Last May, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-New York) went into a workshop in the basement of a House office building looking for a hidden piece of memorabilia commemorating the Capitol attack that took place five years ago.
Making his way past a mini-refrigerator, a scooter, a bookshelf and some small lockers, the lawmaker opened up a crate to reveal the bronze plaque, several feet wide and several feet high, bearing an image of the Capitol and the names of more than 20 law enforcement agencies.
“It’s a beautiful tribute to the men and women who protected the Capitol during the onslaught,” Morelle said in a social media post at the time.
The actual plaque has remained out of sight ever since.
As Democrats prepare to mark the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot with special hearings, Morelle assumes that the official memorial is still buried in the subterranean workshop.
The plaque was mandated in a 2022 government funding law passed on a bipartisan basis. That law gave the architect of the Capitol, who is responsible for the Capitol grounds, a year to produce the plaque and give it a “permanent location” outside on the Capitol’s West Front. But it has remained out of sight because of objections from House Republicans, many of whom have minimized the attack and its effects. The architect has testified that installing it would require the assent of Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), who is a staunch Trump supporter and who led a legal brief trying to block Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.
The fight over the plaque is in many ways a microcosm of an ongoing partisan battle over how Jan. 6 should be viewed.
Democrats maintain that the day’s invasion of the Capitol and its intense skirmishes between police and rioters attempting to block congressional certification of Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election must never be forgotten. They accuse Trump and his allies of trying to rewrite the insurrection’s history to whitewash the violent actions of that day. Republicans — some of whom are in the midst of a new investigation about the day’s events — have dismissed Democrats’ characterization as overblown.
On his first day back in office last Jan. 20, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged with crimes related to the attack. He has continued to deny that he lost the 2020 election and over the past few years most Republicans have avoided commemorating Jan. 6.
House Republicans have announced no plans to observe Tuesday’s Jan. 6 anniversary; instead, they are gathering with Trump more than three miles away at the Kennedy Center. They’re expected to pay homage to the center, which the president recently added his name to, while discussing this year’s policy agenda.
As the immediate installation of the actual plaque seems unlikely, more than 100 House Democrats have hung a reproduction of the plaque outside their offices.
One such spot is right outside the office of Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), in a ceremonial room where that Jan. 6 placard greets Johnson and guests when he uses it for news conferences and social gatherings.
“I guess that’s the irony — that it’s displayed far more because of [Johnson’s] reluctance to follow the law than it would have been had he just done the right thing,” Morelle said.
In testimony before a House subcommittee last April, the Architect of the Capitol, Thomas E. Austin, offered very brief answers to Democratic questions about why the plaque remains hidden.
“We have not received final instructions to install the plaque,” Austin said. Asked to explain who would give those instructions, he paused, looked down, tapped his folded hands on the table and explained that any such requests would “come from the office of the speaker.”
A spokesman for Johnson said Monday that the statute mandating the plaque is “not implementable” because of the vague way it was written and suggested Democrats honor Capitol officers using the legislative committee process that is used to award the Congressional Gold Medal.
“If Democrats are serious about commemorating the work of USCP officers, they are free to work with the appropriate committees of jurisdiction to develop a framework for proper vetting and consideration,” the spokesman said.
That process often takes several yearsor longer, even for noncontroversial figures such as golf legends Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer.
Two officers who clashed with rioters that day have brought a lawsuit against Austin’s office, arguing that not displaying the plaque harms their reputations. Justice Department officials suggested that the plaque need not be installed, arguing that the statute says the finished plaque should list more than 3,600 names of officers who defended the Capitol. The current version does not do so, and therefore, according to DOJ, is incomplete.
Jeanine Pirro, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, in a December motion defending the Architect of the Capitol, suggested that Harry Dunn, a former U.S. Capitol Police officer, and Daniel Hodges, a D.C. police officer, lacked legal standing to bring the suit because their suffering has come from battles during the attack and their subsequent public roles in criticizing Trump.
“It is implausible for plaintiffs to suggest that the installation of the plaque would stop the alleged death threats they claim to have been receiving,” Pirro said.
Dunn, who left the Capitol force to run for Congress and lost the Democratic nomination in suburban Maryland in 2024, accused the prosecutors of joining some MAGA allies in “helping spew the narrative that January 6 never happened.”
“It’s the law. The law says it has to be hung,” Dunn said of the plaque. “If they don’t want to honor us, then change the law.”
Dunn credits those few reporters, such as Scott MacFarlane of CBS News, who have doggedly stayed on top of the twists and turns with the plaque for helping to keep the fight over its installation alive. Dunn said he understands that the plaque might seem relatively inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but it is an important symbol in the battle to define what happened five years ago.
About 140 officers were injured in defending the Capitol, after Trump’s rally south of the White House in which he told supporters he would join them up Pennsylvania Avenue to protest the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.
One officer, Brian D. Sicknick, died a day after the attack, having suffered a stroke. Four officers who had defended the Capitol later died by suicide, which Biden’s attorney general Merrick Garland labeled “line of duty” deaths. Four Trump supporters died: two from natural causes, one a drug overdose, and another shot dead by an officer.
Morelle, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which oversees Capitol operations, said he views the plaque as a broader effort by Republicans to fall in line with Trump.
“He’s trying to rewrite the history of that day, and he can’t have a plaque prominently displayed at the Capitol and rewrite history. And Speaker Johnson is clearly more interested in what Donald Trump has to say than he is in preserving the history of that awful day,” Morelle said in an interview Monday.
Morelle had the idea to hang a reproduction of the plaque a few days after visiting the actual version last May, dispatching an aide to get a picture of the memorial. They turned it into a lightweight placard that could be easily displayed outside his office, prompting others to ask how he did that.
In June, Morelle joined Reps. Jamie Raskin (Maryland) and Jim McGovern (Massachusetts), the top Democrats on the Judiciary and Rules committees, in a letter encouraging colleagues to hang the placard outside their offices.
Now, almost every hallway in the House office buildings has these signs, mixed in with Republican offices displaying posters of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk or of Trump after the July 2024 assassination attempt on him.
Morelle supports the Dunn-Hodges lawsuit but fears that the courts will take way too long to settle the matter. He hopes Democrats can win the House in the November midterms, at which point he expects to get Jeffries’ support to notify the Architect’s office to prepare the plaque to be displayed in early 2027.
“In fact, it would be sort of fitting to have it on January 6th of 2027, that would be my goal,” Morelle said.
“That would be awesome,” Dunn said.
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