Matt Gaetz Trashes Biden Border Policy Over Fentanyl Concerns At today's House Judiciary Committee hearing.

 

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr

At today's House Judiciary Committee hearing, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-TX) spoke about drug policy.

Rep. Gaetz in his remarks said:

Mr. Chairman, I can't imagine being one of the 232 people sitting in federal prison right now thinking if I had committed the exact same offense after President Trump had signed the first step act, I wouldn't be here anymore. I'd be with my family. But instead, because of what I think is a flawed determination that didn't allow retroactivity, we are treating people differently for committing the same offenses.

We're incarcerating some people for the very same offenses that they would otherwise not be incarcerated for. And so I think that's an appropriate fix.

There has been discussion today about fentanyl and it irks me every time I hear someone talk about fentanyl overdoses. Because no one overdoses on fentanyl because I don't think anybody really sets out to, like, score some fentanyl for a good time. I get why it's hard to keep cocaine from coming into the country. People in the United States like using cocaine. They seek it out. They pay high dollar amounts for it. So that would be something hard to stop.

But since people don't set out to use fentanyl, since it's something we don't want in our country, We should be totally capable of stopping it, and the only reason we aren't is that we purposefully allow our border to degrade, not by accident, not because of some lack of capability or some unsolvable problem set. But because there are some groups on the right and left who think that they will do better economically if we just let millions of people into the country and depress the wages of Americans, and the costs they're willing to pay for that are the funerals and the deaths and the broken lives as a result of fentanyl poisoning, because it is not an overdose, it is a poisoning that happens.

We're in the month of September, and I know all of us thought back to September 11, 2001, when we had to relive this day and you think about thousands of Americans needlessly dying, and then us going off into like 20 years of wars in every central Asian cave, or there might be terrorist hiding to avenge those thousands of lives. And I think today about the tens of thousands of lives that we are losing over and over again in every community in our country, and we seemingly clutch our pearls at the suggestion that we might think about dropping off a few Tomahawk missiles in the Sinaloa mountains where we know that fentanyl is being manufactured.

So I don't think it was unreasonable for President Trump to ask the question about whether or not we ought to authorize the use of military force against the very people that are killing tens of thousands of Americans for stuff that we don't want. So I think it's a great fix to the Terry Act, but I think if we really want to get serious about what's harming far more than 232 Americans, we would get tough on the border and even tougher on the Sinaloa cartel and I yield back.