Elijah Cummings

We need to... protect consumers, because we can do it and we can do it effectively and efficiently.

I want to do everything in my power to protect my constituents who are suffering every day.

We've got to be very careful, because, I mean, I think about the elections and where we've got situations where you can drop millions of dollars in a congressional district.

A stronger democracy. A stronger democracy.

I want to leave a better world than the one that I found. I want to leave a world with more opportunity.

Many of them feel powerless. Many of them feel that government goes off and does its thing.

The public wants to know more about, you know, who's giving money where.

On Tuesday, a coalition of institutional investors and investor coalitions, collectively managing more than $130 billion, also wrote to express their support.

Unfortunately, we will not be hearing from these groups today because Chairman Issa refused my request to invite Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, to testify on behalf of this coalition.

Under this logic, all campaign disclosures would be bad, not just new ones.

I have been a member of this committee for 15 years and I never thought I would see the day when our committee would view transparency as the enemy.

I would just again ask that we schedule a date as soon as possible for the marking up of 1144.

Thirty years in an electronic environment is incredibly dangerous.

Because it points us in the right direction in terms of how we deal with our electronic records, and it also raises the consciousness of Congress about the importance of records, which is a real problem that I have inherited as Archivist…

And do we really want to create such an extreme big brother mentality like this?

Yet, some still promote the false notion that White House employees are sitting around all day on their personal iPhones, accessing these personal email accounts to evade the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act.

Certainly, it should be made clear to employees that it is their responsibility to forward any records created on their personal email to their official email.

Mr. Chairman, although you declined to become an original cosponsor of this legislation back in March, I hope that you and I can work together on this issue in a productive way.

The Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act are landmark open government laws that are based on a fundamental principle that Federal agencies must retain records of their official business.

I thank our military service members, our intelligence officials, our diplomatic corps, our law enforcement officials, and our Nation's leaders from both political parties.

If you want to talk about balancing the State budgets, then let's talk about the budget, let's talk about the real reasons for shortfall, and let's talk about the real solutions.

I think this hearing has demonstrated that Governor Walker wildly overreached by insisting on stripping the rights of American workers, even when such measures would have had absolutely no impact on the State budget.

I disagree with him.

It is shameful to play politics with American workers and their families.

I also strongly object to efforts by politicians who try to use the current economic downturn to strip American workers of their rights.