Anniversary of January 6
Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, a year ago today, we witnessed one of the worst assaults on our democracy in living memory. For those of us who were in the Chamber--that includes virtually every Senator--there are images which are emblazoned in our memory. Mine, like others, was of a Vice President sitting, where you are sitting, who shortly after 2 p.m. in the afternoon was pulled off of the dais by two of his security detail and hurried out that door. It is an unusual thing to happen under any circumstances, but while we were counting the electoral college returns, it was amazing and unprecedented.
Then they came up and the Capitol Police instructed us: Stay at your desk. This is going to be a secure room. We are going to start bringing in all the staff, and they will be lining the walls here. We will keep you safe.
Well, we all sat there in anticipation of the next thing to happen and, not 10 minutes later, another Capitol policeman came up and said: That last directive is off. Evacuate this body, this room, as quickly and orderly as possible.
And we all started piling out the doors. As we left and went down the exit stairways just outside the doors of this Chamber, I looked out the window and saw a sea of Trump signs converging on the Capitol. It was an image I won't forget.
We went to what we considered to be a safe location and witnessed over television what most of America was watching.
How serious was it? Well, one misguided soul, a Republican Congressman from Georgia, said it was just a group of tourists-- tourists--in the Capitol.
Yesterday, the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland, had a press conference and remarked on the first anniversary of January 6. And among the things he said was this: All of the investigations--the criminal investigations of what happened that day-- have disclosed some horrible things: evidence of perpetrators punching dozens of law enforcement officers, knocking them unconscious. Some perpetrators tackled and dragged law enforcement officers. Among the many examples of such violence, one officer was crushed in a door, another was dragged down a set of stairs facedown, repeatedly tased and beaten, and suffered a heart attack.
Some perpetrators attacked law enforcement officers with chemical agents, burning their eyes and skins. We saw it--didn't we?--spraying the bear spray in the faces of these officers.
Some assaulted officers with pipes and poles and other dangerous and deadly weapons. Perpetrators targeted, assaulted, tackled, and harassed journalists, destroying their equipment, and that launched the most comprehensive and perhaps largest criminal prosecution in the history of this Nation.
According to the Attorney General, 725 individuals have been charged with a Federal crime, and 145 pled guilty already to Federal misdemeanors. Over 325 have been charged with felonies, many for assaulting officers and many for corruptly obstructing or attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. Twenty defendants charged with felonies have already pled guilty, and the investigation continues.
They talked about the assistance they received: over 300,000 tips from ordinary citizens to help our government bring to justice those responsible for January 6. I say that because I listened in disbelief to the polling data which suggests that it really wasn't an attack on the Capitol; it was only a visit of tourists who were in an orderly fashion visiting this building. The videos don't lie. The facts are the facts.
Individuals are paying a criminal price, and their lives will be changed because of their bad decisions to leave the Trump rally and follow his instructions to come up to this building. That is the reality of what happened that day.
But the grimmest reality was the death of five of our law enforcement officials, who have been named and should be named every time we stand on this floor--Officer Brian Sicknick, Officer Howard Liebengood, Officer Jeffrey Smith, Officer Gunther Hashida, and Officer Kyle DeFreytag--and 140 other law enforcement officials who were assaulted, many of them seriously, and are still paying the price for that day in their lives when they stood in defense of us, in defense of this building.
That is the reality, and if nothing more comes of this speech, commemoration today, I hope that all of us, regardless of our political persuasion--the most conservative Republican to the most progressive Democrat, Independents in between; Black, White, and Brown; men and women; rural, urban across America, will finally come to agreement on one thing: Violence has no place in a democracy.
Those who resort to violence, wherever they fit on the political spectrum, do not fit on that spectrum, do not belong in this country. And what we saw a year ago today was violence unbridled, violence provoked by a former President of the United States, and many innocent people paid a price.
I listened as the President and Vice President spoke this morning in Statuary Hall. It was a somber and meaningful occasion, as they talked about what was at stake on January 6 and the challenge we face today. And I thought for a moment what a difference it would have made, in fact, as the President spoke, if Republican and Democratic leaders stood by his side, but that was not to be the case.
You see, when the proposal was made for a bipartisan commission of Democrats and Republicans--commissions we have seen in the past, from 9/11 and other events that marked our history--that was stopped by Senator McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, by the threat of a filibuster.
He wouldn't agree to a bipartisan commission to look into the origins of January 6 and what we need to do to avoid them in the future. So I want to salute Speaker Pelosi for organizing a bipartisan committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, who is investigating this matter.
I want to salute my fellow Congressman from Illinois, Adam Kinzinger, who has had the courage to step forward and be part of it, as well as Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming and the Democrats who are part of that effort. They are serving this Nation as they should: bringing forth the facts, fighting the resistance from those who don't want to tell the truth.
But there is more that we must do. It has been mentioned several times and bears repeating: What is happening across America since January 6 is equally alarming to this assault on the Capitol, and that is the effort by dozens of States across the Nation to restrict Americans' right to vote.
To think of it, in that last election in 2020, we had the largest turnout in the history of the United States to cast votes in the Presidential election, and the response by so many of these States controlled by Republican legislatures is to try to do their best to make sure that never happens again; to restrict the opportunity to vote for eligible Americans, when we should be doing just the opposite.
I have won elections, and I have lost elections. As long as they were fair elections, I accepted the results, and they all were. I was lucky. Sometimes, I won; sometimes, I lost. But I felt at the end of the day that they were fair elections. We should feel the same way about the election that occurred the year before last, in 2020, with the election of Joe Biden as President of the United States.
It was a fair election. It has been certified. I marvel at my colleagues on the Republican side who come to the floor and say we have no right to tell these States what their laws should be when it comes to elections.
This little booklet is in each of our desks. I would commend to my colleagues, particularly on the Republican side, to consider opening it and consider reading article I, section 4. I would like to read into the Record: ``The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.''
And you go further in and read the Bill of Rights and the amendments to the Constitution. And then Amendment 15 says:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2 of the amendment says:
The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
And yet Republican after Republican comes to the floor and questions how we can have the audacity to suggest that we are establishing standards so eligible voters across this country have an opportunity to vote.
It is our constitutional responsibility to do it, and simply making that eligibility turn into an actual exercise of that right is consistent with our democracy.
I know other colleagues are here to speak today. I will close by saying this: What brought that mob to this Capitol was the inspiration of a former President, who provoked them, incited them, and turned them loose on this building, and now, we are led to believe that he sat back and watched on television, as the events unfolded, doing nothing--not picking up the phone, not calling on anyone to stop the violence, to stop the bloodshed, to stop the death that took place in this Capitol. He did nothing for hours until, finally, enough forces came in to reclaim this building.
When I saw the images, the photographs, and the videos of people who were clowning in this Chamber, posing for photographs, going through my desk and other desks, and others taking photographs with their phones, sitting in that chair to pose for pictures to send back home, it makes me sick to my stomach. This is a sacred place. It is not sacred because I serve here or anyone else does. It is sacred because it was built to be a symbol of this great Nation.
It was during the administration of a man from Illinois named Lincoln, who completed the Capitol dome in the midst of a Civil War so that this building would always be a symbol of the unity of our Nation and the promise of our Nation.
That symbol was desecrated on January 6. And now, the question arises: Will we summon the courage to come together and lead to extend the opportunity to vote to more and more Americans, to make this democracy more complete and more just? Or will we step back and accept the verdict of history that we are going to go back in time instead of forward as a Nation?
I trust we will move forward. These American people are great people. Regardless of their political persuasion, they have one abiding knowledge, and that is the fact that we are blessed to live in this country, and we each bear a responsibility to its future.
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