Richard Gephardt: “this is the most important amendment in this whole block of crime bills that we are considering. As you consider it, I…”

“this is the most important amendment in this whole block of crime bills that we are considering. As you consider it, I want to take you back in time a few months to the period when we were working on the crime bill, after we had lost the ability to bring it up in the House and we had a bipartisan agreement with Republicans and Democrats, negotiating to bring about a bill that we could pass last fall. Those negotiations went on between my office and now Speaker Gingrich's office, and we arrived at a bipartisan agreement that ensured that we would get 100,000 new police, community police, on the streets of America. We made that decision. In my district, 80 of those police are now on the street. Seventeen thousand across the country are already out either being trained or already on the street preventing crime and cracking down on crime. One of the reasons Government gets a bad name today is that we make decisions often in a bipartisan way, as we did last fall. And then before we even have a chance to see if the action will work, we pull back, we change. We say, we did not want to do that. We want to do something else. It would be a tragedy, after we have made this decision, to now back up and say, no, it is a no-strings block grant, you can do anything you want. I was in my district over the weekend. I went out with the community police that had been hired. And all of them asked me, is this funding going to be taken away?”