You don’t have to be a lawyer to see why a plaque honoring officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was installed only after years of delay, at around 4 a.m. over the weekend. The Donald Trump-led Republican Party has no interest in promptly or fully honoring those who fought to repel the Trump-backed mob that day in 2021.
Quite the opposite: A priority of Trump’s second term has been trying to erase that history.
Yet the memorial’s belated, shady installation wasn’t only morally insufficient.
It was legally insufficient, too.
So explains a court filing this week in a lawsuit brought by Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges, who worked that day on behalf of the U.S. Capitol Police and Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, respectively. They sued last year to get Congress to obtain and install a plaque in line with a 2022 law requiring a memorial.
“They bring this suit to compel Congress to follow its own law and install the mandated memorial, to honor the women and men who saved the lives of those inside the building, and to ensure that the history of this attack on the Capitol — and on democracy — is not forgotten,” the June complaint said.
Dunn and Hodges filed the suit against the Architect of the Capitol, which is a legislative branch agency responsible for operating and maintaining the Capitol and surrounding buildings. Represented by the office of Jeanine Pirro, the Trump-picked U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, the agency moved to dismiss the complaint in December, arguing, among other things, that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing to bring the suit.
Citing a Saturday report by The Washington Post on the plaque’s installation, the federal judge overseeing the litigation asked Dunn and Hodges whether they think their complaint is now moot.
They don’t.
“Unfortunately, this litigation must continue,” they wrote to U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee who, in separate previous litigation, rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to expand the reach of Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons. They’re represented by Brendan Ballou, a former federal prosecutor who prosecuted Jan. 6 rioters.
In the response to Friedrich’s question, Dunn and Hodges said the plaque’s installation — in the interior of a ground-floor entrance, where the public isn’t allowed — violated both the letter and the spirit of the law.
As to the letter, they pointed out that the law requires the memorial to be displayed on the “western front” of the Capitol, which, they maintained, means an exterior part of the building. Therefore, they argued, the installation “in a part of the Capitol hidden from the public fails to comply” with the law. “That Congress intended to install the plaque on the western exterior of the Capitol makes sense: that is both an area accessible to the general public, and the site of the most violent attacks on January 6, 2021,” they wrote.
As to the spirit, they pointed out that the law’s stated purpose is to “Honor Members of Law Enforcement Who Responded on January 6.” With that in mind, they said that honor “is a social — that is, public — recognition,” and so it can’t be kept hidden from the public.
The plaintiffs called the government defendants’ actions “enormously frustrating,” deeming the latest development “part of a yearslong effort to keep the plaque, and more generally, the history of January 6, 2021, literally hidden from the public.” They said it’s “concerning that Defendants continue to block the enforcement of this simple law.”
While noting the potentially temporary nature of the installation, they said that without continuing their litigation, “it is unlikely that the plaque will ever find a permanent — and legally required — home.”
The judge ordered the government to respond by Tuesday.
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