[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 150 (Wednesday, September 25, 2024)]
[House]
[Pages H5809-H5812]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             FOCUS ON CRIME

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. De La Cruz). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 9, 2023, the gentleman from Utah (Mr. 
Moore) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority 
leader.


                             General Leave

  Mr. MOORE of Utah. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all 
Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks 
and include extraneous material on the topic of this Special Order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Utah?
  There was no objection.
  Mr. MOORE of Utah. Madam Speaker, House Republicans are addressing 
the most important issues facing Americans across the country, and this 
week we will focus on crime.
  Over the past 3 years, violent crime has surged under the Biden-
Harris administration. Its soft-on-crime policies coupled with bail 
reform, open borders, and the defund the police movement has put every 
American in danger and threatened our Nation's security.
  That is why House Republicans have brought to the floor the Keeping 
Violent Offenders Off Our Streets Act, to fight back against Democrats' 
woke agenda and give our law enforcement the tools they need to defend 
public safety in our communities.
  Last week, House Republicans passed the Violence Against Women by 
Illegal Aliens Act to ensure that illegal immigrants convicted of sex 
offenses or other crimes involving stalking, child abuse, and neglect 
are inadmissible or deportable from the United States.
  This legislation now waits to be voted on on the Senate floor.
  Republicans are the party of law and order, and we will continue to 
fight for the safety of our Nation's communities.
  I am grateful to my colleagues for joining me this evening to talk 
about the importance of supporting our law enforcement and implementing 
robust crime policies.
  Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York (Mr. 
Langworthy).


                        Honoring Richard Telford

  Mr. LANGWORTHY. Madam Speaker, I thank the vice chair of our 
Conference, Blake Moore, for yielding me the time.
  I rise today with a heavy heart to honor the life and service of 
Chautauqua County Undersheriff Richard Telford, a dedicated public 
servant who spent over three decades protecting and serving the people 
of our community.
  Rich's passing is a profound loss for Chautauqua County. Those who 
had the honor of knowing him say that they knew they could always count 
on Rich. In remembering him, Sheriff Jim Quattrone said: ``Rich was a 
man of integrity. He could always be counted on to do the right 
thing.''

[[Page H5810]]

  Throughout his service, Rich's sense of duty and commitment to the 
community he grew up in ran very deep.
  After graduating from Jamestown High School and studying criminal 
justice at Jamestown Community College, Rich began his law enforcement 
career in 1991 with the Chautauqua County Sheriff's Office. He quickly 
rose through the ranks, serving as a deputy, a sergeant overseeing the 
county's 911 center, a lieutenant, and later a supervisor for court 
security.
  Rich's hard work and his leadership were undeniable. In 2021 he was 
appointed undersheriff of Chautauqua County, a role in which he 
continued to lead by strong example.
  Rich's dedication to the community wasn't limited to his badge. He is 
remembered as a loving family man, devoted to his wife Amanda and their 
three children Katelynn, Andrew, and Alex.
  Throughout his career, Rich embodied the qualities that we look for 
in public servants: integrity, courage, and respect. His actions over 
33 years spoke louder than any words. Whether it was investigating 
fires with the department's fire investigation team or attending the 
prestigious FBI National Academy, Rich never stopped pushing himself to 
be better for his community.
  Madam Speaker, our hearts are heavy today, but we are filled with 
gratitude for the life and the legacy of Rich Telford. His dedication 
and his service to Chautauqua County will not be forgotten.
  Your family is in our prayers, Rich, and, Rich, you will be missed, 
but your contributions will live on through the many lives that you 
have touched.
  Mr. MOORE of Utah. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York 
for his comments on such a dedicated public servant.
  Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. James).


                Congratulating 2024 West Point Graduates

  Mr. JAMES. Madam Speaker, today I rise to congratulate the West Point 
class of 2024 on their graduation this past spring and for their 
continued commitment to service. It is no small feat, and the country 
is indebted to them for their immense willingness to sacrifice.
  I hesitate because I myself am a West Point grad of 2004, and I know 
what they are signing up for. I know how serious it is, and I am very 
proud of them. It is the greatest service academy in all the land, and 
I know that each of them will be looked at as leaders not just now but 
for the rest of their lives.
  So I ask them all to lead with the West Point motto in mind: ``Duty, 
Honor, Country.'' It is something that is ingrained into every cadet. 
It is something that is part of The Long Gray Line. They are our 
Nation's best and brightest, and I cannot wait to see what they and the 
class of 2024 does for our great Nation.
  I also briefly want to congratulate them all on going 3-1 in their 4 
years against Navy. They are winners.
  On a more serious note, the country will be better off because of 
their sacrifice and determination.
  I am honored to ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating the 
following 24 grads of the 2024 class from Michigan:
  Kathryn Cornett of Muskegon
  Dominic Curti of Bloomfield Hills, who is a fantastic intern, by the 
way
  Lucas Dickerson of Sterling Heights
  Colton Dougherty of Garden City
  William Drake of Bloomfield Hills
  Jason Fargo of Portage
  Alexzandria Goss of St. Clair Shores, in my district
  Aiden Griggs of Traverse City
  Shane Haener of Brownstown
  Joseph Hickson of Orchard Lake
  Timmy Kipfmiller of Freeland
  Brandon Liu of Northville
  Brennan McAlister of Chesterfield
  Titus McClary of Detroit
  Mark Miller of Grand Blanc
  Eamon Mott of Bloomfield Township
  Andrew Przekora of Metamora
  Alexander Roos of Hackensack
  Atef Sikazwe of Novi
  Dawson Stec of Canton
  Chelsea Tene-Kuate of Macomb also in my district
  Emily Vanderploeg of Hudsonville
  Kyle Wallace of Brownstown
  And the son of my sponsors when I was a West Point cadet, Second 
Lieutenant Robert Sundy of St. Joseph.
  The class of 2024's service and sacrifice will never be forgotten. 
God bless them all and Godspeed to them.
  Mr. MOORE of Utah. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Michigan 
for his comments.
  I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. LaMalfa) to address the 
House.
  Mr. LaMALFA. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for leading this 
Special Order tonight as we certainly have plenty of things to talk 
about and what Congress and our Federal Government should be doing.
  The topic I am going to hit on is the crime situation.
  Now, you will hear different things reported in the news on how crime 
is in the U.S. Well, I think normal people, regular everyday Americans 
see that it is a problem, but the way it is reported or the way it is 
spoken about under the Biden-Harris administration is like, oh, crime 
is not a problem, crime is down.
  Tell that to the people or the storefront owners in various blue 
cities where you see these massive break-ins by hordes of people 
smashing their way in and smashing the countertops and all that, taking 
cell phones and jewelry and whatever else might be on their minds.
  Where do they come up with the statistics like crime is somehow down?
  Well, we are seeing more and more evidence that perhaps the mayors of 
these blue cities, perhaps other leaders, are telling their people to 
not report them. If the police departments--and many jurisdictions 
around this country are underreporting what is really going on. I guess 
that is how you can skew the statistics to look like they are better, 
and that crime is somehow down.
  I tell you, theft is up, breaking and entering is up, violent crime 
is up, and it is due to lax policies.
  As a Member from California here, it is very acute in some of our 
large cities, as well as we have these soft-on-crime recent efforts 
being made by the Newsom administration and others that have basically 
made it almost a free-for-all in my home State.
  For example, the dollar amount got bumped up several years ago via 
one of the propositions fooling the voters as to what the proposition 
was actually doing on crime. Prop 47, which is one of the big problems, 
was known generically as the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act, yet 
all it did was relax the level of felonies down to misdemeanors to the 
level of $949. That means you can steal $949 of stuff out of the store 
and still have it just be a misdemeanor instead of a felony as it 
should be.
  People go in sometimes with calculators and add up how much they can 
steal and brazenly carry it out the door because there are not enough 
police around, and, of course, the retailers, especially the large 
corporate box retailers say, oh, don't dare go and try and impede them, 
don't go talk to them, don't even go out in the parking lot and take a 
picture of their car or their license plate because we don't want to 
offend them or we don't want to incur that somebody might get injured.
  Well, I tell you, people are getting injured by this happening. The 
price of everything in the stores--I mean, look how many stores are 
closing around the country as it is, and then tell that to the mom-and-
pop stores that only have one or maybe two markets that they deal with 
and they are not supposed to do anything about this rampant crime, the 
rampant stealing happening in their stores?
  So this was put in place in my home State by legislation called AB 
109, which is supposed to be trying to help empty overcrowded prisons, 
as they termed it at the time.
  Now, I don't know that the prisons are overcrowded, I actually had a 
chance to visit them, and thankfully they let me out of them when I was 
done with the visit, but you see, prisons are designed with two bunks 
in them, and they were only keeping one person in there due to 
somebody's idea of how that would be crowded.
  So what else happens?
  When the Federal court ruled that California had overcrowding, they 
started trying to release prisoners to meet a number. Also, the State 
had several out-of-State prisons it was contracting with to take some 
of its extra prisoners.
  What do they do first thing?
  They bring those back. They bring them back from out of State, which

[[Page H5811]]

they are actually getting a good deal on the cost of keeping them in 
those out-of-State prisons. They actually brought them back home so 
they could crowd them even more and have even more to release.
  Does that make an ounce of sense to anybody?
  Crime is up in California because they are releasing more.
  Under AB 109 called ``realignment'' it pushed more and more hardened 
criminals down to the county jail level, which means now the county 
jails have to deal with them when they have got more normal 
neighborhood crimes or even something up to the level of assault or 
stealing a car or things like that, there is no room for them.

                              {time}  1830

  They are releasing people. Normally, Madam Speaker, you would have a 
local county jail on their own recognizance or on a small amount of 
bail or what have you. Now, they get rid of bail, as well.
  They keep pushing the problem down, and now, we have chaos at the 
local level for what our sheriffs, jailers, and district attorneys have 
to deal with locally. It all starts at the top on this.
  The crime wave we saw during the riots that one summer in Portland, 
Seattle, and Minneapolis--especially I want to underline Minneapolis 
here, where the Biden-Harris administration wants to claim crime is 
down--Madam Speaker, you saw Kamala Harris actually advocating for 
people to send in money so they could bail out the people who were 
arrested for all the chaos, damage, vandalism, and burning of 
Minneapolis. Let's chip in to help get them out, because she thought 
that was some form of justice.
  In this campaign, she seems to want to run away from all that, 
changing her spots to some other, as a political chameleon would do.
  There is no lack of crime. There is no lack of prisoners. My home 
State, again, is bringing the ones back from private or other prisons 
out of State to crowd ours even more and then closing down more and 
more prisons. Gavin Newsom has in mind closing down four more.
  I keep telling people: It is not as if the population of our State 
and country are running out of bad guys. Our population of the State 
and our country increases anyway, so you think the number of prisoners 
and the number of criminals is going to increase probably 
commensurately with that, especially in these times when we are 
encouraging people to do it with lax laws.
  We had AB109. We had Proposition 47 fooling the voters by saying it 
was somehow a safe neighborhoods, streets, and schools act. Indeed, it 
just lowered the level.
  Then Proposition 57 came in, and it had some horrific crimes it made 
into misdemeanors or less, including some forms of date rape and things 
like that. It is horrific.
  Those three things have helped put California in this mess, and a lot 
of times this body here tries to emulate what California does. 
Certainly, the White House does, bringing a lot of Californians in when 
they came into power. To emulate what California does isn't good for 
the country.
  What we have in California, for example, is to counteract a lot of 
Proposition 47. One currently on the ballot is called Proposition 36, 
which will restore some of the jail sentence lengths and some of the 
crime classifications back up to what really should be a penalty and 
doing other things that are going to tighten up the idea that crime is 
so far paying in California because they can walk away and get away 
with it.
  We are seeing more and more people go into these markets, stores, and 
big-box stores. When they are catching somebody coming out, obviously 
with armloads of stuff they haven't paid for--they are disguising 
themselves, et cetera--this is someone stealing. We are seeing more 
citizens stepping up and saying: No, I am not going to watch this 
happen.
  They are detaining because the store won't do it. I consider that 
kind of heroic actually, but some on the corporate level might say they 
shouldn't do that because someone might get injured or whatever.
  The buyers and consumers see that their prices go up because they 
can't keep insurance anymore. They go into a large-box retailer and 
find everything is locked up. I don't if it is this way all around the 
country, but the retailers, many of them in my home State, are locking 
up a whole bunch of the items.
  Madam Speaker, you have to go ask the clerk to come open it up so you 
can get into the make-up counter or some of the medicine counter. I 
hear even socks and underwear in some cases are being locked up behind 
glass, or the tool section. We have to have people come help us get 
these items because it is going to walk out of there otherwise.
  Crime is down? I don't think so because we are seeing those effects.
  Madam Speaker, you are seeing it in places like San Francisco, more 
and more corner markets and drugstores. They might have quite a few of 
a particular chain of drugstore in downtown, but they are closing 
several of them because of the rampant conditions of theft and other 
things going on in the city.
  Why are they promoting this? Why are their city leaders allowing 
this? It is a mystery to me.
  It does start at the top, and when we get the signal being sent from 
the White House and even Congress of soft on crime, then this is what 
the results are going to be.
  Again, in my home State, voters have an opportunity with Proposition 
36 to turn back that tide at least somewhat. Even the retailers were 
behind it there, which generally they are kind of afraid to upset the 
applecart in Sacramento because of the three-to-one Democratic majority 
there, and they don't want to make them mad.
  So far, they are sticking with it, which is actually admirable, for a 
change.
  Fentanyl and drug charges that have been made weaker during this time 
would actually be increased and put back in place in prop 36. We are 
not talking about the guy being caught with a little bit of marijuana 
that Kamala Harris has made famous. We are talking about serious drugs 
and serious amounts of them being dealt out there that is going to be 
curtailed, at least in part, by Proposition 36.
  I hear it is polling quite well, and I hear Governor Newsom has given 
up on it, too. He went so far to say that with all the support for 
Proposition 36, because the people are speaking back with their 
initiative process, that they are tired of the crime and tired of the 
inaction by the government, he says: I don't know what State I am in.
  Well, Governor, I think I agree with you because I don't know that 
you know what State you are in either.
  It is pathetic, and he doesn't seem to care much about neighborhoods 
and regular folks who have to deal with this stuff.

  Lastly, this crime extends to our border, and we are talking about 
this Biden-Harris administration, the czar, Vice President Harris, 
allowing 530,000 illegal immigrants to be flown in on aircraft into our 
country and then turned loose because we can't possibly process them.
  Madam Speaker, they are ending up in your neighborhoods, and they are 
overwhelming some of these neighborhoods. They are overwhelming the 
school system. They are overwhelming the other services, hospitals and 
all that, because they are just flying them in for an unknown reason.
  They will try to float themselves on the idea that they are helping 
refugees or something, but it is way beyond that, especially when we 
find, talking to the Border Patrol, that a high ratio of them is coming 
from China. These are likely going to be agents of China's efforts to 
undermine the United States.
  We are expecting also maybe another 800,000 of them are going to be 
attempted to be brought in by the Harris czar situation.
  They get 2 years of the humanitarian parole and work permits, but 
they are not even tracked. They are completely blowing the idea of what 
asylum is as a temporary respite for people in a bad situation in 
another country. We are still sympathetic toward that, but there are no 
holds barred on how it is being abused, especially in this last 3\1/2\ 
years.
  ICE officers are overwhelmed by the work they are having to do at the 
border and with the expectations of parole that they have to deal with. 
Madam Speaker, 8 million illegal immigrants have come into this country 
under this administration--8 million. That is

[[Page H5812]]

more than the size of several States, but they go on, push the Border 
Patrol out of the way, take their jobs, and really demean them. Morale 
is as low as it has ever been.
  The last kicker on top of this is when the administration orders the 
Border Patrol agents to underreport, to skew the statistics, and to 
basically be forced into lies about how many people are coming in, 
especially those on the terrorist watch list.
  We have a serious problem. People need to be brought up on charges 
for that, not the Border Patrol guys who are trying to execute their 
plan, but people in the administration who are telling them to lie 
about it. How pathetic. How deranged.
  We have a lot of choices to be making in the next few months here. 
The American people are tired of the crime, and they are tired of the 
sieve at the border. They can make some very clear choices if they want 
to improve this.
  In my home State of California, Proposition 36 will go that way, but 
also demanding from their politicians that they care about them, their 
communities, their storefronts, and their ability to do normal business 
like the United States used to until this administration has made such 
a farce of our borders and fighting crime.
  Americans must pay attention this fall and ongoing.
  Mr. MOORE of Utah. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from 
California for his comments.
  Madam Speaker, I will quickly reiterate that I appreciate my 
colleagues for not only tonight but the last several months in 
communicating some of the reality that we see on the ground.
  Policy matters. Policy leads directly to good or bad outcomes back 
home in our districts. We need to be recognizing what is going to 
create better outcomes and, if we have made mistakes, be willing to own 
it and move forward and find better ways to address the issues that our 
Nation faces.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________