[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 102 (Tuesday, June 2, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2655-S2656]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                 RACISM

  Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Madam President, let me start by saying to our 
colleague, the Senator from New Jersey who just spoke on the 
floor, that we are all thankful for his passion to make sure that this 
country lives up to its promise and for sharing with this body his 
personal testimony about racism and the need for all of us to move 
urgently to address the fundamental inequities at the heart of our 
society and institutions. I don't think it is an overstatement to say 
that we are at a pivotal point in our country. It is a moment of 
reckoning. Historians will carefully examine this moment to see how our 
country responded to see which path we took, how the Senate responded, 
how each Senator responded.

  The immediate spark for this moment was the brutal murder of George 
Floyd by agents of government. In Minneapolis, a police officer aided 
and abetted by three other officers--we all witnessed the horror of 
George Floyd gasping ``I can't breathe'' as a White officer kept his 
knee on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds; three other officers 
participated in the crime. All four need to be brought to justice, but 
the murder of George Floyd was not an isolated event in the United 
States of America. It is not the first time a Black man has called out 
``I can't breathe'' as he was choked or lynched. We can draw a straight 
line that runs from slavery to Jim Crow to legal segregation to de 
facto segregation to institutional racism to the killings of Michael 
Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Breonna Taylor, and 
George Floyd, as well as the vigilante killings of Trayvon Martin and 
Ahmaud Arbery and others.
  The White police officer who looked at the video as he kept his knee 
on the neck of George Floyd thought he would get away with his actions 
because he and so many others had not been held accountable before. He 
thought he could get away with it, based on his experience. We must 
change that. As Senator Booker said, we can have our moments of 
silence, we can have vigils, but that is not enough. It is not nearly 
enough. This is a moment that demands real action, real change, and 
real results, starting with changes in police practices and the 
systemic racism and institutions that have shielded those who engage in 
misconduct from accountability.
  Those changes must include establishing truly independent oversight 
mechanisms to ensure that those police officers who betrayed the public 
trust are held accountable. We must ban outright the use of chokeholds 
unless the officer's life is in imminent danger, and we must use 
Federal leverage to incentivize deescalatory practices over escalatory 
ones. We need national standards backed up by real consequences for 
those who do not comply, and we must establish a Federal databank that 
tracks reports of police misconduct--not simply unjustified killings by 
police, but all forms of misconduct. These and others changes are 
required to ensure the protection of citizens, communities, and an 
overwhelming number of police officers who are meeting their sworn 
oaths to protect our communities. Bad cops are bad for good cops, and 
we need to make sure we have a system in place to punish misconduct and 
reward those who are upholding their sworn duty.
  Now, while the murder of George Floyd and others has, again, exposed 
the need for systemic change in police accountability, it also cries 
out for systemic change to address racism embedded in our institutions. 
The need for additional change does not mean we have not made progress 
in our country on key issues of civil rights and political rights, but 
it does mean we have a very long unfinished road ahead to achieve the 
promise of equal justice, equal rights, and equal opportunity in 
America. The murder of George Floyd comes in the middle of a pandemic 
that has inflicted disproportionate harm on communities of color, 
especially the Black community, because of deep underlying disparities 
in our society that have been well documented. It comes amid a pandemic 
that has shone a harsh light on deep inequality in our education 
systems, including the digital divide and the homework gap, but so much 
more.
  The reality is we must put all of our systems under the microscope 
and very intentionally root out racial bias and discriminatory impact. 
In the city of Baltimore, in my State of Maryland, we have a terrible 
legacy of housing segregation. Baltimore City had an explicit committee 
on segregation, which was followed by harsh and restrictive covenants 
and redlining that blocked our Black community from economic mobility. 
That may seem like a long time ago, but the harmful impact of those 
laws is lasting, and you can still trace those red lines separating our 
neighborhoods today.
  So let us be very clear here that these disparities can be directly 
traced to policies that were designed to discriminate. For decades, 
Federal, State, and local policies covering issues from housing to 
banking amounted to nothing less than state--sponsored efforts to deny 
African-Americans the basic equal rights they are owed under our 
Constitution. While many of these policies are off the books today, 
their legacy endures and practices endure, and it is our obligation at 
every level of government to uproot and destroy those embedded policies 
with the same kind of deliberation that they were put in place in the 
first place.

  Now, the protests taking place in Minneapolis and all across the 
country are an expression of the deep pain caused by the continued 
death toll and other harms caused by our failure as a nation to address 
the underlying inequities in our society and in our institutions. That 
is why people have taken to the streets to protest. It was Dr. King who 
said: There can be no justice without peace, and there can be no peace 
without justice. Real justice and real peace is long overdue.
  Last night, in response to those protests, we witnessed something I 
never thought we would see in the United States of America. We had the 
President of the United States call up and order military police to 
fire tear gas and rubber bullets at peaceful protesters to clear a path 
for him to conduct a photo op in front of Saint John's Episcopal 
church, a historic church close by to the White House.
  Here is what Mariann Budde, the bishop of the Episcopal archdiocese 
of Washington, had to say about what the President did. She made a 
statement that outlined the President's abuse of their church for his 
political purposes, and then the church itself issued the following 
statement--I should point out that the pastor of the church and many of 
the parishioners were at the protest and providing water and nutrition 
to some of the protesters.
  Here is what the leaders of the church said:

       We at St. John's Church were shocked at the surprise visit 
     from the President this evening and even more appalled at the 
     violent clearing of Lafayette Square to make the visit 
     possible. St. John's is a community that welcomes all--from 
     powerful presidents to the homeless--to worship God. We fully 
     espouse the words of our Baptismal Covenant, which says, in 
     part, that we ``will strive for justice and peace among all 
     people and respect the dignity of every human being.''

[[Page S2656]]

       Living that covenant, we stand with those peacefully 
     protesting the tragic and unnecessary death of George Floyd, 
     and the far too many who came before him.
       We pray that our nation finally confronts its history of 
     racism and, as a result, can fully embrace the peace of God 
     that passes all understanding.

  Those are really words that we should have heard from our President. 
Instead, they came from religious leaders responding to the President's 
use of their church for political purposes--and, in the process, 
violating the First Amendment rights of peaceful protesters, the rights 
of those protesters to peacefully assemble, as the President ordered up 
military police to clear a peaceful crowd.
  We also listened in disbelief as Mark Esper, the Secretary of 
Defense, talked about turning public places into ``battle spaces'' to 
be dominated. This is the Secretary of Defense, who is charged with 
defending our country, talking about turning rubber bullets and tear 
gas against peaceful protesters here in the United States.
  We witnessed General Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 
in full military uniform, presiding over the breakup of this peaceful 
demonstration.
  I remind Secretary Esper and Chairman Milley that their oath is to 
support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and they are 
not permitted by that oath to follow illegal orders, even from the 
President of the United States.
  The President of the United States can give them what orders he 
chooses, but the Constitution and their oath requires that their first 
loyalty be to the United States of America and not to any one 
individual.
  So I think it is important that we investigate this incident and the 
role that the Secretary and the Joint Chiefs of Staff played in 
following the President's illegal orders, illegal because they 
represented a gross violation of the First Amendment rights of citizens 
of the United States to peacefully assemble.
  Let me close with this. I said at the outset that this is a moment 
when our country has different paths to choose and this Senate is very 
much a part of deciding which path we will take. Will we take the path 
that Senator Booker said of not only having moments of silence, but 
working together to pass true reform to address police accountability, 
to address other forms of systemic racism? Will we be willing to stand 
up to the President of the United States when he violates the civil 
rights and First Amendment rights of American citizens?
  That is really a test for this institution, whether we are willing to 
do our job and uphold our oath to the Constitution of the United 
States.
  Thank you, Madam President.
  I yield the floor.

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