In March 2022, Congress passed a law mandating that, to commemorate the regulation enforcement officers who responded to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, a plaque wanted to be positioned on the western entrance of the Capitol constructing itemizing every of the officers’ names.
The regulation stipulated that this plaque needs to be up inside a 12 months. As of early 2026, although, the completed plaque was collecting dust within the depths of the Capitol’s basement subsequent to a pile of instruments and upkeep tools.
For the previous three years, the plaque’s future has develop into caught up in a sport of partisan cat and mouse. After management within the Home shifted to Republicans in 2023, a number of Democrats claimed that Home Speaker Mike Johnson purposefully stalled the plaque’s set up. Johnson failed to present the go-ahead for its set up to the Architects of the Capitol, the steward of the Capitol constructing that was charged by Congress with commissioning and mounting the plaque. These delays continued for thus lengthy that two of the officers concerned within the assault, Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges, sued the Architects of the Capitol final summer season.
Lastly, on March 7, the plaque went up—albeit inside a hallway with out public entry—and it was all thanks to 1 intelligent design add-on: a tiny QR code.
A commemorative plaque will get caught in design drama
Earlier than the plaque lastly made its strategy to the Capitol, most Democrats who spoke on the matter have been of the thoughts that Republican leaders have been strategically delaying its show as a lot as potential. Oddly sufficient, Johnson tried to refute these claims by shifting the blame onto the plaque’s precise design.
Again in Could 2025, Home Minority Chief Hakeem Jeffries stated in a information convention that the rationale for the delay was that Republicans, “directed by their puppet grasp Donald Trump, have been instructed, ‘Attempt to erase January 6 as if it has by no means occurred.’” However in an interview with PBS on January 6, a spokesperson for Johnson stated that the plaque couldn’t go up “due to logistics,” claiming that that they had not discovered a strategy to match the three,000 officers’ names onto the plaque.
Presumably, Johnson’s group was referring to the unique language of the March 2022 regulation, which said that the Architect of the Capitol’s plaque wanted to record the names of “the entire officers of america Capitol Police, the Metropolitan Police Division of the District of Columbia, and different Federal, State, and native regulation enforcement companies and protecting entities who responded to the violence that occurred at america Capitol.” This constraint, they appeared to argue, made the challenge “not implementable.”
“Honor is a social—that’s, public—recognition”
However Johnson’s hesitance to approve the plaque’s set up was in the end overridden in early January, when Senators Jeff Merkley and Thom Tillis helmed a resolution ordering the plaque’s show, which was handed unanimously within the Senate.
When the plaque lastly did make it to the partitions of the Capitol, the Architects of the Capitol addressed Johnson’s design considerations with a easy repair: a tiny QR code, set in its personal body subsequent to the plaque, that hyperlinks to a listing of the entire officers current on January 6. In keeping with a report from The Washington Put up, that record goes on for 45 pages.
[Photo: Getty Images]
The plaque itself is a reasonably small bronze rectangle that features a picture of the Capitol constructing with the phrase, “On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary people who bravely protected and defended this image of democracy on January 6, 2021. Their heroism won’t ever be forgotten.” Beneath it’s a record of the regulation enforcement departments who lent their assist through the assault.
For the 2 officers who sued the Architects of the Capitol, this end result is just too little, too late. “This can be a tremendous stopgap, nonetheless they don’t seem to be but inside full compliance of the regulation and the burden of a judicial ruling would assist safe the memorial towards future tampering,” Hodges wrote on Twitter. “Our lawsuit persists.”
On March 10, Hodges and Dunn filed a motion asking a decide to permit their lawsuit to proceed. The doc argues that the plaque, which was hung inside a pair of Capitol doorways, ought to’ve been affixed to the outside of the constructing per the unique regulation, and that its present location retains it out of the general public eye.
“Honor is a social—that’s, public—recognition,” the submitting reads. “Hidden from all guests, the present location is not any totally different than the basement the plaque was stored in for years.”
