Hal Rogers: “Mr. Chairman, what this argument is about today is unlike what has been argued before in this body on this matter. This…”

“Mr. Chairman, what this argument is about today is unlike what has been argued before in this body on this matter. This debate is about what was the intent of the Congress in 1995 when we passed the act in this bill that allowed the Department of Justice to be reimbursed from other agencies for extraordinary expensive cases. What was on the table at that time was a lawsuit by a company against the Navy when the Navy canceled the A-12 aircraft contract. It was a multibillion-dollar lawsuit. Justice came to us and said, Would you please put in your bill a provision that allows the Navy to reimburse Justice for representing it in this massive lawsuit against the government. We said, Okay, we'll do that. Never in anyone's wildest imagination on the floor of this body was it anticipated that that statute would be used by the Government to initiate lawsuits, to sue people willy-nilly. Why? Because the Justice Department has a Civil Rights Division of some 1,039 lawyers with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend in filing lawsuits. Why would they need this kind of money to file a lawsuit? No, the Congress intended when we passed that statute to enable the Justice Department to be able to represent the Government when it was sued, not when it was the suer.”