Sunday shows – Biden’s first 100 days, police reform dominate
by The Hill staff
President Biden’s first 100 days in office and the debate over police reform dominated the Sunday morning political talk shows with multiple guests weighing in on the topics.
Biden is scheduled to speak to a joint session of Congress Wednesday evening to mark his first 100 days in office, and is expected to touch on police reform in the wake of several fatal police-involved shootings.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Sunday that President Biden’s first 100 days in office amounted to a “bait and switch,” and accused the president of pushing policies that were to the left of those he promised during the campaign.
“I think he’s been a very destabilizing president,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said. “And economically, he’s throwing a wet blanket over the recovery, wanting to raise taxes in a large amount and regulate America basically out of business.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Sunday that the U.S. was not a racist country but faced racism in the form of “bad actors” following the guilty verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd.
“[T]o me, you cannot have true justice when chokeholds and knees on the neck are still being considered legitimate in some places,” Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) said.
“I think what we ought to do is let’s find best practices. I think if you go back to what [Sen.] Tim Scott [R-S.C.] proposed, let’s have more transparency so we can find out what’s working and what’s not working. In his bill, we had incentives to … stop chokeholds, as an example,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told host George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.”
Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) said Sunday that she disagreed with a call from Republicans to preserve qualified immunity for individual police officers, which she said was shielding bad actors like Derek Chauvin from legal action.
“[W]hen we have seen the occasional guilty verdict, it is rarely followed by the maximum sentence,” Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.) said. “And considering the egregious nature of the torturing, the death of George Floyd, a maximum sentence, I think, is absolutely needed.”
Florida Rep. Val Demings (D) on Sunday said she thought the officer who fatally shot Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio “responded, as he was trained to do,” based on the information she has seen so far.
“I come at this issue from the perspective that most people don’t want to leave home,” Vice President Harris said on CNN’s “State of the Union” when asked how she would define success in her role leading the Biden administration’s efforts to stem the growing number of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. “They don’t want to leave their grandparents; they don’t want to leave the place where they grew up; where they, you know, they speak the language or they know the culture.
“I’m not a roadblock at all. The best politics is good government. I can’t believe that people believe that if you just do it my way, that will give us the momentum to get through the next election,” Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) said. “We won’t give this system a chance to work. I’m not going to be part of blowing up this Senate of ours, or basically this democracy of ours, or the Republic that we have.”
