[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 163 (Wednesday, October 16, 2019)]
[House]
[Pages H8189-H8190]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1745
                    DECLINE IN THE U.S. MURDER RATE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2019, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. 
Grothman) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I intend to address the good news that we 
had a significant drop in murders in this country in 2017 over the 
recent peak in 2016.
  However, before I address the House on that matter, I would like to 
yield to the gentleman from West Virginia (Mr. Mooney), my good friend.
  Mr. MOONEY of West Virginia. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman 
Grothman for yielding.
  Mr. Speaker, I spoke a little earlier in a 1 minute on this topic, 
but I was a little pressed for time, and I saw my good friend from 
Arkansas, Mr. Hill, speaking on this and other important issues, and my 
friend from Wisconsin, and I thought I would expand a little bit upon 
my remarks earlier.
  As the previous speaker just talked about, we have important trade 
issues and other issues the President of the United States is working 
on with other countries, and I couldn't agree more that those are 
important issues to be working on. That is exactly what the President 
and Congress should be focused on. In fact, it should be focused on 
that in a bipartisan way, Republicans and Democrats working together.
  Instead, what we are faced with is this pretty bizarre impeachment 
inquiry process. I think it is important for the American people to 
know and understand how this is supposed to work and how it is working.
  An impeachment inquiry sounds, first, like it is a fair discussion 
process, but in the past, during impeachment inquiries of President 
Nixon and President Clinton, the House of Representatives right here, 
led respectfully at the time by Speakers Carl Albert and Newt Gingrich, 
established the following procedures that are currently not being 
provided in this rushed process to attempt to impeach President Trump.
  This is an important precedent when you are dealing with the 
President of the United States, who is duly elected by the people of 
this country. The people of the West Virginia Second Congressional 
District that I represent voted for Donald Trump for President.
  This country, in the fair process of the electoral college, put 
Donald Trump in as President of the United States, and my district 
voted for Donald Trump for President of the United States. So that is 
how we choose the leader of our country.
  I stood there on the steps of the Capitol just a few years ago and 
watched Donald Trump be inaugurated as President, with the support of 
all the former living Presidents who attended at the time.
  Our country has a process that is emulated in this world, admired by 
the world, that we have a free election and we respect the results of 
that election.
  Instead, what we are seeing here, announced by the Speaker of the 
House, is this so-called impeachment inquiry. However, she is denying 
this President the same rights that other Presidents were given under 
this so-called impeachment inquiry.
  And what exactly are those? I think it is important to understand how 
this has happened in the past and how it should be happening right now 
but is not.
  I think my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, the Democrats 
in Congress here, would like the American people not to understand what 
they are doing. But first and foremost, in the past when this was done, 
the two times it was done in the past, I am going to list the seven 
things, the seven rights that have always been given to the accused 
party. In this case, that is Donald Trump, the President of the United 
States.
  First, in the committee hearings, there should be given coequal 
subpoena power to both the chairman of the committee and the ranking 
member of the committee, which is the minority party. At that committee 
level, they are given coequal power to subpoena witnesses. Right now it 
is one-sided. Those who want to impeach Donald Trump are subpoenaing 
witness after witness after witness, and the other side does not have 
the power to subpoena witnesses to maybe offer counterinformation. That 
is how a fair process is supposed to work.
  Secondly, all subpoenas have been subject to a vote of the full 
committee at the request of either the chairman or the ranking member. 
So to avoid a one-person witch hunt, when you want to subpoena 
somebody, the head of either party here in Congress can request a 
committee vote, and the committee can vote ``yes'' to subpoena or 
``no'' to subpoena. So rather than one person making all the decisions, 
which seems to be how it is occurring right now, you have at least the 
committee input. That is how it has been done in the past. That is not 
happening right now.
  Third, the President's counsel had the right to attend all hearings 
and depositions. Can you imagine that? We have hearings and depositions 
going on right now in the committees, and the President and his counsel 
who represent him are not even allowed to hear what is being said about 
him. This is, again, a denial of the basic right in America in a legal 
process of any kind.
  The President's counsel has had the right to present evidence, 
because when you had evidence being presented on one side, unless it is 
a kangaroo court, you had evidence presented on the other side. That is 
being denied to the President of the United States.
  The President's counsel has always had the right to object to the 
admittance of evidence. Again, another basic legal procedure, a legal 
right. The evidence being presented, it may have some objections to it, 
it may not be accurate for a variety of reasons. The President is not 
there, his counsel is not there. He can't even object to the evidence 
being presented.
  In the past, the President's counsel had the right to cross-examine 
witnesses. This should be familiar. In this country, we have a right to 
face those who accuse us, the right to face our accuser and the right 
to cross-examine witnesses. Basic legal precepts in this country.
  Last, the President's counsel would have the right to recommend a 
witness list.

  So, Mr. Speaker, it is important to understand that our President is 
being denied these seven basic legal rights to defend himself right 
now. This is not a fair and just system in any way.
  My mother fled a communist country. When she was 20 years old, she 
was in Cuba. Fidel Castro came down from the mountains with guns and 
locked her and her family up. My mother was in prison for 7 weeks.
  In communist countries, you have to prove your innocence. You are 
accused first, and then you are stuck with the burden of somehow trying 
to prove you didn't do something, trying to prove that you are not 
guilty.
  In this country, they have to prove you are guilty. You have the 
right to be presumed innocent. Innocent until proven guilty.

[[Page H8190]]

  Mr. Speaker, it is a disgrace what is happening here. The President 
is somehow in this court of public opinion with one-sided evidence 
trying to prove his innocence to people who are assuming he is guilty 
and haven't presented any real evidence to that fact.
  Even if a person is not a supporter of President Trump, they still 
should object to this process. Only imagine if they were falsely 
accused of something or God forbid their son or daughter was falsely 
accused of something. They would expect their child to have these same 
basic rights of legal process to defend themselves.
  If they can deny these rights to the President of the United States 
of America, rest assured, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle 
will deny that right to other citizens one day. We should be alarmed at 
this no matter where we stand on the issue of liking President Trump or 
not.
  Mr. Speaker, with that, I again thank my colleague from Wisconsin, 
Congressman Grothman, for yielding me this time.
  Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would now like to address the body on 
the topic of the recent decline of murders in the United States of 
America.
  For people who watch this House, we know that there are all sorts of 
bad things we can dwell on. We can dwell on the immigration crisis, we 
can dwell on high healthcare costs, we can dwell on the debt, but 
recently some relatively good news--we have more work to do--was 
brought forth, and that is the murder rates for 2018 were published.
  Largely in this country, murder rates skyrocketed from the early 
1960s, when we had the beginning of the welfare culture, the war on the 
family under Lyndon Johnson, and murder rates rose from around 5 per 
100,000 to over 10 per 100,000 in 1980. Murder rates stayed relatively 
high throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s.
  Since that time, I think in part because of increased incarceration, 
those murder rates were falling until 2015.
  And then, I think in part because of a government that spoke 
negatively of police, talked about or implied that police shootings 
were racially motivated, something happened opposite of what had been 
going on the 25 years before that.
  All of a sudden for 2 years in a row, the number of people murdered 
in this country jumped up, jumped up from a low of 4.4 to 5.4 per 
100,000 in the years 2015 and 2016.
  After that, we can talk about whether it was because of this or not, 
but Donald Trump took over, somebody who ran encouraging support of the 
police, respect of the police, and the murder rate began to drop a 
little bit in 2017, and last year, it one more time fell to less than 5 
per 100,000.
  President Trump ran, of course, on respect for police. That is one of 
the reasons I think people wanted him in there.
  The prior President, a dignified man, had Al Sharpton in the White 
House over 80 times. And I think if you look, Barack Obama is praising 
Black Lives Matter, is encouraging people to view police with distrust, 
was perhaps one of the reasons why, completely out of the ordinary at a 
time when the economy was not bad, we had police shootings rise 
significantly.
  Now we have a President who, as the yard signs in my district say, 
``Respect the Badge'', we have somebody as a President who is more a 
respect-the-badge sort of guy, and in 1 year we have a decrease in 
murders in this country--despite the fact the population continues to 
grow--of 1,000 people; 1,000 lives saved.
  We have to ask ourselves, why was there a spike in murders before 
President Trump took office and why was there a reduction in murders 
after he took office?
  As I mentioned, I think the embracing of people like Al Sharpton, who 
encourages disrespect for police, or at least blames them, blames sad 
shootings on racial motivation, I think that is one of the reasons why 
you had an increase.
  You had police who were afraid to do what they could do for fear of 
being sanctioned. You had people maybe afraid to go to the police to 
report criminals, perhaps because they were told the police were their 
enemy.
  But in any event, in this era, I haven't checked, but I am sure Al 
Sharpton hasn't been invited to the White House a dozen times in 
President Trump's first 3 years. I would be surprised if he was there 
at all, actually.
  Instead, we have someone who knows that as long as the police are 
appropriately doing their job, he has their back. And we have seen that 
significant drop in the last 2 years, which is rare good news that you 
get.
  I anxiously await when the statistics come out for the year 2019. We 
know there was another drop of about 7 percent in the massive city 
south of me in Chicago, I believe, in the first 7 months of the year. 
We saw another 10 percent drop in Milwaukee. There was another drop in 
New York.
  Is this a coincidence or is it because our police know that they are 
respected at the highest level of government?
  So I know when I get back home, I hear some people talk about crime 
and worry about crime, and there is more work that has to be done. 
Obviously, having as many people as we have murdered every year is 
still a figure way too high, but a drop of 1,000 was a significant 
drop.

  I hope everybody pays attention to what I believe is another drop 
that is going to happen in 2019, and I hope everybody realizes that 
this may not have been just an aberration. One thousand lives are a lot 
of lives. It could be the result of a policy based on respect for the 
police, punishing police when they are wrong, no doubt about that, and 
there are bad police, but not a love affair with Black Lives Matter; 
respecting the fact that when studies have been done by groups such as 
the National Academy of Sciences, they find that when police do kill 
people, it is collectively not a racially motivated or a racial thing.
  It is, sadly, something that happens because sometimes people do 
wrong things and it is usually people that are in the process of or are 
trying not to be apprehended from very dangerous crimes. And a couple 
times, a few times, it does happen because police make mistakes. But 
when it is, it shouldn't be used to tarnish police as a whole and it 
shouldn't be used to come out with the idea that these things are 
racially motivated.
  So there is my report on the good news to the American people.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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