I want to thank the distinguished Delegate, the congressperson from Washington, D.C., for her steadfast leadership on this. I had the opportunity to work with her predecessor back in the late 1980s in this Chamber, Delegate Walter…

I thank the gentleman from Georgia for yielding. Madam Speaker, on Monday, the House will meet at 9 a.m. for morning- hour debate. I would repeat that because it is unusual. On Monday, we are meeting at 9 a.m. for morning-hour debate and…

I hope the gentleman has as high an expectation for the President of the United States as he has of others.

I thank the gentleman very much for his respect. Is the gentleman aware that the District of Columbia was reduced in size historically a while back so that the land was reduced? This is what is happening here. There is clear precedent for…

I am going to leave my mask on, not only because it is the safe thing to do for all of you--not for me, for you--but also because it represents the best of America. I am from Maryland. Maryland was a slaveholding State. I represent the…

I claim the time in opposition to the motion to recommit. The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Maryland is recognized for 5 minutes.

I urge all of my colleagues to reject this weak and unconstitutional motion to recommit. The motion proposes to condition the admission of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth on either the imposition of the whimsical policy preferences of…

When in the course of human events a relationship stops working and one party experiences a long train of abuses and indignities at the hands of the other, you scrap the old relationship and you start anew. It is nothing personal, but I…

So every State has faced objections. They said Utah was too Mormon, and New Mexico was too Catholic. Hawaii and Alaska, in 1959, of course, they weren't contiguous; they couldn't be admitted. Yes, the District exists now under Article I…

I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, our colleague across the aisle a moment ago talked about the District of Columbia being special. There is nothing special about being second class, which is what has happened to the…

For too long, we have not had the courage as a Nation to say, ``Black lives matter.'' Well, now it is a new day. Anguished and outraged by the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many others whose families have…

Mr. President, this Sunday, we will mark a grim anniversary. On June 28, 2018, a 38-year-old man who held a longtime grudge against the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, MD, for reporting about him, made good on his sworn threats. He…

I thank the gentleman for yielding. In ``Leaves of Grass,'' Walt Whitman wrote that ``the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.'' So each of our States is like a stanza, a line in the remarkable and always unfinished…

The whole premise of civil government is that we will be safer inside the social contract than outside of it, the state of nature which Thomas Hobbes famously described as a state of war, ``solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.'' So…

If Congress can redraw the boundaries of the Federal District to protect the property rights of a few hundred slave masters in the 19th century, surely we can redraw the boundaries of the Federal District to protect the democratic rights…

American apartheid lasted until the modern civil rights movement, when the blood sacrifice of John Lewis and Medgar Evers, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, and Dr. King gave us the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965…

I thank the distinguished gentleman from New York, the chair of our Caucus, for yielding. I listened intently to the litany that the minority leader chose to deliver, and I watched and looked through a lens of history about his admonitions…

To my friends on the other side of the aisle, every now and then in our Nation's history we find ourselves at a singular, searing, and seminal moment, a moment such as this. And so, whether it was the great debates of the 1960s and the…