Steve Scalise Makes Things Uncomfortable for Nancy Pelosi as 'Defund the Police' Debate Is Revived

Much to the delight of House and Senate Republicans, Democrats including the Biden administration have calculatedly revived the national debate over defunding the police, laughably now trying to portray GOP members of Congress as the ones who really want to yank funding from the brave men and women across the country who put their lives on the line every day to keep their communities safe.

But no matter how hard they try, the tactic is blowing up in their faces big time, as my colleague Nick Arama reported Monday.

Helping in the effort to make Democrats squirm even more over their stupid decision to gaslight the American people over the issue was House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), who appeared on Fox News this morning and made things rather uncomfortable for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and company as he threw her anti-police rhetoric and that of her colleagues right back in their faces.

“Everybody knows it was Democrats who started this crazy, radical, extremist move to defund police,” Scalise stated. “All the big city mayors that defunded their police, whether it’s New York, Los Angeles, Chicago – they’re all Democrats.”

Then Scalise turned up the heat on Pelosi and other Congressional Democrats, noting that “Speaker Pelosi just recently called police ‘stormtroopers.'” Also, he pointed out, “you had one of her top lieutenants in Congress on the Democrat side [say] police are inherently racist and need to be abolished.”

“Now they’re seeing the dumpster fire they created,” he observed before dropping facts about crime in Democrat-run cities. “I mean crime’s up – almost 80 shootings in Chicago over the weekend where they defunded police. And so what is their answer to admit they were wrong? They never admit they were wrong. They’re just going to try to blame somebody else.”

Watch:

Rep. @SteveScalise on which party bears responsibility for defunding the police:

"That's Democrats who did it. Now they're seeing the dumpster fire they created." pic.twitter.com/AdMHux8jhG

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) June 29, 2021

As I said yesterday, Republicans are more than happy to have this debate and to drag it out to the 2022 midterms, because the facts are not on the Democrats’ side.

The “defund the police” movement was the core tenet of the Black Lives Matter marches in 2020, which Democrats wholly embraced even to the point some Dem-run city councils took action to demonstrate their loyalty to the cause by denigrating law enforcement officers to the point there were en masse retirements and corresponding rising crime rates in those same cities:

This is the cost of liberal soft-on-crime policies. https://t.co/S7C4A6JOIS

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) June 28, 2021

Further, in some cities across the country, due to funding that was pulled from local police departments by those Democrat-run city councils (like in Asheville, NC, for example) police are having to cut back on the type of 911 calls and criminal complaints that they follow up on because they simply don’t have the resources to do their jobs:

Since 1/1/20 APD has lost 84 officers. As a result, several changes in officer response will go into effect immediately to improve response times for emergency calls made to 911. #avlnews @WLOS_13 @asheville @wyffnews4 @WSPA7 @foxcarolinanews @SpecNews1MTN @newsradio570 pic.twitter.com/WBiSZOifFB

— Asheville Police (@AshevillePolice) June 2, 2021

Considering how the Democrats’ embrace of the “defund the police” movement cost House Democrats dearly last fall, their effort to try and reframe this debate by switching the roles of the characters in the production may go down in history as one of the dumbest political stunts ever attempted, but I’m glad to see the response from Republicans like Scalise and others has been three simple words:

Bring. It. On.