'No leaders should have sacrificed small businesses to riots and mobs a few weeks back, and no leader should let threats or left-wing jargon persuade them to tolerate occupations for weeks on end.'
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding civil unrest:
"I'd planned to speak first today about the NDAA. I'd planned to discuss our work to ensure American servicemembers can protect our nation and secure peace for the United States.
"But unfortunately, the inexplicable passivity and weakness of local leaders in our own country has denied some citizens peace and security right here at home.
"Here we are in Congress, equipping our Armed Forces to protect the homeland. Yet some local leaders have apparently felt it would be too politically incorrect to do their jobs and keep the peace.
"It has now been 22 days since radical demonstrators seized control of several blocks of downtown Seattle, drove the police out of a precinct, and declared an autonomous zone which the mob itself would rule.
"It's worth pausing to consider how the mainstream media and leading Democrats might have reacted if Tea Party protesters in 2009 had forcibly created a breakaway zone within a major city and barred the actual authorities from entering.
"Somehow I'm skeptical the press would have bent over backwards to find a sympathetic light. Somehow I doubt these same politicians would have felt compelled to curry favor with the occupiers or flirt with their demands.
"But we're talking about the American left in 2020. So instead, what we get is a major newspaper lavishing praise on the, quote, "liberated streets," and a mayor and local government that have expressly declined to restore order and the equal protection of the law.
"The mob has gotten its way.
"There have been numerous shootings in this lawless place. About a week ago, a 19-year-old was shot and killed. Last weekend, after yet another shooting, a 16-year-old is dead and a 14-year-old was injured.
"Some reports suggest these two boys were shot by the self-appointed security squad. These are miscellaneous citizens who roam the area with guns drawn after the occupiers drove the real police out.
"We are talking about Seattle, Washington in the United States of America.
"The rule of law cannot fade in and out with the fashions of the radical left.
"No leaders should have sacrificed small businesses to riots and mobs a few weeks back, and no leader should let threats or left-wing jargon persuade them to tolerate occupations for weeks on end.
"I understand that just this morning, Seattle's mayor finally released a new order that at last empowered police to bring an end to this. Let's hope the rule of law finally prevails."
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