00:00Thank you kindly, Mr. Speaker. I yield myself such time as I may consume.
00:05This week, we welcome thousands of law enforcement personnel to Washington for National Police Week.
00:10We remember officers who lost their lives in service to our communities and our country,
00:15and 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.
00:23Mr. Speaker, I rise to strongly support this resolution because we strongly support our local law enforcement officers.
00:29But we also strongly support our state, federal, and tribal law enforcement officers as well.
00:35Why are these brave officers not part of this resolution?
00:40This is a strange development.
00:41In the last Congress, the 1-18th, we passed House Concurrent Resolution 40 to honor local law enforcement and House Resolution 363 in 2023
00:51to recognize the police lives lost that year and the importance of funding and supporting all law enforcement,
00:58federal, state, county, and local, followed by House Concurrent Resolution 106 and House Resolution 1213 in 2024, which did the same.
01:08But this year, the majority has chosen to have a solely recognized local law enforcement.
01:13Why is that?
01:14What explains this strange omission of the federal police officers who serve us?
01:19With 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,
01:33our staffs, and our democracy on January 6, 2021.
01:37Apparently, 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
01:48by 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.
02:00Is that right, or will the majority please prepare a resolution honoring federal law enforcement as well that we can bring to the floor?
02:09This is one troubling sign among many of an ideological abandonment of our federal law enforcement officers,
02:16and there are more than 137,000 of them, not just the Capitol Police.
02:21The bill mandating the creation and placement of the plaque, H.R. 2471, was signed into law on March 15, 2023,
02:39and the plaque was supposed to have been erected within one year of that, March 15, 2024.
02:45The plaque is finished, it's ready to be placed, and it looks like this, if you can hold it up, and it reads, let's see,
02:59on behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected
03:06and defended the symbol of democracy on January 6, 2021.
03:10Their heroism will never be forgotten.
03:14Well, it seems it's already being forgotten by the GOP majority, or at least they want us to forget it.
03:22Are my friends so captive to conspiracy theories and revisionist fantasies about January 6th
03:27that they will not do the bare minimum to honor the police officers who fought tooth and nail
03:34to protect every person in this room who was there, including members on my side of the aisle,
03:40including members on the other side of the aisle.
03:42The people we are failing to honor by not hanging this plaque include at least 140 police officers
03:50who were beaten with poles, bats, American flags, Trump flags, Confederate battle flags, their own shields.
03:59These are people who lost fingertips, they suffered concussions, broken jaws, broken ribs,
04:07they had heart attacks and strokes, they sustained multiple other violent injuries,
04:12and suffer from them, many of them, to this day,
04:16in one of the worst days of injuries for law enforcement officers in the United States in this century.
04:23Well, this affront is now adding further symbolic insult to the grievous injury that began at the beginning of this administration.
04:35President Trump granted full pardons to more than 1,500 insurrectionists and rioters
04:42and commuted the sentences of the right-wing extremists who spearheaded the attack on this chamber
04:48and on the police officers who defended us.
04:51More than 600 of those defendants whose pardons are full, complete, and unconditional
04:55were charged with assaulting or obstructing law enforcement officers.
05:01And now President Trump, backed by his own Justice Department,
05:05thinks that the violent insurrections should be compensated.
05:09And not the police officers, but rather the people who perpetrated this assault on America.
05:16And I quote President Trump said,
05:18A lot of the people in the government really like that group of people.
05:22He is creating a compensation fund, not for the officers and their families,
05:26who fought and suffered, and several died to save our democracy,
05:31but for the domestic terrorists, as leaders of the Republican Party described them at the time,
05:37who tried to destroy it.
05:38That's the decision to cast his lot with the proud boys and other extremists that he incited on that day.
05:45Many of the officers who served on January 6th feel betrayed by the officials whose lives they saved that day.
05:54Take former U.S. Capitol Police Sergeant Aquilino Gunnell, who was nearly crushed to death on January 6th.
06:01Sergeant Gunnell is an Army veteran from the Iraq War
06:03and was upholding his oath to defend and protect the seat of our nation's government.
06:08He said he saw violence on that day here at the Capitol far worse than anything he experienced fighting for America abroad.
06:17Despite the fact that he and many other officers nearly lost their lives
06:21and now face lifelong injuries that have forced him out of the line of police work,
06:27they still cannot get approved for public safety officers' benefits,
06:31which provide disability benefits to officers catastrophically injured in the line of duty.
06:36As Sergeant Gunnell recently told my staff,
06:40Trump is treating the rioters like they were the ones defending the Capitol.
06:45He noted that at every turn, when Republicans could honor the bravery of law enforcement officers that day,
06:51they've instead chosen to do nothing.
06:54Of course, if my colleagues across the aisle want to focus on local law enforcement,
06:59then I might ask why we are simply honoring them with this concurrent resolution
07:05and not taking more meaningful action,
07:08like restoring millions of dollars in federal grants that help support them
07:12that were recently terminated by the Department of Justice at the direction of Doge and Elon Musk.
07:18Those grants supported programs like the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative,
07:22which delivered financial assistance directly to dozens of rural law enforcement agencies across America
07:29and allowed agencies to upgrade technology and equipment,
07:33hire and deploy personnel, support victim services, and crime prevention programming,
07:38and fill in other gaps in policing for small, rural, underfunded police agencies.
07:43We should be grateful for all of our officers, federal, state, county, local,
07:49who help keep us safe while people are in their communities,
07:54while members of Congress come to Washington, D.C.
07:58We should be grateful for all of them.
08:00Let's join together to uplift all law enforcement officers,
08:04whether they are local or state, tribal or federal,
08:08and let's support them symbolically with our words,
08:11but more importantly, with our actions.
08:13Let's restore all of the funding, the hundreds of millions of dollars
08:17that have been cut or that face cuts by this new administration.
08:22I reserve the balance of my time, Mr. Speaker.
08:24Gentlemen of Reserves, gentlemen from Ohio is recognized.
08:26Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
08:27Let's be clear.
08:29Republicans honor local law enforcement.
08:31Democrats defund them.
08:34Five years ago this summer, they spent the whole summer doing that.
08:37That's all you can hear from Democrats.
08:38Got to defund the local police.
08:41We've been consistent.
08:42We have condemned violence every single time it happened,
08:45whether it was January 6th, whether it was the summer of 2020.
08:48They haven't.
08:50Summer 2020, I still remember the guy standing in front of the burning building
08:54on CNN saying, this is a mostly peaceful protest.
08:59They spent the whole summer trying to defund the police,
09:02so don't give us the lecture.
09:04I want to thank the fine gentleman from Mississippi
09:06who served in local law enforcement,
09:08who was a sheriff,
09:10who knows what it's like to go out there
09:11and protect his community for sponsoring this resolution.
09:14And I would yield him as much time as he wants to consume.
09:18Gentlemen from...
09:19I will.
09:24I am not knowing you.
09:24I know.
09:27I am not sure you're not sure who's going in.
09:29Remember to see your thoughts on the technology?
09:31Thank you so much.
09:32What Mr.
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