Sen. Mike Braun, who has introduced legislation to reform qualified immunity laws in place for the nation's police officers, said Wednesday that changing the rules will help law enforcement agencies.
"I'm going to be talking to the state police in Indiana and the sheriff's association later today and say, hey, try to find ways to fix it from within," the Indiana Republican said on CNN's "New Day." "Maybe we won't need to do anything here, but I think this is a moment in time where it's been raised to a crescendo that something needs to happen."
His comments came in the hours before the Senate was to vote on whether to advance Republicans' police reform legislation, which Senate Democrats are expected to block because of the various disagreements between both bills — including on the issue of qualified immunity, which shields individual police officers from facing lawsuits.
Republicans are not interested in eliminating the immunity question, even though Democrats are, said Braun, which he finds "ironic because they've probably been tighter with police unions over the years."
He further noted that after 37 years of being a CEO at a company, there are "always parallels I can use in this new job."
"If you kick the can down the road, you have something inherently wrong at a division, a location," said Braun. "You always have whatever you believe in strong ways that you can make it better, and I think this moment is here now for law enforcement."
Meanwhile, Democrats are saying that the Republican police reform bill is not salvageable, and Braun said that's because "they want to at least do something on qualified immunity. They want to eliminate it. I've talked to enough Democrats, if we had the process, which we don't normally have here that's easy to amend and debate, I think we would arrive at a place where my bill would be the landing spot when there are very few people who want to do it now."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.