Courtney Statement on Speaker Johnson Shutting Down of the House of Representatives

NORWICH, CT - This week, House Speaker Mike Johnson canceled another day of scheduled House votes. Earlier this month, Speaker Jonhson also canceled the last two weeks of previously scheduled voting days in September, meaning that the House of Representatives will not return to session for over seven weeks until November 9^th. In total, Speaker Johnson has canceled 23 House voting days so far in 2026.

"It's beyond irresponsible that Speaker Johnson is choosing to shut down the House of Representatives while AI executives are sending urgent warnings on the need for AI safeguards," Courtney said. "Congress would not be starting from scratch on this issue. There are commonsense, bipartisan AI safeguard bills ready to be voted on. For example, I strongly support the AI Kill Switch Act to put emergency third-party protections in place to protect against the threat of rogue AI programs acting outside of human control. The CEO of Anthropic has endorsed this approach. I am also a cosponsor of the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, a bill to criminalize creating and posting non-consensual deepfakes on social media. This bill is especially needed to address the disturbing surge of instances of generative AI use related to child sexual exploitation reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The House could vote on these two bills today and take real action to protect the public. Speaker Johnson instead chose to cancel votes - a dereliction of duty."

This week, Rep. Courtney joined over 100 colleagues in calling on Speaker Johnson to cancel his premature recess in order to pass bipartisan AI safeguard bills.

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