Senate Republicans get 'woke' — but do they mean it?

GOP politicians have grown increasingly sympathetic — at least rhetorically — to grievances over systemic racism, writes US political correspondent Griffin Connolly

Senator Mitt Romney, R-Utah, marched in a Black Lives Matter protest in Washington, DC, in June. (Photo courtesy Reuters) (via REUTERS)

Senator Josh Hawley has been on a crusade to cancel the cancellers, so to speak, after he proposed an amendment to the annual defence bill last month to preserve — for now, at least — the names of US military bases commemorating Confederate officers.

“The American people are tired of the cancel culture. They’re tired of the woke mob. And they want to hold onto who we are together and to find common ground,” the freshman Missouri Republican said in a recent interview with Fox News.

Among that so-called woke mob are people who ought to be some of Mr Hawley’s closest allies: GOP senators, most of whom have said they favour renaming bases and removing paraphernalia that honours Confederates.

And while Mr Hawley is hardly the best-equipped to arbitrate who’s woke and who’s not, the inclusion in this year’s National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) of a clause to "remove all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honour or commemorate the Confederate States of America ... or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America from all assets of the Department of Defence" within three years of enactment does help illustrate a recent rhetorical shift from Senate Republicans marked by more sympathy with arguments from activists about race relations, systemic racism, and policing.

Getting woke

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2012, marched with protesters in Washington, DC, last month, two weeks after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and proudly tweeted out a picture of himself with the caption, “Black Lives Matter”.

The Senate, with sweeping bipartisan support, is working on the fine print of a bill to make Juneteenth a federal holiday on a par with Martin Luther King Jr Day, Memorial Day, and other days of US historical and cultural significance.

Juneteenth, celebrated annually on 19 June, is a holiday for the emancipation of enslaved people in the US.

That bill isn’t out of the woods yet, as some senators have reservations about scratching off another day from the federal work schedule without adding back another one. Some Republican senators have proposed axing Columbus Day — already a controversial day — to make room for Juneteenth.

And Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina used his bully pulpit as chairman of the Judiciary Committee several times in June to highlight white privilege and the distrust between police and communities of colour.

Many prominent black pastors in the Palmetto State hold seminars for black teenagers after church services on how to respond when confronted by police, Mr Graham explained at an unrelated hearing last month.

“I never remember that discussion in my church,” he said.

“The last thing I think about when a cop’s behind me is that I'm [under] threat. I wonder, ‘Did I go too fast?’ And that's the way it is,” he said.

“If you're a young African-American man in parts of this country, that's not the first thing you think about. And we just need to get to the bottom of how that happened and what can we do to fix it,” Mr Graham said.

Legislative failure

The protests this summer against the deaths in police custody of Mr Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, and others have moved the rhetorical needle to a point where Democrats and Republicans can at least agree on the broad notion that policing in the US needs fixing and racial bias is one issue that underlies it.

That’s more common ground than the parties can boast on gun control (aka gun rights), reproductive rights (aka the murder of foetuses) and “Dreamers” (aka illegal aliens).

And it’s a far more promising national outlook for policing reform activists than even two months ago.

Yet the reignited movement still wasn’t enough to bridge the ideological divide over how — and how much — to reform US policing, as Senate Democrats and Republicans couldn’t even agree on a proper legislative starting point to begin official negotiations.

With a dwindling number of legislative business days left before the elections on 3 November, and with Congress turning its attention to the defence agreement, the 12 government spending bills, and other weighty annual items, lawmakers may have missed their window to come together on a compromise policing reform package this year.

Congressional Democrats have excoriated their Republicans counterparts for proposing a hollow reform bill filled with ineffective “half-measures”.

Only time will tell whether Republicans’ recent rhetorical shift acknowledging racism and its effects on modern policing are the equivalent of “thoughts and prayers” in the wake of mass shootings, or whether they indicate a real desire to produce bipartisan compromise.

Local efforts

Meanwhile, the fight for policing reform will not lie dormant.

As former President Barack Obama has stressed in recent weeks, the battlefield over policing must be waged primarily at the local level.

Mayors and county commissioners are mostly responsible for appointing American police chiefs and negotiating agreements with police unions that set local law enforcement policies.

Several local governments have already heeded calls and taken substantive steps towards reform.

"The reform has to take place in more than 19,000 American municipalities, more than 18,000 local enforcement jurisdictions,” Mr Obama said at an online forum on the issue last month.

“As activists and everyday citizens raise their voices, we need to be clear about where change is gonna happen and how we can bring about that change,” he said.