Why it matters: Hawley has teamed up with an unlikely partner, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in a push to include direct payments in Congress’ next coronavirus relief package, which has entered the final stages of negotiations.
The bill currently being discussed by congressional leaders does include direct payments, but at a size closer to $600 — half of what Sanders and Hawley have said is necessary to support working families.
Johnson’s concerns about the size of the stimulus package, which at about $900 billion would be one of the largest in U.S. history, are shared by many Senate Republicans.
What they’re saying: “We have families in need. There’s no doubt about it. I completely support some kind of program targeted for small businesses so they can reemploy, so they can reopen, to restore capital,” Johnson said on the Senate floor.
“What I fear we’re going to do with this bipartisan package, and what the senator from Missouri is talking about is the same thing — a shotgun approach,” he continued.
“We will not have learned the lessons from our very hurried, very rushed, very massive, earlier relief packages. We’re just going to do more of the same, another trillion dollars. It takes our debt from $27.4 trillion to $28.4 trillion in a couple months. With doing virtually no revisions, no improvements.”
The other side: “Nothing could be more targeted. No relief could be more important than relief for working people,” Hawley responded after Johnson’s objection.
“The senator is right. This body has spent trillions of dollars this year alone on COVID relief. We’re getting ready to spend apparently another $1 trillion more. And yet working people are told, they may be last — if they get relief at all.”
What to watch: Hawley said Sanders will be back in a “matter of hours” to attempt to pass the bill again. Both senators have said they will block an extension to government funding when it expires tonight unless direct payments are in the relief package.
The New York Police Department used excessive force during the wave of protests across the city this summer against police brutality and racism, according to a report published on Friday morning by New York City’s Department of Investigation.
Mayor Bill de Blasio asked for the investigation in May as social media became deluged with cellphone videos showing police officers dousing protesters, elected officials and journalists with chemical irritants, shoving and hitting them while they struggled on the ground and, in one instance, driving police vehicles into them.
The report said the NYPD’s response was excessive in part because most police officers involved had not received “relevant training” in policing protests.
“The NYPD’s use of force and certain crowd control tactics to respond to the Floyd protests produced excessive enforcement that contributed to heightened tensions,” the Department of Investigation said in the executive summary of its 111-page report.
The daily New York City protests were a prominent part of what quickly became a nationwide and international movement prompted in part by anger over George Floyd, a Black man killed by a white Minneapolis police officer, and Breonna Taylor, a Black woman killed in her Louisville home by white police officers during a botched raid.
De Blasio, who repeatedly defended his police department’s conduct during the protests, said he agreed with the report’s findings.
“It makes very clear we’ve got to do something different, and we’ve got to do something better,” he said in a video statement released by City Hall.
The report concluded that the city’s unusual system of three distinct, sometimes overlapping agencies conducting oversight of the police department had caused problems. It recommended that the city create a single independent police oversight agency.
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea in a statement called the summer a “difficult period” and thanked the Department of Investigation for “20 logical and thoughtful recommendations that I intend to incorporate into our future policy and training.”
