Protecting Hunting Heritage and Education Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, I want to thank my colleagues from Arizona and Texas for, really, the first historic activity.

It was a historic month last year. In the wake of the Uvalde shootings, we came together in one meeting--and this is a very diverse group of people, Senator Murphy from Connecticut being one of them. We came together in one meeting, and we developed enough trust to say that we thought we could do something that hadn't been done in a generation: trying to come up with a bipartisan bill that addresses what we considered to be some of the root causes of community safety. We did it in 30 days with bipartisan support, and we sent it to the President's desk.

I am sure Senator Cornyn and Senator Sinema are doing the same thing, but I watch it virtually every day. I watch what is happening on the ground. I look at funding for school safety, funding for school hardening, funding for veterans courts, funding for VA courts, funding for family courts, more funding to make sure that background checks are done quickly, and identifying young people who, yes, a couple of hundred should not have a gun out of about 150,000 who have actually tried to purchase a gun over the last year. The short story is it was a very successful bill.

I have been involved, in the last Congress, in every bipartisan bill that went to the floor. I took the heat back home, and Senator Cornyn took the heat back home, but we worked on it, and we had trusted partners who understood the intent. It goes to the President's desk, and what does somebody in his administration do? Get in our heads. All they needed to do was call us. They knew this wasn't our intent. Hunter safety? Archery training? Teaching a young person how to respect and handle a gun safely? They really thought that we did not want to train them on that; that we didn't want to train them about conservation and wildlife stewardship? That is what you also learn when you go to hunter safety.

As a matter of fact, even if you never want to own a gun, I encourage you to go to a hunter safety course. You are going to learn a lot of stuff. You are going to learn a lot of stuff about conservation, wildlife stewardship, and also the safe handling of a gun. It is the same thing for archery.

So I can only assume that the reason we are here today and the reason the House had to cast a vote is that somebody in the administration wanted to play politics--``gotcha.''

Well, let me tell you why that is dangerous. It is because it makes people like me question whether or not I should trust the administration to implement a bill in the manner that we intended to implement it. If I am going to get a ``gotcha'' at the end for something like this, what encourages me to do it again?

So, today, I think we are going to right this wrong, but I really hope the administration recognizes that some of us are sick of the polarizing environment in Washington. Some of us are willing to work on a bipartisan basis to make things different, but we have to have a willing and trusted partner down the street. This rights a wrong now, but I hope the administration recognizes, in the future, if you want to see more people like me stick our necks out for things that need to be done, you had better behave differently.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source