Today, the House is holding a hearing on the insular cases, doctrines which hold the territories in a perpetual state of colonialism. Earlier this year, I served as a House impeachment manager in the second trial of President Donald Trump…

More than 3.5 million U.S. citizens are denied constitutional rights simply because they reside in one of the five U.S. territories.

We want our political status and our rights under territorial law to be decided by our people, our elected leaders.

If anyone is holding onto these racist Insular Cases as a way of keeping Article XII afloat, they may be holding onto an anchor, not a life preserver.

We do not want to have court decide the fate of our people as it was done resulting in the Insular Cases.

House Resolution 279, which calls the Insular Cases racist, undemocratic, unconstitutional, unAmerican, and having no place in the America we know and love, is the first and important step to make amends.

I offer my qualified support for House Resolution 279, which acknowledges that the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in the Insular Cases and the territorial incorporation doctrine are contrary to the text and history of the U.S. Constitution.

What we are doing is to urge protection first and foremost for the self-determination and rights of sovereign-owned peoples.

As a resident of the Virgin Islands, it is of the utmost importance that we, as Members of Congress, confront our disenfranchisement.

House Resolution 279 could be interpreted as an invitation for the courts to repeal the Insular Cases without giving any rights to sovereign people.

There is material doubt about how the courts will play the role of judicial review assigned by the Constitution.

I co-sponsored the Resolution being discussed today because the Insular Cases doctrine denies democracy and equality and reflects abhorrent bias and have provided a justification for Congress to discriminate against American citizens…

The resolution naturally, therefore, is a nullity without identifying the specific laws of each ruling that it seeks to overturn.

the Supreme Court's decisions in the Insular Cases are contrary to the text and history of the Constitution.

I sincerely appeal to you to follow her example, because as she recognized, this is a fundamental issue of self-determination.

We simply cannot ignore the basic truth that the super majority of people actually living in American Samoa vociferously opposed the case.

The solution chosen by the voters of Puerto Rico to determine its ultimate political status is clear: they chose by clear majority the equality within the Nation that they are citizens of.

The residents of the territories each have their own opinions about their relationship with the mainland.