Expressing Support for Local Law Enforcement Officers and Condemning Efforts to Defund or Dismantle Local Law Enforcement Agencies

Floor Speech

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Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for allowing me to speak on this issue today. It is an important issue.

I remember my first townhall after I was elected to Congress. We had 1,000 people show up. Many of them were wearing resistance T-shirts. The radical left was busing people in actually from California to protest my townhall. That was fine. That is what it is about.

What wasn't fine was the ridiculous number of threats to me, my family, and my staff.

That is when I remembered from days in my legal practice my gratitude for the police who came and made sure that the crowd was protected and my staff was protected. They even placed two undercover police officers flanking my wife because she had been threatened, as well.

Thank you. Thank you to the men and women of law enforcement.

I thank the police chiefs and the rank and file in Apache Junction, in Mesa, in Chandler, in Gilbert, in Queen Creek, and in Maricopa County. The sheriff is a Democrat, but I think he does a pretty good job; not like some of the other folks that I will be talking about in just a minute.

I thank the sheriffs and their departments in local law enforcement in the border communities in Yuma County, Cochise County, and Pinal County who are having to take up the slack because of what is going on on the border. The Biden administration is allowing people to just run rampant across our border. It is unbelievable.

I thank them. They don't run away. They run toward, to save us. They run toward the people who would harm us, and they provide the rule of law.

Mr. Speaker, you can't have freedom if you don't have respect and rule of law.

Now let's talk about the Federal agencies for just a second. A story just came out last weekend about the bomber who put the bombs over at the NRCC and DCCC on January 6. Those were inert bombs. It turns out the FBI had surveillance and film of that person placing those inert bombs. They had video of them moving around on the Metro, moving on out to the suburban D.C. area getting into a car.

They have the license plate of the car, they have the tracking, and they have the credit card that paid for the Metro that that bomber used.

When they went to try to investigate, the leadership in the FBI halted that investigation. The Durham report has come out. I urge you to read it, Mr. Speaker.

I heard some of you talk about it. I am not sure you read it.

Any objective analysis of that report will tell you that the Department of Justice and the FBI were working with the Clinton campaign to create a false criminal allegation. We are still talking about the Russian hoax.

It is unbelievable. As some have said, the DOJ and the FBI abandoned their standards from the start. They had no predicate for that investigation. They knew it at the time. I think we should hold them accountable.

You want to keep funding them? Fine. You keep funding them, but you are going to have to reform them someway, somehow.

I, like my friend from Colorado, remember the time when it was the Democrats who often called for civil liberties and the protection of civil liberties from the Federal police apparatus. That is where I am. We have now come to a point where we have to protect our citizens from our own Federal police apparatus.

I will also get into this notion of federalizing the police. You can't simply always throw Federal grant money at local law enforcement.

At least in Arizona, when I talk to our friends in policing there, they will tell you: We take this money with trepidation because the Feds always want to take over.

They don't understand. I will just tell you, we don't understand Seattle. Why would you come to Congress and say you control policing in Seattle, you control it in Phoenix, or you control it in the town of Gilbert? Why would we turn that over to the Feds? That is too much.

Now, I want to share some comments that we have heard over the last couple of years from some of my colleagues across the aisle.

From the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler), with reducing the NYPD budget, stating: ``There should be substantial cuts to the police budget and a reallocation of those funds to where we need them.''

The minority leader, asked on CNN, expressed his openness to defunding the police when he said: ``You have to look at that on a case-by-case basis.''

Cori Bush was the vice chair of the Crime and Federal Government Surveillance Subcommittee. She said: ``It is not a slogan.'' ``Defunding the police'' is not a slogan. She said: ``It is not a slogan. It is a mandate for keeping our people alive. Defund the police.''

When she was challenged about that, she further said: `` `Defund the police' is not the problem.'' She continues to always double down on that.

The gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Ocasio-Cortez) also said: ``This is what happens when leaders sign blank check after blank check to militarize police, CBP, et cetera, while letting violence go unchecked. We need answers. And we need to defund.''

When New York decided to cut a billion dollars from their police force, Representative Ocasio-Cortez thought the cuts did not go far enough, stating: ``Defunding police means defunding police.''

Representative Jamaal Bowman said: ``We don't need police with lethal weapons carrying out routine traffic stops. Reallocate police funding to unarmed traffic forces to remove even the possibility of state- sanctioned manslaughter.''

Representative Jayapal said it is completely reasonable for us to ``shift significant sums of money from police'' and invest in people.

Representative Ilhan Omar said: ``We need to completely dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department because here is the thing. There is a cancer. . . . The Minneapolis Police Department is rotten to the root, and so when we dismantle, we get rid of that cancer.''

Representative Ayanna Pressley said: ``The defund movement isn't new. Folks are just finally listening.''

Representative Rashida Tlaib said: ``When we say #DefundPolice, what we mean is people are dying, and we need to invest in people's livelihoods instead.''

So don't tell me now that you can't vote for this resolution, which honors local police enforcement and condemns the defund police movement.

Don't tell me that is idle rhetoric. That is real. That is sincere, and that ought to be what the position of this body is.

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