John Cornyn: “Yesterday, I introduced my amendment to the pending Commerce-Justice appropriations bill, and I would like to briefly…”

“Yesterday, I introduced my amendment to the pending Commerce-Justice appropriations bill, and I would like to briefly explain this amendment for my colleagues. This amendment is designed to basically cut off any future funds that might be made available under this appropriations bill to fund the Department of Justice's program now notoriously known as Fast and Furious. This would prohibit the taxpayer funding of operations where Federal law enforcement personnel knowingly cause the transfer of firearms to drug cartel agents and intentionally fail to monitor those weapons. On December 14, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was gunned down on the southern border while attempting to apprehend members of a predatory criminal gang that operated in Arizona's Peck Canyon. A congressional investigation and several news reports have confirmed that some of the guns used in that attack actually came from gun dealers in the United States, and the guns were actually put in the hands of the agents of the cartels and allowed to cross the border with the full knowledge of officials associated with the U.S. Government, most notably the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona, although it is unknown at this point how far up in the chain of command knowledge of this program went. But that is another story for another time.…”