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Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to the Ranking Member of the subcommittee, Mr. Nadler, and thank you to my colleague, Chairman Jordan. Thanks to all of our witnesses for being here with us today.

I was surprised to hear my friend from Ohio talking about a transgender comic book from I can’t remember which country, but if there’s a form of government expenditure taking place that we have a problem with, isn’t that why the congressional oversight function exists? Don’t we have a whole Oversight Committee which you serve on, which I’ve served on, which can do that? Do we really need to hire a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk to go out and do it for us? We’re about to enter into a budget process right now. We can deal with it ourselves.

Mr. Chairman, in the last 22 days, Donald Trump’s billionaire government has taken a wrecking ball to public institutions and the rule of law in America. The agent of chaos is Elon Musk, a “special government employee” purportedly working on technological reform. More crucially, he’s a big businessman whose floundering Tesla sales in Europe create huge financial pressures for him, according to the Business Press. Even more crucially, he’s a government contractor who collects billions of federal taxpayer dollars every single year and yet has not filed a single employee ethics disclosure form as required by law.

He has access not only to computers controlling his own billion-dollar payments from us, the people, but to computers containing his contractor rivals’ contract bids, their contracts, their invoices, and their payment systems. Yet he has not shown us a single conflict of interest waiver form for these multiple egregious apparent conflicts of interest.

He and his mutant teenage racist computer hackers have taken possession of financial payment systems at the United States Department of Treasury, meaning data access to the private financial records of every American citizen. Every member of Congress. Every federal prosecutor. Every regulator who’s supposed to be looking at what his business does. Every private lawyer and every federal judge who they’re now calling for the impeachment of, because they dare to speak up for the rule of law.

What could go wrong with this situation?

Fortunately, we do still have an Article III, a working federal judiciary which has issued no fewer than 12 injunctions in three weeks, 12 temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions in three weeks against the illegality of this arrangement, including an injunction against any further unlawful seizure, possession and corruption of Americans’ private financial data.

Now, the Elon Musk cyber raid against our data and privacy infrastructure has set the stage for the Administration’s outrageous and unprecedented violation of congressional lawmaking and spending power. That’s what the first hearing of this subcommittee should be about, Mr. Chairman, the blatantly illegal and quickly reversed freeze on billions of dollars in federal grants already appropriated by the United States Congress, programmed by the agencies, contracted for by government lawyers, and in the proper pipeline for payment. The flagrantly illegal efforts to not pay federal workers and honor our contracts for work already rendered to condition federal funds on totally made-up restrictions never voted on, much less approved by Congress, in the scandalous effort to dismantle and neutralize entire federal agencies like NOAA, USAID and the CFPB, spitting in the face of congressional power enactments and appropriations.

An Appropriations Act is a federal law, like any other law, like the law, for example, against violently assaulting federal police officers. An appropriations Act is not a recommendation or a bargaining maneuver with the executive branch. It is a law. It must be enforced.

This Administration needs a constitutional refresher course, Mr. Chairman.

The preamble to the Constitution says: “We the People, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare and preserve to ourselves and our posterity the Blessings of Liberty, do hereby ordain and establish the Constitution of these United States.”

And the very next sentence of the Constitution establishes in Article I, the Congress of the United States, possessing all of the legislative power. Some of my colleagues have taken to saying we’re three co-equal branches. I beg to differ. We’re not three co-equal branches. Not at all. First of all, “co-equals” is not even a word, right? That’s like “extremely unique.” It doesn’t mean anything. So, they’re saying “three equal branches.” I don’t think so. Read James Madison in the Federalist Papers. Congress is the predominant branch. Congress is the lawmaking branch. It’s Congress. Check out Article I, Section 8. All of the powers we have to regulate commerce domestically and internationally, to pass the budget, to appropriate money—Congress does that. In Article I, Section 8, Clause 18: “And all other powers necessary and proper to the execution of the foregoing powers.”

And after all of that, you get to four short paragraphs in Article II. My friend Mr. Jordan has been quoting the first sentence all over TV. He thinks that he somehow has a knockout argument. He says, “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.” Yes, indeed, Mr. Jordan, that’s where the executive power is vested. But what is the executive power? The core responsibility of the President of the United States is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, right? Not defied, not violated, not trashed, not rewritten to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, which is precisely what’snothappening today.

As they say, oh well, Elon Musk, he’s got all the power of the president. Donald Trump himself could not be doing what Elon Musk is doing in Washington today. He can’t evaporate USAID, he can’t nullify the CFPB. He can’t destroy an agency set up by us on a bipartisan basis in Congress. Nobody in the executive branch has that. Yeah, the president is on top of the executive branch, but we’re the lawmaking power. And who sorts out the conflict if there’s a conflict? The courts do. And what have the courts been saying? They’ve said a dozen times in three weeks that they’re violating the Constitution of the United States and the laws passed by Congress.

That’s what’s going on in America today. That’s what we should be having a hearing about. Not some eerie academic conversation about the administrative state, whatever they mean by that. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.