POLICE REFORM FALLS SHORT IN U.S. CONGRESS

When anyone wants to argue that searching for bipartisanship in Congress is futile, it’s natural to point to the actions of Republican leaders. Senate Minority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, R-KY., in particular is so determined to make Democrats fail, and so willing to do anything to achieve his party’s goals, that with him in charge, placing the onus on Democrats to achieve bipartisanship is preposterous.

But it may be equally instructive to look at the place of the occasional good-faith Republican in this picture. What happens when Democrats find a Republican who seems sincerely inclined to cooperate toward meaningful reform, because it’s the right thing to do?

The case of the attempt at police reform shows what happens: It dies.

The effort to craft a federal response to the ongoing national crisis of police brutality has now been abandoned. It began after the murder of George Floyd brought new attention to the 1,000 Americans killed every year by police, and to American policing’s toxic “warrior” philosophy that sees the local population as an enemy who must be subdued.

There was always going to be a limited amount the federal government could do to change that, since policing policies are made almost entirely at the local level. But the feds do have one lever to press: money. It’s the one Washington

often uses when trying to effect local change. It can offer states and localities funds to do something, or threaten to take away money it’s already giving them.

The billions of dollars the federal government sends to police departments was always going to be the primary enforcement mechanism of any federal legislation on policing. And it ended up being the excuse Republicans used to kill reform.

To be more accurate, we’re talking about one Republican: Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. He was the only Republican willing — at least until now — to work with Democrats to try to come up with legislation.

And he seemed like the Republican who would negotiate in good faith. Though extremely conservative, Scott isn’t a nasty bomb-thrower. The lone Black Republican in the Senate, Scott once gave an eloquent speech describing all the times he has been pulled over, accused of stealing his own car, approached by an officer with a hand on his gun, even stopped by Capitol Police demanding his ID.

Scott was working with Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Rep. Karen Bass, D-los Angeles, for months on a bill. So why did it die? According to Booker and Bass, they kept making concession after concession, such as dropping any changes to qualified immunity, which makes it impossible to sue individual officers for misconduct. But as Bass said in a statement, “every time, more was demanded to the point that there would be no progress made in the bill that we were left discussing.”

And what was Scott’s rationale? That making federal funds contingent on the adoption of policies such as a ban on chokeholds would amount to “defunding the police.”

But if not through federal dollars, how else could the feds encourage local police departments to change? As The Washington Post reported, “Scott did not publicly detail any alternative manner of compelling departments to meet federal standards.”

In other words, Scott made reform impossible, then retreated to a ludicrous talking point meant to produce resentment and fear in the Republican base. Well done, senator.

We’ve seen this before: Momentum for action on a problem emerges, Republicans say they’ll work with Democrats on a solution, Democrats scale their demands further and further back until what’s left is the most modest change imaginable, then in the end Republicans won’t even be willing to go that far. We saw that with legislation to create universal background checks for gun purchases after the Sandy Hook massacre. This is another iteration of the same story.

But in this case, Scott might have been the only Republican in Congress who would have voted for an agreement anyway. The GOP sees no political advantage in police reform; at times they could even be described as pro-brutality, at least when the people being brutalized aren’t White. Donald Trump, who still dominates their party, certainly was.

At this moment, creating White racial resentment is a foundation of the Republican political project. While they campaign against the phantom threat of critical race theory, the most popular figure in conservative media, Tucker Carlson, delivers nightly rants about a conspiracy to “replace” what he calls “legacy Americans” with dark-skinned foreigners, a message about an inch removed from what you’d hear on the average neonazi web radio show.

Scott is no fool; he knows what his party is and where its votes come from. He knows what kind of poison his constituents are imbibing every night on Fox News. He knows his fellow Republicans aren’t interested in bipartisanship on much of anything, but especially not on police reform.

So maybe the next time anyone is tempted to ask why Democrats aren’t doing more to reach across the aisle, we can remember what happens when they do.