Congressional roll call

Voterama in Congress

Here’s how area members of Congress voted during the legislative week ending June 26.

House

RULES FOR POLICE: The House voted 236-181 on June 25 for a Democraticsponsored bill (HR 7120) that would set federal rules and guidelines for lawenforcement practices at all levels of government. In addition to imposing rules for the tens of thousands of federal police officers, the bill includes requirements for state and local law enforcement and uses the disbursement or threatened withholding of federal funds to encourage compliance. Congress typically delivers hundreds of millions of dollars annually to state and local law enforcement. Among its wide-ranging provisions, the bill would:

• Prohibit federal law enforcement from using chokeholds or other applications of pressure on the carotid arteries, throats or windpipes of persons being restrained.

• Eliminate the “qualified immunity” defense from civil federal and nonfederal litigation in which a police officer is being sued for damages based on misconduct including excessive use of force.

• Prohibit the use of noknock warrants in federal drug cases, and use federal funding as leverage to persuade states and localities to bar the use of such warrants in nonfederal drug enforcement.

• Establish a National Police Misconduct Registry for data on officers fired by local police departments for reasons including excessive use of force.

• Prohibit racial, religious and discriminatory profiling by federal and nonfederal law enforcement.

• Amend federal law to justify “use of force” on grounds it was “necessary” rather than merely “reasonable,” and use financial incentives to encourage state and local law enforcement to adopt the same standard. • Require state and local police to report use-of-force data to a new Justice Department database, breaking down the information by race, sex, disability, religion and age.

• Limit the transfer of military equipment from the Department of Defense to state and local police agencies.

• Require uniformed federal police to wear body cameras and marked federal police cars to mount dashboard cameras, and give local departments financial incentives to equip officers with body cameras.

• Lower the criminal-intent standard of evidence in police misconduct prosecutions under federal law from “willfulness” to “recklessness.”

• Fund local commissions and task forces for developing practices based mainly on community policing rather than the use of force. • Give the Department of Justice subpoena power for investigating discriminatory and brutal “patterns and practices” by local departments, and fund efforts by state attorneys general to investigate troubled municipal departments.

• Require all 18,000 local police departments in the United States to adopt of law-enforcement accreditation

standards.

• Make it a crime for a federal police officer to engage in sex, even if it is consensual, with an individual under arrest or in custody, and use financial incentives to encourage states to enact the same prohibition.

A yes vote was to send the bill to the Senate.

Antonio Delgado, DRhinebeck: Yes

Sean Maloney, D-Cold Spring: Yes

REJECTING SENATE

POLICE BILL: Voting 180 in favor and 236 opposed, the House on June 25 defeated a bid to replace a Democratic-sponsored police bill (HR 7120, above) with a less-extensive proposal by Senate Republicans (below). House Republicans said the Senate bill includes farreaching reforms and could reach President Trump’s desk this year, while Democrats called it unworthy of the Black Lives Matter movement because it lacks enforcement, omits certain reforms and favors study over action.

A yes vote was to embrace the Senate GOP police bill. Delgado: No

Maloney: No STUDENT LOANS: Voting 238-173, the House on June 26 failed to reach a twothirds majority needed to override President Trump’s veto of a measure (HJ Res 76) concerning an administration rule on student loan forgiveness.

The effect of the vote was to affirm a rule that critics said would provide forgiveness to only 3 percent of some 200,000 claimants who allege their school fraudulently misrepresented the quality of education they would receive. Education Secretary Betsy

DeVos testified the rule would correct the “blanket forgiveness” of an Obama administration so-called “borrower defense” rule it replaced.

The Trump rule bars classaction lawsuits against schools and requires claims to be adjudicated one-by-one by mandatory arbitration rather than in open court, with borrowers prohibited from appealing the decision. The rule also sets a standard of evidence requiring borrowers to prove the fraud was intentional. A yes vote was to override the presidential veto.

Delgado: Yes Maloney: Yes

D.C. STATEHOOD: Voting 232-180, the House on June 26 passed a bill (HR 51) that would make the District of Columbia the 51st state, renamed as Washington, Douglass Commonwealth. As a state, the new Washington, D.C., would acquire voting rights in Congress, with one representative and two senators, and would have control over property within its present boundaries, with exceptions including the Capitol complex, national monuments, the Supreme Court, the National Mall and nearby federal buildings, the White House complex and assorted other lots and edifices.

Created by the Constitution as the seat of government not within any state, and established initially on land carved out of Maryland and Virginia in 1790, the 68-square-mile District of Columbia, with about 700,000 residents, has limited self-government but is ultimately ruled by Congress, where it has no voting representation.

A yes vote was to send the bill to the Senate. Delgado: Yes

Maloney: Yes

Senate

POLICE BILL: Voting 5545, the Senate on June 24 failed to reach the 60 votes needed to advance a Republican-drafted bill aimed at improving federal, state and local policing. Democrats called the measure much weaker than their party’s proposals in the Senate and House (above). The Republican bill would prohibit chokeholds as narrowly defined, in contrast to broader Democratic language in both chambers that would outlaw the use of a range of restraints on blood flow and breathing. The GOP bill would establish one federal commission to study policing issues especially affecting black males, and another to recommend criminal justice reforms.

The bill also sought to make lynching a federal crime; require police officers to wear a body camera; establish a federal database of officers fired for misconduct in order to make it difficult for them to get rehired elsewhere; require local departments to submit details on their use of force causing death or serious injury to a federal database; and fund diversity hiring and de-escalation training.

The Republican bill omits Democratic provisions to bar or scale back the “qualified immunity” defense in civil lawsuits against police officers, and to give the Department of Justice and state attorneys general more power to investigate local police departments for “pattern and practices” abuses. The Republican bill also does not include a proposed ban on racial profiling

that Democrats put in their bill, nor would it scale back the militarization of local police departments. In another difference, Republicans would require most information in a newly established FBI database on police misconduct to be shielded from public view, while both Democratic measures would open the database to the public.

A yes vote was to advance the GOP bill to debate and votes on amendments.

Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.:

No

Charles Schumer,D-N.Y.:

No

JUDGE CORY WILSON:

Voting 52-48, the Senate on June 24 confirmed Cory T. Wilson, a state judge in Mississippi, for a seat on the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over federal trial courts in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

President Trump has now appointed 53 federal appeals judges, about onefourth of the circuit-court total.

While Republicans praised Wilson’s conservative views, Democrats criticized him over his opposition to LGBTQ rights and the Affordable Care Act and support of Mississippi’s voter ID law and the carrying of concealed, loaded guns on public property, including college campuses.

A yes vote was to confirm the nominee.

Gillibrand: No

Schumer: No

Coming up

The Senate this week will debate the fiscal 2021 military. The House schedule was to be announced.