Expressing Support for Local Law Enforcement Officers

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, this week, we welcome thousands of law enforcement personnel to Washington for National Police Week. We remember officers who lost their lives in service to our communities and our country, and we thank all officers who work to keep us safe while reflecting on how we can invest in law enforcement to better serve our communities.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to strongly support this resolution because we strongly support our local law enforcement officers. Yet, we also strongly support our State, Federal, and Tribal law enforcement officers, as well. Why are these brave officers not part of this resolution? This is a strange development.

In the last Congress, the 118th Congress, we passed H. Con. Res. 40 to honor local law enforcement. We also passed H. Res. 363 in 2023 to recognize the police lives lost that year and the importance of funding and supporting all law enforcement, Federal, State, county, and local. These were followed by H. Con. Res. 106 and H. Res. 1213 in 2024, which did the same.

This year the majority has chosen to have us solely recognizing local law enforcement. Why is that? What explains this strange omission of the Federal police officers who serve us?

With President Trump back in office, the majority apparently now sees fit to honor only local officers and not the Federal law enforcement officers who fought so valiantly to protect every Member of this body and the Senate, our staffs, and our democracy on January 6, 2021. Apparently, their commitment to backing the blue is so weak that they now won't even mention Federal officers because they have to maintain the pretense that Capitol officers did something wrong by defending us against the violent rampage of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and other extremist marauders who stormed the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.

Is that right or will the majority please prepare a resolution honoring Federal law enforcement, as well that we can bring to the floor?

This is one troubling sign among many of an ideological abandonment of our Federal law enforcement officers and there are more than 137,000 of them, not just the Capitol Police.

Speaker Johnson still refuses to hang a simple plaque honoring those officers as is required by Federal law. The bill mandating the creation and placement of the plaque, H.R. 2471, was signed into law on March 15, 2022, and the plaque was supposed to have been erected within 1 year of that, March 15, 2023.

The plaque is finished, it is ready to be placed, and it looks like this. It reads: ``On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on January 6th, 2021. Their heroism will never be forgotten.''

Well, it seems it is already being forgotten by the GOP majority or at least they want us to forget it. Are my friends so captive to conspiracy theories and revisionist fantasies about January 6 that they will not do the bare minimum to honor the police officers who fought tooth and nail to protect every person in this room who was there, including Members on my side of the aisle and Members on the other side of the aisle?

The people we are failing to honor by not hanging this plaque include at least 140 police officers who were beaten with poles, bats, American flags, Trump flags, Confederate battle flags, and their own shields. These are people who lost fingertips. They suffered concussions, broken jaws, and broken ribs. They had heart attacks and strokes. They sustained multiple other violent injuries and suffer from them, many of them, to this day, in one of the worst days of injuries for law enforcement officers in the United States in this century.

This affront is now adding further symbolic insult to the grievous injury that began at the beginning of this administration. President Trump granted full pardons to more than 1,500 insurrectionists and rioters and commuted the sentence of the rightwing extremists who spearheaded the attack on this Chamber and on the police officers who defended us.

More than 600 of those defendants whose pardons are full, complete, and unconditional were charged with assaulting or obstructing law enforcement officers. Now President Trump, backed by his own Justice Department, thinks that the violent insurrectionists should be compensated, not the police officers, but rather the people who perpetrated this assault on America.

President Trump said: A lot of the people in the government really like that group of people. He is creating a compensation fund not for the officers and their families who fought and suffered and several died to save our country but for the domestic terrorists, as leaders of the Republican Party described them at the time, who tried to destroy it.

That is the decision, to cast his lot with the Proud Boys and other extremists that he incited on that day.

Many of the officers who served on January 6 feel betrayed by the officials whose lives they saved that day. Take former U.S. Capitol Police Sergeant Aquilino Gonell who was nearly crushed to death on January 6.

Sergeant Gonell is an Army veteran from the Iraq war and was upholding his oath to defend and protect the seat of our Nation's government. He said he saw violence on that day here at the Capitol far worse than anything he experienced fighting for America abroad.

Despite the fact that he and many other officers nearly lost their lives and now face lifelong injuries that have forced him out of the line of police work, they still cannot get approved for Public Safety Officers' Benefits, which provide disability benefits to officers catastrophically injured in the line of duty.

As Sergeant Gonell recently told my staff, Trump is treating the rioters like they were the ones defending the Capitol. He noted that at every turn when Republicans could honor the bravery of law enforcement officers that day, they have instead chosen to do nothing.

Of course, if my colleagues across the aisle want to focus on local law enforcement, then I might ask why we are simply honoring them with this concurrent resolution and not taking more meaningful action, like restoring millions of dollars in Federal grants that help support them that were recently terminated by the Department of Justice at the direction of DOGE and Elon Musk.

Those grants supported programs like the rural violent crime reduction initiative, which delivered financial assistance directly to dozens of rural law enforcement agencies across America and allowed agencies to upgrade technology and equipment, hire and deploy personnel, support victim services and crime prevention programming, and fill in other gaps in policing for small, rural, underfunded police agencies.

We should be grateful for all of our officers, Federal, State, county, and local, who help keep us safe while people are in their communities and while Members of Congress come to Washington, D.C. We should be grateful for all of them.

Let's join together to uplift all law enforcement officers whether they are local or State, Tribal, or Federal, and let's support them symbolically with our words but more importantly with our actions. Let's restore all of the funding, the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been cut or that face cuts by this new administration.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to hear the distinguished chairman of the Judiciary Committee denounce the assault, the violent assault, on Congress, the Capitol, our police officers on January 6, 2021. I wonder if he would work with me to help enforce the law that was signed on March 15, 2022 by President Biden for a plaque to be placed in honor of the police officers who served us so valiantly and so bravely and saved our lives on that day.

It was supposed to have been up by March 15, 2023, and the Speaker simply has remained noncommittal and indifferent. The plaque is actually completed. It is ready to be put up. We can show it again. It is not as big as this poster, but it is the smallest token of recognition and honor that we should be able to extend to the Capitol officers, many of whom are still with us on the force, for their sacrifice and the sacrifice that their families made based on their work that day defending us.

I wonder if the chairman of the Judiciary Committee would follow through on his very impressive statement that we all denounce the violence of any kind against officers, including the more than 140 Capitol officers who were wounded, injured, hospitalized, some of them permanently disfigured and maimed on that day as well as officers around the country.

Now, on the point about defunding the police. Look who is defunding the police: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and their silent partners in Congress are defunding the police. They just terminated $500 million worth of grants, lost funding from the Department of Justice providing Federal support for local violence reduction by community police, community policing and prosecution, victim services, juvenile justice, child protection, substance abuse and mental health treatment, corrections and reentry, justice systems enhancements, research and evaluation, and other State, county, and local level public police and safety functions.

I brought this to the attention of the Judiciary Committee because, again, this was an operation by DOGE. We have got a Federal District Court opinion from northern California saying that DOGE basically has no legal status because it wasn't created by Congress. It might be a completely renegade operation in an attempt to create a fourth branch of government.

In any event, those of us who voted for the money, and that is people on both sides of the aisle, voted for the money to be distributed by the Department of Justice to local grantees didn't even know about this. I shared with the chairman and with all the members of the committee, the one name of the DOGE employee, an unelected bureaucrat, a juvenile bureaucrat from Silicon Valley who worked his way up through Tesla and so on, and they ended up in DOGE, cut hundreds of millions of dollars to local police. They defunded the police.

DOGE defunded the police. Donald Trump defunded the police. I introduced an amendment to try to restore every single grant that they cut off in severing that Federal investment in local police.

My colleagues uttered not a word, not a word in opposition to my amendment, but they all voted against it simply because they are walking the line with Elon Musk right off the edge of the Constitution because there is no constitutional grounding for anything that guy is doing.

They walked the line behind Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and they just defunded hundreds of millions of dollars from community law enforcement and public safety, so don't give me that lecture about defunding the police, which our side has never supported, but their side has just colluded in right now in terms of what the Department of Justice did.

That doesn't even get into their attempt to dismantle completely the ATF, shut down critical functions in the Department of Justice that protect us from foreign involvement in our elections, to take down the kleptocracy task force and so on. I don't want any lectures coming in our direction, either.

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I will start just by asking my friend from Ohio whether he is referring to me when he uses the word ``you'' or if he is referring more generally to some other people because I would categorically deny having done any of those things.

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Mr. RASKIN. I yield to the gentleman from Ohio.

Well, the gentleman refers exclusively--and I think he is aware of this because he is an extremely clever debater--to things that different local governments did or did not do. I don't know what Denver, Colorado, or Burlington, Vermont, did. I know what the United States Congress does, and we never defunded the police, and we never tried to defund the police.

On the other hand, my good friend, I believe, participated in--and if he didn't, I am happy to stand corrected, but I know a bunch of his colleagues said they wanted to defund the FBI, just like those who want to defund the ATF and shut it down right now, so that is a reality.

In any event, why don't we talk about what Congress can actually do? The President's new budget proposes to cut--so this is something that my colleague and I could agree on--$1 billion across 40 Department of Justice grant programs which support local police departments to reduce violent crime, hate crime, and crime against women.

Would my colleague work with me to oppose that suggestion in the President's budget? They want to cut $646 million from FEMA for violence and terrorism prevention. Why do they want to do that? I have no idea.

They want to cut $545 million from the FBI, cutting its workforce by more than 2,000 personnel. That sounds like defunding law enforcement to me.

I know they don't seem to be as fond of Federal law enforcement as they are of local law enforcement, but do they really want to cut more than half a billion dollars from the FBI to be fighting criminals and terrorists? For the life of me, I don't understand how they can do that while they swear fealty to law enforcement. It just makes no sense.

They want to cut $491 million from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, making our cyber and physical infrastructure far more vulnerable to attack by foreign bad actors like Vladimir Putin and President Xi and Kim Jong-un. I know there are some people in high levels of office who are fond of those people, who write valentines to Kim Jong-Un, but the rest of us would like to be protected from them. We shouldn't be dismantling the cybersecurity infrastructure of America.

They want to cut $212 million from the DEA. Can you imagine? If a Democratic President had proposed any of this, they would be screaming, their hair would be on fire, but Donald Trump proposed it, and they just mumble along like it is no big deal.

What about all of these efforts to defund Federal law enforcement, like the DOJ, FEMA, FBI? Will our colleagues work with us to restore that money?

Yes, the record is becoming increasingly clear here. My colleagues don't want to do anything about the dismantling of hundreds of millions of dollars of funds that we appropriated at the Department of Justice that have been mysteriously deleted by a DOGE employee from local law enforcement. These are grants that go to local police departments and victim assistance agencies all over the country. They got rid of that.

Then the President comes forward with a budget that will cut more than $1.5 billion, maybe $2 billion from local law enforcement to go after violent crime, hate crime, to defend the victims of rape and sexual assault, and my colleague changes the subject once again to talk about weaponization.

We have never seen weaponization of the government like what we have seen under Donald Trump and his Department of Justice. The first thing they did was they got rid of a dozen experienced veteran criminal prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's office and the Department of Justice simply because they had worked to prosecute January 6 insurrectionists and rioters.

Yes, let me repeat that. They fired prosecutors for doing nothing more than their jobs to prosecute the criminals who beat the daylights out of our police officers, and they sacked all of those prosecutors. They were some of the most experienced veteran prosecutors that we have in the U.S. Attorney's office. Then he named to be the acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin. He was just forced to withdraw that nomination because he was standing by a Neo-Nazi Holocaust revisionist who said that Hitler's problem was that he didn't finish the job. He also said that those who are born with disabilities should be killed at birth. Ed Martin called him a great man and a great leader.

He withdrew the nomination, but still he put Ed Martin in the Department of Justice in a position that is not subject to Senate confirmation. They have weaponized the Department of Justice. They have weaponized the Department of State. They are going after anybody they describe as a political enemy. Ed Martin was writing letters to Members of Congress when he didn't like what they had to say.

We have never seen weaponization of the government like what is taking place right now. They took the U.S. Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer, and they sacked her because she refused to take the position that Mel Gibson should get his guns back. That wasn't part of her job, but they tried to conscript her to it. The pardon attorney refused to do it because she said that was not her job and there were too many questions about domestic violence episodes.

If you want to have a separate hearing on weaponization of the government under Donald Trump, let's do it. In the meantime, let's support local law enforcement and let's support Federal law enforcement. Let's have another resolution praising all law enforcement for what they do, and let's get that plaque up.

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