Special: Police Reform Negotiations Hit Roadblock

Yamiche Alcindor (00:01):
Welcome to the Washington Week Extra I'm Yamiche Alcindor. George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer 494 days ago. His death set off protests around the country and across the world. Crowds demanded that police be held more accountable for violence, especially against black people and people of color. Last week though, months of negotiations came to an end as a bipartisan group of lawmakers in Congress failed to reach an agreement on police reform. Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina explained why he believes the GOP couldn't make a deal with Democrats.

Tim Scott (00:38):
We said simply this, I am not going to participate in reducing funding for the police after we saw major city after major city defund the police

Yamiche Alcindor (00:48):
Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, pushed back on that characterization.

Cory Booker (00:53):
This is a bill that would have had millions of dollars for police departments.

Speaker 4 (00:58):
Less, fewer dollars though?

Cory Booker (00:59):
Millions of dollars more.

Speaker 4 (01:01):
Additional.

Cory Booker (01:02):
Additional dollars because we want to help officers with mental health issues. We want to collect more data so we should give more resources.

Yamiche Alcindor (01:11):
Joining us tonight, Garrett Haake, senior Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC who joined us from Capitol hill, if we can find him, I guess. And, joining me in the studio, Laura Barron-Lopez, a White House correspondent for Politico and Carl Hulse, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times. Carl, I'm going to start with you. How did this happen? How did it happen that police reform after all of the different protests, that it just went nowhere in Congress and what happened with the political environment here?

Carl Hulse (01:39):
It was a brief, brief moment that this was possible, and that moment passed without an agreement and I've always been skeptical that this was what's going to happen mainly because of the politics of it. Republicans are seeing tough on crime, again, as a winning issue for them. They think it helped them in 2020, the defund the police, that they were able to use that against candidates and they think it's going to help them again. The Virginia governor's race, you're seeing a big ad, the race that's going on here right now, about the Democrat and what he is thinking about for the police. Mitch McConnell was very, very reluctant to do this. He was reluctant to do criminal justice reform. He was finally forced into it, but I think that this was just too much of a political winner for them that they see, and Senator Scott's rationale for ending this is just not really holding up at all and I think that that demonstrates that there was political resistance.

Yamiche Alcindor (02:46):
And Laura, jump in here. Talk a bit about President Biden. He made this promise where I'm going to try to get policing reform done. What's that mean now?

Laura Barrón-López (02:55):
Well, just to piggyback off of something that Carl was saying is that McConnell from the beginning has also said that he wants to stop as much of Biden's agenda as he possibly can, so give him as few wins as possible. So police reform, there weren't 10 Republicans for that, even though Scott was negotiating on it. And so, that's the problem that Biden has is that if there aren't 10 Republicans for so many of his agenda items, then the only option is potentially to change the Senate rules, which we know the president doesn't want to do, at least not right now.

Laura Barrón-López (03:27):
Biden did throughout the entire campaign police reform, like voting rights, like immigration reform, it was one of the biggest things that he and Democrats were promising after the mass protests that we saw across the country in response to George Floyd's murder. This is something that Democrats really grappled with and talked a lot about during the primary, during their Democratic primary, and Biden really said he wanted to act on it.

Laura Barrón-López (03:53):
He also though, wanted to be sure, and from the beginning he he's had organizers and Black Lives Matter organizers at the negotiating table. He's also though had police unions there and he's always wanted to have them there. His plan during the campaign, the proposal that he issued, was actually one that would put more money towards the community policing programs. So, from the beginning, to the dismay of some progressive Democrats, he has always wanted to put more money towards policing.

Carl Hulse (04:24):
And, he wanted to change his image on this a little bit too because of the crime bill in the 90s and that he wanted to show, "Well, I want to maybe offset some of the effects of it." But, this was a classic play by the Republicans in some way, and you see it on gun control too. It's when the incidents happen, there's a big public uproar, let's negotiate. We're going to talk about things. Let's see if we can find some common ground, but as the temperature dies down a little bit, they don't reach an agreement, but I think that Republicans at the end of the day had no interest in this.

Yamiche Alcindor (05:03):
Garrett, I hear you're back. Thank you for joining us now. I was thinking, maybe he's going to go get a scoop for us. He's going to come back and tell us something that we don't know, but talk about police reform, how it all ended up stalled, and was Tim Scott really the only Republican that wanted to negotiate on this? Is there other levers that either the president or congressional leaders can pull to try to get policing reform done?

Garrett Haake (05:26):
I think Carl had an exactly right, that they missed the moment here. Essentially, there was a very narrow window after the killing of George Floyd and after the sentencing of Derek Chauvin when the whole country was focused on this issue, and so too were members of Congress. Those negotiations with Tim Scott I think really did start out in earnest, but he was always the key player here because there aren't other Republicans with anywhere close to the same level of interest even in this issue as Tim Scott had. And, I said at the time on MSNBC and continue to believe it now, Democrats might've been wise to take whatever they could get Tim Scott to sign off on at the time because he is widely respected in the Republican conference, and if they could have gotten a buy-in from him even on a much smaller package of reforms, they would have had something to show for this.

Garrett Haake (06:14):
But, Democratic activists wanted a big kind of sweeping overhaul and that wasn't in the offing, and as more time went on the desire among Republicans to touch an issue that they think they've got Joe Biden over a barrel on just went down and went down and went down. I don't think there's a path for federal legislation on police reform at this point. Like so many other issues, this is just going to run into the buzzsaw of the filibuster rules. Democrats have made pretty clear they don't have the votes to change that. For the activists out there, I think seeing change at the local and state level is far more fruitful than at a federal level right now. This issue is just pretty well in stuck.

Yamiche Alcindor (06:57):
Laura, what Garrett is talking about is this idea that the filibuster again is shutting down a big agenda item for President Biden, but I also want to think about the fact that so many people, including African-Americans, who were killed at disproportionate rates by the police, they were looking at Congress and saying, "If there's a big bill in Congress, then maybe in my local community there will also be change here." You were in Georgia talking to voters. You also, of course, talked to voters across the country. What are you hearing from people about what they wanted to see and what it means to black people and people of color that this isn't happening?

Laura Barrón-López (07:31):
It is devastating for so many people of color that it isn't happening. I was just in Georgia and I was talking to Democratic base voters there, so black and brown voters, and one issue that they brought up a lot was the fact that the voting rights reauthorization hasn't been passed because of the fact that Georgia is feeling that very acutely given the changes, the election law changes, that were made there to restrict access to the ballot. They also brought up police reform and the fact that that hasn't passed. They also brought up, which seems to have permeated beyond DC, the issue of Haitian deportations at the border, and that that was something that was really striking to them when they saw it because they saw themselves in that situation, and so they were upset about that.

Laura Barrón-López (08:16):
They were disappointed with Biden and Democrats on this front, but when I asked a number of voters that I spoke to, I said, "Who do you think the responsibility lies with specifically on voting rights and on police reform, or who do you blame for this not getting done?" And they said both, not just Democrats, but Republicans because they understand that there are these slim majorities in Congress, and they understand that Republicans are blocking these big bills from passing.

Yamiche Alcindor (08:44):
And Garrett, the GOP often talks about itself as the law and order party. I wonder when you look ahead, what's next for this conversation on policing, even if as you say policing reform might not be able to pass in Congress?

Garrett Haake (08:59):
It's really tough to say. Look, there's structural issues here in the way that our government is formed that make it always easier to do nothing or to block something than it is to try to do a reform on basically any level. And, I think that's part of the challenge here. Republicans talk about increasing funding to police. You sort of see things like the kind of throwbacks from the mid-2000s, whether it's military surplus equipment or more money to fight crime, that kind of thing, but the two parties fundamentally don't see eye to eye here on those issues. Although public safety, as a broader issue, could be the kind of thing that rears its head in 2022. Linking back to our earlier conversation, those kind of domestic, kitchen table issues are far more resident term voters than are things like, how do we feel about Afghanistan however long after the Afghanistan war is over? So, you could see political pressure to do something come up, but I can't see around the corner to tell you what it is right now.

Yamiche Alcindor (09:58):
And Carl, last question to you, you're sort of the Dean of Capitol hill. So, I wonder just for you, when you think about policing and just the rhetoric of it, where does it land and where does this next chapter go even if Democrats just talk about it?

Carl Hulse (10:12):
I think it's up to the Department of Justice. I think that the president is going to have to use the Department of Justice, Merrick Garland, the attorney general is very well-versed in this area and I think if you're going to see anything happen in this area, it's probably going to have to come from there. No appetite, well there's appetite among Democrats, but the Republicans are not going to move on this.

Yamiche Alcindor (10:37):
Well, we'll have to leave it there tonight. Thank you so much to Garrett, Laura, and Carl for joining us and sharing your reporting. Make sure also to sign up for the Washington Week newsletter on our website. We will give you a look at all things Washington. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Yamiche Alcindor, goodnight from Washington.