Cruz challenges Biden DOJ pick's contention that she opposes defunding policePresident Biden's Justice Department Civil Rights Division nominee Kristen Clarke insisted during her Wednesday confirmation hearing that she does not support defunding police, but Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, confronted her with a recent article she wrote that, he claimed, proves otherwise.
Early in the hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., attempted to get ahead of the controversy by asking Clarke about a June 2020 Newsweek opinion piece she wrote about the subject.
"The article that you referenced, senator, I wrote to make clear that I do not support defunding the police," Clarke said. "I do support finding strategies to ensure that law enforcement can carry out their jobs more safely and effectively. And channeling resources to emotional health treatment and other severely under-resourced areas I think is one path forward."
Later in the hearing, Cruz brought up the Newsweek piece, first by pointing to its headline: "I Prosecuted Police Killings. Defund the Police—But Be Strategic."
"Do you still believe it is a good idea to defund the police?" Cruz asked.
"I do not support defunding the police," Clarke responded. "The impetus to writing that op-ed was to make clear that I do not support defunding the police and I spend considerable time talking about the need to channel resources to places such as mental health treatment to alleviate some of the burdens that we place on the doorstep of law enforcement and the issues we ask them to wrestle with that are outside their core competency."
Cruz interrupted, pointing to how the article's title said "defund the police." He then went into the body of the op-ed. He referenced the beginning, which said that the protests across the country in 2020 "opened up space for transformative policy discussions," and that "into that space has surged a unifying call from the Black Lives Matter movement: 'Defund the police.'"....
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cruz-challenges-kristen-clarke-defund-police
