Amy Klobuchar Blames the Bill of Rights

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The tragedy in Minneapolis has certainly put Senator Amy Klobuchar on the spot. She is, or has been, a front runner to be Joe Biden’s running mate. She is also the ex-prosecutor in the Minnesota county that includes the city where a police officer is accused of murdering George Floyd. It turns out that in 2006 Ms. Klobuchar had the accused killer, Officer Derek Chauvin, in her sights in an unrelated killing by police, but no charges were handed up.

It’s one thing for Ms. Klobuchar to point out that she had already moved up to the Senate by the time the grand jury balked at indicting Officer Chauvin in the 2006 case. Fair enough. It’s another thing, though, for her to blame the grand jury system itself. Which is what she just did, when asked by Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC about more than two dozen police brutality cases that went uncharged during her tenure as D.A.

Ms. Klobuchar’s circumlocutions strike us as a serious blunder. Particularly when she reckons that letting grand juries handle such cop cases was, as she told Ms. Mitchell, “wrong.” Said she: “The cases that we had involving officer involving shootings went to a grand jury. That was true in every jurisdiction across our state and that was true in many jurisdictions across the country. I think that was wrong now.”

It would have been better, she suggested, had she taken “the responsibility and looked at the cases and made the decision myself.”