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Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. As I have talked on this floor through the past few years, I have talked about visiting each of the 95 counties in our great State of Tennessee every year. And when I am there, I spend much of the time talking with local leaders, small business owners, families, citizens who call Tennessee home. And I have seen firsthand what the Biden agenda has done to them over these past 2 years.

The out-of-control spending that started almost immediately after Democrats took power and the inflation it caused has made life too expensive to afford for many individuals. The open border policy that did indeed start on day 1 of this administration overwhelmed Border Patrol and turned every Tennessee town, just like towns all across this country, into a border town.

The Democrats' obsession with environmental radicalism and the Green New Deal destroyed thousands of jobs, and as a bonus, this has sent gas and energy prices soaring.

They ignored our broken-down supply chains, and now economic development in rural and depressed areas has stalled out. I wish I could chalk all this up to gross incompetence, but after 2 years, I know and Tennesseans know there is a lot more to that story. Joe Biden and the Democrats know what they are doing. They know it is wrong, and they are doing it anyway.

One of the most frightening consequences of Joe Biden's reckless abuse of power is the rise in violent crime. The left's ``defund the police'' movement gained traction before Biden and his Democratic allies took power here in Washington, DC, but it was their decision to let it fester and undermine local law enforcement.

Instead of abiding by their duty to keep Americans safe, they have made heroes out of criminals and turned police officers into villains.

The results have been disastrous. Compared to mid-2019, America's largest cities have seen a 50-percent increase in homicides and a 36- percent increase in aggravated assaults.

Cities that caved to the radical left's demands to gut the police department have seen crime rates rise even higher.

The people of Memphis have had a front-row seat to this violence. I would implore my colleagues to listen to them, rather than to the anti- police activists making their phones ring, because they--they--are the ones who are paying the price for this little experiment.

Ask them how they felt as they watched a shooting spree play out live on social media. I won't use the perpetrator's name here on the floor of the Senate, but he is accused of murdering three people, wounding three others, and committing not one but two carjackings.

Ask them how they felt when they found out what happened to the wife, mother, and teacher who never came back from her morning run. A monster with a long criminal record--again, whose name I will not use here--is charged with her brutal abduction and murder. And then ask them how they would feel about living in a world without law enforcement officers.

There are thousands of examples, unfortunately, that I could list, but the point is that the Democrats and their reckless anti-cop, anti- law enforcement agenda destroyed the concept of law and order in this country to service a narrative about how evil America is, but in the end, all they did was to empower the real evildoers.

Joe Biden and the Democrats have squandered their time in power, wasting our money and throwing cops under the bus, and now, just as they have with every other disastrous choice they have made, they are determined to, unfortunately, ignore the consequences.

The Democrats did not take power with a mandate to defund the police, but if they listened to the American people, they would have known we do have a mandate to undo the damage that caused and support ``Back the Blue'' and make our communities safe again.

Last week, Senator Hagerty and I introduced the Restoring Law and Order Act, and I am hopeful that my Democratic colleagues will see reason and help us move this through Congress and to the President's desk as soon as possible.

The bill addresses two key priorities we should all share: One, hiring more police officers with experience handling violent crime and, two, cutting down the processing time that it is taking for processing rape kits.

Sheriffs in Tennessee have confirmed for me, time and again, that manpower is, indeed, a problem. They don't have enough people to keep up with the crimewave that we are seeing. We need to change that.

We are also going to give them the resources they need to target drug crime, clean all that cartel fentanyl off the streets, and keep criminals locked up behind bars.

I want to devote the time I have left to the issue of the rape kit backlog because this is something that we have talked about for years but haven't been able to get to the bottom of, even with the help of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Simply throwing money at the problem is no longer enough. I want to use one program as an example of why we know this is the case. Between 2015 and 2021, $266 million in grants has flowed out the door to 40 States and the District of Columbia as part of the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.

These jurisdictions have identified about 136,000 unsubmitted kits and tested more than 81,000 of them. Let that number sink in. As I said, they have identified 136,000 kits. They have tested more than 81,000 of them.

This has led to 13,000 CODIS hits, 189 convictions, and 795 guilty pleas. Good results but not good enough. Those grantees still have 50,000 kits gathering dust on the shelves of their evidence lockers-- 50,000--50,000 kits, aggravated assaults, rapes, incidences reported, but they have not been processed even yet.

So what is going on here? That is a question that is truly in need of an answer, and this administration, the Democrats, all of us in this Chamber, owe it to the women in this country to help local law enforcement officers get an answer.

Why are these kits not being processed in a timely manner? As I said, we have put hundreds of millions of dollars into this. We have made certain kits are there. We have money that has been put forward to push these through the system, but they are languishing. We are not getting those results in a timely manner in order to lock up violent criminals.

The Restoring Law and Order Act will direct some funds to State and local agencies to specifically address the backlog. It also will require the GAO to study the availability of and deficiencies in processing rape kits.

Congress has let this go on long enough. When I speak to women at home in Tennessee, they are terrified about how far this has been willing to let go. This President's anti-justice agenda has destroyed trust in our system.

It is astonishing to me that in 2022, we are still having to debate the merits--the merits--of maintaining law and order, especially considering we can see the consequences of undermining it live and on camera every single night.

Turn on the local news here in DC, you will get a taste of what it looks like when local leadership turns their backs on victims and empowers criminals.

The Restoring Law and Order Act is an important bill that the Senate should pass as soon as possible, but that is just one step. If you listen to the outcry from Memphis or L.A. or New York and other cities around the country and especially on the border, it is so clear this President and the Democrats have a mandate from the American people to fight crime, to empower law enforcement, and to seek justice for victims of violence.

This means embracing a simple mantra: If you do the crime, you have to pay the time. It also means hiring and electing tough prosecutors and district attorneys and eliminating soft-on-crime policies that allow violent offenders to roam free.

If the powers that be had been a little tougher on the violent criminal who live-streamed his shooting spree, the streets of Memphis would have been a little bit safer. He only served 11 months of a previous 3-year sentence for aggravated assault. But they let him out early, and now three individuals have lost their lives. If they had really taken their time with the other criminal I mentioned just a few moments ago, who had a past record of rape and aggravated assault, they may not have let him out of prison before his 24-year sentence was up. If the crime lab had secured the resources to clear their rape kit backlog, they may have discovered the year-old kit containing his DNA and stopped his release. The monster would still be in jail; a wife and mother would still be alive; and one less family would be in mourning.

The time for politicizing this has come to an end. Tennesseans aren't worried about the midterms. They are not worried about a legislative timeline. What matters to them is restoring law and order.

I would venture to guess that this President's administration and my Democratic colleagues probably know this, and if they block this bill, if they stand between victims of violent crime and the justice they deserve, they do so with the knowledge that more people will die; more violent offenders will walk free; and more families will suffer.

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