Anniversary of January 6 (Executive Calendar)
Mr. President, I rise today joined by Democratic Leader Schumer and so many of our colleagues in raising our voices on this fifth anniversary of a dark day in American history. Yes, it has been 5 years, and some on the other side of the aisle may ask, Why are we still talking about this? I think we just witnessed why it is important to keep talking about this--because the lies continue, the conspiracy theories continue, and the truth must be told. We will not let history be rewritten.
The truth is that 5 years ago today, insurrectionists stormed the Capitol in an unprecedented attempt to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. The truth is police were beaten as a violent crowd surged forward. The truth is there were Members of Congress literally running for their lives, rushed out of this very Chamber and told to hide and barricade themselves.
It was an attack instigated and fueled by lies, a coordinated campaign by President Trump to overturn the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election.
Now, even on that day, as rioters threatened to hang Vice President Pence, Trump tweeted a message to them that the election had been stolen; that they were ``patriots''--his words, not mine--that he ``loved them'' as the violence erupted.
Special Counsel Jack Smith recently testified that President Trump was the ``most culpable and most responsible person'' in this January 6 conspiracy. He continued, ``These crimes were committed for his benefit. The attack that happened at the Capitol does not happen without him.''
Now, despite the President's attempts to rewrite history, today, for the sake of our democracy and for the sake of future generations, we remember and highlight the truth. See, we all vividly remember where we were 5 years ago. Unlike most of my colleagues who will speak out, I was not in this Chamber 5 years ago. I was still serving as California Secretary of State at the time, where I had spent years working to keep our elections, not just accessible for all eligible voters, but safe and secure, which they have always been despite the claims of the President.
On November 3, 2020, it was my privilege to serve as the chief elections officer in the Nation's most populous and diverse State. I assure you that, even under the best of circumstances, election administrations are complex operations, but in 2020, our election workers faced the additional and unprecedented challenge of a global health crisis. Those election workers stepped up. They rose to the occasion. As a result, California election officials and volunteers administered an extremely accessible, secure, and safe election that drew an historic turnout, and we saw similar electoral performances across the country. By every objective measure, the 2020 election was a success.
But, furious at his loss, none of that mattered to President Trump. He didn't just refuse to concede the election; he filed and lost more than 60 frivolous lawsuits that challenged the election. He personally called State elections officials, including, as I know the Presiding Officer will remember, the Georgia secretary of state, asking him to find more votes. He also called State legislature leaders in Michigan, in Arizona, and in Pennsylvania, trying to pressure them to change the official vote results; and he lied to the American people, denying his loss. He lied to them again just this morning, to a roomful of House Republicans, calling the 2020 Presidential election rigged.
Online and across the country, President Trump's Big Lie caught fire, and, clearly, it is still burning. Sadly, many Republicans participated in fanning the flames by spreading false claims of voter fraud for political gain. Others stood by silently as President Trump radicalized his supporters with these lies. They chose loyalty to Trump over the truth, and our Nation paid the price.
On January 6, we saw, we witnessed, we lived through what was once unthinkable--an unprecedented attack on this Capitol by violent extremists who were incited by the President. He told a crowd that was gathered outside the White House to ``fight like hell'' or ``you're not going to have a country anymore.'' Then he pointed them directly at the Capitol.
Armed rioters brutally beat police officers and stormed this building. For the first time in our Nation's history, the Confederate flag flew inside the Halls of this Capitol. Members of militarized hate groups searched the hallways with the intent to kill Democratic- and Republican-elected leaders. They found their way to the House floor and to this very Chamber to try and stop the certification of the Presidential election.
The deadly January 6 attack will forever remain an ugly stain on American history. But, yes, thanks to the bravery of the U.S. Capitol Police and other law enforcement officers who risked their lives, including five officers who tragically lost their lives, the assault on our democracy failed. Still, Speaker Johnson refuses to install a plaque--required by law--honoring the police officers who defended the Capitol that day. Even this morning, the President is shamefully blaming officers for, as he said, deliberately escalating the violence that day. But thanks to the strength of the American people and our institutions, our democracy has survived. It continues to be tested, but it has survived.
In the aftermath, Congress enacted meaningful changes through the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act.
Despite this action, we are still not out of the woods. Clearly, President Trump's attacks on the right to vote and the very foundation of our democracy have continued. In one of his first acts in his second term, Trump issued a blanket pardon of more than 1,500 of the defendants charged with attacking the Capitol, including more than 1,200 who were convicted--1,200 convicted. Upon hearing the news of the pardon, one of the Capitol Police officers injured that day who testified against the rioters felt Trump was ``trying to erase what [he] did.'' Not satisfied with that, the January 6 convicts are now seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts of taxpayer money.
Mr. President, I would like to share with all of you that Senator Whitehouse and I are introducing new legislation today to bar these payouts.
But this is about more than just payouts and pardons. Trump doesn't believe he has done anything wrong. The President continues to work to undermine the midterm elections in a desperate attempt to hold onto power.
Five years after January 6, Trump continues to double down on the Big Lie conspiracy. He has already issued an Executive order that threatens to seize authority over State elections administration. Thankfully, much of it has been blocked by Federal courts, but he is threatening more of the same or even a phony national emergency while he tries to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters. He has staffed the White House, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security with known election deniers. In 2020, he was trying to make calls to Georgia, demanding 11,000 more votes, but now Trump is pressuring States to redraw congressional districts to tilt the scales before the upcoming midterm elections.
I refuse to stay silent while Trump tries to rig the next election and continue to lie about the last election. We will fight for the future of our free and fair elections in this country.
Mr. President, Senator Whitehouse and I are also leading the No Rewards for January 6 Rioters Act to forbid payouts to January 6 rioters.
I will continue to press the Office of Special Counsel to investigate the many brazen Hatch Act violations related to partisan political campaigns being waged from the current Oval Office and the current Department of Justice.
We must defend bipartisan State election administrations in this country and take to the floor to warn Americans about the Trump administration's efforts to rig election rules ahead of this year's midterm elections. American democracy was here long before Trump came into power, and it will be here long after he is gone because we will continue to fight every anti-voter, undemocratic action this White House rolls out.
I thank my coalition for participating in the floor block this afternoon.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. President, 5 years ago, our Nation and democracy experienced one of its darkest days when a violent mob--incited by President Trump--ransacked the Capitol.
Brave police officers were beaten, crushed, bear-sprayed, and maced while defending our democracy with their bare hands. The sacred Halls of Congress, including the Senate floor, where we are standing today, were desecrated. Symbols of hate were flown through these sacred halls. Worse, blood and more was smeared on the walls and floors. The certification of the election was delayed, and later that night, with blood still staining the Capitol Grounds, many of the President's allies still--still--voted against certifying the election.
I was in the House of Representatives on January 6. I was in the House of Representatives exactly 5 years ago. I was asked by Speaker Pelosi to be one of the managers of the floor debate that day, to be one of the managers opposing the efforts to decertify the electors, and I remember vividly what that day was like.
I remember being surprised to look up from my notes from where I was speaking and rebutting what others were saying to see that Speaker Pelosi was no longer presiding in the Chamber. She had been removed so quickly that I didn't even see her leave the Chamber. Then I saw the Capitol Police come back onto the floor, grab our No. 2, Steny Hoyer, and whisk him off the floor. I noticed only peripherally Members were on their phones and not in a way that they were texting but, rather, in that they were watching. What they were watching, of course, were hundreds and thousands of people outside the Capitol who were starting to beat their way into this building. Then I could hear them myself outside the Chamber as they were banging on doors and trying to get in. I remember Capitol Police officers coming back on the floor, making sequential and more serious statements about the emergency and that we needed to get out our gas masks. I remember grabbing one under my seat and the difficulty we all had in just opening them.
I remember when the Capitol Police came back on the floor and said: You need to get out. You need to get out now.
I remember waiting, as Members fled the floor, until two Republicans came up to me.
One said: You can't let them see you.
The other said: That's right. I know these people. I can talk to these people. I can talk my way through these people. You're in a whole different category.
At first, I was moved by their evident concern for my safety. Then my next thought was, if you hadn't been lying about the election, I wouldn't need to worry about my safety. None of us would.
As I walked off the floor and through the tunnels that day, I remember thinking back to when I had first been elected and how, a few months later, it was 9/11 and how we had gathered on the steps of the Capitol--Democrats and Republicans--to sing ``God Bless America.'' That tragedy had been unifying for the country, and I remember thinking, on January 6, as I walked through those tunnels, that this tragedy would not be unifying.
But little could I have imagined that the person who incited that attack on this building--the person who led that first effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power--would once again be President and that among his first acts in Congress would be to pardon hundreds and hundreds of violent attackers who beat the Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police who were defending us on that day or that we would hear the rampant kind of denials that we just heard from one of my Republican colleagues on this floor--this repugnant, this dangerous, this disgraceful effort to rewrite history; to pretend that this was somehow this misunderstood, peaceful gathering of tourists on January 6.
I was proud to serve on the January 6 Committee. What really came home to me while serving on that committee, more than anything else, was a large part of what saved us on that day--what saved our democracy on that day--which were Republicans of good faith who were willing to do their duty and uphold their oath: Brad Raffensperger, who said, when the President called him and berated him for an hour to find 11,780 votes that did not exist, that he would not do it; or Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker in Arizona, who said to Rudy Giuliani, when he was urging much the same, that what you are asking me to do is a violation of my oath, and he would not do it.
But now we are seeing a systematic effort to weed out anyone who defies the President's false narrative. In hearing after hearing on the Senate Judiciary Committee, candidates for high office and for the Federal bench cannot be confirmed if they admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump lost. It is a prerequisite to be nominated or confirmed that you must adhere to the Big Lie. This is where we are.
Most astonishing to me after January 6 is that I would find our democracy in more danger today than I did on that day. The danger has grown along with the denial. The danger has grown along with efforts by this administration to try to succeed next time where it failed in overturning the election by seating within local elections boards diehard partisans who will ignore the law in favor of their favored partisan candidate; by pushing out election workers; by trying to rewrite election laws; by trying to sow doubt in the election system so that, if necessary, if they lose the next election, they can try to deny and overturn that too. This is the danger that we face.
We thought democracy was inevitable. We were wrong. As it turns out, every generation has its own struggle for democracy.
Our parents' and grandparents' generations went off to world war to defend our democracy. What we have to do is by comparison so much less, but it is nevertheless so very important. We have the same obligation as those that went before us to preserve this incredible legacy we have been given by our Founders.
I am grateful to Senator Padilla for organizing this special order hour for us to remember the horrors of that day, and we dedicate ourselves to making sure that something like January 6 never happens in this country again.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mr. President, my husband and I sheltered in place right
We heard them just outside the room I was in, feet away from this Chamber. They were looking for any lawmaker they could find, screaming ``kill the infidels.'' We felt them bashing against our door trying to get in. We held our breath and waited for what seemed like forever.
And this time every year, it feels like I am still holding my breath because I know it wasn't just my husband and I that were in danger that day and it wasn't just the windows that were shattered. It was our democracy that was under attack--our democracy--and the very idea that we use our voices and our votes in this country, not violence.
And the same forces that ignited the insurrection 5 years ago are still here. The same lies are still being spread about the 2020 election--you just heard some of them--by the same bad actors; the same President who told the crowd just hours before that violent insurrection that he would march to the Capitol with them is now accusing Democrats of treason and sharing calls to execute them.
And the same violent people--the people who stormed and battered our Capitol Police, the people who brought bats and knives and zip ties, the people who left blood and feces and broken glass littered throughout the Halls of this building--they are walking free today because President Trump thinks they were the victims.
On his first day in office, Trump pardoned rioters who assaulted officers with pepper spray and metal poles. Trump pardoned people who crushed police with riot shields. Trump pardoned an insurrectionist who violently punched, slapped, and swatted police and even choked one officer to the ground. Trump pardoned someone who plunged a stun gun into a Capitol Police officer's neck.
Trump pardoned those people and many like them with no care for how dangerous or violent they were.
He even let the leader of the Proud Boys out of prison.
The story doesn't end there because several people that Trump let out of prison are now back in jail for other crimes: gun charges, breaking and entering, burglary, a fatal drunk driving accident, child pornography, aggravated kidnapping, sexual assault--even plotting to kill the FBI agents who investigated them.
Months after Trump pardoned Christopher Moynihan--one of the first rioters to breach the police barricades--he was arrested again for threatening the life of Leader Jeffries.
Make no mistake: Trump's mass pardons were a dangerous endorsement of political violence, telling criminals you can beat cops within an inch of their life as long as it is in service to President Trump.
They are also part of an all-out effort by the President and his allies to rewrite the history of the insurrection of that day. President Trump's Justice Department just took down the public database that laid out the thousands of investigations.
He just put up a website that blames Capitol Police for escalating the situation. Seriously. Trump isn't just siding with the rioters; he is trying to blame our law enforcement.
And President Trump's allies in Congress, to this day, have refused to hang a plaque honoring our Capitol Police officers for their sacrifice.
We lost a Capitol Police officer that day. Several others took their lives in the trauma that followed. Capitol Police officers suffered severe injuries--cracked ribs, smashed spinal discs, brain injuries, even the loss of an eye--and yet, Speaker Johnson has turned a plaque that was meant to be proof of their bravery into proof of his own cowardice.
No matter how many criminals Trump pardons, no matter how many lies he tells, and no matter how loudly he tells them, no President can rewrite history unless we stand by and let him.
I, for one, am never forgetting the truth of that day. It is burned into my brain, and I am never letting our country forget it either. This is a battle I have no doubt we can win. But the challenge before us at this moment is greater than just fighting for truth and history.
It is not enough to make sure that we simply remember the truth of the January 6 insurrection. The real fight is to ensure we learn the lesson of the January 6 insurrection because there is no reason to think the same insurrectionists that are now free and the same President--now bolder than ever in challenging our laws and our Constitution--won't try once again to get their way through threats and through violence.
Trump has already made clear where he stands on democracy. He made it clear 5 years ago when he promised to march on the Capitol. He made it clear last year when he pardoned everybody that did storm the Capitol. He makes it clear every single day.
That is why it is incumbent on all of us in this country to be just as clear where we stand on democracy, especially when it comes to standing up to Trump. Our government of the people, by the people, for the people is an amazing accomplishment, but it is not automatic or inevitable. It takes work. It takes people speaking up. It takes Congress listening and acting.
At the end of the day, our democracy is only as strong as our resolve. It is as enduring as our courage. January 6 was a day that tested that resolve. It was a day that tested that courage.
Frankly, some people in this body failed that test, but 5 years ago today, as I sheltered in place steps away from right here, it wasn't just the locks that held. The courage of our Capitol Police held. And most importantly, the resolve of some leaders to put country before party held.
To my colleagues and to the American people: I know we can continue to protect this democracy, but only if we tell the full truth about the threat that we faced 5 years ago and the challenges we face today.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.
Mr. President, I rise with my colleagues and thank them for gathering to talk about this most important anniversary. I think all of us are used to giving speeches on the Senate floor to an empty Chamber.
When you grow up and you learn about the Senate, you generally think people are here listening to one another, but when you come to the Senate, you find that is usually not the case.
One of the things about January 6, 2021, that was very memorable in my mind was that we were all together. We were all here in the midst of a most momentous occasion--the certification of the 2020 election result--looking each other in the eye. And we all experienced the confusion of the Vice President being ushered away and those doors shutting--first the glass doors, and then the wooden doors--as the Sergeant at Arms told us that the Senate was under attack. We remember sheltering here for 45 minutes to an hour before a path had been cleared where we could go elsewhere to be safe.
We remember the brave Senate staff as we were exiting remembering to pick up the wooden boxes that contained the certifications from the various States so that we could actually complete the work of that day and not see those boxes burned by the rioters out on the grounds of the Capitol.
We were all together.
It somehow seems fitting that as we gather 5 years later, it is an empty Chamber again because many want to forget or pretend or ignore what happened that day.
I express my thanks to my colleague from Washington and others to make sure that even if we stand in this Chamber virtually alone, we are not going to forget, and we won't be silent about what occurred.
I want to mention three things as I think about those days. Only one is a memory that I have, but I want to begin with just telling you the names of the five police officers who lost their life defending this Capitol. All five were residents of Virginia.
Brian Sicknick was a member of the Capitol Police, from Springfield, VA. He was 42 years old. He had served with the Capitol Police for 13 years. He was attacked directly by that mob on January 6, and 1 day later, on January 7, he died from multiple strokes that occurred just hours after that attack.
Brian Sicknick, 42 years old.
It is a little painful to say that the other four names that I am going to now read to you and describe were four police officers who lost their lives by suicide--who were here defending this Capitol, defending us, defending me--and were so traumatized by this seat of democracy being attacked by a mob that they lost their lives by suicide in the days and weeks after the attack.
The first was a friend of mine--and I suspect a friend of many--who were here: Howie Liebengood, a Capitol Police officer who grew up in Vienna, VA. He was 51 years old. He was a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Capitol Police.
Howie was an interesting guy because of his tie to the Senate. His father had worked for the Senate during Howie's entire life. This was his family. It wasn't just his job. He grew up coming to work with his dad. He grew up knowing the Halls of this Capitol as if it was his backyard.
When he graduated from college, he actually tried to break into being a NASCAR driver, which was his passion and his dad's passion. But after a few years of finding that that was hard to do, he went into the family business; he came to the family office, which was the U.S. Capitol.
Most of us remember Howie because he usually worked at the Delaware door into the Russell Building where folks come in, that door that staff and Senate visitors come in too. And I would see Howie every morning. My office is in the Russell Building, one floor up from that door where he would be every morning.
He would be this cheerful guy, greeting you, greeting your staff, making a joke, and always quick with a smile and quick with some funny quip. Howie just seemed like that kind of classic definition of just the hail fellow well met. He didn't ever meet a stranger. He loved this place as if it were his home.
He was here protecting the Capitol on January 6. He saw this place that had been his home under attack. This home of democracy, his personal home for him, everything in his life--his dad's career, his own career, his love for this institution, his love for the people in the institution--he saw it under attack by those trying to disrupt our democracy.
His wife Serena, who has also gotten to be a friend, said that Howie went into a deep depression. After this, a few days later, he came back to work and he actually was in an accident in one of the Capitol Police vehicles because his attention was elsewhere.
One day shortly after that accident, he came home and Serena said he seemed to be in a very distant mood, and he went upstairs and, a few minutes later, died by suicide.
I worked with Serena and other Senators, and I do thank Senators for this because there was a provision in the benefit for Capitol Police officers that, frankly, was a national provision for most that you could receive a benefit if your death was in the line of duty. You had to prove that it was in the line of duty. If it was during a traffic accident or summer vacation, you didn't get a line-of-duty death benefit, but there was an exclusion if you died by suicide.
You weren't even allowed to prove that the mental health or depression or the pressure that drove you to die by suicide was connected to the line of duty, and that was a bar that was common in law enforcement agency benefits packages all over the United States, including the Capitol Police.
I worked with Senator Duckworth and Senate colleagues, and we got that law changed, so that law enforcement officers who died by suicide after a traumatic event, such as that attack, at least tried to make their case that that death was not in vain, but it was a death that was connected to your law enforcement career.
And I worked with Serena on that, and we were able to get the law changed in a way that affects Capitol Police and others, that corrects an arcane or old-timey view of what suicide is. I think of Howie every time I walk in that door. That is the door I come into work every day. I have been here for 13 years now. It has been 5 years since January 6, 2021. But when I walk in that door, and Howie Leavengood is not there, I think of him.
Jeffrey Smith was a Metropolitan Police Officer and lived in Fairfax. He was 35 years old. He was a 12-year patrolman with the Metropolitan Police Department. Like Howie, he died shortly after the attack by suicide.
Kyle DeFreytag was a Metropolitan Police officer from Alexandria, VA. He was 26 years old, had his whole life before him. He was a 5-year veteran of the Metropolitan Police Department. He died after the attack--after defending this Capitol, after defending us--by suicide.
Finally, the fifth was Gunther Hashida, who was also from the Metropolitan Police, lived in Dumfries, VA, longtime resident of Northern Virginia, 43 years old, an 18-year veteran of the Metropolitan Police Department, also took his life after the attack by suicide.
These were law enforcement officers who are tough people who see a lot of tough stuff, but they weren't prepared. They weren't prepared to deal with an attack on the Capitol motivated by the President of the United States, and that caused them to spiral into a depression. And they are no longer with us as a result.
I just felt like it was important that we tell their stories. They are Virginians. Their families are Virginians. Their names should not be forgotten. Their names should be displayed in the Capitol.
The second thing I want to say is just one memory from that day, and then I will conclude with something that motivates me.
There was only one thing that day that happened that gave me some, I don't know, glimmer of hope, I guess. And I think we all know in life that sometimes in dark moments you can get a glimmer of hope, and sometimes in really good moments there can be a worm in the apple too. It is one of the mysteries of life.
We were gathered in a room after we had been escorted from this Chamber. It was during the thick of COVID, packed full of Senators and staff. Everybody but one person, as I recall, was wearing a mask, packed together for hours and hours and hours. And we were told by Senate officials that the room had been equipped so that we could complete the electoral college count and certification in that room.
And I give some credit to my Senate colleagues because it was interesting, without even discussing it, all 100 people looked at each other and just said: We are not doing it here. You are going to get the Chamber clear. We don't care how many hours it takes, and we are going to go back. And we will complete this business in the full view of the American public. And we did. But we had to wait for hours to do that because it took hours to suppress the attack.
TV monitors were wheeled into the room so that we could watch what was happening. Here was the only thing that happened that put a smile on my face that day, and it made me reflect upon who we are as a nation and gave me a sense of hope.
As the Capitol Police, together with the Metropolitan Police, were battling to stop the attack, a few hours in, the television showed Virginia State police cruisers arriving so Virginia officers could help defend democracy.
And I went over to Senator Warner, my colleague and friend of now 46 years, and I said: Mark, the last time there was an insurrection against the government of the United States, 160 years ago, Virginia was leading it. Virginia was leading it. And here we are, and the Virginia State Police are arriving at the Capitol to save the Union from an insurrection fomented by the Commander in Chief of the United States. There was a tragedy in that statement, but there was also something positive about the arc of history in a Virginia that had led an insurrection and was now so committed to the Union that the first to respond, other than those immediately here on the campus, were the Virginia State Police.
The last thing I will say is this, a motivation, because you have got to look for motivation on days like this, and you have got to look for motivation when you think nobody really cares about what you are talking about.
Senators usually wear Senate pins. I generally don't wear mine because I lose everything, and the Senate pin that we wear is actually kind of valuable. And I was told when I got here, if you lose it, it costs $400 to get a new one. So I have it in a special place, and I don't wear it. And I hope I may be
And I will just tell you about the seal quickly. I have talked about it once or twice on the floor, but I just feel motivated to talk about it again.
Mr. President, 250 years of American democracy, July 4, 1776, we know what happened in Philadelphia, the Declaration of Independence. On July 5, 1776, now on the Fourth, there were a lot of Virginians in Philadelphia like Thomas Jefferson and others. The A team was in Philadelphia. The B team was in Williamsburg, the Virginia B team.
And on July 5, 1776, here is what they did: They wrote the Virginia bill of rights and passed it. They passed the Virginia Constitution, the first constitution. They elected Patrick Henry the first Governor of the Commonwealth, and they passed and embraced a draft of a State seal that had been designed in 3 days by a four-member committee, including George Wythe, who was the dean of the William & Mary Law School.
The seal is an interesting one. It is a woman, an Amazon, sometimes controversial because one breast is exposed--it is a figure from Roman mythology--standing on top of a deposed Monarch with his crown falling off with the motto ``Sic Semper Tyrannis,'' ``Thus be it always to tyrants.''
Of all the States, every State has a motto, but Virginia's is the only one that is kind of a warning. New York has a good one, ``Excelsior,'' ``Onward.'' Most States have great--``Ad Astra Per Aspera,'' Kansas, ``To the stars through adversity.'' Michigan is a funny one. ``If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.'' I have always wondered about that one.
But Virginia's motto is the only one kind of a warning or rebuke: ``Thus be it always to tyrants,'' ``Sic Semper Tyrannis.'' And those who put this together, they used the future verb tense. They didn't say: We don't like tyrants; down with tyrants; King George is a tyrant. ``Semper'' means always. They used the future verb tense because they knew tyranny was not something that was just in the rearview mirror.
Virginia has never changed its motto. We have never changed our flag. We continue to hold out the sad reality that tyranny is a fact of human nature, not just a form of government. It is a fact of human nature. And the woman standing atop the tyrant in Roman mythology represents virtue, and virtue is a permanent factor of human nature as well.
The Founders believed we had to be on guard against tyranny. The Founders also believed, with confidence, that virtue would prevail over tyranny but not without our effort. And so standing in a nearly empty Chamber today on a day that has meaning to me, and maybe not to a whole lot of other people, I just say I am motivated by this. I am motivated by the notion that if we put our shoulders to the wheel in this great democracy, at 250, we can win out over tyranny. We can turn this year of 250 into a celebration of American democracy, not a requiem, not a wake, not a saying goodbye but a revitalization.
And with that, I thank you for your indulgence.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic leader.
Thank you to my friend Senator Kaine of Virginia for his good words, and I thank Senator Padilla for organizing this floor block, and all of my colleagues who have come to the floor today. I see Senator Peters is waiting.
Why are we here to speak on this difficult and somber day? Because 5 years ago today, down to this very hour, the temple of democracy was turned into a snake pit of mob violence. Its windows were smashed. Its offices vandalized. Lawmakers and our staffs--everyday citizens who love their country and work here every day--hid beneath desks and feared for their lives.
Nearly 140 police officers were injured as 5 people lost their lives. It is like yesterday to me. I was sitting right at this desk. I had just known on January 5, the day before, that I was becoming majority leader because we had won the seats in Georgia. And I am sitting there and looking at something, and all of a sudden, I feel a hand on my collar. It was Michael Lanczycki, the head of my security team. He said: You are in danger. We have got to get out of here. I looked up at my desk, and I saw Pence being rushed off the platform.
We went out the door. We made a right turn. We opened another door, and we were within 20 feet of these hooligans, one of whom recognized me and said: Let's get him.
Because of the bravery of the Capitol Police officers, nothing bad happened to us, but it was a horrible day. Five years later, I want to thank my detail, but all the members of the Capitol Police, the DC Police, our servicemembers, and all the first responders who helped us. You are heroes. On that day, you were the first line of defense for democracy--the first line of defense for democracy.
And it is shameful and cowardly today that the Trump White House has tried to rewrite history. Countries fail when they don't learn from their history, and yet to blame the Capitol Police force for creating violence is sickening. How could they do this? On the one hand, they say they love police officers, but right here they blame those here.
They were our heroes, the Capitol Police officers. And the only ones who caused violence were the rioters, egged on by Trump. So we thank our heroes. We also mourn those who perished in the days and weeks and months after the attack, especially the first responders.
And, of course, the anniversary here on January 6 comes at a bitter and complicated moment. Donald Trump is now back in office. How we could have let somebody who did this, hidden by all the propaganda and lies that he and his allies in the media and his allies in politics propagated, is just incredible. It is confounding. It makes you worry about democracy.
His pardons make a mockery of the rule of law. And on his very first day, he pardoned every single convicted insurrectionist--very first day as President.
That speaks loudly as to who Donald Trump is, the lowness of his character, the lack of any honor. And, sadly, too many of our Republican colleagues remain silent in the face of this obvious evil. Too many have tried to rewrite history. Too many are trying to turn the criminals into martyrs. We were here. I heard one of them say it was a tourist excursion. We were here. It was no tourist excursion. It was no tourist excursion at all.
And while the insurrection lasted just a day, the attack on democracy lives on. There are people, young people here, who may be susceptible to the same kind of propaganda because they think it happened once and the people who did it were heroes and were pardoned.
So this is dangerous, not only at this moment but in future moments and days and months and years ahead.
And that fight against democracy lives on in the threats against free and fair elections; the threats against workers--election workers, poll workers; threats live on in Donald Trump's very own Justice Department, which has tried to get its hands on State voter data, and it has abandoned any fight against voter discrimination.
And, of course, Donald Trump continues to plug in election deniers within the people's government. He makes them heroes. It is making night day, turning black into white, white into black.
The attacks are not over but neither--I want to assure the American people--is our fight to protect the democracy we love. The way forward is clear: We must speak the truth. We must fight the lies. We must never relent on speaking what happened on January 6 in the face of the hurricane of lies that comes from Donald Trump and, particularly, so many of his media allies.
To protect democracy, to speak the truth, to reveal and expose the lies, this is our moral obligation as Members of this institution and as citizens of this democracy.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. President, it is with heavy hearts that we pause to mark the fifth anniversary of the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol--this
There are two ways that a republic can be destroyed. The normal vision is with a mob attacking a Capitol or a White House and taking over a country in short order. The second way is for an authoritarian President to dismantle it from within, eroding the checks and balances of the Constitution. I don't think any of us who serve in this Chamber ever thought either was a possibility here in the United States of America with the strength of our two centuries-plus of determined efforts in the course of running a democratic Republic, but we were wrong.
Five years ago today, our Republic suffered just such an assault by a mob. I will never forget seeing an individual run down this aisle, then circle around to the desk where the Vice President was presiding, have the Vice President immediately gavel down the session, be escorted out, and everyone is looking around the room in mystery.
And then, soon, the Capitol Police officers were working to lock the doors on this level and the balconies above, a moment none of us who were here will ever forget and a moment that America should never forget--a mob that was tearing down the American flag and putting up a flag that said ``Donald Trump,'' a mob that was breaking down these doors and occupying this Chamber, and doing the same in the House of Representatives.
That moment, when we are counting the electoral college votes--the slates, those who were assigned to the electoral college to determine who was elected President--that moment, that is the peaceful transfer of power. The ballot box, the counting of the votes, the peaceful transfer of power--that is the vision at the heart of government by and for the people. That is the difference between a democratic republic and an authoritarian state.
And on that day, we went over to the House Chamber and started the rollcall of States. On the State of Alabama, no one objected. On the State of Alaska, no one objected. And then it came to Arizona, and a Member of the House and a Member of the Senate objected, and we came back over here to debate that issue of whether or not we would accept the slate from Arizona, and that is when the chaos ensued.
You know, up front here were these amazing three boxes. We carried them over to the House, and then when we came back to debate, they came back here to the Senate Chamber, these mahogany and leather boxes with all kinds of straps on them. They look like treasure. They look like they would be filled with gold. But their content is more precious than gold; their contents, the expression through the electoral college ballots of the will of the United States of America about who would next serve as the President of our Nation.
And if it wasn't for the quick action of our Parliamentarian team to grab those boxes, I am sure that the rioters who entered this Chamber just moments later would have destroyed those boxes--another symbolic destruction of a democratic Republic in an effort by some to create an authoritarian state.
We had some real heroes that day like Eugene Goodman, who got Senator Mitt Romney to safety, and then, seeing people coming up the stairs from the lower level, proceeded to steer those folks away from the center of the building and away from the Senate Chamber where we were sitting--an amazingly effective strategy to buy a few more minutes of time for the security of this Chamber.
And we remember the police officers who so valiantly defended this building--170 injured--and others who lost their lives as a consequence of the attack on that day: Brian Sicknick, Howard Liebengood, Jeffrey Smith, Gunther Hashida, and Kyle DeFreytag.
Now, there is a plaque that has been built, and I ask unanimous consent to have the text of it be entered into the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
The plaque says:
And their heroism should never be forgotten.
And that plaque, which by law is supposed to be mounted on this Capitol, has not yet been mounted, and it needs to be mounted.
There is a second way that republics are lost. And in the last 20 years, around the world, this has primarily been the way it has happened--not with mobs storming the Capitol but from authoritarian figures destroying the republic from within. And out of those experiences, in a variety of countries around the world--countries like Venezuela, countries like Turkiye--there has become a set of principles about how to convert a democratic republic into a strongman state without a mob storming the Capitol that includes firing the government's referees, like Trump did when he fired 17 inspectors general and 200 career prosecutors in the Department of Justice; packing the government with loyalists to head key departments, as President Trump has done; demonizing the enemy within, trying to divide and concur; attacking those with dark skin as rapists and murderers and garbage, targeting people on the color of their skin and the language they speak, as this administration has done; disregarding due process; silencing free speech; shutting down programs, even though they are authorized and funded by Congress, in violation of the Constitution; abusing government authorities like licenses and permits and security clearances and research grants; weaponizing the Justice Department; seeking to put the military in the streets to stop peaceful dissent; and rigging the next election--all 10 of these things happening right now.
So 5 years ago, we witnessed the effort to destroy our Republic with an assault on this building, and right now we are witnessing the insidious determination of President Trump and his team to destroy our Republic from within through these 10 strategies.
Just as we stood and stopped the assault on this Capitol 5 years ago, we must stand and stop this President from destroying our Republic today. That is the best way to honor those who defended the Capitol 5 years ago.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
Mr. President, today we mark the fifth anniversary of one of the most shocking attacks on our Nation and on our democracy. For the first time in our Nation's history, our longstanding tradition of the peaceful transfer of power was disrupted in a violent and deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol.
I remember that day vividly, sitting in this Chamber, conducting the ceremonial certification of our election before our proceedings were abruptly stopped.
In the hours that followed, thousands of our brave law enforcement officers, first responders, and National Guard members took swift action to protect every Member of Congress. They put their lives on the line to fend off the violent insurrectionists.
Those U.S. Capitol officers, the DC Metropolitan Police, the National Guard, and all who stepped in deserve our deepest gratitude and recognition for their valiant efforts to defend democracy on that infamous day.
We must also remember the legacy of the five heroic officers who lost their lives in the aftermath of that attack. The attack took an unimaginable toll on the first responders. It also deeply affected the Capitol Hill community and Americans all across our Nation who witnessed the assault on the heart of our democracy with their own eyes on television. We saw the images of officers engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the rioters. We saw pictures and videos of attackers with zip ties in the Senate Chamber and rioters with nooses on the Capitol grounds. To this day, those images are absolutely shocking.
But I have been astonished how quickly so many of my colleagues seem to have forgotten about the events of that day.
Following the horrific attack, as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, I joined with then-Ranking Member Portman, Rules Committee Chairwoman Klobuchar, and Ranking Member Blunt to lead the first bipartisan oversight hearings, investigations, and report on the immediate changes needed to secure the Capitol and prevent a future attack.
This bipartisan effort evaluated the security, planning, and response failures related to the January 6 attack, which resulted in the implementation of significant recommendations that I am proud to say have strengthened security here at the Capitol and has better prepared us for any future attack.
I also led investigations into the failures of our Federal law enforcement and intelligence Agencies to prevent and respond to January 6 and the threat of domestic terrorism more broadly.
Both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security missed warning signs that could have prevented that day's attack. This was both a failure of imagination and a failure of leadership during the first Trump administration as they directed resources away--away--from the threat of domestic terrorism.
Five years later, I fear that, despite these efforts, our Nation has not learned, and the right lessons from this attack are being forgotten. Instead of confronting the dangerous threat of domestic terrorism head-on, the current administration has spent the last year dismantling the counterterrorism infrastructure meant to keep us safe.
President Trump has also twisted the meaning of the domestic terrorism threat beyond recognition, using it to label and target political speech and groups that he does not like and in ways that threaten all of us in this country.
President Trump has also made major cuts to key components of both the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and he has diverted resources from our law enforcement and intelligence communities that should be focused on addressing terrorist threats to bolster--the reason for this is to bolster his political priorities.
Instead of condemning the violent attack and holding the attackers accountable, President Trump called them ``patriots.'' And he pardoned nearly 1,500 individuals who were found guilty of assaulting the very same law enforcement officers that we are honoring today--found them guilty in the court of law. Let us be clear, they were found guilty in the court of law because this Nation is a rule of law. But he pardoned them because the views of these rioters and attackers were his political supporters, rather than offenders who should be held accountable for breaking the law.
There is no question that President Trump prizes loyalty over the law, but he has taken that favoritism too far. Not only did he pardon people responsible for those heinous crimes on that day 5 years ago, he also targeted and fired the Justice Department experts who investigated and prosecuted the cases holding the January 6 attackers accountable for their crimes.
But the most concerning outcome in the 5 years since this attack is how quickly many of our elected leaders have helped to rewrite history and minimize the danger that our democracy faced on that day. Instead of uniting to condemn the attack--and the effort to overturn a free and fair election--too many of our Nation's political leaders were cowed by President Trump and repeated his lies and his conspiracies. Those actions have directly contributed to rising climate of political violence that we see today all across the political spectrum.
And finally, I was furious to see some of my colleagues not only fall in line to rewrite the history of this attack, but to insert a provision in recent legislation to give Senators a special payday because they were part of the criminal investigation into President Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the effort that led directly to the January 6 attack.
For the past 5 years, so many of my Democratic colleagues have joined me in calling for all Americans to put our country before our party and to commit to upholding our most cherished democratic principles before we lose them forever. It has been disheartening that many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are not joining us in those full-throated calls to defend our system of government that makes our Nation so unique.
If we, as the U.S. Senate or as a country, cannot agree on the lessons of the past, I fear that we are setting ourselves up to repeat them. Over the past year, in particular, it has never been clearer that our democratic institutions--our standards and our traditions--and the rights of every American are still under attack.
We can still come together and stand up for the Constitution, and we can stand up for the rule of law. We could still come together and use our authority as a coequal branch of government to hold this administration accountable for these ongoing attacks and actions that risk making our Nation less safe. And we can still come together to protect the promise of our democracy for generations to come.
So today I implore my colleagues to join me in unequivocally condemning the attack on our democracy on January 6 in 2021, and I urge all of them to help us protect our most treasured democratic principles. We have a chance to restore faith in our democratic way of life, but our democracy and our institutions can only endure as long as our elected leaders have the fortitude and the strength to protect and to defend them against all threats, no matter their origin.
In the 5 years since January 6, we have fallen short of that responsibility. In the darkest times of our Nation's nearly 250-year history, we have always found a way to come together to protect our democracy. And if we continue down this current path that we are on now, I am concerned that we are losing our most cherished freedoms for good. We cannot and must not ever let that happen.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada.
Mr. President, I join my colleagues today to condemn the acts of violence we have all been talking about that occurred on this date 5 years ago when violent insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Five years ago today, a mob viciously attacked Capitol Police officers to try to stop the Senate from certifying--right here in this room--the free and fair election that voted Donald Trump out of office. Now, many of my Senate colleagues will never forget that day because, as I have said, we were here.
I remember it very, very clearly as I was preparing to come up here to stand with the States who legally certified that election and argue against the oppositions that were coming from some of my colleagues. I remember, as I was coming up here in the Capitol Building, running into a Capitol Police officer who was in one of the restrooms with the door open, washing his eyes out because he had been pepper sprayed.
Now, I remember thinking, This Capitol Police officer here in the U.S. Capitol has been pepper sprayed, and he is here now trying to protect himself but most importantly protect all of us. What is happening that is so close to the Capitol right now that this police officer has been attacked?
But I will tell you what this police officer did, like many others that day--many others. He washed his eyes out.
He ran out of that bathroom, up the stairs, and out the door to protect us. He didn't think twice about it. He had already been harmed by these violent insurrectionists, but he didn't think twice. He kept being the forefront, being out there, running to protect all of us that were doing our jobs here on the Senate floor.
I think that is what is so disturbing to many of us that lived through that day--and you don't have to have lived through this day. You know, I am talking to everyone in this room that was here, whether it is our Parliamentarian, our staff, everybody here, the interns, our reporters, everybody experienced that day. People manning the doors. Everybody felt it.
But you know who else felt it that day, you know, that feel just as emotional about what they saw? It was every American that was watching it unfold on TV because this is their Capitol. This is their building. This is the building of the people. And they were watching these violent insurrectionists try to tear it down and looking for Members of Congress--looking for Members of Congress to do who knows what, to prevent us from carrying out the duties of our office, but most importantly, carrying out the peaceful transfer of power that this country is known for and has been known for, for over 200 years.
Let me say this. That officer, along with another 150 of his fellow men and women in uniform, they were injured during the insurrection. Five police officers died because of it. Some members of President Trump's mob stole riot shields and used them to beat officers. One person assaulted law enforcement with a metal whip. Another choked an officer to the ground.
They brought weapons and zip ties to the Capitol. They used WD-40 and bear spray on our officers, and they assaulted Capitol Police with American flags. We know this firsthand from, not just the police officers, but from the videos of that day. And I know it firsthand because I saw it in the Halls of the Capitol, the paraphernalia that was littered throughout because of the damage that was caused by those insurrectionists.
I will tell you what, you don't have to take our word. Take the word of rioters because the rioters took videos of themselves doing these horrific things and then posted them online. The claims that these were peaceful protesters are disproved by their own evidence. They were proud to attack the men and woman who keep us safe in an attempt to steal an election. Why? Because President Trump couldn't handle the fact that he lost, because he would rather see our democracy crumble than acknowledge that the American people voted him out.
So earlier that day, he encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol and intimidate the Senators and Members of Congress and his own Vice President, who were in this Chamber to certify those results. The mob smashed through the lines of Capitol Police officers. We saw that on video. They broke into the building. We saw it on video, and we saw it on TV, live. And they left a trail of destruction behind them--all in the name of Donald Trump.
Condemning their lawlessness and their actions against police officers is something we should all be able to agree on, but the truth is that President Trump does not care about that law enforcement. In fact, he is trying to sweep it all under the rug. A year after the insurrection, Congress passed a law to install a plaque honoring the police officers who bravely tried to hold off that violent mob that day; but now Republican leadership in Congress is refusing to unveil the memorial.
Recognizing heroic actions of law enforcement on January 6 is the least President Trump can do, but that would require him to acknowledge that his followers did something wrong. It shouldn't be hard to say that if you commit crimes against law enforcement and incite an insurrection, you should be brought to justice and held accountable.
But instead of standing with our police officers and denouncing these appalling actions, President Trump is rewarding them. He has decided that you don't need to face the consequences of your crime as long as you commit them on his behalf. One of the very first things President Trump did the day he was sworn in was to pardon more than 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists. Now, this is the President who claims he would restore law and order during his Presidency. His actions go against our democracy, our rule of law, and everything we stand for as a nation.
In the United States of America, no one is above the law--not the President and certainly not the convicted criminals he is treating like his own personal army. Letting these bad actors off the hook has encouraged their behavior. In fact, some of them gave interviews saying President Trump's pardons have vindicated their actions. Now, remember, these are some individuals who were convicted in our criminal justice system by a jury of their peers.
These pardons were an endorsement of political violence and an endorsement of attacking our law enforcement. And now, shockingly, within a year of President Trump putting these dangerous criminals back on the streets, several of them have been rearrested for committing crimes. At least a dozen of these men and women, including the one who assaulted Capitol Police officers with a metal whip, have been picked up on various charges ranging from soliciting a minor to plotting to murder the FBI agents who investigated him, to killing somebody while driving drunk to burglary--and I could go on. These are the people President Trump called patriots. These are the people President Trump put back on our streets making our communities less safe and putting innocent people in harm's way.
President Trump owns this. Every crime these violent insurrectionists commit while they roam free is on his head. This isn't a policy debate. It is about right and wrong. It is about who we are as a country. It is about our rule of law and order. Pardoning the January 6 insurrectionists is an insult to our law enforcement, to our rule of law, to our democracy, and, yes, to the American people, who believe in it, who fight for it. We cannot stand for it, and my Democratic colleagues and I will continue--continue--not only to speak out against it, because you can't whitewash this, but also to recognize those Capitol Police officers, those law enforcement officers, those men and women who ran headfirst into harm's way to protect us and this Capitol--the people's Capitol. They will be recognized every single day, and yes, we should have a plaque and a memorial and do so much more, and I am proud of my colleagues for drawing attention to this and continuing to support and thank those men and women who risked their lives to protect our rights and our democracy in this country.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, today is a difficult day particularly for our Capitol Police officers. This is the fifth anniversary of the day when a violent mob attacked this building and attacked them. It did a lot of injury and a lot of harm to Capitol Police officers--in some cases, as they say in the law, death resulting. Today, pardoned criminals who participated in that riot are on the streets of Washington, and if they come back to this Capitol, our police officers are going to have to treat them professionally.
And what support are they getting from all of us? In a better world, this would be a bipartisan showing of respect and gratitude for the police officers who suffered and fought that day to protect this building and an expression of bipartisan gratitude. But that is not where we are as a country right now.
One of the symptoms of Trumpism--frankly, of authoritarianism generally--is the obligation to lie. You are not on the team, you are not in the club, you are not part of the movement if you are not willing to lie for it. So you are constantly tested with the obligation to lie--little ones and then big ones. It tests the loyalty and gradually erodes personal virtue of the person who is increasingly obliged to lie.
So, instead of this being a bipartisan expression of gratitude and appreciation, our colleagues on the other side of the aisle seem to be away today, and it is left to us to remember and honor the brave law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol that day.
The MAGA world has decided that no crimes were committed that day. Well, that is new.
At the time, Senator Ted Cruz described those crimes as a ``violent terrorist attack on the Capitol.''
At the time, Senator John Cornyn said, ``Those who planned & participated in the violence that day should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.''
At that time, Senator Josh Hawley said that ``those who attacked police and broke the law must be prosecuted.''
Those are only a few of the expressions that we heard from our Republican colleagues at the time.
Republican colleagues also once denounced pardoning rioters, particularly violent rioters.
Vice President Vance and the President of the Senate said:
Secretary Kristi Noem said:
Senator Hawley again:
Well, Trump came in, and he issued that blanket pardon virtually right away--nearly 1,600 rioters--and he commuted the sentence of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia. These were not great people. At least 33 of them have already been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for other crimes since that day. Four pardoned insurrectionists have already allegedly reoffended since receiving their pardons. One insurrectionist was charged with a felony for threatening to murder the House minority leader.
Now some of them are so emboldened that they are demanding a reward for having been prosecuted for the crimes that they committed that day and convicted in a court of law. That is an injury to them, in their view.
So, today, Senator Padilla and I have introduced two bills to make clear that no one who stormed the Capitol should get any kind of payment, even from this MAGA Department of Justice--no taxpayer-funded cash giveaways, which, by the way, echoes that we should not be giving taxpayer-funded cash giveaways to our colleagues because their names came up in the investigation of the crimes of that day because they were called by the instigators of the crimes of that day.
So I urge my colleagues to support these bills. Let us not reward the violence that was done that day. Too many are trying to turn that day into a payday for themselves. It is beneath us, and I urge support for those two pieces of legislation.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.
Mr. President, exactly 5 years ago today, I, as well, was in this Chamber, listening to my colleagues debate something that never should have been in question--the validity of the electoral votes from my State of Arizona. We had just returned from the House Chamber, where we were supposed to be carrying out one of the most basic responsibilities of our democracy, and that is certifying the results of a free and fair election. Then, with no evidence and no shame, Republican Members of Congress challenged Arizona's votes. They were trying to discard the will of voters in my State because they just didn't like the outcome.
I was sitting right here in this seat, next to my friend Cory Booker. We knew it wasn't a typical day. We had seen the large protests gathering outside the Capitol, and we knew the President was holding a rally and repeating his lies that, by the way, he still continues to repeat today--his lies that the election was stolen from him. But here in the Senate we were just doing our jobs in following the Constitution and participating in the peaceful transfer of power. Then things started to change. Information came in pieces, and we could hear noise building outside the building. It became clear very quickly that something was wrong.
Vice President Pence was sitting where the Presiding Officer is sitting, and he was quickly ushered out of the room. It happened very fast. Staff began to come in from outside the Chamber while a Senator was still speaking. I was sitting right here, speaking to an intern who was shaking uncontrollably with fear. It was unusual and concerning, but we still did not understand the scale of what was happening beyond these walls.
(Mr. CURTIS assumed the Chair.)
At 1:56 p.m., my brother, Scott, texted me two words: ``chaos outside''--no explanation, no context.
I texted him back: ``What is going on out there?''
He asked whether I was safe and where my car was parked.
Then the messages kept coming from my brother: ``Protesters climbing the walls of the Capitol. Protesters fighting with police inside.''
He used the word ``protesters.'' We would all come to later learn that maybe ``rioters'' or ``insurrectionists'' would have been more accurate.
I have to say, I could not believe what my brother was saying. So I asked him to clarify. I said, ``At the Capitol?'' because after everything I have seen in my life, the idea that a mob could breach the U.S. Capitol was something I never thought I would ever witness in our country.
This situation was escalating very fast. Capitol Police made the call to evacuate, and we trusted them with our safety. Only later did we fully understand how close this came to something far worse. We didn't know that our colleague, the man who formerly had the Presiding Officer's seat in the Senate, Mitt Romney, was literally running for his life. He was a target because he had the courage--he had the courage--to speak the truth about the results of an election.
We didn't know that, at that very moment, Capitol Police officers were being pinned in doors, being beaten with flagpoles, and being attacked with bear spray. We didn't know that Officer Eugene Goodman was making a split-second decision to lead a group of the rioters away from the doors of this very Chamber, and we had seen that video from Igor Bobic of the Huffington Post that he had taken of that chase at great risk to his own personal safety.
I am going to read you a quote here:
This is a quote. These are the words of Inspector Thomas Lloyd of the U.S. Capitol Police, as reported in a new book by Mary Jalonick of the Associated Press. Gunfire--in this room--to protect Senators from getting hurt or worse. That is how close we were. Let's call it what it was. This was an insurrection--an insurrection aimed at stopping the peaceful transfer of power, an insurrection aimed at overturning a free and fair election.
Five years ago on January 6, this did not happen spontaneously. It did not happen by accident. It happened because the current President of the United States and former President Donald Trump refused to accept that he had lost. So when people minimize January 6 or try to rewrite what happened, I cannot accept that, and neither should any of us.
No one has done more than Donald Trump. He has used the powers of his office to hand out pardons--pardons to let people off who attacked police officers. I am the son of two cops. He pardoned over 1,000 individuals. Many of them attacked cops in and around this building. It is insulting to me and to law enforcement officers across our Nation.
These pardons, by the way, they do not just erase sentences; they send a message. And the message is: It is OK for you to commit violent acts as long as they are to support Donald Trump.
And in the years since these pardons, we have now seen exactly who these people are. Christopher Moynihan, who breached the Capitol 5 years ago today and came into this very room, he later threatened to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
John Banuelos, who fired a gun during the insurrection, was later arrested for kidnapping in the Presiding Officer's State of Utah.
Edward Kelley is serving a prison term through 2061 for developing a plan to murder law enforcement officers while he was being investigated for his role on January 6.
And many more have gone on to commit new and violent crimes.
These are the people that Donald Trump pardoned. We know who Donald Trump is. We know he won't take responsibility for this. I am under no illusion. We also know that he is not the man to unite our country, and I do not expect him to change.
We also can't expect these challenges to our democracy to be solved by somebody else or just go away with time. So we have to start being honest about what happened and clear about who caused it, which I think is why we are here today--because this insurrection didn't happen far away. An election wasn't almost overturned on another continent. Police officers weren't beaten in a foreign capital, and guns weren't drawn in some other senate somewhere else.
It all happened right here. It happened in the United States of America. It happened in this room. And fortunately, it failed here. But don't forget why this failed. This failed because of patriotic police officers. It failed because the will of the American people was stronger than an angry mob and stronger than Donald Trump.
But now the question is: If this happens again, will this fail? Democracy is not self-executing. It depends on leaders who tell the truth, respect the will of the people and the rule of law, and put the Constitution ahead of their own ambition. And it depends on every American being involved and holding their elected leaders accountable.
If we do that, if all of us do that, I know that our democracy can remain strong. We can get through this.
This year, we celebrate 250 years of American democracy. What a remarkable achievement. There is nothing our country can't do when we work together. I know that the future of this country and our democracy is bright, but all of us--every single one of us in this Chamber on both sides of the aisle--have to remain committed to it.
Mr. President, I know you are, and so many of us are as well.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
Mr. President, I thank my colleague from Arizona for his remarks just now, for his patriotism and his leadership.
Today, we mark the anniversary of the January 6 attack on our Capitol, on our law enforcement officers, and on our democracy itself.
You have heard my colleagues recount the horrors of that day. Let me be clear: I, too, was in this Chamber as the events unfolded, and what happened on January 6, 2021, was in fact horrible, brutal, frightening, violent, and in some terrible cases lethal.
To all members of law enforcement who responded that day and to their families--but especially to the Capitol Police--thank you. We are grateful to you. We cannot repay what we owe you, but you are in our hearts today.
Mr. President, I come to the floor today because I find myself not only thinking about January 6 but thinking about another anniversary that we marked this week--250 years since the start of 1776, the year of American independence.
It was 250 years ago yesterday that New Hampshire adopted its State constitution after declaring its independence at a meeting in Exeter, a town where my husband and I raised our two children.
This year, there will be no shortage of celebrations of the anniversary of our independence, but it will be up to us--today's citizens of the United States--to decide as a country if these celebrations will represent an empty pageant or a renewal of principle. Because in this moment, a moment when our country is led by a government high on lawlessness and extremism, ambivalent toward freedom, inclined toward authoritarianism, the principles that our Nation was founded on in 1776 feel far more distant than even 250 years.
While the attack on the Capitol may have happened 5 years ago, President Trump's current, constant lawlessness makes every day feel like January 6. So today, it is worth asking: What does January 6 mean for the spirit of 1776? What does it mean for a nation built on self- evident truths that we have a President who continues to tell the lie-- the fantasy--that the 2020 election was stolen? What does it mean to be a country where just powers are derived from the consent of the governed when we have a President who has sought to overturn the voices and votes of the people in a bid to stay in power?
Now, our Founders maintained that we are endowed with certain inalienable rights, but we have a President who routinely attacks the right to due process and freedom of speech, who has sought to use the heavy hand of government to banish critics from the airwaves.
We declared independence, in the words of Jefferson, because we didn't wish to be ruled by a King who ``cut off our trade'' and imposed ``taxes on us without our consent.''
But today we have a President unilaterally declaring costly trade wars on our allies and imposing hefty taxes on his citizens, a President who withholds the people's tax money already appropriated by Congress based on his latest whim. The power of the purse is now the power of the President because the majority in this body refuses to stand up to him.
Our Founders didn't draft a Constitution in order to build a more perfect Union only to one day have a President who rejects his responsibility and sworn oath to uphold it, and our Founders didn't create two other branches of government--a legislature and a judiciary--merely for a wayward Executive to ignore them.
Our Founders wanted the legislative and judicial branches to be checks on the Presidency, but this President seems to think that the clear rules set out in the Constitution are merely a suggestion box.
Surely, as patriots risked their lives, treasure, and sacred honor to establish a breathtaking experiment in self-government, they didn't intend to allow a President to use the long and hallowed arm of justice to target political foes, to ignore laws passed by the people's representatives, or to pardon violent criminals who tried to overthrow our democracy in his name.
There is nothing remotely patriotic, remotely decent about pardoning violent criminals who stormed our Capitol and assaulted police officers.
Can anyone in the administration look the families of the officers in their eyes and explain why such a pardon could possibly be justified?
Of course not.
But then again, this administration doesn't think it should have to. And make no mistake: The pardons may have voided the criminal convictions, but the wounds to the officers remain, as does the attack on our democracy.
When we talk about democracy, it is easy for it to feel merely like an abstract principle. But my dad, a World War II veteran, stressed to me, even as a kid, that freedom and democracy made a real difference in people's lives. Democracy is, in short, the best way to solve problems without violence, with the votes of citizens instead of the voices of a violent mob.
Look no further back than over the course of this last year, and you will see why democracy matters. Despite promising to bring down costs, the President has instead made life less affordable. He has taken away people's healthcare, launched costly trade wars on our allies abroad while making everything more expensive at home, and has spent his days flattering himself, putting his name on buildings and constructing monuments in his own honor.
Are we really surprised that a man who tried to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election does not care about solving the problems that his constituents--the American people--face? If the President didn't think he was accountable to the people's will when he lost the election in 2020, why should we expect him to care about the priorities they want him to address after an election?
Democracy, of course, is about holding leaders accountable when they fail to make people's lives better, and this President disdains democracy because he simply can't deliver.
We are blessed to live in a great country, and we can't forget how unlikely our independence was. In 1776, we subsisted on gasps of hope, our plan little better than a prayer for recurring miracles--not just in Philadelphia but, later, on the icy currents of the Delaware, in the snows of Valley Forge, by the sea in Yorktown.
Mr. President, 1776 was a time when, in the words of Thomas Paine, ``nothing but hope and virtue could survive.''
Surely we didn't survive the hardships of our birth to, only 250 years
When the Declaration of Independence was signed, John Adams wrote in a letter that, hundreds of years from now, people will celebrate the day with what he called ``pomp and parade,'' but he also added that it will ``cost us to maintain this declaration.''
So we have a choice to make as a country. On this 250th anniversary of the year of our independence, we have to decide whether we wish to be governed by the spirit of January 6 or the spirit of 1776.
What is this spirit of 1776? It is the belief in government of, by, and for the people, not of, by, and for any one leader.
Here, no leader is above the law, nor are they above the people whom they serve. Look around this city. Our great monuments here were built by grateful citizens to honor others. They weren't built by greedy leaders to honor themselves.
The spirit of 1776 knows that lawlessness and extremism don't melt away on their own and must be rejected, even when it means standing up to a President or to one's own party. Political courage can be hard; regaining a freedom lost even harder.
And above all else, here in the United States of America, we know that we are not subjects to be ruled; we are citizens to be heard. This is America. This is where freedom rings. And perhaps these sound like lofty principles. Well, I am from the ``Live Free Or Die'' State.
In New Hampshire, we know that principles like freedom matter. We know that they matter because people gave their lives for these principles, and they died for these principles in the hope that the rest of us might live by them. So that is why on this January 6, I am choosing to embrace this spirit of 1776, and I hope that freedom-loving Americans of all political stripes do too.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
Anniversary of January 6 (Executive Calendar)
Mr. President, today is the fifth anniversary of the attack on this Capitol, on this extraordinary building that we love so dearly.
I personally believe that the Capitol Building is the most beautiful building in this country. It is the physical manifestation of article I of our Constitution, and I believe that to defile and disgrace this building is tantamount to defiling and disgracing our Constitution.
It should be the easiest thing for all of us across the political spectrum to say that this building is sacred ground. And I am speaking here in the Senate Chamber where rioters broke into. Look, regardless of our political affiliation, we should be able to say what happened, that it was wrong, and that it should never happen again.
Five years does not seem like a lot of time, but as anyone with young kids knows all too well, time moves quickly. I remember 2 days after January 6, I drove back home from the Capitol, back home to New Jersey. And I drove actually straight to my kids' daycare to be able to pick them up. My 2 boys were only 3 years old and 5 years old at the time. My older son usually bounds out and runs up to me, but this time, he walked out slowly, and he came up to me, and he asked me: Are you OK?
And I glanced towards my wife, who shrugged her shoulders, because we had specifically agreed that we would not mention anything to the kids at this point about what happened on January 6. So I looked back at my boy, and I asked him: What do you mean?
And he looked right back at me, and he said: Did something bad happen at work?
Now, he didn't know exactly what had happened, but he knew something did. He knew something not right happened. A 5-year-old child can grasp that fundamental fact about January 6, that we don't use the means of violence against one another, especially in determining the results of our democracy.
Now, if a 5-year-old can grasp that, why is it so difficult for so many, including some here at the Capitol, to be able to do the same? Why do so many pretend like nothing happened or seek to downplay the events of that day? I call this a purposeful amnesia. Five years out, it is so much more damaging to our democracy than the shattered windows of 5 years ago. This is the storm after the storm.
Now, here is an example to the extent with which congressional Republicans are trying to erase the history. In 2022, the year after the January 6 attack, Congress passed a law that mandated a plaque be placed on the western front of the Capitol to allow visitors to this building to remember.
Now, the plaque itself, pretty simple, an image of the Capitol with a few lines of text: ``On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on January 6, 2021. Their heroism will never be forgotten.''
And beneath the text, various law enforcement entities are listed. A simple message of remembrance for those brave individuals who acted and for the democracy they defended. Now, we should be able to walk out of this Chamber today and view that plaque. In fact, it was supposed to be installed by March of 2023.
But instead, nearly 3 years after it was mandated to be made public, 5 years after the event it was meant to commemorate, the plaque is missing, is absent at the direction of Speaker Johnson. As of last night, it is not just absent; it is being explicitly denied because of Speaker Johnson, who is still refusing to do the simple thing, the right thing, and displaying it for the American people to see.
Now, that absence and denial is part of a broader effort by Speaker Johnson, President Trump, and so many others to prevent us from remembering, to encourage us to forget--the purposeful amnesia. Now, they have done this by gaslighting us, downplaying the events of that day. Speaker Johnson directed his conference to blur the face of rioters in publicly released images so they couldn't be ``charged by the Department of Justice.''
A member of his House conference referred to January 6 as resembling a ``normal tourist visit.'' President Trump called that day a ``day of love.'' He called the rioters patriots, and he pardoned more than 1,500 rioters on his first day in office last year, signing an Executive order directing the Department of Justice to drop pending cases against those suspected of taking part in this attack.
But we know better. We know the truth. Now, 5 years out, I still haven't found the words yet to fully tell my boys what happened then. I never fully answered my older son's questions: Are you OK? Did something bad happen at work?
I have avoided it for 5 years, and I have been wondering why. Why is it that I have been unable to be able to find the words to be able to talk to my child? And what I have come to understand today as I have been thinking about it is I have not talked to them about this because I have wanted to hold off on confronting the full implications of that day.
I think what I have been waiting for is some moment where I can say with assurance that things are better now, where I could tell them about what happened on January 6, but immediately say: That was a horrible thing in the past, but we are beyond it now. Things aren't going to be bad again.
But 5 years on, I am still waiting for that day, but it hasn't come-- not yet. Now, 5 years in, I am faced with the reality that I don't actually know when that day will come. I don't actually even know if that day will come. I can't say for certain that we will get there.
When I look at today compared to 5 years ago, yes, our Capitol is secure today. Yes, our own security here is more assured. But I can't say that about our country. Sadly, when I reflect back on 5 years ago compared to today, I actually believe we are more divided now than we were 5 years ago.
I believe our democracy is even more fragile now than it was 5 years ago. And I believe that our future as a nation is more perilous than it was 5 years ago. The future threats to our democracy may not come in the form of
So after I am done here, I will go home and try to have a conversation with my boys. And I will tell them about the divisions we faced 5 years ago and that we continue to face as a nation. I will talk to them about the meaning of cowardice, of those hiding the truth from the American people to try to erase from our memories with that purposeful amnesia.
But I will also tell my boys it is not just about the broken windows and the fighting that occurred here on the Capitol Grounds, but I will tell them about the courage of those who kept us safe, of the Capitol Police officers, many who still serve and protect us to this day, who deserve better than how they have been treated, that they continue with their mission of keeping us safe, even if we are ones that deny what happened on that day and deny the injuries and the harm that they faced.
I will tell my boys growing up in New Jersey about a man from New Jersey named Brian Sicknick, someone whose name should never dissipate from the Halls of this building that he sought to protect. I will tell them about those willing to stand up for our Capitol and our democracy, whose example we should seek to replicate, not just on the anniversaries of January 6, but every day.
I hope to be able to tell my boys that we can heal this country. I hope that we can tell them that we are taking steps to mend the wounds of that day and of the days since that have driven us further apart as Americans.
I should not hold off on having this conversation, hoping and wishing for a day where I can tell them that the threat is passed and gone. We as Americans should confront the problems that we face full on, to not hide from the fact of how fragile our democracy is now. We see it for what it is, but the fragility of our democracy should renew our purpose and our conviction to stand up and do everything we can to make sure days like January 6 never happen again.
And that is my promise to you, to this country, to my State, and to my little boys, that the work can start right here, right now. I stand ready to heal this country and ready to make it OK for my boys, for your kids and your grandkids; let us keep fighting every day.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. President, as we all remember if we were here 5 years ago, this building was attacked. The Capitol was stormed. Democracy was under siege, not just the physical structure, but our lives, literally. Each of us had a memory of that moment.
And I will never forget, I am sure most of my colleagues won't either, how we left this Chamber, without panic, but certainly in a surge of emotion as we heard the pounding at the doors as we were told to move quickly.
Senators were ordered to move out of harm's way, and we saw through the windows or the doors--or face-to-face some of us--the pipes and baseball bats. It was a moment that nobody who went through it can ever forget because insurrectionists scaled the walls; they smashed windows; they forced their way through the doors into this Chamber and the House. They broke into the legislative branch of government.
And it wasn't simply a symbolic move; it was literally to stop the counting of the electoral votes, to halt the peaceful transition of power, which is the trademark of our democracy.
Five years ago, Capitol Police and other law enforcement stood between these attackers and ourselves, Members of this body. They resisted the insurrectionists trying to scale these walls with their own bodies, and they were hurt. One hundred forty officers were injured, several died--five perished.
And in that terrible moment, one of the darkest times in the history of our democracy, we came together. We joined arms, maybe not literally, but we were together in that undisclosed location-- Republicans and Democrats--who had walked at a pretty good pace through the halls and then confined together, guarded by members of law enforcement as well as the military.
We were together, and we felt under threat together, but we decided, when we were asked, that we would stay. We would not go home for the night, as some of the security wanted us to do. We would stay to count the votes. As dark as that moment was in the history of the United States of America, we can be proud, as a body, of that decision to count the votes and do our duty, rather than shirk it in the midst of that continuing unknown and potential danger as the security literally went through the broken glass and the desecrated offices and this very Chamber to make sure that there were no bombs or rioters left and we could come back with some assurance of safety. That moment, we came together, 5 years ago--5 years ago.
And what a difference 5 years makes. In the past 5 years, segments of society have latched onto baseless and harmful conspiracy theories about the attack. There are January 6 deniers, just as there are election deniers and there are Holocaust deniers. We live in an era when conspiracy theorists can spread falsehoods through social media and other means around the globe, certainly around our country.
And these baseless and harmful conspiracy theories are, by now, in a book by the current FBI Director, Kash Patel, who claims that the January 6 attack was ``the insurrection that never was'' and was encouraged by ``deep state'' agitators as a pretext to persecute Trump supporters.
Well, we know who incited the January 6 insurrection. It is on tape. It can be seen. In a speech outside the White House on January 6, Donald J. Trump claimed to a crowd of thousands of Trump supporters that ``we won this election and we won it by a landslide.''
He promised to ``stop the steal.'' He vowed that ``we will never give up, we will never concede.''
And, most damningly, he told that crowd:
And that is when the crowd marched down the National Mall to this building, which they stormed, to the police officers whom they attacked, and the doors that they knocked down.
They entered the Capitol at 2 p.m. Not until 4:17 p.m. did Donald Trump call those supporters to go home--2 hours after people were injured and some died.
So we shouldn't be surprised, perhaps, that Donald Trump, in one of his first acts of office, pardoned all of those rioters--blanket pardon, even the ones who hit and caused the deaths of the Capitol Police.
And maybe we shouldn't be surprised that just several weeks ago, when I asked three judicial nominees--three lawyers nominated to be Federal district judges by Donald Trump--``Was the Capitol attacked on January 6,'' they refused to answer, each of them parroting a standard remark to the effect of: President Biden was certified as the winner.
They refused to tell the truth about January 6. That is how history is degraded. That is how history is rewritten. That is how the truth is suppressed. That is why we are here today. That is why I am standing here to make sure that history is preserved.
You know, we say often we want to speak truth to power. We need to speak history to authority. We need to speak the truth to America about what happened on January 6.
Notwithstanding all of those conspiracy theorists, the Department of Justice inspector general reported there is ``no evidence . . . that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6. No FBI CHS [confidential human source] was authorized to enter the Capitol or restricted area, or to otherwise break the law on January 6.''
I am under no illusion. I know this speech is not going to talk any of those conspiracy theorists out of their deep-seated beliefs, but we owe it to our children--and I owe it to two grandchildren born within the last 6 months--that we preserve history, despite the blanket pardon, despite the distortion of history that has occurred.
So we are here today to say to our Republican colleagues: Join us in preserving that history. Join us in making sure the truth is told from this Chamber to America, to all of our country.
Trump pardoned, glorified them, even empowering some of them in key administration offices. We cannot allow him to rewrite history.
Do not forget. Police were brutally attacked, injured, and killed for doing their job to enable a peaceful democratic transition of power. They still bear the scars. So does our democracy.
Do not forget democracy is not guaranteed. It cannot be taken for granted. Do not forget it is our duty to remember the truth.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
Mr. President, I rise today with so many of my colleagues to recognize the anniversary of one of the hardest days our democracy has faced, and I also want to focus on some of the work that we have done to respond and the work we still must do.
Five years ago, insurrectionists--they tried to overturn an election. They assaulted our heroic Capital Police officers and attacked not only this building but American democracy itself.
The President wants to rewrite the story of what happened that day, but he wasn't at that Capitol when the violent mob attacked. I was there.
As the incoming chair of the Rules Committee, it was my job and Roy Blunt's job to make sure all of the electoral ballots were counted. That morning began with pomp and circumstance. Senator Blunt and I and the Vice President led a train of elected officials from the Senate to the House to start the ceremony.
Three pairs of young women held the mahogany boxes with the electoral ballots for the entire country and then came the insurrection. We got back here. I remember speaking--my desk was up there. I remember the police telling me that this was happening, and I had to, in my role, tell the Senators to get away from the windows, and we were brought to an undisclosed location.
Capitol Police officers were attacked, pepper-sprayed, clubbed, and trampled. We were in that room together. I remember praying. I remember incoming President Biden on the TV. I remember the Senators trying to call the National Guard to see if anyone could help.
I remember in there coordinating, talking to Senator Schumer while Senator Blunt talked to Senator McConnell about what we were going to do. And we vowed that morning, whatever happened, we were going to come back, and we were going to finish our job, no matter what time it was.
So Senator Blunt negotiated the negotiations about the number of objections. I worked on keeping everyone in that room and other things, and then, together, we got it done.
And at 3:30 in the morning, the only Senators left were Senator Blunt and myself and Vice President Pence, along with those same six women carrying those mahogany boxes from this Chamber to the other. But this time, it wasn't pageantry. It wasn't a parade. It was just the Vice President, Senator Blunt and myself and those boxes. But this time we were walking over broken glass. We were walking past marble pillars spray-painted with racist vulgarities.
But we made the walk. We got to the House. The House Members were there. Speaker Pelosi, at the time, was there waiting for us, and we did our jobs. That was January 6.
Tragically, five brave officers who reported for duty that day ultimately passed away, and the courage of these officers will be remembered forever.
And rewriting of history cannot stand. As we know today, the White House released a web page that described the day as ``patriots march to the Capitol'' and blamed the Capitol Police, and it doesn't even mention the injuries and the over 100 officers injured.
I remember them in the room protecting the Senators with scratches on their faces.
It was clear that this can never happen again.
Then, as I chaired the Rules Committee, Ranking Member Blunt and I, along with Chair Gary Peters and Ranking Member Portman from the Homeland Security Committee, immediately launched a bipartisan investigation of what the failures were with security, planning, and response. We had a number of bipartisan hearings that stretched on for just a few months, and then we came out with major recommendations with then-Police Chief Manger, who implemented nearly every single one of them. Hundreds of changes were made.
Never again will police officers who are meant to guard us have worse equipment than people who are trying to invade the Capitol. Never again will they go to a bus and have their gear, their riot gear, locked in the bus. Never again will you hear the haunting words of an officer on the police radio say: ``Does anyone have a plan?''
We also had to help protect our democracy against future assaults. I worked on a bipartisan basis to update the antiquated Electoral Count Act in the Senate and helped usher that through, along, again, with Senator Blunt. We worked with the House Members to improve what the insurrectionists thought was some kind of a loophole that they could use to stop the will of the people. That law has now been changed. We worked to get better benefits for our officers, and we worked to change the number of officers to make sure that this wouldn't happen again.
Despite our bipartisan efforts after January 6 to protect this Capitol and our democracy, 5 years later, President Trump and his allies continue, sadly, to spread a false narrative. He has called January 6 a ``day of love.'' He has described the prosecutions of people for crimes related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol and on law enforcement as a ``grave national injustice.'' He has pardoned more than 1,500 criminals.
For this administration, it is the very heroes who defended our Capitol--our democracy--on January 6 whom they now consider a threat. I don't think career Federal prosecutors are terrorists or despicable people, as they have called them. I think they are public servants, and I think they are patriots.
We have seen repeated attacks on access to the ballot box from this administration. We must pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which would guarantee access to the ballot. As we mark the somber fifth anniversary of January 6, we know that democracy only held then because of those who defended the peaceful transfer of power. Those are the people whom we honor today: the Republican Senators who were willing to uphold that vote even though the candidate they supported did not win; the Republican Senators who actually, in this Chamber, spoke out and condemned the coup; the officers who protected us that day from something much worse than the fright that people experienced; and those who ended up dying and those who were injured. Those are the ones whom we honor today, not the insurrectionists.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
Anniversary of January 6
Mr. President, today is January 6, 2026. We are 6 days into what will surely be a defining year for our Nation. We will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country. We will hold midterm elections. Americans will determine the control of Congress.
But while there is much to look forward to on this cold winter night, I find myself transported back 5 years ago to January 6, 2021.
Over the last 5 years, a lot has been shared about the events of that day. It has been distorted, romanticized, even downplayed. But as they say in the play ``Hamilton,'' ``It matters who lives, who dies, who tells your story.''
For me, a lot has changed since 2021. Five years ago, I didn't carry the title I proudly carry today. No, not Senator, although, I am proud. It is grandmother.
Today, I rise here on the Senate floor to tell my story, not just for the history books but for my granddaughter Lennox and all of the young people of this country. It is a story of sorrow, fear, and loss, love, hate, and betrayal. But it is also a story of redemption, bravery, and resilience.
On January 6, I was a Member of the House of Representatives. Joe Biden had just been elected. Kamala Harris was just about to become the first woman and first person of color to serve as our Vice President. I was ready to watch history.
Because we were in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, only a few Members of the States contesting the election results could be on the House floor. The rest of us were able to sign up for 1-hour shifts in the House Gallery.
I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember that night choosing what outfit to wear. I remember taking two pairs of boots with me to work. I ended up wearing the more comfortable ones, not knowing I would soon be running, ducking, and crawling on my hands and knees for safety.
I remember signing up for the first shift to watch from the Gallery. There was never a second shift. Not long into the proceedings, I saw the leadership and my colleagues whisked off the House floor. An announcement was made that the Capitol had been breached.
I sat stunned. And as they were taken to safety, I realized they forgot about us trapped up in the Gallery. We could hear the sounds of yelling and banging on the Chamber doors. We ducked for cover and were instructed to get the gas masks out from under our seats--gas masks that we didn't even know existed, that we did not know how to open or use.
And I remember my friend, former Congresswoman Val Demings of Florida grabbing my arm and locking eyes with me and saying: Lisa, there is only one who can get us out of this.
And I began to pray.
People say that right before you die, your life flashes right before your eyes. In that moment, I saw history flash before mine. I saw the peaks and valleys of our American story. I saw slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow. I saw a Trail of Tears, women locking arms marching for the right to vote, two World Wars, 9/11, the murder of George Floyd, and a global pandemic.
I saw the history of our Nation and the path that we had traveled to get us to this moment, and I prayed.
I recalled a piece of Scripture that tells us ``all things work together for the good,'' even the bad, because despite the violence, despite the trauma, despite how close we were to losing our democracy, brave men and women stood up to protect this institution, and we will never ever, ever forget them.
We, the Congress, came back in the wee hours of the morning to do our jobs, to certify the results of a free and fair election. It was a moment of redemption. And redemption is part of what makes America America because whenever we falter, there are ``shoulders to the till'' who push us forward, who remind us of the values upon which our Nation was founded so that we can ``come back stronger.''
I find myself thinking about those foundational values a lot these days, and a specific phrase from the preamble has risen above the rest, that we are to ``secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.''
The Founders used the common phrasing of the time where churches spoke of bestowing blessings of knowledge or faith. We, the United States, would bestow the ``Blessings of Liberty'' and not just for ourselves but for our posterity for future generations, for our children and our children's children, for my granddaughter Lennox.
But ``securing the Blessings of Liberty'' isn't just a promise, it is a call to action because while liberty is a blessing, it requires work to maintain, work that we have strayed away from many times in our history.
Five years after January 6, we are faltering once again. From efforts to dismantle the Department of Education and the EPA to the weaponization of the Department of Justice, to active efforts to strip birthright citizenship, the Federal Government is losing its ability to protect many of the blessings of liberties we have come to expect as Americans.
But this isn't new. We have seen this before. In the late 1800s, formerly enslaved people gained new rights--many Americans did. The 13, 14, 15 Amendments enumerated these rights. But without enforcement, they became no more than ink on paper.
I believe we are repeating history. There are some more focused on tearing down than building up. But here is the thing, you can tear down the East Wing of the White House, you can put your name on buildings, or try to tear down this very Capitol Building itself like was done 5 years ago, but our democracy is built on more than just bricks and marble. Ours is a democracy built on the values of liberty and justice for all, on the premise of freedom, on the ideals of equality and independence, and on our pioneering spirit of innovation.
Ours is a story of redemption. This very room that I am standing in is a testament to our system of governance, a room built by enslaved people where Lennox's grandmother now has the privilege to serve as a duly elected Senator.
When our democracy expands, when it breathes, we inch closer to those divinely inspired ideals of our founding documents and to truly securing the ``Blessings of Liberty.''
This is the story of America I want to pass on to my granddaughter, a story of courage and bright hope for a democracy that endures. But again progress isn't inevitable. It is a choice, and it requires effort.
In 2025, we let the aisle between our parties stretch to a chasm, but it is a new year and it is a new day and we must come together to choose progress to move forward to protect our democracy and patch the holes in our Republic, punctured by the few to spite the many.
As I close, I stand here today as a Senator with gratitude to those who protected us and even gave their lives on that day. And I stand here as Lennox's grandmother with words of wisdom from the late, great Justice Thurgood Marshall, who said:
To our posterity, to Lennox, to the pages in this room, to the interns in our office, to the young people inspired to save the world that work on our staff, and to each and every young person in this Nation, I would add two more words to Justice Marshall's quote.
This democracy is yours. Make it ``your own'' because this democracy belongs to you too. So make it your own. Protect it like we did on January 6 and pass it on.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. President, first of all, I want to acknowledge the wonderful comments by my colleague the Senator from Delaware.
There are three reasons why it is very important we have this discussion:
No. 1, we have got to honor the Capitol Police who were on the receiving end of violent conduct by citizens who stormed the Capitol.
No. 2, it is important that we have accountability for who caused this and to be explicit about who caused this and who was the primary motivator.
And 3, it is extremely important for us not to allow history to be rewritten so what happened then will happen again.
So I want to start most directly with what we all share, and that is an incredible appreciation for the Capitol Police. They showed up that day. These are folks who oftentimes have to commute an hour and a half.
The person who was guarding us--I was in the Gallery of the House of Representatives--had an hour and a half commute each day--to and from work. He had two young kids. And the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to have to use his firearm in order to protect us. But it was clear he was going to do his duty.
We saw so many officers who were in the same place, where they were actually being assaulted by American citizens whose democracy was under assault by American citizens.
I want to express today what I think all of us feel and that is a deep appreciation for the men and women who serve on the Capitol Police force, the Metropolitan Police force, and other authorities who came to the assistance.
Second, it is important for us to be explicit about what happened here and who is accountable. We are having a debate about it. There is an effort to rewrite the history of what happened on January 6, but the fact is indisputable that the primary instigator of January 6 was the President of the United States then and who is the President of the United States now, and that is Donald Trump.
Why do I say that?
He is the one who lost the election. He is the one who created the narrative that it was a stolen election, despite the fact that of all of the challenges, they were largely dismissed by the courts. There was never evidence. There was the use of the Presidential power that he had because he did have and does have many American citizens who believe in him.
With the trust that he had with those everyday Americans, when they heard their leader say that the election was stolen, understandably, they believed him. When he said: Come to Washington; it will be wild, they came to Washington.
When he made his speech at the Ellipse and he said: We will march down to the Capitol, they marched down to the Capitol. When the whole place was falling apart here and he was getting urgent calls from the then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy, when he was hearing from others, he was going on to tweet against Mike Pence for not abusing the authority of the Vice President of the United States--by the way, it is not even authority. It is a ceremonial function to certify the election.
It was Donald Trump, who was, in the beginning, the instigator of the lie, the instigator of the call to people around the country who did believe in him to come here and stop the steal and who culminated his efforts with his speech at the Ellipse, telling people to march on the Capitol.
Now, the third reason it is absolutely so important is that history can't just be written, in this case, by the winner. And that is, Donald Trump did win the election. It was a fair-and-square election, despite all those things I just said that are true--not just that I believe are true.
But what happened on that day was shocking to me, and it was shocking to all Americans. Here is why: It is not just--when this happened, I was in the Gallery in the House. I was 30 feet from where the shot was fired. I was standing there witnessing the mob trying to break down the doors that the President enters to give the State of the Union Address and saw the glass and heard the glass shatter.
Even as that was happening, and all of us in the Chamber were bewildered as to what was going to happen, fearful of the violence that was occurring now and how that could escalate, I didn't believe it was happening. I didn't believe it was happening.
I was seeing it. I was hearing it. I was witnessing officers with their guns drawn, but I said to myself: Peter, this is the United States of America. We have a peaceful transfer of power. We win elections. We lose elections, but it is the people of this country who decide who the winner is--not politicians, not a mob attacking the Capitol.
This is a blessing that all of us have been bequeathed by those who came before us, the peaceful transfer of power.
The other aspect of this I couldn't believe was I was witnessing violence--and we have never had violence in the Capitol--in an effort to overturn an election. So two things happened that have never happened: an assault on the Capitol in the effort to overturn the results of an election and thwart the peaceful transfer of power.
That is on Donald Trump. I want to say that explicitly, as uncomfortable as that may be, and whatever policy positions he may have and others and many people may agree with, that attack on the Capitol was inspired, instigated, and accelerated by the explicit actions of the then-President of the United States.
We have to go back to where America began, and that is: We have elections; we do all we can to encourage people to vote; we count the votes; and we accept the outcome as decided by the people of this country.
That is what a democracy has to be about, where the competition is about ideas. It is about aspirational connection to the wonderful Americans that we represent and their confidence that we will serve with the honor, the integrity, and the commitment to their needs, not our preferences, that makes us all so proud to be representatives of the people who sent us here.
So this day is a day of commemoration for those who served us. But it has also got to be a day of accountability and assessment about what happened and how. It can't be whitewashed because the current President has support and was elected. He does. We have accepted that--those of us who didn't vote for him. But that does not whitewash, it doesn't exonerate, it doesn't erase what he did to cause this insurrection. He played the major role in this, and it is forever going to be a stain on that President.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. President, 5 years ago, Donald Trump incited a vicious MAGA mob to storm the U.S. Capitol with one goal: to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election.
Fortunately, Trump and his gang of violent extremists failed in their mission to undermine our democracy that day, but make no mistake, Donald Trump continues to bear direct responsibility for this disgraceful attack, an attack that forever scarred our political system and scarred our Nation.
We cannot, and we must not forget, what happened on January 6, 2021. That morning, my colleagues and I started the day in this Chamber, ready to fulfill our constitutional duty to ratify the electoral college votes that would elect Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States, a peaceful duty undertaken by Congress after every Presidential election since 1789.
But by the afternoon, the peaceful transition of power was obstructed by armed rioters sent to us by Donald Trump. Trump's vicious mob forced its way into the Capitol Building armed with firearms, bear spray, and baseball bats. The rioters beat U.S. Capitol Police officers with flagpoles bearing the American flag itself.
They blinded officers with chemical sprays. They smashed windows and caused millions of dollars in damage to our temple of democracy. They hunted for lawmakers in the Halls of this building. They called for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence. For several hours, American democracy hung by a thread.
Those people came into this Chamber. They desecrated this Chamber. They went through the desks of the Members of the Senate here. They hung from the walls of this Chamber. They did the same thing to the House of Representatives. They were looking for House and Senate Members that they could capture.
And our Parliamentarians, they actually took the electoral college votes out of the well of the Senate and whisked them off to safety, and we thank the Parliamentarians for their courage that day.
The insurrection, however, resulted in the deaths of several of our officers here and injuries to more than 140 members of law enforcement, who were here trying to protect the Members, trying to protect the building, trying to protect the electoral college votes.
Just this morning, I spoke to a Capitol Police officer who stood shoulder to shoulder with Officer Brian Sicknick on January 6. He was with Officer Sicknick who collapsed in the Capitol after being assaulted by insurrectionists and, tragically, passed away the next day, trying to protect this institution, trying to protect democracy.
And to this day, the brave officers who defended Congress bear the scars, physical and mental, of that dark day. And thanks to these brave officers, the rioters were ultimately pushed out and lawmakers returned that night, as I could sit at this desk after 9 p.m. that night to return so that we could, in fact, ensure that Joe Biden was certified as the President of the United States, as the winner of the 2020 election. And democracy, though bent and battered and bruised, was not broken. That is what we are remembering here this evening.
But today, we confront something that perhaps is even more sinister than the heinous violence that occurred that day. Today, we face the systemic attempt by supposed leaders, by Trump and rightwing MAGA Republicans, to erase and rewrite the truth of January 6, whitewashing the violence of the riot and calling it a ``day of love.''
I invite everyone in this Chamber and across the country to watch the footage of that day, to ask the colleagues and families of those law enforcement officers who were hurt and killed that day if they see January 6, 2021, as a ``day of love.''
On his first day back in office, Trump pardoned the January 6 criminals en masse. He gave amnesty to the insurrectionists, rightfully charged with and legitimately convicted of assaulting law enforcement with dangerous weapons in this building as they protected democracy.
And as one of the first official acts of President Trump, as he came back into power in January of 2025, President Trump chose not to lower costs for the American people or to end Putin's war in Ukraine in 1 day, as he promised, and instead on his first day in office, Donald Trump chose to betray the brave law enforcement officers who protect us day in and day out. He chose to erase the crimes committed that day for his personal political benefit.
He chose to send the chilling message that political violence in his name would not only be condoned, it would be rewarded. Trump and his rightwing MAGA supporters hailed those who carried Confederate flags and symbols of White supremacy as patriots. That is gaslighting on steroids. The true patriots are our brave Capitol Police officers who fought on the frontline and held the line for as long as they possibly could. The true patriots are the Americans that stand up for democracy and speak out against authoritarianism. The true patriots are Americans who refused to bend the knee to wannabe Kings.
Trump will continue to lie about what happened here on January 6, 2021, but the video, the texts, the personal messages from that day do not. We all saw what happened that day. We all heard what happened that day. We cannot and we must never forget what happened that day.
January 6 was not an isolated incident. It was the first page in Trump's authoritarian playbook. It marked the start of Trump's sustained attack on our democracy, on the legitimacy of our elections, on our government institutions. In just the last year, Trump has unlawfully imprisoned international students for their speech. He has exacted revenge on his political rivals. He has deployed troops in our cities to do his bidding. He has ignored court orders. He has engaged in unauthorized and illegal acts of war. And now, Trump and MAGA Republicans have set their sights on the 2026 election.
They are rigging the system in their favor by peddling lies and misinformation, by enacting partisan gerrymandering schemes and by restricting access to the ballot for millions of Americans. Five years later, Donald Trump remains laser focused on sabotaging our free and fair elections in the United States of America. This President has no regard or respect for the Constitution. This President has no regard or respect for the rule of law. This President has no regard or respect for our most sacred values as a nation. He is testing our democracy day in and day out.
And in the face of this historic test, every American must denounce the actions of those who chose to subvert our Constitution on January 6. Every American must condemn those who continue to side with lawlessness and authoritarianism over the basic principles of American democracy, equality, freedom, and the peaceful transfer of power.
Every American must stand up and say no to this wannabe King. On the 250th anniversary of our country's founding, a founding that began in Massachusetts, on Lexington Green and in Concord with ``the shot heard round the world,'' we are once again saying we will stand up for democracy. Our future demands it. We ourselves must summon the courage to fight to protect a democracy that began 250 years ago. We must show the same courage to take on a king, a dictator, a despot in the same way that those minutemen and women 250 years ago displayed their courage.
Those great patriots, they did create a Constitution under which we live here, but that is now under assault. So it is up to us to stand up--and by the way, to redeem the courage of all of those police officers, all those law enforcement officers who gave their lives and their own personal health in order to protect this institution. That is what we remember today, and we must never forget it.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Venezuela
Mr. President, I rise to speak about the invasion of Venezuela that the U.S. military carried out last weekend, which will be the subject of a War Powers Resolution vote on Thursday morning.
The news that President Trump had ordered an invasion of Venezuela on Saturday to capture Nicolas Maduro was a shock but not a surprise. Beginning with unauthorized military strikes against unknown persons on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific starting in early September and continuing through the massing of U.S. military assets in the region over the past several months, the likelihood of this happening one day has been obvious to most observers.
In November, I forced a vote on a privileged and bipartisan War Powers Resolution to explicitly prohibit the use of the U.S. military to strike Venezuela without congressional approval. The administration, in my view, has not provided any clear rationale for the military pressure campaign, much less any legal rationale or request for congressional authorization for military action against this sovereign nation.
At that point, all Democrats supported my resolution, and two Republicans did so as well. But there were insufficient votes to pass it.
Many of my colleagues who voted against the resolution at that time told me that they did so because they viewed that President Trump was bluffing, and so they voted no for that reason.
In the aftermath of the invasion with the administration claiming it has the right to seize Venezuelan oil and ``run Venezuela'' under the supervision of the U.S. Secretaries of Defense and State, and with the President threatening to put boots on the ground and even conduct additional strikes to control the country, we can now agree this was no bluff.
After the administration actions over the weekend, which resulted in several injuries to U.S. servicemembers, and we are praying for them and their families for their recovery, Congress needs to tell the American public where it stands. And so on Thursday morning, I will, again, ask my colleagues to vote on a resolution specifying that we shouldn't wage military action within or against Venezuela unless Congress votes to authorize it.
We will have to vote later this week, and there will be a floor block of an hour tomorrow where a number of Senators are scheduled to speak briefly. But I wanted, for personal reasons, to speak at some length tonight about why this is such an important vote for the Senate, for the United States, and for the world.
Speaking as the lead Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee's Western Hemisphere Panel, before the Presiding Officer, who is the chairman of that panel, I know far too well the despotic nature of the Maduro rule in Venezuela, following a similarly despotic rule by Hugo Chavez. I have condemned the Maduro rule for years. I have visited the Venezuelan border in Cocuta, Colombia, and interviewed people exiting the country, from children to senior citizens leaving behind everything they have known because of this despotism.
And together with all of my colleagues in the Senate, I have advocated forcefully for a democratic transition for the electoral malfeasance of the last election where Maduro claimed victory when that was clearly not the case, and I have supported the Nobel Prize winner Maria Corina Machado's efforts, with others, to bring democracy to Venezuela.
So this discussion, this invasion, this vote is not about whether Maduro is a bad guy. He is. But here is the thing: I also speak as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as a military dad, and as a former missionary in Latin America. The use or misuse of American troops is very personal to me, and the role that the United States plays in Latin America has been a lifelong field of both study and lived experience.
Mr. President, I know you served as a missionary in Taiwan.
I was a 21-year-old first-year student at Harvard Law School when I decided I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and that I needed to take a year away from my studies to figure it out. So I wrote a letter to Jesuit missionaries working in Honduras that had a connection to the high school I attended in Kansas City, and I offered to take a year off school and come volunteer with them.
That is how I found myself in El Progreso, Honduras, in the intense heat in early September of 1980, more than 45 years ago. And during that academic year, I ran a small technical school, teaching teenage boys carpentry and welding. I was a Harvard Law student, but that meant nothing there. But being the son of an ironworker who ran a welding shop, now that was a vocation that the Jesuit missionaries could put to use during my time in Honduras.
I will say that year, from September of 1980 until, essentially, May 1981, was the pivotal year in my life. It put me on a path to serve others. As a civil rights lawyer in Richmond, VA--the capital of the Confederacy--for 18 years and as an elected official for 30 years and counting that year in Honduras, that formation year, that fortified my Catholic faith. It forged my fluency in Spanish. It taught me so many lessons about myself, my country, and the circumstances under which so many people live around this world in settings far less comfortable than what I had been used to growing up. I have drawn on those lessons from that time in Honduras every day for the last 45 years.
The families and students that I worked with showed me how to live with grace under the most challenging conditions. And the Jesuit missionaries--Brother Jaime, Father Patricio, Father Ramon, and others--showed me how serving other people is the path to happiness. I can never repay--never repay--the good they did for me, both my students and their families and these missionaries. But my life has been an attempt to do so ever since.
Now, the lessons of my time in Honduras were not all pleasant. When I was there, Honduras was a military dictatorship, and it was also one of the poorest countries in the Americas, second poorest next to Haiti. People prayed--prayed--for the day when they might have the ability to choose their own leaders, and they also hoped that they might have a future with a path out of the grinding poverty that surrounded them.
But I learned, as a naive 21-year-old, much to my sorrow, of the many instances in which misery throughout the region was spread by actions-- sometimes unintentional but sometimes intentional--of the United States.
When I was in Honduras, the military dictatorship there suppressed political opposition and dissent, and it was supported by the United States in doing so. A long history of U.S. intervention in Honduras to protect the interests of two American fruit companies has left a legacy of corruption and underdevelopment whose consequences are still felt today, 45 years later.
Toward the end of my year in Honduras, the United States began secretly funding a band of rebels in the southern part of the country to wage destabilizing military action against the Government of neighboring Nicaragua, which had been ruled for decades by the U.S.- backed Somoza family dictatorship until it was overthrown in 1979.
Another neighbor just dozens of miles away, maybe 50 miles away--El Salvador--was in the midst of a devastating civil war in which a rightwing government used U.S.-trained military and security personnel to murder civilians, including Catholic bishop Oscar Romero, a few months before I arrived, and four American missionaries--Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan--a few months after I arrived. The civil war in El Salvador led to more than 65,000 civilian deaths.
Yet another neighbor not that far away, Guatemala, had a similar longstanding civil war sadly initiated after the United States engineered the overthrow of a popularly elected government in 1954. That war lasted for nearly 40 years, with as many as 200,000 deaths and nearly a million refugees chased from their homes by the civil war.
The Presiding Officer can think about his time as a young person as a missionary, and he can imagine. This was shocking to me. I had just gone to Honduras to teach carpentry and welding, but the conflicts I described were at my doorstep, with refugees from violence in neighboring countries flooding into Honduras and the murders of bishops, priests, and nuns spreading fear among the Catholic missionaries whom I worked with. And I was confronted with this very painful question: Why was the United States--my country, a nation that I loved--backing military dictatorships and death squads and the plotting of the overthrows of democratically elected governments at the expense of poor people who were just struggling so hard to feed their families?
I came home from that experience a changed person--fortified in my faith life, energized to serve others with my life, but also deeply concerned about the role that the United States was playing in Latin America. This part of our history--the part that I have given, the Reader's Digest version here in the last few minutes--isn't taught a lot at home because we have some reason to be ashamed of it, but it is remembered very clearly and very well throughout Latin America. They view a U.S. military invasion of a sovereign nation today to seize its oil as a sinister repeat of decades, generations, and even centuries of a painful past.
The Trump administration released a National Security Strategy in early December--barely more than a month ago--and it announced a clear plan for the Americas. I am going to quote from it:
The strategy prioritizes the Western Hemisphere first among all regions of the world, and I am going to get to a complement of that toward the end of my comments.
But let's talk about the Monroe Doctrine because that is not so well- known, and when the President and his
The Monroe Doctrine goes all the way back to the 1820s. In that doctrine, Virginian President James Monroe and his Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, declared the Americas were now off-limits to European colonization or interference. Remember, most nations in the Americas had had a prehistory after their indigenous history of European colonization. So the Monroe Doctrine was like, you know, a ``No Trespassing'' sign or a ``Do Not Disturb'' sign, where America said the Americas would now be off-limits to European colonization or interference.
While it was a foreign policy doctrine about the Americas, it wasn't fundamentally about building good relationships with nations in the Americas. Rather, it was about keeping Europe away. Initially, Latin American nations appreciated it. They appreciated the United States clearly stating that European colonizers could no longer have free rein to continue the past practices that had used the Americas as a region for plunder or slavery. But over the years, after the initial declaration in the 1820s, Latin American leaders also came to see that the Monroe Doctrine had evolved to being more about American dominance than American partnership.
In the early 1900s, President Teddy Roosevelt expanded the doctrine to also assert the right of the United States to intervene in the domestic politics of all nations in the region. It was called the Roosevelt Corollary, and it declared that economic challenges in Venezuela threatened the nation's economy--the economy of Venezuela-- thereby increasing the likelihood of its default on international debts.
How ironic that Venezuela thus became the first use of the Monroe Doctrine to justify U.S. intervention into another nation's domestic affairs rather than just, as it had been previously, a defensive doctrine to ward off European interference. The people of Venezuela know this history very, very well even if Americans have largely forgotten it. The reinterpretation of the Monroe Doctrine to now allow the U.S. intervention led to escalating U.S. military intervention in the region. Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic all were affected in the first half of the 20th century. During World War II, the United States invoked the Monroe Doctrine to occupy Greenland once Germany occupied Denmark.
In more recent years, under the Monroe Doctrine and its corollaries, President Eisenhower authorized U.S. assistance for the overthrow of a democratically elected Government in Guatemala and for a coup against the Government of Brazil. President Kennedy, as we know, authorized a U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba. President Johnson authorized U.S. troops to invade the Dominican Republic. President Nixon authorized U.S. support to assist the toppling of the democratically elected Government of Chile. President Reagan secretly funded the Contra war against Nicaragua and also authorized an invasion of Grenada, and the first President Bush authorized the invasion of Panama.
You will notice that I mention both Democratic and Republican Presidents. The Monroe Doctrine was not the fault of one party or the other. It was an attitude of the United States that stretched for nearly 200 years that we had the right to interfere with and dominate the politics of nations in our region.
The collapse of the Soviet Union led to a few decades of relative calm in the relations of the United States and its neighbors, and we turned our attention to the Global War on Terror. But now, after many years when the phrase ``Monroe Doctrine,'' I am sure, was not even mentioned once on the floor of the U.S. Senate, President Trump now pledges to revitalize the doctrine of American dominance in the hemisphere and go even further.
In his own words, ``[T]he Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. They now call it the Donroe Doctrine.''
Now, I am not sure which marketing department came up with the name ``Donroe Doctrine.'' It sounds sort of comical, but it is anything but humorous to Latin American nations whose history books are filled with example after example of the United States using our military to interfere in their domestic politics.
And that brings us to President Trump's invasion of Venezuela to arrest and depose its de facto leader and seize its oil.
Again, Nicolas Maduro was an incompetent and barbaric dictator who stole the last election just less than 2 years ago, which he clearly lost by every internal and international count, and he has presided over the economic collapse of a nation that was recently one of the most prosperous countries in the entire region, but multiple things can be true.
It is also true that President Trump's haphazard initiation of a unilateral war against the country of Venezuela is, in my view, a mistake of historic proportions that will make our country and our region and our world less secure. I view this invasion in the same way that many warned about the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam or in the initiation of the war in Iraq in terms of the potential negative consequences that it will likely deliver.
I hope to convince my colleagues, whether they believe the war is a good or a bad idea, to at least stand up and support the constitutional requirement that the United States shouldn't be waging a war without a vote of Congress.
I assert that the military action against Venezuela is illegal, is confusing in its true motives, is harmful to U.S. interests in the region, is a dangerous precedent if when followed by our adversaries is unnecessarily and suspiciously secret, is a frightening return to forever wars, is unpopular, and, finally, is profoundly disrespectful to U.S. troops.
First, the war is illegal. As I have argued on the floor of this body since I came here in 2013 and as I have asserted face-to-face with Presidents of both parties, only Congress can declare war or, in the modern phrase contained in the 1973 War Powers Resolution, ``authorize the use of military force in hostilities.'' That legislation was passed in response to the abuses of President Nixon both initiating war without notice to Congress, and it builds off one of the clearest parts of the Constitution: Congress and only Congress initiates war, and once initiated, the President and only the President as Commander in Chief is charged with the duty to execute the declared war.
The text of the Constitution is so clear. The Constitution has some phrases that are superclear: that you have got to be 35 years old to be President. Then there are other phrases that are a little vague. What is ``due process of law''? What is ``cruel and unusual punishment''? So you can put the phrases of the Constitution on a spectrum between extremely clear and somewhat ambiguous to be determined under the standards of the time.
When it comes to warmaking, the Founders of this Nation were very, very clear, and the meaning of the Constitution is not just in the text of that document. It was additionally clarified by the notes taken during the debate at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, by the Federalist Papers that were written by those involved in drafting the Constitution, and in correspondence between the Founders who were there which described what they were trying to accomplish. Congress declares war. The President executes upon that declaration.
Now, the Presiding Officer knows that the narrow exception has already been understood. The President as Commander in Chief has the power and the duty to defend the Nation for ongoing or imminent attack without asking for prior congressional approval, but any war that is offensive in nature or that would be sustained beyond that initial point of self-defense needs congressional authorization.
This administration has advanced no credible legal basis, under either American or international law, to invade Venezuela, to depose its leadership, to seize its oil, to run its country. There is a legal analysis issued by the administration to justify military strikes against boats in international waters. The administration has been unwilling--in a very rare instance--has been unwilling to share that rationale publicly. And I know why because I have read it. It is laughably weak, and the administration knows this.
As evidence of the administration's own insecurity about its own legal rationale, in October, the U.S. military carried out a strike against a submersible in international waters, and there were two survivors. The U.S. having slaughtered struggling survivors in September made a different decision in October to rescue the two survivors.
Well, they were narcotraffickers, so we would bring them to court, right? No. After rescuing survivors, the U.S. military returned these alleged narcotraffickers to their own countries for release rather than prosecuting them. Why? Because the U.S. understood that the flimsy legal rationale allowing targeting these individuals would not stand up if scrutinized in an American court.
While I am not at liberty to share the many weaknesses of the classified legal opinion, it does not violate any rule of classification to say what is not in the opinion--what is not in that 40-page legal document. There is nothing whatsoever about the legal rationale in that document that would allow for military action against the sovereign nation of Venezuela or any sovereign nation.
Now, the assertion of the administration that this is not military action but merely a law enforcement operation doesn't pass the smell test, and it doesn't pass the laugh test. The coordinated military mission--massing of ships and aircraft, deployment of forces on land, dropping of bombs, and seizures of a country's main political leader-- is the very definition of hostilities.
The Saturday operation alone involved more than 150 aircraft-- fighters, bombers, surveillance platforms, drones, refueling tankers-- launched from at least 20 air bases across the Western Hemisphere. The killing of untold Venezuelan civilian and military personnel--the number is 80 and climbing by the U.S. Armed Forces--is hostilities. American troops were wounded in this invasion. That is the essence of hostilities.
Deep concerns about the legality of this military operation are widespread not only in this Chamber, but in the Pentagon, where leaders have been forced into retirement for raising questions about the legality of these actions among the American public and among American allies, some of whom have stopped sharing intelligence with the United States in these operations because they do not believe they are lawful. Unless and until the invasion of Venezuela and the ongoing operation to seize its oil and run its government are authorized by Congress, it is illegal.
Second, the reason for this war is deeply confusing to the American public because of the mixed messages sent by the administration. If you listen to Secretary Rubio, it is about countering narcotrafficking. If you listen to other officials, it is about changing the Venezuelan regime. If you listen to President Trump, it is about seizing oil or carrying out a ``Donroe Doctrine'' that allows the U.S. military to smash and grab anything we want anywhere in the hemisphere.
Why can't the administration get its story straight? We know narcotrafficking is a horrible scourge responsible for massive deaths in the United States and elsewhere, but President Trump has shown, as I have earlier discussed on the floor of the Senate, by the pardons of narcotraffickers Ross Ulbricht and Juan Orlando Hernandez, that he cares little about narcotrafficking.
The charges handed down against Nicolas Maduro--if you read the charging document--are eerily similar--eerily similar--to the same charges that were successfully prosecuted beginning in Donald Trump's first term when the case initiated against Honduran former President Hernandez, using his position as a head of state to manage a massive operation smuggling narcotics into the United States. But President Trump recently pardoned Hernandez in a shocking move. That proves that fighting narcotrafficking is not the goal here.
The likely goal is President Trump's desire to seize control of Venezuela's oil reserves. That explains his admission that while he chose not to notify Congress of the invasion in advance, he did disclose his war intent to his friends at American oil and gas companies. This is a war for plunder to benefit campaign contributors, and that explains why the President did not want to seek congressional authorization for this invasion and occupation.
As the father of a marine, what American parent wants to send their son or daughter to war risking injury and death to seize the oil of another nation on behalf of billionaire oil companies?
Third, this attack endangers American influence in the region by pushing nations away from the United States and toward China. We have seen in recent years, in the Foreign Relations Committee and others, how China has ramped up investments in the Americas. They have taken advantage of our focus in the Middle East to expand their influence in our neighborhood.
Many of the Chinese investments are hollow--even predatory--and as I have dialogued with heads of state throughout the Americas, one thing they often say to me is: We would rather deal with you guys than China, but they are offering help, and you are usually nowhere to be found.
But faced with the choice between a Chinese offer of partnership of some doubtfulness and an American ``Donroe Doctrine'' that asserts dominance, no self-respecting sovereign nation will knuckle under and agree to be subservient. The United States has slashed USAID and other humanitarian and civil society programming in the region. We have imposed massive tariffs that hurt the American economy but also hurt the economies of our American neighbors.
And now, after slashing humanitarian programs and after imposing tariffs, we assert the right to invade at will to seize the assets of sovereign nations in the Americas. We will find ourselves--if we pursue this path--with less and less influence in the region closest to our shores, and our chief adversary is likely to grow stronger.
As evidence of this, the Chinese Government put out a Latin America strategy document just last month, focusing on how American overreach and dominance is opening up opportunities for China in the Americas. This invasion plays right into China's hands.
Another downside of the attack is this: Increased chaos and instability always leads to more migration. Attacking Venezuela and, as President Trump has suggested, other nations in the region is likely to lead to even more desperate people crossing borders to immigrate, including to the United States. This has happened throughout history and will only continue and accelerate if the United States continues to carry out these military operations.
Fourth, the invasion of Venezuela by American troops to topple its leadership and seize its oil sets a dangerous precedent in the world that will be used by power-hungry dictators who are adversaries of the United States. If the U.S. can invade Venezuela, what is wrong with Russia invading Ukraine? What is wrong with China invading Taiwan? If the U.S. gets to dominate the Western Hemisphere, what is wrong with Iran trying to dominate Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen? If we can interfere to destabilize Venezuela's leadership, is it acceptable for foreign nations to interfere without consequence in American domestic politics?
The entire international legal order that the U.S. has led in the construction since World War II has been based on respect for the sovereignty of nations and the objection of those who would violate that principle. That respect has worked wonders for the U.S. economy and our national security, and it has also helped advance our interests across the world. The United States--as I have indicated--we have not been perfect in upholding the principle--and others certainly haven't either--but the principle is worth upholding.
The U.S. plays a leadership role for good or bad by our actions. There is no nation whose leadership example is as closely watched and followed as the U.S. example. The invasion of Venezuela under these circumstances has given a green light to more invasions by others in a way that is bad for the world and will harm U.S. interests as well.
Fifth, the invasion of Venezuela and the boat strikes preceding it have been suspiciously secret, with critical details shielded by public scrutiny by either Congress or the American public. The first boat strike occurred on September 2. So we are now more than 4
American troops have been injured. The administration has removed the head of state, intends to seize its oil assets, proclaim that we will run Venezuela for an indeterminate future, weighed in on who should and shouldn't be entrusted with leading the Venezuelan Government. And yet there has not been a single public hearing--not been a single public hearing--in the House or Senate about this major military campaign. This is shocking. The administration has only been willing to offer limited information on occasion to Members in classified settings. It has offered next to nothing to the American people.
Because I can review material in classified settings, I know that the legal rationale for the boat strikes is deeply inadequate and flawed. But I can't fully explain why, even to Virginians whose kids are deployed in this military operation, because the rationale is only available to a limited number of Members in a classified setting.
I have had sessions in the SCIF about the targeting criteria for who gets bombed in international waters. And I would say that those criteria contain at least one critical flaw that I believe would be shocking to the American public, but I can't describe it because I only know about it from review of classified material.
The United States, at the President's say-so, has declared war against a number of groups. I can't say what the number is, and I can't say who the groups are because that has never been made public and it has only been made available in classified settings.
That is pretty important because, when the U.S. declares war publicly against an enemy, those connected to ISIS or al-Qaida are on notice that if they act with those groups, the U.S. has put a military target on them.
But if we declare war against a secret list of organizations whose identity can only be known by a tiny handful of people who have privileges to visit a classified facility in the U.S. Capitol, then many people are carrying out activities in their lives without knowing--without any knowledge--that the U.S. has put a target on them and rendered them eligible for attack.
The Presiding Officer may have seen this as well. I have seen the video of America striking shipwrecked sailors on September 2, who didn't even know that President Trump had placed them on a secret list to be targeted. But I can't fully describe it because the administration, while proudly and immediately displaying the video of the first strike on that boat, the strike that destroyed their ship, chose to hide the fact of that second strike and hide the video of the murder of those two shipwrecked sailors, even from Congress, and from the American public for nearly 2 months and continues to hide that shocking evidence from public scrutiny, which raises the question: If the administration believes this cause is so righteous, is so legal, is so necessary, is so in the national interest, what is it afraid of?
Put the facts before Congress and the American public in a public setting where they can be subjected to the questions that should precede U.S. involvement in a military campaign of this kind.
And if my colleagues in this body believe these actions are justified, well, what are they afraid of? Why haven't the Armed Services or Foreign Relations or Intelligence committees in either House, under the Republican leadership of those committees, called for even a single public hearing on this important matter?
They have been repeatedly asked to do so. They have been repeatedly urged to do so and have, thus far, resisted.
But America and Americans shouldn't tolerate a war waged in the dark in which oil executives get better notice of our military actions than Members of Congress or everyday Americans.
Sixth, the invasion of Venezuela represents a dangerous slide to the kind of forever wars, or permanent war footing, that this President specifically campaigned against. In the first year of his second term in office, President Trump has carried out unilateral and unauthorized military hostilities against or within Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, and boats in international waters.
And the Venezuela invasion comes with a pledge to occupy the country, seize its oil, for some indeterminate future. But that is not all. The President has also strongly suggested the possibility of using the American military against other nations: Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Greenland, and our NATO ally Denmark. Where does this end? If this President, or any President, can wage war on multiple continents in secret and without congressional notice, consultation, debate, or vote, we will have transformed the United States from the world's chief diplomat--an important position that we achieved when President Teddy Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering the end of the Russo- Japanese War.
Since that time, the United States has been viewed as the chief diplomatic nation in the world. But if we can now wage war on Presidential say-so in secret, without congressional authorization, anywhere in the world, we will have transformed the United States from the world's chief diplomat into the world's chief bully. Is that what the American people want?
Seventh, the invasion of Venezuela without congressional authorization is deeply unpopular in Virginia and the Nation. Polling suggests that even after the exemplary performance of American troops, 63 percent of Americans do not believe the United States should have invaded Venezuela without congressional approval.
I have had conversations around Virginia, a very pro-military State, about this very topic, and in those conversations what I have noticed is this: The opposition to war in Venezuela without congressional authorization is not about article I versus article II powers; it is not about a constitutional abstraction or theory of government; it is about an instinctive wisdom among the American people that says war should be a last resort, and it shouldn't be entered into upon the say- so of one person--it is too big a decision for one person--but instead should only proceed after careful deliberation by a President and by the people's elected Congress.
And let's be clear, the American people are not asking for more wars right now. They are telling us that housing costs too much, that food costs too much, that healthcare costs too much, that childcare costs too much, that energy costs too much. They want us to fix the American economy, stop the tariffs and the chaos, make everyday life better for them.
This endless foreign adventurism, which was precisely what President Trump campaigned against, is very likely helping his own pockets and helping out oil companies and cronies and donors, but it is doing nothing for everyday folks. Instead, they are seeing higher costs, fewer jobs, slower growth, and a distracted President focused on air strikes and ballrooms.
It is long past time for the President and all of us to work on what he promised as a candidate instead of dismissing everyday folks' affordability concerns as a hoax.
Finally, the invasion of Venezuela and threats of unilateral military action against others is profoundly disrespectful of our Nation's military. Our troops aren't a palace guard to be used by a President in chaotic ways around the globe or deployed against Americans at home. That is not what they are for.
The juvenile decision to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, completely without legal authority and sure to be abandoned as soon as this administration exits the stage, sends a loud message to our troops and their families. People like my oldest son volunteer to serve because they love this country and they want to defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They take that oath just as we do.
People of integrity don't see military service as measured by how much they wage war against others; they see it as a patriotic commitment to defend the United States and our allies. And a nation committed to ill-conceived and secretive wars, waged without adequate debate and consideration, will see over time a decreased willingness to serve by those whom we would most welcome as our military leadership.
I am not aware of any military service in Donald Trump's family. I wish he
I have had these conversations with Virginians serving on warships in the Red Sea while getting fired on by Houthi militias, and I have had these conversations with Virginians whose families are part of the military assets now deployed in the Caribbean and Pacific and poised to strike Venezuela and other Latin American nations.
Just at church recently, somebody came up to me and said: Don't let this President send my kid to war.
Our military signs up for a tough job. When they volunteer in this all-volunteer military, they are signing up for a tough job, and they are always ready to do it. And when we ask them to do it, they always do it in ways that are so impressive. But they deeply want civilian leadership of this Nation to be wise in decision-making about how to use military force, wise when making the decision about when or how to put their lives on the line. And wise decision-making requires careful deliberation and debate, not impulsive action such as this Venezuelan invasion, where we now find it hard to answer even the most basic questions about what comes next: How long will we be there? What is the goal? Who will be in charge?
If we can't answer those questions, do we have a right to order these young men and women to risk their lives in military actions without a real plan?
Let me conclude with a positive message--positive message--about President Trump's national security strategy and a final plea to my Senate colleagues. I believe that this Trump national security strategy, which I believe was issued on the first Thursday in December, is right in placing the Americas as the top priority. If you read both the introduction and then the portions of the strategy that really get into the regions of the world, this is the only strategy that has been produced during the entire time in the Senate that puts the Americas and the Western Hemisphere as item No. 1, rather than the last item. And I think the President is right, and I applaud him and his team because we have ignored our own neighborhood for so long--for so long. And when we have focused on it, it has usually been more about keeping other nations away than it has been about building the partnerships that will really strengthen the Americas.
The Trump administration's decision to make the Americas the top priority makes it unique among any recent administration that I have been familiar with, and if it is done correctly, I believe it offers us a great path forward to deepen the ties among the more than 1 billion people who are Americans--North, South, or Central--who live in this hemisphere.
And as the chair and ranking member of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, I say getting this right is critical to American well- being because today certainly, but even going forward, how can we match up economically with nations like China or India, each with more than a billion citizens?
The productivity of the more than 340 million Americans is second to none, but at some point--at some point--the scale of our chief competitors becomes really hard for us to match. But if you think about the Americas with 1-plus billion and if we strengthen ties throughout the Americas--let's call it an ``Americas First'' policy--strengthening ties in security and education and trade and diplomacy and humanitarian assistance and democracy promotion, we can more than match the might of the world's most populous countries, even our fiercest competitors like China.
But we won't achieve it--we won't achieve it--through dominance or invasion. We have tried it before. We tried it for 200 years, and it hasn't worked. It produces hostility, suspicion, resistance. It chases nations that could be friends, that should be friends, into the arms of adversaries. But we can achieve much through respectful partnerships and by giving the attention to our America neighbors that we have often reserved solely for nations in Europe or the Middle East.
We have tried throughout our history this positive approach on brief occasions--FDR's Good Neighbor Policy, President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress--but we have too often tried it for a short period and then lapsed back into a failed Monroe Doctrine mindset.
President Trump's instinct to prioritize the Americas is the right one; it is the right one. But doing it the right way and not repeating the mistakes of the past is the key to making it a success.
And finally, a plea to my Senate colleagues: The vote we will have Thursday on our bipartisan resolution to say no to war in Venezuela without congressional authorization is actually a vote about many things. It is a short resolution, like a page and a half, but it is a vote about many things. It is about Venezuela. It is about war. It is about the use of U.S. troops. It is about our complicated history in the region. It is about the example we set and our position in the world. But it is also, ultimately, about what it is to be a U.S. Senator.
In recent months, this body has rejected my resolutions saying that the Senate should have a role, if we go to war, with Iran or Venezuela or launch strikes on unknown boats in international waters.
I have put those votes on the table, and we have had votes on them. And the Senate has opposed my resolutions. The Senate has actually voted in favor of its own irrelevance, saying that it didn't need to be consulted about war.
We have the opportunity to change this. We have the opportunity to say forcefully: Mr. President, you are the article II Commander in Chief of this country, and we want you to inhabit every square centimeter of power the Constitution gives you. But we are the article I branch, and the Constitution demands that you need to consult us before taking America to war.
So cast a vote in accordance with the Constitution, and that honors the relevance of the U.S. Senate. If you believe that a war to topple the Venezuelan Government and seize its oil is justified, you should be willing to vote to support it. You should be willing to introduce an authorization for use of military force, put it on the floor, and advocate for it. And if you don't believe a war against Venezuela is a good idea--as I don't--you should be willing to vote against it. But don't outsource this power, carefully vested in the article I branch by our Founders, to this President or to any President.
We were all sent here for a reason. We were all sent here to show courage. We were sent here to stand up for our constituents and our troops and the Constitution, and there is no more important power for Congress to maintain than the power to send our sons and daughters into war.
I yield the floor.
