First Test of GQP Filibuster: Sen. Mazie Hirono’s COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act (Updated)

New research released by reporting forum Stop AAPI Hate on March 18 revealed nearly 3,800 anti-Asian hate incidents reported over the course of roughly a year during the pandemic. It’s a significantly higher number than last year’s count of about 2,600 hate incidents nationwide over the span of five months. Women made up a far higher share of the reports, at 68 percent, compared to men, who made up 29 percent of respondents. The nonprofit does not report incidents to police. There were 3,800 anti-Asian racist incidents, mostly against women, in past year.

The data, which includes incidents that occurred between March 19 of last year and Feb. 28 of this year, shows that roughly 503 incidents took place in 2021 alone. Verbal harassment and shunning were the most common types of discrimination, making up 68.1 percent and 20.5 percent of the reports respectively. The third most common category, physical assault, made up 11.1 percent of the total incidents. More than a third of incidents occurred at businesses, the primary site of discrimination, while a quarter took place in public streets.

According to the data, Asian women report hate incidents 2.3 times more than men. A further examination of the submitted reports showed that in many cases, the verbal harassment that women received reflected the very intersection of racism and sexism.

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Karthick Ramakrishnan, founder and director of demographic data and policy research nonprofit AAPI Data, previously also warned against defaulting to a “simplistic understanding of what’s going on,” adding that the violence cannot be neatly summed up by solely the heightened anti-Asian sentiment witnessed throughout the pandemic. He said a confluence of factors, including the effects of poverty and financial struggle exacerbated by the pandemic, as well as opportunity, could have played into it.

“There’s a complex variety of factors, but the fundamental reality is that there’s an increase in the number of Asian Americans who feel unsafe,” he said.

Such issues have been elevated to the executive branch as President Joe Biden has addressed the issue of anti-Asian attacks. In addition to referencing the violence in his first national prime-time address, he also signed a memorandum earlier this year that in part issued guidance on how the Justice Department should respond to the heightened number of anti-Asian bias incidents.

Jeung said addressing the root cause of the violence requires more education, more expanded civil rights protections and more restorative justice models. The memorandum — which focuses on hate incidents, rather than hate crimes — allows for a more holistic approach to combating racism against Asian Americans in public streets, transit, private businesses and other settings, he said.

“If you just narrowly focus on hate crimes, you only address a sliver of the racism that Asian Americans are experiencing,” Jeung said. “Biden’s memo that actually addresses hate incidents rather than hate crimes is actually helpful, because that gives us the opportunity to frame the issue comprehensively.”

In response to the surge in anti-Asian American hate incidents during the Coronavirus pandemic, Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI) introduced the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act. She was initially confident that she would receive bipartisan support for her bill.

Sen. Hirono was overly optimistic. Now she says that not a single Republican in the Senate signed on to her anti-Asian American hate crimes bill.

Hirono said:

.@maziehirono says no Republicans have signed on to the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act to address hate crimes against Asian Americans, which she introduced with @RepGraceMeng:

“No. It’s not as though we haven’t tried. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. They basically don’t respond.”

— Weijia Jiang (@weijia) April 12, 2021

It is disgraceful but not surprising that Republicans would oppose specifically federally criminalizing hate crimes against Asian-Americans. After all, this is a political party led by a man who insisted on calling COVID-19 the “China virus” and “kung flu.”

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) said in March that Republicans were refusing to support the bill. Senate Majority Leader Schumer said that the Senate would be voting on the hate crimes bill this week, but instead of showing Asian-Americans that they want their votes, Senate Republicans are likely to unanimously vote against the bill to send the message that Asian-Americans aren’t welcome in what is still Trump’s Republican Party.

Including Senator Mitch McConnell? His wife, Elaine Chao, was born in Taiwan and emigrated to the U.S. as a child. Chao was the first Asian-American woman and the first Taiwanese American in U.S. history to be appointed to a President’s Cabinet. Way to represent, Mitch. And why is Elaine Chao virtually silent on this issue? She could be working to round up Republican votes on this bill.

NPR adds:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told Capitol Hill reporters he hopes to work out an agreement to “get on the bill in a normal way, have some amendments and move to final passage.”

“As a proud husband of an Asian American woman, I think this discrimination against Asian Americans is a real problem,” said McConnell, who is married to Elaine Chao, the former Bush and Trump-era Cabinet secretary.

In other words, a “process” argument: the bill isn’t going through regular committee order, but is being brought up on a “snap vote” on the floor.

Politico reports, Democrats dare GOP to filibuster Asian American hate crimes bill:

Senate Republicans are weighing whether to mount the first official filibuster of the new Congress

The legislation in question, a modest anti-Asian American hate crimes bill, is also forcing Republicans to confront their diminished standing in a Washington where they no longer set the political agenda.

Democrats, for their part, are daring the 50-vote minority to block the modest legislation amid a spike in hate incidents against Asian Americans during the pandemic. While the GOP has yet to make a conference-wide decision, Wednesday’s vote could serve as a data point for Democratic senators seeking to persuade more of their colleagues to scrap the 60-vote threshold that has left some of President Joe Biden’s most progressive priorities to languish in the upper chamber.

Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said that Republicans are considering voting to open debate and offering amendments on the hate crimes measure. Some in the GOP may want “an opportunity to engage in a discussion about how to make it better, how to improve it,” Thune said of the bill.

But other GOP senators dismiss the legislation, championed by Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) as a way to enhance federal coordination against hate crimes, as unnecessary and a potential government overreach.

“My understanding is it doesn’t do much,” said Sen John Cornyn (R-Texas), who said he still needs to review the legislation. “It’s just a messaging vote, it sounds to me.”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a key moderate, added that the bill had “drafting problems that I hope can be corrected. For example, it seems to say that the hate crime has to be linked to Covid, which is rather odd.”

Is it now, “mythical moderate from Maine”? Have you already forgotten the racist Florida Man?

NPR adds:

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said she hopes her Republican colleagues will join her in supporting Hirono’s bill.

“I certainly hope so,” she said. “I think it’s an important issue and one that’s worthy of our consideration.”

Maybe Murkowski should have a talking to with her buddy the “mythical moderate from Maine.”

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) described the decision before the GOP as a test for the filibuster as the party weighs whether to engage on the issue. After all, Durbin observed: “Who can’t say that hate crimes against Asian Americans and others [are] reprehensible?”

White nationalist and Christian nationalists in the Trump/QAnon personality cult can, that’s who.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer chose the relatively narrow hate crimes bill for his first use of legislative floor time after he successfully steered Biden’s Covid recovery plan into law. That selection in itself, as opposed to an alternate bipartisan proposal designed to tackle rising bias crimes, suggests that Democrats may see an upside in teeing up a filibuster fight on a politically popular topic like preventing discrimination.

Calling it “unobjectionable,” Schumer pleaded with Senate Republicans to let the bill “go forward and pass with a strong bipartisan vote.”

The bill “sends a very important signal from the Congress to the American public: These crimes will not be tolerated and there will be consequences,” Schumer said.

Schumer needs at least 10 Republican votes to open debate and again on final passage.

“I’d love to see a bipartisan result here. But in some ways it goes too far, in our view,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio).

NPR adds: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters he is “open to strengthening the bill” and referenced an effort to add an amendment with bipartisan sponsors that would boost resources to law enforcement for training on how to identify hate crimes, establish hate crime hotlines and provide rehabilitation for perpetrators of hate crimes through community service.

Hirono’s   (S. 937) would designate an official at the Justice Department to expedite the review of Covid-related hate crimes, beef up guidance for state and local hate crime reporting and ask federal agencies to provide a general framework for avoiding racially discriminatory language when describing the pandemic. It currently lacks any Republican co-sponsors.

Hirono said she was not confident the bill would receive enough GOP support to break a filibuster. “Anything that the Democrats are putting forward as important, the Republicans tend to not support. There you have it,” she said.

In addition to Hirono’s bill, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) this week reintroduced a measure with Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kans.) that would create grants to help state and local governments improve hate crime reporting. A companion bill in the House is also bipartisan.

Should Republicans decide to block the bill, it would be their first filibuster since 2014, when they were last in the minority.

“I will be honest: I’m not inclined to create another category of crime,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said Monday evening.

NPR continues, ‘Enough Is Enough’: Democrats Push For GOP Support On Asian American Hate Crimes Bill (excerpt):

“Words matter”

Hirono praised President Biden for his support in passing the legislation.

“Words matter,” she said. “When you have a president who deems the virus to be the ‘China virus’ or to have members of his administration refer to it as ‘kung flu,’ you create an environment where people will be motivated because of whatever reasons they have to commit these kinds of crimes.”

Former President Donald Trump frequently used racist phrases like “kung flu” to describe the coronavirus.

During Tuesday’s press conference, lawmakers described personal experiences with discrimination this past year.

“Before, if I was walking around outside I would have my earbuds on, I’d be listening to books on tape,” Hirono described. “I would never do that now because of the incidents of totally unprovoked hate crimes against AAPIs.”

Rep. Andy Kim, D-N.J., said he has never before felt this “level of fear and vulnerability.”

“Over the last month, I’ve shared stories I’ve never shared before, I’ve opened up in ways that I never had before because the moment calls upon [you],” he said. “When I worked at the State Department as a diplomat, I was banned from working on issues related to Korea, because I’m Korean American.”

He said his 5-year-old son came home and told him “a bigger kid kept calling him ‘Chinese boy, Chinese boy’ over and over again.”

“I really do believe that the next few weeks will determine the next few decades of how Asian Americans are treated and understood and accepted in this country,” Kim said.

The vote is scheduled for Wednesday.

UPDATE: In a rare bipartisan vote of 92-6, the Senate advanced legislation aimed at improving anti-Asian hate crime tracking and identification. Axios reports, Rare bipartisan Senate vote advances measure to address anti-Asian hate crimes (who would vote no?):

The bill had looked initially unlikely to garner the 60 votes necessary to end debate and move to a final vote. But Republicans decided to not filibuster, in part because Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose wife Elaine Chao is Taiwanese American, signaled openness to working on it with Democrats prior to final passage, the Associated Press reports.

What’s next: Democratic lawmakers said Tuesday they were willing to work with Republicans to strengthen the bill and ensure passage by incorporating the broader bipartisan Blumenthal-Moran “No Hate Act”, which would streamline federal responses to all hate crimes, as an amendment.

The bill, if signed into law, will improve anti-Asian hate crime tracking, train law enforcement to better identify anti-Asian racism and appoint an official in the Justice Department to review and expedite COVID-19-related hate crime reports, among other measures.