DC Criminal Reforms to Immediately Make Everyone Safe Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. CROCKETT. Mr. Speaker, as I sat and listened to the beginning of this debate, my heart simply broke, and many people know me for being able to do alliterations, and all I could think about was: Amnesia allows adolescents accountability avoidance agility from across the aisle.

Work with me for a second. Imagine being a young man born to Jamaican and Panamanian parents who messed up not once but twice. Imagine standing in front of a judge with your whole future hanging in the balance. Instead of prison, you are given a promise of mercy. Your record gets wiped clean, and you get a second chance at life.

Now imagine taking that promise and turning it into promotion. You go to college. You get a job and even become a Member of Congress. That is what redemption looks like. That is what America is supposed to be about, and that is exactly the story of the next wannabe Governor from Florida.

As a young man, he went through pretrial diversion for misdemeanor marijuana possession. As an adult, yet younger than 24, he was charged with and ultimately placed on probation for felony bribery charges, which ultimately were, too, expunged.

He was given a third chance, and now he is the face of a bill that would not afford young people in Washington, D.C., the same opportunities afforded to him.

Let me be real. If he had grown up under Donald Trump's America or under the very D.C. crime bill he is pushing today, he wouldn't be standing here as a Member of Congress. He would still be living with the weight of those charges.

Let's call this what it is: Opportunities for me, but not for thee. He climbed the ladder of redemption, and now he is yanking it right up from under D.C. youth. Most of us were taught to lift as you climb, but clearly some have forgotten to lift as they climb. Now they are committed to telling the next generations to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

I will not sit quiet while a man who was saved by grace turns around and tries to snatch grace away from others.

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Ms. CROCKETT. If we are going to be real about crime, about communities, about second chances and even third chances, then it needs to start with us looking in the mirror and remembering that even the author of this bill has a story, too, before he tries to lecture D.C. on safety.

It would be complete hypocrisy to have, hypothetically, someone convicted of 34 felonies to lecture D.C. on what to do with youthful offenders who have been scientifically shown not to have fully developed brains under the age of 25, especially if said multi-count convicted felon was in his seventies when he was convicted. What would be his excuse since his brain would be fully developed?

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