Senate Republicans and House Democrats have been furiously drafting their own versions of police reform bills. On that, they seem to be united. But in a classic case of Washington dysfunction, the partisan divide is barring reasonable compromise from consideration.
Both bills overlap on substantive reforms — new training requirements for police, increased accountability, limiting chokeholds — but leaders from one party seem wholly unwilling to consider anything from the other. At this rate, election-year politics will keep the country from seeing the changes it needs now.
Republicans argue the Democrats’ proposal is too overreaching and too reliant on government action. Democrats respond that the Republican bill is too narrow.
The Democrats want to “federalize all of these issues,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, by way of “typical Democratic overreach to try to control everything in Washington.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi withheld little in her rebuttal: “For the leader of the Senate to say, ‘It’s going nowhere, we don’t want any of that,’ is really disgraceful — and really ignores the concerns of the American people. I feel very, very disappointed by the dangerous statement made by the Republican leader of the Senate.”
The White House doesn’t seem to be mending the divide, either. Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said earlier this week that including qualified immunity is “a nonstarter” — a legal doctrine that is central to the George Floyd case and prominent in the Democrats’ bill. Further, President Donald Trump’s Tuesday afternoon announcement of his police reform executive order turned into an opportunity to take jabs at the Obama administration and, specifically, his opponent this November.
Despite Washington’s squabbles, the situation on the ground isn’t going away. The killing of Rayshard Brooks at the hands of an Atlanta police officer, who on Wednesday was charged with murder, only fan the flames of unrest, and the need for police reform seems more pressing than ever.
During this week 162 years ago, Abraham Lincoln delivered his timeless “House Divided” speech. At the time of the address, America was splintering over the issue of slavery and the South’s hints at secession. Lincoln — then an up-and-coming Illinois politician en route to a failed campaign for a U.S. Senate seat — was far from a household name.
The speech was radical and too strong for some, including Lincoln’s law partner, William H. Herndon, who viewed Lincoln as “morally courageous but politically incorrect.” Lincoln appeased his questioning companion by saying this: “The proposition is indisputably true ... and I will deliver it as written. I want to use some universally known figure, expressed in simple language as universally known, that it may strike home to the minds of men in order to rouse them to the peril of the times.”
At a crucial moment in our nation’s fight for racial equity, its leaders should reflect on Lincoln’s message. The Senate majority’s partisan jabs at the House — and vice versa — are largely political hyperbole. The two proposed bills seem to be of the same hue. Talk to each other and get to work.