Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) weighed in on the Democrats’ pushback against the Senate GOP’s police reform bill.
Although Democrat and GOP leadership sound like agreement on the legislation is far off, Collins said he believes a bipartisan bill “can happen.”
“I see that it can happen, but it’s got to happen when you take the politics of what people want to do, like we’re going to have here … taking on a lot of different things instead of focusing on the real issues that we need to talk about — transparency, vulnerability, those with our police departments, making sure accountability happens but also giving them the technology and the training to make sure that police are trained in de-escalation instead of escalation, making sure that they understand how to deal with mental health and addictions and other things that they’re going through so that the police and communities can come together,” Collins told host Sandra Smith.
“Bipartisan agreement can happen,” he added. “I did First Step Act, that was a criminal justice bill — a huge bill that we did bipartisanly — that’s how you get stuff done. But you’ve got to take the politics aside, and you have to get to what actually works.”
Fox News played clips of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) criticizing the other party’s legislation, but Collins said what he heard from the two is “the perfect recipe to get something done.”
“When you hear Chuck Schumer saying this is too narrow when you hear McConnell rightly saying that this bill is too much of a broad overreach and to start looking at the things we can do, you’ve now set the stage for the things we can do,” he emphasized.
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent
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