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LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS SHOT IN 2021
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2021, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) for 30 minutes.
Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I heard my colleague on the other side of the aisle and I certainly appreciate his friendship and service.
I would take some disagreement with my celebrating the extent to which the President of the United States has announced beforehand the race and sex of the next Supreme Court Justice. And I would remind my friend, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, in general, the extent to which the current President rejected, filibustered, blocked Janice Rogers Brown--notably both Black and female--he did so because she wasn't the right kind of Black and female. You see, she was a conservative. She was not a leftist, a liberal.
So the current President blocked, when he was in the United States Senate, filibustered, fought, broke the rules and the traditions of the Senate to do it. By the way, Janice Rogers Brown, a Black female, qualified but conservative, judge. So he refused to let her advance. Why?
Now, the President of the United States is going out and lauding, praising his predetermination that the next Justice must be Black or female, undermining the nominee before even making the nomination.
I would note also that the President blocked, attacked, voted against Miguel Estrada. And did so, we know, for one reason. He was a Hispanic conservative. Now, how do we know that? We have a memo. Yes, indeed, a memo in black and white, spelled out among Democrat Senators and staffers back in 2003. I happen to know this because I was a lawyer on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. But my, how this town loves to sweep aside little details, like the current Democrat President of the United States working in coordination with Democrat Members of the United States Senate when he was a Senator to stop, to block, to filibuster Miguel Estrada because he is a Hispanic conservative.
And we can't have that, can we? Because it breaks the narrative. It destroys the narrative. Republicans are anti-Hispanic. Republicans are anti-Black. We can't have a Black conservative woman advance under a Republican President, George W. Bush. We can't have Hispanic Miguel Estrada advance under a Republican, George W. Bush.
But, no, no, will you hear Jen Psaki talking about that at the podium at the White House? Or will you hear more lies, lies about the whipping of migrants at our border? Will you hear her talk about the fact that no report has been generated by the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security or anybody else about the alleged whipping of migrants, which did not occur, which we know didn't occur. By fact, we know it didn't occur.
But yet, the President of the United States and his own White House Secretary sat at the podium and accused them, ``them'' being our Border Patrol agents, standing on the front lines, being ignored, underfunded, chastised, refused to say any apology since that day. They refused to look at the Border Patrol agents and say, You know, we are sorry. We got that wrong. No report forthcoming.
Anybody sensing a theme that my Democrat friends and colleagues in the White House on the other side of the aisle love to make race an issue? But they are going to sweep aside the killing of Miguel Estrada's nomination because he is a Hispanic male, Hispanic conservative; sweep aside the blocking of Janice Rogers Brown; sweep aside running to cry racism and whipping of the Rio Grande when it is the policies of the Secretary of Homeland Security that is specifically and intentionally endangering the American people; causing our young children across this country to die from poisonings and overdoses; causing bullets to be fired upon our law enforcement officers in Texas; ranchers to get overrun, livestock to get out, cartels to get empowered. And the Secretary of Homeland Security literally refuses to enforce any of the laws to stop that from happening.
But, oh, no, he can't bring himself, and Jen Psaki can't bring herself, and the President can't bring himself to look in the eyes of the Border Patrol and say they apologize for saying that they were whipping human beings.
{time} 1445
That is the state of the Democrat Party's commitment to race. It is all a fraud. It is all a fiction. It is all a front. It is all about continuing to foment racial division for partisan political gain. It has nothing to do about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin because if it were, Janice Rogers Brown would not have been blocked and Miguel Estrada would not have been blocked. The President of the United States wouldn't be standing up at a lectern today predetermining the race and the sex of the next Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Mr. Speaker, I came down here today to talk about our law enforcement community. A year and a half ago, I sat here on the floor of the House--maybe in the same spot--with the number 43 similarly positioned on a board. That 43 represented the number of law enforcement police officers killed in the line of duty at that time.
Well, saying to the Speaker and to my colleagues--who, of course, notably, as I like to observe, are not here. This is our idea of debate, you know, in the United States House of Representatives. On fly-out day, everybody is getting home. Nobody is here.
We never have actual debate. We never offer amendments. We never have a back and forth. We come back and have showboats and give speeches on the Capitol steps about how Republicans are better than Democrats or Democrats are better than Republicans. We never sit down here and actually debate. If we did, then we could have honest debate about policies that will protect this country and protect law enforcement officers from the constant barrage and attack levied against them across this country.
I am sick and tired of seeing nonstop attacks on our law enforcement community for being the ones on the front lines every day dealing with crime and figuring out how to protect our communities yet getting tossed under the bus, cast aside as being the ones that we should be targeting.
Eighty-four dead law enforcement officers across this country last year; 346 officers were shot in the line of duty; 103 ambush-style attacks on law enforcement officers, up 115 percent from the year before; 4 police officers were beaten to death; 3 were stabbed to death.
Sergeant Joshua Bartlett, Lubbock County Sheriff's Office in Texas, shot and killed during a barricade at a home on July 15 of last year. Earlier in the morning, the subject had been stopped by a Texas Highway Patrol trooper for reckless driving and attempted to bait the officer into a confrontation. He returned home after the encounter and began walking around the neighborhood with a firearm at 1:15.
When officers of the Levelland Police Department arrived, the man opened fire and barricaded himself inside. The regional SWAT team was requested as the man randomly fired shots from the home.
Sergeant Bartlett was a United States Army veteran. He is survived by his wife, four sons, parents, and a brother.
Police Officer Mitchell Aaron Penton, Dallas, Texas, was struck and killed by a vehicle operated by an intoxicated driver on February 13, 2021. At the time of his death, he had a stepson, and his wife was expecting.
Police Officer Brandon M. Stalker, Toledo Police Department, Ohio, was shot and killed during a barricade involving an arson suspect. Officer Stalker was on a perimeter position and was struck in the head and fatally wounded. He is survived by his two children and fiance.
Police Officer Jimmy Inn was shot and killed while responding to a domestic violence call on May 11, 2021. He had served with the Stockton Police Department for 6 years. He is survived by his wife, 7-month-old son, and two stepchildren.
Sergeant James Smith, Iowa State Patrol, Iowa, was shot and killed while attempting to arrest a subject who had assaulted and disarmed another law enforcement officer during a traffic stop on April 2, 2021. He is survived by his wife, two children, mother, brother, and sister.
Lieutenant Michael Boutte was shot and killed after responding to a call involving a subject attempting suicide. He was a United States Air Force veteran and served with the Hancock County Sheriff's office for 8 years. He is survived by his wife and two children.
Police Officer Chris Oberheim, Champaign Police Department, Illinois, was shot and killed at about 3:20 a.m. while responding to a domestic disturbance call. He had been on the job 20 years. He was 44 with a wife and four children.
Trooper Chad Michael Walker, Texas Department of Public Safety, March 28, 2021, succumbed to gunshot wounds sustained 5 days earlier when he was ambushed while stopping to assist what he believed was a disabled vehicle near Mexia, Texas. He served with the Texas Highway Patrol for 6 years. He had 18 years in law enforcement. He is survived by his wife, 15-year-old son, twin 7-year-older daughters, and a 2-month-old daughter.
Here are some of the quotes from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue about police officers.
Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, while criticizing FOX News coverage of soft-on-crime policies, stated, while laughing, ``What does that even mean?'' and referred to the coverage as an alternative universe.
President Biden famously expressed support for the defund the police movement in 2020 and then had to walk that back after backlash.
Vice President Kamala Harris applauded Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti for defunding the police.
Representative Ocasio-Cortez said, ``Defunding police means defunding police,'' arguing the cuts to the New York Police Department weren't enough.
Representative Ayanna Pressley said she supports efforts to defund police departments.
Representative Rashida Tlaib called for ``no more'' police. Tlaib's campaign has paid over $150,000 to defund the police activist Rasha Mubarak.
Representative Ilhan Omar said:
Not only do we need to defund, we need to dismantle police departments.
Representative Cori Bush said that she would ``make sure'' she has private security for her protection while simultaneously promising to defund the police. This weekend, Representative Bush doubled down in her support for defunding our police departments on Twitter.
President Biden's Assistant Attorney General, Kristen Clarke, supported efforts to defund the police.
President Biden's Associate Attorney General, Vanita Gupta, said officials must heed calls to ``decrease police budgets and the scope, role, and responsibility of police in our lives.''
President Biden's Secretary of Labor, Marty Walsh, proposed a budget to divert funding from law enforcement.
We see now what is happening in Minnesota, where you have one of the individuals who was a part of the mob violence riots in the summer of 2020, who burned down a store, a commercial property, and did so with video footage indicating the glee of doing so--this being an individual with a very long criminal record.
The man who owned or worked at the establishment, I think, had five kids and died as a result of the fire set by this individual in Minnesota. The United States Attorney's Office in Minnesota filed a sentencing brief that read exactly like the defense lawyer's brief, citing all the events of the summer, completely offsetting the dead father of five with a store burned to the ground during mob violence rule in the summer of 2020.
This United States Department of Justice, this United States Attorney's Office in Minnesota, downward departed from the sentencing guidelines of 20 years down to 10 years, purposefully citing the political interest of the summer of 2020, the political cause of the summer of 2020, in recommending that downward departure despite the criminal record of the perpetrator of the crime, despite the destroyed and burned down building, despite the death of the owner of the store and the fact that he had multiple children. All of that was cast aside in the political judgment, not even of the judge, but of the United States Attorney's Office.
Lo and behold, that acting United States attorney a few months later is now working at Main Justice. I would sure like to know why. I would sure like to know who was involved. I would sure like to know who made the calls. I would sure like to know from the current acting United States attorney if that acting United States attorney agrees with the sentencing recommendations of the so-called prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney's Office who turned a blind eye to their duty to keep the streets safe, to prosecute them under their oath to the Constitution and defense of the laws of the United States to protect the people of Minnesota, and chose to choose a political path, and chose to follow politics rather than do their job.
We want to know. We are going to ask questions in the House Judiciary Committee. I can assure you that if the good people of the United States were to give the majority to the Republicans in January 2023, there are going to be some questions asked and some answers delivered by this administration for their failure to enforce the laws of the United States while American people die, lose property, are harmed, are killed. At the border of Texas or in Minnesota--it doesn't matter--the laws of the United States are supposed to be enforced, and we should be standing up for the rule of law.
We are going to demand answers to questions. I want answers from the United States Attorney General for targeting parents for daring to stand up to school boards. I want answers from the Secretary of Homeland Security for his clearly impeachable conduct for recklessly ignoring the laws of the United States, endangering my people and constituents in Texas, endangering the people of this country while empowering cartels and allowing fentanyl to pour into our schools. I want answers. We are going to demand answers.
We are going to want answers and demand answers from Anthony Fauci and all the bureaucrats at NIH and CDC for shutting down our schools, shutting down our economy, lying about what we were seeing in terms of gain of function research in China.
We are going to want answers, and we are going to get those answers. While this body fiddles, we will demand answers if the American people will give us the ability to get them.
I mentioned our situation at our border. We are in the midst of a fentanyl, opioid, and drug crisis in this country, the likes we have not seen before.
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Those of us who grew up in the eighties know what we saw with the cocaine epidemic. I was a 14-year-old when Len Bias notoriously died from an overdose within a week of being drafted by the Boston Celtics after his career at the University of Maryland.
We know the horrors of the cocaine epidemic that led, by the way, to the crime bills of the 1990s supported by this President, supported by Black Americans across this country and lobbied for by Black pastors and Black leaders across this country because of the violence and the epidemic of drugs across our cities and across our towns in the 1980s and 1990s. We responded, and as a result, the crime rate went down.
And now what are we seeing?
Massive spikes in crime, massive spikes in drug use, carjackings in our Nation's Capital where it is easier to get carjacked than to order a hamburger while we are under lockdowns, and vaccine mandates and vaccine passports in the Nation's Capital.
Side note: Yet another reason why we should never let the District of Columbia be a State. It is not supposed to have the political interest of a State. It is supposed to be our National Capital where people can come and go, where they can petition their government, and where they can come and do the business of the people. So we will address that issue as well in the next Congress.
I am proud to represent Texas, but Texas is under assault. Texas is under assault every day by cartel-driven violence fueled by China and driven by the profit motive of pouring fentanyl into our communities, destroying our children's lives, causing addiction, causing death, and causing destruction. And this administration not only does nothing, it is worse than that, this administration purposefully--purposefully--
ignores the laws of the United States to the detriment and the endangerment of the American people.
There is no other way to put it when our laws require operational control of the border and we do not have it.
There is no other way to put it when our ranches are overrun, fences are cut, and livestock gets out.
There is no other way to put it when there are stash houses in Houston, in San Antonio, in Laredo, in Del Rio, in McAllen, in Arizona, and in California. In every big city across this country there are stash houses where human beings are being moved for profit.
There is no other way to put it when the current administration is releasing people into the United States. They are knowingly, in violation of law, releasing people into the United States under the guise of so-called asylum. They know it is not asylum, and they know it is not credible fear. They know they are releasing single, adult males. They are lying about it because we see them talking about the lies on tape.
And the American people are the ones holding the bag. The American people are the ones who have their kids dying because they take a Xanax that is laced with fentanyl. And this administration doesn't care.
This administration ignores the rule of law, ignores the Secure Fence Act, lets fencing rust in the field, and fails to require the fence to continue to be constructed which would help support Border Patrol and the communities in south Texas.
But let me send a very clear warning signal to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle: My colleagues take for granted the people of south Texas, as a political matter. And I can tell you, the people of south Texas are tired of it. The people of south Texas are tired of being on the front lines of a cartel-driven drug-and-human-trafficking war with bullets flying, people dying, morgues filled, and rape trees being used.
And this body, the people's House, not only sits silent, they facilitate it, and they facilitate the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security who does nothing but fuel the crisis even more.
Mr. Speaker, 100,306 Americans are dead as a result of drug overdoses or poisonings.
Mr. Speaker, how many minutes are remaining?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Texas has 4 minutes remaining.
Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I do want to finish by saying, it is our duty to secure the border of the United States. It is the duty of the Secretary to secure the border of the United States. There are 100,000 dead Americans as a result of wide-open borders, and it is impeachable conduct by the Secretary of Homeland Security. We are going to address that issue if the American people will give us the ability to be in the majority.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Hill).
Mr. HILL. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas for yielding. I want to say, first and foremost, I thank him for his consistent, loud, smart, and well-reasoned comments on our open border and the impact on our citizens.
Mr. Speaker, I too want to bring attention to this criminal issue.
I have this Sweet-N-Low packet that so many of us put in our coffee in the morning, and that illustrates, Mr. Speaker, that that one amount of sweetener, if it were fentanyl, would kill 500 Americans.
In Arkansas, fentanyl deaths are up 441 percent since 2015. Over 600 Arkansans have lost their lives. Every 5 minutes we lose a neighbor to an accidental drug overdose. Just last year, as my friend from Texas said, we lost over 100,000 Americans to accidental overdoses, which is now the leading cause of death between the ages of 18 and 45. We were here on this floor 3 years ago lamenting 55,000 Americans dying in 1 year--the same we lost in the entire Vietnam war--and now it is 100,000.
Fentanyl is directly responsible for 64 percent of those deaths, Mr. Speaker, and a majority of that fentanyl within the United States comes from our porous Southwest border--the border that the Biden administration has continuously failed to secure--as it flows directly into our communities.
Last year, enough fentanyl was interdicted--that is what we caught--
by our overworked Border Patrol to kill every American seven times over. It isn't enough to confiscate it at the border. We need strong leadership to discourage it from arriving in the first place, and we can do that by permanently scheduling fentanyl as a schedule I substance and increase the criminal penalties.
We need strong leadership and strong policies to secure our border and respond to the illicit fentanyl that has been found in every street drug. Until then, sadly, as noted by my friend from Texas, Americans will continue to die at the hand of fentanyl.
Cheering on Team USA
Mr. HILL. Mr. Speaker, as we cheer on Team USA this week and celebrate our athletes participating in the 2022 winter games, it is important we do not overlook the sins of the host nation, China.
China has carefully crafted their image to distract the world from their blatant human rights abuses and their totalitarianism.
The International Olympic Committee has worked to portray China in a positive light. The truth is, China is an authoritarian state set on the destruction of anyone and anything that doesn't adhere to its world view.
The Chinese Communist Party believes that its administrative control over its people is the most effective form of governance. The Uyghurs continue to face genocide and crimes against humanity. The people of Hong Kong have seen the destruction of their liberal state. China seeks to expand its influence in the world through its predatory lending and its failed Belt and Road Initiative.
We can do better. We need American leadership to counter this.
Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I agree with the gentleman's remarks about China, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 168, No. 26
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
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