House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is making it clear that she is “very disappointed” in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for some recent comments he made regarding the House’s police reform legislation.
McConnell told reporters on Tuesday afternoon, “The House version is going nowhere in the Senate.”
Pelosi expressed concern with McConnell’s statement regarding the House’s George P. Floyd Justice in Policing Act as she told MSNBC during an interview Tuesday, “That is serious.”
“How many more hundreds of thousands of people have to demonstrate in the streets, protest peacefully for justice in policing? How many more people have to die from police brutality?”
“For the leader of the Senate to say, ‘It’s going nowhere, we won’t even — we don’t want any of that,’ is really disgraceful, and really ignores the concerns of the American people,” she added.
“We all know that we need to have guidelines. We need to have training. We need to have a database. We need all of those things, but we also need to have some serious legislation to make sure it happens nationally, nationally. I feel very, very disappointed by the dangerous statement made by the Republican Leader of the Senate.”
Watch Pelosi’s interview below:
She later added:
“This isn’t about drawing red lines in the sand. It’s about making a big difference, taking a giant step forward and saying to the leader in the Senate, you call yourself the ‘Grim Reaper.’ How aptly named you are when you see how many people have died, how many people have died, how much lack of confidence there is and whether there is racial – systemic racism in our country. And clearly, there is.
“This is a time of reckoning to say we’re going to make a change that is real, not cosmetic, not perfunctory, not a photo op, but legislation that is real,” Pelosi said.
McConnell, along with Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), is expected to hold a news conference on Wednesday to announce they will be unveiling their own police reform legislation by next week.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on police reform Tuesday, which bans chokeholds, improves information sharing on police officers, among other aspects, as IJR reported. However, it did not garner the approval of Pelosi, as she called the executive order “weak.”
The Senate Republican’s draft measure of the police reform bill includes bans on chokeholds, while the House Democrats’ bill bans chokeholds and requires an independent investigation into no-knock warrants, among other aspects to both bills, according to the Washington Examiner. A reported difference between the two bills is that the House Democrats’ legislation would change qualified immunity for police.