Invest to Protect Act of 2022

Floor Speech

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Mr. FITZGERALD. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in opposition to H.R. 6448, the so-called Invest to Protect Act.

All of the bills that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle rushed to the floor today are nothing more than kind of last-minute political items, obviously, a few weeks out from election day. They will use these bills to claim that they support funding the police.

However, the American people are not fooled. They saw Democrats across the country call for defunding of the police. There is video that continues to run ad nauseam with examples of that, and it was all in the wake of George Floyd's death.

We only need to look at the House Judiciary Committee Democrats' refusal to take up these bills in regular order. For further evidence that these bills are a political stunt, just this week, Judiciary Committee Democrats postponed a hearing on organized retail theft until after the election.

The simple truth is Democrats have no interest in putting forth a serious effort to reduce crime. All the money in these grant programs don't mean a thing if leftwing prosecutors continue to let violent criminals out with little or no bail.

That is why yesterday my colleagues and I introduced the Keeping Violent Offenders Off Our Streets Act after last year's horrific attack in my district at the Waukesha Christmas parade.

This bill takes three steps to push back on radical leftwing bail laws. It conditions the Byrne grant program funding on meeting the Federal pretrial release factors as a floor. It reduces grant funding by 75 percent unless State and local jurisdictions develop and maintain a public safety report.

The problem in Waukesha was that later on the DA said, boy, we didn't know what was going on in other States. We didn't know that there were any other crimes committed there. And then judges did not have enough information prior to setting bail.

We can't let people off the hook just by saying that we just didn't have enough information. Six people died in the Waukesha Christmas parade because no one took the time to figure out that this individual who was before them was absolutely one of the most dangerous people living in Wisconsin.

States would be further incentivized to report this information to the National Crime Information Center. It would bring transparency, and it would change the bail system.

Mr. Speaker, there are solutions to these issues; but, unfortunately, there is a faction of the Democratic Party that simply continues to run the opposite way. I don't know if it is to assure their constituencies that they are with them, but that time is over.

Unfortunately, as we are in the middle of September right before the November elections, the Democrats finally woke up.

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