-9999
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, the week before last, it was my honor to sit down with a number of law enforcement officials in my hometown of Louisville, but I wish we could have met under happier circumstances.
Our city is contending with a tragic and record-setting jump in crime. Last year, Louisville saw 188 homicides--the most in any year on record. In the last 2 years, carjackings have tripled, and deadly drugs are becoming so prevalent on our streets that Jefferson County saw 500 overdose deaths in 2021.
Unfortunately, the historic wave of crime that has swept my hometown is challenging communities all across America. The murder rates of at least a dozen other major cities set alltime records last year. Chicago saw its most carjackings in 20 years, and in the first quarter of 2022, New York's crime rate was already up--listen to this--44 percent.
Needless to say, this is a time for strong law enforcement. Studies show that fewer police and less active policing make crime worse and leave the most vulnerable communities particularly worse off.
But our Nation's police officers aren't just facing higher volumes of crime; they are facing more direct, personal risks to confront it. Last year, as overall homicide counts continued to climb past 2020's record total, killings of police officers saw a staggering 59-percent spike of their own: 73--73--men and women sworn to protect and serve their communities were killed in 2021 while trying to do exactly that, and, already, 2022 has seen more than 100 more officers shot in the line of duty.
The surge in anti-police violence that boiled over in the summer of 2020 has taken its toll on the men and women of law enforcement. An exhaustive report compiled by the city of Louisville last year found that morale-- morale--among our officers is alarmingly low. A full 75 percent would leave for another police department. Not surprisingly, this has led to a severe staffing shortage on the force. Our police chief even took out billboard ads in Atlanta--in Atlanta--to try to recruit officers from other cities.
Now more than ever, we need to fund law enforcement, support police officers, and back the blue, but too many Democrats are apparently bent on doing just the opposite. The far left's call to defund the police has taken root at every level of government. Elected officials--sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution--have chosen instead to amplify distrust of the men and women who work every day to enforce our laws.
So let's just consider whom the Biden administration has prioritized for confirmation to top jobs in the Justice Department.
There is the new U.S. attorney with a reputation for pushing to cancel entire categories of the Criminal Code and the assistant attorneys general who have advocated for efforts to ``decrease police budgets'' and ``invest less in police.''
There is the newly minted Supreme Court Justice who advocated in her last job that the COVID pandemic was an appropriate reason to let inmates out of jail right here in Washington.
Just last week, our colleagues on the Judiciary Committee considered a nominee to the circuit court with an unapologetic record of hostility toward law enforcement. Without any basis in fact, Nusrat Choudhury suggested that police murdering unarmed Black men ``happens every day.'' Happens every day?
When our colleague the junior Senator from Louisiana called her out on it, the nominee tried to claim that she had only made the statement as an act of ``rhetorical advocacy''--``rhetorical advocacy''--on behalf of a client.
Unsurprisingly, that answer hasn't done much to ease the concerns of America's law enforcement community. Major organizations representing officers--from the Sergeants Benevolent Association to the National Sheriffs' Association, to the Fraternal Order of Police--have voiced strong, strong opposition and called on President Biden to ``take a stand against this dangerous and absurdly''--absurdly--``divisive rhetoric.''
Well, needless to say, the President and his administration need to do a lot more than that to prove to the men and women of law enforcement that they have their backs. S.J. Res. 39
Now, Mr. President, on another matter, last week, President Biden offered a particularly candid look at his view of education in America. In speaking at an awards ceremony for public school teachers, he remarked:
They're not somebody else's children. They're like yours when they're in the classroom.
Unfortunately, this wasn't a mistake. It was actually a rather accurate summary of the increasingly radical way he and his party think of children in America.
When it comes to the respective roles of parents and teachers, Democrats have used the past 2 years of the pandemic disruptions to show their true colors. They have shoveled money into woke training, like the North Carolina program to help preschool teachers ``deconstruct whiteness''--``deconstruct whiteness.'' They have torn up time-tested procedures as in one California district's move to institute an equity lottery for admissions. Last fall, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee ran a gubernatorial campaign, saying:
I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach. Suffice it to say, parents in Virginia saw things differently.
Across America, parents have rejected the radical liberal campaign to make education a ``one size fits all government knows best'' proposition. From coast to coast--even in deep-blue bastions like San Francisco--they have sent rogue local administrators packing and asserted their rights and responsibilities as the first and most important teachers of their children.
Yesterday, Senate Republicans made clear once again that we stand with the parents of America. A bipartisan majority adopted Senator Thune's resolution of disapproval on one of the Biden administration's most egregious violations of parents' rights and kids' well-being.
Masking children as young as 2 in Head Start Programs across the country, including outside on the playground--including outside on the playground--flies in the face of what even the World Health Organization considers settled science. And it has seriously damaged parents' confidence in the systems to which they entrust their children for hours every day.
So I was proud to join a majority of my colleagues last night to express the Senate's opposition to this unconscionable policy. Ah, but make no mistake: This is not the last we will hear about the far left's efforts to grab more control over how America raises its kids.
As we speak, Senate Democrats are trying to resurrect portions of the failed reckless taxing-and-spending spree they spent most of last year trying to ram through on party lines. That proposal includes the Toddler Takeover that would stick American families with dramatically higher costs and dramatically less choice in the market for childcare.
More redtape for independent providers, special subsidies for bureaucracies' preferred one-size-fits-all systems, outright hostility toward the faith-based options that are preferred by a majority of families who use outside-the-home childcare, and nothing--nothing at all--for families who choose to have a full-time parent or another family member look after their kids; just the latest example of a massive overreach the American people never asked for.
The Biden administration is having a hard enough time with basic governing responsibilities like national security, energy independence, and controlling inflation. American families, and especially children, will be a whole lot better off the sooner the Democrats stop looking for even more ways to fail them.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source