Andy Biggs: “I thank the gentleman for doing this. Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to dovetail with what Mr. Good has talked about…”

“I thank the gentleman for doing this. Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to dovetail with what Mr. Good has talked about, and that is the weaponization of the Federal Government against American citizens for political purposes. It is bad enough when it becomes weaponized against American citizens, but it becomes actually exponentially worse when it becomes a tool of authoritarianism to actually attack political opponents. Why is it worse? It is worse because it undermines the very foundation of the rule of law and of the free association and free speech of American citizens, from which we recognize all of our political apparatus. Let's think about this. We know the committee of weaponization, the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, recently put out a report dealing with the misuse of financial records of Americans. Imagine if the Federal Government could get ahold of everybody's credit card statements. Well, they can, actually. Why can they? Because they have asked for it, and the banks and credit card companies, many of them, have actually turned that information over to the FBI and the Department of Justice. For what reason? There is no particular reason. There is no indicia of probable cause or suspicious behavior. They are just acquiring metadata so they can go after and pursue the individuals. We see the same thing with this movement to buy up additional metadata from data brokers, private commercial data brokers.…”