Video of the beating of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police has revived talk of police reform efforts that fizzled out in the Senate in 2021. But Republican lawmakers expressed little optimism for reaching a compromise, despite the renewed conversations and widespread outrage that Nichols’s death has engendered.

In the wake of the 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Tim Scott, R-S.C., spent months negotiating a police reform deal they hoped could attract enough Republican votes to pass the Senate, after the Democratic-controlled House passed a police revision bill named after Floyd. Those talks collapsed, however, even after Democrats privately scaled back the proposal to avoid controversial changes to qualified immunity, which shields police officers from lawsuits.

Unlike when Scott and Booker previously negotiated, Republicans now control the House, and they’ve shown little interest so far in the type of policy changes discussed in 2021.

“You tell me what law is going to change that terrible behavior we saw,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, the likely forum for any police reform bills.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s, R-Calif., position on the matter has been to defer to Jordan on the probability of legislation passing that falls under his committee’s jurisdiction, according to multiple leadership aides who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Booker and Scott, two of three Black senators, have remained in touch on the issue, a Senate aide said, and have talked about how to more formally restart the discussions.

Scott also discussed his desire to pursue reforms at lunch with his colleagues on Tuesday, although Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who was involved in the talks last time, did not express optimism about much coming out of them.

“I don’t know if anything’s going to happen,” Graham said, adding that a few liberal Democrats’ calls to “defund the police” in 2020 “hangs over things now.”

Nichols’s death revives reform talks

Videos released last week show Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, being brutally beaten, kicked and pepper-sprayed by Memphis police officers. Nichols died three days after the beating, and five officers, all of whom are Black, face local charges of second-degree murder. The Justice Department is also investigating.

Nichols’s parents are attending President Biden’s State of the Union address next week as a guest of a Democratic lawmaker, and the president has urged Congress to act. Vice President Harris will attend Nichols’s funeral on Wednesday.

In a floor speech Monday that in part excoriated Democrats, Scott called for “simple legislation” that would include more funding to police departments for de-escalation training and more resources for officers on the scene who have a “duty to intervene” when a police interaction with a civilian dangerously escalates.

“Politics too often gets in the way of doing what every American knows is common sense,” Scott said. “Here we find ourselves again having the same conversation with no action having happened.”

Scott, the Senate’s lone Black Republican, is traveling to Iowa in the coming weeks, sparking speculation that he may be considering a presidential run.

Democrats also called for Republicans to come back to the table, saying they wanted legislation that goes beyond what was negotiated in 2021. “I want to rekindle this conversation, and if others want to participate, they’re welcome,” Sen. Dick Durbin, Ill., the No. 2 Senate Democrat and chair of the Judiciary Committee, told reporters.

A Booker spokeswoman said the senator was contacting colleagues on both sides of the aisle and “is considering all legislative options to raise the levels of transparency, accountability and professionalism in American policing.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who was involved in past criminal justice reform discussions, said he didn’t see much opportunity for a deal given the chambers’ split. “Particularly with a divided Congress, I think that’s going to make things more challenging,” Cornyn said. “We’ve been talking about it for two years, and I don’t expect a breakthrough here.”

In 2021, the Democratic-controlled House spurred action in the Senate by passing their own bill, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, that would have created a federal database for officer misconduct allegations, incentivized states to end “no-knock” warrants and limited transfer of military equipment to police, among other changes. That effort followed the deaths of several Black people at the hands of police, including Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

“The real impetus for the 2021 talks came out of the House, and that’s not going to happen now,” said Jim Pasco, the executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police union, which was deeply involved in the 2021 negotiations. “That said, it’s also extraordinarily important and worth the effort, so we should keep trying.”

Democrats hope Biden will put pressure on Congress to act in his upcoming State of the Union address, and the president plans to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus at the White House to discuss reforms on Thursday.

“Our goal right now is to get the president to use the power of his office to make this issue a centerpiece of his State of the Union,” said Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus who invited Nichols’ mother and stepfather to the speech before Congress.

Horsford said that the president played a role in passing gun legislation, an infrastructure bill and a microchips manufacturing bill last Congress with bipartisan support and that he should try to do the same on policing.

“We want him to be involved in this because it’s important enough to the American people that all of our communities are safe,” Horsford said.

On Monday, Biden urged Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. “I think we should do it right now,” he said. “We should have done it before.”

But the House has struggled to vote on even some of their highest-priority bills – including a border proposal – in the past few weeks, given the chamber’s narrow and fractious Republican majority.

Two criminal justice proposals have also been caught in the delays. One is a resolution that would simply express Congress’s gratitude towards U.S. law enforcement and condemn any efforts to defund the police. The other was a proposal by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., that would require state and local prosecutors receiving funds via a government grant program to report some prosecution data to the attorney general.

It’s unlikely those two bills are brought straight to the floor anytime soon because of a lack of support in the House and a sense that the timing would appear insensitive after Memphis, according to a senior Republican aide.

Rep. Pete Stauber, R-Minn., who served as a police officer for 20 years, said he is engaged in conversations to reintroduce his police restructuring bill that had more than 130 GOP co-sponsors last term.

Asked whether police reform is a priority for the GOP majority, Stauber said that “support for the police is a high priority” and that the “horrendous” incident in Memphis will lead to justice at the local level. “Nobody dislikes a bad cop more than a good cop,” he said.

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