Maddow Blog | The Republicans’ ‘Police Week’ comes with important fine print

In theory, there are still roughly seven months remaining in the current Congress, giving lawmakers plenty of time to tackle key national priorities and rack up some accomplishments they can take to the electorate. In practice, most observers tend to believe that there will be little, if any, meaningful work in the coming months.

That, in turn, will leave ample time for messaging votes in the House, crafted by Republican leaders to score some partisan points, without regard for whether the measures will even be considered in the Democratic-led Senate.

Take this week, for example.

GOP leaders in the lower chamber decided to leverage National Police Week to emphasize the party’s ostensible support for law enforcement, and to that end, House Republicans passed a handful of bills yesterday. But as HuffPost noted, there was a nagging detail the party preferred to ignore.

Quite right. As we discussed in March, the Republican Study Committee — representing more than three-quarters of the House Republican Conference, including the entirety of the GOP leadership team — released a plan calling for Congress to cut funding for Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), a federal program created to help fund state and local law enforcement agencies.

With this in mind, HuffPost’s Arthur Delaney asked House Speaker Mike Johnson at a Capitol Hill press conference, “We’ve heard a lot this week about Democrats supporting ‘defund the police.’ The Republican Study Committee budget cuts the main federal grant program that local departments use to hire officers. How is that not proposing to defund the police?”

The Louisiana Republican — who used to chair the Republican Study Committee and who co-authored a similar effort — responded, “I haven’t looked into the details of the RSC budget,” adding, “There’s lots of nuances.”

In this case, however, there are far fewer “nuances” than the House speaker would like to believe — because the Republican Study Committee’s plan really does call for reduced federal support to law enforcement. What’s more, as The New Republic noted, there are plenty of related data points.

And did I mention that the party celebrating “Police Week” has rallied behind a suspected felon as its presidential nominee? Who has his own troubled relationship with law enforcement? Because that’s true, too.

Republicans believe they have a political advantage when it comes to law enforcement, but the closer one looks, the more difficult it becomes to take the GOP line seriously.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com