A federal law passed nearly four years ago required Congress to mount a plaque honoring the law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol when rioters stormed the building on Jan. 6, 2021. The deadline to install the memorial: March 15, 2023.
A plaque was made. But never hung.
A bipartisan duo on Thursday sought to remedy that.
Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, and Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, offered a resolution mandating that the plaque be “prominently displayed in a publicly accessible location in the Senate wing” of the Capitol “until the plaque can be placed in its permanent location.”
They called up the bill suddenly at the end of the Senate’s workweek and no senator was there to object. It passed by unanimous consent, just days after the White House launched a website that falsely claimed the police were to blame for the violence on Jan. 6.
Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, had agreed to display the plaque publicly, Mr. Tillis said on the Senate floor.
But it remains unclear when the Senate may hang it and where. Those details would likely be worked out by the Senate Rules Committee.
The officers who protected the Capitol in 2021 helped lawmakers overcome “one of the most significant stress tests for this institution since it was founded,” Mr. Tillis said. On that day, he added, “thousands of thugs storming this building” had delayed the certification of the 2020 election results.
“It’s so important we recognize those who defended our democratic republic on that day,” Mr. Merkley said on the floor. “It’s so important that people know that we came back as senators and House members and finished our work that day for the peaceful transfer of power.”
A sweeping spending bill passed in 2022 included a resolution that stated Congress “owes its deepest gratitude to those officers” who had “valiantly protected the United States Capitol, members of Congress, and staff.”
It required that the plaque be installed at a permanent location on the “western front” of the building within one year. Democrats have called for years for the installation, accusing Speaker Mike Johnson of purposeful delay.
“It has been created,” Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said last year. “An image of it hangs outside my office. But House Republicans refuse to follow the law and hang it.”
Mr. Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
One sticking point was that the law required the plaque list all the names of the hundreds of officers on duty that day, from not only the Capitol Police force but also the D.C. Metropolitan Police, and other federal and state law enforcement agencies. The plaque eventually listed only the law enforcement agencies who deployed officers to respond to the violence.
It has remained in storage, never unveiled to the public, for years. On Tuesday, some lawmakers commemorating the five-year anniversary of the attack exhibited mock-ups of the plaque.
“On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on Jan. 6, 2021,” the cardboard stand-ins for the bronze plate read. “Their heroism will never be forgotten.”
Nearly 140 police officers suffered injuries as the mob swarmed the Capitol with bear spray, stun guns, fireworks and other weapons, and two officers who responded to the violence died shortly after by suicide.
Mr. Tillis had suggested earlier in the week that he would seek to amend the law to allow for just the law enforcement agencies to be listed on the plaque, but ultimately offered up the resolution to hang it temporarily on the Senate side of the Capitol.
Democrats have proposed that a digital exhibit alongside the plaque listing all of the officers’ names would be a simple workaround to having to install a large enough memorial to display them.
Megan Mineiro is a Times congressional reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
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