On the recordSeptember 22, 2022
It is head-spinning that House Democrats either want to defund the police, as Judiciary member Cori Bush does, or they want to Federalize the police, as Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler does. I am against both, here is why. In my community, the voters in one of the reddest counties in Florida voted to raise their own taxes to fund school resource officers. Protecting our schools was that important, and we understood that that was the responsibility of our community. Now, as places like Detroit, Chicago, almost every major metropolitan area in California, defund their police as some virtue signal, as some way to sacrifice the safety of their constituents on the altar of wokeism, now they want my Florida constituents to subsidize the bad decisions that they make at the State and local level, both constitutionally and practically. The police power is not a power of the Federal Government, it is a power of our State and local governments. When we excessively entangle ourselves in that, we do to law enforcement what we shamefully did to education. In our schools all across this land there was innovation, creativity, school projects, different ways to learn. Then the Republicans and Democrats joined with President Bush in passing the No Child Left Behind Act, and we got Common Core, in this theory that we had to have every kid on the same page, in the same book, on the same day, and we lost what was so special about it. We don't want to do that now to law enforcement.…
