The Morning Dispatch: Police Reform Hits a Partisan Wall

Happy Thursday! In the words of Sen. Marco Rubio, “Everyone should just wear a damn mask.”

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• As of Wednesday night, 2,380,490 cases of COVID-19 have been reported in the United States (an increase of 33,553 from yesterday) and 121,969 deaths have been attributed to the virus (an increase of 745 from yesterday), according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, leading to a mortality rate among confirmed cases of 5.1 percent (the true mortality rate is likely much lower, between 0.4 percent and 1.4 percent, but it’s impossible to determine precisely due to incomplete testing regimens). Of 28,567,355 coronavirus tests conducted in the United States (502,290 conducted since yesterday), 8.3 percent have come back positive.

• A federal appeals court panel ordered a dismissal of the case against Michael Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser. The president told reporters that news of the dismissal made him “very happy,” adding: “He’s been exonerated. I want to congratulate him.”

• The three men charged with killing Ahmaud Arbery were officially indicted on nine counts, including felony murder, by a Georgia grand jury. “This is another step forward in seeking justice for Ahmaud,” the local District Attorney said in a statement.

• Senate Democrats blocked the GOP police reform bill spearheaded by South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, justifying their move to prevent the legislation from reaching the 60 votes needed to advance to debate by arguing the JUSTICE Act did not go far enough in addressing issues of racial justice and police brutality.

• The Senate’s Wednesday confirmation of Cory Wilson to a New Orleans circuit court marks the 200th judge installed by the Trump administration, working in concert with Mitch McConnell’s Republican Senate majority.

• The federal government is reportedly planning to end federal funding for 13 different coronavirus testing sites, spread out across five different states, on June 30, shifting operations to states. Coronavirus testing czar Brett Giroir said, “We are transitioning 13 sites from the original now antiquated program to the more efficient and effective testing sites.”

‘The Actual Problem is Not What is Being Offered. It is Who is Offering It.’

On June 1, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said: “Leader McConnell should commit to put a law enforcement reform bill on the floor of the Senate before July 4.” A week later, McConnell announced that he had tasked Sen. Tim Scott with leading a working group to craft exactly that. Their legislation, the JUSTICE Act, was introduced in the Senate this week, and on Wednesday, Democrats blocked it from advancing to debate.

All 52 Republicans—and three dissidents from the Democratic caucus—voted to advance the police reform package, but the legislation fell short of the 60 votes necessary.

The JUSTICE Act—as we detailed in last Thursday’s Morning Dispatch—would require local police departments report to the FBI any use of force that results in death or serious injury, withhold federal funding from states and law enforcement agencies that do not ban the use of chokeholds except in “situations where deadly force is authorized,” subsidize the purchase of body cameras and relevant training for state and local governments, and make lynching a federal crime.

Democratic Sens. Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Chuck Schumer said the bill was “not salvageable” in a letter to McConnell, arguing it keeps qualified immunity for police officers intact, does not “go far enough” in collecting use of force data or creating use of force standards, and “does nothing to end … racial and religious profiling, no knock warrants in drug cases and the use of chokehold and carotid holds.”

The legislation would take concrete steps to end chokeholds, and the White House has made clear President Trump will not sign any legislation reforming qualified immunity. But Republicans offered Democrats amendment votes to address the other points. The Democrats said no.

“If you don’t like what you see, change it,” an exasperated Tim Scott implored on the Senate floor yesterday. “We offered them opportunities, at least 20 [amendments] I offered, to change it.”

“If the five amendments that they wrote in the letter saying that they needed to have these things fixed won’t do it, if 20 amendments won’t do it … then what, pray tell, is the problem?” he asked, rhetorically. “Well, I finally realized what the problem is, Mr. President. The actual problem is not what is being offered. It is who is offering it.”

Sen. Tim Kaine did not accept that characterization. “I voted no not on the what, and not on the who,” he said. “I voted no on the how. … Why are these bills not being taken up in committee with a Republican majority and debated and marked up and reported to the floor in a bipartisan way?”

In the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths—and the mass protests they sparked—this should be a bipartisan issue. Only 5 percent of respondents in a recent Associated Press/NORC Center poll believe “no changes” are needed to the criminal justice system. 88 percent favor requiring the use of body cameras for police, 85 percent favor prosecuting officers who use excessive force, and 82 percent favor penalizing officers for racially-biased policing.

But this close to an election, not even overwhelming agreement among the American people can overcome the allure of partisan politics. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to apologize yesterday for saying earlier this week Republicans are “trying to get away with murder, actually, the murder of George Floyd.” Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin apologized last week for referring to Tim Scott’s legislation as a “token” approach.

“The irony of the story is that today and through the rest of June and all of July, what we’re going to have here is, instead of getting 70 percent of what you wanted or more, you’re going to get zero,” Scott said. “How does that work for the little kid at a home in North Charleston where Walter Scott got shot? … You’re going to wait until the election to get more. Okay. Well, why wouldn’t you take the 80 percent now, see if you can win the election and add on the other 20 percent.”

“When this bill is gone, and next week we’re on the [Department of Defense] or something else, we’ll forget about this,” he concluded. “We’ll move on. People will forget about it. And you know what’s going to happen? Something bad. And we’ll be right back here talking about what should have been done, what could have been done.”

Making Masking Mandatory

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee rolled out an order requiring his constituents to wear masks in all indoor public areas and in outdoor public areas where social distancing cannot be maintained. The rule will go into effect Friday, adding Washington to a list of nearly 20 other states with mandatory face mask orders—including four that have been hit hardest by coronavirus: New York, California, New Jersey, and Illinois.

Statewide mask orders typically follow major spikes in new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, and people are more likely to adhere to these mandates in areas most affected by the virus. A recent Pew Research Center poll found 80 percent of adults in counties with a high COVID-19 death rate reported wearing a mask in stores or businesses all or most of the time, compared to 55 percent of adults in counties with a low death rate.

The same survey also uncovered stark divisions in mask wearing based on political affiliation, race, and age. Among Democrats, 76 percent reported wearing masks all or most of the time, while only 53 percent of Republicans did. (Geography is likely a confounding variable here, with Democrats more likely than Republicans to live in urban environments.) Asian adults—at 80 percent—were the most likely to acknowledge wearing masks all or most of the time, while white adults—at 62 percent—were the least. Among Americans 65 and older—a group considered high risk—74 percent reported wearing masks all or most of the time, compared with 61 percent of adults between the ages of 30 and 49.

Public health guidance on mask wearing is clear now, but the message was more muddled in the early stages of the pandemic. “Face mask use by the general public—people without symptoms who are not caring for others—has little or no benefit and potentially great harm if people who need masks can’t get them,” Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted on February 8. Vice President Mike Pence—by then head of the White House coronavirus task force—was adamant in a February 29 press conference. “Let me be very clear, and I’m sure the physicians who are up here will reflect this as well: The average American does not need to go out and buy a mask.” 

These officials have since changed their tune—Pence was photographed in a mask just yesterday—but the early confusion took a toll. “It has … become too easy to point to earlier comments (which were admittedly less well informed due to severe lack of info about a truly novel virus), and criticize them or use them for political purposes,” Howard Forman, a professor of public health at Yale School of Management, emailed The Dispatch. 

The more we learn about COVID-19, the clearer the conclusion becomes: Masks work. Research published in Nature Medicine shows the role that surgical face masks can play in preventing transmission of coronaviruses. “We detected coronavirus in respiratory droplets and aerosols in 3 of 10 (30%) and 4 of 10 (40%) of the samples collected without face masks, respectively,” the studies authors wrote, “but did not detect any virus in respiratory droplets or aerosols collected from participants wearing face masks.”

A study from two University of Iowa researchers published in Health Affairs detected a similar phenomenon on a larger scale. George Wehby and Wei Lyu analyzed government mask mandates in 15 states and D.C. between April 8 and May 15. Their results found “a significant decline in the daily COVID-19 growth rate after mandating facial covers in public.”

But cultural buy-in will be required for these masking mandates to be effective, just as it was for the lockdowns themselves. “I believe that influence can be much more effective than authority in these matters. If the leadership of government made mask wearing more acceptable, it would probably help more than by fiat,” he told The Dispatch. “I think commercial entities should have self-interest in mask wearing and don’t require government involvement. I think there are many softer approaches that could be very effective.”

The need for ubiquitous masking and ongoing conscientious distancing is becoming even more obvious as other policy approaches to the pandemic begin to show their weaknesses, as Andrew writes in a new piece for the site. Although the original White House plan intended for states’ phased reopenings to be keyed to slowing cases—and to move back toward more extensive lockdowns if infections sped back up—the reality is that many states aren’t even considering locking down again, even as many places around the country are worse off with COVID than they’ve been at any point before.

Worth Your Time

• Should Confederate statues be toppled down, or should they be left alone and preserved for history’s sake? According to Joshua Zeitz, the answer is obvious when you look at post-WWII Germany. “When armies are defeated on their own soil—particularly when those armies fight to promote racist or genocidal policies—they usually don’t get to keep their symbols and material culture,” he wrote in August 2017 in the wake of Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally. Though this article was written three years ago, its message still resonates today.

• Robert Julian-Borchak Williams spent 30 hours behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. Why? Police officers wrongfully arrested him after a flawed match in their department’s facial recognition algorithm. Law enforcement agencies have been using facial recognition technology to help solve crimes for several years now, and studies show the systems falsely identify black and Asian faces 10 to 100 times more often than white faces. Read Kashmir Hill’s New York Times piece, which tells the heartbreaking story of a man who was permanently scarred by a flaw in the criminal justice system.

• Bernie Sanders had his moments along the way to losing the Democratic nomination in both 2016 and 2020, but he’s become less relevant in the midst of this cultural moment when democratic socialism has been supplanted by a more cultural reckoning. “Rather than Medicare for All and taxing plutocrats, the rallying cry is racial justice and defunding the police,” writes Ross Douthat in his New York Times column earlier this week.

Something Fun

The Dispatch’s recent influx of Gen-Z staffers means this is a meme-forward newsletter now.

Presented Without Comment, Throwback Edition

Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• Jonah’s Wednesday G-File (🔒) takes issue with some of the statue toppling we’ve seen in recent weeks, as crowds have gone after not just Confederate monuments but also statues of U.S. Grant and, in Madison, Wisconsin, an immigrant abolitionist named Hans Christian Heg. “People try to defend it, to give it context, to make it more sophisticated and high-minded,” he writes. “They say ‘You don’t understand, they’re angry.’ Who doesn’t understand that? It’s not a difficult concept to grasp. But if anger is self-justifying, then anything can be destroyed.”

• You may have noticed, we’ve been having some technical difficulties with our podcast feeds in recent days as we update our hosting platform. Our apologies for the inconvenience, but we do have a new Remnant for you over at the site. Jonah was joined by a returning guest, Fox News’ Chris Stirewalt, to discuss Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy and 1800s newspapers, as well as offering some rank punditry.

• In the latest Vital Interests (🔒), Thomas Joscelyn explores the disconnect between President Trump’s messaging about ending “endless wars” and the number of strikes we’ve made against al-Qaeda. Joscelyn critiques how in a speech “the president cavalierly dismissed the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere as ‘ancient conflicts in faraway lands that many people have never even heard of.’”

• The pandemic disrupted an already struggling agricultural sector by disrupting supply chains. Blake Hurst looks at how it also exposed deeper problems between ranchers and meat processing companies, and he warns that some of the proposed solutions might be repeats of past mistakes.

Let Us Know

Yesterday’s police reform imbroglio is just the latest example of legislative brinksmanship we’ve seen play out in Congress. Both sides want to get something done, both sides agree on about 75 percent of what they want to get done—and nothing happens.

Our question to you: Is there a fix to this? Is the congressional incentive structure fundamentally broken, driving even legislators with the best of intentions toward undesirable outcomes? Or have individual bad actors poisoned debate?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Nate Hochman (@njhochman), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Photograph by Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images.