Madam President, our nation’s police officers work fearlessly and tirelessly every day to protect our families and to keep our communities safe.
As we get ready to honor their service on National Police Week, the least we can do is stand by them and ensure that as they’re doing their job, they’re able to do it as safely as possible.
Every day, more than a million law enforcement officers across this country accept risks to their personal safety. As they leave their families at dawn and head off to their jobs, they know and their families know that they accept as a part of their mission of public safety service the risk that they may not come home that night.
We owe it to them to do what we can to make that service just a little bit safer, to ensure that more of them come home safely week in and week out, year in and year out. And providing officers with bulletproof vests is one of the most effective ways that we can contribute to that desired outcome.
Madam President, I come to the floor today because I share the deep frustration of my good friend, Chairman Patrick Leahy, over the continued inability of this body to overcome the objection of one senator and move forward to renew on a bipartisan basis the federal Bulletproof Vest Partnership.
Yesterday Chairman Leahy gave the Senate another opportunity to take up and reauthorize this partnership through a unanimous consent request. He is trying to move forward a bill we have already voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a bipartisan basis. Yet, it was blocked again by objections raised by a colleague, the Senator from Oklahoma.
Madam President, for 14 years the federal Bulletproof Vest Partnership has been an important way for our nation to equip local police departments with one of the most effective ways to keep our officers safe. But this needs to be a lasting commitment. This needs to be an enduring partnership. As new officers join, they need to be fitted for new vests. Because vests wear out and don’t last forever, we need to ensure they can be replaced.
We know, Madam President, that bulletproof vests work. Since 1987, bulletproof vests have saved the lives of more than 3,000 police officers across this country, and I am proud to continue in the tradition of my predecessor, now Vice President, Joe Biden, in supporting local law enforcement and in supporting this initiative. In my home state of Delaware this partnership has provided our officers with thousands of vests over the last 14 years, including more than 3,800 over just the last five years.
The Delaware community has unfortunately seen up close why these vests are so important. It was 13 years ago that Dover Police Sergeant David Spicer was trying to make an arrest, an arrest he successfully completed when the suspect with whom he was wrestling pulled out a gun from a hidden pocket and shot him at close range four times. As Sergeant Spicer bled out, he lost nearly half the blood in his body before effecting the arrest. But because he was wearing a vest provided to him through the Bulletproof Vest Partnership, his life was saved. I was honored, Madam President, to welcome Dover Police Sergeant David Spicer here two years ago on a previous effort at reauthorizing this long bipartisan bill.
More recently, just last February, 2013, at the New Castle County Courthouse in my hometown of Wilmington, a gunman unleashed a stream of bullets into the courthouse lobby, tragically killing two. In what was a devastating morning in the courthouse lobby, two lives were also saved, those of Sergeant Michael Manley and Corporal Steven Rinehart, Capitol Police officers who were wearing bulletproof vests funded in part through this federal Bulletproof Vest Partnership.
Madam President, the very real results of this federal-state partnership, of this investment in keeping the men and women of law enforcement safe in the line of duty are hard to ignore. With many police departments at the local level facing shrinking budgets, this Bulletproof Vest Partnership makes vests – which cost more than $500 – more affordable, ensuring officers are outfitted with the most current and effective and appropriate protection possible.
In fact, the program specifically prioritizes smaller departments that often struggle to afford vests and don’t provide vests or require vests of their officers. And it is exactly in these smaller and more rural agencies and departments where line of duty deaths due to gunfire had historically been high. This is critical. As a County Executive, in my previous role in local government in Delaware, I saw firsthand how officers in smaller agencies often struggled to have current, up-to-date, and effective bulletproof vests. In addition, this is a program that is a 50-50 match – federal and local money.
How could anyone oppose this program that saves thousands of police officers’ lives; that extends the reach of the federal-state partnership in keeping our communities safer; and that is such a wise investment in saving lives that matter so much to our communities?
Well, a colleague objected yesterday and has objected before and will object again. And I’m reminded of so many times when a bipartisan bill that comes to this floor dies here due to objection after objection after objection. And at times I struggle to understand the rationale.
In his objection yesterday, my colleague raised an argument that somehow this program, which promotes public safety, does not fit within the authority granted to Congress under the Constitution. That it’s not part of the enumerated powers of Congress.
Madam President, I disagree.
Whether you ascribe to the narrow Madisonian view of the General Welfare Clause of the Constitution, or follow an expansive, more Hamiltonian view, as our Supreme Court has done since 1937 when they affirmed the constitutionality of the Social Security Act in Helvering v. Davis, this is not a close call.
If providing federal-state partnership money for bulletproof vests goes beyond the enumerated powers of this Congress, what does that mean for public health, for investments in partnerships with state public health agencies to prevent pandemics and flus? What does this mean for the interstate highway system? What does this mean for hundreds of different partnerships where in a cost-effective way we work together with communities and states all over this country to extend and improve the general welfare of the people of the United States?
To my colleague’s argument yesterday on this floor that this is solely a state or local responsibility, the reality is that the Bulletproof Vest Partnership doesn’t replace local action with federal action, it ensures a federal partnership, an investment to help police departments struggling to meet the safety needs, the equipment needs of their officers, to act where they otherwise can’t.
In my view, this Bulletproof Partnership is even more important because it is about more than just handing out dollars and vests. It ensures all vests are compliant with National Institute of Justice safety standards. Only the federal government has the resources to do that level of analytical work. It’s no more reasonable for us to expect every state to have their own National Institute of Health to do cancer research, or for every state to have a National Institute of Highway Traffic Safety. Having one coordinated national program to ensure that these bulletproof vests are as effective as possible at saving the lives of the men and women of law enforcement just makes sense.
In my view, the denial of a federal role where it’s necessary and efficient would take us back to the Articles of Confederation, a very cramped and narrow view of the appropriate role of our national government, one which our forefathers found unworkable two centuries ago.
The truth is plain. Without this program, we leave police officers without lifesaving vests in the line of fire, in the line of duty. And for us to fail to stand up for them when they stand up for us each and every day I find outrageous.
This is the way the world looked before Chairman Leahy and Republican Senator Campbell created this program jointly back in 1999, and in that world, before there was a federal Bulletproof Vest Partnership, there would today be two more Delaware families without a hero at their dinner table tonight.
Not on my watch. That will not happen as long as I’m here to stand for the men and women of law enforcement and to promote the federal role, an appropriate federal role in standing side by side with state and local governments to provide the equipment that men and women of law enforcement need.
This partnership, Madam President, expired back in 2012. Fortunately, we’ve been able to fund it through short-term appropriations. And this is a tiny program in the scope of this federal government — $22 million a year. The entire federal investment in local law enforcement is less than one-tenth of one percent of the entire federal government. Yet it enables standards and leveraging of the types I described that extends the reach of law enforcement and improves the safety of the men and women who put their lives on the line for us.
Without authorization, this program becomes unsustainable, short-term, and doesn’t allow us to improve the program year in and year out. The reauthorization bill that was passed by the Judiciary Committee this Congress extends the program another five years, ensures its consistency, but makes important reforms to save money as well. It prevents localities from using other federal funds as their matching funds. The bill would take action to eliminate Justice Department backlogs and the bill would require agencies using the program to have mandatory-wear policies and would for the first time ensure these lifesaving vests are fitted appropriately for women, at a time when there are more and more women in law enforcement and more and more at the very front lines of protecting our communities.
This bill is fiscally responsible. And enacting this bill is a moral responsibility.
Madam President, police officers work to keep us safe every day. Congress can and should do the same for them. Congress should be standing with our law enforcement officers, not standing in their way.
I applaud the persistent leadership of Chairman Leahy and will stand with him as long as it takes to get this program back on track and ensure its long-term survival. While this program had a long history of bipartisan support and passed out of the Judiciary Committee with a number of Republicans voting in support, a few of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle now don’t seem to think this investment in officer safety is an appropriate one for this body and this government to make.
Madam President, last year our nation lost 33 police officers in the line of duty killed by gunshots. According to the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund, there is some reason to be cheered because this is the smallest number lost in a year since the 1800s. But 33 deaths, line-of-duty deaths, of men and women shot to death while protecting their communities, is 33 too many. And while we have an opportunity to continue to provide to state and local law enforcement vests that can save these and other lives, we should. We should continue working tirelessly until those numbers come down to zero.
Madam President, in recent months I’ve been proud as this body has come together across the partisan divide, has passed a budget bill, an appropriations bill, a farm bill, has begun to deal with some of our nation’s most urgent needs. But I am distressed by this particular action. To block even consideration of so small a program with such important consequences is, to me, profoundly disheartening. I call on my colleague to stop blocking this bill and allow this body to debate and to pass this reauthorization that will save lives in law enforcement this year and every year going forward.
We owe them no less.