Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., is unveiling a new set of bills that could have child sexual predators facing the death penalty.
“If you are raping someone, if you’re molesting someone, you are essentially murdering their soul. Those people never actually fully recover. I’ve actually sat on a committee with a very prominent [female House Democrat] who actually talked about the fact that she was molested as a child. And so you can see that it impacts and really hurts people,” Luna said.
Two of her three bills, all of which are being introduced in the 119th Congress on Tuesday, would require sentences of death or at least life imprisonment for those charged with a wide range of crimes related to children.
A third bill would require guilty verdicts of rape and sexual abuse against adults to carry a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years to life in prison.
Luna told Fox News Digital she broached the topic with President-elect Donald Trump over the weekend, who she suggested was enthusiastic about the idea.
“I got the impression that he absolutely is supportive of anything in this sector,” Luna said.
The Florida congresswoman was among the members of the House Freedom Caucus who met with Trump over the weekend at Mar-a-Lago.
She said they also discussed Trump potentially signing an executive order levying the death penalty for pedophilia-related crimes but that it would likely be impossible to accomplish that way.
“He would be willing to sign an [executive order]. But the fact is, is that it has to go through Congress first. So it would have to come to his desk that way,” she said.
Luna first introduced the bills in the last Congress when Democrats controlled half of Congress as well as the White House. They failed to get much traction, however, and ultimately never saw a House-wide vote.
She suggested that the death penalty aspect could have put some people off of an issue that otherwise could get wide bipartisan support, but she argued that child predators “cannot be rehabilitated.”
“If you are going to continue to push forward in a moral society, [then] you need to ensure that people like this, that are predators, are taken off the streets permanently,” Luna said.
