Why Is Marco Rubio Trying To Hold Hearings About the George Floyd Protests of 2020?
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If the Republicans take back control of the Senate in a couple of weeks, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has one particular thing on his mind to do. In an interview on Fox News, Rubio floated the idea that Republicans could hold hearings over the George Floyd protests that occurred during the summer of 2020, according to Newsweek.
“We have to use our oversight role that we have,” Rubio said. “We should have hearings, for example, on the riots of the summer of 2020. “There’s been no accountability about the summer of 2020. Who was behind it? How much did the political rhetoric lend itself to it? For example, these efforts to bail people out of jail in 2020, how many people did that encourage to come back out and do that all over again?”
The thing “behind” the protests of 2020 was the murder of a Black man while he was in police custody. There’s no “political rhetoric” to the number of African Americans adversely impacted by the continued denial of meaningful police reform. People kept coming out to protest because of the lack of Congressional reform to address police brutality against Black and people of color. Sen. Rubio knows why the protests occurred. He even acknowledged this in his own words when he spoke on the Senate floor that same summer.
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From Sen. Rubio’s website:
“After Mr. Floyd’s horrific murder at the hands of a man sworn to uphold the law, our nation has seen justified anger. As I said here two weeks ago, it is a moment that calls for not just “police reform”; it calls for a full reckoning with racial inequities that still plague our nation.”
“The overwhelming and vast majority of these Americans on our streets are peacefully reminding us that yes, black lives matter; and they are not asking that we destroy America; they are demanding that we be more American — that we more fully become a nation with “liberty and justice for all.”
Two years later, some Republican leaders are still willfully ignorant about why these protests happened in the first place. If Sen. Rubio wants to make constructive use of his time in office, he can push for the George Floyd Policing Act to get ten Republican votes to get passed.
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