Senator Tim Scott, the lone black Republican in the U.S. Senate, put forward a good police reform bill, and yesterday, Senate Democrats defeated it.

Scott, who has been at the forefront of police reform efforts in the Senate, put his bill forward, offering a lot of good reform policies that would alleviate many of the issues activists on the left and right want to see fixed. The bill even won some praise in mainstream media outlets, and earned him at least one profile at Politico.

One would think, with massive protests and plenty of vocal activists out there, that Scott would be praised for his work. He has been incredibly vocal about his experience as a black man in America, discussing his own interactions with police and the type of discrimination he has faced in his life. However, putting the bill forward and offering solutions on the issue — an issue that has bipartisan agreement over things that should be done — was not enough for the Democratic Party, whose Senators blocked the bill on Wednesday afternoon and ended up on the receiving end of an angry speech from Scott afterward.

Scott’s anger is understandable. His bill was lied about by some folks (like Corey Booker) and straight-up condemned by others (like Kamala Harris) before they’d even read it. Senate Republicans offered Democrats twenty chances to amend the bill. Twenty. They offered nothing, and they never wanted to change what Scott’s bill offered.

Not because they thought it was a bad bill but because they did not want to hand a GOP Senator a victory on the issue.

Consider the GOP’s treatment of the bill in the Senate versus House Democrats’ treatment of their own bill in the other chamber: While Republicans offered Senate Democrats a chance to amend the bill, Democrats voted to bring their bill to the floor without allowing a single GOP amendment. That says a lot about the Democrats, and none of it good in the fight to bring real police reform. //

As Scott acknowledged later in the day, it’s not about police reform, but who was offering it. The Democratic Party does not want a Republican, even the Senate GOP’s only black member, to get any sort of win on the issue, and it is clear now that their party will try to run out the clock before the August recess in order to run on the issue in November.