WASHINGTON (CN) — Weighing a law that would alter police conduct and accountability to the public they are sworn to protect — in particular African Americans disproportionately impacted by police brutality — House lawmakers found themselves sharply at odds Wednesday over how to solve a long-running crisis of civil and human rights.
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was debated over a charged and lengthy session Wednesday with Democrats and Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee in disagreement over several provisions in the law introduced after the May 25 death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck, sparked national outcry.
The bill is an amalgam of police-reform legislation that has languished in Congress, featuring a federal ban on the use of chokeholds as well as no-knock warrants in drug cases, while also modifying qualified immunity, a doctrine stating that government officials, or in this case, law enforcement, cannot be sued for violating a person’s constitutional rights lest those actions violate “clearly established” law.
It calls too for an end to racial profiling and the creation of a national database where misconduct can be tracked and shared between jurisdictions, plus mandatory racial-bias training on the federal level, and the codification of lynching as a federal hate crime. Limits for the transfer of drones and other military-level weapons to police departments and an increase of dashboard and body cameras are included as well.
The law goes significantly further than the Senate package unveiled Wednesday and, despite widespread criticism hurled at the Floyd Act by Republicans, the bill does not call for defunding of police, a platform Black Lives Matter activists and protesters nationwide have made the centerpiece of their demands as lawmakers on the state, local and national level have rushed to mobilize a response.
With 225 co-sponsors in the House, Floyd’s law is virtually guaranteed to pass in that body, but it will almost certainly fail to vault through the Senate where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said it has no chance of passage.
Democrats like California Representative Karen Bass, who also chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, and Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee delivered emphatic entreaties nonetheless, as the merits of the law were debated and a litany of amendments were considered.
“What is the value of black lives? Are black lives valued? Is a black life valued? Are all black lives valued? Living in the skin that I live in obviously for all of my life … I realized that question was never answered by this nation,” said Jackson Lee, who is black, before expressing her pain hearing fellow legislators reject the concept that “systemic racism has plagued every aspect of our society.”
This pain was wrestled with over several tense moments Wednesday including one ignited by Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who quickly issued the qualifier of “all lives matter” when California Representative Eric Swalwell asked Republicans, as he took the dais, if they could “unequivocally” state that black lives matter.
“I think it’s clear my colleagues would like to put up a straw man about the uncomfortable conversation we need to have about race. In police shootings, we talk about the act, but we don’t get to the harder part,” Swalwell said. “Nobody is disputing what the officer did here with Mr. Floyd should be defended. … Until you are willing to get rid of the straw man, the confusion, all of the different tactics you’re using to avoid the hard conversation about race in America, we’re not going to get where we need to be and not just in policing.”
