Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act of 2019
Floor Speech
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Mr. HECK. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 1595, the SAFE Banking Act.
Before I do that, I want to acknowledge the leadership of this man for a very long period of time. The only reason we are standing here tonight about to vote on this is because of the tireless and brilliant leadership by the gentleman from Colorado. I thank him for it. It has been an incredible journey over a long period of time. I thank the chair of the committee as well for her strong and clear leadership on this. Lastly, I would like to thank the two gentlemen from Ohio, Mr. Stivers and Mr. Davidson, who are not just allies, they are friends and have done excellent work in this regard.
This is a public safety bill pure and simple. If you want your neighborhoods to be safer, Mr. Speaker, vote ``yes.'' If you want your communities to be safer, vote ``yes.'' If you want the employees at the dispensaries throughout the 47 States who have some form of legalized cannabis, vote ``yes.''
This is a public safety bill, and it is not hypothetical. It is real. Exhibit A, Travis Mason. June 18 of 2016, Travis Mason got up and went to work. He was full of optimism about life. He was a marine veteran. He served this country honorably. He was looking forward to his future, because he just had been informed that he was approved to take the Denver Police Department test. He was confident he would pass it. He had been studying for it.
So he kissed his lovely wife, Samantha, good-bye. They were both marine veterans, both just 24 with three small children. He kissed Aidyn and Daisy--they were twins--and little baby Julian good-bye and went to work where he served as a security guard in a dispensary in suburban Denver.
Because that was an all-cash settlement, because the Federal law did not allow for that business to be banked, to be within the guardrails of the financial system, an evil person walked in that night and shot Travis dead and left Samantha a 24-year-old widow with three small children. This was so unnecessary. If we pass this legislation that does not have to happen. This is not hypothetical.
You can be agnostic on the underlying policy of whether or not cannabis should be legal for either adult recreational use or to treat seizures for juvenile epileptics, but you cannot be agnostic on the need to improve safety in this area.
If you believe that the first two provisions, especially, of the Cole memorandum, which sets forth: Keep marijuana out of the hands of children and keep cash out of the hands of the cartels, if you support that, you must vote ``yes'' on this bill so that we can track this and so that we can monitor this.
If we do nothing, bad things will again happen. If we pass this law, if we pass the SAFE Banking Act, the public safety measure, then we can avoid another widow, Samantha, and another murdered clerk at a dispensary. We can make our neighborhood safer, and we can make our communities safer. Please join us in voting ``yes'' on H.R. 1595.
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