A week ago, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said in a statement that “defunding the police” was central to the reason why policing reform negotiations collapsed in Congress. Fast forward to Tuesday, and the truth emerges. The International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Fraternal Order of Police said in a joint statement that “at no point did any legislative draft propose ‘defunding the police.’” The statement additionally said: 

Following the typical GOP playbook and loudly blowing the dog whistle of standing behind the “thin blue line,” Uncle Sen. Tim Scott knew full well that the Democrats, President Joe Biden, Sen. Cory Booker, and Rep. Karen Bass flat-out rejected the notion of cutting police departments’ budgets, but Scott says what he knows will surely excite his base. 

Both Democrats and supposedly Republicans have been working on legislation around police reform since George Floyd’s murder in 2020, one of the numerous cases involving Black men and women who’ve died at the hands of police and received national attention. Sen. Booker and Rep. Bass say they’ve continued to compromise during the process, but Republicans continue to demand more and more concessions. 

“At the end of the day, it was clear that we were not making the progress that we needed to make,” Booker The Washington Post. 

On Monday, Sen. Scott tweeted a fake plea for Democrats to come back to the negotiating table, but the message smelled as funky as “pluff mud”—the mud made up of decomposed grass that lines the salt marshes in South Carolina. 

This is the same man who denied that President Donald Trump was to blame for the Jan. 6 insurrection and claimed that Rep. Maxine Waters, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are to blame for inciting violence.