Melvin Watt: “in the last few days, my Republican colleagues have gone out of their way to say that they are trying to reach out to…”

“in the last few days, my Republican colleagues have gone out of their way to say that they are trying to reach out to the African-American community and racial minorities in various ways. They have had a big summit here for Historically Black Colleges and Universities at which they took credit for doing all kinds of things that I was not aware of that they were doing for Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Some of them had a big press conference about all of the efforts that they had taken on behalf of black farmers; and, of course, we had to dispute that at today's press conference. The Speaker and my colleagues on the Republican side have gone out of their way to tell us how much they support a new markets' initiative that they would like to do on a bipartisan basis with the Democrats, and this is the appropriate bill, Commerce, Justice, State, this would be the appropriate bill to fund that through. I note that there is not anything in the bill that would fund that initiative, yet, we are trying to do away with and not fully support the Civil Rights Commission, whose job it is to go into communities and investigate hate crimes, investigate police brutality, investigate and expose racial intolerance and the problems that we have in this country so that we as a Nation can confront these issues. What would we rather do with the money? Sure, we would rather get tougher and tougher on crime and increase monies to build prisons.…”