Biden’s cowardly flip-flop on crime
Washington Examiner
The Council of the District of Columbia, apparently unconcerned by a huge spike in crime, especially in carjackings, which are up 327% so far this year over the same period in 2020, decided that this was the moment to pass a bill reducing sentences for carjacking, robberies, and burglaries. The crime bill would also abolish mandatory minimum sentences and burden the courts with jury trials for every misdemeanor charge. This means criminals would have the incentive to hold out for a trial in hope that charges would be dismissed to clear the docket.
The attempt to rewrite the district’s admittedly imperfect criminal code was the usual hot mess of woke garbage. The people this bill would harm most, as always, are the urban poor, who are disproportionately victimized by criminals. The measure was so crazy that Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser vetoed it — and the D.C. Council is so woke that it overrode her veto, 12-1.
Fortunately, the Constitution wisely grants Congress plenary power to govern Washington, D.C., so there are some adults in charge. Although Congress granted home rule to the district in 1973, it still reserves to itself the power to block ordinances that are sufficiently egregious, like this one.
At first, when House Republicans scheduled their vote on the measure, President Joe Biden promised his Democratic allies in Congress and in the district government that he would intervene with his veto, preserving the D.C. Council’s special favor to local violent criminals. Thanks perhaps in part to the recent savage criminal attack against Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN) in her Washington apartment building, the House voted on a bipartisan basis to block the crime bill. Right after the House voted to scrap the bill, Biden did an about-face — not publicly, though. Instead of taking charge of the issue and making a speech, Biden revealed his flip-flop in private to Democratic senators, who then leaked the news to the press.
Some people, understandably feeling threatened by escalating crime in the district and in many other cities, might feel gratitude toward Biden for this brief episode of wisdom. Has he turned over a new leaf? Will he seriously challenge the Democratic Left’s consensus in favor of coddling criminals while demonizing parents, law-abiding gun owners, and taxpayers?
Sadly, Biden has had no epiphany. Rather, what he shows by failing to keep his veto promise is that he will do the bare minimum to spare himself from the political consequences of his party’s growing anti-police and pro-criminal policy consensus.
Biden’s advisers watched this week’s trouncing of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and realized that even hardcore Democratic constituencies will not tolerate such criminality in their communities. So they apparently persuaded Biden to back down, leaving 173 House Democrats swinging in the wind. They don’t deserve sympathy, for they had just voted to go easy on carjackers. They got what they had coming.
But as amusing as their political humiliation is, one can smile only briefly. That’s because the nation suffers under a president who has no real compassion for the victims of crime, who has opened the borders to gang members and drug smugglers. He found one occasion to pretend to be tough on crime. But that’s it.
District residents will now enjoy the benefits of Biden’s posturing, at least for a time. But people everywhere else in America deserve so much better than what this cowardly lion of a president has been willing to give them. He needs to speak out against criminals and for law-abiding citizens. That’s something he is signally failing to do.