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Nearly one month ago, racial tensions threatened to tear apart an exceedingly rare and productive bipartisan relationship in Congress, a partnership making progress on one of the thorniest political issues of our time: police reform.

U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in Congress, declared that America is not a racist country, although he added that it still has work to do on improving race relations and curbing police profiling and brutality.

The backlash from many corners of the black community against Scott, who made the statement in a televised rebuttal to President Joe Bidens address to a joint session of Congress, was fierce. The term Uncle Tim went viral on Twitter for nearly 12 hours before the social media platform stopped allowing it to appear in its trending section. The Rev. Al Sharpton countered that the practice of America was built on racism.

Before that firestorm, Scott was reporting new progress on a reform bill after more than 10 months of stalemate. And the two-term senator praised the work of his Democratic partners, Sen. Cory Booker, a 2020 presidential primary candidate and former mayor of Newark, N.J., credited for decreasing crime and turning the city around, along with Rep. Karen Bass, a California Democrat and a prominent member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Could the cross-party partnership survive the new wave of vitriol directed at Scott after his remarks countering the liberal argument of systemic racism?

Apparently so, because the same trio of lawmakers on Monday issued a joint statement citing renewed momentum in forging a compromise police-reform bill. Scott, Booker and Bass timed the statement to mark Tuesdays one-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, who was killed by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, sparking months of protests, many of which became violent, in cities across the country.

One year ago, George Floyds murder awakened millions of people around the world who had never before witnessed the deadly consequences of the failures in our policing system, the lawmakers said. While we are still working through our differences on key issues, we continue to make progress toward a compromise and remain optimistic about the prospects of achieving that goal.

If a bipartisan bill is truly within reach, its passage would take pressure off President Biden, who in his joint address promised to help push a measure over the finish line before the Floyd anniversary, only to back off that goal once it became clear Congress wouldnt make the deadline.

The White House has since kept a lighter touch, arguing that it is allowing lawmakers the space to work through the issues, a position White House press secretary Jen Psaki repeated Monday.

[Biden] is encouraged that there is ongoing progress and that there is a sense from negotiators that theres a path forward, and he believes he can continue to press on that, Psaki told reporters during her daily briefing.

Instead of a Rose Garden signing ceremony on a reform bill, Biden will host the Floyd family at the White House Tuesday for a private meeting.

Meanwhile, Bass, Booker and Scott are working through their differences. Chief among them is crafting a compromise on the issue that became the main roadblock to progress last year: whether to lift qualified immunity protection for police officers in civil lawsuits. Scott in early April told RealClearPolitics that he is willing to forge some middle ground, but more recently signaled he will not agree to total elimination of the legal protection.

The bipartisan trio reportedly has met in person three times over the last week in sessions that included the chairs of the Problem Solvers Caucus Reps. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, and Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican.

Last summer, Scott spearheaded a reform measure after an emotional speech on the Senate floor in which he talked about his own unsettling encounters with law enforcement, including one year in which police stopped him seven times. That effort broke down when Senate Democrats led a legislative filibuster to block the bill, with many of them stating that their top problem was that it didnt include an overhaul of qualified immunity protections.

The bipartisan measure lawmakers are hashing out right now would overhaul several policing practices and modify qualified immunity, although they have yet to say exactly how. It would bar racial profiling at every level of law enforcement while trying to stop no-knock warrants and choke-holds by preventing police departments that dont adhere to the standards from receiving federal aid.

The bill would also create a national police misconduct registry so that officers who are fired for such violations could not easily move on to another police department.

But the negotiations arent taking place in a vacuum. It could be difficult to win over the 10 Senate Republicans necessary for the bills passage, especially with new reports of skyrocketing crime in some big cities amid continued high levels of pandemic-produced unemployment. After seeing a 36% increase in murders, Los Angeles, for instance, is set to reverse its $150 million cuts to the departments budget made last year amid calls from the left to defund the police. The infusion of cash will allow the police department to hire 250 more officers.

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics' White House/national political correspondent.

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OPINION | Bipartisan police reform in reach on Floyd anniversary - The Livingston Parish News

It was another busy week in New York politics as the end of session in Albany draws ever closer, as does the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. In what has likely got all city Board of Elections employees breathing a sigh of relief, the state board has finally given the official thumbs up to software that will tabulate ranked-choice voting results. This week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced yet another new incentive for people to get vaccinated, this time offering up full scholarships to public colleges to a lucky few teens. And he announced that the long-awaited East Side Access project will open to passengers next year. Keep reading for the rest of this weeks news.

In a major decision for New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that public schools in the city will be 100% open in the fall with no remote option. Currently, although schools have been open for in-person learning, the city has allowed students to continue learning remotely if they or their parents had concerns about returning to the classroom with the pandemic ongoing. But with vaccines getting approved for younger teens and children and consistently low positivity rates, de Blasio said that kids need to return to the classroom if the city wants to begin achieving a full recovery. But many parents, particularly parents of color, have long expressed wariness at the prospect of sending their kids back to the classroom, even if they dont like remote learning options. Asked about the prospect at the state level, Gov. Andrew Cuomo indicated that there will be a uniform approach to school reopenings and said the state is on track to have all schools fully reopened by the fall. He didnt say whether removing the remote option, as New Jersey recently announced as well, is something he is considering.

Although most eyes are on the Democratic primary for the New York City mayoral race, a heated race for the Republican nomination is also underway. And candidates Curtis Sliwa founder of the Guardian Angels and Fernando Mateo a restaurateur and bodega-owner advocate participated in their first debate of the race. Despite agreeing on many issues, including that crime is the most pressing issue facing the city and committing to refunding the police, the debate devolved into a shouting match of personal insults with props. Mateo attacked Sliwa, who leads in the only polling done in the race so far, as a liar and a comedian, and even mentioned Sliwas many rescue cats. Sliwa went after Mateo for his past support of Democratic candidates.

The state Senate moved on several pieces of legislation, at least partially driven by recent scandals surrounding the governor, to further strengthen the states sexual harassment laws and to reform the government ethics agency the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, or JCOPE. Asked about the reforms to the commission he helped establish several years ago, Cuomo called JCOPE meaningless and that reform would be ineffective without a constitutional amendment, which has also been proposed in the Legislature. Meanwhile, a much anticipated bill that would allow gig workers to unionize effectively died before arrival as most stakeholders came out in opposition to the proposal before it was even introduced.

Diane Morales campaign for mayor of New York City was rocked with internal turmoil the past week that led to her missing a candidate forum hosted by the Rev. Al Sharpton and to several members of her team resigning or getting fired. Her campaign manager and senior policy adviser both departed the campaign after Morales allegedly failed to address claims of racism, harassment and employee abuse. Morales has said that two of those fired were staffers who were at the root of the complaints, but another four were leaders in the effort to unionize campaign staff. Although several have called on Morales to suspend her campaign, and even to drop out of the race entirely, she said she has no intention of doing either as she downplayed the strife. Members of her campaign staff are still looking to unionize, and attention on their efforts has increased significantly since news of trouble in the Morales camp first broke.

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Back to school in NYC and GOP mayoral candidates duke it out - City & State

The Rev. Al Sharpton on Monday argued that "the practice of America was built on racism," while addressing GOP Sen. Tim ScottTimothy (Tim) Eugene ScottUpdating the aging infrastructure in Historically Black Colleges and Universities McConnell amid Trump criticism: 'I'm looking forward, not backward' Theinstructive popularity of Biden's 'New Deal' for the middle class MORE's (S.C.) claim last week that "America is not a racist country."

Sharptonwas speakingat the funeral of Andrew Brown Jr., who was shot by deputies in Elizabeth City, N.C., last month.

I watched, the other night, the president make his first address to the joint session of Congress," Sharpton said. "And then I watched the rebuttal by the senator from South Carolina. Seems something awkward to me, where a white president talked about white supremacy and a Black senator said ... America is not racist. Seemed a little strange to me."

Now, everybody in America is not racist. But are you talking about whether the practice of America's racist, or the people, cause the practice of America was built on racism, the civil right activist added.

Brown was shot while driving away fromPasquotank County Sheriff's deputies who were serving an arrest warrant for felony drug charges, according topolice. His fatal shooting by police happened shortly after the trial of a Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murdering another Black man, George Floyd, last year. Floyd's deathprompted widespread protests over police violence and racism.

Sharpton gave an impassioned address atBrown'sfuneral, joining in the calls for the body camera footage of the shooting to be publicly released. He attacked the reasoning that has been given by the Pasquotank County Sheriff's office and a North Carolina judge who said publicly releasing the footage would endanger a fair trial.

I know a con game when I see it. Release the whole tape, and let the folks see what happened to Andrew Brown, Sharpton said. How is a tape gonna prejudice a grand jury, when a grand jury got to see the tape in order to decide whether or not they will prosecute? Don't talk to us like we're stupid!

If theres nothing on the tape, there won't be nothing on it in 45 days and if theres something on it in 45 days, there's something on it today, Sharpton continued. You don't need time to get a tape out, cut it out.

Sharpton acknowledged Brown's criminal history, but statedthe fatal shooting was done "unjustifiably and illegally."

"And when you break the law, you've got to be held accountable to the law. Andrew Brown Jr., if he did wrong, bringhim to court. But you don't have a right to bring him to his funeral," Sharpton said.

Prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump also spoke at the funeral, repeating his own calls for the body camera footage to be released.

"Andrew cannot make the plea for transparency. It is up to us to make the plea for transparency and demand that these videotapes be released," Crump said. "We know that it was a reckless, unjustifiable shooting."

Originally posted here:
Sharpton responds to Tim Scott: 'The practice of America was built on racism' | TheHill - The Hill

Ben Crump, the Rev. Al Sharpton says, is Black Americas attorney general.

In less than a decade, the Florida-based attorney has become the voice for the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd -- Black people whose deaths at the hands of police and vigilantes sparked a movement.

He has won multimillion-dollar settlements in police brutality cases. Hes pushed cities to ban no-knock warrants. He has told a congressional committee that reform is needed because its become painfully obvious we have two systems of justice; one for white Americans and one for Black Americans.

And hes stood with Black farmers taking on an agribusiness giant, and families exposed to lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan.

Hes a real believer in what hes doing. He has taken the attacks. He has taken the cases that others wouldnt take, Sharpton said, adding, People can go to him. The reason I trust him is because he has never misled me. Good or bad, hell tell me the truth about a client.

These days, he seems to be everywhere. In April, he joined with George Floyds family in celebrating the conviction of ex-cop Derek Chauvin. Then he was among the mourners at the funeral for Daunte Wright, who was shot during a traffic stop in suburban Minneapolis in the week leading up to Chauvins verdict a juxtaposition he finds incredible.

If ever there was a time for police to be on their best behavior, if ever there was a time for them to use the greatest standard of care, if ever there was a time for them to de-escalate, it was during this trial, which I believe was one of the most consequential police (and) civil rights cases in our history, Crump told The Associated Press.

After Wrights funeral, he was back in Florida to call for a federal investigation of a deputy who fatally shot two Black teenagers. And he began this past week demanding that police in North Carolina be more transparent after deputies fatally shot a Black man outside of his house.

Critics see him as an opportunist who never fails to show up amid another tragedy. But those who know Crump say hes been fighting for fairness long before his name was in headlines.

Where theres injustice, thats where he wants to be, said Ronald Haley, a Louisiana attorney, whos among a wide network of lawyers Crump works with on lawsuits. He understands hes needed everywhere, but he also understands he cant be everywhere.

Crump, 51, is a tireless worker who mixes Southern charm, a talent for attracting media attention to his cases and a firm belief that racism afflicts the nation, and the courts are the place to take it on.

He has an uncanny way of making his clients feel like kin, they say.

He has never missed a Thanksgiving to check in on me, he calls on Christmas, said Allisa Findley, who first met Crump three days after her brother, Botham Jean, was fatally shot in his apartment by a white Dallas police officer who mistook the Black mans apartment for her own.

Even the little things, he makes time for it, when there are no cameras rolling, she said. He does feel like family. I consider Ben family.

Terrence Floyd, the 42-year-old brother of George Floyd, said Crumps attention and care for his family over the last year has bonded them beyond the attorney-client relationship.

It feels like its more family-based than business, he said. After a while, I went from calling him Mr. Crump to calling him Unc, like he was one of my uncles.

Crump keeps up a dizzying schedule that takes him all over, but he makes sure hes home for Sunday services at Bethel Missionary Baptist Church. He lives in Tallahassee with his wife and their 8-year-old daughter, Brooklyn; he also helped raise two cousins and became their legal guardian.

I look at my daughter, Crump said, I look in her eyes, and then I look in the eyes of my nieces and nephews, and my little cousins all these little Black and brown children. You see so much hope, so much optimism in their eyes. Weve got to give them a better world.

He added: What Im trying to do, as much as I can, even sometimes singlehandedly, is increase the value of Black life.

Crumps path to becoming a lawyer and advocate began while growing up in Lumberton, North Carolina, where he was the oldest of nine siblings and step-siblings.

In his book Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People, he described learning in elementary school that a white classmates weekly allowance was as much as what his mother made in a week working two jobs at a shoe factory and a hotel laundry.

I wanted to understand why people on the white side of the tracks had it so good and Black people on our side of the tracks had it so bad, he wrote.

He often recounts how he learned about the world by reading the newspaper to his grandmother and how his mother taught him the story of famed civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who became his hero.

He has always gravitated toward leadership and being the answer to injustice, said Sean Pittman, an attorney who has been his friend for 30 years, since they met at Florida State University. There, Crump was president of the Black Student Union and led protests to bring attention to how the school recruited and treated Black students.

But his rise from personal injury attorney to a voice of Black America began in 2013 when he represented the family of Trayvon Martin, a teenager killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida. He then took on the case for the family of Michael Brown who was fatally shot by a white officer near St. Louis.

Crump organized marches and brought media attention to both of their deaths each happening during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

He has gone on to win financial settlements in about 200 police brutality cases. In March, the city of Minneapolis agreed to pay $27 million to settle a civil lawsuit from George Floyds family, which Crump said is the largest pretrial civil rights lawsuit settlement ever.

I keep hoping and believing, if we can make them pay multimillions of dollars every time they shoot a Black person in the back, that there will be less Black people shot in the back, Crump said. Thats my theory, but it remains unanswered because they keep killing us.

In recent years he has produced and hosted an A&E documentary Who Killed Tupac? and launched a production company to make shows about injustice and civil rights.

Crump even had a brief role in the 2017 film Marshall, which tells of the early life of his hero, who became the first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice.

His higher profile has brought more scrutiny and turned him into a frequent target. Conservative author Candace Owens in April accused Crump of trying to profit from police shootings and encouraging violent protests.

Keeping racial issues alive has become a business in America, she told Fox News Channels Laura Ingraham. Its Al Sharpton yesterday, Jesse Jackson tomorrow, Ben Crump today.

It doesnt really bother Crump: You cant care what the enemies of equality think of you, he said. It would be the height of arrogance to think that everybody is going to love you. Its not a popularity contest.

Its fitting that he is now mentioned among the giants of civil rights, said John Bowman, who has known him since Michael Browns killing and is now president of the St. Louis County NAACP.

I cant get in his head and say he charted out this course, and said, Im going to be the next strongest voice for injustice, Bowman said. I do know that when the call was made, he didnt shy away or step back from it.

But Crump says he eventually would like to step back from it all.

I literally pray for the day when I can close down the police brutality division of my law firm, he said, because I am so tired of seeing Black people killed by the police unjustifiably. Id like to tell my staff that we no longer have to fight in the courts, or be counselors to so many grieving mothers and fathers.

____

Morrison reported from New York City. Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio.

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Morrison is a member of APs Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison. Also, follow Seewer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jseewerap.

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'Black America's attorney general' seems to be everywhere - Associated Press

Its a Washington axiom that when a power player dies, their influence and secrets do as well. One night this spring, my phone chimed with a text message that showed otherwise. Sally Atwater, the widow of the legendary Republican political operative Lee Atwater, had died. She had been married to the bad boy of the G.O.P. during the Reagan and Bush years until his untimely death, thirty years ago. The Atwaters eldest daughter, Sara Lee, who lives in Brussels and is a Democrat, invited me over to her parents home to read through cartons of papers from her late father, whom I knew well when I covered the Reagan White House. They included seven chapters of Lee Atwaters unpublished draft memoir, which had remained untouched since he succumbed to brain cancer, in 1991, at the age of forty, and at the height of his political career.

The house on a quiet street in Northwest Washington was the kind of tidy, brick place that bespeaks proper family life. The scene inside was something else. Its first-floor rooms were filled with a jumble of cardboard and plastic containers, overflowing with manila folders, crammed with everything from the former Republican Party chairmans elementary-school papers to his dying thoughts, dictated to an assistant during his final days.

Some of the memorabilia was surprising. Despite Atwaters well-deserved reputation for running racist campaigns, there were friendly private notes and photos of him with Al Sharpton and James Brown, whose onstage acrobatics Atwater was famous for trying to mimic in his own blues-guitar performances. There were also personal notes from underground-film stars of the John Waters era. According to his daughter, Atwater was a huge underground-film aficionado. While the Republican Party he chaired trumpeted family values and the Christian right, on the side he helped a friend open a video store in Virginia specializing in pornography, blaxploitation, and his own favorite genre, horror movies. Atwater experienced horror in his own life early. When he was five, his baby brother died of burns from an overturned vat of hot grease in the familys kitchen. Atwaters papers contained no mention of the tragedy, but he said that he heard the sounds of his brothers screams every day of his life.

Atwater died before he could finish his memoir. What remains of it are hunks of yellowing typewritten pages, held together by rusting staples and paper clips. But the seven surviving chapters suggest that, far from dying along with him, the nihilism, cynicism, and scurrilous tactics that Atwater brought into national politics live on. In many ways, his memoir suggests that Atwaters tactics were a bridge between the old Republican Party of the Nixon era, when dirty tricks were considered a scandal, and the new Republican Party of Donald Trump, in which lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost have become normalized. Chapter 5 of Atwaters memoir in particular serves as a Trumpian precursor. In it, Atwater, who worked in the Office of Political Affairs in the Reagan White House, and managed George H. W. Bushs 1988 Presidential campaign before becoming the Republican Partys chairman at the age of thirty-seven, admits outright that he only cared about winning, not governing. Ive always thought running for office is a bunch of bullshit. Being in a office is even more bullshit. It really is bullshit, he wrote. Im proud of the fact that I understand how much BS it is.

In the nineteen-eighties, Atwater became infamous for his effective use of smears. Probably his best-known one was tying Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, Bushs Democratic Presidential opponent in 1988, to Willie Horton, a Black convict who went on a crime spree after getting paroled in the state. A menacing ad featuring Horton was a blatant attempt to stir fear among white voters that Dukakis would be soft on crime. At the very end of his life, Atwater publicly apologized to Dukakis for it. But Atwaters draft memoir makes clear that he had already mastered the dark political arts as a teen-ager. In fact, it seems that practically everything Atwater learned about politics he learned in high school. Its easy to see the future of the Republican Party in the anti-intellectual dirty tricks of his school days.

Born in Atlanta, Atwater grew up in a middle-class white family in South Carolina. His father worked in insurance, and his mother was a teacher. But from the start, Atwater was an ambitious and charismatic rebel, or, as he put it, a hell-raiser. While secretly gorging on history and literatureUpton Sinclairs The Jungle was one of his favorite bookshe went out of his way to seem unstudious at school. He sneered at the top grade-getters and student-government leaders. His aim, he wrote, was to be seen as too smart and too cool to care. In high school, the only office he sought was to be voted the wittiest. To that end, he tried every day to do something funny. If it wasnt funny, it at least screwed somebody up. Every damn day, Id screw people up. And thats fun and funny. And I pulled a lot of shit. Over time, he organized a group of about a hundred students to disrupt the school at his command. When speakers came to assembly, Atwater would signal his followers to rise in unison and turn their backs for a few seconds, or cross their legs in synchronized motions, or break out in wild applause. But Atwater was cunning. He writes that there was a secret to screwing everything up successfully. He always understood the line that he needed to stay within in order not to get caught. The No. 1 lesson was to be so subtle that they cant nab you for anything.

Atwater could be amusing. As he rose in American politics, candidates and reporters alike were drawn to his subversive sense of humor, despite themselves. But throughout his life he displayed more than a tinge of amorality. In his memoir, Atwater describes, without remorse, falsely accusing another student of instigating a fight that he had started, and remaining silent after the student was paddled twenty-five times. I didnt tell the truth worth a shit, he admits. He describes organizing six hundred and fifty students to spew spit wads at a female official who, he writes, hadnt been screwed in 20 years. The best moment, in his view, was when a fellow-student threw a glass of ice at her, and it really hurt her which was the funny part.

The first presidential campaign that Atwater managed was a bid to get a friend of his elected as student-body presidentagainst the friends wishes. He created a list of false accomplishments and devised a fake rating system that ranked his friend first. He plastered the school with posters declaring his friends platform of false promises of Free Beer on Tap in the CafeteriaFree DatesFree Girls. The campaign took a darker turn when Atwaters sidekicks stomped on the bare feet of a hippie-like student until his feet bled profusely. Afterward, the group threatened to do the same to younger students unless they voted for Atwaters candidate. Atwater recalls that he privately revelled in the tactics, and was proud that he could participate in intimidating his fellow-students. But publicly he feigned concern, or, as he writes, I was acting like Eddie Haskell saying, My gosh young people, you could be next. His candidate won an upset victory, but the school declared it void owing to a technicality. I learned a lot, he writes. I learned how to organize... and I learned how to polarize.

Although Atwaters adult professional rise was meteoric, toward the end of his life his double game of paying homage to Black cultural leaders while milking racism for political gain caught up with him. His appointment to the board of trustees at Howard University, in Washington, shortly after Bush won the White House, provoked an uproar on campus. The student newspaper at the prestigious and historically Black university denounced him, and the students occupied an administration building in protest. In his papers, Atwater complains that Jesse Jackson duped him, writing, If theres anybody on the political scene whos done me dirty, its Jesse Jackson. Atwater writes that Jackson talked him into resigning from Howards board with a promise to lionize Atwater for doing so. Instead, the day after Atwater agreed to resign, Jackson went to Howard and just kicked my guts out. Sara Lee Atwater, who loved her father but not his politics, finds it somewhat fitting that as racial politics evolved, The trickster got tricked.

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The Secret Papers of Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized - The New Yorker