Biden-Garland DOJ: Quiet on Crime Wave, Silent on Far-Left Lawbreakers, Hyperactive Against Conservatives
‘Today’s Democratic Party has made a deliberate decision to make public safety and innocent citizens a lower priority than repeat criminal offenders… 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 think of. Evidently the Biden Administration either does not agree… or just cannot deliver.’
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding law and order:
“The American people are deeply concerned about the collapse of law and order in this country.
“39% of New York City residents say they feel less safe than they did a year ago.
“Last month 63% 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 their incumbent mayor.
“Americans see this problem going from bad to worse. More than 70 percent of the country expects we’ll see crime rates rise even higher this coming year.
“Unfortunately, my fellow Kentuckians know this as well as anyone.
“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’re 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: “[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 rash of brazen theft.
“Just two days ago, the town of Somerset 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, provably hurts law enforcement and leads to more crime.
“It’s 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 for whole classes of crimes.
“For example, in Los Angeles, the District Attorney’s refusal to go after major misdemeanor offenses has brought his office’s prosecution rate down to half of what it was under his predecessor.
“The Commonwealth’s Attorney in Fairfax County, Virginia, has repeatedly declined to pursue justice against perpetrators of child sexual assault.
“And the former District Attorney in Boston who made headlines for declaring that charges involving fifteen different serious crimes would be “outright dismissed” was rewarded by President Biden with a promotion to be 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 for extra scrutiny was moms and dads exercising their First Amendment rights.
“Last fall, armed FBI agents were sent to rural Pennsylvania to arrest a father at home in front of his young children because of 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, Virginia office that talked about needing to put informants in church pews so the FBI could spy on Catholic Americans with 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’ve simply turned up the scrutiny evenly, across the board.
“Quite the opposite.
“While the Biden-Garland DOJ seems fanatically overzealous about harassing conservative citizens, they are conveniently 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 wouldn’t lift a finger.
“The Biden Administration simply refused to enforce black-letter federal law that forbids picketing and protesting at judges’ private residences.
“This willful failure to enforce the law effectively made this President and 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.
“Or 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.
“Suffice to say the Attorney General had a lot to answer for at his oversight hearing before the Judiciary Committee yesterday.
“But unfortunately Senators saw no evidence that a course correction is coming.
“The Attorney General wouldn’t give Ranking Member Graham a straight answer on designating Mexican drug cartels 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 O.K. 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 — basically cherry-picking their way around existing penalties to make current law even softer on lethal drugs.
“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 think of.
“Evidently the Biden Administration either does not agree… or just cannot deliver.”
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