“Let’s give them the five amendments” Senator Scott said, “After I sat down with more senators and they said wait, wait, wait. There’s not just five. There’s 20. I said, how about 20 amendments? And they walked out.”
Photo Credit: Melik Abdul | Justice for All March, 2015 | Washington, D.C.
The verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial over the death of George Floyd had Minneapolis and the nation on edge. But despite the guilty verdict in this single case, the larger matter of police reform remains unfinished business in President Biden's initial legislative push.
The White House is focused on passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, having abandoned the 2020 campaign promise to stand up a police oversight commission. This makes sense. But political posturing by both parties has gotten in the way of passing any meaningful legislation – and Republicans, surprisingly, may be backing the reform plan more likely to become law.
Less than one month after the death of George Floyd in 2020, Senate Republicans introduced the Justice Act. It was a wide-ranging police reform package that mandated new reporting and training requirements, a national database for tracking police misconduct, made federal lynching a crime, and would create a commission to study what systemic issues impact Black men and boys.
Although checking off almost all of the bi-partisan boxes, the bill did not include provisions in the House Democrats' bill that ended qualified immunity for police officers, prohibited the use of chokeholds, and banned no-knock warrants in drug arrests.
To address these concerns, Sen. Scott (R-SC) met with his colleagues across the aisle and offered them the chance to add up to 20 different amendments if only Democrats agreed to move the bill to the floor for debate.
“Let’s give them the five amendments” Scott said, “After I sat down with more senators and they said wait, wait, wait. There’s not just five. There’s 20. I said, how about 20 amendments? And they walked out.”
Photo Credit: Melik Abdul | Justice for All March, 2015 | Washington, D.C.
While the issue of qualified immunity is much thornier because of Supreme Court precedent that grants officers protection from lawsuits even when they break the law; many states have already banned chokeholds and Virginia became the latest to ban no-knock warrants.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s Breonna Taylor Act went even further than what Democrats proposed and not just prohibited no-knock warrants in federal arrests, Paul’s legislation required “the same of any state or local law enforcement agency that receives funds from the Department of Justice.”
You probably missed that.
A Republican Senator from the very state where Breonna Taylor was killed introduced a bill that both banned such warrants at the federal level and effectively tied funding to states that complied. It is the only such legislation with the capacity to substantively change the outcome of the many police-involved deaths that have captured the nation’s attention.
Conversely, there is no prohibition in either the Democratic or Republican proposals that could have prevented the deaths of 20-yr old Daunte Wright, Eric Garner, or even Floyd himself.
Senate Democrats could easily have allowed the 2020 GOP bill to advance by seven of them joining the Republicans' 53-member majority. Instead, they blocked it from even being debated...
The U.S. Constitution places specific restrictions on Congress that prevents it from usurping state’s authority. This is why states, on their own, have continued to enact policies that govern law enforcement personnel and Congress itself has not gone much further than pushing for changes applicable only to federal officers.
However, meaningful national police reform is possible given how much overlap exists between the two competing bills. Politics just has to get out of the way. Senate Democrats could easily have allowed the 2020 GOP bill to advance by seven of them joining the Republicans' 53-member majority. Instead, they chose to block it from even being debated on the floor which killed any chance that a bill would ultimately pass.
As easy as it will be for Republicans to now simply return the favor and play spoiler when the Democrat-led House and Senate proposals inevitably come up for a vote, they should take the high road and instead work with their colleagues on compromise measures that have long had bi-partisan support.
Yes, Democrats and their allies in media will conveniently ignore work the Trump White House, Senator Scott, and Republicans put into passing a comprehensive bill last year.
But such is the politics of police reform in an environment where Republicans have little support.
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