Political Quotes

“yesterday, I came to the floor to discuss the terrible human cost of fentanyl: the lives lost, the families changed, the futures destroyed. In 2022, we lost 295 people a day to drug overdoses, the vast majority of them opioids and, specifically, fentanyl. Twenty-two teenagers died each week that same year from drug overdoses. That is like losing an entire high school classroom every week. The majority of drug overdoses in this country are from fentanyl, and a lot of illegal fentanyl comes across our southern border in the form of fentanyl analogs, which are versions of fentanyl created with slight chemical variations in an attempt to dodge law enforcement. So getting this crisis under control requires targeting that flow of drugs. That starts, of course, with securing our southern border so the cartels can't hide behind a flood of illegal immigration and so that the Border Patrol is free to focus on cross-border crime. In just a few short weeks, President Trump has made major progress on this front, dramatically slowing illegal crossings and taking significant steps to halt the flow of fentanyl across our borders. Now it is Congress's turn. The bill before us today, the HALT Fentanyl Act, would permanently classify fentanyl analogs--the fentanyl that cartels are making--as schedule I substances.…”