This should prove interesting. Seeing how badly they are tanking in the polls on this subject, this week the White House attempted to claim that it’s actually the Republicans who have been pushing to defund the police. Before you ask, no… that wasn’t a typo. Biden advisor Cedric Richmond was the first one sent out to try to pitch this pitiful claim, but Jen Psaki went all-in on it later in the same day. After more than a year of seeing Democrats kowtowing to the Black Lives Matter movement and literally defunding the cops in cities controlled entirely by their party, these dishonest scammers are actually trying to claim that it was the Republicans who wanted to cut funding for law enforcement. Our Redstate colleague Nick Arama has the details.

The Democrats and Joe Biden have told some whoppers in their time.

But the whopper they were putting out today, the new “talking point” — that somehow it was the Republicans who were behind “defunding the police” — really takes some kind of nerve to push.

One of Biden’s closest advisers, Cedric Richmond, started it, but then Jen Psaki, speaking on behalf of Biden, supported what Richmond said and tried deceiving the American public with the new line, as well.

Curtis Houck of Newsbusters captures the moment when Jen Psaki tries to deliver this outrageous lie with a straight face after being questioned by Fox News.

Absolutely shameless. Under questioning from Fox's Peter Doocy, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki argues it's *Republicans* who have been defunding the police and not supporting law enforcement because they didn't vote for Biden's stimulus boondoggle the American Rescue Plan. pic.twitter.com/pIwfFkonu1

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) June 28, 2021

The two parts to this staggering bit of deception are that the “American Rescue Plan” provided money for expanding law enforcement and that the cuts to police forces around the nation were driven by the pandemic. Each of these mistruths is easily dismissed. First of all, as noted by Charlie Spiering, the bloated American Rescue Plan makes absolutely no mention of police departments or law enforcement in general.

Am I missing something? For some reason the words “police” or “law enforcement” don’t come up in a search of the text of the 242 page American Rescue plan

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) June 28, 2021

It’s true that some cities and states (mostly under Republican control) have taken money from that package and used it to shore up law enforcement. But that’s only because the grab-bag of “free money” was so poorly defined that states were able to end up using it for nearly anything in the name of “flattening the curve.” But that was never the intention of the bill. If it had been, the Democrats wouldn’t have voted for it.

As to the assertion that it was the pandemic driving most of the defunding, that’s obviously nonsense as well. There were very likely some cities that had to make cuts across the board as their tax revenue dropped during the shutdowns, with some cuts hitting their police departments. But that’s just business as usual. This lie attempts to ignore the many speeches by the mayors of cities like New York and Oakland where money was specifically transferred away from police departments and into “community engagement” activities.

I realize that any story about a politician lying is pretty much a dog-bites-man tale in America, but this development takes things to an entirely new level. The mayoral race in New York City tells you all you need to know. The most votes went to one of only two candidates who vowed to refund and expand the police to get Gotham’s spiraling crime problem under control. And that’s in a place that is arguably one of the largest liberal bastions in the country.

The Democrats are in serious trouble politically because of their tight embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement and its “defund the police” rhetoric. And with the midterms approaching, they’re trying to do some damage control. This isn’t going to fly, however. You can only sit there and eat the stolen pie for so long while trying to blame it on your sibling as you wipe the crumbs off your face. This is simply unbelievable.