President Joe Biden is planning to use unilateral executive action to address police reform after Democrats “stood with Jefferson Davis” and used the “Jim Crow filibuster” in 2020 to kill the police reform bill proposed by South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim Scott.
According to “three people familiar with” Biden’s plan, “the executive actions on policing are still being finalized.” These sources told NBC News that they don’t know how the actions would be different from the Justice Department’s new restrictions on chokeholds and “no-knock” warrants from last year and that Biden is going to roll them out at the start of February (Black History Month) while criticizing former President Donald Trump.
For comedic effect, this couldn’t have come at a better time. Biden just recently declared that he wanted to abolish the Senate filibuster, which some congressional Democrats have taken to calling the “Jim Crow filibuster.” But Democrats just used the filibuster 327 times in 2020 when the GOP controlled the Senate and Trump was in the White House.
Even better, one of the Democrats’ filibusters was staged to block Scott’s police reform bill.
Police reform was an urgent issue in 2020, according to Democrats. But when Scott, a conservative black senator from South Carolina, brought forward a bill to address it, Democrats decided they would rather have nothing than let him take credit. They did their best to confuse the issue at the time, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi declaring that Republicans were “trying to get away with murder, actually — the murder of George Floyd.”
So, instead of a police reform bill passing with bipartisan support, Democrats chose to get nothing. They were playing a political game, of course, with black lives. They figured that by preventing reforms that had bipartisan consensus, they could instead keep people scared and use fear to turn out their votes in 2020. When Democrats failed to win bigger majorities in Congress, their police reforms fell flat.
Now Biden wants to bypass Congress entirely to do illegally what Democrats prevented from happening legally in 2020.
In short, Democrats cynically use police reform, like most issues, as an election issue rather than a problem that needs to be solved. Democrats didn’t want to help Trump and Republicans pass police reform in an election year (Trump had already signed criminal justice reform legislation), so they tanked the best shot at congressional police reform. They haven’t come up with anything that can pass in the two years since.
Also, here’s a reminder that Democrats will stop talking about abolishing the filibuster the moment they lose control of the House, Senate, or White House. They are brazen, shameless hypocrites about this, even using it now, to help Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Biden and other Democrats will go from calling it the “Jim Crow filibuster” now to defending it later as an essential part of democracy when they find their cynicism has lost them Congress and the presidency by 2024.
