Media Notes Congressional Failure to Demilitarize Police, and Reason is Proud to Lead the Way

Members of Congress had a recent chance to
demilitarize policing—and Ferguson, Missouri’s own member of
Congress, Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), is among the majority of both
Democrats and Republicans who turned up their noses at the
opportunity. That point
was made by Reason‘s own Ed Krayewski, last week, who
noted that “House leadership on both sides also voted against it,
including Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Eric Cantor
(R-Va.), and Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)”

Media outfits including the
Washington Post and the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch have now picked up on the
irony of Rep. Clay’s justifiable opposition to “police
repression” just two months after he joined 354 of his
colleagues in opposing a measure sponsored by Rep. Alan Grayson
(D-Fla.) intended to “prohibit the Department of Defense from
gifting excess equipment, such as aircraft—including drones—armored
vehicles, grenade launchers, silencers, and bombs to local police
departments,” in the words of its author.

The Post-Dispatch‘s Chuch Raasch notes that “Five of
six members of the House from the St. Louis area voted against the
amendment.” Raasch quotes Clay defending his vote, while still
condemning police militarization.

Cognitive dissonance, thy name is…well, pretty much anybody
holding government office.

To put Clay’s vote in context, the Washington Post‘s
Philip Bump points out, “In short, the amendment would have
prevented the military from distributing to local police forces
some of heavy weapons and vehicles that the country has seen
deployed in response to unrest in Ferguson, Mo.”

Special props to columnist Clarence Page for openly
tweeting Krayewski’s original piece.

As Krayewski made painfully clear, Clay was not along in his
vote against severing the flow of military equipment to police
departments. Grayson’s amendment gained only 62 votes, with 355
opposed.

Supporters of the amendment include the usual civil libertarian
suspects, such as Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who called
attention to this vote on Twitter
earlier today, John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rush Holt (D-NJ), Walter
Jones (R-NC), Raul Labrador (R-Idaho), John Lewis (D-Ga.), who

nevertheless called for martial law in Ferguson, Thomas Massie
(R-Ky.), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), and Mark Sanford (R-SC). Fourteen
other Republicans and 43 other Democrats voted for the
amendment.

There were a handful of members of Congress who didn’t vote,
including Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.)

See how your representative voted here.

Realizing there’s a problem is a first step. Now that horror is
growing over military equipment and tactics deployed in the streets
of American cities with the encouragement of the country’s
political class, maybe a solution will be next.

Maybe?