| | |  | BY RENUKA RAYASAM | Presented by Gilead Sciences, Inc. | With help from Tyler Weyant
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| GUILTY — President Joe Biden said this evening that the “verdict is a step forward,” after a jury found former police officer Derek Chauvin guilty on three counts, including second- and third-degree murder, in the death of George Floyd. “We can’t leave this moment, and look away thinking our work is done,” he said. “We have a chance to begin to change the trajectory in this country.” Floyd’s death last May sparked a year of civil unrest that reshaped the presidential election as well as scores of local races across the country. Nightly chatted over Slack this evening with Brakkton Booker, national political reporter and author of The Recast , about the verdict. This conversation has been edited. What an emotional afternoon. The moment hasn’t hit me yet. I did get to sit down for like an hour before the verdict came so that’s my rest. Are you surprised about the verdict? Yes, I was surprised, no doubt. Once the trial proceedings ended Monday, my thinking, perhaps from covering a number of these over my career was that Derek Chauvin might only get convicted of the lesser charge, manslaughter — if that. It’s usually very difficult to convict officers who face charges for excessive force in the line of duty. But of course this was no ordinary case. Biden said today justice was served. Do you think that’s true in a larger sense? Will anything change when it comes to policing and race relations in the country? In this particular case, I think you can say yes it was. But I can’t help but think, what if all this mountain of video evidence wasn’t present, would the jury have reached the same verdict? Also the bigger issue is how communities of color, particularly Black and brown people, are policed. That issue does not get resolved with the singular verdict reached today in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin. That justice will take a little more time. Speaker Nancy Pelosi thanked Floyd for sacrificing his life to justice, which many thought was a pretty clumsy response to the news. Why do you think it’s so hard for politicians to talk about race in this country? Look, issues of race are difficult to navigate. It was not her finest moment, but I can argue neither was her wearing Kente cloth and taking a knee before cameras last year as a show of solidarity. How do you see this verdict being politicized in coming days/weeks? Are fault lines already emerging? We’re definitely going to see how this plays along ideological party lines here. I was talking to one conservative source who says you are not going to see too many so-called Back-the-Blue supporters coming out in defense of Chauvin. He said the conduct the ex-officer displayed was indefensible. On the legislative side it looks like police reform is going to be squarely back on the table. It’s already passed the House; now will there be motivation on the Senate side to get it passed. And will there be GOP support for the measure? That’s always the question in Washington these days. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas for us at rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @renurayasam.
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A message from Gilead Sciences, Inc.: Known to keep pushing. Decades of discovery lie behind every breakthrough. From HIV to viral hepatitis to today’s battle with COVID-19, Gilead scientists have been pushing boundaries for over 30 years. So that we can bring tomorrow’s life-changing therapies forward today. To know more, visit Gilead.com. | | | AN EXPERT WEIGHS IN ON THE CHAUVIN VERDICT — On April 29, 1992, after seven days of deliberations , jurors largely acquitted four police officers for the beating of Rodney King, which had been caught on video. The verdict set off days of rioting in Los Angeles, with thousands of National Guardsmen and federal troops dispatched to the city. Now, nearly 30 years later, crowds across the country cheered the guilty verdict against Chauvin. One woman standing near the spot where George Floyd was murdered cried after she heard the news. Renu reached out to Omar Wasow, a Princeton politics professor who focuses on race and protest movements, to talk about how this verdict will shape our political climate. This conversation has been edited. What are the parallels and differences between the Chauvin trial and the one against four police officers for beating Rodney King in 1992? Part of what makes an event like the trial of the officers accused of beating Rodney King possible was the recording of a video that took what might have been a routine officer-involved death into something that has transformed our politics. Now it’s the same thing: Somebody who happens to document what would otherwise be unseen by much of America. One big difference — we’ve now had 30 years of these videos with increasing frequency now that smartphones are video cameras. We have seen a broad shift particularly for whites, that this is a much more pervasive part of policing than they understood. That’s much more true of white Democrats than white Republicans. But even among young Republicans, they look significantly different than the older Republicans in terms of seeing issues of race as being more systematic than just idiosyncratic acts of a rogue officer. What do you think the next few days hold for us as a country? There’s a kind of unpredictability to what happens with protests and resistance movements. What is predictable is that whatever happens, we’re going to keep finding ourselves reliving these kinds of conflicts, protest waves, in some cases even uprisings that escalate to violence until the underlying processes of policing change and more generally unless society changes. There’s a film, LA 92, that opens with footage of the Watts uprising in 1965 and the commentary that was offered about the frustration with police abuse in Los Angeles. Then we see in the course of 1992 how much of that same analysis can be made unchanged essentially 30 years after that wave of violent protest. That is a really dark view — that nothing will change as a result of these protests over George Floyd’s death. There is reason for optimism. There has been a significant wave of reform efforts around the country, but they are not proportional to the need, and so we should assume we're going to find ourselves back here again. In Los Angeles, there actually were significant reforms. There was a period of unrestrained violence and a kind of militarization of the LAPD that has been reigned in. There were things like gang squads that were essentially given free rein to do whatever they want and often became quite corrupt, and those sorts of groups were shut down and that made a big difference. We have seen changes to use-of-force policies around the country. Some of it might just seem bureaucratic but in fact there’s evidence that those kinds of policy changes can change the policing behavior on the ground. There is still reform that could be done like with policing in cars. People get stopped for trivialities that are pretexts to begin investigations. An expired registration shouldn’t lead to use of force. The key thing being that in order to have that one kind of horrific incident, you need a large denomination of essentially low-grade stops that don’t escalate to violence but have that potential. The shooting or the killing is a relatively rare event, but what is not a rare event is the constant surveillance and monitoring and policing of Black people driving. How will history remember this moment? I teach a film in politics class. There are things like the Oklahoma City bombing, where 168 people get killed, and my students have only the vaguest sense of what that was. Children today won’t really know anything more about this than as a footnote in history. For people who are slightly older, for high school students and college students, this is highly transformative for them. ... This will really shape their world views about how race operates in America.
| | ‘THERE’S A BROADER PRINCIPLE AT STAKE’ — Who can vote in the next election — and how easily — will depend on where Americans live more than at any point in recent decades. Red and blue states are on opposite tracks in shaping the electoral process: As Republicans pass some of the most restrictive voting laws of modern times, Democrats are ramping up a strategy to expand voting rights by passing bill after bill to make it easier for more Americans to access the ballot box, Liz Crampton writes for The Fifty. Democrat-led states like New York, New Jersey and Virginia have been busy chipping away at electoral guardrails, approving automatic voter registration and other measures designed to increase turnout, as GOP-helmed Georgia, Florida and Texas are trying to make it harder to vote under the guise of voter integrity. “New York had one of the worst voter participation rates in the country and we needed to remedy that,” said New York Senate Deputy Leader Michael Gianaris, a Democrat whose automatic registration bill was signed into law in December. “There’s a broader principle at stake when so many states are moving in the opposite direction and making it more difficult to vote for blatantly political reasons.” When Democrats gained control of the New York Senate in 2018 after decades of Republican leadership, they immediately went to work undoing the state’s restrictive voting laws. They kept it up for the next few years. Within weeks of gaveling into each session, Democrats leveraged their majorities in both chambers to pass laws that expanded early and absentee voting and registered voters when they went to the DMV to get a driver’s license. This year, they’re also aiming to codify an executive order from Gov. Andrew Cuomo that restores voting rights to people with prior convictions.
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| | STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING : The Biden administration is quickly approaching 100 days in office — has it delivered on its early promises? What tactics and strategies are being debated in West Wing offices? What’s really being talked about behind the scenes in negotiations with Congress on the infrastructure plan? Add Transition Playbook to your daily reads for details that you won’t find anywhere else that reveal what’s really happening inside the West Wing and across the executive branch. Track the people, policies and power centers of the Biden administration. Subscribe today. | | | | | | | — GOP fails to censure Waters: A GOP push to punish Rep. Maxine Waters for encouraging protests against police bias fizzled today. But its collapse laid bare a massive problem facing congressional leaders in both parties as they struggle to rein in members’ inflammatory rhetoric. — Ukraine: 120,000 Russian troops soon stationed at border: The situation has rattled Western allies, who fear an invasion could be afoot. Moscow annexed the Crimea region from Ukraine in 2014, drawing international condemnation and setting off a years-long, low-level skirmish along the border between the two countries. — GOP senators float $600-800 billion infrastructure counteroffer: Republican senators today discussed a counterproposal to Biden’s infrastructure plan, likely coming in at $600 billion to $800 billion and paid for with user fees and unspent Covid relief money. — Facebook oversight board’s newest member voiced skepticism about Trump ban: Facebook’s oversight board today tapped as its newest member a prominent human rights lawyer who has argued that the company may have a tough time selling the panel on why it should uphold former President Donald Trump’s suspension from the platform.
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| | | | | Nightly asks you: A New York Times headline turned viral meme posits that “you can be a different person after the pandemic.” How has the pandemic changed you? Use the form to send your answers , and we’ll include select responses in Friday’s edition.
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| | JOIN TOMORROW – A PLAYBOOK INTERVIEW WITH COMMERCE SECRETARY GINA RAIMONDO: A day after testifying before the Senate about the Biden administration's $2 trillion infrastructure and climate plan, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo will join Playbook co-authors Ryan Lizza and Eugene Daniels to discuss the prospects of the plan's passage. They will also cover Biden's relationship with corporate America, the administration's milestones as it approaches the 100-day mark and what to expect from Biden’s address to Congress. REGISTER HERE. | | | | | | | | |
About 8 weeks The amount of time Judge Peter Cahill announced will pass between today’s verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial and his sentencing. |
| | | THAT HOUR — Nightly’s Tyler Weyant emails us: My faucet has been dripping. It’s not the sort of thing where you call a plumber right away, but damn, is it annoying. And I know it’s been dripping, because I’ve been home, like so many of us have been, sitting, working, eating, repeating. This afternoon, when the news of the verdict came out, it came with a caveat: We’d have to wait about an hour to hear it. And so, I sat, making plans for the newsletter you’re reading right now, delving back into the doomscrolling habits I thought I had under control. And listening to my faucet. Drip. I thought of my friends, who told me last summer, in phone calls well into the night, about The Talk their parents had with them, about field trips to plantations they didn’t go on, about living in this country and this world with skin that isn’t white. Drip. I thought of the city I live in, the city that saw heartache and helicopters and hellacious angst over the past year, and about how it could come back. What family members I needed to call if things got bad. What to do about a vaccine appointment I have later this week if it became too difficult to get an Uber or take public transportation. Drip. I thought about George Floyd, and George Floyd’s family, and America. Man, is this a country that is tired. We’ve been staring at screens and trying not to die for a long time, some of us longer than others, and we keep coming to these points where everything going on across America seems to crescendo, leaving us all to await the next dramatic note. Drip. About 10 minutes before the verdict, I got up and smacked my faucet. If I consulted with an expert on such matters, I assume this wouldn’t be the advised action. But, as I stood briefly, just enjoying not reading tweets or slacks screaming at me, it seemed to have ameliorated the situation. And then it came. And the speeches, the pressers, all of it. The photos of relief and family. And my thought that, while one trial is over, there’s still so much more to do. There are just some problems that one trial, however momentous, won’t come close to fixing. And, as though God had heard my thoughts, an answer came faintly from the kitchen. Drip.
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A message from Gilead Sciences, Inc.: Decades of discovery lie behind every breakthrough. For more than 30 years, Gilead scientists have been pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. We’ve worked to advance the science that has unlocked therapeutics for HIV, viral hepatitis, and even COVID-19.
Today, Gilead therapeutics are at work, effectively providing treatment for millions. But we’re not stopping any time soon. We’re committed to the relentless pursuit of scientific discovery. To keep pushing to the next goal. To bring tomorrow’s life-changing therapies forward today. And then reach farther.
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