Expressing Support for Law Enforcement Officers
Floor Speech
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Mr. RASKIN.
Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose and to deplore this partisan resolution. As you just heard, H. Con. Res. 96 is another tiresome and loathsome exercise in partisan MAGA polemics.
Unlike H. Res. 1252, which was honestly written to honor law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty, and which received an overwhelming bipartisan vote in the House just a few hours ago, this nonbinding rhetorical resolution desecrates the solemnity and abandons the nonpartisanship of Police Week by scrawling a bunch of false and inflammatory anti-Democratic and pro-Trump graffiti on what has always been, until now, a simple nonpartisan resolution expressing the national consensus supporting law enforcement.
It is not difficult to write these resolutions in a way that garners widespread bipartisan support. Last year, Congress passed H. Con. Res. 30, a bipartisan resolution expressing our mutual common support for local law enforcement. The year before that, together we passed H. Res. 1213, condemning calls to defund the police and violence against law enforcement officers.
We have always strived for bipartisanship in these resolutions on Police Week to show that the whole community is together. But just as 21 Republicans voted against the Congressional Gold Medal for officers who defended this Capitol and this Chamber against rioters and insurrectionists on January 6, 2021, now, the Republicans bring forward a resolution designed not to unify but to divide.
The resolution before us invites us to endorse a tired, false, cliche-ridden partisan claim about defunding the police when, in fact, it is Democrats who have repeatedly promoted robust funding for law enforcement, while congressional Republicans, the Trump administration, and Elon Musk have cut funding for law enforcement and public safety programs that actually work as they slashed $500 million from State and local crime-fighting and victim assistance grants and programs under the DOGE and Elon Musk's crusade against the Federal Government.
The resolution also invites us to sign on to the demonstrably false claim that the Trump administration's focus on restoring law and order has contributed to a notable decline in homicide rates. The significant decline in violent crime in major cities over the past couple of years has nothing to do with the Trump Presidency as the resolution asserts and everything to do with the Democrats they denounce and the Biden Presidency's investment in State and local law enforcement.
In fact, homicides skyrocketed during the first Trump administration, and the historic nationwide decrease in violent crime began during the Biden administration and was the result of Democratic-led investments in public safety through both the American Rescue Plan, which House Republicans unanimously opposed, and the historic Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
Thanks to these sweeping investments in public safety and our common security, cities leveraged Federal funds and innovation to pursue a variety of effective programs to combat violent crime, with some cities recording the lowest murder rate since the 1960s, or even before that.
Madam Speaker, instead of restoring law and order, as the resolution claims, the current administration has systematically undermined law enforcement and jeopardized public safety without any objections from the party that claims to back the blue. The administration canceled millions in critical grant funding that supported State and local law enforcement. It reassigned more than 25,000 Federal agents tasked with fighting organized crime, terrorism, and human trafficking away from their missions in order to do immigration roundups.
The administration invaded American cities with a lawless paramilitary force, unleashing chaos and deadly violence on U.S. citizens, like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, under the pretense of fighting the worst of the worst. The administration stopped enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, announced that in its first week in office.
It fired dozens of experienced Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents just because they participated in the largest criminal investigation and prosecution in American history against the people who attacked this Chamber and the Capitol and the Congress and the Vice President on January 6, 2021.
This administration has also pardoned dozens of white-collar criminals and fraudsters, including the former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, an international narcotrafficker who brought 800,000 pounds of cocaine into America, saying he would shove it up the noses of the gringos, and he was going off to jail for decades when President Trump decided to pardon him for reasons unknown.
He has released people from prison from January 6 who went on to commit serious new crimes against our people, such as Mr. Johnson who got out because of his Trump pardon and went on and sexually assaulted two 12-year-old children and now has been sentenced to life in prison because of that. Those kids' lives have been irrevocably altered by the mass pardon of all of these people that included armed robbers, violent felons, domestic abusers, you name it, and a lot of them are back at it right now.
Madam Speaker, the administration has repeatedly threatened to cut off funding for State and local law enforcement in numerous jurisdictions and attempted to commandeer State and local police officers and resources to do the Federal Government's job at State and local expense. All of this compromises public safety and is an insult to the officers who work to keep us safe.
Republicans in Congress have done nothing to put the brakes on Donald Trump's weak-on-crime agenda, and we were going to give him a chance. The fact that he has 34 Federal criminal counts that he is convicted of himself doesn't mean he had to be soft on crime, but he is soft on crime, and we are not going to help the Republicans pull the wool over America's eyes. We are not going to do that to salvage their leader who is sinking like a stone in public opinion polls for his illegal tariffs, his unconstitutional war, his soaring inflation, and runaway corruption throughout the government.
Donald Trump has a staph infection, and America can see it every day. House Republican appropriators recently rejected the Trump administration's proposal to increase ATF's budget by 4 percent and agent head count from 2,400 to 3,000 agents in the coming fiscal year. Instead, they want to cut ATF's budget by $285 million, which would leave ATF with even fewer resources to support State and local police as they work to prevent and investigate and prosecute gun crimes.
Meaningless polemics against leftist activists and progressive politicians have no place in a resolution purportedly meant to honor law enforcement. This is the first time that any majority has fallen into the political trap, but they can't help themselves because they are so desperate because of the plummeting poll numbers of Donald Trump and his administration.
Now that you raise it, it is worth noting that Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee have actually voted to defund the police in the 119th Congress. H.R. 7640, the Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act of 2026, would strip Federal funding from jurisdictions that have laws placing any limits on State and local law enforcement officers' involvement in Federal immigration matters despite the fact that immigration enforcement is the job of the Federal Government and not an unfunded mandate that can be put on the States and cities and localities.
All of this undermines public safety. I cannot support this resolution, which lies about Republicans and this administration's real record on crime and public safety. The observance of National Police Week and Peace Officers Memorial Day marks a time of solemn remembrance when our Nation should come together to honor the courage, sacrifice, and dedication of our law enforcement officers and personnel, and promote awareness of their service to our communities.
Let's stand united and reject this shameful effort to inject divisive partisan politics into this resolution and this week.
If you want something that can bring us together, please support the bill that I introduced today to create a fund to compensate the law enforcement officers who defended the Republic, this Capitol, the Congress, the Vice President against that violent attack on January 6, 2021. They continue to suffer the physical, medical, psychological effects of that atrocious attack.
The Trump administration wrote a check for nearly $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt despite the fact that there were two different investigations which determined that the police had acted reasonably, lawfully, and honorably. Yet, they just gave them a check for $5 million.
What do the families of the officers who defended our lives get? So far they have done nothing. We are introducing legislation to make that happen, and I hope everybody in this body who really believes that law enforcement should be stood by and should be defended in their work will get with us on this resolution.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from Georgia (Mrs. McBath), who is the ranking member of the Crime and Federal Government Surveillance Subcommittee.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
The worst Congress in modern American history cannot even write a resolution praising law enforcement that maintains bipartisan support-- something that every other Congress, Democratic or Republican, has been able to do--because they are so desperate to cover up their miserable record.
The Trump administration has done nothing more to improve public safety than it has done to lower the ruinous inflation they unleashed on us with their illegal tariffs or to open up the Strait of Hormuz, which was closed only because of the illegal war Trump has already spent $29 billion of our money on.
Well, our colleagues have some very fine rhetoric about how much they love public safety. So why don't we look at their fiscal year 2027 budget proposal. They won't fess up to the fact that they just slashed $500 million out of local and State crime fighting and victim assistance grants, but let's talk about the future.
Well, what does their fiscal year 2027 budget proposal say? It proposes significant funding cuts for grant programs under the Office on Violence Against Women, including a $14 million cut to transitional housing grants and a $15 million cut to legal assistance grants to help survivors and their children.
They want to cut 62.1 percent, nearly a half a billion dollars from the discretionary budget request for COPS, which would translate into complete elimination of the anti-methamphetamine task forces, the anti- heroin task forces, the Community Policing Development Project, de- escalation training, and the dramatic reduction in STOP School Violence, and other crime-fighting projects.
So you are talking about defunding the police and defunding criminal justice. That is what their proposal is for next year.
They want to cut millions of dollars from successful programs to fund the Office on Violence Against Women, of course. For example, they want to cut millions from the Financial Assistance to Victims Program. They want to cut from consolidated youth-oriented programming, access to sexual assault nurse exams $12 million and on and on.
That is their budget.
They want to cut $538 million from the Byrne Discretionary Community Project Grants in the Department of Justice budget. They want to eliminate the Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative whose great successes they want to take credit for. They want to cut $50 million from that.
They want to cut $17 million in grants from the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes community policing program. And it goes on and on. You don't have to go and make up a bunch of mirages and ghosts about defunding the police. That is in their budget for next year. They want to dismantle one criminal justice program after another.
But of course, they want to increase the military budget to $1.5 trillion, which they all leapt up to support even before hearing about what specific military projects and arms projects were contained in it. They want $1.5 trillion for that budget as they continue to drive our budget deficit up to the heavens. They have added already more than $3.5 trillion to the debt. So it is fiscally irresponsible, and it is irresponsible from the standpoint of public safety.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I reserved the balance of my time.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I am prepared to keep going. I am not afraid to keep the debate going. Whatever the gentleman pleases.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, which they propose to slash and essentially dismantle, is responsible for advancing the practice of community policing at the State, local, territorial, and Tribal levels. The COPS Office awards grants to hire community policing professionals, that is something that they propose to gut.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I am prepared to close if the gentleman is prepared to close. He seems to be in a hurry.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
Look, it is unfortunate that we have reached this place, Madam Speaker. Every prior Congress has been able to honor the police on Law Enforcement Week. Yet, they insisted on scribbling polemical, partisan graffiti, attacking Democrats and Progressives and so on, using a nonbinding ceremonial resolution to try to pick a political fight, which is not very wise given their miserable record in terms of crime fighting.
One of the first things they did was they said they were no longer going to enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Then they gutted anti-terrorism and counterintelligence programs in the Department of Justice. They pardoned 1,600 or 1,500 Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Klan members, violent rioters, and insurrectionists from January 6. Even his own Vice President urged him--or said he supposed the President was not going to pardon those who had committed violence, but he pardoned everybody.
Prior to Donald Trump, you know, the way the Presidents did it was there was a pardon office in the Department of Justice, and they would look at very specific requests and applications that came in for a pardon, and they would try to judge whether the person was truly reformed, truly rehabilitated.
Every President up until Trump insisted that they actually pay off their fines and pay restitution to their victims. But no, not President Trump. He said: I am going to take all of them together. I am going to pardon them en masse, 1,600 of them. Some of them were armed robbers, domestic felons, violent assaulters. Some maybe it was a first offense, but they were all mixed in together, and then they got their pardon, and they were forgiven for all of their fines and all of the restitution that they owed to their victims.
Then the President continued that rampage with all of the white- collar criminals and fraudsters and drug dealers he pardoned. Some of them owed tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. It was all forgiven. That money was, therefore, transferred from the victims of these crimes right back to the criminals. This is the person that they want to praise as being tough on crime and such a great law-and- order President.
We were willing to look--aside from the fact that he had 34 criminal convictions of his own and was an adjudicated sexual assailant under the civil law of New York--and say maybe he will actually invest in fighting crime. But no, it has been quite the opposite. He has been doing everything in his power to undermine criminal law enforcement. Now they want to take credit for what the mayors and Governors have been doing for several years now, which is causing a dramatic decrease in crime by investing in all of the programs that they have pulled the plug on.
They just slashed more than $500 million from Department of Justice grants going out to the States and the cities. You want to look for weak on crime? You want to look for defunding the police? Look no further. You found it in the Trump administration. Elon Musk and DOGE came right over to the Department of Justice and slashed $500 million from program moneys that were appropriated by Congress and programmed by the Department of Justice, and they said: Stop the delivery of this money. We are going to cut off these grants.
The reason they don't say anything about it is because they know it is true. We heard all about it in the Judiciary Committee. That is the real track record.
Now we see in their budget request for next year they want to continue to ravage the crime-fighting budget of the country.
Why did President Trump pardon the former President of Honduras who brought 400 tons of cocaine into America? Why? He brought in 800,000 pounds of cocaine. He said: We are going to shove it up the nostrils of the gringos. That is what he said. And Donald Trump pardoned him, saving him from decades in Federal prison.
How come they are not talking about that?
We wouldn't have brought any of it up if they had just come forward with the same consensus, bipartisan resolution that we have always had. But no, they wanted to pick a partisan fight.
Well, they picked the wrong people, because we know what has actually been happening. We know who is standing strong for law and order and who is bringing us down into the mud of lawlessness and authoritarianism in the country.
Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I am happy to yield to my colleague for a moment if he wants to respond about the pardon of the former President of Honduras, whether that is something that our colleagues on that side of the aisle support or not. I don't know if he is interested in responding to that.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I was just offering to yield if he wanted to respond to that question, Madam Speaker.
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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I reclaim my time.
We consider the safety of the people to be the highest law that there is, along with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Unfortunately, this administration has been trampling all of it. We saw what happened in Minneapolis where we had U.S. citizens shot down at pointblank range in broad daylight for exercising their First Amendment rights, the rights contained in the First Amendment of our Constitution, shot down in cold blood.
Then we saw their then-Attorney General, Ms. Bondi, come out and say that these people were engaged in acts of terror and had been threatening people, which was a lie, and she refused the opportunity to apologize for what she had done.
There will be a real investigation. There will be a real investigation of those homicides. There were only, up to that point, three homicides, three murders that took place in Minneapolis, in Minnesota, up until that point of the year, and two of them were committed by Federal agents, two of the three. Well, that is a pretty powerful statement about the law-and-order administration that they want to praise in this completely partisan resolution that they want to push through the House of Representatives today.
So the Constitution is under attack, right? They promulgate executive orders telling thousands of lawyers at different law firms they cannot enter Federal buildings, including Federal courthouses, which makes it difficult to practice law.
They have used their power of the Federal Communications Commission to force them to settle completely bogus, frivolous lawsuits that the President has brought against media companies. Then they have installed their minders, their little spies, into TV networks, like something out of Putin's Russia or Orban's Hungary.
They have been systematically undermining the free press in the country. They are attacking the Constitution, and they are attacking the Bill of Rights.
It is so bad that even their stacked-and-packed, gerrymandered Supreme Court has had to strike them down for things like their illegal, unconstitutional tariffs, their global trade war against the world, which has been ruinous for our economy, compounded only by his illegal, constitutional war on Iran where he usurped the power of Congress to declare war.
James Madison said it had to be the Representatives of the people to declare war, not a President, not a Vice President, not Tulsi Gabbard or their leaky chat group. No, it has got to be the Representatives of the people, because the kings were constantly plunging their people into wars of conceit and vanity and imperial plunder.
They have created lawlessness from the highest levels of the government all the way down to the streets, where they are pulling the plug on Federal grants to help State and local governments fight crime, while they pardon narcotraffickers, white-collar fraudsters, people scamming American citizens.
So we are going to have to try to restore real law and order in the country, and that begins at the top. That begins with the Presidency, and it begins with everybody who is in government.
I wish that we could just go ahead and honor law enforcement without all of the partisan graffiti they have scrawled all over the resolution. We would show just as before, you have an overwhelming vote when you do it the right way, and we honor the people who have served us.
I invite our friends to join us in honoring and standing by the men and women who defended us on January 6. One hundred fifty of them were wounded, injured, hospitalized, disfigured, and disabled. Some of them were disabled and forced out of police work because of the injuries inflicted by the mob that came here.
They have given nearly $5 million to Ashley Babbitt's family, despite the fact that two different investigations showed that the police had acted reasonably and lawfully in what they did.
How about millions of dollars to the families of the police officers who lost their lives as a result of that violence? Let's show for real that we are committed to law enforcement by standing by the police officers who defend us every single day.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.
The yeas and nays were ordered.
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