of the Republicans in opposing my amendments in committee debate said that they contained the material which the committee report libelously says they do. As the transcript clearly shows, the transcript contained in the committee's report appearing on page 58 to 120 will clearly show. It is regrettable that even in filing the supplemental report, the majority felt the need to restate the slander, but this time in the section reserved for majority views. The majority, however, is entitled to its views, even if they are not factually based; and the appropriate place to express them is in debate and in documents reserved for expressing their views, such as the majority view section of the committee report. The minority has a similar right in debate and in its dissenting views, and I would not expect the majority to tell us what views we should have or how to express them. Not abusing the power the majority has over the contents and the filing of the report, which the minority does not get to see until it is filed, is really based on nothing more than the honor system. Unfortunately, in this system, the honor system failed. This abuse of power of mischaracterizing and slandering the amendments and the Members who offered them in the section of the report reserved for simply reporting amendments and the votes thereon, could not be allowed to stand or there would have been no end to it. This is not about party, nor is it about a bill, nor about an amendment, nor even about the underlying issue. It is about the ``rights, reputation and conduct of Members, delegates or the resident commissioner, individually, in their representative capacity only.'' When the majority abuses its power to attack the reputation of Member or Members, as it did in this case, the House must act to correct the injustice. The supplemental report filed by the majority is an important step in that direction, and I thank the chairman for agreeing to file the correction. We have strayed far from the customary comity and fair play to which this House has long adhered. That is no way to represent our views to the voters of this country. The voters have every right to expect us to fight for our beliefs, to represent them vigorously, and to speak out in clear terms on the important issues of the day. But, Mr. Speaker, there are limits. When Members of this House transgress those limits, we fail the people who sent us here and we fail the institution in which we are honored to serve. We are elected to 2-year terms. The office does not belong to us, but to the people. We are mere custodians of the office. I hope that, in our conduct, we can prove ourselves good and responsible stewards of this public trust. It is my sincere hope that now that the correction has been filed and the slander abated, this will be the last time any Member has the unpleasant duty of rising in this House to defend his or her reputation and the traditions of this institution. I hope that this single aberration will be remembered as just that: a single aberration. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Scott). (Mr. SCOTT of Virginia asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks, and include extraneous material.) Mr. SCOTT of Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I include for the RECORD an editorial published this morning in the daily newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, the Virginian Pilot, on this issue. [From the Virginia Pilot, May 5, 2005] A House Divided Against Itself The mood in certain precincts of Congress has become so poisonous that people aren't speaking our common language unless they're accusing political opponents of unspeakable crimes. The ``Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act'' would make it a federal offense to take a minor across a state line to get an abortion without the consent of her parents, for a physician to perform such abortions, and allows parents to sue anybody who does. Democrats on the Judiciary Committee offered several amendments that would have limited the law's scope. U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, for example, sought to insert this line: ``The prohibitions of this section do not apply with respect to conduct by taxicab drivers, bus drivers or others in the business of professional transport.'' Pretty straightforward, right? Should the U.S. government prosecute a bus driver because a girl in one of its seats is traveling to end a pregnancy? No matter your answer to that question, the congressman's wording is pretty clear, unless you're a member of the Judiciary Committee's staff, which managed Scott's amendment into this: ``Mr. Scott offered an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution if they're taxicab drivers, bus drivers or others in the business of professional transport.'' In other words, the staff of a committee on which Scott serves accused him of trying to protect sexual predators, arguably a crime in itself. It is the kind of libel--repeated against two other Democratic members of the committee--that only nameless, faceless bureaucrat would dare make. But, significantly, it's also the kind of power-made mischief that the Republican leadership felt deserved defense. The Congress Tuesday evening spent an hour debating a resolution to require Republicans to change the descriptions, which are supposed to be, and ordinarily are, written in dry, neutral language. That debate was itself illustrative of how deep the divisions in Congress have become. While the Democrats--including Scott and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi--talked about how Republicans abused the truth to score political points, the majority changed the subject entirely and re-argued the merits of the abortion bill, which passed the week before. ``The issue is whether we can trust each other to deal with each other fairly,'' said Wisconsin Democrat Rep. David Obey, who had voted for the abortion bill. In the end, Tuesday's debate was a rancorous parry and feint, lasted an eternity and came to absolutely nothing. The resolution to change the descriptions, of course, failed on a party-line vote. Still, for 60 minutes, the rudeness that now rules the hall of the Capitol was on sharp display for all America to see. ``The rewrite says more about the person who wrote it, and those who defend it, than it does about the amendment itself,'' Scott said Tuesday. Scott's right. What is says is nothing kind, and not to be forgotten. Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, not seeing the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee), I thank the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary for filing the corrected report, and I yield back the balance of my time.