Despite broad popular support for legislation to curtail police violence, Congress got nothing done. Democrats, despite controlling both the House and Senate in 2021 and 2022, slow-walked the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, insisting on bipartisan support that never materialized. Ending qualified immunity, the legal standard that prevents police officers from being sued for wrongdoing even when they knowingly break the law, was deemed not urgent by Jim Clyburn, then the highest-ranking Black member of the Democratic House majority, despite that being a core demand of the protest movement. Once that slipped away, it opened the door to even smaller reforms floating out of reach.
In the end, despite the embarrassing photo op in which Democratic leaders donned matching kente-cloth stoles and knelt on the floor of the Capitol building, no reforms were passed into law. After much hand-wringing over activists’ use of the slogan “Defund the Police,” no major efforts to defund large police departments were ever implemented. Police killings continued to increase: Officers killed at least 1,232 people in 2023, the deadliest year in a decade.
Now not even a single representative who swept into Congress on the heels of the popular mandate of police reform remains.
It’s a stark outcome. Consider, for example, Georgia Rep. John Lewis, an activist during the Civil Rights Movement and the leader of the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama. Lewis continued his activist work for years afterward, arriving in Congress only in the 1980s, but he served 17 terms as a celebrated member of the Democratic House caucus until his death in 2020.
Worth noting, this opinion piece came out before Ilhan Omar’s primary took place, which she ended up winning
e; wrong archive link
They were pushed out by a foreign nation (Israeli) lobby. Let’s not forget how this happened.
We have a very short attention span in the usa
Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year to make it that way
*Billions
It wasn’t that Americans forgot…
It’s that Israel spent millions of dollars to keep them out of office. Mostly because they kept mentioning Israel is activating committing a genocide, but considering their practice of giving Black Israeli immigrants birth control for years while telling them it was vaccines…
They likely weren’t a fan of BLM either.
The short attention span part is when Harris and Walz have both given speeches at the annual AIPAC conferences but people are pretending they’re perfect because they’re not 20 years past retirement age.
I’m still hoping they’ll do the right thing while in office, and they’ll undoubtedly be better than Biden or trump…
But they’re miles away from perfect. And pretending they are won’t help anything, it just means they only get pressure to move to the right.
sure, AIPAC and continuing genocide had nothing to do with it
Now, just over four years later, both Bowman and Bush have been routed out of Congress, thanks to a historic deluge of big-money spending against them. They battled challengers in the most and third-most-expensive congressional primaries in American history, respectively, and each was outspent roughly 4–1. In both races, the overwhelming majority of that money came from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the conservative, pro-Netanyahu lobbying group that has fast become one of the biggest outside spenders in elections, funded in large part by Republican megadonors. The cryptocurrency industry, also increasingly Republican-aligned, chipped in at least $1.5 million to knock out Bush and over $2 million to knock out Bowman too.
Thanks Citizens United! I love having an unlimited amount of dark, untraceable money from foreign powers influencing our elections!
While MeToo and BLM were fairly short-lived political movements, they had an incredibly large and positive impact on the culture.
I remember a time just before covid when saying “black lives matter” was a controversial phrase. Now, not being able to say it is fairly scandalous. But for gay marriage, I can’t think of many things which were as widely accepted as the fight for racial equality (in slogan, at least).
I’m not excited for the pendulum to swing back, led by corporate america, joy.
they had an incredibly large and positive impact on the culture.
I wish this was true, but I’ve only seen our financial commitment to police violence increase over time.
But for gay marriage, I can’t think of many things which were as widely accepted as the fight for racial equality
Yeah…
Look at all the people who get REAL fucking pissy if you say “LGBT” instead of “LGB”
And as for racial equality? At the same time people were acknowledging the systemic prejudice against black people (but not acknowledging TOO hard because still gotta get theirs) EVERYONE, left and right, were making snide remarks about how COVID was China’s fault and Asian elders were being attacked in the street. And we were told to shut up because it was detracting from the real issues. And… we did because that is what we have been trained to do.
The BLM protests were a beautiful thing and I marched as part of my state efforts. But, like with most activist movements, it was immediately forgotten once something else happened (or, in this case, we were allowed outside again). But it was incredibly specific and mostly just highlighted people’s inability to care about multiple things at a time.
But hey, we solved racism in the same exact way we solved sexuality and gender!
Less ‘allowed out’ and more ‘forced to return to work’. Good luck getting mass unemployment when another pandemic happens (when, not if). People not being wage slaves worried about their survival opens up a lot of dangerous freedom to demand change.
Dems don’t want actual change. They just say they do.
Good. The whole “defund the police” movement was just stupid. Crime will ALWAYS be an issue in a country like the US, where there’s millions of people with different types of background, cultures, and beliefs. No other country on the planet has this same type of society. We need tough law enforcement, and we need to be able to enforce those laws. Go to any ghetto or run down neighborhood in America and ask them if they want “less cops” on the streets…
Tell me you don’t understand what “defund the police” was actually about without telling me…
I can’t recall… Was it the motte or the bailey?
Removed by mod
