Establishing the Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I will join the gentleman from Texas in expressing my anger and disgust at the cowardly attack on the former President in Butler, Pennsylvania, a couple of weekends ago. What happened at that rally was horrific and un-American.

When the news first broke, my thoughts immediately turned to the former President's family, and the uncertainty and fear they must have felt. Our families are often the ones who shoulder the burden of the decisions we make, and I know that must have been an awful day for them.

I am truly grateful that the former President is okay. I am also heartbroken over the death of Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief, who selflessly shielded his own family from the bullets. Of course, I will continue keeping the other two victims who were seriously wounded in my prayers.

Sadly, political violence is not new to this country. One of my earliest memories is actually of sitting around our dining room table with my mother and my father and my two sisters in Worcester, Massachusetts, writing condolence cards to Ethel Kennedy in the wake of Robert Kennedy's assassination. It was an awful, awful thing. I hope our country never goes through that ever again.

We don't yet know the motive of the would-be assassin, and there are still many unanswered questions. We know he was a disturbed, isolated young man, who happened to be a registered Republican who had easy access to an AR-15. He was doing computer searches on both Republicans and Democrats, on the rally in Pennsylvania, as well as the Democratic National Convention.

We also know that an assassination attempt is more than just an attack on one person. It is an attack on the fabric of our democracy, and so it needs to be taken very, very seriously.

There needs to be accountability, and I will just caution here that accountability does not mean finger pointing. I actually want to echo the remarks of the former President's family to say that many brave law enforcement officers and Secret Service agents put their lives on the line at that rally. They nearly took a bullet for the former President, and they ought to be applauded for their bravery.

I also think we shouldn't be jumping to conclusions about which law enforcement agency or officer is to blame, whether it is this leader or that leader or this person or that person. We don't need to play the blame game. We need to know the facts. We need to get the facts.

Clearly, there were major breakdowns in communication and planning, which is why we need a task force to investigate every aspect of what happened. Let them examine what went wrong, and let us make sure this never, ever happens again.

Let me just say to the gentleman from Pennsylvania that I agree. One of the reasons why I think there would be overwhelmingly bipartisan support for this task force is because people want to get the answers. What happened, and how do we make sure that it never happens again?

Mr. Speaker, we hear a lot of talk about the need to turn down the temperature in this country moving forward. I put out a bipartisan statement alongside my friend, Chairman Burgess, the day after the assassination attempt, and we talked about how to move forward.

The bottom line, we agreed, is that we can have loud, passionate, even at times angry debates in this country. That is the way it goes in a democracy as big and diverse as ours, but at the end of the day, we are all Americans who love this country deeply, and we must resolve our differences peacefully.

I think Robert F. Kennedy, a hero of mine whose life was taken by an assassin's bullet when I was just 8 years old, said it best. ``A sniper is only a coward, not a hero, and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.

``Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily, whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence, whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole Nation is degraded.''

Mr. Speaker, what was true in 1968 is true today. Our common bond as Americans demands that we speak out against violence and condemn it whenever and wherever we see it. We can't pick and choose. It needs to be condemned all the time, even when it is not easy or convenient to do that.

That hasn't always been the case, if we are being honest, and that makes me sad. It makes me sad that we had some people make fun of Speaker Pelosi's husband, Paul, when he was violently attacked with a hammer.

We need to come together, Mr. Speaker. We need unity. We have people who still refuse to condemn what happened on January 6, when a violent mob beat up police officers and tried to execute Vice President Mike Pence, right here outside the Capitol Building. Police died that day.

I am comfortable condemning political violence all of the time, period, end of discussion. I think the bipartisan nature of this resolution is a sign of hope for me that we will move even further in that direction.

I know the gentleman on the other side is as well comfortable calling out violence wherever it may occur, but we need to get to a place in this country where all of our colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, feel compelled to do the same.

I hope we get to that point because political violence is against everything America ought to stand for.

When the Founders of this country put pen to paper, they imagined a future where reason would triumph over fear, a world where the ballot, not the bullet, would determine who would wield power, a Nation where the consent of the governed, not the fear of force, would confer legitimacy upon our leaders.

Generations of Americans have worked hard to turn those dreams into a reality, to expand the circle of our democracy and make real the promise of this country for all. Political violence is the ultimate betrayal of that work. It is a dead end that leads only to disaster.

What happened on July 13 was an awful, cowardly, despicable attack, something that should never ever have happened, and I hope that this task force gets answers on behalf of the American people.

We need to know what happened. We need to get to the truth. We need to find a way to prevent this from ever happening again.

Mr. Speaker, I join with my colleagues here in urging a ``yes'' vote on this bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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