House Majority Whip James Clyburn Thursday called for a "real conference" of members of both parties from the House and Senate to hammer out police reform legislation, while at the same time using the current momentum to also dig into education and poverty in the United States.
"I don't want to see a ping pong," the South Carolina Democrat told MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle. "I want to see a real conference where Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate, sit around the table and really talk through these issues.
"I think that we have the real conference, get in the room, and have some real facts and figures, put some video up on the wall and let everybody see exactly what we're dealing with," said Clyburn. "We may come out with a pretty good bill.”
Clyburn insisted that Democrats will work with Republicans to craft legislation, and even though no Republicans voted on the House reform bill coming out of full committee, he thinks they will rest on their bill that is coming out of the Senate.
"I noticed when the Senate had their announcement two days ago, there was a Republican House member standing with them, so I suspect that they have been caught in their activities quite a bit," said Clyburn. "The House Republicans will go with the Senate bill and then we'll hopefully have a real good conference."
Meanwhile, it's time to work toward real change on both police reform and on education and poverty.
"We've got to go directly at that persistent poverty and do it with health care, with education, with schools, with infrastructure, broadband deployment, community health care centers," said Clyburn. "This is the kind of stuff that we've got to do. And I am tired of hearing people telling me how much it costs. If we did everything I just mentioned, build 100 percent out of broadband, build 100 percent coverage of community health centers, it will be about 10 percent of what we spent on that tax break that this administration gave to the upper 1 percent.”
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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