Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Friday slammed Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as a “total hypocrite” for preventing a vote on a Republican police reform bill.
Schumer (D-NY) led Democrats on Wednesday to block the bill responding to the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police. Schumer said it didn’t go far enough and House Democrats passed a broader bill on Thursday.
McConnell alleged in a Fox News Radio interview that Schumer had an eye on the election and tried to “airbrush” bill author Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) out of the debate. Scott is one of three black senators, the other two being Democrats.
“It was an inconvenient truth for Chuck Schumer that Tim Scott was the author of the bill,” McConnell (R-Ky.) said. “And so he tried to just sort of airbrush him out of it. He referred to it several times as the McConnell bill. It was the Scott bill that they refused to allow to come up — someone experienced exactly the kind of police selective enforcement that we all witnessed in the most severe form with the murder of George Floyd.”
Democrats blocked the Republican bill to “portray us as insensitive,” McConnell said.
“[Schumer] is not interested in making a law, he’s interested in making a point. He’s trying to queue this up for the fall election in order to portray us as uninterested in responding to the legitimate concerns the American people have in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor,” McConnell said. “They didn’t want an outcome, they want an issue, and they want to portray us as insensitive and not responsive to the whole effort of police reform.”
Schumer said in a statement responding to McConnell that, “The Republican policing reform bill failed because it wasn’t a serious enough effort at reform. The legislation itself was so threadbare, so weak, and so narrow it could hardly be considered a constructive starting point. That’s why more than 138 civil rights organizations — who want nothing more than to see progress on these issues — strongly urged Senators to oppose the Republican bill.”
Democratic Sens. Doug Jones of Alabama and Joe Manchin of West Virginia and independent Sen. Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with Democrats, voted to allow debate on the Republican bill. But the effort came four votes short of 60 senators needed to proceed.
On Thursday, three House Republicans — Reps. Fred Upton of Michigan, Will Hurd of Texas and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania — voted for the Democratic package.
Republican lawmakers and White House officials say the less-drastic GOP proposal contains widely supported reforms, and that the Democratic proposal overreaches and has no chance at becoming law.
The Democratic bill would restrict chokeholds and ban federal agents from conducting no-knock drug raids. It would curtail transfers of military equipment to police, create an officer misconduct registry, end qualified immunity from lawsuits and lower the threshold to federally prosecute officers if they show “reckless disregard” for someone’s life.
The Senate Republican bill would incentivize departments to restrict chokeholds, purchase and use body-worn cameras and keep information on use-of-force incidents and no-knock raids. It would make lynching a federal crime, create a commission to study conditions of black men and boys and fund black police officer recruitment.