Sen. Jeff Sessions

      As we reported in last week's FAX Alert (Vol. 6, No. 10), U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) chaired a hearing on Monday in the Senate Judiciary Committee's Youth Violence and Criminal Justice Oversight Subcommittees on the dramatic reduction in federal prosecutions of firearm-related offenses under the Clinton/Gore Administration. Sessions, a former federal prosecutor and Alabama attorney general, stated that such federal prosecutions have fallen 46% since 1992, when the current administration took office.

Sen. Arlen Specter

      As we predicted in last week's Alert, Clinton tried to preempt this criticism during his weekly Saturday radio address by using one of his favorite political tactics -- coopting popular, proven ideas, and trying to peddle them as his own. The President used his Saturday address to announce he was calling on the Justice and Treasury Departments to work together with local, state, and federal law enforcement officials to increase the prosecution of firearm-related offenses, specifically singling out the program that NRA has been promoting for some time -- Project Exile. Also predictable was his complete omission of any mention of NRA's support of this program, which has included financial assistance while Clinton's budget proposal for FY 2000 capped expenditures on such programs at $5 million. NRA's frequent requests of the White House to promote Project Exile had been repeatedly ignored, so one can only assume that when Clinton realized that another failure of his administration was about to be exposed in Senate hearings, his only option was to reverse his position and try to hijack Project Exile as his own.

Sen. Strom Thurmond

      During the hearings, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) stated that he and Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) would seek to expand the funding for Project Exile tenfold beyond what President Clinton has called for, and Thursday, he followed through with his pledge. The President's budget for expanding Project Exile was approximately $5 million, indicating that the support for this program was half-hearted at best. Specter, on the other hand, has secured $50 million to be earmarked for the program to expand into America's top 25 high-crime cities. The Specter amendment passed on a simple voice vote, showing strong, bipartisan support for this important crime-fighting program.