EXECUTIVE CALENDAR--Continued
Floor Speech
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Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, 3 days ago, I came to the floor and spoke in honor of the life of Tyler Herndon, a Mount Holly, NC, police officer who lost his life just days before his 26th birthday last week. He was laid to rest this week.
Now 5 days after his murder and 3 days after my remarks, I am devastated to report that another officer in North Carolina has lost his life in the line of duty. Wednesday night, the Concord Police Department received a call about a crashed, abandoned car on I-85 just outside of Charlotte. Responding officers were alerted that the suspect had attempted to steal a woman's car while she was still in it.
Officers Jason Shuping and Kaleb Robinson tracked and identified the suspect on foot. As they approached the suspect, he pulled out a handgun, and he shot both of these brave officers. Tragically, Officer Shuping died at the scene. Thankfully, Officer Robinson is recovering at the hospital. Officer Shuping was just 25 years old--the same age as the officer we memorialized this week, Tyler Herndon.
I am just devastated by this. These brave officers had begun their careers in law enforcement and had nowhere to go but up. They were serving our community, and they were doing it with honor.
We talk a lot about the sacrifice given by law enforcement officers who day in and day out are serving our communities and putting themselves in harm's way, and it is dispiriting to think that these fallen officers, at the very beginning of their careers, have already made the ultimate sacrifice in the name of public safety and community safety.
Families in North Carolina and in each of our States are about to endure their first Christmas without their loved ones. We owe so much to these families whose parents, spouses, siblings, children, and grandchildren have given everything in the line of duty.
On Tuesday, when I spoke on Officer Herndon, I said that in the next Congress, I would be moving forward with the Protect and Serve Act again. This act increases penalties for people who murder or assault police officers. But in light of another police officer's death--the second one in a week in North Carolina, in the suburbs, just around the corner from where I live, 10 or 15 minutes away--I think we have to elevate the discussion now and send a very clear message to those who would harm police officers that if you do, then there are going to be dire consequences to pay for it. We owe it to the police officers to let them know that Congress cares about them. We should send this message.
This is a simple bill. It only focuses on those who are so brazen that they would murder a police officer in the line of duty, assault them, ambush them--all the things you have seen; now 48 murders in this year alone.
The best thing we can do is to pass this commonsense legislation and send a message to these people who are taking away the men and women serving our communities.
4605 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
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Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I am obviously disappointed in the objection from my friend and colleague from Illinois, but I do believe that we have to start recognizing that something bad is happening--48 murders, hundreds of assaults, ambushes, premeditated attacks.
I do understand the idea that maybe you could prosecute it through existing law, your Federal or State law, but we have an epidemic of ``abolish the police, defund the police,'' marginalizing the police, that suggests to me that even if there are pathways now to properly prosecute these brazen criminals, we have to cut through some of the rhetoric that, honestly, I believe is the responsibility for some of these unprecedented numbers of murders and assaults.
So although I am disappointed with the objection today, I look forward to working with my colleague on the Judiciary and others to do everything we can to pass the Protect and Serve Act and to send a very clear message to these increasingly less safe communities and more threatened law enforcement officers that we are going to do everything we can to make our communities safe and to make a police officer's job as safe as it can be.
Thank you.
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