Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), Chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), says the Democrats’ China bill is a “massive boondoggle that’s going to help the Chinese” and hurt Americans, making the remarks during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday.
Banks explained that Democrats are falsely pitching the China bill as a way to better compete with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but he said it is innately flawed as it has absolutely no safeguards to prevent the theft of our intellectual property or research.
The problem, Banks said, is the bill does “exactly the opposite of what the Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer’s reporting that it does.”
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“They say it would help the United States compete with China. We believe it actually helps China and there are a lot of reasons why,” the Indiana lawmaker explained, referring to it as a “boondoggle spending bill” which spends hundreds of billions funneling money to places that are already susceptible to being taken advantage of by the CCP, stealing our intellectual property.
“For example, it gives $29 billion to the Nation Science Foundation for research and development on new technologies but does nothing to safeguard those investments from being stolen by the CCP,” Banks said, explaining the bill gives hundreds of billions to similar areas, such as universities, which the CCP has a strategy to take advantage of, mentioning the creation of Confucius institutes used to steal American research.
“Why would we funnel so much more money to the exact places that the Chinese are using to take advantage of us and steal our military secrets and our research?” Banks asked. “That’s exactly what that bill would do.”
The chairman, citing the U.S. Trade Representative, said the Chinese steal $600 billion worth of our intellectual property every year in the United States of America.
“It’s a whole other thing to talk about the jobs lost in the United States, working-class jobs good-paying jobs in America, that are lost to the theft of our intellectual property,” he explained.
“This isn’t about entrepreneurs getting wealthy. This is about good-paying, working-class jobs in America that are lost through $600 billion worth of theft of intellectual property in the United States,” he explained.
China, Banks continued, is embedded in our research institutions and different government-invested areas, such as the government research we funnel to the Department of Defense and college campuses.
“They have a very calculated and sophisticated strategy to go into places where we fund our national security research to steal it,” he said, adding that it is on top of what they do to steal intellectual property from both “businesses and entrepreneurs nationally.”
“This bill that’s in the Senate … would funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to places we already know are being infiltrated. You bang your head against the wall when you realize we’re making the same mistakes over and over again and we’re taking advantage of U.S. taxpayer dollars to do it,” he said.
Banks referenced the RSC memo, detailing how the Senate could make the China bill a “worthy endeavor” and protect intellectual property and research. However, he said, it has been largely ignored by the Senate. He mentioned Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who put an amendment on the floor “on this bill to just to protect these taxpayer dollars to go, from stopping it to go to fund embryonic stem cell research,” but that amendment failed.
“This tells you this is a massive boondoggle that’s going to help the Chinese, not help us compete with the Chinese,” Banks said.
However, while he said it has a better chance of passing in the House than the Senate, he does believe it is stoppable in the upper chamber. While the bill initially had momentum ahead of Memorial Day, the delays seem to indicate that many of the senators who voted for the procedural motion for it to move forward are having second thoughts.
“The secret sauce of all this for the Democrats is a couple of things. One, they get a couple of Republicans on board so they can call it bipartisan, dangerously. And two, they try to create a narrative that this is about competing with China which really it’s not,” he continued.
While Democrats got away with that narrative for a while, Banks said, that has been unraveling. He credited Breitbart News for helping expose this “dangerous piece of legislation.”
“[It’s] starting to stall and that’s good news, but we can’t keep our eye off the ball,” Banks added.
The U.S. Senate is expected to vote on the bill Tuesday.