Crises Facing America

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, I am going to try to add a few additional things about fentanyl.

I first got here about 7 years ago, and at the time there were 47,000 deaths caused by illegal drugs a year. By comparison, there were 57,000 people who died in Vietnam, but that was over a 10-year period, a 12- year period. This is over 1 year, 47,000 people. And it was a national crisis. And every politician had to address that crisis.

Well, 7 years later what became of that statistic, 47,000 deaths a year from fentanyl? It went up to 100,000 deaths a year.

Now, I have been at the border five times. Every time I am down there the Border Patrol, again and again, emphasizes that with this open flow of people coming into this country, you're getting unlimited fentanyl.

So we have to do two obvious things to address the problem. We just passed a continuing resolution today with some increases in there, but the budget proposed by our President doesn't increase funding for the Border Patrol at all. You go through that budget, 12 percent over here, 18 percent over here, 7 percent over here. Border Patrol, nothing. Like these lives don't matter at all. We have got to spend more money at the border.

Secondly, when it comes down to penalties for people who are selling this fentanyl or trafficking in fentanyl, they are not great enough.

Right now, your penalties for heroin, which is a fraction as lethal as fentanyl, are much higher, the mandatory minimums, than the cutoff for fentanyl.

I have introduced a bill that is going to deal with that called the Fentanyl Penalties Parity Act, which adjusts the mandatory minimum to be the same as heroin.

So we have got to throw more people in prison. That 100,000 deaths, by the way, that is not what we call nonviolent. Ask the parents of the people who died of these fentanyl overdoses whether that is just a nonviolent crime, and we will slap somebody on the wrist and who cares? We have got to up the penalties on people who are selling that fentanyl. We had 560 people die in Milwaukee County alone last year, and Milwaukee County is not that big.

And secondly, we have got to do something at that border. The idea that these fentanyl drugs continue to flow across the southern border, and we can pretend there is nothing we can do, that we can continue to allow Kamala Harris to look out at the border, which is just like a joke on the American people. It is a joke on anybody who has had a loved one die of this fentanyl. That has got to end.

I hope everybody in this building, those people fortunate enough to meet the President tell him, Get Kamala Harris off that border and get us some more Border Patrol agents down there so it shows that we are taking the lives of these 100,000 people a year a little more seriously.

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