Improving Law Enforcement Officer Safety and Wellness Through Data Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Ranking Member McBath for her extraordinary leadership.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to support the Improving Law Enforcement Officer Safety and Wellness Through Data Act, which seeks to improve law enforcement officer safety and wellness by requiring that the AG and other Federal officials issue regular reports on attacks on police officers, aggression against police officers, and on officer mental health.

I salute Mr. Fry, a freshman to this body, for his stewardship of this bill. The collection of this information is important and useful, but the mere passive gathering of data does little or nothing to actually improve officer effectiveness or public safety.

In fact, none of the bills we have considered from the majority during this law enforcement week would actually produce any measurable gains in public safety.

We spent the week voting for bills that will do nothing really but increase the number of weapons on our streets, our buses, our trains, our subways, parks, restaurants, and in our schools. That is a strange way to improve public safety or aid law enforcement in doing their jobs.

Now, there are things we can actually do to improve public safety.

Mr. Speaker, forgive me. I know Mr. Fry is in his second term, not in his first term. He is a valuable member of our committee.

Mr. Speaker, the last gentleman to speak said he never wanted to hear about defunding the police again, and I agree with him completely.

The problem is, he is about to hear about it because DOGE is defunding the police as we speak and, unfortunately, with your cooperation and your passivity, they are getting away with it.

Now, this self-anointed fourth branch of government, DOGE, which I think is getting run out of town right now because of its rank incompetence and lawless assaults on the privacy data of hundreds of millions of Americans and its unlawful summary mass firings of professional civil servants like air traffic controllers, food and drug inspectors, pediatric cancer researchers in my district, Forest Service, and firefighters. They are getting run out of town now. I don't hear a lot about Elon Musk. He has lost some elections for my friends across the aisle, so they are trying to let him sink into anonymity, but he has done his damage.

Over at the Department of Justice--and I have got to correct myself. I was saying that his employee, who I can identify now as Tarak Makecha, was responsible for slashing more than $500 million in public safety, local law enforcement, and victim assistance organizations across the country. Although that was technically correct, more than $500 million, it really understates the gravity of this offense against public safety. It was $811 million in grants that were terminated.

Now, understand what a grievous assault this is on our system of government. Congress passes budgets. They are initiated here in the House of Representatives. We voted to appropriate that money to the Department of Justice. The House voted for it. The Senate voted for it. It was signed into law by the President. The money went to the Department of Justice. It was programmed for those purposes. $811 million was awarded to each of those grantees and now we have got some reportage explaining what happened. It all came down to this one guy, Tarak Makecha, working for Elon Musk.

Did anybody elect him around here? Did anybody confirm him for any job? I don't think so.

He wrote some memos under the authority of dusk, which now I think is an invalidated, discredited authority if you read the opinion from the Federal District Court of Northern California on Friday night because they remember how the Constitution works.

We don't have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk or Tarak Makecha. This guy wrote memos to the deputy attorney general demanding that all of these grants to law enforcement and public safety and victim assistance groups across the country in our districts be deleted. He wouldn't rest until they were deleted. They were deleted so he said he could report it to his superiors and to the White House.

Now, why aren't we using this valuable time not just to pass a mere reporting bill, which is fine, but how about an action bill?

How about a bill that restores hundreds of millions of dollars to actually promoting criminal law enforcement, public safety, aid to victims of rape and sexual assaults, organizations fighting child sexual abuse across the country? Why don't we do that?

Why don't we just pierce the fog of rhetoric a little bit and get down to something that is actually happening?

Then we can follow that up with what I think would be a significant symbolic statement, as Mrs. McBath urges us to do, let's put up the plaque to honor the officers who defended us against the rampage of January 6.

The gentleman from North Carolina, I think, tried to change the subject as if one mob rampage justifies another. I am against all mob violence. I am against all mob rampages. I don't feel like I have to speak out against one of them. If I can't speak out against the one that comes to our House, who will trust me to speak out against mob violence anywhere else? I denounce it wherever it takes place, under whatever guise, under any ideological auspice at all. I denounce mob violence.

I challenge my friend from North Carolina to find me one Democratic official who incited violent insurrection or incited mob violence on that day because I will tell you, this Chamber voted to impeach that President who incited mob violence against us in a sweeping bipartisan vote, Democrats and Republicans, together. Then the Senate voted 57-43.

The President, in his inimitable way, was able to beat the constitutional odds, but nonetheless, commanding majorities of both Chambers found that he incited violence against us in order to overthrow a Presidential election he had lost by more than 7 million votes.

Find me a Democratic Governor who pardoned any of the mobsters or the violent insurrectionists or people burning down buildings. Can you find me one? Can you find me any Democratic politician who wants to honor those people? Can you?

I can show you a United States President today who seems to think that it was the rioters and insurrectionists who deserve honor and praise.

Don't give me any false analogy or false comparison. We denounce violence everywhere.

Will our colleagues have the courage to ask for the plaque honoring the police officers who opposed the violence that came right into this Chamber? I can hear them chanting: ``Hang Mike Pence. Hang Mike Pence.''

Remember him? He was the Republican Vice President of the United States, and they chased him out. Now, they would like his memory to go down that Orwellian black hole so nobody remembers him or so nobody remembers the things the Republicans said. They called it terrorism at the time, but now it is inconvenient.

Donald Trump doesn't want police officers being honored for the work they did defending our Constitution, our democracy, our Capitol, and the Members of Congress, including people who sit on that side of the aisle as well as the Members who sit on this side of the aisle.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman stirred me out of my stupor there by coming back with a couple of grants that apparently were eliminated. I will take his word for it. If I did the internal math correctly, that was less than $2 million out of $811 million cut in awards that were made by the Department of Justice to local law enforcement citizen community safety groups, and so on across the country.

Now, apparently there are certain grants that the gentleman doesn't want ever to go out. For example, I take it the gentleman doesn't think very highly of anything having to do with citizens who are transgender. We differ about that, apparently, because I think everybody has civil rights and everybody's voice needs to be heard.

In any event, that needs to be brought up in the Appropriations Committee where we can vote on it democratically. That should not be up to one of Elon Musk's midnight riders, a computer hacker who comes in and simply decides to wipe out all of the handiwork of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate signed into law by the President and then awarded by the Department of Justice.

We do not have a fourth branch of government here, which is what the Federal District Court, Northern California, was saying on Friday.

Are my colleagues aware that there have been more than 250 cases brought against the reign of lawlessness and authoritarianism brought down on America in the first 5 months of the Trump administration? There are 156 preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders right now.

A couple of hours ago, the Supreme Court heard the case about Donald Trump in an executive order trying to destroy birthright citizenship in America. Every sixth grader in America knows that if you are born in America, you are a citizen of the United States. They tried to reverse that. That got struck down by four courts.

They call them radical left rogue judges. Well, two of the ones who struck it down were Democratic appointees, one by President Obama and one by President Biden. The other two were Republican appointees, one appointed by President Bush and one appointed by President Reagan, who said that in his four decades on the bench he had never seen a more unconstitutional law than that one. He had never seen an easier case than that one.

You don't have to be a lawyer to understand what is wrong with that. You just have to know how to read. The first sentence of the 14th Amendment says: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States. . . . `'

These people are finger painting all over the Constitution. They are usurping the rule of law as adopted by the Congress of the United States. They are creating new branches of government. I am glad that they finally ran Elon Musk out of town because he was no longer politically useful to him, but in the meantime we have to deal with the wreckage.

If he, by accident, did something the gentleman agrees with, bully for him, great, but in the meantime, he has undone the will of Congress. He has nullified and canceled hundreds of millions of dollars going out to public safety and criminal law enforcement across America.

Let's get back to the rule of law. Let's get back to law enforcement.

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