John Conyers: “Mr. Speaker, the Conyers-Woolsey hate crimes bill is approaching that critical mass where we will soon have the 218…”

“Mr. Speaker, the Conyers-Woolsey hate crimes bill is approaching that critical mass where we will soon have the 218 votes. This Special Order is generated to pick up the last dozen or so cosponsors that we would like to have to have the bill brought forward as quickly as possible. The Members will recall that there has been hate crimes legislation since 1968, and what we do is take away some of the restrictions which would prevent us from bringing in Federal jurisdiction to aid local law enforcement. This bill does not supplant the law enforcement at the local level. We assist them and work in a cooperative spirit with them. Particularly, we take away the existing Federal jurisdictional requirements that a Federal act is impeded upon as a result of the incident. For example, voting, interstate commerce, or some other Federal nexus is required to trigger the bill under its current legal status. What we do is to say for crimes of gender, sex, sexual orientation, we remove a Federal requirement because a hate crime is a hate crime whether there is a Federal nexus or not. Many States have hate crimes legislation, except for the fact that 21 of them are admittedly very weak. Five States have none at all. What we are doing is in the wake of September 11, what we are doing is saying that there has been a dramatic increase of hate crimes activity.”