Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Texas for yielding. I want to say, first and foremost, I thank him for his consistent, loud, smart, and well-reasoned comments on our open border and the impact on our citizens. Mr. Speaker, I too want to bring attention to this criminal issue. I have this Sweet-N-Low packet that so many of us put in our coffee in the morning, and that illustrates, Mr. Speaker, that that one amount of sweetener, if it were fentanyl, would kill 500 Americans. In Arkansas, fentanyl deaths are up 441 percent since 2015. Over 600 Arkansans have lost their lives. Every 5 minutes we lose a neighbor to an accidental drug overdose. Just last year, as my friend from Texas said, we lost over 100,000 Americans to accidental overdoses, which is now the leading cause of death between the ages of 18 and 45. We were here on this floor 3 years ago lamenting 55,000 Americans dying in 1 year--the same we lost in the entire Vietnam war--and now it is 100,000. Fentanyl is directly responsible for 64 percent of those deaths, Mr. Speaker, and a majority of that fentanyl within the United States comes from our porous Southwest border--the border that the Biden administration has continuously failed to secure--as it flows directly into our communities. Last year, enough fentanyl was interdicted--that is what we caught-- by our overworked Border Patrol to kill every American seven times over. It isn't enough to confiscate it at the border.…”