U.S. Representative Val Demings

Representative Val Demings (1957- ), police officer and politician. Valdez Venita Butler was born and raised in a poor neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, the daughter of a custodian father and domestic servant mother. She became interested in law enforcement at her racially segregated junior high school, and she earned a degree in criminology from Florida State University in 1979, becoming the first member of her family to finish college. After college she worked as a social worker before joining the police department in Orlando. There she steadily rose up the ranks while also earning a master’s in public administration from Webster University Orlando. In 2007 she was appointed chief of the Orlando Police Department, becoming the first woman to serve in this position. Demings served as chief for four years and was credited with helping to bring the city’s crime rate down. In 2012 she resigned to run for the U.S. House of Representatives, seeking to represent Florida’s 10^th congressional district as a Democrat. This district included the greater Orlando area and since its creation had been represented entirely by white men, all but one of whom were Republicans, even as it became more liberal and ethnically diverse. Although Democratic voters held a slight majority across Florida, after the 2010 census Republicans redrew the congressional districts to help ensure that they would retain power. Voting rights groups sued on the grounds that this violated state law, and in 2014 a judge agreed and ordered that several districts, including the 10^th, be redrawn. Two years later Demings ran the seat again and won with 65% of the vote, becoming the fourth black woman and the eighth African American overall to represent Florida in Congress. She ran unopposed for reelection in 2018, part of an electoral wave that saw the Democrats win control of the House and thus also a majority on all House committees. This included the Homeland Security, Intelligence, and Judiciary committees on which Demings serves. Utilizing her law enforcement background, she quickly became a leading voice for gun control. In 2017 she advocated for the Gun Violence Restraining Order Act, which if passed would have better enabled law enforcement to temporarily confiscate guns from people who had been found to be a risk to themselves or others. She called for the repeal of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which allows civilians to use deadly force when they feel threatened and has led to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and other minority males. After the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in south Florida, which caused more fatalities than any other school shooting in American history, she rejected Republican proposals to arm teachers, saying that this would “[shift] the pain, the hurt, and the guilt to school staff who will find themselves out skilled and outgunned in active shooter situations.” One year later a Saudi national killed three people and injured eight others at a Pensacola naval base, and Demings co-sponsored a bill that would create stronger background checks for foreign nationals, stating “It’s simply common sense that people shouldn’t be able to get a gun anywhere, anytime. Nearly every American agrees with this basic principle, yet the gun lobby has left federal gun laws riddled with loopholes.”

Demings’ seat on the Judiciary Committee, though, has led to her involvement in some of the most consequential events in the history of the United States presidency; specifically, Donald Trump’s alleged interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections. In 2018 Congress heard testimony from Robert Mueller, who had investigated the events of 2016, and Demings asked “Isn’t it fair to say that the president’s written answers were not only inadequate and incomplete, because he didn’t answer many of your questions, but where he did his answers showed that he wasn’t always being truthful?” That investigation ended without clear proof of direct involvement by Trump, but a year later evidence of other possible wrongdoing emerged. Congress had allocated $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, but in 2019 witnesses and documents showed that Trump had refused to send the money or meet with Ukraine’s president unless he looked into discredited allegations of corruption by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden; in other words, that the president had illegally used taxpayers’ dollars as leverage to get foreign help against one of his political rivals. The House began the impeachment process, which as per the Constitution and Congressional policy began with investigations by various House committees, then a vote by the Judiciary Committee on whether or not to write articles of impeachment, then a vote by the entire House on whether or not to impeach, and finally a trial in the Senate with several House members serving as impeachment managers who would present the evidence and make their case. During the Judiciary Committee’s voting deliberations, Demings tweeted that “I am the descendant of slaves, who knew that they would not make it, but dreamed and prayed that one day I would make it. So despite America’s complicated history, my faith is in the Constitution. I’ve enforced the laws, and now I write the laws. Nobody is above the law.”

The committee wrote two articles of impeachment: abuse of power, related to the Ukraine activities; and obstruction of Congress, related to his refusal to cooperate with the investigation. The House then voted to approve both articles, making Trump only the third president in U.S. history to be impeached, following Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Because there were no African Americans in Congress in 1868 and because no black House members voted in favor of impeaching Clinton in 1998, Demings and her black Democratic colleagues were the first African Americans to ever cast a vote to impeach a president. When Senate Majority Leader and Trump ally Mitch McConnell declared that he would work closely with the White House during the trial, Demings demanded that he recuse himself; in her words, “The moment Senator McConnell takes the oath of impartiality required by the Constitution, he will be in violation of that oath. He has effectively promised to let President Trump manage his own impeachment trial. The senator must withdraw.” She was also chosen as one of seven impeachment managers; she is one of three women, one of two African Americans, one of two from a southern state, and the only one who is not an attorney. Because there were no women in Congress in 1868 and because no women were selected as managers in 1998, Demings is also one of the first three women to ever serve in this role. The trial is currently underway. During her presentation of evidence before the Senate, she asserted “As a career law enforcement officer, I have never seen anyone take such extreme steps to hide evidence allegedly proving his innocence. And I do not find that here today. The president is engaged in this cover-up because he is guilty, and he knows it.” Although she was largely unknown outside her district before the investigations began, her experience as a police officer, her tough public image, and Florida’s importance in the Electoral College have led some in the Democratic Party to see her as a potential vice-presidential nominee. She has declined to comment on this speculation, but in a recent speech she said “Only in this nation can a little black girl – from Jacksonville, Florida, the youngest of seven children, grew up in a two-bedroom, wood-frame house, mother cleaned houses for a living and father was a janitor who went to work every day – grow up to be the first woman to serve as chief at the Orlando Police Department and doggone it, be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.