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Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, today, roughly 175 Americans will die from fentanyl poisoning. Many of them won't even know that they have taken the fentanyl. They will think they have taken Xanax for anxiety or oxycodone for pain. That is what Devin Anderson--you will see his picture here in a minute--of Shelby, IA, thought when he took a fentanyl pill marked like an oxy.

Devin had fought hard for his sobriety. He had enrolled in treatment and moved back home, but he was struggling with anxiety. To cope, he took a pill from a friend.

Devin's coworker came to pick him up for work in the early morning of February 24 of this year. Devin wasn't ready, so his coworker called him. When Devin didn't answer, he called again. Devin's 14-year-old brother heard the phone ringing. He went downstairs to investigate and found Devin unresponsive.

Devin was 23 years old when he died. His mom wants you to know that Devin was a kind person and he was loved by his friends.

In 2021, fentanyl killed more Americans between the ages of 18 and 45 than any other cause. That is more than COVID-19, cancer, and car accidents combined.

Six months ago, I stood where I am now and asked for a permanent solution for fentanyl scheduling. Today, we are absolutely no closer to a permanent solution than we were back then, 6 months ago.

While Congress has been waiting to take action, the cartels have not. The cartels have simply rebranded, coloring fentanyl like candy to addict America's children. Fentanyl is in our schools, like in Blackwood, NJ, where a 12-year-old overdosed on a schoolbus after his uncle made him clean a fentanyl trap house; or in Chipman Junior High School in California, where a 13-year-old brought 150 fake Percocet pills laced with fentanyl, with 4 out of every 10 fake pills containing a potentially lethal dosage of fentanyl. Both of these schools are hours away from the Mexican border, but despite Customs and Border Protection's efforts, fentanyl has reached our children's hands.

So when the Vice President tells the press that our border is secure, we all know that is just plain wrong and irresponsible, and that attitude, that the border is secure, ends up killing.

In the Federal Government's absence, parents like Arletha and Robert Gilliam have been forced to fill the void. Their daughter Ciara died last month because of fentanyl. And you see Ciara right here. By all accounts, Ciara had a big heart. As her dad puts it, if you were in a bad mood, Ciara would make sure that that bad mood didn't last very long. Even though she had graduated from Iowa's Ankeny Centennial High School and lived on her own, she still FaceTimed her mom every day.

But on August 23 of this year, no one could get hold of Ciara, so her grandparents drove by her house. Her car was in the driveway. Ciara's grandparents knocked, both on her doors and her windows, with no response. Finally, Ciara's grandpa crawled through her bedroom window. There, he found her dead on her bedroom floor. Fentanyl shut down her organs, and she went to sleep. She never woke up again. She was only 22 years old.

Ciara's parents are now searching for answers they never should have had to find in the first place. They have offered a $50,000 award to locate the dealer who supplied the fake pill that killed their daughter. They deserve better than that. They deserve congressional action, and they deserved it in 2017 when the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, first scheduled fentanyl.

Grieving parents are the unsung heroes in the fight against fentanyl. Time after time, they push through their heartbreaks to share their stories, as you have heard me tell for two families, and now they demand action so that more kids don't die. It is time for Congress to match the efforts of those parents.

The Department of Justice has been very clear:

The permanent scheduling of FRS is critical to the safety and health of our communities and class-wide scheduling provides a vital tool to combat overdose deaths in [America].

End of quote from the Department of Justice.

For those whom we have lost, like Ciara and Devin, and for the countless lives that we will save if we take action, it is time that we give them the tool they need, and that is the scheduling of fentanyl--and on a permanent, long-term basis. Combating Violent and Dangerous Crime Act

Mr. President, on another subject--and a shorter subject for anybody waiting to talk--it is dangerous to live in many places in America, especially in blue cities. Like inflation, violent crime remains very high. For example, compared to 2019 midyear figures, America's largest cities have seen a 50-percent increase in murders and a 36-percent increase in aggravated assaults. And it is no mystery what is causing this spike in crime. Blue city progressive, pro-criminal prosecutors and radical bail reform laws fuel this spike, a spike in violent crime, by letting dangerous, repeat criminals go unpunished and, in some cases, even uncharged.

The recent tragedies in Memphis, TN, earlier this month underscore the dangers that families face at the hands of chronic criminals. And remember the words ``chronic criminals'' because the fact is that the majority of violent crimes are committed by a relative handful of repeat offenders like the two in Memphis. For example, criminals in Chicago charged with shootings and murders have, on average, 12 prior arrests. In Oakland, CA, only around 400 people, or just one-tenth of 1 percent of Oakland's population, were responsible for a majority of the city's murders. Now, just think, one-tenth of 1 percent of the population of that city is responsible for a majority of the murders in Oakland.

Federal law enforcement has a unique and very vital role in targeting repeat violent criminals, but for the last 2 years, the Senate's ability to actually pass bills that expand criminal law to reduce violent crime and target repeat violent criminals has hit a brick wall. It is just impossible to get any consensus even though we all know it is a very major problem.

In July, as part of my effort to promote a solution to this problem of major crime caused by a very small number of people in each community, I introduced a bill that I entitled ``Combating Violent and Dangerous Crime,'' which is cosponsored by 26 of my Republican colleagues in the Senate. The House companion bill was introduced September 15, with seven Republican cosponsors.

The bill has seven simple solutions that will help to reverse this violent crime spike by putting dangerous criminals in jail and keeping them there. These commonsense solutions will fix real problems and bring immediate relief and increased safety to communities plagued by the scourge of violent crime.

Given the unprecedented increase in murders, we can and we should make it easier to prosecute murders. This bill will do that.

Mr. President, 2021 was the deadliest year to be a law enforcement officer since 9/11. We should make it easier to prosecute people who attack law enforcement. This bill will do that.

Carjackings are way up nationwide--200, 300, and even 400 percent in some cities. We should deter carjacking with sufficient sentences. This bill will do that.

Dangerous drugs are being marketed to young people as colorful candy--I just spoke about that--and these children are dying from overdoses. We should make it so that no children die from fentanyl made to look like candy. This bill will do that.

Bank robbery, kidnapping--the list of violent crimes that would be strengthened by this bill goes on and on.

I stand ready to work with Democrats who want to provide relief to their constituents from this crimewave. So if any of them are open to any of these provisions, I want them to know that I am ready to work with them. Let's partner together to make the American people safer.

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I think you all might remember when the Biden administration's so-called experts claimed that inflation was ``transitory.'' It ended up that they couldn't have been more wrong by using that word.

Since President Biden took office, Iowans have seen prices rise 13.7 percent. That adds an extra $666 to their monthly budget. Couple that with falling real wages, and Iowans have been strapped very thin.

This combination of rising prices and falling real wages has hit rural Iowa communities particularly hard. As a result, according to a report issued by Iowa State University, the disposable income of rural Iowans fell 33 percent over the past 12 months alone. It is no wonder, then, that the high cost of living is the number one concern that I hear about from Iowans as I travel all of our 99 counties.

However, here in DC--and remember, DC is an island surrounded by reality--here in this town, the primary concern of President Biden and congressional Democrats has been enacting their very partisan agenda.

They have refused to work with Republicans on sensible policies to tame inflation and provide targeted relief. In the process of doing that, they haven't even followed the advice of their own brethren. And I will use Larry Summers as an example, that Harvard professor and former Secretary of Treasury. He said, way back in January, before this President was sworn in, that the economy was turned around: Don't spend any more money or you are going to have inflation.

And, immediately, within 60 days of being in office, this new President and this new Congress passed a $2 trillion appropriations bill to feed the fires of inflation.

So instead of taming inflation, they rebranded the reckless tax-and- spending spree that they had pursued for more than a year as a bill recently passed called the Inflation Reduction Act, which I call the ``Inflation Enhancement Act''--never mind that outside experts uniformly concluded the bill's hodgepodge of the Green New Deal and the subsidies that go with that program and the tax hikes would do nothing to address inflation today.

Of course, if you want to stop inflation, now caused by excessive government spending, the first thing you should do is stop spending; or another way you can say it--and common sense dictates this: When you are in a hole, quit digging.

Instead, Democrats doubled down with Big Government spending and coupled it with job-killing tax hikes. The National Association of Manufacturers said they would lose about 217,000 jobs. Democrats' policy decisions made even less sense given that, only a week before, we learned our economy had shrunk for two straight quarters, indicating recession.

And everyone knows, as President Obama once said--and this seems to be the third term of the Obama Presidency, but this is what he said when he was actually President:

The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession.

And yet it was done in that bill in August by more than $300 billion. The last thing our economy needed was another tax-and-spending spree, but Democrats just couldn't let go of their wish list.

What is more, at the height of hypocrisy, Democrats touted the Inflation Reduction Act as an example of fiscal responsibility. Yet the supposed savings they claim will result from the bill was then immediately dwarfed in just 1 day of actions by President Biden's unilateral student loan announcement, which will cost American taxpayers at least $500 billion. And some people are saying it could cost up to $1 trillion.

When President Biden announced that he was wiping out $10,000 to $20,000 of student loan debt for people making as much as $150,000 or $250,000 for households, that likely illegal action will send the bill for this student loan giveaway to Americans who did not attend college or people who graduated from college already paying off their college expenses. And at the same time, it is going to fuel the fires of inflation.

So much, then, for the lip service about deficit reduction and inflation. But we now know that that inflation was not transitory. It is persistent. Iowans are sick and tired of paying the price for the failures of this Biden economy.

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