During debate on the House floor, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) spoke in opposition to HR 2255, the Federal Law Enforcement Officer Service Weapon Purchase Act of 2025.
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00:00Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition. I want to thank my colleague from South Carolina
00:06for his excellent presentation. But this bill is a case study in a legislative majority that's in
00:14search of not common ground and common sense, but rather extreme measures that divide and
00:19polarize the Congress and the people. Once upon a time, this was a sensible bipartisan bill
00:25led by our Democratic colleague, Val Demings from Orlando, Florida, who'd been a police chief.
00:31Her bill allowed federal agencies to sell handguns that they were no longer using
00:36to the active duty officers who previously carried those handguns for fair market value,
00:43as long as they completed a background check like everybody else in America.
00:47Well, last Congress, Republicans weakened that bipartisan bill, which I think commanded
00:57unanimous support in Congress, by stripping the background check requirement while still
01:03restricting the bill to handgun sales to current law enforcement officers only. So we were willing
01:09to go along with that compromise. We accepted that in the last Congress. When the bill came to the
01:16floor for a vote, however, Republicans filled the bill with a menagerie of more outlandish and extreme
01:23provisions. And that's the version that they started with in this Congress, which is before us
01:28today. When we marked up the legislation, we offered an amendment that would allow them to go back
01:33to the compromise version of the bill, a version of the bill that they themselves had introduced
01:39and that we support, but they refused to do it. So today, in place of a reasonable, common sense,
01:46common ground bill, Republicans are dug in on another extreme proposal that riddles our gun laws
01:53with loopholes and politicizes what should have been a simple bipartisan measure. The bill before us
02:01today would allow surplus firearms to be sold not only to active federal law enforcement officers in
02:07good standing, but also to retired law enforcement officers. Because the bill also now has no
02:13background check requirement, it would create a situation in which it would be possible for an
02:18officer to retire, commit a crime like domestic violence or assault that would ordinarily render
02:25him or her ineligible to purchase and possess firearms, but then still be able to buy a firearm
02:31from the federal government without any background check at all. While the bill includes a good
02:37standing requirement, as they remind us, this is plainly meaningless as applied to retired officers
02:43who may have left a department in perfectly good standing, but could not pass a background check
02:49today. Agencies can certify that an officer is in good standing when they retire, but they have no way
02:54to track the behavior of their former officers after that if they cannot do a background check. So an
03:01agency could unknowingly sell a surplus firearm to someone who cannot lawfully buy a gun. And all of
03:08this would occur under the statute without any background check at all. The bill also allows for the sale of
03:17any firearm except machine guns. That includes not just handguns, but also assault weapons, destructive
03:24devices like hand grenades, and even firearms that are subject to heightened restrictions under the national
03:31firearms act. And it allows them to be sold at salvage value, effectively making it so that the federal
03:38government and the taxpayers would actually be subsidizing gun sales. They replaced fair market
03:44value with salvage value. My colleagues have claimed that the bill would not really allow for the sale of
03:50all of these types of firearms because it only applies, they say, to service weapons. But they need to read
03:55their own bill. It allows for the sale of any firearm other than a machine gun that is, quote, issued to an
04:01officer. That means if an officer uses not just a handgun, but an assault rifle, a grenade launcher,
04:07anything classified as a destructive device, any firearm or destructive device used by a SWAT team, any
04:14firearm or destructive device used by the Secret Service, so long as it's not a machine gun, if it's issued to an
04:20officer, can be sold back to him or her without a background check under the bill at salvage value.
04:26If that's not what they mean, and they've been scrambling to deny it, they should change the
04:31language of the bill, because that's plainly what the bill says. And forgive me for insisting on
04:37scrupulous attention to words, but that's the business we're in when we enter the legislative process.
04:43Taken together, the bill makes it so that an officer could retire, commit a crime, become a person who may
04:50not legally own firearms under federal law, then buy from the federal government a handgun, a semi-automatic
04:57assault rifle, a sawed-off shotgun, or even a grenade launcher at a discount with no background check
05:04at all. Now look, this is a famously do nothing or do very little Congress. They don't have much on
05:12their agenda other than slashing $880 billion from Medicaid and SNAP and Meals on Wheels and Head Start
05:19and the other programs that actually serve Americans who don't live like Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
05:25But you think that they would have the time at least to write a bill that would not permit these kinds of
05:31things to happen. These are unacceptable risks of a dangerous weapon being sold to a person who may not
05:37legally have one. And so reluctantly, we must oppose this bill, which began as a Democratic bill, which commanded
05:43unanimous bipartisan support before. Nothing in this bill is going to help law enforcement officers
05:49actually do their jobs, which was how all of this was introduced when we first started out today.
05:55Indeed, it doesn't provide a single federal dollar to help local law enforcement. In fact, our colleagues
06:01have not advanced a single bill during this entire police week or even this entire session of Congress
06:07to increase funding to state and local police. In fact, the party that now controls the White House and
06:14both chambers of Congress is letting Doge and Elon Musk and their midnight crew of computer hackers
06:21dismantle entire agencies, fire thousands of federal workers without cause, and generally wreak havoc
06:28across the government. Last month, Doge decided unilaterally to cancel more than $500 million
06:35of Department of Justice grant funding for local law enforcement, public safety, and crime prevention
06:43programs all over the country in our communities. And what did we hear from our colleagues across the
06:49aisle? Did they stand up to Doge and object to this defunding of the police? No, Mr. Speaker,
06:56our colleagues said absolutely nothing. And I mean that literally. During the Judiciary Committee markup of
07:03the reconciliation bill, Democrats offered a simple amendment to immediately restore hundreds of
07:10millions of dollars in funding for the police and for hundreds of other essential public safety grant
07:16programs dismantled by, as far as we can tell, one employee at Doge. Every single one of our GOP
07:23colleagues voted against that amendment, but they refused to utter a word in favor of Elon Musk's
07:30chainsaw massacre of local law enforcement and public safety programs. They don't want to be quoted
07:36supporting Doge, but even if your quotes don't support Doge, your votes support Doge. And they have
07:43voted not to restore hundreds of millions of dollars that Doge cut from our state and local and county
07:51law enforcement and public safety organizations. And in case some of our colleagues haven't heard yet
07:57from their outraged constituents about this, let me offer just one example of more than 365 grants that were
08:04abruptly terminated by Doge. That's one grant program per day all across the country. Well, Doge cut funding for a
08:12program called the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative, which provided funding to dozens and dozens of rural
08:20law enforcement agencies across America, allowing them with their strapped budgets to hire more officers
08:27and purchase up-to-date equipment and technology. They also supported rural victim services and crime
08:34prevention programming. This program was created to assist small rural agencies that need federal funding,
08:42but are so small, short-staffed or under-resourced, they wouldn't even have the ability to apply for the funding.
08:47Well, one such recipient of this grant from the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative was the Shawano,
08:56Wisconsin Police Department, which was using the funding to pay for a detective dedicated to
09:03investigating and solving unsolved violent crimes and to stop narcotics trafficking in their community.
09:11The police department said the additional detective would build trust with community members,
09:15increase patrols in hotspot areas, enhance crime prevention, and sustain a reduction in violent crime and narcotics-related
09:24crime. And this is just one of the hundreds of rural police departments and other agencies using this funding from
09:32this one grant program from 365 that were suddenly terminated by one Doge employee running amok in the Department of Justice. This is funding, Mr. Speaker, that we're in the
09:45House of Representatives voted for on an overwhelming bipartisan basis that the Senate overwhelmingly voted for on a bipartisan basis.
09:54We had bicameral passage and presentment to the president. The president signed it into law. The Department of Justice got the funding. The Department of Justice
10:04programed the funding. The Department of Justice awarded those grants all across America. And guess who stopped it without my knowledge, without their knowledge, without anybody's knowledge?
10:16Doge employee, one of Elon Musk's junior lieutenants who spent his career at Tesla. And then he decided he was going to wipe out hundreds of millions of dollars going to our people.
10:29Well, are our colleagues going to allow Doge to get away with this critical destruction of law enforcement in rural communities, urban communities,
10:43suburban communities across the land? Apparently so. They remain silent on it. They won't utter a word in favor of it, but they don't utter a peep against it. They just vote for it.
10:54They just sheepishly get in line and support this destruction of what we had already voted for to put into action.
11:02Mr. Speaker, I oppose this legislation, which is a trivial distraction from what's really going on in America today,
11:10which is they are dismantling the priorities of the people as passed through the People's House and through the Senate and signed into law.
11:19And I urge my colleagues to join us in actually standing up for law enforcement and for the police and for community safety.
11:26And I invite them to join us in actually standing up for the Article One powers of Congress.
11:33And I hope they will join us in rejecting Doge's deranged funding cuts that are undermining public safety and harming law enforcement across the land.
11:42I reserve the balance of my time.