GOP lawmakers are doing everything they can to silence racial-justice protests
Following the signing of a Florida “anti-riot” law that, among other things, grants civil immunity to people who decide to drive their cars into protesters who are blocking a road and makes it a second-degree felony to destroy a plaque, memorial, painting, flag, or other structure commemorating historical people or events, The New York Times reports that GOP lawmakers in dozens of states have introduced anti-protest bills meant to silence people speaking out for justice.
Oklahoma and Iowa, for instance, were apparently inspired by what Florida did re: basically encouraging drivers to strike protesters with their cars, and passed similar bills granting legal protections in certain situations for drivers who hit protesters supposedly blocking the street. In Indiana a Republican proposal would ban anyone convicted of unlawful assembly from holding state employment.
A Minnesota bill would bar people convicted of unlawful protesting from receiving unemployment benefits, housing assistance, and even student loans.
In Kentucky, where Breonna Taylor was killed by the police inside her apartment last year, the State Senate passed a bill that would make it a crime to insult a police officer with “offensive or derisive” words or gestures that could “provoke a violent response.” (In other words, one could be charged for using words that caused a police officer to violently respond to them.) That measure would have required those arrested to be held in jail for a minimum of 48 hours, a rule that does not automatically apply to people arrested in Kentucky on charges of arson, rape, or murder. While the bill died in the statehouse, its lead sponsor, Republican state senator Danny Carroll, said he would refile it next session.
“This is consistent with the general trend of legislators’ responding to powerful and persuasive protests by seeking to silence them rather than engaging with the message of the protests,” Vera Eidelman, a lawyer at the ACLU, told the Times. “If anything, the lesson from the last year, and decades, is not that we need to give more tools to police and prosecutors, it’s that they abuse the tools they already have.”
Of course, despite seeing a need to viciously crack down on peaceful protesters, most Republicans have had precious little to say about the violence perpetrated at the Capitol building by Trump supporters on January 6, which Florida state senator Shervin Jones sees as a clear indication of GOP lawmakers’ true intentions: to target people of color. He called the bill Florida signed into law on Monday “racist at its core.”
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