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Floor Speech
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Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, first, I want to acknowledge my colleagues from Minnesota Senator Smith and Senator Klobuchar.
You have conveyed to us the deep pain and anguish that you feel and that every Minnesotan feels about the shocking shootings that occurred in your State. This follows on tragedies that occurred before this. The pain of your community is the pain of this U.S. Senate. My deep appreciation--and I know I express this on behalf of all of my colleagues--to you for putting this in a human, real perspective. Thank you very much.
Second, this is shocking. Two people got shot for no reason-- absolutely no reason. Renee Good was a 37-year-old mom of three kids. She was protesting. That officer walked from the back of her car to the side of her car to the front of her car and shot through the front windshield and then moved to the side and shot two shots in the driver's side window. That is what happened.
Alex Pretti was out with his cell phone camera observing what was going on and was shocked, I am sure, to see that an ICE agent was pushing a woman into a snowbank, and he came over to try to get between them. There was a scuffle. He was in total subjugation by the officers who had him on the ground. He was disarmed--never using, by the way, or even threatening to use the gun that he had legally in his possession. ICE officers--2 of them--shot him 10 times. Ten times. That is what happened.
Why aren't we all just totally shocked? That is not acceptable.
Then that is all done with the authority of the State--with no restraint.
Then the Secretary of Homeland Security, who is responsible for the training and the discipline and the mission, blows this off and says that these two people were domestic terrorists--no accountability, no expression of sadness, no expression of remorse.
How is this acceptable to any one of us here? How is that acceptable?
Yet what we are hearing when we are saying ``Let's look into this. Let's get some reforms in place that allow our citizens to feel safe, for there to be accountability''--we are being told that it is too complicated because we already have a bill and we will have to divide it, and that means procedural hassles; that means, oh, the House will have to come back.
Are we serious? That is called doing your job. It is called accountability. It is called taking responsibility.
I want to pay tribute to the people of Minnesota. We are actually having a discussion about inconveniencing House Members because they have to get on a plane and come back if we act to do something that every American knows we should do: Pass the bipartisan bills where we have five bills done, and take on the burden of responsibility that we have as a U.S. Senate to put reforms in an Agency that needs reform.
Folks in Minnesota--it is 20 degrees below zero--are out in the streets. They are out protesting peacefully. They are out providing coffee and cocoa and some warm soup to each other so they can get through this. Why are they doing it? Do you know what? They care about the right of assembly. They care about the First Amendment. They care about their constitutional rights. But the reason they are doing this is they care about each other. That is who they care about.
In this U.S. Senate, our job is to care about every single American. We have an Agency that is totally out of control, with a leader that is--you know, I would say incompetent, but the cruelty of that remark, to dismiss two innocent people who died as ``domestic terrorists,'' tells me there is not an inkling of acceptance of responsibility that goes with the enormously important job of being Secretary of Homeland Security. So I am not going to vote and give a blank check when we are not even willing to have a discussion about what the reforms are.
I want to say that I know every one of us here is shocked by what happened. This is not a Republican or a Democrat deal. This is about seeing two innocent people shot when they didn't need to be.
You know, one of the things that is so important for us if we have a family and if we live in a community is to act in a way in which the people around us can be confident that we have got their backs; that we won't hurt them or harm them; that we notice what their struggles are and that we will try to help.
You know, all of us here have such admiration for law enforcement and the work they do--it is such an incredibly hard job--but more than anyone else, the people who have contacted me in Vermont to express their shock at what happened in Minnesota have been people in law enforcement. They know the job is hard, but they have accepted the responsibility to be a guardian, to be protective.
We can accept our responsibility, wherein we are the 100 people in this country who are in this Senate, who have the opportunity to provide some reassurance in safety and in confidence to the people that each and every one of us represents.
So, yes, let's do our job.
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