Their visceral hatred for President Donald Trump and their obsessive urge to take a contrarian stance on every issue he raises seem to know no bounds. It is hardly surprising, then, that so many Democrats are now apparently determined to resist the restoration of law and order in America’s cities. From his Aug. 25 executive order aimed at eliminating cashless bail to the federalization of the Washington, DC, metropolitan police (MPD), Trump has managed to stir up his political enemies. It’s gotten to the point where they are now claiming crime doesn’t exist, or, if it does, Americans are not concerned with it.
Cashless bail or cashless bond means an individual, having been criminally charged, can be released from jail prior to his or her court date without paying a bond. A president doesn’t have the authority to force local jurisdictions to end cashless bail, but he can cut off federal funding to those that don’t. That is what his executive order aims to do.
The nation’s capital, meanwhile, is perhaps the safest it has been in decades after the Justice Department took control of MPD and the National Guard was deployed to support law enforcement. As of this writing, Washington had seen no homicides in 12 days until, on Aug. 26, a man was shot in Southeast Washington and died later at a local hospital. That might be just the second time in a very long time that DC has gone more than 10 days without a murder.
As President Trump muses about replicating this success in other cities, Democratic governors and mayors are not happy about the prospect of federal agents cracking down on their criminals. Maryland’s Democratic governor, Wes Moore, is now in a war of words with the president over crime in Baltimore. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) is also touting decreasing crime rates in her city. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, both Democrats, also recently claimed decreasing crime rates showed there was no need for federal intervention.
That aside, President Trump would almost certainly run into all kinds of legal hurdles to mount large-scale federal law enforcement operations in other cities. The capital, being a federal district, has a unique status.
Democratic strategist Dan Turrentine doesn’t think this is a good look for his party. Addressing the issue on his podcast, The Morning Meeting, he observed:
“Just like with immigration, Trump has found another issue where the Democratic Party is on a back foot. They don’t want to admit that there’s a problem, even though nobody in New York City, Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles or San Francisco would say things are good. The fact that we have people arguing that crime is not a problem is crazy.”
At least one Democrat took the party’s stance against crime crackdowns into the absurd. Speaking at the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting in Minneapolis, MN, Insha Rahman, who is the vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, told her audience not to “take the bait” by talking about “migrant crime or carjackings or the things that actually don’t matter to that many Americans.”
Meanwhile, Gov. Hochul was compelled to address the cashless bail issue. There have been several recent examples of horrific crimes committed by individuals who had just been released from jail without having to pay a bond.
A recent White House press release cited, among other examples, a mother murdered in front of her children by a man who had been released the previous day, thanks to cashless bail, after he was charged with assaulting another woman.
Hochul pointed out that New York has not done away with cash bail and that certain judges decided to release suspects without requiring them to post a bond, even though they should have.
As Turrentine observed, this is another “80-20 issue.” Not to be confused with the Pareto Principle (the 80-20 rule, often used in business circles), an 80-20 issue speaks for itself. The political party that is aligned with about 80% of the nation on a particular issue has a commanding advantage, obviously, over the party aligned with the other 20%. It’s unlikely that many people, apart from Rahman, it seems, would seriously debate that the 80% is in favor of more law and order. It would have been so easy for Democrats to applaud the progress on the streets of DC and admit that crime in the United States is a problem that must be more forcefully addressed.
They just cannot bring themselves to do that, though, because opposing President Trump at every turn has become so much more important to them than addressing real-world challenges.