“FOUNDATION OF THE FEDERAL BAR ASSOCIATION CHARTER AMENDMENTS ACT OF 2019” published by Congressional Record on Nov. 13, 2019

“FOUNDATION OF THE FEDERAL BAR ASSOCIATION CHARTER AMENDMENTS ACT OF 2019” published by Congressional Record on Nov. 13, 2019

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Volume 165, No. 181 covering the 1st Session of the 116th Congress (2019 - 2020) was published by the Congressional Record.

The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.

“FOUNDATION OF THE FEDERAL BAR ASSOCIATION CHARTER AMENDMENTS ACT OF 2019” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Agriculture was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H8794-H8796 on Nov. 13, 2019.

The Department is primarily focused on food nutrition, with assistance programs making up 80 percent of its budget. Downsizing the Federal Government, a project aimed at lowering taxes and boosting federal efficiency, said the Department implements too many regulations and restrictions and impedes the economy.

The publication is reproduced in full below:

FOUNDATION OF THE FEDERAL BAR ASSOCIATION CHARTER AMENDMENTS ACT OF

2019

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 1663) to amend title 36, United States Code, to revise the Federal charter for the Foundation of the Federal Bar Association.

The Clerk read the title of the bill.

The text of the bill is as follows:

H.R. 1663

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the ``Foundation of the Federal Bar Association Charter Amendments Act of 2019''.

SEC. 2. ORGANIZATION.

Section 70501 of title 36, United States Code, is amended by striking subsection (b) and redesignating subsection (c) as subsection (b).

SEC. 3. MEMBERSHIP.

Section 70503 of title 36, United States Code, is amended--

(1) by striking subsections (a) and (b) and inserting the following:

``(a) Eligibility.--Except as provided in this chapter, eligibility for membership in the corporation and the rights and privileges of members are as provided in the bylaws.''; and

(2) by redesignating subsection (c) as subsection (b).

SEC. 4. GOVERNING BODY.

Section 70504 of title 36, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

``Sec. 70504. Governing body

``(a) Board of Directors.--The board of directors is the governing body of the corporation. The board may exercise, or provide for the exercise of, the powers of the corporation. The board of directors and the responsibilities of the board are as provided in the bylaws.

``(b) Officers.--The officers and the election of the officers are as provided for in the bylaws.''.

SEC. 5. RESTRICTIONS.

Section 70507 of title 36, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

``Sec. 70507. Restrictions

``(a) Stock and Dividends.--The corporation may not issue stock or declare or pay a dividend.

``(b) Political Activities.--The corporation or a director or officer in his or her corporate capacity may not contribute to, support, or participate in any political activity or in any manner attempt to influence legislation.

``(c) Distribution of Income or Assets.--The income or assets of the corporation may not inure to the benefit of, or be distributed to, a director, officer, or member during the life of the charter granted by this chapter. This subsection does not prevent the payment, in amounts approved by the board of directors, of--

``(1) reasonable compensation; or

``(2) reimbursement for expenses incurred in undertaking the corporation's business, to officers, directors, or members.

This subsection does not prevent the award of a grant to a Federal Bar Association chapter of which an officer, director, or member may be a member. This subsection also does not prevent the payment of reasonable compensation to the corporation's employees for services undertaken on behalf of the corporation.

``(d) Loans.--The corporation may not make a loan to a director, officer, member, or employee.

``(e) Immunity From Liability.--Members and private individuals are not liable for the obligations of the corporation.

``(f) Claim of Governmental Approval or Authority.--The corporation may not claim congressional approval or the authority of the United States Government for any of its activities; it may, however, acknowledge this charter.''.

SEC. 6. PRINCIPAL OFFICE.

Section 70508 of title 36, United States Code, is amended by striking ``the District of Columbia,'' and inserting ``a United States location decided by the board of directors and specified in the bylaws,''.

SEC. 7. SERVICE OF PROCESS.

Section 70510 of title 36, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

``Sec. 70510. Service of process

``The corporation shall comply with the law on service of process of the State or District in which it is incorporated.''.

SEC. 8. DEPOSIT OF ASSETS ON DISSOLUTION OR FINAL

LIQUIDATION.

Section 70512 of title 36, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

``Sec. 70512. Deposit of assets on dissolution or final liquidation

``On dissolution or final liquidation of the corporation, any assets of the corporation remaining after the discharge of all liabilities shall be distributed as provided by the board of directors, but in compliance with the charter and bylaws.''.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the rule, the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin) and the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Collins) each will control 20 minutes.

The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Maryland.

General Leave

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and to include extraneous material on the bill under consideration.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Maryland?

There was no objection.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I am proud to have served as the lead Democratic cosponsor of this bill introduced by my friend from Ohio (Mr. Chabot), H.R. 1663, the Foundation of the Federal Bar Association Charter Amendments Act of 2019.

The Federal Bar Association serves as the primary voluntary bar association for attorneys, both in the private and public sectors, practicing in Federal courts. This bill will permit the FBA Foundation to better fulfill its role as the only institution in America chartered by Congress to promote the Federal administration of justice, the advancement of Federal jurisprudence, and the practice of law in the Federal courts by providing it with the organizational flexibility that it needs to fully meet its contemporary mission.

The original 1954 charter created a framework that has served FBA for the last six decades. During these years, the foundation has indeed strengthened Federal jurisprudence, advanced legal education, and promoted effective legal practice. The organization's initiatives have also directly improved the lives of our people.

For example, one community outreach program, the Wills for Veterans Initiative, is a pro bono project where FBA chapters provide the drafting of wills and signing services for veterans in their communities. I know a number of my constituents who participate have found great fulfillment working on this project, just as many veterans have benefited from it.

Another initiative establishes a mentorship program for law students to work alongside experienced attorneys.

The current charter must be amended to allow the organization greater flexibility of operation and growth.

For example, the existing charter codifies strict membership and governance requirements that constrain member development and nimble governance of the organization. This rigidity presents serious challenges as the organization seeks to expand its critical charitable and educational initiatives.

H.R. 1663 makes technical fixes to the charter that will give the FBA the needed flexibility in the new century. In the place of legislatively fixed membership criteria, it permits the FBA to proactively establish and update membership criteria through the bylaws process. Similar provisions authorize enhanced flexibility in the composition and duties of the members of the board.

In general, this measure would enable the FBA to swiftly meet its needs and improve the administration of Federal justice.

A similar version of the bill was introduced last year, which was passed by this body on a voice vote, but it did not pass in the Senate for various reasons. One was that the language in the bill's proposed nondiscrimination provision did not explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity, as most of the new antidiscrimination legislation does.

To that end, I am very pleased that the Federal Bar Association took it upon itself to amend its own bylaws on April 18 of this year to include the following language: ``The terms of membership may not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.''

As a cosponsor of the Equality Act, introduced by the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Cicilline), my good friend, I fully support equal rights for all. The proactive amendment of the FBA bylaws, I believe, makes clear the intent of the Federal Bar Association that everyone must be protected against invidious discrimination.

In light of this development, I believe that H.R. 1663 will help the FBA to flourish for many decades to come. I strongly support the bill, and I look forward to the FBA's continued positive involvement in our Nation's Federal legal system, and I urge all of my colleagues to support the bill.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. COLLINS of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I rise today in support of H.R. 1663, the Foundation of the Federal Bar Association Charter Amendments Act of 2019. I appreciate the gentleman and his fine laying out of what the bill actually does. I thank him and Congressman Steve Chabot for their work on this legislation and for their support of the Federal Bar Association.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments.

I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia

(Ms. Norton).

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank him for bringing this bill to the floor.

I support the mission and work of the Foundation of the Federal Bar Association. I support passage of H.R. 1663, which would give the foundation more operational flexibility, as I did when the House passed a similar version last Congress.

However, I would be remiss if I did not note my concern with section 6 of this bill. Federal law requires the foundation's principal office to be in the District of Columbia. Section 6 would amend that requirement and allow the foundation to have its principal office at any location in the United States decided by its board of directors and specified by its bylaws. Currently, the foundation's principal office is in Arlington, Virginia, in violation of Federal law.

I am speaking on this bill not to oppose it but to make a larger point about the location of Federal agencies. While the foundation is a federally chartered corporation and operates independently of the Federal Government, H.R. 1663 comes to the floor at a time when the Trump administration and many Members of Congress, among them my Republican colleagues, are working to relocate Federal agencies outside the national capital region.

Recently, Senators Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn introduced a bill that would relocate most agencies outside of the Nation's Capital and the national capital region. We can have a discussion on ways to make government work better for the American people, but such bills should not be part of that discussion.

These types of bills or administration proposals are often used for cheap talking points against the national capital region and Federal employees or are intended to undermine the work of the Federal agencies the bills or proposals are ostensibly designed to help.

Eighty-five percent of Federal employees work outside of the national capital region already. Hundreds of Federal employees and their families have already been harmed by the recent relocation of two U.S. Department of Agriculture agencies, as has the work of those agencies.

Congress cannot do its job without the unvarnished facts and briefings that nonpartisan agencies give the House and Senate almost daily. I have already gotten language in appropriations bills that would block politically motivated moves outside of the national capital region, and I will continue to fight agency relocations with every tool at my disposal.

Fortunately, H.R. 1663 is not about relocation.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I thank the gentlewoman, who is a great champion for the people of Washington, D.C., and I could not agree more with her sentiments about efforts being made in the Senate to relocate agencies central to the operation of the national government away from the national capital region. I stand firmly with her in opposition to that disturbing trend.

As the gentlewoman noted, the Foundation of the Federal Bar Association operates independently of the Federal Government and is currently headquartered in Arlington. I have received assurances from the FBA that they have no plans to relocate their principal offices as a result of the passage of this bill.

FBA's mission and institutional interests, advancing the quality of justice in the Federal judiciary, necessitate location close to Washington, D.C.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman from Ohio is prepared to close, I am as well.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. COLLINS of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The gentleman from Georgia is not prepared to close because, frankly, the gentleman from Ohio is on his way. I will do the best I can here.

Mr. Speaker, interesting discussion today. I could go on. I think it is interesting. Again, sometimes we get lost in the formalities and everything else of what is going on here. But this discussion about moving offices outside the District and moving them around is an issue and discussion that should be had.

I think there are some that are very vital to being here in the District or, as in the case of this organization, in Arlington, just outside the District. But then there are also some very real concerns on how we can discuss that.

I think one of the things that we have lost, and I will discuss here since we are in this mode, is this discussion of having a real, honest, back-and-forth discussion on legislation and pieces of legislation or, honestly, where things need to be.

Mr. Speaker, I think this is something that is vitally missing, probably from both sides of the aisle, especially this year, as we look at the context of bills and stuff that have gone on without the benefit of true bipartisan discussion. I can think of the arbitration bill that was just recently on the floor, in which there were very real concerns that Republicans had, very real concerns the Democrats had.

Unfortunately, when I actually mentioned to the chairman that I think we could have gotten a bill that would have had 375, 400 votes on the floor for ``yes,'' my chairman was amazed. Do you think we really could have? And I said, yes, if we had engaged in dialogue to fix what was wrong and not try to do a whole rewrite on something that could get made into law.

I think these are the kind of discussions that are very good. I think these are the kind of discussions that make it.

I appreciate so much the gentlewoman taking up for the District of Columbia. I think that is exactly why we come here. I come here from the perspective of northeast Georgia. The gentleman comes from Maryland. The gentlewoman comes from the District right here.

Members from all over the body bring their ideas and their thoughts of their constituents to the floor, especially in markups and especially in bills, in which not everything, at the end of the day, is from a Republican or Democratic standpoint.

At the end of day, as someone who has authored many pieces of legislation, just as the gentleman has as well, the big things get done when we work together. The big things--I mean, criminal justice reform was when Hakeem Jeffries and I bridged a large gap in a divide, even an unruly Senate, to actually pass something that really worked.

We had the Music Modernization Act, which, again, took 6 years to discuss and 6 years to be a part of. When you had Members of the bodies that ended up being a part of this not even willing to sit down and talk to each other at the beginning of this process and, at the end of the day, having a major accomplishment and a major bill that was passed because of bipartisanship, I think that it gave on both sides.

{time} 1230

I appreciate the gentlewoman bringing those things up. I think it is an interesting correlation between the Federal Bar Association and the excellent work that they do. I have no problem with the work that they do.

I will reserve, if the gentleman would like to share and respond on what we just talked about.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I want to thank the distinguished and always eloquent gentleman from Georgia for his comments on a number of interesting things. One is the question of bipartisanship and us working together, and I think the gentleman correctly invites us to study the record of legislative success and achievements in our body.

It is true that the best legislation, like the Voting Rights Act, for example, is legislation that came through a bipartisan process where we had both parties working together.

All of our great Presidents have been people who themselves were involved in partisan politics, and often in a bare-knuckled way, but also, once they were in office, called the country to try to speak across party lines.

Jefferson said, ``We are all republicans. We are all federalists'' in his inaugural address in 1800.

And Lincoln, of course, said: We are friends; we must not be enemies. We must be friends, and we must not be enemies.

And President Obama said: We are not the red States of America; we are not the blue States of America. We are the United States of America.

And so we have to try to aspire to that even though we work in a party system. And the reason we have a party system is because we are not a one-party dictatorship.

One way to get rid of partisanship is you get rid of political parties and you have a one-party state. But we don't believe in that. We have got political freedom in America.

But, at the same time, once we get in, the same way that we render constituent service to all of our constituents without regard to whether they are Democrats or Republicans or Independents, we should try to render legislative service to the whole country at the same time.

Let me just make one other point to my friend about the Seat of Government Clause.

Now, as the gentleman knows, the distinguished gentlewoman from the District of Columbia represents 700,000 people who have no voting representation in Congress, and the basis for that, what I think is a historical accident, has been the existence of the District Clause that Congress exercises exclusive legislation over the land that is ceded to Congress for the purposes of a seat of government.

Well, I suppose to the extent that there is an attempt to justify us being the only country on Earth where the people of the Capital City are not represented, it has to do with the fact that this is where the Federal Government is located.

Now, the District of Columbia is involved in a statehood struggle, which I support. Like every other American, they want to be part of a State. But as long as they are in the so-called seat of government, it seems to me that the gentlewoman makes a good point, which is that truly Federal functions should not be stripped away from Washington, D.C., and relocated around the country.

Now, most Federal employees don't live in the National Capital area; 80 to 85 percent of them live across America at Army bases or post offices, Departments of Justice around the country. They work in all of those Federal functions around the country.

But there are certain things that do belong here. The Federal departments clearly belong within the seat of government, and I think that the gentlewoman was just identifying that there has been an effort to strip away essential Federal functions and to relocate them to other parts of the country, leaving her constituents with the worst of both worlds, which is no representation the way that our constituents are represented, but, at the same time, a gradual stripping away of the Federal offices and departments.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. COLLINS of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I have one more speaker and I will yield him the balance of my time, so when he yields back, I will close.

I appreciate that now that the airplane has circled enough and we have run out of enough fuel, we are now on to the next topic, and I appreciate the gentleman discussing that.

I yield the remainder of my time to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Chabot).

Mr. CHABOT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I want to thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin) for his leadership on this particular piece of legislation that I am going to discuss now.

I rise in support of my bill, H.R. 1663. Put simply, this bill helps to support those Federal attorneys who prosecute major drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, and others who commit Federal crimes and those Federal judges who preside over cases heard in their courtrooms.

In a few short months, the Federal Bar Association will celebrate the centennial anniversary of its founding. It was founded with a mission to promote and support legal research and education, to advance the science of jurisprudence, to facilitate the administration of justice, and to foster improvements in the practice of Federal law.

Back in 1954, Congress chartered the Federal Bar Association, but in the decades since receiving its charter, it has neither been updated nor amended.

As a former educator and attorney and current senior member of the Judiciary Committee myself, I recognize, as many of my colleagues do, the important work that the Federal Bar Association does to bring civics education to classrooms in my State of Ohio and throughout the country.

Without legislation like this, H.R. 1663, it would take, literally, an act of Congress to allow the Federal Bar Association to make simple changes to its bylaws.

More specifically, this legislation gives the association the ability to choose the location of its principal office, restricts its officers from engaging in political activity, and makes other technical changes to conform to commonly used language used by other congressionally chartered groups.

This legislation being considered today serves to provide the Federal Bar Association with the ability to continue its important work and scholarship in communities throughout the country.

Finally, I want to again thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin) for his support of H.R. 1663, and I want to thank both Chairman Nadler and Ranking Member Collins for bringing it to the floor today for consideration. I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support it.

Mr. COLLINS of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Mr. Chabot for his excellent work on this legislation, and I want to thank Mr. Collins for his thoughtful intervention.

Mr. Speaker, this bill was advanced to allow the Foundation of the Federal Bar Association the flexibility it needs to successfully manage its own affairs, as Mr. Chabot pointed out. I urge its passage, and I yield back the balance of my time.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion offered by the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin) that the House suspend the rules and pass the bill, H.R. 1663.

The question was taken; and (two-thirds being in the affirmative) the rules were suspended and the bill was passed.

A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.

____________________

SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 165, No. 181

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