[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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