me as a very distant cousin but with hair. the latest billionaire space joyride, for instance, but the pro insurrectionist rally at the capitol won't be one of those things. the far right pro insurrectionist crowd was small and was seemingly outnumbered by police, journalists and counter protestors. traditionally protests in defense of prisoners, in this case those jailed for their role in the january 6th terrorism. traditionally the number of protesters exceeds the number of pris nors. here the ratio was reversed. on average there was not even one concerned citizen per imprisoned insurrectionist. the rally itself was relatively short and peaceful. four people were arrested mainly for weapons violations. meanwhile, at the capitol building they swarmed, or should i say trickled around. lawmakers will be looking at actual governing. if you want to get a accepts of

what's at stake in the days and weeks ahead. biden's entire presidential agenda rests on expansive spending bill. and, indeed, president biden continues to try to rally democrats around his $3.5 trillion spending package, especially senator joe manchin who remains opposed in addition to the separate bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill. house speaker nancy pelosi is expected to hold a bill on biden's larger spending package until the end of the month although it is widely expected to be altered and revised in the senate. without manchin's vote, democrats can't pass the package for budget reconciliation. they are threatening to hold up a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure deal which is expected to happen this week and has passed the senate until the larger package has a vote. in washington right now it is the season of competing leverage. another reported sticking point in the interparty negotiations

has to do with the future of the affordable care act and whether to make the enhanced subsidies permanent or roll it into a medicare expansion and now politico reports 21 former house democrats who lost seats back in 2010 owing in part the gop attacks and ds information about the aca have signed a letter to president biden urging him to use reconciliation to shore up the legislation before history repeats itself. as for the president, he will be on capitol hill much of the week. he travels right here to new york city for the united nations general assembly which takes place weeks after the disastrous withdrawal from afghanistan and days after the u.s. admitted that a drone strike killed no terrorists but instead 10 innocent civilians including 7 children. joining me now to discuss it all, politico national correspondent betsy

woodruff-swan. betsy, you've been reporting on how those responsible for the january 6th insurrection used ticktock. you've been following a big decision brewing ahead of executive privilege regarding january 6th. first, talk to me about the giant protest that was to be yesterday and what in fact happened? >> part of the reason that there was such a dramatic lead up to this protest is that the senior leaders at the u.s. capitol police department are still reeling over the fact that they really, really, really messed up in the lead up to the january 6th attack on the capitol. so now everyone in national security, federal law enforcement is very eager to overcompensate on the opposite direction. if they see anything involving far right activists gathering in large numbers, they're assuming that it's going to be very dangerous and violent. it's a bit of an over correction which is not super shocking.

what's really interesting about this new challenge that law enforcement folks face in the wake of january 6th is that there is a massive purge of far right extremist conspiracy theorist types from all of the main street attack on january 6th. what people in law enforcement worry about, what i hear about overand over, many extremists have migrated to much frinier communication channels and they've planned potential events elsewhere. law enforcement, frankly, feels that right now they're behind the curve. they're possibly not keeping up with the way these extremists are developing new and secretive communication channels. part of the reason there was so much concern in the lead up to the protests that happened yesterday was that law enforcement officials didn't know what they didn't know and they worried that there could have been more organizing and more detailed plans for violence going on in parts of the

internet where they have major blind spots. what we learned yesterday is at least in the case of this particular event, that ended up not being a problem. but looking forward, it's something that people in law enforcement and intelligence space are quite worried about. of course, it's complicated additionally because of constitutional and civil rights issues. broadly speaking, law enforcement in this country has a nasty history of monitoring dissent, obviously particularly disproportionately when it comes to people of color. because of that, we have a culture of being very skeptical when it comes to law enforcement monitoring of social media. that's something that makes it even trickier for people in that space to try to stay on top of what the far right is doing. if anything, what we saw yesterday is that at least in the case of the event that happened then, they were pretty much on top of it. >> betsy woodruff-swan, thank you so much for joining us this sunday morning. >> sure thing. joining me now, democratic representative gwen moore, a

member of the ways and means committee. thank you so much for joining us. tell us this "new york times" framing this morning of a kind of make or break moment for president biden's legacy. all of it on the line in this $3.5 trillion spending bill. what do we expect? what do you expect in the coming days with this legislation? >> thanks for having me. i really appreciate the hair. although i miss ali, the hair is great. good to be with you. i think that democrats on the committee on ways and means are extremely proud of the many grueling hours that we put into our mark where we focused on tax fairness, not gouging the rich, but just being fair and more progressive. and really trying to meet some urgent needs, and that is typically the middle class. we expanded the child tax

credit. provided retirement security for folkes. really dealt with climate change. that's another topic, but think about it. we either deal with it now ordeal with consequences that are 14 times worse than the fires and floods and stuff that we've been dealing with now. the green economy. and we've done it. we're really proud of that mark. we think we can carry the case to the american public to move people in the senate like joe manchin. we think that we have made the case for expanding medicaid to those 12 states. i'm from one of them, wisconsin, where the -- where the states under republican rule have not saw fit to provide people with medical care. and so i think that what is going to enable us to overcome these challenges to the mark is

really the overwhelming public support that we're feeling for providing dental, vision, hearing to medicare patients. we think we've done a really, really good job without, again, gouging the wealthy, not resenting the wealthy but asking them to pay their fair share. >> congresswoman, do you -- there was this very big vociferous argument in the primary in 2020 and also in 2016 among democrats between the progressive wing of the party, the moderate wing of the party represented by joe biden. do you soak the rich, do you not. do you do a wealth tax, do you not? do you talk about sweeping government change or not? it seems to me in the kind of legislation you're talking about, that conflict has been somewhat synthesized into a relatively unified position on

using government to solve problems. can you talk about where that argument has been resolved in the somewhat improbable biden presidency? >> you know, what good is government if it's not there for the safety, security and health of the country? it would be wonderful if markets worked perfectly and that the self-interests of business would just trickle down, which is what we've seen not work for the past 50 years. so that's where government regulation really comes into play like our requirement that there be some retirement security for folk. that we provide the child tax credit which, of course, i've provided your producers with some graphics here to really demonstrate the difference that we have made in our mark and what the republicans did with their tax cut and job act. we -- you know, our chairman,

richie neil, you know, also constantly framed this in terms of getting 218 votes. so many of us would have wanted to do wildly -- wild things in terms of collecting more revenue. some of us, you know, didn't want to do anything that found ourselves more on side of some of the republican comments but we have synthesized this, to use your term, by focusing on the 218 votes we need to pass and i think we've accomplished that. >> congresswoman, before i let you go, we had this news over recent days, the you states admitting a mistake, quote unquote mistake in killing citizens in afghanistan. do you believe the united states has committed war crimes in that country and there needs to be

more accountability than there has been? >> well, i certainly am not in a position to speak, you know, instead of the international war crimes committee. i -- commission. i do know that leaving afghanistan was not going to be smooth. i mean, i didn't expect some sort of parade to the airport and mutual hand shakes, fist bumps or kisses to get out of afghanistan. we grieve every single life of our personnel and certainly any innocent civilians. we're working very hard to integrate those citizens who have come to our country into our country or to find places for them to go, and i do think it's really too soon to start talking about war crimes. i think we have exited afghanistan and of course we can

monday morning quarterback the whole situation but i do think that it is too soon to talk about war crimes. >> thank you so much for joining us sunday morning. >> thank you for having me. coming up, we head to texas. ground zero for the fight for abortion rights where one doctor has just announced he has openly defied the new abortion ban. and some much needed good news in the fight against covid-19 for real. the anti-vaxxers are losing. we'll take a look at the evidence ahead. ♪♪ it's the easiest because it's the cheesiest. kraft. for the win win. age is just a number. and mine's unlisted. try boost® high protein with 20 grams of protein for muscle health. versus 16 grams in ensure high protein. boost® high protein also has key nutrients

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horizon. convincing everyone to get it. that second fight has been no less grueling but today we can say, do not despair because difficult as this national project of persuasion might be, the numbers are moving in the right direction. what more and more data seem to suggest is that the unvaccinated are best thought of as not one monolithic group but two. unvaccinated with questions in their head and the unvaccinated without questions. the group that gets all the attention are the ones without question. the people who simply will not get vaccinated ever, whether because they are so deeply entrenched in the trumpian right wing death cult that they would rather take a drug meant for horses than get the shot or for some other reason, these people say they are unmovable. perhaps we ought to believe them. but there's another group and the data increasingly tell a different story about them. these are the unvaccinated people with questions, questions

about whether the side effects will keep them home for a couple days and will get them in trouble at work. questions about the history of medical racism in the country. questions about chronic conditions they have and interactions. it's important to remember that having these questions is not equivalent to living in a trumpian death cult. we see this now in the numbers because this group appears to be reachable and persuadable. day by day legions of them are having their questions answered and are changing their minds which suggests the possibility of rare good news in this pandemic. the anti-vaxxers may be losing because that group is getting smaller. a new monmouth poll shows the share of americans who likely said they would never get the vaccine has fallen from 24% in january to 15% right now. a whopping 42% reduction, meaning herd immunity doesn't sound so impossible anymore. joining me now is tara haley.

a science journalist who covers vaccine hesitancy and is the author of "vaccination investigation, the history and science of vaccines." tara, thank you for joining us. the poll i mentioned shows this quite promising significant drop in the number of holdouts. how do you interpret that? and how would you think about this notion of there being some kind of trumpian hard core disinformation junkies on one hand and on the other a group of more perfect situatable people who may have a different set of hesitations about the vaccine. >> i am not surprised at all. there is a tiny core of people who are totally unreachable. they're usually very small. we're talking usually below 5% so i would expect that number to drop even further. and they're not ever reachable, but there are the others who are reachable. they tend to follow along the

continuum, a continuum of i don't think i ever want to get it but that's different than i will never get it. all the way to i've been thinking about it and i'm leaning toward it and i have a few more questions i want to answer. so it doesn't surprise me at all and it's definitely good news. >> i wonder for those of us who are, you know, believers in science, as you are and i am, and who share the goals of the government in persuading people to take this vaccine, what mistakes have we made in perhaps condescending to some of those folks who are holdouts with questions as opposed to death cult snems. >> how much time do you have? we've made a lot of errors. the biggest ones have been that they're all one monolithic group. the vaccine hesitant individuals are a very diverse group of people. they have different desires and needs and fears and concerns and they fall along a continuum. they're not just the vaccine refusers over here.

the other thing we've done is mock them and assume they don't believe in science. most of them do believe in science, they trust doctors or they trust the doctor they have and know if they have one but we haven't done a good enough job of creating access for them. access includes making sure everybody has access to someone they trust who has accurate information that they can ask any questions they have about the vaccine and that person will give them information that is satisfying to them and accurate. that is part of access. i don't think we've done enough of creating spaces for that kind of access for individuals. then we've just assumed they are stupid or antiscience or any number of other things that are not fair or accurate characterizations. >> in the minute or so we have left, can you give us a little bit of a master class? a lot of people watching this have folks in their family who are in this group of holdouts with questions, have folks in their religious community, other people they know, love, have some trust with.

give us a couple tips for approaching those people in a way that's likely to increase their odds of vaccination. >> the number one first thing you need to do is listen. create a safe, comfortable place. you know, maybe when i brought this up in the past i haven't been very fair. can you just help me understand what are your concerns? what worries you? and you have to listen to what they actually are worried about and let them keep going. keep asking questions until you feel like you've heard everything that's concerning them and say, would you be open to listening to or seeing some other information that addresses some of those concerns? and start small. start slow. start with easier stuff, if you will. but you have to constantly be reassuring, empathetic, accepting. all the things that frankly it's really hard to be right now, and i understand that, but if a person doesn't feel safe they're not goings to talk to them about

it. you're asking them to stick a needle in their arm to put chemicals in their arm that they don't understand. to get them to that level of vulnerability. >> a call for listening in america in 2021 to people you disagree with. tara haele, thank you very much. the book is "vaccination investigation, the history and science of vaccines." coming up, we'll look at one doctor's fight to provide safe abortion practices in texas. the first glimpses of civil disobedience against the new law. you don't want to miss this. okay, imagine this... your mover, rob, he's on the scene and needs a plan with a mobile hotspot. we cut to downtown, your sales rep lisa has to send some files, like asap! so basically i can pick the right plan for each employee... yeah i should've just led with that...

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19 days ago for the first time in 50 years the u.s. state was allowed to effectively ban most abortions. today we're seeing the first

public instance of civil disobedience in the face of this new law. dr. alan brayed announced an op ed published in today's washington post that he has performed an abortion in open defiance of the state's ban and he explains why. he started his career as an ob-gyn in 1972, the year before roe v. wade made access to abortion the law of the land. abortion was effectively illegal in texas at the time. quote, at the hospital that year, i saw three teenagers die from illegal abortions. one i will never forget. when she came into the e.r. her vaginal cavity was packed with rags. she died a few days later from massive organ failure, caused by a septic infection. when the supreme court brushed aside almost five decades of protection for abortion rights earlier this month and allowed the new texas ban to take

effect, he said for me, it is 1972 all over again. he provided the abortion, he says, because, quote, i had a duty of care to this patient, as i do for all patients, and because she has a fundamental right to receive this care. i fully understood, he writes, that there could be legal consequences, but i wanted to make sure that texas didn't get away with its bid to pro thekt blatantly unconstitutional law for being tested. now thanks to his action it almost certainly will be tested. joining me now is nancy north thup which is representing both the clinic that's fighting the abortion ban in court and dr. braid who is stepping forward in civil disobedience to test it. thank you so much for joining us, nancy. the enforcement mechanism of this abortion ban infamously is that it empowers any average citizen, kind of anywhere, to

sue anyone who violates it, including famously uber drivers who drive people to get abortions. so what happens now for dr. braid? is he just waiting to be sued? >> well, let me just start by saying, you know, it is incredibly courageous that dr. braid published that op ed yesterday in the washington post. you know, this law has been in effect since september 1st. it's now been over two weeks and the people in texas are hurting. it is hard for people to get access to services. people are having to leave the state and, you know, dr. braid has said in his op ed piece that, you know, he provided care to a woman. he's a doctor. this is what he's been doing for almost 50 years. yes, under this vigilante lawsuit it could be now that the lawsuits will be coming. >> i wanted to understand what you know about the state of things on the ground. is this an isolated case of a

doctor doing this and writing about it in the washington post to provoke the legal argument that we need to be having or is this actually happening quietly across texas? are there many, many dr. braids who are simply not in the op ed pages? >> dr. braid is a doctor providing care. not provoking a lawsuit. he has provided care to this patient. we will see what happens next. what is really just frustrating is that the hearing in the department of justice's case, they sued texas a little while ago and it's not going to be until october 1st. that is just too long to have a blatantly unconstitutional law in effect. in fact, this week congress is going to be taking a vote on the women's health protection act which would address the situation in texas and also the

many states that are putting restrictions on access to abortion services. we're just in a crisis at this point with the supreme court having turned its back so it is important for congress to act and it's important that dr. braid put his story out there in the washington post today. >> as you all prepare to have the bigger legal fight about this law and seek to shore up roe, there's been a lot of argument over the years about the legal basis for the ruling, whether privacy was the right legal foundation, whether equality or other legal arguments would have been a more appropriate basis. what are you and your organization going to put forward as the core most important argument for the constitutional right to abortion? >> yes. we just filed our brief. we're representing the last clinic in mississippi in which mississippi has asked the court to overturn roe versus wade. and what we've put forward is

what's been the core for 48 years, that is, it's essential for people who are pregnant, to have control of their bodies, their lives and their futures. the court has said it's in the fundamental right to liberty in the constitution like so many decisions about our families and our lives but also they've made the point that it is about equality. the court has said that control of reproduction for women has been central to our ability to participate fully in the economic, social and political life of the nation. so equality is in the understanding of this liberty interest. in the supreme court's doctrine as it stands today. >> nancy, thank you so much for joining us. also this week, could the war on abortion that dr. braid is defying have the knock on effect of reversing decades of progress on gay rights? we want to bring to your attention an ominous under the radar discussion. waying in on a mississippi case

set to go before the supreme court this fall. trying to use the mississippi case not only to cement the end of roe v. wade but to shatter two decades of civil rights. more broadly it involves jackson women's health organization. the last standing abortion clinic in mississippi. this summer they overruled roe v. wade and if that wasn't enough, jonathan mitchell, the architect of texas's controversial abortion bill jumped on the bandwagon asking the court in an amicus brief to overrule two landmark lgbt rights cases along with roe, you know, while they're at it. in the brief he wrote that same-sex marriage and abortion rights are, quote, judicial concoctions. with me now is barbara mcquade, former u.s. attorney and legal analyst for msnbc. barbara, in the wake of the

supreme court's ruling regarding the texas abortion bill there's this ominous feeling attached to the mississippi case coming up. is there a chance the court will actually overturn roe v. wade for real? >> this ominous feeling you're sensing is a genuine fear. there are a couple of reasons in the tea leaves that we see. one is there were five justices, which is all you need to make a ruling, saw fit to let this texas abortion law stand while they worked it out, meaning that constitutional right under roe is being violated every day as it goes by. likelihood on the merits is an important decision there. the fact that they didn't think that standard was met suggests maybe they don't believe there is a likelihood of success on the merits on an ongoing basis under the precedent of roe. i think the fact that they even took this mississippi case when the lower courts had struck it down which bans abortions after 15 weeks, if they had wanted to

just leave that alone and preserve roe, there would be no reason to take the case. the fact that they're hearing it i think suggests there is a serious likelihood that they are -- at least four justices necessary to take the case are considering overruling roe. i think that concern is well placed. >> i wanted to ask you about this threat to gay rights that seemingly is being slipped into the war on abortion. the mississippi case, we thought, was quite clearly about abortion. why are these landmark lgbt rights cases, lawrence versus texas, why are they being dragged into the dirt along with this assault on roe? >> yeah, i think in this amicus brief, which is a friend of the court, not the parties themselves, all different parties will weigh in on this to share their views, this is texas right to life. i think the audacious nature of their arguments here really gives up the game. this is not about a sound legal

argument based on roe, this is all about an extreme far right agenda and they say that, you know, the word you used is the word they used in the brief, that roe is a judicial concoction, as is the case that found for marriage equality as was the case that permits gay sex and decriminalizes gay sex. judicial concoction means it's not literally in the text of the constitution. you know what else is not literally in the text of the constitution? qualified immune knits at this. executive privilege. the ability to be free from illegal wire taps because they didn't exist. this idea is so far out there, i think, that it is likely to backfire because if the justices follow this line of thinking i think it completely delegitimizes the court. i think when people argue in the over the top fashion it can have

the opposite effect and expose them for the extremists they are. >> barbara, mcquaid. thank you very much. the background behind you, go blue. >> go blue. >> msnbc audio is available 24/7 on the streaming platform tunein. you can hear it any time anywhere on any device with tunein. go to tunein.com/msnbc2021 to listen with tune in premium. the historic spacex splashdown. for a handful of lucky and very wealthy individuals. this is velshi on msnbc.

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you might not have noticed them. a series of steps towards police reform this past week. announcements from the justice department, one at a time, they can sort of fly under the radar but the head of the naacp legal defense fund, she noticed this. and this week she explained that something we probably didn't even pay attention to was really a big deal. she tweeted, and i quote, proof that elections matter and that having civil rights attorneys in d o doj leadership matters. attorney general merrick garland announced a review of the department's use of monitors who oversee concept decrees which can allow police departments from admitting wrongdoing.

the department of justice announced it will ban the use of no knock entries and choke holds by federal law enforcement officers except in cases where deadly force is authorized. last, the department announced a review to ensure that its grant programs to law enforcement comply with the civil rights act of 1964 which forbids the provision of federal funds to programs engaged in racial discrimination. that was all this week. joining me now to help put that list into context, katie benner, pulitzer prize winner for "the new york times" covering the justice department, also msbc contributor. and host of the podcast and former member of president barack obama's 21st century policing task force.

katie, was this expected? how significant is it? what is the department of justice trying to tell us through these actions? >> several measures were expected. they're results of reviews after merrick garland became the attorney general. so the associate is the number three position at the justice department that oversees key programs like grand making programs, a lot of programs that would give money to police officers as well as things like the civil division and other civil rights compliance. so it was really essential that these two leaders got together and wanted to undertake these reviews. and then once they did that work, we saw the results trickle in over the summer this week. >> brittney, i wanted to ask you. you're someone who has functioned as an advocate advocating for change and sometimes at risk to one's identity as an activist. gone inside on the task force to

work within as well. we've had in this country for seven or eight years this argument about policing raised by the up risings of black lives matter. when you look at this slate of actions this week as well as other moves for reform coming, how do you see them in the context of these years of black lives matters demands? >> i continue to see them as a both. you're right. there were questions about whether i should join the task force years ago. in my estimation, the task force was going to happen anyway. my question was whether community voice, activist voices was going to be well considered in the measures that were taken in the recommendations that were made and i sat at a panel with people who would be doing the work from outside and inside of the system. we pushed intently to ensure that we leveraged every single

lever that we had to create change. so, again, i constantly see this as a two-tiered inside outside game. we're never just pulling one lever to make change, and i would be rice to remember, all of us, there are nearly 18,000 police departments across the country and decisions being made about their budgets, their tactics and training every single day. that is work that needs to happen locally and at the state level, not just at the doj. these are steps long overdue. i'm especially heartened by the investigation into georgia prisons. it reflects the kind of work from places like missouri, baton rouge, louisiana. new york city given the long fight to close reikers island. a society is judged by how we treat those that we somehow cast aside. if america is being judged by

that, we're not doing very well. >> katie, i wanted to follow up on brittney's point about georgia. as you know, many states in that region of the country are so averse to the federal government dictating any kind of terms to know, treasonously tried to leave this country in the 19th country, secede from it. and that desire to resist federal authority continues in many forms. what are we expecting in terms of the department of justice's ability to actually enforce the conditions in georgia prisons and tell us what those conditions are that merited this kind of action. >> yes, let's start with the last question first, so there's context. in georgia, we saw last year a devastating prison riot in which security guards, prison guards were taken hostage, fires were lit, people were seriously injured. and before that, we saw conditions deteriorating as prisoners leaked their lives out

to their loved ones and their friends and they went on to social media. we know there were tremendous numbers of killings. a lot of prisoner-on-prisoner violence and there was an epidemic of lgbtq crime, both by inmates and guards. the justice department was investigating what's going on by civil rights allegations by lgbtq prisoners, and it's going to be wrapped into this larger investigation that was just initiated, a top-to-bottom review that especially looks at lgbti-related violence and prisoner-on-prisoner violence, sort of in response to what we know from the public record, that is troubling about georgia's prisons. now, to your point, these reviews do often end in something akin to either a consent decree, a negotiated agreement between municipalities and the justice department for reform, but sometimes states resist. alabama, for example, has resisted. there's been an ongoing investigation, an ongoing

process of trying to get these municipal governments to the table. the department has a lot of levers, including funding it that it can use. i would not say that these states are going to escape accountability. >> this is an incredibly important conversation and we'll continue it in the next block. so to stay with us. brittany packnick cunningham and katie benner. we'll be right back after a quick break. this is velshi on msnbc. back a quick break. this is velshi on msnbc. the legends she births on home town fields. and the future she promises. when we made grand wagoneer, proudly assembled in america, we knew no object would ever rank with the best things in this country. but we believed we could make something worthy of their spirit. what do we want for dinner? but we believed we could make burger... i want a sugar cookie... wait... i want a bucket of chicken... i want... ♪♪ it's the easiest because it's the cheesiest.

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welcome back. still with us are katie benner, pulitzer prize winning reporter for "the new york times," covering the justice department, also an msnbc contributor, and brittany pat nick cunningham, msnbc contributor as well, and author of the podcast, undistracted with brittany packnett cunningham as well as a member of president biden's 21st century policing task force. brittany, given the record of

violations in places like georgia, is the department likely to be effective, given the federal nature of our system, the decentralized nature of our system? how valuable is it to actually have a department of justice doing the right thing with the american structure, as it is? >> this remains an open question, right? and certainly, i cannot underestimate the value of having someone like nina cupta at the head of these kind of investigations. she has been a long ally of many activists, and not just activists, but she's been engaged deeply with community if he said for a long time. those folks who have been subject to the consent decrees, who have been involved in trying to figure out and negotiate the contours of what those things would be. she understands deeply the local nature of things. and i have been glad since the very day that she was nominated for this role that she would be back in position to try to fix

some of the things that were messed occupy over the last administration and to try to actually catch up to the place where we should have been all along. but most certainly, when we look at the kind of campaign aid that brian kemp just put out yesterday, where he called himself essentially a super conservative and blew up things in his yard and cocked his gun and actually got in a truck to say that he was ready to gather up undocumented people, although that's not the word he used himself as it came to it, georgia is a difficult place to make change. as the great sherilynn eiffel said, elections matter. that's why people like brian kemp have been stealing them, so they can resist the kind of change that the doj and organizers on the ground at great risk to their own personal safety have been trying to make for years. so the chemical weapon certainly remains. but i do believe with the federal push that we're seeing from the doj and the consistent and the determined local push

that we've seen from organizers and activists on the ground, that certainly something is to come, and hopefully it's movement in the right direction. >> katie benner, quickly, before we go. i want to ask you the political evolution behind this policy. president biden is not associated with things in his record. he was a tough on crime democrat, very much an active propagator of the war on drugs and that kind of rhetoric. what do you read in how the country has changed and what activists have achieved, how they have changed the conversation, that the policies you're now covering are coming from a joe biden administration? >> well, i would say, first of all, i think that joe biden has evolved since the 1990s, and i think we all have, but he has said that regrets some of those decisions he has made on being tough on crime in the '90s. he is a reflection of how the democratic party has shifted more to the left. if you look at these reforms, these reforms are the result of the justice department, merrick

garland, and especially vanita gupta, speaking not just to activists and to community members, but also to police officers. if you look at what was announced last week, it was a slate of reforms that brings accountability to bear all across the components of the justice department that are used as levers top both oversee law enforcement, but also to have a better understanding of how the system works together. so you have a way in which they spoke with police departments, they found that consent decrees, while a powerful tool, are actually in many ways unfair to law enforcement, because they never end. there's no sunset provisions. there's no way to see a department has truly reformed, because the system itself seemed to incentivize monitors to keep them under consent degree forever to make money. the government said, if we're going to use this as a powerful tool and expect reforms from our police departments, we have to listen to their complaints and their voices. you look at the grant-making function that sherilynn eiffel spoke about.

the grant department is giving more than $4 billion to police departments this fiscal year and $7 billion to police departments next year. they want more money for police. that's the opposite of defunding police. they're just saying, if we're giving this out, we need accountability. >> thank you both so much for joining us. please don't go anywhere. we have another packed hour of news ahead for you. steps away from where i sit here in new york, world leaders are descending ahead of the u.n. general assembly. president biden will be here tomorrow. plus, we'll talk about aoc. her much-talked about met gala look and the message behind it. and the fight for an eviction moratorium is coming to washington and this time, it's personal. another hour of "velshi" starts right now. good morning. it's sunday, september 91, i'm