Here’s entirely unsurprising news: Efforts to come up with a bipartisan police reform bill have failed. Democratic Sen. Cory Booker and Rep. Karen Bass negotiated with Republican Sen. Tim Scott to produce a bill that Scott could get some Republicans on board with. That would have entailed a drastic watering-down of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, passed by the House in March, but Booker and Bass were willing to try, including giving up on qualified immunity reform.

Nonetheless, “It was clear at this negotiating table, in this moment, we were not making progress,” Booker told reporters. “In fact, recent back-and-forth with paper showed me that we were actually moving away from it.”

According to Bass, “It wasn’t like there was a big fight. It wasn’t like there was a big rupture, but at a certain point, you have to recognize that you’re just spinning your wheels.”

Scott is trying to blame Democrats for walking away, saying, “After months of making progress, I am deeply disappointed that Democrats have once again squandered a crucial opportunity to implement meaningful reform to make our neighborhoods safer and mend the tenuous relationship between law enforcement and communities of color.” But he’s the one who demanded concession after concession—and wasn’t satisfied, despite getting many of those concessions.

Ultimately, though, Democrats had a bottom line, a place beyond which they weren’t willing to concede. After Scott rejected what NBC News describes as a “drastically scaled-back proposal,” Booker and Bass decided that their months of work had failed.

”The proposal included the minimum that Democrats were willing to accept and left out controversial provisions like qualified immunity, the criminalization of excessive use of force, and no-knock warrants,” NBC News reports. “The proposal included provisions to address mental health for police officers, a database of police misconduct and terminations, the militarization of police departments and would also make an executive order former Trump signed into law.”

Giving up on qualified immunity reform was a big deal, since that is a key way police officers get away with abuses. Qualified immunity protects police from lawsuits over abuses they commit in their official capacities. It tells police officers they can harm people, abuse the public trust, and abuse power without fear of repercussions, and too often, they do so. For Tim Scott and his fellow Republicans, this is a doctrine that had to remain in place.

Shoot, Senate Republicans wouldn’t agree to put a Donald Trump executive order into law, for which President Joe Biden slammed them in a statement, saying, “Regrettably, Senate Republicans rejected enacting modest reforms, which even the previous president had supported while refusing to take action on key issues that many in law enforcement were willing to address.”

Biden vowed to continue efforts to make police reform happen. Still, the refusal of Republicans to agree to any significant reforms makes that unlikely at the federal level in the near future.