-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, the American people are deeply concerned about the collapse of law and order in our country. Thirty- nine percent of New York residents say they feel less safe than they did 1 year ago. Last month, 63 percent of likely voters in Chicago said they felt personally unsafe from gun violence and crime. By the way, on Tuesday, those Chicago voters tossed out the incumbent mayor. Americans see this problem going from bad to worse. More than 70 percent of the country expects we will see crime rates rise even higher this coming year.

Unfortunately, my fellow Kentuckians know this as well as anyone else. In my hometown of Louisville, youth homicides tripled between 2018 and 2021. In fact, since the onset of the pandemic, Louisville has seen the second worst increase in youth homicides among more than a dozen similar U.S. cities. Total homicides have slightly subsided from their record high in 2021, but they are still sitting in the triple digits.

One Louisville couple whose 19-year-old son was murdered by a convicted felon in 2019 summed up the way everybody is feeling. Here is what they said:

[Homicides] may be down, but it's not down enough.

Of course, crime is not limited to the most callous acts of murder; there is also a literal rash of brazen theft. Just 2 days ago, the town of Somerset in my State was stunned when their local car dealership was robbed point-blank. A group of masked thieves stormed the showroom and drove no fewer than six high-end cars right off the lot.

The nationwide decline in law and order hasn't been happenstance. Today's Democratic Party has made a deliberate decision to make public safety and innocent citizens a lower priority than repeat criminal offenders. This has happened at the Federal level, where prominent Democrats have spent years amplifying anti-police rhetoric that tangibly and provably hurts law enforcement and certainly leads to more crime.

It has happened at the local level, where liberal mayors and city councils around the country have waged rhetorical wars against their own police departments and sometimes actually followed through on cutting funding.

The left's ``soft on crime'' campaign has even infiltrated the legal system itself. Far-left political donors have worked to get radical district attorneys elected in and around major cities. Many of them have promptly instituted what amount to blanket amnesties to whole classes of crimes.

For example, in Los Angeles, the district attorney's refusal to go after major misdemeanor offenses has brought his office prosecution rate down to half of what it was under his predecessor. The Commonwealth's attorney over in Fairfax County has repeatedly declined to pursue justice against perpetrators of child sexual assault. The former district attorney in Boston who made headlines for declaring that charges involving 15 different serious crimes would be ``outright dismissed'' was actually rewarded by President Biden with a promotion to be the U.S. attorney for her whole State.

To make matters worse, in the midst of the violent crime surge that Democrats' actions have helped cause, their administration's Department of Justice has focused on many of the wrong things. A year and a half ago, Attorney General Garland instructed the Department, including the FBI, to go sniffing around stories of concerned parents voicing opinions at local school board meetings. In the middle of a violent crime wave, the administration's priority was extra security for moms and dads exercising their First Amendment rights.

Just last fall, armed FBI agents were sent to rural Pennsylvania to arrest a father at home in front of his young children because the man had defended his son during an earlier minor altercation outside an abortion clinic. Apparently, under this administration, the crime of protesting while conservative can bring FBI agents to your house with guns drawn.

Then just a few weeks ago, a memo leaked from the Bureau's Richmond, VA, office that talked about needing to put informants in church pews so the FBI could spy on Catholic Americans whose religious views they deemed overly traditional.

Our major cities are beset with murders and carjackings, but these Democrats are focused on subjecting God-fearing Americans to this junior-varsity J. Edgar Hoover act. It is nonsensical. And don't think for a minute they have simply turned up the security evenly, across the board. In fact, it has been quite the opposite.

While the Biden-Garland DOJ seems fanatically overzealous about harassing conservative citizens, they are currently asleep at the switch when far-left activists are flouting actual Federal laws.

When fringe activists advocated for violence against sitting Justices of the Supreme Court, when crowds spent months picketing outside Justices' private family homes in direct contravention of Federal law, the Attorney General didn't lift a finger. The Biden administration simply refused to enforce black-letter Federal law that prohibits picketing and protesting at judges' private residences. That is the law. This willful failure to enforce the law effectively made the President and the Attorney General willing partners in the improper pressure campaign that the leak of the draft opinion was surely designed to spark in the first place.

Get this--as the senior Senator from Utah has pointed out, there have been more than 80 recorded attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers since the start of last year and 130 attacks on Catholic churches.

Do you know how many of the offenders Attorney General Garland's DOJ has managed to charge? A grand total of two, just two. Suffice it to say the Attorney General had a lot to answer for at his oversight hearing before the Judiciary yesterday, but, unfortunately, Senators saw no evidence that a course correction is coming.

For example, the Attorney General wouldn't give Ranking Member Graham a straight answer on designating Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. He wouldn't give a straight answer about whether we should expand mandatory minimum sentencing laws to address the fentanyl crisis. He seemed to imply the status quo is OK, and the DOJ already has the tools it needs to address the problem, which I would add, if true, would make the administration's failures all the more galling.

He also couldn't satisfy questioning from Senator Cornyn about whether the Department is deliberately not charging drug traffickers with offenses that would already entail mandatory minimums under current law; in other words, basically cherry-picking their way around existing penalties to make current law even softer on lethal drugs.

Look, the American people want and deserve law and order. Getting murderers off our streets and foreign poison out of our neighborhoods are among the most basic governing responsibilities you could possibly think of. Evidently, the Biden administration either does not agree or just cannot deliver.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source