Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WV, claimed this weekend that he doesn’t know of any Democrat who would actually defund the police.
Manchin, who has criticized the Democratic Party’s far left circles, argued his party has been unfairly tagged with the ‘Defund the police’ movement.
“I’m a West Virginia Democrat, a proud West Virginia Democrat, and I don’t know of any Democrat that I know of that would ever defund the police and how that got on as a mantra that that’s a Democrat slogan, that’s not true,” he told NBC News. “And how all these other things that seem to be extremes are not true it’s not who we are but we were tagged with that.”
There are, however, multiple examples of prominent Democrats coming out in support of the ‘Defund the Police movement.’ Last week progressive “Squad” members hit back at former President Barack Obama for deriding the policy as a “snappy slogan.”
With all due respect, Mr. President—let’s talk about losing people. We lost Michael Brown Jr. We lost Breonna Taylor. We’re losing our loved ones to police violence.
It’s not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive. Defund the police. https://t.co/Wsxp1Y1bBi
— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) December 2, 2020
We lose people in the hands of police. It’s not a slogan but a policy demand. And centering the demand for equitable investments and budgets for communities across the country gets us progress and safety. https://t.co/Vu6inw4ms7
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) December 2, 2020
But Manchin claimed the real problem with the ‘Defund the police’ accusation against Democrats was their failure to rebut the charge.
“We were slow probably as a party at responding to it and saying, ‘Listen, there’s more to us if you look at basically our bedrock of who we are,'” he said.
