News from Congressman Andy Biggs | |||||||
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The Week in Review Happy Friday! I hope you had a wonderful week. I am grateful to serve you all in the 118th Congress. Read below to see what I’ve been working on this week. Opposing House Republican Leadership's Debt Ceiling Increase Proposal I voted against House Republican Leadership’s paltry debt ceiling legislation titled the Limit, Save, Grow Act. This legislation would raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion or through March 31, 2024, whichever comes first, while failing to address or reduce our $31.4 trillion national debt. Click the topics below to see some of my explainer videos: Introducing Legislation to Protect Responsible Homeowners from Increased Fees I introduced the Responsible Borrowers Protection Act. This legislation would block the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)’s increased Loan-Level Price Adjustment (LLPA) fees on mortgage borrowers with higher credit scores announced on January 19, 2023. The new FHFA fees will subsidize mortgage borrowers with lower credit scores beginning on May 1, 2023. The FHFA—led by a President Biden-appointed director—is punishing financially responsible mortgage borrowers. Their agenda of equity over equality defies common sense and will endanger the stability of the housing market. I hear regularly from constituents about the high cost of housing, which has been exacerbated by the insane interest rates imposed to combat Biden’s skyrocketing inflation. If implemented, the latest FHFA fee change could result in thousands of dollars in additional fees for lower-risk homeowners over time, while encouraging and rewarding financial irresponsibility. My legislation prohibits the new fees from going into effect and I’m grateful for the support of more than 30 of my House Republican colleagues. House Judiciary Subcommittee Hearing on FISA Abuse I led the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance hearing on Fixing FISA: How a Law Designed to Protect Americans Has Been Weaponized Against Them. House Judiciary Committee Hearing on ATF Overreach The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on overseeing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). House Oversight & Accountability Committee Hearing on Eliminating Government Waste, Fraud, and Abuse The House Oversight & Accountability held a hearing titled The Government Accountability Office’s 2023 High Risk List. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), numerous federal programs are currently susceptible to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement and cost taxpayers roughly $250 billion annually. That’s unacceptable. House Judiciary Subcommittee Hearing on Unaccompanied Minor Children at the Border The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement held a hearing titled The Biden Border Crisis: Exploitation of Unaccompanied Alien Children. 2023 Congressional Art Competition Results The 2023 Congressional Art Competition is now wrapped up and I am pleased to announce this year’s winners: Passport Tips from Congressman Biggs Planning international travel this spring or summer? Don’t wait to update your passport! The U.S. State Department currently takes 8-11 weeks to process passport applications and recommends you submit your application 4 to 6 months before your travel date. Check out these useful passport tips below. There are several small details that you may not know of! Coming Soon: Drop Zone 2023 My annual Drop Zone event is coming up! Drop Zone 2023 will occur on Saturday, May 13 from 10am to 2pm at the American Leadership Academy, Applied Technologies Campus, located at 7729 East Pecos Rd, Mesa, AZ 85212. Next Event: Military Service Academy Want to learn more about military service and career opportunities? Join me and Rep. Eli Crane from Arizona’s Second District on May 6 (next Saturday) to learn more. Details below! Legislation and Letters Legislation sponsored:
Legislation cosponsored: Letters cosigned: Alien Invasion Border Documentary Check out my border documentary titled Alien Invasion. The 30-minute documentary features footage from private ranches along the border, the Darien Gap in Panama, and interviews with members of Congress, Border Patrol, local and state law enforcement, and much more. It addresses how President Biden’s border crisis began, its consequences, and solutions to address the crisis. Top Media Appearances of the Week I joined Fox News’ Harris Faulkner to discuss the issues surrounding House Leadership’s debt ceiling proposal, the Limit, Save, Grow Act. Click below to watch some of the segment. I joined War Room’s Steve Bannon to provide my reaction to the House passage of the Limit, Save, Grow Act and why it is a big letdown for Americans. Click below to watch some of the segment. I joined KFYI-AM’s (Phoenix, AZ) Russell & Hunter to highlight the Biden family’s corrupt finances and ties to China. Click below to hear some of the segment. What's the Biggs Idea Podcast w/ Alex Epstein Alex Epstein joined me this week on my What’s the Biggs Idea? podcast. Alex is an author, and commentator who advocates for the expansion of fossil fuels. He is the founder and president of the Center for Industrial Progress, a for-profit organization in San Diego, California. He is the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (2014), and Fossil Future (2022), in which he argues for the expanded use of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas. We discussed these exact topics and debunked myths from climate alarmists. We’ll be posting more episodes soon. Check out our social media pages for updates. Tweets of the Week Constituent Services Flags Tours and Tickets Interested in touring the White House or U.S. Capitol? As constituents of the Fifth Congressional District, you may request tickets and tours for various Washington D.C. destinations from my office.
In an unprecedented move this week, Fox News terminated its prime-time host Tucker Carlson. For years, Tucker Carlson dominated both Fox News and cable television news programming with impressive viewership and ratings.
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Monday, May 01, 2023
The 'What's the Biggs Idea' podcast is live with Utah State Treasurer Marlo Oaks (26:48)
Crimea Revenge, Russian missiles hit weapons supplies for NATO and Ukrainian
WATCH THIS: A Conversation with Trevor Noah and Melinda French Gates
VIDEO FROM SPACE:See SpaceX deploy 3 satellites post-Falcon Heavy launch
AMERICA 2023: Fearful & Trigger-Happy | Ramon Antonio Vargas, writing in The Guardian
‘Fearful and trigger happy’: flooded with guns and paranoia, the US reels from shootings
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"Waldes Thomas and Diamond Darville were driving for the grocery delivery service Instacart near Miami in mid-April when they drove the order up to the wrong address.
Thomas, 19, and Darville, 18, reportedly told authorities they were backing away from the home when the owner emerged with his son, grabbed on to the driver’s window and fired a gun three times at their car. Antonio Caccavale, who didn’t hit anyone, later reportedly claimed to police who investigated the encounter that he shot because he feared for his and his son’s lives as Thomas and Darville’s car ran over his foot and struck a boulder.
Eventually, police concluded everyone – including Caccavale – acted “justifiably based on the circumstances they perceived”, leading to no arrests.
It remains to be seen whether the police’s interpretation of the case is the final word on the matter. A local prosecutor told ABC News in a statement that he would evaluate whether Caccavale should be charged, adding that “the safety of the entire Instacart community is incredibly important” to his office.
Nonetheless, that case, along with a spate of recent shootings across the country which victimized Americans who approached property owners by mistake or for an otherwise innocent reason, did not only vividly illustrate how the US is flooded with guns. It all also showed how people who are made paranoid by the nation’s bitter political climate believe they can use guns with impunity thanks to firearms laws and self-defense statutes that in many states are remarkably permissive, according to experts who spoke with the Guardian this week.
“A lot of people who shouldn’t have guns, who don’t need them, who don’t know how to use them safely … are fearful and trigger happy,” said the president of Global Action on Gun Violence, Jonathan Lowy. “And it’s inevitable that that will lead to tragedies like we’re seeing.”
In a speech on the legislative floor, the Democratic Connecticut US senator Chris Murphy added: “Gun murders are now just the way in which we work out our frustrations. This is a dystopia … that we’ve chosen for ourselves.”
A Harvard University study from 2016 found “there is no good evidence” that using a firearm in purported self-defense reduces the likelihood of injury.
The study’s author, David Hemenway, found some evidence that having a gun for such a purpose may reduce the likelihood of property loss. “But the evidence is equally compelling that having another weapon, such as [pepper spray] or a baseball bat, will also reduce the likelihood of property loss,” Hemenway has said.
Nonetheless, US gun manufacturers have been able to sell their products briskly – some experts estimate there are more than 400m firearms circulating across the country, whose population is about 332 million. Experts say gun manufacturers have done that by collectively convincing buyers that having a firearm is both a constitutional right as well as an effective tool to help them ward off potential danger, playing up the worst-case scenarios that few people are statistically likely to experience but which receive disproportionate attention from media outlets and political partisans.
“The narrative that has been pushed by the gun industry and many politicians [is] that a person needs to be armed at all times everywhere or else they are going to get murdered by the boogeyman,” said Allison Anderman, the Giffords Law Center’s senior counsel and director of local policy.
Most US states now allow residents to carry around a concealed gun without a permit that would typically require some level of training to get, even as a pro-gun, self-defense expert like the author Paxton Quigley says such instruction is essential to be a responsible firearm owner.
“There are very good courses out there that will explain … when you can shoot a gun and if you should shoot it under certain circumstances,” said Quigley, adding that she began carrying a gun on her after her friend was raped. “But a lot of people will just go to a gun store, say ‘that’s a cute gun’, pick it up, see they can handle it and off they go.”
Meanwhile, at least 28 American states, along with the territory of Puerto Rico, permit people to resort to meet an aggressor with deadly force without being required to try to retreat as long as they are lawfully in that place, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Information from the conference adds that at least 10 states mention the right for a person to “stand his or her ground” – including Florida, where the Instacart delivery pair were shot at.
To many experts, the inevitable outcome of those realties is a quick-trigger culture exposed internationally by a hellacious, two-week stretch that more or less began with the 13 April shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl. Yarl was shot and injured in Kansas City, Missouri, by a man whose doorbell he rang after going to the wrong address to pick up his siblings.
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Kaylin Gillis, 20, was shot dead two days later in upstate New York when the car she was riding in pulled into the driveway of a wrong address. Three days after that, high school cheerleaders Payton Washington and Heather Roth were shot in Elgin, Texas, after practice when Roth inadvertently almost got into a car that strongly resembled her vehicle but was actually the shooter’s.
The same day as the cheerleaders’ shooting in Texas, six-year-old Kinsley White and her parents were allegedly shot by a neighbor in Gastonia, North Carolina, after a basketball that the child was playing with rolled into the attacker’s yard. And in Illinois, on Tuesday, police accused a man of shooting his neighbor, 59-year-old William Martys, to death 13 days earlier while Martys used a leaf blower in his own yard.
The shootings of Yarl, Gillis, Washington, Roth, White, her parents and Martys have all led to arrests, but it remains to be seen whether their accused attackers are convicted. For instance, in 2013 and 2021 in Florida and Wisconsin, respectively, juries acquitted George Zimmerman of murdering Trayvon Martin and Kyle Rittenhouse of murdering Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber after claiming that they shot in self-defense.
Rodney Peairs was acquitted in Louisiana in 1993 of committing manslaughter when he shot Yoshihiro Hattori to death after claiming that he feared for his, his wife’s and their child’s lives when the 16-year-old Japanese exchange student mistakenly knocked on his door during the previous Halloween while looking for a party.
State legislatures and the US federal government could at least limit the chances of cases like these unfolding if they enacted measures that “separated people who are not responsible gun owners from their guns”, Mike Lawlor, a criminal justice professor at Connecticut’s University of New Haven, said.
While a member of Connecticut’s legislature in 1999, Lawlor authored the first of the nation’s “red-flag” laws, which enable courts to be petitioned to allow police to confiscate weapons from a person who is judged to be dangerous to themselves or others. The state five years earlier had banned assault-style weapons.
And after an intruder at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook elementary school shot 20 children and six adults dead in 2012, Lawlor said the state enacted even more restrictive gun laws, including prohibiting high-capacity ammunition magazines, requiring permits to purchase firearms and bullets, and outlawing the public carrying of loaded rifles.
The fact that people can go to many other states to circumvent those restrictions stop a place like Connecticut from getting the full benefit of that legislative work, said Anderman, adding that it’d be more effective if Congress passed more substantial federal gun control.
Nonetheless, Lawlor said he firmly believes that legislation is why Connecticut and states that have sought to build similar systems – including New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts – consistently have firearm death rates ranking among the lowest in the US, though they are higher than many other places around the globe where guns aren’t so culturally or legally entrenched.
“As long as there are more guns in circulation in this country than there are responsible gun owners, public policy … has got to narrow that gap,” Lawlor said.
On Friday, a day after Lawlor made that remark to the Guardian, Colorado’s governor signed four gun control bills as the state continued its attempt to reckon with its long history of mass gun violence, including the killings of people at an LGBTQ+ nightclub last fall.
Sunday, April 30, 2023
"A dirty trick in New York City? I’m so shocked,” Former New York City mayor reveals voter suppression tactics from 1993 election to Steve Bannon and Kari Lake
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AFormer New York City mayor reveals voter suppression tactics from 1993 election to Steve Bannon and Kari Lake
Giuliani admits using ‘dirty trick’ to suppress Hispanic vote in mayoral race
Former New York City mayor reveals voter suppression tactics from 1993 election to Steve Bannon and Kari Lake
Sat 29 Apr 2023 03.00 EDT
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has admitted to a “dirty trick” that his campaign used to suppress the Hispanic vote during the city’s 1993 mayoral race.
On Tuesday, Giuliani revealed his voter suppression tactics to the far-right Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon and Arizona’s defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake during a discussion on his America’s Mayor Live program.
In the conversation, Giuliani – who was central to Trump’s efforts to subvert the result of the 2020 presidential election – lamented that he had been “cheated” during the 1989 mayoral race in which he lost before explaining his 1993 campaign strategy, saying: “I’ll tell you one little dirty trick,” to which Lake replied: “We need dirty tricks!”
“A dirty trick in New York City? I’m so shocked,” Bannon sarcastically responded.
Giuliani then interrupted the former Trump adviser, saying: “No, played by Republicans!”
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“Republicans don’t do dirty
tricks,” Bannon said before Giuliani enthusiastically said: “How about
this one?” Bannon replied: “Okay give it to me.”Giuliani explained that he spent $2m to set up a so-called Voter Integrity Committee which was headed by Randy Levine, current president of the New York Yankees baseball team, and John Sweeney, a former New York Republican congressman.
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“So they went through East Harlem, which is all Hispanic, and they gave out little cards, and the card said: ‘If you come to vote, make sure you have your green card because INS are picking up illegals.’ So they spread it all over the Hispanic …” said Giuliani, referring to the now defunct US Immigration and Naturalization Service before trailing off.
“Oh my gosh,” Lake replied as she raised her eyebrows. . ."
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Rudy Giuliani Admits To ‘Dirty Trick’ That Suppressed Hispanic Vote In NYC Mayor’s Race
During a podcast with former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani admitted to using a “dirty trick” that aimed to suppress Hispanic voters in New York City during his 1993 mayoral campaign.
Bannon and Lake laughed along awkwardly as Giuliani described the tactic, which he said spurred a Justice Department investigation and would likely be subject to prosecution today.
The discussion occurred on Giuliani’s “America’s Mayor Live” program on Tuesday night. (Video below.)
After complaining, as he has for years, that he’d been “cheated” when he lost New York City’s 1989 mayoral race, Giuliani recalled spending $2 million on a “Voter Integrity Committee” for his next campaign in 1993. He ultimately beat then-incumbent Mayor David Dinkins by around 53,000 votes.
When Giuliani first raised the scheme, Bannon sarcastically replied, “A dirty trick in New York City? I’m so shocked.”
Giuliani enthusiastically cut him off. “No, played by Republicans!” he said before explaining more.
“Republicans don’t do dirty tricks,” Bannon protested before Giuliani continued, “Well, how about this one?”
“So they went through East Harlem, which is all Hispanic, and they gave out little cards, and the card said, ‘If you come to vote, make sure you have your green card because INS are picking up illegals.’ So they spread it all over the Hispanic...” Giuliani trailed off after Lake exclaimed, “Oh my gosh.”
INS, or the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, was the immigration enforcement agency precursor to various agencies now housed within the Department of Homeland Security.
Giuliani then described how he’d heard from his attorney that the Justice Department, then run by Attorney General Janet Reno, was investigating the scheme for potential civil rights violations.
Giuliani said he told his lawyer, Dennison Young, not to worry because “What civil rights do we violate? They don’t have civil rights! All we did is prevent people who can’t vote from voting. Maybe we tricked them, but tricking is not a crime.”
Nowadays, the former Trump lawyer and New York City mayor acknowledged, he might face prosecution for the suppression tactic. “And that’s the way we kept down the Hispanic vote,” he concluded.
At that point, Lake butted in to clarify: “Not the legal vote, the illegal vote.”
“Of course!” Giuliani replied. “The Hispanic illegal vote, which takes away the Hispanic legal vote.”
Giuliani said Randy Levine, now president of the Yankees, and John Sweeney, a former U.S. congressman, led his “Voter Integrity Committee.”
Sweeney called Giuliani’s claims “nonsense” and said he and Levine ran a “legitimate” operation.
Levine, in a phone call Thursday, acknowledged that he and Sweeney ran Giuliani’s voter integrity team, describing it as focused on “getting poll watchers and attorneys when there was a dispute.”
However, he said, he had “no knowledge” of the scheme Giuliani described on the podcast and that the voter integrity unit had nothing to do with it.
“My only knowledge was what was in the news back then and shortly after 1993,” Levine said. “I was never contacted by the Justice Department on this investigation because it was clear it did not come out of our operation.”
News reports and a government press release from the time roughly line up with Giuliani’s claims.
The New York Times, announcing Giuliani’s election win, noted that Dinkins had called a noon news conference on Election Day to accuse his opponent of “voter intimidation and dirty tricks,” including the charge that pro-Dinkins posters in English and Spanish were put up in Washington Heights and the Bronx. According to the article, the posters “suggested that illegal immigrants would be arrested at the polls and deported if they tried to vote.”
Giuliani said at the time the allegation had “nothing to do with my campaign,” the Times reported.
New York City Mayor David Dinkins gives his concession speech on Nov. 3, 1993, after narrowly losing to Rudy Giuliani.
A press release from that Election Day from James P. Turner, then the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration Justice Department, said the department was aware of “posters … placed throughout New York City misinforming voters about the role of Federal officials in today’s elections.”
The release encouraged voters to ignore the posters and stressed that no immigration officials were at polling places and that federal observers “are not there to enforce immigration laws,” but rather, to protect the rights of minority voters. The release also stated that the department would be investigating the posters and “allegations that individuals are intimidating and harassing voters at polling places.”
A few days after Election Day, The Washington Post reported that the Justice Department was probing complaints about efforts to suppress the vote in Democratic-leaning minority neighborhoods in New York City.
Posted: 4 days ago
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