On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that Senate Democrats will block the Republican bill to address police brutality, which he previously called “deeply, fundamentally, and irrevocably flawed.” Republicans currently fall short of the 60 votes needed to open debate on their legislation.
Speaking on Boston Public Radio Tuesday, CNN Chief National Correspondent John King said the decision was “a risk, in my view, on the Democrat’s part.”
“By shutting down the debate — that’s the old school establishment, the NAACP legal defense fund [saying] ‘this is not good enough.’ And so there’s a major African American organization that the Democrats are citing, saying ‘we’re not going to let this debate go forward.’
"I get it. That’s the way Washington worked before all this,” he said, in reference to the current national reckoning around racism and policy brutality. "Is it the way Washington should work in the middle of all this?"
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Disagreements between the two parties stem from questions like whether chokeholds ought to be banned outright, or if Congress should merely incentivize police stations to do so. The issue of qualified immunity, which currently shields police officers from lawsuits, is also not addressed in the Senate's bill.
"The Democrats could vote to start debate and then give a whole lot of speeches saying ‘however, we’re only agreeing to start the debate. If the final product is lousy, we will filibuster it at the end,’” King said. "But this is the decision that they have made as of now.”
