House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) slams Democrats as they release police reform legislation:

“To the police officers across the country who put on the uniform every day and uphold their oath—THANK YOU. Democrats want to defund you, but Republicans will never turn our backs on you.”

Congressional Democrats unveiled sweeping police reform legislation in response to protests after the killing of George Floyd, the Washington Post reports.

“The Justice in Policing Act of 2020 would ban chokeholds, establish a national database to track police misconduct and prohibit certain no-knock warrants, among a range of steps. Democratic leaders of the House and Senate released the legislation that had been drafted by members of the Congressional Black Caucus.”

A powerful photo shows the most senior Democrats in government kneeling in the Capitol, minutes before introducing the bill.

Playbook: “Most elected Democrats will get asked over the next few days and weeks whether they support defunding the police. It will prove to be a tricky question for some: either get crosswise with middle-of-the-road voters, who probably — just a gut feeling! — won’t support taking away money from police, or get on the wrong side of the base.”

“Either way, Republicans, who are fighting to keep their Senate majority and win back the House, will hang the defund movement around Democrats’ necks. Part of their strategy is to paint all elected Dems as extreme.”

Said NRCC spokesman Chris Pack: “House Democrats have gone so extreme with their ‘abolish culture’ that they’re one step away from wanting to outlaw fire departments. This is insanity and not what Democrats ran on two years ago.”

Tim Alberta: “It’s a loaded phrase, one that politicians in both parties have invoked for decades — with great success — to project a certain virility to the electorate. It has recently taken on even harsher connotations in the context of Trump’s Twitter usage (10 times in just the last week) and the accompanying sentiments (threats of unleashing ‘vicious dogs’ on rioters, and promises of, ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts.’)

“But it has long carried a cautionary subtext: Don’t dare challenge the integrity of a justice system predicated on punishing wrongdoers, the harsher the better. Over time, this has meant fewer rehabilitative doors opened and more retributive cells slammed shut. It has meant refusing to acknowledge that anything is fundamentally amiss with the system itself; that disparities and discrimination are not the same thing, that isolated incidents of police misconduct are just that, no matter their regularity or similarities.”

“I think there’s racism in the United States. But I don’t think that the law enforcement system is systemically racist.”

— Attorney General Bill Barr, on CBS News.

“A sweeping new police reform bill being drafted by House and Senate Democrats would ban chokeholds, limit ‘qualified immunity’ for police officers, create a national misconduct registry, end the use of no-knock warrants in drug cases and make lynching a federal crime among other dramatic changes,” Politico reports.