Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal is leading a bipartisan effort to fight what he calls “modern day slavery.”
Blumenthal has joined co-sponsors Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, Rep. John Carter, R-Texas, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., in introducing the Human Trafficking Reporting Act on Thursday.
The bill calls for human traffickers to be labeled under the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “Part I violent crimes.” The label would make human trafficking a major crime under the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. Murder, non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault are other crimes with a Part I designation.
Designating the crime as a Part I violent crime would also better equip law enforcement agencies to train officials to prevent human trafficking by opening up more grant funding opportunities.
Blumenthal has co-sponsored pieces legislation to fight human trafficking and violence against women in the past, and co-chairs the Senate Caucus to End Human Trafficking.
“Human trafficking is a heinous crime which egregiously exploits women and children and forces them into modern day slavery,” he said in a statement. “Trafficking deprives people of their liberty and freedom through indentured servitude and forced labor.”
Of the human trafficking cases opened by the U.S. Department of Justice between 2008 and 2010, 83 percent of them were U.S. citizens. In 2011, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline received 90 calls from Connecticut in relation to human trafficking.
“We must work together, at every level of government, to equip law enforcement with the tools they need to crack down on human traffickers,” said Cornyn.
A screen capture from the home page of the National Rifle Association’s lobbying arm taken Friday, March 1, 2013.
The National Rifle Association has more in common with the White House and Congress than you think.
Its switchboard has been overwhelmed since the Dec. 14 massacre at Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School.
So much so that the organization’s lobbying arm recorded this very telling greeting for its callers:
“Your call is very important to us. We are currently experiencing extremely high call volumes due to the recent attacks on our second amendment rights. Please be sure you contact your lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to express your opposition to these latest anti-gun proposals.”
The lobbying arm of the NRA keeps a report card for federal and state law makers on their Second Amendment positions. The information is available to members only.
Hearst Newspapers this week requested the grades for several state legislators in Connecticut as part of a survey on gun control measures.
Friday may not be doomsday after all. President Obama said as much in a press conference Friday, when he said the sequester is “not apocalypse” but “just dumb.” He said he could not do a “Jedi mind-meld” to convince Republican leaders to avoid it.
So Obama is not a Jedi but perhaps the White House has miscalculated the politics of the dreaded sequester, which promises to knock $85 billion out of domestic and defense discretionary spending, leaving entitlements — the key driver of chronic U.S. deficits — all but untouched. The cuts will total 5% to 6% of agency budgets, split between domestic and defense. Military personnel will not be affected.
Unlike a government shutdown, the cuts are spread over the rest of the year and won’t be noticeable for at least a month, making the administration’s, and the Pentagon’s, scary scenarios feel a lot less scary. The administration has backed off claims of airport delays, and its teacher furloughs were exposed as overblown.
Republicans have had a field day pointing out all the bloat that could stand a trim. Wall Street Journal editorialists have taken to calling the sequester Obamageddon: “And when the Republicans opened the seventh seal of the sequester, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black and the stars fell unto the Earth; and our nation’s ability to forecast severe weather, such as drought events, hurricanes and tornadoes, was seriously undermined. Lo, and the children were not vaccinated, and all the beasts starved in the zoos, and the planes were grounded.”
For Republicans, the sequester may be moving the party off its devotion to the Pentagon.
Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO), on Monday proposed a sequester alternative that would cut $500 billion from the Pentagon over 10 years, by cutting programs that contribute nothing to defense ($150 billion), cutting troops in Europe ($20 billion) and spending less on military bands ($1.8 billion — that’s a lot of bands).
Mark Lucas, an Army veteran who now runs the Iowa chapter of the conservative Americans for Prosperity, said he saw ample examples of waste during his 10 year service, backed up by GAO reports.
Lucas said many conservative activists tell him, “Oh, cutting defense, that’s a sacred lamb, oh, we can’t do that,” but he tells them: “Hey, I’m a conservative I’m a right winger, I’m a neocon, I love the Department of Defense, I love the military, but, we can’t afford this.”
Because personnel are off limits, the sequester will cut about 13% of the applicable Pentagon accounts, said Gordon Adams, a former budget chief for national security now at the Stimson Center. On a conference call Friday, Adams and Larry Korb, a former deputy defense secretary, said the Pentagon could more than stand this slimming down without affecting readiness or national security, despite what Pentagon chiefs say.
“This is an organization that has plans for invading Canada,” Korb said.
A senior staffer for Rep Jim Himes, D-CT4, confirmed late Wednesday that Himes will serve as finance chair for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the current election cycle.
The DCCC will make the announcement Thursday morning.
“As the Republican majority once again holds jobs, recovery, and the middle class hostage to extreme ideology, it is more important than ever that we fill the House with representatives who will eat, sleep, and breathe opportunity for their fellow Americans,” Himes said Wednesday night. “I’m thrilled to devote myself to that effort.”
The move confirms earlier media reports that Himes had interest in taking a DCCC leadership role.
Himes, currently in his third term, is well-positioned, given his financial-services connections, to be a significant fundraiser for Democrats.
The DCCC could not be reached for comment Wednesday night.
Continuing coverage of the Judiciary Committee’s hearing on Sen. Feinstein’s proposed assault-weapons ban:
The crowd at the hearing, boisterous at other times, was utterly hushed as Newtown’s Neil Heslin, father of 6-year-old Newtown victim Jesse Heslin, testified, the father’s grief pouring across the room like a tsunami wave. Most of the Republican members of the committee had left, the right side of the committee seating area conspicuously empty, but no one who was in the room could forget the father’s broken voice as he described saying goodbye to his son for the last time on the morning of last Dec. 14.
“It was 9:04 when I dropped him off with a hug and a kiss. ‘I love you and I love Mom too,’ he said to me. ‘Goodbye.’” And that was the last time I saw him, as he ducked around the corner.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (AFP photo)
“I remember the hug he gave me … he just held me, and he rubbed my back. … and Jesse said, ‘It’s going to be alright. Everything’s going to be okay, Dad.”
“He was six and a half. The day he was born was the happiest day of my life. The day he died was the saddest. … I was at that Sandy Hook firehouse until 1:30 in the morning — Sen. Blumenthal was there, Governor Malloy was there … that night I went home without my son to an empty house.”
“My son was brutally murdered,” he said tearfully. “He was the love of my life.”
“I fully support the Second Amendment,” he said. “(but) I had a little boy I devoted my life to.”
He said that Jesse was curious about guns — he’s gotten a BB gun the previous Christmas and Heslin had taught him gun safety — and the night before he died he was looking at a gun magazine.
Heslin said on one page was three pictures — one of a Bushmaster .223 semiautomatic rifle, one of a Glock and one of a Sig-Sauer — the three weapons Adam Lanza used the next day.
Heslin said that when he came to the Capitol Wednesday morning, he saw a guard with an assault weapon. “Protecting our Capitol, protecting us now,” he said. “But I can’t believe somebody could bring one of those into an elementary school.”
The second Newtown witness. Dr. William Begg, EMS Medical Director at Danbury Hospital and a Newtown resident, said he was at the hearing for one reason: My goal is to tell you that banning assault weapons will make a real difference.”
“What galls me,” Dr. Begg said, is when people say we should fix mental health before we ban weapons. “What programs get cut first? Mental health!” Begg said.
His voice hoarse with emotion, Begg said, that when you say assault weapons account for a small number of gun deaths, “Don’t tell that to the citizens of Newtown!” It produced a burst of applause.
“To the families of those who lost loved ones,” he said, his voice breaking, “on behalf of the ER, we tried our best.”
And to you lawmakers … please, make the right decision on the behalf of Newtown and Connecticut, and the United States.”
Continued coverage of the Judiciary Committee’s hearing on Sen. Feinstein’s proposed assault weapons ban:
Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, who have been conservative outliers on many issues in the opening days of this Congress, certainly voiced their opposition to an assault-weapons ban, but they showed the political acumen to be much more measured in their approach than, say, Cruz was in going after Chuck Hagel.
Cruz offered condolences to gun-violence victims present in a very carefully worded statement: “I’d like to express the deepest sympathy that law enforcement was not able to prevent” the tragedies.
He said forcefully, “We need to target our efforts at violent criminals. We should not target our efforts toward needlessly restricting” citizens’ rights.
Cornyn sounded much the same note, pointing out through questioning that 4 million “law-abiding citizens” will still have guns classified as “assault weapons” under the proposed ban.
“Call me skeptical,” Cornyn said, because “criminals will continue to get weapons.” He added, “Sixty thousand people killed in Mexico show that drug cartels are not stopped by weapons restrictions.”
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina started by saying, “To all the victims of these shootings, I don’t know what to say, except ‘I’m sorry.’” Then he took the gloves off.
He repeatedly, argumentatively, interrupted U.S. Attorney John Walsh as Walsh tried to point out that law-enforcement is not making cases against people who fail background checks. As Walsh kept trying to respond that Graham was missing the point, the audience erupted into applause, drawing an admonition from Feinstein, who had to be grateful nonetheless for the evidence of support.
Graham, unperturbed, said, “I would argue that the law is fundamentally broken, and we should start fixing the laws we have rather than expanding them.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., asked Walsh, “Could you describe for us the events in that movie theater in Aurora, and how they might have been different?”
Walsh replied that while he was limited by his role in what he could say since Aurora is an active case, “It is a matter of public record that a shooting that resulted in 12 dead and 58 wounded took place in a time of 90 seconds.” He added that the Newtown killings occurred in less than four minutes. He cited the Tucson, Ariz., event in which Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot, citing the fact the shooter was disarmed by heroic bystanders when he had to change magazines. Walsh posited the possibility that fewer people would have been shot if the shooter had not had a high-capacity 30-round magazine.
“There is no way we are going to prevent people from engaging in these sorts of attacks completely. What we can do by limiting and banning high-capacity magazines, is you can limit the damage and the tragedy these people cause.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s hearing on the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 opened solemnly, before a packed hearing room, many of the observers gun-violence victims and law-enforcement personnel from gun-tragedy locations.
Feinstein, flanked by a photo of the 26 Newtown victims, opened with a pointed reference to Newtown and the growing number of mass-casualty events over the past decade.
While Feinstein’s tone was dispassionate, her words about the urgent need for an assault weapons ban were certainly emphatic: “It is clear we need a national solution,” she said. She showed a SlideFire Solutions Inc. promotional video of their product, which turns a semiautomatic rifle into a near-machine gun. And she stressed that a ban on high-capacity magazines was a “crucial” part of the bill.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the ranking minority member of the committee, offered his condolences to the families of Newtown victims, but said “I happen to have a different view” about the assault weapons bill. He advocated improving the NICS database of non qualified shooters and mental-health services nationwide, but said he thought the AWB would be ineffective.
The first panel of witnesses, United States Attorney John Walsh of Colorado and Edward Flynn, Milwaukee police chief, spoke forcefully in support of limiting the access to assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Walsh said he hoped he would “never have another predawn phone call” like the one he got about the Aurora tragedy, and he said that while the Justice Department has not taken any position on the ban, it “strongly supports the goals” and “is confident that both the assault-weapons ban and the ban on high-capacity magazines” can be implemented constitutionally.
Flynn said America’s cities are experiencing “slow-motion mass murder every single year.”
“It’s time for Congress to pick a side,” Flynn said. “This time, I hope it’s the side of law enforcement.”
