Defunding the police, taxpayer-funded elections, restricting Second Amendment rights, and a massive partisan spending package disguised as coronavirus relief. These are the bills the House of Representatives have prioritized this year. The one thing they all have in common is throughout the drafting of the bills or debate on the floor, not a single Republican idea or amendment was allowed. What’s more, with the exception of the stimulus bill, it extremely unlikely that any of these bills can pass the Senate and become law. So why are they doing this? Because in January, House Democrats passed a rule that allows them to skip the committee process, where bipartisan consensus is often found, and send bills straight to the floor for a vote until April 1st. And in order to receive enough votes for the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that has next to nothing to do with COVID, the Speaker had to promise her members votes on some of their most radical ideas.

Last week, one of those promises was carried out. After a year of calls from anti-law enforcement groups, Democrats passed a bill that would actually defund the police. The bill, call the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, would force police departments to comply with new regulations that will cost them hundreds of millions of dollars without providing any funding for them to do so. The new cost is equivalent to the salary of 3,000 police officers, meaning less law enforcement patrolling our communities and higher crime rates. This ties directly to the backward thinking that less arrests means less crime. That couldn’t be further from the truth.  Most of us agree that less police officers with less resources only puts our law enforcement in even greater danger and makes our neighborhoods less safe.

If that wasn’t enough, this week the House passed two bills that would limit a law abiding citizen’s ability to buy a gun. If they became law, these bills would criminalize activities that are common practices among law abiding gun owners and create arbitrary delays on background checks, hindering millions of Americans’ Second Amendment right to defend themselves and their families. Taking law enforcement officers off our streets and making it difficult to exercise Second Amendment rights is not only irresponsible, it’s downright dangerous. 

Another Democrat priority has been a federal takeover of our elections. The bill Democrats passed last week contains provisions that would severely compromise election integrity nationwide like outlawing voter ID, legalizing ballot harvesting, and – if you can believe it – allowing federal tax dollars to fund political campaigns. According to the bill, for every dollar a politician raises, the federal government would give their campaign six dollars. I’m not joking.  The Democrats’ bill includes a 6-to-1 federal match of campaign donations. So, if a candidate raised $100,000 dollars for their campaign, the federal government would then give that campaign an additional $600,000. Democrats named this bill the “For the People Act.” I’m not sure which “people” want their tax dollars given to political campaigns by the government, but I certainly haven’t met any.

And finally, earlier this week Democrats passed the $1.9 trillion “rescue package” that President Biden will sign into law. Rather than working with Republicans to put to use the $1 trillion in unspent funding from bipartisan relief measures Congress has already passed, Democrats put together a new massive package – only 9% of which is actually dedicated to COVID relief. It gives mismanaged blue states who unnecessarily shutdown their economies a $350 billion bailout, punishing states like Missouri who handled the pandemic responsibly for doing things right. The education funding in the bill does nothing to help kids get back in school, as only 5% of the education funding will be spent this year despite the desperate need to return in-person learning. And while falsely claiming it as a COVID response bill, it actually will cut Medicare for Missouri’s seniors by $8.3 billion. Again, this is hard to believe, but according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the new law will cut roughly $480 billion from Medicare over the next ten years. As if the horrible treatment of seniors in retirement homes in states like New York wasn’t enough, they are taking hundreds of billions out of Medicare in order to fund things like: $50 million to Planned Parenthood, a $270 million endowment for the arts and humanities, $200 million for museum and library services, $1 billion for Amtrak, and $350 billion for blue state governments. This isn’t emergency relief; this is a liberal to-do list and I was proud to vote against this egregious waste of taxpayer dollars.

With great power comes great responsibility, and Congressional Democrats seem to be squandering it. Rather than working with Republicans to find commonsense solutions and compromise, they are pandering to the far-left and trying to score political points. We desperately need to get all K-12 students back in school, distribute the vaccine to everyone who wants it, and help American businesses thrive to get our economy humming along again. So far, none of those have made it on the Speaker’s priority list, but I will keep working with anyone who will join me to accomplish the goals that actually matter to you and our community.