Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) did something beautiful on the House floor this week. He pulled up a video compilation of top Democrats — Ilhan Omar, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and a whole parade of their colleagues — enthusiastically calling to defund the police. Then he hit play and let the whole chamber watch.
Mercy! The looks on their faces were worth the price of C-SPAN alone.
The video opened with a simple message on screen: “Democrats now say they don’t support defunding the police… But here’s the truth.” What followed was clip after clip of the Democrats’ greatest hits from their summer of love in 2020.
There was Ilhan Omar demanding that Minneapolis “dismantle” its police department entirely. Not reform it. Not reimagine it. Dismantle it. Like it was a faulty IKEA bookshelf she couldn’t figure out how to assemble in the first place.
Then came Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Ayanna Presley — the whole Squad lineup — each one tripping over herself to say “yes, I support the defund movement” louder than the last. AOC jumped in to explain that defunding the police “looks like a suburb.” Whatever the hell that means.
Even Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi got their cameos, nodding along about “reallocating resources.” That’s Washington-speak for “defund the police, but we’re too smart to say it out loud.” Spoiler: they weren’t too smart. They said it out loud. Biggs had the receipts.
And Eric Swalwell? The guy who was sleeping with a Chinese spy and somehow still has a security clearance? He had the audacity to accuse Republicans of wanting to defund police. Biggs calmly pulled up the tape and let Swalwell’s own party bury him. Swalwell sat there looking like a guy who just realized his zipper’s been down during an entire press conference.
Adam Schiff, America’s favorite fiction writer, spent four years telling us that Donald Trump was a Russian agent based on “evidence” he had personally seen. (He hadn’t.) Schiff got censured by the House in 2023 for lying to the American people, and somehow California rewarded him with a Senate seat anyway. That’s California for you — a state so broken it can’t keep water in its fire hydrants but it can definitely elect a proven liar to the Senate.
Here’s what makes Biggs’s video so devastating. It’s not just that these Democrats said what they said. It’s that they said it right before violent crime exploded across every major American city. Murders in 2020 and 2021 surged by the largest percentage since the FBI started keeping records. Carjackings skyrocketed. Smash-and-grab robberies became a spectator sport. Entire neighborhoods turned into war zones.
And every single one of these Democrats pretended they never said any of it.
Omar went from “dismantle the police” to “I never said defund.” Swalwell accused the other side of his own party’s position. Schiff pivoted to lecturing everyone about “democracy” as if he hadn’t spent half a decade manufacturing fake scandals.
The beauty of what Biggs did is that video doesn’t lie. You can memory-hole a tweet. You can scrub a press release. You can send your communications team out to “clarify” what you “actually meant.” But when there’s a video of you standing at a podium saying “yes, I support the defund movement” with a big grin on your face, there’s no amount of spin that saves you.
## Where This Is Going
Here’s the thing nobody on the Democrat side wants to talk about. This video isn’t just embarrassing — it’s a campaign weapon that will be playing on loop from now until November.
There are currently 18 House Democrats sitting in districts that Trump won or came within 5 points of winning. Every single one of them has to answer for the defund movement, whether they personally supported it or not. Their party leadership championed it. Their Squad members screamed for it. Their presidential nominee nodded along with it.
The last time Democrats got caught this badly on a policing issue was 1988, when Michael Dukakis fumbled the death penalty question in his debate with George H.W. Bush. That one moment cost him the election. This isn’t one moment — it’s a hundred moments, all on tape, all searchable, all ready to drop into a campaign ad.
And the second-order effect is even worse for them. Every time a Democrat tries to talk tough on crime now — and they will, because the polling tells them they have to — some kid with a laptop is going to splice their “tough on crime” soundbite right next to their “defund the police” soundbite. The contrast ads write themselves.
Mark my words: at least five of those 18 vulnerable Democrats are going to lose their seats specifically because they can’t outrun the defund tape. Biggs didn’t just embarrass them on the House floor. He handed every Republican challenger in America a gift-wrapped attack ad.
The Democrats can hide their heads in shame all they want. The video is already out there. And unlike their promises to “fund the police,” this one isn’t going away.