Chris Smith: “I thank my good friend for yielding. I thank Mr. Wilson for his great work, and I want to thank my distinguished…”

“I thank my good friend for yielding. I thank Mr. Wilson for his great work, and I want to thank my distinguished colleagues on both sides of the aisle, Eliot Engel and Michael McCaul. Thank you for your support in helping to get this legislation to the floor. I thank Chairman Keating, as well. Mr. Speaker, I urge swift enactment into law of this bipartisan bill called the Belarus Democracy Human Rights and Sovereignty Act of 2020, which I have introduced. And here is why this legislation is absolutely needed right now; not next year, not when we come back, hopefully the Senate will take it up if it passes today, and I think it will, but we need this right now. Many of my colleagues know, and perhaps they know it well, that Belarus was perhaps the nation most mired in the Soviet past, with an inefficient economy and a strongman autocrat, really a dictator, in charge for over two and a half decades, Alexander Lukashenko. Yet the indomitable spirit of freedom stirred among the people of Belarus, and when a patently false election--another one--was announced on August 9 declaring Lukashenko the winner, the people took to the streets. And they are still on the streets today.…”