In theory, there are still roughly seven months remaining in the current Congress, giving lawmakers plenty of time to tackle key national priorities and rack up some accomplishments they can take to the electorate. In practice, most observers tend to believe that there will be little, if any, meaningful work in the coming months.
That, in turn, will leave ample time for messaging votes in the House, crafted by Republican leaders to score some partisan points, without regard for whether the measures will even be considered in the Democratic-led Senate.
Take this week, for example.
GOP leaders in the lower chamber decided to leverage National Police Week to emphasize the party’s ostensible support for law enforcement, and to that end, House Republicans passed a handful of bills yesterday. But as HuffPost noted, there was a nagging detail the party preferred to ignore.
House Republicans are using National Police Week to bash Democrats for allegedly pushing to “defund the police,” but Republicans themselves have repeatedly proposed funding cuts for police. The Republican Study Committee, a policy group counting most House Republicans as members, puts out an annual budget proposal that calls for cutting the federal government’s main grant program for local police departments.
Quite right. As we discussed in March, the Republican Study Committee — representing more than three-quarters of the House Republican Conference, including the entirety of the GOP leadership team — released a plan calling for Congress to cut funding for Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), a federal program created to help fund state and local law enforcement agencies.
With this in mind, HuffPost’s Arthur Delaney asked House Speaker Mike Johnson at a Capitol Hill press conference, “We’ve heard a lot this week about Democrats supporting ‘defund the police.’ The Republican Study Committee budget cuts the main federal grant program that local departments use to hire officers. How is that not proposing to defund the police?”
The Louisiana Republican — who used to chair the Republican Study Committee and who co-authored a similar effort — responded, “I haven’t looked into the details of the RSC budget,” adding, “There’s lots of nuances.”
In this case, however, there are far fewer “nuances” than the House speaker would like to believe — because the Republican Study Committee’s plan really does call for reduced federal support to law enforcement. What’s more, as The New Republic noted, there are plenty of related data points.
It’s not the first time that the GOP has proposed cutting federal spending on law enforcement; it did the same thing in its debt limit budget bill last year. And ever since the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol seeking to overturn the 2020 election results, Republicans have attacked Capitol police as well as federal law enforcement for prosecuting those responsible for the riots that day. Republicans have even missed a deadline to install a plaque in Congress honoring those who defended the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 riots, which was supposed to be installed by March 2023.
And did I mention that the party celebrating “Police Week” has rallied behind a suspected felon as its presidential nominee? Who has his own troubled relationship with law enforcement? Because that’s true, too.
Republicans believe they have a political advantage when it comes to law enforcement, but the closer one looks, the more difficult it becomes to take the GOP line seriously.
Steve Benen
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics.”
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