This week, the House and Senate will show us how not to get meaningful policing and justice reforms passed and signed into law, as leaders of each chamber quickly push through large bills covering multiple topics with almost no debate or scrutiny of the actual legislative texts.

Because I’m in the House, I’ll focus this thread on that bill. The Justice in Policing Act has several provisions that take us backward, and rushing it through the House will stifle debate on some important reforms and issues that it overlooks.

The bill reforms, but doesn’t end, qualified immunity; in fact, it implicitly endorses it for most officials, including prison guards. It suggests Congress supports immunizing such officials for abusing rights—contrary to Congress’s intent in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1871.

The bill provides *more* money for police and prosecutors, which may undermine local efforts to change the role of policing in communities. The ACLU calls it a “nonstarter,” noting, “The role of police has to be smaller, more circumscribed, and less funded with taxpayer dollars.”

This problem is compounded by the fact that most of the bill’s reforms for state and local law enforcement (where the vast majority of policing happens) are required only if the state or city is willing to accept federal dollars to increase their spending on law enforcement.

Specifically, the reforms are structured as conditions on Department of Justice grants that are available only if the state or city receiving the grant uses the money to increase their overall law enforcement funding, not just replace state or local funding.

The bill tasks the Department of Justice with designing guidance and regulations to implement many of the policing reforms, but DoJ—regardless of who is in the White House—is itself part of our brutal, disastrous criminal justice system.

This is not to say that the Department of Justice has no role to play in reforming policing, but it’s obviously a terrible idea to put Bill Barr in charge of designing and enforcing rules for how police in America operate.

The bill also includes H.R. 35, which increases penalties for various crimes while falsely presenting itself as a bill to ban lynching—which is already a federal hate crime. In fact, H.R. 35 simply references existing laws. I detailed H.R. 35’s many problems here: https://twitter.com/justinamash/status/1232845321983741954

I also elaborated on these problems and on the confusion surrounding H.R. 35 here: https://twitter.com/justinamash/status/1236000643736907780

The bill includes many state-level reforms that could be done without the federal government, yet it overlooks some important changes that only the federal government can make, such as fully ending transfers of equipment from the Department of Defense to police.

The bill doesn’t even address the federal practices that undermine states’ efforts to eliminate civil asset forfeiture, which incentivizes cops to initiate interactions with the public and take property from people who haven’t even been charged with a crime.

The legislation from Senate Republicans also focuses mostly on changes that states can already do, while ignoring some key federal reforms. If federalism is their concern, they should at least be interested in fixing the federal practices that undermine state policies.

The House bill also fails to grapple with overcriminalization as a key source of the problems it’s trying to address. We can’t fix the issues in law enforcement without ending our overreliance on policing (and the criminal justice system more broadly) to implement public policy.

We need fewer criminal laws, period.

I’m not saying all these reforms must be in the House bill; in fact, I’m against cramming so many things into one bill. But House leaders do support having one giant bill, yet their proposal sidesteps key issues. You can’t fix policing without examining *what* is being policed.

We can do better through real debate. There’s widespread public support for some serious reforms, and we can find compromise if we deliberate and proceed meticulously. Let’s vote on individual bills, such as my bill to end qualified immunity, and let’s freely consider amendments.

Congress continues to squander opportunities to genuinely legislate by giving all the power to leadership and avoiding difficult debates and votes. This dysfunction prevents us from productively addressing national concerns, which feeds into people’s polarization and anger.

We must decentralize power and have serious debates on other issues of national importance as well, but it’s especially crucial here because our failure to pass meaningful reforms will help perpetuate direct violations of Americans’ rights. We cannot allow this to continue.