[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 40 (Thursday, March 2, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Page S617]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                 Crime

  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.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.