Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I yield such time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Steel).
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Madam Speaker, nobody in this Chamber believes that there isn't work to do in the area of ensuring that crimes are not committed against any American but, in particular, due to their race, their color, their national origin, or anything about who they are.
Many on this side of the aisle, including the gentlewoman who spoke before from California, raised concern about the sort of nature of this legislation and a lot of the concerns that have been raised about its continued focus on hate crimes in many ways at the expense of our focusing on crime, crime itself.
In the findings in this piece of legislation, of course, we reference the terrible tragedy that unfolded in Atlanta, Georgia, and much of that was a rush to be included in the form of hate crimes when the facts being borne out in the investigation among prosecutors and the investigators in Georgia are indicating that that was not at all or didn't seem to be the motivation. And I use careful words like ``seem to be'' because, as a former Federal prosecutor, I like to wait until you do the investigation before you jump to the conclusion of what the motive was or what actually went into the crime at hand.
As in the words of Chief Justice Roberts when he said that it is a ``sordid business, this divvying us up by race,'' I think we do our Nation a disservice when we spend every waking moment on this floor divvying us up by race. Increasingly, that is what we are doing.
This legislation is well-intended, but this legislation, in the eyes of many in this body, is flawed, in terms of having in it things like the Health Equity Task Force or designate an officer or employee at DOJ whose responsibility shall be to facilitate the expedited review of hate crimes. We have provisions in the legislation to encourage the collection of data, encourage local law enforcement to collect data on hate crimes, but to seek to do so specifically to focus on hate crimes.
It is the contention of many of my colleagues that this is, in fact, a continued focus of division in our country, rather than focusing on the fact of the crime itself, the murder itself.
We all, of course, thought that the crime in Georgia was awful. But, again, the crime doesn't seem to have been motivated by race, yet it is being brought into the context of a hate crime.
Perhaps we should spend some time investigating sex trafficking and human trafficking in the form of massage parlors and people who are basically indentured servants or slaves in the form of the sex trade; the cartels that are along our southern border that are forcing young girls into the sex trade; the people who were bound in a car in Boerne, Texas, in suburban San Antonio, being forced into the sex trade en route to a stash house in Houston, Texas, because they were being run by the Cartel del Noreste of Los Zetas out of Nuevo Laredo--literally, just occurring in the district that I represent in Boerne, Texas.
Perhaps we can focus on this kind of criminal activity and what that actually means for young women and young individuals in our country.
We talk about is it a hate crime when we have seen data of a young Black male in San Francisco hitting an elderly Asian man on the streets of San Francisco. We have seen that footage. It's probably a hate crime, but it is a crime. If that guy was a White guy or a Black guy, it is a crime. It is a crime going after this elderly man, an American citizen.
And I think when we think about justice, the reason the blindfold exists on Lady Justice is we are supposed to have blind justice. We all acknowledged that we have not had blind justice at many points in the history of our country, but that blind justice is what we seek when we seek equal justice under law.
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, as the gentleman said, as a 34-year-old, the end product may look okay. This 48-year-old may not be able to make a similar statement.
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, the gentleman from Virginia reminds me--and we have not discussed this--that I first met the gentleman from Virginia when I was in college at the University of Virginia and he was the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, and I was an instructor for a golf camp that summer in Charlottesville for his daughter, I believe Stephanie. Pulling out of my memory banks. And that is where I first met him. Again, 20--whatever I was--23 or 22 years old, right out of college.
But he reminds me that one of my college teammates at the University of Virginia was a gentleman by the name of Lewis Chitengwa. Lewis is not somebody you all would know, but you do know the name Tiger Woods. And Tiger was asked after his infamous 1997 year when he won the Masters-- obviously breaking down the color barrier at Augusta Masters. He was asked if he had ever been disappointed in sports. And he said he was disappointed once when he lost the Orange Bowl, the biggest amateur tournament down in Miami, where you would expect that to be. And he lost it to my friend, Lewis Chitengwa.
Lewis is the first Black to win the South African Open. It was a monumental event, I believe in the early 1990s, when he won that tournament before he came to the University of Virginia, where he ultimately graduated. Unfortunately, he passed away 20 years ago this summer from meningitis.
He had played golf in the Canadian tour in Vancouver and shot, I think, 68-69 Thursday or Friday, and passed away Saturday morning. Talk about a pandemic. He passed away from viral meningitis.
I raise Lewis just because Lewis, when he went home, he passed away that summer, they had to wait about a month to bury him because of the AIDS epidemic in Zimbabwe, where he was from.
Lewis was the recipient of unspeakable hate when we were in college around the Charlottesville community in the 1990s. And we would often discuss that and talk about that and about those changing times. But it was fascinating for me to watch a man like Lewis, who came from Zimbabwe and experienced a lot of what was apartheid in South Africa and being the first Black to win the South African Open, to him talking about the greatness of this country and justice in this country and what this country has meant as a beacon for people around the world and justice. And we talked about it at length.
I understand the intent behind this bill, and I just want to say that I share that intent; and I know in speaking for Mr. Jordan, who had to relinquish the time to me, that we share that intent. We just have serious reservations about defining hate crimes and going down the road of collecting data and the way we are doing it and how that divvies us up by race.
Mr. Speaker, I do think it is important what the majority leader just said. I mean, first of all, we will never be a perfect union. All we can do is strive, of course, to achieve the ideals set out in our founding and throughout our history.
But I do take issue; as the distinguished majority leader knows, I stood on this floor recognizing my concerns about January 6. But to suggest that the Senator from Missouri, Senator Hawley, is somehow giving a thumbs-up to insurrection, as opposed to engaging in speech and debate about his beliefs and his beliefs under the Constitution; I think that is wrong.
And I think we are continuing to go down this road of back and forth on these issues, as opposed to having a deep discussion about what occurred and what didn't occur. But, importantly, on this issue, you know, taking the Senator's word that he has some concerns, as I do.
I mean, I have sat here and expressed my solidarity and hope and desire, again, as a former Federal prosecutor, figuring out how to root out hate and stop crime. I happen to believe that we should do that through the lens of being color blind, and attacking our criminal justice system the way we should to try to root it out, but not to embed in our code the continued divvying us up by race. That is just how I view it.
That is how I view it with a number of friends of mine of all walks of life, of all political persuasions, of all racial persuasions; and I think that we should be mindful of that.
And the majority leader, I think, gave it up a little bit in saying that, you know, this vote will be seen either as A or B, right? It will be seen as you are either for hate or you are against hate. That is, I think, one of the fundamental problems we have in this body, is that we can't engage in a reasonable debate about what we are seeing here and concerns we might have. And being equally opposed to hate, or equally opposed, or wanting to go root out crime, but have a differing view about how we get there; that doesn't mean it is A or B, you are for hate or you are against hate.
But that is what we do; we drop a $2 trillion, 2,000-page bill on the floor, and you say, well, you are either with us or against us. Vote for this bill, it is named fill-in-the-blank. Right? Come up with a great name, you can't oppose that.
Suddenly then, that is what is put out in the headlines, you know, Chip Roy votes for hate, right, instead of having an actual, robust debate here on the floor about how we want to carry the country forward. I think that is what we ought to have.
I actually enjoy this part of our job. I enjoy having numbers of Members on the floor engaging back and forth about these issues that are important, rather than just seeking the headline and running out to the triangle and giving a press conference, divvying us up further in our ideologies, or in the name of a certain or particular bill.
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
Madam Speaker, the gentlewoman from California earlier made a good point, and I am going to use my own words to paraphrase what she said when she said that we can't legislate away hate.
The perspective of many of us is that we don't need new laws, we don't need more committees, and we don't need more bureaucracy. We need to give our police the resources they need to do their job. We need to make sure that we are rooting out crime wherever it may exist between whatever communities it may exist. We need more emphasis on family, more emphasis on community, more emphasis on the Lord Almighty, and less reliance on the Federal Government to make our communities better.
As I said earlier, I can get into the intricacies of the bill, but we have already gone over it. The concern of many on my side of the aisle is in this continued sordid business of divvying us up on race and focusing on race.
We have spent the better part of the last year rightfully concerned, focused, and outraged on what we saw with respect to Mr. Floyd. But we have had a continued focus on race over the last year, and I think one can look at the impact on communities and the impact on Black communities throughout the United States' cities, businesses that have been closed down, and crime sprees that have occurred and wonder what this continued focus on race is doing to better our great Nation.
I would posit that we are a far better country when we follow Lady Justice with the blindfold and that we seek to achieve that recognizing our failure to do so in the past but seeking our desire to achieve that blindfolded justice going forward.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. ROY. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.
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