Source: United States House of Representatives – Representative Mike Johnson (LA-04)
WASHINGTON — On Friday, September 5, Speaker Johnson delivered keynote remarks at the G7 Speakers’ Meeting in Ottawa, Canada, on the subject of “Protecting Legislators from All Forms of Violence.” During the summit, Speaker Johnson also held bilateral meetings with the parliamentary leaders from other G7 countries.
G7 parliamentary leaders’ “family” photo.
Speaker Johnson delivers remarks at the Parliamentary G7 Summit.
“We do have to protect the free marketplace of ideas, but at the same time, watch out for this madness escalating into violence,” Speaker Johnson said.
“Actual threats, of course, have to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law – and we can’t criminalize every post and every heated remark or every dissenting view,” Speaker Johnson continued. “We don’t want a chilled expression. We don’t want to undermine the very democratic systems that we’re aiming to protect. We all know that, we’ve all said it, but at the same time, we have to strike that careful balance.”
Below are the Speaker’s full keynote remarks as delivered:
Thank you so much. Thanks for being such a gracious host. This has been a great event so far, and the beautiful surroundings, and we’re grateful to be here. It was good to see my friends who I met for the first time last year, and a couple of new faces as well. So, it does my heart well to be with you all. And we are all in this together, as has been articulated here many times today, and one of the things we have to face is this very real issue.
We talked about the online violence and now the rising threat of physical violence and all the threats that we face. Thank you for accommodating my request to switch the order of these two programs. And I would not leave for anything except that we have a very important event at the White House in just a few hours from now. So, the president called me this morning on the way in to make sure I was going to be there. Yes, sir. I said, and he said, send you all his warm regards. So that’s from the President.
Before I begin, I just want to say it was a little more than 40 years ago. My favorite American president since George Washington was Ronald Reagan. And he made a now famous trip here to Canada. And he spoke before your parliament, and he was only the third sitting American president to address that chamber. And his speech left a lasting impression for its policy as much as its spirit. He just had that way about him, as we all remember.
But in that address, President Reagan reminded his audience of something that rings true as we sit here today. And he said, “Friends, come to help, an acquaintance merely advises.”
So here we are giving thought and attention in our time to trying to help one another, and that is very meaningful and this dangerous, unprecedented era in which we are all called to serve. So I know, today we speak as genuine friends, and we’re trying to help one another to address these, these important issues.
So with regard to violence against legislators, it’s a subject sadly that many of us are now developing an expertise in. It’s one that weighs heavily on all of us, and one we take very seriously in Washington because of recent events. Violence against legislators is not a new danger, of course. I mean, we know in history there have been assassinations and famous attempts on the lives of elected officials, but in our time in this modern digital age, that threat feels more personal and more pervasive and more difficult to define than ever before.
With the omniscience, you know, the omnipresence of the online community, people know everything about all of us, all the details where we live, our addresses, where our children and spouses are, and all the rest. And as lawmakers, technology and emerging innovations have revolutionized the way we interact with our constituents as well. We’ve talked a lot about that already today. In turn, it’s given the public unprecedented access to anybody who represents their interests or makes policy. And that’s been mostly used for good. But of course, sometimes it’s not.
And the uptick in violence against legislators is not confined to just one party or one nation. It’s a common challenge for all of us. That’s why we’re discussing it. In the U.S., we’ve seen a troubling and steady rise in violent threats against elected officials. It’s almost daily.
Now, last year, the number of threats – you mentioned your statistics, which are alarming – here’s ours. The number of threats directed at members of the U.S. Congress continued at an upward trend, exceeding 9,000 serious assessments of threatening and concerning behavior, most of which originated through phone calls and social media. But this year it’s an even more dramatic shift, and I’m not sure exactly what accounts for it, but it’s a dangerous trend.
With three months left in this calendar year, our U.S. Capitol Police have already tracked close to 14,000 assessments. So we went from 9,000 last calendar year to 14,000 already this year and counting.
A recent West Point study broadened the picture. It found that the growing number of threats and acts of political violence don’t just target members of Congress and state legislators. They’re also going after our judges and our federal agents and law enforcement and others charged with keeping order.
Sadly, these statistics come with names and faces. Some of whom you may recognize. I’m sure you heard of the state of Minnesota’s Speaker Emerita, Melissa Hortman and her husband, who were gunned down and murdered in a targeted political attack just three months ago. The Governor of the state of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro and his family, who on the first night of Passover, their Jewish family nearly escaped their home when an arsonist set it ablaze.
Some may know of my colleague and close friend, our House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, from my home state of Louisiana, who was nearly killed when a deranged gunman opened fire on him. That was just a few years ago and other members of Congress, they were practicing for our annual charity baseball game on a baseball field. And if Steve Scalise had not been there, we would have 12 deceased members of Congress of the House, because the gunman had them inside a fenced perimeter.
And the only reason the gunman was taken down is because Steve Scalise happened to be there, and he’s the Majority Leader, so he had two security guards if he had not been there, they would all be deceased.
So that was in the year 2017, we witnessed the largest jump in threats directed at Congressional, elected officials that year, and it has not ceased since that time. And of course, finally, famously, there were two failed assassination attempts on President Trump’s life, one in Butler, Pennsylvania. And, you know, if he had not turned his head with a split second when he did, he would not be with us today, and he knows that. And I was with him ironically, the very day, the very moment that, moments after. The second failed assassination attempt at his golf course in Florida. I happened to be arriving at Mar-a-Lago for a meeting with him right as he came off the course. And we sat together for three hours and processed the fact that within 64 days, he had two assassination attempts on his life, and his own mortality came into focus. And I mean, it would affect any man under those circumstances. And it’s changed the way he thinks.
But all of this is a rising threat and the threats, of course, don’t stop with just us. They extend to our families and our spouses and our children, who bear as much risk as we do, and that may be the most horrifying reality of this situation.
I’ll tell you, I just told my friend Lindsay, that on the way in here this morning, my 24-year-old daughter sent me a text message and she said, “Dad, I just want you to know there’s a strange man standing outside of our townhouse. He’s been here for two days. He’s showing abnormal behavior. He’s lurking around. We don’t know what to do.” I called my Chief of Staff, Hayden, sent a note to our security detail, and they went to go question the guy and run him off. I mean, when your daughters are calling you and you’re on a short trip and saying Dad, we’re scared, it’s, you know, it’s a big deterrence for people to run for office. We’re going to have less and less good citizen legislators if they feel like they’re going to jeopardize the lives of their own families. So, why is this happening? Why the risk? I think this panel ties well with our recent discussions, what we’ve had this morning. Rhetoric is a big part of it. Of course, part of the answer, I believe lies in the tone of our own politics.
Too often today, citizens are told that their opponents are not just wrong, but they’re existential threats to the survival of the nation and all of that. And so it stirs up dissension, but it also stirs up violent people. There are crazy people in the world, and we have to acknowledge it. And as we discussed, politics is framed in increasingly dire terms as though the very survival of each of our nation’s hinges on every election outcome. And that is not normally the case.
But at the heart of this problem, I personally fear that we’ve lost something deeper, which is our sense of absolute moral truths. There’s a notion right now that you can’t call evil evil. I mean, I was complimented this morning for an interview I did yesterday, and I just called Putin Evil. We’re all willing to say that, but some people are not. They won’t speak in clear moral terms. They won’t just call something wrong. And we have to do that.
The height of the anti-Semitism encampments at our universities in America, you know, just less than two years ago, I went to Columbia University in the middle of it, and I stood and faced the harsh crowd. And I’d been Speaker for just a couple of months, I think, and I just said, you’re wrong. And with gnashing of teeth and veins sticking out of their necks, or they’re waving Hamas flags, and I thought they were going to rip me limb from limb, but I felt like it was important to say it, and we have to do that.
George Washington was the father of our country, and have I mentioned we’re going to have our 250th anniversary as a nation? Oh, oh. But in his famous farewell address, he gave his prescription, he said, you know, we’re doing something that hasn’t been done here before, and it’s a grand experiment in self-governance and liberty and democracy and all these things. And he says, I’m going to give you my advice on how to keep it, how we think we might keep this grand experiment, and he gave us lots of advice.
One of the things was, he said, avoid political parties. Oh, I wish we had because they’re so divisive. He said, avoid large national debts. We failed that too. Pretty much we ignored all of his advice, okay? But one of the things he said, he said, of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. And what he meant by that is you have to have a common moral consensus to have a free people. You’ve got to have a sense of right and wrong. And to me, that’s something I lose a lot of sleep about.
I feel like at least in our country, that a lot of the young people are losing their guiding compass, and they don’t recognize that there are absolute truths. There is good and evil in the world, and we should acknowledge it.
So what do we do about all this? I don’t think all hope is lost. I think there’s some practical things that we can do. I’ll outline just a couple here real quick, and I’ll wrap this up. But things that we’re doing in the United States Congress, we’re looking at tools that we have at our disposal. We’re identifying or at least trying to identify what’s not working and expanding what is.
So one of the benefits and the blessings of new technologies, it helps us, whether it’s enhancing residential security through AI – one of the good uses of AI – or implementing robust security infrastructure to protect lawmakers personal information online. That’s a big thing as well. We now have an opt-in, if you’re a elected member of Congress, that we can deploy this technology to scrub the internet of your personal information, your address and your phone numbers, et cetera.
It’s not fail-proof, but it’s helpful. This month and last, we have started a pilot program of a small financial allowance for each member of Congress, if they wish to avail themselves of it, to hire personal security.
We have 435 members in the body that I lead. And the annual cost of providing a full security detail bodyguards for everyone, it would be like a billion plus dollars or something annually. So what we’ve done is we’ve put a small amount there to see how many members might avail themselves of using that. It is taxpayer funded, but you know, desperate times call for desperate measures. And so we’ll see how many of the 435 members avail themselves with this opportunity to use that to provide for their security, at least when they are going to a large, public event or a town hall or something like that.
And we’re going to assess all that data at the end of this month for the two-month pilot program to see how it was used and try to reassess and do we need more funding or less and, and what have you, so we’re trying to be creative.
It’s important to note that partisan politics is not part of the equation here at all, because everybody’s under the same threat no matter what party you’re in. And of course, law enforcement plays a central role in protecting lawmakers, especially in Washington, in our capital city. I’m ashamed to say last year, we saw Congressman Henry Cuellar was carjacked less than a mile from our Capitol building. We saw Congresswoman Angie Craig was followed into her D.C. apartment complex and physically attacked. so we’ve taken dramatic measures and President Trump, the federal government, has now effectively taken charge of crime in the District of Columbia.
It was controversial at first, but just two, three days ago, the Democrat Mayor of Washington D.C., Muriel Bowser, came out and said, “We’re so grateful that we have National Guard troops on the streets of our capital city because carjackings have dropped in the last three or four weeks 85% robberies down 43%, violent crime down 25%.” So, policing matters, and you’ve got to have energy and resources to attack the problem. And we do, but as we know, security alone is not enough. President Trump’s brush with death last July should serve as a clarion call. Even with one of the most sophisticated security operations in the world, his survival came down to a split-second turn of his head.
Look, as we all agree, and we’ve discussed many times, in many ways, it’s incumbent upon each of us as elected leaders to just set the example. And I think civility is a big part of that. I’m grateful for how each of you leads as individuals.
When I entered Congress in 2017, our divisions were very real. That was the first year of the first Trump Administration, and that election was pretty divisive. People were in a pretty edgy mood when they showed up in Washington. But we went on an annual trip, as the new freshman. I was a freshman in that year. The new members of Congress go on a retreat that first weekend of the new Congress to get to know one another.
Somebody said, “It’s hard to hate someone if you know the names of their children.” And so, we have endeavored to get to know one another better. At least in, in that event we did. Our class was pretty successful at it. We had 55 members of the freshman class that year, Republicans and Democrats.
I drafted a document called the “Commitment to Civility” to memorialize on paper what we had all agreed to personally at our little retreat. And it’s just simple notion, follow the Golden Rule – treat one another with dignity and respect. This is not your enemy on the other side of the aisle here, this is your colleague. And, for heaven’s sake, scripture says we’re supposed to love our enemy. You’re supposed, certainly supposed to love your colleague and your fellow countrymen. So, everybody signed onto this thing, and it worked pretty well. And then as social media began to rise since 2017, and the vitriol and the partisan divide has gotten worse. It’s more and more challenging, but I don’t think we should turn our head from that. We started a group called the “Honor and Civility Caucus” in the U.S. Congress, and we’re trying to forge relationships.
And so, I think those are important things as well. You know, we talked about it a little bit this morning. I’ll just close with this. I mean, there are some positive things that we can do. We need to be creative, we need to use new technology, we need to foster personal relationships, and I do think we have to, we have to be careful, as we’ve discussed. We had a great discussion here – protest and revolution – and, you know, negative attitudes. I mean, that’s all part of it. And we do have to, as we’ve discussed, protect the free marketplace of ideas. But at the same time, watch out for this, this madness escalating into violence. We talked about the censorship issue and how we struggle with that, and that’ll continue to be a challenge for us. But I look forward to having the ongoing dialogue about those ideas.
Actual threats, of course, have to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and we can’t criminalize every post and every heated remark or every dissenting view. We don’t want a chilled expression. We don’t want to undermine the very democratic systems that we’re aiming to protect. We all know that, we’ve all said it, but at the same time, we have to strike that careful balance as was mentioned by you all earlier this morning. So, as we work on that, it’s encouraging to me that we all share these same values and that we’re trying to do this together, and we’ll come up with some solutions. We’ve got to be creative, and we must adapt with the times – and we will. I just close with a helpful reminder. Our countries are at our best when we call out hard truths. But we also have to remember to, I think it’s important for us to herald what is good and strong, and that’s what we do here together. And we have to continue to do it back home. I think it’s what makes us uniquely exceptional. The freedoms that distinguished democracies: these are the good noble, right things. When the axis of evil gathered for the little party last week, I wonder what they would go out and champion other than authoritarianism and power and control. We’re for the opposite of all those things, and we should be proud to stand and say it in the public square. We don’t just identify our challenges, we work on meaningful solutions. And I think that’s what separates the good guys from the bad guys to say it bluntly.
We’re going to celebrate a big, big birthday next year, and we invite all of you to come and join us in Washington at some time during. It’s going to be a golden year, okay? I’m telling you–it’s going to be golden. We’re going to host the Olympics. We’re going to host the FIFA World Cup all next year. And so homeland security will be top of mind for all of us. And I fear that threats will be at an all time high as well. Maybe that’s a prayer request of my friends and colleagues here that we can keep everybody safe. We’re going to do our best, and we want all your countrymen to come and have a good time at those events. So, with that I will yield back, and thank all of you for all you’re doing.
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